It's now a lot more tractable to build a multiplayer game, on the other hand balancing it is a whole other kettle of fish

I notice that all the advertising examples you listed are about spending time and not money, I'm wondering if there's something there?

And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being?

For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area

This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging

IE How their quota and caching interact with each other, it doesn't make pro and max a little different, it makes it significantly different by unintentionally penalising pro users

I'm really beginning to feel the lack of control when it's comes to context if I'm being honest

I'm curious why 1 hour was chosen?

Is increasing it a significant expense?

Ever since I heard about this behaviour I've been trying to figure out how to handle long running Claude sessions and so far every approach I've tried is suboptimal

It takes time to create a good context which can then trigger a decent amount of work in my experience, so I've been wondering how much this is a carefully tuned choice that's unlikely to change vs something adjustable

A fan project still encroaches and Blizzard as many have pointed out is well within their rights to do this

In case I wasn't clear enough, I'm not a fan of this move, I don't think it's a good thing they're doing, however I can't deny they can choose to do it

If we want their behaviour to be constrained, then we've got to either convince them otherwise, regulate away their ability to do this or weaken copyright to prevent this

That's the reality of the situation

Also, I'm not sure they have to start by creating an MMO

Honestly as someone building a game right now, I'd love to meet some people who are trying things and are open to meeting

This just happens to be a positive example, IP still exists to restrict certain kinds of competition

I mean you can't get a clearer case of copycatting than this, as much as I'm a fan of pirate servers, assuming that they don't stifle the original game and considering calling Blizzard an 800 pound gorilla is quite an understatement in this case, I doubt this could

The team have proven credentials at this point surely?

Not to mention at least some of their players must actually like what they do vs wow, unless I'm mistaken about that part and it's still mostly nostalgia

He's got to take care of it or no more yachts

Though part of it just might be helpful knows and respects hit market, at least well enough to understand them, I vaguely recall he left Microsoft to start a game company after seeing how much people fell head over heels with games and thinking there was value there

Just fire that off every now and then?

Basically the same thing, but you don't lose repl state

Basically the ability to reason about first and second order effects

IE, before the cellphone was invented you could have predicted the it, things like star trek envisaged a world of portable communication

What impact the cellphone had was predictable to some people, on the one hand increased convenience of communication as well as the end of making a call and wondering who was going to pick up, which was a definite consideration pre-mobile when you called a place and not a person, now we just assume that when we call someone we'll get them and not their family

The second order effects were less obvious, ease of access to someone meant being always accessible, so now everyone could be contacted whenever someone wanted them, it changed the dynamics of life for many, not to mention the effects of different technologies combining, the personal computer and the mobile phone becoming one in the form of the smartphone gave everyone a computer in their pocket, let alone adding the internet into the mix

Each of these changes were completely unpredictable to the people pre-cellphone, once again, compare modern day trek and the originals

I still vividly remember the moment one of the characters in discovery asked the computer to give her a mirror, the same behaviour of countless people now using the fact that their selfie camera functionally gives them a portable mirror in the form of their phone, that was unpredictable

So that's one form of being unable to predict the future

But there's another interesting dynamic I think, which is each direction of technical development is accelerating, which means that we may soon hit the point that only a subject matter expert will be able to predict or perhaps even be aware of what happens in any particular field, so we may get a period where before we can't predict the future, we may have some strange middle ground where we're constantly surprised by the developments we see around ourselves and when we look into it find this new discovery has been around months or years

I certainly have experienced that once or twice, however I'm wondering if that may become the new normal

Agreed

It's a top down ARPG called Mechstain where the player creates and pilots voxel based mechs

Instead of traditional gear, your mech has a physical voxel footprint that you the player have to fit weapons and components inside

Your job is to manage space, power and mass, what you can fit and power directly becomes your stats and abilities, essentially a bin packing problem

Basically take Diablo 2 and remix it with Kerbal Space Program, still fleshing out the various systems, but I'm really enjoying the process of slowly designing systems, iterating on it and fleshing it out

It's quite fun taking thoughts I've been noodling on for years and trying to figure out if they synergise with what I'm looking at and do they provide interesting player decisions

Recently onboarded a 3d artist and it's really making things look a lot better

If anyone has experience lighting + vfx in this sort of game, I'd love to talk to them, still trying to figure that out =)