BougieBirdie

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.

Haha, I’ve considered it. I’d really like to at least be able to buy pizza for the gang who helped make the game.

I released a game like three years ago and it’s earned $97 in that time.

I feel your pain

A lot of the criticism comes with AI results being wrong a lot of the time, while sounding convincingly correct. In software, things that appear to be correct but are subtly wrong leads to errors that can be difficult to decipher.

Imagine that your AI was trained on StackOverflow results. It learns from the questions as well as the answers, but the questions will often include snippets of code that just don’t work.

The workflow of using AI resembles something like the relationship between a junior and senior developer. The junior/AI generates code from a spec/prompt, and then the senior/prompter inspects the code for errors. If we remove the junior from the equation to replace with AI, then entry level developer jobs are slashed, and at the same time people aren’t getting the experience required to get to the senior level.

Generally speaking, programmers like to program (many do it just for fun), and many dislike review. AI removes the programming from the equation in favour of review.

Another argument would be that if I generate code that I have to take time to review and figure out what might be wrong with it, it might just be quicker and easier to write it correctly the first time

Business often doesn’t understand these subtleties. There’s a ton of money being shovelled into AI right now. Not only for developing new models, but for marketing AI as a solution to business problems. A greedy executive that’s only looking at the bottom line and doesn’t understand the solution might be eager to implement AI in order to cut jobs. Everyone suffers when jobs are eliminated this way, and the product rarely improves.

I agree, this is a work function so HR could be invoked.

That said, I’m with Anon on this one. His coworker started it, and while on the surface Anon’s response sounds much darker, Anon is punching up and Israeli Coworker is punching down.

The potato famine was an economic genocide incited by colonial powers. You’d think if they get a laugh out of that they’d also get a laugh about currently ongoing genocides.

Imagine if there was a train to the hospital that also did triage.

So you get on the hospital line and a nurse determines if you need urgent care. They could take you to a less crowded hospital further down the line or dispatch paramedics to next stop.

Just so you have a heads up:

If you use yt-dlp like a regular user, you shouldn’t have a problem. If you use it to download like a thousand videos at once then YouTube may block you out or rate limit you or something.

If that happens, or that’s your use case, then you may need to use a VPN

I recommend Dusk to people just for the music.

I mean, the game is good too, but the soundtrack just goes so hard

This is a mutation of an anti-piracy campaign. The text usually reads “You wouldn’t steal a car” an then asks why you would download a movie.

I would totally download a car though.

Just stand outside looking through the window so you can see when she clocks out.

I also have a USB stick on my keys. Mostly I keep books I’m reading, favorite movies, stuff like that. Then when I’m hanging out with friends later and we’re talking about what we’re watching I have it all ready to share.