I guess along with all the google money, they also got Google’s pathological need to cancel everything, too.

Speed running Wii Sports?

Huh.

(I have probably 50 copies because I kept ending up with more and more due to buying game lots at estate sales and garage sales and such.)

Wii games worth something?

Maybe I’ll be able to retire on my collection of Wii Sports disks.

Did not know that, and everywhere should require that at the very bare minimum. Knowing how you’re going to get screwed is a good place to start.

Have you been to a theater recently? You only wish it was silent.

Idk when it started but its fine to talk through the whole movie or fuck with your phone volume turned on now.

Knowing the odds doesn’t stop children from developing a gambling habit.

Agreed, and this is why I’m firmly on the no-kids side of things.

If you can’t go to a casino until you’re 21, why exactly should you be able to gamble online (in any form!) until then either?

Oh I wasn’t meaning to say it wasn’t predatory, merely that it’s honest about what it is. A LOT of other gacha/lootbox games are far more obscure about what’s going on and how you’re getting screwed and Genshin at least has it all clearly outlined and easily (ish) understood.

Also, I was mentally using 21 as the gambling age since I’m an American and we don’t really trust those shifty 18-year-olds with anything other than being shot at in a war.

I take your point, though, but at some point, you have to shrug and call someone a full-fledged adult, and let them shit up their own life.

But call it gambling, regulate it under the same legal requirements as you would any other form of gambling, and keep the kids out.

Agreed on P2P gacha games. Those are just gross as fuck, since as you said, they’re explicitly pay-to-win.

Genshin does, for the most part, provide very clear percentages and how the math works out, so you can actually do that but they’re certainly a rarity. I will say, though, that while they do provide that information it’s also in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a ‘beware of the leopard’ sign.

You can find it if you know where it is, but your average user isn’t going to know the magic things you should click on to get from the wish screen to the page on the website where they outline specific odds and pull rates, which eh, not a fan of making that so obscure.

Also: not a fan of the sell you a currency you have to convert to another currency to convert to a 3rd thing that then can be used for gambling thing. There shouldn’t be more than one level of obscuring between your money and the final item you need - Genshin goes from Crystals to Primogems to Wishes, and that’s almost entirely to be sure to confuse people how much that wish actually cost, since you’ve got a lot of math to do to get back to what you orginally paid for the Crystals.

Not really: if you’re astroturfing, you don’t do all your astroturfing from a single source because that makes it so obvious even a blind person could see it and sort it out.

You do it from all over the places, mixed in with as much real user traffic as you can, and then do it steadily and without being hugely bursty from a single location.

Humans are very good at pattern matching and recognition (which is why we’ve not all been eaten by tigers and leopards) and will absolutely spot the single source, or extremely high volume from a single source, or even just the looks-weird-should-investigate-more pattern you’d get from, for example, exactly what happened to cause this post.

TLDR: they’re doing this because they’re trying to evade humans and ML models by spreading the load around, making it not a single source, and also trying to mix it in with places that would also likely have substantial real human traffic because uh, that’s what you do if you’re hoping to not be caught.

If this worked for other forms of content than microblogging it’d be more interesting.

I don’t have an issue with paying for people who make long-form video content, or people who post actual real long-form blog posts, or newsletters of interest but microblog shit?

There’s barely enough of interest there to justify reading it most of the time, let alone paying for it.

Tweets and toots are just advertisement for the actual content, not the actual content, IMO.

This would be more interesting if it was a way to monetize Peertube or the various blogging platforms that are federated.

Fantastic. Though, I have to wonder if this is going to result in either way more cheaters, or if the anti-cheat will become super fucking awful to deal with and start making (broader) arbitrary decisions on what you can and cannot run because it has less access to shit.

Regardless, the less shit fucking around in the kernel the better, especially for shit that shouldn’t have ever been there in the first place.

As someone who plays a gacha game (Genshin Impact) I 100% agree. This shit should be kept the hell out of the hands of kids until their brain has at least matured to the point we’d let them go actual gambling.

That said, there’s certainly a spread of abusiveness in the games: some are very reasonable and could be played with no money or very little money because they’re generous with premium currencies and others are doing a sexy little dance while they steal your wallet.

Regulation around how much you can spend in a month would be reasonable, no kids would be reasonable, requiring clear and published probabilities and what those probabilities mean in terms of how many pulls would be a good start.

I can assure you most gacha players cannot tell you how many pulls you’d need to make for a 0.5% chance pull.

Also maybe outline estimated costs for winning wouldn’t be awful, but that’s maybe not feasible since there’s a lot of variability?

None of my youtube creators are producing content on peer-tube.

That’s probably more of a monetization issue than anything related to peertube. If your job is making Youtube videos, then at least some portion of your income is AdSense. Sure, it’s not what it was, but at scale it’s not nothing, and the peertube alternative is… $0.

(Also, for the non-commercial ones or the ones that are funded outside of Youtube, maybe ask if they’ll use Peertube. I’ve had luck with a couple of people I watched being willing to upload to multiple platforms, but you don’t know if you don’t ask.)

Stripe is pretty much global, outside of some weird prepaid/debit cards in various places which just don’t work.

The bigger problem is that the number of chargebacks you need to get your merchant account killed with them is very small if you don’t have substantial dollar/transaction volume which a Lemmy admin isn’t horribly likely to have.

And of course, their chargeback fees in general are unpleasant though that’s more of a universal problem than a Stripe problem.

off-brand Super Soakers until they get frustrated

I’m now imagining the leaders of the Andromeda Initiative shopping for guns at the Citadel branch of Temu, which is Commander Shepherd’s least favorite store.

Another paper that equates not changing the world with being a complete failure.

A valid viewpoint, I suppose, but some Fedi-things have certainly improved my life, which really, is how these things work: you improve people’s lives incrementally, and not by the hundreds of millions at once.

Of course, that means this is a complete failure because we won’t accept anything other than massive global success as success anymore because… reasons?

I’m not sure what’s wrong with your PC, but mine can run a lot more than 3 different consoles worth of games ;)

And of course you’ve also forgotten about Steam, the past 40 years of computer gaming, as well as the easy(easier?) use of all sorts of mods and addons that you just don’t get on one of the major consoles.

Use a better client that shows you the information? The default UI does, so that’s firmly a problem you’ve inflicted on yourself.

thus I don’t really see a problem

Except you no longer can edit, delete, etc. the posts.

You’ve lost complete control over your data, and there’s no way to get it back if your instance vanishes.

Either of which seem reasonable enough.

I’m just confused who is spending $700+ for a gaming console if the one that’s $200-300 less seems to be fine?

I’m old and out of touch I guess. (And do all my gaming on a Ally Z1 non-extreme these days which is an absolute potato compared to either of these PS5s and it’s also… fine.)