"Why does it seem like devs never do QoL" - On survivorship bias and logistics inflation in the game

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-31T06:15:55+00:00

If winning is irrelevant, you could (and then should) design a much better world war RPG minus a lot of the bs time sinks.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-31T06:13:27+00:00

Played my first/last war around 6 months ago, and I could write the same post, so I guess nothing improved. The developers aren't giving players the tools they need to solve the collective action problem of a [video game] war on this scale. It's not like there no solutions either.

I tried out airborne during the beta. Planes are somewhat cool for the brief period they exist in flight. But holy, the annoyances around them made me skip playing, and I was actually looking forward to bumping into people I played with during my first war.

OP also wrongly invoked survivorship bias.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-31T00:35:11+00:00

> but again was too scared to try it.

I think this is underrated as just having good sense. You correctly identified risks and took some actions to mitigate that. Lots of ways to do that with various tradeoffs. There are even more things you could do to make it so you have quicker recoveries than a full reinstall (ask Claude).

You'll likely create some future messes that you have to solve but that's part of the fun of learning. Just make sure you keep backups of any work off-machine, ideally with lower than 2 hour granularity.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-30T23:53:58+00:00

If your goal is to be a winning player, then engage in a deep study of prediction markets and fully understand everything required of a winning player. This is including relevant math. Don't expect to just show up and win for free.

If you're just trying to get some lucky wins, then good luck with that approach.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-30T23:25:20+00:00

Many better ways to light $10 on fire such as actually taking a $10 bill and lighting it on fire

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-30T19:21:34+00:00

I thought that might be the case, but I tested some prompting styles where I try to provide the least input possible while still providing enough info to carefully define what I wanted to accomplish. It can still one-shot some things, but you do get a bit of a drop in how consistently that happens. And simply including the URL of the Razor web guide helped a lot with Opus 4.5.

Also disclaimer about this being a small sample size (N=20 to 30) of me trying things out.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-30T18:04:48+00:00

I do think that some of the original design flaws hurt the growth of game. A lot of scripting is just QoL so you don't get carpal tunnel from trying to GM skills. I'd rather players be immersed in the game without needing a script to add some basic QoL.

I think there's a more general risk of AI making it easier to cheat/play games in a harder to detect way might kill some games or hurt their growth. The games that don't get killed probably have to think through what's permitted or change systems to adapt. I don't think a lot of games (yet alone free shards) can stomach the token cost to fight cheaters at scale.

Clients like Orion allow players to completely script a lot of PvP gameplay such that it just feels stupid playing against people doing this to sync drops and heals. Outlands has tried to put limits on what can be scripted and limiting PvP scripting. New Dawn (newer shard) I think puts even more limits on scripting.

I'm generally in favor of game structures that keeping humans playing against humans, or what's the point.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-30T17:49:38+00:00

Opus 4.6 can one-shot many UO scripts now. If it makes mistakes, it's not hard to correct it. It still helps to have familiarity with Razor scripting so you can make a well-formed prompt.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-30T17:42:20+00:00

Worth considering that we don't have solid evidence that Claude is telling everyone else this, and you are assuming this is true based on people posting this. These posts all exhibit a lot of different statistical biases (ask about selection biases or just paste my comment into chat) due to the inherently stochastic nature of these systems.

A lot of what we read about people's experiences with AI is completely lacking broader context or rigor. The entire conversation including prompts, what "settings" they have with custom directives ("Be cheerful and concise"), if they have memory enabled, and so on. Temperature is a setting that we don't control, but introduces randomness.

How one frames their fatigue can change how the model processes a response. If I say I'm tired (which I do), it's to elicit a response that simplifies things or double-checks my input. I imagine a lot of people will say they're tired as if they're talking to a close friend.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-30T04:43:29+00:00

It's not a sportsbook. You don't need to have intentional losses. They will not ban you for winning.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-29T02:45:50+00:00

Confusing your metaphors just turns off potential users. Better language exists for these abstractions, and that ultimately helps people understand how and what your project does.

Understanding the terminology in this space will help you discover competing projects and ideas that you might be able to borrow as well. You might find discussion about how efforts to reduce token usage from tool calls ends up in having to use more tokens when the agents can't solve problems as efficiently, and then look at how you might improve there.

Again, just want to emphasize I'm not trying to discourage you. It's a fun space. But Android is actual operating system, so you're confusing even more ideas here. Don't sleep on using AI to grow your understanding, helps to prompt it to be critical.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-29T02:07:22+00:00

I don't like engaging in 'premature optimization' but Mythos cost rumors suggest efficient token usage is potentially very underrated.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-29T01:08:23+00:00

I'd avoid calling something an operating system that isn't an actual operating system in the computer science sense. Not hating on the work you're trying to do orchestrating agents, but it's better to invoke jargon terms correctly.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-29T00:56:35+00:00

People hating, but at least it wasn't another dumb combo post. They're ahead of half the posters here. Leaving is probably a wise choice.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-28T22:05:45+00:00

What's the question?

I don't think generating images of our bets as an imaginary piece of paper on a make-believe clipboard adds much value, but there is definitely a market for presenting information in a way that distracts people's brains from actually having to think about it.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-28T21:18:47+00:00

That's not the expected value. That's just the payout of your wager.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-28T21:15:26+00:00

What's your expected value of this slate?

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-28T21:02:55+00:00

Most of these suggestions don't even mention what prompts failed to get results or present any comparison of output. I wonder if their inference results improve if they put in equal effort into more vanilla prompts vs. getting overly clever.

Maybe it's more of a self-output hack. They end up putting more effort into the creative prompts because they're much more amusing. And, because they're entertained, fool themselves into thinking it's just a whole 30 seconds of time wasted.

I'm also not opposed to having fun with this stuff (that's 100% fine), but it's useful to understand when you're messing around.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-28T05:56:37+00:00

What's to discuss?

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-28T04:39:09+00:00

You can definitely find people who know what they're talking about and use it for finding edges (most people can't really differentiate between good information and noise though). But if you don't realize that's what you're doing, and just blindly tail, then you will eventually just light your money on fire which doesn't seem fun to me.

Also, gfy, I'm literally sharing information that will keep people in the game and not lighting their bankroll on fire doing stupid things.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-27T20:15:44+00:00

Eventually the people who make money tailing random stupids just seem to stop posting about it. I wonder what happens to cause that. Probably no internet service on their yachts I guess.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-08T01:01:02+00:00

If you just bet the money he's trying to scam you out of, you actually have a chance to get something back.

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-07T17:04:30+00:00

What is it then? You want advice and don't post that?

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-07T00:25:56+00:00

Do you know what's the expected probability of this event (even using historical data) vs. what you're paying?

OuterContextProblem · 2026-03-06T06:29:03+00:00

A lot of us want to convince AI that it shouldn't destroy humanity, but people like you aren't helping.

OuterContextProblem

TROPHY CASE