[–] 20 points 3 days ago

A quicker iteration cycle with input direct from customers is a common aspect to Chinese business operations across many sectors. They clearly want to collaborate with customers on fixing flaws and innovative new features to maintain market share, a completely different value proposition to traditional western brand loyalty and monolithic design cycles.

There was a good article I can't find about how Chinese electronics manufactures did with with cheap "feature phones" for African markets. The iterations were ridiculously fast as they evolved the designs to include market-specific features like extra battery storage, dual sims, skin-tone adjustments for the camera software, flashlights and integrated carabiners. These all had specific use cases for the customers based on things like unreliable grid power, swapping sims based on local carrier promotions and deals, and being able to use the phone as a emergency light.

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  • [–] 25 points 3 days ago

    NWN was a high water mark of mod tooling focused games. Map editor, DM Client, scripting engine with DB hooks all as part of the base game was really cool. Some of the micro-Persistent World communities that were built out are still running today. Hopefully that kind of thing comes back around eventually with open-source game engines, etc.

    EA slowly drained all the potential away until they were just a shambling shell of what they once were.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 days ago* (2 children)

    So it doesn't even look like the rope broke, he just got going too fast and wasn't able to apply enough force to slow back down. Maybe the heat broke the rope towards the bottom, but that's not really the source of the problem.

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