Melee players thriving

Optimization is the natural path of all things commercial. When the Internet was young it was more experimental as a whole and that was fun for people. Computing is still experimental but the experimentation isn't obvious as it was back then. Unfortunately that means adventure finding you across your computer screen doesn't happen as often. You either need to look for it around the fringes or look beyond the monitor.

I am disappointed in myself that I immediately recognize this is jerma

The incentive structure just doesn't seem designed well. It creates a zero sum game. When downloading you can either:

1. Not seed to 100%. This damages your ratio

2. Seed to exactly 100%. In terms of ratio maintenance across all seeders this option makes the most sense

3. Seed past 100%. You build up your own ratio but deny other downloaders from reaching 100% which hurts their ratio. They must spend longer seeding the torrent to reach 100%, which further decreases the likelihood of subsequent downloaders from reaching 100% when seeding

When you seed past 100%, you essentially have to rely on bad actors to create more upload work for good actors. If there are no bad actors then seeding past 100% is to the detriment of other good actors, who you want to protect because you also rely on them for system health. And private trackers aim to minimize the number of bad actors.

Ubisoft style open world games. I honestly know I'm not built to enjoy them but I convinced myself to try and finish Horizon Zero Dawn and it was a huge mistake.

For a single player game, it vigorously wastes your time. The entire game is based around crafting but each time you need to gather something you need to come to a full stop, and spend a second watching the interact meter fill before you can gather each thing you see in the overworld.

The talent trees either contain things that are not meaningfully impactful on the core experience, ie tons of talents are slightly dressed up raw damage increases. Or they are things that are meaningful, but not surprising such as silent takedowns or bullet time. Overall it feels like Aloy was designed to be kind of fun and then they hamstrung her in a bunch of different ways to give a reason for the talent system to exist, and it takes the runtime of the whole game to undo this.

Many quests do not have anything to say about the lore or characterization of the world, whether it be for individual characters or the world overall.

Really? I guess you could consider the game's visual flair to be predatory that way but I always felt that stuff was a joke because it doesn't have microtransactions

I'm the CEO of ExxonMobil but thanks anyway

If a company ever puts ads in my group chats I will jump in a volcano

It is impossible to know whether there is a higher power. I believe that the existence of the universe fundamentally violates causality to begin with, since everything must have a beginning. Thus anything is on the table.

All human conceptions of religion and spirituality are almost certainly wrong though.

I think the insinuation of the gigantic brain is that it's not

Feels weird to make Grampa into Trump and then have him talk to Burns

The number of bad takes in this thread has convinced me that Lemmy may really succeed