>> Artifact had in effect a perfectly reasonable economic model, but players did not see it that way.
I don't think it really did though. Artifact took Magic the Gathering's payment model verbatim (pay for a starter set, pay for booster packs, pay for entrance any activities where you might win more cards) but removed the thing that makes that work for Magic the Gathering: face to face interaction with other human beings at your Local Game Store.
If we compare it vs. it's more direct competition (digital CCGs) it's a worse proposition for the average non/low spending player, but even if we do the kindest thing and compare it against what it's directly copying it's still a strictly worse deal.
It's easier to pay for a physical product, especially one where you can employ the doctrine of first sale and reuse them in any way you choose.
With Artifact you couldn't even sell your deck without paying Valve again. Fuck. That. Card games are already expensive, you didn't need to make it worse.
Yeah, I think this is one of the biggest points: they were marketing to the wrong demographic. Dota players like to laugh at League players for having to buy heros, so even if a competitive deck is only $200 which is really good compared to other CCGs, that price is super high to a video game player steeped in the philosophy that "mtx should be cosmetic only, anything else is pay to win."
On the other hand, look at the article's point 7: the economic model was fundamentally flawed through oppressive transaction fees plus a conception of cards as both valuable (resale) and free (via card rewards).
Players don't see a game's economic model in its ideal state, they see the economic model as implemented.
Well, I for one didn't want to pay $20 to get a game i might not like where I have to pay ~~$100ish to test-out a deck I might end up not liking.
Seriously, when compared to Hearthstone (biggest, well establish competitor) free to try, can grind the cards, side modes, single player 'adventure' expansions etc. Valve throws Artifact as competition, unpolished product that wants your money upfront.
Valve needs to unstuck their head from the rearend, cuz they are no longer beloved internet darling.
tl;dr: Unicode codepoints don't have a 1-to-1 relationship with characters that are actually displayed. This has always been the case (due to zero-width characters, accent modifiers that go after another character, Hangul etc.) but has recently got complicated by the use of ZWJ (zero-width joiner) to make emojis out of combinations of other emojis, modifiers for skin colour, and variation selectors. There is also stuff like flag being made out of two characters, e.g. flag_D + flag_E = German flag.
Your language's length function is probably just returning the number of unicode codepoints in the string. You need to a function that computes the number of 'extended grapheme clusters' if you want to get actually displayed characters. And if that function is out of date, it might not handle ZWJ and variation selectors properly, and still give you a value of 2 instead of 1. Make sure your libraries are up to date.
Also, if you are writing a command line tool, you need to use a library to work out how many 'columns' a string will occupy for stuff like word wrapping, truncation etc. Chinese and Japanese characters take up two columns, many characters take up 0 columns, and all the above (emoji crap) can also affect the column count.
In short the Unicode standard has gotten pretty confusing and messy!
> Your language's length function is probably just returning the number of unicode codepoints in the string.
The article didn't say that!
"Number of Unicode code points" in a string is ambiguous, because surrogates and astral characters both are code points, so it's ambiguous if a surrogate pair counts as two code points or one. (It unambiguously counts as two UTF-16 code units and as one Unicode scalar value.)
The article presented four kinds of programming language-reported string lengths:
1. Length is number of UTF-8 code units.
2. Length is number of UTF-16 code units.
3. Length is number of UTF-32 code units, which is the same as the number of Unicode scalar values.
4. Length is number of extended grapheme clusters.
This was fascinating, thanks. Made me think about why I used 99 as my max -- I think it's because back in the SNES days, all the RPGs used 99 as a limit.
I guess the secure solution is to carry around your own X-Ray verified lightning-USB dongle and high voltage fry any dumb cable you find yourself needing.
It's probably just his DC power supply he has handy.
As far as 120/240 thing, if you have a component not meant for that kind of voltage, it might fail open, or it might fail short.
If it fails short, high amounts of current might be allowed to flow through other components which would carbonize so even more current would flow. And maybe catch fire.
Is it really 50% though since more than one ball is falling through at a time? Wouldn't a steel ball hitting another steel ball affect it's possible path?
Notice how the drawn Gaussian doesn't follow the bottom row of binomial coefficients of the Pascal's triangle[1]. The model that assumes that each ball independently falls left or right exactly one unit is limited and doesn't actually describe many real world Galton boards.
Seeing things for what they really are...isn’t that our greatest desire and our greatest fear? I love the voice in this fiction, and the astonishing fact that it is provided to the world in a newspaper. Speculative fiction is where truth can be approached safely. Keep it going.
Where can I find a tutorial, examples, or any concrete details?