freshhawk

When your job depends on it you tend to work really hard at believing that advertising is necessary and actually it's good, actually actually relevant ads are helpful! After all, if it wasn't then what am I doing with my life?

Only in theory, with branching factors of 32, they are not remotely equivalent unless you have a supercomputer counting atoms in a universe or something.

Useful to specify that it is log32N, not log2N since that makes an enormous different in practice.

Also, if you care about that then you can use transients (if no one knows you mutated the data structure then it still counts as immutable) or mutable structures - both of which are pretty simple.

Why didn't it work? Paizo had a big jump in sales ... for Paizo, the numbers are a rounding error for WotC.

Same with the DnDBeyond boycott drive, did that actually make a dent? To me there is basically no evidence for this supposed level of consumer power that the fandom is claiming they have. WotC's response was the most half-assed, who-gives-a-shit, PR statement I've ever seen. They did not treat it like a real PR issue at all.

> They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design.

Well yes, they will definitely be losing those people. However it's a small percentage of DMs who are even aware of 3rd party stuff in the first place. Single digit percentage and on the lower end, at best.

I think it's hard for lots of old players to realize that post Critical Role/Stranger Things, they are a tiny minority of the market now, and they kinda suck as consumers if you are trying to extract video game level profits from your players.

It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this.

They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest.

So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?

This is a segment of geek culture that has all sorts of ego/identity stuff tied up with these brands. So when they don't "act properly" it feels like it reflects on them and they take it personally.

That's the downside to having that market segment as your customers, the upside is that they are fanatically loyal and are not remotely picky or discerning as customers/consumers.

I honestly don't understand it completely, but there are a lot of casual players who will not even read the rules intro in the players handbook, and will play for a long time without ever learning how their character works. They don't want to leanr anything, they just want their DM friend to take them through some games and make it fun, so learning something they aren't even vaguely familiar with sounds like a lot of work.

It's also a longstanding, odd thing that even experienced players will spend a huge amount of time homebrewing hacks to D&D to make it work as a different kind of game instead of learning a new system that works well for the kind of game they want to play. Ttrpg systems seem to have a lot more momentum/brand loyalty than you would guess.

A lot of D&D players play a fairly "adversarial DM" style and, rightly, don't want to play the more narrative focused or rules-light systems that are easy to learn, because giving players freedom will lead to them abusing it. The dynamic is players wanting a power fantasy and relying on the DM to stop them from ruining the game with their rule bending.

I'm one of those people who likes learning new ttrpg systems and trying out different systems, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this. It seems like it's a lot of compounding factors, including a lot of growth being driven by streamers and new players who want to play D&D, not some nerd stuff they've never heard of.

WotC owns or controls all the places those creators sell their stuff. So they definitely have the economic means to force creators to abandon the old license. They will also probbaly just threaten people with their odd legal interpretation of their actual legal means as well, and plenty of people will comply.

They are going to "revoke" that license in the way that you will no longer be able to sell content with that license in the stores they control (which are all of the ones that matter).

In practice it's much harder to avoid. Especially with the new players driving all the recent growth.

The brand is so dominant that in any group most of the players will play D&D or they will not play. If you don't have the brand on your 3rd party product then the average number of units you will sell is around zero.

It's not really Windows, D&D is Windows+Apple+Linux and everything else is one of the BSDs.

Yes?

The entire industry is obsessed with onboarding and first-experience ease and intuitive interfaces and making things "just work", etc, etc. This includes Linux, which still has rough edges but the approach of just making things simple instead of easy and aiming at advanced users is very rare these days.

They aren't automatically more capable, it's just a well known and frequently noticed fact that Clojure tends to attract more senior developers, and the community is very senior dev heavy compared to other language communities.

So of course that is interesting, probably says some important things, and moves the average salaries up as well. Everything points to "Clojure tends to attract some subset of better devs" rather than it making them better.

There are clearly also effects from the small pool of available candidates, the high output of experienced Clojure devs, etc but generally being in a smaller ecosystem doesn't drive prices up.

I have basically the same experience doing cljs dev that I do with clj dev, when it comes to being REPL-driven.

I know that the setup for cljs is a bit more involved and things will break sometimes (putting a browser in the loop will do that). I have dev tools open ... but I use it less and less, between hot-reloading and a data browser (portal or reveal) hooked up to the clojurescript repl I only use dev-tools stuff occasionally (the network tab is still very important of course).

It does sound like you are missing something, I'd try out one of the shadow-cljs example projects or walkthroughs to see what an example setup includes as features to see what you might be missing.

It is a very weird unexpected artifact of Clojure being so focused on backwards compatibility. People finish excellent libraries and because they don't need to constantly update them because they still work perfectly ... the vanity metrics look bad and you have to reassure people that the project isn't dead, it's just finished.

It does a very good job at giving developers what they said they wanted, not having to do this constant annoying churn ... and it turns out a lot of people didn't actually want that, they like the churn and the feeling of productivity that merging dependabot PRs gives you.

> I'm explaining to you why Clojure won't reach mass adoption

I don't think you need to explain that, it's a conservative ecosystem for experienced devs, that was the target niche it was always aiming for. It's intentionally built to not reach that level of "mass adoption", mass-adopted, market dominating tools are one small subset of the set of useful software tools.