Especially considering a lot of the creative talent behind Valve’s acclaimed single player catalog are no longer at the company. Valve is a different company now and so their games will be different too.

young men have been told that white men are the worst thing to be.

Ok, but try not being a man and see if people think that’s any better…

While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply. On the one hand, yes you can tell people their ideas do not gel with the vision of the project, and sometimes that’s the right call. And sometimes doing this a lot is best for the project.

On the other hand, even if a majority of the work is coming from one person, not only does your community learn your project, they also spend time contributing to it, fixing bugs, and helping other people. I feel it’s only to a project’s benefit to honor them and take difficult suggestions seriously, and get to the root of why those suggestions are coming up. Otherwise you risk pissing off your contributors, who I feel have the right to be annoyed at you and maybe post evangelion themed vent blog posts if you consistently shut down contributors’ needs and fail to adapt to what your users actually want out of your software. And forking, while freeing and playing to the idea of freedom of choice, also splits your userbase and contributors and makes both parties worse off. It really depends on the project, but it pays to maintain buy-in and trust from people who care enough to meaningfully contribute to your project.

I’ve attempted to do public-facing technical support for a game and dear Christ you’re spot on. I love people for wanting to engage with something I’ve spent a substantial part of my life putting together and trying to make it run okay, and am sympathetic to people feeling frustrated when technical issues prevent them from fully enjoying an early access game. Early on when the community was small I had a great time shitposting with the players, but once we hit release the environment turned toxic pretty much overnight as the community suddenly grew.

But like, none of them know how hard we crunched to get even a playable version of the game out, nevermind one that’s playable on the lowest of netbook specs. None of em know how complicated the system is that’s breaking preventing them from logging in, that that’s not actually my area of expertise and that I’m just feeding them information from the matchmaking team who are all freaking the fuck out because this is the first time we’ve tested this shit at scale. None of them know that we were getting squeezed by our publisher, who wanted us to do a progression wipe that we didn’t want ourselves, but like they control if the game gets shipped at all so… not really a choice there. And we can’t admit any of this because accusations of incompetence come out pretty early, tend to stick around, and leave devs very little room to make bad decisions (which happens a lot!)

And like, being trans now on top of that? Hell no, I’m never touching a public server again if I can help it. Slurs and mistrust were already flying before, I can’t throw myself in front of that bus again. I’m gonna miss it because I cared a lot about connecting with people playing the game and for a while found a lot of joy in responding to bugs and fixing individual system issues and integrating into the community. And there were some amazing people who were great to talk to that I really missed when I left. But the inherent abuse that comes with that gets so overwhelming and it drained my desire to even work on games at all for quite a while.

I’ve heard this as a sticking point for some people, and I think it’s fair. Some don’t enjoy putting themselves in the shoes of a complete fuckup main character who’s already made a ton of terrible decisions before the game’s even started and will continue to do so despite your best efforts.

But, worth noting this is part of the appeal for a lot of other folks, and the game is going somewhere really special with it. It’s not bad writing, it’s a necessary component of the story being told.

Outer Wilds, to my estranged family. I think they could use a new religion and that game’s probably a better place to start.

Escapism is a valid reason to enjoy music, but catharsis is a thing for some too. Sometimes it’s helpful to hear someone artfully articulate something I feel but haven’t put words to. When I’m frustrated with the world I put on some Against Me, rage about things for a bit, and then feel better.

It really depends on the sport imo. Trans women may retain some more muscle and some parts of the skeleton are largely unaffected, but muscle elasticity, hip rotation, flexibility, and endurance all end up being more dependent on hormones than birth sex in the long term. How much these things matter varies a lot from sport to sport, and the current system is not sufficient to balance these traits even among people of the same sex. Multiple leagues based on broad body types sounds reasonable, but I have no idea how complicated the rules would have to be to make it completely fair, given we already accept a great deal of unfairness currently.

Do you know who ate all the function candidates?

If it were up to me I’d be avoiding templates altogether. Sadly, I don’t get that choice with 3rd party code.

I love gcc but it can’t make nested template errors any less horrifying