Idle Thumbs 140: The Customer's Always An Asshole

[TychoCelchuuu]

NEXT EPISODE CONFIRMED DELAYED FOR FIVE MONTHS

[Sean]

NEXT EPISODE CONFIRMED DELAYED FOR FIVE MONTHS

 

Well played.

[Bjorn]

I just discovered that there is no /wizard page on goty.cx.  I am disappoint.

[elmuerte]

The Gh:ost took is

[Badfinger]

DayZ really isn't as incomprehensible as it's sometimes suggested. Yes there's some basic orienteering, but once you begin to learn the map that just becomes traversal. Hell in the standalone the inventory system is drag and drop! You can assign items to hotkeys! The depth is way more like an old-school RPG where you find out what things interact with other things as you go. There is a really cool learning curve though. The first challenge is the game itself, because you have to learn how to do things. Then it's the terrain, then it's the zombies, then the zombies stop being an issue, and it's people, and then it's how to deal with/exploit/avoid/help people.

 

Actually the RPG thing is pretty apt. It's not abuse, I promise. If you get in a situation where people are genuinely interacting with you, you've already won. It might be tense, or stressful, but it's FUN. It's way more boring and annoying to just get shot. Don't even say hello, just unload? The worst, WORST way to play the game. It's way more interesting to get held up, ambushed, robbed, whatever. Sadly that's not happened to me very much.

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/01/06/the-best-dayz-videos-so-far-the-gentleman-bandit-heroic-high-fives-and-more/

 

These are half a dozen clips PC gamer found and they're cool stuff that can happen. I recommend checking them out, the longest one is only like 5-6 minutes. With that said, no of course it's not for everyone. I'm only writing it up because if you are interested but you think the game is a non-stop abuse simulator then I can promise that's not true. You can always avoid handcuffs, you can try and run away, or you can just log out. It's just way more interesting (to me) to see what happens.

 

 

Sean - in the mod, a Hero skin totally did exist. You got it from having a really high Humanity score, which you can get from blood bagging other survivors, and maybe other things. Killing non-bandit survivors lowers your Humanity.

 

http://dayz.gamepedia.com/Hero_skin

 

 

Jake - I'm so upset with you for retracting your Customer statement, because the first one is 100% accurate. Too many years of customer service have borne that out time and time again. I remember years ago I applied for a job with Enterprise Rent-A-Car and the hiring manager asked me what I thought about the phrase. I did my best to explain that I believed that was absolutely not true, but the customer is always important. When they're not right, you need to do your best to explain, educate, apologize, whatever to help get them to the same frame of mind. I did not get the job.

[sclpls]

This is a pretty good Polygon piece on improvisation in games like Nuclear Thrones that acts as a nice companion piece to Chris' comments about Nuclear Throne (also: bonus Spelunky content).

 

http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/17/5304982/games-that-develop-you-how-players-teach-designers-about-their-own

[vimes]

I picked up using "bespoke" in that context from Irrational.

By the way, I was in HK late in December and this happened:

Bespoke things everywhere.

[Latrine]

Well, the term bespoke originally refers to custom tailoring so yeah.

[Justin Leego]

Speaking of emails from Blazing Griffin, did anything happen to the thumb-wide 300 key seed propogation revival of The Ship (with each key ancestor-in-waiting to another 4 gift keys) as proposed by BG's community manager back in Ep. 90's reader mail, or was it basically unfeasable?

[tabacco]

I had a plan for this, and then sort of ran out of steam to follow through on it. I should pick that up again at some point.

[tegan]

I thought those had all gone out. If not, I'd totally like to have one.

[mikemariano]

Ha, I was sure I had missed this.  The Ship and my Steam library are destined never to cross paths.