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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  6mo ago (text post)   1051 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 15, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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This is just mostly for me so I can feel awkward later.

List of essays I need to write for various reasons

  • non-gamer accessible description of huge Ark: Survival clusters and the lessons 24/7 no rules, no safezones PvP has to teach about society/people.
  • the idea for an PvP MMO that wouldn't devolve to "the biggest no lifers win"
  • essay on how militaries that promote officers on the basis of other qualities than anonymously demonstrated command competence in weeks-long highly stressful immersive simulations are NGMI (kinda superfluous now hat 1st Lt. Skynet is coming but maybe good writing practice)

the idea for an PvP MMO that wouldn't devolve to "the biggest no lifers win"

I think the first Guild Wars achieved that a while back. The in-game advantages from playing a lot plateau'd very quickly, and the game was not, even at a high level PvP, execution heavy enough that one would need to play for tens of hours a week to keep up.

Ultimately though, I think the idea is doomed. Because success in a game is based on usually one of three things, very rarely a fourth. 1) How far along in the grind you are, which reward people who put in a lot of time in the game. 2) How competent you are at the game mechanically, which rewards the naturally talented and those who put a lot of time in the game to keep up with a high skill floor for competition, 3) Luck, which feels usually bad and doesn't motivate people to play because it doesn't reward them.

And extremely rarely, 4) Not game dependant skill, like for instance social deduction games like Among Us reward social skills. This is rare outside of like social or puzzle games.

  1. Not game dependant skill, like for instance social deduction games like Among Us reward social skills. This is rare outside of like social or puzzle games.

Social skill is highly important in MMO PvP games, no? Like group size matters, if you can't find a group and keep it, you're dead.

Outside of EVE Online, which succesfully maps real life skills, I'd say the bar is pretty low. Don't get involved on the losing side of a personality clash, and don't be an asshole in general, and any guild would gladly have you if you're mechanically skilled and/or you grinded enough. At worse all you have to do is not say a single thing except what you need to perform your role in the game and your guildmates will not have anything bad to say about you.

There's a fair amount of games like EVE, no?

Maybe I've been out of touch, I only know of EVE where real life skills like accounting and running a company map directly.

Planning projects, carrying them out, managing people.. these are all real-life skills too.

the idea for an PvP MMO that wouldn't devolve to "the biggest no lifers win"

I always supposed the way to do this was to just limit play time per player per game instance. The no-lifers can play for 80 hours a week, but if they have to split that play time between 20 different avatars in 20 different games to avoid going over a 4-hour-per-week time limit in each, then casuals who can only afford that 4 hours each week still have a level playing field.

You could have different time limits in different instances, too - give the no-lifers a 40-hour-per-week instance if they want to play there, but because everybody has options they'll only end up competing against other players spending 40 hours per week on that same single game, they won't be steamrolling the 4-hour crowd there.

I have a dream to do this by basically building a Dungeon Crawler Carl videogame.

You'd have a single global dungeon which everyone in the world is competing to complete. An enormous collaborative effort which isn't expected to succeed in the first or maybe even tenth season. Early "floors" are split between however many servers are necessary. You get maybe a few hours to complete a floor, if you fail to complete it in that time you get killed as the floor collapses. PvP is enabled, and killing people for their loot might get you farther, but the game is designed so that cooperative play is the only viable option on later floors.

I think it would be cool to put the whole world on the same team like that. And the nature of the game keeps the playing field relatively fair.

Something like that, but I think what could work would be having servers that only open at specific times, for games where you can't segment the world, or having segmented worlds where distant areas can do their turns inside a period.

You can play say, 8 hours a week, whenever, but any travel/attack across a zone border would happen in the next period, with say battles between areas happening at a mutually agreed upon time.

hold up do any militaries achieve that last one? They’re not getting it from exercises. I guess OCS and the specialist schools are filters for personality traits that might signal competence. But it’s not like they’re anonymous, and they definitely don’t keep sending officers back to Ft. Benning every time they’re up for promotion.

No, they don't, even though they could. There's nothing stopping a good military from making a simulation of a war, sticking officers into dorms rooms for a month and having them wage virtual war 16 hours a day and communicating through monitored, anonymized chat so no cliques possibly, you wouldn't even know who is on the other side.

Officer schools filter out the worst performers, but they don't and can't evaluate the ability to lead people or improvise. In addition, this should be all promotions above a certain level.

In US armed forces it's notorious that any and every position above captain requires being political, having patrons and all that bullshit. That's how you get the level of dysfunction they have now - they stopped being able to build ships, they can't get rid of Houthis, etc. In all likelihood, every capable, disagreeable officer got filtered out by this clique system.

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