Hazzard
Despite the massive amount of comments here, I still don’t see anyone talking about my personal issue with PvP here.
It’s ranked matchmaking. In order to keep things working at all, you have to pair players with players of a similar skill. And this means that fundamentally you don’t get a sense of progression besides an MMR ranking. Your win rate will always be roughly 50%, unless you either smurf, or become the literal best in the world. Compare that to tough PvE games, like Doom Eternal, or a brutal platformer, where you can raise your difficulty, beat stuff you could’ve never beaten before, and generally see your progression. Heck, if you want to relax, just put the difficulty back or crush some earlier levels. I love to go back and learn to speedrun some of my favourite platformers, and that feels awesome. Games like Souls are also great at this, when you have to explore an earlier area and the enemies are just… so easy and satisfying to roll through. Or moments like in Sekiro, when you go into NG+ or just start a new playthrough and crush Genichiro on the first encounter.
And this whole thing is just… so fundamentally necessary for PvP to work, you can’t let new players get utterly crushed by veterans, so it’s not something anyone is going to “fix”. But I’m not hopping onto an endless treadmill that’s never going to give me a sense of mastery. Especially not with so many other fantastic games out there I want to check out.
Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.
So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen… which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon’s “chat support” AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours “in case my package shows up”. I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it’s not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I’m willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final “solution” and I have to restart the convo over and over.
Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.
Honestly I really don’t think that’s effective either. Giving people more money to buy something generally just means the market will respond by charging more money for that thing. The assistance will effectively get “priced in” given time.
It’s honestly the weakest part of the Harris/Walz platform for me. Trump plan is utterly insane top-to-bottom though, and they’re just using immigration as a scapegoat here, which is… something.
Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.
What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.
Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?
Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?
So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.
Eh, this is a thing, large companies often have internal rules and maximums about how much they can pay any given job title. For example, on our team, everyone we hire is given the role “senior full stack developer”, not because they’re particularly senior, in some cases we’re literally hiring out of college, but because it allows us to pay them better with internal company politics.
I think it is a problem. Maybe not for people like us, that understand the concept and its limitations, but “formal reasoning” is exactly how this technology is being pitched to the masses. “Take a picture of your homework and OpenAI will solve it”, “have it reply to your emails”, “have it write code for you”. All reasoning-heavy tasks.
On top of that, Google/Bing have it answering user questions directly, it’s commonly pitched as a “tutor”, or an “assistant”, the OpenAI API is being shoved everywhere under the sun for anything you can imagine for all kinds of tasks, and nobody is attempting to clarify it’s weaknesses in their marketing.
As it becomes more and more common, more and more users who don’t understand it’s fundamentally incapable of reliably doing these things will crop up.
Sounds like a CEO who doesn’t have a damn clue how code works. His description sounds like he thinks every line of code takes the same amount of time to execute, as if x = 1; takes as long as calling an encryption/decryption function.
“Adding” code to bypass your encryption is obviously going to make things run way faster.
I think I have an interesting perspective here, as someone who did kinda get their finances under control thanks to a Dave Ramsey course, and later had the unpleasant experience of discovering how much of a right-wing idiot he is during COVID.
Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of his advice seems targeted towards people who are crushingly bad at navigating debt. One of the most viral things they do is called “the debt free scream”, where people share their stories on his radio show after getting debt free, and just… do a victory scream, essentially. Kinda fun, not really a bad thing, but it shows how most of the people he deals with directly and the ones that make the best marketing are people with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt despite making very average money. Just absolutely no self-preservation instinct around available credit.
And for these people I think his advice makes sense. Absolutely no debt, debt is the enemy, it will crush you. And stuff like how he pushes you to chase paying debt with high intensity, get multiple jobs, etc. Because otherwise it’s impossible to even manage to put money on the principle of a debt that large.
For the average person though? His best advice is basic budgeting, focusing on paying your debts one by one so you can celebrate each victory quickly, and building an emergency fund so you don’t need to go backwards as soon as you have a car problem. Also, yeah, ditch the brand new truck, it’s burying you in debt you didn’t need.
But absolutely, I’d highly recommend modifying his recommendations for most people, and I don’t doubt someone out there is doing a better job of teaching this stuff than Ramsey is. My advised tweaks:
- Find a budget you can live with, paying your debts a couple months faster isn’t worth being miserable, and makes it more likely you’ll be able to stick to a budget for as long as it takes.
- Zero-based budgeting (budgeting every dollar at the start of the month) isn’t really necessary, leaving a little loose change that you can allocate later once the month is actually happening is pretty helpful. It’s ok to shift things around so long as you aren’t spending money you don’t have.
- Actually do keep “fun money” or “restaurant money”, so long as you’re capable of including it in the budget without hamstringing your ability to pay debt. If you’re giving more to debt than these things, then you’re probably fine.
- Ultimately just… think for yourself, and make your own decisions, based on your own income and expenses. Ramsey is a decent, if aggressive, starting point (and again, not the best person, he seems to have lost the plot somewhere).