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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new.

    The rationale was to make a 128 player battle royale ala PUBG or Fortnite. You know, shameless trend chasing!

    It was supposed to basically be a spin off, non mainline BF game with the potential to be the next big thing while the next mainline game was being produced, but that only works if BF5 has staying power.

    Which it did not.

    And EA want MONEY, BIG MONEY ASAP!

    So then BF2042 got massively reworked in a tiny amount of time to try to make it into a mainline series game by throwing a ton more developers at it than originally planned, ending up as a rushed, buggy, undercooked mess with tons of crap (half baked half reworked game modes) thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

    That is why distinct armies were replaced with a cadre of mercenaries, as well as the entire 2042 timeframe setting in a world where nation states had basically collapsed already.

    It is also why the maps are gigantic and seem like they were designed for a battle royale.

    I’m guessing also their original plan was to have the much hyped dynamic weather systems serve a similar function as the the closing force fields or bubbles of death that battle royale’s have to force players into conflict and games to eventually end, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to make that work.

    Any questions Vince?







  • No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

    If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

    If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

    If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

    Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

    That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

    It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.



  • He was one of the few OG guntubers to actually have a hard rule of not mixing political or cultural opinions, views or charged rhetoric or lingo in with his discussion of firearms.

    In addition to that, he had far more practical experience than many other guntubers, had far, far more practical advice regarding firearms than most guntubers, and had an exceptionally direct and effective communication style, with plain language and simple yet accurate demonstrations.

    Most (not all, but most) other popular guntubers are highly political, brash, and edgy, highly commercialized themselves and basically turned into gigantic spectacular overproduced shills for whoever is sponsoring them, and participate in creating and maintaining a culture of continuous conspicuous consumption for firearms, akin to FOMO… or they just had no clue what they are talking about.

    Basically, Paul came across as a disciplined range master with a subdued yet wry wit, amidst a sea of overly cocksure, foolhardy guntubers with more money and ego than sense, who he’d likely ban from said range.



  • Before we can commence with therapy relating to your suspected anxiety, adhd and trauma relating to people consistently extracting large amounts of time and money from you whilst making complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing promises (involving the complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing views of multiple third parties you do not personally know) to repay you in some way, which they never do…

    … please allow me to trigger all of your suspected conditions as thoroughly as possible in the name of ethical transparency and consent before we can proceed.

    Don’t worry this will only take 15 minutes to explain adequately if you’re in a good headspace.

    Subject appears irrationally angry and violent for no discernible reason, suspicion of psychosis.



  • Yes, whether or not you are immersed in still, motionless water, being showered by a … shower, or rainfall, or hose, being swept along by a river or undertow, or covered in snow…

    The primary thing that triggers a human response to sweat is just your internal body temperature.

    It doesn’t matter how or what is transmitting heat to you, so long as your body is generally above a certain temperature threshold, you will sweat. Go below a certain general threshold and you will begin to shiver.

    Exactly what those temperature thresholds are vary from person to person, based on your genetics, the climate you are used to living in, what kind of fitness level you have, whether or not you are currently sick and fighting off an infection… etc.

    Generally speaking, I am seeing that humans begin to sweat when their immediate surroundings are 32C or about 90F, but again, different kinds of people used to different environments will have somewhat different thresholds.

    https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1966.21.3.967

    So, perhaps thats a rough approximation of how hot the water of shower or bathtub would have to be for a roughly average person to begin sweating while bathing.



  • Because we are imperfect animals with imperfect survival mechanisms, and sometimes water is actually hot enough to heat your body above what it considers to be its threshold for thermostatic equillibrium.

    Problem: Body Temp Too Hot.

    Solution: Emit Salt Water Tears from basically all of your skin so that the heat can transfer into Salty Tears and then evaporate. Works very well in low humidity situations.

    But also problem: Humidity and temperature in ambient environment is so high that evaporation either does not work at all or is ineffective at dissipating internal body temp to the outside environment.

    Same Solution: Keep sweating even though it doesn’t work, enjoy heat exhaustion/stroke.

    This is the whole problem of a ‘wet bulb’ temperature causing heat exhaustion, stroke or death: If the humidity and temperature are high enough, long enough, its literally impossible for a human body to naturally cool down.


  • Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

    Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

    Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

    Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.


  • I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.


  • I disagree.

    Amazon still owns and operates New World.

    All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.

    They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

    The servers will be shut down in a few days.

    There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.

    Why would you promote a product that does not exist?

    Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

    I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).

    It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

    It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.


  • I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

    Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.