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I mean…

The unfortunate reality is that both parties, the customer and the game company, are culpable and both share blame

Personally I don’t play any game with microtransactions.

I’m only interested in games I can purchase outright and then own*. If there’s large scale DLC that’s fine, great even, but if there’s some in-game way to spend money that isn’t restricted to a DLC button/section, then I’m not interested.

I want to play games, not be inundated by constant sales opportunities.

*I’m aware I don’t “own” most game due to the stupidity of licensing, and while I don’t love that, I can acknowledge it’s still a different and better thing that games that constantly push microtransactions

Honestly, I’m a fan of abolishing IP law too, but for some reason I suspect the implementation of that they support is very different than the one I support

And it’s beyond obvious in the way LLMs are conditioned, especially if you’re used them long enough to notice trends. Where early on their responses were straight to the point (inaccurate as hell, yes, but that’s not what we’re talking about in this case) today instead they are meandering and full of straight engagement bait - programmed to feign some level of curiosity and ask stupid and needless follow-up questions to “keep the conversation going.” I suspect this is just a way to increase token usage to further exploit and drain the whales who tend to pay for these kinds of services, personally.

There is no shortage of ethical quandaries brought into the world with the rise of LLMs, but in my opinion the locked-down nature of these systems is one of the most problematic; if LLMs are going to be the commonality it seems the tech sector is insistent on making happen, then we really need to push back on these companies being able to control and guide them in their own monetary interests.

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I dunno. Frankly they’re both absolutely pantheon, legendary games that deliver a near-perfect gaming experience, but I feel like Portal 1 delivered a kind of tighter package where Portal 2 meanders just a little bit, and while Wheatley is still brilliant I’m not sure I he hit the same way or struck the same tone as GlaDOS. But we’re talking about like nanometers of difference in quality here either way as both games are goddamn stellar.

East Coast USA, born and raised and lived in all my life. So no, not Australian.

I play almost every genre (minimal interest in sports games, admittedly), and my favorite changes all the time. But in general, here are some of my all-time top games:

Final Fantasy Tactics

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (people who think BL2 is better than TPS are wrong)

Spider-Man (PS4)

Hades

Civilization 6

I wish Vivaldi wasn’t Chromium-based, because I think it’s the slickest browser out there.

But it’s chromium, so it’s time to move on to Firefox regardless.

Ladybird development can’t happen fast enough.

Fr seeing in the modlog that people are regularly getting banned from parts of the fediverse for innocuous shit like “chronic downvoting” is so disappointing.

Imo however you do or do not hit the little arrow buttons should never have any bearing on your account or standing, at all.

I don’t even understand why mods/admins have access to see how people are voting, fuck that bullshit.

I have a Pixel. It is literally made by one of the largest advertising companies in the world.

Bigger screens mean bigger and more obtrusive ads.

I’m convinced this is 90% of the reason right here.

Why is there steak at the steakhouse??

I would have pre-ordered Civ7, but then they announced it has Denuvo so now instead of pre-ordering I’m just not going to buy it at all.

Fuck denuvo and fuck corporations who think their customers should just bend over and accept whatever bullshit they offer for the “privilege” of playing their game.

There is so much good indie gaming content these days, we don’t need these abusive mega-corp games.

I’m fine with earning some kind of influence based on community participation that could be then used for things like rewards, since that tied to genuine community good standing…

But even then I’m also very fine with not having any of that, so I guess then what’s the point?

That’s exactly what the US government did under Teddy Roosevelt when it forced by law these large entities to divest and break up into smaller ones not subsidiarized to each other. And yes, they should also do this to Amazon and Microsoft.

edit: I guess I should say I understand they can’t force them to break up in this instance, but they can simply state they won’t do business with the entities at present and recommend it. If that doesn’t happen, I am confident other savvy investors will be happy to fill any hole left by these giants. The world will keep turning, I promise.

My friend, you yourself have been implying this whole time that Google’s infrastructure is too vital and important to remove - how do you not see that this means they are too powerful? Remember trust-busting? Remember anti-monopoly activism? Nobody thought that by breaking up the railroads people wouldn’t need trains anymore, but they understood the danger of allowing a single company to have such market dominance and what it that would mean for consumers. Same thing here. And yes, I’m aware this requires continual diligence as the phone companies that were once PacBell are now bigger than it was, but that lacking of failure to continue enforcing anti-trust doesn’t mean the concept is wrong.

No single company should be allowed to have such influence that very idea of them going away leads to the very doomsday considerations we’ve been talking about. That’s what this is all about.

Step one in saving us from the oncoming corporate technocracy?