mbunch

Turns out the system wasn't quite able to handle the traffic that came through yesterday. It should be working better now!

The last time this came up, it was an unhandled exception that basically killed the combat thread. Probably something similar this time. In any case, thanks! Hoping to get it back into a playable state shortly, haha.

Sorry, looks like this is a bug with Flee that just popped up and it just stalls combat entirely. Trying to fix now.

Welp, that's definitely a bug! Flee is supposed to move you to an adjacent room on completion, which is, of course, exactly what it did until some time today. Working on a fix now!

It just came online and I was able to get in. Is it still not working?

Not OP but somebody else who has worked on the platform. Thanks for the feedback! I can't give quite as good of a response as teebes but I'll take a crack at it.

- Patreon isn't the ideal subscription service but it was the most lightweight tool we could find for the job since some users wanted to contribute and it didn't make sense to integrate a full payment platform right now. Is there a particular reason that you find it off-putting?

- Telnet actually came up recently on the Discord. It's something we might do, but would take a fair bit of work and loses out on some of the UI we've incorporated to try to make combat a little more engaging like cool down timers and cast bars. That said, we're not opposed to it if there's enough demand and people would actually use it.

- We've actually had a few visually impaired players and gotten some very useful feedback! There is a 'Use Accessibility Layout' option that tries to optimize the experience for screenreaders, although there is likely room for iteration.

- That's a fair point and may be tough to optimize to the same degree while taking advantage of the more modern frameworks that make the platform (hopefully) more user-friendly. That said, there's probably some refinement that could be done there to at least help a little and I would imagine that once in-game, the packets going back and forth don't put too much strain on the connection.

Always good to hear from people who know the space!

Yes it's restarting now, had a hiccup for a bit. Sorry!

Edit: Should be online now

sigh Looks like it needed a restart. It was getting hung up when trying to put you into the tutorial. Sorry about that!

It's frustrating how hard of a sell the text medium can be, especially with how creative authors have grown to explore what visual media isn't well-suited for. So many of my avid gamer friends just won't give anything with such a minimal UI an honest shot, even if they loved playing similar games in the past when it was more of a necessity.

Incidentally, I was actually thinking of submitting something that I'd been working on for the competition, but I didn't think it would qualify since it was already publicly distributed. It's up at https://writtenrealms.com/worlds/7996/brimstone-prologue, so if anybody is into this kind of thing and has some time to kill, I'd actually love to hear any feedback!

Sure, it may not completely be a corollary of compound interest, but the fact that there are people that can live entirely off of the passive income generated by their assets and have some left over to invest further illustrates that the game is fundamentally different at higher levels of wealth.

There are some projects like https://writtenrealms.com that are trying to modernize the MUD and lower the barrier to entry, but they are still coming together and most of the ones with an established player base / full feature set are still the traditional telnet setup.

Drafting will only cost you about $10 if you like Limited. Commander can be done on a reasonable budget too if you like wacky multiplayer.

It is my least favorite part of the game (really the only part of it that I dislike), but you're right. I don't know if it was quite what Richard Garfield had in mind, but at this point it's 100% an intentional part of the design philosophy.

The art in Magic: The Gathering followed a very similar arc. Cards have absolutely amazing art today in terms of technique, but many older cards conveyed a sense of charm and whimsy that's gone now.

That's part of the reason why Bitcoin is seen as V1 tech that's being moved away from and other cryptocurrencies using variants of Proof of Stake (which consumes orders of magnitude less electricity but has other potential pitfalls) instead of Proof of Work have grown more popular. Ethereum, generally considered the #2 crypto, is planning to make the switch from PoW to PoS, for instance.

There are some people who still support large-scale adoption of PoW coins, though, and you are right that they're generally willfully ignorant of the environmental concerns. The only case I can see for those is something that aims for true trustlessness and anonymity like Monero, since most PoS methods make compromises around that.

EDIT: I stand corrected. Ethereum is still laying the groundwork for a switch from PoW to PoS and hasn't yet transitioned.

Did robber barons have as much political power as corporations do today? This is an honest question. I'm not an expert, but my speculation is that the level of control that lobbying gives those "winning" capitalism today over the laws that are supposed to be keeping them in check is a new thing and will take us into uncharted territory.

So the ideal is to adopt an "abundance mentality", right? One where you're so confident and successful that you really don't care if any individual reaction doesn't go your way. It takes a loooong time to get there if you're starting from a point of having dealt with rejection (whether explicit or imagined) for years.

I don't know if everybody's experience is the same, but I was a virgin well past the normal age and every attempt to get into the romantic game crashed and burned for one reason or another. Sure, the first few times can be explained away with truisms and platitudes, but after a while, the thought that you're just broken, undesirable, unlovable starts nagging at you. Every time that some girl dances with you then disappears without giving you her number, when that OKCupid date doesn't get a followup, it's all reinforcing that thought that there's just something wrong with you. Even when you do start seeing success, that thought, that fragment of your self-image, it stays with you. Shedding that part of your identity can be rough transition, and that's if you're aware of it and trying to move past it. Otherwise it just colors all of your future interactions.

I feel for the guy, to be honest. I've been in a good relationship for years now, but I know that bitterness and resentment. If I'd made the mistake of broadcasting my honest thoughts during that time and somebody linked them to me, it would not be pretty.

> When you see a headline like "P versus NP", do you look at criteria like http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 to check for signs of credibility?

It's funny that you reference another person who was pilloried by the social media masses for being a misogynistic monster because he made a post that conformed to certain maligned social patterns (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2119)