proud recipient of the prestigious you tried award.
- 0 Posts
- 35 Comments
then don’t make a half a billion dollar game. red dead 2 would have been fine without dynamically sized horse balls. a lot of people (read: me) don’t care about hyper realistic graphics in games. i’d rather play something with a cool aesthetic that runs smoothly instead of something that looks like a disney live action remake and makes my computer beg for mercy. indie developers have been eating everyone’s dinner recently with a never ending stream of incredible and beautiful looking games. i’m sure it’s possible to make a good game for less than 500 million dollars and with less than 8 years of development time.
both articles seem to suggest that this is only (or primarily) affecting ubisoft games, which suggests that ubisoft might share some of the blame here. microsoft is very dumb for pushing out an update that breaks a ton of games, especially given how much they claim to love backwards compatibility. but ubisoft is also dumb if they are relying on undocumented APIs, as some of the other comments suggest they might be. microsoft already struggles to keep their documented APIs stable, so i can only imagine what happens with the undocumented APIs
i wonder how much of that has to do with the e sports scene.
i wonder how 5% of employees getting laid off will translate into executive bonuses. last year the top 2 guys made $72 million after laying off a bunch of people.
yeah i completely agree. it’s in the details. there are so many oversights and inconsistencies that the game feels soulless, like they didn’t have a central vision they were trying to create. it’s a lot of jumbled parts that oddly feel both repetitive and disjoint. lots of the quests feel the same, and the game just gets so predictable.
i just don’t get the appeal of the game at all. you load in, walk for a few minutes, talk to generic npcs to get generic quests, fast travel, walk for several minutes, shoot your way through unthinking npcs, scan some planets, etc.
bethesdas combat and writing has been lackluster for quite some time, but before they had the excuse of having interesting worlds to explore. here that is not the case. there’s like 3 or 4 copy pasted dungeons on most planets, and the rest is completely barren. i just don’t really see the joy in the game, it all feels so monotonous.
Doesn’t that go both ways?
no. not everything goes both ways. some things are bad, and should not be tolerated.
And don’t you think what you imply is scary?
no i don’t, what about it do you find scary?
And with that I mean : “people’s thoughts influence their actions” I fucking hope so. And who are you to tell them what is right and what is wrong?
just so we’re clear, the context of this statement is me saying “i care about people having racist/homophobic thoughts because people’s thoughts influence their actions”. so, again just to be clear, the “what” that is being discussed is “racism/homophobia”.
in context, your reply reads “i fucking hope so, who are you to tell them racism/homophobia is right or wrong?”.
i appreciate the well thought-out reply. i disagree with some of the things you’ve said but respect your reasoning and level-headedness. i’m going to (generally) quote the first line of each paragraph so you can more clearly see what i’m replying to, but my responses are intended to address the whole paragraph.
And that’s solved with trusted sources. I personally don’t analyze what toothpaste I get, I ask my dentist or look for the support by the American Dental Association.
you may be a bit of an anomaly then. this page gives an overview of consumer behavior and how companies are able to influence peoples decision making. it also links to this page listing ways in which consumer behavior tends to be irrational, often being influenced by their moods, what their friends buy, and also by marketing techniques.
putting that aside, let’s suppose that everyone did behave rationally and only bought things recommended by experts. wouldn’t this be much more work for everyone than simply letting the experts pass regulations on which products can be sold? wouldn’t it be nicer if you didn’t have to consult an expert each time you bought something? if instead, you could have some faith that anything on the shelf was a good option?
It’s often a lot easier to figure out who to trust than it is to figure out which products to buy. And with a free market system, there’s a lot of competition both at the product variety side, as well as the product review side, so bad products tend to die and good products tend to succeed.
i’m not so sure it is easy to find out who to trust. this article you linked is a good example of that: 40% of people had a hard time finding out who to trust in regards to the 2020 presidential election, something that arguably is way more important than something like which brand of toothpaste you buy. it might be tempting to write those people off as unreasonable, but keep in mind that would mean saying 40% of the population is unreasonable.
next, i’m not sure i agree that bad products tend to die. i understand “good” and “bad” can be subjective, which makes this topic a bit more complicated, but you yourself have said fox news is relatively untrustworthy. i think it would then be reasonable to say they are “bad” news organizations. despite this, they were the most watched news network last july and i dont think they’ll die anytime soon. there are many other examples of this: companies like EA, comcast, nestle, etc, who many people have disliked for years, continue to do well economically and show no signs of dying.
This is almost exclusively due to cronyism.
this is actually part of my point: cronyism is part of the free market. if companies are incentivized to compete with each other britannica defines the free market as “an unregulated system of economic exchange, in which taxes, quality controls, quotas, tariffs, and other forms of centralized economic interventions by government either do not exist or are minimal”. in an unregulated system with minimal interventions where companies are supposed to make money above all else, why wouldn’t they influence legislation, sue other companies out of existing, and all the other things you mentioned?
in a free market, cronyism is just playing by the rules. this is probably the biggest reason why i don’t think free markets work. you can say that’s not right or it’s not supposed to happen, but it is what happens. it’s why we need regulation. another famous example of this was the book “the jungle”, which led to the creation of the FDA.
In your example about electricity providers, that’s because the deals are made between the power company and cities, not between individuals.
i’m not sure about electrical grids (texas comes to mind but that arrangement seems much different the situation you’ve outlined), but from what i’ve read, britain’s current arrangement is (at least a bit) similar to what you’ve outlined. we can see how that’s going. but i want to make clear that i understand you expressed apprehension about applying a private model to the electrical grid, so this is more of a minor point.
Capitalism works best when you expect selfishness and have the government set and enforce rules. If something cannot feasibly be offered in a competitive fashion, the government should step in and provide it as a public good.
this is something i agree with. i would add a few more things to your list (such as housing, all parts of healthcare, public transportation, among others), but i can acknowledge that certain things could work fine if they worked in the private sector with government regulation (eg video games and movies). i also agree with you that we need much more action when it comes to enforcing antitrust laws.
It happens a lot in autocracies, democracies, and everything in between. It seems to happen less in smaller communities, which is why I prefer to have each level of government be as small as possible while remaining effective.
i completely agree. it’s something that can happen in government as well as the private sector, and does seem to happen less in smaller communities. this is a very hard problem to solve, and i’m not sure it can be completely solved. i think having a good education system reduces the risk of corrupt people coming into power, but that only helps to reduce the problem. that being said, things are very bad in the current system. this kind of corruption and manipulation is allowed in the private sector: most of the time it’s either legal or it’s illegal but the consequence is a very small fine.
The only overlap with the free market is that we have a mix of trustworthy and non-trustworthy sources.
the overlap with the free market is that news organizations are incentivized to pander to their viewers, which is what the thing about fox news showed. they played the election fraud narrative because they didn’t want to upset their base. this is because from an economic perspective, the viewers aren’t the “buyers”. the advertisers are the “buyers” and the viewers are the product. in the context of this example, this means that it’s “bad” to say the election wasn’t stolen because it could result in fewer viewers, resulting in fox news having a “worse product” in the eyes of advertisers.
Just think how much worse it would be if the government were in control of the media.
don’t get me wrong, i completely agree that things can get very bad when the government is in control of the media. controlling the media is one of authoritarians’ favorite pastimes. my goal in bringing up that point was to show how free market principles can be inherently at odds with journalistic integrity. in a capitalist society, journalistic integrity will take a back-seat to economic pressures.
the problem is that not enough people make “good decisions”, partly because of how exhausting and time-consuming it is to carefully analyze and consider all the options for every facet of life. for example, there are lots of people who don’t want to switch to linux because they think its tedious to pick a distro, learn a new operating system, and find replacements/workarounds for software that doesn’t work out of the box on linux. now imagine having to do that for every single aspect of life. how do you pick your toothpaste and deodorant? do you carefully examine all the options each time you go to the store, or do you have a brand you pick without thinking about it because it works fine enough?
another problem with free markets is the inherent progression towards monopolies. this can be seen most readily with the so called natural monopolies (monopolies that emerge because of an extreme barrier to entry). how much choice do you have when it comes to your electricity provider? if they do something you don’t like, what can you do other than complain to a politician or move to a new region? aside from natural monopolies, we also see a progression towards monopolies because of inherent efficiencies of producing at scale.
there are other problems as well, such as corruption/lobbying, companies lying to the public, using psychology to manipulate people (link may not be the best source on the subject).
something that i personally find to be a great example of how the free market works in practice: rupert murdoch (among several others working at fox news) knew the 2020 election was not stolen, but pushed the narrative anyway because they didn’t want to upset their viewer base.
its really absurd. it becomes even stupider when considering that many of these assumptions allow mathematical models to be built on top of them, and then those models are treated with such importance and authority. but then they sometimes also get the math wrong. i remember learning a while back that part of the 2009 housing crash was caused by faulty mathematics laid ontop of these weird economic assumptions. the part im talking about is:
The paper, generally referred to as the Dahlem report, condemns a growing reliance over the past three decades on mathematical models that improperly assume markets and economies are inherently stable, and which disregard influences like differences in the way various economic players make decisions, revise their forecasting methods and are influenced by social factors.
the first part refers to a kind of “smoothness assumption”, where they approximate the bumpy, jagged graph with a “smooth” curve that is easier to analyze. but it turned out the bumps were there for a reason. oops! the second part of the quote then says that in addition to the faulty smoothness assumption, there were quite a few important things the model flat out ignored
that’s because they instead crouch right before jumping, so that they can reach an even higher ledge. i would be okay with them killing crouch jumping so long as they don’t kill c-tapping. its just so satisfying to pull off.
i also worry that switching to step ups would severely impact rocket jumping and surfing. the advanced movement systems in tf2 are my favorite among any video game i’ve played so far. i’d be pretty bummed if they gutted them in tf3. im still mourning the loss of full turn control on the chargin targe.