Lurker > adjl

https://imgur.com/0c6Cn6H

I feel like that's more likely to backfire than yield any actual benefit for McD's. They won't be able to apply the trademark retroactively, so they won't be able to claim anything from prior uses of WcD's, and moving forward artists will just shift to a new parody instead of having to pay any sort of royalties to use WcD's. In turn, that's just going to piss off people who are annoyed that McD's has destroyed the venerated tradition of WcD's, who will then be even less likely to buy McD's (and they're probably the main niche this is trying to attract).

Assuming they're strangers and it's not a case of playing against friends, like bots. Say nothing unless I have to, keep any frustration or excitement to myself, and just play the game.

I definitely plan to pick it up at some point, but I'm in no great rush. 3 months of PoE's Ancestor league satisfied my desire to play an ARPG for now. I'll probably grab it in a sale some time, depend on how that timing lines up with PoE2, Grim Dawn's next expansion getting a sale, and/or how I feel about getting into an ARPG at that point.

Yellow posted...

I find it kind of badly designed? Capacitors should discharge themselves on shutting off?

I think they do, it just takes a long time for a capacitor of that size to fully discharge, and that means there's a dangerous amount of energy left in it. It's not a design flaw so much as an inherent limitation of how the physics of electricity work. I expect that to discharge it faster than that (without going through the process of connecting a dozen heavily insulated things to various grounds before shorting it), the microwave would have to have a process you could activate to block it from charging while still being plugged in, then have the microwave run until it mostly drained. You'd have to do that before unplugging the microwave, but theoretically it would be safer.

In practice, though, I don't know that you could guarantee that such a process would actually discharge the capacitor enough to eliminate the risk, so for liability reasons it's probably better and definitely easier for manufacturers to just not offer the option and instead give a blanket advisory to have an electrician service your microwave instead of DIYing it. As it stands now, they say not to do it, so that puts the onus on anyone who does want to do it to research it themselves and figure out how to do it safely and absolves the manufacturer of the responsibility.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

what happens to Fortnite when it eventually dies?

It dies. The servers are taken down and you lose the ability to play it. It's still a live service, just a dead one.

By comparison, Palworld will persist in the state created by its final update. You'll be able to continue to play it as normal, if perhaps without multiplayer. It just won't get any more new content. At that point, there will be no basis to even consider calling it a "live service," despite nothing about the core gameplay structure or relationship with the players having changed. Therefore, there never was a basis to call it one.

Yellow posted...

On the back of one of the machines at my work is a big fat capacitor that could just kill you even if you unplug it. Your average person would think it's safe to touch.

Heck, the same is true of home microwaves. I had one die recently in a way that made me suspect a fuse blew, so I looked up how/if it was possible to change a microwave fuse. The first step was "This is super dangerous seriously just call an electrician but if you insist on doing it anyway here's how," followed by like 90% of the procedure being everything you have to set up to be able to safely discharge the capacitor. Needless to say, I opted to just get the landlord to replace it.

So what happens when new content stops being developed for Palworld? Does it stop being a live service, or does it persist as a live service that isn't live or servicing anymore?

Jen0125 posted...

LMAO no one believes they were going to lower prices during non peak times. These business management idiots really think we are ignorant.

I mean, I'm sure they would lower prices during slow times... if measured relative to peak prices and not to what we're paying now.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

That's why I call it live service lite. They're adding more to the game in the future. That's not early access. Early access is just that: early access to a game that's largely complete but needs quality of life fixes.

Again, was Hades a live service before they finished adding all the areas and weapons?

Early access very often involves adding new content, not just QoL/bugfixes. Factorio didn't even have a win condition when it first launched as an Early Access game, and even after it came to Steam (which happened about 6 months after the win condition was added), it went through several pretty substantial content updates (enough to justify raising the price) before 1.0 launched 4.5 years later. Early access just means "it's not done yet, we just want feedback and an income source while we finish it." Exactly what "finishing it" means varies from game to game and dev to dev.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

Suicide Squad is offering a lot of free updates. No Man's Sky offers a lot of free updates once you've paid for the main game.

I can't speak to how Suicide Squad is structure because I haven't really paid any attention beyond knowing that it's at least trying to mimic the live service looter shooter model, but NMS is not a live service, they just keep having ideas to add to the game. Again, the important distinction is that they'll stop when they stop having ideas, not when it stops being profitable to keep players engaged with the game. Live services are characterized by that push to keep players engaged long-term, not simply by receiving additional content updates.

https://imgur.com/4EnWl3B

MeatiestMeatus posted...

They stated they plan on releasing more content (islands, pals, bosses, tech) and endgame raid bosses. That's live service, not early access:

Is Stardew Valley a live service? Is Terraria? Was Hades, before they finished releasing all new zones and weapons pre-launch?

Live services are a matter of continuous content delivery to keep people playing. Early access is a matter of "the game's not done yet, here's what we're still planning to add." Some other games get long-term support because the devs have new ideas that they want to add, which may bring players back, but aren't really meant to keep people playing continuously. As far as content delivery goes, the lines can blur a bit, especially when it comes to formatting roadmaps, but the primary distinction lies in the motivation: Live services get more content to hold people's interest, and will therefore continue to get new content until the game stops holding enough people's interest to be sustainable. Early access games (and games like Stardew with long-term support) get more content because the devs aren't done yet, and will therefore stop getting new content when the devs run out of things they want to do.

Most notably, though, live services are live, meaning they can die. They're based on servers and can therefore eventually stop when the publisher decides to stop hosting them. If a game doesn't meaningfully change when its servers shut down because the game's support is based on a one-time purchase and not ongoing monetization, it's not a live service.

Now that McDonalds has done it themselves, does that mean anime can no longer feature WcDonalds without infringing on their trademark? It's now become an actual thing instead of just a parody.

I'd say it applies across the board. If crunch was ever on the table, having AI tools that supposedly speed things up will probably make it worse. In cases where the tools don't make crunch worse, crunch was probably never on the table to begin with. Either way, AI tools aren't likely to impact abusive crunch.

I'm also not sure I'd go with dumb/smart companies so much as companies that do/don't suck. By and large, the "dumb" companies are quite successful and have made/are making tons of money. It's unlikely that that money is sustainable, but they're engineered such that if the bubble does burst, the executives and board members will get their golden parachutes and the only people really suffering for their myopic greed will be the employees. They may have a few high-profile failures as a result of being out of touch with what it takes to actually make a good game (Anthem being one of the more notable recent examples), but generally speaking, they're quite competent when it comes to the overall goal of making a lot of money quickly. They just suck, from our perspective, because we place more value on having good games and not compromising employees' quality of life than on giving shareholders nice returns.

If anything, it'll probably result in more crunch time because the out-of-touch executives who come up with project deadlines that require crunch in the first place will just buy into the hype that AI can shorten development times without actually taking the time to understand how it can do that and what that actually means for project timelines. Crunch (at least the serious cases, occasional overtime is kind of inevitable) happens now because executives don't understand game development and the capabilities of their employees/studios well enough to form realistic expectations for timelines. AI is more likely to make that worse than to fix it.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Israel drops notes warning innocent civilians

If I send you a letter telling you I'm going to burn your house down, I'm still an arsonist, and you're still homeless. I don't magically become a good guy and you don't magically stop being horribly victimized by my crimes just because I gave you a chance to not die in a fire.

If we're really keeping with the analogy, though, I then also burned down the house of the friend you went to stay with and you still died. Whoopsie! But hey, at least I warned you about the first one, and that makes it okay.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

The vast majority of Israelis want peace and prosperity for Palestinians and everyone

I (and pretty much everyone else speaking on the matter) have made it pretty clear that when I say "Israel" in this context, I'm speaking of the country in terms of its government and actions on a national scale. Most Israeli citizens do indeed not want to commit genocide, as can be said about most Jewish people worldwide. Israel as a country, however, is doing exactly that, and that's bad.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

For that last bit, I want you to know I reported you to our moderators who will most likely choose inaction because they do a terrible job.

On the list of people that should be told to go fuck themselves, genocide supporters are pretty much right at the top of the list. If you've got a problem with that, consider not supporting genocide.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

anyone who doesnt toe the ideological far left line is a goose stepping Nazi amirite?

No, but the people wearing swastikas are, and Trump's nationalistic and xenophobic rhetoric makes him exactly the sort of candidate they want to rally behind.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Trump has numerous times condemned white supremacists.

While continuing to court them and accept their support. Condemning them is largely a performative measure, given that I don't think even Trump could recover from publicly heiling Hitler (his cultists would stick with him, but he'd alienate too much of the general public to stand a chance). He doesn't necessarily agree with them, but they support him and he appreciates that because he appreciates anyone that strokes his massive, throbbing ego.

Muscles posted...

You could always vote 3rd party if you don't like Biden

Voting third party is functionally identical to not voting, and thereby increases the chance of the person you want to vote against winning. Yes, if "everybody voted third party" that would change, but everybody isn't going to vote third party, not matter how much you want to cling to the idealistic fantasy that there's hope for a third party win. If you want electoral reform, you aren't going to make it happen at the ballot box.

SinisterSlay posted...

Your thinking the wrong way, its not more games, its higher quality games in the same time, or games made faster.

That's more cost saving than increased production. If you can produce the same product in fewer salary hours, you've saved money, and increasing quality is distinct from increasing production (which I tend to interpret as increasing the volume produced).

agesboy posted...

that's why i think they'll sell all price fluctuations as a discount from the "regular" price (which will match what the highest fluctuation price would be). people fucking love getting deals, even if they're fake

Indeed. When WoW was in its early beta stages, they had a system where you could only get a certain amount of experience at a time before you'd suffer a 50% debuff to exp gains, a debuff that would go away after being offline for a while. Players hated it. In response to that feedback, they instead called the 50% debuffed exp rate the standard and offered a 2x "rested" bonus that you could accumulate by being offline for a while. Players loved it, despite it being functionally identical to the original system and just being framed as a bonus for not playing instead of a penalty for playing too much. As far as I know, the Rested system is still in the game today, almost 20 years later.

It's really quite easy to manipulate people into thinking they're getting something good without actually giving them something good.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

Palworld has planned endgame support and other post-launch content. That's live-service

That's early access. Certainly, live service games can have early access/beta periods, but to say "we've launched in early access, we're planning to do a bunch more updates before calling the game finished" is not a live service model. That's just early access.

Notably, they explicitly are not planning to make a game that's designed for people to play it forever. Live services are designed with the intent of keeping up a continuous supply of content to keep people playing indefinitely, almost always with some kind of recurrent monetization opportunities (whether a subscription fee, microtransactions, DLC/expansions, or a combination of the above) to capitalize on that engagement. If they're not planning to keep adding stuff to keep people playing forever, it's not a live service.

Heck, if we say that any game that keeps getting content updates after launch is a live service, arguably that means almost every game is a live service these days, and at that point the term just loses all meaning.

SinisterSlay posted...

Yup.
Dumb company: Use AI to reduce costs
Smart company: Use AI to increase production

The problem with increasing production is that there isn't really a shortage of games coming out of any major studio, nor is there a shortage of games coming out in general. Getting more games out can help to capture a greater share of that market, but games already struggle to stand out enough to be successful, and by and large producing more games means compromising on their quality and therefore jeopardizing their chances.

Generally speaking, because the market is finite (people can only buy and play so many games), you're going to see better returns by using new tools to produce the same output at lower cost than to produce more output at the same cost. The exact comparison will of course depend on the magnitude of the savings/production increase (saving 1% is obviously worse than selling 100% more), but I'm not surprised that companies are looking more for opportunities to cut corners than to expand.

That's pretty messed up.

Blue_Thunder posted...

This looks pretty good ngl

Some of the comments were saying that the parts of the noodles inside the hot dog bits didn't cook, which makes sense because the water couldn't really get to them. I'm sure you could figure that out somehow (most likely thinner slices), but I'd rather just cook the two separately and serve them together.

Jen0125 posted...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68405119

"In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the offensive in the face of international criticism, saying America would be "doing a hell of a lot more" if it had suffered such an attack."

Interesting defense. Not only is there zero substance to it beyond "everyone else is doing it!" (and even then, it's not actually "everyone else," it's "one country that already supports us"), it's also demonstrably untrue. 9/11 killed more than double the number of Americans than Hamas' October attack killed Israelis, and in the 20 years that followed, a combined ~70,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, alongside ~85,600 combatants (https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll). Israel's killed 30k civilians in four months and has maybe 100 combatant kills to show for it (admittedly, I haven't seen any more recent figures than the 13 they had when civilian deaths were only at 8k, so that may need correction). That's not to say there isn't also plenty of room to criticize the US for the amount of collateral damage they inflicted during the War of Terror and other American offensives in the Middle East (holy hecknuggets there's room to criticize the US for that), but Israel is quite unquestionably killing citizens at a much higher rate and with much lower success eliminating their actual targets (and probably with greater damage to critical infrastructure that will lead to more indirect deaths, though that's hard to quantify). Netenyahu doesn't have to lean on "The US would do the same thing," because the US has already faced a worse attack and not responded the way Israel has.

Jen0125 posted...

Yeah my beef is with Zionists, not Jewish people as a whole. People that ignore the distinction are either ignorant or acting in bad faith.

In many cases, it is just ignorance. The fact that Israel as it exists today didn't exist before 1948 isn't nearly as common knowledge as one would expect such a major piece of geopolitical information to be, and for people that don't readily know that, it's pretty easy to think of ethnic Jews elsewhere in the world as just being Israeli immigrants within a few generations, rather than a historical diaspora going back thousands of years. It's certainly not helped by people taking the Bible as... well, gospel, ignoring the historical reality of the region and everything that happened between 1 and 1948.

Jen0125 posted...

This sentiment makes me insane. WWII and the Holocaust were my special interest history topics to learn about as a teen. Everything I read shapes my opinion on what is happening now. Zionists are completely in the wrong. Anyone with a cursory understanding of the Holocaust can see that.

What's really annoying is that I get it: A huge factor in the "success" of the Holocaust and the other ways in which the Nazis oppressed Jews was a strong undercurrent of casual antisemitism throughout all of Europe. Hitler didn't show up as some antisemitic asshole out of nowhere, he just represented the extreme of the the antisemitism most people felt. It wasn't until the extent of the Nazis atrocities came to light that the rest of the world realized just how bad the antisemitism they thought nothing of had gotten, and to that end I fully understand why people are hesitant to disapprove of Israel: Even if it seems reasonable to them, they've seen what can happen with the free pass that's afforded by reasonably (in their eyes) thinking ill of Jews, and they don't want that to happen again.

The reality, of course, is that such matters are significantly more complex than just "don't be mean to Jews," but I do believe that most pro-Israel people at least mean well. It's just really frustrating to see intelligent, well-meaning people just drop the issue at "I don't want to be antisemitic" or "Hamas is a terrorist organization" when there's so much more to it than that and arming Israel is so blatantly complicit in a horrific genocide. Avoiding antisemitism is good, but not when that anti-antisemitism prevents you from recognizing and responding appropriately to cases when somebody who happens to be Jewish is doing something wrong.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

That's fair, but there are like ten people who read this board and I think we're already like 66-80% pro-Palestine

All true, but I still think it's worth taking the time to form arguments. If nothing else, doing so helps me understand the issue better.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

adjl you crazy

I'm not getting into the Israel discussion again, especially after this guy was outed as MAGA, they aren't even worth trying to argue with

Perhaps not, but he's not the only one reading this thread, and I don't want to leave his propaganda unchallenged. Especially around Israel, there's a ton of ignorance about the region's history and what's actually going on there right now, which is why so many people default to "I feel bad about the Holocaust, so I should probably stand up for the Jews here." Propaganda like his preys on that ignorance, so I do what I can to challenge it and educate the ignorant.

Remember that the goal in a public argument is not necessarily to convince your opponent, but to convince the gallery.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

So supporting our greatest ally in their time of need

Massacring civilians en masse and deliberately engineering one of the worst refugee crises in recent memory are not "needs" that I particularly care to support. I'm all for helping Israel defend themselves as needed (I think establishing the country after WWII was a mistake, but at this point reversing that decision would likely cause more harm than good, so we can really only work with what we've got), but what's happening right now is not defense. It's genocide.

To call Israel anyone's "greatest ally" is also quite the stretch. Globally, the country is a pretty minor power with little historical significance to back up that title (bearing in mind that they didn't exist during either World War and weren't particularly involved in any other high-stakes conflicts since their inception). The largest benefit they offer as an ally is a staging ground for any offensives the West wants to conduct in the Middle East, which is useful, but hardly "greatest ally" material when you can name a country that single-handedly allowed the US to form in the first place.

Devil_May_Cry posted...

Just be aware your true colors are showing with statements like this

Personally, I don't have any issues showing the colour of "genocide is bad." I'd even go so far as to suggest that anyone who does have issues with that particular colour should immediately re-evaluate their views on the world and consider permanently isolating themselves from society in every possible regard if they choose not to change their mind.

https://imgur.com/Pq46tmD

Accrovideogames posted...

When will people realize that voting for the lesser evil is only helping the rigged system stay in place?

The alternatives are to vote for the greater evil or not vote at all (which increases the chance that the greater evil wins). Unless there is actually a viable candidate that's including voting reform in their platform (and even that's not a guarantee, just ask Canada), the election is not an opportunity to push for voting reform. The election is an opportunity to work within the system you have to get the best outcome that system allows. Treating it otherwise will never accomplish anything more than helping the party that most benefits from lower voter turnout.

OhhhJa posted...

Easy to become apathetic about politics/voting when you vote and vote and either nothing changes or it just gets worse

It is easy to become apathetic, but that just justifies giving up and disengaging. Actively deriding people who are still motivated enough to care and try isn't apathy, it's a thinly-veiled effort yo defend the status quo.

Trump didn't push the vaccine conspiracy. He cemented "Covid is a Chinese/liberal hoax they're trying to take away your freedoms" as the official MAGA position pretty much right out of the gate before trying in vain to walk that back a bit when it became apparent it was making a colossal mess of things, and said a lot more things that undermined the response (like "I'm not going to wear a mask, but you all should if you're scared," which had exactly the effect you'd expect on the insecure people glomping onto his every word) or were outright stupid (like injecting bleach), but he was generally pretty pro-vaccine. By that point, though, his cultists treated his pro-vaccine statements as evidence that he was being forced to say such things by those behind the vaccine conspiracy, so it didn't help much.

darkknight109 posted...

Honestly, the idea of populations being monoliths is hilariously ignorant. As Randall Munroe so adroitly put it: there are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

I'm a big fan of when people lie with statistics while telling you that they're lying with statistics to make a point about how easy it is to lie with statistics, and Munroe does that often in some pretty elegant ways.

Geaux1210 posted...

quick question; why do yall assume MAGA is so horrible? What did he ever do to hurt gaming?

Are you suggesting that you believe the only reason anyone here opposes a given political movement is that they think it's going to hurt gaming somehow?

ItIsSoOver posted...

yall are fucking hysterical and its well... hysterical

youre about the same level of cringe as schmen on one of his captain capitalism rants, and similarly to him you all turn it up a notch every election season

democracy was a mistake

I remember thinking I was so much cooler than everyone else for being apathetic about politics. Those were good times. It's a pity that high school ends so fast.

SinisterSlay posted...

I never noticed. Emulators do a pretty good job of ignoring this problem

They do, but that's where the "legally" part comes in. It's significantly more common to get in trouble for downloading a SNES ROM than for downloading a digitized version of a film that was only ever released on projector reels. Part of that is the age (if the projector film didn't get a VHS or DVD release in the last 60 years, nobody really cares about it, while 30-year-old yet-unported SNES games do sometimes get rereleased), which gets into the fact that the medium is relatively new, but the issue remains that there are legal concerns around emulation.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

We have a skewed view of how well media was preserved in the past because we really only remember the things that were preserved.

Yes, I will gladly concede that survivorship bias plays a huge role in how we perceive the issue. Games being as new as they are also makes it much easier to learn about games that have been lost, as does the ongoing battle between companies protecting their IPs and emulation sites preserving games that would otherwise be lost.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But the same thing happens with games - in precisely the same way you might have a film reel copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, a VHS copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a DVD copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (and you need specific and unique hardware to play all of them, and none of them are cross-compatible), a popular game like, say, Halo gets released on the original Xbox, gets an updated port for the 360, gets released as part of the Master Chief Collection, and so on.

Here's the thing: VHS lasted for 20+ years before DVDs replaced them, and that VHS version was sold for much of that time. DVDs have been around for 20+ years, and a DVD version of the film has been available for much of that time. Nothing is set to replace DVDs entirely (BDs have ended up as a premium alternative instead of an actual replacement), so anyone can still go out and buy a DVD player and a DVD copy of the film and watch it.

By contrast, the Xbox was available for sale for 6 years, and isn't anymore. The 360 lasted 7. Each release of Halo was available only in those windows, and if you happen to find an older copy you won't be able to play it without also tracking down the old hardware. For games less popular than Halo that don't get ported to every single generation, if you missed that initial 2-3-year window where the game was being printed, you're probably never going to get to play it without paying through the nose for one of the rare surviving physical copies (or piracy). Conceptually, older media becoming obsolete and difficult to play is nothing new, but the timeline is much shorter for games than for other forms of media, which makes it much harder to preserve it through services like libraries.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Combined with virtual libraries becoming more and more common on both consoles and services like Steam, and tons of past games are still perfectly available to modern players on modern systems even if you don't own the original hardware a game was on. And that's not even taking emulators into account.

I'd argue that that's a big part of why it seems like games are so much worse than other media in this regard. Digital libraries are indeed doing an excellent job of preserving games (with a few hiccups), which is making it that much more apparent just how many haven't been given that treatment. For the vast majority of games, there is no technical reason that they could not be available to purchase today. Companies have the ROMs and are already paying to store them, emulators already exist that can run those ROMs on most modern hardware, and every platform already has one or more digital storefront services that could be used to distribute those ROMs and emulators to anyone looking to buy them (at whatever price is needed to cover the distribution costs). That they aren't is a deliberate decision on the part of IP holders.

Loss of physical media is to be expected. Between attrition caused by normal use, other damages like fires and floods, and the simple physical reality that you only have so much storage space and therefore can't store everything indefinitely, stuff is going to be lost. Toss in that physical distribution is comparatively expensive and that stores only have so much shelf space, and you similarly expect physical media to stop being sold. Some loss is also inevitable with digital media (copying files is not perfect, after all), but not to the same extent, nor are the concerns about distribution relevant, so giving games a pass under the same standard that gives historical physical media a pass doesn't make much sense. That's not to be expected. That's a choice to create artificial scarcity, one for which I'm all in favour of criticizing companies.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Games may have a greater rate of loss, and have unique aspects (like abandonware being a thing), but overall it's not that qualitatively different from any other form of media.

Qualitatively, no, but the idea of games being playable only within 1-6 years of their release is significantly more extreme than what's seen in other media, and given the tremendous potential for far better preservation and accessibility than that, I'd say it's still worth identifying as a problem.

orlouge82 posted...

Trump seems to inexplicably get more support and donations from Republicans the more indictments and convictions he racks up.

He's playing the helpless, innocent victim angle pretty hard. The more he's convicted, the more people who believe he's done nothing wrong (or that he shouldn't be punished for doing wrong things because he's somehow above that) want to push back against that perceived injustice.

SinisterSlay posted...

Sounds like you just discovered hardware based DRM. Congrats, that's the entire point of consoles.

That's the point he's making. Far more so than other media, retro games are restricted by the hardware they were released on, outside of comparatively rare ports/remakes that make them accessible with modern stuff, and efforts to pirate stuff that isn't available on modern systems tend to be treated more harshly than pirating other media. Part of that is that the medium is relatively new and nothing is public domain yet (nor will it be for quite some time), but console games in particular have been quite deliberately designed to be accessible for only a very short period of time.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

the needing to endlessly fiddle just to get stuff to work on pc is just obnoxious, yeah

"Endlessly fiddling" is pretty rare unless you're either trying to get really old stuff running (which consoles can't even do in the first place) or delving into modding (in which case you're voluntarily wading into the fiddling), and for many games modding is considerably more straightforward now than it was even 5-6 years ago (like Factorio has a mod portal built right into the game and installing mods is a simple matter of picking from the list and restarting the game). The vast, vast majority of the time, starting a game on my PC is no more complicated than starting one on a console.

As a bonus, actually, being able to fiddle is handy when a game doesn't work. If a game isn't working on a console, you're pretty much SOL. If a game doesn't work on a PC, provided you meet the requirements (and even then there's quite a bit of leeway there), you can often fix the problem without having to send the system off for repairs/replacement.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

the only "pros" for pc at this point are just "xbox and some playstation games games are on pc anyways" and "you have mod options for some games"

Also 20+ years of backwards compatibility (more if you're willing to fiddle) and more control options.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

which the latter isn't as much of a selling point as a lot of pro-mod people think, since it involves fiddling, and needing to fiddle with things is exactly why people don't get a pc.

It makes for better games. That alone is enough to make it a major selling point. Sure, there are going to be people who don't want to fiddle enough to take advantage of that, but that doesn't make it any less of a selling point. There are just some people whose desire for a completely mindless experience outweighs the value mods could provide them.

"It's okay, he deserved to be murdered because he still lived at home at 22."

That's quite the... interesting take you've got there.

Nightwind posted...

You know dadjokes are bad on purpose, right?

I am quite familiar with dad jokes, yes. I would not have suspected that this topic was meant to be one, though.

?

https://imgur.com/GgIoicf

The gratuitous caps lock and quotation marks around "wireless" is giving me big boomer complaining on Facebook vibes. It's like trying to add mocking emphasis to the word, but not understanding the current formatting conventions for communicating that tone. It's kind of weird to see that juxtaposed against a post about video game controllers.

Also ?

Count_Drachma posted...

That and we aren't in a post-labor society where UBI could function.

Virtually every UBI/minimum income experiment conducted has been successful in that it shows overall improvement in pretty much every regard, but sure, keep repeating that dogmatic mantra like it means something.

Count_Drachma posted...

Except net worth isn't billions of dollars that they have, it's holdings in companies where the valuation of the company's shares is volatile.

Which can be liquidated. I'm not sure why you insist on conflating "net worth isn't just a big bucket of money" (which is true) with "net worth can't be compared to liquid assets in any way." Trying to downplay the wealth of the world's wealthiest people is a really weird hobby.

Count_Drachma posted...

While "okay, you're successful, we want to take a good chunk of your money" is questionable, suggesting "okay, you're successful, we want to take over your company" is straight-up Soviet.

It doesn't have to mean the government taking over the company. Just that if a company becomes successful enough that a shareholder becomes a billionaire, that shareholder needs to sell off shares (and spend the proceeds) or otherwise reduce the value of the company until their net worth drops below that threshold. That can take the form of passing the reins to somebody else, profit sharing within the company, choosing not to expand further once the company has reached the threshold... All of it works out to avoid leaving too much power in the hands of any one individual or company, which is the goal. If the individual doesn't drop their net worth by the required amount within whatever time frame is defined (like if your net worth breaks $1 billion, you have two months to reduce it), that's when the government can step in and tax the excess by forcing the sale of shares/claiming liquid assets.

Also, I'm not sure which version of history you're reading in which Soviet citizens were allowed to freely gain wealth up to a point where it was beyond question that they could live out the rest of their lives in absolute luxury and never want for anything before the government would collect anything in excess of that, but I imagine most actual Soviet citizens would prefer to live in that reality instead of the one they got.

Alpha_MaIe posted...

All those sites that check if you can run a game arent even 100% accurate. Having it on Steam would just set themselves up to take all the blame and have the forums spammed with people bitching and threatening to sue or other stupid shit.

Also that. A third party site is just information. If Steam itself is telling you you can run it, though, that's Steam trying to make a sale, and that makes them liable for falsely advertising the product you bought if it turns out you can't. In practice, between the refund feature and the ability to hide behind weasel words like "you can expect," I doubt they'd ever actually be successfully sued over it, but that's just a hassle that's better to avoid.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

adj why are you defending nonsensical decisions

For justice.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

how much is big steam paying you for this

$2.35 and a green popsicle.

SinisterSlay posted...

Although technically with the overlay they do know your resolution and framerate, so they could take a guess.

True, but that's still data they'd have to collect and turn into a summary, which is work that's largely redundant when other services offer similar answers.

Bear in mind also that the primary use of such a feature would be to identify games you shouldn't buy. There'd be a handful of sales that would be made to people with crappy computers who didn't think they could run something and realized they could after Steam told them, but those would mostly be cheaper games anyway. On the flip side, I expect there have been many sales where the buyer wouldn't have bought the game if they knew how poorly it was going to run, but because it was kind of borderline put up with it instead of refunding it, and even more where the game turned out not to run but the buyer didn't figure that out until after the refund period had passed.

Basically, it would cost Valve money to implement it and would likely only reduce their total revenue instead of giving them any sort of return on that investment. It'd be convenient for users, certainly (I quite agree that it'd be really nice to see a "users with similar hardware to yours have averaged X FPS at 720p, Y FPS at 1080p, and Z FPS at 4k" section on each store page, and the technology is absolutely there to do that), but I understand why they haven't.

That is, however, something one of Steam's prospective competitors might want to look at, since that would be an actual service advantage that might justify jumping ship.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

steam also collects the necessary data for that though lmao

you think they don't know what hardware you have?

They know what hardware you have. They don't know what games people have managed to run on that hardware or how well.

SinisterSlay posted...

Some part of that seems wrong.

We know inflation has caused all prices to double since 2012.
Did anyones wage quadruple in these last 12 years? mine didn't

The causality doesn't go both ways. Increasing wages by 10% increases prices by 0.4%. Increasing prices by 0.4% doesn't necessarily increase wages by 10%.

Because there are several other services that have collected the necessary data to answer that question, making it unnecessary for Steam to also collect (and store and process) it.

Lokarin posted...

what if it's the realdoll you're trying to hide?

Another pair of Groucho Marx glasses.

Indeed. The usual suspects lose their collective minds whenever the idea of a wealth cap is tossed around, but really, the only reason to want more than a billion dollars is if you're trying to exercise way more power than any one person should ever have anyway. If you want to watch numbers go up, go play Cookie Clicker or something and stop ruining the economy for everyone else.

As a concept, a flat minimum wage will never work. It'll inevitably fall behind inflation, stagnating until the gap becomes severe enough to generate enough political will to fix it, by which point the economy has come to depend so extensively on poverty wages that fixing it is deeply disruptive and gives more ammunition to opponents of future increases.

Instead, it needs to be a sliding scale based on the regional cost of living: the minimum wage for a given position must be high enough that working for 40 hours a week pays as much as median rent for a 2-bedroom apartment (equivalent to paying 2x what's needed to pay for half of it, aiming for paying 3x what a sub-median apartment would cost) within a 30-minute walk of the workplace, or enough for a similar apartment within a 30-minute drive if you also cover the cost of owning and using a car. The benefits of that are twofold: you ensure that employees are able to afford to live, plus it automatically moderates the cost of living because jacking up prices to cover higher wages will prompt people to move somewhere cheaper and thereby force housing prices down.

The exact numbers will obviously need tweaking, and the increase will initially cause many of the same problems that any minimum wage increase will, but codifying that sort of policy is what's needed to ensure that minimum wage laws serve their intended purpose in perpetuity instead of being a constant uphill battle. Toss in some re-zoning measures to add more mixed-use properties in neighbourhoods to make it easier for people to work and shop locally, and you've got a recipe for a self-regulating system that ensures everyone is able to afford to live.

That, or just do UBI and abandon the idea of minimum wage altogether. That's probably simpler, though it still runs into the issue that living wages are not universal and there'd need to be some regional variation there (with some kind of checks to make sure people don't just move to expensive neighbourhoods so they get more UBI).

SinisterSlay posted...

So maybe the quick solution, if you openly support dictators, your taxes are raised to 99.99999%. Call it the treason tax. So only Musk, Trump, etc have to pay it basically. And we end poverty overnight

Fun fact: If you took away 99.99999% of a billionaire's net worth, they'd still have $10k left. Musk and Bezos would still be millionaires. A billion dollars really is a ludicrous amount of money.

At least this time was shorter. Still weird to have it two days in a row, though.