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

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  • I tend to wonder if subscriptions force a FOMO cycle. To keep you playing and paying, they have to bullet-train players to max level and keep you in a carousel of the latest content at all times. That leaves the rest of the game a hollow shell.

    I’ve been getting back into Guild Wars 2 recently, and one of the draws is the tolerable monetization: a new expansion every few years, that you can buy on your own schedule (i. e. when they go on sale), and the level cap is effectively frozen, so you can go idle between releases without a meaningful loss of place. The game has to service even the non-expansion users, and the game design explicitly benefits this: the difficulty and rewards scale so that almost all areas of the game are still worth exploring once you’ve hit level cap, and they can put activities across the map rather than cramming it all in the latest zone.





  • The less economic and tech dependencies China has on the West, the more free they are to act on their own accord.

    The US is concerned about Taiwan-- they wrote a blank cheque of support because it was a DeMoCrAcY back when China was a far weaker economy and military, and it will now be very difficult and expensive to stop reunification. Using TSMC as a shield is no doubt part of policy-- “invade and we blow the tech world back to 2010” is a viable threat until other countries get 7/5/3nm.

    But their fear is more general; they are losing their economic and geopolitical dominance, and one of their big bulwarks-- advanced tech-- is giving way. They’re trying to hype up the fear and concern. Expect a lot more sabre rattling by the West.




  • I tried Sword and Fairy 7 at half-off ($18 with DLC) figuring “could this be an interesting snippet of a branch of gaming that didn’t quite resonate with the West” – we all know the JRPGs, German Industrial Sim Games, and Korean Grindfest MMOs so I wanted to see what 1.4 billion people were playing.

    Two or so hours in, the game itself has some frustrating control aspects (if you enter an “indoors” scene you slow your walk to a crawl, and the maps are often surprisingly narrow), but the combat is very fluid and the graphics quite pretty.

    However, it seems like compatibility is a mess. You can’t tell it “fullscreen at a different resolution than desktop”, and at 4K with all the pretty stuff on, it does pretty intensely tax a 6900XT (I saw the hotspot temperature top 100C). So I tried it under Linux and it seemed to run cooler (since I use 1440p there as “real” desktop resolution instead of 150% scaling) but there’s some weird glitch on the cutscenes where it shows a literal TV-style test pattern instead of a cutscene.