As much as I hate Meta/Facebook, we need activity and content to keep Lemmy alive, and Meta can potentially help provide that. If after federation, it turns out to be overwhelmingly toxic or the users provide no value at all, then defederate. If nothing else, doing it later will encourage Meta users to try other insrances.
A lot of modern TVs are starting to go power-button only. Was trying to set one up recently, but didn't have any batteries on hand for the remote. I literally just needed it to act as a monitor and display the hdmi input, but without the remote, I couldn't change input, or do anything else useful.
Any system like that implemented would inherantly either A) change the game fundamentally, B) Still cause smurfs to ruin games, or C) prevent the (relatively) good players from being rewarded for playing well.
Fundamentally, either you change the game very substantially in which case smurfs don't know how to play, but then you alienate the low tier players who do want to play the same game and encourage people to smurf to try this new gamemode, you make less significant changes but still add a pretty hard skill ceiling, but that prevent good low-tier players from snowballing or being rewarded for playing well, or you make only minor changes in which case the smurf will still take over the game. Theres no in-between. If skill dictates the game, then the person with most skill (the smurf) will win. If skill does not dictate the game, then you lose the fair, balanced competitve aspect that is the draw of these games. That is the case no matter how good the players are. Low tier or not, you don't just want to be handed a win. You can't have a game that both is dictated by skill, but also make sure that those with skill are pulled in line with everyone else.
Im not sure what you're advocating then? A simplified "New Player Mode"? That already exists. Unranked mode? That exists too. SBMM? Already present. Or are you saying we need to tie accounts to people's SSNs or something to prevent smurfing, because even ignoring account sharing, theres no way at all that that would backfire. As long as there are people to bully, someone will go out of their way to try and put others down to make themselves feel better. At least in DotA, they try and address it with fairly in-depth behaviour systems, unlike every other competitive game.
I mean, your solution seems to be to lower the skill ceiling to the level of the lowest player. That doesn't fix it either. In the example you gave, we don't change basketball to account for LeBroun James playing against toddlers. Are you saying we should? Anything like that completely changes the game into something different.
Likewise in Dota, outside of very niche scenarios, and in the first place, people are chosing to play for MMR. I don't play much league, so I don't know how it works there, but at least in Dota, you can get a pretty complete experience in the unranked modes complete with (hidden) SBMM.
This design creates toxicity instead of competition, and your hot take is 'so you hate competition?' Yeah sure dude, LeBron dominating a junior-high ballgame is what sportsmanship is all about. His team is winning by a lot so they must be super competitive. What a shame we can't judge individual players. Apparently. Stop measuring assists, all that matters is the almighty W.
It would be competition, just not fun competition. And the solution we came to for problems like that isn't lower the nets and remove the need for dribbling, its preventing matchups like that. Thats why SBMM exists and why those who try and smurf around it get banned.
After all - why should games be enjoyable? Losing should feel bad. It can't just be less fun, it has to be miserable. That's motivation! Shaking hands after a game is for cowards! In fact, if you lose a platinum match? Banned for life. Hardcore permadeath rules.
Or, you could just shake hands, say GG and move on? Nothing prevents that. Even if you do chose to play ranked over unranked/arcade (a choice the player themselves makes) a lowered MMR is just a different number.
It sounds like you just don't like the idea of skill-based or team-based games. Plenty of people do. Its not an excuse to ruin it for others through smurfing, or to take it away from those who do enjoy the games.
For a bit more context on what others have already said, Lemmy is more decentralized, akin to email. Lemmy.world is the biggest website for Lemmy, in the same way Gmail is for email, but like email, there are tons of smaller or even personal sites that can all network together. If one site goes down, only content on that site and its users are affected, others are not.
By "corny cliche", I'm not talking about things like the creepy twins, the isolated hotel, or the typewritter scene. Those were all high-points. I'm talking about things like the overuse of dramatic sound effects, and "murder" written backwards. Stuff that was cliche and corny even at the time.
I mean, The Shining came after Halloween, The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw, Alien, and a lot of the classic horror movies that I do like. The problem isn't that its a haunted hotel or anything like that, its things like the racist ghosts (this one admittedly probably wasn't so shocking in the 80s), the nude woman, the overuse of sound effects for things that don't deserve it (such as Tuesdays), and the murder written backwards thing. It just felt like it was trying way too hard while not achieving anything 90% of the time. Most of the peaks were good - all the famous scenes - but all the rest of the movie drags it back down.
The Shining isn't good. There are certainly parts that are good, and its an interesting movie, but theres way too much reliance on corny cliches, and cheap shock for the sake of it.
Considering that we've seen plenty of games become hugely successful off hype alone, even when much of the marketing leading up to launch was lies, its shocking this hasn't happened sooner.
I think you're misunderstanding how copyright works. Losing the copyright doesn't mean they won't be able to make new works, nor does it mean those new works won't have copyright. Copyright is only lost on the original work, so while others can use Steamboat Willie, and that very specific version of Micky Mouse, Disney still owns modern updates to him. Either way, the end of that monopoly opens more avenues for newer authors to build on it, while again, doing nothing but reducing Disney's passive income for work their founder did a century ago. Its a more physical example, but along the same line of logic, if I cure cancer, it might make sense to give me time to get a head start on profiting from it (so I am rewarded for my work) but it would be ridiculous to say no one is else is allowed to use my cure for cancer or build on it for the next century or longer. Theres absolutely no reason not to allow the ideas to spread once the author has had plenty of time to make a profit.
Well, why should the government protect their monopoly? The original creator is dead, so he doesn't benifit from it. The cartoon is 95 years old, and I doubt Walt Disney factored in the profit his company would make 60+ after he died, when deciding to make the original animation. The only reason to let Disney maintain their monopoly on it is to allow a massive coorperation to get more money without doing any new work.
Copyright isn't just paying for an idea, its giving a complete monopoly over a concept. We came up with the idea of copyright to give creators a much easier way to profit off their creation (not having to compete after its created) to make sure innovation is very rewarded. That said, its still a government enforced monopoly, with all the issues that come with that, and with how much its been extended, its far past the point of encouraging innovation and instead just works to cement large companies in place, resting on their laurals rather than making anything new. Even when a copyright ends, the current copyright holder wouldn't lose the idea, they just no longer have a monopoly on it. Disney can and will keep making Micky Mouse content, and the mouse will probably keep being accociated with them for centuries to come unless someone makes something that dwarfs the impact of Disney's work with the character, in which case its best that it was released anyway.
As much as I hate Meta/Facebook, we need activity and content to keep Lemmy alive, and Meta can potentially help provide that. If after federation, it turns out to be overwhelmingly toxic or the users provide no value at all, then defederate. If nothing else, doing it later will encourage Meta users to try other insrances.