Hazzard

Yeah, personally I've always enjoyed playing IRL with people who are better than me. Having a real person gives me that constant measuring stick I'm looking for, and playing with someone better gives me someone to watch and learn from, which helps me improve way more quickly. But that's... not what gets you the big sales numbers and a smooth player onboarding.

For PvP stuff, the experience I enjoyed the most was playing Smash with dorm mates in college. Getting my ass handed to me in 1v1 matches for months by the guy who owned the console, but learning, grinding, letting that guy I wanted to beat motivate me to use the training room, to watch YouTube videos, study techniques, and try to really master my character, learning how to be unpredictable and perform mix ups that needed to fool an experienced player who knew my weaknesses better than anyone, it was so satisfying. And by the end of the year we were on even footing, and I was maybe even a little better, which just felt incredible and so well earned.

That experience is what ranked PvP just completely lacks. Every time you win they just swap in new players who are that little step better than you until you're perfectly even again. Which is great on a game-to-game scale, each battle is hard fought, but just offers nothing on that wider timescale that I need to really care.

Fair, you definitely become more skilled (I put 500 or so hours into DotA 2 years ago), and you can somewhat measure that, but I find it's not nearly as potent.

My additional issue, if you take a long break like I did, is that the MMR somewhat traps you. When I came back, not only was it extremely frustrating to have the head knowledge about what I needed to do (I.E. denying creeps and stealing last hits for optimal farming) while not having the skill to execute it anymore, but I was also trapped in matches with only players who had the skill to capitalize on those mistakes and destroy me. Add to that the pressure of letting down a whole team of 5 players, and my attempts to get back into the game later were miserable.

By comparison, I'm returning to Celeste right now, and checking out the strawberry jam mod. It's been incredibly satisfying to see how quickly I pick up and relearn those mechanics, and I'm just crushing the base game levels that gave me so much trouble the first time, while giving me an enjoyable de-rust. It's been a pleasure to dive back in, and I'm excited to see what heights I can reach, eager to beat the Farewell DLC that I gave up on before and to push myself to even harder modded content.

Maybe I could get a similar experience in DotA, by playing hours of bot matches to relearn fundamentals, and watching lots of YouTube content to learn how the meta is shifted in my absence, but that's a much different grind than I'm having in Celeste, just enjoying the nostalgia of the game and revelling in how much quicker relearning is than the initial learning. And I never have to cope with any social pressures of letting my team down, or watching my hard earned MMR crumble away as the game repeatedly reminds me how much worse I've gotten.

Yeah, very fair. I do think it's essential for the modern scale, and to be constantly on boarding new players, so I don't think it's going anywhere, but there was certainly a time where we could live without it. I used to love playing unreal tournament with the same friends regularly, and that was much closer to what I enjoy, as I could see myself getting better, even if the skill gap between us was obvious and I never really had a "fair" game.

The games I honestly think have the best chance of beating this are battle royales, where you could probably throw caution to the wind and matchmake fully randomly, or by throwing a set percentage of each MMR bracket into the same lobby, and still have players who can achieve a reasonable amount of success due to luck and who they find to fight and when.

Despite the massive amount of comments here, I still don't see anyone talking about my personal issue with PvP here.

It's ranked matchmaking. In order to keep things working at all, you have to pair players with players of a similar skill. And this means that fundamentally you don't get a sense of progression besides an MMR ranking. Your win rate will always be roughly 50%, unless you either smurf, or become the literal best in the world. Compare that to tough PvE games, like Doom Eternal, or a brutal platformer, where you can raise your difficulty, beat stuff you could've never beaten before, and generally see your progression. Heck, if you want to relax, just put the difficulty back or crush some earlier levels. I love to go back and learn to speedrun some of my favourite platformers, and that feels awesome. Games like Souls are also great at this, when you have to explore an earlier area and the enemies are just... so easy and satisfying to roll through. Or moments like in Sekiro, when you go into NG+ or just start a new playthrough and crush Genichiro on the first encounter.

And this whole thing is just.. so fundamentally necessary for PvP to work, you can't let new players get utterly crushed by veterans, so it's not something anyone is going to "fix". But I'm not hopping onto an endless treadmill that's never going to give me a sense of mastery. Especially not with so many other fantastic games out there I want to check out.

From what I understand, the majority of the most ridiculous minecraft feats are just... writing code to write Minecraft world data for logic circuits, not actually placing the blocks by hand. At a certain scale writing some kind of monstrous compiler to place blocks for you based on a proper circuit plan or programming language becomes easier.

They did overhaul the controller mapping in this update, along with just about everything else, so it would be worth checking out. I really can't emphasize enough how massive this update is, it's like the emulator leaping from 2010 to 2024, they've been exceptionally active over the past 4 years.

Aren't there emulators for newer platforms out there now?

And of course. I assume you're referring to RPCS3 for PS3. PS4 is also in the early stages of being emulated, with simple games being playable.

Had a coworker today ask me to change a variable to be in "screaming snake case". So I google it, and sure enough, take your snake case (example_variable) and put it in All Caps (EXAMPLE_VARIABLE). And now your snake case is screaming. Had me giggling reading the PR feedback, I love stupid programmer naming conventions.

Ugh, if only. Amazon has done everything in their power to bury and strip that number from the internet. Once upon a time that worked great.

Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.

So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen.... which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon's "chat support" AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours "in case my package shows up". I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it's not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I'm willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final "solution" and I have to restart the convo over and over.

Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.

For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren't killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.

As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam's lunch, Microsoft is not Steam's friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.

Yeah, my first thought as well was that "pulling up" would be pulling the steering wheel back, which wouldn't do anything. Certainly wouldn't swerve the car all the way off the road, you wouldn't want to jerk a plane left or right in that scenario either.

So... definitely made up. But still an amusing greentext.

Asahi Linux is a project to get Linux running on M-series macs, which has taken a bunch of difficult reverse engineering, since Apple doesn't really provide public documentation on how they work.

Running Linux means they can run steam games like a Linux machine. This is a pretty impressive landmark in terms of their OpenGL rendering support.