Also there’s already a ton of depth on the game

I think I’m too jaded in this regard. Reading the wiki I don’t really see depth. Sure, there are activities with fun names, but they are all the same (you start the activity, you walk to finish it, you get random rewards). And all the items seem to be either for selling, basic crafting or just giving you a boost percentage for the activities you’re already doing.

What the activities are missing are risk/reward, decision making, surprises, etc. Or as you’d say in game design “meaningful choices”.

Sure, you have the choice on what skill you work on, but besides skill go up, items to make the activity faster and gold (not sure what it’s for, besides buying mats/items again?) that seems to be it.

I guess combat could help if there’s actual resource investment and risk there. Like are you going to tackle this level 10 monster for higher rewards, with more likelihood to either fail (or spend extra resources on healing potions or whatever)? Or play it save and go against weaker monsters? There should also be extra gold sinks to work for / use the money you accumulated, be it limited use items, cosmetics and so on. And of course ways to play the game differently from other players, like classes, masteries, skill trees or whatever (and no, clicking an activity that says “Sandcastle Building” vs clicking “Ship repair” aren’t really choices).

Just from someone who values gameplay a lot, I don’t see much difference in playing the game for an hour or 100 hours, in the end it keeps boiling down to the same actions with no depth attached. Personally I didn’t see the game value of it, compared to a step tracker (just that the step tracker doesn’t stop counting when it’s “full”, I didn’t like the step mechanic either where you get bonus steps only. If I’ve done my walking for the day I want to spend the steps, not select an activity and I get double steps for it next time I walk).

Ah yeah, I’m not a big mobile game fan and heavily play PC games. I just missed the draw of it, but had wrong expectations probably. In my head it was more of a sandbox combat game with gathering/crafting, so I kept trying to get to the actual game part :)

While I’m not motivated at all by just achievements or grinding for grinding sake (incremental games are a slight exception there, but progress is much faster / you do have some goals dangled in front of your face). You’re probably aiming more for a classic fitness tracker, but instead of step counts, graphs and so on you present it in game form. Which is valid, but just not what I was after.

As it gets brought up in this thread: When it came out I actually liked Pokemon GO, because the gameplay was interesting. Originally it only showed Pokemon near you and how far they are away (with 1, 2 or 3 foot steps). Which meant you wandered around and actually met people back in the city, grouped up to search or they knew where it was. That all got dumbed down until everyone was just sitting at the same spot and farming unfortunately :-/

I tried it out a while ago and didn’t mesh with it at all. Like the options I had was gather things, minor crafting and traveling. But zero goals or combat (as far as I could tell at the beginning). So after going around, gathering and crafting a bit I got bored and gave up.

Hell, I even traveled around to just find if there are any encounters or places with more happening and I didn’t find anything.

So it felt meaningless to grind with nothing to grind for.

Steam simply due to the convenience and already having a ton of games there. Steam sales are nice too of course.

GOG is awesome, but more for older games or for games I want to play at a LAN. Like the good old days where you hang out with friends, throw a CD (or now USB stick) their way and ten minutes later you’re playing together.

That’s just a tiny tiny part of it.

And on the other end are the actual ads, which are part of marketing campaigns. Where each campaign can define a specific target demographic (doesn’t have to, but usually they do as it’s just wasting money otherwise).

So for makeup the ad might target white single women in the age of 16 to 45 who live in better income areas for example.

I bet you have a hundred conversations with your friends where you didn’t receive a fitting ad afterwards.

It’s not listening to actual words, that’s already too complex (you’d have to parse language for that, which those low power chips can’t do). It’s listening for syllables, Oh-Kay-Goo-Gle or whatever. Depends on the chip and implementation of course, which is also why you get false positives when someone says something similar.

If you add more syllables to that then your phone would activate literally all the time, with tons of false positives.

Seriously, if we had low powered voice recording + voice to text you’d already have instant conversation subtitles on your phone, instant translation and so on. We simply don’t have that yet, those features do exist but they are power hungry (so if you do use them say goodbye to your battery life).

One is a bug, one is just a lawsuit that went nowhere, one is just an accusation (Google did pay a fine, but for geolocation tracking, not voice), the Amazon one is pretty bad, but again it’s not for a phone!!!

Yes, if your phone assistant accidentally activates then your voice might be uploaded without you knowing. That’s a fact. But you agreed to that by enabling the voice assistant (it even warns you about this).

If you switch your voice assistant off (I have) then you don’t have this issue. What is so difficult to understand here?

The low powered chips really just listen to a few syllables, they can easily have false positives. That’s just a technical aspect of it.

That’s more of a bug instead of someone actively monitoring you. The device accidentally thought you activated it, so it started listening.

You wouldn’t be able to access those recordings if they were trying to spy on you.

Besides that, you literally agreed to it when buying and setting the device up. This is not the case with your phone (if you switch the assistant off, if it’s on and heard the keyword it might still upload data of course).

There have been plenty of tests where CPU and network usage were monitored with one phone.

Once in a quiet soundproof room compared to sitting next to a conversation.

Zero difference.

Recording and parsing audio would kill your battery. And it’s not necessary when most people freely provide their data when using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, …

There has been zero proof about illegal recording, even though it would be easy to find.

sigh You’re hanging out with your friend, both your phones are in the same location, same wifi, you’re friends on Facebook or whatever.

So you get ads for things they are interested in. No need to listen to your conversation.

The phones have highly optimized functions to listen to keywords. That’s the reason why you can’t change “OK Google” to “OK Jarvis” or whatever you want. Your phone needs to do this locally without wasting battery.

Until the keywords get said the listening is extremely basic. As soon as you say the keywords then the full audio processing kicks in, often including sending what you say to a server.

Mate, your Alexa is plugged in, it’s not a phone. You agree to your Alexa constantly listening when you buy it. It’s a feature, not a bug.

If your phone would listen as much as your Alexa you’d be out of battery in three hours.

Ask Meta?

Could be anti bot protection, or a feature where you can instantly start recording for creating new posts.

I don’t install shit like Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.

Speech to voice has gotten extremely good by now, but the good stuff needs CPU power. Not something you’d run on your phone 24/7 without your demolishing your battery.

You do realize you’re in Funny: Home of the Haha@lemmy.world?

I wouldn’t expect high quality takes here. You’ll either have to curate the communities you see, or quit social media altogether I’m afraid.

Either way, it’s probably a good thing to check your attitude :)

That one is super easy. Your wife is near you and possibly friends on Facebook with you. The ad system knows that and that’s why your wife sees the ad, as there is a high likelihood that you talked with her about this topic. Though the ad seems to have a shitty target audience definition, your wife should never see it if she’s not into computers herself (waste of money marketing wise).

This is similar to a friend of yours having a new hobby, looked up a lot of stuff about it online, you hang out with them for two hours at a café and suddenly you get ads for this hobby (as it was very likely a topic in your conversation). No need to record your conversation, people are predictable.

designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances

Would make the whole thing even worse, as I could create several new instances with 10 bot users each, then hammer out the votes.

The entire problem is that you can’t trace back each vote to a genuine user. It would be bad in case of fake instances that create 100 user accounts and upvote/downvote stuff, but you can ban the instance. It would be a disaster if a big instance creates fake votes (like lemmy.world suddenly adds 1000 fake users and uses them to manipulate other instances, if votes were anonymous you couldn’t check if it’s genuine lemmy.world users or fake accounts).

It would be damn easy to look up the instance and their “users” and see that the users are not genuine. Then ban the whole instance.

The big question is why did this topic come up “out of nowhere”?

And there can be several reasons!

1. You unconsciously saw an ad for it (could even be a billboard while driving) and that’s why you started to discuss this topic. If it’s a new ad it now also pops up on your phone (as it’s a marketing campaign) and you immediately recognize it because you’ve seen it before and discussed it

2. The ad campaign has been running for ages, but you never paid attention to it. Now that you discussed this topic with a friend you suddenly noticed the ad. Nothing changed ads wise, you just never paid attention to the topic

3. It’s a popular topic in general, could be in the news, could be hip at the moment, for some reason you and your friend started to talk about it, where did it come from?

There’s so many ways this can go. And if we go back to tracking: All it takes is for a friend of yours to later search something related and it’s also hard tracked (and then linked back to you as you hung out with them). Which can be a double whammy. Your phone being “ungoogled” is also worthless if you use Google, Facebook, Instagram or whatever.

This is only partially true. Yes, it’s listening for those keywords, but only for them. Sometimes that’s even an extra chip in your phone, otherwise it would kill your battery in no time.

Which is one of the reasons you can’t just customize the command to whatever you want to say.