Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

The space-is-boring-so-let’s-economy subgenre has always been strange to me, because there are so many interesting things to find out there even without embellishing it with science fiction. There’s even an entire nebula tour thingy for Elite, where William Shatner (!!) will narrate you on a tour of the known galaxy.

Where’s the space tourism genre of game? I waaaaant it.

Apparently, space capitalism in _X4: Foundations_ boils down to creating the most efficient exponentiating gray goo possible and then setting it upon a hapless universe. The fact this is indistinguishable from the evil ambitions of this game’s totally-not-the-Borg faction is not lost on me.

Nor is the fact that, at the highest levels of play, this game is indistinguishable from Cookie Clicker.

Still, it’s good as a digital ant farm for adults.

Also, I totally main Isabelle. She is an amazing character in general, and just as amazing in Smash.

The Isabelle figurine from Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival works with Smash, and pricing for the box set hasn’t caught up with this fact yet: https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Crossing-amiibo-Festival-Bundle-Wii/dp/B00ZSHRPN0

If you’d like to get someone an amiibo that works with Smash for the holidays for $10-15, this is a good way to do it.

Why do space games always go for the same authoritarian brown and utilitarian gray tones to their stations, including inside their hab units? I want my station to be hot pink and gouache tones just for fun, and this game won’t let me.

... okay, thinking about actually trying to live in that kind of environment, maybe that’s why they settled on brown and gray.

This ceramic chef’s knife I received for holiday is the most satisfying non-sexual thing I have ever used.

One of those unusual hoard commissions by iguanamouth, except the hoard is 0s and 1s.

A conversation at work inadvertently had me call online divination software (8ball, online Tarot spreads, etc) “divination by /dev/urandom”, and now I want to take divination using a Mersenne Twister to its logical extremes.

... I think this is why my roommate calls me a glass walker.

I grew up in South Florida, where this sighting is common, and someone on Twitter helpfully posted a good example: https://twitter.com/MarshallJulius/status/1073514582721867776

PPS: also, apologies for typos mid-thread. Writing this over lunch, and my metaphorical editor was more interested in food at the time.

PS: I said I'd get to the ranking thing trying to please two distinct communities of players by assuming "better" players want solo-1v1-no-items. Without getting into specifics, splitting the categories was a better way to go (and I suspect the competitive category had a _lot_ less traffic).

An example that I think really succeeds at doing this is Splatoon and its sequel. And I wonder if some of its lessons will transfer over.

In summary: I guess this was a useful experiment, but please keep me from ever playing Solid Snake again. Down that path lies madness, insanity, and many dodge-rolled-grenades that do 8-15% damage.

The game currently thinks that I match at around the top 10-15% of Smash players, which is way higher than I expect it to remain. But with Snake, I match at the bottom 5%, consistently. And the game has thoroughly no idea what to do with this data.

In its third and fourth iteration, Smash did randomized matchmaking (even in 4's "For Glory" mode). Online matches were kind of unpredictable, but fun for jumping into and out of quickly.

Ultimate, however, has a ranking system called "global smash power", which in similar games is described as a matchmaking ranking (MMR for short). The game also varies the rules based on your ranking to try to please two (mostly independent) communities of Smash players. The developers assume that higher ranked players prefer solo 1v1 without items (which is hilarious, I'll get to that), and they give preference to these rules based on your ranking.

So in comes my unfortunate interpretation of Solid Snake. The game thinks I'm a good player overall, so it... matches me solo 1v1 without items. While only showing my rating as Snake to other players.

These people were clearly expecting a different match than what they got.

I picture it this way: Salty Nacl McSaltington, ultra competitive Simon Belmont player, is all juiced up for a game. They're on their third high-octane energy drink, having just tabbed out of a heated discussion about balancing the returning (Fire Emblem) Roy character. They're angry, and they have their sights on today's high global smash power.

And here comes this Solid Snake that forces them to chase them around the stage for 10 whole minutes before inevitably self-destructing off of the stage, while aggravating them grenades, remote bombs, stage hazards and (sometimes) items. They didn't even get time to teabag them! And then they see they were paired with someone who, compared to their 1.3 million "global smash power", has a rating of 30k and doesn't move their ranking at all.

Injecting this element of chaos to the game fills me with life.

One of my guilty pleasures when the-world-feels-too-hard is to dive into a game's achievements and game out how to get them to 100%. This is different from actually getting them to 100%, and mostly keeps my brain occupied on something other than whatever-it-is-that-day. It's self-care for planners, in a way.

One of Smash's achievements is 200 quickplay battles, AKA online matchmaking. I am thoroughly not the target audience, but I tried it to see how it would go.

Over this (~8-9 hour) experiment, I learned the following:
1. I am quite good compared to the average Smash player
2. I am very, very, very bad with Solid Snake

It turns out this combination completely breaks the how the game matches online play in possibly the best way possible.

I just explained to someone why Russia trying to start a land war with Ukraine directly impacts whether we will see this US administration try to commit domestic atrocities over the holidays, and it has reminded me how much I want it to be January already.

Can we agree to never have the world work this way again, please? I’d very much like to not see people I care about in vulnerable communities targeted because the venal man in office is compromised and afraid of losing power.

Does anyone know to whom the phrase “you cannot use technology to solve social problems” attributes to? Google’s results are apparently SEOed enough that it’s difficult to search for, and I’ve definitely heard it earlier than one source’s attribution of it to Quinn Norton.