A lot of people here are being cynical about it, and to be fair I totally get being suspicious of corporate platforms, but these places are at least half as much about the userbase than they are about the owners. So far it seems to be a much more chill place even compared to Lemmy. People there talk much more about things they are passionate about than having endless toxic arguments, and the general atmosphere there seems pretty open to diversity, as far as I see.
But if you don't care for microblogging I don't think that will change your mind.
I see more transphobia on Lemmy than BlueSky, but that might be because Lemmy is more oriented towards what everyone is saying while BlueSky you mostly see stuff from people you follow. There isn't an algorithm driven feed there (yet)
Not really. Often companies degrade their products as a calculated choice, considering that they will save and increase their profits more than they will lose. If only a few people protest, which seems to be the case here, then they have no reason to change course.
But chosing to buy from companies that do better can at least carve out a niche.
I wouldn't count on millions of people suddenly all deciding to boycott now, if all the egregious practices of this industry weren't enough to get them to do it already.
I don't think it's great for any class to take back powers that the character has earned. Not even clerics. For as long as there have been religions, there have been schisms and power plays. It even ruins possible intrigue involving religions if you can tell what follower of a good god has gone astray by asking them to cast a spell.
There are more interesting ways to do consequences for defiance of higher powers than to hold their abilities hostage. That feels less like the consequences of a living world, and more like the DM yanking the player's leash.
But I can accept that this is an established system/setting thing for clerics and paladins. For warlocks, it is not.
Seems like any customer rights now only exist in direct defiance of corporations and whatever unreasonable unilateral rules they set without consulting anyone else.
Enshittification advances. Consoles already are the prime example of devices that act as if they are still owned by the company rather than the customer, but they somehow find even more ways to make it worse...
From what I heard about it, it wouldn't even be fun for the meme. It's too complicated to play for a laugh and too insane and twisted to play seriously.
In 2023? I don't think so. I got into D&D decades ago and THAC0 was already not a thing anymore. Gurps may not be widely played today but I still see it getting memed a lot for being complicated.
That's a good alternative, but sometimes the issue with picking a different game that is suited for that one thing is that you want your game to do more than one thing.
Every other time I pull a PbtA game I end up banging against the walls of the genre and walking into the barren uncodified void of "I dunno, I guess you just do it".
Some people play it like fantasy accounting, Some people play it like improv with fidget toys. Good thing I'm here to tell everyone the right way to play.
Definitely, technical problems are another reason not to be overly strict.
Ironman mode absolutely has value, but this gets into a greater discussion that I feel more gamers should keep in mind. The value of these restrictions and challenges are your entertainment as well as fairness towards the people you are actively playing with. Game rules are all arbitrary by definition. It doesn't really matter if someone playing by themselves completes an Ironman mode fairly or cheats at it.
It's because gamers were convinced to take game rules more seriously than they deserve that today some believe that fictional items in a remote server they don't control can be worth hundreds of dollars. That hundreds of hours of RPG grind are somehow a necessary requirement to play a match of a game with someone else, and also that paying to rush this entirely artificial aspect of the game is worthwhile.
If the developers of a game prefer that it's played in Ironman that's fair, but there is no need to come up with exceedingly complex and restrictive solutions to police how people play. If they don't want to play differently, that's fine too.
At the point the game allows multiple manual saves, rewinding decisions is trivial. There is not much of a point in restricting autosaves too.
The only way a game can enforce permanent decisions is if it only has auto-saves, in which case it could have a couple hidden backup saves just to prevent any issue from ruining people's progress. Even then that's not enough if players are willing to tinker, but at least it's not trivial.
Online saves are an option too but I wouldn't be too fond of a game that is needlessly restricted to online-only just to make decisions permanent.
A lot of people here are being cynical about it, and to be fair I totally get being suspicious of corporate platforms, but these places are at least half as much about the userbase than they are about the owners. So far it seems to be a much more chill place even compared to Lemmy. People there talk much more about things they are passionate about than having endless toxic arguments, and the general atmosphere there seems pretty open to diversity, as far as I see.
But if you don't care for microblogging I don't think that will change your mind.