This is what really shits me. “Oh, the sports companies won’t be able to fund themselves.” If that’s true, too fucking bad. Our laws shouldn’t exist to arbitrarily prop up certain industries even when we’ve decided that the industry is causing harm.

But also, it’s just fucking not true. You can make an argument and say “oh but gambling companies fund 60% of the sport league” or whatever number it is, and pretend that banning gambling would cut the NRL’s budget by 60%. But that’s just not how it works. They’re sponsors because they were the highest bidder, not the only bidder. You’d just go to the next highest bidder if gambling sponsorships weren’t allowed. In the short term, maybe a 10% loss of revenue at most. Realistically, in the long term, it’d be negligible.

Same goes for pokies at local pubs and clubs. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population and 18% of the world’s poker machines. And if you look specifically at poker machines not located in casinos it goes up to a ridiculous 76%. The entire rest of the world doesn’t allow poker machines at local clubs like we do, and their venues do just fine. The cries that venues would die off if they couldn’t have pokies are just nonsense.

Reverse image search says yes, Singapore.

That bastion of socialism.

I doubt it. Other forms of AI could be useful, but generative AI? I doubt it.

And tbh even deep learning through neural networks doesn’t seem to be making the leaps we’d hoped for. AoE4 promised, prior to release, a machine learning–based AI would be delivered down the line. It’s now almost 3 years since release and we haven’t heard a thing about it.

Maybe eventually we’ll be able to easily train a machine learning algorithm to play any game at a wide variety of skill levels (or at a very high level, if not at customisable levels), but it doesn’t seem like it’s any time soon.

Ok this got a chuckle out of me. But yeah, I don’t see any problem with people expressing agreement verbally.

Imagine a real conversation where you’re only allowed to agree with someone with nods, never saying “yeah I agree completely” or any other verbal feedback.

Honestly I didn’t even read the article. Shared it purely based on the headline.

You say “handful”, but it still hand thousands of players, and the thing that makes me sad about this screw up is that of those who played it, it was probably someone’s favourite game…

…Is what I was going to say, until I looked at the Steam charts. It hit an all-time peak of 607 players, with estimates of total ownership ranging from 9.5k to 25.1k. It very well still may have been someone’s favourite game and I feel really sad for them that it’s gone, but wow the game still did so much worse than even my expectations based on the reporting.

See also: Born Sexy Yesterday

See this, this I get. This is an actual reasonable problem. And we could be talking about it wrt Retold, since Freyr is a day one DLC.

Personally I’m not too concerned with it because even if you ignore Freyr, the cost of Premium is $25 AUD more than standard, and it includes two future DLCs (which they’ve already said will be $15 USD, probably $20 AUD each). So Premium is worth getting just for the two future pantheons. And since Premium includes Freyr in addition to the future pantheons, it ends up not looking like an added cost in the way it would otherwise.

But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that there’s actual playable content not included for free that’s available day one. And it would leave me very angry if the prices had ended up such that the best deal for everything except the day-one DLC actually cost less than the best deal for everything including Freyr. But all this discussion about cosmetics. Not even interesting cosmetics like unit skins, but something that’s basically just profile pictures. Is annoyingly distracting from that conversation.

You buy it for the expansions. The Chinese, one more as-yet-unannounced pantheon, and Freyr. The other stuff you get with Premium is basically irrelevant.

I’d much rather have a conversation about the day-one DLC of Freyr, and the fact that they’re charging for the future Chinese pantheon despite Chinese being available in 2014 Extended Edition and no previous Age of Empires Definitive Edition removing a civ that was previously available (indeed, aoe2 and aoe3’s DEs both added new civs in addition to all the existing ones). Granted, there are extenuating circumstances there, in that the EE Chinese DLC was so terrible it basically killed the game and they’ve promised the upcoming expansion to Retold will be “all new Chinese”. But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

This discussion about what is basically profile pictures is some irrelevant bullshit as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a shit about it, and I find the rhetoric from people claiming they do care (especially that one person claiming that this is a reason they’ll avoid Retold entirely because it’s “an advertisement, not a game”) extremely unconvincing. It’s eye-rollingly stupid to care about this when there are real things to get upset about both with this game and in the wider gaming industry.

where I’m actually playing a game and not an advertisement

That’s more than a little bit hyperbolic.

Mercifully, the base game’s faring far better.

On Steam it is. Though ironically, given the source of this article, PC Gamer has not given it such a stellar review. While heaps of other review sites are giving it 90/100 and its Metacritic score is 84, PC Gamer gives it just 75, which in the inflated world of online game reviews is basically a failing grade, and is a significant outlier compared to overall review sites and fan reception.

I’ve seen others allege that it’s part of a general trend at PC Gamer having a grudge against remasters and not scoring them entirely on their merits.

I’ll repeat my comment from !aom@lemm.ee:

Gonna be honest, I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I do agree that it’s kinda shitty to charge $6 ($8 here in Aus) for something that was basically the thing people already had in the original game.

On the one hand, the description of it as “22-year-old JPEGs” is wrong. They’re at the very least upscaled, but certainly in some form higher quality than the originals. There’s also the fact that they’re completely optional and unnecessary. They provide nothing but cosmetics, and not even cosmetics that you see in important places like character models. I also think it was primarily intended as a small added bonus for people with the Premium Edition, and to me the Premium Edition is a no-brainer for reasons completely unrelated to this. It costs like $20 extra, and includes the first two upcoming expansions free, each at $15 (or similar maths to that), as well as the Freyr god pack (like $10?). It’s able to be bought stand-alone, but I don’t think that’s really what’s intended.

Still, yeah I really think trying to upsell with this pack is kinda penny pinching in a way I wish they wouldn’t do things.

“would” as in, “I would, if I could find one that isn’t insane”, or “would” as in “I have a plan and already know who I’m giving the position to and what position it is”?

Oh interesting. I’ve never used the “thumbnail URL” field on a submission before. But yeah it looks like it messed up before and was treating it as the main URL instead…

It’s a shuttle run. You’re not running laps of a track, you’re running back and forth between two cones placed 20 metres apart.

Oh I used to love doing the beep test! I’ve only gotten to do it 3 or 4 times but it was a great fun challenge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epvLrK6Mhd4

Normal YouTube link

They’ve got options.

• never build in forced server components to begin with
• patch out the need for the server as part of the last update before support ends
• give buyers access to run their own servers with an officially-provided executable and set the client to connect to that executable
• open source the whole thing

And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.

This is beehaw, they won’t see it.

Do you still play?

I mostly gave it up a long time ago, and have found it difficult to get back into any time I’ve tried. I miss the elegant simplicity of the 2013 version of the game, before all the complicated missions and minigames.