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AG3
Feb 4, 2004

Ask me about spending hundreds of dollars on Mass Effect 2 emoticons and Avatars.

Oven Wrangler

MissMarple posted:

I, personally, do that a lot. That's partly because in years of experience i've learned a lot of people REALLY don't get probability and so I do it myself, but you also hit upon a really dangerous word : AVERAGE.

"We want X item to drop after an average of Y hours playtime".
Lots of people will balance around ideas like this, but they forget this is the AVERAGE experience.
What does the game look like for the lucky 1%, and the unlucky 1%? The people at either end of that curve?

Someone gets X item after 10 minutes, and it utterly destroys the early game experience because it's brokenly good if you have it in the first 10 hours of the game.
Then you've got the die hard fan who has been playing for 2 years, every single night, and it still hasn't dropped! And every "yay gratz!" in Alliance chat for a person who has been playing for just a few months reopens the wound.

Probability is the nemesis of the player and the designer.

I remember this really well from vanilla World of Warcraft. A chest that has a 50/50 chance of dropping either a priest weapon quest item or a hunter one. And the guilds that after months and months of clearing the place still only got just one of them every single time.

On the flip side it led to some pretty funny theories about how to game the instance seeds by having certain classes enter the instance first, or have it be the raid leader/not the raid leader.

Average is dangerous.

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AG3
Feb 4, 2004

Ask me about spending hundreds of dollars on Mass Effect 2 emoticons and Avatars.

Oven Wrangler
I don't know which article that is, but I saw a video about the Pacman AI just the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7-SHTktjJc

AG3
Feb 4, 2004

Ask me about spending hundreds of dollars on Mass Effect 2 emoticons and Avatars.

Oven Wrangler
I paid around $90 for SimTower boxed here in Norway back when it was new, so I for one am glad that prices haven't kept following inflation. Also, it's not exclusive to games, a lot of consumer electronics for example have gotten cheaper. The PS2 was more expensive when it was new than the PS4 was.

AG3 fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Oct 21, 2018

AG3
Feb 4, 2004

Ask me about spending hundreds of dollars on Mass Effect 2 emoticons and Avatars.

Oven Wrangler

nielsm posted:

In the Danish model (there is no minimum wage set by law in Denmark, it's entirely controlled by unions' collective agreements) you will find a multitude of unions covering the different trades within one company. Occasionally this even depends on education, e.g. in the IT department where I work, some of my colleages with the same job description and title as me are employed under a different agreement, only due to having a different path in education.
There would not nothing strange about software developers, graphical designers, content writers, management, janitorial staff, etc. all being under different agreements bargained by different unions.

Pretty much the same in Norway.

I don't understand why people in the US find the workings of unions so hard to get (in general, not just game dev). They're common in Europe and for all of their shortcomings, they mostly work? They're certainly better than what is in the US now, which is basically "you have no rights and we'll work you to depression or death at our discretion".

AG3
Feb 4, 2004

Ask me about spending hundreds of dollars on Mass Effect 2 emoticons and Avatars.

Oven Wrangler

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

And adaptive difficulty has been a thing for a long time. Rubberbanding in racing games, for example: early racing games didn't even simulate the other racers on the track, they'd just periodically have one attempt to pass you, or give you a chance to pass a racer, and your place would be updated accordingly.

I didn't know what this was called back in the day when I played Mario Kart on the SNES, but the effect was obvious. It also meant that the only way I could beat some of the 150cc stages was by playing it with someone else, since the AI couldn't rubberband past the person in the first place position if the other person was in the second place position a good distance behind.

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AG3
Feb 4, 2004

Ask me about spending hundreds of dollars on Mass Effect 2 emoticons and Avatars.

Oven Wrangler
For a game like Dark Souls and its ilk, the question is how much of a game there is left once you've made it easy to beat. If you've designed a game whose whole point is to be extremely difficult to beat and that's what the whole game design revolves around, is there really anything left once you take the difficulty out? I mean, I don't think anyone would say that Dark Souls has a gripping story that has to be experienced or anything.

I played Dark Souls a bit. I didn't like the open-endedness and lack of narrative storytelling, and it was way too difficult for me. It just wasn't for me, and that's fine. If I felt the game would have been worth playing through by any means I could've just cheated through it, but I didn't get the feeling that there was anything worth experiencing for me once combat was removed so I didn't bother. I guess some people would enjoy the impressive set pieces and huge bosses regardless of difficulty, but I'm not sure most of them would find it worth the full price of a new game just for that.

I dunno, I just feel like... when you make a game like Dark Souls and you charge $60 for it, I think it's more honest to say "the difficulty is the point of the experience, there isn't $60 worth of fun here if you don't like that sort of thing" rather than shoehorning in a super easy mode so that anyone can beat it while not actually delivering much in the way of interesting things for those who more or less skip the intended combat experience.

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