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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.

    Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).

    Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.

    The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.

    Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).

    If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.

    So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).


  • World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).

    But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.


  • NIB@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldWhy Do People Still Play Destiny 2?
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    2 months ago

    What keeps them engaged with Destiny 2 despite its apparent lack of a clear path forward?

    There is no alternative. The First Descendant is p2w. Once Human has different structure and resets your progress every season. Warframe is pretty different and similar to First Descendant. Overwatch basically cancelled its pve. Darktide is clunky.

    And none of these games have the polish and shooting satisfaction that Destiny has. If people want a pve game, with long term progression that has enjoyable shooting, Destiny is all there is. What keeps them playing? Copium.

    Slowly but steadily Destiny will die. And thats when Marathon will come out. But Marathon is very different, so i am not even so sure that most Destiny players will migrate to that.

    I am not even playing Destiny. Destiny is the game that i want to love so much but always shits on me, so i gave up. It seems to me that the easiest thing in the world, is to keep Destiny going and address its minor issues. But somehow Bungie doesnt think so.


  • When it comes to military action, it is all about proportionality. Obviously Israel has the right to defend itself but killing(and starving) tens of thousands of people and flattening Gaza is not proportional. Obviously the US has the right to defend itself but invading and occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, suspending human rights(Guantanamo/cia black sites/patriot act) is not proportional.

    And the Iraq invasion was straight up imperialistic, literally what Russia is doing now to Ukraine, which is why tankies use that invasion as a “gotcha”. Which is why everyone in the EU opposed, even most EU governments. There were a lot of protests in EU in opposition of that invasion.


  • Lets see what George Orwell wrote about that. Try to read all of it, especially the last paragraph. It isnt about being against pacifism, it’s about how pacifism can be used by authoritarian regimes on liberal countries and how that societal asymmetry defines the end result.

    Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’.

    The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

    Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with.

    In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

    Not all wars are good. I was against the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. But this war is one of the few occasions where american interests mostly align with the moral thing, helping an invaded country defend against an imperial invader. This is one of the least controversial and relatively clean cut wars in history.






  • Trump is charismatic and funny, thats why he was on tv. If only people didnt take him seriously or give him actual power. Let me remind you that /r/the_donald was a joke subreddit.

    Hillary has no charisma. Also her campaign literally promoted Trump, because she thought he would have been an easier opponent. She is smart and capable(or was, she is kinda getting older nowadays) but her political positions are abhorrent. She could have been the perfect “reasonable republican” candidate.








  • First of all, i was answering to someone who seemed like a tankie making a bad faith argument.

    The fact that Trump is about to get re-elected as president, seems to indicate that information warfare is very effective. Foreign countries can tap in whatever resentment there is, amplify and guide it. And next thing you know, Ukraine no longer exists.

    GOP has gone from the party of McCain who warned the US about Putin, and who Obama laughed at and every democrat accused him of having Cold War mentality, to the party of “Yeah, Putin is cool and the US should be more like Russia”, in just a couple years.

    Personally, i am a very big “fuck it” man, if humans arent capable of making very basic and easy decisions, let Trump get elected and Russia/China do information warfare(while shielding their own population from it). But some people seem to care about the world and they need to decide what they want.

    They have to decide whether they want to use authoritarianism to “save” democracy, or risk it all by having a liberal society and hope people can eventually get educated to make informed decision(while information warfare risks bringing the country to a civil war). As i said, decisions have consequences.



  • Abu-Sittah has been accused by some groups in the UK of promoting terrorism and spreading antisemitism.

    Abu-Sittah spoke at a ceremony for the one-year anniversary of the death of Maher Al-Yamani, the co-founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 2020.[22][23] A video showing Abu-Sittah appear to cry while delivering a eulogy at the event that includes the language “This is our only comfort: that even when Maher leaves, the Israelis will be afraid of Maher” is published on The Jewish Chronicle’s website.[18]

    In March 2024, the British NGO, UK Lawyers for Israel (A UK-based, pro-Israel legal lobbying group) sent an open letter to Glasgow University which included a review of Abu-Sittah’s public social media comments. The letter accused Abu-Sittah of reposting “an image commemorating a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Nasser Abu Hamid, the day after he died, holding a machine gun, dripping with blood.”[24] He also wrote an article grieving for Abu Hamid, who had been convicted of multiple murders.[22]

    The Times reported that Abu Sittah had compared Israeli leadership to “the psychosis of the Germans in the 30s and the 40s." The UK Lawyers for Israel letter also accused Abu-Sittah of re-posting “an antisemitic image featuring Hitler on one side and Israeli prime minister Netanyahu on the other side, both images smeared with blood, comparing Israel to the Nazis. The image was headed “Free Palestine (Palestinian Flag), Israel is a Nazi State”. The image compared the average pace of child killing of Hitler, at 127 children per day, to that of Netanyahu, which it put at 178 per day.”[24] Both of these instances have been interpreted by UK Lawyers for Israel as Antisemitism according to Example 10 of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of Antisemitism which proscribes "Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

    Since receiving UK Lawyers for Israel’s letter, Glasgow University has launched an investigation into Abu-Sittah.

    From wikipedia.