If they were really "the hero", they'd follow the bare minimum of responsible disclosure best practices, and allow 90 days between privately alerting them of the issue and going public with it. Two weeks is absurd.

When Americans say "ranked choice voting", what they typically mean is Instant Runoff Voting. It's kinda the bare minimum you can have and actually consider your system democratic. Ireland actually uses the much better (but also much more complicated—on the back end, from the voters' perspective they have to do the same thing) system of Single Transferable Vote. A system that is not only preferential but also semi-proportional.

I just cannot get the “share results” copy/paste to work on here 🤦🏻‍♂️

The best way is to make sure each line ends with two spaces, but that you then only press "enter"/"return" once (so there is not a blank line in between).

Connections
Puzzle #497
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Skill 90/99
Uniqueness 1 in a Million

I think their target audience is a little older.

Technically it’s a couple of Tencent’s subsidiaries, TiMi and Level Infinite, but yeah. Disappointing that World’s Edge gave the licence to develop a game in their beloved franchise to a company that was always going to produce unplayable crap.

It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.

It's telling that they don't have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology. They do have a Discord, and I recently noticed on there the official devs are desperately calling for people to give more positive reviews.

So is Metro to Metro starting from arrival at the airport? Why the sometimes 50 minute, sometimes 55 minute add on, rather than the general 60 minute guideline?

And City to City does my suggestion of adding transportation to the airport?

I'm honestly impressed that someone who knows their shit as well as this guy clearly does did the analysis and presented quite a realisticly-achievable plan that managed to meet the completely aspirational goal I had of needing an average 200 km/h travel time for it to be viable for the average person.

26,000 people travelling this corridor every day makes this a complete no-brainer to build.

I don't really understand how he's arrived at his "plane time" in the comparison at the end. My own searching suggests he's added on some random amounts.

Personally, if I were doing the comparison, I would add a minimum of 1 hour to the plane time to account for the recommended 1 hour early arrival at the airport. Then I'd add on some amount extra to account for the fact that airports are typically less-centrally located than central train stations. Maybe use average public transport time from the centre of the CBD (where it takes you if you just put "Sydney" etc. into Google Maps) to the airport. You can do the same for the rail too if you like. That would improve how rail looks, especially on the Melbourne–Canberra route where it would become properly competitive.

I dunno the difference between "Metro to Metro" and "City to City" as he puts it. Plane time increases for some reason, but rail time doesn't.

Yeah I find the kind of messaging in the headline here really eye-rolling. No, a new (bad) instalment in a franchise doesn't make me stop enjoying the older entries. The Star Wars sequels don't take away from the original hexalogy & Clone Wars.

The review itself here though is really good. The game is really, really bad, and the author of this review absolutely nails the reasons why.

Yeah I understand the lack of clarity in that statement, and I have no doubt that if he could get away with it he'd get rid of preferential voting in its entirety. But if you look at the context where the LNP has been pointing to the Fitzgerald Inquiry, and the comments by the Brisbane Lord Mayor, and the fact that Australians on the whole are very proud of our preferential voting system, he's definitely only proposing switching to optional preferential. Which is dangerous enough, considering how effective the LNP's "just vote 1" campaigns have been at Council elections.

In general I don't mind getting rid of alignment. I just think that D&D did a really clumsy job of it. Look at the Pathfinder 2e remaster for a much better way to go about it. Paizo removed alignment in a way that actually improved the flavour and variety of the game.

But with the 5e tieflings in particular, removing that one paragraph from their statblock completely takes out a lot of really evocative ideas. It was also accompanied by the removal of most of the sidebar flavour text for tieflings, which previously read:

Mutual Mistrust

People tend to be suspicious of tieflings, assuming that their infernal heritage has left its mark on their personality and morality, not just their appearance. Shopkeepers keep a close eye on their goods when tieflings enter their stores, the town watch might follow a tiefling around for a while, and demagogues blame tieflings for strange happenings. The reality, though, is that a tiefling’s bloodline doesn’t affect his or her personality to any great degree. Years of dealing with mistrust does leave its mark on most tieflings, and they respond to it in different ways. Some choose to live up to the wicked stereotype, but others are virtuous. Most are simply very aware of how people respond to them. After dealing with this mistrust throughout youth, a tiefling often develops the ability to overcome prejudice through charm or intimidation.

That got cut down to the far more brand-safe but dead boring:

Met With Mistrust

Ignorant people tend to be suspicious of tieflings, assuming that their infernal heritage has left its mark on their personality and morality, not just their appearance. The reality is that a tiefling’s bloodline doesn’t affect their personality. They are gifted with magic from the infernal realms but chart their own course in life.

Because tieflings were my absolute favourite race in D&D (thanks in no small part to Ms Evans' excellent writing), I was really, really disappointed by the changes. Those changes, as well as all the others that came out around the same time (removing whole pages of content that had already been purchased without any recourse), played no small part in my decision to switch over to Pathfinder

It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.

It's telling that they don't have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology. They do have a Discord, and I recently noticed on there the official devs are desperately calling for people to give more positive reviews.

Connections
Puzzle #496
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Skill 97/99
Uniqueness 1 in 93

Can't believe it. I thought I was guessing a reverse rainbow, but then got the easiest 3 in completely the wrong order.

This kind of stuff? None. It's shockingly bad.

But a real Age of Empires game? Hells yes. This was announced not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be successful (at least critically—no idea how they're doing commercially). So I thought that they had cracked a way to do satisfying RTS gameplay on a mobile device. It'd be great to be able to play a quick Skirmish on the bus, or while spending time away from home without my computer.

So when a few aoe creators showed previews of the game back in February this year, I was rather surprised and very disappointed to see that the game has absolutely zero resemblance to an Age game. That the worst fears of it being a shitty rip-off were completely true. Thanks to those previews, I was not surprised on release this week—though the extent of just how bad even the narrative side of this is was still overwhelming.

I don't think so, why? I only played it very briefly, but I thought it had a small but happy fanbase still playing on third-party servers.

It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.

It's telling that they don't have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology.

I can’t think of any video game that fits that description. But I wish I got into RPGs earlier. My first role playing experience was near the end of my first year of uni. I wish I could have played D&D or other RPGs from when I was in high school. They’re such a blast.

Connections
Puzzle #495
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Skill 95/99
Uniqueness 1 in 1,501

I spent waaay too long on this today. Tried to get it working with a certain distractor

::: spoiler Distractor The poker terms :::

I've been very heavily involved with https://forums.ageofempires.com/ since Reddit kicked the bucket. I don't love the fact that it's controlled by a company with a very obvious bias, but apart from an overzealous language filter they seem to be pretty good at allowing very strong criticism...better than I've seen some companies that run their own subreddits be, anyway.