ICastFist

Copy-pasting a comment from Aurich (Ars Staffer):

I set up the Ars Mastodon instance, and speaking as a relatively educated and technically savvy person I found it extremely confusing. And the more I learned later the more I don't feel remotely bad about being confused, it's honestly pretty messy.

I put Ars on the main instance, and I think it was the right call. We're not going to maintain our own, at least at this time, and trusting a random instance that's very difficult to vet is kinda sketchy.

We ran a guest editorial a while back that I think really clearly outlines the various issues:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigration-didnt-quite-pan-out/

But you know, it's really okay. It doesn't have to be big, or popular or mainstream. As long as it survives and people like it? That's good enough.

I think going into an era of balkanization of social isn't the worst thing.

One of my complaints with Mastodon and similars is that you can't search only for posts of a specific instance, or temporarily mute a single instance from your feed. There's also some sort of "invisible wall" for Pleroma users (niche of a niche), as their public posts simply don't show up in public Mastodon searches, though I don't know whether that's a problem with Mastodon or Pleroma.

Considering all the problems Bethesda had with simply making space work at all, I'm not surprised they didn't even try to look into better games to copy from

Freelancer

+1 for that. One of the best space sims, despite its age, and my first contact with actual zero-g dogfighting (boost, turn off engine, rotate ship to try and hit the enemy)

I usually try searching for alternatives via Yandex

Hey guys, I just found madcat's CSAM stash on Google drive! There's also a video of him masturbating to it!

Hey, I'm just using my right to free speech! You can't censor me!

Yes, even bad people should not be censored. When they misbehave, they should be barred from the place they harmed, ideally not forever, but for a week or so maximum.

"Won't somebody please think of the spam bots?"

The problem is that this childish 'murican view of free speech and censorship has poisoned the entire discussion, because it assumes every speech is equal. It's not. To think a group of idiots screaming on megaphones with the sole intent of causing a ruckus is the same thing as a 1 on 1 conversation is stupid. To equate a snake oil salesman with someone trying to sell a table is also stupid. Not all speech is done in good faith.

Censorship happens at any group, because it's all about maintaining social cohesion. Remember when trump was first elected and several family ties and friendships effectively ended? That was RL censorship, because trying to mend the social cohesion wasn't worth it. Why would you be close to someone who makes your life terrible?

So it's ok to say that zuckerfucker developed mental illnesses due to excessive zoophile orgies

The same folks that created the real money auction house for Diablo 3, the memes "You think you do, but you actually don't"; "Don't you guys have phones?" and Diablo Immoral, continues to show their complete dissociation from reality because money.

Similar to his recent comments about how gamers turned the series towards live-service, Fergusson claims the “consumptive” nature of modern fans means a true, classic Diablo wouldn’t succeed anymore.

Ah yes, it's the gaymurrs that asked for more fucking live service. Fuck off. To be fair, the actual interview doesn't have anything saying that, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a statement thrown elsewhere, since diablo immoral is full of lootboxes, gems and all the predatory bullshit that works wonders to funnel money. It worked exactly as expected, it's profitable beyond reason. To conflate that with "gamers want more of that" is pure corporate bullshit and they know it.

From the actual interview:

(Fergusson): And so we launched that way with D4 and we found out very quickly that if you don't give me my Uber in my season, then I'm upset. And so we're like, oh, wow, okay. And now it's not like, now we actually have an uber currency, uber unique currency that you can go make the one. If you're not finding it, you can actually go make it for yourself, right? And so, which is very different. It's just a kind of a recognition of how much players have changed in 20 years. You know, what they, that consumptive nature of a live service and that time is money and I don't have much time, so let's go, right? And so that idea of like, oh, you're going to get a unique every six months. So what are you talking about? I need to get all the unique in six months, you know? And so it's been, so that's that clarity that Brent talks about is just putting in players' hands, getting their actions and adapting."

That's a "problem" because of how you decided the game should work, as a fucking live service.

For more Diablo coverage, read about Fergusson’s wish to have the ARPG genre renamed to “Diablo-likes”.

Everything old is new again, I guess.

but lets just say they use a super underpowered graphics card. or very little ram, or hard drives too small to install most games on etc

That's why PC games have always had minimum hardware specs listed. Potential buyers will have to keep that in mind if the device they're getting happens to be too weak to run something like CP2077 or Horizon Zero Dawn.

While I find it unlikely to happen, I can totally see an OEM doing that, the "absolute bare minimum SteamOS" (AMD A6-7000, 2GB RAM, 16GB HD), but the bang for the buck might make it a total sales failure, because unlike a general use computer (such as those walmart cheapo win10 with no usable disk space), buyers of any steamdeck-like devices have a very focused use case of games, so the minimum acceptable specs will probably always be halfway decent

55Wh battery, so this probably won't last more than 2 hours as a portable.

People working at evil company surprised that evil company hires horrible human beings, doubly so when criticism was silenced. I mean, what the fuck did you expect??

Yes, we all need to pay bills and etc, but if you work for an evil company, don't act like you care about morals or ethics.

I don't think hardware vendors will use chips or parts that lack decent working linux drivers, which would make the "too many hardware variants" point moot.

Then again, higher ups are known for taking stupid decisions.