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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • Some people like developing an artistic skill. This is that. Fuck up on the piano? Start that part over and get it right this time. Fuck up in elden ring? Start that part over and get it right this time. Both have acceptable amounts of variation that lead to success. Elden ring is in fact easier, because things can change that aren’t solely your skill level (stats/gear). There’s a lot of reasons the souls series and similar games are conducive to speedrunning, this loop of self-improvement is a major one.

    When I read comments like yours, they come across as saying “practicing anything is stupid and I do not see the benefit”. It’s easy: practicing anything is fun and you only get to see the benefit after you fail, then succeed. If there’s some mental disconnect you have where you can’t envision success for yourself, or you think succeeding won’t be fun, it certainly isn’t the fault of the game or the community.






  • As a US citizen I am painfully aware that I could dip down to mexico and buy a competent EV at 35~40k USD value in MXN. Alternatives in the states, even produced here, are upwards of 50k for the poverty model. Maybe the engine itself is cheaper, but the vehicles absolutely are not (unless you are being denied options by your government as part of an ongoing slap fight).



  • Sure the industry is gaining money, but you’re ignoring specific company shutdowns and restrictions that shaped the industry out of the hands of certain players. There have been a lot of regulatory fingers in the pie, particularly above state level, that weren’t aimed at making the populace safer but instead at making those companies unable to produce or sell their most popular products. There’s also a lot of legal language bites like “e-cigarette” and “open container” that are seeing non-uniform interpretation in legal states, across vape legislature and cannabis legislature alike.

    Draconic legislature isn’t quite turning the country into a hellscape for consumers, sure. But it’s clearly a possible side effect that isn’t being considered, especially as states are beginning to take it upon themselves to start outlawing studied hemp-derived cannabinoids (like delta8/10 or THC-P or THC-A) that are provided for under the 2018 farm bill.

    Tl;Dr while the industry is growing, it’s clear it has enemies with legal power and that’s the crux of the complaint.



  • The good news is there’s a couple of decades where games in this style WERE real-time for the most part. A majority of players seem to like turn based a lot more, but neverwinter nights and the earlier baldurs gates have a pause-assign actions-unpause flow rather than turns.

    With pen and paper d&d, guidebooks explain that turns represent about six seconds of action. Some of the older titles took this seriously and it makes trying to use mages in small parties absolutely insufferable, especially at early levels with a low concentration skill total.

    Hilariously, this is one of the VERY FEW genre where I find I do prefer turn-based personally. I didn’t turn on ATB mode in ff15, I refused to use strategic view and pausing in dragon age, but for CRPG I’ve found solidly defined turns to really help drive my decisionmaking.








  • You should look into the origin of the word meme. It’s not terribly old and you clearly don’t understand it. You’ve also gone and thrown away your benefit of the doubt by arguing semantics on what’s clearly meant to be a lighthearted and hyperbolic comparison. Propping up random ideas and putting them, as words, in someone else’s mouth is dumb as hell. Pretty sure there’s hundreds of places online where you can argue with other people who don’t know the difference between socratic and aristotelean logic.


  • The same thing actually passing a turing test would require. You’ve obviously read the words “Turing test” somewhere and thought you understood what it meant, but no robot we’ve ever produced as a species has passed the turing test. It EXPLICITLY requires that intelligence equal to (or indistinguishable from) HUMAN intelligence is shown. Without a liar reading responses, no AI we’ll produce for decades will pass the turing test.

    No large language model has intelligence. They’re just complicated call and response mechanisms that guess what answer we want based on a weighted response system (we tell it directly or tell another machine how to help it “weigh” words in a response). Obviously with anything that requires massive amounts of input or nuance, like language, it’ll only be right about what it was guided on, which is limited to areas it is trained in.

    We don’t have any novel interactions with AI. They are regurgitation engines, bringing forward sentences that aren’t theirs piecemeal. Given ten messages, I’m confident no major LLM would pass a Turing test.


  • While it was the complaint, the game did mention a required PSN account on all storefronts. This was disabled when auth/login was unplayably bad on launch week, then not re-enabled until a while later (with a week long heads up for new players and a month long heads up for existing players). Nobody actually got locked out of the game, and as my PSN account is registered somewhere I do not live, I don’t think anyone would’ve been stopped playing by the change if it had been pushed.

    What we “won” and sony “learned” is that they can’t get accurate metrics on playercount since HD2’s statistics aren’t being tracked correctly by the game’s session system and the playerbase is uncooperative. In this era where data is king, this just means we’ll stop seeing Sony funded helldivers ads on youtube while they market their giants that correctly report the data they’re looking for that helps them make a userbase that prints money.

    Oh, and we marred the all-time and recent review score from overwhelmingly positive. Guarantee you the successful action was the steam refund count on the game - truly unsolvable problem. As refund requests that don’t meet an automatic metric need a reply, and resolution usually takes ~an hour, the 6 digit refund count was not realistically solvable without rolling the requirement for a legitimate PSN account back. You can track how many total refund requests steam has day by day, as this is a public count in steam’s support page. There were 800k more than the average weekend.

    Tl;dr: while the complaint was this, the reality was not. The review bomb hurt arrowhead’s relationship with sony more than it hurt sony. The refund bomb didn’t cause steam to change policies this time but damn if it isn’t justified now.