Spyke

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Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t

In my humble opinion, a twitter-like platform needs a big central algorithm that can associate posts with certain topics and interests to be able to serve up an interesting feed, because most people are just kind of shouting into the void and that endless storm of posts has to be filtered and organized somehow, otherwise everything you see is just benign uninteresting garbage. Lemmy/Kbin have the advantage that by nature all posts are neatly sorted into topic-based communities, and it's a lot easier to subscribe to the stuff you find interesting, and block the stuff you don't like.

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Starfield is Going to be “a Modder’s Paradise” – Todd Howard

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In theory, modders asking to be compensated for their work is not that outlandish of an idea, however in practice there are a ton of problems that need to be solved when going down this rabbit hole:

  • IP and ownership: Is the mod really 100% originally created by the seller?
  • Compatibility: The game is going to be recieving big updates, is there a garantuee that the mod will remain compatible, or be updated as well?
  • Dependencies: Does the mod require other mods? Are the creators of that mod OK with their work being used to make money by others? What if the required mod breaks or becomes unavailable?
  • Load order: Anyone who's modded Skyrim or Fallout before knows how fickle mods can be, often requiring specific configs and tweaks to the load order. Is Bethesda going to offer tools for that alongside their store?
  • Quality Assurance: Am I even getting my money's worth? Is there a refund policy?

All of these proved to be major issues when they tried a paid mod store for Skyrim. Stolen mods, a fishing mod that required an animation framework mod who's creater demanded the fishing mod be taken down, mods that had major incompatibilities with other popular mods, and bought mods just inserting themselves wherever they felt like in the load order.

If Bethesda wanted to create an official mod store, it would need to be carefully curated, with contracts with the modders requiring them to keep their mods updated, and seriously upgraded tools for configuring purchased mods. Honestly, I just don't quite see it happening.

RPG

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Thoughts on D&D 5e vs. Pathfinder 2e?

Having ran PF2e for about ~40 sessions and listening to several actual play podcasts using it, I absolutely love it, and I would be hard pressed to come up with any reason to pick DnD 5e over PF2e.

As a GM, it provides a ton of useful tools that are either broken or straight up missing in 5e, for example when creating encounters, calculating the difficulty of encounters based on the monster's challenge rating actually works, all the magic items have an explicit cost, all the player races have actual lore and "this is how others percieve you" that you can work off of instead of just "you make it up :)", the monsters have actual interesting abilities instead of just being big sacks of hitpoints, and a solo boss monster can still be seriously dangerous instead of just immediately being overwhelmed by the action economy.

The language in the rules is more technical, but in doing so it drastically reduces the room for misinterpretations. The trait system also helps this, for example most undead have the "mindless" trait, which means they are immune to any spell effect with the "mind affecting" trait. Everything being tagged, and interactions being spelled out in this way, just makes resolving spells so much easier.

On the player side, PF2e offers you meaningful choices at every level, and not just picking class, race and subclass and then being stuck on train tracks like in 5e. The action economy is simplified, and instead of action, movement action, bonus action, interact action you just have three actions. Those can be spent on anything you want. Skills like athletics, acrobatics, intimidation, diplomacy, deception and probably more I'm forgetting right now have actual codified uses in combat instead of requiring on the fly house rulings from the GM to be useful. Martial characters actually scale well into late game and aren't just completely overshadowed by casters.

Finally, I just want to note that our group uses FoundryVTT to play our games, and the way the system is implemented there is just incredible. So many useful Quality of life features that I never even knew I wanted until I had them, and now they're glaringly absent in other systems. Foundry and PF2e really go together like PB & J.


Most people who I see saying they prefer 5e say that it's more "rules-light" and roleplay oriented, but it really isn't, at least by RAW. It's only rules light when you ignore half the rules. And there's really nothing in the rules that directly facilitates roleplay either. So if that's your preferred playstyle, there's other systems that would suit your preferences better than both 5e and PF2e

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The top-selling game on Steam right now is a new 254-player FPS made by 4 people

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I played it a bunch during the public playtests throughout the past year and I think they have a fantastic base here and it genuinely feels more like Battlefield than anything DICE has put out in recent years. That being said the game is currently missing a number of QoL features, the menus are especially basic and feel like placeholders, and the audio design is extremely basic. I do expect those things to change throughout the early access period though and the game is great fun regardless

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Hackers are infecting Call of Duty players with a self-spreading malware | TechCrunch

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MW2 had many iterations of fan servers. It started with alterIWnet, and ended with IW4X, which was recently shut down by Activision with a cease and desist. Fan modded versions of the game with dedicated servers and a server browser, with known security vulnerabilities like this one already patched out. Thanks to Activision, there's now no way to safely play this game anymore.

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FoundryVTT might be the best thing to ever happen to crunchy games.

Funnily enough the first time I used foundry was as a player in a 5e game, and even though that's probably the weakest game integration on the whole platform it was still enough to convince me to buy it. Now I'm using it to run PF2e and it's phenomenal, I can't imagine anything else getting anywhere close in terms of QoL and useful automation.

I do wish it wasn't so reliant on third party developers though, while I love the amount of modules that are available it sucks that when a new foundry version releases you pretty much still need to wait until the modules update, if they even update at all. Some module's functionality should just be absorbed into the base system.