You should be able to try to launch the games in a readable terminal from heroic, from game properties or something.

That should allow you to see any errors.

Because optimism without realism is just a recipe for cynicism later on.

Dude. I’m not on my way to cynicism. I’m past it.

If I didn’t believe change is possible, then I’d be part of the reason it isn’t happening.

Looking for, and pushing in the places it might occur, is how you help it come about.

How is that not realistic? What am I missing?

Does the way you argue, not contribute to maintaining the status quo, even as you agree that it is not desirable?

The problem of systemic gambling won’t just fix itself.

Did I say it would?

Advertising and other propaganda creates a great deal of countervailing pressure.

That is a very verbose concession of a point.

Well yeah. It was being developed by Rocksteady, beloved for the Arkham games.

But interest, despite the marketing, dropped off a cliff the second people smelled live service elements.

The game came out a died a quick death even more quietly than Concord.

while turning a blind eye to the mountains of other people who don’t care

People, fundamentally, care.

That’s like the whole point of having a hobby.

No-one games because they don’t care.

You won’t find anything people are more passionate about, than something they do for fun.

I’m not claiming that there’s some point where people magically come together and stick it to the megacorps.

I’m saying that if you consistently burn your fans in ways that result in them hating you, eventually, you wont have any.

That’s not something that happens overnight. A slow-ass process that leads to a gradual decline, which you can only put off by duping brand new people who haven’t sworn off ever purchasing your product again. But eventually, you run out of those, too.

Doesn’t matter if they’re okay with it or not, as long as they tolerate it and don’t do anything about it.

Not being happy about it is the first step on the road to doing something about it. How does that not matter?

Sure but many many more have accepted it. Otherwise they never would have done it again.

Who is doing it again? I’m not.

I remember Overwatch still being a wild success regardless.

Is it?

We are on like 2905295734th now.

And? It takes as many times as it takes.

Indie game studios could only ever dream of achieving the heights of revenue of games like Fortnite, that survives entirely on microtransactions.

Why? There are absolutely indies who’ve made millions. Why is there zero chance that one day, the next Fortnite or Roblox comes from an indie?

It already happened at least once. Minecraft.

They are doing everything they can to screw their own customers and yet they pile in by the millions every time they have something new.

Yes. But again. It takes as many times as it takes.

Remember when gamers found out Suicide Squad, which at one time did have real hype behind it, would be live service BS?

And people literally just didn’t play it.

People. Even entire demographics, can a do learn.

Why are you trying to convince me my omptimism is futile?

What good does that do?

You’re not wrong.

But all I’m doing here is saying “things can get better” and your replies are just you pointing out how bad things are right now, as if that proves the only way things can go, is to get worse.

The worse things get, the faster the number of people wanting to fix it will grow.

Am I wrong?

They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on.

No shortage of marks you say?

And there’s always new marks.

If your market is small enough.

You bring up gambling. Its de-regulation and consequent proliferation via online casinos has made the problems it causes more likely to be addressed than ever.

The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes, the more likely you are be ousted entirely.

A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever, because there didn’t use to be a casino in every persons pocket, worldwide, that might’ve already taught every new mark to be wary.

It will work. Even if they get 10 new subscribers, it probably took them 20 minutes to whip up this splash screen. They’re wasting much more of your time. And people have proven time and time again that they will get outraged but they’ll never actually do anything about it.

For now. But eventually they do. That’s how entire governments have fallen time and time again.

They won’t stop playing Xbox. They won’t stop buying games. People grow increasingly accepting of advertising and invasive business practices every day.

Indeed. People can get used to a lot. But being used to something isn’t the same as being ok with it. No-one I know is ok with there being ads on their tvs, phones and laptops. Living with something isn’t the same as accepting it. People are tolerating more BS than ever, but that doesn’t mean they wont rally the second there’s a way out of it.

Remember how angry everyone was at horse armor? Most people wouldn’t think twice about it these days. It’s so much worse now.

I still am. So are many others. Remember when people thought NMS would be a good game on day one? Remember when Fallout 76 was going to be bigger and better than 4? Remember Concord? Remember when Overwatch was going to have a story?

Suicide Squad.

There was real hype. The second people found out it was a live service, they simply didn’t play.

Every fuckup, is another portion of the masses getting the memo. And the fuckups aren’t stopping. If anything there’s more of them than ever.

These corporations used to be afraid of looking bad, but mistakes happen. Except when they did, and stocks didn’t suddenly implode, their takeaway was they could be horrible, and still make a profit. Because yeah, most people don’t learn the first time. But what about the second? Or the third? Or the tenth?

If you ask me, given time, the one thing every person on this planet can do, is learn. Eventually.

The only reason Roblox and Fortnite keep growing is that there are markets they haven’t penetrated. Finding new customers faster than the old ones leave doesn’t work forever. There are only so many humans on this planet.

Meanwhile, indie games with actual passion behind them and fair business practices that still feed the mouths of the devs, without private equity firms in the middle sucking up all the value, are absolutely exploding.

XBOX is dying. MS won’t say it, but they are less involved in the game-industry than ever. This price hike is a death-throw. Not the next step in their master plan to dominate the market forever.

IMO, the only gaming mega-corporation with the goodwill to exist 20 years from now is Nintendo, and even they are burning through the nostalgia people have for them faster than ever before in their insanely long history.

Ok?

It’s not sustainable. Tricking people faster than they wise up to your BS is not a business model that leads to a healthy, content, customer base. And if it’s what EVERYONE does, you get an unhappy SOCIETY.

No-one will enjoy where that leads, and is already leading.

It’s a ratcheting mechanism. Unless something about capitalism changes SIGNIFICANTLY the masses will simply grow more and more discontent.

Yes. And that shit is a one-way door.

Every customer you piss off the way you are pissed off, is A LOT less likely to be a return customer.

Oh that is gonna piss people off.

Your ads are not gonna work the way you think they’ll work, when every person who sees them is gonna feel like it’s a middle finger.

That was a fun one! I don’t think fully utilized Aeriths kit until that fight, either.

Intergrade still has some of my favorite fights.

I really wish Rebirth was more difficult right off the bat. When you go into it having played Intergrade, you already know to min-max character usage, and the fights are a little too easy.

A lot of the bosses are spot on tho, and the game absolutely SHINES as you juggle three characters and their full range of abilites. In longer fights you can also go past limit breaks, and use level two and three limit breaks. Lining up three level three limit breaks on a boss is 👌.

And the gameplay does improve massively. The addition of party abilities, powerful mini-limit breaks which you can use if two compatible party members both have the relevant bars filled, are an amazing addition to the combat system.

The combo moves are also a huge qol improvement. In intergrade flying enemies are kind of a pain when playing melee characters like Tifa, but in Rebirth you can have Cloud (if he’s in the party) launch you at flying enemies by jumping off his sword at any time. In Rebirth all the characters get additional combo moves depending on who is in the party.

You absolutely need to be switching characters.

The ATB bars fill very slowly when you aren’t playing as a party member, meaning that if you need to use certain abilites or spells, you should focus on playing as the character’s that can use them.

Same goes for limit breaks. On harder bosses you may need to build up a stagger, and then pull off a triple limit break during the stun. But you won’t have all three limit breaks ready if you didn’t evenly play as all three.

Also pay attention to ability effects. Some cause stagger instead of damage, some are single target vs AOE. The game doesn’t do a super good job of telling you what to use when, but read the descriptions and remember to check for weaknesses with assess.

Often assess will literally tell you how to beat a boss with specific instructions like “do a stagger ability during its charge up”, so always always always use it.

Not really.

If it’s the same brand (AMD>AMD or Nvidia>Nvidia) the same drivers you were already using should pick up the new GPU.

If you’re switching, you can uninstall the nvidia driver if switching to amd, and you’ll have to install it, if switching to nvidia.

On some distros you may have to install vulkan-radeon to get vulkan support on amd.

Crab Warden was where I think I really fell in love with modern FF gameplay.

Switching characters to min-max ability usage while keeping HP up was wonderfully intense and engaging for me.

Rebirth is a bit too easy in that regard, and the highest difficulty isn’t available from the start.

Except OPs rule would essentially be identical.

When you see someone “treating others as they want to be treated” than that is what you’d do to them. Hence following that rule when it is deserved.

But unlike with “treat others as they want to be treated”, OPs version would mean you respond to malice in kind.

understand the difference between egoism/hedonism

I can see why they might seem similar. And you can certainly pursue hedonism in an egoistic manner.

But I prefer a utilitarian version of hedonism, which doesn’t necesserily need to come with any level of selfishness. It can, but it doesn’t have to.

I make selfish decisions at times, but try to make sure that doing things for my benefit doesn’t cost someone else.

Taking it even further, putting in a bunch of work to throw someone else a super fun surprise party, is hedonistic, but not very egoistic.

Hedonism is to maximise pleasure while avoiding pain. But unlike egoism, it doesn’t have to focus on only your own pain or pleasure.

It’s not even that vague.

Valve basically said: “we are not doing anything illegal”.

To which mastercard responded: “yeah but you’re making us look bad, so tough”.

1. Years.

2. IDK

3. No.

Cinnamon development is glacial. It works, but the project simply does not have the resources to properly keep up or even triage important fixes.

It’s one of the reasons I didn’t stick with mint, and tend not recommend it if someone can use something else. When I stopped using it, the setting that was supposed to allow games in fullscreen to display without compositing was borked, costing you frames and latency. It had been that way for years.