MudMan

I guess it depends on where your line for “gross” happens to land. In my old age I tend to look at old arcades as being pretty gross. Certainly worse than I thought they were at the time.

I’m also not sure if I have a problem with Diablo IV. I think their incentive is for you not to run out of content and bounce all the way off before they can give you more, which is why they retuned it much more generously later. In this case the version of the game that people like more is also the one that did better for them financially. Is that more or less gross?

So I’m not sure I agree on whether the incentives matter. I think the experience I get matters. There is definitely a bad place there in the middle where you feel frustrated playing but won’t stop playing, and that’s a place where a bunch of the sloppier, grindier games make their money. And I’m not gonna stand here and say that all the upsells in games with a big live service don’t make the experience worse. They do, in my book.

But those impacts to the experience are what matters to me, not that they are made as part of a business proposition. Full games in boxes were also sold for money. Live games I enjoy are made for money, too.

I’m more concerned at how live games get to vacuum up all players and keep them on lockdown forever than I am about their moneymaking practices, to be honest. People are worried about the wrong set of incentives here, if you ask me.

That being said… man, do I wish people would put their money where their mouth is. It’s all well and good to complain about more expensive pay-up-front games or about overly intrusive microtransactions, but this conversation would be a lot smoother if people actively spending hundreds of hours on those weren’t currently spending like 70% of the time and 50% of all the money in gaming. Voting with one’s wallet rarely does much, in isolation, but there are absolutely tons of games out there. It’d be nice to see people flock towards the good ones, as per their own standards, and ideally spend some money on those.

Nah, they did it with Youtube videos.

But on the underlying point of “everybody is freaking out about AI things that good old big data had been doing for years with zero pushback” I very strongly agree.

Well, the missing context is that this is how a lot of gaming is tuned regardless. It’s pretty basic economy tuning to look at how long a task takes to complete and tune based on that (for games with grind, anyway, think RPGs).

So if you’re playing “Perfectly Fair Single Player RPG 3” there’s a more than fair chance that the developers looked at the expected completion time of a quest, plugged in that time into some spreadsheet and assigned XP and other rewards to the quest based on that, just to keep the XP curve of the game somewhat predictable. This is a big rabbit hole with a bunch of nuance, but for these purposes we can assume they at least started by doing that flat on all quests.

If you have a F2P game and you’re charging for things you can also grind I frankly don’t see a much better place to start.

Now, if your premise is that all design for engagement in F2P is gross because it’s servicing your business and all design for engagement in paid games is fine because that’s just seeking “fun”… well, I don’t know that gets fixed. I agree that pay-up-front games can benefit from getting the ugly matter of getting money from players out of the way early, but these days even those games are trying to upsell you into later content, sequels and other stuff, so the difference is rarely that stark.

I think there’s a conversation to be had about whether “good”, “fun” and “makes people want to engage more” should be seen as the same thing and, if not, what the difference is. It’s tricky and nuanced and I don’t know that you can expect every game to be on one end of that conversation. Sometimes a person just wants to click on a thing to make number go up, and that’s alright.

Hah. Those used to be a lot more common, this is actually a bit of a blast from the past.

Early graphical Linux interfaces were constantly breaking and telling you to go back to a terminal to restart your X server or fix whatever was broken manually.

That used to be the “but you have to use the terminal” of very early Linux, back when “can you install Debian from scratch?” was the old “can you install Arch from scratch?”

Man, I’m old.

It did happen, but that wasn’t an OS update, it was a third party update that bricked the OS. The fact that it could do that exposed some Windows practices that are a bigger deal than Linux’s general jankyness when they happen, but they also surface less often for end users.

I thought this particular boo-boo was revelatory because Linux is relatively on the ball anticipating updates breaking the system entirely (one wonders if it should have to be, but whatever). But this was a widespread but specific issue within a random system component. Without googling for it an end user wouldn’t immediately understand what’s going on, and even then there was a fair amount of confusion for at least a day. There wasn’t “a workaround”, there were serveral, as normies and newer users struggled to understand what had broken and how to fix it, and people weren’t very clear in reporting what worked and what didn’t. This all happened within forums and bug reports, with no central source of information or even a centralized official organization informing of the status. Definitely not how that would have played out in a commercial environment, for better and worse.

Also, this is a slight tangent, but can I flag a couple of frequent Linux community behaviors you’re engaging in here that I wish we would get rid of?

One, “it works in my machine” is a meaningless statement. It adds nothing to the conversation and it doesn’t mean the issue is less important. It works on your machine, your version or your distro but not in others. That is every bug, it adds no useful information. In this case, a static screen contains specific instructions that report a common default but don’t match implementation on every distro, so this warning screen isn’t always accurate. That, in itself, is a problem.

Two, “here’s all the smart stuff I did to fix it” (or the smart stuff I do to prevent it) is also entirely useless. The issue came and went, everybody fixed it. The goal isn’t to work around the OS or the DE’s jankiness, it is to have it not be janky in the first place. Putting the onus on the user to fix the shortcomings of the product is… a mitigation, I guess, but the goal is to compete with the paid alternatives on a mass scale, which has different requirements. Complaints about a wonky area of Linux shouldn’t be dismissed or excused with offers to teach people manual workarounds or even best practices, they should be addressed with fixes from the developers of the components that have issues.

I know the fix was up for testing, but I saw some people complaining about other issues with it and it wasn’t rolled into the latest live update for me last I checked, so now I’m using a lock screen wallpaper that doesn’t break and I’m not sure I have a way to tell when it’s fixed other than manually checking.

Also, the error message suggesting a way to manually unlock using keyboard shortcuts to a virtual terminal does not match the defaults on my distro, so that added to the confusion.

Say what you will about Windows, but it was a stark reminder of the places where a single monolithic commercial owner would prevent some issues that can happen in Linux/open source projects. A commercial software developer would almost certainly not have shipped something broken in this way, and if they did they would have rolled it back in an update immediately. They also wouldn’t have had a black screen with some tips on how to bypass the issue, presumably, and if they did they certainly wouldn’t have been just… wrong, or mismatched.

Like I said, pros and cons, but it was a disappointing experience. Mostly because… well, yeah, I can understand what happened and troubleshoot it, but a) I didn’t have the time, so I certainly was glad I am dual booting and could just flip to Windows for the time being, and b) a whole bunch of people would not have been able to troubleshoot this or comfortable tryign to do so even if the provided instructions in the workaround were accurate to their system.

Statcounter is… a valid proxy, but I don’t know if I trust it for fine grain changes. Big trends, maybe. Windows overall certainly seems to have lost some ground over time. Whether that’s desktop PCs becoming less popular, the laptop market moving a bit towards Mac, the handheld market being weirdly represented because this only counts devices used for web browsers or whatever else is harder to parse.

They officially changed the name in 2016. I have to assume they changed what the browser reports earlier this year. For tracking purposes it would probably make more sense to count the ARM version separately from the Intel version, but I don’t know if that’s correlated to this change or what is. I’m not a MacOS user, though, so maybe the change is public knowledge and I just don’t know about it.

Yeah, I don’t know who made the offending changes. I don’t think it’s fixed yet, I’m using a workaround at the moment.

I mean, good thing, too. They just broke the lock screen this week. That was an annoying half an hour of troubleshooting to do in the middle of a work day.

Pros and cons in each, I suppose.

I mean, just to be clear on what …

That’d be the red line, there. Assuming you take Statcounter numbers at face value, even.

Incidentally, how have the MacOS and OSX not converged more, speaking of end of life stuff?

I hate modern reporting.

So, ok, here we go, fact checking dot lemmy dot com.

Tihs one seems to come from Google’s 2025 environmental report, which the article mentions but does not link despite being publicly available. The message Google would like you to take here is that while their power consumption has increased significantly their emissions have not (key chart below).

I guess that’s what you get for trying to spin these things. You get spun right back.

Anyway, Google would also like you to know that:

“However, it’s important to note that our growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”

This tracks. While power consumption seems to be speeding up a bit, it’s been climbing for a while pretty consistently. I don’t know of Google’s implication that less CO2-heavy power generation is enough to not have to care about it, but I also don’t really see a way to reverse this trend. Data centers are data centers, and whether they’re crunching AI numbers or running every spreadsheet in the world, a bunch of big companies are committed to continuing to own a disproportionate chunk of the computing power of the entire planet so they can sell it to you by the minute.

Plot twist, all those fanbases were already kinda garbage before they got flooded with normies and most of the toxicity didn’t come from the casuals.

Sure, but that’s a problem with the language selector setting, as I said above, not with the country list.

Well, yeah, but so are plenty of other gross things and you don’t see me out there raiding coastal villages just because we’ve spent longer taking things from each other by force than enforcing some peaceful, democratic social contract.

To be clear, I’m not disagreeing, we have tribalism baked into us. It just happens to suck and we should strive to break past our built-in biases.

OK, so the difference is a nationalist is a supremacist and a patriot is not.

So I’m back to my original statement, then. Patriotism sucks. Call it what you want, but allegiance to specifically a nation, nation-state or whatever construct you’re assigning special status is bad and I actively oppose it.

I’m not arguing in bad faith, I’m disagreeing. But you made it seem like we don’t actually disagree and like you had a distinction that made patriotism not match the thing I’m saying is bad, so I want to understand if that’s the case. It doesn’t seem to be the case. You think patriotism is not a problem and think my negative characterization is of nationalism instead.

Let me be clear, it is not.

The patriotism you’re talking about? The lovey-dovey “improve your country and learn from others” patriotism? It sucks. That’s what I’m saying here.

I’m also saying it’s just whitewashed nationalism and that your distinction between supremacist nationalism and patriotic nationalism is superficial at best an non-existent at worst. Sure, not all nationalists or patriots are equally toxic, but that doesn’t mean the concept of patriotism is salvageable into something positive.

You owe no allegiance to your nation, beyond what ties you culturally to the groups of people that live within it. Just like you don’t owe allegiance to your hometown beyond the same concerns. Or, you know, to the planet.

You wanting to improve any one of those scales of human organization isn’t any better or worse than the other, and the mere fact of implying any special relevance to one of them is a brand of nationalism I just don’t find justified. It’s a bit like religion. It can be well-intentioned and genuine, but in the long view of history it is undeniably an irrational, toxic force at the core of many atrocities. I will respect it and your right to participate in it, because the alternative is worse, but I won’t take part in it and I don’t think it’s a good thing.

Things, yeah. National symbology, not as much.

I’ll say that I agree with you, though. Americans do way creepier stuff. The first time I attended a US sporting event it felt exactly like being trapped in some ritual for a religion I don’t understand. They may as well have been ripping off some poor guy’s still beating heart before lowering him into lava and watching it spontaneously burst into flame, for all I cared. I genuinely didn’t know what to do with myself for the entire duration of the thing.

I’ve never been to school there, either. I imagine watching a bunch of children recite their daily indoctrinations must be creepy AF. I’m not sure if it actually happens, though. It’s never in American movies.

Yeeeah, I don’t know, it’s an interesting UX question. For language selection, sure. For country? There are plenty of reasons why you may need to select a country name and not be clear on the native spelling of its name. Plus how do you end up in a country selector list in a language you don’t understand?

I’ll say that flagging the language selector for international users is even harder than the list itself. If you don’t have an icon for it in particular. You can make the name cycle, but depending on where it’s at it can be distracting or impractical. Accidentally changing the language to Hungarian (which may as well be an alien language, for how unrecognizeable its roots are if you don’t speak it) was one of the few times I ended up having to delete a config file just to be able to use a piece of software again because I just could not find the lanuage selector after that.

Eh… why would including English help?

Ideally you keep each language in their own language so it can be recognized by native speakers. Flags help. Adding English to the native name… does not.

And of course if you’re selecting a country, not a language, then it makes sense for the country list to be in the language you have selected. Why would you not know the names of countries in the language you chose for the interface? As somebody points out below, those are not language names in the screenshot.

Really? Paying someone else a bunch of money to play by the hour seems like a weird way to manage your time. Plus, I knew several people who had a real problem with spending money in cafés.

I mean, it’s not gambling because you weren’t getting any money back at any point, but if you were leaving your Ultima Online character mining while you went to class, spending money on running a computer when you weren’t even looking at it… well, I’m gonna say there are better ways to keep yourself from problematic gaming.

The way I remember it (at least where I’m from), cafés were a way for broke college students living in dorms or shared apartments with no Internet to get into online gaming, and sometimes for kids to have a bit of an arcade experience in PCs better than their crappy laptops.

In some cases it got pretty wholesome, where groups of friends would just hang out in the one place that kept running the game they liked. There was this one basement grungy spot in town that started running Quake 1 and just… never stop. Those guys could railgun you mid-flight from a bouncepad on a ball mouse and we all decided it was better to leave them to it.