CoderKat

I'm with you when it's generic, way too numerous items like those damned feathers.

I'm all for collectibles when they're interesting, meaningful, and not too numerous. But I think most games and especially open world games really just want to pad the completionist time.

Horizon is a game that did collectibles much better, with the exception perhaps of data points (which aren't marked on the map for some reason). The collectibles in Horizon are unique, have story, and are usually actually interesting to get to. I noticed often in Horizon, they were just so interesting to either get to (the case for ornaments) or had fascinating story (like the ones that unlock images of the past).

I usually dislike weapon durability (eg, in Fallout), but Zelda is the one game where I actually liked it. Perhaps because in Zelda, it was a central mechanic that the game was designed and balanced around.

For most games, durability is something that the game isn't really designed around and feels more forced in. When you can repair your gear (as you usually can), durability just means every now and then you gotta deal with the annoyance of repairing.

I really dislike being set back far when I die or mess up. I can handle a fair bit of repetition, but replaying the exact same thing over and over because I died is frustrating and boring.

Which means that I particularly dislike when games have lousy checkpointing or save systems. I also dislike when games are too difficult and I can't turn the difficulty down to at least get past whatever is giving me a hard time. And of course, unskippable cut scenes right after a checkpoint are a classic pain in the ass.

Examples:

1. I just finished Outer Wilds and found that game's checkpointing to be pretty frustrating. So many boring trips to Brittle Hollow because I lost my footing. I almost gave up because it was so bad.
2. I never finished GTA 4. I got stuck in some mission where there was like a 5 minute drive and then some difficult combat. I kept dying and having to redo the very boring drive over and over killed my motivation. I don't even know why it was so hard. I played GTA 5 twice with no issues.
3. I tried Dark Souls once. Lol, lasted maybe an hour before giving up. Now I'm very wary of any game that doesn't have configurable difficulty levels. Thankfully, most games these days are actually progressing to more granular or meaningful difficulty levels.

IMO, moderators of communities need to merge their communities. Identify which community is bigger and quite frankly push users to just use that one, to reduce the ambiguity over which one to use. The software ideally would also have an officially supported way to just close your community and transfer everyone's subscriptions to a different one, so that we don't have these duplicates confusingly still showing up in the listings.

I personally did this. I tried to create and promote a community I thought I was the first to make. When I learned it actually already existed (and just... didn't show up in search because of course not), I shuttered the one I made and pointed it at the other one.

What's bizarre to me is that the Android community even did switch to a different one... and then switched back to having two?? It's weird and I don't understand why they did it.

I enjoy the scale of large games, but Odyssey and Valhalla was too much even for me. I'd like maybe half that (which would still be at least 50 hours I suspect).

But that's collective punishment. Not everyone is trying to sabotage things.

Ideally the voters would have the intelligence to recognize which politicians are acting in good faith and which are not, with only the bad faith obstructionist being voted out (ideally immediately, without having to wait the potentially years till their term is up). But ehhhh, we know how that goes.

Warning: the surgeon general has determined that this state contains government representatives whom are dangerous to your health.

Honestly, that is weird. I wouldn't expect an intro course to go into a lot of depth on testing or even necessarily show how to use a test framework, but I'd expect them to at least have "printf style" unit tests.

But lol, yeah, tests usually take far longer to write than the actual change I made. A one line change might need a hundred lines of test code. And if you're testing something that doesn't already have a similar test that you can start off from, programming the test setup can sometimes take some time. Depends a lot on what your code does, but sometimes you have to setup a whole fake database and a hierarchy of resources with a mixture of real objects with stubs.

Strong typing doesn't prevent the need for tests. It can certainly catch some issues (and I don't like dynamically typed languages as a result), but there's no replacement for unit testing. So much refactoring is only safe because of rigorous test coverage. I can't begin to tell you how many times a "safe" refactoring actually broke something and it was only thanks to unit tests that I found it.

If code is doing anything non-trivial, tests are pretty vital for ensuring it works as intended (and for ensuring you don't write too much code before you realize something doesn't work). Sure, you can manually test, but often manual testing can have a hard time testing edge cases. And manual testing won't help you prevent regressions, which is usually the biggest reason to write unit tests. If you have a big, complicated system worked on by more than one person, tests can be critical for ensuring other people (who often have no idea how your code works) don't break your test. Plus your own future changes.

Yeah. At my current and previous jobs, literally everything going into an actual product required a code review, and that's despite all the code being written by employees that you could generally trust. Even if my boss or literally the most experienced and trusted dev wrote a commit, it still needed a review.

It's feels weird submitting my own code without a review for side projects. So many bugs have been caught by reviewers that writing code that another person would use without it being reviewed feels just wrong.

I wonder if the removal is just Streisland effecting it? Cause certainly no way I would hear about an ad on Twitter otherwise.