… Its’s Big Whale Day!

Amazing.

‘Under’ would have worked and been shorter.

Its not anonymous. Its pseudonymous.

Even if your pseudonym isn’t directly linked to you, even if you are not doxxed, your pseudonym carries its own reputation.

Its up to the pseudonym operator to determine how to manage that.

To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.

It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console… or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.

Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you’re just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.

Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.

The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.

… Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says ‘hey you don’t own this the way you own a blender.’

That’s very strange framing to use.

What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.

Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.

But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers… but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.

SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.

It… just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.

I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.

Please reread the second sentence.

It doesn’t make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.

In this case I’m not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you’re not even compensated for this.

The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.

And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.

Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn’t matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren’t any alternatives.

All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.

A while back I was discussing Ross Scott’s ‘Stop Killing Games’ proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.

If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.

If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.

If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.

Someone popped in and said ‘well I think they should just make it more obvious that you’re not buying a game, you’re buying a temporary license.’

To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’

So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We’re not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we’re just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.

All this does is make it so you can’t say ‘Buy’ or ‘Purchase’ and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like ‘You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.’

US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.

Oh, this is the first time you’ve left either hexbear or ml then.

The AdBlockalypse.

You really made an account just to post this singular comment?

Firstly, yeah… RDRO is utterly plauged with all sorts of cheaters using trainers and all kinds of cheats is full of crap, at least for PC.

The standard strategy you basically have to employ is that whenever you see something nonsense like that happen is you have to jump to another instance/lobby. Depending on your luck, you may have to do this every 15 to 60 minutes aaaand some cheats allow the cheater to follow you to your new lobby.

Secondly…

A few years back I was in RDRO and was attacked by a cheater.

I had a broke ass level 15ish character with the just a few of the least expensive guns.

They had infinite ammo. Teleport hopping. Spawned 10 additional NPCs versions of themselves, then of my character, then zombies, then legendary animals (basically fucking monsters).

All the while they’re scrambling their name in the scoreboard every minute and create spoofs to make it harder to actually do a report or have the grievance system actually work correctly.

I killed them all. I died over and over again, but I kept killing them. Whittled down the fake names and spoofs and kept doing the grievance thing until it was actually landing on one consistent name.

Then the cheater began spawning gigantic props like boats attached to their character, which rotated and hit with physics force when they rotated, which they could shoot out of but I could not shoot into.

But uh, I managed to juke my way through cracks in the collision mesh, then shoot him.

He got tired of this at some point… and just turned himself invisible.

But, by this point I’d been killed enough times that I’d managed to get him showing up on my radar.

I’d by then long since run out of ammo… and began stalking him, via radar, with just a knife and lasso, sometimes the running tackle with the lasso that leads into a hogtie, other times actually managing to sneak up behind him, executing an invisible foe.

After an hour and a half of this, he started slipping up, and I could see him attempting to flee me, teleport half a klik away and just stand there for 30 seconds, then move a bit, then pause again, presumably fiddling around in his menus.

I killed him a few more times in this state, and he quit, he left.

… I would have just jumped to another instance if he had not killed my horse.

Do not fuck with a man’s horse lol.

… anyway, yeah. hung up my hat after that. fucking nonsense.

According to Mutahar:

1. The Anti Cheat has already been bypassed by a free cheat menu on Windows.

2. He’s fairly sure he has figured out some kind of way to temporarily bypass (as in, it’ll probably get caught in a few weeks) the linux block by some kind of custom virtualization method (requiring only one GPU) that he says he may explain in detail at some point.

In general, he’s done with playing GTO.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSagozpKPs&pp=ygUSbXV0YWhhciBndGEgb25saW5l

But yeah, obligatory reminder for BattleEye and EasyAntiCheat games that refuse to allow linux play:

All these game devs have to do is flip a switch, click a few options in their developer portals, to allow BattleEye or EAC to work on linux, through Proton.

And its been that way for 3 years, since 2021.

There is literally no reason for games that use these services to not work on linux, the devs just don’t fucking care.

Yep, I’m only 35 and remember when almost all drivers generally only used hibeams in situations of serious low visibility due to fog or snow or rain, or a totally unlit road at night out in the middle of no where, and where it was common courtesy to turn your hibeams off when someone is coming toward you on the other side of the road, turn em back on when they pass.

Seems like basically no one does this at all any more, barring some longhaul truckers.

Its just super brights all the time.

If you have an astigmatism, just get fucked, crash and die I guess.

We’ve gone from ‘Wait, the cars are not the dominant life form of the planet, they’re constructed devices of the dominant lifeform of the planet that destroys the environment to facilitate their daily movement between different boxes?’

To ‘No actually the cars are actually the dominant lifeform, they have more rights and priority than 99% of their operators.’

Hope the dolphins take over soon.

EDIT: Has anyone made some kind of online map for the whole US that compares minimum wage to hourly parking rates?

… Its totally fine to include a casino as a setting so long as interactive gambling is not a thing the player can do.

Did you read the article or the actual government literature it links to and quotes from?

Nothing is going to change about existing Mario game ratings.

I’d say it would be outlandish for family friendly Nintendo to suddenly reverse course on general world cultural/legal perspectives and re introduce gambling games when they have not done so in years, the same years many countries have been cracking down on lootboxes/gambling in games for their target demo, kids.

Finally, I didn’t downvote you. I only downvote people who are being exceptionally idiotic or abrasive or rude. I almost always prefer to engage with ideas or comments I take issue with but are not presented horrifically: the point of a discussion board should be discussion, not an internet points contest.

You’ll have to pay a subscription fee.

I still have not forgiven them for what they did to Maxis.

Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.