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You’re stating it like it’s somehow objective, but it’s not. Battlefield 3 and 4 have been delisted and it’s a matter of time until EA turns off services and those games are left for dead. Battlefield 4 still averages above 1k players a month. It’s clear that EA won’t see value in keeping the light on and will turn off the services in the near future, but do you think the players will go overnight from “I want to play this game” to “This game is worthless”. Don’t you think the people playing BF4 wouldn’t want to continue playing after EA shuts down the services keeping the game running?
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are two groups who decide if a game has value or not, the company and the customers. Right now after purchasing the game the customers no longer have a say whether a game has value or not. Only the company has a say and if the company says it’s not worth it then the people who bought it just have to suck it up. And that’s the idea behind the initiative, to make it so that the company isn’t the only one who gets to decide how long you get to use the product you’ve purchased.
I think if we expanded the idea of bricking software beyond gaming, if companies could destroy any piece of software they made, you’d also be in favor of this initiative. Imagine if Microsoft could brick Windows 10 when they’ve officially stopped supporting it. Or Nvidia effectively bricking their older cards by stopping official driver support. Would you then also argue that the software has lost value and it’s acceptable behavior?
I usually agree with Thor but on this one I probably couldn’t disagree more. Based on what he says I’d say his mindset is completely opposite to what his initiative wants to do. He essentially said he doesn’t see any value in (live service) games after they’ve reached their end of service and from that perspective I can understand how this movement is pointless or even potentially damaging. But that assumes that the (live service) game loses value after the company stops supporting it and I just don’t think that’s the case.
A lot of games continue live despite the company ending official support for them. If anyone remembers there’s a gem called Wildstar that was shut down in 2018. Despite the game being shut down and even trademark has expiring people are still running the game on private servers. People are putting in sweat and tears to make sure a game is preserved. Imagine how much easier it would be if Carbine or NcSoft had released proper tools for it. Even Vanilla WoW exists because private server did it first and Blizzard wanted to get some of that money.
And another point that Thor made how it’s not about preservation because you can’t preserve a moment in time. I think that’s a completely disingenuous argument because it feeds into FOMO. If you join WoW today you will never experience “the golden age of WoW”. Maybe another game you might be interested in is having a golden age right now, better buy into the hype. You can’t argue against preservation like this because it’s literally impossible to preserve a moment in time except in your memory so you have be at that exact place at that exact time to really experience that thing, that is FOMO at it’s purest form. That argument against preservation is an argument in favor of FOMO.
Thors points come for a belief that live service games don’t need to be preserved after official support has ended, and he views this initiative through that lens. Of course he will have issues with the initiative because he’s opposing the idea at a fundamental level. It’s like asking a racist how to be more tolerant with other races, the answer obviously is that you shouldn’t want to tolerate other races. And just like you would ignore a racist I think you should ignore what Thor has to say on this matter because anything he says is against the idea of preservation.
So you’re mixing up two different meaning of AI to say that AI doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere? When people are talking about bats, the flying mammals, do you also interject with “bats are use to hit a ball” to make some point? No, because deliberately mixing up homonyms is stupid.
It’s pretty clear what kind of AI people are talking about here. Nobody was discussing game AI.
Online casinos are also tech. The devops in the article literally says they set up proxies to continue operating in countries where their main domain is blocked. I know the core domain of casinos are very regulated, but I doubt the entire tech aspect of online casinos are regulated. I imagine there’s plenty of fuckery to do there.
Also casinos will throw out people who benefit too much at the expense of the casino. The casino benefitted too much at the expense of Cloudflare and refused to share the profits, so Cloudflare did what any casino would do and kicked them out.
My experience has been that it’s often not the team that’s the problem, it’s the management. I’ve seen a team full of talented developers who know how to successfully launch, only to barely get anything done because management keeps reprioritizing everything. It seems in OPs case the org itself might be the issue. Even if they move to a team where the PO actually does their job instead of letting the MVP balloon the team keeps fighting business just to deliver something.
If I was OP I’d probably look for a job in a different company.
It’s so weird. The company I was working at earlier this year went bankrupt so I had to find a new job. I did a lot of interviews and ultimately the one that made an offer and I accepted was the one that had one interview. They took a look at my previous experience, did one test exercise to verify my expertise and then made an offer that I accepted. But for that one offwr I had a lot of interviews at other places where it came down to me missing “it” whatever “it” was. It all felt pretty demoralizing and I ended up spending more time maintaining a healthy mindset, to not become like the author, than I did searching for a job.
My favorite hiring was a company that had me do a recruiter interview after a recruiter had already recommended me (why?). Then I got a poorly worded practice exercise that they refused to elaborate. After that I had a team interview and after it a HR interview (yes, in that order). I would’ve had two more interviews with the head of the dept and one more with some suit. All that for a position that wage-wise was just above entry level and well below my paygrade. I pretty much grilled them on the last meeting for having such a long and stupid hiring process because out of all their hiring processes no other process had wasted my time as much as this.
Yeah. Every time someone comes up with “games are too cheap” I always point to the fact that the vast majority of AAA games have insane amount of bloat. If AAA devs were struggling to make a profit then a clear way to cut costs would be to streamline the product. If leveling is not vital, cut it. If randomized loot is not necessary, cut it. If horse balls shrinking/expanding with the weather is not necessary, cut it.
There are always ways to cut corners in a AAA games and if the cost was an issue they’d do it. But the fact that they don’t shows how little the actually struggle. So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
It is kinda cynical, but it’s also exactly what you’re seeing on Reddit. Some subs stopped protesting the moment Reddit said they will start removing moderators. Not because the sub wanted to stop protesting, but because the mods of that sub decided so. /r/pcgaming for instance is one of those subs. Another sub I frequently visited, /r/europe, pulled an entire charade of having users vote whether they want to protest or not, when protest won they asked for suggestions on how to protest, the top suggestion was moving the community which got no response from the mod team, instead they had another vote on whether to stop protesting or continue, and when continuing to protest won they gave some bullshit response and opened the sub. I never said moderators don’t care about their subs, I simply stated that some of them value their moderation of the sub above what the sub might want to do.
As for fracturing the community, I’d argue what Reddit did already fractured communities into people who want to protest and people who don’t. Fracturing was always going to happen, it’s only a matter of making it apparent or acting like it didn’t happen. Because of that you’re not going to move the entire community anyway. The community is fractured, some people just don’t want to move. From the mod perspective it should come down to understanding who are the people that actually make up the community you’re moderating and then doing what they want.
I don’t have an issue with mods who had the community vote and then opened the sub (or didn’t even participate in the protest in the place) if the community voted that way. I have an issue with the mods who effectively make those decisions themselves. If you’ve already decided to protest without discussing it with the community then IMO you can’t just decide to back out later, unless the community wants it. But that’s what some of the mods did. Decided to protest and then decided to stop. Then it is already in your self-interest because you’ve technically already abused your power to protest without communicating it with the community. If you then stop protesting you should also resign because it’s a breach of trust and someone who the community cannot trust shouldn’t stay as a mod. But the mods don’t do that because “who else is going to moderate?”, meaning they would much rather moderate a community that has no reason to trust them than have someone else moderate the community. How is that not putting their own interest of moderating over the interest of the community?
Mods have an attachment to their community, but most of them have a bigger attachment to mod power. Plenty of mods were willing to protest, until their mod position was threatened. It’s also why most mods won’t even consider resigning or moving their community to the elsewhere, because that puts their mod position at risk.
Having a significant impact was never on the table.
You pretty much confirmed his point. His entire idea is that it doesn’t have to be Kbin that makes better features, Kbin was simply an example. It could be Meta that makes better features. Open source developers will never be able to compete feature-wise with a corporation that will deliberately pour money into making more features than the open source developers, and Meta definitely won’t make them open source. Hence, as per your wording “Meta deserved to win in that case”, which is exactly what we’d want to avoid.
Also batteries have come so far this past decade it almost seems like a non issue.
I’ve actually have the opposite experience. I didn’t mind integrated batteries a decade ago, because the hardware improved at such a fast pace that it became obsolete before the battery gave up.
But now the hardware improvements are not so fast and a decent phone will be usable for many years, at which point the battery (at least for me) is the first point of failure.
I would much rather take battery replacement over some water and dust protection as ip54 should be enough for daily use (fairphone 4 for instance does have ip54). The only time I’ve needed more protection is when I needed to take family photos in a pool
I was also considering ps5, but with Sony doing a delayed PC launches there really aren’t that many exclusives to draw me in, since most of them end up on the PC. The only one I really want to play is Bloodborne, but I’m not buying a Playstation for that. I’ll just wait until they remaster it and port it to PC.
And it’s not like I don’t have an ever increasing backlog of games to play. I was fine without PS games and I’ll be fine with getting them on discount.
I didn’t mean mods of subs that opened and continued to protest through malicious compliance. I mean subs like /r/livestreamfails or /r/pcgaming that opened and returned to normal like nothing happened. The mods of those subs were willing to protest only until their mod status was threatened, and then they backed down immediately.
Power users maybe, but the last days have shown how little spine some mods have. The moment Reddit threatens to kick them as a mod they tuck their tail and say “We we’re all in until they threatened to take out mod positions. This sub now goes back to normal because there’s no world where we get removed as mods.”
Interesting point about the future of Reddit in that article:
Huffman said, however, that he’d like some form of revenue-sharing.
“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
The long-term goal is monetization of subreddits. I’m glad I won’t be there to see that happen.
But it’s broken and unplayable because the developer/publisher renders it unplayable and that’s where the initiative comes in. The initiative wants to make it so that if the developer/publisher wants to turn off their official services they don’t render the game unplayable.