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General Discussion / Re: Maths thread.
« on: April 11, 2020, 01:08:27 pm »
That’s how I understand it as well.
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77
Other Games / Re: Outer Wilds
« on: April 05, 2020, 04:12:16 pm »
It`s on PS4, XBox, and PC (Epic Store now, but can wait until June if you want it on Steam). The game recommends you use a gamepad, but it should be playable with mouse and keyboard just fine, some things will even be easier. The main thing the controller is good for is travelling around in 0g, but the basic autopilot and "match velocities" buttons cover 95% of your space-faring needs.
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Other Games / Outer Wilds
« on: April 05, 2020, 01:21:50 pm »
I’ve just finished this game, and it’s sincerely one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s a game about exploring a toy-sized solar system, discovering the ruins of a long lost ancient race, and a series of mysteries that reveal the close relationship between them and the many strange phenomena happening all over the place.
It’s hard to talk about this game and how good it is without giving anything away, but because the whole point is the exploration and discovery, any “spoiler” I give will take something from your enjoyment of it. The gameplay is unlike anything I’ve played before. The closest might be the Myst games, if you had a focus on exploration instead of obtuse puzzles, but with a similar feel and atmosphere, although more lighthearted and funny. It’s also not a hard game by any means, with a tremendously useful spaceship log that records your discoveries: you always have access to all the info you’ve collected, and it also points you in a few directions that might be worthwhile to explore. But just pointing to a random astral body, landing, and walking for a bit will uncover something, the game is dense with content. And information is the only thing you need: there are no unlocks of any kind, and you could technically finish the game within 20 minutes if you knew how to (and in fact you will). The planets and moons are themselves very imaginative even before you find any ruins, and make for unforgettable vistas.
If you’re looking for a unique ~15h experience during these trying times, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s beautiful and clever, and will leave you thinking about it for a while. It’s also cheap for the quality you’re getting. There are a couple snags in a couple puzzles that involve waiting (the “time skip” feature is a bit clunky), and one or two locations that involve manoeuvring that is a bit more precise than what the controls allow, but those are literally the only complaints I have for a game that would otherwise be perfect.
It’s hard to talk about this game and how good it is without giving anything away, but because the whole point is the exploration and discovery, any “spoiler” I give will take something from your enjoyment of it. The gameplay is unlike anything I’ve played before. The closest might be the Myst games, if you had a focus on exploration instead of obtuse puzzles, but with a similar feel and atmosphere, although more lighthearted and funny. It’s also not a hard game by any means, with a tremendously useful spaceship log that records your discoveries: you always have access to all the info you’ve collected, and it also points you in a few directions that might be worthwhile to explore. But just pointing to a random astral body, landing, and walking for a bit will uncover something, the game is dense with content. And information is the only thing you need: there are no unlocks of any kind, and you could technically finish the game within 20 minutes if you knew how to (and in fact you will). The planets and moons are themselves very imaginative even before you find any ruins, and make for unforgettable vistas.
If you’re looking for a unique ~15h experience during these trying times, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s beautiful and clever, and will leave you thinking about it for a while. It’s also cheap for the quality you’re getting. There are a couple snags in a couple puzzles that involve waiting (the “time skip” feature is a bit clunky), and one or two locations that involve manoeuvring that is a bit more precise than what the controls allow, but those are literally the only complaints I have for a game that would otherwise be perfect.
79
General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff Part IV
« on: February 23, 2020, 03:59:01 pm »
He recruits villagers for you. Which you then use to man your smithies and militias and whatnot. The location he recruits from doesn’t like his aggressive recruiting techniques, so they secede from your Dominion.
80
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.
« on: February 14, 2020, 01:37:22 pm »
Donald has pointed out multiple times that the fun part of making new cards is coming up with the concept. The testing and tuning is the part that feels like work. By picking up fan cards, he’s missing out on the fun part of his job. So he’s unlikely to do it.
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General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff Part IV
« on: February 06, 2020, 07:32:48 pm »
Shame of the low quality of the video. It's just as hilarious now as the first time I saw it, but 240p is not as acceptable anymore :p
82
General Discussion / Re: Maths thread.
« on: January 29, 2020, 12:04:49 am »
And, for hat problem number 1:
Decide ahead of time to always guess odd or always even. Then everyone is guessing the same hat distribution. This produces a 50% chance of victory, because there's an equal number of even and odd distributions.
I think this is the right idea, but there isn’t the same number of odd and even distributions. So we would actually have to check what are the odds of having an odd number of white hats, total, and compare with the odds of having an even number. Then everybody agrees to guess the hat color that leads to a total number of white hats that is odd/even, depending on their previous result.
No, see the exchange earlier with MiX and bitwise. bitwise is correct.
Am dumb. Didn’t want to do the summation, didn’t realize there was another way to figure the answer to my question. Will have to remember this one.
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General Discussion / Re: Maths thread.
« on: January 28, 2020, 07:19:50 pm »
And, for hat problem number 1:
Decide ahead of time to always guess odd or always even. Then everyone is guessing the same hat distribution. This produces a 50% chance of victory, because there's an equal number of even and odd distributions.
I think this is the right idea, but there isn’t the same number of odd and even distributions. So we would actually have to check what are the odds of having an odd number of white hats, total, and compare with the odds of having an even number. Then everybody agrees to guess the hat color that leads to a total number of white hats that is odd/even, depending on their previous result.
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General Discussion / Re: Maths thread.
« on: January 22, 2020, 04:27:17 pm »
The last person in the 1st round can also be the first person in the 2nd round, shaving one chance for guessing off the total. Similarly for the passage between the 2nd round and the 3rd round. Not sure about the passage between 3rd and 4th, that one is a bit confusing.
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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Cards to Use (or Avoid) to Speed Games Up
« on: January 12, 2020, 12:07:19 pm »
Wharf tends to speed up IRL games, in my experience.
86
Other Games / Re: Slay the Spire
« on: January 08, 2020, 01:24:18 pm »
Few card games are. Can you even think of any example? I’ve been following the development of Griftlands, which is pretty similar to Slay the Spire. It’s also really good, but the card wording is quite a few steps behind Slay the Spire in clarity and consistency. I have a feeling this might be inversely correlated with team size (assuming the people working on it are logic-minded to begin with).
87
General Discussion / Re: STAR WARS
« on: January 02, 2020, 02:40:53 pm »
I feel like there’s a difference. The emperor wanted to prove to Luke that he would succumb to the dark side. Luke wanted to prove to the emperor that he could turn Vader to the light side, by choosing not to fight (although he did momentarily give in to his anger).
In IX, Palpatine doesn’t want to prove anything, he wants to transfer his spirit to a new body, Rey’s. Neither does Rey want to prove anything, she just wants to stop him. When Palpatine says that killing him will turn her into the host of all Sith and Rey refuses to strike him down, it’s not to prove a point or as part of a plan to defeat him, it’s to save Ben. Then Palpatine just drops his previous plan, through no conscious action of the protagonists. It feels cheap in a way that Luke’s choice did not.
EDIT: so many typos due to writing on phone...
In IX, Palpatine doesn’t want to prove anything, he wants to transfer his spirit to a new body, Rey’s. Neither does Rey want to prove anything, she just wants to stop him. When Palpatine says that killing him will turn her into the host of all Sith and Rey refuses to strike him down, it’s not to prove a point or as part of a plan to defeat him, it’s to save Ben. Then Palpatine just drops his previous plan, through no conscious action of the protagonists. It feels cheap in a way that Luke’s choice did not.
EDIT: so many typos due to writing on phone...
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General Discussion / Re: STAR WARS
« on: January 01, 2020, 05:02:08 pm »
I think I was saddened the most was the squandering of some great ideas. Rey having to choose between letting the Final Order kill the Resistance, or killing Palpatine and becoming a Sith... that was quite the conundrum. Then, of course, it doesn’t matter, and Rey beats Palpatine by... using two lightsabers.
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General Discussion / Re: STAR WARS
« on: December 31, 2019, 05:46:26 am »saw the new one and uh that certainly was a star war.
episode X is gonna be nuts now that sarlacc gets to dual-wield lightsabers
i also enjoyed when the ewoks blew up a star destroyer
This was funny :p
I went to IX with low expectations, yet I was still disappointed. My current opinion is that VIII was the better of the bunch.
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General Discussion / Re: roguelike games
« on: December 31, 2019, 03:17:27 am »
Cadence of Hyrule got a new character, and Dungeon mode (essentially CotN-style gameplay). I’m finding Dungeon mode to be hella difficult, but maybe I’m just very out of practice.
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General Discussion / Re: Maths thread.
« on: December 13, 2019, 04:53:32 am »What a 95% confidence interval means is this: "if our poll's proportion of Yes (53.6%, for example) was also the actual proportion of Yes in the entire group of voters, AND we re-ran the poll and built a new CI of the same size; well then 95% of those intervals would also include the value 53.6%"
Which is a weird definition.
So I constantly forget and then relearn the rigorous definition of a confidence interval, but I think this one is equivalent to the one that says: "All values outside the 95% CI have less than a 5% chance to give a poll result this 'extreme' (as in, far from the real value) or more." Which is a bit more intuitive for me.
In other words, the CI is not so much keeping the "possible" real values, as it is rejecting all values for which the poll results would be very unlikely.
...Hopefully I'm not just saying something that is obvious for everyone.
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General Discussion / Re: Maths thread.
« on: December 10, 2019, 07:28:25 pm »
Sorry, I should have started my post by saying that I do not work in this domain. A quick check seems to point that the margin of error is defined as half the width of the confidence interval of the measure, accounting only for statistics and any intentional deviation from random sampling done by the pollsters.
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General Discussion / Re: Maths thread.
« on: December 10, 2019, 03:02:00 pm »
That’s the least I would do, if I thought the only source of uncertainty was the statistics of polling a subset of the population. If they have information on the bias introduced by their sampling procedure, that could be folded into their margin of error too. People also tend to give different answers to a poll than when voting (for example), which could also be folded in if the pollsters have some way to account for that.
Alternatively, they could use their polling history to determine their previous prediction error.
Alternatively, they could use their polling history to determine their previous prediction error.
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Other Games / Re: Slay the Spire
« on: December 10, 2019, 01:58:39 pm »
For what it’s worth, I thought the art style was ugly too, but it grew on me with time. I still don’t think it’s great or anything, but it gives the whole thing a dreamlike feel, which works with the strange world the game builds.
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Other Games / Re: Slay the Spire
« on: November 21, 2019, 05:36:25 pm »
I’m confused about what you are saying. By the end of act 1 / beginning of act 2, you should definitely be trying to focus your deck. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but if you don’t have any synergies going through act 2 and later, you’re definitely going to lose.
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General Discussion / Re: Brag Board
« on: November 18, 2019, 01:13:58 pm »
The game explicitly chastises the player for taking one specific route, and the other two are very similar, only one has extra content. It’s pretty clear to me who the final boss is supposed to be. Undertale is not Stanley’s Parable.
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Rules Questions / Re: Tormentor
« on: October 24, 2019, 04:13:58 am »Yes, this is all correct. I could be missing some odd edge case, but there probably isn't a way to play a Tormentor without putting anything in play, especially with the recent rule change.
Ferry on Tormentor. Play Captain, then buy Bonfire to trash it that same turn. At the beginning of the next turn, you play a Tormentor from the supply, leaving it there: you have zero cards in play.
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Dominion Articles / Re: Clean Shuffles
« on: October 20, 2019, 03:39:15 am »Let's say you open Cantrip/Steward. Now, if you draw that cantrip on turn 3 or 4, you draw down 11 cards instead of 10. The math is a bit nontrivial, but it works out to about a 1/11 chance of missing the Steward. breppert has the exact number in their Opening Probabilities article, if you are curious.
I know it's not really the point of your post, but the probability is exactly 1/11. You can think of it as the cantrip being "free" draw-wise, so your deck effectively only has 11 cards, hence the result. The odds of the cantrip itself missing the second shuffle remain 2/12, however.
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News and Announcements / Re: Forum downtime
« on: October 19, 2019, 05:59:47 pm »I missed you guys
100
General Discussion / Re: Movies: Any movie buffs?
« on: October 13, 2019, 11:56:40 pm »
I think the reason why I bring up the difference is that, if you want to make a story about the origin of a character, then the story must cover the characteristics that are common to most of the previous interpretations, or at least justify any large deviations. If you miss something, then on some level the story failed for me. For example, if somebody makes an origin story for Batman, but doesn’t explain his refusal to kill, then that’s a problem.
What I thought was missing from Joker was his manipulative side. Arthur Fleck wears his emotions on his sleeve, and mostly kills when his anger takes hold of him. However, something common in Joker portrayals is that he likes to toy with his victims, either going back and forth on whether he kill tell them, bringing them to their emotional breaking point, or something else. He also controls his minions through some combination of mind games and fear. Nothing of the sort is shown in this movie. Arthur, through sheer luck, finds himself at the centre of a violent social movement, but I see no reason to believe he can leverage that into larger scale crime. We’re shown the origins of a serial killer, but the Joker is more than that.
What I thought was missing from Joker was his manipulative side. Arthur Fleck wears his emotions on his sleeve, and mostly kills when his anger takes hold of him. However, something common in Joker portrayals is that he likes to toy with his victims, either going back and forth on whether he kill tell them, bringing them to their emotional breaking point, or something else. He also controls his minions through some combination of mind games and fear. Nothing of the sort is shown in this movie. Arthur, through sheer luck, finds himself at the centre of a violent social movement, but I see no reason to believe he can leverage that into larger scale crime. We’re shown the origins of a serial killer, but the Joker is more than that.