If you join an official public server, there’s an extremely high chance you’ll join with cheater bots that spawn endless, aimbotting snipers. It’s less of a problem on community servers as they’re actively moderated by players, but official servers have to rely on vote kicking a fresh cheater bot every few minutes.

This is all done by some script kiddy group who apparently want to highlight Valve’s deprecated support. Basically ruin the game until Valve fixes the game. There’s also some measure of farming ingame item drops to sell for money, I think.

Honestly, I don’t believe save TF2 will get anywhere. Valve is clearly uninterested in supporting the game, and who could fault them? It’s an old game, and games don’t need to be supported just because people play them.

The real problem Valve is playing with is that TF2 is still monetized. They should not be selling microtransactions for a game this broken. If they weren’t selling microtransactions, they would be entirely in their right to kill all official support and leave the game to community servers.

My main concern is that Valve will calculate this over the bad PR they’re receiving, and rather than do anything to curb the bot problem, simply kill their support for TF2. I would be okay with this. I think most people wanting to #SaveTF2 won’t be.

yeah the coolest thing about modern economic systems is that we can culturally recognize the ethically barren landscape of pyramid schemes as a bad thing that we obviously don’t get into and even ban in sane places! But economically well yeah sometimes your friend since high school is just going to bumble into an MLM scheme, financially wreck themselves, bomb their social lives, and spew propaganda about being their own boss selling soaps, and that’s just ok. that’s fine. if anything, it’s their fault for falling for it!

character creator, shove a RobCo Reflectron in the newborns face so they can generate their preferred potato look

yes, for sure. I think we all do.

I think it requires a reframing of the mind. The ‘smart-dumb’ scale is an oversimplification of human intellect. It was never entirely accurate. Ignoring intellectual disabilities, every human is equally as capable as being as smart as any other human. We’re the same kind of animal.

The true factor in intellect is your curiosity. Some people are naturally curious of different subjects and will learn more about those subjects. Some people are incurious about most subjects and won’t learn much at all. Most of the traditionally ‘smart’ people you think of were just sufficiently curious in whatever field they’re qualified in. None of the traditionally ‘smart’ people you think of were born smart.

Foster your curiosity. If you know what excites you, you’re already half way to intelligence.

I don’t think it’s going to happen over any single event. I think Federated platforms will remain small scale but very active, and that’s all they have to do as mainstream social medias spring up, monetize, and collapse, over and over and over again.

Then one day in the future, the latest generation of cool kids will just realize that it’s way cooler to be on the Federated platforms than it is to be on the mainstream sites.

Hook my number up and I’ll be the voice assistant. I promise I’ll be extremely private and secure.

In all seriousness just posting to boost, good luck on this project. It seems really promising and wish I could contribute.

that amount of money is simply not able to be accrued quickly, ethically, legally, and safely. a loan is the only thing that comes to my mind other than crime time. you could try visiting mutual aid communities and crowdfunding. you’ll get something from your comrades, at least, but probably not 24k

asking the real questions

i don’t have an answer but im here for the question

in a few hundred years historians will look back at this time of the internet and feel extremely frustrated that we had perfect record keeping systems that would retain all this knowledge and culture forever but we for some reason let companies blackhole it

Sweet, time to finish some of the horrible projects 14 year old me started

Ah yes, in-game currency is fiction. That’s why it costs real money, and publishers mandate developers lock down the game as much as possible to ensure no one circumvents the ‘fiction.’ The mind boggling profits they bring must also be fictional.

Fuck, I hate GaaS.

Haha, online games licensing sucks. It’s almost as if, when we discovered we could distribute media freely and infinitely by digital means, we should have restructured how media and licensing works for these products. but we didn’t, and now we have bizarre situations where publishers try to delete their own games from existence rather than spend some upkeep for music licensing

‘Cuz you ain’t been doin nothin’, if you ain’t been called a red, if you’ve marched or agitated, then you’re bound to hear it said…

Yup, and in the re-release for the gamecube, you could pop the chao in your copy of Sonic Advance 1/2 or the GBA to emulate the effect.

blessed image, i loved raising chao, but i never had access to online guides as a kid so i never bred the rare ones. hell i never really saw a chao die to begin with to know they reincarnated

also, just to be a dick, my sister told me they were pronounced “k-o” and not “chow,” so I spent a lot of my childhood being confidently wrong

HogLeg’s success is pretty crazy if you think about it. Ignoring the sales we’ve looking at today, take yourself back to the launch of HogLeg. It kept up pace with Fallout 4 in terms of active players and achievement completion rates. This is huge to me. They’re both singleplayer RPGs, so they’re both vying for the same type of audience.

But.

Fallout 4 was a hugely anticipated sequel to one of the most renowned series in all of gaming. Harry Potter had almost no presence in gaming beyond nostalgic shovel ware titles.

Fallout 4 was developed by gaming darlings, a company known for producing huge open worlds with strong volumes of content. HogLeg was developed by shovelware developers with no major releases in their history.

Fallout 4 is a first person looter shooter, one of the most ubiquitous and successful genres out there. HogLeg is an action roleplaying game, still admittedly a safe genre but doesn’t have the genre conventions that makes it possible for anyone with FPS experience to pick up a Fallout.

And finally, Fallout 4 targeted gamers. It’s a gamer’s game, you know? It’s for lore nerds and RPG fans and tacticool nuts and all the rest. HogLeg was for Harry Potter fans. It needed to drag fans across media types to secure a big enough audience.

I truly, truly did not expect HogLeg to find the success it has. And to be honest, it’s quite a mid game! It’s a visual accomplishment and adherence to the universe means that it’s a treat for any Harry Potter nerds, but the rest of the game is as close as generic as it could get.

oh boy the twitch streamers sure are getting cocky with the boasting of their personal wealth these days huh

how hard is it to just shut up and be the brand you so desperately want to be

I’m building up to doing the same. Already using Protonmail and Kagi. Looking for a less Google-dependent phone to switch over to and then I might pull the plug myself.

I’m feeling positive, too. You can’t undo the progres made in the decentralized network space. Every loss for big tech is a win for us. I don’t hold much hope that decentralized networks are going to sweep the globe and return the internet to it’s former glory. But I do think we’ll always have a space, and that space can only get bigger.