Zagorath

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

The video will be on YouTube later. I think NJB puts his videos up one week after the Nebula version?

fwiw though Nebula is not “a random site”. It’s the creator-owned platform that NJB and a bunch of other YouTube channels are on that helps give them a more reliable income source than the fickle YouTube algorithm, while being far more affordable and practical for the end user than supporting dozens of different individual people on Patreon.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

Ironically (or perhaps completely unironically) the bundle requires a very weird workaround to get it to work in Australia.

Anyway, I redeemed it and got all those games added to my account. I doubt I’ll ever even install any of them tbh, but I just felt like saying “screw you” to my compatriot.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

I found this solution worked for me in Australia. It involved clicking a link to add the bundle to my cart, and then another link to check out, rather than going through the normal process.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

I found this solution worked for me in Australia. It involved clicking a link to add the bundle to my cart, and then another link to check out, rather than going through the normal process.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

We can blame the religious organisation as much as we want, but the fundamental problem here is payment processors. They should be common carriers. Content-neutral middlemen who facilitate payment to anything that isn’t literally unlawful. This is no different to an ISP throttling access to Netflix because they operate their own streaming platform. If the storefront, the developer, and the buyer are all ok with a transaction, there’s no good reason for a fourth party to stand in the way of that.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

The regressive asked the payment processors to do this. The payment processors themselves are the ones that actually did it. The regressive barely had any actual leverage. The payment processors chose to cave.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

You’d have to ask them.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

Infiltrated? Who said anything about infiltrated? Are you just making shit up now?

What happened is incredibly simple.

1. Some regressive organisations with no power other than persuasive power told payment processors to stop supporting NSFW content.
2. Payment processors caved in to this pressure and told Steam and Itch that their current NSFW content is not allowed and to remove it.
3. Steam and Itch, wanting to be able to keep making revenue at all, responded to this demand by removing NSFW content.

Anyone can do 1. I could go to Visa and say “stop promoting cats, tell Steam to stop selling Stray and Little Kitty, Big City.” It’s up to Visa whether or not they consider my pressure worth responding to. If they do, Steam has to stop selling Stray and LKBC if they want to stay in business. The blame here lies with Visa for choosing to listen to me even though, in this scenario, I’m being a total fuckwit. In reality, Visa would turn around to me and say “lol no, fuck off”. (Or, more likely, ignore me entirely.)

3 is an inevitable result if 2 occurs. If they can’t take in any money, they can’t continue selling any games. They can’t afford to pay the bills for their servers, or pay their employees, or anything. The only option is to give in.

That leaves 2 as the variable. They decide whether to respond to the pressure or not. And they deserve the blame any time they do.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

Jesus christ are you just trolling at this point?

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.

Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that. And being able to read, to access the Internet, to do the many other things provided by library services are fundamental to the human experience or to modern society. You shouldn’t be prevented from these because you cannot afford to pay. A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.

And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”

Well, no. Things being at the whim of who has the most money is what turns it into “money buys right”. It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it. If libraries were paid, that would certainly turn access to reading into a “money buys right” situation.

Simple laws are great, and you should avoid laws that allow loopholes. But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.

in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives

Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.

in not wide enough participation

This thread is not about any one particular country. In fact, it’s specifically about multinational companies bowing to the pressure of one minor lobbyist. That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.

Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.

in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government

We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.

I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance. I have no idea what 6 is even supposed to mean. 7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

I’m also quite disappointed at the change from playing a thinblood to an Elder kindred. I thought the idea of exploring thinblood lore could be really interesting and it would be much more interesting to roleplay someone who starts the game mostly human, compared to a completely inhuman monster right from the start.

Zagorath, 3 miesiące temu

I can’t imagine buying a porn game on Steam. And even if I did, incest holds no interest to me.

Even so, I absolutely fucking hate this crap. Payment processors are killing off content despite the producers and consumers of the content being completely fine with it. This should be a Net Neutrality issue. But I’m not seeing anywhere near the same outrage over it that there was over ISPs doing the exact same thing.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

My theory is that it’s because people who are into it must be really into it, but people who aren’t into it are very good at ignoring the fact that it’s titled like that or that there might be one or two throwaway lines implying it (especially when it’s “step”). So there’s an incentive for uploaders to title things like that and for creators to add a little nod in the video towards it (without adding too much incest roleplay) because it draws in a large audience and actively turns away very few.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

lemon stealing whores …

Dare I ask for context?

Zagorath, 3 miesiące temu

Devs have numerous options for how to address the SKG initiative. The top three that come to my mind are:

• Release server binaries (along with modifying clients to have a setting to connect to the right server)
• Modify multiplayer to work over LAN (good when the server’s only/main job is matchmaking)
• Modify the game itself to no longer require online connectivity

In the case of live service games, I would suggest option 3 is the most appropriate. If the main gameplay is singleplayer, but it’s online so you can dole out achievements and gatekeep content, the answer is simple: stop doing that. Patch it to all work in-client. And keep in mind that this will be a requirement at end-of-life from the beginning. If it’s an unexpected requirement, that’s going to be a huge development cost. If it’s expected, making that EOL change easy to implement will be part of the code architecture from the start.

Zagorath, 3 miesiące temu

There are, it may surprise you to learn, different types of game that have online connectivity for different reasons. And the appropriate EOL response may differ across those games.

“Live-service” games where the main gameplay is singleplayer but an online connection is required so they can enforce achievements and upgrades (…and “anti-piracy” bs) may be best served by simply removing the online component so it can all be done locally.

Online competitive games can be switched to a direct connection mode.

MMOs and other games with large numbers of users and a persistent online server can be run on fan-operated servers, so long as (a) the server binary is made available, and (b) the client is modified to allow changing settings to choose a server to connect to (it could be something as simple as a command-line flag with no UI if the devs are being really cheap).

Zagorath, 3 miesiące temu

But that’s not changing the design, really

Depends on what one means by “change the design”. It doesn’t make a fundamental change to the deeper architecture of the game, no. But it does require some relatively superficial changes, which are themselves a design problem of sorts.

Zagorath, 4 miesiące temu

I lived in Busan at the time this project was done, and visited Seoul only a few weeks after it opened. I didn’t know anything about urbanism at the time, I just knew it was such an incredibly nice place to be.

Zagorath, 4 miesiące temu

It’s called Cheonggyecheon, 청계천. Google Maps in Korea is really, really poor (for legal reasons). The satellite quality doesn’t even come close to capturing this (you can barely even tell it’s there), and Street View is just from the road (as of 2018 at the most recent) where you can see that it’s there, but not get much of a sense of it. There are a very small number of those individual non-path Street View photos.

Zagorath, 4 miesiące temu

Sponsorship? This is the Nebula version, there wouldn’t be any sponsorship. Did he accidentally leave it in and I just blanked that out?

Zagorath, 5 miesięcy temu

Out of interest, how does that site classify Age of Empires Definitive Edition (and aoe2:DE and aoe3:DE) and Age of Mythology: Retold?

Zagorath, 5 miesięcy temu

And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison

Updated how exactly? Oblivion and Skyrim both have pretty serious flaws. I believe there are popular mods to fix the Oblivion system in a way that still feels like Oblivion, though it’s been a long time since I’ve read in to any of it.

Zagorath, 5 miesięcy temu

I managed to find aoe3 and aom on the site by using a site-filtered Google search. Couldn’t find 1 or 2, but with both of those that I found being “remake”, I suspect the two I didn’t find would be the same.

It’s interesting, and perhaps highlights how vague the line is between remake and remaster. AoM I can see being called a remake (at a bit of a stretch), but 2 & 3 are pretty solidly remasters in my mind, due to being entirely in the original engine with just a bit of new QoL features and improved graphics added.

Zagorath, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

Yes I think so. He also runs his own Mastodon instance at notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com.

Zagorath, 5 miesięcy temu

You mean the omafiets of OSes, surely.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

I’m very nervous about the game’s future, given the AoE3 remake was just officially mothballed last week and AoM has fewer active players on Steam.

But for the game in its current state, I’d say that yes, it’s really, really good. It made a fair few changes from the old version, nearly all of which are excellent improvements. They said their goal was to make this game the game you remember playing through nostalgia goggles, rather than being strictly faithful to the original, and I think they did that really well. You can build bigger armies and reuse god powers. Better quality of life features, etc.

The Chinese expansion releases next month, and they’ve committed to at least one more expansion after that (by preselling the Premium Edition with the first 2 expansions). Aztects or something else from the Americas is likely. If it turns out those expansions are going to be cheap and rushed and crap just to meet their contractual obligations, that’s really unfortunate. I really hope that won’t happen. But in the worst case…the game with what they’ve released already is really good.

Feel free to head over to !aom if you want to discuss more.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

I’m not aware of any allegations relating to Age of Mythology or any of the Forgotten Empires–lead Age games. It would strike me as unlikely, given the nature of these games as remasters of ancient code by a group formed initially as modders for AoE2.

A different situation from aoe4, which was developed primarily by Relic, which is a much more conventional game development company, and was developed from scratch.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

I don’t play a lot of big budget games where this kind of thing tends to happen. Probably the worst experience I’ve had has been thanks to confusion caused by multiple remasters.

Age of Empires 2 released in 1999 with an expansion in 2000. It was rereleased in 2013 as the HD Edition on Steam.

Then it was rereleased again as the Definitive Edition in 2019.

And I have seen people get confused and buy the HD version when they meant to get DE. Not quite the same as the OP because it’s not caused by malicious anti-consumer bullshit. But that’s the closest I’ve been.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

Oh, so they have. I dunno what that means precisely. I think I saw they stopped selling the old AoE3 version, but last I checked AoM EE and AoE2HD were still for sale, but deliberately greyed out and renamed to make it clearer that they’re the old versions. Not sure if they’re still for sale or not as of now.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

Mobile is undoubtedly the worst. It’s unbearable. Hardly even a game.

I’ve never played the DS game. I might put Age of Empires Online in this spot instead.

It’s unfortunate, to me, that 3 ended up this low. It’s not my favourite, by a long shot, but it’s functional and fun. Which is more than can be said for the DE version of 1. I love the bones of 1, but the DE was terrible. So terrible that they tried releasing it again in the Return to Rome DLC for 2.

Which leaves us with the 3 good games. Being the mod of !aom, nobody should be surprised that my favourite is Myth. 4 is actually my second favourite, and 2 is only in 3rd place. But Myth still has too many bugs and missing polish features. Even though it’s my #1 favourite, if I was asked to list which I think is the best, I’d put it in 3rd.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

It’s a huge improvement over the original. They’ve made a bunch of balance improvements without infringing on the unique identities of each civ (which is unfortunately what happened when they tried to do balance changes to the 2013 Extended Edition). The graphics are all new and now look how the game is in your nostalgia, rather than…how it actually looked. You can build bigger armies, and reuse god powers (for a cost). There’s improvement in quality-of-life features, like modern hotkeys, as well as tools to assist with scouting and eco management, if you’re a lower-skilled player who gets overwhelmed by all the multitasking.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

Different, unrelated franchise. Age of Empires is real-time strategy. Civ is turn-based.

Civ V is my most-played civ though. It was a great game.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

I’ve heard that Online is actually a pretty good game, once stripped of its monetisation strategy. It seems to have a decent community of loyal followers with Project Celeste.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

I genuinely do love AoE2 and would rate it among my favourite games of all time, but yeah I think it gets a little overrated.

4 is better, IMO, and Myth is just great.

The AoE2 community gets pretty damn toxic if you dare suggest that, though. Or even if they get a whiff that you might be saying good things about other Age games at all.

Zagorath, 9 miesięcy temu

Of any game? Codenames. Was playing with family when the clock struck midnight.

Of computer games, it was probably Kerbal Space Program, which I’ve just started to get into again over Christmas for the first time in years.

Zagorath, 9 miesięcy temu

This back and forth from the comments on the article is interesting:

What the article ommits: The youtuber in question has a long history of threatening smaller channels with various actions against them, from brigading to lawyers to copyright strikes, if they do something he doesn’t like and don’t bow to his will. So I’m not surprised to see someone was fed up with him eventually.

Two wrongs don’t make a right as my nan used to say. This YouTuber being a bit of a grunt does not negate the fact YouTube itself is happy taking a hands off approach to a fundamental part of their business model because the ones it affects are not the ones that give them most of the money.

Of course it’s a problem, I just feel 0 sympathy in this case and I find it ironic that it’s him especially that got hit with the same treatment he threatens others with.

Zagorath, 9 miesięcy temu

Platforms actually do get more leeway than is usually thought with DMCA takedown requests. If they believe it to be fraudulent, they have every right to disregard it. That’s a fact they conveniently try to downplay because they want people to think they have no responsibility for their actions.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

fwiw in my experience, most Age of Mythology: Retold games last about 10–15 minutes. So you could usually get 2 games in if you’ve got half an hour free.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

I should say, this is when I play ranked games at a slightly-above-average Elo. RTS games have a reputation for trending to go much longer at very low Elos because players aren’t good at doing aggressive strategies. I dunno how much this would apply in AoM though, compared to AoE2 (which is my main source for this point) because defensive buildings are much stronger in AoE2 than AoM.