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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • That explains why it was never fixed, the admin running the server seems to have disappeared a week or two before i joined the instance and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them, I even sent them a PM about that issue, but never heard anything back. Considering Fedia still has some issues and even testing the waters recently I’ve been logged out by the “invalid csrf token” problem, I think I’ll just try a different instance again, kbin.run is seeming all right, relatively small, but the owner has been recently active and is updating the instance, even directly posting about the avatar upload bug.

    It’s surprising, actually, just how few truly active kbin instances there are, and I love the hell out of Jerry, but I think he’s got too much on his plate to properly fix up Fedia at the moment, at least, not until kbin is less buggy and he has the time to spare from his many other projects, I hate to step away from Fedia, but since I quit reddit cold turkey and don’t use any other social media whatsoever I’m really relying on a baseline level of usability for all features.



  • Just curious, are you still getting 500s? I left Fedia temporarily because the 500s just got unusably bad, but I’ve noticed I can view my profile and subscriptions without issues now, and the instance I moved to seems like their owner disappeared off the face of the earth, so I’m considering returning, but don’t want to run into 500s anymore.





  • I think there’s a strong possibility you’re correct, especially with that genre. When it comes to purely competitive games continual new content and adjustments keep the masses coming back, and providing those things long term with no monetization is a business suicidal idea, and I think that strong reasoning like that excuses a lot of the cynicism and bad faith behind MTX in those specific cases provided its still relatively fair.

    I give you an A+ for an actual strong argument for MTX (in those and related cases)


  • Personally, yeah, I find it much less offensive if the extra purchases do not nag you in-game and their presence is not missed or noticed in terms of affecting balance.

    For example, Middle Earth Shadow of War infamously let you buy Uruks. Having played the fuck out of that game I can confidently say the game was balanced such that you never needed to do that (apart from the end game grind, but the grind is the gameplay, so if you hit end game and didnt want to grind, you just didn’t wanna keep playing), but having it appear in the menus was jarring and the idea of buying an Uruk with real money juxtaposed next to the mechanical intent of obtaining Uruks through exploration, marking, stalking, and exploiting their weaknesses just stuck out like a cynical sore thumb.

    If they put the Uruk purchases outside the game with no in-game ads and I played through Shadow of War and was like “man holy shit, my Uruks cannot keep up with the curve, this is insanely grindy” and I discovered that you could buy them and skip it, I’d say thats dastardly as well.

    But the happy medium would be balancing it so it wasn’t necessary, but providing an external purchase to milk that revenue if they really still wanted to. That example is moot now anyway since they eventually removed the MTX Uruks entirely.


  • I know and understand the whole idea of maximizing artist hours for cosmetic DLC. It’s an understandable reason for it to exist.

    However, the big thing about MTX to me is the way it changes my perception of the game and how it feels to interact with it. Playing games without in-game cash shops or MTX allows me to focus on the game itself and feel that what I’ve purchased is one cohesive piece that works in a singular purpose towards a goal of something enjoyable to play and rewarding to explore the content of.

    Something like Prey 2016. My entire memory and experience of playing that game is absolutely nothing but the experience of the lore, atmosphere, gameplay, decisions, and the creativity of exploration. At no point was I ever passing over menu options designed to sell me more piecemeal content, I wasn’t wading through a reel of battle pass cosmetics, I wasn’t attempting to ignore little rectangular ads on the main menu asking me to check some skins out.

    And again, I totally understand why those things are there and I’m not inherently against their existence, I enjoy many games where those experiences are a part. In the end, I just believe that being free of that stuff absolutely makes a game feel perceptibly better and more pure, more of a game and less of a transparently monetized product.

    I also feel like there’s a sort of forbidden knowledge aspect to the whole “maximizing artist labor time for cosmetic MTX”. The best way for cosmetic MTX to happen is to utilize extra possible labor time that couldn’t be used elsewhere. I’d love to believe that any cosmetic MTX took no time or development from any other part of the game. I’d love to believe that no amazing visual design for armor or weapons was held because its more premium appearance would better fit a paid item than a free base game one.

    But you’ll never know that for sure. There will always be that inkling of cynical doubt that the cool item got a price tag and the okay one ended up in the base game. That the visual artists are so burnt making constant art for base game and then MTX that their energy couldn’t be focused solely on the core experience. I can assume, I can take the company’s word for it, but I’ll never be able to cleanse my mind of the knowledge that it’s a separate kind of content from the base game.


  • It’s more of a “are good games with microtransactions good regardless of MTX or in spite of them?”

    You can totally have a good game with MTX, but I think it always lowers the quality in some way, and they’re only good in spite. I don’t think OP is suggesting that no MTX guarantees a good game, but that a game should stand on its own merits and sell its whole experience instead of chopping itself up piecemeal




  • I’m sure there is a small amount of extra port work that would need to be done, the big one I can think of is text box size.

    If the Switch version of those EDF games has a unique layout or size of its menus or text boxes compared to previous English localizations, then there would be some amount of new work involved in making sure all lines of text are sized appropriately, or edited if they do not fit correctly.

    Past that, it’s hard to see why they haven’t put them out, I would love to play them again!

    And to your other comment, I’m on a Kbin instance that has a funny time setting, you’re right. I wish I could just say I’m a cool dude from the future.






  • You go up to the magnifying glass icon on the instance that you want to subscribe on (not the instance that the magazine or community actually belongs to), then that’s where you’d search [email protected]

    It should appear and you should be able to follow it. If you are the first person to look up that magazine on your instance it may say that there are zero posts and that the owner of the magazine is your instance’s admin, but as long as the name and the magazine/community icon looks like you’re expecting you can follow it and it’ll start federating in new posts over time.



  • The other problem is that it’s a slippery slope. Theoretically whoever would be in control of essentially killing these people would be the ones who make the final decision on who those people actually are.

    With that level of power corruption will be unavoidable and people that are not even actually flat earthers will die as well due to their deaths being convenient in unrelated ways for the group that decides which flat earthers get jettisoned into space. I don’t think anyone should have that power, humanity has more than proven by now that placing people into positions of that much power never works out squeaky clean.