site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2618 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 6, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm starting to think factorio space age suffers from the same gamey mechanics problems that make modded Minecraft unappealing for me.
Everything goes quadratic, everything before a particular weird meta becomes instantly obsolete the second you hit an arbitrary point on a tech beeline.

Like the correct way to make Legendary Concrete is a rube Goldberg system of turning stone into basic furnaces and recycling them back into stone with quality modules and filtering. Then taking all the non-legendary concrete, painting stripes on it, then erasing the stripes in an infinite loop to farm a 1% drop rate of the highest tier concrete. It's a game mechanic totally disconnected from both reality and the internal rules established at the start of the game.

The same sort of thing turned me off Minecraft too. You get invited to a group server and play for a bit, and then someone goes:

"you're mining?? in Minecraft?! You utter fool! You complete moron! The correct meta is to use your first quadlebonic extractor to make a fairy farm, then grind the faries into ruby dust to be catalyzed with magic tomes from Beecraft (obviously automated with the bibliotek autocasting lectern), producing infinite materials on demand from Greg's Quantum Replicator! Didn't you read the pinned reddit link on the modpack discord?!

I don't know, it just ends up seeming so arbitrary that there's no real joy in thinking your way through it, like one of the old point and click adventure games with the nonsense puzzles.

Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but this is the reason I always preferred the vanilla experience in games. It's like all the mods are just cheat mode but with an extra long and frustrating to type console command. And space age feels like a mod.

This is what has burned me out on most video games. Eventually you discover that there’s one “right” way to do it and everything else is pointless. That’s part of why I loved PUBG so much: you had to scavenge limited supplies of items from the game world so most of the time nobody is running meta because they have to work with what they can find.

This is what has burned me out on most video games. Eventually you discover that there’s one “right” way to do it and everything else is pointless.

I maintain (with no personal disrespect intended) that this is a self inflicted problem. If the game is less fun when you go with the optimal solution, it is very easy to simply... not use the optimal solution. I do it all the time (for example, I played wide in Civ V despite all the game's mechanics pushing you away from that). Humans aren't rats who can't help but do the things that trigger dopamine in the brain, we have agency and should use it.

@ZorbaTHut had a post on I think /r/TheMotte about how, as a game designer, you basically had to trick the players into having fun because otherwise they'd fall into whatever pattern looked "optimal". I can't find it though.

This?

That's the one. How did you find it? I couldn't get DDG nor Google to cough it up.

Normal google/bing/ddg search is pretty useless on modern reddit: you pretty much have to use tools like pullpush. In theory, newer threads should be searchable with the reddit-internal search, but it's incredibly unreliable.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats