BougieBirdie

I would love to be able to gift my unplayed games to others.

I guess you do get into a problem where a group of people might swap the game back and forth to avoid ever having to pay for the game. But people will abuse any system, so I guess that would just be a cost of it

If a game is still within the refund window, then maybe it should have an option to gift it. The devs / publishers could keep their money and Steam doesn’t have to process a refund. Seems like a win-win

I paid a dollar for this two weeks ago

Worth it

If you want an out of the box distro that just works and has that old-school flavour, maybe look into Mint.

If you want something a bit more modern, then pop_os! is something of a Linux darling

Ubuntu probably has the widest community support. Although it does seem to have some issues

I’m not clear on what your bugs are, but if it’s like, you run a command in the terminal and a bunch of scary sounding messages come up, that’s normal. That’s just how it likes to be

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen used it, then I’d say Linux is probably worth another shot. It’s come a long way, and it only gets better with age

In English we have an idiom, “same shit, different day,” which means dealing with the same sort of unpleasant task until it’s routine. Do you have something similar?

This Hamburg court thing sounds like something I’d call “same shit, different pay,” which would be like when you have an issue with your boss so you appeal to their boss, and find out that they’re just as bad except they’re higher in the organization.

Well sure, old people do

I wish this behavior was limited to a single playerbase. I haven’t played league in a million years and this still happens sometimes

Can’t we all just get along? We’re here to play games darn it

Half the time a friend request comes just so someone can continue to flame you after the match is over

Yeah, I’m not sure this is the generational thing that the author is trying to make it out to be. It seems to me like one of those things that leans on personal preference.

The author’s sample for the behavior of generations is a few anecdotes from personal friends. How many friends does a person have, 3, or 30, or 300? That means n is pretty small when there’s something like 3 billion mellenials

Well you try one way, and then if that doesn’t work, you roll over, and if that doesn’t work then rolling over again should do the trick

Oh yeah, and if you want any online services, you’ll want to look up what those cost. I don’t know if they offer a family discount for multiple accounts

I guess ultimately it depends on what kind of games your family likes

As you mention, party games you only need one. If your family’s into single player or portables then each person needs one

How is it affordable? Well, it isn’t really. Although I guess a switch probably retails for about half the cost of a PS5

It’s funny though, if you compare it to other consoles, I think people are far less likely to buy an Xbox or Playstation for each family member. And yet, people would do that for the gameboy and DS without batting an eye. The switch is trying to be everything, for better or worse.

When we got ours, we were pretty content having just one and then playing party games or taking turns on single player games. Sooner or later though, we had to get another so we could play pokemon together. Which is a shame because my interest in pokemon seems to have suddenly fallen off a cliff and now my switch is collecting dust

So I guess all that to say: your mileage may vary

This looks like a screenshot from 7 Days to Die

This appears to be a farming plot that a player has buried into the terrain. Due to limitations in the engine, the terrain renders weirdly when it’s deformed this way. This creates a weird sort of edge in the terrain, which appears to be made of dirt, stone, and grass

Fake: anon has a female friend

Gay: anon likes the tip

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I feel like I’ve had several radical changes in personality through life. I’m not the person I was when I was a teenager. I’m wildly different from who I was in my 20s.

As I’ve grown and learned about myself and the world, I’ve become more empathetic. That’s definitely had a mellowing effect to my personality.

That said, I agree that you can’t suppress your identity. You might try to push it down and repress it, but some things you just can’t change about yourself. But your personality is in your brain, and the brain is plastic.

But at the end of the day, all a person needs to do to have a pleasant personality is not be an asshole. If a person can’t restrain themself from being an asshole, then they’re probably not interested in developing their personality.

Fair point. How can anyone learn if they don’t know what they need to learn?

I hadn’t considered disability. Maybe “present yourself” wasn’t the best choice of words - maybe “conduct yourself” would suit better. And all I really mean by that is that if you think you’re perpetuating a toxic trait then you can take notice of when it happens and strive to improve.

Yeah, like in what world can you not learn to change your personality? I mean, sure, it’s not always easy, but you always have a choice in how you present yourself.

I’m surprised and relieved to hear such a salient take.

It’s not really surprising that if the big names in gaming spend an enormous amount of budget on a game that it’s not automatically going to be a hit. After all, a large chunk of that time and money is spent on further monetizing the game. The more monetization features they work on, the less attractive a game becomes to the player. It feels like that should just be common sense, I’m surprised a bunch of business majors never learned that they need a good product.

Like, honestly, a game isn’t going to automatically generate enormous profit just because a lot of money has been spent on it. It also has to be a decent game in its own right.

This is something that indie gamers have been saying probably as long as there’s been indie gaming. Maybe it will carry more weight when a suit says it. But then, he’s a former executive, so maybe it won’t have as much impact as it should.

Time for an anecdote:
I can think of two Blizzard games that I really enjoyed until they had a 2.0 release. Both used the 2.0 as an opportunity to change their monetization model in favour of squeezing more cash from players. They’re Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch.

Heroes of the Storm was free, but had a cash shop where you could buy cosmetics. Each cosmetic was listed for individual purchase. There were bundles, but if you really wanted just a single skin you could buy it for about $5-$15. That’s not an unreasonable price and I was happy to support a free game by buying the occasional skin for my favourite heroes.

When Heroes of the Storm had their 2.0 rework, they changed the cosmetic shop to be based entirely on lootboxes. You could no longer get the things you specifically wanted and had to rely on random chance. You could of course get more lootboxes by throwing more money at the game, but you’d have to buy way more lootboxes for a chance to get the thing you wanted. That turned me and a lot of players off of the game, and it wasn’t long after 2.0 that Blizzard stopped active development and put the game in maintenance mode.

Funny enough, Overwatch did the opposite, but it was still a step towards greed and super frustrating. In the original release, you had a lootbox based economy and a cosmetic shop where you could spend currency earned from the lootboxes to buy skins. Lootboxes were available for free as you played, but also available for purchase. You could ultimately get whatever you wanted just by playing the game enough.

When Overwatch 2 came out, the model switched to free-to-play and battlepasses. The free stuff you could get was limited to something like half the battlepass cosmetics (you can buy the pass to unlock more), and the cosmetic shop became a cash shop with insane valuation of skins. I think the average skin is like $30, and often they’re only available in bundles where you have to spend even more to also get skins that you might not care about.

In an attempt to reach more market, Overwatch 2 was released on Steam. This was the first (and I think only?) platform that Overwatch got released to where users can leave reviews on the game. It has a 20% recommendation rate, which is categorized as “Mostly Negative” and makes it one of the worst releases of all time on Steam. And this is for a game that you can play for free - it costs you nothing and people are trying to warn you not to waste your time.

The reworks between Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch are both examples of studios taking a beloved game in its own right, and lobotomizing it to make it more profitable. Never forget what they’ve taken from us.

My native american father in law prefers to call himself an Indian.

From his point of view he wouldn’t call himself a “native american” because he belongs to an actual nation and indigenous people aren’t a homogenous group.

He prefers Indian because it makes white people look bad. Incredibly based

I’d love to see more developers with this attitude.

Atmosphere? Love it. Dread? Great! Darkness? Tolerable. Jump Scare? No thank you.

Jump scares are like the fart jokes of horror. Cheap thrills, low craftsmanship, and turns people off of the market.

And that’s not to say I don’t appreciate the occasional jump scare. They can be tastefully made, or used sparingly. Less is often more with these, and it helps add to the tension knowing it might come up again. But if they’re just non stop they lose their payoff quickly.

I once played this game that was styled as a museum of lockpicking mini games throughout the history of games. Super niche, but I’m in game dev so I eat that stuff up.

In four different places the curator mentioned that the lead developer Daniel Vávra is a terrible human. But they also acknowledged that the lockpicking was unique and interesting in that game. It read something like I imagine a museum with an exhibit of the Nazis enigma machine would - innovation spurred by terrible people.

If you’re on the fence about the game, know that the lead dev is a gamergate chud. But if you want a whitewashed and misogynistic game with a thin veneer of “historical accuracy” then I guess the game is on the cheap right now.