Ah that makes sense, it’s oddly suspicious they’d do this out of the blue. Though I am curious at the arbitration. Can they not include a clause that just says that the forced arbitration can be waived by them when they so choose? I feel like they would make carve outs for these big cases if they could to where they can still arbitrate on smaller cases which costs them less.

(Also updating my post text, thanks!)

I believe that Vortex, the nexus mod manager, has Linux support now that I have heard is fairly straightforward but I haven’t tried it myself.

I will say though that I recently used Vortex for modding my Fallout 4 playthrough and it was a breeze on windows while using a Nexus mod collection. Takes a lot of the pain out of modding for sure. So if you can get their mod manager running I think it’s worth a try. Could be as simple as downloading Vortex, finding a collection of mods you like, downloading the collection (usually a temporary subscription is nice for this, and then running the game. You could be done like I was in a matter of a couple hours.

I see AI as being more useful in things like Bethesdas radiant quest system. Theoretically an AI could generate quest and character dialog and react in unique ways to game world events. As far as game elements, machine learning is actually a pretty good way to have dynamic difficulty where the player is pushed as far as they can go and game elements are tweaked accordingly. Or the AI could even design unique quest items and names if trained right.

Plenty of applications for it but I think we’ll see it overused in some games which will lead to bland or non-cohesive elements that on the surface are fine, but don’t amount to anything unique. Like imagine cyberpunk but written by AI and it’d be mostly generic dialog with few connecting ideas. It’s not impossible for AI to get better at that though and maybe if it were only trained on other game dialog or if it gets approved by a human first, it could be incredible.

You’re not in the minority, I just think they should’ve committed to the bit more? The blending of styles is the weird part. Minecraft is already low fidelity and increasing the detail has always worked in the past for these movies. It’s part of why wreck it Ralph, the Mario movie, and even the emoji movie all did pretty well.

I actually enjoyed seeing stuff like the piglins and nether all dressed up and fancy. I just think the people are presented as if the movie contains no animation and it doesn’t work. If they want to make it work, do the Sonic thing and blend the worlds by putting animated spaces in the real world.

Randy Pitchford also says he isn’t smart, it’s just usually in more words and in a daily tweet

Your commitment to analyzing all of this through a small hole of ideas that are relevant to you is preventing what you’re saying from making complete sense. You’re omitting things and skewing the perspective with a lens.

This is because you’re both correct to some degree. Yes there is a large tribe who is using identity politics to gain support. However that support is less than equal to the other camp who uses scapegoating of said identities when you compare support on said social issues.

For all of time this has worked in politics and as always it is, as you point out basically, used to obscure the actual dealings.

Here’s where you’re completely off the rails. The DNC are masters at very little and especially are not masters at mass media marketing. Their slogans fail, their advertisements are bad, and they have failed to instill ideas that counter those of the right. The line about “conservatives are good for economy” still exists and they have no counter. The DNC are incredibly weak compared to the RNC.

Make no mistake, the DNC is scraping by because they do not represent exactly what the elite class believe as much as the republicans do. The media has mostly turned on them and criticizes their candidates about 10x more. Most of the media, owned by the elite class, does not belong to the DNC. Every major news network, including CNN now, goes against them and works counter to them.

And when we talk about why lgbt issues are present now, it has little to do with the tribalism you’re referencing. Little to do with identity politics. What’s even more rough to hear is that lgbt politics don’t matter to most voters. They matter to an LGBT crowd. Which is far smaller than the fundamentalists that the anti-lgbt are attracting. The DNC are not pro-LGBT in the way that we think of. They are pro-LGBT in the opposite way. The way where the other party has forced them to be.

I mean yes but imo the solution isn’t any of that. The problem is that Reddit has super niche communities that people expected to have enough users to build here. That isn’t the case. And we shouldn’t be looking to transplant entire communities because that rarely works.

People really need to hear this: You need to be cross posting every single niche community post into a more general community. There are too many posts on here that exist in a knitting community but not in a general hobby community that’s more active.

This is how Reddit works and we need to follow the template. You need strong pillars that people can flock to and then branch out from there. Examples might be r/funny, r/sports, etc. Then if people want super populated places to go and chat and post, those general communities are there. If they’re new, they can find your niche community by browsing the populated places. We don’t need templates for communities, we just need to have a few really populated places with high engagement to promote natural growth.

This isn’t what was happening. It’s a tale as old as time, once a corporation becomes large enough it will buy up scrappy competitors and allow them to fail so that they can take the ideas and staff who would otherwise be resistant to the business getting sold.

This happens because even if 50 of those ideas fail but you have 1 guy who comes up with a battle royale game mode, it pays off. None of these companies want to own and manage 50 indie studios, so they shut them down and absorb them on purpose.

And big studios aren’t even immune from this. I think Bethesda is keeping their name, but they’re in dangerous territory. Obsidian is hanging by a thread and barely got saved from this. DoubleFine still exists for the moment. But look at what happened to Tango Gameworks getting shafted by Xbox. The industry devours indie studios day by day for the hope of their stock growth, don’t be fooled

Aren’t the brand new LCDs still in stock an 15% off? Still a decent deal

I didn’t say they weren’t banning people, I said they aren’t really playing the cat and mouse game. VAC is a known system and it doesn’t actually affect cheating in any meaningful way since the game is free, steam accounts are easy to create, and time between VAC waves is extremely long.

Go play a few matches of CS2 on competitive without buying the premier and tell me that they’re doing anything at all that is effective. It’s gotten so bad that playing on non-premier games I will get a cheater in the lobby about 75% of the time. And premier isn’t immune but it’s about 20% of the time.

Most of what needs to be done is that their servers need to clean up and stop sending so much data to the client and also the servers need anti-cheat. There’s been some suggestions of this by people getting banned for moving their mouse to fast repeatedly, but that’s about all they’ve done of note.

If you think that the company who has almost entirely abandoned TF2 and left it to rot to cheaters is doing much with CS, I think that’d be a bad assumption.

And yet they really don’t do anything about it, I have yet to see evidence that they engage in the cat and mouse game. A lot of cheaters have full inventories of skins and have been cheating for many years at this point with the same cheats

Look the perk system was bad but it’s wasn’t Fallout New Vegas bad. It was okay for a Fallout game but they probably should’ve done level ups by doing each 5 levels gives you 2 SPECIAL points to spend rather than spending normal points on the core stats.

Obsidian is off doing things and making games better than Fallout, they’d only come back because their studio isn’t extremely profitable and needs the cash.

Really though, please just go buy their games and play them. Outer Worlds got slated as pretty average but I’m still really excited to play that and Outer Worlds 2.

This is sort’ve true but post processing isn’t where the game struggles per se. Both Skyrim and Fallout 4 lacked LOD lighting and featured prominent Z-fighting of many textures, that’s an inherent way that the LODs are calculated in the engine.

So most of what I’m talking about like lackluster quest design and poor visuals aren’t unfixable by the engine, but they’re direct results of developing using it. The quest structures are mostly the same as they have been for decades.

And yes, they could easily code something like an ENB mod but they just don’t. They’re so bad at this in fact that they can’t even get proper anti-aliasing working. If I remember right, Fallout used TAA and it was so awful that I preferred a 3rd party FXAA to their solution.

Also to be fair, ENB is similar to other graphics injectors which aren’t new on the block but you dont really want to use an injector so they’d have to code something like an ENB into their DLL and that would affect the engine so they don’t do it. It needs a big update to add stuff like that and this will be the third game they haven’t bothered to significantly change it.

Imo it’s not about having a new engine, it’s that they don’t make enough changes to it and it’s very apparent. On launch, their games are some of the most lackluster games visually. I remember the update from Skyrim to fallout was just that they added god rays to the engine, that was basically the only difference.

Then Fallout 76 came out and not only was it extremely ill equipped for multiplayer and online, but graphically the game suffered.

Then we talk about the quest systems in the engine, and that’s great and all, but the quest systems haven’t been fundamentally updated since Oblivion came out. Go play any other RPG, they’re running circles around Bethesda in quest design.

What’s worse is that Starfield was met with mixed reviews and showcased their inability to modernize their engine with the loading screen problem. So ES6 is set up to make or break Bethesda.

I honestly thought I was the only one that has those problems. I think the thing that gets me is when you install a program, the installer closes, you don’t know where in gods name it just installed to, so you type the name of the program and windows is like “sorry never heard of it”, so you go to the programs list and it’s right there.

What you mentioned is particularly frustrating because I too will type full program names and it often switches on the very last letter. It’s even more frustrating that the user can’t manipulate the search by typing a few letters, realizing those letters are shared by two programs, and then typing a few more letters to lead it to your program without moving to the mouse. Instead it acts like you’ve added no info and recommends the same thing.

Also if you go to uninstall a program by right clicking it in start or search and instead of uninstalling it presents you with a list of programs which you then have to go find the program again in and then hit uninstall again. Been that way for 8 years now.

Yeah except most consumers no longer care about goodwill when buying new products so they’ve just figured out that it doesn’t matter what they do. So if a company has goodwill at this point, it might as well just be unspent money.

Because those systems already exist for the console players. All they’re doing is switching it over to steam but they likely had a translation layer there before to do all the things you’re saying but through PSN instead. Why? Because that system already exists for consoles.

So their options here are that they can take the netcode for consoles and modify it to utilize SteamIDs and fetch data from Steam or they can just turn your Steam ID into a console ID and treat all of the inputs to their systems exactly like they would on the PS5 while fetching them from Steam.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea, I’m saying you’d think that just trying to match the console and the way it handles players would be simpler. Especially when you’re trying to make cross play work. Clearly it wasn’t so they temporarily ditched it. Maybe Sony does just want your data but if that’s true, why would the telemetry gathering be such a big deal? And they also could just use your SteamID for that data gathering. So clearly PSN used to be more integrated than people here are suggesting

Correct, I never said it wasn’t buggy either. I’m just pointing out that if you have cross play and you already have console support with console user IDs then it makes sense to just convert PC players into that same console user system.

This is what Xbox used to do when publishing games on Steam and still do with their GamePass stuff. And very similarly, that system also broke things and still breaks things for people.

I mean yeah this is especially true for online games as this is a form of DRM for Sony and it gives them control to easily reject or accept keys and ban users using their pre-existing systems.

Same thing with cross-play, it’s possible that some of these games were designed to use PSN systems and so that makes integration easy. No clue, but if true it makes sense from Sonys perspective on both of those fronts.