wccrawford

@[email protected]

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wccrawford,

People are so used to being lied to that they get angry when you tell them the truth instead, even though they already knew the truth.

I’m half joking, though. Part of what makes society work is all the things we do to put a nice facade on things that are ugly. If we all went around telling the hard truth all the time, everyone would be angry at everyone.

All that said… Basically saying “I underpriced the product of my hard work and I’m correcting that” shouldn’t be that shocking. Especially when tempered with “Go pirate it if you want”.

wccrawford,

While I do think toxic communities are a problem, I disagree that you can combat them by taking your toys and going home.

Toxic people will always exist, and they are naturally drawn to things that are popular. You won’t convince them to stop being toxic by punishing the entire community. You will only make them more toxic. If you can’t target the toxic people directly, you aren’t fighting the problem, you’re just running away.

I have no problem with the dev deciding that they’ve had enough toxic exposure and quitting. But that doesn’t sound like what happened here. Or at least, it’s not what they claim they’re doing.

wccrawford,

IMO, the problem is that there’s not a log of good content being produced. The vast majority of it is vapid clickbait garbage. Some people eat that up, and they also share it. I don’t think there’s a way to stem the tide. Ever.

wccrawford,

I had to go check and see if I’d backed it or not. I hadn’t. But your comment really made me wonder.

wccrawford,

Delistings occur without warning because they don’t want a bunch of people to buy at the last second and then get angry that their purchase won’t work soon. Instead, they delist first, and then the only angry people are those who have been playing it for a long time. (And a few unlucky sots who just bought it randomly.)

wccrawford,

Destiny has been losing players left and right thanks to decisions they’ve made lately, and I can’t help but see this as a desperate attempt to inflate their player numbers. They’ve said in the past that changes take months to roll through, so even if they had realized their mistake last season, they’d still have at least 3 months before they could fix it at this point.

I’m not convinced they are listening to the community, though.

wccrawford,

They have actively made the game less fun for me in the past few seasons. They decided that what people want is a challenge, all the time. It used to be that low-level stuff was a breeze and you could just shoot your way through it. Now, you slog through it for the same weak rewards as before, but it takes longer and is less fun. The hard content didn’t get any harder, though. Those are the people that actually want challenge, and they don’t get more of it.

And on top of that, the new seasonal content apparently has limited revives and particular things you have to do to survive. Unsurprisingly, blueberries are failing miserably at this. I haven’t bothered playing it because it’s exactly the opposite of what I want from repeated content, and I don’t want to join a guild again. While I loved my guild, I felt compelled to play more so I didn’t let them down, and I’m done with that.

Bungie needs to stop listening to streamers and fanatical players and listen to the players that are quitting in droves instead.

wccrawford,

I used to buy most of my games at full price. Now I buy almost none of them that way. If there isn’t a launch sale, I’ll wait until the next sale for it… Or maybe until it’s in a bundle.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think the game is worth that price… I just have so many games already that it makes no sense to rush to buy a new one when I know it’ll be cheaper real soon.

wccrawford,

I use Palm until my fingers ache and I remember that I need to not grip it like that any more (some of my fingers ache from it), and then I move to fingertip for a while.

wccrawford,

It’s easy to say they should fight the root cause instead of the symptoms, but actually doing it is a lot harder. Steam fought it for a long time, and they’ve finally given up on that.

If publishers want to sell things themselves in other markets at other prices, they can still do so. They just can’t use Steam to do it.

wccrawford,

I agree with closed beta, but for different reasons.

There will always be “dead game” trolls that will find some statistic to back themselves up. Trying to hide from them isn’t going to solve the real problem, though I guess it’ll solve how mouthy they can get during development, rather than after release.

wccrawford,

What do you use for a launcher now?

wccrawford,

“commitments to a particular doubt”

… Do they mean “debt”?

wccrawford,

It also uses the name “Portal” in a way that feels official, too. If it said “Revolution: A Portal mod” it’d be fine.

wccrawford,

That sucks. I’ve been using Mailbird, but their recent push for purchasing 3.0 (and a yearly subscription for security updates) has put a bad taste in my mouth for it. I’m definitely looking for something else rather than give them more money now.

wccrawford,

They’ve actually been ramping up efforts to get people to pay for storage lately. I’ve always been fairly close to full, but lately they’ve started popping up brightly-colored warnings on various interfaces telling me to buy more space.

I did the opposite and got down to like 80% full, and the warnings are still there!

This is a far cry from the original statement that I’d never run out of email storage. (Yes, I use it for other things, too, but I’ve found myself having to delete emails with attachments to keep storage requirements down.

wccrawford,

The hate for Musk is strong here, but I’d also like to see how the world’s richest still-a-kid plays video games. It’s either going to be incredibly normal, or absolutely insane.

wccrawford,

In theory, he could do in-house things to incentivize those companies to want to add that feature back.

In reality, that would make him lose even more money, so it’ll never happen.

Ways to pirate music as convenient as Spotify?

The reason I gave up on MP3’s and subscribed to Spotify was because Spotify was easy. I’ve been listening “Iron Maiden - Empire of the Clouds” song every day and like a week ago, its removed. This was the last straw for me. Right now I’m trying to find “Stremio” of the music world. Can someone assist?...

wccrawford,

Unfortunately, I think “local” is the best word usually, just not when also talking about computers. I’ve tried to think of an alternative and haven’t come up with one. I think you need a phrase like “music from local artists” or something.

wccrawford,

It’s a typical scenario of trying to solve a hard problem with a solution that ignores a minority community.

Unfortunately, this minority community already has a lot of problems, and no one is going to support this decision outside of the company. Even if someone isn’t disabled, they can understand the pain of those who are, and might even become disabled one day. Everyone can empathize.

And all because some people have a slight advantage in certain games? Forget about it. Someone always has an advantage. This was an absolutely idiotic move.

wccrawford,

I’ve had video games refuse to play because of that. Ridiculous.

wccrawford,

Not only that, this is by design. They want their early testers to be a small group of people who are heavily invested in the game, both mentally and financially.

Sure, a lot of people are going to be mad about being “excluded”, but how many of them are going to actually boycott the expansion when it releases because of it? The ones are maddest are the ones who most want to play it and are unlikely to walk away.

There was always going to be a small group of players that got to play it before the majority of the playerbase. The only difference is the $90, and that price is well worth it to a lot of the big fans.

wccrawford,

I don’t usually torrent, but I just looked at recent eps from Usenet and it looks like the majority is 1080p max. 4k exist, but tend to be from streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, or AppleTV it seems.

I find NZBFinder to be a decent usenet indexer for free, so maybe take a look on there for the shows you’re wanting and see if they’re even out there. It could be they just aren’t available at all.

wccrawford,

Interesting! I love Astroneer and tend to think that Devolver publishes good games, so I’m interested in seeing what this means in the future.

My hope is that Astroneer 2 is on the horizon and this is in prep for it! So far as I know, they haven’t said anything about making a sequel, though, so I’m not holding my breath.

wccrawford,

I hate grind, but I used to enjoy just playing D2 weekly, way beyond the weekly content.

Then they decided that literally everything needed to be a slog, and that being overpowered was bad, and they ruined my fun. I went from 80 hr weeks (I know this isn’t healthy) to 1 hour weeks over the course of a couple seasons. I still spent a lot of time after the launch of the latest DLC, but after that was done, and they upped the base difficulty by removing the effect of levels on almost all base content, I struggled to stay engaged. This season, I just gave up. I’ve got like 15 levels, when I usually have 200-300 in the battle pass.

I’m not saying they don’t have a grind problem, too, but it wasn’t what killed it for me.

wccrawford,

I’m a casual who put a lot of hours into the game, enjoying it over a few seasons. Then they decided that what the community wanted was more difficulty, even at the lowest levels, and it has ruined the game for me. I used to just fire it up and shoot my way through a bunch of stuff, having fun.

Now everything is a slog. I find myself having to get serious about getting through the most basic levels, instead of just running through it like a madman.

As a consequence, I now play no more than a couple hours a week, and I’ve even skipped weeks entirely lately.

You’d think this would resonate with someone, but I’ve heard nothing but complaints about this change. High-level, serious players aren’t in favor of it because it makes low-level content slow and boring, but doesn’t actually engage them any better than before. New players find it difficult when it should be teaching them the game. Mid-level players like myself get nothing from the increased difficulty, either.

And yet they persist, adding even more modes that strip the point of levels from the game, and homogenize all the content.

I’m hoping they smarten up next season, but I’m not real optimistic.

wccrawford,

Yeah, just like the original rate change, I can’t imagine who would think this was a good excuse, or that it makes them look better at all. Now, not only was it a really bad idea, it was done on a whim as well.

wccrawford,

It’s a neat trick, but I don’t think it’s actually all that challenging. It’s just a bit of math to find out where you on on the texture you’re rendering to, and then spawn the 3d character at that point, and vice versa.

From that article, it sounds like their main developer wasn’t a good programmer, so they found it a challenge, but… It isn’t that sensational.

It does look like a fun game, though, so I look forward to playing it eventually.

wccrawford,

It sounds interesting, but… Android only? I don’t actually watch much video on my phone. It’s mostly on my desktop browser.

wccrawford,

Non-amp link.

digitaltrends.com/…/motorola-edge-2023-announce-p…

wccrawford,

I thought that this was incredibly dumb, so I went looking… And from what I can tell, there’s a whole section that can be replaced, including the padding. Instead of just the padding. So there will be replacements available, and third party replacements, too, I’m sure.

Buggy games should be 100% allowed to be refunded.

I have no idea how many runs I started in BG3. Every few moments I report a bug. Every update the game seemingly gets worse. Decisions don’t work, pathing is awful, after the latest update attacks no longer connect properly and my character claims not to be able to attack with a clear line of sight and so on. I have never...

wccrawford,

I think the “2 weeks” is the line for auto-refund, but they can and will refund you after that at their discretion. And they don’t seem to be jerks about it.

wccrawford,

I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of overlap from the titles I get on GamePass and the ones I get from Humble monthly. I do have a lot of overlap from Humble and the ones I have already bought, though, which is always a bummer. Each time, I have to remind myself that I enjoyed that game and it was worth the price at the time.

wccrawford,

I absolutely hate it when a game or movie puts up a fully white screen, especially after a dark scene. It’s just painful and stupid.

wccrawford,

As a dev who hopes to eventually publish a game…

What would you recommend that the bug report for have as far as fields/instructions, to minimize player annoyance and maximize usefulness for the devs?

wccrawford,

Yeah, when the new Prey came out I was very, very confused for a while.

I ended up liking the game, but I didn’t find it as interesting as the original.

wccrawford,

I’m pretty sure they mean upload doesn’t go over 50mbps here. We have pretty easy access to 1gbps download in tons of places, especially cities. But high upload is pretty hard to come by without a business line.

wccrawford,

That’s a stay of execution at best. At some point, you’ll need to upgrade to a new Unity. It might be because IOS and Android require using an SDK that’s not more than 2 years out of date, or because nVidia/AMD invented some new amazing tech, or a host of other reasons. But eventually, you’ll need to upgrade.

The worst part is that Android is actually removing apps that haven’t updated in years, even if they still work perfectly. So you’ll get screwed by that eventually if you do mobile at all.

wccrawford,

They deserve their refunds, but…

This is a lesson that you never buy something based on a future promise. Buy it based on what it is, not what someone says it’ll be eventually.

wccrawford,

Steam has rules intended to curb this behavior.

partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/discounts

Specific Discounting Rules


<span style="color:#323232;">You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 30 days.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">It is not possible to discount your product for 30 days following a price increase in any currency.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Discounts cannot be run within 30 days of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 30 days of releasing your title, within 30 days from when your launch discount ends, or within 30 days of a price increase in any currency.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">You may not change your price while a promotion is currently live or scheduled for the future.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">It is not possible to discount a product by more than 90% or less than 10%.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">it is not possible to create new discounts for a product that would result in the price in any currency falling below Steam's minimum possible transaction price. See details.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.
</span>
wccrawford,

As if you can’t schedule your announcements to fall just after the scheduled stock sales… Or just before them, if you want.

wccrawford,

No. I don’t know any of game that allows you to refund purchases of in-game currency.

wccrawford,

As much as I hate the changes (I uninstalled Unity for the last time), this doesn’t actually address how it’s bad for students or teachers as opposed to everyone else.

The terms are certainly fine for both of them because unless they get a really lucky break, none of them are making more than 200k per year with it. (And let’s not forget you can just upgrade to pro for the year and push that to $1mil.)

That said, I do think that teachers should switch to another engine. Godot is free and has basically the same concepts, and UE has really good terms and is more powerful.

wccrawford,

Just glancing at it, a number of them are exclusive to Humble Bundle, yet list the MSRP at $50. Uh, no thanks. I can smell a scam.

wccrawford,

I would love to know what they would port to. UE and Godot seem like obvious candidates.

wccrawford,

Having more features, especially those aimed at corporations instead of indies, means it’s harder to figure out how to make simple things work, especially without tutorials. Even the things that could be simple are probably still more complicated than an indie engine in order to help large developers do what they need to. Since Unreal Engine is pretty much designed for Epic to make their games in, you can bet that that’s their first priority, and indies get table scraps.

The flip side of that coin is that you have access to a lot of the features that the corporations do if you want to put in the time to use them.

wccrawford,

You missed one: They initially said that web-based games count as installs, too. Insanity.

wccrawford,

I’m looking to switch and this is a very timely article. Thanks!

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