There’s nothing to discuss based on your viewpoint. It doesn’t matter what anyone says about the gameplay being actually OK because you’ve already formed your opinion it seems. Judging a book by its cover.
I’m not judging a book by its cover. I’m just calling a spade a spade. Predatory F2P mobile games are not okay. Ever.
I mean, look at where we are. We’re on Lemmy. We all fled Reddit, because we found their policies about advertising and, like, moderator politics to be unacceptable. But now you’re going to stan for fucking mobile gacha game companies?
Since we’re talking about it now, I do actually dare you to explain that position to me. How is that not, like, spectacularly hypocritical?
Have you played the game? What about it is predatory? It never forced me to pay for anything and I was able to complete the story without spending a dime.
I’m not stanning anything. Just being part of the, discussion, if you can call it that.
It just sounds like you’re judging it solely based on the fact there are a few buzzwords in the game and you’re not forming an actual opinion of your own.
Please address my point about Reddit. How is it not hypocritical to leave Reddit and come here, to the fringes of the internet, based on moral principles…but then go ahead and support and defend mobile F2P gacha game villains?
I “fled Reddit” because they started making really stupid managerial decisions and screwing over the user base. They changed how they do things, and I no longer agreed to it. The same thing happened to me on Lemmy. I initially joined a server that decided that majority vote was the way to run things, and I left. Then I joined a server that died. I finally found my current one and like it.
Though in reality, I now frequent both sites and enjoy them for different reasons.
Gacha games, though… They tell you up front what to expect, and they do that. (Except certain illegal cases that actually got in legal trouble for it.) Yes, they’re predatory and manipulative, and they ruin the lives of some people who have certain tendencies. That really sucks.
But they’re fun and satisfy an urge that many people have that isn’t getting satisfied otherwise.
I think spending hundreds of dollars on a game is stupid (I’ve done it, over a couple years on 1 game) and I think spending thousands is insane, even if you have more money than you can ever use. But I can and do play them for free (or close to it) now if they are fun and don’t waste my time.
I don’t think these positions are hypocritical. I’m not on Lemmy because I’m a zealot. I’m on here because I enjoy it.
That’s actually a very fair set of arguments, if you’re absolutely and scrupulously telling the truth.
I kind of suspect that you would have described your position as much more of an “I’m doing the morally upstanding thing,” when you initially left reddit…but I can’t prove that.
I also can’t personally agree that “we’re up front and open about being predatory douchenozzles” is somehow a get-out-of-jail-free-card for gacha racketeers. But I’ll concede your position is not as directly hypocritical as I thought.
Distance - an arcade racer that plays like a good 3D sonic game, has a cryptic story, and has elements of horror. Completely bonkers combination but it works super well.
Thumper - another very fast paced game, but also a rhythm game. The devs label it as “rhythm violence” and it fits. The music is percussive and ambient, mostly consisting of the sounds of you slamming through turns and hitting the a button with ferocious intensity. Levels can take well over 30 minutes.
The Beginner’s Guide - might be more well known but imo this is a must play for anyone who does anything creative. It’s a two hour walking sim, but I feel like it’s a story best told as a game.
DUDE did you also attend Digipen (camps or real classes)? Nitronic Rush was the fuckin shit and Distance was a massive graphical upgrade. Also hard to deny how great multiplayer is as an addition.
Dunno that we need much more experimentation, we all know what the outcome will be - Loads of sexual harassment and misogyny.
Also, the stastically correct way to “sound like a girl” is to mute and never speak up. Last time i read something on this topic, the gender balance in a lot of games is better than we think, but women overwhelmingly stay muted to avoid harassment.
The solution isnt more education/experimentation. Everyone who cares already knows what the problem is. Games need better moderation tools and clear community standards.
I was very glad to read the last sentence. I agree fully. Easiest would be a report button that saves the last 60 seconds of voice, analyzes it with ai and check if something illegal/harassing was said and autokicks the person who said it.
Yeah that sounds totally reasonable and unintrusive, wtf. I don’t want my every word spoken in voice to be live analyzed by ai to see if I did a wrongthink.
Why not simply mute or kick if someone is being an asshole? Has served me well in all my years using discord or teamspeak.
Apart from what you‘re interpreting into my words, I said if someone is harassing you or speaking about lets say the things they did with their daughter yesterday, you can report them and have a computer look into it instead of a human.
Whatever privileges you have in your discord, you cant kick just anyone in every place. You either need privileges or a moderator to do it normally and my idea was to use AI to analyze the reported stuff.
I completely understand the sentiment of protecting children, but at the same time under that argument you can push the most dystopian and intrusive, overreaching legislature imaginable. It is the old balance of freedom versus safety, we can’t have complete safety without giving up all freedom.
And I think a constant ai driven monitoring of everything people say in the general vicinity of a microphone is very dystopian; which would be the eventual outcome of this.
I’m just gonna repeat myself since this is the most common answer I get in those topics:
The vast majority of people is being listened in on, analyzed and manipulated on a daily basis by far, far worse actors. Storing 1 minute of VC for 1 minute only accessible to this hypothetical bot *if someone reports them - facing wrongful report consequences themselves is not comparable to real privacy threats.
You don’t need to repeat yourself (and neither, be this condescending), I am well aware that this is happening to some degree already. Doesn’t mean I have to happily concede the little that is left.
I personally lean more towards humans for moderation, as words alone dont convey the full intent and meaning. And this cuts both ways, benign words can be used to harass.
But of course, humans are expensive, and recordings of voice chat have privacy implications.
generally, yes. But computers can take care of stuff very well at this point. Kicking someone for using the N-Word does not need meaning. Just dont use it, even if it is for educational purposes (inside a game-chat for example).
and recordings of voice chat have privacy implications.
I dont think we live in the same reality. over 30% in the US use Voice assistants that constantly listen in to their conversatoins (was just the first number I could find, I’m not from the US). Having a bot in a game VC chat store 1 minute of text for 1 minute for reporting purposes is like 0.00001% of what is going wrong with security stuff. Billions of people are getting analyzed, manipulated and whatnot on a daily basis. A reporting tool is not even the same game, let alone in the same ballpark in terms of privacy implications.
Yeah, AI to knock out the egregious stuff (n-bombs etc) is prefectly reasonable. But there is still a lot of harassment that can happen the really needs a human to interpret. Its a balance.
The privacy i am thinking of is the legal side of things. Google/FB/Apple are huge companies with the resources to work through the different legal requirements for every state and country. Google/FB/Apple can afford to just settle if anything goes wrong. A game studio cannot always do the same. As soon as you store a recording of a users voice, even temporarily, it opens up a lot of legal risks. Developers/publishers should still do it imo, but i dont think its something that can just be turned on without careful consideration.
It’s not about experimentation, but awareness. Experiencing life as a woman IRL is not easy - you can’t get a sex change on a whim or quickly hop into a female body. In an online game however, changing your voice is the probably the most convincing way to do so and it’s quite easy.
If even a small percentage of men experiencing the other side of the coin became active in improving the gaming space, it would be something.
Waiting and hoping for better moderation tools and clear community standards is non-active course of “action”. It’s like saying "I’m not going to vote because the system is shit 🙅 " and expecting it to get better.
I appreciate what your saying, and you’re right that it is a passive course of action (unless one were to campaign/lobby for developers to implement moderation). But my point was that imo, everyone that cares about the problem is already aware of it, and more awareness doesn’t solve the problem either.
This has been a problem for decades, and pre-dates microphones and games. Any platform that allows users to send messages will be used to send abuse. The tried and true solution has always been moderation. Riot Games seemed to be making headway with their chat moderation tools, but i havent kept up with how that went.
At a certain point, awareness becomes preaching to the choir. The assholes who are causing the problem won’t change their behavior unless they are forced to.
But my point was that imo, everyone that cares about the problem is already aware of it, and more awareness doesn’t solve the problem either.
I’m not sure that’s true. Yes people who care are aware, but I’d argue there are many who don’t now and aren’t aware. I for example didn’t know the impact was measurable in performance. My gullet has been open a few times while gaming online and the regret kicked in not long after, but using my mic has been so rare, I wouldn’t have been able to tie the shitty responses to decreased performance.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the “gamer girls suck because they’re women” crowd joining the challenge figured out that they were part of the performance problem. That is if they had the ability to self-reflect, which probably the minority has.
At a certain point, awareness becomes preaching to the choir. The assholes who are causing the problem won’t change their behavior unless they are forced to.
Oh, in that regard, yes, I agree. At the very base level, assholes will be assholes and those people can only be forced or kicked out
Yeah, i could be wrong about the level of awareness, i am a datapoint of one.
The performance part is interesting, but almost irrelevant imo. If the results had been that abusing your teammates improves their performance, it would still be wrong to do it.
I worry the people causing this problem are more likely to take the “abuse == tilt” information and use it to justify their behaviour :(.
Cyberpunk, and specifically the Phantom Liberty DLC.
I know 2077 has a bad rep for its terrible release, but the game excels in storytelling and mocap above all else. The DLC is accessible at the end of the prologue and requires that you make several hard choices which have a major impact on the dlc’s conclusion.
The DLC is also chok full of side quests and contracts that don’t affect the overall story but can affect your relationship with various factions, and that are affected by other choices made outside the DLC. The quests also feature various difficult choices. Do you kill the guy you were hired to kill, or do you give them a second chance so they can get treated for the cyberpsychosis that made them lash out in the first place?
I can’t recommend this game enough, honestly.
Edit: If you want more details, or have questions, just ask. I don’t want to spoil too much.
If you don’t have the tech skills, you don’t know what the right way to fix the guy who thinks he’s someone else. Who knows what happens if you choose wrong. What do you do with the guy who stole that eye implant?
+1 for Frostpunk. Great city builder where the choices you make are often between the lesser of two evils. Very difficult, expect to lose your first few runs!
The demonic cat-sith called Big Ears could be summoned (Gaelic taghairm Scottish Gaelic pronunciation: [tɤrʲɤm]) to appear and grant any wish to those who took part in the ceremony. The ceremony required practitioners to burn the bodies of cats over the course of four days and nights.
Dyson Sphere Program just got a pretty substantial update adding combat mechanics. If you like other production/logistics games like factorio/mindustry/satisfactory I highly recommend it. The amount of control they give you over sorting/distribution/etc combined with the ability to create blueprints can make for some rapid scalability to your manufacturing operation, and the same mechanics can be leveraged to now wage a competent and scalable offence against the new enemy.
Definitely second Dyson Sphere Program! I'm not at all interested in the combat (it's optional), but now that they have that completed they'll be updating other features too. I'm hundreds of hours in and still come back to it.
Bought the game when it came to Steam a couple of years back and put 100 or so hours and uninstalled it feeling that it needs way more content.
Re-installed last week just because without reading the latest update news and boy oh boy was I genuinely surprised to see the combat and new QoS stuff been added. Highly recommend to anyone that has enjoyed Factories and/satisfactory. The build is somewhere in between both.
I’m crumudgeony enough to remember when buying a game was buying a game. I disliked it when mobile games slowly changed into monitization via microtransactions. Heck, I remember buying games for full price and then they got changed to ftp overnight with mtx. That kind of stuff drove me nuts and I am firmly anti-mtx. That said, I let my kid earn money he can use on mtx for cosmetics and stuff on Fortnite. But it is a dedicated pool of money for mtx, his actual money kept separate so he can buy ice cream or save for bigger purchases without worry. Roblox on the other hand, is a company that exploits children for their labor to create the games and it hires psychologists to ensure kids dump as much money into it as possible all while having no moderation. Roblox is awful. Microtransactions in children’s games are harmful and exploitive. I’m letting my kid get a drip feed so he can get the little benefit from having non-stock costumes in fortnite while also having the learning experience that in games with mtx, you can never have enough - without him becoming a whale.
I’ve recently banned my kid from playing it too. I had only just unlocked it for the first time. I had previously blocked it because it was, IMHO, terrible. As a professional gamedev I find it offensively bad. But I relented, because lots of his friends were playing it. However, and this may be the experiences he was playing, it seems to be almost exclusively training kids up for gambling. Pretty much everything is dopamine based rewards. It’s like a casino. It’s worst than I ever imagined. I’m this close to banning online play in Minecraft because he is similarly gravitating to the same sort of experiences. In our case it’s not about money, he hasn’t spent a cent on these things. But the content is very problematic, I have concerns that it is encouraging developing minds that gambling is the norm.
It’s also just an extremely dangerous platform. They have a stock market, game mode development with children employing children (clearly neither one understands employment laws), and unsurprisingly a ton of pedophiles
First and foremost, This is kind of a rant. I do not like horror games. I have never played any ‘strictly horror’ ones before. And yes I get scared easily.
Lethal Company is a horror game. Sure people find a lot of funny moments in it, but it’s still mainly just a horror game. If you don’t like the horror bits, the rest is just going to be boring for you. Don’t feel like you have to force yourself to like it just because everyone else does
I think they have to get to the point where they mightbplay a video game on their own before stardew valley would land for them. They weren’t particularly inspired by the trailers.
This didn’t really work for us to be honest. It went a little better than most games, but it was too easy to get separated and do your own thing and it just didn’t really feel like we were playing together. Could be a strength, but I don’t think it’s ideal if your partner doesn’t really like video games haha.
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