Allero

joined 2 years ago
[–] Allero@lemmy.today 5 points 3 months ago

Exactly! They've made a financial model that will collapse once the release comes in and wipes stop. And they know it.

The game is essentially screwed by its very financial incentives.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 3 points 3 months ago

None that I know of.

It was a planned official feature, but I think it rather touched small battlegrounds and not the main universe.

Unofficially, I haven't seen any in the wild. Besides, the game's economy and mechanics rely on rather very massive multiplayer.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 29 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

Star Citizen is an insane phenomenon to me. It's a good game and a massive fraud at the same time, and one fuels the other.

Let's give credit where credit is due - the game is incredibly immersive. The massive social element, ability to walk and explore things outside your ships and rovers, to customize them, to create all the inventive ways to make money and to prevent hostiles from doing the same is fascinating. It's...believable, immersive, real. No other game has nailed it just so accurately, and I would invite you to experience it by yourself, but...

But once the player's attention is caught, they become a milking cow. You want to develop in game? You have to pay up big time, lest you want all your ships and money go away with an update. They don't go loud about their wipes, and most players face them when they've reached a certain point in the game - at which point they either lose all progress, or start to buy their ships for cash. For, like, hundreds or thousands of dollars per ship.

While this may sound bollocks to someone who haven't played it, but the way it is normalized in the community combined with the element of frustration of losing everything in a universe player now cares about really drives folks to spend massive sums on the game.

Back in the pre-war era, I remember a person from Ukraine (a country with per capita GDP of ~$5000, or 1/16th that of the US) secretly stashing over $1000 to buy a new ship, adding to his ship park of $4000. His family (wife and two kids) haven't been on a good vacation for years, and this amount of money would allow them to do so several times over in the southern Ukraine, but he bought some virtual ships. No, really. He was a clan leader, so he felt like he had to have all the nicest ships at his disposal, and his only grief was that he couldn't afford the $8000 and $21000 ship packs.

The way community psychology works in the game is insane, and I believe a study could be made on how exactly was this all pulled off. Catch with a good premise, and make sure to never let the player go. I'mma be clear - what made me leave the game is not the sudden realization of its predatory practices, but simply the fact my computer started lagging heavily in the new areas, and me not having money to upgrade at the moment. I did consider buying a $400 ship just to have a decent hauler after wipes though, despite myself living in a not-so-rich of a country. Looking back at my Star Citizen experience though, I see how crazy it would be.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Elder Scrolls 6

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 32 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Russia is one of the key destinations for piracy because of lenient laws and even more lenient police practice regarding it.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I agree that hetero relationships get quite a lot of visibility, but it gets little positivity, which some people are quite sensitive to, especially among teenagers. Also, it enforces LGBTQ+ and cishets as two opposing sides, which they are not.

Faced with (undoubtedly important) messages about how queer folks and their relationships are awesome and worthy of appraisal and attention, some of the hetero teens and even adults feel left out, like they're not "cool" for just being the default.

Obviously, they are no less cool than anyone else, and their relationships are no less beautiful. And we need to talk about that too, in no way to silence the rest, but to underscore that truly any relation to gender and sexuality is equally valuable. The very pushback on LGBTQ+ is partly fueled by the resentment for this lack of hetero positivity, and we need to remove any ground for it.

LGBTQ+ and cishets are not on the opposite sides, they are all parts of the same spectrum, and so any confrontations between the two are as odd as bisexuals attacking homosexuals. To translate this idea, we should include cishets into the same positivity movement, while remembering the groups inside LGBTQ+ are still unjustly discriminated against.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Strong disagree on my part.

Immutable distros work differently from traditional ones, for which most guides and manuals were written. This is somewhat painful even for those coming from other distros, and it's gonna be a nightmare for those coming from another OS. They didn't even familiarize themselves with Linux yet, and people want them to run flatpaks, distroboxes and work with rpm-ostree or its alternatives. It's like learning to fly a plane by saving a Boeing-737 on a crash course.

Immutable options are not for newbie users, at least not in the foreseeable future.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Having tried NixOS, I gotta say the ability to quickly restore everything from a single config (its main premise) is overrated when it comes to home systems. Invaluable for production environments, though.

The rest can be done on any other Linux, and it would probably be preferred by most.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 8 points 4 months ago

On the other hand, the concerns themselves are real, and if they will be addressed in a way positive to everyone else, this will be great!

So, we'll see. Under current administration, the risks for it derailing into the hate fest are quite high, but fingers crossed.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 38 points 4 months ago (17 children)

Honestly, if done without any hate to LGBTQ+, I'm all for it. We need a nice hetero representation, and hetero relationships are beautiful. This does include trans people forming hetero couples, and hetero-demi-/asexuals, and many more, so it can even intersect with LGBTQ+ in some cases.

All relationships and sexualities are beautiful, and hetero ones are no exception.

But I doubt it'll be done this way.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Threadiverse kinda captures it, but it also calls association with Threads (by Meta), like if it's the parent of it, while in fact it's not even part of it.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Honestly, the "human extinction" level of climate change is very far away. Currently, we're preventing the "sunken coastal cities, economic crisis and famine in poor regions" kind of change, it's just that "we're all gonna die" sounds flashier.

We have the time to change the course, it's just that the sooner we do this, the less damage will be done. This is why it's important to solve it now.

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