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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.comtomemes@lemmy.worldName them
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    3 months ago

    Not quite the same but I used to work at a local, family owned supermarket chain that is now out of business. I started at one of the busiest locations, but after I moved apartments I transferred to another location that was out in the 'burbs. At the first location I worked at, all our equipment was well maintained, stock was reasonable, stuff seemed normal.

    At the suburban location, our equipment was all falling apart. The roof leaked. The other stores sent us their overstock and charged it to our departments. I was in the deli, and one day the contracted maintenance guy was there and I asked if he could take a look at one of the meat slicers. He said sorry, corporate told him not to do any work at this location that they hadn’t pre-approved.

    My first hypothesis was that this location didn’t make any money, and that’s why they didn’t want to spend to fix it. One day I decided to ask the store manager about it—he was pretty chill and we talked sometimes, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. I said “Does this store actually make any money?” and he said “Well, let me put it this way: the numbers I report to corporate show that every department here, except floral, makes a profit every month. And then the numbers they put out in the quarterly reports show that we’ve never made a profit since we opened.”

    “Where does the money go?” I asked.

    “That’s above my pay grade,” he said.

    I’m convinced someone was embezzling funds. A couple years after I left, the whole chain closed one day with no notice to the employees.




  • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.comtomemes@lemmy.worldsup
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    8 months ago

    I liked healing in MMOs when all I had to do was click healthbars to fill them up. Other people did all the hard work of actually fighting monsters, and I got loot!

    Now MMOs want to make healers “interesting” so that more people will play them, and this means I have to contend with actual mechanics and sometimes even deal damage. Sorry, my brain does not multitask, I’m simply not cut out for this anymore. :P



  • Open-ended, “sandbox” style MMOs are a lot trickier to get right than “theme park” style ones like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Games like SW:TOR require a lot of content to be developed, but you can at least be pretty sure that if you develop fun quests then players who like questing will have fun.

    For a “sandbox” style MMO, you have to design systems that lead to interesting player interactions… and then hope players actually interact. This is complicated by the market share for sandbox games being smaller overall, meaning you can’t guarantee there will actually be a sizable player population. Also sandbox-style players are sharply divided on basically every topic from “how much PvP should there be” to “how much grinding should there be” so you quickly find yourself either targeting increasingly narrow slices of players or trying to appeal to multiple playstyles at once, which is even harder.

    I think this is why sandbox games have mostly moved towards smaller worlds and self-hosted servers, like ARK and Rust, where they can thrive with small player counts and individual play groups can tweak the experience to better suit their needs.