Kenneth Colley aka Admiral Piett.

Harris Yulin, Gul Darhe’el himself.

“Duet” isn’t just one of my favourite DS9 episodes, it’s one of my favourite Trek episodes period, and Yulin is a big reason for that.

I’m less concerned about grid-level mood than with having the freedom and flexibility to run a scene that might fit whatever sort of tone I want to hit today. For example, on one grid on one character, I GMed:

• A tomb of zombies horror
• Mad Max desert rig chase
• High class well dressed casino heist
• Hacking a secure server (THAT was interesting to GM because you can’t write “and he typed on the keyboard” and be evocative)
• Run
• And a badly dubbed chop socky kung fu comedy

tl;dr I tend to chafe if the tone is too rigid, flexibility lets me be creative. If a grid is a canvas I prefer it unpainted.

I still think using “Sandy Petersen” and “cool shit” in the same sentence is a hilarious oxymoron.

MAP13: Downtown was so messy and the progression was so hard to follow he had to paint a giant arrow on the floor saying where to go next. Doom 1 Episode 3 was a mess. His stuff has always been amateur hour at best so I’m unsure why he’s held up as a shining example of quality here.

I guess my point is, a work isn’t automatically good if the creator matches your ideology.

Sandy Petersen brought us Slough of Despair, so.

@Faraday Trust issues lol. I tend to err on the side of caution and go for absolute clarity because I assume no one looks beyond the text and sees what’s actually happening.

@Faraday Does it? I thought the name was autogenerating as Guest-AdjNoun and up to the player to change later.

@Faraday said in Ares Tour Feature Feebdack:

these characters will be functionally equivalent to any other new character.

You’re on to something here. If someone uses tour to create Guest-AvariciousBinchicken (highly recommend a prefix for Guest instead of a suffix for clarity purposes), then there’s a command like convert that… well, converts the Guest bit into a full playerbit, you’re minimising clicks between the initial inspection and working on their real character.

This hits @Tez’s point about taking pressure off people. It makes it super easy to check the place out and then super easy to stick around. And if they don’t stick around, the Guest bit goes poof into the ether, its job done.

People love convenience.

Spoiler

@Pavel

I am an adult.

Nah but seriously it looks like a metal Q-tip how is that supposed to clean out your ear?

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

So if I reskin a chatgpt interface and “hire” some “researchers” I also get money?

Perhaps by complete accident, you have discovered Baby’s First Startup!

@Faraday I boycott Amazon because AWS absolutely sucks.

I’d explain more but I have to go write more Lambda functions while closing every pop-up telling me to use Q to streamline my processes.

@dvoraen This is one of my favourite reads lately: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

@Pavel that is a genuine QoL feature I use daily.

But I don’t need to have Copilot/Gemini/whatever advertised to me every time I open something that isn’t a video game.

I don’t even read the AWS roadmaps anymore because it’s endless updates to Q and nothing about bringing their existing functionality out of minimum-viable-product stage.

AI has its effective areas of use, but it is far narrower than what has been marketed and sold.

Notepad doesn’t need Copilot.

@Pavel if I have to read seven hundred different linguistic interpretations of “globes” again it’ll be too soon.

Honestly in regards to “sizeable” I was thinking something like a few dozen. I wouldn’t call it a metric of “success” so much as “a lot of people passed the three-month mark”. Quantifying success objectively is risky territory in this highly subjective hobby.

This is probably my cynicism talking, but the games that keep a sizeable number of players post-Bubble usually have one of two things:

• Inventory/econ/XP/gimme shiny gamified rewards that tickle the MMO brain.
• Sex as a basic premise.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins is a fantastic musou game that sits down and really works on the Dynasty Warriors formula and I recommend it to anyone who played prior games, even if they were burned by DW9.

The story gets a proper dedicated focus instead of being relegated to mission and character cut-scenes, and works hard to tell the saga of the Downfall of the Han with a combination of historical accuracy, Romance of the Three Kingdoms embellishments, and Dynasty Warriors flair. Respect is shown to what were formally comic relief characters such as the tragedy of Zhang Jiao and the morph of Dong Zhuo into a truly menacing manipulator.

Gameplay is harder and no longer winnable by mashing X/Square. You need to combine light and heavy attacks, Battle Arts, blocking, dodging, and your Musou attacks (which now come close to being full screen wipes) in a far more skill-oriented system. There are less than ten weapons this time around, but each one has a massive moveset and all are completely differentiated from each other in style and gameplay.

Some things did miss the cut, like playing as historical characters instead of the new protag John Musou (who himself is probably the weakest part of the game), but the work done on the gameplay and story more than makes up for it.

@dvoraen AI is an interesting (read: frustrating) topic that comes up at my job quite often. I can usually sort those trying to get it brought in into one of two categories:

• A C-level exec that wants it so they can slap “Powered by AI” on the product.
• A stressed junior/mid developer who wants it to do their job for them.

Setting aside misunderstandings around what AI actually is, both of the above are fueled by a lack of comprehension of the problems they’re facing in their day-to-day life.

The C-level exec wants to sell and thinks a shiny sticker will do just that. But the issues with what we make (and there are always issues in product development, that is a fact of life) have nothing to do with a lack of AI, nor will adding AI provide any tangible benefit. Asking “how do you want to use it in the product” usually results in a blank stare and instructions to just get it done. The only success I’ve had at stopping the AI implementation bandwagon is telling C-level how much it costs to build, run, and maintain.

The biggest issue that I can go into specifics about is that implementing AI in the way our execs often ask will run us afoul of GDPR. Not might. Will. I cannot elaborate further.

For the dev, working under Infinite Crunch, they see an easy way to work faster and more efficiently. They don’t have the time to assess the code being produced by the AI let alone their own code in the grand ecosystem of the product as a whole. Ninety percent of the time, when a dev asks me for a copilot license, their code is actually pretty good. The problem is the gigantic tech debt and clashing design differences etc etc, stuff that needs to be solved by a manager wielding the Refactoring Mallet.

The manager, however, is usually too busy telling C-level how much AI integration costs to build, run, and maintain.

I sound sour about this, and I assure you, I absolutely am. AI is a scalpel being sold as a hammer, and the only people who stand to gain anything from AI implementations are the ones selling it to hapless C-level execs who don’t know better.

In conclusion, there is a detailed (and deliciously crude) blog post I often refer people to when the AI conversation comes up for the umpteenth time. At the very least it’s good for a laugh. https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

@kalakh This is the variant I’ve seen