NUT

You absolutely can and should regardless.

Beautiful writeup. I miss the days when games shipped with data files in easily user-acessible formats.

Would not be the first time, although usually developers then go out of their way to make things more legally distinct.

Off the top of my head, the PS1 game Croc was reportedly originally pitched to Nintendo as a 3D platformer starring Yoshi (it was made by some of the team behind StarFox). They obviously reworked it a ton before it released as what it ended up as.

for whatever reasons

Until recently, one man, who ran from the sinking ship of Yahoo search into Google’s marketing/ads group. He bullied the former head of search out when they refused to make search worse in order to boost the ad click through rates. He then became head of search himself until fairly recently.

In depth writeup here, and there’s a link to the same story as a podcast at the top.

I don’t like subscription based software, and a subscription based game launcher is even more ridiculous. Especially when there are already free open source alternatives.

With the subscription aspect in mind, this reads to me like an advertisement rather than news. Probably because you just pasted in their literal ad copy instead of giving us any of your own thoughts about it whatsoever.

A big part of why I’m on lemmy is to get away from the “natural engagement” ad posts, so in short this sort of post isn’t something I want to welcome or encourage.

Personally, this post would have come across a lot differently if it was just the link to their site/blog post and even a few sentences about your personal thoughts on it. This comes across as a poorly done ad.

You didn’t “just share news”. You just shared an ad with effectively no further context.

Some additional context to my previous comment: I work tech in the financial industry. I have some experience with payment processors and the stupid amount of bullshit around all this stuff. “They could do both of these things almost instantly” is a big assumption holding the entirety of the weight for your argument.

Anyway.

50 Cent was doing a one off publicity stunt, not trying to ensure continued existence as a company. How many mainstream artists are still doing that? I shouldn’t have to say that this is very much an apples and oranges comparison.

Your other idea has legs, but it’s still suggesting that Valve try entering a game of financial chicken with Visa and Mastercard. Effectively infinite money. And in the meantime most users would just be pissed off at Valve for making it harder to buy anything. We’re already seeing people attack itch.io for not standing up instead of bei g pissed at the payment processors.

Valve can’t make purchasing through a different processor a requirement for some games but not others because Visa and Mastercard said “stop selling games with this content entirely, or we stop processing your transactions entirely”. So anything they do will have to effect all transactions.

I’m frustrated Valve didn’t do more, and that they’ve not made any public statements about trying to fight this, but Valve isn’t just leaving money on the table because they’re lazy or dumb.

Changing payment processors/engaging a new one is anything but a short term thing to implement. Otherwise Mastercard and Visa wouldn’t be in this situation to have this level of control to begin with.

This restated question is not the problem directly.

The problem is the entire discussion/concept of “exposure to a dangerous idea in a pretend context maybe might maybe make someone more likely to emulate it in reality” when there has been little to no evidence found supporting that concept. Additionally the non-proportional amount of concern given to videogames in relationship to this concept as compared to literally any other form of media.

If there was even one iota of connection between “exposure to horrible things in media” (or even “pretending to do horrible things in a pretend context”) and “doing horrible things in real life”, the world would already look considerably different than it does. Militaries would be using these games as “exposure therapy” for soldiers. We’d be seeing crime rates of all sorts shifting in accordance with the media industries. There would already be measurable impacts after the decades of these things existing.

And more so than any of that: This discussion has literally been happening for longer than any of us here have been alive. I’m tired of having it.

Please stop letting the vague idea of “but it might help” override the logic of “but there’s no evidence to support that except a vague gut feeling”.

Tell me again how you’ve not actually read up on the issues with crypto as payment processor.

This shit has already been tried and the issues discussed at length. I think it was Mullvad that stopped accepting BTC and did an extensive writeup on why.

In short: the constantly shifting conversion rates make this unsustainable, as even if they accepted payment in crypto, they have to pay their bills in fiat currency. So their choices are to have crypto prices change literally every page load to reflect the exchange rate, or to just eat extra costs when suddenly 0.51btc goes from being worth $5 when the user pays to being worth $1 when they try to use it for anything else. Even with constantly updating prices, the shifting rates screwing them will still happen. The costs associated with even offering it as a payment type outweigh the actual revenue generated by an extreme order of magnitude, and even privacy/crypto oriented storefronts see something like under 1% of users using the option when it’s available.

And that’s my understanding of the short version.

There’s a big difference between “prioritizing short term profit” and “committing commercial/financial suicide to make a point”.

Jesus Christ we can’t be back to this old chestnut.

We cannot, and do not, standardize society’s guard rails around the most extreme edge cases.

Leave it back with Jack Thompson in the late 90s-early 00s where it belongs. The horse has already been jellied by repeated blunt force trauma more than a decade ago. You’re just punching a horse shaped divot into the dirt at this point.

Short term profits? How are they supposed to make any profits if payment processors refuse to process payments to them? They can’t just spin up their own fucking payment processor.

Beyond that, how does limiting the sale of any products make them money?

I swear, were none of you people paying attention when this happened to the right wing ghouls in the lead up to the 2016 election? Nothing of value was lost (or would have been), but Visa, Mastercard, etc have already shown they aren’t above using their position in the transfer of money to enforce their will.

Edit: Can’t believe I forgot about the payment processors playing games with Wikileaks. For shame. Would have been a much better example.

The goblins being peaceful might be due to your combat level. Once you outlevel an enemy by a certain amount, they stop auto-attacking you and you have to initiate combat with them if you want to.

This isn’t unique to Brave.

even cheap optical media might outlast SSDs since those tend to lose their saved data if stored unpowered for x years.

I wasn’t aware of this. Would you happen to have any handy links where I could read more?

Two lips on my organ? They knew.

But it isn’t a PC with Xbox compat.

It’s just a portable PC with Windows Gamepass and some stuff toggled to make it easier to navigate using a controller.

So it’s been about two and a half years since I’ve played (before my daughter was born), so take this with a grain of salt. I think last big update I experienced was the addition of the Reapers’s equivalent of the Athena’s Fortune faction.

Unless they’ve changed how captained ships work, every time you log in your ship only has a basic set of resources (like 30 wood, 30 canonballs, 15 bananas, something like that). Stocking up from the outpost barrels was an every session start thing. The whole captained ship thing was originally just a way to save your ship cosmetics and adding a bunch of ship specific achievements. Also gave access to a convenient one stop sell location and some “captain” exclusive quests.

Regarding PVP, natural “emergent” PVP has really dried up since they added in the hourglass (dedicated PVP match queuing) and the ability to server hop (lose all your sellable loot and active quest progress, keep the barrelled resources on your ship). So people up for scrapping usually hop servers until they find a popular and lucrative server event happening where there are likely to be other players. There already was the Reaper’s flag and emmisary to imdicate you were up for/looking for PVP too (both make you visible on the map to the whole server). So a lot of players left running around aren’t as bloodthirsty.

Also, unless they changed server limits again, each server has an absolute max of six ships. It’s a big sea for so few ships. Especially when we stayed around The Roar (volcanoey area at the east side of the map) we could go entire sessions without running into other players.

Man, I really hope it’s still around when I have the time to come back to it. Awesome game.

They crawl wikipedia too, and are adding significant extra load on their servers, even though Wikipedia has a regularly updated torrent to download all its content.

It’s hidden in the middle of the description, but this is DoomRL after being told they had to stop using the Doom IP as a fangame. Same person behind it, and my understanding is that it’s even built off the same codebase (just updated a hell of a lot over the years). So less a “spiritual successor” and more a rebranding.

Which is awesome if you like DoomRL.