Unfortunately, a lot of strong chess players do not enjoy playing Chess960 because we've already invested hundreds of hours into learning openings and how those openings transition into a middlegame. While it's certainly fair (position is the same for both sides), it gives positions which are almost impossible to evaluate. This is exciting for spectators, but for me it's excruciatingly nerve-wracking. I can't play it.
I spent hours going through this list on wiki of chess variants. are there any on there that sound compelling to you or less nerve racking? there are even historical variants I've heard of, like one from the mongolian empire where there were "fortress" squares that were immune from attack. theres also a gimick version that sounds fun called "atomic chess" where when a piece dies, it takes out surrounding squares. and another called monster chess where white plays with only 4 pawns and their king, black has all their pieces, but white moves twice per turn.
I've played a lot of chess variants of various levels of sophistication. Here's one due to a friend of mine that I've been enjoying recently:
- normal chess, except you can't move the same piece your opponent just moved. So if I move a pawn, you must move a king/queen/bishop/rook/knight.
- check and checkmate are as normal, no need to capture the king. It's checkmate if the only move that would stop check is to move the forbidden piece. Stalemate also happens - king and queen is not enough to mate unless the kings are fortunately placed.
- castling is a king move
- pawn promotion counts as a pawn move when promoting, but a move with the promoted piece when considering the next player's move
- Black's e-pawn starts on e6 (alternatively, both players start the game with one free move)
My friend invented this as a way to play against beginners, where he plays with this restriction unknown to them. We refined it into an interesting competitive variant.
In regular chess it's incidental. It only comes up in relation to the touch-move rule and similar rules. And even there it's given special treatment: if you touch your king, then your rook, you must castle on that side if it's legal, instead of making any other legal king move.
In this variant, whether castling is considered a king move or a rook move or both has an effect on which moves are legal, so it needs to be spelt out.
I enjoy many chess variants. Atomic chess is quite fun (in 2012 or so a friend and I created an opening book to find forcing lines for White, where Black must know the correct line or lose by force). I have spent hundreds of hours playing bughouse, especially playing both boards against a normal team (which is a very fun way to play for stronger players). The difference is that none of these variants make a claim to be a replacement for normal chess. The seriousness of chess960 is exactly why I don't like it. Bughouse is not intended to be taken seriously.
i think your excessively opposed to this. a simple solution that records all the games has obvious benefits. market is probably too small anyway though, i don't see carbon copies going away any time soon.
To the contrary, many chess players are opposed to the increasing computerization of the game. Computers have already devastated opening theory (by finding solutions to difficult lines and forced draws in others) and made cheating 100x easier, requiring draconian monitoring at tournaments just to keep them fair. Even if a surveillance camera could track every game and create a scoresheet for every game in a tournament (which I strongly doubt is possible), this is the kind of thing I want out of the playing hall.
This isn't a computerization of the game, its a computerization of the recording of the game. Big difference and has nothing to do with computer chess engines. It could be used to detect cheating by comparing played moves to engine lines. Also a board camera isn't the the only way this could be implemented, rfid's in the pieces or a pressure sensitive board would both work. Players could still take their own game notes. It would also eliminate errors in the recording of the game and provide records for blitz and time pressure situations.
This makes no difference. Players are required to keep notation in tournament games, and the use of external software (like what is used at the top boards at some tournaments) does not absolve the players of this responsibility. Writing down the moves of the game as it is being played is a major part of playing chess, and it is one of the most important things for players to learn because it directly improves play (even disregarding reviewing the games afterwards!).
Players are required to keep notation in tournament games, and the use of external software ... does not absolve the players of this responsibility
New technology can change the rules. I'm not sure about FIDE, I'm a former USCF TD. The USCF began allowing digital scoresheets many years ago. No doubt sponsorship from Monroi played a roll in the rule change, but it happened none the less. I can easily see the use of digital chessboards eventually eliminating the requirement to manually write moves down.
There are also many instances where players are not required to notate (at least under USCF rules). Like when a player's time remaining drops below 5min in sudden death time controls. When a player can't read or write. Blind, or other handicapped players. And blitz games.
At many of my tournaments it was pretty routine for parents to set up video cameras to record the games because the player's were too young to read or write.
I am a chess professional, although more as a teacher than a player, so I have a lot of experience in this field. As caro_douglos pointed out, it slows down the initial reaction to opponent's moves, which is one reason why it instantly improves performance for new players. It forces the player to settle into a certain rhythm of play which prevents silly mistakes.
It is also permitted (and encouraged) to write down the time on the clock after each move, and to record all draw offers, both of which are valuable information during and after the game. If one of my goals is to grind down my opponent's clock in a complex position where I have the initiative, seeing how much more time he is using on average gives me an idea of how long I need to maintain the tension to gain a sufficient time advantage. For example, in a game where both players start with two hours, entering the endgame with 1 hour versus my opponent's 15 minutes is an enormous advantage, even in a position which should otherwise be drawn with perfect play.
Also, in some time controls, players gain extra time after a certain move (generally the 40th), so it can be very important to know exactly when you're going to get that extra hour. These time controls are less common than they used to be.
I have students as young as 5 years old learn how to keep notation after only a few weeks of learning chess. It is a very important skill.
When it comes to studying for an upcoming tournament match you will know who your opponent is so you have the ability to study up on their previous play. Maybe they play a certain style against your mainline go-to that you can exploit.
I have bad news for you: Fallout 4 is an incredible game the first time, but the second time through you notice that the game has very little depth. I had a blast the first time, but couldn't force myself to finish a second. I say this as someone who beat New Vegas at least a dozen times.
Fallout 4 has tons of options that are flavorful and make you feel like you live in a dynamic world, right up until you realize there's not much actual dynamic content.
That is a shame. But Fallout 2 had ... zero dynamic content? It was absolutely the same scripted events and environments every time, with the exception of random encounters, which I never prioritized "farming".
New Vegas was a special beast, with its myraid choices and great writing. I will have to replay that. But FO4 on survival mode is a great experience, with plenty of danger and tradeoffs, and so much that I literally cannot do everything (I fail quests just due to lack of fast travel sometimes). And for that, I can thank Bethesda for a new kind of "more real" fallout experience.
This is true, but the reason why Fallout 2 is considered great (and why so is New Vegas), was in number possible paths that player can take during gameplay. Writing in those games was all about presenting gray and grayer dilemmas to the player and leaving it up to them to follow quest lines for either of those.
It was rarely things like "take the lost kitten from a tree or set the tree on fire" types of "good and evil" pseudo-dilemmas that end with player being a paragon of justice or chaotic evil, something that keeps plaguing role-playing games to this day.
Fallout 3 doesn't get enough credit here. Maybe not the whole main quest, but there are tons of side quests that get this for me. Some that I remember toiling over are whether to set Harold on fire and what to do about the Pitt considering I thought the leader was had a set timeline and seemed trustworthy
Not just dynamic content-- It allowed you to approach problems in different ways. You could talk your way out of things, or sneak around, go in guns blazing. In FO4 you have the same skills, but the game consistently forces you into a firefight.
Depends what you call dynamic. The way you handle gecko changes the interaction that you can have later for sure, and the geopolitics of the surrounding area. Same for new Reno.
In Fallout 1, the entire Necropolis arc is time dependent, and what you can do in there depends of the time you arrive: the Vault Dweller can save Necropolis from the slaughter by killing the Master before the Lieutenant and before 25 March 2162 but after 110 days have passed.
That's true, Bethesda are focusing on the wrong things since they bought the IP, of the "new" fallouts, only New Vegas is more than so-so, and it was because it was outsourced. I am hyping myself up for Wasteland 3 as thetrue spiritual successor of the original masterpieces.
After Oblivion, Bethesda's games become sandbox themeparks where you can do a lot of stuff with little substance while chipping away any RPG mechanics.
I think Oblivion's success despite its shortcomings on the RPG side gave them the message that this works and Skyrim's success reinforced it even further.
Though personally i find Morrowind the best of their games by far, especially on the writing side (not a surprise considering the writers they had - and lost right after Morrowind). Not as chaotic and repetitive as Daggerfall and Arena's random generator-based worlds, yet still with solid RPG mechanics, writing and exploration.
I own Wasteland 2 but I haven't been able to make myself play it. It's my own failing, but it's just so old-school. It's very hard to find a game that keeps old-school charm without the old-school mechanics.
I recently started again after an abandoned attempt to play it when it came out. Surprisingly, it does not look or play bad at all, it is just unapologetically hard game, if you build your party the wrong way, you won't be able to progress. Hopefully with 3 they will balance it out better. You should also take a peek at Metro: Exodus, if first person post-apocalypse is your thing. Short and far from trully open world, but very well made and atmospheric
I didn't find it hard, I just found it boring. With some truly terrible design choices because it was trying too hard to be oldskool. It seemed to be pretty easy if you min-maxed your characters.
I remember getting to the 2nd map (Los Angles?) and the first mission was this huge map which was hardly used. Massive waste of my time baby sitting and watching people walk.
And that was when I had enough of the game designers wasting my time so much and stopped.
Tyranny's got a pretty good balance of old-school CRPG feel without old-school difficulty or unfairness. Good gimmick & setting, and good-enough story, to boot.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Hong Kong are also really good. I hear "Returns" was OK but not nearly as good as those, haven't bothered with it.
Divinity: Original Sin seemed really promising but I got sick of it crashing like 1/hr and dropped it.
Perspective: aging former gamer whose access to long gaming sessions for deep single-player stuff is now tightly restricted by adult responsibilities—i.e., kids.
Favorite older games of that sort, for reference, are Baldur's Gate, FO1 and (especially) 2, Arcanum, and (stretching "that sort" a bit) Darklands. Still haven't beaten Planescape: Torment after my game started repeatably crashing ~2/3 of the way through years ago, but that was really good.
Seconding the Shadowrun games from Harebrained Schemes. The mechanics in the first one (SR: Returns) are a bit meh, decking kindof sucks, but the story is Pretty Darned Good. Dragonfall follows up with adding a GREAT set of supporting characters, and adds some neat mechanics. Hong Kong is fantastically done, and mixes the best of both.
The story lines are linear, but the stories are rather good. There's a lot of user generated content, and some are OK, but none of them are as good as the original. (I _think_ someone remade the original game's campaign in the Hong Kong engine, but don't recall for sure.)
Shadowrun: I can only recommend using mods to play returns in HK or DF (iirc you need the game files of returns). While it’s a somewhat linear story, the story itself is still amazing and feels more Shadowrun to me than the others. Playing it as a mod ensures you get the QoL improvements of the later games.
DoS 1/2: Never had any crash in either game and played both from release on.
I agree that Returns wasn't as good as Dragonfall (I've yet to play HK), but I feel that the plot is more focused, as there's not that 'collect money' part in the middle, like in DF, which slow down everything. And I've felt the ambiance way better in Returns (of course that point is a big YMMV).
Yeah I actually think 2 may have been the one I tried, not 1. IIRC I played it on Mac (Intel graphics) and my Windows-using friends reported no such problems. So it was probably just my machine, but regardless, it seemed good but I can't personally provide a strong recommendation for it as I only made it a few hours in.
Halfway through my second playthrough of Fallout 4, I realized that I had been playing (more or less) the same game for 10 years (TES4, F3, TES5, F4). Same gameplay loop, more shallow characters, and more mediocre writing, and to top it all off, I wasn't enjoying the open world/sandbox all that much. Not to mention, all of them have the same weird kinds of bugs and crashes.
I hurried through and went back to Witcher 3.
I decided that until Bethesda starts writing games properly (story- and code-wise), I'm going to pass. Fallout 76 didn't interest me, and stayed away from that soon to be dumpster fire. I found it hilarious that most Fallout 4 criticisms applied to Fallout 76.
On a second playthrough, I wish Fallout 4 would've let you _actually_ lead the Minutemen (given that they were most closely aligned with the settlement mechanics) in rebuilding the wasteland, and let you manage the internal politics of a large organization (eg: you could let the synths in and merge with the Railroad, but you'd lose some subset of followers in the process).
You know, Ive got almost 150 hours on Fallout 4, and I'm not done with the main arc and havent started Far Harbor. On survival, I had to be careful and theres no fast (or safe!) travel. I'm not sure I'll need a second playthough at this rate!
It's important to point out that he was basically emotionally abused by researchers (apparently paid in part by the government) and never really recovered from it. Also that his manifesto (and later works, while in prison) are genuine works of philosophy by a person who really shouldn't ever be let out into society again. Kaczynski is a really interesting guy.
English is the most widely-spoken language in the world (although not the most common first language) and is the lingua franca of the Internet. While language mistakes shouldn't be seen as evidence of technical issues, it should be common practice to ask a skilled native English speaker to review a group's public statements and marketing materials.
I'm not sure where you got that impression. The lowered attendance rate of in-person chess clubs is more than made up by the enormous amount of chess played online, high-level professional chess is doing better than ever, and it's seen by many parents as one of the most generalizable skills for a child to learn.
(It's possible I just took a joke too seriously, but "chess is dead" is a common and incorrect take.)
The economy is not a zero-sum game, nor are corporate profits. Increases in productive efficiency create objectively more wealth overall, and those benefits diffuse out to every socioeconomic class (the classic conservative snark that even poor people have cars, refrigerators, and air conditioning, living better than medieval kings in many ways, is not inaccurate). We are living in an era where megacorporations and their related efficiency gains will rapidly increase the "standard of living" for a population which is (nonetheless!) going to get more miserable over time.
Stepping past the "zero-sum" claim, though, I agree that corporations should take responsibility for their incredibly powerful role in modern society, but I don't see a mechanism by which this could happen. The entire point of a regulated liberal democracy is to create a legislative landscape which modifies the incentive structures of businesses to "coerce" them into providing more social benefit than cost.
There is also nothing wrong with some level of redistributism, as long as it doesn't blindly ignore economic reality (a la communism). Many of the right-leaning nerds here on HN are in favor of universal basic income for that reason.
If that is true then why is wealth inequality so high? I have a hard time believing the argument that that wealth manifests as tech toys and amenities when the amounts of money that are in question here outweigh technology a million-fold.
UBI's an option -- one that I'm in favor of -- but as long as it is an idea and not reality there are still millions of people getting shafted without a lot of recourse, short of restructuring one's entire life and starting over in a new career. An expensive and emotionally draining transition that weak-ass severance packages fail to adequately compensate for.
If corporate tax payers were actually paying taxes and not sitting on a dragon's hoard of cash I might be more in favor of increased automation, but the fact is reserves being as high as they are means that automation is not so necessary in many sectors short of unreasonable and unethical shareholder demands.
Wealth inequality is because capitalism. We collectively permit a very large share of wealth to return to owners of capital. Frequently, this is concentrated because of a variety of financial realities (e.g. large amounts of liquid collateral make it easier to gain leverage, which can increase returns, etc.). OTOH, this return to capital has made the retirement funds and investments of many people's pensions possible. After all, Vanguard and others like them are probably the biggest beneficiaries of the great return on capital (who do you think "Shareholders" are?).
Balancing that return, is of course the relatively lackluster returns on cash. Companies sit on cash not because they enjoy counting it, but because they cannot find appropriately productive uses of it. They also hold it because it helps them cope with uncertainty (of economic reality, regulation, opportunity, etc). Taxing cash is fine, but companies will just change how they balance their uncertainty with other methods.
It sounds like what you are concerned with is that labor is not receiving an equal share of the output, compared with capital. this is likely because true labor productivity has not been great (https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-pro...) and also because capitalists (including pension fund shareholders, often the workers themselves) are engaged in rent-seeking on behalf of their capital. I think in many cases this reflects a shift in the role of savings from the employee to the employer. In eras past, the employee received relatively more pay compared to shareholders, but was required to save for themselves. Corporates that offered pensions had to set aside money to managed those obligations directly. In modern times, corporations tend to create retirement benefits that come from an employee's salary and the company's money, but which have been underfunded due to the assumption of future returns. This "optimistic" assumption about rate of return on the 401k/retirement fund/pension funds of today drives a lot of capital into the role of rent seeking from corporations. Corporations respond by trying to meet their shareholder demands, and corporate officers tend to be the beneficiaries of generally capital friendly activity, since they themselves are shareholders.
There's a lot to unwind here, and a lot more that I haven't written, but I think it is best to not assume that there can be a single solution to a very complex problem which results from a system built of many interacting components.
I'll agree that individual pension-holders and retirement-account holders create something of a perverse incentive, since decisionmaking about capital markets generally improves them less than they think and incentivizes their demise, but how many private-sector jobs nowadays even offer a pension? I imagine the pensioners' argument will hold less and less weight going forward as these populations retire and die off.
I am not saying there is a single solution to the complex problem of low-level work disappearing. However, there are many countries where the business culture is more willing to hold on to labor (non-english-speaking western europe, the specific example I am thinking of is big-box retail in France and Germany, though I've also seen this with the lack of self-serve gas stations in parts of South America); these are still successful businesses doing well in their sectors and in many cases out-competing American entrants to their markets. (And yes the reasons for their success are often better cultural fit than foreign entrants versus comparing where the spend their money) Yet the American zeitgeist seems to be heading full-on into mass automation with its eyes wide shut, when there is already so much money floating around that it doesn't really seem necessary. What labor crises are there that necessitate the deployment of automation? (I don't think rising minimum wages nor increasing threat of unionization count as they do not raise costs above what can be absorbed by capital hoarding)
Agree that there are fewer pensions, however, I think the incentives for rent seeking in 401Ks are still quite strong, and the 401K is quite common for professional jobs.
