We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.
We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.
I feel like most copypastas (at least the ones that I can think of) were initially received poorly. The 300 confirmed kills one and the vaporeon one are unfortunately the only ones I can remember off hand, but they definitely were
Here’s some more food for thought: what happens if they piss off the Eve players? Those clowns have basically been training themselves on how to come out on top in a no-hold-barred capitalist system.
And scams. Or baits, escalations, and war strategies.
I ran my small alliance for a bit. The organization skills corralling 200 active people for an op is insane. Spending days prepping and doing logistics moving tons of ships. Making arrangements and mutual defense agreements. It was arduous work.
Then to have the fight not happen. Or the target not to drop. And having to manage the morale of everyone who devoted the time for it or purposely made sure they were free.
Even sadder is that there are no popular EU streamers throwing their weight behind the initiative. What are they waiting for? Does PewDiePie still stream games?
PewDiePie moved to Japan and while I have no idea what he’s uploaded (or not uploaded) I get the sense he’s basically retired. He’s doing surfing, rock climbing, art, I don’t know that he cares enough anymore to support it.
I can’t imagine ever working on any project that large. Most of your people will essentially have zero communication with each other, and release a half-assed overbudgeted product as a result
But does the texture artist need to talk to the modelers? Of course. Do they need to talk to people in sound design? Maybe. What about game engine and programming? Maybe. What about writers? Maybe.
The fact is, you’d probably have a better product at the end of the day if everyone were able to coordinate their efforts.
Not everyone needs to talk to everyone. But many people need to talk to many people.
Microsoft had to abandon the initial Vista project and start over because they couldn’t manage a team of 1000 developers. People working on adjacent features had to go through so many layers of management that in some cases the closest shared manager was Bill Gates. For something like getting a change in the shutdown code reflected in the shutdown dialog.
Huge teams become exponentially harder to manage efficiently.
NES releases don’t bother me because I was still a kid when I played them. Things released twenty years ago bother me because it seems like yesterday given that I was already an adult with an established career and a mortgage.
No that’s the point I’m making. When I read the headline I was horrified that it’s been that long since the original and they’re not even talking about that.
No I didn’t say it originally came out then I said that my first knee-jerk reaction was that it couldn’t possibly been that long since the original and then I came to realize it’s been so much longer
Agreed, pre-orders are a thing after all…but it’s possible that it still works too often and also that gamers are becoming a bit more jaded about marketing. I don’t buy anything till the Metacritic and Steam reviews are out, and I only watch gameplay videos any more cause who cares about the cut scenes? I’m sure I’m not the only one. Consumers eventually learn their lessons but then a new crop of consumers comes up.
Call of Duty is a good game tho… I personally don’t like it but there is a reason it’s so popular. Outside of Battlefield there really isn’t much else out there on the quality level of call of duty as far as arcade shooters go.
Any other good quality shooters tend to be PC only and are a lot slower paced. Squad, hell let lose, escape from Tarkov are all great shooters but those games are very slow paced compared to call of duty.
Halo is similar as is Destiny but those are in a fantasy setting and a lot of people like the realistic setting of call of duty.
Its a good game but most releases are DLC level, yet they are forcing the player to buy, at least every few releases, because you slash the remaining userbase every time you release a new game.
I think the issue is there’s a constant influx of young gamers entering the market and all the old tricks are new to them. The teen to young adult age bracket is very lucrative and will never stop unless we stop having sex and procreating. If we all abstain for like 20 years, we’ll finally disrupt big gaming and also have no one in chat insulting anyone’s mother.
I’ll be a minority voice considering the other comments. But maybe just pay for onlyfans or whatever you guys use. I’m a generally attractive woman (I can surmise from interactions while trying to date) and I really don’t like the idea that my likeness would be used for something like this. Get your jollies off, but try and be a bit consensual about it. Is that so much to ask?
It isn’t too much to ask. According to Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG (Harvard Psychiatrist/Instructor), research shows that the release of non-consensual porn makes the unwilling subjects suicidal over half the time. Non-consensual porn = deepfakes, revenge porn, etc. It’s seriously harmful, and there are other effects like depression, shame, PTSD, anxiety, and so on. There is functionally unlimited porn out there that is made with consent, and if someone doesn’t want to be publicly sexually explicit then that’s their choice.
I’m not against AI porn in general (I consider it the modern version of dirty drawings/cartoons), but when it comes to specific likenesses as with deepfakes then there’s clear proof of harm and that’s enough for me to oppose it. I don’t believe there’s some inherent right to see specific people naked against their will.
I wonder if part of the emotional risk is due to the general social stigma attached to porn. It becomes something that has to be explained and justified.
If done to grand excess, deepfakes could crash the market on that, so to speak. Yeah, everyone saw your face on an AI-generated video. They also saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg, their Aunt Matilda, and for good measure, Barry Bonds, and that was just a typical Thursday.
The shock value is burnt through, and “I got deepfaked” ends with a social stigma on the level of “I got in a shouting match with a cashier” or “I stumbled into work an hour late recently.”
My main concern is for kids and teenagers. They’ll bully people for no damn reason at all and AI porn allows for bullies to do more fucked up psychological abuse, and that could be made much worse if victims have no recourse to fight back.
I think it would be too big of a privacy overreach to try to ban it outright as I think what people do on their own computers is their own business and there’s no way to enforce a full ban without being incredibly intrusive, but as soon as it gets distributed in any way I think it should be prosecuted as heavily as real non consensual porn that was taken against someone’s will.
So I’m not disagreeing with you, but you’re assuming they’re making deepfake images, and the article doesn’t specify that. In fact I’d bet that it’s just AI generated “people” that don’t exist.
What about AI porn of a person that doesn’t exist?
However, one of Salad’s clients is CivitAi, a platform for sharing AI generated images which has previously been investigated by 404 media. It found that the service hosts image generating AI models of specific people, whose image can then be combined with pornographic AI models to generate non-consensual sexual images.
Deepfake pornography is super goony but if I had to look for a silver lining, at least nobody had to undergo the actual physical degradation of making porn. It’s still gross in its own way, but it’s a different kind of gross that seems worse in some ways but better in others.
I’m not sure if I feel strongly enough about it to have a consequential opinion either way but I’m trying to at least judge the situation objectively.
I think you raised a valid point. The non-consensual nature of deepfakes pushes it into the realm of abuse material and maybe that’s worse overall than the general exploitation of women going on in the adult film industry, even if those are supposed to be “consensual” on paper.
I know someone who’s into really dark romance stuff, like really hardcore stuff, but she’d never do some of this due to safety reasons. I can totally see her generating scenes of herself in those situations.
I have a question and I hope that people here will discuss this because I really want to understand the general opinion on this.
Is it wrong to deepfake someone without their consent so long as you don’t share the content and it’s all stored locally? I’ve seen this come up and my general opinion is that it isn’t. I know that isn’t the case in the article, just want to hear why people would disagree.
My angle is that doing a deepfake of someone in private hurts zero people and is an extension of fantasy. I don’t see the creation of fake nudes any different than writing fantasy erotica about someone. And I also don’t see it as different than creating fake nude art of them by hand or with photoshop. Like if you do it in your head anyways, which is completely normal, then aren’t we just worried about the outside effects and not the fantasizing itself?
It’s at least as wrong as fantasizing about them if they aren’t already romantically involved with you.
How wrong that is, is up for debate. It will definitely creep them out and they can never find out about it.
If it’s just in your head, at least there’s no physical way they could ever find out. You’d have to admit it. But if you have it on your hard drive, a hacker could get it and blackmail you with it, or just distribute it.
So my stance is that there’s a non-zero chance of doing harm to them, and so it’s wrong. I wouldn’t do it. I also wouldn’t create it with Photoshop, or by hand, for the same reason.
If you want to jerk off, do it to existing porn, or imaginary people porn. Don’t create porn of real people without their permission, even if you think nobody will ever see it other than you. Accidents happen, and they don’t deserve to bear the cost of that.
The first part, absolutely. But I think a lot of that is biological so I don’t see fantasy as a problem. You should keep it to yourself though.
The second part I think Id somewhat agree with except the hacker can’t blackmail you with it because it’s just as likely that they created it. And even if they did blackmail you, I would view that as the damage caused by the hacker, not by the individual.
Like if someone put something nasty about me down in their diary where they expected it to be private, and a hacker sent me an email of that diary page, that’s entirely the hackers fault. The diary writer was expressing an emotion or desire or whatever in complete privacy. Was their creation wrong? No, I don’t think so.
And to be clear I’m not saying people should go to this type of fantasy, this is all a thought exercise for ethics, but I think a lot about this stuff because as much potential for bad as it has, it also has some potential for good. All of the women I know experience behaviors such as stalking, obsession, unwelcome sexual advances, etc. on a regular basis. There is a reason those men don’t turn to free porn. Incel behavior is also just as bad in many ways. So could AI and deepfake stuff result in many of those men keeping that stuff to themselves more? Maybe.
And before you say that these perverts will just send fake nudes to you and harass you that way, we should absolutely be prosecuting people that do so. That’s an entirely separate convo tho.
How anyone could think that going so far as to invoke thoughtcrime is relevant in this discussion is beyond me. It should be self evident to anyone that fantasies are a thing. They’ve been a thing for the entire history of the human race. In no way do fantasies compare to creating reproducible and sharable media of someone in a pornographic situation without their consent.
You can’t transplant your fantasies into someone else’s head. Your fantasies literally cannot hurt anyone. On the other hand, imagine if you found out that someone was distributing pornographic material depicting one of your loved ones. It can quite literally ruin someone’s reputation to be seen in a pornographic situation.
Your argument is some slippery slope fallacy shit.
Reread the comment I replied to and then reread my comment. You are putting words in my mouth. I never mentioned anything about sharing anything nor implied anything of the sort.
You’d have to admit it. But if you have it on your hard drive, a hacker could get it and blackmail you with it, or just distribute it.
There are lots of sick fucks that will distribute it themselves and even send it to their victims to harass them directly. It’s already happening.
I don’t think it’s possible to ban it outright, and I think what people do on their own computer is their own business so long as they aren’t connecting to other computers, but we should have strong laws against distributing it and treat it the same as distributing secretly taken real nudes against someone’s will. Victims need recourse against harassment.
I guess this was just one level of abstraction too much for you huh?
The entire issue here is AI being trained on people’s data without them knowing or giving permission. The question of who’s likenesses and which photos are being used is an excellent question and it’s a big part of the problem here.
I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.
Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.
It was the same for HL2 though. I played it like 10 years after it was released, didn’t make the game worse. With VR the first experience will probably be even better in the future.
Of course not, because they didn’t do anything wrong. Just a bunch of pissed off pokemon fanboys pissed that Palworld was way better at the pokemon concept than Pokemon itself was.
I’m glad there are so many Pokemon, and that Pokemon were not unique enough for the most part to be trademarked, but if you think they didn’t lift very heavily from a single source you’re fooling yourself and making flippant accusations of your straw-manned opposition.
Also I’m questioning if it was actually “way better” or just edgier for the memes that games would latch onto and vehemently defend. It seems to have been very successful in the latter even if it wasn’t their intent.
They iterated on a stale formula in a way that those customers had wanted. Palworld is also far more competently designed than you’d expect from its premise, but that premise is the kind of satire that only people familiar with Pokemon would write in the first place.
I mean…it is, literally, factually better than pokemon is at its own formula. Not really a disrespectful take, and far from a strawman. And you’re kidding yourself if you think being inspired by something is the same thing as theft. Fun fact: pokemon lifted off of dragon quest. The fact that it is so successful is literally because it does pokemon better, but sure, “flippant accusations” lol. Congrats, you are the exact type of fanboy I’m talking about
At its own formula? I thought Palworld had a whole like crafting and base building/management side. That's not really what I wanted out of a pokemon type game, and so I didn't get Palworld. I can understand it being a better game for somebody who likes that, but I don't know if that qualifies as Pokemon's formula.
The catching of pals, the way you do it, mounting your pals, fighting in real time instead of turn based, the boss battles, the exploration are what people are specifically saying it does better than pokemon, and I 100% agree with that take.
I love the Pokémon franchise, even grew up with it. And Palworld was just a way better experience than let’s say Scarlet and Violet.
Yes, it was made for PC, which is way more powerful than the switch, yet it ran perfectly fine with ~50 fps on high on my 10 year old PC, while the switch struggles to keep 30.
Granted, a lot of the monsters look like amalgamates of 2-3 Pokémon - but they looked good, like Katress, that fire-gyrados, even that Dragonite-Goodra-Altaria mix looks good IMO.
The world was generic, but unique enough to be explored - and it is too big for the amount of Pals that existed.
I had fun with Pokémon as well, but I only got to play the DLC after I finished Palworld. I did not catch the legendary turtle as of writing this comment because the game is just… boringly slow.
Except Palworld isn’t what you described. It’s "build a base and capture mons and people to out to work at your base so you can climb the tech tree and build guns to fight the boss mons
I want an actual real time strategy game. All popular RTSs are actually just about tactics and micro. I mean every SC2 guide will tell you that up to a very high level of play, if you’re just doing more you’ll be more efficient and win regardless of strategy. Why can’t you just set a standing order of “make unit x” or “make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them”? That’s strategy. Having to tab back to a building and manually queue a couple of units every several seconds is just creating busywork for players, but thats what’s necessary and optimal for playing SC2 and most RTS games well
I love this concept; I had a friend from school viscerally defend SC: BW as superior to SC2 because in his words SC2 removed skill because of not having the unit select cap that BW did. That’s just less, as you put it, busywork, and then the player is more free to consider army compositions and positioning rather than drawing tons of rectangles. Removing more busywork in favor of actual strategy would be amazing.
Good point. I suppose I was combining the intended definition of micro as in issuing individual or otherwise sufficiently granular actions with the extra categorization of busywork, and indeed in that regard chess is pure micro.
There are types of time management which I think can still be interesting. For example, are you able to afford -- in the resources of time and attention -- optimally micro'ing this important fight? Or are you going to have to yolo it a bit so that you can do multi-task economic tasks at the same time?
Some (much?) of the problem is that (for better or worse) skilled players can and will squeeze the game to optimality in terms of win rate, and that tends to collapse viable tactical and strategic choices. Once those choices have been optimised (the game is largely "solved"), the main way to get better is by being faster, not by being smarter.
Hell, I should be able to upload an economic playbook with hundreds of rules like the one you described, and load it on game start. Then all I have to do is the actual unit movements.
Yep, take some ideas from single player colony management games.
It’s astounding how much you can “automate” when fully using the filters and rules options in vanilla Rimworld. Mods increase that exponentially. Granted, different genre, singleplayer, and pausable while you configure things.
I think the challenge is balancing that with the real time events you have to react to, so it doesn’t further compress the meta to an even smaller set of “optimal” options.
Supreme commander was what you describe. You setup your factory to make a unit or a set of units and repeatedly build them until canceled or not enough resources. You could zoom out to view the whole map. it was very much a strategy game and not really tactics or micro.
Rise of Nations (originally released back in 2003) had/has some interesting ideas to reduce some of the busywork:
Worker units will automatically try to gather/build nearby after a short (configurable) delay if they're not doing anything.
Cities (the main worker-producing structure) has a rally point option that's essentially "all nearby empty resource gathering", so you can queue a dozen workers and they'll distribute themselves as they're created.
Production buildings can be set to loop over their current queue, letting you build continually without intervention as long as you maintain enough resources each time the queue "restocks".
Units that engage in combat without being given an explicit target will try (with modest success) to aim for nearby units which they counter.
For the most part, none of the implemented options are strictly better than micromanaging them yourself:
You will always spend less time idling workers if you micromanage them yourself.
The auto-rally-point doesn't always prioritize the resources that you would if you did it yourself.
Queueing additional units is slightly less resource-efficient than only building one thing at a time.
Total DPS is higher if you manually micro effectively.
But the options are there when you need them, which I think is a a nice design. It doesn't completely remove best-in-class players being rewarded for their speed as a player, but does raise the "speed floor", allowing slower players to get more bang for their buck APM-wise, and compete a bit more on the strategy/tactics side of the game instead.
Because too much of SC2's design catered to the progamer crowd that liked that kind of stuff. They made some things easier from an APM standpoint but intentionally added more things to make the have not APM intense.
They really bet wrong on how popular that approach would be.
Why can’t you just set a standing order of “make unit x” or “make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them”? That’s strategy. Having to tab back to a building and manually queue a couple of units every several seconds is just creating busywork for players
I agree completely. Related: have you considered turn based strategy games?
I feel like people dont understand, that the RT part in rts will always be the important part.
If you free up macro work, people will micro harder. WC3 got rid of most of the macro demand of SC and in consequence you will lose if you dont micro your units ik battle.
SC1 had build pipe lines and it wad still better to issue commands seperatley, because the player is more flexible.
A strategy is worthless if it csn be executed and the limits of execution create strategy.
Extraordinary pathing and all-select created the a-click deathball, that is one of the most boring ways to see, play and lose to.
That is not true, at least in Age of Empires 2 which is the RTS I’m most familiar. Have a look at the limited viper series to see a good player destroy using only 60 APM. If you make good decisions, you don’t need to click as much.
Why can’t you just set a standing order of “make unit x” or “make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them”?
Because while this will make casuals that will play the game for 3 hours and drop it happy, the typical RTS fans will not enjoy this. There is a trade off between queuing a lot of units and having more resources available for other techs. Having units auto produce without any disadvantage is just kind of boring. Then you are just watching the game, not really playing it.
Maybe you should try turn based strategy, if you don’t like real time strategy. In the later, like the name implies, time is the most important resource. You don’t need a lot of clicks, but you need to use it wisely.
Well after their pay-per-download debacle, their latest quarter’s earnings may not be indicative of the shit that is coming down on them. There are dark clouds on the horizon for Unity.
The best programmers there probably see the writing on the wall. The best small game dev studios will also.
I think unity is going to see a big quality drop even if it manages to get out of this death spiral.
And I’m still curious if they’ll get targeted by regulators for the anti-competitive shit that started this (the whole thing was intended to strong arm developers into using their ad platform to get an exemption from the new pricing model and put a rival ad platform out of business).
Exactly. The colossal lost of trust is not easy to regain (if it can ever be regained at all) and that’s will be a specter haunting Unity’s economic performance for the years to come. I’ve seen so much outpouring of support for Godot and other open source / free game engines, and really hope that support continues.
I work at Unity. The brain drain is for real. It started 2 layoffs ago and is picking up speed. My department lost some really valuable workers, because layoffs are imminent they don’t let leads hire many replacements, and the resulting critical work gets dropped on people already doing full work loads. Some of the people my department has lost helped build core systems from scratch years ago so that intimate knowledge of those systems is just gone.
Thanks for commenting, it’s interesting to get an inside perspective instead of just speculating.
Out of curiosity, how are they (executives/management) communicating about this whole thing internally? Like are they trying to downplay the impact of that screw up or are they being genuine in how they present the situation?
I can’t get too specific on that one because people get fired for leaking meeting info (I’m hoping to keep this job for one more year wish me luck lol). But in my opinion the new CEO has been a lot more open about what’s going on. He’s very straightforward and has been engaging with us in a more human way than JR ever did.
Unity tripled in size in like 4 years iirc. It is trying very hard to be a large company. Like the culture has been shifting from small company feel to big corporate feel for a while now (since before I joined). It still is clinging very hard to having small company feel though because that’s the kind of culture almost everyone here was sold on.
As far as the efficiency of our size, I’m honestly not super sure. We’ve been multitasking a lot and have cut things in the past, like Gigaya. My department has always felt understaffed and I get the vibe that a lot of departments feel the same. I haven’t talked to anyone that was like “my team is too big to function well”. So if there is an inefficiency issue it is maybe a broad thing that could be hard to see from any one part of the whole. That said I work in a very specific part of the company and don’t branch out a whole lot to other groups so my interdepartmental knowledge is limited.
Yeah, at the time I assumed that the people intentionally spreading in game were just trolling because there was no actual danger to themselves. Reality proved that tons of people are fine with harming themselves as long as they harm others at the same time.
nah. There’s some footage out there of people going maskless and when pressured to put masks on for their safety, they proudly proclaimed that they currently have it, so they can’t get infected again. This ignores the fact that you can catch different strains and you probably aren’t going to double the severity of your symptoms from having two infections. Infection duration on the other hand might be doubled. Turns out selfish people are very, very often stupid people.
This is why the literal only thing that would work is making it legal to shoot people who are unmasked if they’re coughing (which is insane, but insane is the baseline I guess)
I used to think there was nothing more stupid in zombie movies than uninfected humans just leaving each other alone and killing off the zombies. Why would you bother taking guns from other people when you have so many just lying around after 90% of the people died? If everyone just killed 10 zombies, the whole thing would be cleared up. I don’t think that anymore.
Eh, gaming journalism just wants clicks to get ad-revenue. They would write an article about anything. Gabe waking up in the morning is news worthy to them.
I’m looking forward to the ward between factions posting the two quotes in comments sections every time a game gets delayed for the next several decades
pcgamer.com
Ważne