RenOS
something is wrong
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
1d ago
I mean, I think the main story of Battletech is cheesy and stupid, so I just play the sandbox mode. But nobody feels the need to defend it by "well it's optional, you can just play the sandbox mode!". Playing a game at all is, strictly speaking, optional.
Furthermore, Hans in KC:D 1 was more a specific person, not just an amorphous player insert like in, say, Skyrim or CP2077. In Witcher 3 one of the arguments against gay romance was this - the MC is Geralt, Geralt isn't gay, all the options for the player have to be broadly in alignment with that character. That wasn't very controversial.
The same goes even more for Henry; Even if pretending that Hans is just a player insert and so his optional choices do not reflect the character you're playing, the mere option of gay romance with Henry implies necessarily that Henry is now gay, despite no such indication in KC:D 1. Not to mention that the behaviour by everyone else ingame around this topic is extremely obviously anachronistic.
Just to be clear, I had no such issues with the gay romance in, say, CP2077. Even though having exactly 4 characters to cover all bases for all possible relationship patterns definitely felt very current-year, the characters themselves were mostly fine and consistent, and the portrayal of the relationships felt appropriate for the setting. What I really hate is fucking up a setting or character and breaking suspension of disbelief just to get some hobbyhorse in.
RenOS
something is wrong
1d ago
You can see the effect in volunteer work as well - if it's not flashy and exciting, nobody wants to do it anymore. I'm even more cynical about it tbh - by moving morality into the sphere of what (not) to say, it allows people to feel superior without actually having to do anything.
RenOS
something is wrong
7d ago
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is pretty good if you don't mind some wokery that snuck its way in.
This always mystifies me, one of the selling points of KC:D 1 was that it used an unapologetically realist approach to the portrayal of medieval life. Not that it actually is perfectly realistic, but it at least tried to avoid the modernist left-wing lens. The author also took a clear stand against some ridiculous demands.
... And then for 2 he completely changes his tune. Henry and Hans gay, is already funny, but a coming out scene to his (by then dead) parents and they accept it. Musa lecturing the player on women's right and the player just has to take it, that's just lol. Women repeatedly outdoing the main char. Literal quote from the CEO:
Vávra made some unfortunate statements about the absence of black people in Bohemia when releasing KCD1 because he lacked PR experience.
Just why, you're already sucessful, why sell out so blatantly? It makes no sense, yet it happens repeatedly.
RenOS
something is wrong
7d ago
The less obvious implication (and I have no idea whether the historical record would bear this out) is that one reason Bunting and his gang evaded capture for so long is not because they managed to intimidate anyone aware of their crimes into silence, but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.
If you read through the wikipedia article on the murders, their entire social environment seems to have been extremely dysfunctional. Drug abuse, several mentally disabled individuals AND several schizophrenics, even the non-illegal relationships involve frequent partner switching and large age differentials (including with the mentally disabled and schizophrenics!), even the people with no directly mentioned issues somehow collect pensions for unclear reasons ... The article also directly acknowledges at least some of Bunting's victims actually being sexual abusers. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the authorities just didn't want to get involved because, as the old saying goes, "just put all of them in a sack and randomly swing a bat at it, you'll always hit the right one". Not to mean that they all really did what was alleged, but that the extreme level of dysfunction in the general community made the accusations so plausible that most just didn't want to get involved in the mess.
RenOS
something is wrong
8d ago
Sorry for the late reply. I understand where you're coming from, but I find your perspective a bit one-sided. On many of these, the DS devs (and many players) simply have a different view, and they would be less happy with the game you would design. Which is fine - imo games, like most art, should be designed first and foremost to your own vision, with as little accommodation to others as possible. But it wouldn't be, strictly speaking, an improvement.
Take Bloodboil Aromatic: it's extremely expensive to make (requiring an Arteria leaf), meaning you can only use it sparingly. Yet it increases your damage taken by 25%! As a casual player, by far your number one concern is bosses killing you before you have a chance to heal, which this item (and many others, e.g., Fire Scorpion Charm) exacerbates. So what exactly is the point of this item? "Well, if you're good enough to not need it, it makes the game a lot easier!" Yay?
"Increase damage inflicted at the cost of increased damage taken" is a common design choice in DS games. As you say, these actually mostly make the game harder, but they allow you to do content faster if you're good enough. It's intended as a reward for skill, as I see it.
Similarly, the Great Rune system is only useful if you're good at the game and don't need it anyway. I'd just remove rune arcs entirely: once you have a great rune, you can just set it and it's active.
DS already has pretty minor penalties for dying unless you're really careless. Again, rune arcs are a reward for skill.
Even potions (ahem, Flask of Crimson Tears) run afoul of this. Good players don't need these at all: just don't get hit, yo. But for bad players, attempting to use a potion often causes you to get hit, as the animation is painfully long and many bosses are coded to input read it. Again, this could be trivially redesigned in a way that's better for everyone: make potions fast or even instant, and increase boss HP to compensate. For casuals, potions would actually feel useful; for better players who weren't using potions anyway, the game gets harder.
That would be pointless, you might as well just increase player health if the potion is instant anyway. And since increasing boss hp is one of the most awful ways of increasing difficulty, the logical next step is to remove that extra player HP AND the extra boss hp to make the game more fun again.
Also, potion usage is a skill test, yes, but a fairly minor one. Generally speaking once you've passed beginner level in skill, potions are imo fairly satisfying: You get hit often enough to need them, you are good enough at timing to usually be capable of using them, but it's always risky enough to keep you on edge, and it's definitely better not getting hit in the first place. It incentives you to git (even more) gud. At the highest skill lvl, you'd just convert all flasks to mana, which can be viewed as another reward for the skill of not being hit.
Overall, imo you need everything in a good game: Some items/mechanics directly help bad players. Some are low lvl or medium lvl skill test, encouraging you to get better, but once you can reliably pass that threshold, they help you clear higher-lvl challenges. Some are just pure rewards for good play and outright require high-lvl skill to use, but allow feats not otherwise possible. Some are memes that actively gimp you, so that simply using them serves as a way of showing off your skill.
In general, I also like the DS aesthetic choice of being able to simply take a short look at another player, and I can usually tell quite reliably whether they're a complete noob, a loser, a tryhard, a "simple" good player, or a total monstrosity.
RenOS
something is wrong
8d ago
Based on reviews I've seen Good Fortune is also very tired anti-capitalist drivel, and I'd wager the kind of person still going to movies is not exactly receptive to that. But simultaneously that is a tried & trusted approach to rehabilitation in leftist circles, so even a bomb might still be worth it for him.
I mostly agree in theory, but as far as I can see, this being applied in a rather one-sided manner has serious real-world consequences that can't be overlooked. In many parliamentary democracies, the moderate right refuses to work with the far-right, while the moderate left happily works together with the far-left, which means there is a strong bias in favor of the far-left of getting their. Germany is the most extreme example here, as the moderate right as boxed itself into a corner of now only being able to coalition with left-wing parties. Only a fool would think this has no practical impact on politics, and indeed, the CDU was forced to put extremely stupid far-left green current-day demands into the german constitution just to avoid working together with the far-right.
The same happens with violent protests ; Several dozen organized, masked left-wing extremists can storm a moderate right (CDU) office, threaten staff and trash furniture and it will not even go into political violence stats since it gets recorded as a "protest". The moderate politician has to fear violent altercations with the left if he speaks or votes the wrong way. Again, this has practical impacts on political outcomes.
The same, again, in science, my own field of employment; Far-left activist-scholars (their own moniker!) get to openly admit that they consider their political views as more important than there scientific integrity, can openly involve themselves in blatant witch hunts, and there will be not only no repercussions, but they will be, if anything, rewarded with government money. On the other hand, a politically unaffiliated researcher who gets unfortunate results (by left-wing views, that is) in a study but stands by them due to the methodological strength of the design risks his whole career, and other moderate scientists around him are pressured to denounce him as far-right lest they get the same fate. That this is possible is a direct result of genuine right-wingers having been stringently excluded much earlier - not only would they have the moderate's back on this topic, it also means that the demand for right-wing extremism exceeds supply, so you have to start to cancel moderates to keep the far-left happy.
And I can only repeat it, I don't even consider myself right-wing. All I want is being able to do independent research(in my employment) or common-sense governance (in politics), and the far-left is fucking scary, has actual positions of power and can openly do what it wants with little fear of reprisal. The far-right is a bunch of truckers or anons that have to keep their head down lest it gets chopped.
This is the reason why Trump got elected, and why the Afd in germany is literally the largest party.
RenOS
something is wrong
9d ago
Yeah, as said it was more a random idea I had in the moment; I wouldn't expect it to work, and asked more for the purpose of finding out why it is wrong.
RenOS
something is wrong
9d ago
Maybe healthcare just is a cursed industry.
Unfortunately, it is. High intrinsic costs, high legal costs, usually limited pool of customers. Afaik biomedical startups have the highest failure rates among all categories.
A group chat of your friends is leaked. The text:
A: I'll vote for the leftmost candidate
B: Great. I love Stalin
Would you consider calling B "a leftwing extremist praising Stalin" a fair reading?
One thought that has just now come to me - how realistic would you consider it to unify only peaceful settlements of west bank palestinians into the israeli state? I've heard relatively little about west bank terrorism during the last war, and Hamas is not nearly as strong there, so there should be a decent number.
My pro-palestinian left-wing friends/acquintances think that the only solution to the current situation is one-state, with full legal rights to all palestinians. According to them, the palestinian hatred is purely due to the oppression suffered by the Israeli, and the violence will vanish if they are granted full rights. To me, that is pure insanity - at the very least Hamas has always been very clear that at the very least they want to throw out or subjugate the jews, they enjoy broad support by the palestinian populace and obviously they are the de-facto ruling party. The most likely outcome of unification is Hamas ruling all of Israel/Palestina, with the obvious repercussion for the jews.
But this doesn't apply if you only give rights to certain communities that have been peaceful, and would send a strong signal - peace, and you can become a citizen, terrorism, and you get to live among debris. Though, I guess the left would just frame it as evil annexation, so there's that.
RenOS
something is wrong
15d ago
My primary issue is that I have yet to see a left-leaning person espouse a position in favor of immigration restrictions that actually work, in any country. The mention of e-verify by left-leaning posters is a good example here; Going specifically after the working illegals is the stupidest option possible, and would result in not only still having the illegals in the country, but now they can't earn anything except through crime or charity. You can't imagine an approach better optimized to cause a surge in crime and welfare abuse, and I'm 100% sure that the left would have made fun of the right if they actually had done it that way around. This is pretty much the situation in germany right now, btw. I mostly consider myself in the center, and all I want is a working border enforcement and the deportation of immigrants who aren't working after several years of being here. But no matter what the right tries, the left will even make a mockery of it and blatantly work around it (like "help navigating how to get access to the german welfare system" by telling people who are currently in poland how to get past german checkpoints) and if not successful, they will complain until the right stops whatever it is that is actually working. I can see how, to a genuine right-winger, this will translate into "If the left complains, that means we are doing something right; the harder, the better". I'm still sufficiently worried about right-wing dysfunction to really be in favour, but the ICE situation seems like the logical endpoint of this game.
RenOS
something is wrong
16d ago
He thinks he has left the faith, but he still sounds like a Witness.
I almost want to say that parents SHOULD tell their children that Santa is real. That way they learn very quickly in life that everyone will lie to them without hesitation for the most trivial of reasons.
yes_chad.jpg
I literally don't know a single kid who had the problems he had with it, and I strongly suspect his JW upbringing has to do with it (and/or autistic inclinations unsurprisingly inherited from his parents). Not saying there are none otherwise, but it's just extremely rare. The average kid play-pretends a lot naturally already, and they instinctively pick up on Santa being somewhere in the same area, but they're not sure. Then as they get older they notice further facts solidifying that impression, and maybe have a short, smug santa-isn't-real phase, but they quickly join in again on the play-acting ... because it's fun. The "santa-lie" is a great way to indirectly teach kids how to distinguish between truth and fantasy, and the fact that ultimately this is something you can only ever do yourself, for yourself.
RenOS
something is wrong
16d ago
I'll just quote myself here:
It's called ethnic spoils for a reason. It doesn't matter much whether the different ethnicities have immigrated recently or have been there for generations.
Foreign-born is generally one of the worst categories you can possibly look at, because it mixes vastly different groups together as if they are mostly interchangeable. Ethnic spoils systems also don't depend on trust/solidarity, it's quite the opposite; Because trust is so low, nobody believes any other group to actually do merit-based allocations, and without trust, allocating by quota is usually the only kind-of-fair system that everyone can agree on.
RenOS
something is wrong
16d ago
I've never really found this complaint really compelling. In fact, I'll top it: You can beat most parts of all DS games by summoning another (often ridiculously overlevelled) player and letting them do everything for you. You don't even need to know anything.
DS is imo very clearly, very deliberately designed to accommodate large differences in player skill without resorting to outright different difficulty levels. That's also the reason why I usually say that DS games are better grouped as high casual, but not quite hardcore.
In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work.
That's mostly an inversion of reality in practice; Plenty of bad players who don't know how the game works follow some online guide for an OP build to do exactly the stuff you're complaining about. Better players deliberately avoid the OP things bc they don't need it and just do a run with some weapon/spells they like. Even better players deliberately use gimmick gear (not me, sadly) or other limitations.
RenOS
something is wrong
17d ago
I have no objections to looking at only the murder rate - but that doesn't actually change anything, just check out the demographics.
It's called ethnic spoils for a reason. It doesn't matter much whether the different ethnicities have immigrated recently or have been there for generations.
Just purview the list of US cities by crime rate, sort by total crime and check out the highest vs the lowest total violent crime rate cities. It's hard to miss the fact that the demographics are, with only a few exceptions, dramatically different. For example, among the lowest five, 4 have (asians + white) > 75%, while among the highest five, all have (asians + whites) < 50%. The difference for the black population is, of course, especially extreme. Hispanics is also quite noticable.
RenOS
something is wrong
17d ago
In general humans have exterminated, bred & moved very many species throughout history. All to considerable benefit with virtually no ill effect for humans. Most talk about the dangers of loss of diversity are scaremongering nonsense. We could probably even wipe out all mosquitos, and as a result other insects would simply take over its niche. Nature is quite adaptive and there are many overlapping niche species.
RenOS
something is wrong
17d ago
AFAIK the degree of warming usually expected to stop AMOC is generally on the same degree or even higher than the cooling expected to result from the stop, so it mostly comes out as a wash except for slightly more winter extremes, but which are still limited to ca -10 °C. In general also, higher co2 + higher temperatures also mean plants grow better, (which we can already see with current levels) so I don't think starving will be a particular issue.
As someone living in northern germany, I'd certainly welcome a bit more snow in winter!
RenOS
something is wrong
23d ago
FWIW, several of my friends who don't plan on having kids explicitly state that part of the reason is that they will have more money for retirement. From a personal view this is sensible, from a societies' view it's pure insanity, and a point in Soterologian's favor, even if it's far from the only reason people have no kids.
RenOS
something is wrong
23d ago
While I agree with Tractatus' reply as well, I've also had a recent post on a very related topic, namely the dissolution of marriage. Social changes are rarely actually instant; They are spreading & compounding. Just because something became legal, doesn't mean that everyone is doing it. Usually it's only a small community really taking advantage of the most recent change, while the majority just mostly carries on with what they grew up with, unless they have a very good reason.
RenOS
something is wrong
23d ago
Oh, I know, that's the joke/point : This is specifically eastern orthodox, not christianity in general. Neither the catholics nor mainline protestant churches I'm aware of would sign off that statement. If anything, they'd consider it a dramatic misunderstanding, not just a minor point of contention.
That sounds reasonable, although sad. On the topic of unavoidability, see my other reply to Lazuli.
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