gila

I think that’s true for small containers, such as a can. Whereas 1.5L is an impractical amount to drink of anything, more likely to lead to drinking until satiation rather than until the container is finished. Especially where the starting point of the habit involves opening a fresh container with a certain aesthetic, and finishing it. That itself can be psychologically addicting. It was for me.

Neither aluminium nor plastic are infinitely recyclable. I read somewhere that factoring in the energy and materials required in the initial production of the container, plastic is about 13x more wasteful. So while of course it depends on serving size (which would logically be different transitioning from small cans to large bottles), as well as recycling programs in your area and their respective efficiencies, you’re most likely correct that the carbon footprint of large bottle would be higher overall.

What I really meant to get at was ‘waste’ in terms of the amount of empty containers that tend to pile up around you. For myself being addicted to drinking cans of fizzy, I would stack them around me and it would become a much larger job to clean them up than it is for large bottles.

I’ll also say that while being addicted to cans, I lamented their relatively higher cost and was more compelled to go for small bottle form factor on occasions where they were available cheaper than cans, rather than large bottles. Small bottles of course being by far the most wasteful.

Switch to a caffeine-free version some of the time, then all of the time. For Pepsi Max this is only available in the 1.5L bottles where I am, so add in an extra step switching from cans to bottles (which should also reduce cost/waste).

Buy a nice reusable water bottle and ensure you have a clean, not-bad-tasting source of fresh water to fill it with (where I am this means bottled or filtered). Keep it filled and close to you at all times. Only use water in it.

Once you’re comfortable with these adjustments, taper off the fizzy drink. If you’re still having significant trouble or cravings, or substitute for something worse: just keep drinking the fizzies. It’s one of the least harmful bad habits you could have, and depending on your circumstances might be a best case scenario

Thinking more about it, rather than getting something like a suorin edge, you’d be better off just getting a backup pod system of whatever type you already have/enjoy.

Pod devices are essentially just a battery in a hard case as it is. To go a more hot-swappable method than they already are would involve compromises you might not have considered.

Suorin have some user-replacable battery models

I’ve been prompted to manually drag the app into the Applications folder during install flow multiple times. It wasn’t a substitute for an installation wizard, it was a part of it. I’m familiar with archives as well as .debs, .rpms and tarballs, and none of these or Windows equivalents required such interaction. Yeah, it’s due to my unfamiliarity. In my state of being relatively unfamiliar with Mac OS, it seems pretty fucking weird.

Installing a downloaded app by dragging the .dmg into your Applications folder.

Just why? What is the case where I download an app installer, execute the installer, but don’t want the app installed?

Just to be totally clear: Steam OS is a distro for the Steam Deck. It’s great that they based their handheld’s OS on Linux. There is pretty much universal agreement that is a net positive for gamers. Up until recently, there wasn’t a way to install Steam OS on a device other than a Steam deck, except by using third party tools to hack together a bootable version of the Deck’s recovery image. That’s now changed - Valve have recently released generic install images of Steam OS. Hence this post about a Valve dev’s comments about Steam OS competing more directly with Windows, which it previously did not on really any level.

I don’t think anyone in the thread is positing that Valve creating Steam OS is a negative. I and the other poster are saying that regardless of whether the dev’s comments are truthful, the reason Valve has now released Steam OS more widely is money-oriented, not some altruistic act toward gamers. The benefits to gamers generally associated with Steam OS are simply not related to this new development. Steam OS is not an especially useful distribution for PC gamers. For example, it doesn’t include Nvidia drivers like other gaming-oriented Linux distros. But one feature it does have is that it’s inseparable from the Steam ecosystem. And while you could describe Steam as “a games store”, you could just as easily and accurately describe it as “a DRM platform”. In other words, anti-consumer, money-grubbing, etc.

Of course, but that isn’t what they’re saying in response to the topic of the post: the question of what the point in making steamOS available for PC’s is. Is it the main reason? I’m not sure it is, but you can be sure that if it isn’t contributing to Valve’s bottom line in some way, it wouldn’t be happening.

Is it just me or has the main character really done nothing all season except several failed attempts at a supply run? My brain keeps tuning out

Tell it to shut the fuck up (it works, that’s why my grandfather likes it)

That isn’t really a defense of DRM’s. The acknowledgement swings both ways; if DRM doesn’t play a part in game sales, it is unnecessary.

The post’s characterisation is still accurate because of what the impact of DRM is imagined to be by game studio execs, rather than what it materially is.

Migrated away from .world over a year ago due to their shitty admins, possibly even worse than r*ddit

Despite the headline, the length of cutscenes wasn’t their justification for the length of the game, just a separate question.

It’s going to be a story-driven action game, of course it’s gonna have hella cutscenes but from what’s been shown so far, I’m actually looking forward to it.

From around 2016-2020 the most popular devices were just a series of incrementally adding more pointless shit, which is why it’s like that. They’re not that popular anymore.

Wild Hearts comes to mind. Koei Tecmo PC ports are bad at the best of times, but many of the performance problems present in the Steam version mysteriously don’t exist on the EA app version which released a few months later without Denuvo. Just like, buy the game again if you want your product to work I guess.

In the startup I worked for, the HR lead was the CEO’s significant other. They had made fundamental contributions to the operations of the company since its inception and relatively humble beginnings. Once it had grown beyond a certain size, there wasn’t really any particular executive position within a logical company structure for them to fill. The individual departments were run by people more qualified in those areas. I think it made sense for the company to continuously recognize their contributions (and obviously the boss isn’t going to fire their partner), but HR ended up being mostly just a cushy job for them to fall into.

It was one of those companies that likes to say its “like a family”, but really there’s an in-crowd (i.e. the founding staff) and everyone else. I was part of the former, so I could be honest and open with them with regard to HR issues and be supported, and that was nice. But on the other hand, I witnessed HR actions related to incidents involving other staff that caused me cognitive dissonance, because it would’ve been handled differently if I were the staff member involved. More than anything else, because I had found myself in the right place at the right time. Because I was a part of the landed gentry, as it were. That’s fucking bullshit, and the experience made me realize that they weren’t actually different from other companies like I had thought.

LiveCaptions

D4 has shortcuts for battle pass tiers, i.e. cosmetics. There aren’t any level skips like there is in WoW.

You can skip the campaign at the time you create a new toon, if you have already completed it. It is faster to level that way, because you can stick to activities that reward more XP and don’t have to turn in quests/listen to dialogue. You still start at level 1 though, so it’s not really a shortcut. Rather there are certain things in the game that you’re only required to earn once, given it’s intended to play multiple characters/builds. It’d be a slog to have to continuously go around the game world collecting the minor stat boosts for finding altars, for example. Instead the ones you’ve found will carry over between characters and seasons.

Yeah, P2W is what I mean by paying for power and it’s a good thing for players that it isn’t in D4 (like it is in Immortal for example). I edited my earlier comment to include that other games have come up with more creative ways to monetise cosmetics like you mentioned, but that they aren’t really possible in Diablo for technical reasons. It is very poorly optimised for online play by design - when you load an instance, your client loads the full loadout of every player character in that instance. Their full inventory, stash, everything. That’s part of what I mean - it’s an opportunity to monetise which many players would be amenable to, totally missing from the game.

Personally though, I think that there being minimal compulsion to buy MTX post-game purchase is exactly the way it should be. I wouldn’t expect them to continue a live service with no ongoing revenue, so if MTX is how they do that it should be relegated to rich fuckers with nothing better to spend their fortunes on, so I can point and laugh at them while they fund additional content for me. It’s just weird that a dev would subsequently use “hey 150m big number” to try and claim the situation as some sort of business success, as much as it’s weird players (like some in this thread) would consider this revelation as additional points against D4. Are they completely oblivious to the absolute hellscape in which we exist?!

From a developer perspective, tonnes of stuff. Shortcuts, power (edit: see Diablo Immortal for some live examples). From a gamer perspective, it’s really the ideal scenario in this day and age, but Blizzard’ll cop hate all the same.

Other similar games like Last Epoch are doing paid alt animations for skills, but Diablo team just aren’t that creative, and the game wasn’t designed well enough to accommodate something like that.

My experience: I do the game sharing trick on xbox where you and a friend can mutually access both of your digital libraries. Preordered collector’s edition, which included 5 days of early access before launch. Blizzard had implemented a special access control on the server side which checked for a unique collector’s edition license. My friend could download and launch the game using my license but couldn’t login during early access. I refunded my purchase because the point of the extra cost was invalidated by that.

I later bought the standard edition. My account still had all the preorder and collector’s edition bonuses, including MTX currency & a battle pass token. Said token was later redeemed by mistake via Blizzard’s dark pattern implementation at the start of S1. There was some backlash about that at the time which was certainly valid, but personally I didn’t feel affected because I got it at no extra cost.

I’ve played for 1000s of hours since but never spent the free in-game currency. I had never seen another player in-game using MTX cosmetics until the wings items were recently added as preorder bonuses for the upcoming expansion. It’s not surprising that only 15% of the revenue came from MTX because the paid cosmetics are pointless, expensive and they aren’t substantially better than the free ones. Using transmog at all robs the player of any sense of cosmetic progression. Paid portal skins are kinda cool the first time you see them, but the free activity-specific ones like for infernal hordes are cool too.

I’m left confused at why someone would boast about these figures given they’re evidence of not having implemented any solid post-launch monetisation strategy, and more generally the half-baked nature of the post-launch development for the game. The MTX is purely for vanity and it doesn’t even achieve that. The skins might as well be a dork sign. I wouldn’t be surprised if their revenue figures included my original purchase as well.

tl;dr my read is that this dude has done more to unintentionally subvert blizzard’s MTX sales than he’s done to generate them