Except that’s entirely false. Even now they are pretending they do nothing, it’s the intermediaries who force things.

Mastercard sells absolutely nothing. And they have no responsibility for anything sold. And no one ever thought it was mastercard selling or even allowing to sell illegal things.

In fact, most people will believe no one sound of mind will buy something illegal with a credit card because mastercard and the likes will give your identity to the police.

So it’s not about illegal things, and it’s not about their image.

What I read is that it is not about illegal content. It is about the measures taken to prevent illegal content from being sold. It’s much more devious than simple censorship.

It’s much worse than that. How they word it is “if it may damage the public image of mastercard”. And they don’t review the content, they review the means used to prevent the damage to their brand.

So valve doesn’t even need to have anything that actually damage mastercard brand, it just need to be that mastercard is not comfortable enough with the measures used to prevent it.

In fact this statement states that they ask their clients to litteraly do the job of justice. That’s quite scary.

Ensuring a card cannot be used to buy illegal content.

That means they can shut you down if they think you didn’t do enough, which is literally their whim.

How do you pay for a steam game without a credit card?

They have the power because states gave it to them. States can very easily take it back. But they won’t because they’re corrupted assholes.

Censorship is always the first step. Genocide is the last step. People getting mad when the first step toward fascism is crossed is a very good thing to fight fascism and try to prevent a future genocide. This is exactly what the poem is about : react on the first step, because it will be too late when the genocide starts.

We do have a problem of polarisation. But on the other hand we also have a problem of too many games, so we simply can’t play them all. This leads us to a need to choose which one to pick. And a bad choice is very bad, because games are expensive and time consuming.

Now the real problem is when a community mistaken a new game for another. Like avowed was considered a terrible game because the leader scroll fanboys thought it would be their next game, and it wasn’t. Anyone who know what old school bioware games were will certainly love avowed.

Now while veilgard is not a bad game, is it actually good? I’m not informed enough yet about it, but bioware has been terrible in the last decade, so I am clearly very wary of what they’re doing.

I will wait for a discount for both those games, and I’ll play avowed first because I’m informed and careful, and I have other games to play already.

On the side there’s also the problem of fascist propaganda that will brand a game woke a try to destroy it.

There is no chance it wasn’t meant to be an open world. The witcher 3 was a very successful open world they made.

Also, CP77 actually is in the style of elden ring that was praised for it, but CP77 came long before it. Most critiques of CP77 missed that part because the game doesn’t throw it at your face.

Well, if capitalism could tolerate true journalism, journalists would be paid like managers.

I wish it was, but it isn’t. It usually about them being able to ban you from playing for whatever reason they deem worthy.

Horse archers, or skirmishing units in general, are countered by archers or siege units. Unless the game is wildly unbalanced it always works.

Nexus: the Jupiter incident. It is a now a bit old tactical space combat game with a big focus on the narrative. It’s awesome, but I never see it mentioned anywhere.

Sometimes I wonder if these people understand that no player ever wanted exclusivities on a game store. Instead of providing a decent service, they’re litteraly trying to kidnap customers with a choice between waiting for months for this big release or taking it on a subpar platform.

Yes very much.

And you define “satisfying” as “that one shot anything and trivialise everything”?

What I read is “boohoo the game is too hard for me”

They worked hard for decades. They’ve been betrayed and hampered by editors in the past until kick-started. It’s not a lucky situation, they built this luck.

Act 3 is great. It was tougher on the hardware for performances because it’s so big, but patches fixed many of these problems. That was some time ago already.

You have an authoritarian view on competitive gaming. And you’re saying this should be a hard requirement for hardware development. That’s an extreme point of view.

It’s video games we’re talking. If some asshat is cheating in a video game, that’s irrelevant to hardware development.

I mean, do also endorse softwares that plague your kernel to prevent cheating? Why don’t you use special hardware for your competitive gaming if that’s so important?

The world doesn’t live around competitive gaming.

That’s not hijacking code. That’s working on a data flow.

So you argue that video game anti-cheat should prevent good technology from existing. Cool cool cool.

Going that way, there’s no reason to completely lose a fight in BG3. You can flee and resurrect everyone, unlike in most tabletop games.

Which leads to what I was saying : if tpk is the doing of the party, through its decisions, carelessness and/or poor play, they deserve to die.

It’s not a good dm that fudge rolls and adjust difficulty. It’s a dm you like. And it’s a game you like.

And sometimes they’re also assholes that disrespect players. Sometimes they’re too leniant and think a buggy mess is a game worth releasing. That’s disrespect. Being small is not an excuse to release an alpha version.

That’s basic relationship stuff : game studios broke player trust. It’s up to them to win it back.

Now different people react differently to the break of trust. Some do react poorly to it. But I won’t blame people, and I won’t sympathise with studios I don’t already trust.

I’m not saying the behaviour of the game studios justify people hate. I’m saying it fuels it.

The relationship between a game company and a player base is not a equal one. And I’m not saying all game studios are responsible, but you only need enough of them to behave poorly for people to grow defiance for all of them.

And in this, it’s up to the developers to win back players trust, not to players to forgive game dev blindly.

Video game studios are not respecting players. It fuels hate speech. Most social media are also optimized for hateful speech because it increases engagement.

What I don’t understand is the trolls who hate on stuff forever. Like cyberpunk 2077 for example still has haters who miss absolutely no occasion to shit on the game.

Why are people so hateful of this game still to this day? It’s beyond me. Don’t pretend it’s worst than most games, it’s not. The only difference with any other buggy game is the mess that was made on Internet and medias.

I just thought of a better word for their ideology: techno-feudalism. They are not optimist or humanist, they crave for power and controle.

What I hate the most is that they are literally stealing science, technology and progress to enforce their techno-feudalism.

That’s unfortunate. I consider myself a technooptimist, but I am anything but a believer of liberalism or capitalism.

Breaking news! A publisher discover what a saturated market is!

I hope epic game store burns in hell, personally.

Steam has always been rather bad on performances, but epic somehow managed to do worse.

Epic is the worst of the 3 platforms for a user. It is a drm like steam, but with less games on it, and even less optimized (so even more wasted resources and time loading useless advertising).

Steam has it that is makes game run on Linux smoothly, and the biggest library of games. Gog is drm free. Epic has absolutely nothing a user may want, except for free games so that you are now captive of their shitty platform.

On steam you can try for a few hour and get a refund if you don’t like it. Maybe on gog too.

Yes it is. Pathfinder made for builders who want to create a character with hundreds of options to choose from. It is rule heavy in the tradition of dnd 3rd edition. Pathfinder 2e is much more refined, but I doubt they went away from this philosophy. It’s still very rule heavy.

I’m playing Irarus, lord of the dead lately. It’s very similar to darkest dungeon, but easier.

Thea (1 and 2) is noticeable for being a 4x roguelite. It’s also the slave mythology, so quite original in that regard.

Well, if you omit batteries then you are mostly true, although with covid there was a huge shortage of electronic components that would affect solar a lot, at least depending on where you live. Batteries is a big unknown now, because with all the demand for it, we simply can’t build enough batteries to feed all the grids with it.