If you assume they’re from countries with weaker economies. Meanwhile, I live in the US, and I survive under the poverty line. Nothing about the US is ‘region-locked’, I’m just treated like shit for being disabled. It’s a lack of income first and foremost.
Normally I’d say that reddit/lemmy are poor choices for a community - but if the competitor is a live-chat like discord? Yeah. Lemmy is better.
Project leads would just need to make sure to direct users straight to a specific instance that allows instant/unmoderated sign-ups, or else that element of friction will occur – and certainly not start the whole “there’s many instances, pick the one that’s right for you!” spiel, or users will give up immediately. I thought similarly about matrix - on-boarding users to a matrix community would be helped by explicitly writing a guide for them to do so, but then we’re back to step 1, where making a discord channel is quicker than writing instructions.
Everyone in this comment section is yelling about how bad discord is, telling people to use forums or matrix instead. No one is asking “why?”. Why aren’t people using forums or matrix? Because the path to user growth isn’t guilting people into the ‘morally correct’ choice, it’s making a product they want to use.
Why are small communities using discord over forums? Well, we’re talking about small projects, hobbies, and volunteer work. Hosting a forum costs both time and money - renting server space and configuring/managing both the forum and the server. Making a discord channel is instant and free. You want your favorite project to have a forum? Then take up the mantle of hosting and maintaining it yourself. You want all projects to use a forum? Develop a forum system that you absorb the hosting costs for. Neither of these exist, so communities use discord.
Why are small communities using discord over matrix? I’m in my 30s, I spend all day on my PC, I’ve taken a couple years of college courses in programming. Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort. Discord doesn’t. For every step of friction, a product will bleed users. Matrix is cumbersome to set up and use, and it’s copying something that already exists and does it better for the end-user experience. It shouldn’t be surprising that people prefer discord. Want that to change? Start contributing code to matrix and refine the user on-boarding process.
Instead of stating opinions, ask questions. That’s how things get changed. No amount of moral grandstanding will change end-users, no matter how correct you might be.
Seconding these choices. Of note in the second link, TTV LOL PRO is pretty great. It has worked when every other ad-blocking attempt is (temporarily) quashed. It requires manual updating, but considering you’ll know when to update because ads are getting through, it’s not a hassle.
https://github.com/younesaassila/ttv-lol-pro
Edit: Nevermind, there’s an extension hosted through mozilla now, so it auto-updates. Get that instead.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ttv-lol-pro/
Most of what I see as ‘issues’ are personal preferences. Stuff like railroaded dialog choices even worse than Fallout 4, or stiff/awkward voice acting, or landing on planets being randomly generated despite claims otherwise. But as for actual issues, two things stood out to me: spaceship flight is very dangerous because bumping into things has a good chance of bugging the physics engine and killing you instantly (but other times, barely even registering damage). And seeing a player get stuck because they got a bounty without even knowing it, and then the bounty was making them shoot-on-sight by guards and them having no clue how to deal with the bounty. I’m sure there’s a perfectly simple way out of the situation, but without any communication to the player, that’s nothing but frustration. Add in broken NPC pathing/animations (people getting stuck inside objects like bar counters), making it all-too-easy to fall down ladder holes in ships, and horrible performance optimization (with Todd Howard being quoted telling people to just buy better computers), and I think it’ll need a bit of polish before really considering giving it a shot.
Well, sure. And Starfield follows in the wake of Fallout 4’s lackluster RPG experience, offering shallow conversations and the illusion of choice. After Fallout 4, I’m not sure I can get myself to play another game modeled after the same system of “Would you like a quest? [Yes/Yes but sarcastic/One question first then yes/Maybe later]”. If the story is railroaded, Starfield and NMS aren’t too different then - there’s a main quest line, with things to learn and people to meet, and you check off the boxes until it’s done.
But as to whether they should be compared, I think it’s unavoidable. There’s too much overlap, and no other games like it. Games in which you can customize a space ship, explore thousands of planets, make a home base on any planet you want, and are incentivized to explore and find new places and meet new people? NMS, Starfield, Elite Dangerous, maybe Star Citizen. With some similar gameplay elements and a small pool of games, comparison is natural and expected. Nothing wrong with that.
Fair enough, but there’s a difference between reading headlines/articles to make a judgement, and watching actual real-time gameplay for several hours to make a judgement. The only difference was that I wasn’t the one holding the controller. If several hours of uninterrupted unedited gameplay isn’t enough to make a surface-level observation, I’m not sure what is.
Plus, I was just saying how what I saw made me feel, and I said I’d rather play one game over another. If we want to talk about unnecessarily strong opinions, let’s start with you attempting to shut down my honest two cents to reinforce your negative worldview. Let’s all be kind to each other, okay? :)
I haven’t bought Starfield, and I don’t plan to, but I watched some gameplay and… Well, the game is a pile of issues. And the few bits that are acceptable are bits I’ve already seen from NMS - and their implementation is usually better than Starfield. So as I’m watching Starfield footage, all I can feel is a desire to reinstall NMS and play that instead… And I’m not even a big NMS fan. It’s not a good sign if your ‘revolutionary’ game already feels beat out by competition that had existed before your game was even halfway in development. Bethesda had all the time and manpower in the world to compete with NMS, and still fell short.
That was a >100gb download that took the moderators time to download and test. And the admins weren’t involved. All the claims of admins backing the torrent or deleting comments has had zero proof, as it was all hysteria drummed up by the psychotic cracker called Empress, who has had a long standing imaginary feud with 1337x.
1337x can have malware in anything, as anyone can upload. The volunteer moderators downloaded and tested it as soon as they could. I’m sorry some people downloaded it faster, but there’s no conspiracy here.
You’d be surprised how many steam games have no DRM other than steam itself. And how easy it is to put in a replacement (open-source) dll that acts as a steam emulator and runs the games without steam. I’d say… pretty much every non-AAA game on steam can have DRM removed this way. It’s such barebones DRM that I can’t really find reason to be angry at it.