Skip Navigation
InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MM
Posts 0
Comments 17
Creative Assembly's Statement on Steam Forum Bans and Criticism
  • You don’t need to offer solutions when complaining about something not working or feeling right, jfc.

    In fact, most developers kinda hate when you offer suggestions, because they don't like armchair developers.

  • Sonic Superstars Is Being Refunded On Steam Over Epic Games Store Login
  • Agree that they can never fully address it, but it would be nice if they made it easier to block publishers and developers (who do not have a publisher or dev page set up, like Sega) and filter on things like "Requires 3rd-party DRM" that appear in the gold boxes in the Steam UI. Currently, I follow multiple curators who flag games for things like Denuvo. But, it would be nice to have that built into the filters and store preferences, when the info is available. If users could easily filter out bad actors, then it might discourage the bad behavior. Valve might not do any of that because it would probably strain their business relationships. So, I don't know.

  • New Study: 54% of American Adults Read Below 6th Grade-Levels
  • Here's an article with more details about the study: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy#:~:text=by EMILY SCHMIDT | March 16%2C 2022&text=This means more than half,of a sixth-grade level.

    Dr. Iris Feinberg, associate director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University, points to under-served communities with "print deserts," poorly funded schools, and little internet access as being the places where the people with poor reading skills live. She also called it an inter-generational cycle of low literacy, so it's not just a recent problem with people not wanting to read.

  • Or just anyone who likes the convenience
  • The registers with cashiers also have scales and cameras and systems that are built in to determine when a CSM is required for things like overrides. The tech is not appreciably different. It's not automation.

  • Mathematicians find 12,000 new solutions to 'unsolvable' 3-body problem
  • PBS has a good video on it: https://youtu.be/et7XvBenEo8?si=w2ZJDnYQbWDY3TgR

    The summary is that scientists don't have a single, simple equation that they can use to precisely predict the orbits of three bodies based on the initial positions and velocities of those bodies like they can with only two bodies (the two-body problem). The solutions they have are either approximate solutions (not precise, but close enough to be useful), equations that apply only to specific types of orbits and therefore can't be used to predict other three-body orbits, and a general equation that is so ridiculously long that it is not really usable. I am also just a layman, so take my summary with a grain of salt, but hopefully the video will help.

  • Starfield players pirate the DLSS mod after the developer locks it behind paywall
  • I think you're exactly right - it is the combination of money + little oversight that is the big problem. Warframe seems to do a good job with tennogen but they limit it to only cosmetic mods and seem to be pretty restrictive about what they accept into their store. I don't see how you could have good oversight for a game with as many mods as something like Skyrim has.

  • Starfield players pirate the DLSS mod after the developer locks it behind paywall
  • I am not disagreeing with the premise that it's fair for someone to be paid for their work. However, during the Skyrim paid mod controversy (on Steam), I learned that there a lot of situations where having paid mods did hurt the modding community and created ethical concerns.

    • Mods were being stolen and sold by people that were not the actual mod authors.
    • Mods were being sold that depended on larger, more complicated mods to function, but the payment was not shared with the larger mod.
    • Mods that had multiple contributors were being sold by an individual who was not sharing the money with the other contributors.
    • Players were concerned about being asked to pay for bug fix mods when the developer should be fixing their own game. This is of course, was not the modders fault and does not mean their bug fix mod wasn't valuable or deserving of pay, but many felt the developer should pay for it, not users.

    I would also point out that it wasn't just greedy players that complained about paid mods - a lot of modders thought it went against the spirit of modding because of how it harmed collaboration in the community. Suddenly, they couldn't trust that others would not steal their work or profit from it unfairly. And, that seems like a reasonable take to me, given all the abuses that modders claimed happened in the short time that paid modding was a thing for Skyrim on Steam.

  • The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices
  • This line stands out to me:

    TV seems to be settling into something that's not all that different from the cable era we left behind. Except it's even less hospitable for the artists actually making TV.

    I don't think the writer intended this, but it sounds like it's setting up the consumers vs. the artists divide. Like, we should have been thankful for what we had and the executives and shareholders, lacking any agency themselves, are now forced to pay less to artists because consumers don't want to pay for content. No one wants to work and no one wants to pay for anything, or so they say. And, yet, the multi-billion dollar industries keep on keeping on.