Someone said it best describing Destiny 2, that it’s a perpetual feeling of building towards something that’s always just around the corner, but when you get around that corner, it’s just more grinding and pushing premium content, just around the corner. It’s gonna huge bro, I promise. Big stuff coming. Just ahead, just buy one more season bro.

I notice it’s a reoccurring theme for people to go through stuff like that with MMOs.

I think we all have our check-out bottom we will fall to when life hurts too much, some people will just rot in bed and some will watch old movies and some will camp in the woods. We have breaking points in life, and sometimes an online game where people seem to be having normal lives just feels like being someone still connected to the world. When I was little and my parents would go on week-long drug benders and spend the whole time screaming at each other, I would check out into comics and books, so it’s probably where I learned how to do it inadvertently.

The shot reminded me of Elder Scrolls Online at first, and I had that very real PTSD twinge that made my stomach lurch.

When I was going through the worst part of my life, losing everything, burying my family and pets, closing down my business and having my home foreclosed due to family medical issues, I played Elder Scrolls for a couple years for no other reason than to spend time with other people, including someone I cared about a lot. I hated the game, it was exciting for the first couple hours until I realized how far it deviated from the actual franchise and how limited the gameplay really was, how everything was just a funnel towards premium content and skins.

I drank like a fish and laid in trash watching my life fall apart as I sat in Elder Scrolls listening to people chatter and watching them duel, because I didn’t want to be alone because I didn’t trust myself to be alone.

I did start over and everything is a lot better now, but holy shit, that game ruined Morrowind, Skyrim and the entire game world for me.

There’s a name for these kinds of people: Fuddy Duddies

I prefer to call them “pedophiles and criminals” but I guess older terms also work.

Like I said, they don’t actually need to. You’re going to have your own silent buddy watching everything you do!

go step on a partially melted ice cube in your socks.

Why not. If we’re stuck with sketchy, lawless apps for chatting we might as well go back to the OG sketchy, lawless chat app.

I’m sure they’re very sowwy and have learned their lesson and your face and ID and personal, private browsing habits will be perfectly secure, and even the AI bot that will “monitor your habits to decide your implicit age” will be very quiet with all your sensitive personal details and not give it to anyone even if they ask very nicely for it.

“Regular” content and spaces are untouched.

They are also rolling out something like an AI that monitors your chatting and browsing habits that can determine your “implicit age” as well, this isn’t exactly shocking, but it’s gross how it’s being promoted as a handy feature.

The entire thing is a state surveillance project and yes, they are working on desensitizing the population to having no privacy or personal lives.

Sure hope our government doesn’t collapse to a fascist oligarchy or authoritarian surveillance state, sure could bite us all in the ass when the armed deathsquads get ahold of both our identifications, faces and our ideology and the names and faces of all our friends and family members.

Or would be a shame if all the people who use discord to communicate with other marginalized people suddenly had all their personal information revealed to friends, family and schools, including what chat channels and servers they visit, what games they play, who their friends are and so on.

Oh well, I’m sure the company and the government will be completely fair and transparent about all of our online identities.

One of many massive security leaks!

Dark Tom needs to rise to kick the internet’s ass and create a new, old internet that has no algorithms or bots.

I guess we would need some way to confirm the users aren’t AI or bad actors so we would need to use kind of face reco- oh, I see. We’re trapped in hell.

I am never going to convince my younger family members to change platform, they literally keep discord on 24/7 with their friends and SO’s and keep lobbies open around the clock to wander in and play games and stream and thrive in the social space.

It’s horrifically un-secure and I hate so much about the whole thing from a safety standpoint.

I will likely kill my main account and delete all my personal data and messages, for whatever good that will do, and just make a dummy account to received messages and say hi to family. Same as I did with facebook and other social media.

There are lots and lots of companies that use discord the same way they use facebook, just a place to promote and gather “feedback” and such. They likely mean they ran the official company server, not that they use discord to chat between teams.

Although I’ve done that before too.

it was useful when it was new and there were no alternatives as easy to use.

Now it feels like commercialized app slop that wishes it was actual social media.

They will have some kind of nebulously described “thing” that will monitor your browsing and chatting habits on discord and use that to decide your “implicit age” and I wish any of that was a joke or rumor.

They won’t just ask for your face and ID, they are also admitting that AI or something is going to be literally watching you at all times to “determine your age.”

Tell me again how we’re protecting kids? Where them Epstein prosecutions at? We save any kids yet? How about now?

I am also leaving discord, I hated it and the people who use it a lot, but used it to connect to family members. I will find other ways.

This is the same exact cycle I went through with social media, which I also left entirely. I stopped browsing a lot of sites I used to, I took most of my personal info off the internet, and ended a lot of subscriptions.

The internet lately is feeling more and more like making end-of-life plans.

Pay to buy, pay to play, pay to get upgrades, pay to get the best ending, pay to not play. (You will have to use premium currency to set the game down for more than a day or lose all progress.)

Firing up the new Starcraft shooter, the female voice in your coms says: “Run down this hallway, you’re going to need to prove you know how to crouch and jump over obstacles before you can learn how to switch weapon modes!”

yeah, I am gonna need something really special to get excited about another FPS shooter no matter what the wallpaper looks like.

Most of fascism has always been rooted in male sexual insecurity, this has been studied over and over, and exploited over and over.

Steve Bannon wrote in depth about how his tactic for radicalizing the country was to send agents into games like World of Warcraft and other places where lonely, disaffected young men hang out a lot, guys who obviously don’t have a lot of social experience because they’re gaming, and get them to start blaming their lack of success and sex on immigrants, leftists, feminism and progressive ideas. They were doing this back when the internet was new and we all still thought “incels” were a passing, fringe trend not worth addressing.

Moot, the founder of 4chan met with Jeffrey Epstein a day before he made the board /pol, which became the central radicalizing hangout for, you guessed it, lonely male gamers and nerds who were ready to blame their feelings on women, people of color and progressives instead of you know… the fact that they have thousands of hours in Hearts of Iron IV and then spend their remaining time on /pol.

It’s been a tactic for raising armies since the dawn of time. Get all the sexually frustrated young men together and say “THAT CASTLE OVER THERE IS WHY YOU GOT NO PUSSY, GO SACK 'EM” and it works amazingly well.

Also, they capitalize on sexual hangups to a massive degree, especially fear/attraction to men of other races. There’s a reason why “interracial cuckolding” became a huuuuge popular category of porn at the same time when these guys were writing manifestos about how we need to bring back segregation so women don’t “lose control” around black men and how we need to defend against “impurities in the bloodlines” and how other men’s semen stays inside a woman and the potency of black male semen and other homoeroticism. It’s an entire roleplay world that would be hilarious if it didn’t turn into a huge movement.

We will organize the factions and all the underground clans and unite to free our leader!

You may see this as a defeat, but this may be the driving force that finally brings together the Seven Barista Legions in the West and the Mighty Purple Hairs of the South, along with the scattered troupes of Transamurai that are now walking the wastes without a master.

I appreciate that, you guys are gonna also have a hard time with this spreading virus, I mean more than you already have. But I really think the citizens need to keep the alliance alive and we need to all work together to fight this growing tide of oligarchy-fueled fascism that knows no borders or humanity.

I’ve seen a LOT of hate directed at American people, even right here in Lemmy, supposedly from Europe and Canada, and I can only assume it’s more bots and paid shills trying to drive wedges between us. We need to be really vicious in calling it out and shaming these donuts as hard as possible.