“Aqun-athlok” means one who was born one gender and is now living as another. So yeah that means trans. But there’s also a conversation in the trans community about if Non-Binary is technically trans. I would argue it is but some disagree and others say that while Non-binary is trans it is not a “normal” type of trans. That Non-Binary is not either gender. Sometimes Non-Binary is literally no gender. Non-Binary is it’s own umbrella term. So it’s not necessarily living as “another” gender, it can be living in between genders, without gender, or as both genders.
So i would say that “Aqun-athlok” is probably more applicable as binary trans as it was used to refer to krem who was a trans man. Now they could have just thought up a new word for Non-binary trans but Non-Binary is just kinda the perfect word for it. I’m Non-Binary and I actually think saying this is immersion breaking is just kinda bs. Plenty of words in our world also exist in Dragon Age. Not everything has to have a different word. For instance, Dwarves are a thing in our world. Sure they’re not the same, it’s a medical term, but they still exist. But the Dwarves in Dragon Age are still called Dwarves. Why are they not a different name? It’s a fantasy world, shouldn’t they have made up a new word instead of using a word from our world to describe these people? No, because Dwarves is just the word that fits best. Non-Binary here is the same.
Now whether or not it is written well is a better approach to this discussion but also, every trans person has experienced the exact thing that this writer describes, except it’s not always pushups. I’ve had people feel incredibly guilty over misgendering me and done some stupid stuff. When I hear this being described I don’t think it’s awkwardly written, I think it’s an accurate representation of what it can be like being trans and how some people will just be like that when they misgender you.
I also think calling it “preachy” is 100% playing into the narrative it’s Woke because people don’t call CoD preachy even though it’s filled with pro military propaganda. Why is this preachy just because it accurately shows an experience that trans people have all experienced in our own lives?
I haven’t gotten to this place yet in the game and I might end up finding it awkward, but I more likely expect to actually relate to Taash more because of it.
Anyway, just my thoughts from a trans dragon age fan.
There's no magazine on any instance that I see of such a community on the topic matter. To anyone not familiar, a patient gamer is someone who is immune to FOMO, doesn't get caught up or tied up with current modern gaming. Someone who doesn't care that they've beaten a game from 1996 and here it is 2024. Someone who doesn't care...
Finished Metro: Last Light last week. Have to say I didn’t really like it. Spoiler warnings below. The good bits were good, to be sure: the populated stations of Bolshoi and Venice were phenomenal and there were parts that harked back to the highlights of the first game - the early parts with Pavel for instance and some nice levels in the tunnels. Playing on Survival Hardcore there were passages that were phenomenally immersive and enjoyable, and I do love the world building around the communities in the metro.
The story just didn’t land with me. The political war left me completely uninterested and the love story with Anna was so half-baked I almost wanted to stop playing right there when the sex scene happened. I also didn’t really like the overly supernatural stuff like the River of Fate. It was also kind of hard for me to follow the logic of the narrative at times as it felt like Artyom was just kind of drifting around and happened to end up where he needed to be regardless. He also should have died like a dozen times, but I guess he’s a superhero.
The moral system left me frustrated more than anything now that I knew about its existence (I played 2033 completely blind). Finally, the boss fights felt terrible and really out of place in a game that should be about tension, loneliness and stealth. Artyom was too much of an action hero here for my taste. There wasn’t really anything like the great Library level in 2033. When he picked up a gatling gun at the end like a russian Rambo and fought off a horde of enemies I was rolling my eyes.
Still, I’m glad to have gotten through it finally - this was my second attempt - and I am interested to see what they did in Exodus as I’ve heard nothing but good things.
For now I’m taking a breather and tackling Bioshock 2, another backlog game to get through before being able to play Infinite, which is the game I’m really looking forward too.
As far as I can tell, it’s what you suggested. I don’t really care about a fork because of a rogue community manager. Their Foundation apologized, and I suspect they’ll try to do better.
A single instance does not a pattern make.
ETA: and by “rogue,” I mean someone who acts on their own apart from discussing with the team, but still represents them as if they did. I think she was justified to block some of those trolls, but she was a bit overzealous, blocking LGBTQ folks in the process.
Either way, trans rights are human rights. Fuck this fork.
Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the...
I dislike the narrative that something is “unfixable”, everything is fixable if there is a will to do so.
I don’t know why game developers seem to have inhibitions of changing the game too much after release. For instance reworking and extending the main story in a game seems to be a big red line for them.
For instance I would have wished in Cyberpunk 2077 to actually play Vs introduction into Night City and the individual fixers myself, instead of just watching a cut scene. A DLC could have extended the start of the game a bit.
The same for Starfield, they could extend and improve the main story, characters and locations in an update, but seem hesitant to do so. Something like directors cut, that adds cut content as well as tons of side quests into the game.
If people still want to play the original game, they can make the extended story optional, like sleecting what version you want to play at the game start.
For bugs, they could work together with the community and the “unofficial patch” and engine fixer modders, instead just ignoring them. In Skyrim SSE for instance they still had many of the same bugs that Oldrim had and where fixed by thr community.
Bethesda could improve, and even fix their games, if they would decide to do so. Their DLC just doesn’t seem to be worth what they ask for, it could have been just part of a free update, so that some more people buy the base game.
Oddly-enough, it doesn’t on lemmy.today’s Web UI, but it looks fine on beehaw.org’s Web UI. Not sure if there’s some sort of problem with propagating updates, or if it just takes a while, but I reckon that you’ve done the right thing if it looks fine now on the instance hosting the community.
I have been getting into emulation though there is no emulation community here to talk about it. I assume emulation discussion in gaming is welcome any thoughts?
Well we don’t “pre-open” the communities😅 . The hope is that emulation enthusiasts would naturally realize our instance is the best fit for that sort of thing.
Wait, I thought that only applies to communities on that instance, not to a case like this, where you are on another instance? Are you using an app or a browser based way to access the fediverse?
Although I don’t see that as the icon for the community. I use Connect for Lemmy and this community shows that it doesn’t have an icon, so perhaps this is a default icon set by your home instance or preferred frontend?
Who cares? The community will have player made expansions in a year that will likely be free and of higher quality.
Regardless, BGS is a shell of its former self. Whenever I see people clamoring for TES 6 I just scratch my head and ask why?
Starfield was the final straw for me, I will never get excited for another Bethesda game again. They’ve shown that they refuse to truly shake up their game design. When people asked if Starfield would have the same magic as FO3 or older TES games, they said, “it’ll have the same DNA.” I assumed that meant it’d have fun exploration and interesting quests. While it has some decent quests, the exploration is utterly tedious and just unfun. I truly wish they’d had just focused on fleshing out 2 or 3 planets in one solar system, maybe some instanced, hand-crafted dungeons/whatever outside of it. I have zero interest in exploring proc gen worlds, it’s not that fun in No Man’s Sky and it’s not fun here. At least with NMS, it’s all relatively seamless.
Hey everyone, I’m a big player of Space Games of all forms, and this mini-genre (or ‘theme’, if you prefer) really has a TON of range and depth, and is a very fertile ground for indie and unique projects. I was recently playing a game called Avorion, after owning it for years without ever really engaging with it, and...
A couple of years ago, the TF2 community came together with the #SaveTF2 movement, which managed to get a reaction from Valve but little more than that. The game has gotten some bug fixes, VScript support and 64-bit builds, but there’s been no action taken against the true problem – the bot crisis....
what are some proposed solutions we think Valve can implement to solve this crisis?
One of the most critical things they have to revert is the voice command mute of F2P. This kills a very important game mechanic for newcomers, while not really stopping botters, since they will just spend money and unlock the features for their accounts, as it’s evident when you join a casual match.
Another obvious thing is: improve VAC. And to reply to your next point, yes, it is a joke. No, it’s not a joke because it’s not a client-side anti-cheat. Lots of community servers operate essentially with no cheaters, because they employ better protection SourceMod plugins and empower users further. For example, Uncletopia and Skial are very much bot-free, and creators.tf was too, before it shut down some months ago (due to unrelated issues). If the community can develop these effective server-side plugins, so can Valve, and most likely do a better job at it. They have incredibly talented people working there, I’m sure they could make a way better VAC if they wanted to.
And yes, community servers are currently the salvation for people who want to play TF2 unencumbered by swaths of bots. I play mostly on Uncletopia nowadays because I agree with most tweaks they apply (it’s not 100% vanilla casual) and the skill ceiling is a bit higher as well, which pushes me further.
Some sort of federation of community servers, where bans and whatnot are shared between instances sounds like a pretty good idea.
Edit: Ultimately, however, Valve should fix the vanilla casual mode, that’s where the vast majority of players are, and where newcomers will first go to.
Each Sims game is quite different. The biggest difference is between Sims 1 and 2 simply due to the change from isometric 2D to 3D graphics. Not the first game in the genre to have 3D graphics and they weren’t even particularly impressive for the time nor good compared to its competitor, but the charming animations and attention to detail make it a far more enjoyable experience than the comparatively sterile predecessor. Sims 2 ended up becoming an evergreen with very long legs, to the point that people are still playing it, although it helped that EA distributed the complete version with all add-ons (the game is older than the term DLC) for free for a while (you can still find it if you know where to look).
Sims 3 was fundamentally different from Sims 2. Gone were the isolated homes of the predecessor (initially in Sims 2, you couldn’t even see your neighbors’ homes unless you were on the map screen; later they added in low-res stand-ins) and instead, it’s an open world game where you can see your Sim commute to work in real-time. Neighbors can be visited without going through a loading screen - it all feels more organic as a result. Customization saw a huge upgrade as well, the AI was improved, etc. Sounds nice in theory, but the problem was that it was too ambitious for PCs of the time. This series has traditionally attracted non-gamers who don’t deeply upgrade their machines all that often and instead play on laptops bought for homework or old rigs inherited from big brothers. Sims 1 ran on a toaster, Sims 2 on a pizza oven with some kind of GPU grafted to it - whereas Sims 3 was one of the most demanding games of its time in order to facilitate gameplay changes that few people actually asked for and rounded, bloated looking Sims that are somewhat offputting. It was still a massive success and a huge hit with modders as well, but Sims 2 remained popular due to its more focused nature, the fact that it ran on anything and the fact that it was complete with a massive library of add-ons that took years to be replicated in Sims 3.
Sims 4 reset the series back to Sims 2, but went too far initially, limiting player freedom in regards to neighborhood creation. Instanced homes returned, customization features and open world of Sims 3 were cut, the AI saw a massive improvements, Sims didn’t all look obese anymore, hardware requirements were modest again - but at the price of having incredibly intrusive DRM, an attempt to monetize the proud modding community and being very bare-bones in the beginning, requiring years of DLCs to reach feature-parity with Sims 2 and 3. IIRC, even pools - an absolutely essential part of Sims lore - were missing initially. All of the improvements to the building mechanics in particular were overshadowed by EA’s corporate nonsense. It’s come a long way since though. Just like with the predecessors, buying all DLC at once will make you poor - but the base game is free now and the actual intention is that you only buy the DLC that have features or items you care about. The modding scene is as vibrant as ever, making any non-feature DLC unnecessary anyway.
This series is an interesting and unique phenomenon. It’s a prime example of something that only ever truly works on PC. All of the many console, mobile and browser spinoffs and ports were nothing but mere blips on the radar, because fundamentally, it can only work on a platform as open as the PC. It primarily attracts female players who rarely play anything else, yet dive deep into modding and modifying every little aspect of these games like the most hardened PC nerds. It started out and still is in many ways a faksimile of ideal American suburbia, although enhanced by both some quite subversive humor and subverted by an astonishing level of player freedom that goes against the conformity of the real world - while at the same time replicating the fads, consumerism, cliques, feuds and other less wholesome aspects of the real world through its behemoth of a community. It’s ultimately a platform for individual creative expression and the worlds (both in-game and outside of it) that emerge as a result of it, a sandbox that was only ever bested by Minecraft, which literally broke everything down to its individual building blocks. Each game and its DLCs become more like car payments to seasoned players, something you pay for so that you can travel where you want to go, which in turn keeps the experience fresh, finances further development and prevents the community from getting stagnant as it has to learn to adapt to changes from the developers.
I’ll end this here. This wasn’t meant to turn into an essay and now my fingers hurt, because I typed all of this nonsense on a touchscreen.
A lot of the larger abandoned magazines are just spam pools now. I don't see their posts in my feed, but I don't like that the two sidesbars of random posts and threads are now just spam advertising sidebars. I triedblocking the magazines, but doesn't that prevent the posts from showing in those sidebars....
Most of the content being federated to my instance from kbin appears to be mostly adverts for websites selling pharmaceuticals - usually advertising controlled substances.
After a couple from the same magazine(? kbin’s term?) I just block the community. But it’s pretty non-stop. I guess it’s not yet considered to be worth defederating, but yowsa.
fly to planet > choose operation > select mission > “helldive” down to the surface to complete an objective (evacuate civilians, launch ICBM, eradicate swarm, etc) > complete optional objectives and gather resources > call down a shuttle and extract back to your ship > spend resources on upgrading gear and your ship > repeat
The ship provides “stratagems”, basically various forms of orbital support. You can call down mechs, orbital bombardments, automated weapon emplacements, etc.
The enemy’s designs are very varied, it’s possible to sneak around them and the gameplay down on planet surfaces is generally just very diverse compared to other hoard shooters. Mission types are many, guns, stratagems and gear are many.
There is also a macro game, where all completed operations contribute to the war effort as a whole. All players are fighting the same galactic war, though each mission is always a four player max instance. Playing on a certain planet will contribute to its occupation/defense/invasion, and what planets the community spends their time on, determines where ground is gained or lost.
The developers can host a few servers, sure, that’s an option. If that’s the method they take, they also release what’s known as a dedicated server utility, that allows anyone to launch a dedicated server on their machine, or to rent out a server in a hosting center. You can find this model in games such as Counter-Strike, Quake, Unreal, and some of the Battlefields.
This allows for the community to self police, and people will naturally end up in a community that fits their preferences, and rude or toxic players will quickly find themselves banned from the majority of servers and be forced to change their behavior or play a different game. Players can modify server settings, or make entirely new game types that the developers may not have thought about or wouldn’t have the resources to create, and people can create tools that allow servers to easily moderate their servers, and elect moderators and admins from within the community for when they’re not online. This also allows for developers to negate the need to be able to host millions of players, and when the game dies, if it does, all they have to host is a Master Server list.
——
Another option, especially for games with small groups of people is to allow the game to be hosted live by one of the players in the squad or group. This is called peer-to-peer servers. In this case, and can either be done by “hosting” the game server and waiting for or inviting players, or by having the game monitor latency and automatically migrate to the best host based on connection and distance. Deep Rock uses the first of these two options, whoever starts the game becomes the host, and stays that until they close the server or quit the game. In this instance, devs host no servers except the master server list, allowing even the smallest of devs to be able to handle millions of people playing their game simultaneously without any real increase in their server costs.
Typically, for smaller squad based games, like Deep Rock, this is the better option, while for larger player per match games like battlefield, the former is the better option. In both instances, players choose from a list of available servers in a menu and load in from there. You can check out Deep Rock Galactic or the Diablo 2 Remaster to see what a server list looks like.
Like, this is what leads to invasive client-side anti-cheat. Which also happens to be one of the main blockers for OS portability.
But if you make it so that the server has to constantly validate the game state, you get terrible lag.
You really have to design your game well to deter cheaters. And you have to empower server moderators to ban cheaters. This sorta implies releasing the servers so that communities can run their own instances, because these studios don’t have the resources to handle moderation themselves.
Lots of places that list ernest as the only moderator. Some I've seen are on communities such as: fediverse, internet, opensource, science, random (which also pulls content from various places, which had the added minus that spam from other instances will not have deletions federated). Even the ask communities are sometimes hit, or for instance in this community there's a spam thread for pills in Dubai right below this one in new (from 2 days ago).
Specifically I'm talking about stuff you'll either see piled up in the new feed OR in the 'random threads'/posts section. My new feed isn't lotsa spam like it was earlier, but the sidebar currently is.
I don't know if you saw my last thread about KES in this magazine
I did. I would still be commenting about it as I don't think extra stuff should be necessary to fix a problem like this. Filters should exist especially for new accounts (even the most cautious implementation could make a big difference), comparing names to banned accounts before account creation too (or shadowbanning so they don't just choose different names).
because it loads content that, AFAIK, doesn't respect your actual block settings
Oh yeah, funnily enough the one thread in my image that isn't spam was from a community I blocked. (at least I think it was, hard to tell with different instances)
Also to add to my list above, I just noticed a lot of spam posted in the food community. Also checking from the top of the magazine list with default sorting: tech, TodayILearned, space, showerthoughts, programming (though some of the spam is related SEO-type garbage). Books has 1 piece of spam and 1 user (probably bot given the post with 503 - Service unavailable in a title) who just aggregates Amazon links+descriptions.
except it doesn’t work well for the rest of lemmy/the fediverse.
many other instances seem to be getting hit by this, but they don’t have as many activities generated locally for this to become much of a problem. additionally, this is mostly affecting instances with high latency to the instance that is being flooded by kbin, as lemmy currently has an issue where activity throughput between instances with high latency can’t keep up with too many activities being sent. the impact of this is can be a bit less on smaller instances with smaller communities often not having as many subscribers on remote instances, although we’ve seen problems reported by some other admins as well. this includes e.g. kbin.earth, which i suspect to have been hit by responses from a lemmy instance, while the lemmy instance was actually only answering the requests sent from that kbin instance.
during the last peak, when we decided to pull the plug for now, kbin.social was sending us more than 20 activities per second for 7 hours straight. lemmy.world can easily handle this amount of activities, but the problem arises when this impacts our federation towards other (lemmy) instances, as e.g. votes will get relayed by the community (magazine) instance, which means, depending on the type of activity being sent, we might have to be sending out the same 20 requests per second to up to 4,000+ other fediverse instances that are subscribed/following the community this is happening in. trying to send 20 requests per second, which lemmy does not do in parallel, requires us to use at most 50ms per activity total sending time to avoid creating lag. when the instance is in australia, with 200ms+ latency, this is simply not possible.
ps: if you’re wondering how i’m seeing this post, you can search for a post url and comment urls on lemmy to make lemmy fetch them, even if they haven’t been directly submitted through normal federation processes. this requires a logged in user on lemmy’s end.
I know this is an old post, but to answer the last question - to become a mod of an abandoned community, you generally need to message an instance administrator (in this case, @tedvdb) and request to be added as a mod.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Clumsy, Preachy Political Messaging Does More Harm Than Good (www.forbes.com) angielski
Not sure how particulary I think about it....
Are you a patient gamer? (kbin.melroy.org) angielski
There's no magazine on any instance that I see of such a community on the topic matter. To anyone not familiar, a patient gamer is someone who is immune to FOMO, doesn't get caught up or tied up with current modern gaming. Someone who doesn't care that they've beaten a game from 1996 and here it is 2024. Someone who doesn't care...
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of October 27th
Whatcha all been playing?...
Godot fork- Redot emerges after recent events within the Godot project. (github.com) angielski
EDIT context from know your meme of all places Apologies :D :...
Starfield's first DLC is one of the worst Bethesda DLCs of all time angielski
Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the...
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage First Look Accolade Trailer (youtu.be)
So excited for this!
Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening angielski
I have been getting into emulation (discussion)
I have been getting into emulation though there is no emulation community here to talk about it. I assume emulation discussion in gaming is welcome any thoughts?
Recommendation engine: Downvote any game you've heard of before angielski
This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options....
Any Sins of a Solar Empire communities? angielski
Since Sins 2 just came out today, I hopped on Lemmy and was wondering if anyone else around here plays it, and where you hang out?
What's up with the icon of this community? (fedia.io) angielski
What does it have to do with gaming? Or is there bug with my instance?...
Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset (www.gamespot.com) angielski
Thoughts on Space Games, Part 1: Top-5 AAA Games angielski
Hey everyone, I’m a big player of Space Games of all forms, and this mini-genre (or ‘theme’, if you prefer) really has a TON of range and depth, and is a very fertile ground for indie and unique projects. I was recently playing a game called Avorion, after owning it for years without ever really engaging with it, and...
If you like TF2, sign in the petition #FixTF2 #SaveTF2 (save.tf)
A couple of years ago, the TF2 community came together with the #SaveTF2 movement, which managed to get a reaction from Valve but little more than that. The game has gotten some bug fixes, VScript support and 64-bit builds, but there’s been no action taken against the true problem – the bot crisis....
Let's discuss: The Sims (beehaw.org) angielski
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...
Could blocked magazines no longer appear in Random Post and Random Thread sidebars? (kbin.social) angielski
A lot of the larger abandoned magazines are just spam pools now. I don't see their posts in my feed, but I don't like that the two sidesbars of random posts and threads are now just spam advertising sidebars. I triedblocking the magazines, but doesn't that prevent the posts from showing in those sidebars....
deleted_by_author
"PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" (lemmy.world) angielski
Tarkov studio claims it actually doesn't have the server capacity for everyone who bought the game for $150 to play its upcoming PvE mode, still wants players to pay extra (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
KES 4.1.0: Improving the signal to noise ratio by blocking unsolicited ads (kbin.social) angielski
The blurb below is excerpted verbatim from the release notes. For the full release notes, see here....
Banning spam accounts (kbin.social) angielski
Banning spam accounts on kbin.social is a cumbersome affair....
Lemmy.world has gone read only to us (kbin.social) angielski
We'll still get their content but be unable to interact.
Community has no moderator, who is interested?
As pointed out in this post, this community has only one mod listed (@reusable_rocket), and they haven’t interacted with Lemmy for 6 months....