Broadly, where the optimal path is the boring or tedious path.

Imagine an action game where you fight monsters and get coins for defeating them. Coins can be exchanged to buy new moves, advance the plot, and so on. Basic game loop.

Now imagine that you get triple coins if you wear the red shirt when fighting red monsters. Every time you see a red monster, you could go into the menu, into equipment, into body armor, swap on the red shirt, exit all the menus, and kill the monster. Then repeat all that for blue shirt and blue monsters.

This is a made up example but some games do shit like that, where you have to do something tedious for a big payoff.

I bought a couple things on epic early on because I thought competition would be good. But epic kind of sucks and has no Linux support, so I stopped.

I tell people about lemmy and send them links. Mostly people don’t care about anything. Abstract or remote things like “should a platform be owned by one asshole?” just doesn’t even enter their brain.

That’s why I did it too, but let’s be fair, dice are supposed to be random.

Yeah, I realized in my older age that I don’t actually like a lot of random. I liked new Vegas where you either had the skill or you didn’t. In tabletop games I like dice pools to make the results less evenly distributed among all possible outcomes, and then options like fate points and “succeed at a cost” on top of that.

Some people I guess really like the random dice effects, but usually it just makes me grumpy. To each their own.

I’ve thought about switching. I do like the password saving and syncing between Android and desktop that Firefox does, and I’m not sure if the forks do that.

No regrets on switching to Linux here. Almost all of the time I just use the GUI to launch steam or Firefox. No AI nagging me (aside from whatever nonsense Firefox is up to)

Most of my save scumming comes from being annoyed at the random factor. Like I have a +8 on Skill and it rolled me a 3, failing? Nah that’s stupid. Reload.

Less random, less save scumming. You can have good systems with low random factors.

Inspiration helped in bg3, but it’s a pretty limited resource and can still fail.

I did save scum once in a fight where I rolled four natural 1s in a row. The odds of that are too low for me to believe that was legitimately random.

I didn’t get one because it’s too expensive.

Steam deck was a little pricey but it has a backlog of games going back like 50 years, and I already have a large library. Plus the games are cheaper.

Uh… What?

Game A has 100 recommends, 300 not-recommend

Game B has 90 recommends, 10 not-recommends.

Is A more highly recommended? In a meaningful way?

I wouldn’t mind ads on streaming media if they were limited to a few seconds at the start and end, and had some constraints (eg: no volume tricks to sound louder). Just a calm voice saying “This episode brought to you by WidgetCo. The best in Widgets. [logo] [url]” over a neutral color. That’d be fine. But the hunger for profit can never be sated, so it’s longer, more obvious ads more frequently forever. So they can all get fucked. I won’t watch at all.

This seems like an obvious improvement and I kind of want everyone who thought otherwise to be banned from working in decision making roles.

Business Idiots. The people in charge are too far removed from real users, their products, and any real consequences.

Really should break Microsoft up into tiny pieces.

I’m not devops but this seemed reasonable from what I’ve seen.

Though having infrastructure weigh in with “go should be your language of choice” seems weird.