switchboard_pete

the tld is .uk in that case

just take the L good lord

giving somebody a gift card for a product or service you think they specifically will enjoy is objectively more personal than giving them cash, yes

e.g., starfield would’ve been a very different game had you been able to fly space -> surface, and had there been vehicles to do actual exploring with

it would’ve completely changed the way the game plays, and opened up new possibilities for design. it also would’ve removed many of the oft-criticized loading screens and made the whole experience flow better.

but they can’t do any of that, because the engine isn’t good enough to support it.

sometimes you can’t make a choice because the engine says no

Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator

even in your ideal world where they perfect the world, quests and characters, tes 6 is still going to suck if core gameplay plays the same as skyrim, which played the same as oblivion

they can’t improve that core gameplay without a better engine

new vegas and london are popular in the same way 1 and 2 are popular, which is “not mainstream enough to sustain a studio like bethesda”.

which is historically how they made up the difference between the lackluster gameplay

you and i must have been playing different bethesda games, because none of them have been particularly interesting story-wise

the average player doesn’t care about crunchy rpg systems. they do care if the core gameplay would’ve been outdated in 2010.

bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.

even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1

the writing, yes

but if their engine is “perfectly tuned” then that means their engine is informing their design

they can’t make good design choices because they have to work within the limitations of an over-fitted engine

They’ve probably also put considerable work into the next project already

fallout 4 was 9 years ago, and people wanted them to switch to a new engine then

you’re right, of course, but good lord have they had ample time to course correct since then

“perfectly tuned” means their game engine is coupled to their game design, which yeah, more or less makes genuine creativity impossible

not to mention the psychological factors, like the hurdle of convincing higher ups to try something new when simply not doing that is 10x less work

counterpoint: if it isn’t the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i’m not counting “let’s just copy what we designed last time” as design), and that’s worse

josh sawyer has said their engine has the best content creation pipeline he’s worked with, which is probably why they’re reluctant to give it up

but surely at this point they have to be doing something in the background to move to a different one. i seriously doubt they didn’t try to get space-to-surface flight working, but evidently the engine didn’t let them…which is more or less the same story as every other time they’ve tried to break out of the mold they’ve carved for themselves. it always ends up a janky mess.

whenever they build out actual new mechanics for the engine, like the settlement building in fo4, or the space flight in starfield, they’re always just grafted on, rather than being interwoven with existing systems.

i see you realized that building factories isn’t free

congratulations

If you actually responded to what I said rather than deflecting you might learn something.

restate your point if you fluffed it up the first time, but no, what you provided initially was devoid of anything worth responding to

You keep repeating yourself rather than look at what I’ve already said.

because what you’ve said is nonsense that doesn’t address anything i’m saying

let’s keep this real simple: do you agree or not with the fact that spending resources to set up a factory in location A means you, right now, have fewer resources to spend setting up a factory in location B?

if no, where do the additional resources come from in the here and now? and, more importantly, why has china not already constructed an infinite number of factories?

I directly responded to the comparison to US offshoring that you made to explain why this is different.

and your argument boiled down “us bad china good”

If you took ten seconds to think about it, having any financial component makes my point correct and yours incorrect.

genuinely, what are you talking about?

• you can’t invest in factories abroad without by definition investing less in factories at home because resources are finite
• us outsourcing started with “it’s just supplemental” too, so you can’t use that as a bulwark against any notion of further outsourcing

and you’re coming at me to say that if money changes hands then that’s not the case?

my guy i already had the last word of consequence like 5 posts back when you stopped actually responding to things i was saying in a coherent way and started arguing with china

since then it’s all been for the love of the game

If you have constant demand for the good

quite literally, you’re now arguing with your own hypothetical

“As long as your demand is growing” -> not constant demand

but it doesn’t matter because i foresaw your difficulty with this one, and addressed both the case of constant demand and growing demand

all you do is just regurgitate the same nonsense over and over

maybe check your post history i think the call might be coming from inside the house on this one

you are comically bad at backing up a worldview you evidently hold so strongly, and it’s utterly fascinating to me

Having more apples doesn’t make your existing apples less valuable.

having a surplus of apples means you value an individual apple less, yes

that’s how the concept of “having things” works

As long as your demand is growing ALL your factories are just as valuable.

so if 20% of your factories are now somewhere else, whereas before it was 0%, then the share of value taken up by domestic factories has decreased, as has the share of demand they’re managing to satisfy by domestic factories

if china completely stops building new factories at home, and in 30 years 90% of their factories are abroad, and 10% are at home, would you say their industrial base had been “hollowed out”, even though the absolute number of factories at home is the same?

If you can’t even understand what the article says then there’s no point having further discussion.

i pointed out that there was no point discussing this further when you said that china was wrong about their own economy, but for some reason you insisted on it

It’s not an economy where the market makes decisions where labor and resources are allocated. The government decides that and the market acts as an allocator within that context.

this is like saying “the government doesn’t decide that; steve from the finance department decides that”, or “the market doesn’t decide that; a distributed network of private investors decides that”

if the government bases their decisions off the market, then the market is the one making those decisions, just like steve is making his decisions based on what he’s been told to do from the government, and just like investors are making their decisions based on what they think the market is telling them to do

you can quibble about how the same market effects will produce different results, but the result is still a market economy

i’m so excited for your next fruit analogy that accidentally explains why you’re wrong

If I have two apples and I buy a third apple then I’m not less invested in the two apples I already had. Let me know if I need to explain this in simpler term for you.

you just gave me an example that proved my point

if you have two apples, you can afford to lose one of those apples less than if you had three apples. try again.

you also probably wouldn’t spend a decade obtaining an orange if you were only interested in your two apples forever and ever.

you also replied to the bit that i explicitly called out as not relevant, which is hilarious

“if you only have time to go to one shop, then going to the grape shop means you can’t go to the apple shop”

did it get through to you? are you about to reply telling me that any shop that sells grapes would realistically also sell apples or something? that seems in line with the quality of debate you’ve been providing thus far.

Well China doesn’t say that, and linked you an article explaining what China actually says.

literally linked you a source referencing china explaining their own economy

and again, the interpretation you linked to isn’t mutually exclusive with “market economy”

China is increasing capacity to supplement the domestic capacity.

being less dependent on a thing automatically makes you less invested in a thing, but this is besides the point

if you spend decades of effort ramping up manufacturing in one location (away), then that’s decades of effort you didn’t spend ramping up manufacturing in another location (at home)

i literally cannot fathom how you’re so furious to be wrong that you’re still arguing contrary to that

I’m arguing that Chinese understand how their economy works better than an ignorant internet troll.

well china say their economy is a market economy, and you say otherwise, so i guess this puts you firmly in the ignorant internet troll camp

This is not a long thread, go back and read it instead of making vapid replies here.

your last three replies haven’t even been making an argument. they’ve just been quibbling over some definitions you’re wrong about, and shooting yourself in the foot by making my case for me.

what are you even doing here?

If by that you mean China spends decades building out manufacturing capacity and setting up supply chains then sure.

i’m sitting here arguing that china has invested more than zero in setting up external manufacturing, then suddenly you forget what your point is, and emphasize just how much china has invested in setting up external manufacturing

you’re so absolutely rabid to just disagree with anything i say, you’re willing to render the chain of your argument completely incoherent to do it

yes, china spending decades building out supply chains for external manufacturing inherently means they’re less invested in domestic industry, or they wouldn’t spend decades to do it

I’ve literally provided you with the source explaining the context of markets within the Chinese economy and explained why your understanding is superficial.

you’re arguing with china’s interpretation of their own economy by providing a non-mutually exclusive definition

good job

then you’ll see that I’ve addressed your nonsense already

again, combined with the “LMFAO” above this is completely incoherent

maybe work on addressing the argument i’ve spelled out to you multiple times rather than falling back on the tried and true “well your reading comprehension is bad” like we’re 12 year olds arguing in the youtube comments section

if you’re so sure you’ve addressed it, quote it, and i’ll do the reading comprehension for you and explain to you why the thing you quoted isn’t actually addressing anything

Foreign direct investment is not the same as deindustrializing your own country

and as i said at the outset, “we’re just investing elsewhere” is how us outsourcing started

“they’re not doing it at the expense of hollowing out their domestic industry” is a completely baseless claim when following an equivalent timescale the same would have been true about the us

What do you think economic efficiency is?

ratio between resources expended to resources produced

The expectation is that you engage critically so that you can match up the source with the part they are talking about.

they were using the source to argue that china is intentionally moving away from private ownership. the source saying that the move is unintentional is absolutely materially relevant, and it’s laughable that you’d accuse me of failing to engage critically when you missed that.