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Mario meets Pareto

mayerowitz.io

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Re: Mario meets Pareto

#151

Post by OOPMan »

davemp wrote: post #131

This great visualization/article highlights one of my pet peeves with current game design--options for the sake of options. I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!" You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people'…

This is why I preferred Shadow Warrior 2 to Borderlands. Millions of randomly generated guns sounds nice, except they're mostly trash. I'd rather have the 70 hand-crafted options in SW2.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#152

Post by pphysch »

davemp wrote: post #131

This great visualization/article highlights one of my pet peeves with current game design--options for the sake of options. I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!" You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people'…

In the ARPG/Diablo genre, Path of Exile is one of the worst offenders. Each character progresses through a 2D locally-connected graph of over 1300 passive skill nodes, of which you only get to pick about 100, where the "undo" action is expensive or impossible.

That said, the sheer amount of options leads to a class of expert players and build-makers that normal players can rely on. I just wish the game itself provided more tools for navigating it (like an ingame build-guide system).

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#153

Post by simple10 »

superMayo wrote: post #91
simple10 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like svelte + three.js Svelte has some pretty nice built-in scroll animation support: https://svelte.dev/repl/051cd352ce284d15b55c91c8b30fa32f?ver...

Author here. I'm using Svelte, which is great for interactive applications. For the event handling I'm very influenced by what https://mlu-explain.github.io/ does. The 3d plot is made with Threejs through the Threlte wrapper. One challenge was animating the 20k points in the 3d plot, which is handled by a custom vertex shader.

Thanks for sharing the tech stack. It's a really impressive site.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#154

Post by hinkley »

davemp wrote: post #131

This great visualization/article highlights one of my pet peeves with current game design--options for the sake of options. I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!" You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people'…

Worse than that, it makes marks of some players. The serious player doesn’t just have experience and technique working for them, they can now start with a character that can beat the newbie with one hand tied behind their back.

We all know that guy you can’t play games with because he sucks all the fun out of it for anybody else. As a game seller this isn’t just bad, it’s stupid.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#155

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #132
davemp wrote: post #131

This great visualization/article highlights one of my pet peeves with current game design--options for the sake of options. I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!" You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people'…

It depends on why you play though; the "combinatorial explosion of overhead" is only a problem if you're trying to min/max, if you play for fun it's more "What character do I like" or "What wings do I find pretty". The most important thing: Don't tell others how to play. Don't tell them "you should pick X because it's the best" unless they explicitly ask for it. Let people play their own way, and don't push how you p…

In Mario Kart in particular, you might explicitly not want the fastest/highest acceleration cart (kart?) as a new player, especially if you're a younger or older player. Going fast is a handicap if you can't stay on the track at those speeds.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#156

Post by kzzzznot »

jmholla wrote: post #37

I always knew those little red tires were the best. Sadly, this misses the most important thing to me: style. And my love of Zelda. So I'm afraid I'll personally have to disregard all of this.

Well I always pick Koopa, who is apparently the worst. Although in my group of friends I win the most by far… I’ll keep with him to keep it fair :)

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#157

Post by gizmo »

kqr wrote: post #126

> A portfolio with low risks and high returns? [...] Of course, if you already know the exact weights Or! In this case, it reduces to a one-dimensional optimisation thanks to the structure of the problem. What we're optimising in portfolio selection is not the return of a single investment, but of a lifetime of investments. And thanks to compounding, that is a function of both risk and return. So we can find the opti…

Not quite, because one big input is the ratio of your investments to your annual savings. Large drawdowns are bad late in life, early in life they're not such a big deal. Kelly prohibits very profitable bets when they come with considerable risk of ruin (because you lose out on any future compounding when you zero out your wealth), but that is too conservative when you're young and your portfolio is small relative to your income.

The article even hints at this by observing that the discounted sum of future salaries are part of your current wealth. Which is exactly correct and also -- if you're young -- the most significant variable by several orders of magnitude. Curiously, the author understands this but doesn't care.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#158

Post by kzzzznot »

HiJon89 wrote: post #123

Really cool analysis and visualizations! Although there’s an interesting wrinkle with Mario Kart 8 + 200cc - most players don’t want speed over a certain level because you’re too fast to control. So rather than trying to maximize absolute speed stat you may want to minimize the delta from your optimal speed stat

Exactly. Handling and Acceleration are the most important factors at 200cc.

Acceleration because when (not if) you get hit/crash, you need to be able to catch up quickly.

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#159

Post by davemp »

kibwen wrote: post #150
davemp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indeed, like it or not, the idea that the game of Mario Kart (for example) is exclusively the part where you drive around the track is both simplistic and naive. It comes across as a values statement of the following form: "good games are only concerned with moment-to-moment mechanical execution and tests of reflexes, and not any of that other Skinner-box frippery". But (again, whether we like it or not), for a lot…

> I was mostly trying to say something along the lines of "solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay" Consider that Tetris is NP-hard. :) Giving the player optimization problems is one of the fundamental pillars of game design. For many, it's more fun to make a deck of cards in Magic or Hearthstone than to actually play the deck against an opponent.

I'm not here to argue about semantics. The first line of my OP said "options for the sake of options" and then "choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience". The comment you're replying to said "something along the lines of" to encourage readers not to get hung up on the exact wording.

I'd appreciate a bit of a more charitable interpretation of my responses.

Given the context, a more charitable interpretation would have been something like:

"solving NP-hard problems isn't good gameplay...*in and of itself*"

> Giving the player optimization problems is one of the fundamental pillars of game design.

Yes, but this is not what I'm talking about at all. I don't know how you're interpreting my position as being against optimization problems in games.

> Consider that Tetris is NP-hard. :)

Would you consider that the choices that make Tetris NP-hard significantly enhance the core game experience?

How about MtG or Hearthstone?

---

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Mario meets Pareto

#160

Post by goostavos »

sizzle wrote: post #147
davemp wrote: post #131

This great visualization/article highlights one of my pet peeves with current game design--options for the sake of options. I feel like the common trap for designers is to put too much stock in tag lines like "Over 700,000 different builds!" You're dumping a combinatorial explosion of overhead onto players. If all those choices don't significantly enhance the core game experience, you as a designer as wasting people'…

That’s why my go-to Mario kart is the N64 version. No bs just pick a character and go

Nah, Mario Kart 8 is great. You don't _need_ to min/max every stat. Actually, you specifically have to press a specific button to even see the stats at all. Otherwise, everything just appears to be cosmetic.

For the most part, once you've got your kart dialed it. It is still "pick your character and go". It's one of my goto games for "I want to do something for a few minutes to unwind" (which usually ends up with me more frustrated and on edge than unwound haha).

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