Zagorath

I’m also quite disappointed at the change from playing a thinblood to an Elder kindred. I thought the idea of exploring thinblood lore could be really interesting and it would be much more interesting to roleplay someone who starts the game mostly human, compared to a completely inhuman monster right from the start.

Damn, mail too? That didn’t make international headlines the way shutting down the weather service did.

Two of those are literally already privatised in America, and one more took some significant steps in that direction earlier this year.

Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.

Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that. And being able to read, to access the Internet, to do the many other things provided by library services are fundamental to the human experience or to modern society. You shouldn’t be prevented from these because you cannot afford to pay. A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.

And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”

Well, no. Things being at the whim of who has the most money is what turns it into “money buys right”. It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it. If libraries were paid, that would certainly turn access to reading into a “money buys right” situation.

Simple laws are great, and you should avoid laws that allow loopholes. But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.

in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives

Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.

in not wide enough participation

This thread is not about any one particular country. In fact, it’s specifically about multinational companies bowing to the pressure of one minor lobbyist. That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.

Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.

in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government

We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.

I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance. I have no idea what 6 is even supposed to mean. 7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.

Jesus christ are you just trolling at this point?

Infiltrated? Who said anything about infiltrated? Are you just making shit up now?

What happened is incredibly simple.

1. Some regressive organisations with no power other than persuasive power told payment processors to stop supporting NSFW content.
2. Payment processors caved in to this pressure and told Steam and Itch that their current NSFW content is not allowed and to remove it.
3. Steam and Itch, wanting to be able to keep making revenue at all, responded to this demand by removing NSFW content.

Anyone can do 1. I could go to Visa and say “stop promoting cats, tell Steam to stop selling Stray and Little Kitty, Big City.” It’s up to Visa whether or not they consider my pressure worth responding to. If they do, Steam has to stop selling Stray and LKBC if they want to stay in business. The blame here lies with Visa for choosing to listen to me even though, in this scenario, I’m being a total fuckwit. In reality, Visa would turn around to me and say “lol no, fuck off”. (Or, more likely, ignore me entirely.)

3 is an inevitable result if 2 occurs. If they can’t take in any money, they can’t continue selling any games. They can’t afford to pay the bills for their servers, or pay their employees, or anything. The only option is to give in.

That leaves 2 as the variable. They decide whether to respond to the pressure or not. And they deserve the blame any time they do.

You’d have to ask them.

The regressive asked the payment processors to do this. The payment processors themselves are the ones that actually did it. The regressive barely had any actual leverage. The payment processors chose to cave.

We can blame the religious organisation as much as we want, but the fundamental problem here is payment processors. They should be common carriers. Content-neutral middlemen who facilitate payment to anything that isn’t literally unlawful. This is no different to an ISP throttling access to Netflix because they operate their own streaming platform. If the storefront, the developer, and the buyer are all ok with a transaction, there’s no good reason for a fourth party to stand in the way of that.

lemon stealing whores …

Dare I ask for context?

My theory is that it’s because people who are into it must be really into it, but people who aren’t into it are very good at ignoring the fact that it’s titled like that or that there might be one or two throwaway lines implying it (especially when it’s “step”). So there’s an incentive for uploaders to title things like that and for creators to add a little nod in the video towards it (without adding too much incest roleplay) because it draws in a large audience and actively turns away very few.

I can’t imagine buying a porn game on Steam. And even if I did, incest holds no interest to me.

Even so, I absolutely fucking hate this crap. Payment processors are killing off content despite the producers and consumers of the content being completely fine with it. This should be a Net Neutrality issue. But I’m not seeing anywhere near the same outrage over it that there was over ISPs doing the exact same thing.

“recognising” a government seems to be tantamount to acknowledging that government is legitimate and representative of the people

I agree with your conclusion (recognition should be based entirely on who has Actual Control, in cases where that can be clearly determined), but not with this particular explanation. Nobody “recognises” Taiwan, but it has nothing to do with believing it’s illegitimate or unrepresentative. It has to do with the fact that China has a hissy fit if you do.

But that’s not changing the design, really

Depends on what one means by “change the design”. It doesn’t make a fundamental change to the deeper architecture of the game, no. But it does require some relatively superficial changes, which are themselves a design problem of sorts.

There are, it may surprise you to learn, different types of game that have online connectivity for different reasons. And the appropriate EOL response may differ across those games.

“Live-service” games where the main gameplay is singleplayer but an online connection is required so they can enforce achievements and upgrades (…and “anti-piracy” bs) may be best served by simply removing the online component so it can all be done locally.

Online competitive games can be switched to a direct connection mode.

MMOs and other games with large numbers of users and a persistent online server can be run on fan-operated servers, so long as (a) the server binary is made available, and (b) the client is modified to allow changing settings to choose a server to connect to (it could be something as simple as a command-line flag with no UI if the devs are being really cheap).

Devs have numerous options for how to address the SKG initiative. The top three that come to my mind are:

• Release server binaries (along with modifying clients to have a setting to connect to the right server)
• Modify multiplayer to work over LAN (good when the server’s only/main job is matchmaking)
• Modify the game itself to no longer require online connectivity

In the case of live service games, I would suggest option 3 is the most appropriate. If the main gameplay is singleplayer, but it’s online so you can dole out achievements and gatekeep content, the answer is simple: stop doing that. Patch it to all work in-client. And keep in mind that this will be a requirement at end-of-life from the beginning. If it’s an unexpected requirement, that’s going to be a huge development cost. If it’s expected, making that EOL change easy to implement will be part of the code architecture from the start.

I get it, but is there an ideological cause?

There’s an ideology behind drivers who terrorise cyclists try to force them off the road, for sure. They should be labelled terrorists.

But vandalising a speed camera could just as easily be a selfish wish to not get fined.