If you’re playing FFX/X-2 on PC, consider installing the Untitled Project X mod. It fixes some stuff and adds more graphics/UI options, but one of the most significant changes is that it allows you to toggle exp to the whole party regardless of participation.

It completely eliminates the “swap every character in to guard for 1 turn” hassle. You basically never need to grind, because every single character stays properly leveled. Basically, the game difficulty was balanced as if you fully utilized every single character in every fight. So the mod allows your exp gains to reflect that expectation, without needing to mindlessly swap each character out every time.

Currently working my way through Legend of Legaia. I’m shamelessly using some cheats to alleviate the grinding, because the American version of the game is ~4x more grindy than the Japanese version, and combat is much harder. (Yes, they slashed all of the exp and drop rates for the English release, along with making enemies significantly stronger.)

In the American version of the game, you need to stop and grind quite a bit just to be able to afford the gear for each new area. But in the Japanese version, you can pretty much steamroll enemies that are at your level, even without proper gearing. And since you have more gold, you never need to stop and grind. Hell, you actually end up with an abundance of gold in the Japanese version, meaning you don’t need to worry about things like being able to afford healing items. Which, again, just makes the game that much easier.

And quite frankly, I’m way too busy to be able to stop and grind. So I use cheats to level the playing field. I’m about halfway through the second area so far. No big hangups since I’ve played through it probably a dozen times.

I also just beat Megaman Legends again, and have moved onto Legends 2; I haven’t ever actually beaten 2, so it’ll be an adventure. I had forgotten how much more smooth the controls in 2 are, so it has been a pleasant surprise so far. IIRC, Legends 1 was made before DualShock controllers were common, so they couldn’t rely on the controllers having twin sticks. So the movement is very stilted, with turning on your shoulder buttons. Legends 2 actually allows for a true shooter layout with twin stick controls, so I don’t feel like the controls are constantly fighting me.

Yup. Every single home price history on Zillow right now is like “Sold 2017 @ $200k… Listed yesterday @ $375k… Sold today @ $400k”

It’s misleading, at best. They don’t actually restrict sales on other platforms at all. You’re free to sell your game at whatever price you want. The only restrictions they place are on Steam keys which unlock the game for a Steam account. They restrict the price of Steam keys, because they want price parity for Steam keys. But you’re still welcome to sell non-Steam versions of your game at whatever price you want. Hell, you can give it away for free if you want, as long as it’s not giving away steam keys.

For instance, GoG doesn’t distribute games via Steam keys, so you can sell your game on GoG for cheaper.

EDIT: Apparently, the complaint was filed by the CEO of a “Parental Control” company that has a partnership with Meta. This story becomes increasingly ridiculous.

Yeah, there was a similar class-action lawsuit making the rounds in America a few months ago. It failed to take off, because PC gamers pretty unanimously went “lmao get off your bullshit” as soon as they saw what the lawsuit was alleging. It was very heavily advertised on Meta platforms.

Yeah, I have also experienced this. Particularly annoying when I’m at work, waiting on emails to come in. Then I realize my email has been frozen in the background for 45 minutes, because Firefox silently froze all my tabs and needs to restart for an update.

That’s only for defederating. Blocking is local, and basically just hides the instance from your feed.

Higher than the blatant pedo instances? Those are too far down on the list, tbh.

Sort of. It does block the users, but only on your specific instance. If you’re interacting with a post on another instance and that instance is federated with them, you’ll still see them on that third instance.

Defederating basically takes the three instances from a closed triangle ◺ (where all users can see and post on all three instances) to an open triangle ∟ (where your instance and the defederated instance are blocked from each other, but the third instance can still see and interact with both.)

Did anybody say admins aren’t entitled to block stuff?

I mean, it’s a user complaining about defederation from known nazi instances. It gives off some big “free speech absolutist (as long as the free speech is hate speech)” vibes.

User just wanted a system to see everything and block what they didn’t want.

That system already exists. You can spin up your own instance in like 15 minutes, and have access to the entire unfiltered fediverse. But nobody wants to do that, because nobody actually wants to see the unfiltered fediverse. That shit is basically rawdogging the internet, because it’s full of extremists and pedophiles.

There is only one side who benefits from the “everything unfiltered by default, the user has to individually wade through mountains of slurs, hate, doxxing, and child porn to manually block all of them” option. And it isn’t the user. The only side that benefits is the side that now gets to peddle their BS to a wider audience.

If you genuinely want the fediverse to improve and grow, advocating for unfiltering isn’t the way. That shit will scare off any curious new users faster than any kind of reasonable filtering would. Imagine you make a new account, and your first interactions are blocking a thousand individual instances just so you don’t end up on a federal watch list.

The number of instances, not accounts. The instance is the entire server. All of Lemmy.world would be one instance.

Worth noting that there are lots of people who also run personal instances off of their home server. So like they may be the only user in that instance, or have a few friends who use it too. And they would also count as one instance on this chart.

Yeah, every now and then I hop over to an account on another instance, and immediately remember why I tend to hang out on .world…

.world isn’t perfect, but holy hell some of the other instances are just buried in tankie BS.

Yeah, there are more further down in the list too. I was honestly shocked to see how many blatant pedo instances there were.

Makes me wonder about all the times that instances like lemmy.world got brigaded by child porn posters. Was it people against the fediverse, or just shit leaking in from the blatant pedo instances?

Wow, there’s a lot more pedophilia stuff on there than I initially realized. Really blatant shit too? I’m surprised that’s even allowed without the feds cracking down on it immediately, because the whole point of ActuvityPub is that everything is open. So how the hell do the pedos manage to hide their tracks?

Probably important to remember that Git was designed by Linus Torvalds, the same dude who developed the Linux kernel, and who is infamous for going off on big rage-fueled rants when questioned about his methods. So yeah, it’s going to be clunky and obtuse.

And that’s exactly why Epic paid for the exclusive.

Glad you figured your edit out before you got too deep. Yeah, port forwarding is a tricky beast, because there’s no “good” way to do it. Either you have open ports exposed to the internet, or you have everything bouncing off of a third-party service. Neither option is great.

You can hide all of that on your sidebar customization settings, but yeah it’s annoying that it’s turned on by default. The Discover is occasionally useful, but I honestly use Overseerr for discoverability more than I use Plex’s built-in search.

My biggest complaint with Plex is the lack of support for .m3u8 playlists. I want to be able to give it a list of livestreams, and then tune into those via Plex. Plex obviously already has live-streaming support built in via their Plex channels, but they have actively worked against custom livestream playlists, (it used to be supported via an extension, but they removed extension support.)

There have been a few famous (or infamous) cases of game devs adding crack checks into their games. Basically, the devs recognize that cracking is inevitable. So instead of trying to make harder and harder DRM methods, they simply started including checks to see if the player was using a cracked copy. If they did, they could change the game in some way. This can actually be fairly effective for the reasons you mentioned: A cracker gets the game to boot, and maybe plays the first five minutes or so. Then they send it out the door without actually verifying anything further. Because they’re rushing to be the first, so they won’t bother doing a full playthrough to ensure everything works. So when the player gets ahold of it, they’re the ones who experience all the issues.

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, for instance, made the game increasingly frustrating to play. It would start removing treasure you had already collected, so you had to recollect it. And in a game where your progress is tracked via collections, that means it’s a huge time-sink. And if you somehow managed to get all the way to the final boss, the game would crash and delete your save so you had to completely start over.

Game Dev Tycoon is another example. The devs themselves actually posted a “cracked” version of their game on day 1. So all the various sites grabbed it and started seeding their torrents. It’s a game where you spend time and money developing games. And the cracked version also includes a piracy feature, where as you gain popularity you also see your profits getting eaten by piracy. And the game will slowly ratchet up the amount that you lose to piracy, until it’s eventually impossible to make a profit. Notably, there was no in-game way to combat the piracy or stop it from eating into your profits.

That latter example was used to great effect, because it sent all of the pirates to the steam message boards, to complain about piracy in their games and ask if there was a way to develop DRM to combat it. In essence, they were tricked into ratting on themselves. Because if you were playing a legit copy, you wouldn’t have any issues with piracy.

I mean, Palworld suffered from the exact opposite problem, where the game received basically no post-launch content. So once players burned through the main game, there was very little reason to keep playing.

This just goes to show that support needs to both exist and be something players agree with.