sugar_in_your_tea
@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Anon does the shopping 1 day ago:
Sure, microplastics are certainly an issue, but the vast majority of them come from other sources, like clothes and tires. Things like multi-use plastic plates don’t even register on the list of sources.
- Comment on Anon does the shopping 1 day ago:
That’s fair, arguing is pretty great, especially if it’s something entirely pointless.
- Comment on Anon does the shopping 1 day ago:
Agree to disagree I guess. I have kids, and I’d absolutely save those for special occasions for them, like when we have their favorite food or something.
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 1 day ago:
ve been to some, never spoken though… also, not DEFCON though.
Yeah, I’ve spoken at local JS and Go confs with several hundred to a couple thousand attendees (my sessions were small, like 30 people), and attended a couple others.
DEFCON is much larger, but looking at the schedule, it seems pretty similar, a mix of relatively entry level stuff and more advanced topics. So someone attending doesn’t say much other than that they’re interested in cyber security.
Its like getting a 2 year nursing assistant degrer and then acting as if you can safely perform a brain surgery.
Interesting. I haven’t watched enough of his stuff to know what claims he’s made.
- Comment on Anon does the shopping 1 day ago:
Buzz off.
- Comment on Anon does the shopping 1 day ago:
Disagree. Bee plates are fancier than plain kid plates.
- Comment on Anon does the shopping 1 day ago:
Eh, plastic plates:
- don’t shatter when you drop them
- don’t chip
- don’t screech when cutting things with a knife
Plastic isn’t the enemy, single use plastics are.
- Comment on Anon does the shopping 1 day ago:
Hmm, is the correct context a bee furry convention?
- Comment on Anon does the shopping 1 day ago:
Dino Nuggies are for kids, adults eat tendies.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
various developers have been digging into his code
This just feels like bandwagoning. I’m a dev with tons of years of experience and I’m sure I could get some views of I jump on the train and pull up some sloppy code. But sloppy code doesn’t make something unreleasable, in fact, the browser or app you’re using to read this is guaranteed to have a ton of sloppy code.
I think the main explanation is that he’s not working on it actively. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s not the one writing the code. Maybe he is, idk.
I’m merely pointing to the huge influx of reviews since the drama started on a game that claims to have been launched 7 years ago on Steam. My understanding is that the game has been stalled for years, so why would it get so many reviews now if it’s not review bombing?
I’m guessing that’s where the “review bombing” claim is coming from, not from games published by the publisher he was working with.
He said they had been review bombed, in the affirmative
He has a history of exaggerating and not doing proper research. I’m looking to understand why he said what he did, and my explanation makes sense to me. He probably saw a bunch on his game and a few on the publisher’s other games and jumped to conclusions, which is exactly what happened with SKG.
it’s getting really weird
Then I’ll clarify my motivations here. I hate the internet culture of jumping down someone’s throat the moment they make an unpopular statement. They go through their history and dig up random dirt, much of which is exaggerated or even blatant lies, just to smear them to ruin their reputation.
I absolutely hate that, and it contributes to the misinformation problems we have today. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard and embrace the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.”
So in cases like this where there are a lot of emotions, it’s especially important to look for innocent explanations before assuming guilt. YouTubers and streamers will absolutely jump on the bandwagon to get views, assuming one of the extremes because that gets views. We, as viewers, have the obligation to take a step back and look for motivations to suss out what is true from what’s likely sensationalized.
I’m providing an alternate perspective to hopefully encourage others to take that step back and consider that there may be more to the story. It costs me nothing other than some time (which I’m usually spending on the toilet, let’s be honest), and hopefully it helps preserve a little of what I love about the internet: open discourse where facts rule the day. That seems to be dying, so I do what I can to preserve it.
admittedly based on ignorance
Well yeah, I’m not going to claim something is true unless I can back it up, and when I can, I usually link that evidence. I want others to follow suit and actually back up their claims instead of regurgitating what someone else said just because it aligns with their opinions. Facts should rule the day, not feels, and that’s what I’m challenging here.
I don’t have a strong opinion WRT Pirate Software. I don’t watch his content, I don’t buy his games, and I don’t care what orgs he is involved with. I do care a lot about misinformation and brigading, and that seems to be happening in this case.
If you provide sources, I’m happy to review them so better informed. I’ve done that with other commenters, and I think that process has been helpful for everyone.
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 2 days ago:
social engineering
It’s also probably the most common type of breach. It’s way easier to compromise tech support than find a vulnerability, so it makes a ton of sense for a company like Blizzard to have an auditing team to test the various attack vectors.
A lot of roles like QA and cyber security sound glamorous, but that’s because people like glamorous titles. If you’ve spent even a tiny amount of time working in a relevant industry (in this case, anything touching computers), you should be able to read between the lines. That “sanitation engineer” is probably just a janitor or garbage truck driver, not the person in charge of the city water filtration services or something.
scavenger hunt badge
I haven’t been, but yeah, that sounds likely. Things like that are to get people new to the industry excited, not to actually challenge hardcore hackers.
I’ve attended and even spoken at some tech conferences, and they’re like 90% entry level stuff with a handful of interesting events and talks that actually break some new ground. I’m in senior level position now, and conferences are something I’d send my juniors to for networking and to get an idea of how they want to grow their career, but I don’t really attend anymore. I imagine cyber security conferences are similar.
Ask him what SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK are
Lol, that’s basic TCP stack stuff, I doubt he would’ve gone that low level at a company like Blizzard. You get to that level when you’re looking for amplification attacks at a place like Cloudflare or the military.
At Blizzard, they most likely want to make sure they’re up to date on security patches, their tech support is following the proper scripts, and IT isn’t getting lazy reviewing reports and whatnot. Basically, liability coverage in case there’s a real breach so their insurance can cover any losses.
But yeah, streamers like to appear like they know their stuff because that’s what gets people to watch.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
he obligations have to be considered during development.
They should be, but my understanding is that there’s only a penalty if they kill a game without an EOL solution, and what their EOL plans are don’t need to be complete or even stay the same during development. The wording is really flexible here and allows companies a lot of room to explore different options.
If a company can’t redistribute the server code, their options include (and there are probably more):
- write and release a functional replacement
- document the API spec for a functional replacement and help the community develop it as the EOL approaches
- cut out the server bits, or have them gracefully fall back (e.g. for something like Dark Souls, drop the MP feature)
- find a replacement that allows redistribution and make the necessary changes before EOL
That’s certainly easier to do at the start, but my understanding is that the obligation only kicks in once the servers are shut down.
And yes, it’s not “free”, but it’s basically free for an indie shop that likely built the server from scratch or used something FOSS. And that describes PS.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
Interesting.
So TL; DW for anyone that made it down this far: PS’s mod made a Twitch alt presumably for the purpose of buying bits to keep a hype train going. Whether this is legal or consistent with the Twitch TOS is debatable.
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 2 days ago:
I honestly don’t know, but since he ended up in cyber security, I’m guessing it wasn’t games testing, but probably internal tooling. Orgs like Blizzard have a lot of non-gaming related tech, like websites, databases, etc.
I haven’t seen any disclosure about what his role was, just that he started as QA and ended up doing cyber security, both of which likely didn’t involve any coding.
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 2 days ago:
Ross Scott is an absolute treasure, and I’m kinda sad that he has never made more than €63k euros in a given year. He deserves more for all the work he has put in.
I’m not European, so if you are, please do what you can to encourage your reps to support this.
- Comment on The industry filed false claims against the "Stop Killing Games" initiative | Accursed Farms 2 days ago:
As a game tester.
Maybe. All I read is that he was QA. That can mean anything from game tester to someone who tests internal tooling. I haven’t seen an actual description of his role.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
MatPat
Hmm, never watched him. Looks like he has tens of millions of subs, which is probably why I’ve avoided him (I generally like smaller channels).
When he did security, he did social engineering.
Maybe I just have more industry insight, because when I think of cyber security, I think of people auditing computers (do you have the corporate spyware installed?), running automated pen test suites, etc. Most of it isn’t particularly technical, and most security audits I’ve been a part of (and we do them every year) are black box testing, meaning they don’t have the code. Even in the one or two audits we did that involved the code (needed a higher tier audit for government contracts), most of what they checked was just dependency versions, they didn’t look too closely at the actual code.
Outside of high profile security researchers, I see most cyber security jobs as the security guards of software dev, they make sure you keep the doors locked, but they don’t force you to use reinforced doors or whatever, they’re just there to tell you what the obvious weak points are.
then I’m lying by omission
Which pretty much everyone does. If someone doesn’t go into detail, it’s pretty safe to assume there’s nothing to brag about.
That said, even if you only mowed the grass at the White House, you’d pick up on a lot of stuff about politics. You’d notice who the regulars are, important peoples’ routines, etc, not to mention what you pick up on through random small talk with people there. There’s a reason spys target people like janitors and landscapers, they don’t realize how much they know so their guard is down. That’s social engineering 101.
The janitors at Blizzard know more about AAA software development than the average gamer. A QA would know even more since they have more direct access to the devs and designers.
Whether you’re telling the whole truth or not about your credentials is irrelevant if you can prove what you claim. That’s why I’d like to see PS and Ross talk, so it would be easier to tell what’s accurate from what’s BS.
C++ developer
Ah, ok. I assumed the other guy because was pretty public with his criticism of PS and has long hair.
I haven’t heard of that guy either, probably because I’m more into Rust than C++, and actually avoid C++ like the plague (I much prefer C).
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
But what’s his profit motive? He makes mediocre indie games and did some undefined work (probably publicity) at an indie publisher. I don’t see any material change to him financially whichever way the petition goes. He’s kinda popular, but far from a big influencer.
That argument doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.
fear of missing out on profits, if he ever gets his game out.
This doesn’t make much sense. The obligations only kick in once the game gets shut down, so either he makes so much that it doesn’t matter (can keep running the servers for a long time) or it doesn’t sell well and he just releases server binaries and cuts his losses. Even in the worst case (his misunderstanding), releasing server sources isn’t an issue for a failed game, and a small cost to pay for a very lucrative one.
I think he’s just an opinionated guy who sticks with his initial impression, even if it’s wrong, and will oppose anything that sounds inconvenient for game devs (what he sees himself as). That’s sadly really common, people seem to love jumping to conclusions and only really dig in if the easy assumption negatively impacts them.
all the creators that jumped on that particular wagon were dead silent on the initiative in the first place.
Exactly! But honestly, that should be expected because their entire job is to get views.
The only one I kinda like on this subject is Gamers Nexus, because they actually approach it like journalists instead of just reacting to headlines. They’ll interview companies and people to get both sides before making a hit piece. Even then, GN can rub me the wrong way when they pursue something too far.
never understood the appeal…
Same. I watch only a handful:
- FlorryWorry - he’s the best at EU4 and goes deep into the mechanics; I’ve become a much better player from watching his videos
- MTG draft streamers (NumotTheNummy, LSV, NicolaiBolas) - great at explaining plays and picks
- Hikaru Nakamura - chess streamer, second in the world, good at explaining plays
Notice a pattern? I watch people who are better than me at a game so I can learn to be better myself. I don’t watch action game streamers, mostly strategy games.
I’ll occasionally watch YT videos when I either don’t have time to play a game, or I am stuck and need help getting through a section.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
literally none of the games had been review-bombed.
I saw some “review bombing” on his game Heartbound. Long term reviews are 62% (mixed, 3000 reviews), and recent reviews are 8% (600+). When I checked a couple weeks ago when the whole thing was fresh, I swear the overall was positive.
To me, that’s review bombing. The game had been out for ~7 years, and nearly 25% of the total reviews are “recent” (many since the end of June).
So my take here is that he was worried that reaction would spread to the other studio, which I guess never materialized.
He filed a lawsuit
That’s really lame. Games should be allowed to use free expression, barring blatant slander.
Any consequences Pirate faces are all of his own doing
I disagree, but I don’t know much about him. I don’t think anyone deserves to be publicly lambasted unless they truly are a public menace like Trump. Tell people to avoid his content, sure, but his work at a game studio should absolutely be unrelated, provided he’s not given a platform for his unpopular views.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
I’m pretty sure it’s in the US. I’m in Utah (pretty far western US) and ping times are like 10-15ms, which is consistent w/ a west coast server. I have a VPS in Germany, and pings are more like 100-150ms.
I’m not exactly sure how pings work w/ cloudflare, so maybe it’s hosted somewhere else, but I would imagine they’d get a cloudflare host near their VPS to minimize latency.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
excessive negative attention
Yeah, that’s basically what I’m pushing back on. The internet community loves to jump on people and dig up random dirt when they do something unpopular, and a lot of that dirt is exaggerated if not completely fabricated. Look at the response to the Godot tweet about being “woke” for an example of that (which PS rightly defended Godot for).
He may be a POS, but I don’t think he deserves what he got. He deserves to be less popular, sure, but not much more than that.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
You’re missing a step here. 3.5. He chooses not to use the items he has that would have restored his mana
That does change things a bit.
I’ve never played WoW and generally avoid MMOs, so I don’t know how everything works. I just assumed mana items are a time effect thing, so he would’ve needed to plan ahead. If they were already bailing, there’s no reason to use them on the way out.
and avoiding all the other evidence that’s out there you haven’t seen
Well yeah, I can’t know what I don’t know.
Those were the best examples provided to me, and they didn’t seem as bad as people made them out to be. I just have to assume the rest is more of the same.
I’m happy to look at more though. But honestly, I don’t know what you’d gain from that, I already don’t watch his content and support SKG. I guess I might repost some links for others to check out if they’re also confused by the backlash.
playing another MMO on stream
Someone else mentioned that here (today?), and that’s certainly enough for me to not want to watch his streams. I already avoid a lot of the popular streamers for being disrespectful to random opponents, and doing that to someone on your team is absolutely unacceptable.
I still don’t think that warrants the response he got, from calls for resignation to swatting.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
Has to be right on everything and when it’s proven he isn’t, either doubles down or just simply denies being wrong.
That sounds like a lot of people here on Lemmy honestly, and I think that’s pretty common.
I used to appreciate some of his content but given his pattern of behaviour, including bullying, the negative attention he’s gotten is pretty deserved.
I think this is the issue. He had a lot of fans and they were let down. I think the real issue is people looking up to random streamers/influencers. It’s not unique to YT/Twitch, but politicians and celebrities aa well.
I don’t like it. If you don’t like someone’s content, don’t watch it, and don’t burn the place down on your way out.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
Yeah, I haven’t found a reason to care about PS beyond showing courtesy to people who went out of their way to provide receipts for their claims. I also haven’t seen enough to warrant ruining his life. That’s about as much effort as I care to spend here.
The bigger concern is what happens at the EU. Surely that’s where corporations are going to focus their energy, because it’s a lot easier to convince some bureaucrats than millions of gamers. Sure, some negative press helps, but the real impact is made by lobbyists.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
Do you have specific examples of him making multiple accounts to amplify a message? If so, that would certainly change my opinion of him and would explain a lot of the unsubstantiated claims made here.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 2 days ago:
And which bandwagon would that be?
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 3 days ago:
he’s repeatedly refused to talk to ross;
Yeah, and that’s what disappoints me the most. I think suck a conversation could be productive and really suss out where PirateSoftware is coming from. Maybe there’s more to it, but w/o that conversation, it just seems like he misread it and is doubling down relying on whatever meager credentials he has. That’s sad, because I’m sure he absorbed something useful in his years working w/ game devs.
helped spread the drama
And honestly, that makes me want to watch those other streamers less. I used to watch SomeOrdinaryGamers, but him repeatedly getting into YT drama (and claiming he didn’t like it) turned me off, and now he’s apparently back on that same trend. I’m sure those other YTers have decent takes, but I just really don’t like all that drama.
Ross’ petition should succeed because it’s a good petition, and that’s obvious from the text of the petition. It doesn’t need YTers to create a bunch of drama about it.
ross wasn’t at all vindictive in his video
Yeah, Ross is a stand-up dude. He made a big deal about not wanting to get into drama, but that he’d do whatever was necessary, and the result was a very reasonable rebuttal. I’d like to buy him a beverage of his choice, he seems awesome.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 3 days ago:
Doesn’t take accountability for anything. Cannot say sorry.
Have you seen a popular streamer that does? If they do, it’s more like “sorry you feel that way.” To get a decent sized following, you need other people to see you as some kind of authority, and most authorities don’t apologize, they do some amount of damage control and move on.
That’s a big part of why I generally avoid popular streamers/youtubers. Most of my favorite YT channels have like 100-500k subs (and several well below 100k), and I only sub to a few w/ over 1M, and most of those are on the more humble end of the spectrum (e.g. Gamers Nexus). I don’t jive well with wannabe authority figures, so I’m not surprised PirateSoftware didn’t appeal to me. In fact, most of those talking head channels aren’t interesting, I want facts, not opinions, and I do validate the more important facts.
Or that all his previous credentials are fabricated
Why would he? From what I gather (from a random wiki), his dad helped him get a QA job at Blizzard, and then he moved up the ranks to cybersecurity. I don’t think anyone would lie about that, since those aren’t “glamorous” jobs, but they are solid jobs. So my level in trust in what he says takes that into account, whatever he learned about the AAA gaming industry he learned by being present, not by being in any impactful role.
coding Jesus
That guy rubs me the wrong way too (assuming you’re talking about Cr1TiKaL/penguinz0). I’ve gotten through maybe 2 min of one of his videos.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 3 days ago:
misrepresent what he even did at Blizzard to appear like an authority
Isn’t that par for the course for streamers/youtubers though? I’ve seen people claim to be “indie game devs” when they’ve never actually released a game, or if they did, it made so few sales as to be little more than a hobby.
After some very quick research about him, it seems his dad helped him get a job as a QA at Blizzard, and then he worked his way up to doing something cybersecurity related. That doesn’t scream “nepo baby” to me, that’s just a dad being awesome helping their kid get their foot in the door, and my dad would do the same for me if I expressed any interest in his career. If he was given a project lead role or something right out of school, then I’d agree w/ your assessment, but a QA a not a very glamorous job, he’s probably testing some boring component of their stack. Likewise, cybersecurity also isn’t very glamorous, he probably ran pen-tests or something on their servers (maybe not even game servers), it’s a decent job, but not something that would give him any authority since he’s not making important gaming-related decisions.
That said, having worked with important people probably gives him some valuable insight, and I’d like to see him expound on why he thinks things are problematic. All I saw in the videos I watched is some hand-waving and inaccurate statements (i.e. studios would need to release code or some nonsense), which tells me he didn’t actually read the petition. I didn’t watch the full thing, but apparently he read the FAQ where Ross explains what the petition is not about, and he probably just skimmed that. I think that’s unfortunate, since he actually has industry experience and might have something valuable to add to the conversation.
narcissistic bully
Again, I haven’t watched much of his content, but I did watch what I think was a relevant part of the original VOD. Here’s how I saw the WoW thing (I have never played WoW, so I’m probably missing something):
- they’re all working their way to the boss together
- they start getting wrecked, so some (all?) decide to bail
- he casts some spell to help his team get out, using up the rest of his mana
- his teammate is about to die and asks for help
- he keeps running, as was the plan
- he gets roasted for not helping out, and explains that we has out of mana and couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to
That sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe he could’ve said it better (seemed to be playing the “cool and collected streamer” role), but I think his actual actions were reasonable.
But maybe there’s something he could have done. I don’t know WoW well enough to know what options he would have had, but from my perspective, returning to help would’ve just meant he’d die too. And my understanding is that in this game mode, that represents a lot of investment, since the character would be deleted upon death, so it makes sense to be careful. I hear they worked it out after the stream, so his team apparently didn’t think his behavior was all that bad.
And then I look at the reaction. I see several articles slamming him for his behavior in that VOD, and a lot of the backlash citing that as justification for hating him. That seems way over the top, so I think the only rational takeaway is that other streamers are making a big deal out of very little, and people are latching onto it w/o actually looking at the facts and taking what they read for granted.
That’s why I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon. Maybe he’s as bad as everyone says, but I haven’t seen enough actual evidence of that. Each time someone has provided some evidence, I looked at it and didn’t see anything damning, just normal streamer behavior. I think people are making a big deal about it because they strongly disagree w/ his take on something else (say, SKG) and are digging for dirt.
So yeah, that’s my take.
- Comment on Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? 3 days ago:
Perhaps, which I think is really unfortunate. I think he misread or misunderstood what the petition was about, and doubled down instead of taking a step back.
But he’s not going to be making a bunch of accounts on random message boards like Lemmy to try to kill it. The more reasonable argument is that some of his fans and other people who disagree w/ the petition are attacking it, not that he or the games industry cares enough to come here and spread FUD, I think regular people are dumb and emotional enough to do that for them.