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I'm looking at you, ubisoft
  • In no sense did I say that other people's dislike for their games is a problem. I take no offense to that. I myself am literally of the opinion that the newer AC games are hard to enjoy and insulting to the players time.

    Nonetheless, I can acknowledge that it's a source of comfort for some, even when I fail to enjoy it. Making them feel bad about it just isn't OK.

  • I'm looking at you, ubisoft
  • I'm sorry, but "Really? Ubisoft though?" is not just rubbishing Ubisofts practices. It's condescending to OP.

    The fact that just because I criticized your choice of words makes you assume that it's in defense of my own tastes is unreasonable too. Is there not a chance someone might sympathise with someone without sitting in the same exact boat as them?

    Point is, many people would feel bad about being approached the way you did and it is not exactly unreasonable to think that they would.

  • I'm looking at you, ubisoft
  • There's so much attempted shaming in these comments. People like some of their games and some like them a lot. Even if you don't feel like they're the best, Original and Odyssey still carry the attachment people have for Assassin's Creed and Anno 1800 has no real direct comparable alternatives.

    Stop trying to make people feel bad for just wanting to enjoy something they like when they are the victim of these companies trying to make their life harder. The fact that Ubisoft treats their customers like trash isn't something to rub in someone's face, it's too bad that some people's hobbies are locked behind something like that.

  • Dead woman found entangled in baggage machinery at Chicago airport
  • I see many comments discrediting this somehow, but I want to put my two cents in as someone who does work with sensor based AI assisted processing in real time and safety reliant environments.

    Just because a concept can be thought of that sounds reasonable and maybe even works in simple tests, that doesn't mean that it's actually useful for the real use case. Many typical approaches to creating models that can solve computer vision tasks such as this can result in unstable results and no system that has a considerable false positive rate would be tolerated by any airliner. This isn't even to speak of the false negative rate which might then still be rather high, which still leaves the system useless.

    Naturally it's not to say that no such system could be created, but they can't be just whipped out like some people here claim. If, as people here are already assuming, the problem happened because someone climbed onto the conveyor belt and was carried in, then this type of problem is sufficiently unthinkably rare that most companies didn't think about it much either.

    Clearly greater security is necessary, but people are being unreasonable with how trivial they portray the solution as being.

  • Removed
    World of Warcraft: The War Within's pre-patch event has been fixed, removing 90-minute wait times and turning its weekly quests into account-wide dailies
  • I think their main problem was that it was again reliant on the same ramp up that is typical for Pre-Patch events.

    The lack of communication in that left people assuming that the current speed of acquisition was all there was, when most likely there was no worry about missing out even if you joined in the last week. People with alts also had a massive advantage.

    Could have all been solved with more communication. While you can't make two first impressions, it still seems like a fun enough event and the rewards are neat. Not enough to play the game just for the event, but I doubt that that's ever the intent behind these. They're just there to set the mood a bit for the upcoming release.

  • Photo taken by my ruleloved father
  • Well, much of the world does live in areas where 34 degrees Celsius are genuinely problematic and where homes are not suited to providing decent living conditions.

    The fact that you don't immediately consider that temperature a problem given your personal circumstances doesn't mean that you should assume that it's not a problem for them. Your comment made it seem like you were trying to make light of it.

    Where I live, 34 degrees is well past the point where we'd get major national emergency warnings from the government warning of the danger that the current heat poses. I'm curious how people in your area deal with 41 degrees though, that sounds brutal to me personally. I assume it'd at least be a low humidity heat?

  • Photo taken by my ruleloved father
  • Normality in some countries means little when it happens somewhere it's unexpected and people aren't used to it. Not only is acclimatization a thing, meaning that people who genuinely aren't used to these temperatures suffer more from them, it's also relevant how the local culture handles high temperatures.

    Where it's normally very hot or very cold, infrastructure, daily routine and other culturally influenced elements provide for relief in some form. Texas suffered immensely under a cold period that other places in the world would consider utterly unremarkable, simply because it is utterly beyond what had been anticipated.

    Telling people in those situations that something isn't that hot/cold is a bit callous.

  • 2 August 2024
  • Their claim does have support in so far that the early testament contains a lot of work written by polytheistic people that later in would become the monolatrists and even later monotheists that we know as Jews, further branching off into what today are Christians.

    This does not mean that Christians in any sense are not purely monotheistic. Not only are they so, it's one of the most critical parts of their beliefs, to the point where even believing that their one god has in any way shape or form some kind of tangible division is considered strict heresy from trinitarian churches which form the mainstream of Christianity and have done so for hundreds of years.

    Edit: There is a great video by Alex O'Connor interviewing Esoterica on that topic in particular and they talk about the evidence that supports the viewpoints.

  • LGBTQ+ apps & online spaces are no longer safe for Ugandans
  • Maybe not news in the sense that it's a new development (though the title implies it is a deterioration), but still very much worthy of reporting. Just because something is typical doesn't mean it is unremarkable.

  • [Playstation Lifestyle] The Sims 5 Has Been Canceled – Report
  • It's pretty sad as I was especially excited for the moddability and also as it was the only project the now presumably defunct developer worked on.

    But I think it's still better to cut it off early than to release something that is just not fulfilling a certain standard. It looked like it was much earlier in development than it was from the screenshots.

    Really hope the other entries in the genre step in and manage to get the Cities Skylines effect going again.

  • [Playstation Lifestyle] The Sims 5 Has Been Canceled – Report
  • The stated reason was that the games development was not proceeding at a pace that gave the publisher confidence in it. It's not too surprising after several delays and rather rough looking gameplay material shown in the ramp up to early access.

  • Escape from Tarkov is offering players in-game currency as a bounty for reporting cheaters
  • It's not quite that simple. Crowdsourcing has many of the drawbacks that AI has too.

    While it can have a higher reliability in detecting nonsensical inputs or inputs that it's simply unfit in processing, that comes at an intrinsic cost in scalability. Some tasks can't be effectively crowdsourced for, either because of volume or urgency.

    Machine Learning systems learn to approximate decision making and thus can attempt at learning from crowdsourcing efforts. It is notable though that depending on the use case, model and training method, machine learning algorithms can potentially be better than the data it was trained on. Or much worse, it's very fickle.

    It is definitely still the case that crowdsourcing is a really important tool and oftentimes machine learning relies on it's efforts. And it naturally can solve tasks that we don't have a viable automated approach for.

  • a r(ule)ant about game design
  • Most games don't even try to be reasonable about stuff like that, so it's not really your fault. BG3 often enough fails that itself, but it clearly does it's best to consider stuff like that.

    Hope you have fun with the rest of the game, it's amazing fun. And trying to really roleplay a bit and get into the character interactions is rewarded a lot both throughout the game and at the end, so keep at it.

  • a r(ule)ant about game design
  • From the perspective of a DM in a real DnD game, the enemy would simply not have an incentive to follow you. It wants to guard the forge, not kill you at any cost.

    If you really wanted to, I'd have let you go that way, but I wouldn't just let the creature run into suicide or abandon it's only task for no reason, so I think BG3 does this fight really well. Especially because this is actually a fight where using the environment can make the fight much much easier and there are environmental clues before the fight that hint towards a weakness in the boss.

  • Wake me up when September starts
  • They are, but, even as someone who really enjoyed playing them without any nostalgia for them, I would have liked them all the more with a better combat system that is properly turn based and three-dimensional as the one in BG3 is.

    I know for a fact that there is a sizeable portion of players that don't think that BG3 is strictly or at all better, but at the same time, a lot of people can't get into BG1 because they really don't enjoy its combat.

    I'd absolutely adore a mod that gives us the BG1 story in BG3 and I think it would really boost accessibility. It would also be an enormous amount of effort to represent it well, especially in a way that tries to capture it in a recognizable form.

  • A cool guide to Epicurean Paradox
  • You make the claim that a will relies on some idea of chaos, which definitely requires some actual explanation.

    The amount of choices one has is irrelevant in the comparison to random chance. If the person uses reason to decide for one of several options, they, in the most common sense, clearly have acted out of free will. Assuming that a free will exists in a physical universe, but we're in metaphysics anyways.

    I am not sure what it even means to create choices where there were none. If you end up making a decision, then it clearly was an option to begin with, by the definition of what that word means.

    What pointing out the paradox here entails is that amongst the presumptions we made, at least one of them must be false. The argument used in the OP does not disprove the existence of some divine being at all and it's not trying to. It's trying to disprove the concept of a deity that has the three attributes of being all-powerful, all-loving and all-knowing. In the argument given, it is shown that at least one of these attributes is not present, given the observation of evil in the world.

    Your comparison to light being described as a particle and a wave is to your own detriment. The topic of this duality arose in the first place from the fact that our classical particle based models of the universe began to become insufficient to correctly predict behaviours that had been newly observed. A new model was created that can handle the problem. The reason this is a weak argument here is that no physicist would ever claim that the models describe the world precisely. Physical models are analogies that attempt to explain the world around us in terms humans can understand.

    In your last question, you make the mistake of misunderstanding the argument once again. You grant the person omnipotence and leave it at that. The argument is arguing about the combination of omnipotence, omniscience and all-lovingness. The last of these deals with your question directly, explaining the drive to make the changes in question. The other two grant the ability to do so without limitation.

    This chart isn't reducing that much at all. It's explaining a precise chain of reasoning. It may or may not be missing some options, but you haven't named any so far that weren't fallacies.

  • Egg Rule
  • Shops closing on Sundays in Germany is no workers rights issue. No one is asking workers to work 7 days a week.

    Germany as plenty of students, for example, who'd love to have a job on the weekend because they have the freedom to choose a bit better when they work and when not.

    The reason Sunday to this day is still a day when almost all shops have to close is mostly religious. There are restaurants and some other shops that are allowed to stay open and most of them choose either a different rest day or make sure that they have someone on any of those days. One workday on a Sunday is plenty to fill out a typical untaxed low payment job that are very useful to students and others looking to just get a bit of an income.

    Actual workers rights aren't telling people that they can never work on Sundays, they're guaranteeing people that they will never need to work too much.

  • Ask Game Masters @ttrpg.network KoboldOfArtifice @ttrpg.network
    Personal Item Crafting Quest for Armorer Artificer

    I will be DMing a DnD 5e adventure going from levels 1-12 starting this week. I am finishing up the personal quests for each character to help tie them in more into the adventure and give them something to look forward to for themselves. Most of the characters were pretty easy to work with, but I am somewhat stuck on the Armorer Artificer.

    They have stated that their character's dream is to create a legendary item. Whether it be an artefact or just some other powerful magic item, doesn't matter too much to them. Handing out a powerful magic item as the final reward for a personal quest is very classical anyways, so I'd love to go with it.

    The problem is, I can't think of anything fun to give an Armorer Artificer. They have lots of stuff to work with on their own, so neither a weapon nor an armor is really going to be of interest to them.

    Have any of you homebrewed some fun items just for Armorer Artificers or have any idea for existing (be it Wizards stuff or homebrew) stuff to hand out? It should be a considerable reward for someone around level 10.

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    Ask Game Masters @ttrpg.network KoboldOfArtifice @ttrpg.network
    Managing a large campaign

    I have been running a DnD campaign which is only getting longer and more complex as time goes on. Keeping track of every bit of lore, every NPC that is relevant to the party and major events that have happened is getting increasingly difficult. I am currently mostly trying to just keep everything in mind while taking notes here and there, but I am finding linear text documents to be hard to maintain and look through.

    The thing that has made me especially interested in better tools is that I have been planning to do a homebrew campaign once this one has wrapped up and I would like to start planning it out.

    What tools do you use to document info on worldbuilding, story and lore?

    0
    Ask Game Masters @ttrpg.network KoboldOfArtifice @ttrpg.network
    Special Combat Mechanics

    Combat makes up a decent chunk of most campaigns and the setup can make it either a blip that no one will remember to one of the most memorable parts of the campaign. I've been looking for various ways to make combat more fun in my campaign and was eager to see if people here have any ideas they'd like to share. I'm looking for anything that gives alternate win conditions, gives the players new ways to interact with the environment, forces special behaviour or anything to make a combat encounter unique.

    I'll start with some of my favourites.

    ---

    Battle Complications

    Anything that makes combat more complicated than "kill this list of people". Special conditions and anything in that direction.

    -- Ritual in Progress Someone is casting a terrifyingly strong ritual and it must be stopped by either destroying conduits, removing sacrificial materials or killing the casters. Typically this is something that allows enemies that wouldn't be very dangerous otherwise to have a far greater effect simply because the party can't focus them down, needing to spend their time on the ritual being stopped. If they fail, the possible punishment should sound quite bad, so that they feel a strong urge to stop what is happening.

    -- Ritual-borne Foe Similar to the last one, but this time it's not a time limit but rather something that requires a novel way to defeat. An enemy that is incredibly powerful and dangerous to the party being kept alive or present by as summoner or necromancer of some sort, or alternatively by a contraption. Players must destroy or deactivate the source to defeat the opponent before it defeats them. This may be through directed combat or through a puzzle of sorts in the middle of combat.

    -- Constant Reinforcements The BBEG is constantly calling forth fiends from another realm or some device creates more and more small creatures swarming the players. These elements make sure that the players can't just clear out the room, leaving the big bad guy in the middle helplessly overwhelmed by sheer action-economy. Instead, they have to either win quickly or alternatively do their best to disable the sources of enemies.

    Environmental Hazards

    These are difficult to design but great when they work out. Hazards in this case is taken in a very general sense.

    -- Unstable Ground The ground that both the players and enemies are standing on is unstable and may break away easily. May it be as the result of some level being pulled, an attack hitting the ground or maybe just random chance. As long as the players have some chance to react to what is happening, this can include anything that can make ground unsafe to simply stand on. This makes certain types of ground that are stable very favorable and possibly worth fighting over. Bonus if the enemies have ways to contest ground, just like the players can.

    -- The Floor is Lava The ground erupts in Flame, flashes of radiant beams hit the combat arena or meteors strike the area. Very similar to unstable ground, but more temporary, are occasional AoEs hitting the ground. Once again, these are best when the players feel like they can really work around them sensibly.

    -- Bottomless Pit (Maybe with a bottom) A pit that people can be thrown into. This urges people to finally realize that shove is a thing. Don't make it too easy to fall into though, falling to your death into such a pit with little chance to safe yourself won't feel great. Make sure that they get a chance to save themselves or be saved if they do fall!

    ---

    These are what comes to mind immediately. What interesting mechanics have you used to change your combat into something the party ended up finding really thrilling or memorable? I myself play DnD 5e, but I would love to hear your stories from other systems that I may implement in my campaign too!

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)KO
    KoboldOfArtifice @ttrpg.network
    Posts 3
    Comments 46