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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Fandangalo@lemmy.worldtoGaming@lemmy.worldWhy are you like this
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    3 months ago

    I’m an expert in game design and economy design (+10 yr experience professionally).

    You do this so that health doesn’t feel rare. The same thing with ammo. If you don’t drop ammo for weapons, even when the player is full, the player may believe ammo is rare, hoard it, and not shoot. So if you want to incent players taking risks, you drop health and ammo, even at full, so the player feels they can experiment.

    This was noted in the GDC talk for Ghost of Tsushima: they do step on the drop rates when you’re low to give more than usual, but they don’t do the reverse (e.g. give you none at full) because they found, in play testing, players hoarding ghost tools (and therefore didn’t use them) unless the player believed a bunch was available.


  • There’s some diagnostic info when in game through the battery sidebar menu, I think. You can use that to see frame rate and other performance benchmarks.

    I usually just google or YouTube some way to improve whatever game I’m playing on deck. Usually, someone has already done the leg work to figure it out.



  • David Bowie and Prince both bent and blurred gender lines while still being attractive, unique, and amazingly talented. Bowie died really close to his birthday, and both dates are close to my birthday.

    When he died, I decided to check off some of my bucket list items, like performing in drag. Whenever I’ve felt self conscious, thinking about these icons really helped me be comfortable with myself and my journey.

    I really miss both of them as a fan. :/ I wish I had seen them live.






  • Fandangalo@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldXXX
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    7 months ago

    I believe in UBI, but the Captain Laserhawk show made me aware of how much it could get twisted in fucked up ways. “Don’t watch this show? -$100 from your stipend this month.” I used to think things like that were fear mongering, but the world is all kinds of weird today.



  • Maybe more apt for me would be, “We don’t need to teach math, because we have calculators.” Like…yeah, maybe a lot of people won’t need the vast amount of domain knowledge that exists in programming, but all this stuff originates from human knowledge. If it breaks, what do you do then?

    I think someone else in the thread said good programming is about the architecture (maintainable, scalable, robust, secure). Many LLMs are legit black boxes, and it takes humans to understand what’s coming out, why, is it valid.

    Even if we have a fancy calculator doing things, there still needs to be people who do math and can check. I’ve worked more with analytics than LLMs, and more times than I can count, the data was bad. You have to validate before everything else, otherwise garbage in, garbage out.

    It’s sounds like a poignant quote, but it also feels superficial. Like, something a smart person would say to a crowd to make them say, “Ahh!” but also doesn’t hold water long.





  • You are correct, but as someone who has worked in F2P mobile for a decade, it is true that most profitability comes from whales, at least in this market. You might have hundreds of thousands who spend as you mention (dolphins or minnows), but as a percentage of revenue, that aggregate is considerably smaller than the aggregate of whales: I’ve seen that ratio as high as 5:95 on a financially successful mobile F2P 4X strategy game, meaning 5% of total revenue coming from players with a lifetime spend of less than $250, 95% of total revenue coming from those above that. The populations of those groups is usually the opposite (very few whales vs. many dolphins and minnows).

    Not all F2P models swing heavily into “whale-based”, but the traditional wisdom is similar to the casino industry. Large corporate companies often have small teams dedicated to servicing VIP players, ensuring they come back to the game through attractive offers or other gifts (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-does-zynga-hunt-for-whales-this-week-in-business).

    Another component that people don’t understand is that often these aren’t “normal people” in terms of their income. We had geo-tagged data, so when you’re looking at your high level VIPs north of a million in lifetime spend, you’re talking about someone in UAE, someone in Petersburg, someone in Hong Kong, or someone in the Texas oil fields. That’s not to provide moral ammunition, but it is a different viewpoint from these games preying on people who don’t have money. A lot of whales have so much money, they just don’t care about spending $100s or $1,000s at a time.

    Finally, I personally know at least 1 divorce caused by a game I worked on: the husband couldn’t stop spending, and it led to a separation. There are likely more. By the same token, I also know marriages caused by that same game.

    If people are having issues with spending, please stop playing, stop spending, get help. If people don’t want this to be the dominate model, they need to support with their wallets. Having said that, there’s more free games to play than when I grew up. I do think that is pretty cool.