D&D General Shocked how hard it is to get new players now-a-days

[Lanefan]

Yes. And?

If you’re a typical Canadian driver, your car should be hitting around 200 000 km. Which means it’s very much on its last legs. And frankly fairly impressive that it’s still on the road.

But that’s a LONG way from the 1960’s example you gave at the beginning.

Again, most people change their cars in less than ten years. Especially in the rough driving conditions of Canada. Salt on the roads does horrible things to your car.

Advantage of Victoria is that we don't get many snow days and thus don't see that much salt on the roads.

Currently at 125000(?) km; mostly because I never needed to use it for daily commuting. That said, it's been on some damn long road trips.

 

[MNblockhead]

How far are you willing to drive to get to a weekly live group? Twenty miles? Fifty? A hundred???

Having recently moved to a new city and spending time finding an ideal FLGS, I know that answers.

30-40 minutes, depending on traffic.

That is not the norm for me. I'm not a fan of long commutes (not that 30-40 minutes is considered a long commute by most people in the US). But not of the game and hobby stores in the city, close to me, have good play spaces for TTRPGs.

But I found an awesome FLGS a bit outside the city and have signed up for some one shots. What would keep me from a regular game is schedule, not driving distance. For me to join a weekly game, it would need to be on a weekday evening. The FLGS in question closes at 10pm. Most games seem to start around 6pm. That is a bit of a rush and I can't always get out of the office by 5pm to walk home and drive to the FLGS. If there was weekly 7pm to 11pm game in up to about a 30-minute drive, I would consider it, so long as parking isn't an issue and the neighborhood isn't to sketchy.

I'll likely be getting a place out in the suburbs next summer. If I start having a 20-40 minute commute to and from work every day, I think I would be much less likely to have an equally long commute to a weekly game.

 

[Lanefan]

I'll likely be getting a place out in the suburbs next summer. If I start having a 20-40 minute commute to and from work every day, I think I would be much less likely to have an equally long commute to a weekly game.

If your new place is in the same direction from town as that FLGS, though...

 

[GrimCo]

Solid mid range PC from 10 y ago ( something in 600-700 euro range) is pretty decent machine even today, unless you are gamer. It probably has something like quad core i5, at least 8 (but usually 16) gb of ddr3, R9 270/280X, maybe even ssd. That's plenty good for someone who does either light gaming or no gaming.

I still have my 2014 HP Envy laptop as primary personal laptop. It was pricey back then (about 1500e+-), with i7, 16gb of ddr, gforce 840m 2gb and 2x1tb wd hdd. Only thing i did was replace 1 hdd with ssd and bought new battery. Win10 came with laptop. It works well for usual everyday use (internet, netflix, office, even some light work in SiemensNX/Catia). It can serve for at least couple more years, especially with Linux on it.

Unless you do lot's of modern gaming, 4k video editing or do some serious 3d cad/cam, solid 10y old PC-s do just fine. Phones had more of hardware advancement, but their biggest problem is battery. 5 y old flagship, with new battery, is still very viable phone for average user (something like Galaxy S10 or Huawei P30).

We kind of peaked with pc/phone hardware and there is very little incentive for average/ undemanding users to buy new tech often.

 

[Cergorach]

...but PC hardware speeds haven't gone up by a factor of 5-10x in 10 years like they did from 1995 to 2005 where we went from a 120mHz to 400mHz to a 1.6gHz processor in a decade.

That is not entirely accurate. Clock speeds don't say much about capacity/performance anymore. It's like talking about a cars speed when you actually want to know how much stuff it can move per hour between point A and B.

If we look at an AMD 1800X from 2017 and an AMD 7800X3D, there is still improvement in a 6 year period, but if you compare it to an AMD 7950X3D, single core performance doubles in six years and multicore performance quadruples in six years. Depending on Benchmark of course. These days there are just bigger/heavier CPUs available then compared back in the day. And comparing like for like becomes more and more difficult, what do you compare? Cores? Price? Powerusage?

My new AMD 4800u, a low power CPU runs circles around the 7 year Intel i7-5820K, a desktop CPU with less cores. The low power CPU also uses WAY less power, while being way faster.

And we're not even looking at comparisons of comparing 10 year old Intel laptop CPUs vs Apple M1/2/3/4.

And when we look at GPUs, the integrated graphics of my 4800u is about half the speed of my dedicated 7 year old GTX970 and using only a fraction of the power, that is pretty insane. And in the last 4 years integrated graphics have improved even further!

And while CPUs/GPUs keep getting faster, the big difference is that we don't really need that additional power anymore. Unless you have unreasonable demands... Like the latest AAA at 4k Ultra @120fps... Most people don't need that at all! We've reached a certain performance threshold many years ago.

Issues what most people run into is either RAM, storage or they bought the cheapest (clunker) PC they could find 10 years ago and expect a clunker to perform for decades. RAM and storage you can often fix, but doing that with new components on a 10 year old machines can often be way more expensive then new hardware (depending on the RAM pricing cyclus). The question is also, can you add/replace components? Another question is software support. You shouldn't Run W7 anymore, W10 is EOL next year, after that don't run W10 either. Don't like W11, go for MacOS or Linux.

Sidenote: A Jeep is not a type of car the average consumer drives. How old your car is also depends on things like how much you can do yourself, how much you value your time, available resources. The average consumer doesn't fix it's own cars, doesn't have access to a garage and the right tools and then car maintenance becomes expensive fast on old cars when you need to pay someone else to do that... The same goes for maintaining old computers, having someone else replace the RAM or reinstalling the OS is a lot more expensive then doing it yourself...

 

[GrimCo]

Not really. Depending on car in question, driving and maintaining old car can be dirt cheap. Old naturally aspirated diesel VW and MB cars from late 80s and 90s can do over 500k km with very minimal maintenance. There are still tons of old Fiat Punto and Bravo, with N/A petrol engines rolling on the streets. Same with some older Opels, CItroens, Škodas and Peugeots. Minimal electronics, simple engine (no turbo, no compressor), simple mechanics, sold in large quantities so there are tons of cheap parts from junkyards, any village mechanic can fix it. Our version of Jeep owner is Lada Niva owner. That car is so simple in construction that anyone with modicum of technical skill and few general tools can fix easy and cheaply most of problems, but then again, that car can be fixed by kid that finished first grade in auto mechanic school.

When it comes to making old beat up POS cars run more or less reliably with minimal and cheap maintenance, we mastered it here in Eastern Europe/Balkans

 

[Cergorach]

When it comes to making old beat up POS cars run more or less reliably with minimal and cheap maintenance, we mastered it here in Eastern Europe/Balkans

But you don't have car mechanics, you have tank mechanics, because a Lada is supposedly built like a tank! But Ladas are known to be cheap and easy to work with.

There's a difference in income, hourly rates, car costs, car parts, and rules depending on location. There's a big difference between eastern and western Europe. I live in the Netherlands, even if it isn't in a city, land/house/business prices are very high! Hourly rates of experts are high and combine that with the amount of room a decent garage requires, combined hourly rates are high. Also a lot of our old second hand cars depart to eastern Europe, so old parts in junkyards isn't as great as one would expect, add again the cost of land and junkyard parts aren't exactly cheap either here. In our family cars were closer to 20 years when they were replaced, instead of 10 years. 2022 numbers say that cars in the EU where on average 12,3 years old, and in the Netherlands 11,7 years old.

Buying a €500 clunker for a car is going to give you issues unless you're very handy with cars, have access to a garage and have some nifty contacts... And even then, depending on how much time you spend on it, it's going to lose parts on the highway...

I think the comparison between cars and computers has gone way beyond what's useful. The idea is that if you buy a crap car, don't expect to do 20 years with it, if you buy a crap computer, don't expect to do 10 years with it. Also, what are your expectations? Don't expect to run a modern 3D VTT on 10 year old laptop with integrated graphics.

Sidenote: A Mac Mini 2014 (almost 10 years old) is still supported by Apple (10 year life expectancy is pretty decent). Non-Mac PCs can live longer or shorter, depending on the hardware, the manufacturer and driver support. It also depends on whether or not the hardware is from before or after the 'threshold'. And if Windows no longer supports the hardware (via drivers), chances are that some Linux distribution does. But the average consumer+Linux doesn't really compute... Especially not with people that have so little interest in Tech that they have 10+ year old computers as their single main computer...

 

[GrimCo]

Guilty. When i was in army, some of the guys that maintained our IFVs, moonlighted on the weekend as car mechanics (and maybe fixed my Alfa 159 couple of times for crate of beer ). Not just Ladas. Golf 2/3 n/a diesel is still king. Those suckers still roll on the streets. Same with Fiat Punto/Bravo, my SIL still drives one, 20 y old, big service was like 200 euros (cash price). When you drive that kind of car and want to maintain it for cheap, you take it to independent mechanic shop who doesn't mind some after hours work for cash, no receipt needed, and you hunt down parts yourself ( internet is cool thing, for most very popular cars, you can buy parts online cheap). Same with parts for older PCs, there are decent amount of them still floating around on internet. Even in my parts, prices of labour are going way up (i live in Croatia), and don't get me stared on prices of real estate. It's gone bonkers.

But, digression aside. Modern 3d VTTs, even browser based, are getting resource intensive. Even browsers (looking at you Chrome) are getting resource hungry. Mid range gaming computer from 10 y ago might run them semi smooth for some time. But, as i said, you don't need 3d VTT to play. It does help, but honestly, to me, it just feels like playing not so good crpg. Now, if you want to play online using 3d VTT with all the bells and whistles, yea, it sucks, but you need to fork over for decent machine.

 

[Cergorach]

But as with car parts, buying second hand computer parts isn't for the average consumer and certainly not for the not-Tech person that's running that 10+ year old machine. They don't know what they need exactly, they wouldn't even know how to read a compatibility list. Chances are good that they would order the wrong memory and break something when installing it. We all started somewhere as well, but we were motivated to learn and were not disdainful of what we were trying to fix or upgrade. While if I invested enough time and effort into how a washing machine works, I could probably do a lot of fixes myself. But I don't really, so going in half baked will probably do more harm then good. Not to mention that if you take the time you invest into it, it certainly isn't cheaper to do yourself (value your own time), so unless it's something I enjoy learning/working on, it's best to let an 'expert' do it. It's the same with anything really.

6-8 years ago I was working as a freelancer at an MSP and what they charged for changing RAM/HDD/SSD and reinstalling the OS was already €100+/hour (ex. VAT as it was Business-to-Business), the MSP was very happy with me, because I was doing that pretty fast and accurate (could do it blindfolded), but it was pretty much only for customers that had Macs (when you still could do RAM/HDD/SSD swaps or in that period of time when the rest of the world was moving from HDD to SSD. It was only economically viable to do that in certain cases...

For my last workstation I just assembled an over powered machines with enough RAM and storage to last me a LONG time (7 years as it turns out), I opened it once or twice to clean (moving parts/airflow)... I now have mini PCs where I just chugged in the max amount of compatible RAM (64GB) and 6TB of SSD space, put it in a passively cooled case and I never intend to change that again! No moving parts, so no internal cleaning required! Some might call it lazy and wasteful, I just call it time=money efficient as I don't really like messing with my production machines (I earn my money on those) and I don't enjoy it as much as I used to. If I want to mess with a computer's hardware, I'll get myself a hobby machine or just mess with some Raspberry Pis. But after 40 years of messing with computer hardware (started with a C64) it has lost a lot of it's appeal, it's now generally just a tool that needs to work...

 

[J-H]

Don't you still have to clean dust off the heatsinks occasionally?