844k now. Wow. I wonder what caused the sudden surge? Or is it just that most momentum can be gain at the start and towards the end like with Kickstarters?
After Ross announced the campaign is dead a bunch of YouTubers (and media, I think?) picked up the topic and started spreading the word far and wide. This is the result.
That’s actually one of the most annoying parts about the whole thing. SKG campaign has been running for what, a year now? Barely anyone with an audience cared enough to even look into it, let alone spread the news. Now that things came close to failing suddenly everyone thinks it’s an important topic and scrambled to make videos/posts/whatever. I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt but I just don’t have that in me any more…
We could’ve been in so much better place with awareness, petitions and general sentiment if people in the industry actually cared about these things from the start.
Better late than never, I guess. I just hope there’s enough time to push through the EU petition as well.
Up untill Ross posted his ‘SKG is dead’ video… Thor had by far gotten the most views of anyone with a video discussing SKG.
And Thor… well, he was anti-SKG, and had been spreading a bunch of objectively false bullshit about it, actual FUDD.
So… about half of Ross’s video was dedicated to pointing out how Thor was wildly misunderstanding things, and fairly graciously and politely trying to correct these misconceptions.
So here’s the two sort of things at play I see, in terms of 'why sudden surge now?'
Thor was just shown to be objectively, factually wrong. Thus, the immediate effect of this would be to reiterate and clarify and reinforce with more specificity what SKG actually is… and that could directly convince people to give a damn, to believe in Ross’s SKG over Thor’s misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.
But uh, almost certainly much, much more relevant:
Ross doing (1) created an absolute drama shit storm via the way youtube works now… which is very much just drama mongers and commentators reporting on e-drama. (1) kicked off an actual, organic, honest to god, truly viral explosion of many, many people who’d basically never heard of any of this before, mostly dogpiling on Thor for being such a disingenuous, egotistical asshole and liar, but also of course encouraging people to sign the SKG petition.
This kind of absurd, out of nowhere explosion of popularity of some topic, idea, meme, whatever, that spreads from person to person to person, from the ground up instead of top down… this is what something going ‘viral’ originally meant in the earlier days of the internet, 15 to 20 ish years ago.
You know, it spreads, from host to host, like a pandemic outbreak, shockingly rapidly.
These days we have everything hypermanaged by algorithms that silo you into your own content niche… and this was an exceptional enough of an event that it broke containment.
Videos like … this entire topic/event/story… used to be what the YouTube trending tab looked like… just totally random shit that for whatever reason, a bunch of people organically shared with each other, back when the algos were much, much more primitive.
…
Anyway… extremely ironically, a whole lot of the viral nature of this is due to Thor being just such an astoundingly massive piece of shit liar and manipulator.
He has a whole entire history of being astoundingly cocky, arrogant, dishonest, deceptive, intellectually inconsistent, rhetorically manipulative, etc, and it is genuienly… just astounding, i dont know what other word to use, to go through every single shitty thing Thor has done or said, not only in regards to SKG, but many, many other things Thor has done.
Basically, Thor is now a lolcow, a perfect person to milk by making content criticizing him, because he really is that much of an unbelievable, outrageuous idiot asshole.
I mean, its not technically completely impossible, but the vast majority of EU countries require a valid name, id, address, etc, its usually a pretty dumb idea to bot spam an official government web portal, and I’m sure there will be a review process after July 31.
Also… its not like it hits a million and then just no one else can sign up to it anymore.
It’ll stay open till the end of the month, could easily breach a million, maybe even two million if anything like this insane rate keeps up.
Right now we need 1669 per day remaining, though that number is probably going ot be smaller by the time you click the link.
Worth noting that the actual target is somewhere above one million, since there’s probably some invalid signatures mixed in and the initiative needs a million even after these get removed. Still, it’s looking really good.
That guy legitimately made his hobby into his job.
There’s 0 reasons for him to still keep updating the game with as much content as he’s doing except for his own satisfaction. Truly the best developer a game can have
It’s there due to the technical certification requirements of XBox. All games are required to become interactive after a set number of seconds. When you have a complex game with long loading times, that might be difficult. The load start screen works around that, it’s simple enough to load quickly and it is interactive, i.e. “Press any key to continue”. It’s not useful, but it fulfills the certification requirements, all loading time that follows or might happen in the background while that screen is shown, doesn’t count.
It the same reason why you see so many games have the same “You’ll lose all your unsaved progress if you exit the game” screen, even in games that save so often to be a non-issue. It’s a certification requirement too. There is a whole bunch of stuff like this in games (and movies) that is not there because anybody wants it, but because some contract somewhere says it has to be there or you aren’t allowed to publish your game (see also the way names in movie posters never line up with the people on that poster).
PS: This has been around since at least the Xbox360s, don’t know what Sony requires or how Microsoft might have updated their requirements since then.
If you have a particularly slow PC, this screen would be good feedback that it hasn't crashed while booting the game. It also keeps the game consistent across platforms.
Yeah, they're not gonna do all that stuff for cert and then go "now let's remake our whole intro sequence to be more convenient!", I don't think devs typically have that much free time
The problem is that the majority of games do not tell you what you are actually losing or how to prevent it. Do you lose the last five seconds or do you go right back to the beginning of the game? How far away is the next save point? Games don’t tell you. You have to try to find out. There are a few smart games that will tell you “2min since your last save”, but they are pretty rare.
And of course in modern times that screen is rather unnecessary to begin with: Just save the damn game and let me continue were I left of. Xbox has QuickResume, but a lot of other platforms still have nothing like it.
IMO it’s a good feature and it’s a good thing it’s required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.
This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.
I mean, better loading feedback would be better than an arbitrary “interactive within 1 second” blanket rule, leading to this whole “press button to continue” workaround.
That’s like a generator needing an earth rod, and the engineer putting an earth rod into a plant pot. Sure, the earth rod is there, and sunk to regulated depth in dirt… but it’s a plant pot.
Just make an accurate loading screen with accurate feedback.
Imo that’s still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.
I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn’t check if it was accepting feedback.
Neither of these things can be true, because they’ve been around since long before Microsoft got into the console game. I’m pretty sure Atari 2600 games had that prompt. I know NES games did.
Games must enter an interactive state that accepts player input within 20 seconds after the initial start-up sequence. If an animation or cinematic shown during the start-up sequence runs longer than 20 seconds, it must be skippable using the START button.
What earlier games were doing was very similar, but was done for different reasons. Arcade games had an attract mode that would show gameplay or intro cutscenes in a loop when the device wasn’t in active use and had an “Insert Coin” flashing to attract players. The normal game would only started once coin got inserted into the arcade machine. Early console games had that attract mode too, just “insert coin” replaced with a “press start”.
What makes the modern start screen different is that there is often no cutscene to skip, no gameplay to watch, it’s just a pointless screen before you go to the main menu.
Yes, but you’d have to get there in 20sec first, which in case of very elaborate main menus, might not always be the case. The start screen provides a safety buffer so that you never fail at this certification criteria, as all the loading time after the start screen doesn’t count.
I can buy a new toaster from the shop, why can’t I buy a woman too? Does this mean Gamers are pro sex-work? Or pro indentured servitude for women more likely…
my inner engineer wants to challenge this: I know there’s a dildo company that does tours, and at least copies penises and vulvae of customers as a souveneir, im sure there are things that copy at least he surface of the vaginal canal if you want to be completionist. maybe with the right kind of 3d printer it could be done? not sure, haven’t really worked with nylon materials.
Nylon? I would think this would be a ‘print the moulds we use to pour in silicone’ situation, if we’re going for usability. formlabs.com/blog/casting-silicone-guide/ On an engineering note I’m also sure I’ve seen this exact thing before, but I wonder what would improve it. Self-heating? DIY solution could be a hidden pocket for reusable handwarmers lol
Gamers tend to think of things as quests. A box to check off. A completionist. Getting married and having kids is part of life’s quests for many people. It’s not seen as collaboration in many ways.
How does romance work in most video games? Select the correct dialogue options, memorize the correct answer to questions, give them the same gift every day?
The other main way a lot of young men “interact” with women is through porn, which is always made with a mind to what a woman would enjoy during sex…/s
because you think of “I never get laid” as a normal human need to connect with another person, which is what it is but they’re too deep in misogyny to realize it. instead to them getting laid is a quest to complete and it involves a quest item known as a woman, not a character. so I never get laid has less of an undertone of “why can’t I connect with a woman” and more of “when will we get our government mandated sex slaves”
I had to stop playing Half Life Alyx when it got to the dark flashlight bit with zombies jumping out at you. Nearly gave me a heart attack. Definitely couldn’t handle it IRL. edit: autocorrect
Yeah I definitely took breaks and actually just never went back after a certain point. Not because it was too intense directly, but one of my breaks, I just never went back.
But it only works as long as the replacement for Gabe Newell has the exact same ethos about the business. Changing hands always risks changing how things function at a company. Unless Newell has been practically grooming a successor for years, it’s very likely that a replacement will want to “shake things up.”
When Newell retires/passes, things will change. Time will tell if it will be for the better or the worse.
Well he’s 61, and the average life expectancy for males in the US is 73ish. He is well-to-do, so he likely has better access to healthcare than most, meaning he will be one of those who lives past 73. I’d suspect we have twenty years at best, but more likely about 10 years if he retires at a “reasonable” age.
Unfortunately gabe is also overweight and hence has the health risks associated with being overweight. So him only living till the average age has a higher possibility.
Not exactly. Of course Gabe could be replaced by some idiot who fucks everything up, but if Valve doesn’t become publicly traded it will continue to be in the best interest of whoever ends up owning it to continue doing things this way. Gabe doesn’t do good things just because. He does it because happy customers means more money in the long run.
Publicly traded companies on the other hand need to extract as much money as quickly as possible and have no regards to what will happen to it a few months later. So even if Gabe dies, all Valve needs is a leader interested in what’s best for itself.
Dear God. Because Nepotism has worked out so well so many times in the past. /s
Just shut down the company now, Gabe.
From an interview with his son:
“If it’s one thing I’d like to see Valve do, it’s push it with more their ideas,” he said. "The people there are the smartest I’ve ever met, the hardest working, the most inspiring. The culture at Valve is a very good one but they’ve kind of found this point where they’re a working machine. And that’s good, but I think they should reach out and do something scary. Do something that they don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
“They make incredibly smart decisions, but sometimes you have to do something stupid. Sometimes you have to have a stupid crazy idea and say ‘fuck it’, go with it. Valve has a mindbogglingly enormous amount of resources at their back, and I hope they find the courage to throw it at something new. I want to see them push the envelope again.”
Yeah this chucklefuck is going to break shit day one, guaranteed.
Eh, it sounds more like he wants then to go back to the roots and developer a groundbreaking game, like Portal, or HL2, again. Which doesn’t sound like a bad thing. To do something groundbreaking it probably helps if you dare to do something that is scary.
They literally already did that with the SteamDeck, it’s absolutely groundbreaking. They created a whole new product category, but it took years of planning and patience and watching the market. It happened with prototypes like the Steam Controller, the Steam Link, and the original vision for Steam Boxes, as well as the nearly decade of work they’ve done on Proton to get Windows games to run well in Linux. It didn’t happen with a “stupid crazy idea” that they said “fuck it, go with it.” It started with a smart idea, well executed, over a long period of time, with many bumps in the road on the way to success.
Steam Boxes were originally announced in 2012, this is the result of a full decade of work.
And one hell of a lot of work, too! Reimplementing the Windows APIs that Wine didn't already have, and then optimizing those implementations enough to be not only sufficient for some of the most performance-sensitive software under the sun but faster than actual Windows, is no small feat.
I wonder how much of Newell’s past at Microsoft helped with that? He helped produce the first three versions of Windows.
While Windows works wildly differently these days and the last one he worked on was Windows 3.0 (maybe 3.1?) and a massive amount of stuff has changed in how Operating Systems work since then.
However, I do wonder if his familiarity with the old systems helped at all.
Yeah, you are correct, and that’s why I think he was talking about games specifically. That’s a grade A assumption from me though (and a bit of hopium?)
So SteamDeck, Valve Index and pushing back against the short-term money maker that was NFTs until half a year or so, among other things, aren’t scary enough projects when you’re “just” a game developer and distributor?
I love their approach to Hardware and Linux but have we collectively forgotten that Valve had a huge part in pushing loot boxes and underage gambling? Far from being the least evil company, but still a net win for consumers and I appreciate that they exist.
I watch this dude sometimes, he says he’s a fulltime game dev but all I see him do is play other games. The game he works on has seen very little progress.
Would be nice if he at least admits he’s a streamer and not a game dev.
I’ve also noticed this from watching his stream and the more I learn about the guy the less I like him. He seems to misrepresent and oversell himself quite a bit.
Btw did he tell you about the time he worked at Blizzard, for the millionth time?
Are Apple devs even contractually allowed to say that they’re Apple devs? I swear every employee from every other company won’t shut up about it on twitter but you never hear a thing from Apple people. Have I just been missing them completely?
I know a few people who used to work for Apple. The reason a lot don’t say it though is because if you do people automatically assume you had something to do with whatever feature they don’t personally like, and you get berated about it.
Ah, that’s completely understandable. Most people don’t realize that in a lot of companies, the decision to make the stupid feature/break your workflow comes from a suit 10 pay grades above your level and despite everyone involved trying to explain that it’s a bad idea.
Deltarune didn’t exist yet. It’s an undertale ripoff.
Which is very telling, tobyfox released a whole game on his own. While this " I worked at blizzard, BTW" tool hasn’t with an (allegedly) entire company around him. He’s a grifter, he scams people around him to profit off of other’s work. That’s all he does.
I'm in my 40s and I've been playing counterstrike since I was in my 20s. I play other games briefly but anytime i'm bored I still hop on CS. It's a habit like checking your locks 3 times or taking your clothes off to poop
They’re just referring to normal habits we all do like checking your oven for the family of mice you let live there before leaving for work or brushing your teeth one tooth at a time while watching the Flintstones in a language you don’t understand. We all do it.
Yea like moving all the food on the top shelf of your fridge to the bottom and moving everything up shelf by shelf every morning or making sure you vacuum your walls properly. Standard stuff.
I don’t know about every time, but I’ve had an intestinal blockage. Everything came off. I was sweating and crying for what felt like hours. Pooping was the best feeling I’ve ever had at that moment.
While I don’t fully disrobe, the freedom of pulling one leg out of my pants is amazing. You can get a nice spread going for those times you need to bear down a bit.
The older I get, the less I want to learn new competitive games because I just don’t have time anymore. It’s just nice to go back to something familiar every now and then.
Final Profit: A Shop RPG is an RPG about a deposed elf queen who opens a humble shop and slowly advances through the ranks of the Bureau of Business with the eventual goal of defeating Capitalism from within. It’s unique. It has some incremental game like mechanics, and can get a little repetitive in the mid-game, but it has a surprisingly compelling story and a lot of unfolding mechanics that keep it interesting all the way through.
Roughly a 30 hour playthrough with many endings, NG+ and some optional challenge modes that remove or change some of the most obvious strategies for advancement, so if you finish it and still want more, you can play through again with a somewhat different experience.
Man this made me feel guilty downvoting. Great game, a real surprise packet for me, think I got it in a Humble Bundle and tried on a whim and had a great time.
Think it’s an Aussie dev (single person?) too, and still getting pretty frequent large content updates
The dev is also very responsive! I left a (positive) review with some critical feedback and they commented on it very quickly and had a bit of a dialog with me about the comments I’d made; they ended up revising the Steam page based on review feedback (mine and others), too, which made me want to support them even more!
It’s unfortunate that RPGMaker games have such a consistent and distinct aesthetic, it’s really obvious when a game was made with the engine, and a lot of the reviews mention it, too.
That said, this is definitely one of the best RPGMaker games I’ve played. They really stretch what’s possible with it. Can’t get away from that look, though.
The worst part is, there are certain ways a top down spritework game can look unique, and even put some personality on the characters. But the classic NES RPG look just seems so arcadey and wrong to me.
Does this include cloud streamed games? I for one am still waiting for a streaming exclusive game in the vein of Elden Ring or BotW. Bonus if it’s an MMO. Imagine how much more mysterious a world could be if no one is able to datamine the binary. The only way to discover things would be players actually discovering them.
Eh. I would say that they are still mysterious and interesting if you don’t look at the information on a website saying what’s in the game or not. So yeah, I don’t really like what cloud gaming is doing. If you want to keep the mystery of a universe, have some self-control.
I’m not saying “for each player, they are able to experience a sense of wonder in a game when played in isolation”, that’s old hat. I’m saying “for all players, everyone experiences a shared sense of wonder and discovery in an artificial world they live in together”.
I’ve never played Elden Ring, yet I couldn’t help but see the community make new discoveries together. The first couple of days every post was about Margit, then a few people found the fake wall that hides an entire zone, and a month later someone has reverse engineered the levels and found a wall that takes over 1000 hits to get rid of.
When the binary is entirely hidden from the users, and the only thing the users have have access to is a window peering into the world as you want them to see it, you get to create an entire set of physical laws that is hidden from the players. Players have to work together to conduct experiments, peer review each other, compete with each other, and become experts in very narrow fields of research within your simulation. Imagine spending months as a community raising in-game funding and developing the technology to sail/fly/launch to a New World for the first time, and when you finally arrive you know you are the first set of players to ever see it, specifically as a result of your efforts.
What you’re describing is a neat little one-off escape room experience. What I’m describing is an actual world. We currently cannot do this.
While this is a cool concept, I don’t think there is a single organization with the money needed to pull it off that wouldn’t also ruin the concept with monetization features. Maybe some kind of community made game could accomplish it, similar to what the Thrive devs are doing, but the amount of consistent resources needed would be a lot.
Yeah, that’s why I think we’re in an MMO slump right now. The only companies who can afford the scale “need” it to be a cash cow. So they need really predictable methods of generating income, which means not doing anything too interesting. I’m hoping one day we’ll get past that. I think we have the technology right now for indie devs to roll out a semi-affordable MMO of decent quality, but I also don’t want the market to be flooded with garbage MMOs. We already have too many of those.
It’s too big when the developers are unable to fill it with enough interesting things to do and discover to keep my attention. But there’s no absolute size I’d automatically consider too big, as it also depends on things like traversal. If you ride through the map on a mech going 400km/h, it can be much larger and more spread out than if I have to traverse the entire map on foot.
That’s definitely a key point. Absolutely loved the first Forest game, the map was just the right size for what content it had, then the sequel has a map 4x the size that is just completely empty for 90% of it. They did make some improvements over early access but it was still mostly a waste
In case you’re wondering, the graph looks like this. There have currently been 16k new signatures today. The required pace to make it would be 10k a day. Yesterday the count increased by about 30k signatures.
TL;DR Keep spreading this to people you know, and keep signing. It’s working.
Until last week I thought it was done, but somehow it flipped around. Things are looking pretty good, with massive youtubers and streamers taöking about it.
I’m glad the ball is rolling again. This can change gaming and set a precedent for other things as well.
It flipped around because the founder of the movement, Ross, of AccursedFarms on youtube… released a video giving a status report…
And spending a good deal of the video explaining how Thor, PirateSoftware on youtube… has basically been making up bullshit and spreading nonsense about SKG for months now, actively campaigning against SKG, again, based almost entirely on him jumping to hysterical, catastrophic conclusions without factual basis
After that video… basically every single AngloSphere Gamer Youtuber has been putting out videos spreading the SKG messsge, and dogpiling on Thor for being a confused, overconfident narcissist… and Thor is now double triple quadrupling down with ‘im the real victim’ and other such tactics often employed by manipulative narcissists facing the revelation of their public persona as essentially entirely hypocritical.
EDIT: Also, as of right now, I’m seeing 723k…
Which is roughly +20k in only 6 hours from the time this OP was made.
EDIT 2:
If you’ve ever heard of, or seen the Freeman’s Mind series… yeah, that’s Ross, basically being Freeman’s internal monologue, and turning the entirety of Half Life into an action comedy bonanza.
He had more recently been attempting to get through all of HL2 this way as well, in addition to doing esoteric game reviews… untill he got so pissed about Ubisoft being able to just murder The Crew, and what is going on with all games in terms of consumer rights… that he started the SKG movement, and hasn’t had much time to work on his other stuff as much.
To be honest, neither did I… and I may have accidentally replied to the wrong comment, could have sworn someone was asking ‘why line go up so fast now’.
Probably not, I’m the one that’s hated and shunned and gaslit by the entire family because of how easily and often I point out that they are both hypocrites and objectively wrong about nearly every single political, economic or sociological idea they have.
But I do appreciate your validation, lol!
Yeah, got two bachelors degree’s simultaneously.
Managed to do it in 4 years + 1 summer quarter.
But uh yeah, I’m basically too knowledgeable for my own good, and the autism doesn’t help with dealing with abusive narcissist family members.
Oh well!
I ghosted them to the point they probably think I am actually dead.
I get accused of being a bot all the time now because I still enjoy writing long-form posts and, y'know, contributing what I can to the state of human knowledge, or what remains of it anyway. I can't blame people for being defensive about it. It's the AIs themselves I'm offended by, they're the ones doing wrong. We're all just trying to cope with the avalanche of unverified garbage they're putting out. It's digital pollution.
Yeah. I hear you there. Problem I usually have is that the odds of an accusation tend to scale less with posting style in my experience and more with level of disagreement, or whether or not the poster has personally witnessed something. Basically, “I didn’t see this with my own two eyes/dislike you, so this is obviously bot behavior.” It’s a conspiracy theorist-like attitude, and it’s predated LLMs entirely.
Nonetheless, I’m not happy that an entire new form of bot scrutiny has been introduced, and I absolutely cannot wait for GenAI/LLM hype to die the fuck down.
It’s an official EU citizens initiative, hosted on the EU web portal. The one maintained by the EU for the very purpose of digitally facilitating any and all citizens initiatives.
I get accused of being a bot all the time now because I still enjoy writing long-form posts
From cecilkorik, who I was replying to. That kind of bot accusation scarcely ever occurred before LLMs entered the picture. You posted too hastily here and missed a huge chunk of context.
Botting something like a citizens initiative, where every signature WILL get scrutinized by government would be seriously stupid. Or are you saying commenters like me are bots?
Is it really that hard for you to imagine the possibility… that people care?
Or are just not aware of the chain of youtubers doing a call to arms on this, getting millions of views, completely explaining the signature spike?
There is zero scrutiny possible for the form which is 100% based on trust that the signer is who they say they are adults where they say they are. If you want to be John Smith in UK, Paddy Murphy in Ireland and Jurgen Schmidt in Germany, you can be. There’s a reason none of these initiatives have done anything except keep people who care about something busy with dopamine graphing instead of doing something like boycotting relevant games and publishers.
And no, like to the EU, Youtuber noise is not relevant to me. Millions of views is literally nothing. You see the general state of the world, yes?
Right. Because caring about A means you can’t care about B. If you support legislation, you must be boycoting nothing, because no-one in the history of existence has ever done both.
You’re claiming mutual exclusivity where none exists.
You sound more like you’re scared of the implications of this passing, because you’d have us voting with out wallets rather than… actually voting. Nevermind that even games not worth buying should still also be preserved.
Pre-orders, micro-transactions and battle-passes are still a thing, no matter how much we’ve shouted about “big company bad”. This type of crap isn’t something we solve by any one method alone.
And you don’t need to engage with youtube or any other social media, to accept that the phenomenon they enable, occur. To dismiss that reality would be idiotic delusion.
Millions of views is a lot, when all you need to get started, is one of those millions to sign a petition.
I… What? Is that not a mutual exclusivity argument? For you to have a point, this time and effort would need to be better spent elsewhere. I not only disagree with that, but I have the time and energy to do the other things you are claiming will make a difference.
Man what the fuck are you talking about, it requires an EU, country specific verification document(s)/id(s), or the intraEU digital ID to verify you are an actual real person who lives where you say you do.
This is an official EU webportal for formal citizens initiatives petitions.
Like, ok, I guess you could just spam it with a bot/script, and then INTERPOL comes after you for fucking with an official government website, potentially hundreds or thousands of counts of attempted impersonation / identity theft and lying on a government/legal document.
Like sure, go do a DDOS on I dunno, whitehouse.gov, or your US’s state’s unemployment assistance application web portal.
Those are approximately equivalently stupid things to do.
OK buddy, cybercrime never happens and interpol will come arrest your python script if it did because you messed with an EU “government” form that might have resulted in them having to get a 60 year old Greek politican to ask what a EULA was
What happens if you try to just brute force guess at a bunch of possible credit card numbers and addresses and names in some kind of online store?
After maybe a couple of tries, 30 seconds or less of that… the system is rejecting your bullshit fake numbers everytime, and after enough, it auto ip bans you, sends an email to the security admin team, and your journey to getting a chat from INTERPOL or the FBI or what not has now officially begun.
This system doesn’t just accept any old random bullshit you give it.
It is not a random slapdash online poll.
Its only going to count up on that total signatures count if the system actually verifies the info you put in as being consistent with an actual, real, specific person in the system.
I again repeat: You are an idiot.
And I use idiot specifically: you are not only drastically misinformed, but determined, and seem to think very dangerous actions… are not dangerous… you think very unfeasible methods… are feasible.
Your idiot noises have no power over me, you contemptible boffin.
You aren’t worth explaining anything further to, such is the density of your thick skull, such is the extent of the gaping, cavernous void present in the part of your mind where relevant contextual information should be.
If you must pester me further, my server admin tutoring rate is $100 per hour, if you can’t afford the cost, just admit you’re lost.
What do you think the word boffin means? Do you mean buffoon? You should probably double-check your phrasing before quoting anime protagonists from memory
I think they will verify with the municipality of the person who signed whether they actually exist. Theoretically you could sign on someone you know this information for, but I think IP logging would burn you pretty quick if even one of those is bogus/duplicate.
Also, I don’t know whether such signatures would be counted before any verification would take place
I mean yeah, technically there will be some EU member states with different guidelines (due to different id/privacy laws) where maybe yes, a few of them could theoretically maybe be pumped up by a bot.
But uh, for some thing… you’d need a fairly well done bot net to even kind of pull that off for long.
As in like, a new and convincingly distinct bot/ip to burn for each signature, that is actually an ip that makes geo sense for the person/real world address it is spoofing…
As you say: basic ip logging.
If its all coming from… a single, or small number of ips… assuming the EU is at least as competent of a server admin as I am, yeah, that’s gonna look pretty fuckywucky in the logs, probably get noticed within 24 hours max.
And yes, I also seriously doubt there would not be some kind of verification of signees at at least some level, that would be initiated after all the thresholds are passed.
But its wildly innacurate to portray this as if… oh yeah any idiot vibe coder could just drill this up to whatever number after 30 minutes.
That was the way the internet worked back in 2006, or how stupid say Twitter polls are now.
Not the same level of inept incompetence going on with EU government websites.
That’s entirely backwards. I’ve boycotted these online kill-switched games pretty well, but that means fuck all because the general public is incapable of collectively caring about anything. Regulation on the other hand does have an effect, and should the initiative pass, EU is required to properly answer it.
Answering doesn’t mean doing anything, and all they have to do is generally wave in the direction of the overwhelming popularity and profitability of the products compared to the online petition that 0.2% of the EU’s adult population will have signed.
If the general public does not care, legislation will not follow. Filling out and promotinh a glorified change.org form is energy wasted on actually popularising your viewpoint instead of trying uselessly to get it in unpopularly.
Entirely discounting the fact that the EU has a track record of consumer friendly regulation. I agree, instead of doing what has the highest chance of success, let’s do nothing that could have an impact instead.
What on earth makes you think an online petition, which has never led to any of the consumer friendly regulation you mention, has the ‘highest’ chance? Or that the alternative to a petition is doing nothing?
All of that regulation came primarily from legal cases.
The fact that it isn’t just a petition, and if successful will put the issue before EU lawmakers. I’m presenting the alternative as doing nothing because you talked about voting with your wallet, and that is essentially doing nothing.
The reason I see this as having a higher chance of success than a legal case is the monetary limitation inherent to the latter. As far as I know there isn’t a big track record of successful ECI’s, so I would assume you’re basing your opinions on regular petitions. Correct me if I’m wrong.
No, I talked about putting this energy into convincing others to vote with their wallets, not just “doing nothing”. A boycott is an active campaign. It doesnt just mean not buying a product. It means not buying any associated product. Not even tolerating them in conversation.
I’m basing my opinion on how the commission has responded to similar successfully raised initiatives: “that’s already covered by legislation and up to EU states to manage”, “no that’s something we cant support, but feel free to appeal endlessly”, and in the most effective one, “committing to making a legislative proposal by 2023 but actually if thats ok we’ll make it 2026 and I suppose then if legislation is agreed it may be in place within a decade” (end cage farming, which polls at 86% approval already in the EU).
Yes, that’s what I was referring to; I didn’t mean you personally voting with your wallet, but in the broader sense. In my opinion there’s little chance of having success with this method in this field.
I’m not saying you’re wrong in basing your opinion on this, but I think the sample size is very small and not necessarily indicative of future results. I’m not saying the chances are sky-high either, but I think this is the best way forward, especially right now with the campaign having received a second wind.
If there are alternative roads to the same goal, I wouldn’t be against supporting those either. I believe this is the best we have right now, that’s why I’ve put it before friends, family etc. If you have a better idea, you should definitely do the same, but downplaying the potential of this campaign helps nobody but those in the games industry.
Citizens iniatives may be a form of petition, but the difference is they come with actual legal requirements.
This isn’t some change.org bs, a list of names totaling some arbitrary number. That’s why it has a hard deadline. And requirements for how signatures have to come from more than one country.
This is a pre-existing system for the people of the EU to force it to tackle an issue. Most EU countries have equivalent systems locally, as well. This isn’t new or unusual for us.
Legal precedent is how the US works. Where lawsuits catalyzing the setting of new standards for what is legal, is the most common way the law changes. If you thought that’s how EU legislation got done, then you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Almost everything the EU does, is based on proposals. Not legal cases.
Those can happen in the EU, too, but we have additional ways to propose law as citizens, and legal cases are more common on the national level, rather than the continental level.
If you can gather proof (signatures) of concern on a given issue, you can force a proposal through the door that normally has to come from elected representatives.
It does mean doing something: they have to spell out whether consumers should have rights on this or not. Currently it’s undefined, which is equivalent to “not.”
popularizing your viewpont
And the initiative works against that? You say the cause could have gotten more publicity without it? I really don’t see how that could happen, or understand the point in guilt tripping over it.
energy wasted
I’m starting to think this argument is energy wasted.
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