• 5 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Honestly, this just highlights how badly thought out the gameplay is for non-dps classes in a lot of games. So often, both the healer and tank are left as second-class citizens, as all the emphasis is put on killing enemies. For example, in Overwatch, while tanks and healers were effective, there was little depth and little reward in the role compared to DPS characters. Orisa was a dps who couldn’t leave the objective and had to hit ‘e’ on the ground every few seconds. Mercy just followed someone around, with little agency of their own. Compare that with, for example, Junkrat, where you were encouraged to be flying around the map, bouncing grenades off walls to make yourself near impossible to hit while still killing dozens of enemies. Theres both more depth, and more frequent, significant gratification. This is a big part of why I like Dota - supports (tanks aren’t really a thing in the same sense) have a whole separate game they tend to be playing to manipulate the map in their favour, and can still impact fights with a plethora of significant abilities that are flashy and impactful in their own right.



  • Honestly, I think now is probably the best time in history for discoverablity by far. Things like YouTube have done a lot, but I think Steam has played a massive part. Compare it to most of the other options:

    Physical retailers tend to just be a wall of products, with the exception of games with a large marketing budget (esspecially those working out deals directly with the retailer) that often get special placement in their own shelf. Marketing budget is king, and everything else is hard to browse.

    Reviewers offer a bit of an advantage as they provide an easy way to assess if games are good or bad, but they are usually limitted in the number of reviews they can publish, and those reviews tend to go towards the games that get sent from powerful publishers or those with most hype, meaning it usually still comes down to marketing budget.

    A step up from that is most online retailers. Here, you have easier access to information about the games on display, and often have ways to sort by genre, price, or reviews. That said, a lot of emphasis is always placed on either the top grossing, games directly connected to the storefront owner, or games that directly buy space on the front page. This offers far more discoverability than anything that came before, but still tends to massively over-push higher-budget and/or higher-return games.

    Steam on the other hand, has put far more emphasis on featuring good games on their front page. You can’t buy the space, Valve doesn’t bias the store towards their own products as much, and revenue plays a generally smaller part in the algorithm. Instead, they have a much better personalized recommendation algorithm and more tools for customizing your storefront (such as blocking tags). On top of this, they have recognized that this isn’t enough, and introduced a myriad of (often half-baked) additional discovery tools, such the the Discovery Queue, Curators, and the various festivals like NextFest. Sure, its not perfect, but I can consistent find new games I’m interested in, whereas on other platforms its barely worth trying. I think this is a big part of Steam’s success that often gets overlooked.





  • Depends on the context, and how serious and violent the Nazi. If they’re just an isolated idiot who isn’t politically active and isn’t stupid or thick-headed enough to actually follow through on their claimed beliefs, then violence isn’t really justified. They’re an idiot, but not a threat. The problem is with anymore more dedicated or crazy than that. Past that point, you immediately get to people who want to murder or enslave hundreds of millions. Thats not hyperbolic, that’s literally the goal of Nazi beliefs, and a logical extention of almost every belief that stems out of it or is adjacent to it. In theory, yes, it’d be nice to be able to talk down people like this, or use existing systems of power to force them to places where there isn’t a risk of them trying to murder or enslave people, but unfortunately, when you’re talking about groups who don’t respect human lives, the law, or anyone but their designated, arbitrary in-group, then those aren’t always viable means. This is esspecially true if that person is already in a potition of power. Basically, if someone wants to kill you, you can’t always wait for them to successfully aquire the means to do so before acting. This isn’t hyperbole or metaphor, this is literally what we’re talking about here. The problem is in drawing a line of who is an actual threat, and if there are other means to “disarm” them.




  • At least the stuff I’ve seen is more a criticism of the lack of functionality for the Rabbit, esspecially unique functionality or areas where it excels. The fact that it is basically all able to be contained in one app is viewed as evidence of the relative simplicity, and the fact that (as reviews highlighted) a phone provides a better interaction method compared to the dedicated devices just highlights how unnecessary the hardware is.

    Basically, its competing against phones in functionality, but a phone at that price can do everything it can and better, plus so much more. Even worse when considering everyone also already owns a phone and won’t be able to replace with a Rabbit.



  • Still, if people are into it then that’s ok too. I have used it at work on occasion to create stupid little icons for internal tools I’ve built, so I guess there’s some little bit of utility.

    IMO, thats sort of the main use I see for AI image generation (and a lot of other “art”-AIs). There are plenty of cases where a graphic is needed that doesn’t need to be original, nor have any meaningful thought put into it. This could be a small icon that would normally be a free peice of stock art or programmer art, or it could be adding a unimportant backdrop to some character art that would otherwise just be left blank. Not all graphics have to be “art” and things that are “art” don’t have to be 100% original and hand crafted.