KoboldOfArtifice

@KoboldOfArtifice@ttrpg.network

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You hit on a point there I really missed out on in my comment. Sims 2 had that perfect unique character of being weird and endearing at every corner. I feel like Sims 3 frankly was losing it already and by the times of Sims 4 it had just felt entirely corporate already.

  The games used to have a very delightful degree of strangeness that was only aided in by the eccentric but utterly iconic music it ran with. I was rather young when I played Sims 1, so Sims 2 is my nostalgia home turf, but I love both of their soundtracks. Mark Mothersbaugh’s music in particular just puts me into an entire space of it’s own when I hear it. Don’t think there is music that more embodies the lightness of existence than that.

  I miss the times when somehow they juggled making me feel like my Sims achievements are somewhat hard won and meaningful with the silliness of having my Sim dream of nothing but grilled cheese and living next door to plant people and aliens. Incarnations of Strangerville after Sims 2 just never quite hit the note that that game managed to nail.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I can pitch in that for me at least, Sims 4 was a large improvement in terms of the UI and UX in regards to both CAS and Build Mode. It has a lot of small stuff that makes the experience much more accessible for me, personally.

  It also comes with a visual style that I myself quite prefer, but this is controversial itself.

  I still find myself getting bored of actual play in Sims 4 rather quickly, since things just don’t feel like they require much investment at all anymore. Being a perfect all-rounder of a Sim is utterly trivial in Sims 4 while Sims 3 and 2 back then made me feel like I had to work for it quite a bit. It may just be me being more capable, who knows.

  I’ll say, I can’t say the business model of any of these games has appealed to me. I have purchased the base games for all the titles in the series, but have chosen to experience the DLC in a more budget friendly way. Yar har, et al.

  It’s a pity we’ve lost a lot of things that were great that they just didn’t feel like building on. The neighbourhoods in Sims 4 feel terrible and I wish we’d have found some way to make Create a Style from Sims 3 work without bogging down the performance quite as much. At the time when Sims 4 rolled around, I was also happy to swap as my PC at the time just couldn’t handle the game running smoothly anymore, either.

  Sims 4 is not really a development that will do the series good in the long run, but it can’t be denied that it has some really great changes that for me at least make building and decorating buildings feel much more fun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon turns on raytracing⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where is RTX being forced into? Haven’t seen a game where it’s not an option you have to toggle on first and it’s not like RTX is a lot of additional work for the developer, seeing how it in fact reduces the work necessary to make a scene look the way it should.

  Yes, it’s stupidly expensive and not every game manages to benefit massively from it, but it can lead to some very pretty environments in games and it seems perfectly valid in those cases.

  Also, some people do quite enjoy admiring the way the materials of various things end up looking. Maybe it’s not the majority of players, but some people quite like looking at details in the games they play.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Escape from Tarkov is offering players in-game currency as a bounty for reporting cheaters⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  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.