teawrecks

@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story

  I think your anecdotal evidence is an outlier. Blizzard used to publish subscriber counts until it started dipping after wrath. They’ve subsequently never publicly posted sub counts again. I don’t know if this means it’s never been as high again, but given how many more options people have these days, I wouldn’t be surprised. Which means sub counts were never as high as they were before private servers took off.

  Also, blizzard has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do what it believes will maximize profits, and as a result they’ve chosen to shut down Turtle WoW.

  What does this even mean in context of deregulation?

  It’s the entire basis for the push for deregulation. You can grift from all the people you have resources to grift, and corpos can grift from all the people they have resources to grift. A completely free market is not a level playing field. The rich get richer. Regulations are how common folk maintain a competitive landscape.

  there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money

  So we should just get rid of all civil lawsuits then, that would create a completely fair playing field? Come on now…

  But under my perfect legal framework

  Lol or lack thereof?

  Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources

  Why do you think corpos somehow don’t know how to take advantage of DeepSeek, but the little guys do? Why do you believe the poor have an advantage in that situation? Someone makes a 1000x breakthrough and everyone can use it. Great, before: it was your 1 unit of work vs OpenAI’s 1000, an absolute difference of 999; after: it’s your 1000 vs 1,000,000, an absolute difference of 999,000. They run you out of business even faster! The rich get richer!

  And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.

  You understand that if a model doesn’t expose the training set and training algorithm, there’s no way to know if it has been maliciously trained, right? Their use of the terms “open source” are misnomers. They could be effectively backdoored and there’s no way to know.

  Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine.

  That’s not the question at hand. If you can make a tool like that ethically, I’m all for it. But 1) they haven’t demonstrated they can do so ethically, and 2) there’s nothing to indicate that their goal is to create a tool to enable more artists and engineers.

  Their stated goal is to completely eliminate as many jobs as possible. Combined with corporate ownership of fusion research, AI does not currently represent any promise of a democratization of creation. It is the water in a Mad Max movie. We

  It’s clear you haven’t thought through your positions because you’re just repeating the same trickle-down rhetoric the right has been using to dismantle the US for the last 50 years, all while believing yourself to be anti-corpo. But we’ve fully strayed from the original topic at this point, so i think it’s time we called it. Hope you get some time to seriously re-evaluate your judgments here, cheers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer.

  I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.

  I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.

  This is the “deregulation” argument that Elon and the rich keep perpetuating. “Just let everyone do everything and let the free market figure it out”. But we already know how it ends: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They have the resources to be more unethical than you.

  at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI

  Specifically training it on content without permission? Well AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs, so that’s another pro “rich get richer” stance.

  And I don’t think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow

  Less than 5 years ago people were saying that they weren’t afraid of AI because it always looked like easily identifiable slop, always had extra fingers, sounded robotic. Now we’re at the point where it can generate really high quality content indistinguishable from high quality artwork on the first try. The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool. So what makes you believe everything will suddenly reverse course and just settle as a tool?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys

  Turtle WoW is a direct response to years of blizzard ignoring players’ request to embrace what people liked about vanilla WoW. They are well aware that blizzard is a shell if its former self and is entirely profit driven. If they thought blizzard were good guys, they wouldn’t need to exist in the first place.

  it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW

  So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.

  A general purpose MMO platform is a holy grail that’s really easy to ask for, but really complex to actually implement. Even for-profit general purpose MMO tooling (ex. Spatial OS, Spacetime DB) are struggling to establish themselves. This is because, one does not simply write a general purpose MMO backend. Every cycle matters because it represents costs in the form of electricity, bandwidth, and latency that scales with the number of connected users. So historically, MMO servers are written specifically for the requirements of the gameplay they are supporting.

  And then there’s the actual content, which takes an army of devs and artists.

  Turtle WoW devs (if they did any of the coding themselves) are doing something much simpler: approximate existing behavior of the server to support an existing client with existing content. Only then did they attempt to recreate the existing content in UE, and add a bit of extra content.

  What you’re asking for is for a handful of volunteers to do with a shoestring budget what an army of professionals did with millions. But you want it to be even better, because it needs to be able to be general purpose, capable of doing anything any MMO would ever want to do.

  To make such a leap is, to put it bluntly, incredibly naive.

  It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not…In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.

  And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no? Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?

  I agree, what you’re saying is subjective, in that it’s not an actual thought out, ethical framework. It’s just a case where you’re losing a game of Monopoly, so on your turn you yell “new rule, my hotels get to take over your hotels!” Thing is, on their turn they take them back and then some. If you want to play that game, corpos will beat you at it, not because they’re capable of being so much more ethical than you, but because they have the resources to be far more unethical. And that’s what stealing an artist’s IP is: unethical.

  Instead, I suggest not making rash blanket statements for unethical behaviors and doing mental gymnastics to convince yourself you’re some kind of robin hood. Robin hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, he didn’t say “stealing is morally good”. Just call it what it is, and say you’re ok with it as long as the people you approve of are the ones benefiting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW? You’re ok with fan-made art, you don’t care about the legality of IP law, they are more than likely pulling players (and profits) away from blizzard, so are you just critical of the fact that they’re not profiting as much as they could/should be?

  On the note of “morally good”, consider Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson had the integrity and legal protection to say that Calvin and Hobbes should exist as a set of comic strips and nothing else. He refused to do what every other comic creator did, selling their IP to mass produce toys, and movies, and clothes etc. He didn’t want to monetization to taint people’s experience with the characters.

  So if i understand your position correctly, it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The scale is not comparable at all

  Totally agree, but a dozen apples and a bushel of apples are both a bunch of apples. Scale doesn’t really change what I’m saying.

  creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is

  If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?

  no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is

  As well as any fan art itself, legally speaking, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular

  Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.

  And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku

  But you recognize that is always illegal, right? The only reason it happens is because they’re too small and distributed for lawyers to go after every single one. But if one started gaining traction selling custom work featuring copyrighted IP, they should expect a lawsuit just like Turtle WoW. Mods are fan art, Turtle WoW is fan art, they just got popular enough that blizzard lawyers now care.

  The only difference here is that, as I said before, technically if Turtle WoW did it right they would never have to distribute any blizzard assets, and never make money from blizzard IP. They could theoretically be completely independent from blizzard and still distribute the exact same content. Meanwhile fan art is always dependent on the IP it references. So ironically, all your criticisms of about work being dependent on the corpos always applies to fan art, but only maybe apply to Turtle WoW if they messed up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn’t want to waste my time doing…mods myself to support [corpos]…

  Fan art is in much better place because it’s a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.

  Doesn’t that seem like a double standard? Mods that support “corpos” are a waste of time, but somehow fan art is mutually beneficial? But “mods” are literally “fan art”, the only difference is the word you’re using using. Fan art is limited in all the same ways Turtle WoW is and vice versa.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So I take it you’re also not a fan of modding or fan art?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Again, if they’ve covered their bases, they don’t need to distribute any game client, blizzard assets, or blizzard-owned IP, they only need to run their own server code, and distribute a patcher for the official client (which could optionally add any of their own assets). But there was never any option that allowed them to charge money to use blizzard IP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand…making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content)

  That’s all reasons why the community was deliberately not dependent on blizzard IP. If they had roses tinted glasses, they would have never done any of that and just played the blizzard version.

  IMO if Turtle WoW covered their bases correctly, they shouldn’t have anything legal to worry about (aside from corporate bullying). Their servers should be running original code, they shouldn’t be hosting any of blizzard’s binaries or assets, and they shouldn’t be charging money for any game content based on blizzard-owned IP.

  If not, then they messed up…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It Turns Out, Steam’s Adult Content Ban Has Been Plotted For A Year And Is Spearheaded By One Of Project 2025’s Leading Voices⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The best counter example I’ve seen is Shintoism.

  But on a separate note, i believe religion has an evolutionary advantage vs logic and reason, as evidenced by it being so prevalent throughout human history. So in the most literal sense, i believe humans wouldn’t have any progress without religion.

  In order to survive, humans need to build societies that can adapt to the ever changing environments we find ourselves in.

  One possibility is to use pure science, logic, and reason: educate every child on the scientific method, teach them how to not fall for logical fallacies, to be skeptical, to demand extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims, to repeat experiments and engage in peer review, to create ethical frameworks, and have a logical justification for the actions you take…

  Another possibility is to use religion: brainwash a kid on what “good” looks like, and show them how to put on blinders to anything that might threaten that. Johnny down the street is “sinning”? Make him stop, that hurts our society. Father Dale is touching kids? Don’t lose sight of the goal, Father Dale is a great man, this is a personal struggle that we can help him through.

  Which of those two methods of adaptation requires less energy? Because when an organism has to evolve, the organism that can do it using less energy will have the advantage. Religion, or the concept of morality in general, is a society’s selection pressure on itself. The best we can do is acknowledge this, and learn to wield it as a tool. And I believe that many leaders throughout human history, both political and religious, understood this well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 17th⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  C&C Red Alert 2

  I played it as a kid 25 years ago, but Day9 was replaying it recently and I had to go back and try it. It’s so good, especially the campy live action cutscenes 🤌. There was definitely a lot of humor that went over my head as a kid 😂.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta appoints anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck as AI bias advisor⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ugh, can’t wait to post about how sick this is to my insta story…and tomorrow I’ll vlog my trip to the beach!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The CEOs you’re talking about are the CEOs in the analogy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The analogy I use is, it’s like a magician pulled a coin from behind a CEO’s ear, and their response was “that’s incredible! Free money! Let’s go into business together!”

  Literally no one ever claimed it had reasoning capabilities. It is a trick to produce a string of characters that your brain can make sense of. That’s all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux smashes through five per cent desktop share in the US⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You should always be worried about viruses on all your devices. Assuming your OS won’t get a virus because it’s obscure is literally security by obscurity, which should never be your plan A.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure no one will miss those incest games, but letting payment processors decide what speech people are allowed to exchange is nuts. These are middlemen. They don’t need to exist. I want more countries to hurry up and adopt GNU Taler and make all these middlemen superfluous.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of July 13th⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I started Katana Zero over the weekend. Really slick. I love the art and music, and the story and gameplay loop reminds me of Hotline Miami.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, my last statement was more of a tangent. Just something I wonder in general. Because you know it’s gotta be a thing.

  Yeah, it’s normal for people to engage with the latest posts. But also, as far as the news cycle goes, there have been like 10 developments since Feb that completely change the climate that the article was posted in. I think that’s my main issue; people are making speculations about what this means, when we’re already 4 months in the future (which feels like a decade).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also from Feb.

  I’ve been noticing a few articles lately that were several months old, yet commenters don’t seem to notice or care. I do often wonder what percentage of Lemmy is dead internet bots circle jerking about how bad AI is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IRS Makes Direct File Software Open Source After Trump Tried to Kill It⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Cooperating with the law is often percieved as an act of defiance with this administration, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨11 Years Later And Still Can't Beat The Original⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well…there is one thing they have in common.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Afaik this is basically what the NSA’s Prism is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of May 18th⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Blue Prince and Massive Chalice

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, I’ve attended everything you mention. I understand you think that is a large presence, but it amounted to less than 25% of the show. Larian and Nintendo were the exception, not the rule, they made up the bulk of the AAA presence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not saying they have no presence, I’m just saying PAX has not historically been a priority for AAA studios compared to things like E3 and Gamescom. On the whole, PAX is like 75% comics, tabletop/board game, and general nerd stuff, and less than 25% game studio presence. Which makes sense because Penny Arcade is a comic and they’ve always had an association with that crowd. Video games just tend to have a lot of overlap with that crowd, so it’s been worth it for studios to have a presence, some years more than others, some years more indie than AAA (ex Indie Megabooth).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A shift is definitely happening, but idk if counting booths at PAX and GDC is representative.

  PAX’ audience are primarily comic and board game nerds, they’re historically light on video game booths in their expo hall, usually prioritizing indie booths when they can. GDC’s audience is game developers not players, so the expo is typically a bunch of hardware and backend service companies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former PlayStation exec says "$70 or $80" games are a "steal": "As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money, I don't think they should be complaining"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s not wrong, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a steal for the price it is. “Really great games” do exist and they’re worth their price tag, the problem is the number of AAA games of that caliber are like 1 in 30. We’re lucky to get one in any given year. Meanwhile, there are consistently high quality indie games coming out for less than $40.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Doom: The Dark Ages’ DRM Is Locking Out Linux Users Who Bought the Game [404 Media]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, this is an old problem with Denuvo, new proton version looks like a new system. I guess if the containerization is perfect, Denuvo won’t be able to solve this and retain the same functionality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo warns that it can brick Switch consoles if it detects hacking, piracy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah ok hah, was just confused by the fact that it doesn’t seem relevant at all.