If I need to use consumables in this fight, then I might run out of consumables when I built a dependence on them in a harder fight later!

Oh. Well maybe instead it will be a glorious future like Starship Troopers where we spend our days and lives fighting off vicious alien bugs before they manage to develop the technology necessary to destroy us!

Maybe it will be a cyberpunk future.

IMO Bethesda games are perfectly positioned to get a lot of initial interest because they look great and seem like they are full of depth, especially when in the midst of the opening quest chain, but the longer I look around, the more disappointed I end up with it all and then lose interest.

It’s this weird mix of deep and shallow. Like in starfield, I walk up to a building and see a rich interaction between an NPC that wants to go in to talk with someone but the guard won’t let her in because he’s busy and no one can see him but then doesn’t bat an eye as I just waltz right past him and talk to whoever I want in there.

Or I watch a confrontation between other NPCs and then try to interact with them after and it’s just generic responses, not a word about the heated argument that just ended.

It’s like it’s in the uncanny valley, where it looks good enough to think you can RP at a certain level, but when you try to do so, it turns out to be all a facade unless there’s a quest.

And in Skyrim, the NPCs were completely unable to handle stealth characters. You’d figure someone would have a magic spell or think to use a torch or raise an alarm when they get shot with an arrow. Nope, must have been the wind or my imagination that killed my buddy over there. I didn’t try stealth in starfield to see if they had improved on that at all.

Each of their games feels like the same game with a new skin. It was fun for a while, but I’m over it now. I tried starfield on xbox game pass but have since cancelled. It’s on my steam wishlist but I won’t be grabbing it without a heavy sale, and even then I’m not really sure I want to allocate the disk space it wants to it.

Also when it gets boring, sometimes it can be fun to see what happens if you cause something unusual to happen.

Ok, dinosaurs were fun for a bit, but how do they fare against meteor strikes? Hmm, these small ones keep burning up in the atmosphere. Ok, I bet THIS one won’t burn up! It will probably shake things up quite a bit in this regio–oh shit, debris from the impact is escaping orbit, that probably means it’s going to rain hot rocks for quite some time all over the planet. Dammit, it was cool when all of the land was together in one mass but I’ve cracked that apart now and they are going to end up splitting up into smaller continents now. When’s my last save state? Dammit, it’s mid Triassic, the dinosaurs were so lame back then compared to these ones today. Guess I’ll save now. I mean, they dominate the entire planet, surely they’ll come out of this ok.

There’s still a vocal minority of people upset about all the Linux talk on Lemmy, though I find deadpan is generally a lot less risky here than it was on Reddit.

And respect for keeping the historical record accurate even if it results in an unhappy score. I do the same. 👊

That’s pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don’t expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).

It’s in the uncanny valley. Not the uncanny valley of cheaters vs people parodying cheaters, but the uncanny valley of parodying cheaters to protest the change vs parodying cheaters to say people insisting on Linux are doing so because they do want to cheat.

The negative review is a tip off, but that was my first interpretation of it (that you meant people who wanted it on Linux just want to cheat).

If the comments are threaded (like they are here), I don’t get why any point can be considered to derail conversations. That’s just one branch. If you don’t care to discuss that branch, just scroll past or minimize it and find another branch or start your own. They can all be discussed in parallel.

Looking at the two curves, it looks like they are pretty close but French edges out English because of the speed it’s spoken at.

Even when it was fresh in my mind, I was never able to follow French tv because they just go so fast.

That sounds a bit sketchy… Now if you had presented that statement in comic form, I might believe it.

Personally, I see a difference between paying for extra content vs paying to access content that is already a part of the game.

The question of whether it’s abusive is then dependent on the pricing of the base game and DLC, and how much content there is in each.

I’m even ok with games that are clearly designed to have DLC or released as multi episodes. As long as the base game is fine without the DLC, priced fairly based on the content, I don’t see a problem with it.

Like Paradox games, I’ve gotten some DLC in bundles and ignored others but still have a lot of hours in each title I’ve played. Though the way they show placeholders for the missing content is a bit iffy. But they’ve also integrated some DLC into the base game once they’ve decided that it’s become too essential (or too difficult to maintain balance through each variant possible).

But if it’s a game where you pay AAA prices for a skeleton of a game that then requires DLC to be purchased otherwise the game sucks, fuck that. Same with early access games that add DLC before the base game is finished (that isn’t just things like soundtracks or art that functions as tip jars without any in game effect). Those are just money grabs and there’s a good chance that they still suck even if you do spend the extra money.

I’m glad I’ve always looked down on people who spend money to buy shit in games. If something is only available by paying for it, anyone that I notice showing one off in game gets a “tool” label rather than “cool”.

Which is kind funny because if the game was a bit less abusive and had a way to get that item without paying, that negative reaction wouldn’t be so strong because it would be ambiguous. Did this person play the game and get rewarded with that item or did they just throw money at it and get handed it? Can’t be sure, so anyone that has it isn’t automatically a tool.

And progression MTX are even dumber. It’s like paying money so you don’t have to play the game.

Though the overall quality of the game can play a role, plus whether the items are purely cosmetic vs give in game benefits (aka P2W). If the game is amazing, having some microtransactions doesn’t bother me. Like when I pirated games, I had a threshold where if a game was better than that threshold, I’d buy a copy of the game because I wanted the devs to have money. Some MTX are like that, basically a tip jar for a great game.

But if the game isn’t great, it’s more like seeing an expectation to tip when you don’t think a tip is warranted.

Many bigots feel entitled to their bigotry but would probably be outraged if they knew some of the other things the people around them at the rallies they attend believe.

And if you enable the mouse while line numbers are set to be displayed, you can highlight multiple lines without needing to include the line numbers when you paste it later.

It’s a magic mirror from a fairy tale. It doesn’t have any set rules other than what the story teller gives it.

I think you’re overfitting to the average here with your expectations. Especially basing that on the experience level of people who would sign up for help learning how to use Windows products. And even then, the ones learning about copy/paste for the first time will likely make more noise about it then those waiting to see if you’ll teach them something new or any that ended up in your training because their work made them or something.

While the majority might lack familiarity, the 40 - 80 age range includes tons of people that have been working with computers (windows or otherwise) since before Windows was even a thing, including many who worked on Windows and/or developed applications for it. Experience will range from not knowing what windows is, knowing it’s the OS but not knowing what an OS is, to understanding what goes on in the kernel at a high level of detail.

There’s a lot of people on Windows just because of inertia and Linux can handle a lot of the use cases. It makes perfect sense to me that someone, once they’ve seen that things aren’t so scary and different on the other side of the fence, would wonder out loud about why they thought their inertia was so strong.

Your skepticism is more baffling to me than that.

It is possible, though I think it’s one of those products whose success is based more on customer testimonials than actual statistics about it’s effectiveness.

They might exist, but I haven’t met anyone who has said they were able to use duolingo to become fluent or even competent in a language.

But then again, my German learned from a class in high school isn’t much better. Hell, my French leaned from being in French immersion all through elementary school followed by normal French classes in high school isn’t even at a competent level, though I can at least communicate a bit in French. I can still see those subject-verb conjugation tables though lol (though I’ve lost the French version of “them/they”).

Lol Spanish is one language that I had assumed might actually work decently with that approach, but I can’t say I’m surprised it doesn’t.

And yeah, they do seem to design the exercises to be easy. Like translate a sentence to English, but they only give one verb option, or sometimes they don’t even provide any options that aren’t a part of the sentence and it becomes “can you string these English words together to form a valid sentence with hints in the language you are learning?”

I’m using another app specific to Japanese that at least has grouped the answers in ways that make it harder but more effective because I need to tell the difference between similar looking kanji. It’s frustrating, but at least the frustration comes from being annoyed at my own pace rather than from getting a false sense that I’m doing very well only to realize I barely know anything without multiple choice hints.

It’s kinda funny, I’ve become so turned off to these manipulations that the gamification of duolingo just annoys me more than it motivates me. The whole point is to learn a language. Power ups that let you extend the time to complete a timed exercise don’t help with learning a language. Getting to the top of the leaderboard didn’t make a difference either, especially if it was done using xp boosts.

At this point, I just hate that it forces me to spend time watching various meaningless bars fill up after each lesson.

I’ve even missed a couple of days, thinking “oh well, there goes my streak, which also doesn’t really matter”, only to find that they cared more about keeping that than I did and have automatic freezes. Though it wanted me to buy more after the last one, so I’m thinking the next time I miss a day it’ll finally go back to 0.

Oh and yes, duolingo is a pay to win language learning game where you can give them money for boosts in the meaningless gamification shit. Even after buying a year subscription (that I don’t plan on renewing).

They also completely skip any of the foundational stuff and jump right in to phrases that they don’t explain. I’m a few months into Japanese lessons on there and it still hasn’t even mentioned that it’s been teaching the polite form and that other forms exist (which makes things confusing if you try to use other resources that generally use the neutral form).

It might be better for other languages that aren’t so different from English, but I do not suggest duolingo if you want to learn Japanese.

Tbh I don’t suggest learning Japanese at all if you aren’t strong with languages and memorization. There’s a couple thousand kanji symbols you need to learn for everyday communication, and each of those can be combined with others to form words that aren’t always intuitive, and then those words can be strung together into sentences that also aren’t intuitive to interpret.