We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I learned about core wars in high school, but the teachers never found a good spot to shove it in the curriculum, so ultimately I never bothered to play.

0x10c featured a programmable 16-bit architecture called DCPU. The game’s canceled, but the architecture did pick up some fans.

There's also lots of 'genetic' warriors, where people use programs to evolve the warriors through battles-- not quite pokemon, but more, "make a change, and if it gives you a better win rate, keep it, otherwise discard it".

I don’t know what people do for this game, but usually you have a number of individuals in the population per generation, and thousands of generations. Then you let it cook for a while while they duke it out (or whatever else you use to evaluate “fitness”) and mutate/mate. This is because a single win doesn’t mean a whole lot if you’re looking for something that does well in general.

Genetic algorithms are good for certain kinds of problems; basically, it’s something like a shotgun approach to playing hot-and-cold as opposed to a more reasoned one. You’d use it where non-intuitive leaps might prove fruitful (even though they probably wouldn’t most of the time), but wild-ass guessing would not. It is not the sort of thing that runs in real time, so it’s not a technique you see in the field of video games too often... but sometimes it is relevant.

Despite its effectiveness, this build order wasn’t known to the SC2 community. It’s quickly become labelled as a “cheese build”

Ooo, how dare you intelligently work within the confines of the game and discover superior strategies that take the metagame to a new level! That is so cheap.

Cheese builds in Starcraft are bizarre, unusual, or very meta builds that are designed for the sole purpose of being incredibly difficult to counter to a player that isn't aware they're being used, such as rushing the enemy base with SCVs as Terrans, which can be devastating against newer players who haven't posted scouts to let them know about incoming foes.

They're also usually builds designed to win the game very quickly and sacrifice an initial grace period in favor of a relatively rapid start that can either secure victory if successful, or ensure defeat if the enemy was prepared and crushes the attacker.

Although people complain about a lot of builds being "cheese builds" just because they lose to them, there are truthfully a lot of frightfully irritating builds that more or less force the enemy to counter them with another specific type of build. This kind of rock-paper-scissors meta can sap the fun out of the game very quickly for many players, and it doesn't help when they're lumped into the crowd of players who cry foul at everything they lose to by people who don't take the time to examine the argument.

I for one remain confident that Blizzard will solve humanity’s oldest, toughest problems with the next patch ;P

(I really wish I could remember who I’m paraphrasing here.)

There are a lot of specific openings in this other game that people have been playing for a while, many of which can require specific counters to beat against a skilled opponent or are high risk/reward, but nobody calls those cheese.

Calling a strategy cheese is an ad hominem argument.

Cheese builds in Starcraft are bizarre, unusual, or very meta builds that are designed for the sole purpose of being incredibly difficult to counter to a player that isn't aware they're being used, such as rushing the enemy base with SCVs as Terrans, which can be devastating against newer players who haven't posted scouts to let them know about incoming foes.

Chess allows you to see all of the opponent's pieces at all times and starts both players in an equal position. Players cannot hide their moves in order to prepare an unexpected attack that cannot be countered without advance knowledge.

Scholar's mate is a big wheel of goddamn cheese
cheeeeeese

Cheese, as I understood it, typically refers to builds that are viable mainly by virtue of their unexpectedness, but are overall weak or nonrobust strategies. Like transporting cash by hiding it in the trunk of a sedan, and hoping any would-be thieves go for the armored truck instead.

That said, the word "cheese" is one of those words that mean whatever it needs to mean

Things depend on the social environment a bit, wouldn’t you say? In “Romantic chess”, they preferred to play bold and reckless. Declining a gambit was often regarded as cowardly!

Scouting your opponent is a major part of the StarCraft metagame. Surprising your opponent is a major part of any metagame. A win is a win.

It's worth noting that the story BRP posted is more than three years old. SC2's metagame has no doubt adapted to this strategy in the meantime. There is never a strategy that is going to guarantee a win 100% of the time outside of a solved game.

Bad players whine and complain. Good ones develop new and unusual strategies and counter-strategies that upset the player base. Metagames are fluid.

I've never said anything about my own opinion on "cheese builds," and I do agree that bad players will often "cry wolf" and call anything they lose against cheese. But, as Gnauga stated, there are clearly strategies that rely on brute force, luck, and/or surprise over actual skill or tactics. It can hardly be argued that building nothing but zerglings and then swarming the enemy in the hopes of an early victory displays much advance planning or forethought, for example. On top of that, if it's a commonly used strategy, counters will be developed quickly and many players will find random matchup games repeating themselves constantly as less skilled opponents attempt to gain an easy win and are countered and then crushed due to sacrificing resources for the rush.

Stepping away from Starcraft for a moment...

A win is a win.

Speaking as someone who has actually encountered multiplayer games containing legitimately overpowered gear/abilities/builds/etc., this comes across as an absurd bottom line. Multiplayer games at their heart should encourage skill, and when you can hand a player who has just started something that will enable them to defeat highly skilled players a large portion of the time, the game becomes worthless at encouraging players to become better. This is not a specific statement regarding cheese builds in Starcraft, before you jump on me for taking some personal stake in the previous argument.

This looks super weird and interesting:

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Alright, after much leg-pulling I've rented another minecraft server for at LEAST three months
providing Agen doesn't destroy it with GIGABUILDS (ayep, not megabuilds) that crash ~everything~

Ip is Phishcraft.PlayAt.CH
It's running on FTB Direwolf20 pack 1.6.4 Phishcraft.PlayAt.CH v 1.0.14 (not the recommended build )

((it was the first version that added ExtraBees back in, okay?))

(((Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees)))

aw man I GOTTA join this time

e: well dang i think i probably did something wrong, because that direwolf pack closes itself when it tries to start up

FTB Launcher 1.3.4, Direwolf pack 1.0.14, right?

Is Minecraft still stupidly expensive?

yes and yes

edit: what exactly is happening with it?

if nothing seems to open after you launch it, just wait a while

edit2: Map

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Watching the console, everything loads well until it gets to a certain mod, I think? Then all the text goes pink and after a few seconds both the game and the console just close. I tried looking to see if it was still running in task manager/processes but I didn't see it.



I noticed that right before the console autocloses it gives a different message, but it stays up for a split second.

is it " [SEVERE] [Minecraft-Client] Realms: Server not available!"

because the same log happens to me and it works fine so uh....
try allocating more ram under the options tab?

Uhh, I don't think that's it. I tried giving it more RAM and it spat out some Java error at me before even starting up the game.

I tried screencapping the last bit of the log before it quits though.
Sorry it's semitransparent, I only barely managed to grab it.

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for some reason it's apparently saving the logs to a folder I installed FTB to when I used to play it with other friends? But I'm not using that version, it doesn't work anymore...

a quick google-fu of the "problematic frame" (atioglxx.dll) says..it might be graphics card drivers?

I tried playing the recommended build, it gave me the same error. I don't know anything about graphics driver stuff so. For now I give up, I guess.

so, winning doesn't matter, until it actually starts preventing the game from actually being played

so, winning DOES matter, but for different reasons besides actually being the goal of the game

for the sole purpose of dictating when the game actually stops being played, so that the game doesn't actually keep going forever, an end to which both sides attempt to reach on their own terms, even though those terms are largely irrelevant because the actual state of winning doesn't matter as long as the game does not end before the goal has been accomplished

but i still get bored of the sims after five minutes

I’m not sure I want to do an ethical analysis of trying to win. I feel like it depends on a lot of things. Too many things to account for.

But apparently there’s this guy who’s been frustrating a certain part of the Jeopardy! viewership by actually doing smart things with his dollars. That is, he’s intentionally hunted down the Daily Doubles and bet to tie in the final round—these two things are pretty much the only real leverage contestants get over the game, yet most contestants try to stick to their trivia guns instead of the more reliable and consequential realm of game theory.

Regardless of whether this is “sporting”, this sort of completely rational thinking tickles the bottom of my dark, dark heart.

not really anything wrong with that, the thing about jeopardy is that people can grab control at any time, so it's not even a factor in terms of ruining the game

i've had a few theories about how destroying the daily double can work in favor of a faster player, but if he's just bum rushing the questions and nailing them, i can't really fault him for the methodology

the one thing i cringe at when watching jeopardy is when a person clearly in the lead blows the lead on a double rather than electing to decline it when there's no point in risking the lead

I think this game theory stuff is really interesting! I read an article about a guy who essentially broke a game show in the 70s and had an uncontested winning streak, though I can't remember the name of it for the life of me.

I don't think there's anything "wrong" with strategies like that - if anything, they make the game more interesting for dweebs like me

Also he narrates Erfworld which counts for plenty of cool points in my book. I'm kinda surprised that more people don't do something as simple as googling "Jeopardy strategy". Or just know game theory already because (with academic quiz bowlers as my primary reference point), trivia people tend to know Lots of Things. This seems like a fairly logical thing to do for anybody with a vested interest in large sums of dollar dollar bill y'all.

Materialistically speaking, and framing it strictly in terms of extrinsic motivations, sure. But ludologically/psychologically speaking, I’m not sure it makes much difference. Some games are just very attractive to the sort of people whose intrinsic motivations could be best described as pwning noobs being somewhere on the Killer–Achiever continuum (going by the Bartle model; there are other models that describe a similar range), and among such peers, that hypercompetitive approach tends to be a mutually agreed-upon standard (and arguing about anticompetitiveness can be easily perceived as a part of that mindset!). At least from what I’ve seen, for people who enjoy doing this sort of gameplay, it’s not necessarily the end result so much as that that end result can be accomplished; extrinsic motivations are fleeting, but the shot at winning is eternal.

Anyway, some games have very little appeal to these sorts of players; surely you aren’t turned off of those?

What the fuck is a dot-pixel

What happens when your sales copy translator isn’t super familiar with gamer lingo, I guess.

In Japanese, dot is the normal word for pixel in all but the most anal of technical contexts.