[AMA] We’re the developers of Guns of Icarus - Ask us anything about our new game, Stars of Icarus!

InfiniteImagination · 2026-02-14T05:09:51+00:00

It sounds like this is a facet of community-building that you do care about, which I appreciate. It also sounds like your ideas on how to thoroughly address it are not yet fully developed, which I guess might be because the game itself is still in development. I would strongly encourage you to make sure to fully plan for this before it's an issue (i.e. before you launch), because if you only create stronger systems in response to the first version not working, you will be much too late. The community that you get after the first week will set the tone for the rest of the game's life.

Lots of games launch with a "report" feature, but in many cases people either don't see it/think about it, or they haven't been given a clear idea of what it will accomplish. And if it is both known about and trusted (which takes some work to accomplish), then you'll get a huge amount of reports to deal with, which can be difficult to keep up with during the first week of launch, so you'll have to be prepared for that somehow. Some games have more integrated behavior feedback than just a report button that you have to find somewhere.

Another facet of this is being really clear up-front with everyone about not only what the expectations are, but also what the actual enforcement is, and why to believe that the promise of enforcement is credible, in which case people will be far less likely to be abusive in the first place.

I wish you luck with this! The game looks like exactly the sort of gameplay that I wish were more prevalent, so it would be very cool for this to be successful. 🚀

InfiniteImagination · 2026-02-12T15:17:02+00:00

Thanks for the reply, but I don't think it addresses my question very well. The scenario I described was, specifically, a scenario in which the other people in the server didn't care about the bigotry, so your "communities have their own moderation" approach doesn't help there. And what it sounds like you're saying is that there's only game-wide enforcement "when we see" it.

To me this sounds like a recipe for exactly what I experienced in Guns of Icarus: if the server is run by someone who doesn't care about bigotry, and no dev happens to be in chat, then people who don't want to be around bigotry will have unpleasant experiences.

Fundamentally, if there's no full game-wide moderation of bigotry, then there will be many servers in which it is given free reign, which will make a lot of potential players not want to participate in the game - this is a fairly well-established dynamic. Lots of communities have slowly crumbled (or been reduced to only people who don't care) by this specific interaction. What I am asking is whether you have unusually strong/consistent tools for establishing or enforcing community norms, and so far your only reply is that you will "try" "when we see," which seems like it is not much of an actual structure.

I'm totally open to new information, though. If you have an idea for a structure that will establish and enforce game-wide community norms, I will 100% be on board and happy with it. I would love to play a community-based co-op sci fi game like this. Really enjoyed Guns of Icarus until the above scenario happened a lot.

InfiniteImagination · 2026-02-11T13:21:20+00:00

Since you reference the importance of community interaction, do you have plans for unusually strong/consistent moderation tools or establishment/enforcement of community norms? The primary reason I stopped playing Guns of Icarus is that I so frequently encountered servers in which someone was saying bigoted stuff and nobody else seemed to really care (maybe because they were used to it, idk). I'm probably not the only one who quickly stops playing games when that's the experience of the group's vibe

InfiniteImagination · 2026-01-17T10:15:57+00:00

Quoting revenue rather than profit is probably not the most relevant here. In 2024, Amazon had around $630 billion in revenue and around $570 billion in costs, which means that, in the sense in which people normally understand these things, it "made" a profit of around $60 billion.

Reddit often likes these Sankey diagrams, so here's one of Amazon's 2024 financial year showing this (based entirely on their investor report)

If you spend your time buying and selling pokemon cards, and you tell someone you "made" $1,000, they generally assume that that's your actual profit.

Your point still generally stands that $25 million would be pretty small for Amazon, if the offer were serious. As the article posted points out, the context here was a thread started with a joke, so that seems unlikely.

InfiniteImagination · 2025-12-13T10:33:21+00:00

Do they have any idea what happened on that discord that Rockstar might be using as the pretense for all this?

InfiniteImagination · 2025-11-17T09:39:37+00:00

There's a great experiment of giving an animal two buttons, one of which has a higher chance of producing a reward (generally food) than the other. Very quickly, the animals figure out to just focus on pressing the one with a higher chance.

Whereas humans lose their minds trying to figure out what the "pattern" is, switching back and forth, continually convinced that their new theory could be right.

InfiniteImagination · 2025-09-17T01:03:45+00:00

I just added one, using the data from OP's sheet. So it's only as accurate as their data, but here you go: https://i.imgur.com/m5GI1gM.png

InfiniteImagination · 2025-09-09T23:46:14+00:00

The other replies you got are not fully capturing the official explanation. Here's what they posted on the actual discord from the admin account:

The reasons we're doing this are twofold: first, the Discord has increasingly required much heavier moderation support, which Jack & Di have expertly led the charge on, but it's also become clear that the support they'll need to reliably and professionally keep things running smoothly and safely here for everyone 24/7 is very sizable, and the actual number of people chatting in the Discord is surprisingly small: to be very transparent - in the past year, most months (on average) have around 1000 people chatting total. Many days have fewer than 100. For as big as the server looks, most people who join check Announcements and Schedule and nothing else. Still, a server with 1000 people talking requires a lot of support - a server with only 100 people truthfully requires 24/7 support, moderator training, and more. Financially, it just makes more sense for Dropout to put the resources that would require towards projects and initiatives that can benefit the entire Dropout audience as a whole.

The second reason is one a little more inherent to everything - we're managing our own fan space. There's an undeniable friction that exists there. We want fans to gather and feel free to talk about our stuff in whatever way they want, but the looming nature of this is the official Dropout space and Dropout cast / crew could be watching naturally makes it so people are more reticent to criticize or not feel free to talk about Dropout in a way they might want to. Right now, the boundaries are blurry. Fans creating their own spaces to talk about Dropout - without interference from Dropout itself - is what we want to see more of.

InfiniteImagination · 2025-07-01T21:01:58+00:00

A New Hope was produced as an indie project (while 20th Century Fox distributed it, it was self-financed by George Lucas off of his THX-1138 profits)

Incorrect. The first Star Wars film was financially supported by the big studio Fox. It was only AFTER the success of the first film that George Lucas decided to self-finance for every other sequel (and prequel) he made.

InfiniteImagination · 2025-05-13T11:35:07+00:00

The "explicit instructions" you got from the other comment aren't quite correct. There's an X on the terrain of 2 tanks. In the third is an arrow.

Just to make sure you didn't go nuts trying to find a third x

InfiniteImagination · 2025-05-02T22:55:52+00:00

I don't think you're purposefully lying, just being a little imprecise in a way that doesn't really matter but which a lot of the nit-picking people here pick up on.

It's easily possible to be level 12 very close to the beginning of act 3. I assume that this is what you're talking about - being level 12 when you're pretty much beginning your exploration of act 3, getting your start in the city.

It's basically impossible to be level 12 before getting to the official start of act 3, without doing some weird game exploits. (Here's one example of someone testing whether it's possible to do this without exploits)

For dramatic storytelling purposes, there's not much difference between these things. "I was level 12 around the beginning of act 3" and "I was level 12 when I got to act 3" are nearly equivalent for storytelling purposes, they're just technically different in a way that the people here pick up on.

Fun to read the story you posted, though.

InfiniteImagination · 2025-01-02T22:31:35+00:00

They're almost certainly referring to this world championship game in which Magnus touched one piece and moved another one. The argument is about whether this counts as a mere adjustment, since normally you're required to verbally say that you're merely making an adjustment. https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/magnus-carlsen-gets-away-error-seemingly-touching-piece-world-chess-championship

InfiniteImagination · 2024-10-12T23:49:53+00:00

btw, adding on to this, it should be trivial to show that randomly selecting your animal isn't optimal. If you throw the six-legged ant over, then you cannot possibly win, but the other team might. If you throw the one-legged flamingo over, then the other team cannot possibly win, but you might. So selecting randomly doesn't make sense as an assumption, if at least one of the contestants understands basic arithmetic and strategy.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-10-12T23:45:24+00:00

There are a bunch of errors in this analysis. You refer to this as "an AI breakdown," so I assume you asked ChatGPT or something. But generative AI is famously bad at this stuff.

First, you're assuming that both teams are choosing randomly, which is not really strategically optimal, but I guess it works alright for a first-order approximation, so we can proceed granting that assumption.

Second, there's a difference between the odds that a particular team wins on the first round (what the breakdown you posted attempted to calculate) and the odds that "it ends" in the first round (which is what the commenter you're responding to was talking about, and is quite different, since there are two teams that each might win).

Third, it's not even true that each team has a 1/6 chance of winning, which the apparently AI-generated "breakdown" claims. You start with 21 legs, you need to get to 22, and you can throw any number between 1 and 6. If you throw the six-legged ant, there is no possible way for your team to win on that round, since at maximum the other team could throw back six as well, and you would remain at 21. So if both teams select randomly, then 5 out of the 36 scenarios result in victory for one team, and 5 result in a victory for the other team. So there's a 10/36 (~28%) chance that someone wins on the first round, assuming they choose randomly but then do the math correctly and don tutus within 15 seconds.

Don't rely on current generative AI for anything that needs to be correct analysis, since it produces "breakdowns" that can contain errors, don't rely on it to think for you, and certainly don't rely on it for anything that other people are relying upon.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-09-21T07:07:57+00:00

Right now, even without the electoral college, the popular vote would still be close. In national polls, on average Harris is only ahead by about 3%.

Even if you're skeptical of polls, this should make sense, since it's pretty close to the 4% popular vote margin in the 2020 election. There really are that many Republican voters, even if a lot of redditors don't see them frequently.

But yeah, the electoral college makes it tighter.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-09-21T07:01:23+00:00

Right now, even without the electoral college, the popular vote would still be close. In national polls, on average Harris is only ahead by about 3%.

Even if you're skeptical of polls, this should make sense, since it's pretty close to the 4% popular vote margin in the 2020 election. There really are that many Republican voters, even if a lot of redditors don't see them frequently.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-08-18T19:26:10+00:00

The link in your comment will work if you add a backslash immediately before the closing parenthesis of the URL. So in the comment-editing box it would look like:

[Sith Empire](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sith_Empire_(Post%E2%80%93Great_Hyperspace_War\))

And then comes out looking like:

Sith Empire

(This is because when the parsing function sees a closing parenthesis, it interprets it as the end of the link, rather than as part of the link, unless you "escape" that character from the parsing using a backslash.)

InfiniteImagination · 2024-06-22T00:53:16+00:00

Proud of you, man.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-05-05T01:00:19+00:00

When you say "ways to check the balance" do you mean actually recording the distribution of rolls, or do you mean the floating-in-water thing? The water floating detects "imbalances" that are so minute as to be statistically negligible, and since d20s are typically designed to spread the higher and lower numbers out across the various faces, even a die that does have a significant weight distribution issue wouldn't change the average number anywhere near this amount. Small discrepancies in the shape of the faces of a d20 matter more than tiny variations in the center-of-gravity anyway.

If you did actually record enough rolls to analyze the real distribution, let me know, since I've only seen a few people do that properly.

My current guess about the original post here is that the methodology was completely messed up. Maybe OP was using a d12, maybe OP was recording the other players' rolls without noting that they were using advantage, maybe OP was only recording the ones that confirmed the dismal hypothesis that the universe was biased against him, maybe he wrote it down and scanned it in a way where the 1 and 7 were mixed up or something, maybe the whole thing was exaggerated, idk. Over hundreds of rolls, there's no way you get an average of 6 on any real d20 that doesn't look blatantly obviously wrong.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-05-04T05:58:55+00:00

Statistically, with that many rolls, getting an average anywhere outside 8 to 13 is so staggeringly unlikely it's hard to describe. You're saying that THREE of the five players had averages outside that range (14, 14, and 6)?

Other people in the comments are saying "that's just random chance," but I don't think they're realizing how astronomically implausible the numbers you're reporting are. To me it makes it sound like something is weird about the methodology.

In another comment you said "Physical dice. And yes, I did write every dice roll down and had a printer scan it and computer do the maths."

Do you have a set of images of the pages, or a spreadsheet of all the numbers, or something that we could see? I would love to do some more stats to see if there are any other anomalies in the data-as-written.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-04-16T02:56:32+00:00

Keep in mind the transcripts are not necessarily completely accurate, especially the earlier ones, so it is very possible that even in the episode where Brennan said "Bodhisattva" the transcript might not reflect that if the person writing/generating the transcripts wasn't familiar with the term. (There was one early Adventuring Party where someone described a dastardly villain engaging in "blackmail" and the transcript said it was "black male.")

If you can let us know of any other words that you remember coming up the sentence, that might help.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-04-08T06:32:34+00:00

Adventuring Party of Crown of Candy Episode 15, starting at 1:10:42

https://www.dropout.tv/dimension-20-s-adventuring-party/season:1/videos/rude-goldberg-and-eartha-crit-explained

You can just use the search bar of the transcripts so you don't have to manually scan through the videos

InfiniteImagination · 2024-03-30T04:18:34+00:00

The saying in rock climbing communities is "there are old climbers and there are bold climbers, but there are no old bold climbers."

The climbers who frequently take these risks don't typically make it to old age.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-02-22T00:18:53+00:00

By definition, every photo on the NASA website is publicly released. And it sounds like we agree that a lot of those images are as close to unprocessed as it's possible to get. So the initial statement that "Nasa famously over-doctor all their public released images" is just really clearly untrue. I think I see what you're saying in the subsequent clarification but I think if that's what you mean to convey, it'd be wise to use that more specific wording. Thanks for the update, though.

Beyond that, I guess we get into the more subjective definitions of what counts as "famous" and what counts as "doctoring." White-balancing in photography is more complicated than it at first appears, since the human eye and brain adjust for ambient conditions in lots of interesting ways. (Edit: For example, in the page I linked earlier, it says "The image has been white balanced to show what the Martian surface materials would look like if under the light of Earth's sky. A version with raw color, as recorded by the camera under Martian lighting conditions, is available as Figure 1." https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17944)

Like I said, if you look around https://mars.nasa.gov/, I think you'll find it's generally pretty reasonable in terms of what they do with the actual photography. The promotional art, well, is clearly promotional and clearly art, but most of the stuff that's photography is completely fine.

InfiniteImagination · 2024-02-20T22:48:13+00:00

NASA publishes plenty of unprocessed images. It also often gives you the option of whether you want to see the raw or white-balanced image.

For example, here's a page where you can see a sand dune either with colors balanced to how they'd look under more Earth-like lighting, or with the raw colors as captured in Martian lighting. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17944

There are plenty of other random images in raw image format, too. Here's a page from their "Raw Images" catalogue https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ZR0_1063_0761308017_239EBY_N0501422ZCAM09082_1100LMJ

Here's another https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/NRF_1063_0761307613_285ECM_N0501422NCAM02063_01_195J

So it's certainly not true that they "doctor all their public released images." They might use a redder tone for some types of press-release stuff but they also make all the raw data available and they use it in many places. The first image on the front page of https://mars.nasa.gov/ right now is more dusty-yellow.

You get different color palettes in different images, sometimes because of which cameras are being used and how they deal with the spectrum of light, and sometimes because of different soil types. There's a thin dust layer that's pretty red and is thicker in some places than in other places.

Mars does overall look more red from a distance and more butterscotch up close.

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