Even ignoring the workers’ solidarity aspect of it:

It is actually a really good practice to break those login/usage streaks with ALL services. I read a lot of ebooks and I generally will have a “streak” of even two or three years with amazon kindle since I try to read for at least 20 minutes every night. Over the past year or so I’ve started to migrate out of the amazon ecosystem to better support authors and… I definitely find myself hesitating when picking my next book because I COULD read this non-kindle book or… I could read this other book I have via kindle (the prices ARE good) and make number go up. And Amazon realized that we don’t always have an internet connection so they’ll log that to prevent the old streak breaking that came from not bothering to connect to the hotel wifi.

And the same happens with games. I dip my toe into ESO once or twice a year and it always amuses me how much of that is geared up to make you log-in every single day for a month.

Are you the lemmy cops? Is it your responsibility to chase any link to someone’s website across every instance and make sure people know they are a bit of a jackass?

If you think GoL should be a banned source, take it up with the various moderators. If you think only primary sources should be allowed (which I actually agree with), that is also a discussion to be had.

But rushing in to berate people for linking to one of the most popular news aggregators for a story that people would be interested in because you don’t like the guy who owns that site? All you are doing is discouraging people from making posts in the future.

Which is the problem with dragging community/subreddit drama everywhere you go. It just makes the site a much more hostile place for everyone. And we really aren’t big enough to be doing that.

I really don’t see a need to drag community drama everywhere. GoL is one of the biggest aggregator blogs out there for… linux gaming. Whether we should prioritize original sources over aggregators is a different discussion.

But yeah. Liam is great for news aggregating but he is 100% the stereotypical linux gamer and has a long history of starting random shit. Still annoyed by how fast he got everyone to shit on the Duckstation devs because they didn’t want to be exploited.

The architect of the series who was actively involved collected plans and notes into a lore bible over 10 years ago.

You are arguing semantics.

I was grandfathered in to the old funimation (?) subscription rates.

Then I checked on a whim and crunchyroll had silently bumped me up to their insane monthly rates like five months prior.

The good news was that it helped me to math out that it was almost always cheaper to just buy the blu rays for a season or two rather than do any of the online subscriptions for anime. And now I have a ridiculous plex server.

This is reddit. Gotta ignore someone’s post to make a pointless correction that they already addressed but much more aggressively.

The alternative is, Erastil forbid, a conversation.

This has been discussed a lot over the decades (with some VERY good articles written by assholes we try to pretend don’t exist))

The gist of it is: AI cheats because the alternative isn’t “fun” and rapidly outpaces humans.

Because in an RTS? After you get a build order down, the big decider is Actions Per Minute (APM). From a build standpoint, it is the idea of triggering the appropriate research the absolute second you have enough minerals. From a combat standpoint, it is rapidly issuing move and attack orders so that you always win the combat triangle. The former isn’t significantly different than just having cheaper research or faster build times. The latter is actively demoralizing in the same way that we all died inside when we first got permission to go online in Starcraft. Except at a level that even the good players realize they ain’t shit.

For grand strategy games (barring real-ish time ones like Stellaris) you basically have two real approaches. The first is the games with research options (… like Stellaris. Look, I have been playing a lot of Stellaris lately). We try not to acknowledge it but RNG has a massive impact on that when you really want to get torpedoes but no options are popping so you are just doing the fastest research choices you can to get a new pool. And the difficulty option there is… a known order.

The other are the very elaborate fixed tech trees. Obviously this gets back to build order. And the reality is… the benefit gained from rapidly updating the hard mode AI to use the current meta just isn’t worth it. That IS somewhere that an optimizing function can be applied to (and… semi-off-the-record but that has been a thing for over a decade and is why devs aren’t THAT surprised when a “new” meta takes over in a strategy game) but it becomes a question of how much it is worth it.

All that said, we are seeing a lot more effort put into “learning” AI in racing games (driveatars) and fighting games because those tend to be cases where even the best AI is still expected to be “human” and we aren’t TOO demoralized when we realize we are in a pub with Daigo. That said… there is a reason that modern SNK Bosses tend to have super armor rather than frame perfect inputs. Because the former is “bullshit” but the latter is just mean.

Yes. Which was not the topic being discussed.

The idea was that Google Chrome would lose a significant market share because of this. And, on the off chance that somehow happens, that is basically a death sentence for all the browsers dependent on Chromium.

So… basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?

Because if there is not massive amounts of money and resources pumped into Chromium development? Vivaldi and Brave will be up a creek

If the chrome market share significantly degrades then google will stop pumping so much money into it.

And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…

Actually quite a lot of games had multiple revisions even as far back as cartridges. That is why you’ll often hear a speedrunner say “This is done on the 1.01 North American version” and the like. Mostly my point was more to say that there is no question of “did every single patch get archived”

And as a huge Dawn of War fan: you can have every single patcher from Fileplanet and STILL not have a snowball’s chance of getting the version you want. But that is more comedic than not.

Because:

MVC2 is preserved as long as you’ve got at least one other person to play it with.

You can play MVC2. You can’t preserve the CULTURE of mvc2. Because, to switch gears to Third Strike: You and me probably aren’t going to do the kind of insane crap that folk like Daigo are able to do.

But also, like I mentioned above: You can get a hotel room game going. You won’t have anywhere near enough thoery crafting and experience to really run into cases where one character is noticeably better than another.

With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.

Let me tell you something as a Tribes 2 player. I can basically get a full server most nights of the week. But all the folk who are still playing Tribes? They never stopped. So the experience of hopping into a game in 2024 is absolutely nothing like it was back in 2004. It is a completely different kind of amazing but it is not “Tribes 2” from a “cultural” standpoint

Which I don’t disagree with (even if I suspect I do tend to lean more toward not making extra work for overworked devs than many)

The issue is arguing that you are preserving the culture when that very much isn’t Because what “meta” is there in MvC2 without other players? We all had our moment of “I am really good at Tekken” when we played against bots… and then were completely demolished by some kid at a truck stop who actually knew combos.

Which gets to what we see in reality where we DO have basically every version of MvC2 because it was before software patching was common. I would need to check what is popular for specifics but, like with all games, some versions get played and some don’t. And it doesn’t matter if you have every single revision of Karnov’s Revenge AND two different fan patches to rebalance it: if nobody plays it the meta doesn’t exist. MAYBE you can get a hotel room play of a version or two as a curiosity at Combo Breaker.

But you aren’t going to get a proper meta unless it is someone referencing a text guide that was also preserved. And that isn’t actually a “meta”. That is someone knowing combo strings or exploits. Because the meta that builds up around a fighting game involves people learning those combos and learning how to counter them and determining what is best and so forth. Otherwise? You are the kid who can consistently do a dragon punch up against the guy who can’t even do a hadouken.

Which gets back to the difference between preserving games/bytes and preserving culture.

But how feasible is it to have a recording of every single time any high school brit lit class put on Shakespear? Uhm… okay, the NSA got you covered but you get my point.

But, again, is a copy of the state of WoW on October 25th 2024 all that important when you consider that what really matter are the players and… I dunno, I guess they are talking about the expensive mounts?

Which gets back to the argument of preserving the games themselves (which I think has a lot of merit) versus preserving the culture around them. And people tend to conflate the two because they think “we are preserving culture” gives them a stronger argument.

Because they are very different problems. And conflating the two is how you end up losing masters because “there are VHSes with it on it”.

Arguing that game perservation is cultural preservation gets messy.

Let’s use a somewhat recent example: Overwatch. A lot of us LOVED Overwatch during the first few years. Then there were enough changes to balance out teams for competitive play that a lot of us feel it is no longer the same game and bounced off of it. Similarly, Darkest Dungeon 1 was kind of infamous for some major balance changes during early access that proved the true horror was gamers.

What is the answer there? Is it to back up every single version of every single game? Ha! You’ve fallen for my trap card! (also, remember when yu-gi-oh wasn’t a game where it is about building a deck so you can turn one wipe the other player?).

Because youtubers like Josh Strife Hayes who specialize in MMOs and multiplayer games have talked about this to varying degrees. Josh can play a really interesting MMO where he is literally the only person online for most of his recording session. But… that means he can only talk about the mechanics of the MMO and can’t really talk about progression or what it was like to play.

And that extends to “normal” games. There was a time when EVERYONE who was playing Tunic (and La-Mulana before it) was in chat rooms and message boards trying to understand the secrets. And countless video game essayists will acknowledge this. That coming back to a game in 2024 is very much about trying to understand what the game was in 2004. Hell, Illusory Wall has done some great videos where he actually researches this and points out how many misconceptions people have about what the players of Dark Souls 1 were doing which… is amazing.

Which gets back to preservation of culture. Shakespeare’s works are undeniably influential. But what is preservation? Is it the script? Is it the 1968 film where we all saw some boobies? Probably not, but that is what we see in high school. Is it the 199t movie with a Sword 9mm? I actually have a lot of arguments for why it should be but…

Because also? Most of what people learn about Shakespeare completely ignores the… for lack of a more humorous term, cultural aspects of it. Almost everything that man (allegedly?) wrote was a commentary on politics of the day. And you can read an annotated copy that will add in these references Pop Up Video style (remember that?) but that still lacks the meaning of the dimwitted young actor playing Juliet who doesn’t realize and the veteran playing Mercutio who is keeping an eye on the audience and is ready to bolt if people get angry or some cops show up and decide it is too on the nose and go to beat on Billy S.

But also? Who is to say that is any less culturally important than a 10th grade Brit Lit class putting on a performance where Tybalt both decided it would be funny to pretend he is Keanu in Bill and Ted AND spent all night playing Tribes and never memorized his lines so he is just over-emoting while trying to read off a bunch of cue cards in his sleeve? And the class is equal parts amused and pissed off while the teacher takes sips from a flask because this is the third class that day who did something stupid.

And, going back to games: Who is to say that playing Dark Souls by yourself is any less culturally relevant than watching the influencers of the day lose their shit and get mad at chat because they can’t beat Ornstein and Smough?

Because media is not in a vacuum. Media’s impact on culture is informed by the people who consume it.

Which is why I increasingly think that, from a game and cultural preservation standpoint, youtube and twitch and the blogs of the day are actually MUCH more important to preserve.

Yeah. I am not the biggest fan of VNs but last year-ish Cado at Remap did a stream where they did a run of this and I went from “Ugh, VN bullshit. Ah well” to “I NEED THIS”

(Un)fortunately, it feels like every single time I sit down to play it I hear there is another major new update coming. So… here is to finally getting to sit down and see even more of it.

Huh. I had heard people were bringing resources in but never really followed through on how. Might be worth keeping a long term game.

And yeah. I like the grind and progression of the expedition. I just would want to bring a couple dozen hyperdrive fuels and a launch drive fuel regen mod into any expedition since that is always where I lose interest. In the base game it is fine to grind as you go. In an expedition it is genuinely frustrating to realize I needed to jump to the OTHER system along the way if I wanted to get the radioactive fish or whatever the hell or I landed too far away from the resource I need for a goal. It just results in me playing something else after having had five or six hours of fun that expedition.

Hopped in a bit last night:

The barrier mechanic is both fun and really annoying. Basically, unless you grind a resource sink item near constantly you’ll regularly be attacked by ghosts. You can shoot them (and the expedition starts you with a boltcaster) but it basically feels like all the annoying parts of sentinels cranked down to maybe a 7.

And I REALLY like the progression this time around. Near as I can tell there is no actual hyperspace (?) jumping and it is all working toward portals. So no need to hope a system has whatever world I need for whatever item I need to grind to get the next milestone. Was refreshing to realize I would need a storm world because I was being warned about storms while walking toward another objective.

Which… maybe this is not the two weeks to have a fixed progression route where everyone gets funneled to the same comm ball spam location but it wouldn’t be NMS if it didn’t make some really bad decisions.

I would hate it if the game were nothing but this. But for a nice couple evenings while I hold off on starting a spectacular CRPG until I have gotten past the point where I am drinking copious amounts of whiskey and watching C-SPAN for days on end? F’ing A.

If you want a VERY light “elite game” with a much bigger emphasis on space legs with mild to medium amounts of resource grinding? Yeah

I personally can’t tell if the Expeditions system either ruins or makes the game. For those unaware, Expeditions are timed (usually a month or two, right now two weeks) seasonal content with structured progression and a light narrative. Basically a very condensed version of the “campaign” in the base game. So you start a new character bascially every time you play which is fun but also means that there is little to no point in building out a base.

Xalavier Nelson Jr talked about this a few times over on Remap Radio.

Strange Scaffold (and many other indie studios) are literally doing what people are asking for. They are making “complete” games with no early access period and no DLC with shockingly high production values for the budget. And people are ignoring them until there is a massive sale AND still going full culture war over the stupidest of shit*. Which means it is increasingly difficult for them to secure any kind of funding even though they have an incredibly solid track record for both development and sales.

And… that is the sad reality. It has been true for decades at this point but it feels increasingly more true now. Games can’t just release “done” because people will forget they exist by the time they are willing to buy them. Look at your steam wishlist and (please don’t actually) tell me if you even remember what all of those are. Instead, people see that Caves of Qud is finally going to hit 1.0 or that Pathfinder 2 has a new DLC or that Fortnite has fucking Goku and that simultaneously reminds them that game exists AND has “new content” so that they can feel justified in being a “patient gamer”.

I can’t speak to this PoP. I know that it is a games media darling and is INCREDIBLY well done but I also tend to not want to give ubi money until yves is gone due to his role in enabling and protecting sexual misconduct which continues to this day. But it is a solid reminder of why so many major publishers refuse to do anything that is not a major franchise (and apparently Prince of Persia no longer is) or has high enough production values that it bypasses the “I’ll wait for a sale” mindset.

So… Yeah, as consumers it is not our job or responsibility to protect the people trying to sell us shit. But, if you can afford it, consider buying fewer games overall but prioritizing newer ones that actively do things you think are awesome. From a selfish standpoint, you are more likely to actually play it rather than one of the five games you got for a dollar in a fanatical bundle. But it also REALLY helps those studios to be able to report solid first quarter (or even day one) sales and many games are already launching in the 20-30 USD range anyway.

Like, I don’t know if “really well done metroidvania” is a particularly solid reason. But there is a reason all of us squad tactics sickos went crazy buying nu-xcom and the like back in the day. Because we had gone from such a lack of games that even frigging UFO: Afterlight was worth playing (it isn’t. But Aftermath or whatever the first one in that series is is the best SG-1 game ever made) to suddenly having options. And, a decade later, we have enough options that… paradox fucking murdered HBS because they weren’t pulling projected nu-xcom numbers.

*: Paraphrasing since it has been the better part of a year, but Xalavier was joking that he caught so much hell for basically parroting Swen’s stance that Larian’s BG3 was atypical and can’t be reproduced. Yet people ignored all his VERY leftist takes on economics and social justice. Although, I assume that has shifted if he is still on twitter.

It’s almost like this behavior comes from the training data.