#but as marketers and devs get a hold of the term it's like

[mod2amaryllis]

*said from deep within my bunker with a sniping rifle trained at the door* sometimes it feels like "cozy games" is just code for "girl games"

[lizzybeeee]

Friendly reminder the Dragon Age Devs AMA is happening later today for all you Americans out there! Consider me very impressed that a majority of the questions with the greatest upvotes are quite critical of the game!

I linked it below!

[scrabbleknight]

You know what sucks? Exclusivity. Exclusivity sucks. And I mean that in terms of entertainment media, more specifically streaming platforms.

The reason streaming platforms suck is because they break up all visual media into different apps and websites and you gotta pay for all of them to watch (not me because yarr matey). So if you want to watch two different shows, well too bad for you! You gotta pay for two platforms! That's double the cost!

PC gaming destroys exclusivity by allowing people to get games in a variety of ways. You don't always need to get games via Steam; there's no such thing as a Steam-exclusive. Devs can publish games on Steam and on their own website or other platforms. They usually don't but that's their issue, not the platform itself. Epic Games tried to do the whole "exclusively on Epic" and people slammed on it because fuck them for trying that bs. Some game companies tried to make their own game launcher but that died after a decade because guess what? Nobody fucking likes launchers.

Console games are usually exclusive but then people figured out how to put it on PC and getting it for "free". So, companies like Sony and Microsoft just decided to also put it on PC after its exclusive released in order to make twice the money (or at least, reduce the losses), whereas Nintendo games get emulated and they complain about it. I love Nintendo but their exclusives suck.

Meanwhile in the music industry, platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc. have no concept of platform-exclusivity. Songs can be found in all their apps; they compete mostly on services and prices, not the number of music. Some artists only publish on one platform but again, that's their issue.

But streaming sites? Oh, they refuse to let exclusivity die. They'll never let that happen. They will hold it onto their dying breath instead of just leasing it out to different platforms. And the platforms themselves get all uppity and bitchy about other platforms having the same content. "Oh, they can't have Emoji Movie 3: Rise of the ASCII! Because we have that!" Like fuck that! Why can't you two share and be nice? Why can't two streaming platforms have the same movies, cartoons, series, etc? Why not make it as accessible as possible? Creators get paid, publishers get paid, competition is still promoted and healthy, and audiences get to save cash. Everyone wins, so long as no one gets greedy. But nope, publishers have to get greedy.

Exclusivity is the antithesis of free market and economic competitive practices. It kills the very concept of competition and fairness.

[digitalmarketingagencyseo]

Welcome to the Risezonic - Top Website Development Company in Delhi NCR

Greetings fellow digital denizens of Delhi NCR! Is your current website underperforming across key business metrics? Do lackluster page speed, design and functionality have you singing website development blues?

Well friends, fret no more because the code cavalry of Risezonic being top Website Development company in Delhi NCR is riding to your online rescue! Our team of website whisperers brings next-level skills for architecting digital assets guaranteed to delight both users and search engines. From cutting-edge design to smooth UX to robust infrastructure, Risezonic fires on all website cylinders.

The result? Future-ready online platforms primed for conversions and boundless traffic growth. So whether launching new sites or revitalizing existing ones, make Risezonic your trusty web development posse. Saddle up partners and let's ride towards digital fortune together!

Risezonic Wields Cutting-Edge Website Weaponry

Now hold your horses skeptics questioning whether Risezonic actually brings unmatched web dev firepower. Our developers do indeed boast state-of-the-art skills for crafting websites packing serious heat! We stay sharp across trending technologies like:

PHP / MySQL - The classic backend combo powering dynamic database sites.

JavaScript Frameworks - Vue, React and Angular for slick interactive UIs.

Headless CMS - Craft, Contentful and other flexible content management.

Node.js / Express - JavaScript expanded to server side duties.

Python / Django - Rapid web app development with this popular language.

Cloud Infrastructure - Hosting, storage and deployment scalability.

Yet technical breadth alone doesn't cut the web dev mustard in today's crowded marketplace. True website wizards must also obsess over core web vitals like site speed, security and search visibility.

Luckily those imperatives are Risezonic specialties as well! So whether tackling complex custom coding projects or improving existing site performance, our team brings complete end-to-end expertise. Rope that all together and you get blazing fast, functionally rich websites optimized for sustainable growth. 

Risezonic Lassos Long Term Website Relationships: Website Development company in Delhi NCR

For Risezonic, successfully launching websites is just the beginning of our wild rodeo ride together! We focus on forging lasting digital partnerships spanning years - not just bolting after project payouts. This sustained engagement ensures your custom online asset continually elevates ROI while avoiding the dangers of stagnation.

Our comprehensive managed growth plans take the stress out of keeping websites in tip top shape over the long haul. Expect quarterly site audits assessing design appeal, technical architecture and infrastructure integrity. We’ll spot any looming issues around site speed, broken pages or security vulnerabilities.

Risezonic being best Website Development company in Delhi NCR also facilitates regular website feature upgrades to match evolving user expectations. Adding new functionality like personalization, gamification or augmented reality prevents digital assets from falling behind rivals. We handle all technical complexities allowing you to simply focus on big picture marketing.

And through ongoing conversion optimization initiatives, we’ll uncover fresh UX approaches for unlocking greater sales potential from existing site traffic. Consider Risezonic your trusty web sheriff - we got your back protecting online interests year after year!

Risezonic Acquire A Revolutionarily Personal Approach

However, what makes our website services stand out is the dedication to understanding everything about every partner’s needs and goals. We do not use recycled old templates of the web or push square peg customers in round holes. Custom discovery sessions help us understand your brand’s essence and target audience in-depth.

This insight then informs all web design and development choices, such as information architecture, visual identity, conversion optimization flows. Risezonic also keeps the website developmental process very open and transparent. You will be giving continuous feedback on the mock-ups and demos until you are fully satisfied with the final product.

The result? Unique websites meticulously customized to boost YOUR individual business ideals. Therefore, while rivals come up with standard cookie cutter sites, Risezonic delivers custom made digital solutions for brands to stand out in highly competitive niches. Now that’s a revolutionary philosophy!

Partner With Risezonic to Saddle Up Website Success!

Amigos, the choice is clear. To hit website gold, you need true experts guiding your online Sheriff's badge. Allow Risezonic's cracking web team to architect your breakout digital story!

Reach out now to ignite an expansive new chapter where possibilities remain boundless. With our skills, passion and sheer creative joy, no website challenge proves too tricky for us to tackle. Let's connect today to strategize the first milemarkers on the long road to digital fortune and glory!

WHAT AWAITS For Risezonic's Future Story

There are still a ton of fascinating chapters in Risezonic's story yet to be revealed. From modest beginnings, we have quickly become the leading Website Development company in Delhi NCR. However, we have much larger goals in mind as we work to create websites that enthrall users in India and beyond.

We cordially invite you to embark on an exciting adventure with our organization, which is brimming with creative trailblazers and visionaries. Let's push limits and realize our infinite potential as a team. The future has not yet been written, and Risezonic is in a position to write revolutionary digital experiences.

Watch this space for our next exciting installment detailing our plans to revolutionize the website design industry!

Rope Your Website Destiny to Risezonic for Untamed Online Riches!

Hopefully my previous web development praises sufficiently showcased Risezonic's talents for engineering rich digital frontiers full of potential! Now comes your time to stake a website claim in this lucrative online territory by hiring us as your trusty web partners.

Our battle-tested brigade of creative tech cowpokes stand ready to drive website competitors off into the sunset. We’ll unleash cutting-edge web weapons like dynamic personalization, silky site speed optimization, and real-time interaction tracking to firmly cement your online dominance.

This website land grab rests on building a sturdy online fort manned to conquer imperatives like:

Lassoing high value organic search rankings

Establishing thought leadership within your niche

Continually testing and improving conversion funnels

Embedding analytics to unlock website insights

Risezonic unconditionally guarantees victory on these web battlefronts AND crafting stunning sites imbued with your unique brand essence. With us as your web development posse, get ready to live large off website riches for years on end!

Blaze New Website Trails with Risezonic!

The choice is clear partner - to seize online gold, you NEED our gunslingers backing your sidearm. Allow Risezonic’s web pioneers to chart fresh trails towards digital fortunes hitherto unimagined. With our skills, sheer creative joy and technical tenacity, no website challenge will stand in our way for long!

Contact Risezonic now to spur your breakout success story! Submit ambitious web goals and pie-in-the-sky ideas - our team relishes elevating brands to new heights once deemed impossible. But time is of the essence so don’t delay in letting our website posse embark you on the frontier voyage of a lifetime!

Visit for more Information at: Risezonic

Contact Us: 8178857250

[onlinecoursesusa]

DevOps Online Training: Mastering DevOps

Introduction

Welcome to the exciting world of DevOps online training! In this blog, we will explore the ins and outs of mastering DevOps, from concept to certification. Brace yourself for an educational journey filled with valuable insights and witty commentary. So, buckle up and get ready to dive into the world of DevOps online training , where continuous integration, infrastructure as code, and automation reign supreme. Let's begin our quest to become DevOps superheroes!

What is DevOps?

So you want to know what on earth this thing called DevOps is? Well, let me break it down for you in simple terms (because who has time for complex jargon, right?). DevOps is a magical combination of development and operations, aimed at improving collaboration and efficiency in software development. It's like the revolutionary lovechild of the two! With DevOps, teams can deliver software faster and more reliably, thanks to continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, and automation. So, buckle up, because we're about to embark on a wild journey into the world of DevOps!

The Need for DevOps Training

Welcome, dear reader, to the ultimate guide on mastering DevOps. In this blog, we will explore the exciting realm of DevOps online training and its importance in today's digital landscape. So, if you want to enhance your career prospects, increase your earning potential, and gain recognition in the industry, then stick around. We are about to delve into the fascinating world of DevOps.

What is DevOps?: Before we dive deeper, let's get our definitions straight. DevOps, a buzzword du jour, is a magical blend of development (Dev) and operations (Ops). It is a way of working that fosters collaboration and communication between software developers and IT operations professionals. In simpler terms, DevOps is like the glue that holds together teams and processes to achieve efficient and continuous software delivery. Now that you have a basic understanding let's move on to the main dish - the need for DevOps training.

The Need for DevOps Training: Ah, the demand for DevOps professionals. It's hotter than a jalapeno on a sunny day in Mexico. Companies all over the world are frantically hunting for skilled individuals who can navigate the ever-changing landscape of software development and deployment. This, my friend, is where DevOps training comes in like a superhero in a spandex suit. By undergoing proper training, you gain not only the coveted DevOps certification but also a set of invaluable skills that make you a hot commodity in the job market.

It's also about personal growth and development. Through training, you'll gain a deeper understanding of DevOps principles and how they can revolutionize software development. Plus, you'll get hands-on experience with real-world projects, preparing you for the challenges that lie ahead. So, my eager learner, are you ready to embark on the DevOps training journey? Good, because the next step is all about choosing the right online training course. Don't worry; we've got you covered. Stay tuned for the next chapter of our ultimate DevOps adventure.

Choosing the Right DevOps Online Training Course

First things first, you need to find a training provider that is as reliable as your morning coffee. Are they known for their expertise in DevOps? Or are they just another fly-by-night operation trying to make a quick buck? Choose wisely, my friend. Next, closely examine the course curriculum and learning objectives. Are they covering the essential topics you need to master DevOps? Remember, you don't want to end up learning how to make fancy coffee when all you really need is a shot of espresso.

Certification options are like badges of honour in the DevOps world. Consider the different certifications offered by the training providers. Will these certifications make you stand out in the ever-competitive job market? Or will they be as valuable as a participation trophy? Choose wisely, my friend. Last but not least, read reviews and testimonials from fellow DevOps enthusiasts. Their experiences will give you a glimpse into what to expect from the training course. It's like getting a sneak peek behind the curtain before the show begins. So, my friend, armed with the knowledge of researching, evaluating, considering, and reading, go forth and conquer the DevOps online certification training course that will transform you into a DevOps wizard. May your journey be filled with knowledge, laughter, and a touch of caffeine to keep you going.

Key Concepts and Methodologies in DevOps

So, you're diving into the exciting world of DevOps and want to know the key concepts and methodologies that make it tick? Well, hold on to your hats, because we're about to take a little journey through Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and Automation and Orchestration. CI is like a diligent janitor who continuously sweeps and tidies up your code, making sure it's always in tip-top shape.

CD takes CI a step further by automating the process of deploying your code to production, like a reliable delivery person who always shows up on time. IaC treats your infrastructure as if it were a piece of Lego, allowing you to build, modify, and destroy it with just a few lines of code. And last but not least, automation and orchestration bring it all together, like a well-choreographed dance routine that keeps your software running smoothly. But hey, don't take my word for it! Dive headfirst into the world of DevOps and see how these key concepts work their magic. Just remember, it's not just about the theory, it's about getting hands-on and experiencing it for yourself. So buckle up, strap on your coding gloves, and let's get down to business in mastering DevOps!

Benefits of DevOps Certification

So you want to know about the benefits of DevOps certification, huh? Well, hold on to your hats because I'm about to blow your mind with some serious career-boosting knowledge! When you become DevOps certified, you unlock a world of enhanced career prospects. Picture this: job opportunities raining down like confetti, employers lining up to hire you because you're the certified DevOps rockstar they've been dreaming of. And it doesn't stop there! Your earning potential shoots through the roof, so you can finally afford that yacht you've had your eye on. Plus, being recognized in the industry gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling of validation. And let's not forget about the valuable skills you'll develop along the way, like a magical pocket full of tricks for solving problems and streamlining processes. So, strap in, my friend, and get ready to ride the wave of DevOps certification to career success! Woohoo!

Conclusion

Oh, hey there! We've finally reached the conclusion of our amazing journey into the world of DevOps online training. It's time to recap the key points and wrap things up in a neat little package. So, hold on tight! Throughout this blog, we've explored the definition and importance of DevOps, the need for training, and how to choose the right course. We've dived into the key concepts and methodologies, and the wonderful benefits of certification. Moving forward, we've discussed the DevOps training journey, from understanding basics to mastering tools, practical application, and exam preparation. Each step brings you closer to becoming a certified DevOps pro.

So, my friend, it's crystal clear that DevOps training is not just a fad; it's a game-changer in the tech industry. By acquiring these valuable skills, you'll open doors to enhanced career prospects, increased earning potential, and industry recognition. In a nutshell, DevOps online training is your ticket to success. Embrace the journey, explore new horizons, and don't forget to sign up now to unlock a world of opportunities! There you have it, folks! We've wrapped up our DevOps adventure in a concise manner. Now it's time for you to take action and start your own DevOps journey. Happy learning and see you at the top!

[300iqprower]

I can't help but feel a bit bitter over the way Arjuna Alter got screwed in terms of marketing. They delay the release of Lostbelt 4 for an obscenely long time, then release his first banner right before a summer event and anniversary so of course no one wanted to roll, then hold off giving him a second rateup for 3 years and then relegate his second rateup to a CBC event. (Skadi wasn't properly released with LB2, instead she was the anni Servant for that year plus a milestone plus a few events she'd featured in; they made Ibuki the milestone Servant when she'd been available less than a year, then don't put Junao on the Karnamas banner despite there not being any other limited 5*s in the event other than him. I feel like a lot of it was intentional and not just "Oh he just doesn't sell well")

I mean you totally should feel bitter. I would. ...Maybe that's a sign you shouldn't, actually...

It was definitely sexism in terms of pre-release, funny how Skadi and Castoria got that treatment of releasing ahead of schedule, but post-release it's the "men don't sell" mentality + because they realized they fucked up. Castoria overshadows it nowadays, but Alterjuna was borderline to DPS what Castoria is to support. He's the reason debuff meta is garbage now, with bosses consistently being slapped with Debuff Immunity and heavy debuff resistance, because he nukes anything with a debuff placed on it, the same way before him mental debuffs were useless because every boss (specifically male ones) got slapped with Mental Debuff Immunity for no reason other than to stop Eurayle from being an easy F2P option for tough encounters like Surt or Xiang Yu. He trivialized several gilfest level CQs. And if you had Merlin or Waver, let alone both? You've won the game forever. So just like with Eurayle, they nerfed him indirectly in a way that nerfs an entire archetype of servants even harder than it does that one servant. From what I know starting with Olympus there are also significantly less multi-enemy bosses. And this was all DEFINITELY by design; as I've said before LB4's release lines up just after Delightworks suffered a massive profit drop due entirely to their own shitty business practices. I'd be surprised if he ever even got the "increase the scaling and nothing else" NP rank up, because they clearly want to make absolutely sure they restrict his damage ceiling as much as possible.

But there was also a key difference: Eurayle is free to play, Alterjuna is SSR EX. So while they couldn't stop you from using Eurayle, they could artificially limit how many people would have to borrow Alterjuna to get ahold of him by just.....not re-running him at all. Of course with Castoria they aren't even hesitating to rerun her and there's obvious reason for that: She is waifu. She is mascot. And they aren't afraid anymore to powercreep for the sake of proft; it's pretty much their entire MO ever since Castoria dropped. They hadn't realized they were taking the plunge with Alterjuna so they had that kneejerk reaction but it made them go "fuck it" as soon as it was done when it came time to do it again.

TLDR, as OP as Castoria is, Alterjuna was when they crossed that point of no return with powercreep, and so it's no wonder they've done everything they can to bury him every since, even though it was completely intentional because what these kind of hacks think they can do is shove out a whalebait powercreeper for a spike in profits and then just damage control it into non-existence. Either that, or no one leading the dev team is qualified to even hold a position in the entire industry with how little they understand game design.

[askagamedev]

Following up on the Engagement question from earlier today, I wanted to ask _why_ single-player games make more money when players are engaged with for extremely extended periods of time, on a daily basis. If the price tag of a game is up front and not a subscription, what does my thousandth hour in Animal Crossing, a game with no paid DLC or microtransactions for instance, offer Nintendo? What does my 200th hour in Breath of the Wild buy that offsets the obscene scale and complexity that created that 200th hour?

Continued engagement has a lot of positive externalities beyond just selling people more stuff. If you play a game for a few hours and quit, you might have some pleasant memories of it when the sequel rolls around or you might not. However, if you play a game for two hundred hours, chances are far far better that you’ll engage with it beyond just the game itself. For example, if you play one game for 200 hours, you’re much more likely to...

... talk to your friends about the game

... tune in for news about the franchise in general

... engage with the game’s online community

... be interested in other, similar games that are offered on the platform (e.g. other games in the franchise)

... be interested in other franchise merchandise or media (toys, plushes, animated/TV series, spinoff games, card games, posters, t-shirts, etc.)

... be interested in physical or digital events for the game (CitizenCon, BlizzCon, Pokemon Go Fest, Final Fantasy FanFest, DOTA International, eSports, etc.)

... engage with or create fan content (cosplay, fan art, fan fiction, speed running, streaming, video creation, memes, etc.)

These various activities all hold value for us for a variety of reasons - we care about continued monetization of the franchise, we care about having a community that is willing to support the franchise, we want to make content and games for players who like the franchise. Some percentage of those who continue to engage within the game are going to engage outside of the game, and the more of them there are, the more “earned” media we get for marketing and improved franchise purposes. Having more of this means that we get additional marketing for future games in the franchise because we have cultivated a vibrant community that really likes playing our games.

This isn’t to say that shorter games with lower engagement can’t do these things too, but it is much much more difficult for them to establish this kind of presence because the community is just naturally so much smaller for low-engagement games. Even if the games are fantastic, the transient nature of players playing and moving on means that the community generally doesn’t reach that kind of critical mass - the players who loved the game will move on to other games as newer players start playing, resulting in a more revolving-door community than one that is there for the longer term.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent Questions: The FAQ

[rjzimmerman]

Lyme disease is relevant. We’ve been told for years by scientists that Lyme disease is spreading into new areas, because as the climate changes, more local ecosystems become conducive to the spread. In other words: the ticks will find a broader base to breed, grow and infect. So, here’s the story about vaccines, which, by the way, have been around for a while. This story tells us why the vaccine wasn’t use more broadly. You get one guess, and the hint is the phrase started with “anti-” 

Excerpt from this story from The New Yorker:

There used to be a Lyme vaccine—and then, in a rare occurrence in modern medicine, it disappeared. LYMErix was a three-dose regimen for humans brought to market about twenty years ago by SmithKline Beecham, the precursor to the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. It prompted the making of bacteria-neutralizing antibodies in a person’s blood, so that when a tick bit, the Lyme pathogens it was harboring would be killed before they could cause an infection. It was a novel approach: essentially, the vaccine acted inside the tick, not its human host. Following a successful Phase III clinical trial of nearly eleven thousand subjects that showed a seventy-six-per-cent reduction in Lyme disease incidence with no significant side effects, the Food and Drug Administration approved it in December, 1998. The C.D.C. gave LYMErix the so-called permissive recommendation, meaning that the vaccine was advised only for people who were at risk, not the general population. (This was in contrast to vaccines for diseases such as rubella and polio, that affect the population at large.) By 2001, about a million and a half doses had been distributed. The next year, though, GlaxoSmithKline abandoned LYMErix, citing poor sales. Since then, the only Lyme preventatives on the market are for dogs and cats.

How a vaccine that had gone through years of development and testing ended up with such a short shelf life is a cautionary tale with an unlikely villain: people who themselves were suffering from Lyme disease. A number of scientists I talked with who had worked on LYMErix told me that it had succumbed to a trifecta of pernicious events: some people who had received the vaccine came to believe that it caused arthritis, a complaint that was never medically proved but embraced by a vocal cohort of “long-haul” Lyme-disease sufferers and amplified in the press; a snide assessment by a member of a C.D.C. advisory panel, who called LYMErix a “yuppie vaccine” for people who “will pay a lot of money for their Nikes”; and the fact that consumers have the right to sue the makers of “permissive” vaccines.

A half-dozen class-action lawsuits against GlaxoSmithKline, later consolidated into a single suit, were filed on behalf of “vaccine victims,” who claimed that the company had withheld evidence of the Lyme vaccine’s dangers. It’s a position that Lorraine Johnson, the C.E.O. of LymeDisease.org, a patient-advocacy group, continues to hold. “I think the manufacturer was facing a class-action lawsuit, and so part of what they were doing was likely defensive, to protect their legal position,” she said. “And just shutting down the trial, before you disclose Phase IV data, would be a way of limiting the data that could be used against them.” (A Phase IV clinical trial is conducted after a medication is released to study its longer-term risks and benefits. GlaxoSmithKline researchers later made public their findings from the truncated Phase IV study, showing no difference in the rate of adverse reactions between vaccine recipients and the control group.)

[gaklz]

The Side Hustle: Second Jobs To Make Extra Money

A side hustle is a part time job, a second job, or alternate way to earn money – outside of your 9 to 5 career. The economic downturn left many well-qualified adults scrambling to earn wages that would continue to put food on the table, with many taking on a second job just to make ends meet.  According to FOX News and the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. job outlook remains dismal, with wage incomes improving by just 1.4%, and the economy expanded by only 1.9% during the first quarter of 2012.

Whether you’re trying to pay off bills, add to your children’s college fund, or save for a special event, taking a second job is a route many working adults take in order to get ahead financially.

Freelancing Freelance jobs are plentiful across the World Wide Web. However – unless you live in Pakistan and are able to work for pennies on the dollar – quality freelance jobs take some digging to find. I have freelanced for Yahoo and Demand Media Studios, edited web sites for small web publishers, and worked as an independent freelance writer. Of these choices, editing web sites paid the most… writing web content as an independent was the most flexible and pays well, and working for the “content mills” pays – but does it pay what you’re worth?

Demand Media Studios strict content form and requirements hardly make it worth the $25 per article you’ll receive… if you’ve spent an hour writing the article and it’s accepted as-is, $25/hour is awesome. However, this is rare with DMS, so in reality is takes more like 2 – 3 hours to earn the $25. Yahoo Contributor Network is the most user friendly place I have found to write for money… but at $15 per post you really need to have the concept down pat, write fast with few errors, and produce cookie-cutter content that can make your eyes cross by the end of the day. Freelance writing for blogs and websites is a good choice as a side hustle – IF you have the skills needed to turn content fast, and with few mistakes.

Blogging For Money – Side Hustle or Hype? My full time career is as a Blogger. I blog across several websites, and those sites make money through paid advertising, reviewing products, and creating interesting articles and content that make readers want to come back for more. When I first began blogging, I was also doing a lot of freelance writing and editing to put food on the table. I could go on and on about how to become a successful pro blogger, but the truth is that I followed the wisdom of another highly successful blogger, who recently rolled out an e-Book on making money as a blogger.  The eBook, How I Make Money Blogging, is a no-holds-barred tutorial on how to start, and how to create a viable income as a blogger. Since I know the author – Crystal Stemberger – have worked with her as a colleague on several projects, and have personally followed her success on Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, I highly recommend buying this eBook. Her actual website, How I Make Money Blogging, gives details weekly, but the book is one of the best places to start for newbies… of an excellent way for current bloggers/freelancers to get back on track and tuern their blogs into a lucrative business. I know that this eBook is in the up and up, and I couldn’t even say it better – or detail the steps Crystal outlines –  myself. I have watched as Crystal’s monthly earnings went from a level where she could quit her day job… to the point where her husband has been able to quit his own job to work alongside her from their home office. These people are solid, intelligent, hard working folks – and Crystal’s template for success is not to be overlooked. If you’re even remotely interested in creating a work-from-home career, please take a moment to check out the eBook… Click here to visit How I Make Money Blogging.

I do earn a commission for telling you about the eBook — so let me thank you in advance for clicking through my link (above) when you go to buy the eBook. Be sure to come back here to Thriftability and comment on your success with the tips in the book – or email me directly to share your story. If you are having trouble getting started, I’m happy to help. I have 8 years experience as a web dev/web editor, and have been a professional (paid) blogger for the last 3 years. I know that sometimes getting started can be frustrating, but it is definitely worth it for people who have the drive and determination to make it happen. so if I can help or answer a question, feel free to email: Lisa {at} Thriftability {dot} com. The book, How I Make Money Blogging is the true story of Crystal Stemberger’s experience in leaving her day job to work form home as a full time blogger and web ‘preneur. Definitely worth the read!

Side Jobs: Seasonal and Temp Work Taking a job during the holiday season is a good way to earn money in a short period of time. As long as you’re not paying for child care while you work (perhaps your spouse or a relative can keep the kids), you can earn decent money in retail during the holidays. Seasonal and temp work can pay off as well – as long as you’re OK with the reality of becoming involved with a company or project for a short term period. Keep in mind: with the unemployment rate hovering at 8.2% nationwide, you’re up against other adults who have no jobs at all, while those looking for the side hustle are out to supplement their primary source of income. Bring your “A Game”, and treat the interview for a second job as seriously as you would for any other. Dress for success, and be enthusiastic.

Put Your Skills To Work For You Perhaps taking a second  job is out of the question, because you have kids at home, your primary job is time consuming and you only have random hours in which to work, or… (be honest) the thought of taking on a second job makes you feel ill. I can relate to this! This is why I started working from home in the first place: I needed extra cash, but I was also needed at home as a single mom with three pre-teen and teen-aged kids. Think outside the box. Maybe you have valuable skills that could bring in a secondary income without ever leaving the house. Can you sew? The number of young professionals who have mastered the tasks once taught in Home Ec has dwindled sharply over the years. One of my neighbors takes in ironing – clean clothes brought over just to be presses – and makes $40 in an evening… ironing while watching her favorite TV shows or movies. Lawn care, auto maintenance, child care and supplying home-cooked meals are other ways to earn money from home. My latest hobby has just started bringing in extra (unplanned!) cash… I have a large organic garden, and sell produce at the local Farmer’s Market. Regardless of where, how, or how much, the side hustle is becoming more the norm for many Americans.

Do you have a side hustle? Tell us about ways you make extra money  – leave a comment below!

[nerdy-bits]

XCOM: Chimera Squad Review

XCOM Chimera Squad is my definition of a pleasant surprise. Just soldiering through quarantine on a lazy April Tuesday afternoon, across my news feed comes the improbable: a new XCOM game getting shadow dropped. Just a short ten days away, Chimera Squad would be releasing. What’s more? If you preordered, or purchased before May first, the game was only ten dollars.

 Now I fully recognize, it may be the trying times we’re enduring, but that lazy tuesday suddenly felt like Christmas.

 I’ve been a huge fan of XCOM since the reboot, Enemy Unknown, was released in 2012. I remember doing my research and discovering XCOM had first launched in 1994, but I never had the chance to play those games. Regardless, ten minutes into Enemy Unknown I knew I was sold.

Where Chimera Squad differs from its predecessors is, well, in a lot of places. Where XCOM 1 and 2 finds you operating as the Commander of XCOM, at first an international force assembled to fight back alien invasion, then as a resistance seeking to overthrow alien overlords, Chimera Squad is the result of an XCOM initiative called the Reclamation Project. With the war against the occupying aliens won, XCOM tasks an interspecies team of operatives to support the police of City 31. The former hub of Advent control, City 31 has become the world’s model city for human and alien integration. 

As Chimera Squad, as directed by the Reclamation Project, you are tasked with seeking out and pacifying rogue groups in the city hoping to hamper its lofty goals, and simultaneously track down and reclaim scattered wartime technologies. But, of course, things don’t go specifically to plan. In the first moments of the game you are tasked with saving the life of Mayor Nightingale. Taken hostage by dissidents, 31PD is at a standstill and calls in the cavalry. With Chimera Squad so newly formed, Verge, your Sectoid Psionic teammate has to take a cab and catch up with the team on site. 

That is the other way that Chimera Squad breaks the mold. Where other XCOM games give you a force of editable, backstory-less characters, this title has twelve operatives with names, backstories, voice actors, and personality. I wasn’t sure how I would like this change at first. Part of my love of the series is the stories that I can attach to the characters as I grow familiar with each of their abilities. And losing those soldiers becomes so much more personal when they fall in battle. 

In Chimera Squad there is no such thing as losing a character. In fact, character death results in a game over screen and a “Load Checkpoint” prompt. Gravely wounded soldiers have an increased chance at earning a scar, a semipermanent debuff that can only be cleared by sending them to rehabilitative training. At first I wasn’t sure how I felt about these changes. I have moments from previous games that have stuck with me for years, based on the deaths or retrieval of lost characters. Chimera Squad axes that in the interest of telling a story with its characters, and for such a radical change, it really pays off.

Dialogue in-mission feels largely the same. Conversations back at base however, really lend to the depth of the characters. I found myself constantly bemused by the tidbits of information I could glean from these operatives interacting with each other. It only takes a couple of lines to understand where Godmother gets her callsign. In one instance, Cherub - the affectionate mascot of the squad - asks Godmother to sign off on paperwork allowing the soldier and scientist who found him to adopt him. See Cherub is a clone soldier. Created by Advent for war, but woken after the Ethereal mind control had been lifted. He explains that the two people who found him, set him free, had gotten married a few years later and now they wanted to adopt him.

I truly had no expectation that I would be charmed this much by an XCOM title. But it didn’t end there.

Later in the game, given the opportunity to recruit another unit to Chimera’s ranks, I chose Zephyr, a Hybrid bruiser whose only wield-able weapons were her fists. I rarely choose melee characters, but because Chimera Squad is so unique, I figured I would try something new. In her first mission she was a blast to use. Her attack rooted enemies, meaning they can’t move on their next turn, and after her attack she is granted an additional action point so that she can distance herself from enemies that would take advantage of her close range to shoot her. I was convinced. Then we went back to base.

In her one and only base-dialogue I heard, she asked Cherub to be her training dummy. Except, she didn’t call him by his name, she called him Knock-Off. When confronted by Terminal (another agent) that he has a name Zephyr waved them away and called for Knock-Off to come along. Always the team morale agent, he complied, telling his defender that it was ok. 

I never used Zephyr again. She literally developed workshop projects for the next 20 hours of my campaign.

Again, I never expected that an XCOM game would make me feel like this about my soldiers. And quite frankly, I absolutely fell in love with this game because of it. 

Chimera Squad is clearly built on the XCOM 2 engine. As one would assume, with that fact comes the realization that a lot of the combat mechanics for this iteration of the game are immediately familiar. This lends to Chimera Squad feeling like an expansion in a way that few stand-alones achieve. After learning the non-complex intricacies of the Breach phase, a shock and awe stage that starts every encounter, combat falls into a rhythm that fans of the series will be comfortable with. With one major adjustment.

Rather than the “I go, you go” turn-based nature of games previous, this title takes an approach that feels far more like an initiative roll in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. The devs at Firaxis re-appropriate the term “Interleaved” here. Traditionally meaning to place blank pages between printed pages of a book, here it simply means that your enemy will take turns with you, within a timeline displayed on the right side of the screen. 

This forces players, otherwise familiar with the privilege of running through all of their characters before the enemy gets a chance to act, to plan more carefully. You may only have one agent in line at the start of a fight before hostiles get to retaliate. This leads to an increase in the importance of finding the most synergistic combination of agent abilities. Who can manipulate that timeline? Who can debuff, incapacitate, or eliminate targets the fastest and with the most cascading effect?

I found myself, at the halfway point of my playthrough (about 15 hours), settling into my squad. Godmother, a mobile, agile, hard hitting, shotgun wielding enforcer. Verge, a Sectoid psionic, with the ability to disable, berserk, and mind control assailants. Patchwork, a techie drone pilot whose drone shock can arc between enemies with a chance of debuffing every target zapped. And Finally, Blueblood a gunslinger with two pistols, one that ignores cover, and the ability to fire multiple times per turn. 

In any situation, I could finagle my way into disabling or dispatching two targets fully or up to eight targets partially within my first four actions. Add to this the few odds and ends you can nab from the Scavenger Market, a transient market that visits every week, or side mission rewards, and you can find yourself with a few epic weapons, specialized buff grenades like the Motile Inducer. Two free actions, immediately, to whomever you throw it at. 

Finding these synergies and supplements, is at the core of Chimera Squad, and while the process isn’t entirely unique to this title, it certainly feels more important when the turns are interleaved, the quarters are close, and your innate advantage lasts a single, Rainbow Six-esque, breaching action. 

Over the course of your game you will investigate three factions in City 31: The Progeny, Grey Phoenix, and Sacred Coil. Each faction has different units, abilities, and motivations, and as you take out each faction, the surviving factions will scale up in response. It is your job to root out their goals, foil their plans, and neutralize the threatening potential they hold. As illustrated by the comic book-styled cutscenes, Chimera Squad is against the wall and the clock, as unrest in the city rises you have to manage threats based on their cost to your levels of unrest in the nine districts of the city. You will forgo missions that have good rewards to manage the unrest in an unruly district. Spend your investigation points to deploy Security, Technology, or Financial teams in each district to access buffs that give you the ability to stave off increased unrest, decrease unrest in specific districts, or in the city overall. 

At its core Chimera Squad is truly an XCOM game, forcing its players to train their soldiers, research projects in the workshop, manage unrest across a map, and manage resources, all while fielding an active combat team in harrowing and varied encounters. Is it XCOM 3? No, not at all, but one shouldn’t conflate the two. Chimera squad is a $20 exploration into the ways that XCOM can, and I believe will, evolve. Expect to see hero characters in the future, with backstories and voice acting. Expect to see multiple paths in the campaign, with escalative properties as the game progresses. But more than anything, expect to feel right at home with Chimera Squad, despite the ways it alters the formula. You’ve simply moved on from Sazerac to Vieux Carre. Your rye whiskey is still there, just this time you have some sweet vermouth. Enjoy.

[status200us]

Best 3 Backend Programming Languages- Helpful Information for Developers

The backend programming language or framework is the one that connects and communicates with the Front end via an API. An application programming interface (API) acts as a channel to transmit data bi-directionally between the app’s frontend and backend.

A frontend is comprised of a combination of static and dynamic pages. Let’s slightly touch on what both types of pages actually mean.

Static page:

 A page whose content doesn’t get populated by the backend is called a static page. It houses content such as text, images, and videos. For example, About us, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy pages of a particular website.

Dynamic page:

 A page whose content gets updated based on the response that it receives from the backend. It also houses similar content as of a static page but again, all of its data comes from the server. It may also contain input controls too.

In the backend, we have server-side scripts in conjunction with DBMS (Database Management System) to house an app’s complete business logic, API layer(s) contains business data and may also include an admin panel.

Speaking of Databases, there are numerous database vendors in the market, for example:

· Oracle SQL

· Postgres SQL

· MySQL

· SQL Server

· SQLite

After glancing out the overall web architecture, let’s discuss the top 3 backend programming languages that are very famous in devs’ communities.

Django

Node.js

ASP.NET | Open-source web framework for .NET

1. Django Backend Programming Framework

Django is the most common Python Web framework that favors fast yet scalable development. Additionally, Python operates on any platform and is also open source. As it comprises a set of modules, it offers a standard way to generate websites fast and effortlessly. Thus, Django’s main objective is to ease the designing of complicated database-driven websites.

Django contains all of the crucial features that one needs to build any sort of a web application. This framework is bundled with Django-Admin, which further facilitates the quick rollout of any given app. Some of its USPs include,

· Simple to use

· Runs on Python

· More interactive

· Time effective

· Features enriched.

· Appropriate for every web development project

· Requires shorter code & little effort

· Covers most tasks and problems

· Supports object-oriented programming

· Powers tool packages (AI, Machine learning)

· Controls REST Framework for Building APIs

2. ASP.NET | Open-source web framework for .NET Backend Programming Framework

ASP.NET | Open-source web framework for .NET is also a programming language for generating dynamic web applications. Moreover, it supports various languages, such as C#, VB.NET Shop, JAVA the Script, etc. Though, the programming logic and content generated distinctly in Microsoft ASP.NET | Open-source web framework for. NET. Also, an ASP.NET | Open-source web framework for .NET page goes through a specific lifecycle. It is completed before the response is directed to the user. Moreover, there are a series of phases that can be monitored for the processing of an ASP.NET | Open-source web framework for .NET page.

a) Page Request: While the page is requested, the server monitors if it is demanded for the 1st time. If so, at that time it requires to compile the page. Also, it analyzes the response and directs it to the user. However, the cache is inspected if the page output occurs.

b) Page Start: At this stage, the response object is used to hold the data, which is directed back to the user.

c) Initialization: Though, at this phase, all the controls on a page are initialized.

d) Page Loading: This is when the web page is truly loaded with all the default principles.

e) Validation: The validation set detects the errors or bugs in page loading.

f) Postback Event Handling: This event is activated if the same web page is being loaded again.

g) Page Rendering: This phase involves the protection of whole data on the form. And the user received the output as a whole web page.

h) Unloading Process: There is no need to keep the ASP.NET | Open-source web framework for .NET webform object in the memory after sending the output to the user. Consequently, the unloading procedure includes eliminating all undesirable stuff from memory.

3. Node.js Backend Programming Framework

Unlike Python, Node.js is a runtime driven language which runs on a V8 engine. It brings event-driven development to the web servers. And just like python, its open source. Additionally, developers may generate scalable servers without applying to thread. They use a straightforward model of event-driven programming that activates callbacks to signal the accomplishment of a task/event. Nonetheless, Node.js links the simplicity of a scripting language (JS) with the command of UNIX network programming. Bundled with MEAN stack, the Node.js backend programming framework has the following remarkable features.

· Scalability (Vertical & horizontal)

· Improved performance.

· Short response time

· Fast implementation

· Advisable backend development option

· Directly compiles the code into machine code

· Supports the non-blocking Input/output operations

Contact us at Status200

We are Status 200, a full-stack development, and marketing company that focuses solely on the client’s satisfaction. You will explore all the information regarding the best backend programming languages at our site. Our expert team of developers is always available for an assist. Feel welcome to reach out to us for Web and Mobile development services. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

[scripting-life]

FFVII: returning to my first love

 *peeks out of the corner of my lurking spot*

Hello? Anybody out there? It’s only been, oh you know, four-ish years since the last time I’ve posted anything here. I apologize in advance for anybody who’s still following me from my Castle days. If you couldn’t tell from my extended absence, I’ve mostly moved on. Castle and Beckett were fantastic characters that let me to play with some deep-dive analyses, and Castle will always hold a special place in my heart as my comfort show and my first real and extended experience with online fandom. I’ll always be grateful to the community I’ve had the joy of interacting with (or, the community with which I’ve had the joy of interacting, as Castle would correct me my dangling preposition).

I honestly didn’t think I would ever have reason to come back to Tumblr after Castle ended. But the FF7 Remake has returned me to my very first love--when I was young and innocent and before I knew anything about OTPs or ship wars. I’ve been back lurking for several months now and seeing all the fanart/fanfics and fun theories and analyses has reignited my enthusiasm for the FF7 franchise. It’s also fun coming back to this franchise with a more mature understanding of the themes/concepts that completely flew over my head as a young preteen.

(This ended up being super long, so the rest is below the cut to spare everyone the pain of scrolling. Apparently, my rambling tendencies have not changed at all. lol.)

When FF7R was officially announced (five freaking years ago!), I was filled with apprehension. FF7 was my first taste of a “grown-up” game. I was 11 and played my brother’s copy of the OG on PC in 1-2 hours spurts on the weekends when I visited his apartment. It took me months, if not years, to finish the game (I ended up stealing his copy to play on our computer at home...lol), and I was so blown away by it. I remember the exact moment I finished it and how I was literally shaking as I watched the ending FMV.

Later, when I found out my brother had a copy of FF8 (my poor brother was so accommodating to his annoying little sister...haha), I was so excited to play, in large part because I thought it would continue the story of FF7. Young, naive me didn’t understand the numbering conventions of Final Fantasy titles. I was madly theorizing and breaking my brain trying to find connections between the two games’ plots and had literally played through more than half the game before I finally realized the storyline of FF8 had absolutely nothing to do with FF7. I was sorely disappointed, and I think that has somewhat tainted my appreciation of future titles. Not to say I haven’t enjoyed the subsequent FF titles, but I think a little part of me is always comparing them to that first experience of wonder and awe that I had with FF7.

I discovered fanfiction in my teens and starting writing FF7/Cloti fics in college. Aside from interacting with a few fic writers at the time, I was not involved in any online communities, so I kept myself pretty free of any ship war drama and the like. When I did research for my fics, I’d sometimes see shipping sites and theories where I didn’t always understand the logic of how certain conclusions were reached, but frankly, I didn’t much care and didn’t realize that Clerith vs. Cloti was such a touchy subject. I was peripherally aware that some sort great LTD war was waging, of course, but it didn’t really touch me. I stayed in my Cloti shipping/fic-writing lane and was probably a lot happier for it. And, to be honest, based on FFN’s listings for FF7, I felt like I always saw a bunch of Sephiroth/Cloud fics and thought that was just as popular as the more conventional ships.

Graduating college and entering “real life” pretty much ended my FF7 fanfic-writing journey. In the intervening years between college and the release of FF7R, I haven’t gone back to the OG too much. I’ve played almost all the Final Fantasy games since then, and I always enjoy getting my FF7 crew fix when I play the non-canon mobile games or the Kingdom Hearts franchise. But FF7 was a happy part of my teenage years, and I was content to think on it with sweet nostalgia.

Remakes, in recent experience (*cough cough* Disney, why?), have been hit or miss, with a lot of misses. It’s hard to strike a good balance between catering to nostalgia and delivering a fresh product, never mind the change in social mores through the decades. I was so afraid FF7R would screw up my memories, especially since I wasn’t the biggest fan of Advent Children. The graphics were great and the action scenes were fun, but the story felt like a let-down. Cloud, in particular, felt so different (and yes, moody) from where we left him after the OG. I understand now that a lot of his character motivation was better explained in the On The Way to a Smile novels, but back then, I just felt like AC came out of nowhere. 

Btw, because I see this question a lot on other blogs when I’m lurking, I’ve ALWAYS thought that it was very clear in AC--even without reading anything else--that the reason for Cloud’s depression was due to guilt and not because he was pining for Aerith. The only reason I didn’t like his characterization in AC was because it felt like it came out of nowhere since AC is set 2 years after OG and by the end of the OG, he seemed to be in a pretty decent place mentally and emotionally. That being said, I can absolutely understand why some traumas resurface years after the originating incident and how times of peace might actually be worse because he is no longer solely focused on saving the world, but I was just surprised and a little bummed that this was the direction the devs chose to take AC at the time. Now that I’m older, I do better appreciate the complexities of Cloud’s mental state and the fact that they depicted a hero with lingering mental health issues is actually pretty awesome. I’m drawn to characters that have flaws--sometimes serious ones--but try their best anyway. Hence, why why Tifa Lockhart and Kate Beckett are some of my all-time favorites.

Anyhow, that didn’t stop me from pre-ordering FF7R, of course. I avoided reading any reviews as I didn’t want my first impressions to be swayed, and boy, was I happy that I went in mostly blind. That sense of awe really almost felt like playing the OG for the first time again, but somehow more. The combat system is incredibly fun and the world-building is nothing short of incredible. The variety and abundance of NPCs gives the game so much flavor and the locations have been rendered so well. As I’m going through areas like the Sector 7 train station and Wall Market and Aerith’s house, I can almost superimpose the layout from the OG in my head, but now it’s in 3D and so rich and full. It’s obvious that a lot of attention was paid to details, and I love all the head-nods and homages to the OG.

And oh, the characters!

This is the Cloud I’ve been wanting to see in glorious HD and the Cloud I remember from the original game: all awkward, dorky trying to be cool, socially inept, mentally unstable, abrasive-at-times, reluctant to act depending on who’s asking, wannabe hard-ass who’s actually a big softie inside Cloud. I remember reading an article a few years back about how the devs basically redid Cloud for the Remake because they wanted him to go back to his dorky roots--which ends up making him closest to his personality in the OG than his appearances in other franchises--and I was SOOOO incredibly happy to hear that. I was so sick of the way Cloud was constantly depicted as this cool, broody McBrood in his cameos when he was a pretty big dork in the OG. (Anybody remember him doing squats in the Highwind when Tifa says it’ll be lonely with just the two of them and Cloud responds that he’ll make enough noise to make up for it? Like I said: cute, but a dork.)

I WAS surprised by how comfortable and sweet and touchy (so very very touchy) the devs made him with Tifa from the beginning. That initial scene of Cloud being such a smooth operator giving Tifa the flower had my jaw-dropping and every single flirty interaction after that (and there are many) had my Cloti heart overflowing in shock and bliss. Throughout most of my years as a Cloti shipper, even though I believed Cloti was supported by canon and pretty clearly together, I was also under the impression--mistakenly or not--that Cloti was the minority ship. So for Square Enix to make it so blatantly obvious that Cloud is really into Tifa at such an early stage has been an unexpected gift.

Also, they’re just really hot together. (Clotiscrew tunnel--be still my heart!)

As for Tifa...oh, what wonderful character development we’ve already gotten for Tifa. Tifa has always been one of my all-time favorite characters ever since reading her character blurb in the OG game manual. Initially, as a child, it was because I saw so much of myself in her. She was outwardly bright and optimistic, but tended to hide all of her stronger feelings inside. She fought with her fists, and for someone who was a tomboy growing up who liked playing contact sports with the boys, I connected with her in a way that I had never been able to connect with other female protagonists who were primarily back-row specialists. (I also aspired to grow to her listed height of 5′4″, which alas, did not happen...lol).

I love how the Remake delves into more of Tifa’s moral conflict between the destruction that she causes as part of Avalanche and needing to do something to stop Shinra, and yes, even seeking revenge. They touched on this in the OG lightly, but the Remake really hammers it home. She’s perhaps the most conflicted character in terms of motivation in Part 1. That scene with the Shinra manager on the train is actually one of my favorite scenes of her because it highlights that tension. The elevator scene, if you opted for it instead of the stairs (or if you did one, saved, and reloaded to do the other one, like me), is also underrated in terms of how much it reveals about Tifa’s inner struggle.

On this point, I also appreciate that the Remake has the characters reflecting on the damage they’ve both indirectly and directly inflicted--the Avalanche team all do this to a certain degree. In particular, Jessie’s constant inability to figure out what she’d done wrong with the bomb to cause such a massive explosion and her remaining feelings of guilt during her death scene (”they were my victims” ouch!) were heart-breaking.

Aerith’s depiction was another pleasant surprise. I’ll be honest; I didn’t much like her in the OG. She was too pushy and willfully oblivious to the point of being mean at times. In the Remake, much of her sometimes too in-your-face playfulness was kept--perhaps still a little too much--but I appreciate the nuance that they gave her. The train graveyard scene tells the player that she didn’t have friends growing up, and I think that partially contributes to her lack of social tact at times. The other factor that gives her personality more nuance is the hint of special knowledge that affects how she interacts with the rest of the group. It gives her additional hidden motivation and adds to her mystery for new players while simultaneously pulling at the heartstrings for old players who get the impression that Aerith is somehow aware--to a certain, unknown extent--of her own fate. 

I also appreciate that Aerith is more grounded as a real person than as some sort of revered being. I do blame AC for some of that. When you have the power to cure a fatal disease from the afterlife and send the dead back to life, it gets into some godlike territory. Maybe it’s a fair depiction of her powers as a Cetra, but I just get the feeling that Aerith herself wouldn’t really appreciate being made into this goddess-like figure. Remember that her character blurb in the original game manual implied that she was more interested in earthly things (i.e. the love triangle) than in exploring her own powers. I personally think that Aerith used the “love triangle” in the OG as a form of escapism from the weight of her burdens rather than genuine interest, and I just think she’d want to be thought of as a person rather than as a god. One of my favorite scenes for Aerith is when she and Cloud are traversing the rooftops and she slips on the ladder, letting out a simple, “Shit.” It humanizes her in a way that combats some of the ways she’s sort of been deified in the last 23 years. Also, Aerith wielding a folding chair like it’s WWE never fails to make me laugh. Overall, she just comes off as a more reasonably flawed and--as a result, to me--a more likeable character in the Remake, and I do very much like her now.

Barret is pretty much the exact larger than life character I imagined in my head, only somehow even better, and I really love how expressive and emotional his eyes and facial expressions are. His scenes with Marlene are truly the cutest thing ever. Red XIII is a big, furry ball of sass, and I need so much more of him in the coming parts (Cosmo Canyon still wrecks me to this day). The interactions between the Wedge, Biggs, and Jessie are incredible, and they really feel like people who’ve been friends and basically each other’s family for years. The Turks and Rufus are pretty much as cool as I imagined them in the OG.

There’s still so much more I haven’t even started touching on about the Remake, and I think that’s why I’m finally posting this now. I just can’t contain my love for this game any more, and I really really need a place to express myself. I don’t know if anybody is still reading, but I appreciate having the opportunity to finally gush about this game and franchise that I’ve loved so much for pretty much two-thirds of my life.

[askagamedev]

Regarding the DLC question. I know that these games released DLCs. I just wonder why they still develop new games so fast? For example Fifa still releases a new game every year, even with the Dlc. And Mario Kart 8 Deluxe hasn't seen a DLC at all. It was a re-release of the WiiU Version with the DLCs and some extra drivers packed into it. The Switch version hasn't seen a DLC in 3 years. Maybe I should reframe my question. When do Developers decide to stop making DLCs and make a new entry instead?

There’s a couple of major reasons for building a new game, both from a developmental perspective and a business perspective. Let me try to summarize them for you.

The good thing about building DLC content is that it uses the tools and systems we’ve already developed for the game to make more content. This means we don’t have to build new systems and features to support this content, we just make more of the same. Getting the first working weapon into a game can take weeks or months of development time, but getting the hundredth weapon can take days or even hours. This is why DLC is so much cheaper to build in terms of development resources than the original games - it’s easier to use tools and systems you already have than to build new ones.

This also serves as an ongoing constraint on content development - if we didn’t already build support for this new big feature into the game before launch, it’s really really hard to add it in as DLC. For example, FIFA 17 added a story mode to the game they called “the Journey”. Adding support and content for something like this via DLC to an existing game that did not already have the code systems and assets in place to handle, track, and play story content like this would have been nigh impossible. Many of the core game systems would have to be changed in order to support a new system like this; the scope of a change like this would be far too large for it. Franchise games like FIFA or Call of Duty have a constant need for both adding new features and overhauling/improving old features. We have limited development time for the core game, which means that we have to pick and choose which some new features get added and which some old features get overhauled or improved. Then, when the next game rolls around, we have to choose a new slate of new features to be added and a slate of old features get overhauled/improved. In this effect, things are cyclic - we improve/overhaul systems A, B, and C in Franchise Game 2020, improve systems D, E, and F in 2021, and so on. Thus, we need to make a new game when we want to add new core features and upgrade/overhaul old ones. Incidentally this is why, if some players only plays Franchise Game for system A and/or B while ignoring E and F, they’ll only see roster changes - they aren’t looking for the big changes the devs made. 

There’s also the business reasons for periodically releasing a new game. When we launch a new game, it has an accompanying marketing push. Whenever a new game launches, new players who haven’t played the game before will be persuaded to buy the game. This does not hold as true for DLC content releases. When we sell DLC, we aren’t targeting new players with it - we’re targeting players that have already bought and continue to play the game. Adding a single new character to a roster of two dozen is a lot less compelling to players who don’t already own the game, but adding a new playable character is really exciting if you play the game every day. Unfortunately, we naturally “churn” (lose players over time) for a variety of reasons - players get older and their priorities change, they get bored of the game, they find new games they like to play better, and so on. This means our customer base for DLCs is constantly shrinking over time. This is also why many long-running games will periodically release large expansion packs (e.g. Monster Hunter Iceborne, Street Fighter V: Champion Edition) to try to entice new players to give it a try and old players to return. These large expansion packs are generally like a partial lerp (interpolation) somewhere between a DLC and a new game release depending on the expansion pack’s scope. 

That’s generally why we stop building DLC and build a new game. From a development perspective, we want to add new big/core features and improve old ones that are too large or problematic to fit in a DLC. From a business perspective, we’re constantly bleeding players from the player base and DLC doesn’t often bring in fresh blood. New games do. Big expansion packs fall somewhere in between DLC and new games. 

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent Questions: The FAQ

[writingonjorvik]

If I Could Ask the Devs 10 Questions: A WOJ Interview

I think if you’ve known me for a while, you probably know I would jump at the idea of getting to interview the SSO devs, particularly because they tend to have internalized or cherry picked interviews that only focus on what they want to tell us, and not on the questions the players tend to have about the game. So if I could have an interview with the devs, these are the 10 questions I would ask.

Sidenote: I have 10 core topic questions with some brief follow-up questions for clarity. If you counted, yes, there would be more than ten, but there are ten core areas.

What kind of updates can we expect for this year; in terms of new areas, horses, features, etc.?

When can we expect the return of bigger area expansions with full side quests prepared for them and secrets like in the Harvest Counties and Valley of the Hidden Dinosaur launches?

Speaking of updates, about 80% of SSO community wants to see the older Gen 1 & Gen 1.5 models updated across the board like with the update to Gen 1.5. Considering that this is a super majority, and these horses are paid for content, what does SSO intend to do to meet this request from its player base?

Again, since this content is already been paid for, would an “upgrade” feature for purchased old models require additional payment, making player pay to make already purchased content playable again?

If opposed to updating earlier gen models, why does SSO ignore something a super majority of their players want that seems it would also benefit the devs work load?

How does SSO plan to counter price bloat, like what’s happened on the upgraded pets?

Expected counterpoint: SSO has said that the walking pets are more expensive because of “all the hard work that went into them.” This is both a sunken cost and false equivalence fallacy. It’s the developers’ job to continue to make SSO better, and make better content for the game. That should not result in bloated prices for players, but rather more product that they can spend their money on. Saying that “all that hard work” just went into making expensive content diminishes the rest of the work made on the game and it trivializes the job the devs are supposed to be doing. It’s your job to make content for the game. We should not have to pay extra for something we already paid for, and certainly not at a bloat of 4-5x the initial cost for a few bonus animations.

On the note of purchased content, over 70% of SSO’s player base thinks that the game is overpriced, but 90%, regardless of their opinions on fairness, say they would buy more often if the prices were lowered. Is there any intention to lower the prices around SSO to make it more accessible?

Is there any intention is making supplementary content, like more unique items in the merch store that aren’t simply designs with your logo on them?

Would SSO be able to release the comic in English any time soon?

Are there any plans to rerelease the Starshine Legacy games on Steam or the teams merch store?

SSO prides itself for being a narrative oriented story. Are there any plans to establish an official writing team on SSO?

What about a canon wiki about the series?

One of the things the devs have stated about the genderlock on SSO is that it’s to create a space for women in gaming. Does SSO donate to any charities that support girls to play video games like Child’s Play, Code Liberation, or Games For Change, or charities that help women in general like National Women’s Law Center, Dress For Success Worldwide, Girls Not Brides, or Futures Without Violence?

What actions outside of having female leads and job equality is SSO pursuing to promote gender equality?

Can we expect the ability to get magic powers that we can use outside of cutscenes?

Would this involve the “power-up” system the devs have discussed before?

What kind of new customization can we expect in the future of the game?

Would this include the return of the housing function?

Will this provide more options for other gender presenting players besides femme?

Would SSO consider letting the player input their own pronouns into the game without changing the story in any other way?

Would SSO ever consider switching to an expansion based system over the weekly release schedule?

If not, why is the weekly release better for the game than having larger, less frequent updates?

If they would, what would this mean for daily content, in terms of daily quests and achievements, as well as the payment system for an expansion?

Would SSO ever bring back more fan generated content, like the T-Shirt contest?

With SSO branching out to more unique types of story telling, would SSO hold contests for writing companion short stories or producing audio stories like Texas Bluebells?

Will SSO release a public list of community guidelines, so both players and moderators know what is correct behavior, and so also ensure that moderators are upholding SSO’s rules and not personal ones?

What about an internal reporting system to simplify reporting?

Question I Think Would Be Asked Of Me

1. Why are you so critical of the game?

Ok. Here’s the essay.

I suppose it would be easy to say that it’s out of spite. And there’s probably some of that in there. Some innate bitterness over the fact that the PR team, for a period, actively deleted anything critical, regardless of content. The fact that they outright lied about empirical data the players were giving the devs (see the AQH release). Sure, there’s the fact that I’ve seen and had SSO’s dev team do a 180 on me from offering me a space on the mod team for trying to promote a better community to having their devs and outreach insult and demean me on the basis of my comments being “critical.”

And it does drive me a little nutty to see the devs so successfully have turned their player base on anyone who might critique the game. To see my hard work trying to get players to be decent people in the game turned on its head when I say one word crosswise about something that might make the game better. And I’ve be wrong to say I don’t get frustrated when I talk about changes SSO could apply with after being a gamer for way longer than most of the people debating me, with enough research done on my own to be the basis for a master’s thesis, only to be told by someone who SSO is their first video game telling me how the industry works. But that’s really not it. 

So, here it is:

Star Stable is one of the only non-combat MMOs in the world.

Let me repeat that; Star Stable is one of the only non-combat MMOs in the world. And I imagine that invokes a sense of pride, like you’ve hit some kind of niche. But that’s not a truth because of some lucky chance.

Non-combat MMOs survive on small niche markets, before consistently dying off because of failure to expand beyond their initial targets. And it’s not for lack of trying. People love non-combat games; Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, Nintendogs, Roller Coaster and Zoo Tycoon, the Myst series, so on. But when those games refuse to look passed their niche, to expand and improve, they have historically failed as MMOs because one niche cannot fund an MMO.

And where SSO has survived on the niche market of “horse girl fantasy,” it is most certainly not expanding. SSO talks about its overall player count being in the millions, but ignores that fact that for every unique player there are five duplicate accounts, which is a metric that continues to bloat. That out of 12 million players, only 3% of those players are regularly active, compared to most MMOs which will hit 15-25% of their player base regularly between expansions. And no matter how you swing those numbers, no matter how much more you bloat the prices, that is not a long term lifespan. You can’t survive on that niche.

I genuinely believe SSO could help influence the industry. And I don’t mean that in a “if you follow all my ideas, everything will end up perfectly.” I’m not always right, and I’m willing to admit that. But the fact that SSO has been so resistant to any criticism results in a mob mentality with its core player base and it ostracizes anyone who can’t put up with that attitude any longer. Not only does it put the developers into an echo chamber where they can’t improve, it continues to push away the people who care enough to sit down and explain why they’re frustrated. You tighten that niche. You limit your market. You run out of resources.

And I do think SSO has already made leaps ahead for parts of the industry. The number of people who say SSO was their first MMO, their first game, is amazing. It’s great to see a game helping young people get into gaming, particularly girls who, when I was their age, were bullied for even liking video games. So for SSO to make that platform is amazing. But they cannot abuse that by taking advantage of new gamers who don’t know any better about how games are made or sold. I feel, and I feel this of every company, not just SSO, that there is a moral obligation to do right by people, and not to take advantage of their ignorance. And with such a powerful platform to invite young people into this sphere, into making new games and telling new stories, it is imperative that SSO does right by people.

I’m hard on SSO because I care, immensely. You could say I have a fixation on the game, really. I am invested in the survival of this game. But you can’t survive without getting better. Not to mention, the criticism SSO gets is free! From thousands of people. When I edited my book, I paid over $2,000 for my two editors I worked with, and that’s not even getting into beta readers and reviewers. I would love to be able to get feedback for free like SSO does. Because it’s an opportunity to improve because we are never going to be perfect. And if SSO wants to survive the trends surrounding their genre, then they can leave no room for quarter to people like me. Not out of oppression of people’s voices, but by listening and making a better game.

Thanks for your time.

[zombiescantfly]

Words About Games: Unreal Tournament (Epic Megagames, 1999)

In 2291, in an attempt to control violence among deep-space miners, the New Earth Government legalized no-holds-barred fighting.

291 years earlier, I heard that for the first time.  Unreal Tournament begins with a narrated flythrough explaining two very simple things:  there is a Tournament, and you are going to win it.  After the lonely melancholy of Unreal, that's a pretty abrupt pivot.  Why, after getting through most of the 90s with platformers, pinball, and fighting games, did Epic Megagames barrel in headfirst to the multiplayer arena shooter market, a playground run exclusively by industry already-giant id Software?

Because they wanted to.

As I mentioned in the Unreal essay, that game's multiplayer was a fun shell filled with horrible, horrible problems.  Epic set to fixing it, but realized that beyond some quick and dirty surface-level patches, there wasn't a lot they could do within the same scope.  So they broke away from a simple expansion pack and landed on creating a full separate release by the name of Unreal Tournament.

Unreal Tournament, UT99 from now on, was released on November 23, 1999, to an almost absurd level of praise.  Quake 3 Arena, id’s latest offering in the Quake franchise and first multiplayer-only title, would come out just over a week later on December 2, pitching the two games into a deathmatch of their own which still rages to this day almost 20 years later.

Let's talk about Quake a bit.  Shooters, up until around the time the first Quake came out and probably still after that, were commonly referred to as ‘Doom clones’ because, well, many were.  Any unambitious dev could buy an engine license, whip up some sprites on a lunchbreak, and ship a game.  There's a parallel to be drawn between that era and the current ongoing avalanche of Unity and Unreal asset flips, but you can turn to others for opinions on all that.

Quake was, famously, id Software’s followup to Doom 2, and an early frontrunner of fully-3d shooters.  It was so popular and noteworthy that it even caused the term Doom Clone to fall away in favor of Quake Clone.  Quake expanded the popularity of online play, and saw the creation of the some of the first AI bots made exclusively for deathmatch.  Quake 2 came along not too far after and pulled in even more interest.  If you remember from my Unreal essay, that was when it grabbed my own interest, and I became a frequent over-the-shoulder spectator of many a Quake 2 deathmatch.

But then, UT99.  When I first played Unreal Tournament, I was blown away. ��By the bots.  Meaning that they killed me a lot.  I was very bad at it.  I didn't even strafe back then, just ran forward and turned with the mouse.  But I learned.

UT99 is actually quite an accommodating game.  Bots have 9 skill levels ranging from drooling idiot to a fittingly-named godlike, and I remember bumping them up a level at a time over the years.  UT’s bots were one of its largest selling points back then, and the cornerstone of the Tournament part of its name.

The titular Tournament in Unreal Tournament is a series of botmatches of increasing difficulty over the game’s five primary gamemodes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and Assault.  A final series of three 1v1 matches caps off the Tournament, the third of which pits you against the Big Bad Reigning Champ, a robot named Xan Kriegor.  

There were a handful of firsts in that short bit, so let's take a look.

As stated, Quake 2 was the de facto king of online shooters at the time.  But Quake 2, for all its fame, only had three gamemodes available: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag.  Unreal had dabbled with alternative styles of deathmatch and team deathmatch, but all of them were, more or less, the same gamemode, save one.  In a unique take on King of the Hill, the first player to score a kill got a permanent damage boost until they were killed, at which point that buff was transferred to their killer.  Killing the King awarded more points, matches were first to X points, you get the idea.  RtNP added Cloak Match, a take on this KotH concept where instead of a damage boost, players fought for permanent partial invisibility and infinite jump boots.

Unreal Tournament was a little more ambitious than just reflavoring deathmatch, however.  Domination used its own unique rotation of maps centered around controlling three points.  Your team scores one point per every couple of seconds, per point held.  Touching a point is enough to flip control of it to your side, and the result is a fun, frantic match with enough additional focus to guide it away from just another deathmatch.  Map control becomes something more than just controlling various weapon spawns, and demands you keep your attention between the three points.  Random respawns instead of near your team’s current territory and the instant capture of points meant the game never ground down to just being spawncamped, and helped reduce the prevalence of one-sided victories.  Domination was great, the extra effort put in to creating its own category of maps was great, and games today still use the gamemode.  That said, Destiny 2 really needs to make capture instant and not have you sit around for 5 seconds in a tiny room, like come on.

Domination may have been new for the time, and DM, TDM, and CTF made their own waves that I'll get into later, but Assault is what really caught people's attention.  Assault was an attack and defense mode where one team was tasked with completing a series of varied objectives, while the defenders tried to stop them.  The most similar thing we get in games now is pushing a cart down a predetermined path in TF2 or Overwatch.  Payload gamemodes in those games are similar in the sense that one team must progress down a path to get to a specific location, and I suppose it might come across as a streamlining of the idea, but Assault is just more interesting.  

UT99 shipped with seven Assault maps, and each one presented a different scenario.  Assault was not just replacing the objective on an existing map, the same as Domination had its own maps.  Each one had a little story it presented, from the attempted hijacking of a supersonic train, assaulting an ancient fortress on an alien planet, sabotaging an underwater research facility, stealing a Navy battleship, escaping a medieval castle, destroying an experimental battle tank, and even a recreation of the D-Day landing.  Assault maps varied in how linear they were, with maps like Guardia, HiSpeed, and Overlord being fairly straightforward, to the more open-ended OceanFloor and Rook.  It was, by design, an asymmetrical experience, but that design went so far as to change in-level as the attackers pushed further and further in.  On HiSpeed, for example, the attackers start in a helicopter hovering over the rear of the train, and drop down largely uncontested.  There's a full car where they can grab weapons and powerups, and then they reach where the defenders have spawned.  

As objectives are met and various places in the map are reached by the attackers, spawn points start to change.  On the same map, attackers spawn with a serviceable loadout of shock rifles and pulse guns (we'll get to the weapons later), both good options for the mixed-distance encounter they'll be facing as they move towards the next car.  The defenders, however, spawn with access to flak cannons and rippers, which in the close quarters of the car’s interior are absolutely brutal.  Once the attackers push far enough in to it, though, that car becomes their spawn point and the defenders are moved further back, thus giving the attackers access to those weapons for the next part of the map.  

The same sort of design echoes throughout all seven Assault maps, and it creates a varied and frantic experience that was new at the time and still hasn't really been copied.  The feeling of actually taking part in an event in the game’s world added so much to even the relatively sparse setting, and it remains a great example of an excellent piece of very quiet but highly effective worldbuilding.

The other gamemodes were again, team and free-for-all deathmatch, and as standard as that was at the time, UT99 made some weighty impressions on the genre.  At the time of Quake 2’s release, it was common practice to just repurpose singleplayer campaign levels as the multiplayer maps.  Quake 2 would get its own suite of maps designed explicitly for multiplayer later in its life, and Unreal shipped with 14 multiplayer-only maps, with a further 9 added later as free updates.  UT99 shipped with multiple dozens of maps, each one presenting a different take on design and execution.  You have a standard collection of flat-ish arenas, some truly impressive vertical design, maps with stage hazards, big maps, small maps, maps with areas of low gravity, and maps with secret passages leading to hidden weapon spawns.  A handful of Unreal’s maps were even remade for UT99, and two in particular became series mainstays - Deck 16 and Curse.  Both are still thought of as iconic maps, and for very good reason.  They're well-balanced and play to the strengths of the game they're in while also, going back to Unreal’s bit here, feeling like they're a real space.

Because while UT99 may be a multiplayer-only fragfest with no real story, it has lore.  

The opening narration is just a small bit of fluff, but it sets up a whole lot that the various designers had a ton of fun expanding on.  Official weapon descriptions in the manual talk about the (in-game) real-world applications of each, and even set some up as not even being explicitly for combat.  The Translocator, a personal teleporter by way of launching tiny disks, is a repurposed tool given to miners to help escape cave-ins.  The GES Biorifle is a vacuum cleaner for toxic sludge instead of dust.  The Impact Hammer is a jackhammer but sideways.  The in-universe justification for those few weapons doesn't mean anything to the gameplay, but given that the Tournament was set up by Liandri Mining Corporation, it adds a bit of fun sense-making to the whole thing.

Maps, too, are part of that lore package.  Each map throughout the Tournament ladder has a short description, and it's almost always about what this particular arena’s place in the world is.  Most boil down to “this is a site built for the Tournament” or “Liandri bought this and made it a Tournament arena,” but it's about the tiny details hidden in the lines.  Deck 16 is a toxic sludge refinery, but it's also a single deck of the spaceship Gaetano, rented out to Liandri whenever it's in drydock.  Curse is an ancient temple that was an archaeological site until Liandri bought it after funding ran out.  Arcane Temple is a Nali worship site on Na Pali left abandoned after the Skaarj invaded.  Oblivion is a Liandri passenger ship that tricks Tournament entrants by being their first arena.  Hyperblast, the final stage of the Tournament, is Xan Kriegor’s personal spaceship made specifically to be an arena.  

The whole thing paints the Liandri Mining Corporation as this quirky half-malicious corporate giant, as big and influential as any sci-fi megacorp but out of an innocent love for their decidedly not-innocent game.  It's a world where humanity spent seven days on the brink of destruction at the hands of the Skaarj, where the Corporation Wars tore entire planets apart, and where despite that everyone can get over it, crack some beers, and watch people blow each other away on live television, kept safe by technology that respawns them within seconds.

Character backgrounds, too, drop hints in their two to three sentence lengths.  The bots you fight against or with all have tiny snippets of who they are, making reference to revolts, arrests, rebellions, other worlds, secret government experiments, and revenge.  

The important thing to take away from this is that all of this was put in but none of it had to be.  It doesn't affect the game and it's not even immediately noticeable unless you let every map and character description load before entering a Tournament match.  Just going to map select for a practice session/instant action game doesn't show the same descriptions, so you have to go through the singleplayer ladder.  It's work put in that shows a genuine and earnest excitement for the world the devs had created, and I still get a smile thinking about it.  Unreal Tournament is such a weird celebration of every gritty science fiction trope, but turns them all on their heads to create a world for this game that feels exactly as expansive as it isn't.  Because Unreal Tournament doesn't have anything to do with the lore it hides in all these corners, it's just a multiplayer shooter with no story beyond “kill better than the other guys.”  And boy do they ever make that part feel great.

For better or worse, Wolfenstein 3D cemented FPS weapon progression.  Ever since and with only a few minor alterations here and there, the loadout progression is melee weapon, bad pistol, automatic weapon, shotgun (though those sometimes switch position), a better version of one or both of those, some kind of explosive option, sniper rifle (that was a later addition), and then a superweapon of some kind.  From Doom to Quake to our old nemesis Half-Life to our slightly newer nemesis Halo to Call of Duty, you get those weapons in roughly that order.

So let's talk about Unreal again for a second.  I didn't mention that game's weapons because I wanted to bring the whole discussion in at once, but it does require me to go back in time a year and talk about where the series landed on its own weapons.  The first thing to know about Unreal is that it was not immune to the Holy Progression of Gun, but it did make some incredibly noticeable changes.  Unreal saw a videogame gun, famous for being a thing you can left click on men with, and asked “what if you could also right click on men?”

I'm moving a rough sort of progression, so be aware that this is only the general order you get these guns in.  In Unreal, the first weapon you pick up is the Dispersion Pistol, a projectile-firing semi-auto gun that doesn't do a whole lot of damage.  One fun thing about it is that its projectiles cast a real-time light on the environment so you can use it as a way to peek into dark areas before going in them with your vulnerable body.  But another thing about the Dispersion Pistol is its alt fire, where you hold down the right mouse button to charge up a shot which then acts essentially as a rocket launcher shot - it deals better damage, it deals splash damage, and it can gib enemies.  In-universe, the Dispersion Pistol is a Skaarj weapon, and you can also find hidden upgrades for it that boost the damage of both firemodes at the cost of taking more ammo per shot.  Luckily, as your holdout weapon, the Dispersion Pistol recharges its ammo passively.  

The second weapon you get is the automag, a basic hitscan pistol.  Primary fire shoots a fairly accurate shot, alt fire has you hold the gun sideways to increase the fire rate at the cost of accuracy.  It's dumb and I love it to this day.

Third up, the Tarydium Stinger, a projectile-based minigun with an alt fire that acts as a projectile shotgun.  Here's where the lines start to get a bit blurred, but we're not totally out of the usual progression just yet.  

After the Stinger you get the ASMD Shock Rifle, a famously curious gun that, as its primary fire, shoots a hitscan beam, and shoots a fast-moving projectile orb as its alt fire, trading perfect precision and speed for a little bit of splash damage.  The thing about it is that if you shoot the orb with the beam you get a giant explosion that does an absolute ton of damage.

Moving from that piece of sweet hardware brings us to the GES Biorifle, a rapid-fire goop-throwing mine layer with a charged shot as its alt fire.  

Then, the Eightball Launcher, a rocket launcher that has not two but four firemodes.  Click primary fire to shoot a rocket, fast moving and with splash damage.  Hold primary fire to charge up to six rockets that fire in a spread pattern, or click alt fire while charging to shoot them in a spiral formation.  Also, you can get a mild lock-on effect by holding your mouse cursor over an enemy for about half a second.  Alt fire is the same as primary but with grenades - click alt fire once to lob one, hold to charge up to six.  The grenades bounce around for a set period of time, and also blow up on contact with an enemy.  

Then possibly the series’ most famous weapon, the Flak Cannon.  Primary fire is a projectile-based shotgun that fires individual shards that bounce around the environment for a bit, allowing you to fire around corners or even up at the ceiling to bank a shot over cover.  Alt fire is another grenade launcher, though this one fires its shells at a shallower angle, a higher velocity, has a smaller up-front splash radius, and still creates little bits of flak that bounce around for a short time.  This gun is my and many other people’s favorite gun in videogames.

The Razorjack is a strange gun that fires disks that bounce around the environment at scarily high velocities, and even have the ability to decapitate enemies if you hit their head, a useful feature in the Skaarj-infested levels where you first find it.  Alt fire is a tricky system that lets you influence the path the disk takes, though its high velocity, bad turning radius, and small size makes “influence” a more appropriate word than “guide.”

Next is the Rifle, a high-powered hitscan primary fire with an alt fire that zooms in.  Headshotting enemies decapitates them but other than that it's just a sniper rifle, let's move on.

Finally, Unreal has the Minigun, a hitscan bullet-spewing beast that shows up near the end of the game, leaving you with just barely too little time to get to use it as much as you want and also to realize that hey, it's just a minigun.  Primary fire shoots with a short spool-up time, alt fire shoots faster but less accurately.  Unfortunately this does not make you hold the Minigun sideways like the Automag.

So that was Unreal’s loadout, and it made some big waves at the time.  Physics-based projectiles?  Well sure, Quake had the bouncy grenade launcher, but the Flak Cannon and Razorjack made being aware of and using the environment second nature to players.  The ASMD’s ability to produce a BFG shot on demand if you could combo properly was amazing.  And the upgradeable nature of the Dispersion pistol made what was usually a loadout slot reserved for being sad about having to use a legitimate late-game complement to your arsenal.

So it stands to reason that Unreal Tournament barely changed it.

UT99’s arsenal did change a little bit, but not too drastically.  Most changes were to damage or fire rate, and every weapon got a new model.  Some weapons were slightly renamed, like the Automag becoming the Enforcer or the ASMD receiving its full title of ASMD Shock Rifle, the Eightball Launcher was just called the Rocket Launcher, the Rifle became the Sniper Rifle, and the Razorjack was renamed the Ripper.

The next level of changes was tweaking some alt fires.  The biggest change here was the new Ripper losing its guided blade in favor of an alt fire that shot an explosive disk.  Unlike the primary fire, it didn't bounce, and while it had only about half the splash radius of the Rocket Launcher proper, its fire rate and projectile speed were both much faster.  Other than that, the only change to another gun was the Sniper Rifle getting a thematically appropriate overlay when you zoomed in, instead of Unreal’s Rifle not displaying anything.  Additionally, because it seems to fit here more than the next bit, if you manage to find another Enforcer lying on the ground, you can pick it up and dual wield.  It's pretty rad.

Larger changes came in the removal of both the Stinger and the Dispersion Pistol, and the addition of the Impact Hammer, Pulse Gun, and the series’ first superweapon, the Redeemer.

I'm personally a bit conflicted about trading the Stinger out for the Minigun.  On one hand, UT99’s Minigun is a great piece of visual design - massive, chunky, and bold, with the added flair of seeing your arm holding onto a forward grip to really sell the vibe of that one scene in Predator.  On the other hand, there's something to be said about a projectile weapon over a hitscan one, especially since so many high-powered hitscan weapons exist in the game already.  But at the same time, UT99 does have an answer to the automatic projectile weapon, the Pulse Gun.

The Pulse Gun should be instantly familiar to anyone with a passing understanding of id Software’s early titles.  Primary fire is just the Pulse Rifle from Doom, and alt fire is the Thunderbolt from Quake.  But put together, married in this suitcase-sized brick of green polygons?  A thing of beauty.  

Let me at least address the Impact Hammer before moving on: it's a melee weapon you can charge up.  It'll kill someone pretty good if you charge it up and manage to make contact.  It has a pretty fun and inspired visual design but ultimately the only reason it's there is because you can run out of ammo with the Enforcer you spawn with.  The end.

Alright, the Redeemer.  The Redeemer is a man-portal nuclear warhead launcher, kind of like the Fat Man from Fallout 3 except way, way cooler.  Primary fire launches a relatively slow-moving projectile that, on contact with anything, explodes in a shockwave that does enough damage to instantly gib anyone without 199 health and a Shield Belt powerup.  It goes through walls, too.  It's a very good superweapon.  Making it better is its alt fire, where you take personal control of the missile as it travels, allowing you to guide it around the map with a surprising degree of maneuverability.  The BFG may have a classic flair, but the Redeemer took the idea of a superweapon to a whole other level.

So how did all of these weapons actually play together?  How did an arsenal designed for and balanced around a singleplayer game with fixed enemy spawns translate to a multiplayer arena?  Quite well, in fact.  Epic didn't design the game in a vacuum, and as Quake 2 was the reigning champ at the time, they didn't have to look far to see what worked and what could be changed for the better.

UT99 plays fast, hard, and unrelenting.  People load into a map and immediately start running around picking up weapons and letting the lead fly.  Now, it's time for my bias to show a bit.  I only ever watched Quake 2 multiplayer, but I have in fact played Quake 3 and Quake Live, as well as a handful of hours of Quake Champions which I know isn't really comparable but it uses the same weapons so I'm still mentioning it.  UT is my series, I have a preference for it, and this next bit is all my own opinion and observation.

Quake only has three weapons.  

Quake is a game where movement is fast, projectiles are fast, and time to kill is fast.  It's a fast game.  But it's so fast that only three weapons end up mattering - the rocket launcher, railgun, and thunderbolt.  They're the three highest-damage weapons in the game and they make up pretty much the entirety of its arsenal.  Quake matches inevitably all play out as taking potshots at each other with rockets as everyone strafejumps around like crazy, switching to the railgun if someone manages to be in the open for more than half a second, and swapping to the thunderbolt if you manage to get close enough that another character model takes up more than a handful of pixels on your screen.  

Quake is a very fast and chaotic game, and I'm not saying that this kind of play isn't skillful, it's just so fast that actual duels never really happen, and people just kind of end up taking damage from one end of the map when they're on the other.  Quake’s other weapons just may as well not exist, because if you find yourself using your starting shotgun, the nailgun, or any other weapon you want to be close for, you're likely doing so in range of someone's Thunderbolt and that's not a race you're going to win.

It's a difficult point to make, so let me move back to UT and why I prefer it.  UT is a small but noticeable bit slower than Quake in a way that I feel greatly benefits it.  Overall, it comes down to bringing the action in a little closer, really making the fights seem more personal, and really giving players more of a chance to dance around each other rather than hopping around the level on their own accord until they find each other by chance.  Projectiles are both slightly slower and much more visible than in Quake, so trying to slam a rocket into someone's face from three hundred meters isn't really going to happen.  So, from further away, you'll want to use a hitscan weapon, but since your target will be smaller they'll be harder to hit.  Unless you want to zoom in with the Sniper Rifle, but then you lose a bit of awareness of your immediate surroundings.  Close up, the Flak Cannon is king, but its range is short enough to matter.  The Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just the Thunderbolt, and it'll tear someone apart pretty handily, to say nothing of putting the Minigun into overdrive with its own alt fire.  Even flipping your Enforcer sideways will get bullets into someone quickly, and with fancy enough footwork you can save yourself from a gruesome fate with the starting gun.  Or, if you're trying to keep someone away, quickly laying down a gooey minefield with the Biorifle works just as well as filling a hallway with a dozen bouncing Ripper blades.

Every gun in UT99 can kill someone, and not just in theory.  The game balances each of its weapons almost perfectly, and nothing ever feels totally useless or has an obvious better version (I am not counting the Impact Hammer or Enforcer in this statement).  Jumping over or dodging away from rockets to close with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just as reasonable as forcing someone to switch away from their Flak Cannon by retreating backwards as your Biorifle makes it impossible for them to safely advance.  Lobbing a Flak alt fire over that minefield is alway an option though, so be ready to get out of the way, and maybe pull out your Shock Rifle to push them backwards.  A fully stocked Minigun can keep an approach locked off, but a quick sniper bullet right to the face will put an end to it.  

Alright, admittedly the Biorifle is historically a bit ignored, and the Ripper didn't even show up in subsequent games, but both still had a purpose.  I, personally, am a staunch defender of the Biorifle’s utility as an area denial tool, and the ability to charge its alt fire will instantly kill someone no matter their health and shield level, if you can hit them.  It's certainly better in team gamemodes like Assault or CTF, though.  But just shooting at people with the weapons does not an arena shooter make.  For there to be the proper levels of frantic action, movement needs to have a strong focus.  

As in Quake, you'll want to get familiar with your spacebar.  Strafe jumping isn't a thing as far as constantly upping your own speed, but it sure does make you harder to hit, and getting decent at dodging rockets always helps.  Double tap a movement key to do a quick dodge in that direction, useful not just for avoiding projectiles but for snaking down corridors.  On an elevator?  Jump just before it reaches the top to get a massive boost and go flying.  The Impact Hammer isn't ideal as a weapon, but a quick blast downward makes a decent stand-in for a rocket jump, if at the cost of significantly more self-damage.  Capping it all off is the Translocator, the aforementioned teleporting-disk-thrower.  Primary fire to shoot a disk in a pretty generous arc, alt fire to teleport to it.  Disks emit light and can be destroyed, if you teleport while carrying a flag you drop it, and yes, you do fall faster than the disk travels upward.  Truth be told, I usually play with the Translocator turned off, but that's mainly because the bots, as good as they are at the rest of the game, are less than stellar at putting those disks where they want, often leading to a cluster of them bouncing their shot off a wall just inches under the ledge they want up to, and not taking any action until they get it.  I think it has to do with the accuracy modifiers based on bot skill level, but I'm not sure.

The bots are great in every other respect, though.  Sure, they'll never actually replace a human player, but they're more than good enough for a few hundred hours of offline play.  All the tricks the Skaarj demonstrated in Unreal are on display again, and tuned up to use every weapon.  Bots jump and dodge, retreat if they're low on health, make decisions about what weapon to use based on their proximity to you as well as their own inventories, switch between firemodes when it makes sense, and plenty else.  Upping the bot difficulty doesn't just make them do more damage or give them more health (it doesn't even do that in the first place), it makes them smarter.  Or ‘smarter’ if you really care - it changes their reaction times and how accurate they are, how aggressively they'll act, and even how good they are at using the weapons beyond just aiming.  A low-level bot might not get close enough to hit you with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire, or will use a Rocket Launcher in close quarters with all the risks of splash damage and self-death that entails.  Higher difficulty bots will bank Flak shots off walls and bounce grenades around corners, lay fields of Biorifle goop, or be deadly-accurate with a sniper rifle from above.  

The bots are what really put UT99 firmly on the ‘classic’ shelf, because its contemporaries just didn't offer the same thing.  Again, Quake 2 had bots, but they served the purpose of being moving targets and not much else.  Driving UT’s bots was a dead-simple, if tedious to implement, system.  If you'll indulge me, I'm gonna pull back the hood and reveal the not-at-all-secret ways Unreal Tournament made all of its bots so good at playing each map.

All over a map, there are invisible waypoints hand-placed by the designer.  The goal is to make a rough trail of waypoints to each part of the map.  Bots see each waypoint and have the ability to travel in a wide radius around each.  Weapons, ammo, health, armor, and special powerups all act as special waypoints that a bot will see and travel to if they don't already have what that pickup is.  Players and other bots are considered waypoints as well, and when all that comes together, a bot will very intuitively move around the level.  Placing a waypoint higher in the air will make a bot jump to reach it, so having them move over obstacles is simple.  Like I said,  it only requires a loose sort of web across the level, as the world geometry itself is also something a bot sees.  Going around a corner or a box in the middle of a room is no issue provided the waypoints are good enough.

So now that you know how the sausage is made, what does that mean for the game?  Well, quite a lot.  Bot support is built into every single one of the maps UT99 shipped with, which is no small feat considering the base game came with 53 maps across four gamemodes (deathmatch and team deathmatch use the same maps), with a further 30 maps added for every gamemode but Assault over the course of four free downloadable bonus packs.

Every single one of those is playable, to this day, offline with a complement of bots just as ready to rock as they were almost twenty years ago.  And that's not event counting the thousands of user-made maps still available for download, but we'll talk about modding in a bit.  Because right now, it's time to talk about another excellent thing present on each map - the music.

Returning from Unreal are indisputable gods of music Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos, who trade the previous game's subdued alien score for a soundtrack full of some of the boppin’est, crunchiest, hypest EDM tracks of the late 90s.  (Can you tell I don't know anything about music?)

Run, GoDown, and Organic provide the upbeat bleeps and bloops to murder by; Save Me, Razorback, and Superfist let you rock out with your shock (rifle) out; while Forgone Destruction, Skyward Fire, and The Course chill things out a bit so you can focus on getting sick headshots.  The quality of the music in Unreal Tournament is impossible to overstate, just as it was in Unreal.  Brandon and van den Bos are unrelentingly good at their jobs, and the mishmash of styles all grinds together across UT99’s broad palette of maps like butter full of shrapnel.  It's good, is what I'm saying.  The music's really good.  Listen to it.  Please.  

Stage music is something I personally miss from shooters, if you'll indulge another tangent.  I love hearing the gameworld as interpreted by the composers, it adds so much to the whole package, and we just don't really get it anymore.  The rise of the modern military shooter in 2007 with the runaway success of Call of Duty 4 kind of slammed the door on stage music with a tactical-lite focus on identifying footsteps and directional fire, but even Halo’s deathmatches were filled with a blank silence.  Or Halo 2, I suppose, since Halo 1 didn't have online play, except for the PC version, which did.  No stage music though, that's the main takeaway.  

UT99 had a truly odd mix of contemporaries, from the last days of Quake 2 and the imminent release of Quake 3 a week after UT itself came out, to Half-Life creating a mod scene in its multiplayer, to Halo a year or so later.  The turn of the century would bring with it the generally-accepted death of the arena shooter, but they all went out kicking, and the few hundred people still populating UT99 servers to this day are a testament to its tight, clean design and no-frills focus on gameplay.

Unless, of course, they're playing a mod.

Truth be told, I never actually played much UT99 online.  I was very bad, you see, and when I got better my horrible social anxiety had progressed to the point where the idea of even playing a game with faceless strangers was terrifying.  I was 8.  But anyway, modding!  You may have, in your travels as someone who presumably plays videogames - an assumption I'm making because you're reading this - heard of the Unreal Engine.  In a hidden bit of Trivia, Unreal was the first game on the Unreal Engine, and Unreal Tournament also used it.  Wild!

Along with the game itself, both releases also shipped with the Unreal Editor, or UnrealEd.  UnrealEd is the exact development tool the fine folks at Epic Megagames used to make those games, and they just casually handed them to the players.  The result echoes throughout the game industry to this day, and while Epic was hardly the only developer supporting mods, they were the first to do so on that kind of level.  As a result, there are thousands if not tens of thousands of user-made maps scattered around the web, along with new gamemodes, fan-made expansions for Unreal, new character models, weapons, and mutators.

Ah, mutators.  

Mutators can be thought of as ‘mini-mods,’ if you want.  There's a list of them you can select before each game that all change, or mutate (see?), the gameplay a bit.  Superjump, low gravity, replacing each weapon spawn on a map with another, big head mode, stuff like that.  Mutators are a fun addition that can mix up a usual match, but don't bring with them the sweeping changes of a full mod or total conversion.  They were a way to illustrate how flexible the development options were, and a nifty thing for players to have available to them.  

So, Unreal Tournament had lots of ways to keep the game fresh, either built-in or crafted by other players.  Turn a small map into Explosion Hell with the Rocket Arena mutator, or download a player-made weapon pack filled with weird goodies.  Wondering how Quake’s iconic maps play in UT?  Somebody's made them.  Hell, someone's even made a bunch of UT2004 maps for UT99, complete with de-made character and weapon models.  A lasting legacy of creativity is what UT99 brought above all else, and the fact that so much of what it did can remain as the primary example of how to do something right says more than I can about its impact on videogames as a whole.  

Unreal Tournament is a fast, brutal game balancing all of its various systems on the edge of a spinning razor blade, and it does so with a mastery that I feel was not seen among its peers of the time.  From the weapons, the movement, the maps, and the gamemodes, Unreal Tournament presents you the player with so many options, but it never feels like a generic crowd-pleasing paste has been slathered over everything.  The game's core is simple and well defined, and everything else builds on that.  It has a certain tightly-realized identity that I feel is missing from a lot of games that try to have the same sort of arcady arena vibe - Halo was probably its closest rival as far as small genre shifts go, and looking at Destiny 2 as the latest version of that is a weird mix of procedurally generated weapons, hero abilities, flat maps, and very few projectile weapons.  Skill has been taken out of some areas and added to others, but the design feels looser, less actualized.  Call of Duty is fast, but still has that small desire to be somewhat tactical, so there are recoil patterns and weapon attachments, the rich-get-richer killstreaks, and a progression system that murders any attempt at balancing their arsenal.  Quake Live, from what I understand, has a healthy enough playerbase, but my preference has already been stated.  Quake Champions tries to marry its classic gameplay with that of Overwatch, and the reactions have been mixed.  Team Fortress 2 has been bogged down with more and more weapons that blur the lines between classes, and the official map rotation - already small on launch - has barely been added to in twelve years.  

This isn't a “games are different now and that's bad” sort of thing, my point is just that UT99 had a much cleaner mission statement, if you will, than what we get now.  The industry's gotten bigger, and budgets followed.  Expectations of sales rose, leading developers to want to bring in as many players as they could.  Games can't really be niche anymore.

Or maybe that was true five years ago, but now the indie scene’s getting huge, and you can find a revival of your favorite genre just about anywhere.  Most aren't super well polished, but isn't that what made games like Unreal, Quake, and Half-Life into what we remember?  They all had more ambition than was perhaps warranted, and each made their huge impacts despite a healthy amount of blemishes.  Endless polish makes for a good player experience, but maybe not as much of a memorable one.  

Unreal Tournament all but made me into an FPS fan, and I think it's great that we all have so many types to choose from now.  Public tastes have shifted and evolutions of the genre happened.  I've enjoyed my fair share of Calls of Duty and Battlefields, I plugged hundreds of hours into TF2 throughout highschool, I've ridden the Overwatch hype train, and I love poking holes in walls and getting sneaky kills in Rainbow Six: Siege.  But Unreal Tournament is my oldest bastion, and one I return to every now and then when the whim takes me.  It occupies my top slot, though admittedly in an endless 1v1 with Unreal Tournament 2004.

But there was another Unreal Tournament between the two, one that came and went with mild fanfare while paving the way for what I feel is, hands down, the best game ever crafted by human hands.  Check back at the end of the month for a short look at the odd little Unreal Tournament 2003.

[tanadrin]

One consequence of having seven billion people on an increasingly interconnected planet is that everything is becoming an attention game. @argumate​ has been talking recently about how bad a life decision becoming an indie game dev is, because the market is flooded with indie games and even brilliant entries in a given genre don’t stand out anymore. Everybody who’s ever a guest on a podcast I listen to ends up plugging a book or a project they’re working on. And when people make a witty tweet that gets lots of retweets, inevitably they follow it up with a “hey if you liked this check out my book/blog/side hustle” etc.

Maybe this is just the side effect of the current economic trend of a downwardly mobile middle class in a knowledge economy, but I suspect it’s something longer-lasting, the side effect of a mass media that has become so mass in its audience and so cheap to distribute that almost every form of it has essentially zero value now. We have achieved or are close to achieving a true post-scarcity environment in games, news, blog posts, novels, short fiction, music, visual art--in almost everything except, like, film (and the entire rest of the economy). This would be great, except people still need to pay their bills even if their real gifts and inclination lie in the arts or the media, and with billions of people on the planet connected dirt-cheap via a torrent of information you can hold inches from your face every waking hour of the day, it makes it real hard to make a living if your chosen economic output is post-scarcity, but food, housing, and healthcare are not.

This need not be dystopian. Technophobes and luddites might whine about nobody going outside anymore and just enjoying the sunshine, and you see smarmy signs at hipster cafes like “no wifi, talk to each other”--as if that’s not what we’re doing on twitter and tumblr and reddit, and frankly the people I interact online are way more interesting than you mr. cafe owner--but I do, truly, honestly think that the majority of the impact of this new technology has been positive. The downsides are the same as the downsides of traditional mass media--hate groups and racists and demagogues and genocidaires can communicate more effectively, too, which as far as downsides go is fucking terrible. But hopefully as we better understand the kind of society we’re creating, we’ll get better at holding the assholes of the world in check. I’m optimistic on that front.

And I’m optimistic that the creation of the kind of world I want to live in--one suffused with all manner of artistic beauty, easy communication between far-flung people, and mutual understanding between people of very different backgrounds--is more aided than hindered by this kind of technology. But right now we’re trapped in a really awkward place, a place where the people who want to inject beauty into the world (or knowledge, or wisdom, or anything else whose cost to create and transmit is reduced nearly to zero by these new technologies) suddenly find that there are zero dollars to be had in their chosen profession. Writer, artist, university professor, musician? All these things pay like dirt and will continue to do so as the population becomes more educated and connected and the number of people capable of doing these things increases.

My worry is that we have a model, now, of what happens as a post-scarcity regime envelops one part of the economy, and the lessons we learn may translate to other parts of the economy when and if (big if) the same thing happens there. In the areas of film and software, by comparison, real abundance in reproducibility (although not original production) is hidden by artificially-enforced scarcity (think regional copyright regimes, DRM, the concept of intellectual property metastasizing into a way to carve out permanent abstract fiefdoms via licensing and subscription services--imagine, if you please, if there was no such thing as software patents and all software was public domain after a 20-year copyright term, renewable once at most); in many creative fields, selfless producers are basically sharing the bounty of their until it reduces them all to penury. At no point has anyone said “look, media is very nearly free to reproduce and distribute now; old models of law and property are incoherent here, and we risk strangling creativity and innovation if we insist on kludging together a system that lets the winners of the previous system maintain their advantage indefinitely.” Or, if they have, they’ve basically been regarded as the equivalent of free software anoraks, utopians who must be ignored by hard-headed realists.

So we have a situation where either 1) nobody can make a living in a profession, or 2) they can make a living because artificial scarcity is imposed to make what should be an abundant good rare. There have been some faltering attempts to introduce regimes like (2) in other areas of the economy, hindered only by the fact we’re a long way off from true post-scarcity in them, like patenting the genome of more abundant strains of crops, but my worry is that just as we accept the current system in media as “normal,” as a natural consequence of how the pre-scarcity system transitioned to the post-scarcity one (even though it didn’t have to be like this!), we’ll accept a similarly recalcitrant transition to post-scarcity if and when it includes greater abundance of other goods, like food and pharmaceuticals and consumer goods. And, as a result, we’ll be living in a society in a few hundred years with the productivity and abundance of Star Trek, but the material inequality of the Middle Ages. And given that the future is long, and the limit on human dickishness very high indeed, in my more cynical moods I imagine we will invent strong AI, it will promptly be declared the property of some corporation, and it will be put to work maximizing their stock price--and anyone who tries to build their own will get arrested or sued into destitution for violating their patent. Incidentally, this is why I don’t trust Google, and why I’m mildly horrified that there exist at least some people who seem to like the idea of powerful megacorps--because the incentive for big firms is always going to be orthogonal to the goals of the rest of us, is always going to be tilted in the direction of making money and not ensuring that they’re actually making the world a better place, and hence I don’t expect any firm like Google, no matter how forward-thinking it claims to be, to, when push comes to shove, actually permit a scarcity society to be replaced by a post-scarcity one.