Preface: the things I’ll mention have, for the most part, improved a lot in more recent games.
I default to women nowadays in almost every game I play. A lot of it is because back when I was a kid male characters were basically hulking hairy ogres with your choices of hairstyles being short, spiked punk and bald. For example: one of my favorite games from my youth is KOTOR, and the male faces are incredibly forgetful. It’s all white guy, white guy with a scar, white blond guy and so on. And that doesn’t appeal to me in anyway. On the other hand women got many different options for hairstyles and faces that were cute, which is something I like to be able to be in games. Granted there are a ton of games where the women were just eye candy, and yet that was still more interesting than generic white guy #555.
There’s something very appealing to me in being able to be a cute girl that still kicks ass in the same way as any buff guy in that world.
The nature of software development and internet communities has always been transient - frameworks and projects and websites have all come and gone. Despite how unlikely it may seem, even Facebook is not immune to becoming dust in the wind someday. God knows I've started my fair share of hobby projects and left them behind in states ranging from broken to buggy, so I should be the last person to throw stones. I know how it feels to just hit a complete motivational brick wall, or to have so many other things come up in life that my little project is the last thing on my mind.
For as long as I can remember, from the days of PHP bulletin boards to Reddit to kbin, I've never had only a single profile. So I think it's not a bad idea to prepare for the possibility that kbin doesn't last forever - literally nothing does. Nor do I think that's a foregone conclusion! But even if Ernest has moved on, or he's tied down by other matters, I think what he built is inspiring. I legitimately believe that kbin is cool tech, far far cooler than Bitcoin or VR or AI. Maybe someone else spins up a kbin instance, or mbin becomes the new de facto standard, but I don't mind running this account for as long kbin.social sticks around... no matter how many 503's I see lol.
I recognize each and every other commenter in this thread, y'all are prolific contributors. So if you are leaving, at least link your new profile in your bio.
Oh, the irony! I'm trying to upvote your comment, but keep getting an error.
I signed up here and Lemmy.world (same username), at roughly the same time, and have mostly used this account. Only in the past few days have I been leaning on lemmy.world, and giving some thoughts as to where my new backup might be. I really do appreciate the added benefits of 3rd party apps, but I'm definitely going to keep checking in here, and hoping I'll be back to using this account (almost) exclusively again soon. I don't even use the microblogging side of things here, but I've really enjoyed the vibes of Ernest and the local community.
Having a female character and trying out a variety of cool outfits, dresses and make-up is fun. Especially as most games allow you to do a lot of customisation for female characters. Barbie in Night City, Barbie in Skyrim, Barbie in the post-Apocalypse. I can happily spend far too much time getting their outfit and make-up just right, before I even get down to kicking ass.
Female bad-asses are far more interesting than the boring male action hero stereotype.
Games are escapist fun. I'm a man. I'm tall, I do weight lifting. Why would I play as a man who looks like me, when I can play as a woman, something I would otherwise not get to experience?
lol I had the same thought. This was one of my most wanted features! Idk if Artemis is still being worked on at this point, but I hope support for collections is added there.
This time is probably unrelated to @ernest's supposed inactivity. Actually, his another /kbin server, https://karab.in has been brought back on 15 of February.
Oh wow, what a day for the fediverse huh? Kbin's infrastructure went down, Lemmy.ml's certs expired (or so Firefox told me), and a ton of Misskey servers got hacked and started botspamming everyone.
Ah, there's one more thing I forgot. I would like adding a new post/thread to be done asynchronously to reduce client-side time, but this might extend to next week because even though I have the foundation prepared, I want to thoroughly test it.
Because with Overwatch 2, the changes were so small and meaningless that it could have just been an update to the original game. CS2 is on a whole new engine and has significant upgrades that couldn’t have been implemented in a simple update. Not to mention all the promised features OW2 was supposed to have that they backtracked on. That being said, I don’t exactly agree that they should have outright replaced CS:GO, but it’s not really the same as what Blizzard did. If they had replaced the original OW but had a significant reason to do so like Valve did, people wouldn’t be so upset at them.
Do you know what OW2 changed, since you call it small and meaningless?
Imo the gameplay updates with a move to 5v5 were pretty significant. The engine stayed the same, afaik, but some things were overhauled, although I don’t know if it was just visual changes.
According to some comments I’ve read, CS2 feels somewhat rushed. Some game modes and maps are missing, and the subtick server stuff also seems like a mixed bag.
So, why is it fine for one of these games, but not the other? For someone who hasn’t played either game in years, it feels like a similar level of change for either game.
OW2 changed the number of players on a team, rebalance some heros and changes some day maps to night and some night maps to day, nothing that couldn’t have just been a big update. The only justification for a whole new game was the free PvE mode, which they walked back on and is no longer free. Not to mention that people who’ve had hands on with it are saying it’s not even very good. CS2 on the other hand is on an entirely new engine with significant upgrades across the board, both in the technical aspect and graphical. I played some just last night and the difference between 2 and GO are night and day, no way it could have just been an update. Also it’s been brought to my attention that, unlike what I previously thought, CS:GO is indeed still available to run community servers on, unlike the original OW which is lost completely to the world.
OW2 PvE was 100% originally going to be free, then they cancelled it outright and only brought it back when the community spoke up about it, but now for a price. But yeah, as far as I’m aware CS:GO is still available so unlike OW2, you don’t like the new one, you don’t have to play it, you still habe options. Another commenter posted the how to if that’s something you’re interested in.
edit: also as far as I’m aware, Dota 2’s engine update was just a graphical update, they didn’t change anything fundamental to the game. As I said before the difference between CS:GO or CS2 is night and day, they changed a lot.
Edit 2: also I think it’s a little disingenuous to imply that the quality of a game mode that people now have to pay for doesn’t matter
If you search for results before the OW2 PvP release last year, you’ll find a bunch of articles and comments, that say PvP is free, PvE is going to cost money.
You said repeatedly, that the engine changes between CSGO and CS2 are night and day, and I’m not disputing that. I just think, going from 6v6 to 5v5, reworking and rebalancing heroes to accommodate that, is also a night and day difference.
When I was talking about how the quality of a game mode shouldn’t matter in this discussion, I meant only when comparing the “name changes” for OW2 and CS2, and if a game “deserves” to be called a sequel.
Fair points I suppose. Tho I think the real game changer here is that CS:GO is still available, while the original OW is not, thus making all other points moot. If I don’t think that CS2 deserved to be a full on sequel instead of an update and would rather keep playing CS:GO, nothing is stopping me. I think that’s why Valve “got away with it” as you put it. They haven’t forced the new changes on anyone like Blizzard did. Players still have a choice. Whether or not it deserves to be a sequel is meaningless when the previous game is still available for free.
Note: OP of the thread just with a beehaw account now since Kbin shit the bed for me and I can’t see comments.
Except its only technically available. If you want to use steam console shenanigans sure you can technically play CS GO and while there is a beta version up for CS GO it is an outdated version. Nothing is stopping Valve from having a new steam id associated with CS2. While there are servers up for both 1.38.7.9 (the one available via beta) and 1.39.4.8 (latest build) it is clear the move Steam did has basically killed that community.
To technical users they have a choice, the less savy users they don’t. We shouldn’t get angry at one company for doing something bad but ignore when another but more beloved company does a very similar thing but we ignore it because there is a hacky solution to it. Imagine if they did the same exact thing to CS 1 or CS Source. Hell really imagine if they fucking killed Half life 1 and replaced it with that abomination Half life 1 source. Like its cool to have an answer to possibly help but we can’t expect most users to do the hacky solution.
Having CS2 and GO as separate entities would go a long way for sure, but I don’t think what they’ve done is quite as egregious at OW. To be clear, I’m not saying I agree with it, but it’s no where near as bad.
If enough people cry out for an easier way to access CS:GO then I would not be surprised in the slightest if valve heard them and did something about it. They’re pretty good about listening to their community and that’s more than I can say for Blizzard. That tends to be why people are less harsh when they screw up because they don’t have a history of screwing up and they tend to fix them too
I think the real game changer here is that CS:GO is still available, while the original OW is not
Absolutely. This is the main difference for me, which I didn’t know in the beginning, although it makes sense, since it’s been known that Steam has this functionality. If that gets some “official” support (selecting the version in the game properties like a beta), and not the current hacky solution, it would be great.
To be honest though, I still think for a lot of people across the internet, it’s totally a Blizzard bad, Valve good, situation.
You’re not really wrong that people think “Blizzard bad, Valve good” but they’re kinda right in a way. Valve have a much better track record when it comes to not screwing over their customers compared to someone like blizzard (or EA, or Ubisoft, etc). Screwing up OW2 was one more grievance on top of a mountain of them and there’s no hope that the community will get what they want. Valve on the other hand has shown they actually give a shit about their fans and are willing to listen (an example being how so many user requested features have been added to the steam deck remarkable fast). Valve is one of the few major companies left in the AAA space that seem to have any soul left, everyone else seems to have succumbed to corporate greed. So yeah, people might react less harshly when they do something like they just did. Honestly tho, if people are really upset about it, I don’t doubt that valve will here it and do something about it, it’s much more likely that Blizzard bringing back OW1
Good luck to you!
But i think instead of waiting to announce planned things you should just show them, even in early stages.
Then we can give feedback, check your code and contribute ourselves.
You dont have to do everything, we really want to help.
On the other hand, if people really wanted to contribute, there's plenty of open issues on Codeberg that are unadressed. I agree that it would be better to announce plans in advance rather than surprise drop them, but I doubt there would be more contributions from the community.
I know. I'm just saying that the idea people would magically help out on kbin if he was more open about his plans doesn't work out, because the people willing to do so would either already be contributing to cleaning up the backlog or have moved on to mbin.
Btw, do mbin devs look at kbin issues too or do common problems have to be posted to both repositories to be seen?
Currently I wouldn't count on it as for as long as there is no activity on codeberg, looking at it in general is a waste of time. If you find an issue on both Kbin and Mbin and are convinced it is the same issue, it's definitely worth reporting on both.
Sometimes showing that things are being done is more work and way more stressful than the act of doing them, so I can relate to that.
But it would probably be a good idea to get more admins on board - sometimes one needs to take a break, and a one-person moderation team for a page with this many users cannot be sustainable in the long run. But I guess getting to a point where that is feasible, not to mention finding qualified people, might in itself be a fair share of work. :)
And of course - get well soon, Ernest! It's great to hear from you.
It doesn't have to be a show-and-tell. Just pushing your changes to a branch is enough. That way people can at least see that something is being worked on.
As a software dev I find it strange that you can go a month or more without pushing. At work I push at least daily, even if it's just a WIP commit that I reset the next day.
Exactly this is what i mean.
Name your branch something useful and push reguarly.
Ernest feels like doing so much secrecy for code that is ultimately going to be public anyways.. We wont scold you for having fucked up code. We will fix it ourselves if we have to.
Exactly this. There’s no way to know what’s going on when kbin goes down. It would be nice if there was a kbin Mastodon account or something people could check for information when the site is down.
I gotta say, I don't know what I would do if one of my projects took off the way kbin has. It's good to see you holding on after eight months of this crazy ride.
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