The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[payn]

I'm an Everquest survivor myself. For me, it was when the grind added the social component that I really lost interest. I didn't mind grinding quests, dungeons, etc, in my free time. I didn't mind when you had to form groups with others to do big missions or monsters. But it was when it turned into joining guilds, planning battles/raids, and basically just became a real commitment with schedules and expectations that I couldn't enjoy it any more. It was too much like real life.

I didn't mind the group aspect of DDO, in fact I really liked it. What I didn't like was the change they made that allowed you to view other players character's equipment and stats. Suddenly a bunch of elitist jerks went around banning folks from playing with anyone. What a poor idea...

 

[MarkB]

Yeap, I did love my time in Eve online and especially Dungeons and Dragons Online. However, the grind eventually gave way to the fun and interest. I did hang on for a few years due to the great people I met though.

I played Eve Online until I realised I'd got to the point of spending most of my time in spreadsheets and it was feeling more like a job than a game.

The one I played longest was WoW, but my favourite is Star Wars the Old Republic. I still go back to that one for a few months at a time occasionally - played the Smuggler all the way up through the base campaign last year.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I never played it but I heard the FFX ripoff was actually pretty solid.

We're talking about The Third Age?

It was a pretty good game, if a little linear.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Is it stealing if they let you watch how they do it and then you still change it up to make it less spicy?

Bell literally closed his restaurant down the block and got a job at Mitla Cafe with the express intention of taking their recipes and techniques to be able to then beat them in business. He left once he had learned what he thought he had needed.

If someone did that to your business, I have to assume you'd view it as stealing.

But I guess if we want to keep the narrative of a white guy stealing from a minority and them not getting the full credit they deserve then stealing is the word we go with.

Thanks for making it weird and political.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You don't have to feel shame about stealing an recipe from anywhere. A recipe is legally not considered copyright-able.

He was not just copying recipes. He got a job there with the express intention of learning the whole process, soup to nuts, so he could then compete with them.

And lots of things are legal. It doesn't make them the right thing to do.

 

[Ryujin]

Bell literally closed his restaurant down the block and got a job at Mitla Cafe with the express intention of taking their recipes and techniques to be able to then beat them in business. He left once he had learned what he thought he had needed.

If someone did that to your business, I have to assume you'd view it as stealing.

"Welcome to McDowell's!"

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Not entirely true. A basic list of ingredients is not copyrightable, but the particular expression of the steps necessary to put them together is copyrightable. So you can’t copy and paste the recipe itself, but you can rewrite it. Which is why a lot of recipes intentionally put steps in a weird order or include far more personal info than necessary. Like greasing a pan in step one when you won’t need it until 3 hours later or the writer suddenly talking about their summer vacations with grandma in the middle of step four.

The big personal stories are also for SEO purposes, as a recent version of the Google algorithm penalized sites for being short and to the point and having few uses of keywords and few links out. I'm pretty sure everyone universally hates the format, including the food bloggers, so the moment Google stops rewarding that model, it'll be over.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's exactly why online recipes are so annoying. Better make sure the recipe that is basically the same as in 100 other places is the exclusive provenance of my mommy blog!

During the pandemic, I really found a lot of joy in taking cookbook recipes and working with my family to tweak them to our tastes (my son wants more black pepper in everything, including pizza) and then recording that in a family cookbook Google Doc.

I would feel weird running a food blog and not having made at least some tweaks to reflect what my family's preferences. But content mills are gonna content mill.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don't care why you chose that brand Jessica...just give me the recipe!

I like hearing the why behind ingredient choices if it's meaningful and not just brand placement. (Gebhardt's chili powder turns out to genuinely be awesome for homemade chili, for instance.)

That the recipe was inspired by their trip to Greece and here's the picture of Jessica's children at the beach I can skip.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That's MMOs in a nutshell isnt it?

The non-Korean ones are walking that back, focusing more on story and quests. That's a lot more expensive in man-hours for developers, though, which is one of the reasons MMOs are fading away -- they're not the easy cash cows they were (wrongly) perceived as being previously.