MentalEdge , 20 hours ago

I don't think so, but you should be able to create an install usb, same as for linux, boot into that, and access recovery tools. From there, you can definitely run chkdsk, done it before though I don't recall every step.

MentalEdge , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Apparently any further sales of the game will have a cut going to even the staff that was laid off.

That's commendable, but overall this is still an unfortunate development. I wonder if microtransactions in big games like apex and genshin are down this year? Is this an overall trend, or are people choosing to spend on one game, foregoing titles like Jumplight Odyssey for bigger spending on one (arguably less deserving) game.

MentalEdge , 2 days ago

My headcanon is that most of their speech is ferengi being translated by the universal translator, but when they say the word human they just use the human word for human which then goes untranslated.

MentalEdge , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Cheats will only grow more advanced, at some point you'll be able to train an AI to play exactly like a human, but while performing perfectly far more reliably than a human.

The line between what skill looks like versus cheating will only get blurrier.

The real long term solution is to enable the vetting of players (not by the game company or god forbid the government, looking at you china), by returning to community based servers/private matches. And to have reports dealt with faster and by people who care about the game personally.

As a member of the Northstar community, cheating is basically a solved problem for us atm.

There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.

People used to form "gaming-clans" in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.

MentalEdge , 2 days ago

EA account ID. Northstar is the community modded version of Titanfall 2.

MentalEdge , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

While that's all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same... Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.

Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.

For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.

Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.

Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.

But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you're in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you're in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.

Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it's a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.

MentalEdge , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

It's open source.

No choice? I can still apply my own bans on top no matter what the mod does. Spyglass isn't what enables bans, it just makes them networked and tracked. And I could modify the mod to work however I like, or even fork the whole thing and make my own database.

That's not been necessary as Erlite has been maintaining the spyglass mod and database with integrity.

There's no chokehold here, no problems have arisen, and if they do, only then are additional solutions warranted. I'm not suggesting this is the final solution for all games, but that this kind of community driven counter-cheater work, is.

Cheating is being treated as a tech problem with a technological solution, when really it's a social problem which should be solved with inter-social solutions.

MentalEdge , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

I'm not denying any part of what you're saying, I'm saying that this specific case is currently working fine, and that it is merely an example of the kinds of solutions I want to see enabled.

Obviously the bigger the community, the more complex the solution needs to be, and the more bases have to be covered. You're nitpicking a specific example I gave (and doing so from a position of ignorance concerning northstar and its community), rather than my ideological thesis. Which is that communities should be empowered with social structure so that cheaters can be properly ostracized. Spyglass is just one way for a community to implement that.

Northstar isn't big enough to even begin to compare with discord or minecraft. The concurrent playercount on all servers put together seldom matches ONE big minecraft server.

If the factors you bring up become a concern, I'm ready to pick up the tools to deal with it myself, as I've already done before. But so far, there has been no need.

MentalEdge , 3 days ago

"But some people just have a shitty work ethic" is not the counterargument you think it is.

As for the difference in what a big business can afford vs a small one, that's tough. But if you fall behind on the expenses of doing business, you should simply be charging more. If you still can't afford something, while charging a fair (both to customer and proprietor) price, then you don't get just handwave it off and hire someone for less than they're worth.

A lot of "mom and pop" shops stay in business for decades and finally bite the dust because they refuse to adjust prices that should be orders of magnitude higher due the ever-decreasing worth of money itself.

Instead they try to match prices with giant companies, while providing three times better services because they actually care about both customers and employees in a way corposhits "optimize workflows" too hard to even afford considering.

If you're a boutique business, charge like one.

MentalEdge , 7 days ago

It’s been two decades. We can wait a bit more for the story to continue.

MentalEdge , 7 days ago

Psygnosis, later known as Studio Liverpool.

Sony shut them down a few years ago. Man seeing that old owl logo hits me hard in the nostalgia bone.

MentalEdge , 7 days ago

They seem to consider only massive franchises like GoW and TLoU and Horizon worth their time… But most gamers need variety outside the mainstream game genres, so I don’t see why they are shutting down anything with a smaller fanbase.

MentalEdge , 9 days ago

No that’s when death plays the coin pushers at the arcade.

MentalEdge , 9 days ago

!meow_irl

MentalEdge , 9 days ago

!meow_irl

MentalEdge OP , 12 days ago

This boy also purred for a full day and near constantly for the days that followed when I brought him home. When I looked into it I learned that cats also purr to themselves in emotional distress, as a way to comfort themselves.

Obviously it wasn’t to deal with fear as he confidently explored the new home, but being taken from the shelter by a new person into a new place surely has to leave a cat unsure and nervous about what’s happening in their world.

MentalEdge , 13 days ago

Truly. My orange boy never ceases to amaze in how he simultaneously embodies the majesty of ancient pharaoh’s, and the goofiness of… well, an orange cat.

MentalEdge , 15 days ago

offensive spam account, please ban forever

MentalEdge , 15 days ago

offensive spam account, please ban forever

MentalEdge , 15 days ago

offensive spam account, please ban forever

MentalEdge , 17 days ago

Considering those are people who only cost them bandwidth and provide nothing in return, that might actually be a net positive for their bottom line.

MentalEdge , 17 days ago

You’re relying on a lot of assumptions, which even if true, still doesn’t mean that the math works out in a way that means allowing ad-blocking users makes sense.

Netflix doesn’t need a “healthy community” for people to use the platform. Shows do perfectly fine letting all the talking happen on other social media.

AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all, which with how hard they push premium, definitely isn’t the case.

MentalEdge , 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.

This claim is opposite to their actual current behavior. This isn’t a case where they made their ad-blocking slightly more effective, they added it to the terms of service. They changed their stance legally. To use ad-blocking on yt, is now legally the same as using cheats in competitive games. Which game publishers have sued over.

Blocking ad-blocking is not “trivial” from the software side, the arms race has made the work of both sides incredibly complex in some cases. It’s “trivial” to block the video if the ad isn’t served just as it is “trivial” to have the ad-blocker pretend to watch it if that’s the requirement.

It’s fairly clear to me, that YT has decided that whatever losses this incurs, outweighs the benefits. And I tend to agree. YT’s business model never made sense, not after they began allowing basically infinite uploads.

YT doesn’t charge for all the things that actually cost it money, no-one pays them to store the content no-one watches from ten years ago, or even six months ago. The rate at which their expenses grow is not coupled to the rate at which they charge. In fact, their income is constant, while their expenses have the potential to be exponential.

Compare that to Netflix, which has a fixed catalogue that they curate, and doesn’t grow out of the blue as users throw more at their servers to ingest. And they are in a downturn, with subscribing users!

Even targeted ads stop working once an individual gets used to them, ad-based revenue only works for a while, per customer. It only works long-term on a subset of people, which isn’t lucrative, nor ethical. That modern platforms are disproportionately subsidized by their most gullible users is a disgusting reality.

That makes data-mining and targeted advertising a huge business, but insufficient for running something like YT. Because it, is an even bigger business, one that has included all the people you can’t advertise to. Streaming doesn’t do “economies of scale” the way physical products do, servers and bandwidth don’t magically become cheaper the more you buy. In fact in recent years the opposite has often been true.

YT will never make enough with ads. The math simply doesn’t work out. I am very skeptical that it makes sense for YT to “allow” ad-blocking to “spread the message” of their product. If anything, to become solvent, YT needs to deliberately downsize their audience.

To grow and form a network, can be left to the communities that form around channels.

MentalEdge , 19 days ago

I’ve only ever used Collabora via the CODE server on my nextcloud instance, which has worked without issues on both desktop and mobile. Though that obviusly isn’t accessible without setup, or when offline, even.

Is there an issue tracker for Collabora somewhere? Are these problems known?

If not, reporting your problems is step one towards getting them fixed. I’m not really finding alternatives either, so that will likely be faster than waiting for a whole nother FOSS office suite app to pop up.

MentalEdge , 21 days ago

Are there nordic keyboards yet?

MentalEdge , 21 days ago

I think the “desktop app” is also just the web version. So yeah.

MentalEdge , 23 days ago

Soon playing multiple games will be as exhausting as working multiple jobs!

MentalEdge , 25 days ago

When I first attempted to give Wayland a try, it just wouldn’t work. Did some troubleshooting but stuck with X11 for the time being.

About a month ago I gave logging into a Wayland session a try on a whim, and it just worked. Everything was fine, only difference was a change is mouse sensitivity.

MentalEdge , 25 days ago

Akame ga Kill is a fantastic manga!

We do not talk about the anime.

In a nutshell, it tried to speedrun the plot of the manga, and halfway through decides it would be better for it to do its own thing. It then just goes completely off the rails compared to the plot of the manga. I honestly felt personally insulted as a fan and actively try to forget the anime exists.

MentalEdge , 27 days ago

It’s Konami, everything good they’ve done the last decade has been despite it being Konami, not because of.

Konami has a tendency of taking the slightest amount of positive reaction as an excuse to immediately go ahead and try to squeeze out more, so this after their seemingly promising return to Silent Hill has me worried.

MentalEdge , 26 days ago

I’m not old enough to have proper awareness of what the industry looked like that far back, but I would not be surprised.

MentalEdge , 27 days ago (edited 27 days ago)

Animated webp’s: Am I a joke to you?

Gifs are insanely inefficient, hosting them on volunteering instances would be pointless extra cost. Lemmy can already do both animated webp files and it even has an embedded player if you use a direct link to a video file.

MentalEdge , 1 month ago

Fucking finally.

MentalEdge , 1 month ago

…

I’ll be sticking with papirus.

MentalEdge , 1 month ago

Psst, you can use header formatting to make text even bigger.

PROBABLY A STUPID QUESTION BUT ARE POSTER/COMMENTS LIKE THIS AI?

MentalEdge , 1 month ago

!meow_irl

MentalEdge , 1 month ago

Also check if your instance accepts support 👍

MentalEdge , 1 month ago

He didn’t “fuck up” so much as think he was big enough to bully the legal issue away.

They did it with the word “meta” here’s hoping they don’t get away with it a second time.

MentalEdge , 1 month ago

Legally, yes.

In every other sense? Fuck no.