Does Factorio count? It’s a good game, you can play multiplayer, the factory can always grow (at least until your hardware, or in the extreme the software, can no longer handle it) and if you’re grinding for something rather than automating it, you’re doing it wrong.
I had a decent time with it and probably would’ve played a 2nd run had the game not failed me because every faction (including the rebelling one) was too happy to pass the final law or whatever. They probably fixed that by now, but it was pretty souring.
My expectation was combat would be more of a setup/payoff play style with situational skills and players suffering resource attrition over long fights and maps when compared to PoE’s use one skill to clear the entire screen as fast as possible so you aren’t one shot by a random rare that is harder than the map boss.
A lot of what they’ve said helped inform that understanding, but it’s really hard to meaningfully combine skills when mobs are basically trying to shoot/rush you as soon as you can see them.
Ok, if you are against hard feelings, cross off anything that is directly competitive, that would be any game where players directly and willfully interact with each other in a way where one gains while another loses as part of the core gameplay. To varying degrees things like blood rage, root, monopoly/solarquest, everdell, 7 wonders, clank, carcassonne, ticket to ride, dominion, etc.
If your group must have competition, you’ll need to stick to independent competitive games, this is anything where players are primarily taking actions in their own space and are progressing largely independent from each other. Example recommendations include things like Quacks of Quedlinburg, Shifting Stones, most roll and writes (welcome to series, cartographer with a minor exception), cascadia, verdant, etc
If you can do without competing with each other, cooperative games are definitely the way to go to minimize hard feelings (it’d only come up then if someone thought another player did something suboptimal causing a loss). The variety here is actually pretty large: simple trick taking games like The Crew series Information sharing games, like Mysterium “Combat” games of all complexities (generally ascending: Lord of the rings storybook, marvel united, D&D board games, Heroquest, Stuffed fables, Atlantis Rising, legends of andor, horrified, Arkham horror, marvel champions, mansions of madness 2nd edition, spirit island, Gloomhaven) Mystery/puzzle games (Adventure Games series, Exit The Game series, Animals of Baker Street)
I’d also like to call out 2 other games specifically: Stella, while it is a 1 winner competitive game where your score depends largely on other players, the push your luck and prisoner’s dilemma aspect of how you earn points I think largely removes the feel bad aspect of competition. Kitchen Rush: pure cooperative, but it’s also a real-time game where everyone is taking simultaneous actions to run a restaurant in 4 real time minutes stretches.
Just wanted to add, for the fully cooperative Heroquest experience, they came out with an app for the new edition (but it’s compatible with the original base game) that fully takes over the Zargon/DM role.
There’s actually a specifically cooperative expansion for Carcassonne, called Mists Over Carcassonne. It adds an element of managing a ghost population while trying to cooperatively reach a target score based on certain scenarios.
So for 1, here’s a pretty explicit quote where he does speak out against the harassment “I call on everyone to reject harassment in all its forms.” @cynicalbrit (first comment).
Definitely unfortunate that while he was attempting to champion the cause for a discussion on ethics (which he had been involved with for years when that all happened), the mantle got co-opted by a bunch of terrible people. But at best I can only blame him for thinking he could right the ship at that point, and that’s not a large enough mistake for me to define him by.
He definitely didn’t “yell into camera”, both because he was just projecting his voice (I’m constantly confused when people can’t distinguish loud from yell) and most videos didn’t actually feature a camera shot. He was known for a lot more than his criticisms for devs for things like 30 FPS locks: he was an excellent color commentator for SC2, he prolifically provided coverage for indie games and was a huge consumer advocate.
As he relates to the topic at hand, he was a giant reliable source of gaming recommendations of his day and it’s disingenuous to suggest there haven’t historically been highly influential, reliable and quality creators to assist people in discovering games.
They could easily put a toggle on so people can choose to enable cross play, off by default. If console folks want to subject themselves to people using mice, that’s their own fault, and nobody who didn’t want to would need to play with them.
There might be other reasons for the delay that are more contractual in nature to get sorted out.
Someone would setup some third party tracker that identified the auto reject threshold and listed it for everyone, so people could low-ball just above it. Or devs would just set it to auto-reject below the listing prices.
There are a few sections restricted to solo only, but it’s not the default, the matchmaking is pretty quick for a random group and there’s a variety of people always looking to form groups for different tasks. One word of warning, people move fast, until you get parkour down, you might just end up running from the start to end of a level if you join groups, they’ll have completed the objectives and be waiting for you to extract.
Clans exist, and each have their own space station called a dojo that’s customized by them (cost is based on size of the clan, as a solo I was able to build up and level a clan on my own).