Rich coming from someone who made a name for himself as the president of the nickel and dime company…

The problem really is, like in most industries to be fair, that the actual creators get far too little of the figurative monetary cake.

And if we ever see tipping in games, god forbid, then that money will at best get shared by everyone so there would need to be millions in tipping before it is even noticeable for an individual developer in a normal AAA team.

Yes, it’s the next step and an evolution because it is far more of a trust less approach. With VPNs you need to trust your provider. If they “give you up” then you’re well and truly fucked. For I2P there is no way for a malicious node operators to parse out who is doing what. And the source code you can vet yourself so no need to trust it. Still if you have actors working together in the nodes, the torrent provider and at the ISP level then you can most certainly find a way to break the layer of secrecy. The barrier is however vast and so far police haven’t spent that much effort on piracy because it isn’t a serious crime in the eyes of the law. And I don’t foresee that they will for many years.

It’s also far more accessible than say Usenet and VPN+private trackers. Which is a very good thing for privacy in general.

Yes, it’s the next step and an evolution because it is far more of a trust less approach. With VPNs you need to trust your provider. If they “give you up” then you’re well and truly fucked. For I2P there is no way for a malicious node operators to parse out who is doing what. And the source code you can vet yourself so no need to trust it. Still if you have actors working together in the nodes, the torrent provider and at the ISP level then you can most certainly find a way to break the layer of secrecy. The barrier is however vast and so far police haven’t spent that much effort on piracy because it isn’t a serious crime in the eyes of the law. And I don’t foresee that they will for many years.

It’s also far more accessible than say Usenet and VPN+private trackers. Which is a very good thing for privacy in general.

Hmm, the 4:3 versions did make it to DVD but finding the old version for things is never easy. It’s a common wish however, in Anime circles in particular.

Looking at a predb over scene releases and going back as far as they go I see that the naming standard, as I suspected, didn’t hint at neither aspect ratio or resolution.

https://predb.net/search/south.park.s01?page=1

However if you look for DivX or Xvid releases I’d say it’s fairly likely they’ll be in 4:3 since Xvid by and large had gotten replaced by H.264 / X.264 by 2017 which is the earliest release I can confirm is going to be the remaster since it’s from the Bluray that released then:

https://www.dvdsreleasedates.com/movies/4399/South-Park-(TV-Series-1997-).html

The above is likely not fully complete so the remaster might’ve happened between 2004 and 2017, and this might be readily available information but I’m running out of time…

So basically my tip if you’re lazy is look for Xvid/DivX and cross your fingers. If you’re not then correlate the remaster date/release date to the predb and look for a scene release from before the remaster dropped.

That’s what I’m saying. It’s like everyone knows some college kids smoke pot from the smell in the dorms, but Police can’t legally search room by room to find out who it is, they need a search warrant which they need more than a general suspicion that someone in the dorms smoke to get.

Same with I2P, it’s done in a public setting so from traffic patterns we can be pretty sure someone is downloading a shit ton, and that it’s likely illegal content. Residential IPs have little reason to consistently download several GB files on a daily/weekly basis, streaming and download also look vastly different profile wise and at least no one I know of go to those lengths to try and mask their traffic patterns by trying to make streaming look like download or vice versa.

But as I said and you reiterated, you still need to crack the encryption to actually prove it in court. But given a specific target there are many ways to do that. A generic approach is likely not going to happen. Which means that I2P is secure much like having a secret chat in a crowded place like Grand Central Station in NY. You know that people are meeting there to chat about illegal stuff but you don’t know who. It becomes much easier if you know who to follow and eavesdrop on, but of course still not easy.

It is however nowhere near as safe as communication over channels that aren’t public to begin with. But such of course do not exist outside military and other special contexts.

But at the same time I2P is still built upon TCP/IP so it’s still like encrypted yodeling. Finding out who’s likely yodeling down movies is rather easy. The protection instead lies in the high barrier to prove exactly which movie and when so as to pass the barrier for court admissable evidence.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I2P is great stuff and I’ve used it on and off for years, but it shouldn’t be treated as the holy grail of safe and secure communication. Nothing can truly be that if it’s built on TCP/IP for fairly obvious reasons.

I feel Mass Effect did at least some of this in terms of allowing you to cut people off and quite a few “shortcuts” of just shooting someone that you can tell from a mile away will be trouble. That game of course has you play someone that obviously can’t have reached the position they have by being a selfish asshole so the premise limits what you can do.

1337x is probably the biggest these days and it just needs a free quick and easy account to upload a torrent. If you’re concerned about privacy then use a mail relay like Firefox Relay which is free.

The best approach in my opinion was in Mass Effect.

Dragon Age a close second but there it’s much more subtle and good/evil not really a part of it, it’s more internal to you the why behind your characters actions. Stuff like using blood magic which is illegal but very powerful can be used from a perspective of “the greater good” or you could roleplay that decision as a lust for power. Which factions you side with for sure has morality attached but since all roads lead to saving the world its much more about your own reasons to judge if your character is evil or just focused on the grander scheme, utilitarian.

But back to Mass Effect. It’s the same thing with all roads leading to save the world but unlike Dragon Age there is a morality system in place that is not about just a dichotomy between self sacrifice and malicious indulgence. Instead it’s about what is OK to do to save the world? What sacrifices are reasonable? What risks should you take for others? What approach do you take to solve conflict? Renegade (as the ‘evil’ approach is called) options allow you to pistol whip people that want you to follow rules and decorum while the Galaxy hangs in the balance. It allows you to order people to die for the greater good. It’s about using the power you have to take the shortest and most direct route to ultimate salvation. To not pussy foot around trying to appease everyone.

And really that’s the only way to make morality work in a story driven game imo. If the same story is to be told with moral decisions left to the player than they need to be ultimately inconsequential to how the game and story plays out. At best they give slight variations to story beats but nothing really changes from a good playthrough to an evil one in the grand scheme. If it works and feels satisfying is largely down to the developers accepting this and instead focus on smaller nuances like Mass Effect or leaving it ambiguous and up to the player to craft their narrative for the why and motivations like Dragon Age.

What I’d instead would like to see is a game where you play out an evil narrative. And I do know of one such RPG, Tyranny, but I haven’t gotten around to play it yet.

The best example perhaps of melding good and evil in the same game is Star Wars: The Old Republic (the MMORPG). Because you can play it from the evil side as a good character and the good side as an evil character. If you play it through multiple time you can really craft a world and narrative of incredible depth. And I can really recommend playing it as you would any other western RPG and just ignore the MMO side of things. Bear in mind that each individual playthrough suffers from the exact problem you raise in your post, but on the total, the bigger picture, becomes something very interesting and worthwhile.

Dead accurate meme.

My protip if you really can’t bother with all that and just want to do expensive Legos is to go to an active forum for PCs where you can simply ask for a recommendation for a build.

What you need to supply is a budget example and what it needs to cover. I.e. if screen needs to be part of it or if you have one. If you do the resolution and refresh rate is good input (or just make and model which is printed on it). Finally you need an idea of what games you’ll play. With that a mini war will erupt between AMD and Intel and AMD and Nvidia around what would be the best build for the budget.

Keep in mind to pick a forum based in the same country as you, else the recommendations might not at all fit your budget due to local price variance.

Hell you could probably make do without a budget if you say you’re unsure how much is reasonable to spend to play the games you wish to play and you’ll get recommendations to that effect as well.

Ah, right, read to fast it seems! Though that still leaves the possibility of software firewalls, but any OOTB ones wouldn’t be doing any packet inspection.

Do you have a firewall? Packet inspection in particular can wreak havoc on speeds.

I’d say the problem isn’t so much optimization as it is scaling. The FPS delta between low and ultra is just stupid small in many games nowadays. Before dropping to low would make the game look like shit sure but it would also run on 5+ year old hardware. Now you get like 10 FPS+ and still slog around under 60 fps on 2-3 year old 6-series cards (X060/X600). Sure some games are CPU bound as well but that’s less common.

Really what needs to happen is devs need to add a potato mode so we can at least play the game.

I’ll however say that the source of the problem is of course consoles. On them settings are rather meaningless so it’s only for the PC market you need them and given how many gaming PCs outperform consoles and PC gamers generally expect the PC version to look better it’s no wonder that’s where they put their focus and effort. But a proper low setting that actually scales shouldn’t be too hard to achieve.

Yes, which is exactly what I’m stating. Showing a forcibly non-upscaled video (or one where you’ve manually tweaked the upscaling for that matter) is likely not what you want because there are no circumstances where that is what you’d watch on that particular screen. It could perhaps work as an example of how that video would look if you had a 1080p monitor of the same size instead of the 4k one you have, since it scales in a linear fashion, a pixel of 1080p is 4 pixels in a square on a 4k screen. But that’s likely not what you want to test. Instead the thing you do want to test is “does it matter if I download X content in 1080p or 4k? How big is the difference really?” And if that is the question you need to let it upscale.

Not really possible. A 1080p video smashed into a 4k container (so it can actually represent the 4k part) would look worse than a true 1080p video file since that would get up scaled by your TV or monitor in most situations.

Best comparison would be making a playlist of the same video first in 1080p and then 4k.

Lol wut? Was this guy in a year long coma starting in December 2020? Cyberpunk had one of the top 10 most disastrous launches in gaming history. And in no small part due to botched expectations around quests, mainly because a lot of the pre-release footage was of “The Pickup” which really was the only quest to really deliver all they talked about in those early videos.

Now the game is still a good game. But it’s a great “emergent gameplay” game, one where gameplay and level design work together to create something greater than the sum of the pieces. Quest, plot, story wise it’s not at all anything special in my opinion. It has high production values sure, but the substance is rather meh, and there is little story agency, outside of “The Pickup”, which I think is a large part of the reason they themselves, without announcement, stopped calling it a RPG about a year or so before release.

Tell them to move to yubikey or similar hardware key which is far more secure than any password policy will ever be and vastly more user friendly. Only downside is the intense shame if you manage to lose it.

The key should stick with the user thus not be stored with the computer when not in use. The key isn’t harmless of course but it takes a very deliberate targeting and advance knowledge about what it goes to and how it can be used. It’s also easy to remote revoke. If you’re extra special paranoid you could of course store the key locked at a separate site if you want nuclear codes levels of security.

So much dumb shit has been done under the banner of NFT that I want to disagree but yes, if each ID in your blockchain represents a unique variant of an item, and we want to that to persist then yes NFT would fit the bill as a correct term for it.

NFTs don’t need to be limited, they don’t need to have transaction fees to move them, they don’t need to contain a link to an image and masquerade as if you own that image. All they need to do is prove that you have control of it by virtue of it being in your care. Then that proof confers the ability to use the item it represents in game. For currency you naturally wouldn’t use NFTs, though you could if you’re adamant you want a more “cash like” experience with change back and all that jazz.

Adding blockchain tech can do a lot of things here actually.

• Reduce amount of ways to be scammed and making trades more straight forward and safe.

Both these are realizable with smart contracts.

• Retain ownership even if the game goes offline

While it of course will lose its value you at least have the mementos available. Of course you either need a service to be up that can show you a visual representation or make a backup of the visual data yourself, but for a culturally important game like EVE that is very unlikely to be an issue

As for transaction fees that is not at all necessary for blockchain/crypto. Especially not a centralized one like would be the reasonable approach here. Sure CCP might want a cut, which they could call a transaction fee, but double dipping would be dumb and just make the whole thing fail.

As for currency value being influenced by external actors sure, that is a risk but also an opportunity. The people playing the game has access to make currency just by playing, people outside need to pay to get it. If anything it would make the amount of bots and miner accounts skyrocket, which might be annoying to players.

As for marketplace without blockchain it requires more trust and I’d argue is harder to realize in a secure manner. Blockchain started out as the next evolution in transaction safe databases, that preserves history, and that is exactly what you want for keeping track of in-game items and currency imo. Crypto as most know it is not all that blockchain is or will be. But equally blockchain can’t solve everything like Cryptobros think it can.

Further making their own marketplace might put regulatory crosshairs on them in some markets and also would alienate the large third party marketplaces that are important to the games longevity up until now. Blockchain however could be made to make it easy for them to adapt to the new and make it easier for more sites to pop up and due to the nature of the tech you can build it such that no marketplace operator can easily scam users.

Really I see no issues at all using blockchain tech, and only slight issues with making it a full on, exchange tradeable cryptocurrency, and that’s mainly from follow on effects.

I’ll add to the group saying things got better by 30. In my case having kids has helped me get my shit together and take better care of myself both physically and mentally.