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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • RTS games are currently in a big slump (nobody’s really making them, and the player base on the ones that exist has seriously dried up) because most people only like half the game.

    The people who love the micro end up going to MOBAs like League or Smite. The people who love the macro end up going to 4X/Grand Strategy like Stellaris or Crusader Kings. The market of people who equally enjoy both aspects is pretty small. Like, I’ll never buy a bag of Chex mix again, now that I know I can get a whole bag of just rye chips.

    To make the scene even more anemic, the skill cap right now is so high. I know several people (including me) who tried to get into Starcraft 2, only for their first random opponent to be a person with 20,000 APM who thinks a match lasting longer than two and a half minutes is a slog. It’s not even possible to learn from your mistakes when you get stomped that hard, that fast. But the single-player part does nothing to prepare you (other than maybe letting you figure out what the buttons do), and it’s going to happen just about every time (because the only people still playing are the people who have been playing for a decade or more).








  • I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them?

    I mean, as a chat room, it’s fantastic. It’s a massively upgraded IRC (except in terms of the ease of discovering new servers), with QOL features I didn’t even know how badly I wanted back in the old Yahoo! Chat days (such as the ability to spin up a temporary thread to take an in-depth conversation out of the main channel without going to DMs). It’s for discussions that happen right now and are not meant to be conserved forever because, generally speaking, they’re not expected to be that important. I love discord for that, because I miss chat rooms.

    But it’s absolutely garbage for being a repository of static knowledge. Releasing patch notes only in discord is ridiculous.


  • I wish people would stop trying to use Discord as an information repository/hub. It’s a chat program. It’s designed for people to engage in transient, real-time back-and-forth communication, not to store discussions or information for long-term use. I get so cranky at people who insist that Discord can be used like a web forum when it so obviously sucks nuts at it.

    A forum has content that can stay up indefinitely, where the message history on narrowly defined subjects is packaged into a convenient container and is visible as far back in time as one cares to go. It’s easily searchable, and old discussions for which a user has new questions can be brought back up to the top of the list, in full. Trying to recreate that kind of functionality on Discord is not only stupid, but also generally futile. It’s the exact opposite of what Discord is intended to be.