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I think what might be different this time is influencers. If Critical Role abandoned D&D completely, I think they’d probably stay popular and whatever system they switched to would get a lot of attention. I also think that they’d be likely to use a system that isn’t math heavy, and allows for a lot of role playing and acting.
The problem would probably be splintering. But, if a tiny company like Paizo made such a big impact on the D&D ecosystem with virtually no ad money back in the 3.5 days, just imagine what could happen today when so many D&D influencers exist. If they worked together on something, it could be a major change to the D&D ecosystem.
I just wonder if maybe another big stumble from Hasbro will cause the rise of a new system.
Paizo is relatively tiny compared to D&D and especially compared to Hasbro, but Pathfinder gained a pretty sizeable following mostly from word of mouth, and this is basically before social media. One of the biggest “promoters” of D&D now is Critical Role, and before the stream started their home game was a Pathfinder game. But, CR is now also streaming their own game system called Daggerheart in addition to their main D&D campaign. I have a sense that many other D&D streamers have a “plan B” game ready in case Hasbro steps over the line again.
An interesting twist to all this is that you can’t copyright rules or stat blocks. That severely limits the kinds of “moats” that Hasbro can put up to prevent competition.
Anyhow, I think you’re overall right. I know Hasbro is going to push an exclusive VTT, and it’s just a matter of time before they try to push a LLM DM.
AFAIK this is different from the original auction house mount. That one had a auctioneer and a vendor who could repair things. This one comes with an auctioneer and a “mailbox” NPC.
For some people whose purpose in playing WoW is to make money trading, this makes it marginally easier. Instead of having to park your mount next to a mailbox, you can both post your auctions and collect your money on one mount. But, since most people doing auction stuff also need access to a bank, it doesn’t mean they can easily just abandon the city and live out in the country.
Many of the people who might consider this mount are already playing for free because they make enough money in-game to buy a token every month.
Also, it’s $132 if you’re Canadian, otherwise it’s 90 USD.
Should it also be illegal for a company to issue press releases when good things happen? Or, maybe, required that they issue press releases any time there’s bad news?
I don’t see a problem with it as long as it’s clear that the group pushing the bad news is honest about their short position. Especially in a world where an advertising duopoly has appropriated nearly all the advertising money that used to support news, and as a result news organizations are crumbling, we need short sellers. Shorting a company is extremely risky, and generally an organization will only take a short position if they’re sure the stock is overvalued. That means they’re going to do deep research on the company – the kind of research that used to be done by financial reporters.
Naturally, if they do take a short position they really need the stock to drop, so they’re going to frame everything they find in the most negative light possible. They’re also going to be extremely aggressive about getting the news out, because they need shareholders who don’t pay much attention to the news to hear about what’s happening and want to sell. While they might not be fully honest about the companies they’re shorting, the kinds of companies they’re shorting are also often not being at all honest about their performance.
I’m sure that sometimes a company gets targeted by short sellers without doing anything wrong. But, I’m even more sure that there are companies out there lying to their investors to keep their stock price high.
That’s one thing I’ve always admired about Eve Online. It’s an MMO that’s almost entirely player driven. Various sectors of space change hands between different factions of players. That results in the sorts of things you’re talking about. Unfortunately Eve has extremely boring space battles (for players, for watchers it can be fun), and a toxic community.
But, I’ve always wanted an RPG where the world evolved. To me, the key thing to make that realistic would be NPCs that didn’t respawn. Like, if you killed a certain golden dragon named Gurnadom, that dragon was dead, gone, nobody else could kill it. There would be no Gurnadom killing guides because there was only ever one Gurnadom and only one group of players ever killed that dragon. There might be tips on killing golden dragons, but each dragon was unique so it wasn’t a matter of watching videos and understanding the patterns. Each fight against a golden dragon could only happen at most once, and every fight was unique.
And, in any game involving war, there should be permanent destruction of things: fortresses that were attacked would take damage over time and eventually be turned into rubble. A side that’s winning a war should be expanding its territory. As a result, where a player can safely go should depend on the progress of the war, which is something not programmed into the game, but player driven.
I’m just so tired of the WoW style of MMO where the player is “The Champion” who has saved the world multiple times… along with the hundreds of other nearby players who are all the one-and-only champion who also killed a certain raid boss over and over every week for a month.
Some of my favourite games use procedurally generated maps. But, those maps are not hand-sculpted the way MMO dungeons are. And, while you could certainly use generative AI to come up with generic babble from NPCs, that’s not the same as designing entire quests. It may be that eventually a generative AI system will be able to do everything a human could have done: hand-crafted maps, full quest chain dialogue, etc. I just think we’re nowhere near that point yet.
For example, a quest chain almost always has a goal behind it. You’re revealing a certain aspect of the story to the player bit by bit as they complete parts of the quest. But, to do that you need at least a very basic theory of mind. You need to understand what the player knows before the quest chain starts, what each bit of the quest chain will add to their knowledge, and then what they’ll understand at the end of the quest chain. That “theory of mind” stuff is the thing that generative systems just can’t do right now because they’re just fancy auto-complete.
As for auto-generated dungeons, WoW tried that with Torghast in the Shadowlands expansion, and it was not well received. Granted, part of the problem was that Torghast was a depressing, death-themed “dungeon”. But, a bigger issue was that there was no intention behind the design of the levels. It was just a randomized set of corridors that fit together in a random way. Good dungeon designs require intention. You want to reveal something to the player as they go through the dungeon. Ideally you want to know that you’re working your way towards a boss. WoW’s black temple raid is a good example of this. You start in the sewers, you work your way out into a courtyard, you enter another building, clear out the ground floor and open a door that unlocks access to a set of staircases that works its way to the top of the building. You beat the Illidari council which allows you to access a door that opens to the roof of the building where you face the final boss Illidan. I don’t think generative AI is anywhere near being able to come up with a concept like that, let alone design the maps and art for the whole thing.
The sad thing is, I think those days are 100% over. With data mining, wikis, etc. I think there will never be a game that’s played mostly in-game with in-game tools, with people chatting in-game about how to do overcome various challenges the game throws at you. The world has just moved on. I never played something as hardcore as Ashron’s Call in the early days, but I do miss the early days of WoW when so much more of the fun was player-driven, and there was so much more interaction with other players.
I think that’s one reason why D&D is seeing an increase in popularity. It’s a game where you can optimize things to some extent, but because it’s human-driven, a DM can mitigate that somewhat. It’s also inherently social, and it’s impossible to data-mine, and difficult to min-max because each campaign is different and many DMs have slight variations on the set rules.
I don’t think Blizzard understands how to make a social game, and I’m beginning to realize they never did. The game used to be more social, but it seems like that was by accident instead of by design.
Like, you used to have to use the chat channels to find a group for a dungeon run. That forced you to chat. When they added dungeon finder, you didn’t need to chat anymore, making it less social. When they made cross-realm things happen, zones felt less lonely which was good for being social, but then it meant that you no longer ran into all the same names over and over, so you stopped knowing people. That was really bad for social things because it meant that people who behaved badly didn’t get a bad reputation and people who behaved well didn’t get a good reputation.
This is a great feature given the current state of the game. But, I wonder if it will have the unintended side effect of making the community even more toxic.
I haven’t gotten into the Beta, so I haven’t played it, but I’m curious, is the game designed so you can’t do anything without walking, or is it so that you can creep along at a snail’s pace without walking but to actually make real progress you have to walk?
It seems to me like you could use the psychology of a Pay To Win / Microtransactions game to motivate people but by using walking instead of money.
Does GPS really require an internet connection? I know it uses the radio, which kills the battery, but AFAIK you can get GPS without Internet access. For example, I’ve downloaded offline areas for Google Maps and have tracked my location that way, while traveling in countries where I didn’t have a SIM allowing me to access the Internet.
Nintendo used to be a company that specialized in cards, although these days it’s more associated with carts. They made a very successful transition into gaming, but still make cards in Japan.
I can’t see Hasbro being as effective though. I’m sure Hasbro is just going to try to churn out shovelware that bears their IP so that they can monetize things they own.
“You can’t sue us for making opiods ‘too pleasurable’, say major drug manufacturers in response to addiction lawsuits.”
The reality is that it comes down to motive. In the case of the Sackler family, lawsuits showed that they were effectively trying to get people addicted to their opiods. They lied about them, claiming they weren’t addictive. They tried to push doctors to prescribe them for everything from sports injuries to arthritis, not just for ultra-serious pains like from cancer. They were rewarding doctors for prescribing them, even when it was obvious those doctors were just selling drugs to addicted patients. They especially liked to try to talk to doctors who were not pain specialists. Sales reps were trained in how to overcome objections from doctors, like saying “The delivery system is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug”, even though they knew that wasn’t true. They gave doctors all-expenses paid junkets to Boca Raton, Florida to attend seminars on OxyContin.
If a developer ends up making a really good game that keeps you wanting more, that’s one thing. But, if you have internal messages from that developer talking about how they can hack dopamine releases and keep people coming back, that’s another thing. If internal messages are about the “whales” and how to get them to cough up the most money, that’s yet another one. If someone leaks internal memos where employees are laughing at idiots who are ruined after spending all their money on loot boxes, that’s even worse.
IMO, the developers who really need to be sued are the ones developing gambling machines. They seem ultra-optimized for addiction, and to extract as much possible cash from the victim. It’s amazing that that kind of thing is legal, but as long as it’s legal, it needs to be heavily regulated so that gamblers are actually having a good time, not that they’re simply being slowly drained of their blood.
In addition, they’re forcing binding arbitration on anybody who doesn’t opt out.
To opt out, you need to send an email within 30 days of the day they go into effect. They go into effect on April 15th so you have until May 15th to opt out.
That means if you have a reason to sue Discord, you’re forbidden from doing it. Instead you’re required to use an arbitrator. Whatever they decide is official. But, don’t worry, even though Discord pays for the arbitrator and relies on them for repeat business, the arbitrator is definitely neutral.
That’s what we have now
Which, I think most people agree, sucks.
this would give them an option to target a different demographic
They already have that option. They could stream on cam sites dedicated to adult content if they wanted to do adult content. They don’t do that because they want to reach Twitch viewers not porn viewers. But, they know they get more attention from the Twitch viewers if they’re doing nearly-porn.
I don’t know much about it, but I read something about epic paying for “minimums”, so it sounds like they pay a flat fee up to a certain number of “sales”, then pay per-unit (or at least pay more) beyond that. But, like you said, more “free” games claimed is more units shifted, so publishers will expect higher fees, even if it’s a flat fee.
I think you should grab the free games.
Epic still has to pay the publisher whenever they give away a game. So, every time you grab a free game, the publisher gets money and Epic loses money. Right now they’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
As long as you can limit yourself to only the free games, every free game you get causes Epic to lose money and gives money to some random publisher. I grab the free weekly game every week. I’ve never played any of them. But, if there’s a really good one I haven’t played, I might do that. The key thing is that each week I cost Epic some money.
Or they can choose not to focus on profit at all. Probably most people with an ownership stake in Valve are fabulously rich now. Maybe they just want to focus on interesting R&D now.
Theoretically there’s a benefit to a publicly traded company that since a lot of your financials are visible to everyone and people get to “vote” by buying and selling shares, there’s a sense in which you can get feedback on how well you’re running the company that you don’t get when it’s private. But, as Reddit’s “wall street bets” and “superstonk” subreddits show, a lot of investors are morons.
Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton
And their VR efforts. VR seems to have lost popularity lately, but I was really glad that someone out there was competing with Palmer Luckey, especially once he sold out to Facebook.
And… holy shit, I just found out he’s Matt Gaetz’ brother in law. That explains a lot.
There are other game marketplaces out there, but they’re bad.
This isn’t like the Apple App store where it’s the only option on the platform. In fact, they’ve competed with Microsoft’s store on some things. It’s not even like Amazon where they strong-arm people selling things on the platform. Amazon does things like forbid anybody who sells on Amazon from selling the item at a lower price anywhere, including on their own site. I don’t think Steam has any requirements like that. Steam’s store has a huge market share because people like using Steam. AFAIK, Steam doesn’t even do exclusivity deals, which suck for the consumer but are pretty standard for games, except with their own (Valve) games, and those are rare.
Not only does Steam have a user-friendly library and a user-friendly store, if you launch a game you bought on steam but that is published by a company with a shitty launcher / store / library (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar), Steam goes a long way to neuter the shittiness of that launcher / store / library.
Maybe a 30% cut is too big. I don’t know. It would be great if someone tried to compete with Steam while keeping the consumer-friendly approach Steam has. Maybe competition would reduce that 30% to something lower. But, most of the other game stores I know of have much less consumer-friendly approaches. The only one that’s at all similar that I know of is GOG, and I do occasionally use them, especially for old games.
My favourite factoid about that is that the minister of finance in Greece who was in charge during the Greek Debt Crisis was Yanis Varoufakis, the former economist-in-residence at Valve.
Exactly. A blockchain is just a slow, inefficient, append-only distributed database. The only excuse for using one is if you lack a central authority, but in this case CCP has to be the central authority because everything in the DB only works with their game. So, just use a normal DB, it gives you everything the blockchain does in this case, but is much more efficient.
It underutilizes the pinky, and it’s not the home keys.
ESDF still lets you reach tab, caps lock, shift, ctrl and alt, but opens it up so your pinky can also use Q, A and Z. With WASD your pinky can only really hit the “big keys”. Everything else can just get shifted over by one. Plus, if you’re a touch typist your fingers are already good at finding the home keys so your ring finger is already used to being on “S”. That means if you have to stretch to hit a special key, it’s easier to get back to the right keys. Plus many keyboards have a nub on F and J so you can find them / verify you’re on the right keys by touch.
The advantage that ESDF movement has (boo, WASD uses the wrong keys), is that you can stop movement by just not pushing any keys or buttons. With mouse-based movement there’s rarely a “stop movement” button, you just have to click close to where you already are.
But, the bigger difference is that you can dedicate one hand to movement and the other hand to aiming. This is key when you’re playing a ranged attacker. With a melee attacker clicking on an enemy is fine because you want to both attack it and move in that direction. But, if you want to stay away from the enemies and attack them from long range, a mouse-based movement system combined with a mouse-based aiming system means you’re clicking on one side of the screen to aim and the opposite side to move. That’s inefficient and imprecise.
ESDF movement does have its drawbacks though. The biggest drawback is that you can only move at one speed. That’s especially bad for certain scenarios, like escort-type missions where you want to move at the same speed as whatever you’re escorting, or stealth games / activities where the slower you move the more stealthy you are. But. for those, the mouse isn’t any better. What’s better is a joystick / thumbstick. With those you can move the stick very slightly to move very slowly.
Often I think the best of both worlds would be a mouse for aiming and a thumbstick for movement.
and in a way that they actually do have meaningful recurring costs per user to provide.
Yeah, it almost certainly costs them nowhere near $15/month per user. But, it’s probably more than $1. They have “game masters” on call to help people who are experiencing a glitch or who are being harassed or something. They have ops people keeping the servers running, keeping the databases clean, rolling out the changes in a way that doesn’t break things for players, fending off DDOS attacks and hack attempts, and so-on.
hosting isn’t magically cheaper because you’re in a country with a broken economy
There are probably some things that are cheaper. Like, they can probably employ Argentines to staff the Spanish-language game-master jobs cheaper than if they have to pay Americans. If they host servers nearby for low latency, it’s likely that the datacenters and the staff to run them can be cheaper than the US equivalent. But, it’s not going to be 15x cheaper.
OTOH, there are probably lots of things that are more expensive. I’d imagine that in a country with the problems that Argentina has, you’re more likely to have brown-outs or black-outs from the power station. And the main headache will just be tracking the pricing for things. If some cosmetic add-on costs $2 US, you maybe have to revise that cost once every 3-4 years. But, if it costs 1000 Argentine pesos, you probably have to check it out every month or so. Plus, any contracts Blizzard/Microsoft has with any Argentinian partner, say for Internet service, probably has to be renegotiated constantly to deal with the latest inflation figures.
It’s launching sometime in 2025, so we’ll see how hard they push it when it’s ready. So far, they’ve only hinted at it. I don’t know if they’d want to do this, but they could also try to convince other smaller (but still big) streamers to use it too. There are some streamers they’re pretty close with (the Dropout guys for example) and others who they’re on friendly terms with (like Penny Arcade’s guys).
If WotC / Hasbro wanted to mount a charm offensive to get people to keep using D&D, I don’t know how influential they are. Other than Chris Perkins, I can’t think of any well known D&D employees at all.