Embark is working wonders through The Finals. I came from Destiny 2 and am so glad to have devs that listen to their entire community and put so much effort into their game.
I am excited to see what they do with Arc Raiders!
Rozwala mnie cały ten Ezra Klein do którego podkastu mnie tu namawiali. Posłuchałam trochę i w sumie to co rozmawia z jakimś ekonomistą to opowiada o tym jak bardzo jest przeciwko deficytowi budżetowemu i jakie to smutne że USA traci hegemonię na świecie. A i tak uchodzi tam za radykalnie lewackiego jak na standardy NYT.
I think cosmetics can be fine, but they aren’t always. I remember spending a lot of time and effort unlocking all the armor in Halo 3, and it made it feel rewarding. Now, skins can be interesting customization, but they’re never rewarding.
I like MTX to an extent, because it let’s other people pay for continued development of games I like. However, even cosmetics only absolutely still has an opportunity cost to the feel of the game that’s being payed. I think we should all be aware of this. I know at this point most people probably don’t remember when cosmetics were opportunities to make the game feel more fun, not just products to sell, but that is how it used to be.
Oh, definitely. The one issue with cosmetic DLC is that they used to be unlockable. Sometimes paid cosmetics are more development work than the kinds of things that were unlocked in-game back in the day, but not always.
Sometimes cosmetic DLC is a way to support the developers. Sometimes cosmetic DLC is a cashgrab. But if the game stands on its own, players generally aren’t missing much if cosmetics are paid DLC. Smash Bros. Ultimate comes to mind – there’s plenty of stuff to unlock in the game even with lots of costumes and such being behind paywalls.
The problem is what follows from microtransactions. When the managers see line go up because they released a paid element to the game, all the incentives push toward more paid elements. This means any dev hours that can be redirected away from work on the core game to the paid elements will be redirected.
Regarding the first point, if they can hire someone to make a feature happen, and maybe get an unpredictable increase in revenue, or hire someone to crank out cosmetics, which are much easier to make, and for which they often have metrics to show how much they expect to get, which do you think they’ll pick?
As for the second, I’m not sure if I’m understanding you.
I’m not talking about firings, or even other specific examples. The talk of hiring A vs B is just an example, not the whole concept. I’m talking about the inputs that influence internal decisions. Microtransactions incentivise decisions that put the focus on generating microtransactions, often to the detriment of other objectives.
And, okay, I get you now. DLC is kind of a case by case thing, but still not great to me. Some devs put out incredible DLCs that actually add something to an already complete game. However, some companies put things into DLC that should just be in the base game. (playable characters, etc.) The practice of having paid DLCs incentivises that approach, so I’m not a huge fan, even if some of them are good. It’s kind of like political donations. I can like the effect some of them have, but I recognize the problems that come from a system that uses them.
I have to say that the customer holds some of the blame. If people are obsessively buying cosmetics that do nothing and that’s the only way the game is being sustained…either the game is that good already, or the players are the reason the game sucks.
When players need to spend money to be competitive, I think it’s fair to place the blame jointly on both the devs/publisher and the players. When spending money doesn’t change the game OR provides new content, it generally indicates that the player base is happy with what they’re spending money on. I don’t think that’s a problem.
Enh… iffy hand wiggleI tend to put blame more at the point of informed decision-making.
In the same way I wouldn’t blame a person from the 1930s for their lung cancer after their doctor sold them cigarettes, I wouldn’t blame gamers for the DLC. A huge percentage of gamers are kids, legally incapable of giving informed consent. Many others are people who have never had the chance to learn the implications of their buying habits. It’s hard to blame people who aren’t making an informed decision.
The people at dev companies on the other hand, are immersed in the gaming world. It’s effectively a form of incompetence or negligence to not pay attention to the industry if that’s your job. They are either knowingly engaging in the practice, or failing to pay attention to the effect they are having on the world.
Part of it is the question of where you assign fault in a bad system. These days, and I’d hope you can agree, slavery is bad. But where should the blame lie if you lived in ~1800s America? Should it be on the producers, who choose to use slave labour, on the providers, who capture the slaves, on the legislators, who make/keep it legal, or on the customers, who choose to buy the fruits of slave labour? They all could be said to play a part but I’m inclined to find the customers, who have the least power in the system, have the least blame as well.
I think you’re making large reaches in your analogies. Are we supposed to have the government come in and bad cosmetic DLC, and then fight a war over it that splits the country (or world) in two? Lol
My point is that cosmetic DLC (and expansion packs) isn’t the problem – the problem is loot boxes and pay-to-win microtransactions.
I just wanted an unambiguous evil to serve as an example. You’ve gotten lost in taking the example as the point again. It’s an analogy, not an exact replication of of a previous event. See the similarities between the two and not the particulars of either one. That’s the point of an analogy.
The point is that the system of microtransactions incentivises the bad results (manipulative practices and distortion of decisions) without necessitating the good. (enjoyable content) As long as paid DLC exists, there are reasons for people to use paid DLC to manipulate people out of their money. However, nothing about paid DLC means there will necessarily be benefit to anything other than revenue, and things that exist within DLC could exist without it. I’d try to give another illustrative example but I don’t know if it would help.
You don’t understand the use of analogies. Common enough. Many people can get lost in them. Not a big deal. Not your fault.
You do understand them, but were actively trying to focus on the ways the chosen analogies were not one to one with the object instead of on the point the analogies were only used to illustrate. This falls under the category of bad-faith communication.
I assumed you were well-meaning in assuming your ignorance. Was I wrong?
Microtransactions have gone wildly past financing devs
The entirety of the Starcraft wings of liberty campaign made less money than a single mount cosmetic in WoW. That money definitely didn’t to to the developers
Dude, I just installed The Force Engine on my Steamdeck, found a good write-up how to do that via the flatpak the project now offers. It’s fantastic, looks so much better and plays very smooth! And since you point it to the current game directory I could even continue my progress from the original game!
This was such a great RTS/FPS hybrid at the time. I looked for RTS/FPS games a couple of years ago when I remembered it, and the genre is all but dead. I did spend a lot of time playing Silica though, which is still in early access. I haven’t checked in on that in a while now though.
I never understood the hate for Loss (the original). Is it that it’s trying to evoke emotion? Is it because it’s a departure from the more gamer orientated content? Is it because it’s one sided? Is it actually cheap? I didn’t mind it.
Taking a traumatic, devastating, and most of all very personal health event like a miscarriage that your girlfriend went through and hand drawing it in a cartoon style to post on your public “Funny haha” gamer douche web comic is generally considered a dick move.
Some further context is that the author Tim Buckley was generally pretty despised at the time and considered a huge dick. The comic itself IIRC was full of that turn of the century gamer douche “haha women bad” type comedy. So the posting of that comic was not only like a comically huge tonal shift but almost felt like him trying to somehow appear more sensitive and likeable.
I never saw it as a dick move. It always seemed to me like any other creative person putting their life experiences into their work. That didn’t make it good, but his best work in a comedy comic isn’t likely to come out while he’s grieving. It was sort of a shark jump moment for that site, but it always seemed way more distasteful to me to make it into a meme.
Well, it was more like putting his college girlfriend’s life experience into his work, and then making the work about him. You’ll notice he’s in 3 of the four panels and she’s in one. Where he appears as the empathetic and caring boyfriend, while she is the one grieving.
Making the comic into a meme is disrespectful to him, but not the girl, since she’s such a small part of it, and we don’t even know who she is since it’s a fictional character taking her place in the comic.
I believe that in the life experience that he’s drawing from, that he based his self-insert character on, he’s in every panel, yes. I certainly took it to mean that he too was grieving the child that he expected to be born into the world. I found it distasteful to make it into a meme because the subject matter it’s mocking is fucked up, plus bullying is kind of disconcerting in general.
You are giving the author a whole lot of benefit of the doubt that he hasn’t earned. You’re looking at this through the lens of a guy using his art to express his feelings of grief. Thats certain what he wants you to think, and if that’s what it was, it wouldn’t be so bad. But that’s not what it is. I mean for gods sake a couple comics later the female character crying on the hospital bed in the fourth panel apologizes to his self-insert for having the miscarriage. If that’s the type of guy you empathize with I don’t know what to tell you other than YIKES pal.
This is just a comic made by a notorious and blatant narcissist who dug up the traumatic experience of someone else from his past in an effort to be taken more seriously because his comics were regularly mocked as a poorly made ripoff of another popular comic at the time. If bullying a bad person is immoral then hey maybe you’re right. I’m not really prepared to have that philosophical debate at this time lol.
You are free to make your own interpretations as far as how he portrays/portrayed women in his comics. It’s been almost 20 years since that comic went up, and standards in social mores and comedy have changed a ton in that time, but when I read those comics back then, only being familiar with Buckley through CAD comics and nothing else, he never struck me as a narcissist or a misogynist. His self-insert character was a Homer Simpson type (“which was the style at the time”), which is hardly the caricature of a narcissist in my opinion. I find it’s very easy to invent a narrative about who someone is from how they portray themselves publicly, and also…it’s been 17 years. Whoever he was 17 years ago is very likely not who he is today. I don’t know that he’s a bad person, I don’t know that he ever was a bad person, and I don’t think it’s admirable to hound someone with a joke about something that they put out into the world so long ago. Surely whatever he learned from that experience has been learned, and we can move on. I didn’t feel good when I saw that comic the first time, nor was I intended to, but I definitely don’t feel great whenever it’s brought back up either.
Whoever he was 17 years ago is very likely not who he is today.
Surely whatever he learned from that experience has been learned, and we can move on.
Ok well you keep all that learning and growing in mind while you take a look at this comic that the artist uploaded to his site a few short years ago on one of the anniversaries of the original comic.
Which could just as easily be interpreted as steering into the skid, like a strategy someone might use when they’re relentlessly bullied. But you’re clearly more interested in Tim Buckley’s life than I am.
Lmao “relentlessly bullied”. Well you are free to hold your candle for the guy if you want to. Good luck in your pursuit of getting people to stop posting loss memes I guess.
Thanks for the context. I only looked at it from within the frame of the comic. From that perspective, it only seems strange to have such a tonal shift - a usually comedic comic presenting a more serious issue. So the problem was the context, got it.
this is probably the case but it doesn’t matter because everyone looks at your life from the outside and puts together the story based on what type of ball pictures you post on the internet
Yeah I think it became such a meme partially because the comic itself was out of place in CAD, but mostly for Buckley’s reputation. Plenty of other serial webcomics had similar range of tone and style.
A genuine expression of how he felt about an event that had happened years prior? I guess that’s possible, although an odd choice. And out of character for him to boot.
As for his tools, his tools were his ability to draw. He probably could have drawn something to express his feelings that didn’t involve his funny haha web comic characters and it would have been far less weird.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with epic games store. People think just because everyone on the internet told them not to like it so they have to not like it. It’s a store. It sells you games then when you click on the game it opens so you can play. That’s it literally that’s all it does same as steam same and Xbox. Just like stores in real life I buy things where the price is the best which sometimes means I buy on epic or steam depending on the sales.
After reading your comment I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I tend to not buy where owner of the store treat me like shit. Neither in real life nor online.
This is me, except for spending an hour getting the thing running properly and graphics settings tweaked properly just to play 10 minutes and never touch it again. Sometimes I wonder if I actually just enjoy tweaking games.
Whole Lee Shit jazz jackrabbit brings back memories. I remember my first time playing it at a friend of the family’s house, there was a dude there talking shit about how Windows was for lazy people (I was very young and windows was still kinda newish)
But how dare you not include OpenMW! Imagine having an og Xbox masterpiece on your phone, and you can mod it!
The minefield has been cleared. You fence of the remaining space with appropriate warning signs. Once the marked sights are disarmed the area can again be made available to the public and the nation can begin to heal.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne