PenguinTD @ PenguinTD @lemmy.ca

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2

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383

Joined

2 yr. ago

well, if any previous BG experience tell me, sometimes people just roll with situation instead of reload when they try to steal stuff and get busted then forced into fight or die situation, which leads to big fight in town and stick through their decisions. Unless the graph means the actual conversation choices not the end result.

dang that would really take a day to watch, the full play list is long~~~

Just to lay out the points, I think real life stuff like card packs, gacha ball/box, rigged claw/arcade machines are at similar addiction level but slightly better than game loot box. There are aspects why it's worse than even casinos and we(including this generation that heavily inflicted by lootbox) will be paying the aftermath in the future.

For physical gambling, casino is heavily regulated, all the "approved" machine are giving out reward listed in that odd table and they get audited for payout etc. And people can "opt-out" by signing agreement that get themselves banned from casinos in that region per local government regulation. Maybe they want to stop it, or the doctor determine that you don't have the self control etc, there is way to get out of that financial/mental trap and are enforceable by law.

Next, the play for fun but only get some chance to win physical stuff (card packs/gacha/arcade), I don't like them cause it's very obvious designed mental traps that drives people too churn their coins. They have a lot lower barrier of access, their labeling is not regulated like casino(no odd table on the claw machine because apparently it's "skill" issue? yeah right, that's exactly what it's deceiving. ) And if you are not there to just play machine like Racing/DDR/TimeCrisis etc, you have much better time/odd doing those basketball machines. The goal was to have fun doing competition between friends, the reward tickets are just extra. (And if you do the math, those things you can buy at dollar store at much cheaper price. ) For card packs/gacha I've seen fucking grown adult argue with store staff why they can't get the card/thing they wanted, like accuse of staff cheating etc.(while everyone else was there mostly for table top games.) People that are addicted really goes to extreme and disregard what they might inflict to themselves or others.

Last, the loot box, the barrier to access is just the phone, a child can literally click an ad on your phone, install a shiny cute game and started playing and keep pressing the "5 more tries" button, and then they might throw that big button with so many gem that are overflowing the box/bag icon and say you can "save 30% when you buy more with this bundle, plus extra!". And it's up to the parent to gate that access and setup their phone/creditcard in ways to prevent bad thousands of dollars outcome you see in the news. Children does not understand until much later. (if you ever see the herd of pokemon go player with more phones than their limbs can access, it's not healthy "gaming" and is very obvious for any external observer. And they can't ban themselves from this type of access like casino/lottery.)

Future consequence, everything is statistics, when you have a population, you have distribution, certain amount of people will be vulnerable to these type of psychologically refined "experience" and can't get out of that dopamine trap specifically designed to trick your age group. When you have your children age group expose to this type of environment, all the stress for preventing them to get addicted to those game is fully on the parent. What "else" can you attract them more? What's your solution when all they want is 20 more pokemon ball? It's like exposing people that may or may not be alcoholic and treat them with unlimited cheap booze, it's only 25c per hit. Then when certain percentage of them became addicted and have social/mental issues, it's the society's problem to get them back on track. Social support, medication, consulting, extra regulation, etc, etc all the fallout are not the responsibility of those company selling it, you as tax payer will be paying for it. And you know what they do if they make big bucks using lootbox? They hire economist/psychologist to further refine that experience, people that addicted would rather skip snack or better food just to have those extra money to throw at the app. AND, for economics, there is that opportunity cost, the money that sunk into those corp would have be doing something different, which IMO even just spend them on chocolate has better outcome than lootbox. Money that eventually become more addictive app is worse then pretty much anything else.

Saying it's not too bad and you should have self control or parent needs to teach their children properly is the typical misunderstanding of how or why people can become addict and then blame the victim. It's more or less like you don't throw Li-ion battery into fire, it's very violent chemical reaction that there is no stopping once triggered, and for addiction you just need that person and environment to match and then the brain go full steam ahead. They are born vulnerable to that specific substance, thrill of winning and can only regain self control after heavy intervention/regulation. Dare I said it, lootbox games are wiring children's brain so they become more vulnerable to similar stimulation later down the road. I don't have actual study to back it up, it would take another 5_{10 years for children playing lootbox games to become adults and then another 5}10 years to study the aftermath.

I don't like the down vote button so I will spare you with that. Yes, they can still put it on their resume but what the employer did is scumbag move cause translation is a hard job to do well and good translator can make good money doing various job. In creative industry, credit listed is a big thing for anyone that starting out. If not so, why does movie, anime, game that have those long scrolling opening/ending credit?( A xxxxx Film, Directed by xxxxx, Produced by xxxxx.) For a video game, there is no "screen time" limit like movie/anime do, so not including the team and only the execs is like slapping those that worked really hard for the project to make it a better game.

Dream does have those (pretty extensive) tutorial and "from MM" levels but they are not a bundle experience like LBP.

Repost my comment why gaming laptop is a scam(can't copy comment link cause the link failed for me):

gaming laptops are pretty much scam anyway, as person "once" fall for such scam.

• they are really heavy, not really good with travel.
• they are also power hungry, might be less than your actual tower rig, but significantly more than common "business laptop"
• the battery won't last with degradation where you constantly plug it in.( to gain the boosted frequency where you can play games at higher settings/frame rate)
• your upgrade path is very limited and they won't have the parts after like 2~3 years.(so anything broken you have to try find it on ebay/amazon/aliexpress)

for portable gaming during travel, your best choice is consoles. So switch, steamdeck, heck, even PS4 slim is better than gaming laptop.(hopefully PS5 pro/slim is made into form for easier box/travel format.)

It's really good prototyping tool as well for people wants to dip in to game dev. It's more complex compare to say Mario Maker, but less overwhelming compare to using unity/unreal engine. And you already have all sorts of project asset template you can copy from.

I'd imaging some future gamedev actually started by making dream projects.

I am pretty sure they can't give information to 3rd party other than the necessary part since they are EU based. And usually when you link account, it's where you started the linking asking information from the target platform. In this case it's Larian asking Twitch for auth so that a Twitch user is linked to a Larian account so they can access your viewing time and distribute the drop. (No, you don't need to link if you are just viewer and not wanting the drop, it's the streamer needs to the twitch integration like the voting extension, etc. I still have mine disabled. ) It's usually outlined when you try to link and it will show what's requested during the linking process.

Maybe I am not really careful from your perspective, but I have like 5 gmail/yahoo/proton email accounts that does different things depending on the information I want to share with the registered site. Didn't go crazy like some one site per e-mail account, but it's sufficiently safe over the years. I have never had a data breach/account stolen with my practice so far. (or getting unwanted emails on my banking/work related account.)

As for hiding my identity entirely from internet it's probably a bit too late to the big corps cause stupid me registered a FB like every "dumb fucks" that did, oh, and google too when I do business with them.

I only created this after so many post of "I don't know why Larian would need to put up a launcher and ask for an account". It's to show what it actually do and why they needed it. And of course the user can just go with other higher voted comment thread. I think it is a legit reason and usage to ask you to create account and using the feature they provided, and it's also totally fine that you don't. (I didn't created an account when I was checking back and forth with Larian support about the vault account I used to use for their website. I just skip and play EA as always until like 4~5 days later a guy explained this new account situation. I created account like 1 day before launch since I want to get the twitch drop.)

NOTE: this is based on my personal understanding which might be wrong/outdated in the modern setting, so if some lemmy is expert in this regard feel free to correct me.

some source, I only skimp it and decide what I typed might still be relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor#

If anything that my previous cpu architecture course(in the early 2000, so almost 20 years old) is that intuition doesn't work as you imagined. The branch prediction is like a counter you can keep or adjust or flush and there is a very good reason that you execute both when you have the registers and processing unit that can run the instructions in parallel and just pick the correct path once the IF check result is completed. Why they have this in the beginning even before multicore CPU is that the penalty of waiting far outweight just run as if the "if" never exist and "abandon" the result and skip the if block. Common if block is to hide expensive calculation, which means you usually have fetches and potential cache miss and needs to go all the way to read disk(that's why we have prefetching etc instructions that compiler guess for you depending on your code), so if you waited all the cycle and then cache miss, you are gonna stall and wait until a couple hundred cycles waiting for the data to fetch and fill the registers/cache required to run that instruction in side the if block. is there a penalty if the predictor guess wrong? yes, but the penalty is far cheaper compare to if you don't run at all.

For blocks that have both if/else that are roughly similar, then running both is preferred unless your scheduling etc can't really do this(compile will decide this for you) and you probably need some profiler to check why your CPU stalled and fix your code so compiler can schedule better for you(profiler assisted optimization is a thing). It doesn't have to be all equal weight for both if and else part, that's why predictor kicks in so if the past batch of data all resulted in true, they allocate more in the true block and run less in the false block and eat the penalty if only a couple in the same data set resulted in having to run longer in the false block. Modern compiler/CPUs are really good with this and usually are better using the predictor/default optimization flag over hand tuning(like writing your own unwrap/asm etc).

Is there cases where running both is not really practical? yes, I think there will always be cases where your program maybe data heavy where say, true and false fetches entirely different block of data for calculation and doing both makes your cache miss more, it would just be game of "eating less penalty" and usually is out of reach for us since compiler just did it for you. And that's not my specialty at all, I am just your common pleb programmer that relies on compiler -O3.

It was done to do the both side of if/else while waiting for the check to finish, then it jumps to the correct branch result execution point to keep going, whatever that was "wrong" is wasted and should be flushed. Don't know if this fits the modern definition but that's why they do this type of thing.

Actual design or implementation is more complex than I described as there are a couple ways to tackle this branching delay issue.

Lol, I remember that huge number during conversation screen that was removed.

Yep I understand those and just saying the obvious reason why one might want to create account, and you can skip or disable launcher entirely as mentioned in this thread.

Cross save( especially between consoles<->PC ) requires linking accounts, Larian disabled it now because of a hotfix bug since PS5 version is not released yet and causing PC player issues.

And I honestly don't know what kind of threat Twitch has over your privacy on a fresh Larian account. See here is a brief breakdown what they can see:

• Larian: they now know I have a twitch account, potentially my twitch account's email address.
• Twitch: they now know I have BG3, on top of Rocket League and some games I used too stream with a friend. And I am on that garbage tier cause the account is a burner(to sign up stuff that might get spam mails), I never spent a dime on twitch, my user experience data is probably worst since I only go straight to the channel I want to get drops with and never "browse the recommendation". BG3 I had to go to the game's page and click on the drop enabled one then afk for 2 hours then I just close it.

So unless there is some secret tech I am not aware of, please do let me know why and what else might be shared that have threat to my personal info/privacy.

This would be a game that can survive really well if it was ported to PC and supports user server.(to host their collection of dream projects.) Instead, it probably not gonna last for very long following similar treatment to PS3's little big planet when player count taper out.

Whoops, should have look it up I guess. Sorry for my old and fading memory and thanks for correction.

I know people don't like to create accounts, but Larian seems to be doing fine when I created the vault account(for their prior kickstarter redeem etc.) It doesn't work with launcher and I contact support to then know they have a new system so they can link steam/twitch/gog for their game specific feature(cross save and twitch integration). So if you ever want to do a session in the future using the twitch integration, you would have to register account to be able to link and use that. It lets viewer check character build/inventory and quest logs, so you can have like 3 viewer like your buddy playing together while you control the choice, your buddy can vote for decision making or direct their character's combat choice. At worst you can be the only viewer to your stream and just use it as a 2nd screen to have over view of character build or inventory.

example screenshot of twitch integration

Xbox has always doing the x86 architecture(Edit: as corrected by following comment, 360 was not.) so it's much easier to do BC. For Sony or Nintendo it's just not worth the effort until the emu is mature that they can just reap the benefit. PS5 can already play almost entire PS4 library, Anything PS2 or before can be emu pretty consistently if you are trying to get it done, then it only left PS3 in a weird place. For PS3, many good games already have a PS4/PS5 remaster games, for non-best sellers you can probably get a cheap ps3 slim with enough storage to play those left out games.(ie, PSN only Puppeteer), OR stream them like you mentioned.

I think that was intended for figure out ways to beat some of the time sensitive quest, where the trigger might be you talk to someone, enter an area, etc. If you long rest then the NPC might be dead and change the subplot. With multiplayer I don't know how they handle long rest(like can one player go long rest while others don't? or a voting system? etc.) Anyway, I do single player, and I think multiplayer could be fun as well.

The no lifer, are you not married or have kids to tend to?

But I am glad that you literally can save anywhere(except cutscenes) and continue.

AND, didn't actually wrapping up the story, for sequel sake.

BG3 is so huge even if it's only the beginning arc(Larian tends to taper off at the end, lol), I had to "replay" some decision making and see how outcome and the exp net gain and to decide how I proceed.(yep I save scum, don't hate me I have limited time and want to explore content and choices to my desire outcome. Then my other play through I can be more free form, and I bet there are something I haven't seen yet from this good guy talk things out approach.)