So, I was scrooling yt last night as I am wont to do sometimes, and miraculously, all these videos showed up, one after the other. I haven’t seen the algorithm working this well in over a decade lol.
Microsoft’s addiction to hiring 18 month contractors and then forcing them to learn an in-house engine has disastrous effects on Halo Infinite, leading them to abandon their slipspace engine in favor of Unreal
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eXIVC8494l8
Serious, the developer of CoD BO3’s T7 patch, was one of the first community patches to address the arbitrary code exploits which began to ravage the multiplayer servers of the older CoD games, making them unsafe to play online. Recently this topic has made a resurgence, new RCEs have been found, but the developer of T7 makes a convincing case that his patch has been safe all along, and the people causing controversy (mostly cod/zombies youtubers) have no idea what they’re talking about beyond regurgitating FUD
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lnjB4gMRL4A
Someone dives into the question of why TV appearances of the world’s greatest detective are so….weird, if he even appears at all. Makes a convincing case that it’s nothing to do with “preserving the brand” (look at gay black superman for confirmation) and is probably because of a legal quagmire surrounding the rights of Batman ‘66
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MrSarELf6uc
Apparently Cloudflare’s business model is something like the mafia’s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8zj7ei5Egk8
Who could have ever imagined that the evolution over 20 years of the approach to clearing or controlling a single hallway in a video game could be so interesting
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vGtCJFSiSpE
EVE Online, at its highest levels, isn’t PvE and it isn’t even PvP. Eventually you reach a point where it becomes PvDev (or you join goonsquad)
What one book contains the most valuable lessons on government that every citizen of the country should become familiar with? The Federalist Papers? Plato’s Democracy? Seems to me that some of this stuff would be a lot more valuable than Romeo and Juliet or anne frankly’s diary or whatever passes for a civics class these days
Inb4 Starship Troopers
Most of these come from MMOs for me interestingly enough:
Diminishing Returns:
“Hmm, this new piece of gear gives +8 strength, which will increase how hard I hit, whereas my current piece of gear adds 2% chance to crit - given my current build/stats, how can I tell which is better?”
This is a situation that every person who’s ever played an RPG has come across. Given the overlap between “gamers” and “autistics”, it was always inevitable that math would be used to meta-game and theory-craft into oblivion. A fundamental key to theory-crafting is the concept of Diminishing Returns - if you’ve ever studied economics you probably know something about Return on Investment or RoI - diminishing returns governs the rate of return on investment. Basically, as your investment in something increases, the rate of return on each “dollar” invested will initially increase until hitting a plateau and then decreasing. If you pump every stat point you have into Strength, but totally neglect Accuracy, Critical Hit Chance, and Stamina, your character will be weaker than one who split their points up between the different stats, and that character will be weaker than a third character who min-maxed their stat allocations with knowledge of the game’s system of diminishing returns.
The law of diminishing returns is an economic principle stating that as investment in a particular area increases, the rate of profit from that investment, after a certain point, can't continue to increase if other variables remain constant.
I learned this in terms of RPG stat mechanics in WoW. The most valuable stats for a class tended to all have “soft caps”, which effectively translate to a point near the “Point of Maximum Yield” on the graph of yield/investment. But really, this applies to…practically everything, atleast everything that can be modeled economically. A political campaign can pump $10M into a single region and get 60% of the votes there, or they could spread $2.5M between four regions and get 51% of a much larger share of voters.
Really a powerful tool that so many have never had to engage with and thus are totally unaware of the concept and how it plays a role in their lives.
Triage
Or: Geek the Mage
This one is simple enough, it’s about prioritizing what’s actually pressing and needing to be addressed immediately (the smaller enemy casting self-destruct, about to wipe your whole group) and what needs to be addressed consistently over the long term (keeping everyone healed, decursed, and buffed, and the reverse for the enemies)
The third lesson I’m not sure of any academic links or terms that could be applied here, perhaps most fitting are the ideas of “high trust societies” in sociology.
What I’ve basically noticed over the years, as “social” game experiences evolved, the value of any given interaction with other players has been reduced to almost nothing - and it seems largely to be because of a “lack of consequence” - nothing in these social games “matters” any more. Three examples I’ll give: party finding in MMOs (the old fashioned way, posting in town/lfg chat and forming a group, or calling from a list of friends) being replaced by “random group finder” matchmaking systems. This is made even worse by the matchmaking systems often drawing from a far wider pool than just “your server” - you will never see these people again, thus nothing you do (socially) in the group can have any consequences, so why bother! This brings me to the third example, private voice chats. Anyone who played through the early days of Xbox live or PC community servers knows how those places turned into ghost towns (50,000 spastics used to live here) with the advent of “party chats”.
