MudMan

Well, for one thing because I’d like to know if my threads are a cesspool and to be able to do something about it.

If I have some random obsessive online stalker that is posting the most grotesque crap systematically on all my posts and interfering with everybody else I want to know and I want to report them so this person can get moderated for everybody, not just me, instead of having them scare people off from my threads without my knowledge.

I like how Bluesky handles this. They have a turboblock nuclear button. If you block someone not only do they lose the ability to see your stuff, their posts de-thread everything under them. Nobody can keep going up the chain of their posts to find yours or keep arguing in your thread without your knowledge. With that feature set, absolutely block fast. You’re effectively doing moderation there.

Here you can cover your ears, but not everybody else’s and you have no control about moderation of any kind unless you own your instance AND the instance of the person you want to moderate. Muting is a last resort to make it not your problem, but not a solution.

Was it missing? I don’t remember that. Did all the DLC make it to the remaster? I kinda remember it did.

EDIT: Checked. The Steam page says it did.

Yeah, Paradise is built on you learning the map. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how hard doing that is fresh because man, is that map seared into my brain forever now.

Traffic checking is weird because I want to dislike it on principle coming from 3, but… yeah, I kinda really like the games that include it, too. Like, reluctantly. I see how it breaks something at the core of the Burnout idea, but also… it’s really satisfying and makes the game more pleasant to play, even if acknowledging that feels wrong.

Romania’s relationship with flowers is weird and it freaks me out.

Going there for the first time and finding weird flower selling stalls in every corner is a very surreal moment and if you dare ask for an explanation people look at you like you are about to be wrapped in roses and sacrificed to some weird pagan deity.

Yes, that’s the point. You put them in there, try to enforce them, see if that plays out or not. Ultimately you’re punting the determination of how far they can apply to the courts.

Which ends up being why a lot of these never get enforced. In some cases the companies would rather let you quietly break their terms than roll the dice and find out that they don’t have the protections they tried to give themselves.

Ultimately the limits of EULAs are set in legislation. What really matters is consumer protections. And in issues like these and copyright more generally we are in a bit of a no man’s land where the regulations are woefully out of date, not keeping pace with the new online-driven economy of digital goods and companies are mostly not trying to enforce a bunch of their EULAs anyway.

We end up in a system where a significant chunk of our online economy is decided by Google and social media companies by default.

Both MW and Paradise have very quirky handling built for their open worlds, but I honestly really love both.

Paradise is such a perfect little gem of a small open world that is entirely consistent and has super clear design rules, sometimes to a fault. MW is a super smooth, compulsive expansion on that. They both hold up amazingly well today, even visually.

Yeah, I skipped over the original and when I went back to it I genuinely couldn’t see what the fuss is about.

My biggest gripe with the remake ended up being that it felt a bit weird after coming from playing a bunch of Hot Pursuit, but I ended up playing an absolute ton of MW once I got used to the way it drives.

I couldn’t tell you why they chose to reuse titles for those two games, though.

I think the Criterion Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted games are underrated. I get why, they’re very Burnout-y for NFS fans but don’t play just like Burnout, but man, are they sticky and precise and smooth.

And they still look great today, too.

It’s telling the guy went “what did Brave do now?”, though.

Maybe telling that we have a couple meme opinions in our head for these recurring arguments and we don’t particularly consider anything else, but telling nonetheless.

Maaan.

I mean, I would take a Burnout instead. I just wonder if it’d make sense to try that at this point with a completely different market and group of people. I guess we can see if they figure out that Skate reboot and go from there.

For sure. There’s plenty of unenforceable stuff in EULAs. For one thing a bunch of these are trying to apply globally across places with way different laws managing customer protections.

But if you don’t mind that logic getting turned both ways, just because a EULA clause isn’t enforceable doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add it.

If the idea is your lawyers think there’s a risk of people buying a copy, refunding it and keeping it and you want to make sure that doesn’t happen it makes some sense to add the clause. If a judge ever says that clause doesn’t apply to a given situation you still mitigated the risk from the intended applicable situation.

That’s why these license deals also tend to have boilerplate about how a clause being unenforceable or made illegal should not impact the rest of the clauses. It’s a maximalist text, by design. It mostly exists like a big wet umbrella to keep companies out of the splash zone. Whatever ends up being used in practice is anybody’s guess. The world of civil law and private deals is way less of a black and white exact science than most people getting their legal intuition from crime dramas tend to think.

Admittedly, this game doesn’t look particularly good on a CRT, either.

The hype about the visuals being “3D” was so weird and misinformed, and you could absolutely tell at the time.

It’s boilerplate meant to clarify that if you refund the game you can’t keep a copy (and that you need to accept the eula and if you don’t you can’t keep a copy either).

Notably a lot of the games in that list are strictly single player.

Also, the same line shows up in all sorts of private contracts. It’s probably in your work contract if you work from home.

Online discourse is broken. It doesn’t help that everything else is also dumb.

I am mad about how dumb we all are, and how easiy swayed by simple narratives that reinforce our biases.

From the Baldur’s Gate 3 EULA:

This Pact shall remain in effect for as long as you use, operate or run the Game.

You may terminate the Pact at any time and for any reason by notifying Larian Studios that you intend to terminate the agreement. Upon termination all licenses granted to you in this Pact shall immediately terminate and you must immediately and permanently remove the Game from your device and destroy all copies of the Game in your possession.

This didn’t cause any stir when it came out. That makes sense, right? Nobody reads these things.

Except everybody in the press read this one, because it went viral for being written in character as a D&D document and having a bunch of jokes in it.

Admittedly this is meant to apply to refunds and things like refusing the privacy agreement, but that’s the point, it’s fairly standard boilerplate for that reason.

Not what it says.

It’s in the Baldur’s Gate 3 EULA.

Read the article.

What they’re saying is this is a relatively common temrination clause. It’s meant to apply to, say, refunds.

I am not advocating muting over blocking. I am saying blocking here sucks, so “block fast” isn’t particularly useful. I’m confused about what part is confusing.

No, it’s more the other way around. You can’t block. Blocked posts/people still exist attached to your post, they can keep seeing your posts and replying to them, I’m pretty sure. All blocking does here is keep you from seeing what the blocked person is doing, but it doesn’t affect them in any way.

I guess it’s an expedient way to make them think you’re super passive aggressive. So… like a mute button.

Not sure you should block fast on Lemmy and its derivatives. Fedi in general, really. It’s a mute at best.

Honestly, for such a well intentioned meme I’m surprised by the general icky feel I get from it. I think these general advisory things based on a world that is still super into social media and terminally online may feel outdated now. You may just want the being kind part somewhere not on the Internet.

Wait, who wins between scissors and wax tablet? Does that count as rock?

Yeah, I had to dig a bit further for this figure. They display the same data more prominently in percentage of the time devoted to each bug, which gives them smaller error bars, but also doesn’t really answer the question that matters regarding where the time went.

Worth noting that this is a subset of the data, apparently. They recorded about a third of the bug fixes on video and cut out runs with cheating and other suspicious activity. Assuming each recording contains one bug they end up with a fourth of the data broken down this way.

Which is great, but… it does make you wonder why that data is good enough for the overall over/underestimate plot if it’s not good enough for the task breakdown. Some of the stuff they’re filtering out is outright not following the instructions or self-reporting times that are more than 20% off from what the recording shows. So we know some of those runs are so far off they didn’t get counted for this, but presumably the rest of the data that just had no video would be even worse, since the timings are self-reported and they paid them to participate by the hour.

I’d definitely like to see this with more data, this is only 16 people, even if they are counting several hundred bugs. Better methodology, too. And I’d like to see other coder profiles in there. For now they are showing a very large discrepancy between estimate and results and at least this chart gives you some qualitative understanding of how that happened. I learned something from reading it. Plus, hey, it’s not like AI research is a haven of clean, strict data.

Of course most people will just parrot the headline, because that’s the world we live in.