sugar_in_your_tea

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

sugar_in_your_tea,

We’ll get there, just give it time.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I live in Utah and have a coworker that was supposed to be there for class tonight. Wild times…

sugar_in_your_tea,

I played tons of first person shooters, GTA, etc, and I also have never thrown a punch at anyone.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Hey, dude was a POS but I’ll never condone violence.

sugar_in_your_tea,

we have the most gun violence

If we look at “intentional homicide rate” (choice of weapon agnostic), the US is 66th and just above Greenland. I think this statistic is better than “gun deaths” since it excludes suicides and accidental deaths and looks at intentional murder.

The number is way higher than it should be, but probably way better than most assume given the news.

sugar_in_your_tea,

It really doesn’t.

The only legitimate link between violence and video games is that violent people seem to like violent video games. I haven’t seen any compelling evidence of a video game causing someone to kill.

sugar_in_your_tea,

To be fair, a lot of POC gun violence is gang related, not mental health related, because POC tend to be stuck in poorer areas and resort to gangs to make ends meet. There is certainly white gang violence as well, but there’s also a lot of mental health related crimes that happen to be committed by white people, probably because they have more ready access to guns that the average non-gang affiliated POC.

Games are unrelated to both cases.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Absolutely. There have been so many studies trying to prove a connection and failed. It’s a completely debunked argument.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Because those are separate problems with separate solutions.

If people use guns to kill themselves, will they stop killing themselves if we take the guns away? Maybe some will, if the alternatives take so much more time, but the impact won’t be massive. Instead of making suicide harder, we should be treating the root cause of suicide, which is desperation (i.e. have a decent social safety net) and depression (make mental health resources widely available).

If people get hurt due to gun accidents, I highly doubt they’d be happy if we took their guns away, since that’s like solving traffic deaths by banning cars. The better solution is to improve safety features on guns and teach people gun safety so they can use them safely, or in the car example, we should be improving road design and driving education (and making cars less necessary, but that’s a separate point).

Suicides and gun accidents are certainly interesting statistics, but mixing them with homicides just makes it harder to see what’s going on and arrive at effective solutions.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Idk, I’m not a psychologist, but I have looked at studies on video games and there hasn’t been a causal link between violent video games and IRL violence. You’d think that with so much focus on age ratings and whatnot that we would’ve found something, yet that’s not the case. My understanding is the largest contributing factors are childhood abuse, social groups (esp. anonymous online groups), and bullying. I suppose some of that could happen in video games (i.e. in-game chat), but then it’s not the game itself causing violence, but the interaction w/ other players.

So no, I haven’t seen any evidence that violent video games contribute to anything. The best argument is that people who have violent tendencies tend to play violent video games, but the reverse has little to no evidence.

sugar_in_your_tea,

If you’re referring to the Kirk shooting, this was before that.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Sure, and sensible things like barriers at bridges makes a ton of sense because doing that doesn’t negatively impact anyone and merely gives people more time to rethink their choice.

That said, even with those safeguards, tons of people kill themselves. I had a friend do it by hanging, others use drugs, and some use cops.

If we look at statistics, the US has 15.6 suicides per 100k, compared to 18.4 in Belgium, 12.9 in Germany, and 16.6 in France (not trying to cherry pick here, please look up the stats yourself). Each of those countries has (largely) banned guns, yet the US’s numbers aren’t all that different, so surely guns aren’t a major contributor here.

What we need is to address the core issues here, such as access to mental health resources, more social interaction, etc. Banning guns isn’t going to meaningfully impact suicide, it’ll just shift the statistics to other methods and maybe delay it a bit. People like easy solutions, and treating the symptoms is very attractive, but it’s not a real solution.

sugar_in_your_tea,

there’s a very wide middle ground of options between “do nothing” and “take all guns away”. This is not a binarry issue.

Sure.

However, most of the gun-related “solutions” I’ve seen wouldn’t actually solve anything, or there’s very little supporting evidence that they’re actually effective (see this Twitter post by the RAND Corporation, media bias for RAND Corporation).

When it comes to suicide prevention, the most effective solution I’ve seen presented and implemented are red flag laws, yet suicide and mass shooting rates don’t seem particularly impacted by that. It turns out people are really bad at taking advantage of those laws, and there’s always the risk that innocent people get hit as well.

We already have laws in place in most (all?) of the country that, if actually followed, would prevent a lot of these cases (not suicide, but access to guns). You already can’t own guns if you have a felony, if you’re on certain medications, or have a history of mental illness. The problem is that many people don’t actually get officially evaluated for mental health, don’t report medications, etc, so the laws end up missing the very people they’re intended to prevent from getting guns.

And then when we look at suicide statistics, the US isn’t all that different from European countries at 15.6 per 100k, France at 16.6, Germany at 12.9, and Belgium at 18.4 (IIRC, guns are largely banned in those countries). The US is higher than its neighbors (i.e. Canada has 9.4, and Mexico has 7), but I don’t think that’s a smoking gun here since Europe also has a wide range (UK is 9.5 and Spain is 8.7). Guns existing doesn’t seem like a major factor in suicide rates, it just happens to be the most convenient method so it gets used the most. If guns were effectively restricted from suicidal people, the biggest change we’d likely see would be shifting from firearms to other methods of suicide, not a significant drop in overall suicide rates (though maybe an initial drop due to delayed suicides).

Real solutions here are hard, and banning guns is comparatively easy, but I really don’t think it would actually solve the problem.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I usually have 10-20 on my PC and Steam Deck. Sometimes I’m not in the mood for the 2-3 games I’m playing through, but one of my favorites sounds fun.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I’m still surprised when I see 50+ on some indie games.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Lol, gottem!

sugar_in_your_tea,

At least it’s not Obama’s…

sugar_in_your_tea,

Eh, I voted third party. Why? Because my vote literally doesn’t matter in my state, since Trump took it with >20% margin. Votes only really matter in like 8 states because the rest have enough straight ticket voters to secure the election for one of the candidates. And in those 8 or so states, the misinformation was real, so it’s understandable that many people didn’t know what they were getting with their vote, they just voted based on whatever smear campaign made them hate the other candidate more.

IMO, the fault here lies w/ Kamala Harris for running a mediocre campaign promising the “status quo” when most people wanted real change. If she ran a more interesting campaign with actual plans regular people could understand, maybe she could’ve cut through the noise and reached enough people to win.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Link’s Awakening Remake is super rad, and my second favorite Zelda on Switch (after Skyward Sword).

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

It needs to be a mix. Have your clientside anti-cheat look for obvious attack vectors, have your serverside anti-cheat look for suspicious play, and let users report others. Then have humans review suspected cheaters and make the final call.

But that’s expensive, and off-the-shelf anti-cheat gives them someone else to blame.

sugar_in_your_tea,

And anti-cheat needs a lot of access (e.g. read app memory) and sees a lot of churn to evolve with cheat engines. More churn means less thorough testing, which means higher likelihood of an exploit.

sugar_in_your_tea,

It needs it to accomplish its goals. Whether its goals are worth accomplishing is a separate discussion entirely.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I doubt the revenue from sales to cheaters is that significant compared to the risk of losing players. I think the simplest explanation is that catching cheaters is hard (read: expensive), so they’re happy with catching the most obvious cheaters with off the shelf solutions (i.e. the Pareto principle).

sugar_in_your_tea,

I refuse to play them. If they want kernel level anticheat, they can submit the source under the GPL to the Linux kernel devs for consideration, because that’s the only way I’d consider using it. No game is worth compromising my system’s security.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup. Sometimes larger studios make a good game, but most of the games I play are from indies or smaller AA studios.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup. I watch MtG Arena draft videos, and they throw hundreds with worth of resources sometimes in a single video, but they’re also making ad revenue and whatnot, so it works out. And viewer numbers are peanuts compared to more mainstream games.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Or more likely, some Karen somewhere saw face cards and complained, and lawmakers/regulators didn’t bother doing any actual research.

sugar_in_your_tea,
  1. Europa Universalis IV
  2. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
  3. Lords of the Realm II

EUIV will probably be replaced by EUV when it comes out.

sugar_in_your_tea,

So Silksong is going to be a trilogy? Rock on!

Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3% (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out...

sugar_in_your_tea,

Which is perfect for Linux. If it lives in userspace, it can be made compatible.

What game sequel ruined a beloved franchise or character for you? angielski

You fell in love with a game and it's characters, sunk hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours into it. It became a comforting, immensely satisfying part of your daily life. Then you heard a sequel was coming and got really hyped but when it came out it was utter rubbish......

sugar_in_your_tea,

Man, GTA IV is my favorite, and GTA V is my least favorite, and largely for the same reason: the main characters.

In IV, I really liked Niko and wanted him to succeed. I really didn’t like Roman, but I could relate since everyone has that annoying cousin. I just really wanted Niko to succeed at having a second chance in LC.

In V, I hated Michael, Trevor felt shallow (more backstory could’ve helped), and Franklin was a disappointment (what happened to his dream of owning a business?). Maybe they’re fleshed out more in GTA Online, but I never played it. Honestly, I was fine with them all dying since they all seemed like a waste of space, yet I had to play as them. Franklin was the least disappointing, but I really wanted him to have some interesting side content instead of an attempt of a story w/ his friend that ultimately went nowhere.

GTA SA is mu favorite because CJ’s arc is just so good.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Lords of the Realm III

1 was great, though the economy was overly complicated. 2 fixed all the issues of 1 and made combat more fun. 3 removed everything I liked and replaced it w/ a weird realtime RTS system.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I replay it every couple years because it has so much nostagia for me, and it runs perfectly on Steam on Linux (and I assume GOG). They even fixed the incredibly annoying mouse issue that I dealt with for years where it wouldn’t scroll down or to the right.

sugar_in_your_tea,

But “best RPG” though? There are tons of RPGs that won “Game of the Year”, and when people talk about iconic RPGs, Disco Elysium is rarely the one mentioned. Most people will claim Chrono Trigger, Morrowind (or Skyrim I guess), or one of the Final Fantasies (usually 6, 7, or 8). Look up any list of top RPGs and it probably won’t crack the top 10.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, but “best RPG” is a pretty crowded field that rarely includes Disco Elysium.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Not OP, but:

  • Chrono Trigger
  • Morrowind (or maybe Skyrim)
  • Final Fantasy (esp. 6 and 7)
  • Baldur’s Gate (esp. 3)
  • Pillars of Eternity
  • Fallout (esp. New Vegas)
  • The Witcher (esp. 3)
  • World of Warcraft (not my jam, but it’s insanely popular)

There are a ton more, especially if you broaden the definition to sub-genres to include Diablo 2, TLoZ games (esp. Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild), and Dark Souls.

There are just so many bangers.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Sure, but being different doesn’t automatically win you “best RPG.”

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, I intentionally picked a diverse set of examples. My point here is that “best RPG” doesn’t make much sense without qualifiers, like a year or sub-genre.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I’m in the same camp. Paying more feels bad, but it’s justified by currencies being less valuable.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The closest for me is about 5% off at Costco for a Nintendo new release that I was looking forward to. Nintendo games don’t drop much, so that was probably the best deal on new I’d probably get until the next console release.

I don’t remember the time before that, since it has probably been a decade or more.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Of course it’s inflation. Currency is worth less, so prices need to go up to get the same value.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The only exclusives AFAIK are Valve games (understandable) and games that don’t bother listing elsewhere. I also think Valve’s “no undercutting” policy is reasonable. They give you free keys to sell elsewhere if you choose, and you can have sales happen elsewhwre at a different time (or the same) vs Steam, the only requirement is that you don’t undercut Steam.

That’s very far from monopolistic behavior. Adding to that, Valve also invests heavily in their own platform, providing features like Steam Input, Proton/Steam OS, etc.

Epic, on the other hand, bribes users to come via free games, bribes devs via paid exclusivity, and hasn’t meaningfully invested in their platform, they’re still lightyears away from Steam, and even GOG is way better from a features standpoint.

Which is showing more monopolistic behavior? Epic, and it’s not even close. The only “monopolistic” behavior from Valve is being really popular, and I think they’ve earned that.

sugar_in_your_tea,

That’s a choice those devs made, not an exclusivity deal.

As for Borderlands 2, it looks like it was available on most consoles as well. It was released in 2012, which was before Steam even came to Linux, before the original GOG Galaxy, and way before EGS. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, The Witcher 1&2 were “exclusive” to Steam until ~2012 when GOG relaunched their website, so CD Project Red didn’t even bother selling their own games on their website. If they don’t, why would other devs?

I get it, I’m sad we don’t have good alternatives to Steam, but it’s not because of anything nefarious Valve is doing, it’s because their platform and policies are just better. I didn’t even have a Steam account until 2012 or so when they came to Linux, it just wasn’t necessary because everything I wanted to play was available elsewhere (e.g. direct from devs). These days I use Steam almost exclusively because they make playing on Linux so easy, not because I don’t have other options (I also play EGS and GOG games through Heroic, a community solution to support those stores on Linux because the stores themselves haven’t bothered).

sugar_in_your_tea,

To be clear, this is a different system than stores listing non steam key games.

That depends. For GOG and EGS, yeah, those stores don’t want to sell Steam keys, they want to sell keys for their own platform. But other stores like Fanatical sell Steam keys, and I’m not exactly sure how those work.

My point is that devs can sell keys on their own and take 100% profit if they want, they just can’t undercut Steam. And that’s pretty common in retail, if you see a product in store, it’ll be a very similar price to buy direct. It turns out, retail stores don’t like providing marketing just to get undercut on your website or a competitor store.

Valve doesn’t get a free pass just cause they have a better platform

Neither does EGS just because they take a lower cut and give away free games.

AFAIK, Steam isn’t doing anything differently than other retail stores. If EGS were in Valve’s position, you can bet they’d be way worse.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yes, I’m not implying Epic is forcing game devs into anything, I’m saying it’s explicitly anticompetitive. Whether a business partner wants to be exclusive should be 100% their decision and not involve a legally binding contract or coercion, because that’s textbook anti-competitiveness.

Epic isn’t iffy about others not using their launcher, so there’s an official GOG Galaxy plugin for Epic endorsed by Sweeney.

Would they retain that policy if they or GOG became #1? I highly doubt it, this is merely a ploy to try to dethrone Steam, and you can be assured the policy will change once someone else gets on top.

sugar_in_your_tea,

How can it not be 100% their decision if it’s their decision?

It’s very hard to break a contract like that. So an exclusivity contract is strictly worse for consumers than a dev choosing to only list with one platform since it removes the possibility of listing elsewhere.

Not if it’s done by an underdog

Anticompetitiveness is bad regardless of market position. They may not get hit with antitrust until they get a dominant position, but it’s not great for consumers.

The reason the Epic store was created

No, it was created so they could keep all the money from Fortnite. It’s the same reason they sued Apple and Google. They don’t seem interested in actually having a competitive platform, they just want people to buy their MTX.

still keeps their software open

Yet their store still doesn’t support Linux, and Fortnite doesn’t work on Linux either, despite their anti-cheat technically being compatible.

So don’t tell me they’re doing open, they merely want their game engine and anti-cheat to sell.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Should be feasible, many of my bills allow it. If there’s an issue w/ lag, they could always allow it only for wallet top-ups and people could use that.

But I think the issue is that if they accept these payment processors at all, they need to comply w/ their policies. Completely cutting them off could significantly hurt sales.

Game reviewers boycott publisher CGE, for publishing more Harry Potter branded products (boardgamewire.com) angielski

CGE faced an immediate online backlash after unveiling Codenames: Back to Hogwarts on social media site BlueSky on July 23, with the announcement receiving hundreds of responses attacking the decision before the Codenames account locked comments, and switched off the function allowing users to share the post alongside their own...

sugar_in_your_tea,

I thought it was great. Yeah, it doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s a solid Harry Potter-universe adventure game. It gets bonus points for being developed by a studio near where I live. My kids love HP and we enjoyed playing through it together, in fact, one of my kids made their own account and beat it before me.

The main opposition I see to it is being affiliated w/ JK Rowling, nothing bad about the game itself, other than features they wish it had.

I feel these companies stole my money by delisting game, and I'm sure others feel the same. Nobody is sure if the EU will get the law passed. So it got me thinking -- why not revive games together? angielski

There are many great games out there that had to shutdown because they couldn’t fund their servers (for smaller player bases, 100 US$/mo. should be ok). I know someone personally that wanted to downsize the server because of costs, but that would mean fewer max players in the server, which would mean snowballing is gone and...

sugar_in_your_tea,

No, mostly because I don’t like MP games. Interacting with randoms just isn’t my idea of a good time.

However, I like the idea.

  • Wszystkie
  • Subskrybowane
  • Moderowane
  • Ulubione
  • •
  • FromSilesiaToPolesia
  • fediversum
  • esport
  • rowery
  • tech
  • test1
  • krakow
  • muzyka
  • turystyka
  • NomadOffgrid
  • Technologia
  • Psychologia
  • ERP
  • healthcare
  • Gaming
  • Cyfryzacja
  • Blogi
  • shophiajons
  • informasi
  • retro
  • Travel
  • Spoleczenstwo
  • gurgaonproperty
  • slask
  • nauka
  • sport
  • Radiant
  • warnersteve
  • Wszystkie magazyny
    •