Starfighter, Summer 2015
Hmmm, personally, I have rather mixed feelings about this. I'd really like to be excited, but so far, I'm not. (And, on a somewhat tangential note, also I'm fairly surprised not to see any voices similar to mine here in the comments; am I the only one? hard to believe; or maybe others like me just shrug and don't bother to write? sounds more probable, to me at least.)<p>I tried to analyze my thoughts on that; I'll try to give some feedback/impressions, but please forgive if chaotic or otherwise flawed. So, in somewhat random order:<p>- I'm absolutely not interested in topic of "stock trading", or similar stuff. I'm not into trading/speculation, whether stock, currencies, or else. I don't like gaming others. Or PvP. So, if that's gonna be required, or important, sounds very much like something unfun to me. I like building stuff, and especially useful stuff. In my mind I characterize myself as "an engineer". And from this description, I don't see much in this area for myself. Even if I'm going to be building something here (some in-game "cyberdeck" of tools), I don't know how this could be practically useful for someone else, outside the game; so for now it sounds like wasted time and effort to me.<p>- From the original announcement, it sounded to me as an attempt at something revolutionary, appealing to a wide audience, and who don't have much free time they can put into this (but I may have overinterpreted, I dunno). Given my previous objection, I don't see how it is so, for now. Specifically, when/if I have free time, I prefer to put it into attempts at some open-source work, so that it would be useful to others, while also I could learn something. But when I don't have much time, I don't see how I could take part in the game in any meaningful way, such that my "score" could reflect my knowledge & abilities. In other words, for now it sounds like it requires some "grinding", and for me that sounds like wasted time (real world requires enough grinding). I don't really see how this differs from MicroCorruption (where I also didn't care to waste time on that), or other "CTF"s. Or, really, "an actual job". Only unpaid^H^H^H^H^H^H"paid" in virtual karma points/pixie dust ("score").<p>- The one thing that seems mildly interesting to me as of now, is the AVR theme. I'm somewhat hoping to dabble a bit in microcontroller programming (one of my many hobby project ideas). So, if I correctly understood that it's aimed to have a very faithful simulator of an AVR, I may at least learn something in this area, which may be easier than experimenting on real hardware. So, maybe the relatively "wide range of topics" (stock trading, AVRs, compilers, competition) might be the "revolutionary" aspect, so that there's higher chance everyone will find something for oneself? But if I'm willing to grind only on one aspect in-game, then my "total score" will probably be low, no? Unless at least the scores are multi-aspect, not totalled/averaged. Still, if I don't grind on other aspects, they won't show up in my profile, and will remain unknown to "potential employers", no? Also, back to the AVR theme, microcontrollers are closely related to electronics (i.e. very physical hardware: cables, soldering, analog voltages, timing, unexpected capacitances, coupling, etc.), and here I presume I won't be able to learn anything anyway.<p>All that said, I understand that this is kinda "2nd trailer announcement", and the stuff is not open to public yet, so the jury is still out.