Comment by jewel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jewel | Hacker News Reader

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A few years ago we played this for a few weeks at the office over Christmas break when things were otherwise slow. We had maybe a dozen players, and played in Survival mode which I believe is infinite with difficulty ramping up.

We split into four teams, with one providing power, one providing ammo, one building defenses, and the rest just running around trying to help out where we needed it the most.

There was a ton of potential. I had to keep adjusting the difficulty as the match went on to keep us alive and then to finish us off when we were running out of time.

I'd love a multiplayer coop game like this but with the potential to have fifty or a hundred players. Right now the office plays CS:GO once a week, with the settings changed to allow max players, but it still caps at thirty. CS:GO is hard for new employees to get in to so I'd love something where everyone has fun. We also did TF2 for a while, which was better because the newbies could be medics and still feel like they were contributing, but the hard-core player base loved the challenge of CS:GO.

Factorio.

I play it with my kids (10 and 16) and my father (70) and brother. Everybody finds something to do and everybody has a lot of fun.

I can recommend Teeworlds (CTF modes) for casual office gaming. I've organized a tournament once and got my ass kicked in the final matches (2v2 CTF) as people improved really quickly.

Hope this helps: https://teeworlds.leaningtech.com/

You clearly need Eve Online

And you clearly need to use sarcasm in a way that is not invisible to everyone but people familiar with the subject matter.

According to the OP, CS:GO is too hard for their new employees to get into, so Eve, which is famous for its brutal learning curve [1], would be a terrible choice for them. After playing it for four years and having created dozens and dozens of notes, I still felt like I understood only 70% of its mechanics.

[1]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/23579228@N04/2335016192

Why?

As an aside, it's a wonder to read casual accounts of office work where teams will play with toys rather than be allowed to go home to their families or other interests

> rather than be allowed

This seems like a particularly uncharitable interpretation from the context of the post.

it’s the industry standard to expect defined working hours presence regardless of the work at hand. whatever workers want to do in the lulls or otherwise, that’s great for them. I was commenting on their owners

Ooh, can I play? "It's a shame you dislike your coworkers so much that you'd like to spend as little time with them as possible."

Be careful not to fall for the "we're a family here" corporate tropes and then have an existential crisis once you get fired or laid off. Work is work. Your customers are not your friends and your coworkers are not your family.

Coworkers might not be your family, but it doesn't mean you can't be friends. Some of the people I'm closest to I met at work, however to ensure our interactions aren't constrained to the workplace, we've made deliberate attempts to meet up outside of the office.

Worker friendship and solidarity is fantastic and should be encouraged. I was commenting on their owners

The friend I'm closest with I met at a previous job and we continued talking and seeing each other after I quit that job. Your coworkers are not your family, but they can be your friends if you let them, and that relationship doesn't have to end when the professional aspect of the relationship ends.

I think it's taken for granted that finding even three other people to play couch co-op is very difficult, much less enough people for a 30-person LAN match. Work seems to be a reasonable place to meet people who want to partake in extracurriculars.

Yeah being forced by owners to pass time together would enable that

We don't know anything about their business -- for all we know they could be required in the office to provide availability, but with large downtimes in actual work.

that’s the line given for every instance of it at scale

I have a family and a great work life balance. Some of the fondest memories I have of team building at work is playing video games or doing activities like paint ball or volley ball. So go ahead and judge.

No judgment on you and I’m glad to hear it

I was commenting on the owners, who restrict freedoms unnecessarily and with consequence even if many people are able to make a happy way through it

OK I can agree with that.

Not every office is 100% full of people with kids and a relationship.

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