I mean, yea, trends exist.

The world progresses.

This thing is good.

What’s bad is the marketing dark patterns and mtxs.

Also fuck giving saudi arabia money. Sometimes its unavoidable, but this is a video game. There are other video games, but there is no regime worse than the saudi regime.

“bUt ThEy DoNt OwN tHeM yEt”

The price has been settled on, so any success from here on out absolutely does directly benefit the saudis.

There isn’t a single comment in this chain that says it’s purely about server costs.

The implicit implication of your comment is that sever side verification etc inherently means unacceptable latency and I see no reason to believe it; only gut feelings

The most important thing is to first have a governing body that governs the police, without being police.

Without this, nothing here matters because they haze, and brutalize those who do not conform to their awful internal group standards.

You can literally see what happens to good cops. They get forced out.

The problem with your post, is that you can’t help someone who does not want to be helped.

Ideally that type of person would be kicked out of the force, but instead they comprise of the majority of these forces.

Just to be clear, many if not most agencies have mandatory psych evals, visits etc after different types of incidents, but as you can see, they just don’t solve the problem.

Absolutely. It’s completely possible too by using server side verification and not giving the client info they shouldn’t have, but that costs them slightly more in server costs (which aren’t significant).

It would also require designing the games code to account for this from the start, so not insignificant but definitely all reasonably possible, as in if there were magically legislation tommorow forcing all new multiplayer games to stop doing invasive anti cheat in a year, it’d be done in 6 months.

But wont end as long as the biggest resistance they see is people making snarky self censored comments on mostly right wing billionaire owned social media.

I keep thinking theres gotta be a drug that gets you into that state, but alas pharmaceutical companies have not found the magic money maker, so plain ol stimies help a bit.

I find your idea that a comment ought be positive rather displeasing. I think its a bit of toxic positivity whereby useful criticism is muted for no good reason other than vibes.

The big point though, is that you simplifying my comment down to positive or negative, going so far as to imply that my comments said anything like “give up” is completely out of order.

Someone in a dark place does not want to be belittled by advice that minimizes the actual difficulty of the situation they’re in and the hard work and process they’ll need to go through to get out of it.

This idea that people magically are just happier with light, trite advice is inane to me.

It also seems utterly empathy lacking to dump on self-pity like people aren’t allowed to be sad, like thats a failure of the person.

Quite frankly you come across as someone who pretends to care so they can beat down others with their opinions and feel smarter/better by using weaponized civility. Its all frustrating and it feels like you have tried your best to egg on confrontation here with how wildly you misrepresented what I’ve said.

I can’t say that this advice is relevant for those with ADHD, but the fact that your first response wasn’t to investigate whether their advice was useful

One-sentence prescriptions for a complex problem are rarely actionable. “see a professional” is at least concrete but obviously still has problems as described. “just start” or “regulate emotions” both lack actionability and detail. They both name outcomes while offering no practical advice to reach said outcomes. More than that, they downplay and minimize how hard this actually is. It’s belittling to people who are struggling, and I responded in a polite manner to what, to be honest, was very frustrating to read.

Your follow-up comes off as scolding rather than engaging in good faith. The fact I expanded in a later comment which was ignored in favour of chastising me for not praising the near-truism is more frustrating still.

Therapy is very expensive (many insurance companies only cover a minuscule amount of visits per time period), hard to access, has few options (for many people), and is exactly the type of thing you need to shop around in (like you need a therapist that is not only decent, but also cares about you (in a patient doctor sense) and communicates with you well).

More than that, even when that lines up, its nowhere near the nearly instant/fast or surefire process so many people imply it is online.

More than all of that, the idea that you need to go to therapy to learn something indicates that its not really actionable advice.

It’s abit like how saying the solution to having good politicians is to take the money out of politics.

We all know that, but the path to achieving it is clearly where the real difficulty is, and so the initial statement ends up not actually being useful to anyone, as it isnt what the actual goal is, and in this case, a psychologist might just have a different plan/words they use as the goal for you based on how they do things.

Nice idea, in theory, just like many other mental quick tips that also equate to “just do it”

I gotta be honest, there was, and always seems to be so much more to fight against whenever I use linux pretty much purely because there is just less third party support for it.

The number of things that I just give up on because I know itll be another multi hour fight for something basic are too high.

Like KDE Plasma is goated, but I just, from personal experience, just don’t buy the idea that you don’t fight more on linux. You have more agency, but you also have to use it more.

I have 2 modern desktop systems, so Ill probably continue to play with it, and I certainly will obviously keep using it for my NAS, self hosting projects, but in terms of a desktop os, oof; I don’t have the energy/fight/will and resolve.

I’ve used linux systems for years btw, in jobs, in my personal life etc, so really the only thing that was new was trying to use it as my main desktop self administrated OS for general purposes.

I’m not into CAD stuff at the moment but I’m pretty sure there are some really good open source ones out there at the moment that are Linux native also.

Oh I wish, but the only thing worth anything is FreeCAD, and it is literally pain to use. The UI is infamously horrific, they’re only now sort of fixing basic issues like the infamous topology issue, and it seems like the devs are dead set on breaking all the standard UI and UX conventions of every other CAD program since the beginning of time, and its just pain to use or learn.

Then it breaks your designs all the time too with cryptic errors.

The other ones, some of them only have basic modelling capabilities, are completely programatic, and you have no hopes of doing things like FEA or anything like that, much less motion studies or the other basics you need to successfully make a lot of things.

Its in a painful state, and CAD, if you even want to make a cent with other CAD software is bare minimum almost 1000 USD per year.

Its very depressing if you are a more creative person and not made out of money.

Keep in mind with bazzite and cachyos i also didn’t need to do any tinkering to get the games to work. They just do.

I’ve been told this many times, and sure its true for single player games without awful DRM schemes, but you can basically count multiplayer games out, and many games that have awful phone home systems.

Its ultimately like, how much do i want to fight my own operating system, and when people have a finite level of burn before burnout, how much do you really want to spend of that burn on an operating system you use daily?

Its a heavy cost for not that much benefit, especially with so much on fire right now.

Maybe Ill try again eventually if there is at least a competent CAD package available.

I listen to podcasts featuring people who used to score games in that separated way for Gamespot, and it frequently led to scores that were out of sync with what the content of the review actually said.

This is my point about why a single number doesnt make sense.

Things are not a simple sum of their parts.

Plus, who’s to say if the visuals of Clair Obscur are better or worse than Hades II when they’ve got very different goals and art styles?

Also in support of what I’m saying.

How grindy a game is or how it’s monetized often makes its way into a review.

Before I completely gave up on written reviews, I feel like it was increasingly obvious that reviewers were purposefully just glossing over painfully obvious mtxs and marketting dark patterns to the point I felt like they were clearly being influenced by the fear of losing special access to ignore what they knew games companies felt strongly about.

Some ex media org folks have talked about the politics internally that went into pressuring people not to acknowledge problems like this, though I don’t recall the name of any specific source. I feel like there was a large group that split up and some of them talked about it. I want to say Jim “Stephanie” Sterling (I believe thats how they title themselves) has talked about it, but I can’t quite recall.

Anyhow, I don’t think the knobs being cranked can be fully to blame as I don’t think that happens all that often because they dont even need to. It has happened a few times infamously though and devs regularly try to boil the frog in modern games

So many multiplayer modes are not designed to last, and no one, often times not even the people updating the features list on the Steam store page, care to mention if a game supports offline multiplayer like LAN. Some games blur the line, like Hitman, on just how offline their game and its content can be. That’s what I’m missing from review outlets.

Definitely true.

Feels like the sort of thing movements like StopKillingGames would hope regulation would solve. Id love to see like, a mandatory nutrition facts label on games dictating a minimum amount of time from launch the servers will be active, whether you can play without servers, etc etc.

Real change has been happening by way of reporting on unionization and crunch. Harassers are being taken to court or otherwise removed from their position of power in their companies.

True and good, but with current admin, I think we’re going to see a lot of these positive changes reverting as we come to realize that crime is legal for those affiliated and who bend the knee.

Understandable. I just feel like amalgamated scores tend not to truly reflect the subjective opinions of the reviewer as sometimes games are more or less than the sum of their parts, and then it doesn’t represent anything close to objectivity because it ignores that different people value different things more or less than others, therefore making this score not all that useful for them.

I can completely understand just wanting a quick score at a glance from a favourite review or outlet though.

I eventually plan to watch it, but I usually try to avoid watching things until they are finished to know if they just rapidly gave the thing a bad end or if it has a satisfying conclusion.

Also because if there is a long time between seasons, Ill forget the story line.

I tried to use OpenSUSE tumbleweed for about 6 months as my main desktop, but eventually due to many of the things I wanted to do being a real pain to do in linux, said fuck it and went back to windows whilst building a new high end gaming rig.

It really sucks as I hate Microsoft with a burning passion, but if you want to play games, or use many CAD packages or make music, or watch videos (specifically with pot player for me, as it absolutely dunks on VLC unfortunately), then you just have to use Windows.

I haaaaaate the obvious attempts by the new taskbar to control user behaviour.

I hate the spying which it takes a while to turn most of it off, I hate… a lot, but the world is how it is.

I’m very thankful for Steamdecks gaining steam so that one day hopefully gaming on linux will be possible, and maybe adoption goes up and then maybe other apps follow.

Maybe the US collapse will have Europe mass switching, causing professional apps to also move over, especially CAD.

I think they’re almost kinda right.

I think these platforms need to adapt. They need to make short form, entertaining videos like The Washington Post or the break off with Dave Jorgenson called Local News International.

There is too much news for anyone to actually bother reading the long form articles that theyre used to having awfully agitating formats designed to get the reader to read the whole thing and scroll past ads.

Short form, entertaining, and factual is the best route. Do a little skit, explain the concept simply, bingo bango.

Absolutely agree. A youtube video where you can mostly ignore what theyre saying and just see the game and problems with it along with some benchmarks is all you need.

If its online, watching someone play online to get a feeling of how the community is also works, particularly if its just them playing solo for a long stretch of time not editing out toxicity.