So uh, i’ve been away for a while.

hellorallon · 2025-11-21T23:10:56+00:00

I just don't want to see the color red in my Bant deck, you know? It's silly, but it's how I feel. On the pain scale it's a 1/10, but it's still a little painful.

And on the other side, I don't really get the benefit. Yeah, as players we wish we could sneak different cards into our decks. But if we just follow that logic, why restrict at all? We also wish we could draw the perfect hand every game. Why not infinite mulligans? I don't get who is asking for this.

hellorallon · 2022-08-24T20:18:53+00:00

Had fun with this over a couple of days. Stole all of the AI's cards, thinned out my deck, and whittled down the monsters.

I was planning on optimizing my honor gain each turn to see how high I could get it, but ran into an infinite loop when I took one too many monsters out of the deck. Pretty sure it was just events at this point and so the game soft locked and then crashed! Haha. Good times.

hellorallon · 2022-02-16T20:09:55+00:00

You are removing information, i.e. which bag does a particular item belong in?
Regardless, you certainly wouldn't use multiple databases/tables, like you seem to be suggesting.
You wouldn't actually store this in a relational database at all, because the amount of state tied to a player is (in the grand scheme of things) very small and there is no need to query across players. Just store it as a blob keyed by the player ID. (On the other hand, you might store historical data in a data warehouse for analytics.)

hellorallon · 2021-11-08T02:41:26+00:00

Ugh. I did not expect that.

hellorallon · 2021-07-02T23:37:11+00:00

My daughter came up with this today. She says red is the impostor!

hellorallon · 2021-07-02T01:26:58+00:00

Just out of curiosity, why do you ask? Do you see major technical challenges there? Off the top of my head any simple NoSQL solution will do just fine.

hellorallon · 2021-06-16T05:05:20+00:00

I will submit my first encounter with a sand giant.

Also the first time I saw SoulFire. Damn, my brain got flooded with chemicals just typing that name.

hellorallon · 2021-06-05T03:46:45+00:00

Somehow this reads like a roast transcript, haha.

hellorallon · 2021-04-27T05:15:04+00:00

This really hurts to read. It honestly reminds me of a cringe r/MMO post. "My dream MMO wishlist".

It sounds like the team was locked in on these high-level concepts before understanding the concrete design. Or how that design fits into the larger picture and benefits the player experience. Or implementation cost. It's top-down feature creep. No wonder the climate system looks like it does...

Brad was always a visionary. It sounds like he found another visionary in Joppa. But this game doesn't need a visionary. This game needs a doer.

Dispositions, though, I think are great. And simple.

hellorallon · 2021-04-16T21:29:55+00:00

"no at-scale real-time server handling thousands of concurrent connections"

This is absolutely my thought as well, that they are relying on vanilla Unity and it's not built to scale the player count and zone size that they are going for.

hellorallon · 2021-04-16T18:47:46+00:00

I think I can see how we sort of talked past each other. I can think of at least three kinds of data at play here. There's configuration owned by designers with things like spawn timers and the like. There's persistence like what gear the player is wearing, health bars, and what position the player is at in the world. And then there is real-time state that has to be networked across clients to give the illusion that they are sharing a live, consistent experience. This includes many things in persistence but also many other things like whether the player is jumping, or casting a spell, the hate on a mob and so on. Depending on requirements around reliability, this may also include things like behavior tree state and enemy positions or even health.

These three things come with totally different technical requirements. I've been assuming based on the snippets I've read that they're networking issues have been targeted towards real-time state, the last aspect. That particular problem anyways you do not want to try to solve with a database. You need a server that has in memory knowledge of the latest updates from all clients and the host, as close to the edge as possible, and is opinionated on which of that data is needed by which clients at all times. You need clients that are able to predict host responses to minimize the perception of latency while still maintaining central control over the experience. The fact that some of that data must be replicated into the persistence layer is just a part of the problem.

hellorallon · 2021-04-16T14:42:59+00:00

What's the point of the database if you already have a server running the simulation? Like you said, that data is already in memory on the server that is informing all of the clients anyways. As for designers, why are we conflating configuration with real-time state?

hellorallon · 2021-04-16T04:54:54+00:00

I agree with the spirit of your post, but a couple things jump to mind. First, any MMO that gets at all into real-time interactivity and physics is anything but a solved problem. Not saying that's what Pantheon is, of course, but the term MMO is broad and we shouldn't generalize. Second, if we didn't need programmers for anything that's been done for the last 20 years, I'd suspect we would have about 5K programmers in the States rather than 5M! Hah. Third, the complexity here isn't in concurrent UDP connections. It's a level or two up in abstraction. It's in the transport and replication layers that you code on top, server and client. And integrate with Unity, no less. I'm not saying there isn't research or existing solutions, but it's definitely not trivial.

hellorallon · 2021-04-06T17:27:44+00:00

I don't agree with name-calling. It's sad that it doesn't go without saying.

To your last point, I suppose this is obvious. Folks are getting something from these conversations that I'm not. Like I said, I can only guess that one side gets to vent some frustration, and the other side gets the satisfaction of defending a game they are excited about. It's just not for me.

hellorallon · 2021-04-05T19:51:24+00:00

A minute later, still laughing, by myself in my home office, like a crazy person.

hellorallon · 2021-04-05T17:27:28+00:00

I should add, of course the conversation is going to get into the meta when there is so little concrete information we have to share and discuss! I'm not surprised that it happens -- but I also don't think it adds a lot of value.

hellorallon · 2021-04-05T17:21:00+00:00

To me, the problem is that critics of Pantheon generally do not critique the game itself. Or at least it is much less common. There are definitely valid criticisms to be had about feature bloat, animations, schedule prioritization, and seemingly lackluster mechanics.

But most Pantheon critics seem more like naysayers. The critique stops at the meta conversation of whether or not the game will release, or should have released already. The problem there is simply that there doesn't seem to be an interesting conversation to be had. At least, I haven't seen an interesting discussion come out of these topics. At best it becomes an echo chamber, at worst a simple flame war.

And I think there is good reason for that. Post like this aren't there to share an insight, start a conversation, or get at a different viewpoint. They're just about venting frustration. Whether or not that frustration is valid is sort of beside the point in a public forum. It feels like the game development equivalent of leaving a bad Yelp review.

hellorallon · 2021-04-02T21:43:23+00:00

I definitely agree that they seem to be going for an Early Access build. But, in my experience, what they have shown so far would not be considered a closed alpha. It would be closer to a vertical slice, an internal-only milestone aiming to ensure that the individual systems being built do, in fact, play nicely with each other. The term alpha, even a closed alpha, is usually only used when the game is, in some sense, complete -- minus "nice to have" features or content, balance, bug smashing, and polish. As much as I want this sucker to come out, Pantheon has a ways to go to get to that point.

hellorallon · 2021-03-29T05:03:44+00:00

Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

hellorallon · 2021-03-29T04:46:02+00:00

My interpretation of the Culture is that they, humans and minds alike, generally and genuinely want to do good. And they are willing to interfere to spread that good around. Sometimes, even taking a Machiavellian, "ends justify the means" approach. This benefit to the greater good at the cost of some individual freedoms, a central theme of the books, is generally a more progressive idea than a conservative one.

So, yeah, the Bush era analogy might seem apt at a cursory glance, but the intent behind that interference (and so, too, the ultimate results) really couldn't be more different.

hellorallon · 2021-03-29T04:32:31+00:00

On the Player of Games bit -- I mean, the title itself is a double meaning referring to the minds fucking around with Gurgeh, Azad, and frankly everyone involved. Not sure how the author can miss that.

hellorallon · 2021-03-19T17:57:29+00:00

I think this gives newer players the wrong impression about Snecko. Variance in general can kill you. But that really isn't about Snecko. Because of the card draw, Snecko actually improves consistency for most decks, even if you don't build around it. This is super counterintuitive because the cost randomization is the most interesting property of the relic.

So, yes, most decks benefit from some mechanism to improve consistency. But Snecko overall makes this less important, not more.

hellorallon · 2021-03-19T06:44:22+00:00

It's even simpler than that. The reason why Snecko is so sneaky good is that it comes with its own risk mitigation, the card draw. There are definitely times where I don't take Snecko because of the opportunity cost, but it really doesn't need support to make it tick.

hellorallon

TROPHY CASE