#it's bad!

[andmaybegayer]

HHhH I wanted to tumble-dry the quilt to revive it a little, it spent three weeks vacuum packed, but this bizzarely stupid "intelligent" washer/dryer decided (despite me explicitly specifying not to) to run some kind of hot "steam dry" cycle that looks like it has the same effect as a hot wash. Blue colour runs all over the place. Currently consulting with the relatives about solving colour runs while it goes for another cold wash, hopefully the steam cycle didn't make anything permanent. Fuck!

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

An Idiot Plot

I get the idea of heroes being merciful to villains when common wisdom says they shouldn't. The ol' "Batman Not Killing the Joker" discussion comes to mind. And I get the idea of heroes being so momentarily stunned by an act of pure evil that they can stand there gawping for a second, maybe even a couple seconds.

But the heroes in this anime have just been told that a) the villain is summoning a monster and b) the villain is currently powerless except for the ability to control the monster once the summoning is complete, using a special tool. That he's showing off.

Why in the hell are they just standing there? You defeat an enemy you at LEAST take their weapons. Knocking him out would be clever too. Dude's monologuing like he's in control of the situation. He's not, but it's because the monster he's summoned is gonna kill him. But that shouldn't be what happens. There's no reason that even a merciful hero just lets him hold onto his weapons when he's beaten. Also, there's a small chance the heroes could use the same item to get control of the situation and make this not a disaster, if they took the item from the villain now. This is an idiot plot.

[youlooklikeasixtiesqueen]

why are the women in x men first class so sexualized......

[dykethang]

alcohol consumption to DID is so isolating pipeline. is real

[keydekyie]

listen, the shape of a thing is hardly ever its most defining characteristic. and if you'd ever tried to make a pbj in a hot dog bun you'd know that!

[mmthemayoarts]

dragon-pug YOU COMPLETELY GET IT. My FOMO is so bad right now and I KNOW I can't buy it for myself so I've been actively avoiding my friends when they're playing it.

Blocking all possible tags and hoping for the best is the way ;.; Don't wanna be spoiled, I want to go in blind. But I won't be able to play it for a loooooooong while so ufffff. Real bad FOMO..............

[softwaluigi]

my new favorite Bad Experience is a shot of jagermeister + peepsi (peep flavored pepsi) chaser

[georgebbwbush]

[lonesomedotmp3]

it's bad.

[emilnikos]

love it when my friends say "you would do numbers on Tumblr" buddy I am on Tumblr. and the number is 3

[sunriseovergotham]

characters have to be a little bit awful in ways that you cant defend. its good for the ecosystem. your honor he did do that. He did in fact do that

[hansoeii]

the honda odyssey, huh?

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Vestigial Mechanics

I was going to call them "bullshit mechanics" as a kind of parallel to Ebert's discussion of "idiot plots" in narrative design, and it is bullshit, but "vestigial" really does express more of what I mean.

So, let's talk Star Trek: Fleet Command. It has this mechanical system where you build devices that procure/generate units of tritanium and dilithium and parsteel.

Now, in other games the purpose of this kind of thing is

a) to let the player gain stuff passively over time b) to try and induce the player to come back repeatedly so they aren't "wasting" the free resources once their storehouses overfill

Right? Like, that's the general point of that, as a mechanic.

Not here. In ST:FC you have this setting your floor. See, almost immediately the things you're building - the things you can spend parsteel, tritanium, and dilithium on - are too expensive for your storehouses.

Also, in contravention of basic sense and the concept of what storage is, your storehouses are only a limiter to how much your passive generators can build. If your level 1 parsteel warehouse is full at 5,000/5,000 parsteel and then you finish a quest that gives you 1,000,000 parsteel, you now have 1,005,000/5,000 parsteel.

And like, if you can do that with the parsteel you're getting from some dude on Seti-9 I'm unclear why you can't do it with the parsteel you're literally generating yourself in a parsteel generator.

The result is that your generators - many of which you have to build because they're prerequisites for other buildings that do Actual Things - feel useless, as leveling them up causes them to more and more quickly max out your warehouse total before ceasing to function because your warehouse is (in some way that is clearly not meaningful in the game's own logic) full.

As it is, warehouses are actually for pirates. Your warehouse doesn't benefit you; It sets the amount of your stuff you can have sitting around for someone to take by attacking your base when you aren't paying attention.

This - like the generators - feels extremely shit, because you're the one doing the work involved in gathering resources and building all this stuff to improve your base! And it's making your base worse and enriching your enemies! Meanwhile to do your next build you complete a quest or two, which overflows your warehouses, and then spend down those resources as best you can - not so that they can refill, so much as so you don't have stuff to steal if someone ganks you.

It seems like the real reason this mechanic of warehouse and generator is in the game is because it was in Travian and, like, Space Hamsters, and the idea of including it in their own base-building mobile game was too enticing to ST:FC's dev team.

What strikes me is they just need to rejigger the math on Warehouse sizes. That's it! Just look at the cost of everything on each tier, find the most expensive thing for each resource, and have the warehouse hold at least that much. If you can do that, suddenly the warehouses and generators are always worthwhile. You still have to be careful with the prospect of people stealing from you (in fact it's likely a bigger deal, because if the warehouses are bigger that means more hours worth of generation can be stolen at a time) but if you go unrobbed for enough time you can just complete a thing.

As it is, it feels like a mechanic they put in when they first started building the game and then never took out because they didn't know what they'd do with the design space it currently inhabits, if they removed it.

[youlooklikeasixtiesqueen]

the threads algorithm is like. oh you liked a positive post about judaism? here's some blood libel :) oh you liked a positive post about trans people? here's someone claiming trans people are pedophiles :)

[sweaters-and-vertigo]

they could never make me trust cops