My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it’s good after a couple years of DLC and patches.
You know, the usual Civ cycle. I’ll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn’t actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.
The AI has never been great in the series for various reasons, but for whatever reason it just did not know how to play in Civ6. I’d either get crushed by the bonuses early on if I played on high difficulty or have the game firmly in hand by the Renaissance otherwise. Easily the worst game in the series for me as a result.
Yeah, it seems at a certain breaking point in the difficulty curve it becomes “catch up with the AI boni”, which made it a completely different game for me. And as you said, usually by renaissance you know if this is going to be a landslide victory (which at that point becomes a chore), or if you’re screwed.
Yes pretty graphics are nice, but I have never understood why it seems like all effort to make better game ‘AI’ just completely stopped.
Like I get getting game ai to act ‘real’ is/was virtually impossible, but it’s possible to fake it enough to make it enjoyable and has been for a long while and yet is always an afterthought.
Im honestly so sick of online games that should be offline. I just got a few switch games to pass time on my breaks, and half of them require internet access. One of them is literally a bubble shooter.
Click baiting video. Other devs don’t care. As long as they can make money pumping out mediocre games then they will continue to do so. Acting like this is the first good game to come out in a decade or something.
Looking at how many games have stood in Dragon Age: Origins’ shadow over the past decade, I get the sense that lots of studios wanted to create the true spiritual successor but couldn’t come up with the resources to do so.
The managers who make the decisions don’t. Doesn’t matter if they are a publisher or the development company itself. It’s a bit blurry these days anyway, what with how easy it is to self publish and how many publishers have their own internal development studios.
The managers who make the decisions is also unclear as power differs on the company. They could care all the way up to the CEO but if the CEO puts an unrealistic deadline, the game has an unrealistic deadline
It’s gonna take twice as long as Starfield all to contain the same jank in an even larger, more barren, world where nothing is interesting and you’re just going through the motions because that’s what Todd Howard thinks games are.
People have actually made it through Starfield? I tried so hard, but couldn’t make it past 20 hours (which isn’t a lot for a Bethesda RPG). The story is just sodamnBORING.
Oh boy, you’re lucky. I trudged through for 70h out of sheer morbid curiosity. The boring main story goes straight into “icecream on forehead” when the starborn show up. The ending is just a shit cherry on top of that, with Emil Pagliarulo’s best “fuck you for asking questions” ever
It really does feel like Starfield completely killed any excitement for Bethesda games, everything since Oblivion has been a step in the wrong direction IMO.
Including Oblivion. I enjoyed it but it was a huge disappointment to me coming out of Morrowind. Bethesda reputation for me has been on Morrowind credit this whole time.
Even Morrowind was a simplified version of Daggerfall, even though it was groundbreaking when it was released. They decided that the direction to take was to simplify the mechanics progressively, to make the series more appealing to more people, as opposed to adding interesting complications back as their tech develops. They succeeded in their mantra of “keep it simple, stupid”. I don’t have any hope that the next game will be more interesting. It will look prettier, of course.
It’s smaller but I would not say it was dumbed down like Oblivion was to Morrowind. Morrowind feels more or less the same as Arena or Daggerfall, except in how character progressiom works and that you didn’t have to swing your mouse around trying to hit things with your weapon.
It literally still has all the deeper mechanics like performing rituals during certain times of the day/months/year and what not. Just not a procedurally generated world with RNG quests or dungeons. And thank God for that because Daggerfall and Arena both could literally break by generating a dungeon you couldn’t actually finish.
Idk, having only played Oblivion and Skyrim, I feel like (generally speaking) the simplifications in Skyrim were for the better. Take custom spells for example. Only a few spells really even made sense to make and it was better to make them in very specific ways. It’s not like the games are super difficult. Fucking around with spells and more complex enchantments was cool but too easy to cheese.
Oh, and the leveling. Holy fuck what an over complicated mess. Where you could accidentally over level but also under level. Insane. Good riddance.
Complex systems are not inherently good. They’re good if they provide meaningful choices and are fun to use. But ES has always been about the story and exploration more so anyways (in my opinion).
Oblivion had quality of life improvements that made it a better game IMO. Yes Morrowind was bigger and deeper, but it was also a frustrating game that didn’t age very well.
They would have to also start charging to save scum. Why would I pay $5 for a crit when I can just reload my save and try until I get one? Every new save is $0.50 and every reload is also $0.50.
Boy, it was frustrating to see Thor completely misrepresent the position of the campaign. It wasn’t “vague enough to also include live service games”; it purposely includes them.
Yeah, that’s why he says it’s stupid. It seems like he’s fine with the idea of removing DRM that makes single player games unplayable but forcing devs to make online multiplayer games playable forever is ridiculous.
My position is it’s ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don’t think all games should be forced to exist forever.
You sold someone some code that you then rendered inoperable by actions beyond their control; that’s what you’d get in trouble for. Delete your own code all you like.
If you sell someone a game that relies on a server you own, and did not advertise clearly that you were selling a service, not a good (something you own), and then break that product for the customer without any possibility of them repairing their good, and you delete the code that could’ve fixed it, you’d be sorta commiting fraud.
If you abandon a product that was sold as a good, and it became inoperable due to forces unrelated to you, you’d be in the clear.
Right, so an MMO charging a monthly fee shouldn’t need to make their game available to everyone if they stop charging people the fee and shut it down? Because that’s what I think too.
A few things. People use MMOs as an example of a thing that cannot be run by users, and the FAQ calls out that this is demonstrably false. Second, there’s the idea of a good and a service, and games have been happy to blur this line over the past decade and change. When you pay a monthly subscription fee, there’s no question that you’re paying for a service; your service ends when that month is up. The problem comes from selling you things as though they’re goods but then revoking access to them at some unknown time in the future as though it were a service or lease that you had no idea when it would expire. So this campaign also demands that if you’re selling microtransactions like a cosmetic mount in an MMO, you need to be able to use that mount after the servers are no longer supported, and as we’ve already proven, it is definitely actually possible for ordinary people to run MMO servers, even if they’re hosting them for a few hundred or a few thousand people rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.
The question on the FAQ is asking if it’s possible, which it is. But in his big video on this topic, he says that subscription based MMOs really don’t count (even if he’d like it to).
I agree with that. That’s what I meant in my original comment that applying this to all games is ridiculous. Subscription based MMOs are a game but this initiative shouldn’t apply to them.
I’m being specific because this is being intended as a law everyone must follow. “All games need to be available forever” is very vague. How will this vague law be applied in practice? People brought up the idea of eternal code preservation. Alright. How does that work?
I’m not picking a fight. I want supporters to explain in vivid detail their expectations because it’s clear not even all the supporters agree on how it would be implemented. Some said it doesn’t apply to MMOs. Some said it does. It needs to be one or the other. That’s not being pedantic, it’s being realistic.
What the petition says is what it’s asking for. What we want may be different. What European parliament drafts, if we’re so lucky, will be what’s actually the law. The concerns in the petition are quite clearly about how this applies to EU consumer protections, and many of us are interested in that plus the bonus that this will grant to preservation by proxy.
A game's code can be submitted to a repository on release to the public to be stored for the sake of preservation. The repository can always be made access on a case by case basis, thus preventing the loss of code and culture while also protecting the IP holder's rights
And every single game dev would be required to do this for the thousands of games released every year? Who would host this massive repository? Who would determine access on a case by case basis? It’s a nice suggestion but mandating this as a law everyone has to follow? Why? I thought this was about consumer protection
Is that repository required by law? Is every author and director required to follow it or be punished? What if an author only publishes it on their website and then takes the website down and it never makes it to the archive are they in trouble? It’s a nice thing, but mandating it as law is ridiculous.
Any company that isn’t completely incompetent has some revision control solution like GitHub. It saves the original and all the changes throughout the life of the code. It’s designed specifically to allow developers to update or even delete code while still maintaining records
An indie dev recently lost the source code to their early access game and had to remove it from Steam. If this law was in place, what punishment would they face for their incompetence? It would be rare for a massive company to not have source control, but it probably isn’t uncommon for small first time devs. So now you have a well intentioned law putting regulations in place that hurt small devs and raise the barrier to entry.
Well, it wouldn’t be retroactive. As a consumer, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to know what I’m buying. If anything, this petition is way softer than my stance. As per this petition, you could get around doing the honest thing of providing the customers the ability to host the servers themselves by just clearly informing the customer at the point of sale how long services will be up for, if you truly want to try to convince people that it’s a service and not a product that they just made worse for business reasons. But they don’t want to do that, because then they can’t sucker people into buying something that isn’t long for this world.
Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: www.stopkillinggames.com/faq(apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)
Q: Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?
A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:
‘Gran Turismo Sport’ published by Sony ‘Knockout City’ published by Velan Studios ‘Mega Man X DiVE’ published by Capcom ‘Scrolls / Caller’s Bane’ published by Mojang AB ‘Duelyst’ published by Bandai Namco Entertainment etc.
That’s fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone’s home computer when they’re purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?
The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.
WoW’s server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.
Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.
It’s not impossible at all. People have done this literally for decades. Classic WoW only exists because people hosted their own seevers and Blizzard wanted in on the money. Star Wars Galaxies the same. I think Everquest 1 as well. And probably others as well.
Because they can be sued for that. Have been sued for that. And while it is possible to reverse engineer this stuff it is incredibly hard to do. So games with smaller fanbases might lack the manpower to achieve it. Or the game was made in such a way as to make reverse engineering impossible.
I don’t think there’s any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.
If a big MMO closes that’d be rough, but those types of games tend to form communities anyways like Minecraft. You don’t have to pay Microsoft a monthly rate to host a Java server for you and a few friends, you just have to have a little bit of IT knowledge and maybe a helper package to get you and your friends going. It’s still a single binary, even if it doesn’t run on a laptop well for larger settings.
With a big MMO, there will form support groups and turnkey scripts to get stuff working as well as it can be, and forums online for finding existing open community servers by people who have the hardware and knowledge to host a few dozen to a few hundred of their closest friends online.
Life finds a way.
If it’s a complicated multi-node package where you need stuff to be split up better as gateway/world/area/instance, the community servers that will form may tend towards larger player groups, since the knowledge and resource to do that is more specific.
God, finally someone with common sense. The devs do not need to change the software for you to host a server in your 10 year old ThinkPad, they just need to make the software available. It’s not up to them to figure out HOW you are going to host the game’s server, they just need to make it POSSIBLE.
Not a fair comparison. The private servers were written with the small hosting in mind. They would very likely never scale to what Blizzard has in place. For all I know, Blizzard could run their stuff on a Mainframe with specific platform optimizations against an IBM DB2.
But I also don’t think this has to be transferable to a local setup without effort either. Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
You found the point. It’s not about having it scale to the level the official servers are at. It’s about preserving it in some fashion, so that the dedicated few can still experience it. We don’t need thousands, we need a few dozen. And, if developers develop with this design philosophy - that eventually the game servers will be shut down and we have to release a hostable version at end of life, then the games can be written from the ground up with that implementation in mind.
Such an architecture is typically shit. Building a system that is simple AND scales high won’t work. Complexity usually gets added to cope with scale. If we don’t allow companies to build scalable (i.e. complex) systems, we simply won’t get such games anymore.
Again: I am completely in favor of forcing devs to release everything necessary to host it. I am not in favor of forcing devs to target home machines for their servers, when their servers clearly have completely different requirements. That’s unrealistic.
Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.
Also, tell me you’ve never worked with scalable infrastructure without telling me you have never worked with it.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of games, including MMOs, that are privated hosted, and by that I don’t mean hosted in a basement potato.
Look at Ragnarok servers, there are hundreds of them, DEDICATED servers, with all the newest technology, for an old game nonetheless.
Have you ever seem how massive the infrastructure are for those big minecraft multi-servers? Thousands and thousands of concurrent players.
Im not asking you to research what you’re talking about or anything, but if you clearly dont know what you’re talking about, refrain from sharing your opinion so you may not negatively influence a similar minded person.
Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.
Before attacking me with such an arrogant rant, maybe read what I wrote.
I said:
Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
So of course it’s about releasing anything (!) at all.
I simply said that you can’t compare a small fan project like a WoW self hosted server with Blizzards infrastructure and the requirements to have a high available setup for millions of players.
ArenaNet is quite open about their infrastructure and you can see that this is far from trivial, but also allows them to have zero downtime updates. That is a huge feat, but also means that self hosting that thing will be a pain in the ass. Yet I would not want them to not do this just so it could be easily (!) self hosted some time in the distant future.
FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.
Many consider games to be works of art in the same way that music, books, movies, and paintings are. In the same way that historians use the creative works of yesteryear to guage how people during events like World War I, historians of tomorrow need access to games to study the events of our lifetimes.
Book burnings have occurred throughout history and they have been devastating, but many works can still be studied because other copies exist elsewhere. The problem with games is that they’re deliberately designed to self-destruct. Historians 50 years down the line can’t study Fortnite’s mechanics or its evolution because as soon as a new update releases, the servers for the previous chapter of the game are gone. Even if we wanted to preserve just the final release, we can’t because it is far easier for Epic Games to hide or throw away the server source code rather than properly archive it when they inevitably kill the game. This is a huge deal because Fortnite has genuinely had an impact on our culture, for better or worse. Even if it didn’t, it is a technical feat to get a game like that to work well, and programmers need to be able to study the game after the industry inevitably moves on.
To be clear, companies shouldn’t need to maintain their games and software forever. However, there is simply no way to play many games because there are no usable servers for them, which is entirely unacceptable. The initiative simply wants us to be in a world where someone can put in a reasonable amount of effort to play abandoned games, and I don’t think that’s a huge ask.
Only if you think the campaign means that companies must pay for the multiplayer servers forever which Ross has said on MULTIPLE occasions is not reasonable and not what he wants.
Giving players the tools to host their own servers or adding LAN functionality, though? That’s entirely reasonable seeing as that’s how multiplayer always used to work. I mean, there are still plenty of Unreal Tournament servers active today without any involvement from the developer in decades.
Especially since, if this initiative works, developers will make games with that functionality in mind.
He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.
Ross wrote a response to Thor’s in the comments of this video, but it’s a bit buried. I’ll include Thor’s for context as well:
Thor:
I’m aware of the process for an initiative to be turned into legislature much farther down the road after many edits. If people want me to back it then the technical and monetary hurdles of applying the request need to be included in the conversation. As written this initiative would put a massive undue burden on developers both in AAA and Indie to the extent of killing off Live Service games. It’s entirely too vague on what the problem is and currently opens a conversation that causes more problems instead of fixing the one it wants to.
If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just “videogames” as stated in the initiative. Specifically call out the practice we want to shut down. It’s a much more correct conversation to have, defeats the actual issue, and stops all this splash damage that I can’t agree with.
Ross’s response:
@PirateSoftware I actually wasn’t planning to write to you further since you said you didn’t want to talk about it with me and I’ll still respect that if you’d like. But since you brought up what I said again I’ll at least give my side of that then leave you alone:
I’m 100% cynical, I can’t turn it off. I wasn’t trying to appeal to legislators when I said that, I doubt they’ll even watch my videos. I was trying to appeal to people who are are kind of doomer and think this is hopeless from the get-go. I wanted to lay out the landscape as I view it that this could actually work where many initiatives have failed. Did it backfire more than it inspired people? I have no idea. I’ve said before I don’t think I’m the ideal person to lead this, stuff like this is part of why I say that; I can’t just go Polyanna on people and pretend like there aren’t huge obstacles and these are normally rough odds, so that was meant as inspirational. You clearly weren’t the target audience, but you’re in complete opposition to the movement also.
I’m literally not a part of the initiative in any official capacity. I won’t be the one talking to officials in Brussels if this passes. The ECI could completely distance itself from me if that was necessary.
In my eyes, what I was doing there was the equivalent of forecasting the weather. You think it’s manipulation, but I don’t control the weather. I can choose when I fly a kite based on my forecast however.
It was also kind of half-joke on the absurdity of the system we’re in that I consider these critical factors that determine our success or not. So yes, I meant what I said, but I also acknowledge it’s kind of ludicrous that these are perhaps highly relevant factors towards getting anything done in a democracy.
Anyway, I got the impression this whole issue was kind of thrust upon you by your fans, you clearly hate the initiative, so as far as I’m concerned people should stop bothering you about it since you don’t like it.
How is it vague? If I buy a game, it should be playable for all eternity. Just like how I can pop in Super Mario on NES and play it just like how it was in the 80s.
Or how I can still play Half Life deathmatch more than 25 years after its release.
I’m aware that exists. But the experience of an MMO on a community server must be pretty different (but I don’t know).
If the desire is to not lose the experience after the company shutters the project, I’m not really sure that’s possible. Maybe it is for WoW. But I can certainly imagine a game like Pokemon Go or something being developed by an indie dev that works by orchestrating live real-time events depending on players locations. Would this game even be allowed in the EU following this law? They can’t allow users personal locations to be released, they can’t create a game they can’t eventually fully release to the public. Even if they found a way to strip out users locations, the experience would be completely broken. So what’s the answer? Just don’t innovate in that space?
I don’t think the intent is to maintain the exact original experience forever and after. It’s to ensure it’s possible to play the game at all even if the developer shuts down their servers.
It’s becoming more and more common that games stop functioning completely when the developers no longer want to support the game anymore - even games that are perfectly playable single player.
Yeah I agree with the single player bit. And even multiplayer if it’s as simple as releasing the server app. But I think Thor’s point and what’s being debated here is that live service games often aren’t like that. So why is this law seemingly including them?
If you don’t like live service games and don’t feel like they should exist, then don’t buy them. I can see some legislation around clear marketing. But if people want to pay for an ephemeral service, that’s up to the consumer.
The answer is to allow people to host it themselves. If you’ve got a Discord server and people who want to experience a game with you, you could get 40 people together to do a WoW raid long after it stopped being profitable for Blizzard. In a case like Pokemon Go, either that stuff is determined algorithmically or there’s a game master with their finger on the button to trigger the event; users could run that too.
I agree. Louis brought a good point when he talked about Gran Turismo licensed content (like Ferrari cars and etc), that some companies have licenses that will expire for content in the game. But you know what? THAT’S NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM. You buy a game, you should be able to run it until the end of time.
First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can’t work for games that have a technical server requirement, … world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that’s usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what “could be” single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn’t done.
It’s not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It’s not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.
It’s not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn’t immediately ready to keep working.
And a few more.
That being said, I think Thor’s stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that’s not happening.
He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.
I don’t think he have any soft spot for mega corp, is just online figures/influencers can’t never be wrong type of thing.
If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just "videogames" as stated in the initiative.
Spoken like an idealist. Video games is probably the biggest thing that will gain traction. Sure, it would be great to tackle the entire issue, but the people making this initiative aren't using other software that does that shit. Saying "care about all the people" dilutes the issue.
… to the extent of killing off live service games.
I mean… Nothing of value was lost? In my opinion, so far, the only decent live service game to have ever come out is still Warframe. Everything else that cane after is either a pale imitation or straight up cow milking garbage.
We could certainly do with a lot less “live service”.
Honestly him calling Ross a “greasy used car salesman” really hurt to see. I didn’t take Thor as the type to insult someone like that simply for disagreeing with him.
Kind of makes me wonder if his whole nice guy thing is an act. Either way it calls into question the person I assumed he was.
It was on stream, so hopefully someone recorded it and uploads it.
In this video though, at the very end, this guy shows another clip that I haven’t been able to find of Thor reacting to one of Ross’ comments and… well I can’t think of a better word than melting down tbh.
Sinking ship or not, word was that Wizards’ cut of BG3 was over $90M. $100M was the entire production cost of Baldur’s Gate 3. If you could fund an entire other massive video game for the cost of what you paid your partner for licensing, I’m sure anyone would be rethinking that deal. At this point, they don’t need the D&D license any more than BioWare needed the Star Wars license after KOTOR.
I agree, but Piazo seems like much better partners. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d let them make the game for no fee, just license out the rules to try to make the system more well known and popular. Pathfinder 2E is the better system without a doubt, but people are used to D&D5e, so having something out there to bring new people in would be huge for them.
I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 1, Baldur’s Gate 2, and Planescape: Torment on 2nd edition rules. I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 on 5th edition rules and started playing tabletop 5th edition. I’ve played Pillars of Eternity 1, as I understand it largely inspired by 3.5 edition rules, and the first 10 hours of Pillars of Eternity 2, which I assume is now iterating on its own offshoot. I understand Pathfinder to largely be D&D 3.5. If that’s the case, and it’s in the ballpark of what Pillars of Eternity 1 is, I’ll take 5th edition any day of the week, but if you’d like to explain to me briefly why I might be wrong, I’m listening. Compared to how the 2e games and the Pillars games handle spells of different levels, 5e’s upcasting seems like a godsend, for instance.
I understand Pathfinder to largely be D&D 3.5. Pathfinder 1E is essentially an improved D&D 3.5 that came to be the last time the licensing for modules became an issue. 2E is it’s own thing, and a large improvement.
One if the best changes for Pathfinder 2E is how actions work. D&D 5e has its a weird system of movement, action, bonus action, and then abilities that can add actions, but you can only cast one spell per turn regardless of if you have actions to use, except in some situations, and you can only use actions for some things sometimes, sometimes only once per turn. It’s just filled with exceptions because that’s not the original design intent but it’s tons of patches to make things function halfway decently.
Pathfinder 2E you have three actions per turn. Those can be used for anything always without exception. Every ability has a cost. For example moving is 1 action and can be done multiple times per turn, which makes things that displace enemies useful as they have to consume actions to get back into melee. Some spells may cost multiple actions, some very large ones can even require channeling multiple actions over several turns. It’s a very simple and intuitive system and you don’t need to remember thousands of exceptions like D&D5e.
Almost everything in Pathfinder 2E works like this. Things may be more complex to start with (which allows for choice), but you don’t need to remember tons of exceptions, so in total it’s simpler.
It doesn’t feel like a bunch of exceptions to me. It feels like you have a bonus action that’s basically always class-related, and everything else is an action. What you describe for Pathfinder doesn’t sound bad at all, but if some things cost multiple actions, that sounds like every bit the type of exception that you make 5e out to be full of. I don’t really find 5e to be unintuitive thus far such that I’m looking for another system to remedy it, I guess.
What you describe for Pathfinder doesn’t sound bad at all, but if some things cost multiple actions, that sounds like every bit the type of exception that you make 5e out to be full of.
The issue in D&D5e is that they are dependent on a bunch of other circumstances. In Pathfinder 2e it’s only dependent on if you have enough actions. It’s clearly listed how many actions anything you can do takes.
For example, here’s magic missile. The “Cast:” is the action cost. The squares are how many it takes. It can take anywhere between one to all three of your turn. Each action spent is another missile. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already cast a spell that turn or done anything else. As long as you have the actions available you can spend them on anything you want.
I started playing TTRPGs on Pathfinder 1e, but the vast majority of what I played is D&D5e. I never had too much issue with it, because I never saw a better option, but after seeing how Pathfinder 2e works it’s so much cleaner. Learning about how the action system came to be in 5e it’s pretty clear it wasn’t meant to be the way it is today. Because of that there’s stipulations to almost everything. I didn’t notice the issues until I was made aware of them, then you see them everywhere. For example, the Critical Role cast constantly fuck things up despite having played the game professionally for however many years it’s been now. If the rules were intuitive that wouldn’t happen, at least not as often.
I’m a recent convert to Critical Role as well, and even moments ago, I witnessed one of those fuck-ups (I’m still a long ways from catching up on campaign 3, so it’s an old episode), but I can’t seem to recall it having much to do with what’s an action or not an action and instead more about what the range of a thing is or what type of creature it can be cast on. I don’t know if there’s some equivalent solution to that in Pathfinder, but that would strike me as a harder problem to solve via systems changes to make more intuitive.
Another thing I respect about what 5e does compared to other D&D or adjacent games I listed above: they rebalanced the hell out of magic. In those other games, someone casts a spell that paralyzes your entire party with an AoE or massive cone, and you just have to watch with no recourse as everyone dies. In 5e, the equivalent spell has a finite number of targets, they scale intuitively with spell level by adding one extra target per level, and if it has an ongoing effect, it would require concentration so the person can’t steamroll by casting a bunch of them concurrently. Again, I haven’t played Pathfinder, so I definitely can’t knock it, nor do I have any negative reaction to the systems you’re describing (except for the part where some spells take longer than the actions you have in a single turn…that sounds terrible), but 5e isn’t the first RPG system I’ve played. It solved tons of problems with ones that I’ve played before. Advantage rolls another D20. Upcasting adds another die or another target. You get to move, and you get an action; everything else is an action, but your class gives you bonus action options. Resistances and weaknesses are simple halves and doubles. Armor affects your ability to hit or not, with no extra junk slowing down the calculations. That sort of thing. They’re all very smart changes. If I was going to nitpick things about 5e, it would be like how your ability scores are all out of 20, but your modifiers are every other point; and that’s something I seem to recall hearing through the grapevine that Pathfinder 2e does address, correct me if I’m wrong.
The action economy is just one example of the improvements of it. There are many. As for range and target types though, yeah I don’t think there’s a good solution to that. You either just have to get rid of it (which I think can and is done with some spells) or deal with the complexity that makes spells more useful only in the right situation.
As an example of making things simpler with spells, P2E’s Detect Alignment you choose an alignment to detect and can detect it. It comes out of older D&D’s detect good/detect evil which became the generic Detect Good and Evil in 5e which does not actually detect anything with alignment anymore in 5e. Pathfinder 2E generalized it to be more useful and simpler, D&D5e generalized it to be not what it says on the can anymore. It’s really strange what 5e decided to do with so many things. It just makes things not make intuitive sense.
As for the magic scaling, PF2e is similar. I don’t think you’re going to find many situations where D&D is more balanced than PF2e, at lead with the rules as written.
I definitely can’t knock it, nor do I have any negative reaction to the systems you’re describing (except for the part where some spells take longer than the actions you have in a single turn…that sounds terrible)
You can back out of the channeling if you need to. It’s a nice system for really powerful spells requiring a lot more risk and investment. Keep in mind, this applies to enemies as well. If you see them powering up something big, you will have time to try to interrupt them.
This is a good video for some more information about the three action economy. That channel has tons of other videos about the system too, a lot of which is focused on how it compares to D&D 5e. He has a lot more knowledge than I do, and he probably has a video on every question you have. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested.
Additionally, if you want PF2e content to consume, Tabletop Gold is a podcast using PF2e. I’m just over episode 100 I think and it’s pretty good. They aren’t the most knowledge about the system, most of them haven’t played TTRPGs at all before I don’t think, but it all flows very well, which is a testament to the design.
How about Wrath of the Righteous? Does that use 2nd edition? Is the game any good? I know it was built primarily for real time with pause, but is it any good in turn based mode? I don’t have the time for another tabletop podcast in my life, and I don’t see any world where I play it myself until at least my current D&D campaign reaches a conclusion. And to be totally honest, your pitch still sounds like it’s a cure for problems that I don’t have, but a video game would be a decent way to sample it.
I don’t know. The Owlcat games have a really deep system that Divinity and BG3 don’t have. Is that just because of the pathfinder ruleset? Or does Larian do better with simpler systems? I don’t have an answer to those questions. It might be cool to see a BG3 “version” of Pathfinder, but I think it would lose something in the process.
The visuals out of Larian run laps around Owlcat. But that comes at the expense of depth, as each asset takes more time to develop.
It’s two different design philosophies creating two very different kinds of experience. Owlcat makes more of a complex digital board game while Larian has muddled a strategy format with a dating sim.
Moral of the story: run proxies. Speculators and investors ruined the market, WotC just let them do it. (Also, fuck the secondary market and the reserve list. It’s cardboard. Some of us just want to play)
This is why I bailed out of Standard, finally. I’ve moved entirely into Limited.
I’ll still do pay-to-play with drafts of new sets here and there, but proxy Cube is where it’s at. My fun-to-price ratio with the game has never been better.
Ah, that kind of price churn has been the norm in (lower case “l”) legacy formats for as long as I’ve been playing the game (25+ years now). It’d be reprints, bans, or just plain old power creep. Those formats have been too expensive/volatile for me for a very long time now.
Reprinting some things, neglecting to reprint others, power creeping the stuff they did reprint out of the game, banning some stuff that was too powerful while printing other stuff that’s just as good for the same reasons. You know, standard card game stuff.
The rate of bans has dramatically increased since 2020. They even had to errata an entire new mechanic in the Ikoria set because some of the companion cards were crazy broken with the original design.
An extra wrinkle to this is that they are making bans due to how cards perform in online play, as best-of-one is a widely played format now.
Yeah, I’ve been moving over to Call of Cthulhu with my tabletop group. I find it far more enjoyable when the players are more careful about dying or worse.
I don’t believe, they’re actually 6 years into the development. Back then, they just announced that at some point, there would be a TES6, but they’ve been busy developing Starfield since then.
As part of Starfield, they did do some engine upgrades. You know what that looks like…
Their announcement for the 30th anniversary implies that it is in early pre-alpha right now. Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
Wonder if it’ll be ready for the 30th anniversary of Skyrim
Anyway
Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
You can still make improvements in pre-alpha for sure. Not massive overhauls of existing systems, but there’s no reason you couldn’t fix bugs, incrementally improve existing features and add new ones.
Sure, you could, but given beths track record in that regard, why would they? They have been perfectly happy shipping Skyrim to new platforms with the same bugs for nearly a decade.
Who knows, honestly. I’m not holding my breath for this game anymore. When it comes out, i’ll check it out, but if it’s in the same pitiful state as Starfield, then idk
Elder Scrolls especially Morrowind will always have a place in my heart but I’ve moved on. If they ever release a better game I will come back. What ever is running Starfield won’t be it.
I’ve found New World and as far as MMOs go, it’s the best I’ve played in comparison to Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 (in depth) and a few others (<40 hours).
But New World has the lore, baby. That’s what seals the deal. Superior gameplay: check. Great art design: check. The lore is the final block and New World is so interesting. I didn’t think a fantasy setting could have new and interesting lore but they succeeded.
How the Lost came into creation from
Tap for spoilertrying to cure the Corruption
is so tragic. I’m still learning what Angry Earth is all about tho.
And it’s just fun! Like, I would have never guessed that I’d enjoy running around in a pilgrim hat getting killed by a giant turkey with laser eyes. And who would have guessed you could successfully merge the giants from Nasusicca Valley of the Wind with 1500s Caribbean aesthetic?
But if you’re thinking: “We’re talking about single player games, dumbass.” Yea, I know, I like New World so much that I wish the same dev team would make a proper single player game in the exact same setting.
And on the other hand, Karl Jobst has always been very well researched in his videos, so I’m a big torn here. Definitely going to keep an eye on this and see where it goes before making my own conclusions.
He’s also someone who hangs around with nazis which is wild. He backed away from them when it all came out but then got chummy again so I got the fuck away from his content. Which is decidedly in the outrage bait genre these days.
imgur.com/a/X7qLRXa his friend who he promotes in his videos, nazis fuck off, fuck you if you support this
I mean… Goose is still prominent in the Goldeneye speedrunning community, and was only banned from The Elite for about a year before he was welcomed back. Jobst made his name speedrunning the same game, even managing to get some uncontested world records.
Lemmy isn’t supporting Nazis, you’re being downvoted because making accusations without sources is just yelling into the wind. “Just Google it” and “do your own research” is synonymous in practice and adds nothing to the conversation and only is rumormill level gossip.
Provide links to some sources if you have some legit concerns, because that’s definitely news to me.
Firstly, these screenshots are from The Elite’s and RWhiteGoose’s own Discord servers. He was part of the site’s council that effectively moderated Goldeneye speedrun records and set precedent for new rules, hence why they didn’t do anything until this all came out.
none of that is debunked, he’s just trying to worm his way out of it. the correct thing to do when you find out someone is a nazi is to cut them out. he doesn’t, then he tries to say i’m just trying to help him be a not nazi by promoting and featuring him in my videos.
you’re a fool to believe that for a moment, especially when it comes from him.
i want to be incredibly clear here, nothing is debunked. he said what he wants to say, you choose to believe him at face value.
You have been incredibly clear, and so has he. He is clear on his disgust and why he chose to help him rather the cut off all ties and whilst I would not do the same myself I do not condemn others who try to.
But so far there has been no evidence that he supports or sympathises with any Nazism ideals or ideas which to me is the breaking point.
If there is something I have missed then please show me but I have not seen anything to the contrary.
At the same time, Mutahar and Karl are very well respected content creators who do their research. They wouldn’t drop a bombshell like this if they didn’t have good sources.
Easy to check the filings yourself. The research presented in the video is legit. There is no reason to have zero donations to charities since 2014. Zero
What “actual evidence” are you waiting for? The filings are public (you can confirm literally right now) and Jirard admitted to the accusations himself? What else do you need?
Welcome to the cult of personality. You could show them the guy’s fingerprints on the bloody knife at a murder scene and they would still ask for more conclusive evidence. 🙄
Speaking of the cult of personality, you see a one-sided YouTube video and automatically assume this has been through trial.
What about 2023? Was the money then donated? Where the tax forms filed incorrectly? Almost a year has passed since this supposedly just came to light for this guy. What has been done to fix it?
I’m not sticking up for him, seems like this was a huge fuckup either way, but I’m not ready to burn someone at the stake for “being a personality”.
The accusation is not that the money has not been donated now, however. It is that the money has been sitting around since 2014, while happily paying themselves “expenses” from it.
It’s just a mix of an externally paid expenses account + a tax writeoff for the years 2014-2022, so even iff the money has now been donated, that doesn’t excuse the previous 8 years and in fact, you can’t shirk legal responsibility that way.
There wouldn’t necessarily be legal responsibility. Things have been reported to the IRS with the money sitting there. If they’re paying themselves “expenses”, that would need to be reported on their personal income taxes. If that’s all there is to it, nothing illegal is happening. As of now, that’s all the evidence tells us.
Bad way to run a charity, but not illegal. That may change with more evidence, like if the money was paid out more than is actually reported.
Jirard’s Open Hands charity is a nonprofit so you can see their books through their tax filings.
The most likely explanation is that Jirard is incredibly busy running a successful YouTube channel and so he had no idea how the charity is being run.
When being made aware in 2022 he said he stepped in to make sure the money is being donated the way he believed it was. That wasn’t reflected in their 2022 tax filing but it still can be true for 2023, the public will find that out when those filings are made public.
Karl Jobst is a really good content creator but he has a bit of a dramatic flair and tends to call things “illegal” when they actually aren’t and he did in this video again. Still I think that it’s important to make call outs like this. And I think that Jirard will make it right, now that he has been made aware. It’s clear from the filings that they aren’t committing fraud or skimming off the top. They just were sitting on the money probably because the task of running a charity was beyond their capabilities
I feel like your comment is the most reasonable explanation. The charity sounds like it isn’t actively being run. It is probably a misunderstanding. I can see the charity paying for a group to run the charity, but because their income is very small, they want the charity ran frugally, and are paying the minimum required for management. The management is running the account, making sure taxes are filed, etc, but Jirard thought they were dispersing the funds too. They don’t talk much, other than a quick review at tax season, and the issue is never addressed, because both sides don’t interact enough to see the difference.
This video really frustrated me, because Jobst is claiming things “Fraud” when the evidence he provided looks nothing like that. It isn’t great PR, but nothing so far looks remotely illegal, or even unethical. The internet just loves ragging on a “bad guy,” and are eager to get mad at the bad guy of the day.
The one thing that does lean more towards malice is the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired long before the charity existed.
That said, I otherwise agree. If the IRS forms are right, the money is just sitting there. That’s not illegal in itself. It just looks bad.
Jobst also doesn’t always know US law, since he has a legal background in Australia (and I’m not sure what his specialty was, either).
He particularly mentioned in the video that the IRS isn’t an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, which is true. I’ve seen the bullshit US tax protesters sometimes get away with. Irwin Schiff, for example, once signed a blank 1040 form and sent it into the IRS. He almost made it to the statue of limitations until he went on The Tomorrow Show (a nationwide NBC talk show) and bragged about it. That said, people in the US do tend to think of the IRS as an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, and that’s why the response with the guy came back that way. Jobst doesn’t seem to be fully cognizant of how people in the US view the IRS.
Yes, their quoting of the guy who was fired before they filed as a non-profit was very deceptive. And soliciting with the list of other organizations that the money supposedly goes to is as well. It is probable that they donated funds to these places when it was just them raising money for their mom before they decided to organize as a non-profit in 2014 (when Jirard’s YouTube channel started to really gain popularity). The problem lies in that these donations can’t really be proven just based on public filings and so they create the appearance of impropriety if not proving actual impropriety.
Over half a million dollars isn’t “very small” for this type of charity in my opinion.
Not to mention, they seem to admit they’ve known about the issue for a while, but have continued to fund raise and present the charity as if it’s been running along doing good this whole time, but they’ve just been hoarding the money so far.
I’m certain he’s very busy. He’s busy with his channel, and he was also one of the cast of G4 for the short time it returned, and they were being overworked I think there, and he was still running his channel. This is why you hire people to handle these things though. It’s bad that it wasn’t handled properly, but not necessarily malicious. I’ll forgive a mistake, but if it turns out it was a scam that’s unforgivable.
Based on the reported expenses being around $10,000 a yea; I don’t think they were trying to run a scam or trying to be malicious. I think they wanted to honor their mom, but didn’t have the time to run the charity or donation volume to justify hiring someone to run it. Not an excuse for how they ran things of course, I think it wasn’t fair to the people who gave them money that they solicited donations on how they wanted things to be rather than how they actually ran it. Whether they knew or not that the money was just sitting there isn’t an excuse. If they were soliciting donations then they have a duty to inform themselves.
…did you watch the video? You can see their contributions have been $0 year after year with their tax filings, and Jirard admitted they haven’t donated anything.
I don’t know who this guy is or anything about the situation other than what’s written here, but if he’s naming specific charities supposedly receiving these donations, it makes zero sense that they’d be “looking for a good charity to donate to.” If that were the case there’d be zero reason to name the ones they did.
you should watch the content in the post before engaging in discussion about it. What you’re saying is kinda the whole crux of the issue. Jirard has been caught lying, saying his fund has donated to specific charities when in reality the fund has donated nothing. You’re right - it doesn’t make sense to lie about something so easily verified, but here we are.
He’s already caught in a lie. Even if his unbelievable story that he, the director of the charity, was unaware the charity never did anything charitable for as long as it has existed (this already makes him guilty of failing the donators by incompetence), he still lied about knowing where the money went for all those years to the donators and CONTINUED TO DO SO AFTER HE ADMITTED HE KNEW ABOUT IT.
Now he claims that he has been looking for worthy charities for over a year while he could easily just donate the money to the charities he has been talking about for years already.
The fact that he kept naming specific organizations where the money was being donated after he was made aware that the money was just sitting there is quite the red flag. This whole situation is very weird and I must say, I’m really curious to understand what is happening.
Also worth mentioning that the Charity organization tried to take the video down, another red flag
It points to something hinky, but it’s not complete proof. If it’s correct, then the money is just sitting in an account. It’s not going into anybody’s pockets (although the interest might?). The open question is if the IRS form is accurate to the amount of money just sitting there. If not, then this starts to look like criminal tax fraud.
This could still come down to incompetence rather than malice. That said, the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired years before the charity existed does lean more towards malice.
One other thing to note is that while Karl Jobst does have a legal background, it’s in Australia. The US is also a common law system, but there are enough differences that Karl might not realize what is and isn’t illegal.
I have been preaching abandoning it for YEARS. It’s even worse on mobile because the formating is so messed up some links just don’t work. And even without adblock, there’s so many ads that THEY slow down the site. Just because it’s ‘free’ everyone defaults to fandom and I hate it so much
I’ve found the best way to browse Fandom(if necessary) is to use a VPN set to Nordic countries. Ads are very generic and in a language I can’t read. So they are very easy to spot.
It redirects you from fandom wikis to the new official wikis, to which the community has now moved from the fandom one. Also filters out fandom results from search engines only if an independent, more up-to-date alternative exists.
If something is still hosted on fandom with no indie wiki, redirects it to a BreezeWiki instance.
I use it in combination with wiki.gg redirect, which redirects to newer wikis which aren’t independent, but moved to wiki.gg from fandom.
Update: IndieWikiBuddy can now redirect to Wiki.gg wikis too, no need for wiki.gg redirect.
Unless you have no plans to play Online, the money you’ll spend on Shark Cards trying to catch up with established players will far exceed $80. That’s why I stopped playing GTA V Online—I got tired of grinding for cash, just to keep up with the unemployed people who dedicate their lives to one game (I refuse to spend money on microtransactions in any game). Either play at launch, or don’t bother with Online.
There’s literally no reason in this day and age to not release on pc on day 1. Xb and ps market share is absolutely losing ground to pc at record time, there’s no reason anymore.
If they don’t pc release day 1, then I guess gta6 actually just comes out 2027.
Honestly, in a lot of ways, I think this video is a miss. In both this video and to a lesser extent the last, he put a lot of the blame on Valve, but also provides a higher standard to Valve than the other companies covered. So much of this video boils down to “Valve uses lootboxes too,” and “Valve needs to do something about this.” without addressing Valve’s position as a market player nor providing any solution for Valve to actually tackle the casino problem. He even says in the video that Valve previously issued takedowns but nothing changed and many of the casinos didn’t even respond to the cease and desist. No other course of action is suggested, and frankly, I don’t see any from Valve that wouldn’t punish victums and unrelated users far more than the casinos.
This isn’t to say Valve is blameless, but Valve is fairly tame for their direct involvement with lootboxes and is competiting directly against companies that use them far more agressively - exactly the reason Coffee previously gave the casinos and those involved with them leniency, and encouraged looking further up the chain. In the same way, I’d say the actual solution here would be for governments to ban underage gambling and enforce those laws - because the more Valve trys to crack down on this or even just avoid it, the more of an advantage the worse players in the space have. Ubisoft and EA have already been attempting to dislodge Steam for years, and its not because they think they can be more moral than Steam.
He did say govt should be involved, and I’d agree generally. Gambling and gambling lite like lootboxes need regulation to die, but Valve is also a massive company running the biggest game storefront in the world, and they don’t need the money from the lootboxes and cuts from selling and trading. They aren’t in direct competition with most game creators, they compete with other storefronts, and it isn’t even close. They could fix this relatively easily and it would barely make a dent in their finances.
They could also leave the lootboxes and gambling up, and just implement an age verification system, one that locks you out of trading until the account is verified 18 or older, and add other tools like locking yourself out of trading or opening boxes similar to how casinos allow you to blacklist yourself for your own good.
In terms of a relatively quick, relatively painless, realistic fix, with a decent timeframe, valve makes the most sense, and they can fix this extremely easily compared to getting every government in the world to agree, implement, and enforce regulations. Ideally, yes, governments fix it. Realistically, kids are getting addicted to gambling and having their lives ruined right now, and valve has the power to stop it. I think it’s fair to ask, and expect a real answer, yes or no.
I think the issue of lootboxes and shady third-party casinos, while intertwined, are very separate, almost parallel issues. Coffee reads them as largely being the same issue which leads to a lot of the messiness of this video, and makes the video harder to discuss.
I think in terms of dealing with the 3rd party casinos, Valve is pretty powerless, and feel Coffee’s arguments for their intervention are very hand-wavey. That is the biggest issue I have with this video. As I outlined in a comment on his last video, most options they have punish victums and unrelated users more than casinos. Even if Valve goes all-out and disables all item trading and marketing, casinos still walk away with all their profits and are incentived to try and scam their users out of every penny before that happens, while normal users and traders are left without ways to get skins they want (at least outside of gambling through Valve) or are left with a bunch of dead inventory they don’t want. If anything, this kinda highlights what I meant by Valve being less agressive on the gambling, as they provide many fairly priced ways to be involved with the skin ecosystem without ever having to open a lootbox or a casino.
In terms of Valve regulating lootboxes on their platform, and specifically CS2 crates, I think theres more merit to the argument, but I still think it’s not realistic to ask Valve to regulate themselves and assume they’ll be able to compete both on the game and platform level, with those who are not. Valve’s momentum does play a bit part in their success, but so too does their featureset to players and friendliness to developers and publishes.
On the game front, if Valve removes lootboxes or adds barries to entry, they will still be forced to directly complete with games that don’t. Even assuming players don’t want lootboxes (although the unfortunate reality of the market is that many do) Valve is still put in a position where their budget is determined by what they can morally earn while their competition uses whatever manipulate, deceptive, or immoral methods they want.
On the platform side, it might be easier, but it could also put them in an even worse position as they rely on other developers and publishes, including the shady ones like EA and Unisoft, to fill their storefront. Part of the reason Steam has the userbase where other platforms don’t is because they have the most complete selection of games. On the other hand, if Steam starts to threaten Publisher’s incomes such as by requiring age verification on gambling, this will likely be far more in incentive to leave than their 30% split ever was. At least the 30% cost covered infrastructure, payment processing and first level support whereas if companies are blocked from their gambling addict audience, they likely will lose a significant part of their revenue outright.
compared to getting every government in the world to agree, implement, and enforce regulations
You don’t necessary need every country nor do you need particularly extreme measures to have an impact. Same as with privacy regulations and a lot of other forms of monitization on the internet, you just need a few bigger blocks to massively increase the costs and risk. If, for example, the EU started requiring age verification to access lootboxes, that would immediately add a significant new cost to adding lootboxes. Notably, for exactly the sorts of live-service games these lootboxes are most common in, data collection and anti-cheat also tend to be key elements of the game and it’s design and monitization - both of which conflict with the ability to ignore user location or age. The developer can’t claim they thought the user was in the US, if the anti-cheat reported that they were using a VPN and were actually logging in from the EU, for example. Obviously there are workarounds for this sort of thing, but again more costs and compexity that eat into profits, and more risk for making mistakes.
But valve is not powerless. They provide the API to easily trade outside of the steam marketplace. And saying Valve is morally earning money while the competition does not, its not a fair thing to say. Valve started the whole slotmachine lootbox bullshit in the first place. They know very well what they’re doing. Valve could give gamblers 2 weeks to take their skins off the sites and then block API access to these casinos or just shut down the API completely. Saying victims will be hurt so lets have casinos continue to create victims, is a strange argument to make.
And saying Valve is morally earning money while the competition does not, its not a fair thing to say.
This was arguing in the hypothetical that Valve stopped acting immoraly. I’m not trying to argue that Valve is in the right here. I’m arguing that they are a player in this game as well, along with their competition, and so shouldn’t be singled out as the ones required to change or to enforce new laws.
Valve could give gamblers 2 weeks to take their skins off the sites and then block API access to these casinos
This just gives the casinos warning so they can pull the rug more cleanly, and have more time to spin up a replacement casino.
or just shut down the API completely.
Then this punishes every other user for the actions of a tiny, tiny minority. Even ignoring users using the open market for legitimate and fair buisness, said market provides a way to obtain skins without relying on Valve to set prices or distribute skins. As such, unless Valve also removes their own lootboxes at the same time, it means that users can only interact with skins through gambling.
The one solution that would address all of this at once and wouldn’t substantially affect unrelated users would be governments implementing laws against unregulated gambling. Unlike Valve, they can address the whole industry at once, and aren’t punished for trying to enforce said laws.
Valve is still put in a position where their budget is determined by what they can morally earn while their competition uses whatever manipulate, deceptive, or immoral methods they want.
What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)
if Steam starts to threaten Publisher’s incomes such as by requiring age verification on gambling, this will likely be far more in incentive to leave than their 30% split ever was
Age verification on the marketplace transactions is the more likely scenario, and again, no other game I know of has as much of a gambling community so I don’t really get why other publishers would leave if it doesn’t effect them.
Ultimately, I think you’re missing the point of coffeezillas video, which is that a lot of people who were in the skin gambling community are actively or, started in it, as a minor. You are here trying to find all of these excuses for valve not to be held accountable for facilitating gambling to a minor.
What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)
Most mobile games? Apex? Overwatch? Keep in mind, a lot of the CS gambling happens off-platform and Valve doesn’t collect any direct revenue from it, which is why Valve can’t directly intervene in a lot of it.
Age verification on the marketplace transactions is the more likely scenario, and again, no other game I know of has as much of a gambling community so I don’t really get why other publishers would leave if it doesn’t effect them.
This argument is specifically in the context of lootboxes as gambling on Steam. Think how much people will spend in lootboxes on your average free to play game. If they aren’t allowed to do this on Steam, games like Apex, CoD, PUBG, War Thunder, ect. won’t stay on Steam.
Ultimately, I think you’re missing the point of coffeezillas video, which is that a lot of people who were in the skin gambling community are actively or, started in it, as a minor. You are here trying to find all of these excuses for valve not to be held accountable for facilitating gambling to a minor.
This is exactly my point about Coffee’s argument being muddled in this video, making it hard to discuss. There are three parallel problem here that the video combines into one: third-party casinos, CS lootboxes, and lootboxes in the industry in general.
In terms of Valve shutting down illegal/third party casinos, they don’t have the means to impact this without also shutting down the entire market for everyone, innocent or guilty. Why should I, as someone who has never even bought a lootbox, nonetheless run an illegal casino be punished for their actions. Even then, casino owners aren’t held responsible, they’re just stopped. On the other hand, with government intervention, no one is caught in the crossfire and casino owners could actually be held responsible for their actions with fines or worse. Why wouldn’t this be the better option?
In terms of Valve selling lootboxes themselves, yes its immoral, but as Coffee said about the casinos, they’re competiting with other products doing the same and you can’t reasonably expect one side to just role over and accept their loss. Instead, you need to change the system so neither side can use tactics like this. Instead of asking Valve to regulate themselves, and expecting their competition to do the same, you change the law (or just actually enforce it) to ensure that noone gets away with it.
What competition has such a rich gambling scene though. No other game I am aware of (Maybe TF2 but, still valve)
Gacha games have been taking over the world ever since Genshin Impact and those are pure gambling. Going even further back, Ultimate Team on FIFA (EA FC now) is probably the worst true “selling gambling to kids” product I can remember.
Most of them don’t have a gambling scene, because most gacha games don’t allow you to trade the things you get from the gacha. Valve does and that’s what facilitates the online casinos that is based on CS2 skins.
It’s not his place to provide a solution: he is a journalist exposing a problem. Do you have such expectations for all journalists talking about any topic?
When articles get shared about any other company using micro/macrotransactions, predatory tactics or gambling-related schemes, people’s consensus is unanimous, but when Valve is involved, suddenly people have double standards.
Valve is fairly tame for their direct involvement with lootboxes and is competiting directly against companies that use them far more agressively […] Ubisoft and EA have already been attempting to dislodge Steam for years, and its not because they think they can be more moral than Steam.
Valve could shut down the entire gambling market today and nothing would change to their market position. Steam is not the number one marketplace because of the skin market. They are leaving it as is because it nets them money. I don’t know how can you call Steam “fairly tame” when they are literally allowing multimillion dollar casinos to exist and operate without impunity. They sent a C&D to casinos and then washed their hands of the problem, because ultimately they don’t really care about shutting them down.
They could ban accounts linked to the casinos, but they don’t, because they profit from them. They could have some sort of account-level check to make sure that minors don’t spend their steam gift cards on CS skins (which, by the way, Coffezilla proposes at the end of the video) , but they’d rather use the gambling loophole of “akshually, it’s not gambling as defined by law”. Then they lie through their teeth by saying that they “don’t have any data” supporting the claim that the gambling aspect of the game has profited them by leading to more interest in their games, which is bullshit.
PC players, and Lemmy users in particular, have a huge double standard for Valve.
It’s not his place to provide a solution: he is a journalist exposing a problem. Do you have such expectations for all journalists talking about any topic?
It wouldn’t be his place to provide a solution if he was arguing that the practice is a problem and prehaps pushing for further study. It is his place because throughout the video, he tries to argue that solving the problem is not only possible, but easy - and yet, despite supposedly being easy, his best solution is to basically propose that the industry self-regulate. That is the main issue I have with this video.
Valve could shut down the entire gambling market today and nothing would change to their market position.
And how would they do this without screwing over normal users and victums of the casinos in the process? They can’t get money from these casinos, nor collect casino records to redistribute scammed money. All they can do is disable trading or their marketplace, effectively seizing the poker chips (or metals balls, following Coffee’s pachinko comparison) but doing nothing about the money casinos have taken from victims nor preventing the casinos from either walking away or re-investing in a new casino. To prevent new ones from popping up, you could disable all trading and marketing, but now you’re punishing 132 million users for the acts of a couple thousand.
They could have some sort of account-level check to make sure that minors don’t spend their steam gift cards on CS skins
They could, but A) this is just one game on their platform, and B) this would leave them directly competiting against those who don’t regulate themselves and can make and reinvest significantly more. This is exactly the situation that Coffee argued was systematic and needed to be adressed further up the chain previously.
they’d rather use the gambling loophole of “akshually, it’s not gambling as defined by law”. Then they lie through their teeth by saying that they “don’t have any data” supporting the claim that the gambling aspect of the game has profited them by leading to more interest in their games, which is bullshit.
Again, exactly like their competition. The recent talk of Balatro’s PEGI rating being a prime example, with the industry self-regulation body declaring that virtual slot machines and loot boxes aren’t gambling but featuring poker hands was.
PC players, and Lemmy users in particular, have a huge double standard for Valve.
This is the problem I have with this video. Valve is being held to a different standard, and told to self-regulate while others in this very series are having blame redirected away from them because its unreasonable to expect them to self-regulate.
It wouldn’t be his place to provide a solution if he was arguing that the practice is a problem and prehaps pushing for further study. It is his place because throughout the video, he tries to argue that solving the problem is not only possible, but easy - and yet, despite supposedly being easy, his best solution is to basically propose that the industry self-regulate. That is the main issue I have with this video.
He is not proposing that the entire industry must self-regulate and that it’s the only solution to the problem. He is saying that this specific instance, the CS skin market, could be solved by Valve taking a firm stance, which not only they are not doing, but are actually working against, such as them side-stepping the regulations imposed on them by the French government.
I’m all in for stricter regulations on gambling by government agencies, but that doesn’t mean that the people side-stepping those regulations aren’t to blame too. While they are not doing anything technically illegal, they are purposefully operating in a grey area to profit off vulnerable people.
And how would they do this without screwing over normal users and victums of the casinos in the process? They can’t get money from these casinos, nor collect casino records to redistribute scammed money. All they can do is disable trading or their marketplace, effectively seizing the poker chips (or metals balls, following Coffee’s pachinko comparison) but doing nothing about the money casinos have taken from victims nor preventing the casinos from either walking away or re-investing in a new casino. To prevent new ones from popping up, you could disable all trading and marketing, but now you’re punishing 132 million users for the acts of a couple thousand.
They can’t do anything about the money the casinos have already made, but can stop them by making further money. That happens pretty much all the time in every market.
They could, but A) this is just one game on their platform, and B) this would leave them directly competiting against those who don’t regulate themselves and can make and reinvest significantly more. This is exactly the situation that Coffee argued was systematic and needed to be adressed further up the chain previously.
A) The video is explicitly about Counter Strike and the gambling market surrounding that specific game; not the whole industry. I agree a more systemic approach (ie. on a government level) should be advisable, but until that day comes, Valve could put an end to this specific problem, which they are currently choosing to ignore because they are profiting from it instead;
B) Valve makes literally billions and can invest to their heart’s content. They are not a small indie dev.
Again, exactly like their competition. The recent talk of Balatro’s PEGI rating being a prime example, with the industry self-regulation body declaring that virtual slot machines and loot boxes aren’t gambling but featuring poker hands was.
Cool, their competition does it too. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
This is the problem I have with this video. Valve is being held to a different standard, and told to self-regulate while others in this very series are having blame redirected away from them because its unreasonable to expect them to self-regulate.
Valve literally created the market. If you take the bigger share of the profit, you also take the biggest share of the blame. Casinos are obviously bad, but they are ultimately leeching off the system that Valve put in place.
You can’t do anything about the money the casinos have already made, but you can stop them by making further money.
Valve makes literally billions and can invest to their heart’s content. They are not a small indie dev.
So if I understand this right, and I don’t think I am, you’re arguing that valve should just disable the entire CS skin trading and marketing system, current victims and other users be damned, and should stop expecting to make money on their products because they have enough money as it is? That sounds like a ridiculous argument, so please clairify what I’m misunderstanding here.
Edit: fixed typos, and changed phrasing to sound less combative
I’m just saying what they could do if they were willing to. Your argument was that:
A) Valve should not stop casinos from profiting off vulnerable people, because they have already made money off those people and it would somehow be unfair to stop now, which to me sounds ridiculous.
You are using this as an argumentation that the government should ban them instead of Valve, but the end tesult would be the same. The casinos would walk away with the money, and the victims would be left to cry over it.
B) Poor Valve could not compete with their competition if they didn’t have the money they are gaining from their gambling-adjacent market, which to me sounds even more ridiculous. When Epic attempted to pry open the market using one of the biggest and most successful games ever as a leverage, they largely failed because the Steam user base was too entrenched. Steam is literally printing money right now and they don’t need the CS skin money to compete with anyone.
A) Valve should not stop casinos from profiting off vulnerable people, because they have already made money off those people and it would somehow be unfair to stop now, which to me sounds ridiculous.
My argument isn’t that Valve shouldn’t ban them if they have the means. Its that Valve cannot effectively ban them without penalising unrelated users just as much or more. The body that does have the means to do so without putting random users in the crossfire is the government.
You are using this as an argumentation that the government should ban them instead of Valve, but the end tesult would be the same. The casinos would walk away with the money, and the victims would be left to cry over it.
In a lot of these cases, even under current law, the government could be fining the individuals running these casinos. As they are run with effectively no oversight, many are blatently rigged, rely on false advertising, or use shoddy, under-the-table finances. That was what the first big crackdown was over - not the existance of these casinos, but the revelation of how rigged they were. As exemplified by the mob tactics being used by these casinos, they haven’t changed. Depending on the location, laws could also be implemented in ways that do go into effect in more aggressive ways, upto and including fining casinos for past actions if its really needed (and to be clear, I wouldn’t be opposed to fines like this being applied against Valve either.)
B) Poor Valve could not compete with their competition if they didn’t have the money they are gaining from their gambling-adjacent market, which to me sounds even more ridiculous. When Epic attempted to pry open the market using one of the biggest and most successful games ever as a leverage, they largely failed because the Steam user base was too entrenched. Steam is literally printing money right now and they don’t need the CS skin money to compete with anyone.
When talking about CS, we’re talking about an individual product, and one that is competing with other products where lootboxes and other manipulative tactics are already the norm. As you said, this isn’t about Steam. Valve is still a buisness, and their products are still a part of the market. They’re not going to just spend money to run a game they lose money on. Even if they do stop selling lootboxes, that doesn’t fix much because you’ve got thousands of other companies also trying to hook the same addicts on their gambling products. Instead, you need to impose limitations industry-wide, to ensure one product can’t get ahead by just being more abusive. Since we obviously aren’t going to have Valve, EA, Ubisoft, Epic, ect. all come together and agree to stop putting gambling in their games, we need a higher power to do so, that being the government.
But why not just have the people who can pay reparations, can punish those running illegal casinos, and can do it without catching others in the crossfire do it?
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