I strongly suspect that “modernize” implies “microtransactions”…

That being said, creating a private instance is a relatively difficult hurdle. By providing private communities, an admin can take care of the hosting, along with all of the other communities, while those who want something more controlled and closed can have an easily accessible option.

That’s fair, and I’m honestly probably just thinking about worst-case scenarios that won’t actually happen. There’s plenty of ways malicious actors could already be doing some pretty bad things and they don’t seem to be, so it’s probably fine.

Eh, we already have private communities.

I did mention further down the comment chain the one use case for this I can think of - communities for info and feedback about the specific instance to / from its members; things like donations, financial disclosures, etc. - that you wouldn’t want participation in from anyone not actually using the instance. It has its place; I’m more afraid of seeing popular communities going instance-only for whatever reason, with it being used solely to drive signups on a specific instance.

I mean it’s fine on paper. But like… imagine that a popular instance - lemmy.world, let’s say - has a community that’s very popular and, for whatever motivation, decides they want to push people to move to their instance (or at least create accounts there), so they change one or more of those popular communities to be local-only.

Best case, they fracture the community. Worse case, a very large number of users start making accounts there to use those communities, and abandon other instances. Worst case, they use the large influx of signups they get from such a move to promote themselves, grow even further, and eventually do something malicious.

We can already create private instances that don’t federate for those niche communities; I don’t really see what this feature is adding other than specifically having communities dedicated to that specific instance (With instance-specific information like donations, financials, outage notices, that sort of thing.)

Hopefully these don’t start getting used too frequently, as it kind of… defeats the purpose of federation. Would not want to have to make accounts on multiple instances just to participate in niche communities.

“Hey, can you recommend a good free photoshop alternative?”

“DIE!”

Just like the good old Jraphics Interchange Format!

Plus as an added bonus we can have the ‘gif’ pronunciation disagreement!

The Coors Light of shooters could probably be cel shaded and be just as fun in 2024 as the next release 9-12 months later. And they could save a lot of overhead costs.

Heck, take these two screenshots as an example:

The first is XIII (Gamecube), the second is Metal of Honor: Rising Sun (PS2). Both were released in 2003. I’d definitely say XIII holds up better visually.

Do it. If people want to pay high prices for brand new video games, let them pay it. I’ll just do what I’ve always done; wait for a sale.

If you think that’s in favor of paying such prices, and defending the practice, I don’t even know what to say.

I can’t control what anyone else does, but I can control what I do, and I’m right there with the post I’m agreeing with: I’ll wait for a sale, and if that sale never comes, I won’t buy it. There’s no disagreement or contradiction there.

Yes, because you know what? It is a solution, if everyone does it. If they started releasing games at $80, and everyone just said “Nope, sorry!” and refused to pay it, that practice would stop really fast. I have a huge game backlog, and there’s tons of great indie games with $10-$25 price tags that won’t be subject to this bullshit.

What’s your plan to discourage this practice, complain about it on Lemmy and then buy the games anyway? I’m sure that’ll be madly successful.

If that sale magnitude doesn’t happen, I won’t buy the game.

It’s really not difficult. You don’t have to buy the game. You can just choose not to play it.

There’s a fundamental disconnect here and I’m not sure where it is, so let me just explain my position and maybe you can tell me where you’re confused.

Let’s take, for instance, a game which at full price is $40, a game that’s $60, and a game that’s $80.

In all of these cases, let’s assume I have decided that I am willing to pay $20.

In the first case, I will wait for a 50% sale, and buy the game.

In the second case, I will wait for a 66% sale, and buy the game.

In the third case, I will wait for a 75% sale, and buy the game.

If that sale magnitude doesn’t happen, I won’t buy the game. Similarly, if I’ve lost interest in the game by the time that sale magnitude happens, I won’t buy the game.

It’s very simple. Nobody is forcing you to pay $80 for a game, and nobody is forcing you to buy it just because it’s 50% off, if the 50% off price is not low enough that you feel it’s worth your money to buy it. It’s OK to just not ever buy a game.

You realize that sales come in varying magnitudes, right? Each individual decides what a game is worth to them, and if that means a 50% sale might have been sufficient for a $60 game, but that it’ll take a 65% sale to make an $80 game worth it, then so be it.

The real punchline will be April 1 2025, when they actually release it.

You encounter the merchant where you can buy the MTX stuff in the first few hours of the game. You can’t even use the majority of them before reaching that point.

I would honestly bet money that they’d designed the game to not have microtransactions, then some executive at the 11th hour told them to find a way to include them, and they made them inconsequential as a sort of malicious compliance. Not that I think it’s OK to have them in the first place, it really soured me on the game initially. I think it’s considerably worse for including them, but they are completely meaningless.

If they shifted back towards the GW1 formula, I’d be at least semi excited about this. That game was great for its time and there really aren’t any other MMOs that have gameplay like that.

As long as the advertisers and corporate bullshit stays on the for-profit solutions and doesn’t start bleeding into everything else, this is fine. Hopefully they’ll act as a wick and draw the corporate interests to themselves.

I use a pretty simple method, not only for 1.20 caves but for any branched exploration:

• When you come to a crossroads or branching path, put a single torch down on the floor in the direction you came from.
  • This creates breadcrumbs you can follow to retrace your steps.
• If you come to a dead end, backtrack to the last crossroads, and put 2 torches down next to each other at the entrance to the path that was the dead end.

When backtracking, if all of the paths are double-torched, you’ve explored the entire branch. Take the single torch path (the way you came from), and put a double-torch down in that direction at the next crossroads, to mark the whole branch as explored. If you’re short on torches, you can pick up all of the double torches before following the single torch path, since you won’t be going back down that way again.

When placing torches to light a path normally, use the walls, not the floor, to avoid confusion. If you’re worried about your ability to remember this, you could use redstone torches for the markers instead of normal ones.