It’s a nice game, probably one of the best RTS projects out there. It was probably even better 10 years ago. That about must’ve been it’s peak more or less. Maybe a bit more.

I’ve heard that for people to be teachable they have to feel safe. Feeling afraid makes your body enter a defensive stance and this includes not only resisting harm but also resisting knowledge transfer. I assume that’s why people who struggle with a subject at school sometimes have a difficult time catching up even when with tutoring.

It would then be similar to how you can’t convince a stranger who believes in wrong things - controversial topics cause stressful situations and when you’re seen as an enemy their brain goes into a defensive mode, distrusting you and not letting new information in. You first have to build up a certain level of trust and mutual understanding.

Maybe that’s nothing new. Either way, this picture reminded me of that.

This reminds me of “Fun to imagine with Richard Feynman” (Youtube link)

In it he said that he thinks people who find science dull lose out on a lot of pleasure. Then he goes on to explain some of the physics behind things we encounter everyday.

I feel like comparing OTTD to OpenLoco is a bit similar to comparing Freeciv to Freecol. OTTD and Freeciv just had so much more popularity and development. But OpenLoco and Freecol are still nice to try.

Of course! TTD and Locomotion were developed by the same person. From my understanding Locomotion is closer to the Roller Coaster Tycoon engine and UI. Also I think I remember reading an interview in which Chris Sawyer said Locomotion had the cleanest code out of the three.

On that note, considering the original engines are similar I wonder if OpenRCT2 and OpenLoco have any big similarities in the code base as well…

Very true, but only the fact that the game had such an incredible and easy to use map editor was the reason this was possible.

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I’m aware of that and also see the problem, but argue that that’s partially because most people just aren’t used to this. People’s actions depend a lot on what they consider the norm. Take waiters or other service people as an example - in some cultures it’s usual to tip them, in others it’s unusual or even frowned upon.

You would have to at least have a base minimum purchase price and then accept tips on top.

That’s also fine. If the initial price were lower than other comparable games then I assume that more people could be convinced to tip. Or even just if a company is very open about their work / income and dedicated to communicating to their players. I think there’s already some companies like that, though perhaps not necessarily the big ones.

That’s where work contracts can help. Any form of tipping and how it is split would have to be handled by a contract anyway.

He’s not talking about donations though, he’s talking about paying full price THEN tipping.

I’m aware of that. The “Pay what you want.” concept mentioned in my first paragraph was its own idea/suggestion/thought, since it kinda fits the topic. It’s a different thing.

It’s a blatant excuse to pay developers less while placing financial guilt on the people paying for the product. It’s the same way tipping at a restaurant works.

Not really, really good video games take months or even years to complete, so your developers will want to be paid for that time before they become profitable. At restaurants the initial investment isn’t quite as high, as far as wages are concerned. I’d argue that you get tipped before even getting your first monthly paycheck. That can not be the case for video game tips.

I assume software developers and other people in the IT sector are also in higher demand than waiters, so they don’t have it quite as bad as waiters. That’s why I think they’re not comparable.

That said, I do believe that a company that is open about the tips it receives could be interesting for developers. If I saw that tips were actually split evenly among all the employees and their work hours then I think it’d be worth considering applying there. Though I guess for fairness those tips should even be paid out if employees quit or get kicked out so you’d have to track how much each person contributed to each product and that could be a bit of a bureaucratic hassle.

I think the concept of “Pay what you want.” is a very friendly approach to this. It already exists on platforms like itch.io and some free to play games financed through donations, like Dwarf Fortress, also became extremely popular. Humble Bundles are also pretty famous for this. And of course kickstarters do something a bit similar to this.

Personally I’d love to see donation buttons/infos especially for all the free music and games that exist out there. But I want to make sure my donations reach the people who actually worked on it, so I dislike products like paypal or patreon where a portion of the money goes to men in the middle and their managers/owners, etc. A bank account number or something along those lines where I can transfer money a bit more directly would be nice, but some creators only provide paypal buttons, so I won’t donate.

But you can easily test this yourself: Go and try to create a new Discord account without a phone number. Then try to use it.

I did and I could use it.

Maybe it’s regional? Or they have different behavior based on your email address provider?

Yeah or maybe it’s based on a cookie or IP ranges or other forms of tracking.

Yeah so just to clarify I totally believe you when you say that an account can technically get flagged. However, I don’t believe that “New ones don’t work without [a phone number]” and I also don’t believe that every account will be flagged eventually like the other commenter mentioned.

Remember, the initial comment I questioned was saying that “If you want to use Discord nowadays you need a valid phone number”.

you just have to manage to not let your account flagged

That seems to be very easy. I’ve been using it for over half a decade, am a member on dozens of very different servers, interacted with hundreds of people, wrote tens of thousands of messages - I actually checked all those numbers - and participated in discussions about all kinds of topics. My assumption is that the threshold for this sort of flag is set really high. Either that or it’s different based on where you live, maybe based on laws or politics or such.

New accounts work perfectly fine without a phone number as well. Only certain servers require one. It’s an option in servers settings. It could also be a regional thing.

It’s interesting how the truth gets downvoted while misleading information gets upvoted. Apparently people like randomly clicking buttons without verifying anything. That seems like it could be really harmful. Since votes are public information, maybe there’s a way to play around with that.

If you want to use Discord nowadays you need a valid phone number, that’s it.

No you don’t. I can use it just fine without a phone number added.