Yeah, its not terrible looking, but even ignoring the fact that its spreading into the lawn, I am hoping to plant more productive plants, and the ground-cover is so thick its hard to cut through to get to the ground, nonetheless letting my plants grow through it.
It also doesn't help that I now know its considered an invasive species in my region (along with 99% of the other stuff that was in the garden when I moved in) so probably a good idea to get rid of it for that reason too.
The ones in my garden haven't produced any flowers (might have something to do with me trying to kill them) but it does look like it, esspecially this picture from Wikipedia.
Considering that its already been effectively announced unofficially, and whats been leaked is in a very unfinished state, I expect they'll wait until its more polished before putting any real marketing weight behind it. They may even be extra late, considering the rocky launch of CS2, with it still lacking much of the content from CS:GO.
Given the significant changes between trailer and gameplay, as well as the delays, I'm guessing the hero got reworked and simplified a lot during development. In his current state, he seems far too simple given the dev time. Still interested to see how he plays around though.
PlateUp can be fun in 2 player co-op. If you've played Overcooked, its basically a clone of that, but turned into a roguelike. Its not the longest or deepest, but its still solid, and the price is very fair IMO, esspecially if you get it on sale.
The vehicle challenges were definately the weakest part, but on average, I still enjoyed them. In particular, a lot of the wingsuit courses and land races were fun, and actually took advantage of the game's strongest elements.
At least personally, its a lot of the shorter, gameplay-focused games that always leave me wanting more, or wanting to further improve, without having some unbeatable new-game++++++++ mode or anything overly RNG based.
A couple games I've 100%ed that still have significant bonus/optional content outside the main plotline include:
Inscription - Willingly played through the story twice and spent nearly as many hours on the bonus new-game+ mode. Super solid gameplay, that while well explored in the base game, leaves plenty of room to further experiment and perfect your strategy.
Just Cause 3 - while there is a ton of bonus content, its not overly hidden, and the core gameplay is solid enough that challenges feel fun and rewarding, while travelling around gathering collectables is satisfying in a chill, podcast-listening, but not unengaging way.
Hotline Miami - after completing the game, I wanted to go back and get a A+ on every level because the gameplay was fun and I felt I still had more room to grow. "The puzzle" wasn't as fun, and I did use a guide, but I was just happy for any reason to play through the game again.
Wolfenstein the New Order - again, just a solid gameplay loop that made me want to keep playing, with bonus objectives that worked as an objective rather than a chore. Also, unlike later ID shooters, it doesn't have the "beat the whole game without dying" achievement, which just feels too punishing over mistakes that may be minor or downright unfair.
The problem is that you then end up with sites based on attention, leading you into the (imo even bigger) pitfall of every other social media site, where things like attention-grabbing, clickbait, and sensationalist content has a massive advantage. Look at what gets sorted to the top on platforms where that is the main metric, things like Mr. Beast's low-brow, cacophonus videos, children's content, scantily clad women and softcore porn, and gambling or otherwise particularly addictive content. Even focusing on comment count alone means a focus on topics that are both broad-appeal and controversial, more like what you get out of Twitter's trending topics: mostly politics and flamewars rather than experts sharing their research, or artists sharing their (non-pornographic) art.
Don't get me wrong, voting isn't a perfect system at all, but it correlates with quality far better than engagement does.
Just Reddit. Its where basically all the content that matters to me is, as none of those communities have migrated over to Lemmy (or anywhere else, as best as I can tell) so I'm stuck with Reddit as my primary social media.
It is worth noting that unlike something like a League or Overwatch skin, and even a lot of early TF2 trading, modern CS and Dota skins have more emphasis put on their marketability and speculative value. For example, I've bought a few CS skins that I don't use, purely because I expect their value to increase over the next couple years. Of course, thats not all of the buyers, but that influences the purchase, and allows for those valuations unlike a Fortnite skin with a fixed price tag set by Epic with zero recoupable value.
A) flashy, loud, snippy content that works on people with no attention span or who are easily amused like kids (and annoys everyone else)
And B) clickbait-type, over-the-top content and games that no one else does - the sorts of things that, even if not high-brow, are still interesting. For example, blowing up a Lambrogini appealing to the action-movie lizard-brain, or a giant game of hide and seek appealing to the sort of person who daydreams about how to survive a zombie apocalypse.
Basically, its the peak of broad-appeal, low-brow, high effort/production value media.
I like both, but as others have said, the apm focus in RTS games really puts a cap on my enjoyment of the genre. In theory, I should love the genre, and I usually like the single player Campaigns or skirmishes against bots, but as soon as apm becomes a significant factor, I lose interest. Maybe I should learn some with a pause function, so I can see how I feel about those.
Just a few days ago, I wrote a comment about how you would theoretically try and become a significant competitor to Steam, and one of the points I raised was that Steam's storefront and recommendations are very generous (compared to others). It makes a huge difference that even indie games can appear on the front page regularly, both improving user and dev experiences. Players find games that they enjoy, while devs pay a very small amount to get effective, targetted advertisements.
This is whats keeping me from full-committing to Lemmy. I get most of my news from other sources, and I'm not a Linux user or IT specalist, so theres really not much content here for me. The communities on Reddit I was most involved in were mostly for specific games or niche areas within gaming like VR, or for acedemic topics and discussions like history. Here on Lemmy, theres is effectively none of that aside from some history memes largely reposted from Reddit by a few very dedicated users (although thank you to those users). Even really large games like Dota, and CS, both of which lend themselves well to sharing content, discussion, and general lifestyle adoption of the game have nothing here on Lemmy, nonetheless single-player games like Half-Life.
Maybe an immitation of a military uniform top? Makes you look like someone who worships the military, but not enough to actually join, and who also doesn't really respect the uniform or its implications. Thats cringy to basically anyone who looks at it, whether they like the military or hate it, almost anywhere the the world, but also still benign enough wear in public.
Honestly, even those are pretty overkill to make a competing storefront. All you'd have to do is to offer lower prices and/or take a smaller percentage while matching at least a fraction of Steam's functionality (unlike Epic) or actively working to screw over customers (also unlike Epic). If a store sold games consistantly 5% cheaper than Steam, even without controller options, good support, a built-in forum, explicit Linux support, ect., I'm confident it would be reasonably successful. Just look at Humble and Fanatical. While they do (mostly) sell Steam keys, their prices are arguably what made them a success, not the features you get after redeaming the Steam keys.
Even beside that, the ideas you provided are all pretty minor. If you're willing to throw more significant amounts of money at the platform, like many before have, you can go a lot further than that even. For example, seeing as Steam's discovery algorithm is one of the bigger benifits Steam provides, you could one-up them by providing off-platform marketing for games launching on your platform. This would be a way to bring devlopers and players alike to use your platform without screwing over either. Similarly, you could take a page out of Epic's book and do giveaways regularly. Alternatively, you could use a less generous system such as "buy anything and get x game free" or "every $10 spent gives you a chance to win x game bundle" to make it more sustainable, and/or allow you to market specific underperforming games. It isn't that hard to come up with ideas that would allow a competitor to do well. You just have to do that rather than putting all your resources into trying to take games away from players, and harvest their data.
I'm using a yellow-orange. I've themed everything to Half-Life's Combine propaganda, so that fits even if I normally wouldn't be a fan of the colour, not to mention that its easier on the eyes at night.
Yeah, its not terrible looking, but even ignoring the fact that its spreading into the lawn, I am hoping to plant more productive plants, and the ground-cover is so thick its hard to cut through to get to the ground, nonetheless letting my plants grow through it.
It also doesn't help that I now know its considered an invasive species in my region (along with 99% of the other stuff that was in the garden when I moved in) so probably a good idea to get rid of it for that reason too.