Squiddles

There’s something called “Brook’s Law” that basically observes that a software project which onboards more developers in order to catch up will fall further behind. I hope they’re careful about how they allocate new developers or they’ll end up doing a year of onboarding, rewriting core code, and have no meaningful updates for 6-12 months. I know they have the resources to spare, and that scenario worked out okay for Valheim, but I hope the game doesn’t lose momentum because they overhire or don’t allocate enough senior devs to continue feature development while they catch the new devs up to speed.

Edit to add: I don’t think it actually matters in this instance if they don’t have a large player base by the time the game is feature complete. They don’t have continuous revenue streams like a live service game, so hiring more devs is ultimately just about making sure they have enough talent to make good on their early access promises. The company could probably dissolve tomorrow and all the staff could live the rest of their lives in luxury never working again. It’d be a dick move, but they already sold an insane number of copies.

Sensory processing disorder associated with autism is exactly what came to my mind because it’s exactly what I deal with. I usually shut down instead of melting down, but kids playing at anything past a barely-audible level is extremely difficult for me. Other attention-grabbing noises are also difficult, like dogs barking, car doors closing, people yelling, etc., and other stimuli cause me to shut down too, like dogs jumping/breathing on me (basically everything about dogs, unfortunately) or someone touching the back of my head/neck.

It took a lot of research into how my sensory processing reacts to different things, and I still struggle frequently, but I’m a father now and most days I’m very happy about it. I have noise canceling headphones for when I get overwhelmed, and I keep a clicky mechanical keyboard switch and barrette in my pocket to fiddle with, which helps a lot.

OP, I can obviously only speak from my own experiences, but I think dissecting what exactly causes these sudden emotional bursts and finding sensory distraction or blocking techniques to dampen them might work for you too. Headphones are a godsend.

Edit: Definitely seek a professional opinion (if possible for you) and look into misophonia, especially if specific sounds are your only issue. I just wanted to provide my perspective because for me the exact same issue the original post describes was part of a broader thing that needed addressing.

Definitely second Dyson Sphere Program! I’m not at all interested in the combat (it’s optional), but now that they have that completed they’ll be updating other features too. I’m hundreds of hours in and still come back to it.

I don’t even think you need one for eggs necessarily. I switched from PTFE nonstick to all metal (stainless/carbon steel and cast iron) a few years back. Eggs were no problem once I figured out heat control. I cook scrambled eggs and omelettes every week with no sticking.

I did eventually get a ceramic nonstick for making soft tofu in a sticky sauce. Definitely don’t try that in a stainless steel pan. It worked okay in the carbon steel wok, but was obnoxious to clean.

Broadly, I agree with what you’re saying. Totally just devil’s advocate-ing and speculating to provoke thought, so feel free to ignore. I wonder if the enormous number of games available plays into this. I can almost always dig around and find at least one 10/10 game from the last couple of years that I haven’t played which is already on sale for cheap. Comparing that to a 7/10 game that just came out at full price… I’d almost certainly enjoy the 7/10 game, but I’d spend less money and likely have more fun with the 10/10. The newness factor may not be enough to bump the 7/10 game to the top of the queue.

With so many great games available an 8/10 might actually feel like a logical minimum for a lot of people, which may influence the scale that reviewers use. If people tend to ignore games with 7- scores and a reviewer feels that a game is good enough that it deserves attention, they may be tempted to bump it up to 8/10 just to get it on radars.

Meanwhile, back in the day there wasn’t such a glut of games to choose from. And with better QoL standards, common UX principles, code samples, and tools/engines, games may legitimately just be better on average than they used to be, making it fiddly to try to retrofit review scores onto the same bell curve as older games. To reverse it, I can see how an 8/10 game released in 1995 might be scored significantly worse by modern reviewers for lack of QoL/UX features, controls, presentation style, etc, or even just be scored lower because in modern times it would lack the novelty it had at the time it was released.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, even though I was critical! Sure, I have no disagreement with anything you said in your reply. I’m also involved in hobbies where bad information can hurt people (including canning and foraging for mushrooms), and I’m obviously against knowledgeable people being removed from positions of authority in these communities. This post bolds the text about being worried that new mods may miss something that the old mods wouldn’t, which could lead to someone getting hurt. I saw that, and that a couple of early comments latched onto it as a focus. I had broccoli in a wok that I needed to get back to and just fired off a quick comment as a bit of infernal advocacy that the replacement of mod powers probably isn’t as dire as the quote makes it sound.

I mean, Reddit deserves to be punished, and there are many reasons to be upset (I personally shredded all my contributions and deleted my account in protest), but I kinda feel like the canning safety issue might be overblown. Nothing is stopping them from staying and calling out unsafe recipes with comments/in association with the new moderators. Sure, they have to go through the new mods to fully remove things, and their removal in the first place raises significant ethical questions, but calling this a safety issue because “someone else could get it wrong” seems like they’re reaching.