Man, I do find that quite sad... the app store still has some major issues with regards to discoverability. It's funny because you'd think as the app store became more and more saturated, that they'd create more ways to deal with that, but many of the changes have actually made it worse lol :/

Sadly, I think Apple serves most users best by simply ensuring the "top" choices during an app store browse or search are good enough that users don't ever have to search deeper and really feel the pain of the App Store situation. And the top choices are often quite good.

My conclusion is Apple just doesn't feel enough pain to solve the discoverability problem that hurts developers (especially new developers).

They have unashamedly said their order of doing things is

1. Good for apple

2. Good for users

3. Good for devs (distant third too)

They have been nice lately though. I'm really excited about the App Store analytics and all that entails. It's really nice that they've finally added that for us.

I actually think the store is in a pretty decent state right now overall. You can't possibly make everything very visible. It's a pretty good deal to be on the shelves, now you just have to work harder on your own promotion.

Maybe a perfect solution isn't easier, but it should be very easy to improve the mess that is the app store. Let's start with a very simple suggestion:

Searching for an app by name should return that app.

Yeah. It's much better than it used to be (today when I search for Tweetbot it pull up Tweetbot) but that hasn't always been the case. You still have the issue that they clearly have a CDN with a slow refresh so that when an app is first released you can find it via links online or features on the front of the app store but not by searching the name.

It seems like an unjust reward for already successful apps - they're given the right to steal search results for a competitor's app name.

That's a good way to be sure you can be found. If you type "Vima"[1] in the app store, I guarantee you find my apps :-)

[1] Vima is greek for "pace", which is how we came up with it. Full title is "Vima - GPS Run Tracker"

Sure it is. Stop trying to funnel the entire marketplace through a single vendor-controlled retailer.

One instance where it's very obvious to me was 300 vs its sequel 300: Rise of an Empire. I tried to find 2 similar images: 300 http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/dvdreviews46/300_the_complete... 300 sequel http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTQwMTk3MTU3OV5BMl5Ban...

So basically I think digital is getting there but it still has a little ways to go in matching the perceived quality.

Although high-def video most often is used for blue screen shoots, director Zack Snyder and Fong shot on film. "We wanted the film grain to show," Fong said.

I guess it is quite subjective, but what makes the second one look better to you? For me the first one, whilst chalked with noise/grain, has a much better rendition of the skin-tone, along with detail in the highlights, and the depth of the reflection in her eyes. I guess it's hard to describe really, but that's kind of why I would side towards the first image.

The main thing is the noise on her skin - it makes it look very artificial. Like it's not an actual person. On her cheek it almost looks like she has beard stubble.

The background of the first one also looks like a pointillist painting instead of the real world. (Although I might not notice it in motion.)

I'm not a fan of the skin color either since real people don't look like that. To me it looks cold and artificial, like I'm looking at a painted robot instead of a person.

I do wonder how much of this is film vs digital, as opposed to post processing. Film might not be able to stop grain, but I don't think it needs to look like that for the color. It suspect it was over sharpened and over contrasted in post.

Otherwise you make a paid game and hope an Apple-featuring makes you enough.

I think I basically tried almost every A* trick available (rectangular symmetry reduction, HPA*, points of visibility, jump point search, etc) but ultimately I couldn't make it run fast enough on iOS for our max level size which was about 100x100. It also couldn't be multi-threaded because it needed to work with online code (synchronous tick engine)...

What ended up happening was I found a full C implementation of Jump Point Search, and it was incredibly fast! I had already moved several parts of my code to C in order to speed it up, but I guess using a higher level language like Objective-C is just way too slow to have instantaneous path-finding on a 100x100 grid. I think this was the code I found https://github.com/Bio2hazard/cJumpPointSearch

It started out completely broken, storing waypoints in Core Data and was taking upwards of four minutes to calculate a path. Switching to prefetching Core Data paths brought it down to about 90 seconds, but that's as far as it could go with so many Core Data faults firing.

What made it really fly was the change the underlying data to direct bitmap access on maps prepared from the source maps (shopping centre levels actually) and applying simple filters to generate monochrome maps where one color was walkable and another not. Then source and destination locations were obtained through the original Core Data coordinates and a quick search algorithm found the closest walkable point to both. The A* calculation took perhaps a second or two.

Not content with that we went further and drew more complicated maps with what amounted to train tracks, a network of walkable paths one pixel wide connecting every store to every store to narrow down the solution space. The result was instant A* pathfinding and it was a very neat feature in the app.

You can definitely do A* in Objective C - just get to know Instruments inside out and keep tuning. On a 5S I expect you could get away with a lot of inefficiency.

100x100? That sounds trivial to make fast enough. What was the programming language used?

I am not sure that this works for all situations though; maybe I've been lucky too... I tend to work for smaller startups.

As an employer i think there is nothing better than to be able to verify beforehand if a candidate will be able to do what you actually plan to pay him for. I would just change that "few hours" with few weeks and favor interaction with other employees (that will then be able to assess the candidate).

"In Angband, any monster that drops stuff can drop pretty much anything. Monsters have a level, and if they drop loot, it just randomly picks any item near the monsters level."

-> (RPG related) I felt like this was an issue with Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2. You basically just had to mash around in D3 grinding the top-level monsters and hoping... whereas in Diablo 2 you could make conscious choices over where to farm if your goal was to find a certain item (albeit the drop chances were extremely low, so most people just did Meph runs or Baal runs and traded their way up). Here though the author is doing drops way more realistic than either of those games heh, so that's quite an awesome feat.

Itemization seems really tricky; analyzing Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3 can actually provide some interesting insight into how item systems affect gameplay etc... maybe those devs even tried doing it realistically at some point but found it didn't pan out gameplay-wise?

In Diablo 2, areas were randomized internally but externally consistent: the individual makeup of areas would be different every game, but the connections between different areas would remain the same.[1] This means that repeatedly exploring the same area remains entertaining for a relatively long time in Diablo 2. This is important, because as you say, items have a higher chance of dropping from certain monsters than from others. If you "have to" keep farming the same area over and over, it helps prevent boredom if that map is different every time.

In Diablo 3, the internal layout for each outdoor area is always the same, and even indoor areas are relatively static, compared to Diablo 2's. After a while, you know the best way to maximize efficiency, which encourages people to repeatedly farm one area, but this is a double edged sword: once you know what the most profitable way of playing the game is, playing any other is much less attractive. This actually reduces the range of (rational) possible actions in the game, inducing boredom more quickly. In addition, some of the best areas to farm in Diablo 3 are the dungeons. These are (smaller and optional) sub-levels within areas. Each area had fixed dungeons in Diablo 2. In Diablo 3 areas can often spawn 5 or 6 different special events, while it has only 2 or 3 (fixed, just like the areas themselves) spots for such events. This adds another layer of randomization: you need to be lucky twice: once to find the dungeon and once again to find the item in the dungeon.[2]

Something else that changed between Diablo 2 and 3 is the way item affixes are randomized. In both games, magical items can spawn with certain properties, and those properties have stat ranges. You might find a Short Sword with the Red prefix, giving +1 or +2 damage. In Diablo 2, the best items (Uniques, Sets and Runewords) had fixed affixes with random stat ranges: you might find a Tyrael's Might with anything between +20 Str and +30 Str (in addition to have a dozen other affixes), but that it would get a significant +Str roll was guaranteed. Even the worst Tyrael's Might was a great find. Relatively casual players would be happy with any stat rolls, while true Diablo 2 addicts would make do with nothing less than a +30 roll. Such a perfect roll could (and still can) increase the value of an item by a factor of 10 to 1000+,[3] even if the objective difference between a random roll and a perfect roll is fairly small in the grand scheme of things.

In Diablo 3, this was thrown out the window. Legendary and Set items get some fixed affixes, but even if you got the best item in the game and perfect rolls on the fixed affixes, you still need 1-3 other affixes to get a genuinely good item. In addition, the stat ranges were much wider. Immortal King's Tribal Binding could get +30 or +200 Str, and with the right random affix, all the way to +300 Str.[4] This makes the relation between gear cost and power fairly linear. You might have to find half a dozen Tribal Bindings before you got one worth using. In addition to finding the dungeon, and then the item, you also need to get good affixes on the item, then get good rolls on your affixes. Finally, in some slots, the best items in the game were not Legendaries, with their half-random setup, but Rares, with fully random affixes, which instead of 1-3 good affixes, need 5 or 6. It is no wonder then that players were unable to find their own items, and were forced to turn to an auction house, where they were primarily supplied by bots and gold farmers (unknowingly, but still).

Blizzard tried to address some of these issues in the Reaper of Souls expansion. Here's a few examples relating to the above points:

* Enchanting was added: allows you to replace one of each item's affixes with a different one (only one affix per item, but you can repeatedly change the same affix until you get one you like), reducing the impact of random affixes.

* Rifts were introduced: random dungeons with random monsters and a random boss at the end, which are generally slightly more efficient than just farming normal areas.

* The auction house was removed, reducing the impact of bots and farmers, allowing an increase in the drop rate. Trading in general was removed as well, making it impossible to turn to third-party trading sites (as was common in Diablo 2).

* The stat ranges on affixes were reduced, lessening the dependence on highly random items. Many Legendary items got unique Legendary-only affixes that (when combined in clever ways) make them far better than fully random Rare items.

Overall, this has significantly improved the game, but having played Diablo 2, Diablo 3 and Diablo 3 after the Reaper of Souls expansion, I can't help but feel like these are in the end just patches on a fundamentally flawed design, and that some of those patches actively prevent it from becoming better. Diablo 2, on release, was a bad implementation of a great design. This allowed it to be improved over the course of almost a decade (sporadically by modern standards, but impressive at the time). Diablo 3, on release, was a mediocre implementation of a bad design. Blizzard improved the implementation (at significant cost, to the point of forcing them to postpone the expansion), and details of the design, but it is still only a good implementation of a mediocre design, and improving it much further strikes me as uneconomical, to put it mildly.

_____

[1] For example: http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/maps/act1.shtml

[2] It's worth pointing out the two different types of randomization in games. One is the type the player can influence, like which area to farm and whether to play solo or in groups. The other is forced upon players, like what affixes your drops have or whether a dungeon spawns in a given area. Players tolerate the latter to much higher degree than the former.

[3] Filled with jargon, but: http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=59979863&f=52. Look at Hellfire Torches for a typical desireable item, and Black Hades for an extreme example.

[4] These are the post-expansion stats, but it illustrates the principle, which is much reduced, but still very much alive: https://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/immortal-kings-tribal-bindi....

Whether or not Rares or Uniques are best in slot items is a matter of designers taste when it comes to Action RPGs. You can tune the item drop tables however you want. I would argue its nicer to have rares be BiS items, as its more fun when you see item diversity in the top builds. Seeing everyone walk around with the same Uniques is boring.

Diablo 3 fails because it does not provide enough ways to customize a character's build. There are a handful of stats that are important, and they mostly scale linearly. The skills are all unlocked, and you can change them at will.

If you do not have enough ways to customize your character, the item drop tables are moot. You can't drop items that are interesting if there are no interesting stats.

Path of Exile is the true successor to Diablo 2. The options for customization are endless, so every item that drops has the potential to be interesting. You should check that out if you are interested in ARPGs, especially something like Diablo 2. And if you are really interested in game analysis, their systems are really unmatched in today's game marketplace.

Diablo 3 is not a game in the Diablo genre. D3 is closer to something like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, or the X-Men Legends games.

Edit: I focused on the itemization part of your post, but I totally missed the map part of your post.

I'm not sure map randomness was relevant at all in Diablo 2. That game was pretty much all Meph runs, and then Baal runs. The maps didn't really matter, you just teleported to the boss and hoped for good drops.

I agree with your point on maps. Diablo 2's focus on bosses over general farming was one of its weak points. The map structure would've been more important if Blizzard had made boss runs and general farming rewarding in distinct ways.

There are other things that I feel Diablo 3 did wrong, but my comment was getting dangerously long as it was: lack of build permanence (you touched on this), non-existent social features (slightly improved in the expansion), uninspired items (less so since the expansion) and badly tuned reward structure (I appear to be alone in feeling the expansion has not improved this aspect).

Hey I still do that! :(

I wonder if my (or anyone's) film photos on Flickr are completely useless metadata-wise. Because they are all scanned so they just say "NORITSU KOKI EZ Controller". There seems to be a large portion of people (on Flickr) shooting film still but I wonder if it's only a small percentage overall.