Badfinger
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Posts posted by Badfinger
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11 minutes ago, Chris said:To address something that seemed to go largely unchallenged in this thread, I want to note that a private company making its own decisions about its own service is not a regulated market. It can change any of those decisions at any time. You might approve of it and think it's necessary, but it's kind of the opposite of a regulated market. Valve isn't publicly accountable in any way. It's just a pure capitalistic enterprise. Their motivations and intentions are their own, and the outcome of them are not regulated in any way, at least not with respect to the specific types of choices being discussed in this thread. You can feel however you like about the right of any company to operate that way, obviously.
I'd be somewhat curious how that would shake out re: antitrust practices. I think there are too many avenues to get games (eg consoles) that you can't consider Steam a monopoly even if they effectively are for their chosen platform, but you're right. It's definitely worth remembering from time to time that Valve has a number of policies I'd consider to be consumer friendly because they found out it made them the most money to operate that way, and not the other way around.
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3 hours ago, SecretAsianMan said:I still can't believe that Dan won a Taco Bell contest to have his wedding in the Las Vegas Taco Bell cantina. This feels like one of those things that makes me realize I'm in the Matrix.
I'd have been more surprised if he hadn't won, honestly.
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Mark Hamill is now older (and was for Force Awakens) than Sir Alec Guinness was when Star Wars: A New Hope was released.
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I keep waiting for someone to say it is the unequivocal right time to jump back into Stellaris, and it keeps kinda not happening. I'm waiting for someone else's approval even though I basically like what's there.
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Still really liking this. I'm not consumed by it, but I'm definitely thinking about playing it when I'm not playing. Got a 4th place tonight and ugh it could have been. I had my back almost to the death zone and I still got shot from behind. I guess that's where I should have been looking, since no ones gonna run across the open area to come at me.
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6 hours ago, sucks2Bme said:Wasn't PlayerUnknown the guy who did the mod for ARMA that became Day Z? Or something?
maybe I should look at the website...
He's the guy that made the Battle Royale mod for DayZ Mod.
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56 minutes ago, Gormongous said:I'm tempted. How's the shooting model? Is there a game that the moment-to-moment gameplay resembles?
It's apparently supposed to be attempting to find a sweet spot between ARMA 3 and stuff like H1Z1. It has the DayZ style 3rd person/1st person/Aim Down Sights camera setup. I find it to be a more workable version of that ARMA stuff. No middle mouse wheel to swap between actions. You have a "use" action, number keys to select weapons, thrown weapons, and healing items.
Just now, Jutranjo said:If the game is actually good, why does it have such a shit name?
I dunno dude? People like games named Destiny and Dota. The game's just called Battlegrounds. It could be way worse.
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9 minutes ago, Twig said:To be fair, can pixel art really be considered art?!
Are games art?
Can love bloom on the battlefield?
Does water really roll off a duck's back?
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The long con to usurp someone's plane ticket sounds really different now vs the time it was recorded. Time, man.
I have what I assumed was a relatively uncommon name, until I got invited to a Facebook group made up entirely of dozens of people with my full name. It's not like it's John Smith or Mike Williams, thankfully enough. I've gotten plenty of emails from car dealerships telling me to renew the warranty on a car I don't own. The weirdest set of emails were broken into two sets - someone emailing me extremely religious stuff about being missionaries and proselytizing Christianity, and also a series of emails literal years apart where someone emailed me and asked if they should enlist in the armed forces, since I was in the Marine Corps. Then years later I got an invitation to MyName's promotion ceremony to Major.
I have definitely written back to these people because they're both very personal messages and I also want absolutely no part in those conversations.
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I bought INSERTNAMEHERE'S BATTLEGROUNDS yesterday and I'm not sure why I waited 3 weeks. It's, at present, a straightforward take on the games of Battle Royale. You and 99 of your closest friends are air dropped out of the back of a cargo plane onto an island covered in guns, gear, and vehicles, and your task is to be the last person standing. As the game progresses, players are herded into an increasingly shrinking safe area of the map. It's currently more popular than any game on Steam that Valve hasn't set up as a gambling skinner box. I played for 2 hours yesterday, and outside of the jank that seems omnipresent in games like this, it was really good and fun. Has anyone else tried it out? Can we squad up?
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19 minutes ago, Badfinger said:I have an answer for that one, because it's the one I mentioned obliquely yesterday that has "the most reviews".
It's been in Early Access for 2 years now as a free download, but it was changed to either paid early access or "released" last week, which is why it shows up both with 300k downloads and was released this month for $4.
Parsing reviews and other stuff it seems like people downloaded this for 3 reasons - catastrophe tourist after this person's first game, internet detective to figure out just how much of a scam/stolen the game is, and idling to get steam trading cards.
e: I checked out the update history. It went from Beta 1.0 in July 2016 to Alpha 0.1.2 in August 2016. So that's fun.
Nope I'm wrong this cost money for a year until it went to free "early access"!
https://steamdb.info/app/344040/
Holy shit that's maddening.
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I have an answer for that one, because it's the one I mentioned obliquely yesterday that has "the most reviews".
It's been in Early Access for 2 years now as a free download, but it was changed to either paid early access or "released" last week, which is why it shows up both with 300k downloads and was released this month for $4.
Parsing reviews and other stuff it seems like people downloaded this for 3 reasons - catastrophe tourist after this person's first game, internet detective to figure out just how much of a scam/stolen the game is, and idling to get steam trading cards.
e: I checked out the update history. It went from Beta 1.0 in July 2016 to Alpha 0.1.2 in August 2016. So that's fun.
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3 hours ago, clyde said:I'm fine with more reliable categories. Removing games from the store is what I have a problem with.
No one is stealing people's money in any of the circumstances we have discussed so far.
Also, if you take a chance with fewer games that are chosen by Valve employees or whatever and you don't like the game, what is the difference?
I want to see this. How do you do this search?
Yes they are. They are creating a sham product and selling it for money. They are scamming people. That's theft. They are finding the soft edges of the Steam return policy and grinding pennies together to make dollars. You don't have an unlimited number of Steam refunds, which is in place to protect legitimate experiences that might fall into the realm of completable inside a refund window. as well as make sure people can't just roll some endless amount of money and try every game. I support this. I want people who make exciting and interesting short experiences to get paid for them. But it makes putting money into questionable experiences a gamble.
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32 minutes ago, clyde said:Y'all don't seem to think that these frightened PC players would enjoy smaller games that a lot of folks wouldn't consider worth a buck, but I certainly would have if I had known they existed.
No dude it's that the $1.00 category of gaming on Steam is so full of stuff that is literally a scam due to lack of curation that there's no worldly reason to take the chance that anything there is real, barring word of mouth approval from credible sources.
The reason I said you're going against your previous position is for the important issue (stealing people's money) you don't want curation, but for the relatively unimportant issue (determining game genre) you want much better curation.
By the end of 2008 there were 400 games on Steam. Total. There were over 400 Steam releases just in March this year. There are six games in April released under $1. 21 released under $5. Seven of them have any user reviews of any kind whatsoever. The one with the most reviews is one that's come out of free "early access" to paid "early access" that people are reviewing just to link to the places where the assets were stolen from.
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27 minutes ago, clyde said:You can by foot in COD multiplayer too. I don't think that people are looking for Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 when they are searching for racing games. I assume they are looking for something like Project Cars or Assetto Corsa, not GTA5.
p.s. I'm continually surprised by what y'all seem to think my position has been in this thread. Not sure what is causing the confusion. I guess it's not a big deal. It's weird though.
Your position, from where I'm sitting, appears to be that as long as products released on steam are not literal IP theft, and if you can recover your money through Steam's refund system, it doesn't matter how much of a scam or how broken they are, they can and should be allowed to exist on the platform and curation towards the ends of curtailing releases of this type cause active harm to both developers and consumers.
I don't think that people are looking for scams that can use the masquerade of Early Access to hide forever in barely disguised unplayable ignominy when they are searching for indie games. I assume they're looking for original, completed works.
I can see something academically noble in your active search for titles people have labeled "fake games", to see if there's any value in them. Let's be real though, If Steam as a united storefront didn't exist and these were being sold on someone's website, you the consumer would not buy them because the fear that they'd be stealing your credit card would be way too omnipresent. As it is they're just stealing your money if you can't refund it quickly enough.
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27 minutes ago, clyde said:Maybe Valve should concentrate of fixing their categories rather than removing games from sale (or not putting them up at all). here is the second page when I browse "Racing"
Based off of some of the positions stated in this thread, an uneducated consumer might buy Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 or Mad Max or Arma III DLC thinking that it is a racing game. This failure to properly categorize is also burying games and losing revenue for hard-working game-makers. Why isn't this the priority solution when it is something that more people would be happy with?
That would be fucking great. You're now arguing against your own previous position, because tags are Valve's solution to grouping categories the same way that most of their solutions are implemented in the storefront: let customers do it. Tags are assigned by people who care enough to go on to store pages of games and manually write a tag on a game. If Valve actually did curation, you'd probably see a wider variety of tags, and ones that more accurately represent the games upon which they're placed.
But I'll ask, what's wrong with the screenshot of what shows up in the racing category? You can damn well race in all of those titles if you want to.
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I also think of articles where they purposefully obscure what would otherwise be an obvious answer to the question the article headline asks or teases.
"There's a man innovating how taxis are run, and who he is might surprise you"
A: It's the CEO of a big taxi company.
When in real life the NY Times would have (it now also writes clickbait headlines) written the title as something like Yellow Taxi CEO Proposes New Taxi Regulations to Compete in Today's World or whatever.
It's articles where you have to click to even find out what the SUBJECT of the article is, rather than being interested in reading the article.
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Something in my brain says Rocket League doesn't work for the Switch, but I guess Splatoon is just as internet needy and they're planning that.
It sounds very much like Campo is working on a new thing, so that sounds unlikely. I think Spelunky/Inside/et al make sense, but only for people that haven't played them. iunno, I'd much rather have fun and interesting new indie titles that take advantage of or had in mind the Switch's capabilities. I am very anti doubling up on games, though - Hollow Knight, new Shovel Knight, Rime, I think Mr. Shifty is coming out this week?, etc.
It definitely can't handle The Witcher, unless you mean Witcher 1.
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1 hour ago, YoThatLimp said:I watched a bit og the Giantbomb quicklook and man, that game definitely as style!
Hope Amazon actually ships me my copy, still pending, boo.
I watched the GB quick look and I was massively put off by how much everyone is a dick to your character, a boy who saves a woman from assault, because you got in trouble for saving a woman from assault. I guess they were all very stylish assholes. Jeff and Vinny both seemed wildly put off from it as well, but at the end went "YEAH I'M INTO THIS!" in a way I very much was not. Is anyone else feeling this way?
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1 hour ago, Atlantic said:The Flop House is good! All of the Max Fun ads are terrible and do a poor job of capturing the enticing parts of each of the shows. The best episodes are the ones where they watch a film that ends up as "good-bad" in their final judgements, especially the ones that are completely crazy. They all have a deep appreciation of movies, but they have wildly different tastes. Someone has been keeping track of their recommendations, and once you know that Dan watches whatever, Elliott likes old movies, and Stu likes schlock you might find something you like.
You will in time come to love Elliott's letters songs!
Most of the actual seconds of the letters songs are bad, but man some of them go to some dark places.
It's less that I think they have different tastes or I wouldn't like the movies, it's more that I really just don't actually watch any movies. If I have my choice I can always find something to do that's not a movie or a tv show.
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I don't begrudge them for a second, but I think the podcast would be better served if they did weekly episodes. I'm not saying they can or they should, but it would be better if they did. If you cut an entire year off of the run of this arc, I bet a lot of complaints either disappear or are mitigated.
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53 minutes ago, Reyturner said:I wonder how TaZ would go if they started using Dungeon World or something. However, I get the impression that they, like 99% of people who play RPGs, wouldn't want to bother learning a whole new system to do, ostensibly, the exact same thing (collaboratively make a story). These aren't thing I think are necessarily bad about the McEl-boys since it takes a special kind of weirdo to care enough about PnP games to really dig into alternative systems but for me, who's interest is mostly in the craft of DM-ing and RP-ing, I find TaZ deeply unsatisfying.
They sound interested and perhaps even enthusiastic about doing this particular thing when the current arc ends.
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I genuinely like the story, I'm invested in the characters. I think Barry Bluejeans is a nice punchline on a joke. I still feel pretty critical about the way their roleplaying is evolved. They talk pretty candidly about not "breaking" Griffin's story, and I think the characters are way more important than a "story", which is where my sandpaper rubs up against theirs. It's nice to nod to Kravitz being penciled into a storyline, but if stuff changes and you think it's important, change the story and put 'im in there.
The fact that for the next arc they're thinking seriously about getting away from a d20 system is an excellent idea. Something Dungeon World-y where people can say yes more often is definitely their style. I liked both Travis' idea and Clint's idea. I thought Justin's idea was hilarious but he's obviously steadfastly against thinking seriously or putting real time into this thing ever. I did not like Griffin's ideas, unfortunately.
Idle Thumbs Streams
in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
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As heard on the Bombcast, I would very much like to watch Nick/All Thumbs play DUMBNAME BATTLEGROUNDS on stream and am now advocating it in a public forum (and play with in duo/squad mode, though that's a completely different conversation).