Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.

Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).

Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.

The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.

Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).

If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.

So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).

World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).

But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.

What keeps them engaged with Destiny 2 despite its apparent lack of a clear path forward?

There is no alternative. The First Descendant is p2w. Once Human has different structure and resets your progress every season. Warframe is pretty different and similar to First Descendant. Overwatch basically cancelled its pve. Darktide is clunky.

And none of these games have the polish and shooting satisfaction that Destiny has. If people want a pve game, with long term progression that has enjoyable shooting, Destiny is all there is. What keeps them playing? Copium.

Slowly but steadily Destiny will die. And thats when Marathon will come out. But Marathon is very different, so i am not even so sure that most Destiny players will migrate to that.

I am not even playing Destiny. Destiny is the game that i want to love so much but always shits on me, so i gave up. It seems to me that the easiest thing in the world, is to keep Destiny going and address its minor issues. But somehow Bungie doesnt think so.

With geforce now(and other similar cloud gaming services), you can play all kinds of AAA games in your browser, including diablo 4.

An ai can help a lot of non tech savvy people. Imagine every time they want to do something, they could just ask the ai on how to do it, instead of asking you or having to go through a billion SEO garbage google results.

Because not many europeans primarily identify as “european first”. This is slowly changing but for the most part, people identify by whatever european nation they inhabit. But i bet most chinese identify as “chinese first” instead of whatever region/city they are from.

In fact, China likes to brag about how “advanced” they are, that they solved this “issue” centuries ago, while the EU is currently trying to “copy them”.

TLDR : If you ask a chinese tourist “where are you from?”, they will answer “China”. If you ask a european the same, noone will say “Europe/EU”.

Normal memory isnt supposed to be 100% reliable. Thats why you have ECC memory, which is used on mission critical computers(servers). It’s more expensive and more reliable but normal memory is reliable enough for most consumer uses and cheaper, thats why it is the default.

Normal DDR5 modules have something like a “light ecc” function built in but there are actual DDR5 ECC modules that are obviously better.

PS Your motherboard needs to support ECC memory in order to use ECC memory modules.

1. Lego horizon Adventures looks neat, hopefully it has more depth than other lego games but i dont expect much. At least it looks pretty. Atm it isnt on steam, but it is announced that it will be.

2. I am very hyped for Space Marine 2. This might be the best warhammer 40k game ever.

3. I am optimistic for Star Wars Outlaws by the division devs(i liked division 1 and 2). But it isnt even on steam, so it will fail.

4. Civilization 7 is definitely one of the most anticipated games ever.

5. And hopefully Battle Aces will revive the rts genre.

It is. Europe is commonly defined all the way to the Ural mountains, which are located somewhere in the middle of Russia. Most of russian population lives in Europe.

Intel was ahead of AMD ever since core 2 duo, in 2006. Amd was behind for almost 10 years and it wasnt until ryzen and especially zen 2 that AMD pulled ahead. And then with zen 3 and zen 4, AMD wiped the floor with intel.

7800x3d is the best cpu ever made for gaming and it succeeded the 5800x3d which was already a legendary cpu. Intel has been getting wrecked so hard that they are literally using tsmc to manufacture their cpus, an obvious admission that their manufacturing is behind the competition(amd is fabless and is also using tsmc).

Intel has the ability to come back on top, at least as far as x86 cpus are concerned. The question is whether x86 is even relevant anymore, considering the insane efficiency gains shown by apple’s m series and even qualcomm’s upcoming snapdragon x series.

Why did you link a swedish tv broadcast of the song, a 500views video and not the official one, on the official eurovision channel?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nidDtyS0Wo

In Europe, some cars have a plastic clip on the windshield, where you can put stuff in it(parking permits, etc).

My entire postscript was just an attempt to make veganism more appealing. That extra little push might enable more people to become vegan. Which is why you see a lot more emphasis to the health benefits of veganism or the positive environmental impact of veganism.

These are things that might enable people to become vegan(or reduce their animal product consumption), because they dont make people feel attacked when you discuss these aspects of veganism. Ultimately, the animal doesnt care if it doesnt get killed(or created), because a human stopped eating animal products for the gains or because the human became a “woke” animal rights advocate. The end result is the same.

And while becoming “woke” is a more sustainable long term position, it can also be harder to sell to current mainstream because of social norms. And a lot of people might become vegan for the gains and then transition to be an animal rights advocate, because it is easier.

Most people think themselves as good people. Most people love, or claim to love, animals.

The existence of veganism and its implication is that there is an unnecessary animal holocaust happening, because of societal norms and for the entertainment of people’s palates. So how do you reconcile these things? By claiming that veganism is something extreme, something unattractive, something that is impossible to do.

People who talk about how “militant vegans have turned them away from veganism” are mostly lying to themselves. If an asshole told you not to litter, would you litter because of that? If an asshole told you to be atheist would you go “well now, i will be even more religious”? But when people make arguments like this, leftists realize how ridiculous those arguments are. Except when it comes to veganism.

Obviously you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar but i want to believe that people in this site can see past that and think for themselves.

Legumes(beans/lentils), vegetables, fruits, potatoes, pasta and rice is what most of the world already eats. Nowadays there are vegan alternatives for stuff and most restaurants often have a vegan option. It isnt hard to be vegan but any lifestyle change can be hard, especially if real life is putting a lot of pressure on you.

Any change is hard, being vegan is easy. Millions of people are vegan and have been vegan for many years. I have been vegan for 12 years now. There has never been an easier time to be vegan than now. Being vegan is the easiest and with the biggest impact thing you can do.

True Courage Is About Knowing Not When To Take A Life But When To Spare One

PS Salt potato chips and oreos are vegan. You dont need to eat healthy. And if you are a straight dude, vegan dudes are more attractive to women, even to non vegan women. It’s literally free +charisma in real life.

It is free. But they can gather data, get you into their ecosystem, hopefully making it more likely you buy a playstation or other playstation published games. Eventually maybe they want to have cross progress between pc and playstation or have playstation achievements on pc, maybe their own steam like client.

Ultimately these countries are probably responsible for less than 5% of their total sales. Most of them are either tiny or poor or both. It does have countries like Egypt, Albania, Serbia, Morocco and Algeria but most of the banned countries are irrelevant in terms of sales.

They have inferior ray tracing performance for their price and fsr has inferior image quality/performance in comparison to dlss. Even intel’s xess is superior to fsr. And thats on top of amd cards using more power per frame rendered while offering extremely marginal rasterization performance/price improvement over nvidia.

So in the end, people would rather pay 10% more and get an nvidia card. And thats without taking into account the perceived brand value.

Amd gpus are in their bulldozer days. They need a zen like pump in their architecture or a significant price cut. People shit on nvidia for selling neutered overpriced cards but amd deliberately prices its own cards barely cheaper than nvidia’s.

Imagine if the 7800xt was 400€. We wouldnt be having this conversation. Are you telling me that amd’s margins are so narrow that they cant do that? Then either nvidia isnt scamming us or they have brilliantly created something that has lower cost than amd’s cards, while offering similar performance. I am not sure which scenario is better for AMD.

Meanwhile in Greece, you had statues like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroisos_Kouros

No wonder the romans were greekaboos. Also the italian statue is made from limestone and needs 2 pillars to support it, while the greek one is made from marble.

If the cars run over people while going 30kmh because they use cameras and a bug crashed into the camera and that caused the car to go crazy, that is not acceptable, even if the cars crash “less than humans”.

Self driving needs to be highly regulated by law and demand to have some bare minimum sensors, including radars, lidars, etc. Camera only self driving is beyond stupid. Cameras cant see in snow or dark or whatever. Anyone who has a phone knows how fucky the camera can get under specific light exposures, etc.

Noone but tesla is doing camera only “self driving” and they are only doing it in order to cut down the cost. Their older cars had more sensors than their newer cars. But Musk is living in his Bioshock uber capitalistic dream. Who cares if a few people die in the process of developing visual based self driving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm2x6CVIXiE

Dont worry dude, China intends on catching up and building up their nuclear arsenal to the level of the US and Russia.

https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-nuclear-arsenal-more-than-500-warheads-pentagon-report-2023-10-19/

So i guess “yellow” people have joined the “white” people’s paranoia. I dont see how race is relevant in any way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUp62AGE9JU