sugar_in_your_tea

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, miesiąc temu

Lol, gottem!

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

At least it’s not Obama’s…

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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, 2 miesiące temu

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.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

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.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

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.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

I’m guessing there’s legal pressure from some countries, and to stay in their good graces (i.e. ward off alternatives), they’re making these policies global.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

Amex and Discover are ubiquitous too, at least in the US. I honestly don’t remember the last time I went somewhere that they weren’t accepted, but there was a couple weeks when Visa wasn’t accepted at a grocery store because I guess they were renegotiating their deal or something (local Kroger chain).

My Discover card has foreign transaction fees, so I don’t check when I leave the country, and I mostly use my Visa since it does waive those fees.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

Here are the options:

• credit - visa, MasterCard, discover, American Express (all ubiquitous)
• debit - mostly mastercard, some are visa
• Prepaid cards - mostly MasterCard and Visa, amex has one too
• mobile Payments (Samsung, Apple, Google) - you pay using credit or debit; I’ll include PayPal here too
• cash - doesn’t work online obviously, and some places don’t accept it or at least discourage it (e.g. many self checkouts, food trucks, smaller restaurants)
• checks - like cash, but many stores don’t accept them at all

Some online places accept bank transfers, but that’s mostly for paying regular bills, not anonymous checkout.

There are some fringe ones like money orders (basically cash), cryptocurrencies (very rarely accepted), and Venmo (mostly just food trucks, fairs, and small restaurants).

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

They at least took credit, but I’m guessing there was pressure from other areas as well. Hopefully this campaign will help reverse this policy.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

Most games require killing the end boss to finish the game, how exactly would you play around that? Or do you mean don’t kill anyone who doesn’t try to kill you?

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

All those games you listed are violence centric, so I imagine the non-violent route isn’t as satisfying. I tried to finish Dishonored (not really an RPG) without violence, but most of abilities involve violence and getting caught just meant waiting for them to kill me instead of fighting back. The gameplay just isn’t optimized for it like something like Thief is.

There are games designed for non-violence where violence simply isn’t an option, such as Disco Elysium or WanderHome. Searching specifically for games without violence is probably a better option than finding games where nonviolence is an option, unless you’re specifically looking to find clever ways to play games non-traditionally.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

Taler isn’t a general payment solution, it’s designed so that separate entities can have their own way to handle small transactions. For example, you attend a conference and deposit some cash into the event, and then you go and use those tokens to exhange for various stuff at the event, and the event organizers settle up with merchants after the event.

Rolling this out on a more global scale mea a you’d need some major institution, like a bank, to back the currency and handle settling up. AFAIK, this hasn’t happened anywhere and isn’t likely to happen because banks already have a system that works that requires far less effort: credit and debit cards.

We already have a solution here that has some market presence, and it’s cryptocurrency. Get some Monero and you can go buy stuff today without those transactions being public. The fees are minimal, transactions are fast, and merchants exist. The main issue is the negative public perception of cryptocurrencies, which is mostly due to speculation and bad actors running scams, but there are solid, proven currencies that can be useful as a cash alternative.

sugar_in_your_tea, 3 miesiące temu

Ross Scott is an absolute treasure, and I’m kinda sad that he has never made more than €63k euros in a given year. He deserves more for all the work he has put in.

I’m not European, so if you are, please do what you can to encourage your reps to support this.

sugar_in_your_tea, 3 miesiące temu

I honestly don’t know, but since he ended up in cyber security, I’m guessing it wasn’t games testing, but probably internal tooling. Orgs like Blizzard have a lot of non-gaming related tech, like websites, databases, etc.

I haven’t seen any disclosure about what his role was, just that he started as QA and ended up doing cyber security, both of which likely didn’t involve any coding.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

social engineering

It’s also probably the most common type of breach. It’s way easier to compromise tech support than find a vulnerability, so it makes a ton of sense for a company like Blizzard to have an auditing team to test the various attack vectors.

A lot of roles like QA and cyber security sound glamorous, but that’s because people like glamorous titles. If you’ve spent even a tiny amount of time working in a relevant industry (in this case, anything touching computers), you should be able to read between the lines. That “sanitation engineer” is probably just a janitor or garbage truck driver, not the person in charge of the city water filtration services or something.

scavenger hunt badge

I haven’t been, but yeah, that sounds likely. Things like that are to get people new to the industry excited, not to actually challenge hardcore hackers.

I’ve attended and even spoken at some tech conferences, and they’re like 90% entry level stuff with a handful of interesting events and talks that actually break some new ground. I’m in senior level position now, and conferences are something I’d send my juniors to for networking and to get an idea of how they want to grow their career, but I don’t really attend anymore. I imagine cyber security conferences are similar.

Ask him what SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK are

Lol, that’s basic TCP stack stuff, I doubt he would’ve gone that low level at a company like Blizzard. You get to that level when you’re looking for amplification attacks at a place like Cloudflare or the military.

At Blizzard, they most likely want to make sure they’re up to date on security patches, their tech support is following the proper scripts, and IT isn’t getting lazy reviewing reports and whatnot. Basically, liability coverage in case there’s a real breach so their insurance can cover any losses.

But yeah, streamers like to appear like they know their stuff because that’s what gets people to watch.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

ve been to some, never spoken though… also, not DEFCON though.

Yeah, I’ve spoken at local JS and Go confs with several hundred to a couple thousand attendees (my sessions were small, like 30 people), and attended a couple others.

DEFCON is much larger, but looking at the schedule, it seems pretty similar, a mix of relatively entry level stuff and more advanced topics. So someone attending doesn’t say much other than that they’re interested in cyber security.

Its like getting a 2 year nursing assistant degrer and then acting as if you can safely perform a brain surgery.

Interesting. I haven’t watched enough of his stuff to know what claims he’s made.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

Interesting.

So TL; DW for anyone that made it down this far: PS’s mod made a Twitch alt presumably for the purpose of buying bits to keep a hype train going. Whether this is legal or consistent with the Twitch TOS is debatable.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

he obligations have to be considered during development.

They should be, but my understanding is that there’s only a penalty if they kill a game without an EOL solution, and what their EOL plans are don’t need to be complete or even stay the same during development. The wording is really flexible here and allows companies a lot of room to explore different options.

If a company can’t redistribute the server code, their options include (and there are probably more):

• write and release a functional replacement
• document the API spec for a functional replacement and help the community develop it as the EOL approaches
• cut out the server bits, or have them gracefully fall back (e.g. for something like Dark Souls, drop the MP feature)
• find a replacement that allows redistribution and make the necessary changes before EOL

That’s certainly easier to do at the start, but my understanding is that the obligation only kicks in once the servers are shut down.

And yes, it’s not “free”, but it’s basically free for an indie shop that likely built the server from scratch or used something FOSS. And that describes PS.

sugar_in_your_tea, 2 miesiące temu

various developers have been digging into his code

This just feels like bandwagoning. I’m a dev with tons of years of experience and I’m sure I could get some views of I jump on the train and pull up some sloppy code. But sloppy code doesn’t make something unreleasable, in fact, the browser or app you’re using to read this is guaranteed to have a ton of sloppy code.

I think the main explanation is that he’s not working on it actively. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s not the one writing the code. Maybe he is, idk.

I’m merely pointing to the huge influx of reviews since the drama started on a game that claims to have been launched 7 years ago on Steam. My understanding is that the game has been stalled for years, so why would it get so many reviews now if it’s not review bombing?

I’m guessing that’s where the “review bombing” claim is coming from, not from games published by the publisher he was working with.

He said they had been review bombed, in the affirmative

He has a history of exaggerating and not doing proper research. I’m looking to understand why he said what he did, and my explanation makes sense to me. He probably saw a bunch on his game and a few on the publisher’s other games and jumped to conclusions, which is exactly what happened with SKG.

it’s getting really weird

Then I’ll clarify my motivations here. I hate the internet culture of jumping down someone’s throat the moment they make an unpopular statement. They go through their history and dig up random dirt, much of which is exaggerated or even blatant lies, just to smear them to ruin their reputation.

I absolutely hate that, and it contributes to the misinformation problems we have today. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard and embrace the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.”

So in cases like this where there are a lot of emotions, it’s especially important to look for innocent explanations before assuming guilt. YouTubers and streamers will absolutely jump on the bandwagon to get views, assuming one of the extremes because that gets views. We, as viewers, have the obligation to take a step back and look for motivations to suss out what is true from what’s likely sensationalized.

I’m providing an alternate perspective to hopefully encourage others to take that step back and consider that there may be more to the story. It costs me nothing other than some time (which I’m usually spending on the toilet, let’s be honest), and hopefully it helps preserve a little of what I love about the internet: open discourse where facts rule the day. That seems to be dying, so I do what I can to preserve it.

admittedly based on ignorance

Well yeah, I’m not going to claim something is true unless I can back it up, and when I can, I usually link that evidence. I want others to follow suit and actually back up their claims instead of regurgitating what someone else said just because it aligns with their opinions. Facts should rule the day, not feels, and that’s what I’m challenging here.

I don’t have a strong opinion WRT Pirate Software. I don’t watch his content, I don’t buy his games, and I don’t care what orgs he is involved with. I do care a lot about misinformation and brigading, and that seems to be happening in this case.

If you provide sources, I’m happy to review them so better informed. I’ve done that with other commenters, and I think that process has been helpful for everyone.