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,

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,

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,

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,

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,

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,

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,

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,

As a game tester.

Maybe. All I read is that he was QA. That can mean anything from game tester to someone who tests internal tooling. I haven’t seen an actual description of his role.

sugar_in_your_tea,

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,

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,

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,

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.

Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? angielski

As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago

sugar_in_your_tea,

Why would they? Most people didn’t know about the petition until a few weeks ago, and I think people are largely knee-jerk supporting their favorite streamer (in this case, PirateSoftware). I don’t think there’s a concerted effort here to kill it, just people coming out of the woodwork now that it got a lot of attention.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Perhaps, but the most I’ve seen are some tenuous “evidence” about him being a little selfish in WoW, not finishing games, or using his dad’s influence to land a job at Blizzard. Neither of those are particularly bad, and certainly don’t warrant the negative attention he got. It really seems like people are looking for dirt just because they don’t like his position on SKG.

Then again, I didn’t hear about him until he came out against it, and I saw he defended Godot, which is pretty rad. That’s the extent of my knowledge about him, other than the handful of hit pieces against him people posted here once he got negative attention.

I support SKG and don’t think PirateSoftware is a bad dude. I say just let him be, and don’t watch his content if you don’t like it.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Kazakhstani

? Is lemmy.world hosted by Borat?

sugar_in_your_tea,

Really? From the 5-10 min of his videos that I watched over the last 2 weeks when trying to figure out why people dislike him, I didn’t see any of that nonsense. That’s really too bad if true, because he seemed like a pretty level-headed guy who was a pretty laid-back gamer (no yelling or other form of aggression, which is unfortunately common among streamers). I watched some clips of:

  • take on Godot - defended Godot despite some missteps and (IMO) correctly pointed out that their PR person probably got overrun after a somewhat controversial comment that was apparently intended to be a joke (the “woke” post)
  • take on SKG - got a little unhinged in his follow-up video, but I hear there were swatting attempts after the first, so I understand the frustration
  • an “infamous” clip of WoW where he allegedly left his teammate to die (but he was clearly following other orders to run)

That’s about it. He didn’t seem like a toxic person who routinely trolls and screws people in games, just kind of your average, run-of-the-mill streamer who’s a little low-key but still out there to create content to get people to watch.

Then again, he could totally be the jerk you make him out to be. It’s really hard to tell what’s a legitimate explanation of things and what’s people looking for a reason to slander him because they don’t like his take on SKG. The couple of articles I read seemed to mostly be the latter, but they also didn’t mention most of what you did here. So idk, I guess I haven’t made up my mind about him, but honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth digging into because I’m not into his content anyway.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Domain and IP resolve to California, but it’s a cloudflare IP, so who knows where it actually is.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Dr. K

This one? He sounds like an awesome dude according to his bio, but I’ve never seen anything by him, I’ll check him out.

And I haven’t seen any conversations between him and Ross. I did see snippets of his original reaction, where he seemed to completely misunderstand the petition, and his follow-up, unhinged rant, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the latter because he had apparently gotten a lot of negative attention (swatting attempts, calls for him to leave the publisher he was at, and random negative remarks on his own games), so I think it’s quite possible his attack on Ross was an emotional reaction to that negative attention, and not level-headed attack on Ross (I’ve seen nothing to suggest Ross is anything other than an awesome guy).

So my opinion on PirateSoftware is relatively neutral. He seems to be on the better end of the streamer range, which isn’t saying much (lots of popular streamers are pretty toxic). I don’t think he’s anyone to look up to, and I wish he’d either have Ross on to discuss the petition or thoroughly read and understand it so he can elucidate his opposition to it, both of which I think would be helpful for his audience to form an actual opinion instead of borrowing his. But maybe he’s on the worse end of that spectrum, I don’t know, since again, I’ve only watched a few minutes of his content and he seemed like your average streamer who exaggerates their credentials and leans into “content,” and I’m not surprised clowning on people is part of that.

I literally had not heard of him a month ago, so I’m missing a ton of context. However, nothing I’ve seen makes me want to watch more of his content (he’s definitely not my style), but nothing makes me think he should be “cancelled” or whatever. Aside from some offensive remarks, I don’t think he’s really hurting anyone.

sugar_in_your_tea,

No, I explicitly said I don’t have a strong opinion on him. I’m not going to knee-jerk follow the hate train just because of a bad take on SKG and a couple of emotional videos where he said some moderately offensive things. Maybe he’s really a bad dude, idk, but I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Perhaps, which I think is really unfortunate. I think he misread or misunderstood what the petition was about, and doubled down instead of taking a step back.

But he’s not going to be making a bunch of accounts on random message boards like Lemmy to try to kill it. The more reasonable argument is that some of his fans and other people who disagree w/ the petition are attacking it, not that he or the games industry cares enough to come here and spread FUD, I think regular people are dumb and emotional enough to do that for them.

sugar_in_your_tea,

misrepresent what he even did at Blizzard to appear like an authority

Isn’t that par for the course for streamers/youtubers though? I’ve seen people claim to be “indie game devs” when they’ve never actually released a game, or if they did, it made so few sales as to be little more than a hobby.

After some very quick research about him, it seems his dad helped him get a job as a QA at Blizzard, and then he worked his way up to doing something cybersecurity related. That doesn’t scream “nepo baby” to me, that’s just a dad being awesome helping their kid get their foot in the door, and my dad would do the same for me if I expressed any interest in his career. If he was given a project lead role or something right out of school, then I’d agree w/ your assessment, but a QA a not a very glamorous job, he’s probably testing some boring component of their stack. Likewise, cybersecurity also isn’t very glamorous, he probably ran pen-tests or something on their servers (maybe not even game servers), it’s a decent job, but not something that would give him any authority since he’s not making important gaming-related decisions.

That said, having worked with important people probably gives him some valuable insight, and I’d like to see him expound on why he thinks things are problematic. All I saw in the videos I watched is some hand-waving and inaccurate statements (i.e. studios would need to release code or some nonsense), which tells me he didn’t actually read the petition. I didn’t watch the full thing, but apparently he read the FAQ where Ross explains what the petition is not about, and he probably just skimmed that. I think that’s unfortunate, since he actually has industry experience and might have something valuable to add to the conversation.

narcissistic bully

Again, I haven’t watched much of his content, but I did watch what I think was a relevant part of the original VOD. Here’s how I saw the WoW thing (I have never played WoW, so I’m probably missing something):

  1. they’re all working their way to the boss together
  2. they start getting wrecked, so some (all?) decide to bail
  3. he casts some spell to help his team get out, using up the rest of his mana
  4. his teammate is about to die and asks for help
  5. he keeps running, as was the plan
  6. he gets roasted for not helping out, and explains that we has out of mana and couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to

That sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe he could’ve said it better (seemed to be playing the “cool and collected streamer” role), but I think his actual actions were reasonable.

But maybe there’s something he could have done. I don’t know WoW well enough to know what options he would have had, but from my perspective, returning to help would’ve just meant he’d die too. And my understanding is that in this game mode, that represents a lot of investment, since the character would be deleted upon death, so it makes sense to be careful. I hear they worked it out after the stream, so his team apparently didn’t think his behavior was all that bad.

And then I look at the reaction. I see several articles slamming him for his behavior in that VOD, and a lot of the backlash citing that as justification for hating him. That seems way over the top, so I think the only rational takeaway is that other streamers are making a big deal out of very little, and people are latching onto it w/o actually looking at the facts and taking what they read for granted.

That’s why I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon. Maybe he’s as bad as everyone says, but I haven’t seen enough actual evidence of that. Each time someone has provided some evidence, I looked at it and didn’t see anything damning, just normal streamer behavior. I think people are making a big deal about it because they strongly disagree w/ his take on something else (say, SKG) and are digging for dirt.

So yeah, that’s my take.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Doesn’t take accountability for anything. Cannot say sorry.

Have you seen a popular streamer that does? If they do, it’s more like “sorry you feel that way.” To get a decent sized following, you need other people to see you as some kind of authority, and most authorities don’t apologize, they do some amount of damage control and move on.

That’s a big part of why I generally avoid popular streamers/youtubers. Most of my favorite YT channels have like 100-500k subs (and several well below 100k), and I only sub to a few w/ over 1M, and most of those are on the more humble end of the spectrum (e.g. Gamers Nexus). I don’t jive well with wannabe authority figures, so I’m not surprised PirateSoftware didn’t appeal to me. In fact, most of those talking head channels aren’t interesting, I want facts, not opinions, and I do validate the more important facts.

Or that all his previous credentials are fabricated

Why would he? From what I gather (from a random wiki), his dad helped him get a QA job at Blizzard, and then he moved up the ranks to cybersecurity. I don’t think anyone would lie about that, since those aren’t “glamorous” jobs, but they are solid jobs. So my level in trust in what he says takes that into account, whatever he learned about the AAA gaming industry he learned by being present, not by being in any impactful role.

coding Jesus

That guy rubs me the wrong way too (assuming you’re talking about Cr1TiKaL/penguinz0). I’ve gotten through maybe 2 min of one of his videos.

sugar_in_your_tea,

he’s repeatedly refused to talk to ross;

Yeah, and that’s what disappoints me the most. I think suck a conversation could be productive and really suss out where PirateSoftware is coming from. Maybe there’s more to it, but w/o that conversation, it just seems like he misread it and is doubling down relying on whatever meager credentials he has. That’s sad, because I’m sure he absorbed something useful in his years working w/ game devs.

helped spread the drama

And honestly, that makes me want to watch those other streamers less. I used to watch SomeOrdinaryGamers, but him repeatedly getting into YT drama (and claiming he didn’t like it) turned me off, and now he’s apparently back on that same trend. I’m sure those other YTers have decent takes, but I just really don’t like all that drama.

Ross’ petition should succeed because it’s a good petition, and that’s obvious from the text of the petition. It doesn’t need YTers to create a bunch of drama about it.

ross wasn’t at all vindictive in his video

Yeah, Ross is a stand-up dude. He made a big deal about not wanting to get into drama, but that he’d do whatever was necessary, and the result was a very reasonable rebuttal. I’d like to buy him a beverage of his choice, he seems awesome.

sugar_in_your_tea,

And which bandwagon would that be?

sugar_in_your_tea,

Do you have specific examples of him making multiple accounts to amplify a message? If so, that would certainly change my opinion of him and would explain a lot of the unsubstantiated claims made here.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, I haven’t found a reason to care about PS beyond showing courtesy to people who went out of their way to provide receipts for their claims. I also haven’t seen enough to warrant ruining his life. That’s about as much effort as I care to spend here.

The bigger concern is what happens at the EU. Surely that’s where corporations are going to focus their energy, because it’s a lot easier to convince some bureaucrats than millions of gamers. Sure, some negative press helps, but the real impact is made by lobbyists.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Has to be right on everything and when it’s proven he isn’t, either doubles down or just simply denies being wrong.

That sounds like a lot of people here on Lemmy honestly, and I think that’s pretty common.

I used to appreciate some of his content but given his pattern of behaviour, including bullying, the negative attention he’s gotten is pretty deserved.

I think this is the issue. He had a lot of fans and they were let down. I think the real issue is people looking up to random streamers/influencers. It’s not unique to YT/Twitch, but politicians and celebrities aa well.

I don’t like it. If you don’t like someone’s content, don’t watch it, and don’t burn the place down on your way out.

sugar_in_your_tea,

You’re missing a step here. 3.5. He chooses not to use the items he has that would have restored his mana

That does change things a bit.

I’ve never played WoW and generally avoid MMOs, so I don’t know how everything works. I just assumed mana items are a time effect thing, so he would’ve needed to plan ahead. If they were already bailing, there’s no reason to use them on the way out.

and avoiding all the other evidence that’s out there you haven’t seen

Well yeah, I can’t know what I don’t know.

Those were the best examples provided to me, and they didn’t seem as bad as people made them out to be. I just have to assume the rest is more of the same.

I’m happy to look at more though. But honestly, I don’t know what you’d gain from that, I already don’t watch his content and support SKG. I guess I might repost some links for others to check out if they’re also confused by the backlash.

playing another MMO on stream

Someone else mentioned that here (today?), and that’s certainly enough for me to not want to watch his streams. I already avoid a lot of the popular streamers for being disrespectful to random opponents, and doing that to someone on your team is absolutely unacceptable.

I still don’t think that warrants the response he got, from calls for resignation to swatting.

sugar_in_your_tea,

excessive negative attention

Yeah, that’s basically what I’m pushing back on. The internet community loves to jump on people and dig up random dirt when they do something unpopular, and a lot of that dirt is exaggerated if not completely fabricated. Look at the response to the Godot tweet about being “woke” for an example of that (which PS rightly defended Godot for).

He may be a POS, but I don’t think he deserves what he got. He deserves to be less popular, sure, but not much more than that.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I’m pretty sure it’s in the US. I’m in Utah (pretty far western US) and ping times are like 10-15ms, which is consistent w/ a west coast server. I have a VPS in Germany, and pings are more like 100-150ms.

I’m not exactly sure how pings work w/ cloudflare, so maybe it’s hosted somewhere else, but I would imagine they’d get a cloudflare host near their VPS to minimize latency.

sugar_in_your_tea,

literally none of the games had been review-bombed.

I saw some “review bombing” on his game Heartbound. Long term reviews are 62% (mixed, 3000 reviews), and recent reviews are 8% (600+). When I checked a couple weeks ago when the whole thing was fresh, I swear the overall was positive.

To me, that’s review bombing. The game had been out for ~7 years, and nearly 25% of the total reviews are “recent” (many since the end of June).

So my take here is that he was worried that reaction would spread to the other studio, which I guess never materialized.

He filed a lawsuit

That’s really lame. Games should be allowed to use free expression, barring blatant slander.

Any consequences Pirate faces are all of his own doing

I disagree, but I don’t know much about him. I don’t think anyone deserves to be publicly lambasted unless they truly are a public menace like Trump. Tell people to avoid his content, sure, but his work at a game studio should absolutely be unrelated, provided he’s not given a platform for his unpopular views.

sugar_in_your_tea,

But what’s his profit motive? He makes mediocre indie games and did some undefined work (probably publicity) at an indie publisher. I don’t see any material change to him financially whichever way the petition goes. He’s kinda popular, but far from a big influencer.

That argument doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.

fear of missing out on profits, if he ever gets his game out.

This doesn’t make much sense. The obligations only kick in once the game gets shut down, so either he makes so much that it doesn’t matter (can keep running the servers for a long time) or it doesn’t sell well and he just releases server binaries and cuts his losses. Even in the worst case (his misunderstanding), releasing server sources isn’t an issue for a failed game, and a small cost to pay for a very lucrative one.

I think he’s just an opinionated guy who sticks with his initial impression, even if it’s wrong, and will oppose anything that sounds inconvenient for game devs (what he sees himself as). That’s sadly really common, people seem to love jumping to conclusions and only really dig in if the easy assumption negatively impacts them.

all the creators that jumped on that particular wagon were dead silent on the initiative in the first place.

Exactly! But honestly, that should be expected because their entire job is to get views.

The only one I kinda like on this subject is Gamers Nexus, because they actually approach it like journalists instead of just reacting to headlines. They’ll interview companies and people to get both sides before making a hit piece. Even then, GN can rub me the wrong way when they pursue something too far.

never understood the appeal…

Same. I watch only a handful:

  • FlorryWorry - he’s the best at EU4 and goes deep into the mechanics; I’ve become a much better player from watching his videos
  • MTG draft streamers (NumotTheNummy, LSV, NicolaiBolas) - great at explaining plays and picks
  • Hikaru Nakamura - chess streamer, second in the world, good at explaining plays

Notice a pattern? I watch people who are better than me at a game so I can learn to be better myself. I don’t watch action game streamers, mostly strategy games.

I’ll occasionally watch YT videos when I either don’t have time to play a game, or I am stuck and need help getting through a section.

sugar_in_your_tea,

MatPat

Hmm, never watched him. Looks like he has tens of millions of subs, which is probably why I’ve avoided him (I generally like smaller channels).

When he did security, he did social engineering.

Maybe I just have more industry insight, because when I think of cyber security, I think of people auditing computers (do you have the corporate spyware installed?), running automated pen test suites, etc. Most of it isn’t particularly technical, and most security audits I’ve been a part of (and we do them every year) are black box testing, meaning they don’t have the code. Even in the one or two audits we did that involved the code (needed a higher tier audit for government contracts), most of what they checked was just dependency versions, they didn’t look too closely at the actual code.

Outside of high profile security researchers, I see most cyber security jobs as the security guards of software dev, they make sure you keep the doors locked, but they don’t force you to use reinforced doors or whatever, they’re just there to tell you what the obvious weak points are.

then I’m lying by omission

Which pretty much everyone does. If someone doesn’t go into detail, it’s pretty safe to assume there’s nothing to brag about.

That said, even if you only mowed the grass at the White House, you’d pick up on a lot of stuff about politics. You’d notice who the regulars are, important peoples’ routines, etc, not to mention what you pick up on through random small talk with people there. There’s a reason spys target people like janitors and landscapers, they don’t realize how much they know so their guard is down. That’s social engineering 101.

The janitors at Blizzard know more about AAA software development than the average gamer. A QA would know even more since they have more direct access to the devs and designers.

Whether you’re telling the whole truth or not about your credentials is irrelevant if you can prove what you claim. That’s why I’d like to see PS and Ross talk, so it would be easier to tell what’s accurate from what’s BS.

C++ developer

Ah, ok. I assumed the other guy because was pretty public with his criticism of PS and has long hair.

I haven’t heard of that guy either, probably because I’m more into Rust than C++, and actually avoid C++ like the plague (I much prefer C).

sugar_in_your_tea,

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,

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,

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.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Some routers will let you configure a VPN onto a VLAN or SSID. Set that up and configure your Switch to use it and you’re golden.

sugar_in_your_tea,

No. Well, you could, but it would be super complicated. You’d need a wired connection from the Switch to your PC and know how to configure a network bridge (kind of like putting a phone into hotspot mode), and your PC would need to be up (not sleeping) for it to work at all. You could do the same with a Raspberry Pi and a WiFi dongle, but again, you’d need to know how to configure it.

It would be much simpler to buy a decent router to put in front of your ISP router, or replace it altogether (you probably can, but I’d need to know more about your ISP to say for sure). I use a Mikrotik router without WiFi and a separate WiFi access point, and the Mikrotik router supports setting up a VPN. They’re not all that expensive (maybe $100), though they can be a bit daunting to configure because they have a million features. Basically, it takes all traffic from connected devices and tunnels it through the VPN, so that computers aren’t aware that it’s connected to a VPN.

Basically, a VPN sends traffic over an encrypted channel somewhere else, kind of like a digital ethermet cable. Most applications aren’t aware of it at all, and the VPN connection is only available on that computer. The only way to share a VPN connection is to connect the device to a machine with the VPN configured and tell that computer to send all traffic from that connection to the VPN.

I hope that makes sense, I’m happy to answer any questions.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Awesome, it should work. If the Switch doesn’t allow setting the IP directly (no idea if it does), you may need to configure DHCP on your PC, and how complicated that is depends on what OS you’re running, but it shouldn’t take more than a couple hours to figure out if you’re good at searching for stuff.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Video games do, which is why I buy so many story heavy games. If the industry moves more toward live service games, that’s fine, I’m just not going to buy them. There are plenty of non-live service games to choose from that I’m absolutely spoiled with choice to the extent that I’ll never play all the games I own, not to mention games I want to buy.

Yeah, live service games suck, so play games that don’t suck.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Only if you let it.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Eh, I play everything through Heroic. I haven’t paid a dime to EGS, but I’ve claimed a fair number of games, so they just live alongside my GOG purchases.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Don’t connect your Steam account? Also, make your Steam profile private.

sugar_in_your_tea,

More role play I suppose?

sugar_in_your_tea,

I got banned as well, and I’m still not sure why. I’ve never sold anything, and I’ve only bought a handful of things and sent money for rent a few times.

I think someone hacked my account, because I hadn’t used it for ~10 years before noticing that I was banned when I tried logging in again.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Microsoft?

sugar_in_your_tea,

When most people refer to capitalism, they mean free market or laissez-faire capitalism. Many (most?) of the issues you mentioned require government to step in to occur. For example:

  • trusts - government structure to protect wealth
  • oligopoly - failure of government to prevent collusion (price fixing and whatnot are expressly anti-competitive)
  • regulatory capture - government must be complicit since regulations are typically a government thing

I think government has a place in protecting the free market, but it needs to be restrained so it doesn’t get manipulated into destroying the free market. For example, a regulation could protect consumers, but it could also raise the barrier to entry and prevent competition from correcting the underlying problem.

A lot of the issues stem from corporate welfare, where wealthy people are able to manipulate corporate structures to build their own wealth and protect themselves from liability. I think it’s largely those liability protections that encourage anti-competitive behavior. End the protections and courts can meaningfully punish corporations when they break the law.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If the market is sufficiently free, you only need a handful of experts to look past the BS and inform the public. In the past, we called those people journalists, and they would hold bad actors to task.

The issue seems to be that government has given in to moneyed interests and allowed them to shut down critics. If we had actual consequences, like jail time or confiscation of personal wealth for illegal behaviour, I think it would self-correct.

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