Everyone knows in real life your shoes come apart every 15 minutes and if you don’t eat every 20 minutes you’ll immediately die.

So… No one should ever give any feedback on what kinds of thread anyone else posts? Not sure I agree with that.

Because it’s populating my feed?

Agreed.

This is actually why I stopped using Startrek.website, though. One of their mods posts constant updates about STO. Honestly, I’m pretty sure he’s employed by STO.

To be fair, it is kind of odd to post patch notes. All sorts of games get new patches all the time. If people start making a habit of posting every set of patch notes for the games that they play, it’d very quickly become a substantial portion of the posts here.

Personally, if people were regularly spamming patch notes I’d probably eventually either block the community or block the poster.

Most single player steam games are cracked anyway. The real danger of steam is the reliance on it for most multiplayer games. Though if it were to get particularly nasty I imagine adding aftermarket multiplayer functionality would probably be in the realm of possibility. If private WoW servers are a thing, it stands to reason that the same can be done with a lot of other games.

My takeaway from this is that Trump supporters are hiding their eyes so we don’t realize that they’ve all been crying constantly.

Do you think it’s realistic to take back any branch of government from like, actual whole ass conservatives by dividing the only coalition we have?

This framing isn’t particularly helpful for solidarity.

The left relies on coalitions. Criticizing the stewards of those coalitions because they fail to address the needs of the people they rely on for votes is helpful and constructive. Just reducing all left-wing voters to a pair of stereotypes and trying to push one of those stereotypes away from the other? Not helpful.

We need nuanced dialogue and mutual aid. It’s a matter of survival. This isn’t that.

I mean, there is. DMCA essentially protects content hosts from copyright claims. When they get a DMCA notice, they remove the material and inform the user whose material is removed. If they want to contest it, they can submit a counter notice denying the claim and basically saying “take me to court then”, with their contact info so a suit can be filed. At this point, if nothing is filed in a two week period, the host is free to consider the initial takedown notice void.

Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.

This is extremely dependent on which games you’re playing and how you’re playing them. Public servers or matchmaking seem to generally be pretty bad for making connections, because they tend not to require as much social interaction and when they do it’s of the throw-away variety. Raiding and PVP in MMOs, when it’s difficult enough, tends to lead to greater connection-building because you want to actually be able to rely on your teammates. For me, though, the greatest games for building community tend to be sandbox games on private RP servers.

The roleplaying community for any given game tends to be substantially smaller than the community at large. It’s a fairly small pool where you see the same people over and over again. There are new faces too, but you’ll usually recognize folks if you’ve been around for a few years. If I check out a new DayZ server or a new Conan server, I will invariably run into people I’ve met time and time again. These communities have a shared history spanning years and dozens of servers, and they tend to bubble out into hundreds of small discord servers for in-game groups and general friend groups that form. Roleplay is all about communication, so you don’t really have that same distance that you do when the game is just about playing out a game loop over and over again. To play the game is to make friends, whether your characters are allied or are enemies.

There’s toxicity, to be sure, and private servers introduce a whole new layer of drama with nepotism and staff abuse, but those problems actually have solutions other than turning off chat or hoping the developers do something. Most servers have some form of whitelisting process and will actively ban problem users, or may even have some form of mediation process. If you don’t like how a server is run, you can get together a group of friends, rent a VPS or a dedi, and host a new server yourselves. It happens over and over again. Arguably most new RP servers come about because somebody didn’t like something about some previous RP server they were playing on. This leads not just to new servers, but to people developing new skill sets. It gives people a reason to develop new social and leadership skills, to expand their artistic abilities, and to develop new technical prowess. I know quite a few people, myself included, who got back into making art or got into modding, hosting, or development because they wanted to make something different for the community; to show people how things could be.

For me, roleplay has been life-transforming. It’s helped me work my way through a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see up close as easily if I were only seeing it through the context of my own real life. It’s given me artistic drive that I didn’t have before. And perhaps most vitally, it’s gotten me invested in community and led to meaningful friendships in a time where I haven’t really been super enthusiastic about getting out of the house in my free time. In an era where people are increasingly atomized, I’ve found it to be a great way to meet people that I care about.

It honestly blows my World of Warcraft raiding and PVP days completely out of the water. If you’re looking for community in video games, I definitely recommend getting invested in some RP. Immerse yourself and get wrapped up in some stories. Join some groups; make some friends. It’s a lot more interesting than toxic public lobbies full of people who don’t care about one another or any sense of community.

I have to ask, do you use Discord? Because I see Pepes and Peepos all over the place there and they aren’t especially likely to be associated with right-wingers at this point as far as I can tell.

The difference here being that the swastika was used as the official symbol of a fascist government that conquered a substantial portion of Europe and perpetrated the holocaust. Outside of contexts where its religious significance overshadows this, it’s pretty universally associated with Nazis, and even in the places where its other uses are overshadowed it’s presented differently than the black, tilted swastika in the middle of a white circle on a red field. There are swastikas on the sign of a local Indian restaurant down the street from me, but nobody confuses them with the very clear nazi version. Pretty unambiguous.

Meanwhile Pepe, a relatively recent creation, was coopted by a handful of fascists who don’t use it as their primary symbol and haven’t done anything nearly as drastic or impactful with it, and has since become a widely used emoji character with a huge number of variations that’s used by all sorts of people. Have fascists made use of it? Yeah. But most of the people using these emojis in their discord posts have nothing to do with alt-right fascists and aren’t even especially likely to be right-wingers in any sense at all.

It simply doesn’t have the same connotation that the symbols it’s being compared to here do. It’s easy for people who aren’t versed in spaces where it’s used regularly and innocuously to assert that it is, but that doesn’t make it any more true.

What it does do is make those people seem incredibly out of touch to people who are accustomed to seeing cringespin and sleepypeepo and grabbyhands in their discord chats posted by literal queer leftists.

Omg this is such a helpful comment! Good job! <3

Get rid of actual fascist imagery and references? Yes please. That shit is rampant.

Get rid of fucking Pepe? …Are you kidding? Way to make yourself and your argument seem fully out of touch. Yeah, sure, there was a point when Pepe was being coopted by right-wingers, but at this point? Like… have you been on discord once ever? Everybody uses Peepo. Moreover, half my trans friends use D&D emojis derived directly from Peepo.

People pointing fingers at Pepe are literally taking the bait and making themselves look less credible, which was presumably the point of it being adopted by assholes to begin with. That fight is over and we won and took it back. Yeesh.

Spam G in support.

Meow meow meow.

How exactly are you presuming to accurately estimate future sales that don’t exist yet? They increased their cost of operation substantially by relying solely on servers they themselves host, and tie the future viability of their product to hosting those servers. That means there’s a clock on how long it makes sense to make the game available to the public.

If they allowed for private servers, that small initial batch of players could potentially grow. Especially if they build in the extensibility of allowing players to mod the game. As it stands, the game now won’t make them any more money, and creating the opportunity for it to ever make them money had a continuous cost. There would be no incentive to shut down access to the game itself if it didn’t carry a cost to the company.

If they happened to be one of the few successful games in their genre, then sure, hosting their own servers exclusively is a potential means of revenue. But if they’re not? It makes much more sense to leave the thing out there for people to fool around with. You never know when one streamer with a following might pick up a game and decide they like it. Can’t happen if it doesn’t exist though.

These companies really need to learn the private server model. How is your game ever going to get up enough players to be popular when you’re financially incentivized to bail as soon as possible? Put up some public servers for players to hop on, put out a private server, and let people do their own thing. You can still monetize DLCs or even go the route TF2 went and release paid items and loot crates.

People are still playing TF2 and still spending money in the item shop. They definitely wouldn’t be if Valve had bailed on it entirely the first time they had a slump in their playerbase.

Are they? Seems to me like they’re corporate leeches sucking the life out of every industry and offering nothing of value in return.

Tell that to the C-levels who literally are putting in orders.