sigh You're right.

Having said that, if they happen to fix Warcraft 3 Reforged, they might get on my good books. I'm not that hopeful for it, but I want a version of the game from 20 years ago that isn't busted and can be played online again lol.

Difficulty curves are exceptionally difficult in turn based RPG games.

If the game is too easy, you have essentially designed a game that requires the use of very few mechanics and thus lacks depth or replay-ability. Fewer options to choose from essentially makes an easier game to balance the difficulty, but you remove player agency. A good example of this (and I mean good) is Final Fantasy X which has player agency in the form of the sphere grid, but the system is mostly linear until the late game and the mechanics basically force you to use the right character against the correct enemy for the first 10 hours or so of the game. This is good design because it forces the player to engage with the systems that exist in the game but gives them very few options to shoot themselves in the foot.

Conversely, if you want a more open player-agency design, I would recommend looking at the balance difficulty of Final Fantasy V with some notable asterices. This game gives a lot of player agency in terms of team composition and stat allocation (in a round-about way) but this comes with the down side that most encounters have to be designed punishing to certain playstyles to encourage changing your party configuration. While grinding in most games feels like a chore, FFV actually adds achievable "goals" in either mastering jobs or unlocking more job abilities, which basically increases your character's overall flexibility. The downside is that bosses can be brick walls so a pseudo-fail state (as in, keep progression but respawn in the last inn) would be a nice patch that would make the game easier for new players. Additionally, systems like the 4 job fiesta would be nice as a "hard mode", if a game were ever to ape that design.

Both of those designs work for me, personally, as long as the game is upfront about it's design decision and that the difficulty scales appropriately to the number of choices I have (This means the game has to essentially become easier, because permutations dictate that my team composition might be radically different from someone else, or there need to be mechanics that help make "catching up" faster like FFV/Bravely Default)

Yeah, thanks for sharing this. I'm going to have to give this a try sometime.

I had previously been building it manually, but I think I'm starting to realize that gitlab/github CI is basically essential to running a proper repository anyway.

I would use BTRFS and Snapper over using Timeshift due to the lack of granularity it has. You should be able to back up any volume you want, not just the home directories like Timeshift does.

This is 100% justified.

These types of features have been regulated in fighting games for a long time. The ideal situation here would be for Razer to open source their firmware and establish a community-driven approved firmware design and let valve greenlight a specific configuration which can be parsed by the game's executable (or, for tournaments, can be flashed for valid gameplay).

That's my 2 cents at least.

Some applications, such as those with tablet demands, are not met by current wayland des with proper tablet support and xwayland is currently the better option. This may have changed in the last year or so, but this is roughly my recollection of certain big art programs.

I'm currently using debian with Docker.

If I were to do it again, though, I'd probably just use either fedora or the server equivalent to silverblue (I can't remember the name). I am so heavy on docker use at this point that I wouldn't mind going full immutable.

Yeah, I agree. Though I would be willing to give it a shot just to see how it shapes up. Games like Valkyria Chronicles (while not strictly turn based) benefited a bit by having a similar system, though you could argue that it's a bit of a missed opportunity to not bring the camera down more in the way that game does.

I use BTRFS for the snapshot and subvolume tools.

It is pretty good but usability is a mixed bag. Always getting better by the month though, it feels like.

I started playing the Trials of Mana remake only a few weeks ago.

It has rough parts but overall increased my interest in Visions of Mana. I went from not knowing it even existed to being cautiously optimistic!