kruczek

> Psycho-history is fiction. You're not going to be able to model a single human much less millions of humans and their environments.

Of course it is fiction, but to be precise, within that fiction it was also stated that it's not possible to model a single human; the whole idea was that large societies of humans behave statistically in a predictable way, exactly because then non-predictability of any individual human becomes statistically irrelevant.

You are doing the same classification. It all depends on the definition of what a living being is.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> there is even a curator on Steam that marks games that use Denuvo, which is helpful for doing exactly that.

Could you let me know which curator it is? I'm also actively avoiding any game that uses Denuvo, so I'd certainly find such a curator useful.

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).

Then perhaps based on user's voting history, it could be calculated how likely a user is to always vote +2/-2, and how likely to actually differentiate between both axes. This could then be used as a multiplier for user's votes on the contribution axis.

It would probably require hiding comment scores though - otherwise it'd be easy to observe how the multiplier changes and game it.

But here we're talking about one particular CVE:

> everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products

This one fault doesn't tell anything about overall quality of the product.