RenOS
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User ID: 2051
It's appropriate to be cynical, and I 100% agree about the heat pump arrangement being effectively a mandatory ripp-off, but fortunately the Erbbaurecht is legally very restrictive and they have already made some unusual choices that they can't take back. First, setting the price of the plot so low now means that possible later price explosions are mostly irrelevant for the yearly payment, since that is instead entirely bound to the VPI, i.e. the general inflation index. The same goes for rate of 2%: Typical is between 3-5%, so this is not just at the lower end, it's even below. The rate is entirely fixed, by contract, for 99 years. This part is genuinely beneficial to us and they have little leeway to screw us over. There are even several clauses protecting us should we struggle to pay otherwise.
It makes sense however once you know more about the structures behind the scenes: The plots of lands themselves originally belonged to the church and they now want to use them to generate some alternative income stream. As I've talked about before, modern church employees tend to be very progressive and not very religious. So they were easily talked into extremely generous conditions under the excuse of social housing. The "public" utility company, on the other hand, is a private company that is merely owned by the city. So they are relatively free to re-distribute significant income to (usually high-ranking) employees, and any further profit goes to the state (I've just checked, they indeed have gotten a decent profit the last few years). And I don't think anybody will be surprised to hear that they, too, are very ideologically progressive.
So it's in practice a re-distribution scheme from old church assets towards one (large) part ideological progressive pet projects, one part towards well-off Bildungsbürgertum, and one part to the state.
RenOS
something is wrong
3d ago
Yes, it's depressing. We consider building a house soon-ish, since there is a very attractive Erbbaurecht project currently. In short, they treat the value of the plot outrageously low (ca 200/sqm, comparable plots here can easily go to 600 and more!) and then on top you even only have to pay 2% of the cost per year, so you pay an absolute pittance. Connection costs etc. are also very low. After 15 years you also get the right to buy it up properly (still for a low price, though it can increase somewhat), so it has basically all the upsides of either buying OR renting the plot. For this reason, the project is considered "social" and it's also "family-friendly", meaning you can only apply if you're a family AND don't earn too much together.
But then they throw all of this under the bus for the "green" part. You have to use a green flat roof with water retention, which is basically worse in function in all ways that matter to you (notably excludes an attic) and also costs an extra 50k. We have to build significantly more solar than we normally would. You can't build a cellar, either, nor a garage or carport, because ... fuck you, I guess? Most importantly, you're forced to take the local cold district heating for 10 years, which includes renting the heat pump for >100€ per month (in addition to paying 25k connection costs in the first place) and then you still have to pay for the electricity to run the heat pump. The kicker? You can't use the solar energy for the heat pump, "for technical reasons" and since the energy provider owns the pump (not us), we can't do anything about it. And a million other overly-specific, stupid limitations.
All this together means especially that when searching for duplex partners, we had a lot of contact with low-earning people at first, but they all get weeded out by the requirements since they can't afford all this stuff. So the only people left are people like us, well-off Bildungsbürgertum who are not in private industry bc we'd be earning too much then. That's quite convenient to be clear, but also extremely self-serving since guess who are the people making these decisions?
And when I talk with other germans about this, they're just so goddamn defensive no matter how stupid and self-serving it is. Sure the limitations are annoying, but combatting climate change is alternativlos! Yes the cold district heating design is a ripp-off, but gas prices will go up (for mysterious reasons not spelled out) so you come out ahead! Green roofs will be mandatory soon anyways, so why complain! Sure the project is not actually social, but the real fault lies with capitalism not paying enough!
Germany feels so, so dead. The entire mentality revolves around what needs to be done to sate modern progressive moral conceptions, and everything else is an afterthought that can only be used if the former is threatened. German industry going down is good, actually, since CO2 is going down with it, and the only reason why we shouldn't overdo it is that we can't finance the Energiewende otherwise.
And mind you, this is with the allegedly conservative CDU allegedly in charge.
RenOS
something is wrong
6d ago
Maybe it's petty, but that is too me possibly even worse than general wokery and makes me want to avoid the game. Good romance is already hard enough to do well in a video game when focussing on one or two fleshed-out options and still often feels very cringe even then. Strong feelings ought to be earned, which is incompatible with many genres. I often entirely avoid romantic subplots altogether if possible for the same reason, and there is little I dislike more than accidentally stumbling into it (and no, I can just watch porn if I want to see merely casual sex, I don't need it in games).
RenOS
something is wrong
6d ago
It's a bit of a digression, but I found it funny (and admittedly unsurprising) for acoup to say that he thinks the story would be improved by making admiral purple hair uncontroversially competent and Poe incompetent UNTIL he realizes his error of not listening to his female superiors. That's an extremely sanctimonious and unfun storyline (sexist to boot, though who cares if it's this way around?) and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if that was the original intention, but was scrapped on contact with focus groups to make it more fun.
RenOS
something is wrong
7d ago
The article is from 2018 and talking about specifically post-2015 increases. That just-so-happens to be the timing of the largest migration waves ever to enter germany. It even itself admits that the only group which plausibly stayed structurally the same - mothers with a german passport - had only a change from 1.43 to 1.46, which they call "notable" but which most would call "pretty much nothing". Attributing these changes to policy is, to be frank, imo bordering on willful misinformation. In general including foreigners/immigrants in most modern stats leads to nonsensical results, since everything gets drowned in composition effects. It's the equivalent to comparing test scores between a rich kid prep school and a public school in a poor district and claiming that it's due to this or that teaching approach; No, it's 100% due to differences in the populations (which, btw, don't need to be genetic; I know quite well how much difference simply highly motivated & supportive parents make).
You can see the stark differences quite well here. Again, note that the foreign population, at different times, included substantially different percentages of a) turkish majority-muslim migrant workers, b) italian majority-catholic migrant workers, c) syrian majority-muslim asylum seekers, d) north african asylum seekers (often, but not always masquerading as syrians), e) Ukrainian majority-orthodox asylum seekers and a million other smaller groups. Concluding anything from those numbers except the composition is pure insanity.
So that leaves us with german mothers subgroup. Now, there is an argument that you can see a very slight increase from around 1.3 in the 90s to a top of almost 1.5 in the mid 10s (note that the timeframe of the DW article is actually flat), and that this is due to policies. That's prima facie plausible, but firstly as you point out generally considered not nearly enough, and secondly doesn't match very well with the timing of the actual policy changes usually considered major. The biggest was the 2007 Elterngeld, which was deliberately designed to benefit working mothers and families in general as well as increase male investment into children. Can you see it in the plot? I can't, not as a one-time, not as a rate-increase, nothing. The second was the Elterngeld Plus in 2013, which accomodated part-time work in early childhood specifically. There is a modest increase here between 2013->2014, but it's still small, also looks more like a continuation of a former trend and worse, the line flattens shortly afterwards anyway. Another problem is the covid bump and the post-covid downturn; Family policies in germany are still very generous and didn't really change during covid, but the overall change observed easily drowns out all the other changes. Neither does it fit with economic or general anxiety; those were, if anything, especially high, not low, during covid.
And finally, even the german mothers actually have a significant problem with composition effects, even if they're not quite as strong. See the large increase in foreign births vs a corresponding small decrease for german mothers in 2011? This isn't an immigration wave nor policy effects, it's entirely due to the Zensus 2011 re-counting of who belongs into which group. Most immigrants stay in western countries nor is getting a passport particularly hard, and germany is no exception to that rule. So culturally noticeably different foreign groups with non-western marriage/family patterns get increasingly counted as german. Btw, afaik France's high official birth rates are for example almost entirely due to this as well, thanks to comparatively early postcolonial immigration waves.
And this even applies to rather old immigrant groups, and even non-immigrants. The region where I'm from has a specific town with a large church of pentecostals who fled from Soviet Russia long ago. Back then, however, it was a very small group. When I grew up (90s to 00s), they were already a substantial percentage of a specific town. Nowadays they are literally half the population (I can send you a DM with a link if you do not believe it, but don't want to share it publicly for OPSEC). They have consistently high (6-10 children is not exceptional) birth rates, high cultural cohesion and high retention rates, similar to Hasidic Jews in Israel. They are large enough so that our entire region is among those with the highest birth rates in germany, and has at multiple times been number one. Though admittedly my heritage (conservative catholics) isn't doing badly there, either (I literally do not know how many cousins I have; it's around 30-40).
Which leads to the explanation that makes by far the most sense to me: Culture. The pentecostals do not earn well (in fact, substantially below average). They do not have better family benefits. But what they have is social structures that consistently, consciously and openly advocate for and support marriage and family formation, while suppressing all influences that plausibly reduce it, such as casual dating, the focus on self-actualization, abortion and birth control, non-standard sexualities, education, female careers .... the list is long. It's a matter of priorities; Having children is hard and expensive, and no entry on the list is in itself mutually exclusive with high birth rates, but our culture just has a low status and low priority for #children, so almost any competing topic or enabling technology plays a part in the reduction..
If somebody put a pistol to my head and said I have to do something that reliably gets us back to >2.1 TFR, fast, I'd absolutely go with the right-wingers. Ultraconservative religious groups exist all across the western world and still have extremely high birth rates; If we become more like them, we will, too, have a higher TFR again, QED. Family benefits policy nerds are almost exclusively using bullshit composite stats and are thus ignorant about very basic realities. That doesn't mean, however, that I WANT us to do this; As it happens, I'm best described as a technoutopian transhumanist, and I do think we would have to pay a large price in technological progress if we were to attempt this, let alone my libertarian distaste for coercive measures. Me and my wife are trying our best to find a modern synthesis, where we consciously sacrifice what is necessary to have the number of children we desire while still keeping the parts we value about the modern system. But that doesn't make the right-wingers wrong on the facts.
No offense, but you're roughly two decades behind the state of the discussion. The rough trajectory goes like this (I'll use germany as the example since I'm most familiar with it, but afaik it's quite similar for many different western countries, save maybe a decade or so earlier or later):
60s: Germany is on a high due to the baby boom with a birth rate of ca 2.3. It switches to an overtly pay-as-you-go pension system, which works very well due to the circumstances. Some already point out that it will only work if birth rates keep stable and say we need to have policies to ensure that it does (of course, this is actually true of almost any economic system, but pay-as-you-go makes it overtly obvious). Chancellor Adenauer dismisses them stringently with "children will always be had" and this is also the public sentiment, so nothing is done.
80s: Birth rates went done substantially to ca 1.5. However, it's generally chalked up to be more an issue of delayed children rather than not having them at all. (Also, as a note: Germany already had rather generous maternity leave during this time already)
00s: The first generation of women has become old enough with a low birth rate so that it's clear that delaying is not the reason - people really have significantly less children overall (only 1.3, even). This coincided with a great increase in women employment, which was an amazing economic boon. When asked, women directly say the reason is economic - not enough money, not enough protection from discrimination after maternity leave, not enough family accommodation, ... and so on. Obviously, people are reluctant to rock the boat too much when times are good. So the focus is on increasing the (economic) benefits over the years in the expectation that the birth rate will go up again. People aren't terribly worried and the discussion is not really big in the public. The only who are worried a lot are, more often than not, literal nazis, so they are still easy to dismiss. <--- you are here.
10s: The birth rate didn't change, at all. More people get worried, since at the current rate there will be a big crunch in the 30s when the baby boomers retire. But in 2015 a new possible saviour turns up: Immigration! The immigration of earlier years usually was too small to be demographically notable, the large waves now were so massive that they actually could plausibly make up for the crunch. While this wasn't the primary reason that we opened the borders, it was mentioned multiple times by the left wing and made it hard for the then-mostly economic right to argue against it (it went roughly like this: "We worry about having not enough workers in a few years, now we are gifted plenty of young people, what are you complaining about!"). So policy doesn't change much, especially since accommodating the immigrants is too expensive to plausible further increase child benefits.
20s: It becomes very clear that the immigrants are actually an additional drain, not a benefit, to the economy. Birth rates also pretty much didn't change, except a short-term anomaly around covid. Now there actually isn't enough time left to solve the problem until the 30s - kids born now would only be teenagers. In fact, the negative impacts already become noticeable since some boomers already scale back work or even retire early, and the general economy is bad enough that people get unhappy. As usual, this is the moment the wider public really groks that there is a problem at all. Behind the scenes for the last decade, lots of overwhelmingly progressive, optimistic scientist have been looking for any policy, anywhere in the world, that increase the birth rates. There are none. All known developed countries have low birth rates. The discourse gets pretty gloomy, and the only reliable relationship that anyone can find across most countries is a negative one between female employment and birth rate. This coincides with a general rise of the right-wing across the entire west.
It's not terribly surprising here that some are jumping to coercive measures, and it's definitely not coming out of nowhere. My personal opinion is most close to pronatalist Lyman Stone (and to a lesser degree the Collins), which is that the problem is cultural and can't reasonably be solved economically. As a father who shares family obligations equally, I can tell you that especially small ones are a lot of fucking work (and money), and they will not only reduce your immediate work time, they also reduce your career opportunities and your free time. It's almost impossible to redistribute so much that having kids becomes economically beneficial. If you tell women that careers are important to them, they will not have kids, bc you can't have both and everyone knows it. Men will generally not blow up their career, either, especially since women don't actually respect house-husbands. A culture that idealizes self-actualization also suppresses child-rearing, since they are in the way. Etc. That doesn't mean coercion, but pretty much everything you propose has been tried in one country or another and found wanting. Of course the old arrangement (male main breadwinner, women part-time worker + child care) still works, but there is an ever-increasing portion of the population who is not willing to do that anymore. And once you've changed to the new dual-income model, the margins become quite thin so making a family work on top of that will include quite a lot of sacrifices. Worse, you have to outright compete with the DINKs.
RenOS
something is wrong
11d ago
Sorry for talking a while. It seems I slightly misremembered it. The kids-bleeding-out part is something he allegedly said, not wrote, but it is referenced in the text you quoted ("you were talking about hoping jennifer gilbert's kids would die" -> "Yes I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy").
RenOS
something is wrong
11d ago
Yeah, I agree with this. An owner kicking a drunkard out of his restaurant is, strictly speaking, a form of discrimination. Just one most people would approve of. But it's easy and convenient to just jump to "well it's not REAL discrimination when we do it".
RenOS
something is wrong
12d ago
It makes some sense. First, the design somewhat lends itself to this, since they use a very broad category (TGD can mean almost anything). Second, it's the group with highest percentage of males, and the rapid-onset worry was specifically about teenage girls that have shown no or very little indications beforehand. Most importantly however, it's clearly the most ego- and status-protecting option; I've heard about cases where a detransitioner would lose large parts of their social environment since their decision was seen as a direct attack on the shared worldview. Saying, in essence, that you didn't really change, you just chose to discontinue your transition due to discrimination gives you a gentler way out.
Personally, my biggest concerns is orthogonal, if not opposite, to detransitioners; I think that the concept of "gender" as-used in the social sciences is mostly bunk and better seen as "social realization of sex-based differences". For example, woman prefer interacting with/caring for people over other activities. In some (especially ancestral) societies this is realized through informal, usually familial, caring and organizing behaviour which is not directly paid but there is instead a general expectation for the men to provide for the women. In others (especially in modern), it's realized as formal, paid caring and organizing work. The basic underlying needs/expectations, and often even the actual behaviour, can be near identical, just the framework it's embedded in is different.
And I know they hate it, but most trans-individuals I've met fit in much better with their biological sex in both interpersonal interaction and general choice of occupation/hobbies. Using female-only pilots, painting your battlemechs in bright colours, creating large, detailed spreadsheets to optimize your firepower and occasionally making comments about the hot steaming yuri sex you want to have is just not very feminine (not making this up, I swear, though it's admittedly a particularly extreme example). Neither society nor them really benefits imo from enabling their delusions. That's not to mean that they necessarily are perfectly average manly men; They just certainly aren't female in a meaningful sense, either.
Worse, it has been quite conclusively shown that at least a substantial part of these needs/expectations come from sex-specific changes in puberty modulated by your hormonal state. That means if you screw with that, people biologically become sort-of intersex and will struggle even harder to fit in with either side of the natural sex dichotomy. You can't actually postpone puberty indefinitely, so after a while you get locked into an irreversible intermediate/undeveloped state. At that point, it's actually de-transitioning that becomes delusional; it's a one-way street. So, I don't actually expect a large number of de-transitioners to begin with, despite viewing the entire enterprise as rather questionable.
Overall, the data is better, but the results don't really seem notable enough to change anyones view on this, I'm afraid.
RenOS
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16d ago
I find it genuinely funny that you chose this in particular, since it's imo among the most reasonable quotes. Sun exposure has a well-attested, uncontroversial positive impact on our general mood, it's really not a big jump from there to positive impact on libido in particular. Going from there to stereotypes about different nationalities is certainly uncouth, but, again, pretty straightforward.
Whether it's actually true is another matter, but it really isn't so far out there.
RenOS
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19d ago
AFAIK this even left out the worst part, which is that he doubled down yet again that he hopes their kids are killed, bleeding out in front of them.
RenOS
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20d ago
The real issue is with actually getting their hands on equipment in a timely manner. As everyone is rearming at the same time, there is preciously little materiel available to actually send. No amount of money can magick guns out of nowhere. Production takes time.
We have known this since the start of the war. We could have, and in fact should have, started production immediately. Arguably we should have seen it coming and started before the war.
We did not do any of those things. I thought the war would motivate us to get our shit together, but it didn't. Maybe the US reducing their involvement will, but I'm increasingly cynical. I wouldn't be in the slightest surprised if the great majority of the military investment will just be de-facto wasted.
As a european, I say the EU is fucked. It's dedicated to pointless virtue signaling and otherwise just eating the seedcorn (which increasingly gets produced elsewhere), and then rage impotently when other countries throttle the tap. But there is a lot of ruin in a nation, so we're still fairly advanced. But I don't really see a any way but downward for the EU. The conservatives will at most manage the decline.
RenOS
something is wrong
22d ago
FWIW, while I like it in theory, all the european multi-party government system countries have a very similar problem as the one plagueing the US at the moment, with a sizeable chunk of people not feeling represented by any of the existing options and switching to the new (usually right-wing) kid on the block, despite not really liking that either.
And imo they are correct, there has been a coalescence towards a shared worldview that is best described as internationalist left among all major establishment parties. As a european myself, I don't have the impression that the US really has it worse, with the democrats taking the role of the internationalist left establishment vs the republicans as the opposition to that.
RenOS
something is wrong
23d ago
I can recommend Soma. It has been some time, but as far as I remember it skips most tediousness. Though arguably the gameplay is quite minimalist, the atmosphere is effective.
RenOS
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26d ago
Even after reading ape's chain of articles, I find this reasoning very unconvincing. Beauty is asked, per awakening, how likely tails is. The obvious answer is 2/3, as Ape (and you) acknowledge through the betting odds. That it is possible to construe some weird betting scheme that restores the original coin toss likelihood is true, but entirely irrelevant, in my view, to the original though experiment; It just transforms it into a different (rather boring) thought experiment, namely: "you toss a coin. Some stuff happens on monday or tuesday but it doesn't matter. It's wednesday now, how likely was the coin to come up heads?". The scheme is deliberately designed so that your awakening doesn't matter anymore, the only thing that matters is that after the summations are applied on wednesday you have to arrive at the original coin toss likelihood. You can of course also construe many betting scheme for various odds once you allow for weighed summation. We can get p=1 by only summing over tuesday, for example. We can also do even more degenerate shenanigans, like explicitly summing only if the coin toss was heads, so the correct bet would become p=0. The original question was still, however, per awakening.
The technicolor problem doesn't change this, either (though I agree it's interesting, so still thanks for the link!).
RenOS
something is wrong
27d ago
I've noticed this as well. There was another of those quite recently - the ICE-shooting-pastor (David Black, if you want to check it out) video. To the left, the priest is not doing anything dangerous, so shooting him is obviously overkill. To the right, the priest is blatantly ignoring orders and blocking the entrance, so what did he expect? Both sides have imo increasingly trapped priors, to use bayesian parlance, so in short videos it's easy to fill in the details with what you already are predisposed to believe.
RenOS
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29d ago
Progress Studies is basically this, with all the political issues one can imagine. But there is still some interesting work being done on the topic.
RenOS
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1mo ago
That sounds reasonable, although sad. On the topic of unavoidability, see my other reply to Lazuli.
RenOS
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1mo 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
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1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
Ha, I remember very well when I pirated DMC3 as a teenager and couldn't afford a controller. The difficulty and the over-the-top edgelord-ness meshed well with my mind-state at the time, so I pushed through despite the, as you put it, masochism of the endeavour.
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