Dead Cell

I'm gonna spell this out because this issue is deceptively subtle: 1. The Steam client and infrastructure is somewhere between "not that hard" and "trivial". It's a download service attached to a payment processor with a smattering of services on the side. Cloud providers handle all the infrastructure these days. 2. Steam takes 30% of gross revenue; ostensibly for the privilege of using these services, but in reality it is purely to get access to the massive Steam userbase. 3. Steam users love Steam and having their whole library in one place. It works. It's dependable. It has sales and cards and achievements, oh my! 4. PC developers have no option but to distribute through Steam or lose the vast majority of sales. Not releasing on Steam destroys the business model. 5. Therefore, no amount of competition will ever unseat Steam. People post-hoc rationalize this with memes about how gracious Gabe is. And how brilliant their services are. But realistically, no avid Steam user wants other stores to succeed. The mere existence of other stores risks splintering their precious collection. They are "all in" on Steam. Invested. Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users. They would in fact find it to be a problem and a threat to their investment. Competition in this space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users, it's actively denigrated! The CONSEQUENCE of this situation, is that 30% of all gross revenue is siphoned out of the PC games industry into a black hole. It doesn't recirculate into studios. It doesn't pay any bonuses. It doesn't fund any sequels or DLC. This is a particularly insidious tax because it's well hidden. It's a second order effect. Most Steams users don't know, and the few that do never consider the aggregate effect this has on their favorite hobby. It's undeniable that, at this point in history, Valve could EASILY lower the distribution fee while maintaining healthy margins. But they don't have to. Users are locked into Steam and therefore developers are stuck paying 30% of gross revenue to Valve. The irony is that Steam users, the very ones maintaining this unbreakable stalemate, would benefit the most from a better financed game development ecosystem. I don't think this is fixable. It's just sad.

North Korea has moved self-propelled artillery toward the South Korean border, with footage from the Kaepung area showing soldiers and 122-mm howitzers aimed south.

CD Projekt Red has hired so many Cyberpunk 2077 modders that Cyberpunk 2’s associate game director says around half of the quest team are former modders. Pawel Sasko says modding can be a “foot-in-the-door technique” and a “gateway into game dev,” giving talented fans real experience with how games are built. “We actually hired so many modders. I would say, at this point, half of the quest team is all former modders.” Some of the developers working at CD Projekt Red started out making mods as far back as The Witcher 2.

The single best thing WoW Forever could be doing, is making All existing dungeons in vanilla Bigger, with more branches. BRD-ify them all. No1 is forced to do all branches every run. Stop adding 5 minute retail dungeons.

WAIT, YOU’RE TELLING ME THAT BEING ABLE TO HEAR ELECTRONICS TURN ON BECAUSE OF A CHANGE IN FREQUENCY CAN BE A NEURODIVERGENT THING??? BRO I THOUGHT EVERYONE COULD HEAR THAT.

"superior platform" That’s the problem, my friend: your elitism There is no such thing as a superior platform; the best platform to play on is always the one where you feel most comfortable For me, nothing beats the comfort of playing PS5 on the couch—without spending 3,000$

Alliance sucks DICK at PvP in WoW Forever. And the reason is: Alliance has too many feral druids, which are trash. Horde has too many Paladins and Shamans, which SHRED without requiring much skill. Consequently, Alliance loses most matches. The only saving grace for the Alliance is that they have Queen Lina Hua on her side. I have more influence on match outcomes than some WoW Worldchampion tier streamers such as Venruki or Ziqo because I play a HEALER, while they play completely useless mages. Also, they talk to their stream viewers, while I talk to my noob subjects INGAME. I tell noobs what to do, I order rogues to camp enemy bases and sneak tap them whenever the Hordebots are zerging in the middle. I tell hunters to occupy Hordebots in the middle with hit and run to create numerical advantage elsewhere. It's not rocket science, but, apparently, you need the agency of a Queen to pull of something so simple, yet so consequential. I won the Alliance some games where Horde outkilled us 4:1.

I'm really torn on Dungeon exp in WoW Forever and the correct way to do them. I've seen good arguments on both sides of the issue. At first I strongly agreed with the changes blizzard made to Dungeon exp. Dungeon spamming Meta was a problem. SoD as an example of mages doing insane AoE runs. People not exploring the world and adventuring and just sitting in dungeons power leveling as it was the most efficient. So nerfing the exp and increasing quest exp seemed like a good solution. You do dungeons once as a big thing and get a ton of experience then move on. But players are reporting some problems with this. Now you are getting players who just skip as much if the dungeon and the bosses as they can. Anything that's not for a quest or has a highly coveted item is skipped. Many of the bosses don't have loot tables with enough goodie to justify doing them unless they are mandatory to progress. Many people just leaving a dungeon once they get a drop they want or the quest items and movie on. There isn't an incentive to do the entire dungeon normally, just whatever specific bits that player needs. And I'm not sure what the solution is. Lock you out if a dungeon so you can only do it once a day but boost the exp? Just pick your poison? I'm not sure. We don't want people just power leveling dungeons like SoD but we also want an incentive to actually do the dungeon.