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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2337 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.

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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.

I know the one you mean. It was about Rimworld, and how players wanted grow lamps for plants to turn off at night (because they used a lot of power). But the lamps were intended to be expensive, to nudge people towards growing crops outside. So they wound up having the lamps turn off at night, but use twice as much electricity when active.

Another similar example is how beta WoW had a "fatigue" penalty to XP from kills (after playing for a long enough time), because they wanted quests and not grinding to be the best way to level up. Players complained, so they added the rest XP system which was mathematically equivalent but inverted - you always gained the lesser rate of XP, but if you logged out for a while you would gain rest and earn double XP while rested. And people praised the system even though it was the same thing.

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