JDPoZ

Was gonna say - how long after Elden Ring did Shadow of the Erdtree DLC come out?

Payday 2 was a really novel idea a long time ago. Highly scripted replayable missions with unique aspects but RNG for procedurally variable elements like guard patrol positions, locations and security aspects… in addition to dynamic changes based off how successful the player was at doing a job without letting security escalate the mission to going “loud.”

It made otherwise boring repetitive loops of missions feel new and different enough each time that it was exciting. Being randomly matched with others fed into the unpredictable heist aspect as well…

But instead of focusing on constantly further improving upon those systems, fixing terrible issues related to both friendly and antagonistic A.I. (I remember how for the longest time your teammates could not literally pick up a duffle bag), they saw dollar signs with in-app-purchases… and with Payday 3, they doubled down on that aspect… so no one got on board… and eventually longtime players like myself stopped playing Payday 2 as well.

Instead of wishing any game company to fail, I wish for them to unionize.

That would piss the CEOs off more, would result in a bunch of passionate good devs who have nothing to do with the bad decisions and who just want to make fun games NOT losing their jobs, being discouraged and then leaving the game industry due to constant cycles of endless crunch, followed by layoffs and studio closures due to greedy stupid shortsighted actions by management.

Valve showed how to do this right years ago at this point with the Steam Deck.

1. Force (or at least put a sizeable number of devices to be available for exclusive) purchase through their own store.
2. Limit to only a single unit purchase per official account.
3. Require the official account to have already been present before the device was announced to be available to purchase.

Boom. Scalper market collapsed for Steam Deck, PS5, etc.

thx. fixed.

Also, what a fucking piece of shit Google is for doing that. I fucking hate them so goddamn much.

I immediately installed this extension in Firefox to auto-strip that out from now on.

I hate that this was my first thought… but just in case no one else was aware of this literal classic moment in gaming villain history…

I feel like I only know just enough about docker containers to get myself into trouble.

I’ve ran a few docker containers for things like Minecraft Bedrock for my kid and his friends and a local Ubooquity server and stuff like that but I’m wondering if anyone has made a guide for glutun VPN bind + an Invidious instance with tailscale/twingate setup you mentioned.

I am just an iPhone pleb who really loved using Yattee while it worked and assume a similar setup to what you described would allow me to point my Yattee to the self-hosted instance.

I think it’s because some people reading who aren’t terminally online like some of us, just see the word “liberal” in there and just immediately ignore everything else and take a defensive stance as they see themselves as aligned to their perception of the meaning of that word, and decide to push back as if you weren’t actually just accurately assigning blame to the economic school of thought that largely has led us to the massive upward curve of inequality we now see still growing…

…A curve which FDR had initially reversed starting in the 1930s after the Great Depression, but has since increasingly been clawed back by the rich getting a hold of all the necessary levers of power since then.

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You seem to be a decent person based on the fact that you refused to cheat someone, so I’m going to try to reply to each point you made. First, they should NOT have deleted something you’ve paid for.

Bungie literally deleted content I paid for. They can get bent, they have lost myself and my money, among others, as customers permanently.

As of 2 years ago, Bungie became owned by Sony. The 2 guys who founded Bungie are no longer in charge. One of them left, and the other is basically a recluse, but who when we HAVE seen on camera, comes across as a guy who just likes making good games.

As you may or may not have seen in the headlines with Helldivers 2, SONY - a massive multi-billion dollar corporation (like Microsoft, EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc.) are all perfectly capable of making self-destructive monumentally stupid business-centric decisions and in pursuit of boundless greed have hurt their own IP, their industry, and their customers. Sony LITERALLY deleted licenses for movies people paid for, so I’d be willing to wager this a similar call some idiot Sony exec made that was out of Bungie’s hands.

And before you say “Who cares? They should have remained independent and not sold out to some big corporation then.”

If you like big games, this is the current reality you will have to contend with. Bungie is not a tiny studio. The games they make require a literal ARMY to build. The logistical reality of that means that - for them to be able to afford to even just purchase the equipment needed to build and maintain such big games - let alone hire and pay people to work on them for something like 7-10 years at a time before having something “shippable” - they need MASSIVE backing. 10s if not 100s of millions of $ in investment. Even with some of the most successful game launches ever, if they plan on doing it bigger the next time, they need more than they earned to make the next game’s investment back plus more.

The result of the company getting less money means people get let go. That’s how business works.

Not really. A company firing workers has nothing to do with whether or not the company is “getting less money.” A company does do whatever it thinks will make it the most money… Privately owned companies with decent owners - like Gabe Newell do want to make money, but also know their business is making things for people who like games… and he’s personally invested in making the company do that well. And because Gabe isn’t an asshole, turns out customers and most companies kinda like him and Valve and pretty much all their products. He also keeps good people, pays them well, and pretty much anyone working at Valve works there for the rest of their professional lives if they can.

HOWEVER… if the owner is an asshole who would, for completely random example, rather build himself a magic theater than provide his team members a decent salary and job security… or even worse… a company is publicly traded, their goal is to absolutely rocket the share price THAT QUARTER at ANY legally viable cost - even if it fucks them over long-term. So even if the publicly traded company made a billion dollars last quarter, if by firing 250 people they normally pay $50K a year, they make $1.00001 billion as a result and that makes the stock go up by $0.002… most CEOs will sign off on that. Hell, most CEOs would let their own children starve if it meant the share value went up by 5% that quarter.

Really a gigantic publicly-traded company letting people go has less to do with their success, and more to do with fiduciary responsibility to maximize share price each quarter.

Any person that keeps working with a company that actively harms its customers is not a person that I will support.

Objectively good take, though I also would suggest try to start from a point of empathy and assume no one LIKES working for an evil company (unless they’re something like a hedge-fund management company or something kind of inherently exploitative - then maybe they’re just an asshole).

My personal work ethic and integrity could never allow me to continue to work in such a dishonest place of work. I quit on the spot when one of my old bosses told me to lie and tell a customer that they needed parts replaced for their car that they didn’t need so he could charge them more.

Really awesome thing for you to do. Seriously, hats off to you for that.

Walked across the street and got a job at the competing shop the same day, and ended up getting paid more.

Ok… here’s where you veer off a bit. Game dev studios are not car repair shops. There are literally only a HANDFUL of major game companies in the world. Look - here’s an interactive map that shows pretty much EVERY major (and many minor) game company… in the WORLD.

Car repair shops - as you clearly even provided with your own example - are literally on every street corner. I have a feeling that - in addition to being a pretty stand-up dude - you must be pretty great at your job to be able to literally walk into some place to get immediately hired for more money, but the idea that any person working in the game industry can just immediately quit and find another job across the street as easily as that is unfortunately just not how reality works.

To become a game developer, most people will have to go to some sort of higher education institution… whether a dedicated trade-style game dev school or some prestigious engineering program at a major university. Many would need to take out some sort of loan to learn this BUT EVEN IF THEY DON’T (because I can see you typing “not my problem they took out money for something they couldn’t afford”)… yes, you can self-teach (much more so these days than in the past), but most people will need to learn via some sort of program designed to teach the trade. And even if you are lucky enough not to need any loans, many companies will ask you to move, have decent computer equipment to at least do the portfolio-type work needed to even convince a game company to give them an interview for the job they are applying for, or provide some sort of credentials that cost money to show you are certified to even get your resume even in the middle (let alone the top) of a pile.

All of this means financial risk. Less places to work means it might be hard to stay in the same city if your company fires you (unless you’re in like Seattle, or San Francisco or New York - which is crazy expensive and makes people financially desperate on its own but that’s a whole different discussion).

Anyway, I personally know guys who moved and bought houses to start a new job with a game company where that was the ONLY game company in a 3-state radius… and it closed within a month, throwing them into financial ruin. When there’s financial risk for the workers, it’s MUCH harder to stand up and say “hey don’t do that” if you’re worried that you’re going to lose your job at the only shop in town.

If you are good at your job (as good as you seem to think all Bungie employees are), then finding another job will be easy.

Not necessarily… because you see - a SHIT-load of these companies are run by these fucking ghouls who have fired a collective of something like TENS OF THOUSANDS OF GAME DEV PROFESSIONALS over the past handful of years. These people didn’t lose their job because they aren’t talented. And neither did probably at least 25% (if we’re being assholes and assuming a fuckton somehow aren’t talented - which is asinine) of all the others who now those ex-Bungie folks will be competing with for LESS positions from the other companies who have cleaned house the past couple of years (again for no other reason than to artificially boost the share price of their publicly traded companies).

Sucks for the few good people that might work there, but if they get let go they will have the opportunity to work somewhere better. If they’re a good person, they will likely pick a place that doesn’t actively harm its own customers (and employees).

Yeah… I’m sure they all have a super long list of AAA game companies that aren’t publicly traded or run increasingly by private equity firms that they can apply to that are MUCH more ethical and don’t do things to actively harm their customers and employees.

Does any of what I’m rambling about here make sense?

You were wronged, my friend… and no one is trying to excuse that, but the issue is being caused by some assholes at the very top of ALL our favorite game companies… and basically saying “sucks to suck, if they’re cool at their job, it’s just as easy to find another as just walking across the street” to a bunch of lower-level people (who - again I can’t stress this enough speaking as someone who WAS one of those types of people before I quit making games - just wanted to make a fun game that they could see people like you share about how much they loved playing it) because the suits did something shitty that no one thinks is good - is not really understanding the reason as to why it occurred, and what can be done as a consumer, voter, citizen to make it so this sort of shit doesn’t happen anymore.

Bungie hasn’t made a good game since 2010, they deserve it.

No they don’t, you ghoul.

You don’t get hired at Bungie by being a shitty game dev.

You make shitty games or get fired by having shitty management or a parent company run by a shitty exec.

Shit like this is what is making the game industry suck and why you are seeing more bugs and more garbage and as long as companies fire people after every project, and no one sticks around, it’s likely to just keep worsening things.

Do you know why Elden Ring, Mario, and Zelda games are good?

It’s because the devs at Nintendo and From Software have people in charge who have been making games for like 30 goddamn years and have become literal masters of their craft.

Meanwhile, all the companies making shitty games are firing people as soon as their game ships and chasing trends instead of focusing on fundamentals of good game mechanics and gameplay design.

…And so then the next quarter when they need more warm bodies to ship something, they basically have to hire a bunch of 20-something fresh graduates who generally have no idea what they’re doing, pay them next to nothing, give them unrealistic deadlines, crunch the shit out of them, burn them out, and then repeat the cycle.

That’s at least one of the reasons why even industry celebrities like Cliff Blezinski got out of making games.

Not a fan of Joe Rogan, but go watch John Carmack - one of the singular greatest programmers of the last 40 years and basically also one of the creators of the FPS - tell Rogan that game dev is harder and less secure and pays less than Facebook.

It’s why most game studios’ average tenure is around 5 years… and why a lot of people (myself included) left… because the pay and job stability is better in adjacent careers like just general software dev.

These people are trying to make games that they are passionate about. No game dev gets into it to make money or micro transactions… especially not someone who would want to work for a studio that once crafted flagship titles like Bungie or Blizzard or any of the other big name studios.

People telling game devs that they “should lose their jobs” really need to redirect their ire toward the private equity bean-counting suits - who are making off like bandits while absolutely gutting the future of an industry I fucking guarantee is having its legs cut out from under it by shit like this.

Edit : Holy shit some of the absolute chirplords in the thread below really make me happy I got out of making games. To anyone still soldiering on in the trench that is video game dev work, I salute you… I really wish you had the fortitude to still do it, but I’m a mere mortal. Here’s to hoping you guys are able to get what you need and that the suits just get out of the way.

Such an incredible game and a great humble developer. Honestly, there’s nothing I can think of to do to improve the game from a gameplay mechanics standpoint, but there are a few technical back-end things I do wish it had :

1. Cross-platform compatible cloud-based save support. I want to be able to play in my same game save regardless of what system I play on. I don’t even mind paying for the game multiple times, but I want to have a singular Stardew account that I can sync somehow between PlayStation, Steam Deck, iOS, etc.
2. Cross-platform multiplayer. If I want to play on my Steam Deck and hop into my spouse’s farm on the Switch or whatever… or have them be able to do so on mine.
3. Mixing local and online co-op. If my kid wants to play with my spouse split-screen and I want to play on my desktop, again - would love to just be able to do so more seamlessly.
4. Dedicated server support.

I know at this point doing those things would be very hard from a technical standpoint since they’d probably require a lot of deep work in a code base that was not built to do any multiplayer to begin with, but I still would love if they could somehow do so or fork the base game to allow it to be done by the community.

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Is Vermont really aa amazing as I’ve imagined it being?

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When I bought my buddy’s used GameCube for like $50 back in 2005, he gave me an extra controller and Smash Bros. Melee with it.

Just on that game alone I logged more than 2,000 hours playing almost literally every day for 4 years alongside my dorm-mates and buddies.

That’s like… $0.02 and a half cents per hour… for a whole ass GameCube and a game.

…Best purchase I ever made.

The problem is the idea of working on games sounds amazing… and it allows them to pull in a constant fresh young pool of eager workers willing to completely destroy themselves to make their mark on the world and release something they’re passionate about…

And all these publicly traded ghoulish-MBA-run companies would rather have more cheap inexperienced “Pikmin” type workers to throw at endless “copycat-chase-whatever-concept-is-popular-and-constantly-pivot-toward-the-popular-right-now” type game projects than experts in their field with dozens of titles under their belt, decades of design, or artistic, or programming experience.