Kickstarter

Demo (via GOG)

Xenonauts 2 is a sequel to 2014's Xenonauts, a turn-based tactics game inspired by the original Xcom games.

I've never played the older games but I'm in love with the Xcom reboots, so I'm definitely keeping a close eye on his one. Any other Xcom fans here?

So I have a group of Discord buddies that we just had our first session last night, and it went pretty well. I used a pregen character that they had on Roll20, but feel like I missed out on creating a character. No one I know IRL really plays consistently, but after that session I am hooked. I want to get into it more, but don't know where to really start. If anyone has any newbie friendly tips/tricks on what I can read/get to learn more, I'd really appreciate it!

EDIT: Thanks for the tips everyone! I'll try to stop by my LGS this week and see what they say.

Mine's definitely Evan's Gambit. IF I can get a game with it I'm going to play it. Always leads to a fun, spicy game with enough tactical mess to make for a great blitz game. For any classical game though I'd probably just stick with open Italian systems but castling queenside and throwing pawns if they dare castle first.

How about you guys?

You can't talk about stupidity in corporate culture anymore - certainly on Reddit - due to the hoardes of people who will comment saying "They're a business, what do you expect" or occasionally "Capitalism at work" and general low-effort replies. Like yeah, I get it. I know why company x does greedy thing y. Obviously it's to make money. Your comment doesn't contribute to the discussion. Yes companies have to make money but that doesn't mean they should sacrifice all their morals to do it.

We're at roughly 7 days since the last weekly thread, so here's another! Imo we should have more regular threads like these, if anyone has ideas then drop them here! Personally I like the idea of doing "listening clubs," where we choose an album for the week, all listen to it, and have a regular discussion thread for every week. If there's any interest, I would love to run a hip hop focused one, though I could definitely do a lot of other genres if the desire was there. Anyway, drop a comment if anything like that sounds appealing to you!

Shamelessly copying my own prompt for this one:

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What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something!

Feel free to give recs or dicuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

In multiplayer games where there is open chat between teammates or worse, among all players there is rampant toxicity. It is known.

I think that most game companies believe that if they crack down too hard that they will lose their player base.

My belief is that the opposite would happen. A sincere effort (with human review) would require a HUGE initial outlay of resources but with the right punishment (30-day ban from ranked play for example) would nearly eliminate toxicity and also significantly reduce the need for human review.

DOTA did a half-assed measure in like 2015 or something and it worked really well for the time they kept it. But there was a serious change in people's attitudes when it got implemented. Games went from total-toxic to mildly-toxic.

I would bet that a game company that has a decent game (thinking mobas but FPS's probably involved too) such as Hots, Dota, or LOL, they would not LOSE playerbase, but instead gain a HUGE playerbase of people that just want to play games and know that if someone tells you that you are a non-team-playing motherfucker for choosing the hero you think best (but they don't).... they might get banned for 30 days... that might stop them from going off the rails and politely asking instead.

Anyway, I fucked your mom last night.

First of all: Desabafo is an idiom in Portuguese which means "to get things off your chest, when you're upset about something". I didn't find a one-word English equivalent, but, hey, at least your learnt something :P

Anyways, I'm a Brazilian man in my mid 20s and I can speak English and Spanish pretty well (at least, I think), but I don't get many opportunities to practice both languages verbally. I found this local group "poliglotas" which hang out in a restaurant every week for 2 hours to practice foreign languages (mostly English). I actually liked this group a lot and it's helping me get better at talking, each week there's a theme so we have something to guide the conversation

The thing is, yesterday's theme was "patriotism" and, as you can guess, the conversation got to politics pretty fast. And... it was weird...

The conversation started with Brazil vs US patriotism, but it quickly went to how the US border control policies are justifiable, how in the scandal about the children of immigrants being separated from their parents is the parent's fault. There were a few rebuttals mostly from me and one other guy

Then it went to the problems we have with Brazil and how it could be solved. The arguments presented were to inflate the sense of nationalism, taking votes away from people who they felt were not qualified to choose their own politics, one of them specifically feels that we need a dictatorship and gave compliments to people in the veins of "Rodrigo Duterte" the infamous guy from the Philippines and even mentioned things like how Hitler was great for Germany, just not the rest of the world (wtf). Needless to say, I didn't agree with anything about it and just decided to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the meeting

The most extremist one though did want to hear my opinion, which I said very non-confrontational way "we need stability, we can't keep changing our government whenever things go bad. We need to choose a path and stick with it" but I also took the opportunity to talk about the things we lose with a dictatorship: freedom of speech, transparency, people being alienated

And they countered by saying that in democracy people are alienated because of "fake news" and that giving rights to people is no good if they don't know how to use them. The worst argument in my opinion though is how an older woman said that our people are like children who can't take care of themselves, so they need a parent to give the rules and take care of them until their old enough to be able to take care of themselves

Their mindset border those of a conspiracy where democracy is actually hurting people and that we need some saviour to free us from some unknown enemy force. It really left a bad taste in my mouth, I think I'll keep going there because I don't think someone's political opinion defines who someone is, but it's a little hard to swallow this last experience I've had

Pheew, making this desabafo made me feel better :)

Thanks for reading, feel free to share your opinions about it or to make a desabafo of your own!

I was reading a discussion about this on here earlier today, and I've already lost it! 😬 Sorry if this is just creating more noise, but we clearly need better ways to find content. The search feature will go a long way, but here are some other ideas:

Tag search. On any topic with tags, the tags should be clickable links to URLs like https://tildes.net/tag/elder+scrolls. This page would show all topics that use that tag, with sort and filter options. There should be a way (maybe built into the search form) to type any tag and jump straight to this page.

Recently viewed topics list. Reddit shows a sidebar listing the last n posts you viewed. It's admittedly a little creepy seeing your history displayed like that, but it's a useful way to jump back into conversations for follow-up later. The old Reddit design had a "clear" button to delete the history, but curiously that is no longer present in the redesign. (Privacy features like that should not be overlooked here.)

Saved topics. Another feature from Reddit. Every post has a "Save" link below it, that adds the post to your personal saved posts list, which can reached from your profile. Saved post lists are only visible to the users that own them.

Repost detection. I really like how Ask MetaFilter helps posters make sure their content is fresh before they publish it. The submit button under the new post form is labeled "Preview" and clicking it shows what the post will look like before publishing it. This gives posters the opportunity to proofread and ensure their text formatting is correct. More importantly, the site scans the content of the post and displays a list of five possible existing posts that match it:

The following previously-posted questions might be related to the question you're asking. Please take a look before posting to see if any of these answer your question.

This flow adds an additional click before you can actually post, but I think it's for the best. The slowdown politely nudges you toward considering the quality and originality of what you're about to say, without being overbearing. The main MetaFilter site also checks all URLs you enter to see if anyone has posted them before. Note that these tools don't prevent anyone from posting, they just empower users to avoid reposting and reinforce good posting behaviors.

Repost flagging. I have a half-baked idea about allowing users to flag topics as reposts, but I haven't seen this implemented before. This would be separate from voting. A user wishing to flag a topic would be asked to provide the URL of an existing topic it duplicates. This wouldn't affect the topic itself, other than to add a small banner to the top of the page: "n users flagged this as a repost of the following topics: [list of links]". Then anyone would have the ability to [agree], [disagree], or append a link to the list. Public consensus would affect the future of the topic... if enough others agree the topic is redundant, it could be auto-deleted or just algorithmically prioritized lower than non-reposts. If enough disagree, the flag could be auto-removed from the topic. The usernames of the flaggers should be public, and there should be a way to view both a user's frequency of flagging and whether consensus agreed with those flags. Accountability would be important for this sort of system.

Ability to subscribe to users. I saw the other feature request for a "friend" mechanic. I agree with the commenters who said it would be too much like a social network. However, I could see a use case for a "Subscribe" button on a user's profile page, just like the ones on group pages. This would cause all topics posted by that user to be included in your main page, even if they are in groups you aren't subscribed to.

I'd be interested to hear your feedback on these suggestions, as well as other ideas specific to increasing content visibility.

When I joined, I was excited by a site that aims to be something different to reddit. However, it seems like there's a large influx of people who seem to either want a reddit 2.0, or are influenced by reddit culture enough that it carries over here.

Maybe limit the invites from reddit for a bit until the current set of members have some time to settle in?