you're shitting me. how does someone that age end up so deficient?

As a mid 30's guy with modest life experience, I can assure everyone that most adults just end up deficient. It's astonishing society even functions.

already bought more leaps on baba and voo, so I'm ready for the rocket.

People who are being assholes about music on hikes are the ones doing it on relatively popular hikes, not remote ones filled with grizzlies. Just head over to the foothills in Boulder, CO, and bear witness to the fucking morons blasting their dumbass music all the way up the flat irons.

Appreciate the good conversation btw.

MO is 10 years old and had pretty shit developers. I don't know if they are strong evidence for your claim.

Still, I admit a degree of uncertainty with respect to how a non-resetting MMO open pvp game might unfold. But my claim is specifically that NW had the development team to carry forward a fairly innovative open pvp MMO game, and that that plan had a much greater chance of success than it succeeding as a more traditional MMO.

If you're right, then, frankly, they should never have bothered with the project in the first place.

There's tons of griefing in open pvp games, and because of that, they naturally filter out a huge subset of gamers. But you're mistaking this filtering effect for failure. The type of people who play games like Rust are a different breed, but that game has sold millions of copies and has maintained a large concurrent user count for years because the other subset of gamers who like that style of game crave it and are dedicated to it.

NW could have capitalized on this market, and instead, capitulated to people whining on the discord. Now they are after a market of people that are insatiable devourers of pve content, and the developers will never keep up or satisfy that base of people. It has happened time and time again. People will quickly get bored and move on.

Ark officials famously don't reset.

And lots of servers aren't small. Big Rust servers have 300-400 people on them.

Anyway, they demonstrate that people do like open pvp. The original NW design was potentially very innovative and could have been huge, but Amazon backed down due to the perceived risk. It was a bad move, and the game will be dead and join the other MMO's in the graveyard.

Maybe it still would have failed, but at least it would have explored a cool idea and pushed some boundaries.

Rust and Ark have been dominating Steam concurrent user charts for years; and they are full open multiplayer PvP games.

Turns out no one really wants to play half baked MMO's that are doing nothing new in the space. NW will be dead in 6 months.

They butchered the pvp long ago. Now it's just another MMO with 1/100000th the PvE content of Final Fantasy or WoW, and it will be dead in 6 months, generously.

But the last game's gameplay was incredible, so it clearly works?

He has a noble goal, but on the bell curve of humanity, the vast majority are just FAR more interested in what he is calling personality politics or culture war rhetoric (and I'm not making a judgment about that descriptive fact here). He will always have a smaller niche audience for a more academic analysis of policy and political philosophy.

It's bad because it cheapens the story. We spent a whole trilogy defeating Agent Smith, one of the great antagonists of modern cinema. He shouldn't come back for the same reason Palpy shouldn't have came back. Smith coming back would literally just be nostalgia farming, which is poison to good storytelling.

Tell a new god damn story.

that would make about as much sense as Palpatine coming back in the sequel trilogy.

Not everything has to be about nostalgia and rehashing the same stories from your coming of age years.

they have serious topics about their beliefs all the time in those places. criticizing them for excessive cj'ing just feels silly. we all enjoy a good cj sometimes.

meh, it's not so bad in those places

outsiders just mad they are wrong

i'm white

ofc

embrace the circlejerking.

it feels nice.

Ah yes, the beliefs that there are no magical deity that's going to wisk you away to eternal paradise; and that we should maybe not mistreat and slaughter billions of animals every year: truly, the most cringe belief systems of our time.

I think you can reasonably and charitably interpret the way I'm using the word rationalize here, no need to be pedantic.

I'm explicitly not rationalizing because I'm not trying to justify behavior with some extra system of principles. I am making a descriptive claim about reality: that humans behave in apparent moral ways because of their feels, not because of sophisticated logically consistent ethical systems (although the force of some ethical arguments can change people's feels to some extent).

Rationalizing just means lopping on logical justification for some behavior, thought, or preference, when no such logical justification actually applies in practice. Rationalization is ad hoc in principle. I don't think this is a bespoke definition I'm using.

Reject morality, embrace a emotivist description of ethics. Admit it's just feels all the way down. Never do mental gymnastics again.

We end the lives of fetuses when it's convenient because we just don't give a shit about them; and we have really bad feelings thinking about ending the lives of people in comas so we don't (usually).

Thats it, that's all there is to it. Everything else is rationalization.

My graph is the opposite. Mega base or die.

Yes. I have literally never not dreamed in color.

This is beautiful. Reminds of a lot of Mark Licari's style (minus the surrealist subjects). Awesome work.