With Larian’s previous game having great DM tools and them saying they would’ve loved to do DM tools for BG3, I think WotC telling them not to is a fair assumption to make.

Good intentions alone don’t guarantee good outcomes. I suggest not giving any single person or entity too much power, no matter who they are.

Source

I can only speak for myself. For me it felt really great being able to explore the world having absolutely zero idea of what is what, how much game is left, etc. It is reminiscent of a time when I was a kid and playing a game was exactly like that.

I even got quite sad when my friend “accidentally” told me

I totally agree with you. I was just clearing up why people bring up Spore beyond just the first stage being similar.

People mention Spore because the official FAQ mentions Spore.

Thrive is never gonna be “from puddle to space adventures”-type of game.

People also mention Spore because this is exactly what the devs are envisioning. To quote the FAQ:

Gameplay is split into seven stages – Microbe, Multicellular, Aware, Awakening, Society, Industrial and Space.

Same. I had PayPal do an automated charge back because their system thought I was doing something fraudulent when I wasn’t. Steam blocked my account.

Talking to support and re-buying said game did fix the issue for me.

I’d argue that with their definition of bots as “a software application that runs automated tasks over the internet” and later their definition of download bots as “Download bots are automated programs that can be used to automatically download software or mobile apps.”, automated software updates could absolutely be counted as bot activity by them.

Of course, if they count it as such, the traffic generated that way would fall into the 17.3% “good bot” traffic and not in the 30.2% “bad bot” traffic.

Looking at their report, without digging too deep into it, I also find it concerning that they seem to use “internet traffic” and “website traffic” interchangeably.

Without knowing any specifics of the TOS or the exact setup beyond what I could gather in this thread: generally speaking they could still send you a bill through email or otherwise.

After that, if you’re not paying up, they might be able to successfully get the money out of you through court regardless, depending on a few factors. What’s more likely for smaller sums is that they’ll just drop it and ban you though.

IANAL of course.

I think the humor is meant to be in the juxtaposition between “reference” in media contexts (e.g. “I am your father”) and “reference” in programming contexts and applying the latter context to the former one.

What does “I’m your father” mean if the movie is jaws?

I think the absurdity of that question is part of said humor. That being said, I didn’t find it funny either.

Or “watch”. That way they don’t have to make it obvious that their customers won’t own it but still don’t straight up lie.

In Roguelikes and Roguelike-adjenct games there are also a few games that get close. (I’d even argue some totally eclipse SV/Terraria in that regard, but that depends on your definition.) Some, but not all, of them are even completely free and open source.

Off the top of my head, a few examples would include Dwarf Fortress, UnReal World and Nethack. Maybe some Space Station 13 servers if you count that too.

I’m not really sure how to describe it other than when I read a function to determine what it does then go to the next part of the code I’ve already forgotten how the function transforms the data

This sounds to me like you could benefit from mentally using the information hiding principle for your functions. In other words: Outside of the function, the only thing that matters is “what goes in?” and “what comes out?”. The implementation details should not be important once you’re working on code outside of that function.

To achieve this, maybe you could write a short comment right at the start of every function. One to two sentences detailing only the inputs/output of that function. e.g. “Accepts an image and a color and returns a mask that shows where that color is present.” if you later forget what the function does, all you need to do is read that one sentence to remember. If it’s too convoluted to write in one or two sentences, your function is likely trying to achieve too much at once and could (arguably “should”) be split up.

Also on a different note: Don’t sell your ability to “cludge something together” short. If you ever plan to do this professionally or educationally, you will sadly inevitably run into situations where you have no choice but to deliver a quick and dirty solution over a clean and well thought out one.

Edit: typos

I think it would be fine as an official extension. Shipping it built-in feels weird to me.