The Expanse was fantastic. I’d love to see the rest of the books adapted some day…
As for other sci-fi, my god there’s so much good shit in literature that will never be seen on a screen.
The Three Body Problem is getting several adaptations, one of which might or might not fix my issues with that series, but it does have conceptual potential.
I enjoyed the federation reborn as well. I have an opinion.
The writers were so busy patting each other on their backs with how “deep” they were being with symbolism about the importance of communication, that they went and made the whole cause of the burn a child being lonely on some planet somewhere so they could twist the burn into a big symbolic point about how “if only we had been a little better” something like it would never have happened.
It was so fucking telegraphed that I saw it coming episodes away and was rolling eyes every time the show referenced this symbolic circle jerk.
No. Shit happens. The universe doesn’t care, and it WILL fuck your shit up, I would have been far more impressed with the crew rebuilding the federation after an inevitable natural disaster, making a point of life finding a way despite the random crap reality throws at us, and how communication and understanding is one of the things that help us do that.
Star Trek is supposed to be optimistic, not delusional, and as such the core message of that season rings hollow. It’s too hopeful. Instead of “we might not be perfect, and we might not know what’s coming, we know we are enough” it was “we’re nearly there, we just need one more step to be perfect, and nothing bad will ever happen because of this ever again”.
I’m not denying any part of what you’re saying, I’m saying that this specific case is currently working fine, and that it is merely an example of the kinds of solutions I want to see enabled.
Obviously the bigger the community, the more complex the solution needs to be, and the more bases have to be covered. You’re nitpicking a specific example I gave (and doing so from a position of ignorance concerning northstar and its community), rather than my ideological thesis. Which is that communities should be empowered with social structure so that cheaters can be properly ostracized. Spyglass is just one way for a community to implement that.
Northstar isn’t big enough to even begin to compare with discord or minecraft. The concurrent playercount on all servers put together seldom matches ONE big minecraft server.
If the factors you bring up become a concern, I’m ready to pick up the tools to deal with it myself, as I’ve already done before. But so far, there has been no need.
No choice? I can still apply my own bans on top no matter what the mod does. Spyglass isn’t what enables bans, it just makes them networked and tracked. And I could modify the mod to work however I like, or even fork the whole thing and make my own database.
That’s not been necessary as Erlite has been maintaining the spyglass mod and database with integrity.
There’s no chokehold here, no problems have arisen, and if they do, only then are additional solutions warranted. I’m not suggesting this is the final solution for all games, but that this kind of community driven counter-cheater work, is.
Cheating is being treated as a tech problem with a technological solution, when really it’s a social problem which should be solved with inter-social solutions.
Apparently any further sales of the game will have a cut going to even the staff that was laid off.
That’s commendable, but overall this is still an unfortunate development. I wonder if microtransactions in big games like apex and genshin are down this year? Is this an overall trend, or are people choosing to spend on one game, foregoing titles like Jumplight Odyssey for bigger spending on one (arguably less deserving) game.
While that’s all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same… Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.
Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.
For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.
Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.
Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.
But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you’re in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you’re in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.
Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it’s a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.
Cheats will only grow more advanced, at some point you’ll be able to train an AI to play exactly like a human, but while performing perfectly far more reliably than a human.
The line between what skill looks like versus cheating will only get blurrier.
The real long term solution is to enable the vetting of players (not by the game company or god forbid the government, looking at you china), by returning to community based servers/private matches. And to have reports dealt with faster and by people who care about the game personally.
As a member of the Northstar community, cheating is basically a solved problem for us atm.
There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
They seem to consider only massive franchises like GoW and TLoU and Horizon worth their time… But most gamers need variety outside the mainstream game genres, so I don’t see why they are shutting down anything with a smaller fanbase.
It’s software. I’m pretty sure my linux desktop can do this… It’s not a special feature, exactly, the system state gets saved to RAM, and then the CPU goes to sleep.
On resume the kernel reads the state from RAM and puts everything back where it was and things continue from the exact same point from which they were suspended. Theoretically.
It’s a complex sequence, and windows sleep is famous for getting it wrong on lots of hardware configs. I’ve had trouble with it on linux, as well, almost always relating to the GPU.
Valve very likely put in some work to have it work as well as it does on SteamDeck, but theres no reason it couldn’t work on any given device.
That’s because it’s not a product. It’s an experiment for figuring out what they as a studio might be able to do with something new and untested. This is a trial run of a new engine, and they simply decided to publish the result for others to see.
This is more like publishing research findings than trying to market and sell something for a profit. Whether the result is good or bad, it’s informative either way.
We want lots of smaller corps competing, not just a couple giants. Every merger is one fewer of the former, regardless whether it forces one of the existing big corps to step up their game.
Not that ABK was small, and for once I’m split because holy hell did it need new management.