Vlyn
@Vlyn@lemmy.zip
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta! 2 months ago:
Also there’s already a ton of depth on the game
I think I’m too jaded in this regard. Reading the wiki I don’t really see depth. Sure, there are activities with fun names, but they are all the same (you start the activity, you walk to finish it, you get random rewards). And all the items seem to be either for selling, basic crafting or just giving you a boost percentage for the activities you’re already doing.
What the activities are missing are risk/reward, decision making, surprises, etc. Or as you’d say in game design “meaningful choices”.
Sure, you have the choice on what skill you work on, but besides skill go up, items to make the activity faster and gold (not sure what it’s for, besides buying mats/items again?) that seems to be it.
I guess combat could help if there’s actual resource investment and risk there. Like are you going to tackle this level 10 monster for higher rewards, with more likelihood to either fail (or spend extra resources on healing potions or whatever)? Or play it save and go against weaker monsters? There should also be extra gold sinks to work for / use the money you accumulated, be it limited use items, cosmetics and so on. And of course ways to play the game differently from other players, like classes, masteries, skill trees or whatever (and no, clicking an activity that says “Sandcastle Building” vs clicking “Ship repair” aren’t really choices).
Just from someone who values gameplay a lot, I don’t see much difference in playing the game for an hour or 100 hours, in the end it keeps boiling down to the same actions with no depth attached. Personally I didn’t see the game value of it, compared to a step tracker (just that the step tracker doesn’t stop counting when it’s “full”, I didn’t like the step mechanic either where you get bonus steps only. If I’ve done my walking for the day I want to spend the steps, not select an activity and I get double steps for it next time I walk).
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta! 2 months ago:
Ah yeah, I’m not a big mobile game fan and heavily play PC games. I just missed the draw of it, but had wrong expectations probably. In my head it was more of a sandbox combat game with gathering/crafting, so I kept trying to get to the actual game part :)
While I’m not motivated at all by just achievements or grinding for grinding sake (incremental games are a slight exception there, but progress is much faster / you do have some goals dangled in front of your face). You’re probably aiming more for a classic fitness tracker, but instead of step counts, graphs and so on you present it in game form. Which is valid, but just not what I was after.
As it gets brought up in this thread: When it came out I actually liked Pokemon GO, because the gameplay was interesting. Originally it only showed Pokemon near you and how far they are away (with 1, 2 or 3 foot steps). Which meant you wandered around and actually met people back in the city, grouped up to search or they knew where it was. That all got dumbed down until everyone was just sitting at the same spot and farming unfortunately :-/
- Comment on I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta! 2 months ago:
I tried it out a while ago and didn’t mesh with it at all. Like the options I had was gather things, minor crafting and traveling. But zero goals or combat (as far as I could tell at the beginning). So after going around, gathering and crafting a bit I got bored and gave up.
Hell, I even traveled around to just find if there are any encounters or places with more happening and I didn’t find anything.
So it felt meaningless to grind with nothing to grind for.
- Comment on Do you prefer to buy games on Steam or GOG? 2 months ago:
Steam simply due to the convenience and already having a ton of games there. Steam sales are nice too of course.
GOG is awesome, but more for older games or for games I want to play at a LAN. Like the good old days where you hang out with friends, throw a CD (or now USB stick) their way and ten minutes later you’re playing together.
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 2 months ago:
It already reduced the services severely. The included Amazon Music sucks if you don’t pay extra. The included Amazon Video has ads now. And Prime gaming has reduced the offers.
While YouTube premium gives you full access to YouTube music and 1080p Enhanced Bitrate video quality. I only got it for the music, no ads on TVs is a bonus (Already had an adblocker for phone/PC).
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 2 months ago:
Amazon has around 310 million active users. Amazon has 230 million Prime subscribers, even though it costs up to $15 a month. Yes, those include cheaper student subscriptions of course, but still.
Of course 30% is optimistic, but the average people I know happily watch those fucking ads. And don’t even complain about unskipable double ads. They don’t like them, they’re still too lazy to install an ad blocker as long as they get their content. Each one of them would absolutely shell out 5 bucks to continue watching (it’s less than a single beer when you go out).
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 2 months ago:
You underestimate how addicted people are to YouTube. There is no alternative to it.
Twitch is streaming focused, the vods absolutely suck. Kick? Same.
What else is there? TikTok? Instagram? Neither of which provide long high quality videos.
After all we are talking about YouTube literally blocking everyone and putting up a banner: $5 a month or you’re out of luck. If someone already happily pays $18 a month for Netflix, what is 5 bucks?
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 2 months ago:
It would be a huge gamble, but it could pay off. Seriously, how many people are watching YouTube every day? Hours of their favorite content creators.
Imagine a rug pull, YouTube is now a pay only service. No ads, but everyone has to pay $5 a month to access. I’d bet with you that a surprising amount of people would just pay that to continue using it.
How many? Nobody knows, but it would certainly be 30% or higher. Now imagine 30% of users paying just $5 a month how much money that would be.
It can be done, YouTube just doesn’t do it right now as they still earn plenty with ads. If suddenly everyone started to use an ad blocker then things would change very quickly.
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 2 months ago:
Collapse what exactly? It would actually reduce strain on their servers and provide a better experience for paying users. Obviously they won’t do it because there’s a ton of users who watch ads (think of the average guy who plays YouTube on their phone or TV, with zero adblocking).
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 2 months ago:
Just the way I described, I’m a software developer, it would be easy as hell.
Your browser requests the video, YouTube decides you have to watch an ad. The ad has 15 seconds unskipable. So the easiest thing they could do is not send you video data for 14 seconds (add a spare second for buffering to not piss off users who do watch ads).
Doesn’t matter if you call some endpoint, load the ad data, whatever. You’re not receiving any video for a while, which would piss people off enough to leave.
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 2 months ago:
I still hold the opinion that they could absolutely block you out. I use uBlock Origin and there was actually a time where I got blocked/warnings every day. Even with upgrading my plugin / refreshing all block lists.
At some point I finally gave in and grabbed YouTube Premium, not because of the ads (I’d rather stop watching than watch with ads), but because I needed their music service (Used Amazon Music before, the app sucked. Music quality was the highest out there though. Also cancelled Prime for a double whammy).
For example the moment an ad gets triggered they could just refuse to send you video data. And if the ad is an unskipable 15 seconds, block playback for 15 seconds. Done. Even if you block this, you get 15 seconds of nothing and will soon be pissed off enough to either start watching ads, buy Premium or leave (no longer costing them bandwidth).
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 2 months ago:
Totally fine by me! But by your logic you can’t get mad at them if they block you from watching due to using an ad blocker. Which brings us back to square one?
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 2 months ago:
That’s a weird way to look at it, obviously you’re watching the content.
I’d rather see it like this:
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Free tier with ads
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Subscription without ads (and better quality)
You are currently on the free tier. Yes, you can block ads (just like you can pirate movies), but that’s not the deal you were offered. I’m using an ad blocker myself, but I can understand the corporate side too.
They absolutely could add a hard paywall, but why should they if there are plenty of users who want to watch for free by paying with ads?
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- Comment on Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous? 2 months ago:
designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances
Would make the whole thing even worse, as I could create several new instances with 10 bot users each, then hammer out the votes.
The entire problem is that you can’t trace back each vote to a genuine user. It would be bad in case of fake instances that create 100 user accounts and upvote/downvote stuff, but you can ban the instance. It would be a disaster if a big instance creates fake votes (like lemmy.world suddenly adds 1000 fake users and uses them to manipulate other instances, if votes were anonymous you couldn’t check if it’s genuine lemmy.world users or fake accounts).
- Comment on Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous? 2 months ago:
It would be damn easy to look up the instance and their “users” and see that the users are not genuine. Then ban the whole instance.
- Comment on Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous? 2 months ago:
The problem isn’t keeping votes anonymous, that’s easy. The problem is bots/spam. You could just create a new instance and then upvote a post from another instance a thousand times. If the votes are anonymous for the other instance it’s tough to say if they are genuine users or just bots.
That’s the main issue here, when votes are anonymous you could easily just spam votes with no way to trace it back. If it’s a rogue instance then fine, you can ban the whole instance. But imagine if lemmy.world starts using fake votes in the background towards other instances.
- Comment on AI Music Generator Suno Admits It Was Trained on ‘Essentially All Music Files on the Internet’ 3 months ago:
Only humans can hold copyrights.
Yeah, no. Most copyrighted material is owned by companies, you don’t have to be a natural person to hold copyrights. And if a company can hold copyrights, you can also argue it can have fair use.
- Comment on AI Music Generator Suno Admits It Was Trained on ‘Essentially All Music Files on the Internet’ 3 months ago:
If I as a human listened to every single song of a band from start to finish, then produced a similar song in the same vein (lyrics / music genre), it would be fair use.
So why would it stop being fair use if an AI does the same thing? Just that the AI can listen to every song of this band and a million other bands, combining them.
- Comment on AI Music Generator Suno Admits It Was Trained on ‘Essentially All Music Files on the Internet’ 3 months ago:
But that’s not how model training works, it doesn’t simply copy and paste entire songs into its training data. It more or less “listens” to it, analyzes it and when you ask to create a rock song for example it just has an algorithm behind it what a song like that would sound like.
But you can’t just ask it to generate Bohemian Rhapsody from its data, it would probably get very close depending on the training, but it would never be 100% the same (except the model was only trained on this one song).
Just like you can listen to rock songs and then make your own, that’s totally valid. The problem here is of course automation and scale, but saying it’s not fair use is dubious.
- Comment on Elden Ring – Patch Notes Version 1.12 4 months ago:
There’s an easy mod to uncap fps, it works. There’s a mod for ultra wide, it works.
It’s not an engine limitation, you can already play like this with mods. But you can’t play online because of changing the files…
- Comment on Elden Ring – Patch Notes Version 1.12 5 months ago:
No ultrawide support, no DLSS, no removed fps cap, no precompiled shaders to remove the stutter, …
From makes good games, but when it comes to technology they either suck or are just lazy as hell.
The biggest joke is that ultrawide already renders the full screen width, they just put black bars on top to not give the player an advantage, lol.
- Comment on Report: Microsoft to face antitrust case over Teams 6 months ago:
I had the same issue, you’re starting the wrong app. When you start old teams you get the selection. When you start new teams (with the little turquoise new icon) you don’t get the selection. Change your shortcut :)
- Comment on Report: Microsoft to face antitrust case over Teams 6 months ago:
It doesn’t for me, just turn it off.
- Comment on Over 10 years later 7 Days to Die is going to leave Early Access 6 months ago:
Unfortunately it’s pretty much just a label change and a price increase, not an actual 1.0 update :-/
- Comment on What would be a good glue to repair this spatula with that wont he toxic or come undone in a dishwasher? 8 months ago:
News flash: Even if they do that, your body is already full of microplastics as it’s in your food. So not sure if this is going to help even one bit :)
- Comment on Messaging app Signal is currently experiencing server issues. 8 months ago:
I’d prefer if my private messages wouldn’t be made public, thank you.
Sure, they are end to end encrypted, but giving everyone access to them is still dangerous.
- Comment on Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox 8 months ago:
Ah, I didn’t expect it to be actually used RAM. Maybe this is a Linux issue with the Steam build then? Here is my Windows 11 task manager, Steam just downloaded 10 different game updates (so did plenty of work) and is now idle:
In total 516.5 MB RAM on a machine with 32 GB (22 GB free at the moment), if there was any pressure on RAM usage it would probably go down further.
Either way, since upgrading to 32 GB RAM nearly a decade ago I haven’t had a single issue with RAM usage (While with 16 GB I actually had games in the past where I ran out of memory). So it’s no big deal as far as I’m concerned and if I’d actually run any applications that needs tons of RAM I’d quickly upgrade to 64 GB and be done with it.
The only way this would be annoying is on low-end machines, like 4 or 8 GB RAM in total, but those have plenty of issues anyway in regards to games (otherwise why would you install Steam?). On a high-end machine complaining about 1 GB of RAM is a waste of time in my opinion, there are a ton of better topics you can rage at.
- Comment on Diablo 4's new mount costs more than the actual game 9 months ago:
Skyrim has only been out for 13 years. It’s not that old :)
- Comment on Diablo 4's new mount costs more than the actual game 9 months ago:
The issue is that the mount is only available in this way. So if you want it you have to buy the “bundle”, making it a $65 purchase either way.
- Comment on Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox 9 months ago:
“Doing nothing” is probably downloading an update. There’s also a difference between reserved RAM and actually used one.
For example .NET applications grab RAM when they need it, but they don’t just free it afterwards if not necessary (Like it needs 1 GB, uses that, but when the work is done your task manager keeps showing 1 GB). This helps performance, if the application needs RAM again a short time later it’s already reserved and ready to go.
The whole behavior changes when Windows is low on free RAM, then applications are forced to free up their reserved RAM so you don’t start swapping too much.
Overall this means: The more RAM your system has the higher the perceived RAM usage of your system. Unused RAM is wasted RAM and it’s easy to free up some if you actually hit the limit. As long as your RAM is not full applications will happily use more and hold onto it to be more responsive.
