Rich coming from someone who made a name for himself as the president of the nickel and dime company…

The problem really is, like in most industries to be fair, that the actual creators get far too little of the figurative monetary cake.

And if we ever see tipping in games, god forbid, then that money will at best get shared by everyone so there would need to be millions in tipping before it is even noticeable for an individual developer in a normal AAA team.

On that I agree 100%

Most homeless are in the big cities, most churches are out in the boonies. The homeless are very unlikely to accept being bussed to a flyover state to sleep in a church in bumfuck nowhere. For a myriad of reasons.

Keep in mind also that a lot of them have a very hard time accepting any help due to past trauma as well.

It’s not a situation with a quick fix. Really the first step isn’t even ensuring housing for the homeless, it’s making sure we don’t get more homeless. We likely can’t save a subset of today’s homeless because they don’t want/or won’t accept any help that comes with any strings (like no drugs or just they can’t trash the place). But we can ensure no-one else ends up on the streets by beefing up mental healthcare and social services.

Lol wut? Was this guy in a year long coma starting in December 2020? Cyberpunk had one of the top 10 most disastrous launches in gaming history. And in no small part due to botched expectations around quests, mainly because a lot of the pre-release footage was of “The Pickup” which really was the only quest to really deliver all they talked about in those early videos.

Now the game is still a good game. But it’s a great “emergent gameplay” game, one where gameplay and level design work together to create something greater than the sum of the pieces. Quest, plot, story wise it’s not at all anything special in my opinion. It has high production values sure, but the substance is rather meh, and there is little story agency, outside of “The Pickup”, which I think is a large part of the reason they themselves, without announcement, stopped calling it a RPG about a year or so before release.

Tell them to move to yubikey or similar hardware key which is far more secure than any password policy will ever be and vastly more user friendly. Only downside is the intense shame if you manage to lose it.

The key should stick with the user thus not be stored with the computer when not in use. The key isn’t harmless of course but it takes a very deliberate targeting and advance knowledge about what it goes to and how it can be used. It’s also easy to remote revoke. If you’re extra special paranoid you could of course store the key locked at a separate site if you want nuclear codes levels of security.

So much dumb shit has been done under the banner of NFT that I want to disagree but yes, if each ID in your blockchain represents a unique variant of an item, and we want to that to persist then yes NFT would fit the bill as a correct term for it.

NFTs don’t need to be limited, they don’t need to have transaction fees to move them, they don’t need to contain a link to an image and masquerade as if you own that image. All they need to do is prove that you have control of it by virtue of it being in your care. Then that proof confers the ability to use the item it represents in game. For currency you naturally wouldn’t use NFTs, though you could if you’re adamant you want a more “cash like” experience with change back and all that jazz.

Adding blockchain tech can do a lot of things here actually.

• Reduce amount of ways to be scammed and making trades more straight forward and safe.

Both these are realizable with smart contracts.

• Retain ownership even if the game goes offline

While it of course will lose its value you at least have the mementos available. Of course you either need a service to be up that can show you a visual representation or make a backup of the visual data yourself, but for a culturally important game like EVE that is very unlikely to be an issue

As for transaction fees that is not at all necessary for blockchain/crypto. Especially not a centralized one like would be the reasonable approach here. Sure CCP might want a cut, which they could call a transaction fee, but double dipping would be dumb and just make the whole thing fail.

As for currency value being influenced by external actors sure, that is a risk but also an opportunity. The people playing the game has access to make currency just by playing, people outside need to pay to get it. If anything it would make the amount of bots and miner accounts skyrocket, which might be annoying to players.

As for marketplace without blockchain it requires more trust and I’d argue is harder to realize in a secure manner. Blockchain started out as the next evolution in transaction safe databases, that preserves history, and that is exactly what you want for keeping track of in-game items and currency imo. Crypto as most know it is not all that blockchain is or will be. But equally blockchain can’t solve everything like Cryptobros think it can.

Further making their own marketplace might put regulatory crosshairs on them in some markets and also would alienate the large third party marketplaces that are important to the games longevity up until now. Blockchain however could be made to make it easy for them to adapt to the new and make it easier for more sites to pop up and due to the nature of the tech you can build it such that no marketplace operator can easily scam users.

Really I see no issues at all using blockchain tech, and only slight issues with making it a full on, exchange tradeable cryptocurrency, and that’s mainly from follow on effects.

… I agree it’s great but it’s exactly what is criticized here. It’s the typical bombastic movie epic theme song. It would fit just as well into any Sci-Fi block buster. There is nothing about it that gives away that it’s for a game as opposed to a movie or tv-series.

Huh, fascinating stuff. Wonder what triggers it

??? Frogs breed super quick and aren’t that tricky to breed in captivity? I’d even go so far and say that frog meat should be rather sustainable since they eat insects which we can also breed effectively and they in turn can eat refuse from farming. I also haven’t ever seen or heard about the frog being of a particular breed or “wild caught” being part of the allure, nor seen it mentioned in a menu. This whole thing is absurd.

Probably the only type of destruction of art as protest I condone. The piece:

1. Is not very old or culturally/historically important
2. Directly depicts someone at the root of this conflict
3. Was deliberately targeted and the reasons layed out

Trying to destroy unrelated art work is just wasteful of our shared human heritage. Attacking symbols of oppression however is perfectly valid in my opinion and is to me perfectly reasonable escalation when peaceful protests obviously do not bring the changes needed.

I put this on the same level as African Americans attacking statues of confederate generals and other proponents of slavery to hammer home their point.

As I understand it Dreadwolf is like Andromeda in that it’s the same universe but not a continuation of the story, or even tightly related. But I can’t say I’ve followed it too closely. As such there’s no rush to get a Legendary edition out before it. I’d plan it for 2-3 years or so after Dreadwolf to keep the franchise in people’s minds.

They did for Mass Effect with Legendary edition so maybe

Personally less time to game sadly doesn’t mean less willingness to buy games, if my games libraries are any indication…

Yepp, 117 billion estimated total humans born ever and about 8 billion alive today.

Wouldn’t you be refunded for the original ticket purchase?

No one wants a 20 hour empty game. A 20 hour game needs to be dense, like a good book of equal length. It needs a compelling narrative and interesting immersive gameplay. A 20 hour game can get away with immersion adding limitations to parts of it that an 80 hour game can’t, stuff like not having quick save is annoying in an 80 hour game but perfectly valid in a 20 hour one, same with point of no returns, very grating in 80 hour games but perfectly fine in a 20 hour one.

Also I don’t consider Open World to be a type or genre of MMOs, I’m exclusively talking about Ubisoft style open world games like Assassin’s Creed and games obviously inspired by that open world approach. For MMOs busy work is good because the point really is to socialize and all content is good basically. If the game has co-op then I’m much more lenient on the busy work aspect.

Further I’m also only harping about story less or with very limited story tied to it type events. Like the cop events in Cyberpunk 2077 which is basically an ongoing crime and for whatever reason you have them marked, can go there and kill everybody, get some small reward and a thank you message. But it more or less clashes with the story overall and there’s no point to it. Having enemies to kill and things happening in the world is of course a good thing but drawing player attention to it with an icon and interaction like the thank you message creates expectations about a payoff or it actually being meaningful outside of “clearing the map”. But it’s not. It’s also a fact that crafting all of it takes time, time better spent on making the content that is meaningful even better. Basically give me one 1 hour mission rather than six 10 minute ones.

Seems like it could be interesting but they way it seemed like he thought the UI spam was the problem with their Open World approach in Assassin’s Creed makes me nervous. I hated that shit from day one. It’s just busy work to add play hours for no real reason. Kinda like filler episodes in Anime or that “welp we’re out of budget so we’ll do a recap episode” that StarGate pulled every season. It’s just a waste of time. What really bothers me though is how that was somehow allowed to become more or less the expectation and definition of an “open world” game. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 were made worse by it, killing pacing and clashing hard with the story. Now I’m not saying there shouldn’t be anything of course but make it fit into the game and story, have bounty contracts that are formulaic to streamline making them but at least have some variation like for one you need to chase them, one they’ve set a trap for you, one their friends come to free them during transport etc. Small things like that keeps it fresh and keeps you on your toes and makes it interesting to see what will happen during this bounty hunt.

What an absolutely crazy bar story that surgery team has. “You know I saved the life of a King of the North once…”

Yeah, I think the real exception here is Dragon Age: Origins. It has a lot of interesting choices, many matter and they impact the end in complex ways. Sure some of it is slideshow based but that is completely fine IMO. And all choices made can carry over to the final game in the series, actually altering the experience there in noticeable ways. First Mass Effect also had a good ending variation but it was far more subtle, small differences that ultimately didn’t have much impact on later games (though I applaud them doubling the voice lines by allowing your choice of leader of humanity to stand in subsequent games). Mass Effect 2 however had a very interesting take on ending given that the ending is basically the whole of the final mission were all your choices impact how that mission plays out. It’s interesting how you can “fail” that mission and it’s a viable ending. Kinda like a “bad ending” in a visual novel.

So I’d go with DA:O if we’re talking strictly multiple endings as we normally think about it and ME2 if we want to consider the final mission as a way to do a new take on multiple endings. Maybe “dynamic ending” would fit ME2 better.