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Post your searing hot takes

idk if its a hot take but wendys got the best nuggets of all the super name brand fast food places. (mcdonalds, burger king, etc) but sonic still better lol.

edit bonus take: cucumbers were made by god himself to become cucumber salad or garlic pickles
 
idk if its a hot take but wendys got the best nuggets of all the super name brand fast food places. (mcdonalds, burger king, etc) but sonic still better lol.

edit bonus take: cucumbers were made by god himself to become cucumber salad or garlic pickles
not a chance that Wendy's beats burger king
 
nah McDonald's and Burger King chicken nuggets are based, haven't tried the others yet but they are pretty good so far

also cucumbers have not much of a reason to exist when pickles already took their job
 
idk if its a hot take but wendys got the best nuggets of all the super name brand fast food places. (mcdonalds, burger king, etc) but sonic still better lol.

edit bonus take: cucumbers were made by god himself to become cucumber salad or garlic pickles
As someone who is extremely picky when it comes to nuggies I have to hard agree that Wendy's are very good, mcd and bk don't even compare. Arbys surprisingly has good nuggies too
 
On the topic of fast food, I have no idea where the "dip your fries in a frosty" thing came from. Wendy's fries have basically zero structural integrity, and their shakes are very much on the thicker end. Really, you'll just be dragging your fry across the surface which won't really get much on there. Mcdonalds could get away with it because their fries are stupid strong and their shakes aren't anything super thick, but wendy's has zero right using this on official advertising.
 
On the topic of fast food, I have no idea where the "dip your fries in a frosty" thing came from. Wendy's fries have basically zero structural integrity, and their shakes are very much on the thicker end. Really, you'll just be dragging your fry across the surface which won't really get much on there. Mcdonalds could get away with it because their fries are stupid strong and their shakes aren't anything super thick, but wendy's has zero right using this on official advertising.
I've never tried it, but the concept has never appealed to me. Fries don't seem like they would go well with that kind of sweet. I assume that they're pushing it to sell more of those not-milkshake concoctions.
 
On the topic of fast food, I have no idea where the "dip your fries in a frosty" thing came from. Wendy's fries have basically zero structural integrity, and their shakes are very much on the thicker end. Really, you'll just be dragging your fry across the surface which won't really get much on there. Mcdonalds could get away with it because their fries are stupid strong and their shakes aren't anything super thick, but wendy's has zero right using this on official advertising.
There's this Kim possible episode where Kim goes out with her crush and he dipped his fries in ice cream. "It's salty and sweet", I think he said. I think that's where it started
 
"you control the buttons you press" and "just dont play optimally bro" is such a bad argument that has incredibly degraded discourse about game design
what do you mean. in multiplayer, I get it. but single player games are meant to be fun, and the more options you have, the better. if you don't want to use those options, then don't. stop complaining about things within your control.
 
what do you mean. in multiplayer, I get it. but single player games are meant to be fun, and the more options you have, the better. if you don't want to use those options, then don't. stop complaining about things within your control.
"Players will optimize the fun out of a game" is an objective fact measured for actual decades.

99% of people will not mid playthrough start doing a self-imposed challenge because playing optimally (to their knowledge) isn't as fun to them.

It is the job of the game designer to make sure that the game accommodates different player groups, not the player groups to try to fix the game by not using certain parts of it.
 
"Players will optimize the fun out of a game" is an objective fact measured for actual decades.

99% of people will not mid playthrough start doing a self-imposed challenge because playing optimally (to their knowledge) isn't as fun to them.

It is the job of the game designer to make sure that the game accommodates different player groups, not the player groups to try to fix the game by not using certain parts of it.
I'd say it largely depends on the exact case scenario, but in general, people unwilling to not use an optional overpowered feature that is easy to avoid using have no right to take that feature away from people who want to use it. you are more than welcome to shoot yourself in the foot, but don't take away everyone's gun privileges because you cant stop yourself from doing so.
 
I'd say it largely depends on the exact case scenario, but in general, people unwilling to not use an optional overpowered feature that is easy to avoid using have no right to take that feature away from people who want to use it. you are more than welcome to shoot yourself in the foot, but don't take away everyone's gun privileges because you cant stop yourself from doing so.
I don't see it this way at all because it's not a "privilege" it's just a part of a game.

I don't view games as just toys and sandboxes. I view them as an artistic medium, and in that artistic medium the goal should be to facilitate playstyles that you want to encourage. A lot of games have overpowered stuff that makes a lot of the game matter less, effectively removing other mechanics from mattering as well.

Overpowered mechanics tend to be viruses that infect the design of the rest of the game, usually removing all need to interact with many other mechanics, and often degrading the experience.

Example: Tears of the Kingdom

The shrines in this game theoretically encourage you to be very creative, but 80% of them can be solved by the same solutions: Rocket shielding or a box being recalled. Why think hard when these solutions solve the shrine almost every time? Why should I have to go out of my way to not use the tools at my disposal here?

You're always going to have extrinsic and intrinsic players. My motivation to complete the shrine is to get the Spirit Orb so I can make my Link more powerful. While maybe getting a bit of a break from overworld exploration may make me want to hit shrines faster, a lot of the time they are outright an interruption to my exploration as I see one, complete it and move on.

To actively get the positive shrine experience the devs want I need to be proactive and play around the developer's design.

I am a believer that instant gratification is the enemy of a satisfying gameplay experience.
 
The optimization question is hard for me to approach in general terms because there's so many variables behind gamer decision-making that differ across individuals, genres, and specific titles.

In any given case, my primary questions are these. Compared to the average player of that game, how long has someone played for, how good did they start out at the challenge, and how central is the challenge to the game as a whole?

If a player has been playing a game for much longer than average, maybe it is natural and normal that they're not having fun, because games can only be fun for so long. It's unreasonable to ask a developers to keep their game fun after somebody has spent 99,999 hours optimizing, because people don't play that long to begin with. However, if a ton of new players are immediately optimzing themselves out of fun, that is probably an issue.

Similarly, I only expect games to go so far to accommodate players who start especially good, and to balance challenges that aren't that important to the core experience.

For the TOTK case, an important question is how many players learn about, think to consistently apply, and are able to do e.g. rocket shielding?

EDIT:
It is the job of the game designer to make sure that the game accommodates different player groups, not the player groups to try to fix the game by not using certain parts of it.
I think this is generally reasonable overly lacking in nuance. Game creators should have the freedom to include more or fewer player groups in their vision. A game meant to appeal to both beginners and experts (e.g. Smash Bros. Ultimate) should have different group balancing expectations than a game more focused on beginners (e.g. Smash Bros. Brawl). Also, like above, even games choosing to cast wide nets on player groups can only be expected to go so far. A Pokemon game accessible to a 6 year old, yet fresh and challenging for tournament winners, is a tall ask.
 
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For the TOTK case, an important question is how many players learn about, think to consistently apply, and are able to do e.g. rocket shielding?
I watched someone figure this out on their second shrine out of the tutorial area on launch day, so probably a decent amount of people figured that out or recall tricks.

I think this is generally reasonable overly lacking in nuance. Game creators should have the freedom to include more or fewer player groups in their vision. A game meant to appeal to both beginners and experts (e.g. Smash Bros. Ultimate) should have different group balancing expectations than a game more focused on beginners (e.g. Smash Bros. Brawl). Also, like above, even games choosing to cast wide nets on player groups can only be expected to go so far. A Pokemon game accessible to a 6 year old, yet fresh and challenging for tournament winners, is a tall ask.
This actually brings up the fact that I think Sakurai has generally been a major failure in his conquest to appeal to new players specifically, and I can explain that more in another reply if you want, but for the relevant pat of this argument: Yes, but most games aren't Nintendo games. There are RPGs designed for older teens/adults that also have bad balancing that makes it very exploitable.

The Xenoblade Chronicles series is a good example, Xenoblade 1 will definitely get you to go out of your way to use the side mechanics and optimize and plan your builds more because the main game is tough enough that you will want to do that to keep up on pace. You probably won't lose that many times, but that's because the game encourages extremely early on the value of just small tweaks to your build.

Xenoblade 2 is a mess but it's similar, with tons of more mechanics to optimize things further.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was criticized by a lot of people for being easy enough on Normal mode that you can just beat the game without actually doing much, including doing much with the main mechanic of the game: The main mechanic of the game is switching roles/job classes, but the game feeds you so much Exp. without grinding that you don't really need to do any of it. You get tons of exp from just going to new locations, so following the linear path of the game does that, so in a similar style to a game like BDSP, the best thing you can do is try to minimize Exp. sources and basically ignore most of the optimization mechanics.

I am a living example of this as I played it and never had a struggle, barely using many of the mechanics or exploring, and it was the first Xenoblade I beat. Now we can argue the merits of this kind of thing, but I feel like only using games that are specifically more geared at younger audiences as an example is not really even what I'm talking about because the goal of those games is generally that mass appeal, to very beginners included.

A lot of game designers are 100% intending you to use these side mechanics that overpowered mechanics/bad balancing can make useless. They want you to eek out advantages by using the side mechanics they spent a lot of time on. Tears of the Kingdom itself I criticize because puzzle elements are already fairly accessible, one of the most accessible types of games. The solutions I talked about remove the fun from the puzzles to many people I've seen, which isn't a service to beginner players either.
 
Now we can argue the merits of this kind of thing, but I feel like only using games that are specifically more geared at younger audiences as an example is not really even what I'm talking about because the goal of those games is generally that mass appeal, to very beginners included.
I generally agree with your post... but like. This comes across as "why did you use these examples?", but you vagueposted on a Pokemon site and used TOTK as your example: Smash and Pokemon were totally fair context. If they're not what you mean, that's fine, the clarification is useful, but if you were looking to hear other examples, that's on you.
 
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