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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • Your phone/plan carrier using voice data to make a marketing profile is well documented actually. This data is purchased and verified and resold by meta, or in some cases bought and used by alphabet for GAS. Cacti can show you outgoing data for every device on a network, and you can see data being sent from a phone in signed packets going to your carrier when you’re not “actively using” it. It seems like you know about network monitoring tools but you haven’t actually used them, just talked about them in reference to data collection.

    “Why buy the cow” here is also easily answered: not everyone uses Facebook, a fair number of users will deactivate their facebook page but continue to use messenger.






  • It’s not a small task, it’s a monumental task. I listed examples of existing difficulty features in games and outlined why it doesn’t make sense for from games. You’re completely missing the point, and willfully ignoring the fact that you are not the target audience.

    The reason I even mentioned the mainline Pokemon games is that they aren’t for me. They will NEVER add any level of real difficulty to a pokemon game, so it doesn’t provide the friction I want in a game. And that’s okay. I’m not so entitled or delusional that I think gamefreak should cater to my tastes over that of their existing fanbase, and I’m content to rely on romhacks, mods, and similar titles like siralim to provide the depth and challenge I’m looking for in the genre. “Just add an easy mode” is an asinine take when you imply, like you have here, that it’s something the developer could just turn on. It’s more like three or four digits of work hours that wouldn’t contribute to sales in a meaningful way.


  • homicidalrobot@lemm.eetoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksVideogame Difficulty
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    1 month ago

    There’s nothing artificial about players bouncing off of souls games. As for “whatever reason that may be”, I think we both know you only mean difficulty, but you have a very shallow perspective on difficulty.

    Every souls game has been cleared by a striking number of visually disabled people, and each game presents the opportunity to “grind” so that your character is substantially more powerful than enemies in the area you’re in. The selectable difficulty is in your approach. It’s one of the main reasons the games have mass appeal, and you can choose to play without player invasions in every single one via mechanics or offline mode. You can effectively, through just simple math and perseverance, play the whole game on easy mode.

    The design flexibility in souls games is MADE for people who find the game too hard to have agency. If rolling is difficult for you, a large majority of bosses can be tackled by sprinting away and casting spells. If magic doesn’t make sense to you, there’s weapons with naturally long reaches that stun enemies well. Many challenging segments can be handled by not interacting with them directly, such as shooting immobile enemies or ones that otherwise cannot reach you with a bow. The games even provide a spyglass or binoculars so you can aim at enemies outside your lock on range with magic.

    Traditional difficulty settings in the face of all this would be worthless. A huge portion of the appeal of the souls games is Friction, an element of design where there’s an obstacle for the player to overcome. Without presenting the player with a challenge where walking forward and light attacking might stop you for a life or two, there is no point in acquiring any equipment to empower yourself further. There are PLENTY of games where you may just mash one attack button and see success, even within the same genre(s)(action and rpg).

    Pokemon games are somewhat unique in this regard, where the game itself will literally never ask you to do anything but be aware of type advantage and press attack. There are no cases where you NEED a setup team or baton pass in the core game, it’s just for playing with other people. If that’s your speed, that’s okay, but there is an enormous demographic we used to refer to as “core gamers” that are looking for games with sufficient friction.

    Accessibility and difficulty do not always hold hands. None of Fromsoft’s games start off easy, they expect you to learn their mechanics and interact with them. If you’re getting frustrated that you aren’t improving personally, or don’t know how (it’s practice), the games may legitimately just not be for you. The amount of extra effort to rebalance every enemy’s statistics to make the game easier is enormous, and it would not fix the reasons many players die repeatedly; you would have players who did not learn a lesson from normal enemies dying over and over again to a boss that “checks” whether or not you know what was being taught.

    What would you actually want from an easy mode? Slower enemy animations? Changed health values? Edited enemy behavior, like decision making speed or aggro range? All of these things are already curated to allow the player to overcome them either through learned mechanical precision or improving their stats, so when neither of those matter how much game is really left outside the barbie doll dressup?

    Tl;Dr: git gud



  • You’ve got it backward. Successful modern influencers follow linguistic trends and reinforce them, but they typically do not invent them (see the litany of words from jersey shore that never made it into the greater american lexicon) even when they try. Typically, new words arise out of necessity, efficiency, or mutual enjoyment.

    It boggles the mind to see how many armchair linguists come out of the woodwork for posts like these. As language evolves, we get new ways to express ourselves, but idiots that cannot possibly learn one new word stall that progress by just being stubborn. If anything, you should be more wary of people or groups preventing the use of new words, or re-prescribing existing words that are usually used one way popularly.

    The ONLY valid goal with language is communication and understanding - couples develop words, workplaces develop words, gaming communities develop words, and all of these groups use either existing words to mean new things, or acronym words in new ways, or even make completely new words from brand names or nonsense. Prescriptivists cannot typically handle new jargon, regardless of its use, and this makes them a laughingstock in academia and online spaces alike.

    If you can’t parse what’s being said, lurk more. The etymology of new words is just as valid as the etymology of ancient ones. It’s fine to take words on loan from another language regardless of grammatical correctness. The word “eyeball” came from “an influencer”.