> On the economical side, you need to realize that whenever you are playing and enjoying a game, it's most likely due to the fact that the previous games sold by that developer have been successful in making money, which was most likely made possible by Denuvo.
>
> In other words, making piracy harder allows the next generation of games to be created.
That's an extremely bold claim. There are many games which are successful and don't use Denuvo. In fact I'm quite sure there are more successful games that don't use Denuvo, then those which use it - so I don't believe that "whenever [I'm] playing and enjoying a game" it was "most likely" created thanks to Denuvo.
And then there are people like me who simply refuse to play any game which uses Denuvo. There are thousands of excellent games out there, why should I waste time on those which treat me as a thief?
> I don't believe that "whenever [I'm] playing and enjoying a game" it was "most likely" created thanks to Denuvo
I never made that claim, please reread what I wrote, but here is my point again.
When you play a game from a publisher, they were able to create it because their previous games sold well. Therefore, anything that allows games to sell well is a positive for the entire gaming community, creators and players.
Denuvo is an important part of this picture, but it's obviously not the only one.
> And then there are people like me who simply refuse to play any game which uses Denuvo. There are thousands of excellent games out there, why should I waste time on those which treat me as a thief?
That's great, and I do that as well. And this is one of the reasons why Denuvo is not anti-user: everyone has the choice to not support it.
> Players who want the "pure" game experience can simply not look things up on the wiki.
Unfortunately it's not so simple, if you need wiki to search for the most basic information, because they game doesn't provide it. It's what the author actually describes as "terraria problem" and I fully agree with that sentiment: in Terraria you can craft things, but the game doesn't show you what you can craft, unless you are near the correct crafting station AND have sufficient resources on yourself to craft it. So in order to play without wiki you'd need to:
1. stuff your inventory with all possible resources you'd otherwise store in various chests
2. go to each of your crafting stations
Needless to say, it is extremely tedious and still you might not see that some item can be crafted at a given station, because for example you only have 99 pieces of some resource and that item needs 100 pieces of that resource.
So I'd say it's fine for some cryptic or more advanced mechanisms to be covered on wiki. But when I need to go to wiki simply to get a list of craftable items, then there's something seriously wrong with the UI design in the game.
That's an interesting example, because I never felt the need for 3rd party tools while playing Elite Dangerous. I did some upgrades to my ship, mainly based on what I found in store of stations I visited. I did a bit of mining and was able to sell it for some profit.
I'm sure I would be more efficient, if I'd use 3rd party tools, but it still didn't prevent me from actually playing and enjoying the game. I'd say it's much different to the "terraria problem" mentioned in the post.
I think this is a game that demonstrates especially well how online gaming discourse goes wrong. I believe that this game and Frontier have always deserved harsh criticism all throughout the past 10 years, but that criticism needs to be fair.
Online gaming discourse favors instant gratification, min/maxing, low thought, and low complexity. Reddit, forums, and youtube create feedback/echo chambers that give the impression that there is only one correct way to play a game. Tribal thinking reinforces those bad viewpoints and drowns out, or even punishes, anyone who questions it. People participate in these patterns to feed their own ego more than explore the game. And a lot of people don't know any better; they're told that this is the best way to play, and they believe it and spread that misinformation, getting tribal approval and warm fuzzies for "helping" newbies.
In most cases, Elite now has enough in-game information to let you become broadly knowledgeable and competent, but you have to pay attention, think, experiment, record, persist, and be patient. The high skill ceiling does not just apply to flying, but to understanding the world itself, and it can take a long time to approach it. Most things will take days to get comfortable with, and some things weeks or months! Its philosophy is at odds with reddit and youtube thinking, where the loudest signals you'll receive by far are how to min/max, how to obtain as much as possible as fast as possible, and what the "correct" ways of thinking about the game are.
And certain aspects of the game were meant to be discoverable by the playerbase as a whole, rather than every individual player. Finding barnacles, Thargoids, and Guardian artifacts originally happened because someone in the large number of players searching for them just got lucky. It's frustrating that any given player has an infinitesimal chance of finding that kind of stuff, but that's the price of making something so rare that the news of its discovery can excite the whole playerbase.
I agree with you here, and I should add to my original post that I do love the game for all that it is.
> That's the price of making something so rare that the news of its discovery can excite the whole playerbase.
This is completely true, but its also extremely annoying to me, because when I send the game to friends who I know would love it if they get over the learning curve just seem to bounce off it because they think "is this all there is". And it's a very hard game to explain.
With this in mind, its very easy to see Frontier not getting the playerbase that they deserve and so it being an online only game, will be eventually shut down sooner than it should be. Its really unfortunate.
I have had success with 1 friend and we've sinked well over 300 hours together which co-op play in itself changes the game up so much.
For me it's the exploration side, I love spending a week or so going out to colonia and having that true 'lost in space' feeling.
> I would be really amazed if this person makes a good game when their focus is make players do A rather than B instead of "how do I make this game as much fun to play as possible".
Would you consider Terraria a good game? I think at one point it was the highest rated game on Steam. And yet that game is exactly this way - it makes players do A rather than B: it is pretty much impossible to play it WITHOUT the wiki, because of the design: there is no list of all craftable items in-game.
And because of this I could never really get into it, because I had to tediosly collect all my resources and then go to each crafting station one by one, simply to see what I am able to craft.
You entirely base your opinion about what you know the game CAN LOOK LIKE.
If you don't have an expectation of Terraria, you don't know the depth and therefore play the game as it is.
The only thing that is harming your fun is knowing how it could be by watching videos, streams whatever.
Saying "it is impossible to play without a wiki" is entirely self inflicted by wrong expectation management. Of course people want shortcuts but a person without internet access wouldn't call Terraria unplayable without a wiki.
You are partially correct - of course my expectations for Terraria were set partially by prior knowledge of similar games. But they were also set by Terraria screenshots, trailers and feature lists, where crafting was presented as one of the core features. Nowhere did they mention they are missing such a basic feature as a crafting list and I'd never suspect a modern game may be missing such a basic feature. So I don't really think it's unreasonable expectation on my part.
A person who lived under the rock and found Terraria one day, probably wouldn't call it unplayable, having nothing to compare it against. I remember back in old days, where you'd have to figure out many cryptic mechanisms on your own in the old games. But yet here we are - decades later, and yes I do expect modern games would fully learn from mistakes of the past and provide such basic functionality as crafting lists in the game itself.
Velocity measures how fast displacement changes. In the same way, displacement measures how fast absement changes. This means if displacement is small, then absement will grow slowly; if displacement is large, then absement will grow quickly.
I think in the linked article there's a good real-world example of that with a valve:
> opening the gate of a gate valve (of rectangular cross section) by 1 mm for 10 seconds yields the same absement of 10 mm·s as opening it by 5 mm for 2 seconds. The amount of water having flowed through it is linearly proportional to the absement of the gate, so it is also the same in both cases.
This reminds me of the same revelation I had when observing my cat in a backyard. There were many snails around, but my cat seemed completely oblivious to their presence; it wouldn't register them as living animals, because they would move so slowly.
I switched to Ubuntu for my gaming PC over a year ago and from my Steam library of hundreds of games so far I only found maybe 1 or 2 that did not work on Linux, but worked on Windows. All the others work flawlessly*
* there is one caveat to that though - if you have a VR headset, then there are many people reporting performance issues on Linux with those headsets. And personally I also find VR performance subpar on Linux (although it still improved in the last year).
This is actually what Plato also mentions, a few paragraphs later:
> He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person, and in truth ignorant of the prophecy of Ammon, if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written.
