Hmm, do you mean with a limited number of slots of what can be on offer in the pawn shop? So, that players can maybe grab one or two trophies for selling and leave the rest behind? Otherwise, I’m not sure, what your idea is. 🙃

In my opinion, it works best to make loot non-sellable. It takes away the need to fill your inventory with tons of garbage, just to carry it to the store. Instead, your inventory can be reduced to a size that meaningfully limits your options during challenges and forces you to select your equipment strategically.

In recent weeks: Not having a plan.

Our manager was on vacation for a few weeks and so everyone was kind of just doing whatever they wanted. We’re a software dev team, so one colleague was working on UI, another colleague was working on authentication and a third worked on some showcase.

Now our manager is back and we did planning and it’s like, that showcase isn’t relevant until the end of the next milestone, and we’re not going to need the backend, nor its UI+authentication for the next two milestones.
Only really my work is directly relevant, because I did the incredible strategy of working towards the bare minimum we need.

I kind of don’t care, if we’re inefficient. It’s not my job to manage the place. But I hate not knowing what I should work towards.

Yeah, I’m totally cool with being late sometimes, but I know various folks where it’d be an exception, if they’re not late, because they have meetings back-to-back all day long.

Always makes me feel like the official meeting start should be 5 minutes after or something, but I know that those folks aren’t late for the fun of it. They’d definitely overrun those 5 minutes, if they knew they had them.

Personally, I try to see it positive. They want to protect others from being disappointed from yet another Bethesda game. I got burned by Skyrim in my youth, so when I see Todd Howard spitting straight lies again, I’ll try to save others the disappointment.

Now that Starfield is public, I feel like people can at least try to form an own opinion, but if only the people who are willing to pay extra talk about it, then you’ve only got Bethesda fans talking.

I mean, isn’t it still only available to those who paid extra? That’s probably why you see so many people wanting to discuss it without having played it yet…

I quite enjoy it when songs sneakily build up, starting out with a mellow rhythm and after a few minutes, you find yourself in the middle of an epic solo on top of this thick carpet of rhythm, and it’s all very much over the top, but it works, because of that slow build-up.

If you’re wondering, because it doesn’t sound like I’ve actually spent much money yet, yeah, I’m generally quite frugal. I’m mostly just intimidated by all the options to spend money.

But well, my setup is:

• Laptop running Linux (that already rules out buying most VST plugins, as those are often Windows-only).
• Headphones: Sennheiser HD 560S (←only real money, I’ve spent so far)
• For a DAW, I’ve been dabbling with LMMS. Felt more approachable to me than Ardour. I also enjoy dicking around with Surge-XT as one quite powerful VST/LV2 plugin.
• I’m a traditionally trained musician, so I also enjoy creating electronic music via sheet music. And me being a programmer/weirdo, I like Lilypond for that (basically LaTeX for sheet music), despite it not being built for that…

These ones: https://www.sennheiser-hearing.com/en-DE/p/hd-560s/ckyy9r5q0016i0c96sk5d9tog/

They’re generally said to deliver the sound-quality of medium-grade studio headphones for the price of low-grade ones. But that also means, aside from the sound quality, these are really basic headphones.

You should also mind that they’re open-back. So, they have no noise cancelling, neither active nor passive. You have to use these in a silent room.

Making electronic music. You can get lots of software tools for free, so I started out with those.

Then I realized how many details get lost, depending on what speaker/headphones you use, so bought myself higher quality headphones. As in, quite high-end for normies, but obviously, I’m at the lower end for music production hardware.

Now I’m considering buying a MIDI keyboard, because those software tools don’t quite emulate proper piano playing. Although, you could obviously also spend money on getting different software tools. And of course, on a quadrillion plugins for these software tools, to produce different sounds.

I’m just glad that my other hobby is programming, so when my music-self gets excited about an idea, my programming-self will want to solve it.
…and then never finish what music-self wanted, but at least we’re distracted from spending money.

This will obviously depend on what country we’re talking about, but generally, I’d still expect tons of in vitro tests (e.g. applying it to body cells in a lab), then in vivo tests with e.g. mice and then a few tests with humans who’ve signed a contract, before such a chemical can be sold anywhere close to the free market.

Even if people volunteer for it, you can’t just poison them…

It’s just a business decision. Enough players have strong enough hardware that the invest into optimizing for weaker hardware isn’t likely to pay off.

If there is a weaker platform with lots of players, like the Switch, that can make optimizing financially viable, but obviously, it depends on how much optimizing you would have to do…

I was just quoting the hyperbolical question of the person I wanted to explain to, somewhat taken out of context. I didn’t expect this question to get so much attention, otherwise I would’ve given that title more thought, too. I hate doomeristic titles, too.

Well, part of posing it badly was to post it to AskLemmy, because yeah, this is more just an opinion community. I probably should’ve gone to some finance-related community, but couldn’t think of one, off the top of my head…

Thanks! I guess, I posed this question badly as most of the other folks came here to philosophize or rant.

If you’re doing those moonshots and a company isn’t profitable, does that mean you don’t get paid out in the meantime? You just keep your money in there, because the company’s valuation rises, which makes your x% company ownership worth more, right?

Right, and with inflation, we just need to slow it, i.e. stretch it over a longer period of time, because we have automatic processes in place to adjust for a certain rate of inflation over a fixed period of time (like for example work contracts that include an automatic pay raise every year).

I guess, most specifically the offerings from mega-corporations. I was quoting a hyperbole there, I did not mean to actually talk about everything.

Oh yeah, I’m not arguing against your idea. It would need to be implemented per game anyways, so the devs can decide themselves, whether they want their achievements to be suitable or not.

Having said that, maybe what you really want is a similar idea, which I saw pitched a while ago: Dynamic recaps.
Basically, the game would detect that you haven’t started it in a while, so could offer a quick rundown of the controls. And if you’re loading a save from a few months ago, it could offer a quick summary of your most recent milestones in the story / game progression.

So, yeah, pretty much your idea, but it’s not re-using achievements for that…

I think Achievements are useful if they’re tracked separately by each save game. Minecraft does this, and I find it helpful when I return to a world save after a long time because I can use the achievements I unlocked to help remind me what I was doing and resume from there instead of looking at what clues may have been left behind.

That only works, though, if the achievements resemble game progress. Some games use achievements as entirely optional bonus challenges…

That’s one aspect I like about (difficult) roguelikes. You still don’t want to waste finite items, but if you don’t use them, you’ll go game over and therefore waste all of them.

Guess that would make sense. They’re all wearing makeup in movies…