[To preempt the obvious objection, I’m talking about e.g. a private residence, not a business.]

No, clearly not, as I already addressed. Fuck off.

I would argue that in private spaces, absolutely. The owner of a private space has the exclusive right to admit anyone they choose and bar anyone they choose, based on any criteria they wish. [To preempt the obvious objection, I’m talking about e.g. a private residence, not a business.]

I’d argue this is doubly true for support group style groups. If there’s a support group for a topic that is exclusively experienced by one sex, I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to make that group exclusively for that sex. (Examples might be testicular or ovarian cancer sufferers.)

This seems to be a trend as if you only take into account reviews with 2+ hours of play time, Highguard’s opinions are “mixed” rather than “overwhelmingly negative”.

People who enjoy a game are more likely to have more playtime, therefore the higher the playtime in the ‘window’ of reviews that you look at, the more likely they are to skew high. This is exactly what you’d expect to see on any game, barring situations like the developers making changes that ruin a game that previously was good.

So after 2 hours of not having a good time, the game was deemed bad and negative reviews were written.

Two hours is the window for a refund, so I absolutely make a call within 2 hours. If a game - especially a new / expensive game - hasn’t engaged me within that time, I refund it and move on. I don’t have enough hours in the day to play games I don’t enjoy hoping that they’ll get good eventually. Why should anyone feel the need to do that, whether they’re giving the game the benefit of the doubt or not? It’s the MMO argument. “The game gets really good around the 100 hour mark!” I don’t care. I’m not sticking around for it. There are plenty of other games to play that are fun within the first 2 hours. If a developer expects people to slog through an unenjoyable 2+ hours to get to “the good parts”, they probably deserve the negative reviews.

I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let’s present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they’d only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won’t promote your game at all? Like, it won’t show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can’t participate in sales, etc. - it’s still there if it’s linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won’t be promoted, period.

How do you think that would work out for developers? I’d argue not well, especially for small studios.

The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren’t getting a cut of the sales?

This thing looks slick. How does it do with sleeping it mid-game session and resuming later? That’s the biggest make-or-break feature for me with any of these handhelds.

Achievements (for me, at least) are just a reason to spend more time with a game that I enjoy. In most cases, I have trouble enjoying a game if I don’t have goals to work towards (either game-imposed or self-imposed). If I finish the main part of the game, and am not tired of it yet, achievements give me goals that I can follow if I want to keep playing.

Definitely agree that there’s too many games that have achievements that are just in no way worth the time and aren’t even fun as an auxiliary goal, though. The best ones are the ones that get you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t (e.g. playing a non-standard playthrough of the game). The lazy ones (‘Kill X enemies, Earn Y dollars’) are just busywork or earned ‘automatically’ while doing other things and add nothing.

What is link aggregation? Just combining network connections of a cloud? What does that have to do with lemmy?

It’s specifically a social media platform like Reddit (where people share links to media and users discuss it via the comments, typically). This is as opposed to (for example) microblogging, like Twitter (Mastodon on the fediverse).

Why would there by different servers in the first place doesn’t that make the social media smaller for everyone?

All of the various lemmy servers can interact with each other. You can use your lemmy.world account to interact with communities on other lemmy servers (aka Instances).

What is an instance?

A specific server running whatever Fediverse software. lemmy.world is a lemmy instance.

Isn’t the point of a federalized social media to be better connected?

Yes, and it is!

I only started eating spicy food regularly maybe 10 years ago (starting with spicy noodles, actually), and at first it was a harrowing experience. Now, I’m much more tolerant to it and things that were at first inedible don’t taste particularly hot at all anymore. My wife got me a variety of dried chili flakes for Christmas which include Trinidad scorpion and Carolina reaper and they’re certainly hot, but tolerable. I think they’d have about killed me 5-10 years ago.

We have a local wings place that has a wing sauce they simply call ‘Diablo’, and every time I order it I’m sitting here crying while I eat them thinking, “Why do I keep doing this to myself?”, but after they’re gone I just want more. It’s weirdly addictive.

Even if ads were a thing, they would be instance specific, unless they just took the form of posts advertising things (much like Reddit has) which personally I find to be toxic as hell. How would that money make it to content creators?

Personally, I’d prefer to read posts from people who want to post them because they have something interesting to share or something they want to discuss, rather than people who are trying to maximize engagement because engagement = income. There’s plenty of other places to go if you want to be fed that kind of content.

I think the sweet spot was 20-25 years ago when we had special interest forums with tight-knit communities around specific topics. It would be nice to get more engagement on Lemmy in niche communities, but I’d argue the way to achieve that is to go to other places where that content is posted, and share links to content on Lemmy, as a way to spread the word. Part of the problem there though is recognition, and if people see links to 20 different lemmy instances, they won’t associate those with lemmy as a whole, they’ll see it as all disparate things, and I’m not really sure how to solve that.

I can imagine that the Fediverse could develop remuneration models that are much fairer and more sustainable

What do you even imagine that would look like, without degrading the experience for everyone else? Not throwing shade, just curious what you’re thinking of. Like, who is hypothetically paying in these scenarios, and where is the money coming from? I think everyone would agree that if it’s coming from ads or anything similar, nobody is interested.

The best feature of Lemmy is that it isn’t as big as e.g. Reddit. I much prefer the size we have now to some big mega-site. Yes, there’s less content. Who cares? None of us need a constant stream of new content 24/7. It’s OK if you’ve viewed everything on your feed. It’s more reminiscent of forums from the late 90s / early 2000s, especially in the more mid-sized communities. I like that.

Oh, see, that’s your problem. You’re supposed to put beans, rice, meat, cheese, lettuce, guac and whatever else you prefer inside those the taco shells or tortillas, not tasteless mush. I’m glad we got to the root of the issue.

Well, you’re entitled to your opinion, I suppose, even if it’s wrong.

You’re distributing copyrighted material so the short answer is “Yes”, but the longer answer is “Probably, but it really depends on a lot of factors that you haven’t disclosed, like your location. It could certainly get you in trouble with MEGA regardless; whether it will get you in trouble with the law comes in large part down to the laws governing wherever you live.”

The chances of anything coming of it are another matter entirely and you may consider it worth the risk if you feel that chance is low enough.

I’d bet some significant amount of the hype was from people thinking “Oh, sick! The Marathon franchise is getting a revival!” without realizing that the new game had essentially no relation to the Marathon franchise they remembered. I don’t know who they think is sitting around thinking, “You know what I want? Another live service extraction shooter.”

Ah yes, my favorite DOS games, Red Alert and Unreal Tournament.

I firmly believe that anything “written off” in that manner - this includes movies, too, in particular - should have to be released into the public domain as part of that process.

Any business that’s paying less taxes is harming the public good; we should at least benefit in some small way from that.

Oh, man - I can do you one better. I still have one of these, still hooked up and running. We use it as a game server for some low-requirement stuff… currently Vintage Story.

For what it’s worth, this wired alternative is almost identical to an xbox one controller except for the rumble motor, which is markedly lower quality. If that doesn’t bother you, it’s also less than half the price, and works out of the box in all distros I’ve tried.

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile unlocks and offers to let you switch to ‘Pretty Princess’ difficulty if you die too many times in a row.