Sandboxy games definitely have more replayability. If I look at my steam stats, Medieval Total War 2 is in the lead, followed by Paradox grand strategy games, Mount & Blade, Skyrim, then things like Terraria, Rimworld, Stardew Valley, Prison Architect, Gamedev Tycoon, and so on. I have to go pretty far to hit something with a defined story.
Mass Effect 1, at least, was most fun when you said to hell with the official objectives and just started treating it as a sandbox. I had so much fun using the sniper rifle from as far away as possible, or taking the mako places it really shouldn't have been able to go
Maybe this is changing, but in my generation, gamers are typically more proficient in a lot of the low-level nuts and bolts. Modding was such a big force in pc gaming, and typically the tools to do it were a little sketchy and rough.
I remember hacking around in data files for Civilization II, or poking at python scripts for Mount & Blade, way before I learned any proper programming.
Hmm, I submitted this yesterday, but it got lost in the scrum.
It's always interesting to hear real reports from the trenches that aren't essentially ads for technology XYZ. I'm afraid that all too often, we make things more complicated for bad reasons; whether ignorance, chasing the latest trend, or resume-driven-development...
Message-oriented stuff has been around a long time, so I don't think it's a fad.
It's basically taking the concept of "integration" (or API) itself and creating a product for it, just as a database is a product for the concept of persistence. Thus just as not every application has to reinvent a database, with a messaging product not every product has to reinvent queueing up integration calls if the target system isn't available.
The article also mentions request-reply being "what you really want", I think that this is a) not true, as a lot of the time you can fire and forget, and b) when you need it the products generally provide a request-reply API on top of their lower-level APIs. No need to reinvent.
I got the impression that the author didn't really want a message based system at all, but rather a request response system that they tried to impliment within a message broker. Of course that's going to create more headaches than it solves; it's the wrong solution.
Both message brokers and request-response code have their places in distributed systems, but they really need to learn when each is appropriate.
I agree, saying that request-reply is "what you really want" was kind of silly, especially after the opening paragraph that states "it depends".
In my eyes (where the GP makes perfect sense), a message broker is asynchronous, there's no implicit wait while your consumers work on our request. A request-response interface will stop the producer until the consumer is done.
I'm still using Linq-to-SQL in the .net world. For 99% of what I need it to do, it works golden. Once in a while I've got to go in and profile and rewrite a query when somebody that doesn't know what they are doing has introduced an n+1 query, or done something overly "clever" that's resulted in gnarly SQL being generated.
Quite likely, the people that are capable of doing that sort of hard technical work are not capable of doing the soft, identity-politics ridden outreach functions, and vice versa.
Bang-up programmers are typically not the ones you want pressing flesh and pushing buzzwords.
Maybe there's some magical place where you can actually learn how to program from someone else, but for the rest of us, there's no substitute for solitary hours grinding away actually doing the work.
In Bavaria, I've seen beer carts going along factory production lines at noon time, handing out a couple lagers with lunch. Didn't seem to affect quality, safety, or output.
I can't bring myself to watch espn any more. They've gutted so much of their actually insightful talent, while retaining the hot take artists and trolls. And I don't need to be constantly bombarded with left-wing propaganda and outrage with my sports scores.
In addition, their broadcasts are just not very good. Watching TNT and Espn during the NBA playoffs this year was like night and day.
Yeah, it's another case of an old media company thinking that the internet is stealing the fanbase. No, it's because your product sucks. That's the only reason. There are still tons of sports diehards even among millennials who would get a cable subscription for nothing but ESPN if it wasn't such utter garbage.
Same. The only draw of ESPN for me was analysis and tennis grand slam events. I don't watch a lot of sports, but I love competition and statistics. Sports can give me both of those without me ever having to tune in. Replays of strategic moves (even when boring to the naked eye) is a big draw for me. ESPN has basically dumped all of that.
> it's another case of an old media company thinking that the internet is stealing the fanbase
Interestingly enough, esports fills all of these gaps for me, but I wouldn't say that they stole me from ESPN. ESPN shot themselves in the foot ages ago. The pre-game and post-game discussions of e-sports are full of break downs and actual insight instead of hot-take talking heads. There have been incidents of analysts trolling and giving super shallow answers, but hosts have been cracking down on such behavior.
Yeah, it is just watching a handful of people play a video game, but the strategy can get ridiculously deep.
Can you quantify that? Cause its not just ESPN that is losing subscriptions to cable cutters its the entire industry. There is basically no cable subscription channel that is adding subscribers. The best some can say is they aren't losing them as fast as others. They study this a lot. Its pretty clear from their data that millennials have a different media consumption pattern from their predecessors and that new consumption pattern is moving up the age bands as well. Anecdotely, I recently cut the cord, am not a millennial, and am a huge sports junky that had cable (actually satellite) just for sports. I did it because a) I consume less television generally these days and b) the value proposition wasn't there with all the other ways I can consume sports now.
ESPN is being hit the hardest because they had the largest piece of the pie that is shrinking. Also their sports broadcast deals are staggeringly expensive.
Finally, ESPN is not moving to a sucky product for funsies. They are doing it because contrary to our inclination people do watch the talking heads screaming at each other, in about the same amount as other programming, and its much cheaper to create.
[edit] another thing that might be driving ESPN more to the talking heads model is the way views are calculated. As part of the metrics there is some accounting for public places that are showing television so from a 'real' perspective the bar showing Around The Horn on mute to a few patrons in the afternoon is not very valuable to advertisers, but based on the metrics they use it is. Model error is real.
I think ESPN is being hit the hardest because their content costs the most. Look at this deal they signed. Can you imagine AMC or whatever other premium content channel having to spend 12 billion for a few shows a week?
1) watching content whenever you want, however you want, without wasting your time with advertisements. Oh and you can also participate in a forum discussion including high quality replays, and can link to other replays, etc, etc
Or
2) being subject to ESPNs scheduling, spending your time watching advertisements, and having to deal with an additional middleman (the channel provider)
It's a no brainer that other than the actual game itself, ESPN has nothing to offer that subreddits and other forums can't. And you don't waste your life with commercials.
It's interesting to see sports networks evolve in the same direction as political networks. When your product is based on shared culture it seems to degenerate towards tribalism.
I get a kick out of people saying ESPN is 'left wing' biased.
Nah, they're just bad content. Their competitors are trying to paint them as liberal, but they're just bad at content that isn't a live game and can barely be considered journalism.
They have a left wing biased, but it gets blown way out of proportion. ESPN's biggest problem is exactly what this article is talking about. They have spent so much money on TV rights, that it causes price of getting cable to go up and more people are cutting the cord because of that (not because they are liberal)
I think writers often have a bit of a left-wing bias, but many of the talking heads lean more right-wing. Consider all of the withering criticism you would see on these sports shows for Colin Kaepernick or Chris Kluwe. It's probably a money thing, in many respects: writers aren't wealthy, the talking heads usually are.
In the US the sports media often talks about topics that are only tangentially related to sports. Like whether or not a sports team should accept an offer to visit the white house (a tradition for teams that win their league). Or about players that refuse to stand for the national anthem.
I agree that their problem is completely rooted in the fact that they have overpaid for sports contracts, coupled with the fact that they have no option but to continue to overbid for future contracts.
