gila

We have pretty strong courts though and if she loses the judgement she’ll likely be ordered to pay your friends’ costs.

The post is here: https://lemmy.ml/post/16965449

In short, they wanted to keep the tabs bookmarked but didn’t like working with the bookmarks implementations in conventional browsers

Summit fits image to screen horizontally, ideal layout for me

Have we as users already given up on self-curation via blocks and filters? It seems an essential consideration for the design of this platform.

The recent wave of posts add nothing new to the discussion that I can tell. Maybe we need a sidebar link to help remind people of the instance federation principles, and perhaps help guide them toward use of the features Lemmy provides?

I appreciate the agnosticism. Preserving federation should never be considered as indicative of any position held by the instance, it’s just what’s best for the network.

I don’t have much to add to the local community but have been really pleased that I’m able to interact with most other instances from this one and plan to donate when I can.

It was back around 2018 that I was first learning the ropes in b2b sales, but I do think I felt similarly about people being able to detect parts of what I’d written that were copypasted, not lead-specific. So I just stopped copypasting stuff, wrote short nice genuine emails, opened up to the people that wrote back. Called the ones that didn’t. Always hated phone calls beforehand, but some good experiences on a few early calls definitely eased my nervousness.

I remember the first time I had to call the director of a big competitor, he was like “What was that? I can’t hear you, I’ll have to put the top down. I’m joyriding in my [luxury sports car] right now”. I found that extremely funny and it really broke the ice. And once I was able to be casual with him, I found it easy with pretty much everyone.

There has been a lot of investment into exhibition matches over the past few years, and into a Major League Cricket domestic competition which started in 2023.

There have been failed attempts at domestic leagues in the past, but MLC is a T20 competition. That’s a shorter and more accessible form of the game where a match generally takes around 3 hours to complete.

That could make a difference, because it’s a lot easier to keep kids interested for a few hours vs. the more traditional formats that could last anywhere between 8 hours, up to 5 days.

It’s only a 1-month season though, 25 matches over the course of July. I should hopefully make it to a few of them!

Losslesscut is what you want for this. It’s basic and concatenates without re-encoding. And it’s open source (as is handbrake)

Your overall point seems to be that despite the wide acclaim on launch & yourself / your peer group’s historic enthusiasm for blizzard games, you came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth engaging with the game via word-of-mouth. What is there to argue about that? The reasons you shared generally don’t ring true to me, but I’m not the arbiter of your collective impressions. At the start of this comment chain I tried to elucidate genuine reasons to dislike it - either reasons that haven’t been already addressed for a significant part of the game’s lifecycle, and aren’t ones where D4 is simply guilty by association with blizzard or another of their games. I think the reasons you’ve given generally fall into these categories.

• on initial dev/community response, I agree specifically vulnerable damage didn’t take long to be revealed as overpowered & that cheapened the launch meta. The first dev stream primarily served to address that issue. I’d agree it was significant enough an issue to warrant addressing quickly, but I’d disagree that the response was outside the scope of general expectation for post-launch corrections to the meta of an ARPG. Here I think you’re mistaking the acknowledgement of any fault with the game as going into “damage control” mode, likely due to the issue being played up by commentators. I acknowledge they went into that mode later - following the S1 mid-season patch.

• on sticking with bad design, or the intention behind it, it’s hard to respond about the examples you’ve given because the fact both minions & dungeons have been reworked exemplifies that isn’t true. Minions received small updates in S2, buffs & further reworks in S4. Many of the more annoying dungeon affixes were removed for S2 - lightning storm affix was also removed for S4. You could certainly argue that they were intentional parts of the design during the development stage, but that dev time was straight up sacrificed to improve it, so it’s clear to me they aren’t staunch about really any part of the design. Indeed following the codex reworks, running a normal dungeon is no longer necessary at any stage of the game (except for the sorc lvl15 quest). You can still get aspects that way if you want, but you can also get them all from salvaging gear over time. It’s optional content, and additionally there are many small tweaks over the seasons I’d describe as “surprises” - minor things like new animations for normal mobs in particular locations, spider elites creeping down from the roof of a cave, and other small touches that cumulatively make dungeons more interesting / less repetitive. These are mostly not mentioned in patch notes and as such have been almost completely ignored by commentators.

• on monetisation, as someone that has had multiple battle passes, they aren’t worth it. There’s simply very little motivation to buy them or any of the individual paid cosmetics in the game, because they aren’t meaningfully better than the free cosmetics. My toons don’t wear my paid cosmetics - it’s literally more interesting to go without transmog. The free cosmetics are good enough & that way there’s at least variety in what’s displayed on the loading screens. When you refer to monetisation as a problem with this game, my question in response is - acknowledging the state of live service game monetisation is generally predatory - how could it be less so in D4? Isn’t an entirely optional system that doesn’t involve fomo about as good a place as you could expect the monetisation to be in?

There are 2 exceptions in my mind regarding generally anti-consumer stuff (the isolated incidents I referred to earlier). That is 1. additional DRM that was in place during the early access period for purchasers of the collector’s edition, and 2. the dark pattern implementation causing unintentional activation of S1 battle pass tokens for that same group. These are both things I disagree strongly with on principle, and if anyone dropped the game because of them - I’d agree with them. Indeed when my buddy ran into DRM roadblocks during early access, I promptly refunded my collector’s edition and purchased the standard one upon launch instead.

Now in regards to yours/your friends initial impressions, I think it’s worth considering the impact of external factors such as Blizzard’s reputation, and the general launch state of the litany of games released post-covid delays during 2022-23, both of which I think served to negatively impact interest at launch. IIRC it was their first major non-WoW release following the revelation of issues that culminated in the DFEH lawsuit, and the resulting major changes in company structure. I actually think D4’s launch state is pretty admirable overall in light of those issues, but could certainly understand if Blizzard fans were trepidatious about continuing to support them at the time. Against a backdrop of failed major launches, it’d at least make a lot of sense to wait for post-launch independent feedback.

And likewise if they had held off until that S1 midseason patch where everything was nerfed to shit and people logged in to find their builds suddenly needed extensive reworking, I’d agree with anyone dropping interest in the aftermath of that. I did too, temporarily.

Lastly, keep in mind that they had Megan Fox advertising the game in Superbowl ads. I don’t think it’s the case that D4’s launch state was bad and caused a noteworthy player exodus. I think that ARPG’s simply aren’t that mass-marketable, and that advertising reached a lot of people that otherwise wouldn’t pay D4 any mind, and that group just aren’t generally interested in that kind of game. And so once they reconciled how it was advertised vs what it is, they stopped playing. From my perspective, that isn’t meaningful in terms of analysing whether it’s a good game.

The term benefit by definition means an advantage when compared to the ‘norm’. In places where healthcare is socialised, you don’t really have ‘benefits’ associated with your job. “Ensuring everyone has good benefits” is just socialising with extra steps.

Good luck passing that through the current American political system. He might as well promise UBI lol, what a crock.

I wrote out a longer reply but my phone died partway through. Suffice to say, fair enough, I can’t argue with your lived experience. I still disagree about several of your points - minion AI was reworked in S4 - outside a couple of isolated incidents, monetisation is relatively fair - timeline/urgency of dev/community response re: post-launch corrections (“damage control” mode specifically followed a horrible S1 mid-season patch). But ultimately your opinion is valid and I’m happy to agree to disagree.

I think you’re playing into a content creator-driven narrative that doesn’t quite exist for the reasons you think. It isn’t quite as simple as D4 bad, followed by D4 saved (or the delicate nuance of ‘D4 mid’). Indeed masses already flipped their use of these polar opposite terms several times since its release. This is more of a treadmill you’re on to drive engagement, views. If you’re bored with a game, that doesn’t necessarily have to be because the game is bad. It could just be that the available content has run its natural course for you. This explanation just doesn’t compel people to watch videos about it, though. It can be more satisfying to have it explained to you that there is a problem with the game, that some external factor is inhibiting your enjoyment of it.

I just don’t think that is an accurate representation of reality in this case. I think the latent majority audience isn’t terminally online, doesn’t form their opinions based on what a content creator said, doesn’t watch a line on the steam charts page and cheer when its direction validates them. They just play the game until they’re done, and enjoy their time with it. And that by no means is the same thing as being a ‘casual’.

Ya, that’s a subreddit for an online game tho - being a circlejerk of negativity is like its primary function, even for breakout hits like Helldivers or The Finals. It’s part of why I left reddit completely, and why “someone online said it’s bad” doesn’t pass the sniff test for legitimate criticism for me. As an ARPG enthusiast, I went in with the expectation that it was neither POE nor Diablo Immortal; that I’d play it alongside other ARPG’s cyclically; that it’d be made or broken by the quality of the seasonal content & meta.

I understand it fell short of others’ expectations, but I think that’s primarily an issue with the expectations. That I’d rather play D4 right now over PoE or Last Epoch doesn’t mean that those aren’t great games, they just don’t have that fresh content right now and that’s ok, despite that you can easily find equivalent negative discourse about it. And if D4 S5 sucks, the inverse will also be true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_IV#Reception

There wasn’t really any discontent online about the base game mechanics until there was discontent about the live service content for S1 a couple of months later.

I might be ignoring nonsense complaints like about barb nerfs despite barb being consistently the most powerful class by a significant margin to this day, simply due to having more slots for more affixes & legendary powers

That’s just not consistent with the reality that Diablo 4 was released to wide acclaim. Wolcen was far worse than D4 in almost every area. I think you just got farmed for engagement, because contrarianism is trendy.

They adjusted the level scaling for S3, with different thresholds depending on the world tier you’re in. As you approach the monster level cap for a given world tier, the scaling slows down so that it’s outpaced by the player level.

I agree it shouldn’t have scaled 1:1 all the way to max level on launch, but people are super quick to forget how well D4 was generally received on launch. It was literally used as a counterexample to games that launched badly, “it was more like a toddler trying to make an MMO” seems like a dishonest characterisation to me. What complaints do you have that aren’t long since resolved?

Reminder that teaching while drunk is perfectly legal in Florida

Thanks! Got the script from the TwitchAdSolutions GitHub and it seems to work well

Doesn’t work on Twitch for me (using Firefox). I’ve had some success using ‘Purple Adblock’, but it works by connecting to a public proxy in an ad-free country for the duration of the ad - so it has issues during peak and can get you stuck in a loop

I was initially puzzled about the differences in bacon between US/CA and Aus, thought it must be due to different animals or meat production. Then I realised that it’s just a different cut of bacon - mostly only the “streaky” bacon seems to be popular in US/CA. In Aus we usually have shortcut or middle bacon, and it’s way better IMO. Like a bacon steak in comparison, meatier and not swimming in fat.

1. Install Flatpak

sudo apt install flatpak

(If you’re running GNOME also install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak)

2. Add Flathub repo to sources

sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Now you can just run the software app and there’s a drop-down on each app’s page where you can select which repo to install from. Flathub will almost always have the latest versions. You could have both versions installed simultaneously if you want. There’s also just generally more packages available on flathub.