Yeah honestly AA games deliver the experience AAA games gave 15 years ago, and that’s what I want way more than whatever AAA is today.

RTS’s need a massive new hit to redefine the genre

RTS is a very broad umbrella term. I would have thought a CoD RTS would be more along the lines of CoH in its design than WC3. Though I could see mixing the two to create a tactical RPG RTS.

Because of the broad category that is RTS, I don’t think it’s necessarily right to characterise it as the genre needing to “redefine the genre” or have enormous innovation. AoE4 is an excellent and very successful game, but it basically only has relatively minor refinements on long-lasting staples of the classic RTS genre. And AoE2 is still enormously successful despite being 25 years old this month (with the obvious remastered graphics, newer QoL features, and new patches and expansion content along the way).

I’m not sure I agree with the live-service complaints. Maybe there are some RTSes that went that way, but one that you mentioned was AoE3, and it certainly didn’t. It was buy-once, play forever. (There were 2 major expansions in the same vein as the expansions of earlier Age games with significant new chunks of content in each, but nothing live servicey.) So has been every one of the Definitive Editions (including Age of Mythology: Retold) and AoE4. They do put out new paid content on a regular basis, which is frankly necessary to be able to keep funding bugfixes, balance patches, and server costs. But nonetheless the content has been very well-received by the community, and is entirely optional and doesn’t lock you out of playing your old content at all if you choose not to buy it. I’m not involved in any other RTS games, so maybe they are doing more live service stuff. Shame, if so.

RTS may just be a niche genre. It doesn’t need to change to attract a wider audience, because doing that would be to change what attracts its current audience. And that’s ok. Not everything needs to be for everyone.

Not that there aren’t things that RTSes could do to try to maximise their audience. If the game is esport focused, a good investment in esport prize pools goes a long way, and so does making sure your game is in a high quality state before it gets released—even if that means delaying release. AoE4 is an excellent game today with a pretty solid playerbase, but it could have been in a much better state if it hadn’t turned away a large number of both pros and low-level competitive players by the terrible state of the game at release. I’m also really impressed by the work the Age franchise has done around console compatibility with their main games recently, but I think greater promotion of this fact (for example by sponsoring console & controller–only tournaments) would help in that arena. I’d also love to see a real classic RTS game developed for mobile, which is why I was initially really excited about Age of Empires: Mobile, until the leaks came out revealing that it’s yet another Chinese knock-off like the thousands of cheap mobile games that have come before…only this one tarnishes the brand not just by indirect association/ripping off its assets in ads, but because it’s officially allowed to use the Age of Empires brand. Mobile is never going to have the high level of competition we see on PC, but I think if they put the same level of love and care into a mobile game (designed from the ground-up to be a mobile RTS) that they put into the console ports of their core games, it could be a great experience while on the go, and possibly provide an easier entry point into the genre for some newer players.

What I don’t want to see is the kind of RTS innovation that leads to completely new genres. MOBAs are fine for what they are, but that’s what you get if you embrace the idea that RTS should completely innovate to capture audiences with wildly different tastes: an entirely different genre that no longer appeals to RTS fans.

Do you guys here ticking?

Ron, Ron, Ron Weasley

This has implications with digital content in general

Not even just digital content. This is only half a step removed from right to repair campaigns, and that’s all about physical hardware, ranging from mobile phones to tractors on farms.

It’s really unfortunate that Lemmy handles deleted posts in this way. It’s one of very few genuine advantages of the Reddit platform. Over there, if the OP deleted the post, the text they wrote would no longer be visible, but all the comments under it still would be. And people could continue to have that discussion, so long as they had the link.

That’s a bit doomerist of you. Why leap to the assumption that voters are against it rather than the far simpler explanation that people are unaware of its existence, or don’t feel they understand it well enough to have an opinion?

In which case what’s needed is a much stronger social media effort, preferably headed up by the organisers themselves, or someone else who can make it their entire thing, from where it can hopefully radiate out to other interested parties.

I never played Civ VI. Stuck with V instead. Though to be honest, what I really wish they would do is return to the cool alternate game modes that Civ II: Test of Time added. Being able to keep playing with a second playing arena after completing the ship to Alpha Centauri, or play an entirely different game of fantasy or science-fiction flavoured civ was really cool.

The only country whose opinion should matter here is Taiwan. If and when they decide they want to be recognised officially, they should be. Not before, and not after.

I thought it was a rather simple analogue, but I guess it was too complicated for some?

I said nothing about JavaScript or Python or any other language with my 1/3 example. I wasn’t even talking about binary. It was an example of something that might be problematic if you added numbers in an imprecise way in decimal, the same way binary floating point fails to accurately represent 1/10 + 1/5 from the OP.

A good way to think of it is to compare something similar in decimal. .1 and .2 are precise values in decimal, but can’t be represented as perfectly in binary. 1/3 might be a pretty good similar-enough example. With a lack of precision, that might become 0.33333333, which when added in the expression 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 will give you 0.99999999, instead of the correct answer of 1.

Oh that’s amusing. So it’s just a complete coincidence that you posted it shortly after midnight on Wednesday in the very earliest time zone, then?

Also you confuse me. French pronouns, on a German-hosted instance, and you say you live in Spain. Pick a country!

use QR codes on each product

^{Pssst… products all already have scannable codes on them.}

But yeah, Woolies rolled this out in a few of their stores last year. No need for dedicated hardware, the Woolies app does it. It took me a while to realise that actually it’s not yet available in very many stores. Just 16 in Qld, 20 in Vic, 32 in NSW, and 13 in the rest of the country combined. It just so happens that the two nearest to me are both on that list, so I got the impression that it was more common than it actually is.

But yeah, the tech does already exist as a whitelabel service. If I had to guess, I’d say Woolies rolled their own rather than using one of these, but other companies could do it without needing to do all the work themselves.

I played one (1) game of Age of Mythology. Just too busy to play much more. I do so enjoy it when I get the time though. It was a win, but I looked up my opponent afterwards and it was only their 4th or 5th game.

Also finally got back out an went for a run today, for the first time since the start of the month.

To be fair this is a very early post. It’s 10:30 pm here as I write this in Australia, and the post reads “2 hours”. So that means it’s set for somewhere 4 hours ahead of me, or UTC+14, the very earliest time zone there is, home to the Line Islands of Kiribati, and nowhere else.

It might be a bit more difficult for them than for Woolies and Coles, sure. But Australia is unique in how strong Colesworths are, and yet in other countries, as demonstrated in the video linked above, stores are able to have scan & go tech.

Granted, there are a whole bunch of other factors in the Australian market that make it way worse than it needs to be, like our restrictive zoning practices that promote driving to big supermarkets rather than stopping off at your local small store on the ride home or walk back from the train/tram/bus stop. But the bottom line in terms of their inability to provide customer conveniences is that if stores in a country that is both less centralised and lower population can do it, there’s really no excuse here. Pubs and clubs have gotten on board with it via the prevalence of QR codes to order food, despite menus being unique to every place. Maccas manages to have a pretty damn good app experience despite prices and menus varying somewhat between stores and being largely franchise-owned.

They don’t need to spend millions developing this for themselves. A quick search turns up numerous different while-label services that can do this for you. I don’t know exactly how much they cost or how hard they are to integrate, but I know I would be way more likely to go to somewhere other than Colesworth if the experience didn’t suck arse. Last time I went to my local local store (there’s also an IGA pretty nearby that I do visit from time-to-time, but this was a fully independent local grocer) they refused to check me out at all because I didn’t have cash, and they only accepted cash for small purchases.

Your last paragraph is a good point, and is yet another reason that the government should structure its laws and enforcement to help promote these smaller businesses rather than CostlesWorthdi. But I think it’s unlikely to sway very many shoppers.

I get the joke, but actually…yes. A co-op doesn’t mean the people actually doing the work don’t get paid. It actually doesn’t even mean not-for-profit, just that the people profiting aren’t shareholders, but people who actually have a direct stake in the business. That can be a customer-owned co-op, supplier-owned, worker-owned, or some combination of those. Those groups would be the ones making any profit, in a for-profit co-op. And in a not-for-profit worker- or supplier-owned co-op, the workers (including the CEO) and suppliers still get paid—they’re just able to be paid more while selling goods for the same price, or paid the same while achieving a lower price, than a non-co-op business would.

Sorry, I thought we were having a civilised conversation about how a known problem could be solved. Not being rude arseholes slinging insults at each other and using the tired right-wing “ignore evidence from elsewhere in the world because we’re special” bullshit as justification.

I’m struggling to remember a time when I’ve wanted to look at a price for a grocery item online. I’ve never done direct to boot.

Ok, that’s fantastic for you. I love direct to boot, and I specifically avoid my local IGA because even though they do have self checkout (only installed around the last year or so), it always seems to be roped off when I go. Not sure if that’s just because I only tend to go late at night when they have the fewest people rostered on. I don’t actually care about checking the prices online because I’m financially secure enough that I’m lucky enough not to actually care but if I did care a lot about the price, I would definitely be wanting to be able to check where I’m going to get the best deal. But I do like being able to check which products they’ve got so I can plan my shop. This is especially important for smaller stores where I might need to plan to go to a bunch of different stores to get all the stuff I need.

Maybe I’m wrong and this wouldn’t actually help them. But it’s clear that people aren’t convinced by them doing what they currently do, and that they need to try something new. Maybe getting speciality lines could work, like Aldi does with their centre aisle, which clearly works very well for them. But “focusing on local products” has been the primary selling point of smaller supermarkets and independent grocers for decades, and clearly does not work.

As for it being “too expensive”, if companies in countries that have a smaller population than ours and lack the strong duopoly of Colesworths can develop or purchase scan & go tech 3 or 4 years before Woolworths started doing it here, I refuse to believe that’s actually the real problem. I suspect smaller business owners in Australia are just more likely to be technophobic and to believe that it’s sound business to ignore technology than small companies in Europe.

The smaller guys need to do a better job at providing a good service though, too. Small local grocery stores have had scan & go options for half a decade overseas, something that Woolies only started rolling out last year, and no other store in Australia has, to my knowledge. The big guys also have options like regular self-checkout, checking prices & stock online/in-app, and direct-to-boot ordering. These are all things that smaller guys could reasonably fix, to varying degrees

Much harder for the small guys to fix is the fact that Colesworth are more likely to be a one-stop-shop place. They’re huge, and with that comes a huge range of stock. Supporting your local grocer is fine, but might then mean you have to make a separate trip to a baker and butcher. Given these less-easily-surmountable drawback, it just becomes extra important that they don’t fall behind in things they can control. But they do.

This has been a thing since at least Star Trek: TOS. It’s just more prominent today as online culture becomes more ubiquitous and makes it easier for more people who aren’t quite as dedicated to get involved.