chameleon

@chameleon@fedia.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.

  Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.

  There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam: Updates to User Review Scores Based on Language⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.

  I've done that and it's a result of not having more options than good/bad. Always the same cause: I really wanted to write a 3* review for a game that has a lot to praise but its core is fundamentally flawed, but Steam doesn't let me give a 3*, so I try to correct for the review score bracket I think the game should be in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It's absolutely not the case that nobody was thinking about computer power use. The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point and even had an EU-US agreement, and that was sitting alongside the EU's own energy program. Getting an 80Plus-certified power supply was already common advice to anyone custom-building a PC which was by far the primary group of users doing Bitcoin mining before it had any kind of mainstream attention. And the original Bitcoin PDF includes the phrase "In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.", despite not going in-depth (it doesn't go in-depth on anything).

  The late 00s weren't the late 90s where the most common OS in use did not support CPU idle without third party tooling hacking it in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨#StopKilligGames update: Finland just passed the threshold.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, no. "I'm going to make things annoying for you until you give up" is literally something already happening, Titanfall and the like suffered from it hugely. "I'm going to steal your stuff and sell it" is a tale old as time, warez CDs used to be commonplace; it's generally avoided by giving people a way to buy your thing and giving people that bought the thing a way to access it. The situation where a third party profits off your game is more likely to happen if you don't release server binaries! For example, the WoW private/emulator server scene had a huge problem with people hoarding scripts, backend systems and bugfixes, which is one of the reasons hosted servers could get away with fairly extreme P2W.

  And he seems to completely misunderstand what happens to IP when a studio shuts down. Whether it's bankruptcy or a planned closure, it will get sold off just like a laptop owned by the company would and the new owner of the rights can enforce on it if they think it's useful. Orphan works/"abandonware" can happen, just like they can to non-GaaS games and movies, but that's a horrible failing on part of the company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What type of scam is this?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much every form of these scams is some kind of advance fee fraud. Two more possible avenues:

  • "Upgrade to a business account". They send you an email purporting to be from the payment provider you used saying you need to upgrade to business to receive a payment that large, and the upgrade page is a fake website run by the scammer that asks for a "refundable deposit" or the like (with a little helping of credit card fraud and of course a business account will require all kinds of personal info useful for identity theft too).
  • "But I want it as an NFT" was popular for a bit, they want you to "pre-pay the minting fee but it's ok I'll add it to your payment" and then they disappear. Not sure this scam is popular nowadays because NFT screams scam to just about everyone for a lot of different reasons. But "rich guy spends $5000 on dumbass NFT" was a legitimate genre of news for a little moment and not many people having trouble putting food on the table would say no to that.

  It's all preying on someone that thinks they got an easy paycheck for work that they've already done, on a populace of artists that could really use said paycheck to pay for food and are thus willing to overlook weirdness or principles. They also tend to pick on newer and younger artists that haven't quite figured out how to run a business yet, hoping that they haven't heard of scams specifically targeted to their sector.