Well best of luck with a refund attempt, I guess?

I was once hopeful for it too, but I never actually played or spent money on it.

When they switched to the kind of ongoing, pay a stupid amount of money for the privilege of being an alpha tester thing, because you’ll get exclusive stuff that’ll be either impossible or very difficult to get in the early game… that kind of StarCitizen-like funding…

…at that point I wrote it off as “best case: development hell forever, worst case: eventual total implosion.”

It still is sad to see though, it really does seem like there will never be another major MMO that is any kind of compelling or novel, that isn’t monetized p2w … it apparently just costs too much money to develop one.

On that note: I wonder if the MxO emulator is still being developed…

EDIT: Apparently no, not really.

… major Cave Johnson vibes from this one.

Maybe you’ll get superpowers, maybe your blood will turn into gasoline. Not sure. Science!

It does very much annoy me that, yeah, its always been possible to do this.

I believe Claim A! Claim A deniers are bad, smell bad, and are probably also demons!

EDIT: Welp, looks like Claim A is dubious, thanks to user so and so for setting me straight, see their explanation below.

Yeah you have always been able to do that or something very close to it on basically every forum or social media type thing ever.

But… you are probably right that if you give people a mea culpa flag as a built in part of the UI/UX, that would almost certainly spur more people to do it.

… Its still terrifying to me that a large segment of people would need such a button to exist before they would be ok doing it.

I guess this isn’t a case where the sort of ‘desire path’ solution manifests and is then maybe formally adopted, seems like you’d have to basically social engineer humility into people.

I hate that this would probably work, in the sense that it isn’t just DUH obvious to everyone already that they don’t need a button specifically for this, but I also love that this would probably work.

I can imagine a ‘year end wrap up’ where you get to see all the stuff you said that you decided was stupid.

Then I guess just pair it with some kind of affirmative message of ‘hey, you’re trying to admit your mistakes, and that’s probably good’.

Its less deceptive than trying to delete shit dumb stuff, as… everyone can still see you did say it, but realized it was bad.

I’m not yet aware of any specific, unimpeachable evidence of that yet,… but this would also be entirely unsurprising at this point.

Another thing there isn’t any specific unimpeachable evidence for, but that I am strongly inclined toward believing:

Trump was the one who ordered Epstein killed.

Yeah people consistently forget this, and will say things like ‘Valve isn’t even doing any marketing for me!’

No, they are.

Its just that its on their platform.

Via their categorization and recommendation snd review systems.

As opposed to… other pay to win ad platforms that shove ads in peoples faces depending on how much money you throw at them.

Also, while this is more of a minor point, Valve’s cut drops to 25% for games sales past $10 million, 20% for game sales past $50 million.

Been that way for 7 or 8 years.

I’ve now lost multiple entire weekends to trying to figure out how to just download assets from FAB, on linux.

Finally, they just made a direct option on the website to just download files, you know, like a normal download.

Prior to that, you basically had to install or compile and install UE5, to be able to download some asset.

… This doesn’t work well, because as you say, UE 5 is horrifically borked and improperly documented on linux, they can’t even figure out how to list all the dependencies you actually need, and thats on the linux versions they claim to support.

TIL that Tim Fortnite does not consider Sony or Nintendo to be ‘major stores’.

TIL that the video game industry has never had nor currently has titles that are priced exclusively on certain platforms.

(Where ‘its only available for purchase on one platform’ is an effective price of infinity on other platforms)

Just… from the article:

“Steam’s rules do explicitly prohibit games from steering players to competing purchase methods, forcing everyone to pay 30% to Valve,” he [Sweeney] recently tweeted. “Apple and Google did the same until the court explicitly found this practice to be unlawful. Now they don’t!”

It’s not clear exactly what rule Sweeney’s referring to here, but Steam’s own guidelines state that “it’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.” Though Valve would also prefer that developers “don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam key purchasers.”

It’s almost like this guy is malding, crashing out even, and has just… departed from the realm of even trying to make sense.

What is happening here is that Tim is losing his mind because Unreal Engine 5 only runs on GPUs (mostly from Nvidia) that cost as much as an entire PC did 2 or 3 years ago, and so many AAA studios that used UE 5 to make a pretty but hollow and buggy game are now collapsing or seeing a dramatic consumer pullback.

See how this is all connected, and these idiots did this to themselves?

Nvidia decides that Real Time Ray Tracing is the new paradigm for gaming graphics, and Unreal is the primary way people will experience this, by having all the lighting be done ‘auto-magically’ by UE 5, from the perspective of game devs.

Fastforward 5 or so years, half of everything computer hardware is too expensive now, hugely funded AAA games are routinely failing and causing financial disasters for publishers, Unreal Engine 5 is a hugely stigmatized joke because its not any kind of optimized for hardware people actually have, and outside of AAA games, is notorious for low quality UE asset store flips and actual scam games…

…this paradigm doesn’t work.

Compare that to Valve pretty close to singlehandedly developing its own VR hardware, and showcase AAA tier game for it… and well hey shucks, yeah, its too expensive for wide adoption, but that didn’t ruin their entire business’s financials.

They just actually properly accounted for the costs of trying that paradigm shift, and are today still iterating on and improving it, ala the upcoming SteamFrame and new software layer for translating ARM to x86 calls.

The version I originally heard was not that its like, completely 100% not real people and instead is some kind of bot or something like that, but just that its increasingly more and more proportional internet traffic is like that.

A couple of years ago there were a few reports about just how much traffic on the internet is some kind of automated web scraper, some kind of automated system pinging some other kind of automated system… and then also how many accounts on forums or reddit or twitch or whatnot were not ‘real’ accounts, but were either bots or paid trolls of some kind… vs genuine human traffic by actual people using the internet in some way.

I guess a bunch of people oversimplified that a bit to just fit into some kind of creepy pasta / simulation theory /solipsism type narrative.

But either way, now both scenarios are converging toward being more true at the same time, as… seemingly 90% of people are either easily transfixed or fooled by LLM produced content of some kind… and yeah, we are getting closer and closer to it being difficult to tell, on most popular platforms, whether you are engaging with a real person or not.

Also, agruably… the entire point of ‘the algorithm’ on any corpo social media, tiktok, insta, facebook, etc… the whole point of those has always been to piegeon hole each user into their own little curated content feedback loop, their own personal content/advertising pocket dimension.

I guess it just had to get more extreme for people to realize how bad this can be.

… There’s a Destiny DDG instance?

I mean, the only way Dead Internet Theory could ever possibly be interpreted was weird creepy and dystopian, but yes, we’re just making it much, much more real, faster and faster.

We’re gonna need the Blackwall from CP77 fairly soon, at this rate.

They can’t open source their code because then people would rather rapidly discover all the backdoors they’ve built in for various US LE and Intelligence agencies.

… genuinely, how can they possibly expect to regain or have any trust after turning W11 into a constant wiretap via Copilot, that spams ads all up in your OS in every place, and then also just handing over the bitlocker master keys to the FBI?

You would have to be very uninformed or delusional at this point to think that Windows and privacy/security exist in the same universe.

The only thing they have going for them is inertia.

And they’re now hitting the point where backlash against them is snowballing much faster than they could possibly reverse course on their own internal inertia and actually make any real changes.

And yes that applies to their consumer facing shit as well as B2B.

KNACK

KSP Realism Overhaul players:

…Amateurs!

lol I kid, I kid.

Lets also not forget the various autism powered map painting simulator games.

YOLO is now old enough to legally drive a car.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/smurf_account

Coined by Geoff Fraizer and Greg Boyko, who played the online multiplayer game Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness under the names Shlonglor and Warp. The pair had become so proficient at the game that few people would play against them, so, in order to avoid scaring off potential competitors, they created alternate accounts named PapaSmurf and Smurfette (characters from the Smurfs comic franchise).[1][2]

So basically the most infamous and potentially first widely known instance of this behavior, well they just picked Smurf character names, presumably for the effect of it being more humiliating to be owned by derpy cartoon characters.

Also, apparently ‘smurfing’ or a ‘smurf account’ also means basically a fake/decoy/money laundering/washing bank account:

2. (law enforcement, banking, slang) A bank account of many intended to handle illicit money in amounts too small to raise suspicion.

As far as I can tell, advertisement/profit-driven social media that is directly tied to your real identity might actually be the worst thing humanity has ever invented.

Oops!

Turns out we’re mostly vain and stupid, in our default state.

Now amplify.

Oh and as a bonus:

It serves as a kind of self perpetuating auto-panopticon.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people just record thems committing, planning to commit, bragging about committing, or admitting to commiting crimes that can put you away for 5 years plus… on fucking TikTok.

Hey wow its like I’ve been saying that for a decade, but because I’m poor and I say that, clearly I am some kind of antisocial insane person, not somebody who can read a bunch of existing studies and data and form a conclusion.

Corporation would never gaslight you!

… unless you deserved it.

“Walled garden initiates universal tollbooth policy overhaul.”