I've been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them... irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that.

I think the paradox at the core of it all is that the gameplay loop is basically Stardew Valley in Doom clothing.

It's not a hunting game, it's a gathering game. Walk through this area, and harvest all the objects. Explore every part of the map, rip up all the weeds, look for hidden goodies under every fallen log.

The satisfaction you feel ripping through a wave of mobs isn't the satisfaction from triumphantly pounding your enemy's skull into a pile of bloody ashes and limping away, it's the satisfaction you get from ripping off a really big crackly sheet of tree bark in one go. You could probably reskin the whole thing into an apartment-cleaning game and it would still work.

And that would be fine in and of itself, but it probably wouldn't sell many copies - so they dress it up as Epic Monster Combat, and that's where the problems begin - layers and layers of obfuscation to hide the seams.

In order not to feel tedious and grindy, there needs to be a sense of progression; your standard power-fantasy stuff, where the challenges increase, you improve to meet them, rinse and repeat. In practice this equates to a varying number of clicks-per-mob. You start out needing three clicks to defeat a mob, over time you get better gear and go down to two clicks, level up and drop to one click, and woah I'm so powerful. But oh no! A new area with bigger scarier mobs! They take three clicks, even with my new powers!

But of course you'd see through that straight away, so they put numbers on everything. You see bigger and bigger damage numbers as you level up, so it keeps feeling more impressive. For a while, at least.

But that only lasts so long before you start to feel played for a chump, so slap on more and more layers to hide the lines, and make little mini-metagames around navigating them. Trouble is, those minigames really aren't very fun.

Scattering a dozen different stats and resistances across half a dozen gear slots is just a box-packing game. You want to get the best possible numbers for each attribute, but they're clustered randomly across all the different items, so you need to evaluate a butt-ton of different combinations in order to get the best coverage. I'm guessing that's going to have some kind of shitty NP-hard algorithmic complexity, so you're basically doing the travelling salesman problem in your head. Wheee. (ok but seriously this has to map to a named problem that someone's analyzed already... any ideas?)

And hey look, there's the insanely complicated perk tree of PoE, or the similarly confusing devotions from Grim Dawn. Again it looks like they're confusing complexity with richness, and making optimization too confusing to do without third-party tools or even less fun, following a published build. (for god's sake, if we're going down that route, let us plug the final build in at the start, then auto-level towards it)

Item sets! Because there's nothing like grinding for weeks until your corneas dry out, filling up endless stash tabs with partial sets that you'll level out of before you ever complete; it's so much fun. Crafting recipes, same deal, and even worse, meta builds that rely on unique items that are impossible to reliably SSF, so you spend your whole game grinding for trade.

And on and on, there's so many symptomatic patches to delay the eventual ennui, but no fixes to the fundamental design issue that causes it. You can't just take them away and replace them with nothing, or you'd be bored in minutes. But building up to completely jaded after a couple of weeks once you start playing the engine rather than the game is also pretty crappy.

How do you make the fighting feel like fighting instead of watering cauliflowers, or else how do you make crop-harvesting feel badass? How do you create a sense of progression beyond mere stat inflation? How do you do a rich slew of possibilities without creating spaghetti hell that ends up only having six basic metas at the end of it? How for the love of god do you make combat feel intense without blanketing the entire screen in particle effects? Could someone design a system where every build can be effective if you adapt your playstyle to suit?

I dunno, It just feels like the genre is still only half-invented, and waiting around for someone to do it properly.

Thoughts?

So, fungal spores are literally everywhere, and the requirements for fungus to thrive seem to be trivially low; give it a moderately humid environment and it'll grow on a bare concrete wall ffs eating god only knows what; the dust from the air maybe?

Well, and the great outdoors is full of slightly damp places, many of them downright soggy most of the time - and absolutely rife with organic material to snack on.

Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't the world a choking fungal hellscape?

Actually this would be a neat mechanic in-game: everyone around you nopes the fuck out at the sight of you, especially if you killed them previously.

They don't know and they don't understand, but things are very firmly Not Ok.

Partly the cost of failure, possibly a strategic tool.

Presumably either a terrible idea or already a thing, not sure which.

I'm thinking crispy-fried-aromatics-in-oil, Mediterranean edition. Garlic, eschalots (aka scallions), thyme/rosemary/etc, vast quantity of parsley, peppercorns, lemon zest, fine-diced rye sourdough.

Jar of that in the fridge, use it like chilli crisp but for white-people food.

Is this a thing? Should it be a thing?

So, uh, stupid question, but I'm not from the US.

Do Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and Michael Scott (Steve Carell) share a specific accent? If so, what is it?

They both get that same distinctive tone in their voice when excited; is that a thing from somewhere, or do they just kind of sound alike as humans?

City boy checking in.

So, this one time out on a hike in a semi-rural area, the trail opened out on a grassy riverbank kind of place, and there were a dozen or so cows between me and the path onwards.

Now, I mostly grasp which end of a cow the grass goes in, but that's about my limit; I have no real idea how they operate IRL.

I ended up carefully edging my way past them and gave them as much space as I possibly could, and got extremely stared at by all of them, who probably thought I was nuts.

Just out of curiosity - how careful did I need to be? Can you just like walk through the middle of them, or would that be asking for trouble?

As I understand it there's two main kinds of empathy: cognitive and affective.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the emotional states of others, and affective empathy is actually sharing those emotions yourself.

I do the former, but the latter doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Like, if I see someone being sad, it's possible that I'll be sad or angry that they're in that situation, but those will be my feelings about what's going on, not theirs.

But for those of you who inherently feel-what-you-see, how does this work with, say, anger?

If you see someone being terribly angry, do you feel angry yourself? If so, who do you feel angry at? If you see a fight going on, do you hate both participants?

If someone is angry at you, are you also angry at you?

I guess this applies to any targeted emotion, but anger is a good example.

Yes it's old, I know.

In this opening theme, that deeply unsettling fuzzy vibrato tone.

I'm sure it's copying some kind of hospital sound effect, like an old-tech intercom tone or a warning buzzer, but I just cannot fucking place it. I know I know this sound.

It's driving me nuts. Can someone please tell me what it is? Bonus points if you can link to a recording.

while picking up some paperwork. AAARGH.

M49, I tend to go a bit long between haircuts which is on me, but I seem to have a really hard time explaining that I want short hair, like 20mm / 3/4"

I usually ask for a #2 clipper on the back and sides, (which works fine), then take as much as they off the top so I can still brush it straight up, preferably too short to grab onto.

Basically a cigar butt with eyes, shut up it works for me.

Even indicating with thumb and finger, this somehow gets interpreted as just barely trimming the tips off and painstakingly shaping the surface, barely affecting the overall quantity of hair.

How's that for length?

What no, get in there with fire and the sword, wreak devastation, I want all of this gone.

:carefully trims another quarter inch off:

It's not just one guy, not just one place, so I am obviously using wrong and misleading words.

How do I ask for the thing I want?

That is to say, could they get enough forward thrust to push themselves along, without taking off? Maybe with like a little perch to hang onto...

So, I almost never play evil characters in most CRPGs - despite the potential fun to be had - and recently I've been thinking about why.

I mean, lawful good is the most boring alignment, evil NPCs can be an absolute hoot (exhibit A: Astarion), stealth murdering villagers for lulz can be entertaining, so why am I always such a freaking goody-two-shoes when it comes to actual plot decisions?

I think a lot of it comes down to lame and crudely-drawn motivations for the evil option in each case.

Your options in most games always seem to boil down to callous, greedy or spiteful: haha no / fuck you pay me / I just blinded your child lol.

And those just aren't satisfying. Especially when you're starting out and forming your character's persona and network, you're pretty much powerless, dumped in a situation where you're casting around for allies and can't afford to burn your bridges.

Running around just randomly being mean to folk like some poster child for Troubled Youth and the need to be Tough On Crime is just... stupid. There's some crude sadism there, and there's some crude avarice, it gets you minor short term benefits but no long-term ones, it gets you hated but not feared, without any real sense of control. Everyone dies or gets led off in chains with big sad eyes, and there's always the strong implication that you failed.

It just feels like a heavy-handed morality lesson where all the bad people are thugs, arseholes and/or developmentally challenged. Apart from being not much fun to play, it's kind of erasing the harm presented by smarter, more insidious kinds of evil.

Being a good guy gets you willing allies, is about personal validation, and feels like success. It gets you the generosity of the people you help, but that's a bonus on top the fundamental win of making the world a shinier better place.

By the same token, being an evil bastard should get you unwilling allies, it should be about power, and it should feel like winning. It gets you benefits you did not earn, but that should be a bonus on top of the fundamental win of tightening the screws on people. That's the actual payoff, but it seems to be the one they always miss.

I think evil playthroughs could be a lot more fun if you had better ways to be evil: blackmail, extortion, sneaky betrayal and brutal revenge. Not ODD, in other words, but NPD. Control, leverage, perfidy. Locking your victims down so they have no choice but to help you, or deceiving them into working against their own interests. Either keep a tight rein on your PR - or let them hate, so long as they also fear.

And another BG3 example: I think the nature of the shadow curse was a misstep, what with the all the grotesque madness and putrid corruption that surrounded it. I think it would have been far more effective as psychological horror, morally corrupt but reeking of purity, so shadowheart would have had believable reasons for wanting to join the gothstapo, and the player could plausibly be sold on it despite everything. But instead the lesson seemed to be that evil is yucky and broken and ew don't get it on you, and that just feels like a missed opportunity to me.

What say you?

Am I an outlier in this? Do the typical offerings feel satisfying to you? Are there games that do relatable, enjoyable evil especially well?

dear god I love this game

I'm going to assume you've heard the stereo-panning version of the record player song that did the rounds.

However, searching for more like this, I can only seems to find shitty low-effort remixes of songs with someone swiping the entire audio track back and forth, without timing it to the actual notes of the song or putting distinct elements in their own space or any of the actually cool counterpointy stuff you could do with this.

Has anyone found any that don't suck?

Not sure if this counts as politics or not; let me know.

One major brick in the toilet tank of the rental market is apparently investors just 'parking their money' in properties and leaving them vacant longterm, with an eye to selling them later at an inflated price - with rental income being not worth the hassle.

Some people have suggested a tax on vacant properties to give more incentive to rent them out.

Good idea, but I say we go one better.

1. Put a hefty tax on all properties that aren't owner-occupied.
2. Give a rebate for renting them out, proportional to the percentage above or below the average rental for comparable properties.

If you charge above-average rent, you get a small rebate.

If you charge average rent, you get a medium rebate.

If you charge below-average rent, you get a large rebate. This could even exceed 100%, using the funding from the other categories.

People chasing the large rebate will drive the average down over time, ate viola, we have a race to the bottom and the consumers reap the benefits.

There's probably a dozen reasons why this wouldn't work, but I like it anyway.

It must be a tsunderestorm

tl;dr: something with the murderbot / hexarchate / locked-tomb kind of vibe

I'm after something sweet but astringent to bite down on; this is the general tone I'm almost always looking for, and I've mined out most of the obvious seams of the stuff.

I don't mind whether it's fantasy or SF, I just want a chunk of emotional intelligence mixed with harsh conflict - with a modern, progressive take if possible.

LGBTQ-themed stuff tends to be good at this in my experience, but I'm not fussed either way. I'm not after romance/smut for its own sake, but it's fine as part of a bigger picture.

Suggestions?

As per title. I very, very rarely drink, and I generally just want to buy a single of something for a rare treat, however most beers/ciders/etc are sold in multipacks.

The pricing on the shelf is usually per-pack only, yet sometimes I see random products with single cans/bottles missing, and sometimes random products will have a little section of unpackaged singles, despite not having a separate price showing.

Is it generally OK to split an unopened 4- or 6-pack, or is that as weird and inappropriate as doing the equivalent in a supermarket? What even are the rules around this?

You ever see a dog that's got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it's never going to make the connection.

Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept.

Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?