All still present (positive and negative) on Twitter, plus the benefit to open-minded people of hearing opinions from all sides, which has improved post-Elon.
This is such an annoying and useless comment. This same comment is parroted EVERY time there's an article about robots anywhere on the Internet. How are you adding anything to the discussion at all?
S/he seems excited and wanted to reinforce that with something more than an upvote. Frankly if his/her comment adding nothing, yours took away from the thread because it has a negative and discouraging tone to it.
Yes, me too; PvP, raids, dungeons etc left me completely cold. I just liked wandering around the map, finding the weird things in the corners, working through the storylines (although a lot of them finished up in dungeons which required more than one person to play, which I was annoyed at). I think I solo'd my way all the way through WoW Classic, and then through a couple of expansions. (The article dumps on the Outlands a lot, but they were some of my favourite content. The designers had just gone nuts. I know someone who painted a scene from the Outlands because it just looked so awesome.)
I think I swam all the way around both Classic continents. Took flipping ages. There are some strange things tucked away in corners, though:
It's funny that you say that 2048 "gets really boring" after a while, but that it is "more fun to play than Threes".
It's interesting that the balance and effort that went into Threes resulted in a game that (to me) is more complex and possesses more staying power. However, it is still regarded as not as good as a game with more immediate gratification and significantly less staying power.
I'm always wary of game designers who espouse "balance" all the time. The only place you ever need balance is in a multiplayer game as people like be on an even playing field.
In single player games however, too much striving for balance can lead to a very boring game. One of the classic failures in this regard was Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. It had a balancing mechanism for all the enemies in the game, so that they leveled up in step with the player. However, this meant that every single monster was almost the exact same challenge, all the way to the end. ie. You may have leveled up and increased your damage output, but the monsters have increased their hitpoints and it still takes the same 3 attacks to kill anything. It removed all sense of progression from the game.
So it just goes to show that too much balance can really bore people! You need to hook a player and get them interested by giving them a sense of progression, of achievement.
Some ways that you can give a sense of achievement is by letting them work out optimal strategies, min/max'd character builds, etc. These can be unintentional or artificially included (eg. super weapons near the final boss fight).
tldr; People like a sense of progression, even if that is achieved by having an unbalanced game.
I don't quite agree with you here. I think Elder Scrolls is a bad example to give because the series as a whole is probably one of the most unbalanced RPGs there are: even in Oblivion, the 'balancing mechanics' you refer to just encourage more unbalanced play -- as opposed to, say, Galsiah's Character Development in Morrowind which is ultimately a balancing mechanism but promotes more aspects of gameplay and prohibits undesirable behavior.
Balance is best used as a function to encourage meaningful and difficult gameplay, which I'd argue can be defined largely as the number of interesting choices a player has to make. I think 2048 does a poor job of this relative to Threes: after around a week of play I was able to consistently win using the corner strategy. In Threes, the variance in tile distribution means there is no such panacea.
(That being said, I agree that pursuing 'balance' in a game is like pursuing 'colors' in an artwork. It's a road to reach some desired destination: not a goal in of itself.)
> It's interesting that the balance and effort that went into Threes resulted in a game that (to me) is more complex and possesses more staying power. However, it is still regarded as not as good as a game with more immediate gratification and significantly less staying power.
You have summed up the entire game industry in a nutshell.
And yet, while the games are obviously based on the same mechanics, I find 2048 to be the better game because it is simpler. 2048 gets right to the point, and is trivial to understand. This is an important design point that is often missed: games often work best when they can be easily discovered. Stuff that slows that down (unnecessary complexity, a UI that slows down how fast you can iterate on mistakes, etc) can impact how "annoying" the game is perceived to be.
(I do they're both good games, though, and could see how either could be preferred)
As someone living in New York, my most common response to these sorts of article is:
1: Okay, but I can't just pick up and go to some artist's utopia. I have a job and (hopefully) a career to think about. I made the decision to move to New York years ago and now for better or worse I'm here, and working in a job that is not super common elsewhere.
2: Okay, New York Sucks (Big Cities Suck), so where should we go? Portland, OR where there are no jobs? Austin, same? St. Louis, apparently?
3 (Bonus/most confusing): If you work in tech, are just starting out in your career, where is the intersection of a city with robust tech scene to provide you jobs, and yet low rent and thriving art scene?
Ism: highly active and well-understood suffix that means, among other things: "manner of action or behavior characteristic of a (specified) person or thing" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/-ism
You realize you can do all of those things and still make not very much money, right? You also realize that people in different economic situations aren't privileged to receive all of the institutional knowledge about the job market that you may have? That some people don't even think about becoming doctors or lawyers or programmers because they dont know anyone who became those things? There are a huge number of reasons why some people may not be able to make the same amount of money someone at google can make. Does that mean they shouldn't be allowed to live in SF?
Not to mention young recently graduated lawyers and doctors make shit for money, and newly minted lawyers in particular are facing much weaker than expected demand in the market.
"Making smart choices" doesn't always pan out. I don't think one can easily accuse someone who studied hard, disciplined themselves, and made their way through law school of being shortsighted, but here they are facing unemployment or dramatic underemployment.
Ditto traditional fields of engineering. Lots of people who studied hard, planned ahead, worked hard, and then fell into the massive collapse of manufacturing in this country.
It's nice to know that the crazy "improv political theater" from that one guy has some bearing in reality, though.
As a case in point, my sister and her husband recently finished their post-doc work at NYU and are heading out to SF. Both of them PhDs, both of them work very hard at what they do, both of them in school/fellowships/postdocs since graduating high school (they are 32/33 now) and are having trouble finding jobs. Her husband recently took a job in SF doing research getting paid a mere 60k a year. That's very low anywhere for the effort put into it, insultingly low in SF, IMO. She can probably find work there in SF pretty easy, but probably not making much more.
Lazy they are not.
(seriously thinking of pushing them into joining one of those RoR or similar bootcamps and getting into Programming, they have the drive and intellect to do well, I think)
Edit: Just to be clear, their PhDs are both in the 'Hard Sciences' - biology to be specific - Virology and Genetics respectively.
I had this same discussion with an ex-colleague and he pointed out that if you managed to drive away all the lower paid workers, then who would clean your streets, stock your supermarket shelves, put our your fires and catch those criminals? He made a very good point.
In old east coast cities the low-pay workers will simply live farther away and endure shitty commutes.
In the Bay Area this isn't possible, since NIMBYs have fought against every and any transit project, and caused the neglect of existing mass transit. Housing is expensive from SF all the way south - where exactly would these people commute in from? You can't even get from downtown into the Outer Sunset in an hour during commute hours, where do you think your baristas are going to come from?
The SF Bay is one of the most thorough and complete failures of government and infrastructure I've witnessed first-hand.
Easy access to information and articles about breaking news events.
Community.
A feed of interesting articles and discussions.
Enjoyment gained from following quickly evolving memes, discussions, and jokes.
A way to verbalize incidental thoughts, and the pleasure of crafting those thoughts into small nuggets to share with my friends.
Of course there are many negative aspects to Twitter, but those are the things I found value in.