So what, like, 30 cents per violation?

It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console… or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.

Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you’re just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.

Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.

The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.

… Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says ‘hey you don’t own this the way you own a blender.’

That’s very strange framing to use.

What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.

Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.

But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers… but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.

SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.

It… just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.

I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.

Please reread the second sentence.

It doesn’t make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.

In this case I’m not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you’re not even compensated for this.

The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.

And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.

Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn’t matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren’t any alternatives.

All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.

A while back I was discussing Ross Scott’s ‘Stop Killing Games’ proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.

If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.

If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.

If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.

Someone popped in and said ‘well I think they should just make it more obvious that you’re not buying a game, you’re buying a temporary license.’

To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’

So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We’re not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we’re just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.

All this does is make it so you can’t say ‘Buy’ or ‘Purchase’ and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like ‘You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.’

US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.

So, the goal here is to prevent ghosting by making ghosting minutely costly to the ghoster.

They pick from an array of multiple reasons why, and the app formulates an exceptionally kindly worded explanation to send to the ghosted person.

I don’t see this as dangerous to people who are ghosting potentially dangerous people.

Instead of getting nothing, and formulating whatever cockamamie explanation in their own minds (or maybe just going ‘sigh, oh well’), they at least get a facsimile of closure from a canned response.

Obviously this does not magically solve the many problems of dating apps, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than just ghosting on its own.

The problem is that its minutely time consuming to provide a ghosting explanation.

This ghost explanation requirement requires people to actually explain themselves, and that’s gonna be very cumbersome to people who are not really looking for a serious, long term relationship.

It makes it very annoying to use the app in a scattershot approach for rapid fire hookups, with tons of potentials on deck, as you’ll be forced to consistently ‘tend’ to all of your simultaneous matches, or drop them…

…and for people who think they’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but consistently ghost people, it will basically cause uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when they realize they don’t like having to do a modicum if effort to explain why no one seems to meet their standards or is due their attention, even though they previously thought they were interested.

Basically, the problem I see with this app is that it forces users toward being honest with themselves.

Wow, within 24 hours of the determination that everyone near East Palestine is owed compensation from them burning off chemicals in situ for no actual reason, this happens.

Way to go, Ohio.

The AdBlockalypse.

You really made an account just to post this singular comment?

Firstly, anyone who told you RDRO is not utterly plauged with all sorts of cheaters using trainers and all kinds of cheats is full of crap, at least for PC.

The standard strategy you basically have to employ is that whenever you see something nonsense like that happen is you have to jump to another instance/lobby. Depending on your luck, you may have to do this every 15 to 60 minutes aaaand some cheats allow the cheater to follow you to your new lobby.

Secondly…

A few years back I was in RDRO and was attacked by a cheater.

I had a broke ass level 15ish character with the just a few of the least expensive guns.

They had infinite ammo. Teleport hopping. Spawned 10 additional NPCs versions of themselves, then of my character, then zombies.

I killed them all. Died over and over again, kept killing them.

Then the cheater began spawning gigantic props like boats attached to their character, which rotated and hit with physics force when they rotated, which they could shoot out of but I could not shoot into.

But uh, I managed to juke my way through cracks in the collision mesh, then shoot him.

He got tired of this at some point… and just turned himself invisible.

But, by this point I’d been killed enough times that I’d managed to get him showing up on my radar.

I’d by then long since run out of ammo… and began stalking him with just a knife and lasso, sometimes the running tackle with the lasso that leads into a hogtie, other times actually managing to sneak up behind him.

After an hour and a half of this, he started slipping up, and I could see him attempting to flee me, teleport half a klik away and just stand there for 30 seconds, then move a bit, then pause again, presumably fiddling around in his menus.

I killed him a few more times in this state, and he quit, he left.

… I would have just jumped to another instance if he had not killed my horse.

Do not fuck with a man’s horse lol.

Smile for the drone!

According to Mutahar:

1. The Anti Cheat has already been bypassed by a free cheat menu on Windows.

2. He’s fairly sure he has figured out some kind of way to temporarily bypass (as in, it’ll probably get caught in a few weeks) the linux block by some kind of custom virtualization method (requiring only one GPU) that he says he may explain in detail at some point.

In general, he’s done with playing GTO.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSagozpKPs&pp=ygUSbXV0YWhhciBndGEgb25saW5l

But yeah, obligatory reminder for BattleEye and EasyAntiCheat games that refuse to allow linux play:

All these game devs have to do is flip a switch, click a few options in their developer portals, to allow BattleEye or EAC to work on linux, through Proton.

And its been that way for 3 years, since 2021.

There is literally no reason for games that use these services to not work on linux, the devs just don’t fucking care.

Yep, I am totally convinced that at bare minimum a million Americans live like this.

Car breaks down? Gets in an accident? Can’t afford repairs? Can’t afford gas? Parked somewhere too obvious? Can’t make payments and repo people find you?

All gone, excepting what you can carry, maybe.

No, no, this is the system working as intended.

Every capitalists dream labor force is an unpaid one.

Yeah, the plan is to keep building in areas that are just on the precipice of some kind of climate disaster, 5 or 10 years out, then lock buyers in 30yr mortgages.

Keep moving to and building in Arizona and Texas and then do a Pikachu face when their power grids collapse from a massive sustained heat wave or blizzard or drought, and tens of thousands freeze or boil to death.

Unless you are envisioning some kind of massive New Deal, CCC levels of programs to overhaul our infrastructure and provide actually affordable housing in climatologically safe areas,… something like that as ‘the plan’… then uh yeah, best we are gonna get is:

Pay even more for housing in actually safe areas, or still overpay for uninsurable homes.

All the houses are getting sold to Aquaman now, thanks Ben.

Assuming you aren’t a hoarder, and you properly clean it… well, yes, its weird by the modern standards of our consumeristic society, but in actuality no, this is recycling.

Landfills are full of things that, had they not been placed in a landfill, could likely have been repurposed and reused by someone, somewhere.

Nicotine, pain killers, a laughable disability payment…

…and a furious, blinding rage at the inequity of modern terminal stage capitalism that has doomed our planet to ecocide and most of its inhabitants into petty, self-centered, egotistical and ignorant caricatures of human beings…

…which has mostly congealed and calcified into some kind of mixture of contempt and spite that is either the basis of, or what I can erroneously yet convincingly present to myself and others as the basis of my identity, self-worth and sense of humor, concluding that merely surviving as long as I can, and pursuing that which I enjoy which requires next to 0 monetary expenditure, is the meek and feeble yet largest middle finger I can personally raise toward all who pursue wealth accumulation, or enable those who do.

Ok, for real, is he actually wearing eyeliner or does he just have the most emo possible natural eyelashes?