The golden rule of fascism: always first accuse others of the conspiracies you’re going to engage in.

And lastly, I am wondering how this is going to impact Nazis like Kirk in general. Are they going to ramp it up or step it down?

There’s a reason marvel used a “Hydra” as the mascot for fascism. We’re still at the beginning of this roller coaster.

“You will not get gun deaths to zero. You can significantly reduce them…by having more fathers in the home and more armed guards in front of schools.”

I fucking burst out laughing. This guy was a walking meme.

Party of small government, ladies and gentlemen.

Museum of the Bible

Whoever named that place gave zero shits lol

If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I barely consider that one a run back. It’s like 40s to get to the boss from the bench. And at that point I the game, I noticed myself start hitting the bounce plants much more consistently after having to do this run many times. Up until then I hadn’t been forced to repeat the same small section yet.

And (staying vague to avoid spoilers), the bench itself was particularly “surprising” specifically because of the long gap without any benches leading up to it, forcing you to repeat the same long platforming/combat sections over and over. Players would not have been “surprised” by it if they weren’t so desperate for a bench.

I will need to play more of silksong to be able to comment fully, but I felt that, even though you could understandably say all the same stuff about Hollow Knight, I still do think that the only times I struggled in HK (on required content) I later found out about an upgrade that was available if i had looked that would have made the fight much easier (nail upgrade, ability, charm, more hp, etc).

No, not to the same degree as Elden Ring, i agree, but I do think HK’s exploration played a very similar role as it did in Elden Ring. In both games i would tell people to only bash your head against a boss if you want to hurt yourself, otherwise go explore.

The US economy is now completely detached from productivity and is now running on speculation

Yep, the market feels like it’s in max-greed mode. There was a taste of fear when the tariffs were first announced, but wallst was quick to token TACO to justify just ignoring everything. My question for the last 9+ months has been, “how long can a market willingly ignore reality?”

I assume it will take until a critical mass of those speculators start needing to liquidate. I don’t know what will trigger that, but at some point the profits come due.

And that’s what the title should be. “Cracking down” implies there is something that needs cracking down on.

Do you believe DS and Megaman could have been even more iconic if they had listened to players and made their runs back shorter?

My point is, it’s not like the designers didn’t know what they were doing, this is a very obvious aspect of their gameplay. And regardless of how minor inconveniences like this make us feel as players, we don’t know that it’s not precisely those lows that contrast with the highs to create the intended experiences which made those games cult hits to begin with. You wouldn’t look at a Rembrandt and say, “look how much of the painting is just black! You’re wasting all this space! You could add so much detail and context in there!”

I’m a firm believer that “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. If players weren’t complaining about the run back, then they would be complaining about the empty flask drinking animation. Inconvenience is not a convincing argument to me. Just like any art, games are free to evoke any and all emotions. It only becomes a problem if the emotion they keep evoking is boredom lol. But even then, boredom is a valid tool on the artist’s palette; sometimes the only ones who are getting bored are the boring people.

Have you considered that the run back is trying to tell you something? The game doesn’t want you to bash your face against the same enemy the same way. It may not even want you to fight that boss yet at all.

The run back is meant to be an incentive to think about your options. Do I have other areas to explore? What do I keep dying to? Am I overlooking an obvious weakness during a particular boss mechanic, or am I not using an ability as effectively as I could be to stay alive?

If you let the player immediately run back into a boss, they will veg out and do just that until they eventually get lucky and barely down a boss by the skin of their teeth. But that’s not how you should be approaching these fights.

Sometimes the most productive run back even involves a good night’s rest.

This is to be expected. Silksong gained so much hype that now you have a bunch of people trying it who are finding out it’s not their thing.

I know people these days are used to early access garbage being shoved out the door as a full release, and are ready to rush to the comments to explain why the game is wrong, but I promise you this is not one of those cases.

So far, every run back I’ve experienced in silksong has a purpose. If it’s not something you enjoy, I recommend not playing the game. But don’t be in that overlap of the Venn Diagram between people who are enjoying the game and people who are complaining they aren’t enjoying the game. Either stop playing, or finish it and then we can talk about its design.

I’m not a fan of having two definitions for “lint” in the tech world. Unnecessary ambiguity.

Anyone have any experience with this? This seems like the kind of thing that should just always be enabled by default all the time.

Lol everyone is figuring out how much they need to baby Trump’s ego in order to protect their own power.

If you haven’t taken note, every single person publicly speaking in Trump’s physical vicinity now makes a point to glaze him non-stop. It’s so sadly hilarious to watch these sociopaths figure out how to play the game. It’s like watching Game of Thrones, but everyone is Little Finger.

Their regressive tax system likely only makes sense if there are like 5x the poors to pay them. And by “makes sense” I mean “generates enough wealth to satisfy an oligarch class”.

The plan is literally to get their victims to make more victims.

As an American, there’s a deep cultural issue that needs to be fixed in order for the country to survive.

Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story

I think your anecdotal evidence is an outlier. Blizzard used to publish subscriber counts until it started dipping after wrath. They’ve subsequently never publicly posted sub counts again. I don’t know if this means it’s never been as high again, but given how many more options people have these days, I wouldn’t be surprised. Which means sub counts were never as high as they were before private servers took off.

Also, blizzard has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do what it believes will maximize profits, and as a result they’ve chosen to shut down Turtle WoW.

What does this even mean in context of deregulation?

It’s the entire basis for the push for deregulation. You can grift from all the people you have resources to grift, and corpos can grift from all the people they have resources to grift. A completely free market is not a level playing field. The rich get richer. Regulations are how common folk maintain a competitive landscape.

there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money

So we should just get rid of all civil lawsuits then, that would create a completely fair playing field? Come on now…

But under my perfect legal framework

Lol or lack thereof?

Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources

Why do you think corpos somehow don’t know how to take advantage of DeepSeek, but the little guys do? Why do you believe the poor have an advantage in that situation? Someone makes a 1000x breakthrough and everyone can use it. Great, before: it was your 1 unit of work vs OpenAI’s 1000, an absolute difference of 999; after: it’s your 1000 vs 1,000,000, an absolute difference of 999,000. They run you out of business even faster! The rich get richer!

And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.

You understand that if a model doesn’t expose the training set and training algorithm, there’s no way to know if it has been maliciously trained, right? Their use of the terms “open source” are misnomers. They could be effectively backdoored and there’s no way to know.

Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine.

That’s not the question at hand. If you can make a tool like that ethically, I’m all for it. But 1) they haven’t demonstrated they can do so ethically, and 2) there’s nothing to indicate that their goal is to create a tool to enable more artists and engineers.

Their stated goal is to completely eliminate as many jobs as possible. Combined with corporate ownership of fusion research, AI does not currently represent any promise of a democratization of creation. It is the water in a Mad Max movie. The best we will be able to do is fight each other for the bit of energy they allow us to have.

It’s clear you haven’t thought through your positions because you’re just repeating the same trickle-down rhetoric the right has been using to dismantle the US for the last 50 years, all while believing yourself to be anti-corpo. But we’ve fully strayed from the original topic at this point, so i think it’s time we called it. Hope you get some time to seriously re-evaluate your judgments here, cheers.

Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer.

I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.

I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.

This is the “deregulation” argument that Elon and the rich keep perpetuating. “Just let everyone do everything and let the free market figure it out”. But we already know how it ends: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They have the resources to be more unethical than you.

at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI

Specifically training it on content without permission? Well AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs, so that’s another pro “rich get richer” stance.

And I don’t think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow

Less than 5 years ago people were saying that they weren’t afraid of AI because it always looked like easily identifiable slop, always had extra fingers, sounded robotic. Now we’re at the point where it can generate really high quality content indistinguishable from high quality artwork on the first try. The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool. So what makes you believe everything will suddenly reverse course and just settle as a tool?

Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys

Turtle WoW is a direct response to years of blizzard ignoring players’ request to embrace what people liked about vanilla WoW. They are well aware that blizzard is a shell if its former self and is entirely profit driven. If they thought blizzard were good guys, they wouldn’t need to exist in the first place.

it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW

So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.

A general purpose MMO platform is a holy grail that’s really easy to ask for, but really complex to actually implement. Even for-profit general purpose MMO tooling (ex. Spatial OS, Spacetime DB) are struggling to establish themselves. This is because, one does not simply write a general purpose MMO backend. Every cycle matters because it represents costs in the form of electricity, bandwidth, and latency that scales with the number of connected users. So historically, MMO servers are written specifically for the requirements of the gameplay they are supporting.

And then there’s the actual content, which takes an army of devs and artists.

Turtle WoW devs (if they did any of the coding themselves) are doing something much simpler: approximate existing behavior of the server to support an existing client with existing content. Only then did they attempt to recreate the existing content in UE, and add a bit of extra content.

What you’re asking for is for a handful of volunteers to do with a shoestring budget what an army of professionals did with millions. But you want it to be even better, because it needs to be able to be general purpose, capable of doing anything any MMO would ever want to do.

To make such a leap is, to put it bluntly, incredibly naive.

It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not…In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.

And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no? Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?

I agree, what you’re saying is subjective, in that it’s not an actual thought out, ethical framework. It’s just a case where you’re losing a game of Monopoly, so on your turn you yell “new rule, my hotels get to take over your hotels!” Thing is, on their turn they take them back and then some. If you want to play that game, corpos will beat you at it, not because they’re capable of being so much more ethical than you, but because they have the resources to be far more unethical. And that’s what stealing an artist’s IP is: unethical.

Instead, I suggest not making rash blanket statements for unethical behaviors and doing mental gymnastics to convince yourself you’re some kind of robin hood. Robin hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, he didn’t say “stealing is morally good”. Just call it what it is, and say you’re ok with it as long as the people you approve of are the ones benefiting.