Love this -- and plays great on desktop and mobile. I am making a different sea-faring game focused on merchant trading in the age of Marco Polo, would you mind if I asked you a few questions to compare notes on sailing and 2.5D graphics? is there a way to DM you.
There are plenty of sailing simulators (e.g. Windward), just none featuring large square riggers. In any case, my beef is more with the misleading headline.
If a game advertised "real weapons handling", and it turned out to have infinite ammo with no reloads or shell drop, wouldn't you feel a bit lead on?
It's not fun to spend an hour going zig zag against the wind? What about an hour doing it with a boat full of precious materials that can't go through the portal while you're being chased by some ungodly horror from beneath the waves?
When people have 20 priorities and the company culture and process celebrates that. That's when meetings become the only forcing function. Sad but true and effective.
There's the reasonable amount of oversimplification necessary to just get through life, then there's actively trying to oversimplify because it makes life "easier".
I judge people very harshly based on whether they accept reality as complex or rail against it. I am not proud that I do it, but it seems like it has value.
I feel like strong yearnings for simplicity (and willingness to ignore messy reality) correlates with people who are unpleasant to have in my life. So many "simplicity-oriented" people are happy to burden others with "the details" but are unwilling to actually "pay" others to bear that burden. They're pretty vile people.
Edit: The people who recognize the value in offloading complexity and do "pay" (often handsomely) and are the best Customers to have. I've had some really rewarding financial and personal relationships with people who recognize their offloading complexity is a service you provide.
Reading Ian McGilchrist’s “Master and his Emissary” has been incredibly eye opening on this theme.
Oversimplification and getting upset with the world when it doesn’t fit your model of it is definitely a poor character trait —- which is nevertheless unfortunately trained and rewarded in our schools and much of our professional work.
The world is what it is and there are some helpful abstractions for navigating it, but don’t be upset when your model fails as it always will.
I was hoping this would get mentioned! I heard a podcast with him and was enthralled. Are his interpretations and outlook on this considered "valid" by the scientific community? I've been intrigued but curious about how seriously he's taken.
Indeed, often when we humans are upset about something, we later understand things better. Then comes that aha moment in which we see we were jumping to conclusions.
Don't worry, Amazon screws authors directly too when they self-publish, by using the cudgel of Kindle Unlimited to choke possible competition in ebook sales.
There's entire genres like litrpg, progression fantasy and cozy fantasy that likely would either not exist or be a fraction of their current size without it.
And authors can make a living, there's plenty in those genres (not to mention romance) who via a combination of patreon + KU + Audible are doing just fine.
I too wish there was someone who could compete with amazon, but the thing is nobody seems to actually even try? I feel like the entire book industry would be quite happy if things had remained stuck in time circa 1990, on their own they would never have invented something like KU.
Sure doesn't help that unless you go out of your way to buy a third-party device, there's platform lock-in, which was never an issue with physical publishing.
It does rather feel like the shoe is on the other foot now. Go back a few decades and publishers were the ones rinsing bookshops for all they were worth. Two wrongs don't make a right of course...
There's nuance to this. A company can achieve power by giving customers a better experience and in that way insert itself between customer and the industry. Thus wielding power in the interest of the customer. A company can also achieve power by giving producers a better experience and insert themselves between producer and industry.
I think my point is that in the majority of cases companies will do both. i.e. (when run "effectively") they will use all available levers.
If they fail to, it will usually be an oversight than a deliberate strategy.
Of course - some companies push harder, overstep more bounds and neglect the possible negative 2nd order effects more. But assuming there's an obvious lever that says "make more money legally" - the vast number of companies will reach for it.
The real lesson is if you let a person or organisation get into a position where they can squeeze, they will squeeze. They won't even be doing it because they are "evil" because the hedonic treadmill makes everyone feel entitled to more. The problem is systemic. We know our failures but don't do anything about it.
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