The difference between a million and a billioj is about one billion. Millionaires aren’t the biggest bloodsuckers by a long shot, so the focus right now is on damage control by opposing the parasites.

Time to introduce SoulsLite for those then.

I intended that as a joke, but I’m wondering whether that might be a viable idea now

I imagine the answer is “what’s the real world?”

I’m being facetious. I don’t want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.

They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they’re in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.

At their heart, they’re no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can’t actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.

It’s reallly just the source of their pain that’s so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they’ve been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn’t lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question “why am I suffering?” a satisfying and concrete answer. “It’s not you. It’s not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It’s these people that you can do something about.”

Except you can’t actually do anything about “these people”, but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without “these people”, where naturally you’re doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they’re looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.

If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they’re powerful and “safe” from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It’s one thing if there’s some niche indie game made by “these people” - they’re on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It’s another thing when there’s a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.

For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You’d (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn’t born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You’ll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don’t have it bottled up already.

I say this because I’ve been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They’re victims turned abusers, and while that doesn’t excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:

Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we’re fed, the less that “someone” will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we’re exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.

The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.

Life’s still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.

Last I heard, there were some issues about who owns the IP and copyrights? I’m not overly familiar, but legal jungle combined with corporate politics may be scary enough to navigate that Miyazaki would rather be careful around making explicit statements

Tinfoil Hat Time:

Linux Gaming, while increasingly viable, isn’t currently a threat to MS. There are enough reasons people will stick with Windows. But Valve are doing a good job of showing that it’s possible, that Microsoft’s hold on PC gaming isn’t absolute and that an increasing number of games are playable on Linux too (with the right tools). Wine and co. have been around for a while, but they never enjoyed the spotlight of a major videogame platform investing time and manpower into developing a dedicated gaming compatibility engine.

I don’t think MS would intentionally run it into the ground. They’d probably try to squeeze it for money, which might end up doing so anyway.

I also don’t think they’re really worried about Linux gaming. But I also doubt they’d leave Proton untouched entirely. Whether they’d kneecap it, whether they’d enshittify it, whether they’d work on interfacing it with their proprietary stuff in an attempt to put it ahead of any competition and tip potential Linux Gaming developments in favour of using their engine to more easily target both platforms at once, I doubt they could resist doing something to squeeze money from it.

Maybe the very idea that they’re challenging Microsoft’s supremacy is unpleasant to them. Maybe their analytics show enough of a trend to concern them. Maybe they just want to make sure they have a piece of the pie if it ever becomes worth something.

Or maybe the whole thing is baseless bullshit made up for attention and site traffic.

I’ll die on the hill that DS2 was misunderstood, and rather than being a poor game it just caters to a specific taste in Souls games, which turned out to be the minority.

It’s rather unforgiving with Stamina and requires more in terms of positioning and timing to handle multiple enemies, such as lining them up to hit multiple in one swing or singling out a target to stunlock thanks to weaker poise. Healing also requires more consideration to pick the right window. I like that. It feels more like a harsh and dangerous world where you have to watch out for your own survival.

The Small White Soapstone often works for a quick trip to another world, earning souls, lifegems and regaining humanity with less commitment than a full summon, which encourages jolly cooperation by lowering the stakes and raising the reward. I like that.

I also like the changes to the weapon upgrades and the magic system. Pyromancy becomes an actual magic discipline, that can still be worked in alongside miracles, sorceries and particularly hexes, like having more attunement gives you more casts, consumables can restore spell uses and you can use materials to lower spell requirements, all of which affects character builds. Being able to respec means you can change or fix your build later on.

I’ll concede that the learning curve is bad. There’s more mechanical complexity to learn and less explanation than in DS1, and particularly the differences between the games aren’t obvious if you go at it with the expectations set by the original.

In a way, that makes it a bad “Dark Souls” 2, since you’re obviously expecting more of the same because it has the same name. Trying new stuff may be good, but changing existing systems is always a gamble whether the people trying and liking it outweigh those that didn’t like it or never even tried.

That many people ended up not liking them was unfortunate. Particularly with DS3 going so hard in the other direction, the approval of DS2 has diminished even further. Its playstyle just isn’t to everyone’s taste, and many people conflate “I didn’t like it” with “It’s shit”, which is a shame.

In summary, I think it’s a good game, even a good Dark Souls that innovates on the original, but it’s probably a bad entry point for the genre due to the steep learning curve, and a rough transition from more faster paced titles. I acknowledge it’s not for everyone, but I liked it.

Doesn’t linking users work differently here? I thought @[email protected] would be the canonical way to mention users, given that it includes their instance. I’m still fairly new to Lemmy, so maybe that’s app/instance-specific

As someone on the outskirts of Data Science, probably something along the lines of “Just what the fuck does my customer actually need?”

You can’t throw buzzwords and a poorly labeled spreadsheet at me and expect me to go deep diving into a trashheap of data to magically pull a reasonable answer. “Average” has no meaning if you don’t give me anything to average over. I can’t tell you what nobody has ever recorded anywhere, because we don’t have any telepathic interfaces (and probably would get in trouble with the worker’s council if we tried to get one).

I’m sure there are many interesting questions to be debated in this field, but on the practical side, humans remain the greatest mystery.

I mean, I got upset like everyone else at the news that they wouldn’t be making more BG, but the longer I think about it, the longer I feel like it’s the healthier choice. Like you said, Hasbro might have pressured them to rush out the next game, instead of giving them the creative space to make that game live up to the expectations.

I’m sold, where do I sign up?

Survivor Bias - you only see the ones that “survive”, which may lead you to underestimate just how many tried and failed and vanished from attention.

A chunk of their target audience aren’t really gamers so much as FIFA players. They don’t buy a lot of games, so they don’t mind splurging on the newest and most up to date installment of their favourite soccer sim once per year.

…I somehow didn’t process that. My brain kinda skipped ahead to the punctuation debate and then wanted to get back on topic.

I shall go find a hole to crawl into.

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Some Sekiro, some X3: Terran Conflict. Taking on a whole squadron of enemies with a single (albeit powerful) ship to calmly dispatch them one by one is just the perfect mix of cozy and power fantasy for me to wind down between the more fast-paced sections of “Let’s chop you down as fast as possible because the longer the fight drags on the more mistakes I’ll make”.

Not really. Global Scale Wars were a unique thing back then. The Great War, the war to end all wars, was thought (hoped!) to be the only one of its kind. They had a lot of conflicts between major powers, but at least for the west, 17 million deaths excluding the spanish flu epidemic was a massive outlier.

Even the Mexican Revolution, listed on Wikipedia with an upper estimate of 3.5 million, wasn’t a quarter of that, and it wasn’t global. The last thing in the west that came (somewhat) close was the Napoleonic Wars with an upper estimate of 7 million, a hundred years earlier. China has had several massive death counts in various wars and rebellions, but that won’t have been very present to the average western civilian.

WW1 brought with it a slew of new developments in military technology and capability for destruction. For the world to have not just one, but potentially two conflicts considered at least on par with The Great War would be very concerning.

Most international experts consider the outbreak of a third world war unlikely in spite of global surges of violence

Not mundane, but the implications would be horrifying to 1923 society still recovering from “The Great War”.

Recognising an issue vs diagnosing it vs. figuring out a treatment. You can notice chest pains and shortness of breath, perhaps make an educated guess that it could be a heart attack, but it’s going to take an expert to diagnose whether that’s actually the case and what course of action to take.

Did you actually read my comment? They don’t get the profit from the old game. The success pays for them to develop new games.

Asked the other way round, if the game’s profit doesn’t pay the devs, what does?

The company employing them

Why does the company employ them?

To make money

So what happens if the company stops making money? A game’s profit doesn’t pay the past developers, but it does affect their future employment and income.

I’m not defending the exploitative system that bleeds us dry for the privilege of getting to temporarily benefit from the wealth they’ve already extracted. I’m not opposing piracy. I’m very much in support of OP’s strategy.

All I’m saying is that piracy won’t fix that system, because the ones most dependent on the game’s success aren’t the exec’s that’ll be hired elsewhere nor the investors that’ll extract their wealth elsewhere, but the devs whose employment and existence depends on their capacity to generate that wealth.

Attack the system at the top, but don’t drop the bottom.

I didn’t say they were getting paid directly, but indirectly. Their employment and income - like all other working class grunts’ - depends on their ability to generate profit for their employer. If we deny the employer their profit, the employer will take that out on their grunts. Conversely, if we pay them, that money likely will end up sponsoring further developments which - guess what? - pays the developers for developing more stuff.

Much of our modern economy is centered around credit and debt. The developers are effectively paid as a credit, in the expectation that the profits will pay the debt. If it doesn’t, that will affect further credits.

And no, I don’t remember Usenet, but it sounds like that was a good time then. How do they compare to modern games in terms of entertainment?