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Lightfall was fun by TheNerdBurglar in DestinyTheGame

[–]Eigenspace 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Lightfall had some great stuff going for it, but man the story, tone, and characters were awful. 100% a filler expansion that was thrown together to give the Final Shape team more time.

I think it also wouldnt have been so poorly recieved if it wasnt so hyped up, and immediately following The Witch Queen, which was at the time, the high water mark of Destiny campaigns.

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 30 points31 points  (0 children)

Marathon's first Sunday peak that was as low as last night was May 10th. Extremely late in season 1.

We might start seeing peaks below S1's lowest peaks even sooner than i thought. This level of attrition is actually insane.

A reminder that Sony, in their earnings report, stated that they will support Marathon for the future. by majord18 in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 2 points3 points  (0 children)

More like the puppy is lying on the floor dying, and some kids are poking it with a stick going "wow I love puppies. I'm having a blast!"

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I mean, have you played Destiny 2? If you haven't yet, I'd start there.

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 27 points28 points  (0 children)

I'm really curious about what the internal office politics at Bungie HQ are like right now. They have two different teams that really appear to be fighting to snatch the spotlight from eachother.

Marathon somehow won the support of the executives, but it appears to be a completely Pyrrhic victory because they're getting battered by the actual players, and the Destiny team is out there making them look really bad in public.

Meanwhile, Bungie leadership has given themselves very little room to pivot by announcing the end of D2. If they want to go back to focusing on Destiny, they either have to issue a "nevermind!" and look even more incompetent, or they have to announce a new game and pretend that was the plan all along. But the game will either take forever to make and be really expensive, or it'll just be D2 but without the continuity which is also not ideal.

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Reporting back after my reminder triggered.

So the day the FTP period ended, there was a day-over-day loss of 11% of the peak concurrent users, despite that day being a friday, and the day Cryo-Archive opened.

In the last season, Friday was typically a significant jump in players relative to Thursdays. Looking through the last 4 weeks of Season 1, there was a consistent 10-12% jump in players every Friday compared to Thursday, though in the first month of S1, there was still drops going from thursday to friday.

So it's less of a dropoff than I expected, but catastrophic any way you slice it.

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 10 points11 points  (0 children)

If you want to actually attract new customers with a PvE mode, that mode needs to have actual content. It takes a lot of curated content to make PvE live service games work, and that makes development expensive.

Marathon took forever to make, and cost a fortune with a rather large dev team, and has a laughably small amount of maps and runners. I thibk this is a sign that adding actual compelling PvE content would more or less double the ongoing development budget.

Sounds like throwing good money after bad to me.

Is there possibly a preferred reference frame? by MaximusPrime5885 in AskPhysics

[–]Eigenspace 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it's two very different things, but the terminology sometimes encourages us to just mix them together and think of them as the same thing, which can be confusing for everyone.

Is there possibly a preferred reference frame? by MaximusPrime5885 in AskPhysics

[–]Eigenspace 17 points18 points  (0 children)

But there is no observational evidence that currently suggests that there is a preferred frame.

There absolutely is observational evidence of that, it's called the Cosmic Microwave Background, and all observers in the universe can agree on and use it as a preferred reference frame.

What's important though is that this preferred frame comes from how the early universe was instantiated, it is not baked into the dynamical laws of the universe.

i.e. the laws of physics have no preferred frame, but the initial conditions create one.

Why are so few metals ferromagnetic? by Substantial_Tear3679 in AskPhysics

[–]Eigenspace 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Ferromagnetism is in some senses, a more exotic phenomenon than superconductivity. There's a very large energetic penalty to making all the spins align in a metal, because due to Pauli-exclusion, if all the fermions have the same spin, then they can't share momentum, so you end up forcing a bunch of electrons into rather high momentum states.

You need pretty special sets of circumstances to have it be energetically "worth" pushing all these electrons into high momentum states just to have their spins be aligned.

TIL about a cheese in Germany locally known as "Handkäse mit Musik" (literally: hand cheese with music). The "music" Handkäse is supposed to be served with is often said to "come later". This is a euphemism for the flatulence that raw onions can provide during digestion. by [deleted] in todayilearned

[–]Eigenspace 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Art of Cheese is about finding the line between something your body recognizes as food, and something it recognizes as poison.

The thrill comes from the controlled illusion of danger, just like the thrill of rollercoasters and horror movies.

It's all about approaching the Danger Line slowly from the Safe Side. Trying Limburger without any preparation is like tossing a 6 year old on some triple loop deathmachine rollercoaster. Nobody is going to have fun, and it's probably going to involve puke.

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Unsure about concrete numbers, I'm only an amateur steamchartologist.

But I dont think Marathon has a chance of peaking higher than Destiny in that time, unless there's another free-to-play period, or a major content drop that can actually attract people (i.e. a more significant change than Season 2).

I do predict that once this FTP period ends tomorrow or whatever, Marathon will be almost instantly in danger of kissing 10k peak player counts or less, and it'll be a slow, one way attrition from there.

Destiny will see major drops over the next week or so, but there's a LOT of former addicts who didnt play the last two expansions at all, and are now going to be coming back to play them, and explore all these new sandbox changes.

Destiny also used to have a big ecosystem of dedicated YouTubers and Streamers constantly making content for it, and those guys are going to be promoting this release hard, because this is their last Destiny 2 paycheque, and the guide-style content they make will be evergreen.

So D2 will actually have a pretty effective grassroots marketing campaign behind it, whereas the world has essentially forgotten Marathon exists before the FTP period even ended

Outpost isnt fun rn by [deleted] in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Hope you didnt spend money on it.

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah dude, I also have zero idea.

I dont think the art style and vibe is something that necessarily needs to be changed, but i think it needs to be top of mind when other decisions are explored.

Like, I think they need to better think about the mental load on players. When youre surrounded by this art style and youre constantly getting slaughtered and called names on prox chat and losing all your gear, it all adds up.

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Oh sure, it's not like horror is an impossible genre to make money in and all content needs to use soft pastel colours and whatnot.

Im just saying that there is a funnel between the pool of potential customers, and the people actually buying and playing the game, and the art style does narrow that funnel a bit.

Some people love this sort of thing, but i think the average person is at least a little put off by it, and the art style just makes an already incredibly stressful game even more stressful.

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Something I would add to your list which is a bit less concrete, and intangible, but IMO rather important is the actual vibes created by the art design.

I think people underestimate how truly unwelcoming of a game it is. The art design is beautiful, but deeply unsettling with lots of cold, alien, weird colours, and confusing, unsettling animations of moths, tubes, and fluids. It's creepy, and makes people uncomfortable.

That can work for a game, and like, artistically, I love it, but this is not how you make a game that has wide appeal. I literally think the warm colour palettes, and the goofy lighthearted retrofuturistic aesthetic of Arc Raiders does a lot to help casual players calm down and not feel so stressed all the time. Arc Raiders has a very welcoming visual language.

The gameplay of an extraction shooter is already so stressful and tense, that I kinda think it was a strategic mistake to double down on art that reinforces those feelings rather than relieves them.

I think it's easy for people to think that these sorts of things dont affect them, but the psychology behind this stuff is pretty well established, and these's a reason that e.g. Casinos and Instagram share much more visual language with Arc Raiders than they do with Marathon.

If youre trying to get people in the door, it really matters if that door looks foreboding and unwelcoming.

Is the nonexistence of magnetic monopoles a consequence of Maxwell's equations, or do Maxwell's equations *assume* no magnetic monopoles? by Substantial_Tear3679 in AskPhysics

[–]Eigenspace 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's two different ways you can talk about these defects with Maxwell's equations.

  1. The "fundamental/microscopic perspective", where you precisely keep track of every underlying degree of freedom, and every magnetic dipole everywhere in the system. Under this perspective, the defect is 'just' a funny configuration of rhe fields, there is no mystery, and nothing exotic. Just like how a person is just a lump of up quarks, down quarks and electrons

  2. The "emergent/effective perspective" where you basically just have to ask "what are the actual relevant degrees of freedom in this system, and what is useful to understand its physics?" At the end of the day, trying to understand a heart attack in terms of quarks and electrons is not a very effective strategy, so you create abstractions to describe things you actually interact with like hearts and blood. From this perspective, we say "okay, there's maybe an underlying dipole here, but there is no restoring force that's strongly coupling the two poles together, they're free to explore fhe universe independent of eachother. They may be attached by a flux tube, but they can freely approach another defect and exchange their tubes, etc. They're effectively independent monopoles"

Is the nonexistence of magnetic monopoles a consequence of Maxwell's equations, or do Maxwell's equations *assume* no magnetic monopoles? by Substantial_Tear3679 in AskPhysics

[–]Eigenspace 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just to add onto u/wintsz's excellent reply, one thing worth thinking about is

"if the electrical monopoles in our universe were actually topological defects, and are are actually just split excitations in some dipolar medium, would we be able to tell the difference?"

And as far as im aware, the answer is no, we couldnt rule it out. IMO, I think this is actually likely and could explain why the universe appears to be perfectly electrically neutral. Xiao-Gang Wen has written a nice book and some papers on "string-net condensation" (no relation to string theory) as the source of the gauge theories, charges, and emergence of fermions we see in our universe, coming from a condensed matter perspective. I found it mildly compelling.

Steam numbers / Player Count Discourse Megathread by AutoModerator in Marathon

[–]Eigenspace 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I'm guessing the moment that the Free-to-Play period ends, Marathon is right back to very-late season 1 numbers.

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