I think encumbrance adds something really important to the game but it’s really delicate. Namely, I think the pacing of games is better when encumbrance exists compared to not.

What encumbrance does is force you to make some decisions about loot right now as opposed to later at the merchant. I have to decide to pick something up intentionally because I don’t want to have to deal with all this junk later. When I later go to a merchant, I only now have stuff in my inventory that either (a) I want to have on hand to use or (b) I think will be valuable to sell.

A game with no encumbrance does not enforce this part of the decision making on you. You no longer are required at pick-up time to make any part of that decision. As a result, players are less likely to interact with loot at all until they get to the merchant. At which point they now need to spend much more time sorting through their stuff to figure out what to sell or keep. In other words, the optimal way to play becomes simply clicking the take all button on every container you find and dealing with it later. I personally would find this interact worse as the chore of dealing with it becomes bigger and bigger and harder to manage with no in game penalty for doing this to yourself. Basically, players have to choose to play the game in a way that’s fun rather than being forced to play the game in a way that’s fun.

There’s also a second important thing that encumbrance adds to games like this: scarcity of resources. Not scarcity in a sense that resources of any kind are hard to come by, but in the sense that the player has to purposefully make decisions in order to amass things like gold or camp supplies. With encumbrance, I could still just take all every container until I fill up, but then I would have an inventory filled with worthless junk which might sell for much less. Or I might have less room for camp supplies. What I think most players will end up doing, though, is being more selective about what they pick up, enabling them to be more efficient with their sold goods and inventory space to prioritize things that help them succeed. Without encumbrance, this entire aspect of gameplay is removed.

Sure, it might feel bad in the moment to have to make a decision between two items for the sake of encumbrance, but I think the value it adds to the game is generally more than it takes away.

The game is really, really good.

Genuinely, it’s just a really fucking good game and I think thats most of it.

My issue with all of this is thus, and the article touched on it a bit:

Gamers don’t give a shit if games are buggy. Actually, we only really want it to be a baseline level of playable. And even then, we’ll probably suffer through a lot. What we want is a fun game.

In fact, I don’t actually think most of us give a particular shit about micro transactions or battle passes other than that they tend to be accompanied by games that are abjectly less fun without them. I wouldn’t have batter an eye if baldurs gate has a cosmetic store because what I want has nothing to do with that.

I want to play games that are fun. That’s the bottom line. Baldurs gate is incredible because it’s good. I would have paid more for it than I did. I would have suffered through micro transactions and battle passes if I had to. Because I don’t give a shit about that.

I’m just tired of games releasing and not being fun.

I can’t give you what you’re looking for, but the great part about challenges like this is that they are real problems to solve with input data to deal with.

You might try reorienting yourself, then. Instead of trying to teach your students the perceived “point” of each problem, use the problems to teach them about common design patterns and any algorithm that might apply that they don’t already know about. It’s not necessary to present the “best” solution and algorithm to each problem and only teach that, in other words.

I used one from a couple of years ago to practice dealing with first class functions. Would’ve been wildly inefficient at run time, but I had a fun time returning functions from functions and trying to use that to make really modular, overengineered code. And I feel I have a better grasp of that concept because of that experience even though it probably wasn’t how that problem was intended to be solved or even a good solution to it by any stretch.

Man FFXIV is no ray of sunshine but I can’t imagine it’s anyway near as bad as literally any competitive game. I’ve never been called a slur in FFXIV before and it feels like it happens once a session for things like Dota, LoL, Overwatch, Siege, etc.

Wow I always new I hated Calibri but looking at it up close REALLY made me hate it. I don’t know what it is about that font but I just can’t stand it.

See you found a solution but I’m still curious how you had this problem. There were very few enemies that I felt had a health pool wildly too large and it was usually as a result of the enemy upscaling feature rather than death March. Those two enemies begin the Djinn and a certain swordsman fight from the DLC.

I had to consistently play with upscaling on because the enemies were generally too squishy and I was killing them so fast the challenge of death March was wasn’t completely unnoticeable.

I wonder if it was your build or perhaps some other aspect of your gameplay that made this happen?

Yea, except USB-C is an objectively better connector for both ends of the cable. And it’s not like using USB-A has been made illegal.

If any connector were to be made the standard, I think I’d generally prefer it to be the best one available, wouldn’t you?

But this doesn’t make any sense at all. Defederation is like… the main power afforded to us by creating a federated system. It’s practically the only way instances can actually make themselves unique because it’s the only power they have compared to their Reddit counterparts.

Defederation can’t possibly “not be normal” because otherwise the system of instances and joining your favorite one becomes a complete illusion.

Like imagine this. The Reddit admins set site wide rules and the Reddit moderators set rules for their subreddits. Each user must follow the site and sub rules or have their content removed or account suspended, in the case of a site rule violation. Now, the fediverse is different than that. People posting in a community in lemmy.world are only responsible for the rules of that community and for that instance. But their content also affects other instances who might have stricter rules.

And what are the admins to do about that? The one issue which faces federated sites that doesn’t affect Reddit and it just so happens to be solved by the single moderation tool which the fediverse gets which Reddit doesn’t.

Reddit as an entity is just frustrating. Not just the recent debacle, but the pattern of getting slightly more awful with each passing minute. I’m hoping I enjoy my stay here well enough that I never feel the urge to go back. Unfortunately, it’s less about what Reddit can do to get me back and more about what the Fediverse can do to keep me.

I liked seeing and engaging with unlimited new things with each passing moment. It would not be very satisfying for me to lose that. Time will tell.