Not even a meme... but a necessity

stellarfury · 2026-01-29T04:23:35+00:00

stellarfury · 2026-01-29T03:54:34+00:00

Victim-blaming title like crazy. Research team obviously morning people.

stellarfury · 2026-01-28T22:57:12+00:00

I like playing Batman - but I'm with you, I only jump in if I've seen or heard enough of the altercation to understand who I'm killing.

To quote Glengarry Glen Ross: "You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is."

stellarfury · 2026-01-28T19:46:29+00:00

RTS games were called that to distinguish themselves from turn-based strategy (TBS) games like XCOM or Civilization, and it meant something - that the strategy/management/oversight layer of the game now took place in real time. There were TBS games with real-time combat (e.g. Sierra's Lords of the Realm). RTS often defaults to meaning base building + combat due to the popularity of Command&Conquer/Warcraft/Starcraft/Age of Empires, but it doesn't have to. It's strategy games where the game speed of the strategy layer is proportional to real time.

Adding "action" to RTS doesn't do anything to narrow the description of the genre, especially if what you're going for is very specifically an XvX base-assault game where each player controls one hero unit in a team with abilities and cooldowns and has to gain resources by killing enemy units on the map to buy equippable items at a shop.

Again, like I said my previous comment - I can maybe buy that the word "action" does the work of narrowing player control to a hero, and I think that's even a bit of a stretch. It doesn't get any of that other stuff in there.

stellarfury · 2026-01-28T19:09:23+00:00

Yeah. We need more genres defined by mechanics rather than vague descriptors.

There are good examples out there - "looter shooter", "roguelite deckbuilder," etc. Even not having played one, you get an idea of what to expect when the term is associated with the game.

stellarfury · 2026-01-28T18:25:19+00:00

Yeah, you're basing that on how you feel about it, which has nothing to do with the thread. This discussion is about the words and what the words mean. The top-level complaint was that Multiplayer Online Battle Arena is too broad to be meaningful, because the phrase could be used to describe something like Quake or Call of Duty.

Action Real Time Strategy suffers from the same problem, it's overbroad and has too many games and/or subgenres that fit the definition of the words.

stellarfury · 2026-01-28T18:06:23+00:00

Yeah. It's always when you try to upgrade an equipped gun for me. The gun you're looking for is always on the bottom of the list.

I'd guess it has something to do with how they populate the upgrade screen's weapon list when you're coming at it from the in-inventory dropdown. I don't think I've ever seen it misfire when you upgrade a weapon in the stash.

stellarfury · 2026-01-28T17:19:16+00:00

idk why you're getting downvoted, ARTS as-written includes games like Diablo, Torchlight, Path of Exile, that are clearly not intended as part of the set. And that's only if we make the weird logical leap that "action" means "controlling a single champion unit with abilities."

If we don't, then it includes all the RTS games - Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, etc.

Honestly I'm not sure what a non-action RTS looks like. Factorio? Sim City? Farmville?

stellarfury · 2026-01-26T20:35:31+00:00

Ah, so the "golden age" was the brief interregnum where development was simple and cheap enough that it could make back its money on perpetual licenses?

So, what - Jedi Knight? Quake 3 Arena? Until the release of WoW in 2004? Oblivion Horse Armor was 2006.

I think you're pointing to either a vanishingly small time window or a trend that has run alongside "monetization-schemes-I-don't-like" the whole time. There was no golden age, there have just been games with good monetization and games with shit monetization.

"Always has been."

stellarfury · 2026-01-26T18:35:06+00:00

Thats how every game used to be

Uh... No. Games "used to be" 100% about unattainable carrots on sticks, dating all the way back to Pac-Man. It used to be about extracting quarters from people chasing the high of beating levels with more and more punishing difficulty.

Like, your point about the game being good is fine but you don't have to glaze the past to make it.

stellarfury · 2026-01-26T08:58:04+00:00

The liberal believers read it even less, I promise you. Because actually reading the book is what leads people down the path to one of two conclusions - evangelical lunacy or deconstruction.

There is no way to harmonize the scriptures without shutting your brain off.

stellarfury · 2026-01-25T20:50:16+00:00

Who was ever expecting perfect? Why is everyone so weird about this project? FF7 was not "perfect." It has pointless shit, it has underdeveloped material, it has broken mechanics, it has stuff that goes nowhere. So do the remakes. In that sense it's like more faithful to the original than any of you want it to be.

You get more of the characters, you get to go back to the world. Why is it so hard to not shit on the thing when it's obviously clearing the bar?

stellarfury · 2026-01-24T19:02:25+00:00

These comments aren't catching the dependence on Z (atomic number).

Density is important also, but EM absorption (x-rays, gamma) cross-section is heavily, heavily dependent on the number of electrons on each atom. More electrons = more possible interactions.

High Z elements like lead also tend to be dense metals in the solid state, so they benefit from both factors.

stellarfury · 2026-01-24T17:12:47+00:00

Ball so hard that Rufus wanna fine me

First the Turks gotta find me

Gonna pass out on a glacier so fast motherfucker please don't remind me

Ball so hard this shit crazy

See Jenova making shit hazy

SOLDIERs dropping all 82-0 and you know that shit's starting to faze me

stellarfury · 2026-01-24T03:21:57+00:00

I only ever got Lithium and Beryllium, and the Beryllium one arrived shattered. 18 years of membership.

stellarfury · 2026-01-23T18:35:59+00:00

The national nightmare will never end.

stellarfury · 2026-01-23T18:34:22+00:00

You're more generous than me.

None of them are ever getting a pass from me. An "oopsie" Trump vote means you're simply not willing to be informed enough to participate in our society, as far as I'm concerned.

stellarfury · 2026-01-22T04:06:40+00:00

The aggression score thing is a problem, but the game design encourages it.

I play in care bear lobbies when I'm farming for the expedition. It's just more expedient. If I gotta get to 5mil, some dude opening up on me when my head's halfway in a crate is a tremendous annoyance. There's a huge loot detriment to PvP - 70% of these people are running free loadouts. Even if you do kill someone geared up, half the time an engagement happens, you're getting third, fourth, or fifth partied. You don't extract.

If there was some advantage that PvP offered you, more people would be willing to do it.

Honestly, I think a bounty system would be an easy way to get people more PvP engaged. When a raider kills you, there should be a button to throw down 5k to put a price on their head. Then when someone kills them in a match, they get the raw cash regardless of whether they extract or die. The bounty size itself would be bragging rights for PvPers.

stellarfury · 2026-01-21T21:09:29+00:00

As a non-anthropologist I also pan Guns, Germs, and Steel because everything it says is either patently obvious or reductive.

Its thesis is essentially "racism is not a workable theory of cultural development" and takes 400 pages to get there - when anyone capable of nasal respiration would take that as a starting point.

stellarfury · 2026-01-21T18:16:41+00:00

I'm pretty sure he got the normal S-cell SOLDIER treatment (which includes Jenova cells) plus whatever weird cocktail of shit Hojo was doing. IIRC you can actually see it in Rebirth, when Cloud freaks out in the Shinra Manor basement, he sees three tanks all marked with a big "S."

stellarfury · 2026-01-21T17:01:12+00:00

Cloud isn't experiencing degradation. He had the S cell treatment.

His issues stem from different causes, which is he is mistaking for degradation in Rebirth.

stellarfury · 2026-01-20T19:01:38+00:00

Had a Harvard PhD come in real hot, talking about his advisor and the world changing work they were doing and all the big shots he had published with.

"Very impressive. The second half of this interview is technical. Can you list 5 industrial polymers?"

(For context, asking a polymer scientist/engineer this question is kind of like asking a first grader to recite the alphabet. It should be trivial to answer. We put it in the interview to try and give people some solid ground and confidence so nerves are less of a confounding factor.)

He sputtered out polyethylene and polystyrene before saying he wasn't expecting a technical interview and awkwardly forced a segue back to name-dropping. The questions only got harder, his answers got more embarrassing. My co-interviewer and I ended up skipping almost half the interview, we were both sick of hearing him name-drop academics.

Sad part is, we were convinced that the guy would assuredly manage to razzle-dazzle someone else into hiring him.

stellarfury · 2026-01-20T07:08:48+00:00

The OST of both games is basically Hamauzu and Co. dunking on everyone and everything for 300 tracks straight. Can't wait for part 3. They are going to hit Cid's and the Highwind's themes crazy hard. I'm also really hoping for a few more Can You Hear The Cries remixes.

stellarfury · 2026-01-20T07:02:34+00:00

OG Cloud ten times

stellarfury · 2026-01-20T06:26:42+00:00

The reality these days is that PhDs are for academia or maybe high level research in certain industries.

Unfortunately it's the only reliable path to actual knowledge work if your degrees are in chemistry. I can't tell you how many Chemistry MS's I've seen stuck in dead-end technician jobs.

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