MudMan

Well, for one thing it only works asymmetrically. It’s fine if you have a very specific source of issues that you can isolate and cut off, but it’s not really useful if what you have is hostile users across the network. And it only protects the larger space. For smaller instances it’s a choice between functioning as social media or not existing at all.

It’s extremely far from a magic bullet, it is not resilient to large scale, systemic issues and the only reason its limitations haven’t been apparent is that the AP ecosystem is too small to suffer most of the issues of larger social media.

Aaaaand it’s designed to function via the petty squabbles of FOSS developer arguments, which I hate anyway, but that’s a me thing.

Again, doesn’t matter. There’s data on logged in users and it’s also many orders of magnitude larger than Fedi.

By most independent metrics Reddit has more visits than Netflix. Than Pornhub, while we’re at it. It’s one of the top ten most visited sites on the Internet, and by most accounts it’s actually grown since the “exodus”.

I don’t use it and I do like it here, but the idea that Lemmy is somehow encroaching on it is absurd. And self-defeating, too. Lemmy and its satellites are very worthwhile for what they are… a gnat in the wind as a Reddit alternative. Better to measure them on their own merits.

It may or may not be.

It is definitely not inflating its numbers by the orders of magnitude it’d take to make a dent on this particular takeaway.

Sure. I mean, having a single log-in for all of that is definitely useful, as is being able to chat with others. Defederation as a moderation tool is… overrated, but it is there.

Yep. Which ends up being why old forums were such tight-knit communities. You ended up hanging out with a handful of people. I’m mostly fine with that. If anything, it requires starting something yourself for your niche interests and being fine with it being dormant most of the time.

It doesn’t really matter. For one thing, MAU and unique users are different metrics and they’re both valid, so if Lemmy is counting verified uniques they can just call it that.

For another, I looked at the data for logged in users and Fedi’s MAU is 0.125% of their daily logged in users, so the point stands regardless.

So by my math and some googling, that’s about 0.00005% of Reddit’s MAU.

On the one hand, cool, growth is growth.

On the other hand maybe it’s… healthy to stop looking at Lemmy as an “alternative” to anything and start thinking about it as this small forum you like to use sometimes. Worked for me in the 90s, works for me now.

No, I am seeing what people say and how it relates to reality, then deriving conclusions from that.

For instance, my conclusions just got significantly reinforced by the fact that you’re framing my stance as “defending” the subject of built-in outrage because of what or who they are, as opposed to what they did.

That’s a meaningful part of that statement. Unintended, for sure… but meaningful.

What combination? The game was announced as F2P a while ago, it’s been running tests for a while and was always assumed to have MTX. The only thing that changed is they will make the MTX live during a test run and then refund them, which is not particularly rare.

If you must know, it normally has as much to do with seeing how popular your ideas for cosmetics are as it does with testing that your commerce system works properly.

But none of that is what’s sparking the fake outrage.

I did! And if this conversation was even remotely related to any of them I’d give it more consideration.

But people read “microtransactions in Alpha”, which was clickbaity on purpose, did not read the game was free to play, which was hidden at the bottom of the article on purpose, and got mad anyway.

So proxy for the disintegration of public discourse it is.

But it IS a crazy conspiracy… theory. “Skate testing its MTX during an alpha means that they will be a scam at launch and/or impact gameplay because Multiversus also had MTX and that had a bad relaunch” is a complete non-sequitur. This is cavemen sacrificing goats to make it rain level of random event association.

So I have to conclude the emotional layer is what matters here. Being mad loudly online at a frequent punching bag with a bad reputation is sheer mob-induced dopamine and that’s why that headline exists and why this conversation happens. And why social media exists and is killing liberal democracy, but that’s probably beyond the scope of this thread.

You just made all that up. None of that is even tangentially related to the thing that actually happened.

I mean, now we’re arguing that this weird ploy to extract more money for cosmetics is probably going to harm gameplay (even though it’s unrelated to gameplay) because a different game from a different company also had MTX which were also not related to the bad gameplay changes they made.

I don’t know what to argue there. It’s entirely irrational.

To be clear, it’s not irrational that F2P games often push them in intrusive ways that are annoying. It’s not irrational that Multiversus had a very weird history and a poor relaunch. But the way you’re connecting those pieces along wiht a healthy dose of entirely disconnected preconceptions based on branding is completely off the rails.

This is why this is so frustrating to me. People just want to be mad at things because some other things that are unrelated made them mad once and they want to just smear the anger a bit. It’s pure mob mentality and I fully admit that it pisses me off in games as a proxy for how much of it informs modern society and politics in general. Which I guess I’m doing, too, a little bit. But still.

The implicit perception of value in this comment is making my head spin. We all realize that in-game cosmetics aren’t real, right?

Also, yes, they are doing the free to play version of preordering. It’s called Early Access and it’s supposed to happen later this year. See also Path of Exile 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3.

People are working overtime to get their knee-jerk reaction to be retroactively justified here. The thing is, I would get being mad at this being a F2P game in the first place. I would get being mad at it being funded through microtransactions. Those are meaningful changes from the previous trilogy that I don’t particularly care for.

It’s the being mad on the spot at a haf-misunderstood headline depicting something entirely unremarkable that rubs me the wrong way.

Man, that’s a fair point. If you want to be mad at something be mad at the five year dev cycle into an early access launch. I’m not even saying it’s the devs or EA’s fault. Making games is hard. And expensive. But definitely hard.

I guess it depends a lot on your background. I thought it felt simple compared to the old X-Wing series but not necessarily dumbed down, they did a decent job streamlining it for a modern take on it.

I guess that means some people can find it too slow and intricate and others too arcadey. I imagine the Skate guys are having to make a lot of those same decisions for a lot of those same reasons.

I have to say, I was pretty neutral on this coming in, but reading all the people posturing anger while clearly not having any awareness of what the game is supposed to be or even reading the article is getting kind of annoying.

It really, really isn’t. Guessing it’s testing.

As per the article, they’re refunding all purchases at launch.

It’s a free to play game, there is absolutely nothing newsworthy about this. Path of Exile 2 just launched on early access with a bunch of microtransactions AND a paywall and people were absolutely delighted with it.

The price is nothing, apparently the game is free to play.

It’d be pretty suprising if it didn’t have microtransactions.

I played a fair amount of Jedi Fallen Order. Someone said Squadrons below, too, and I agree.

Titanfall 2 is an all-timer.

Split Fiction is sitting at second on the Steam best sellers at the moment. Reviews are sitting at “overwhelmingly positive”.

The Command and Conquer remaster was maybe the best contemporary remaster this gen, even before they released the source code.

Oh, and the Dead Space remake. That was great. Should have done better.

Lost in Random? Underrated. Should have done better, too.

I don’t know, man. Companies don’t make games, people make games, and a LOT of people make games under EA.

Aw, man, underrated. Great in VR, too.