Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
And I wish they did follow semver, but loosely (i.e. major version bump shouldn’t imply breakage, but instead a major new feature). If there is a major new feature, I think they should maintain security updates for the old one for some weeks in case there’s a problem with the new feature.
if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are
Yes, and I’ve detailed it already. A scam is a fraudulent business deal, meaning you receive something other than what was agreed on.
Selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is fraud because you’re not receiving what was promised, ownership of the Brooklyn Bridge, because the seller doesn’t own it and therefore can’t transfer ownership to you. It’s not a scam because you can’t take it home with you, it’s a scam because you’re not getting what was advertised.
Yep, no ranked competitive games have this
Right, and there are two mentalities here:
You’ll see the first in the lower brackets and the second in the upper brackets. They’ll both often have top-tier gear, and the first gets it to “feel” cool instead of actually getting an edge from the benefits of that gear, whereas the second actually benefits from the gear. So even in a competitive game, the MTX are still targeting the more casual players. I think there’s also a significant overlap in cheaters and the first group, because the first group feels “entitled” to doing well, despite not actually being that good.
I consider that first group to largely be “casual” because the intent there isn’t to practice to get better, but to show off, even if the game is designed to be competitive.
In any case, those MTX aren’t scams, you’re getting exactly what you’re paying for, and in many cases you can demo it before purchasing. I think buying them is stupid, but that’s because I put very little value in what they offer, whereas others could find a lot more value in it.
That doesn’t impact all games though, the game market has essentially split into catering to three groups:
The more social a game is, the more likely the game is to throw in vanity purchases like skins.
I have a simple rule in my house, no F2P games, and it has worked really well in avoiding BS. There are some paid games w/ MTX and whatnot, but those are a lot fewer than among the F2P games.
Refuse to play the worst offenders and offer alternatives to your gaming friends, so you can eat your cake and have it too.
I’m on about all the people getting taken by this systemic problem
What do you mean by “taken”? Were they not aware of what they were buying? Was there fraud at any point in the transaction?
A bad deal isn’t criminal, it’s only criminal if it’s misrepresented. And given that there are a ton of repeat customers, I fail to see how it’s being misrepresented. When exactly did the fraud take place? Did the customer get something other than what they expected to get?
At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.
The small charges are more insidious
Oh, they absolutely are, and I definitely don’t like the stupid dopamine machine that mobile gaming has become. But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online (Look how big my base is! Look how cool my character looks! Look how high on the leaderboard I am!). That’s the real dopamine hit IMO, and that’s where the analogy with luxury items comes in (lifted trucks, designer bags, etc).
lootboxes
This one is different and I consider it gambling, and it should be regulated as such, because the value is undetermined.
These games are no longer optimized to make you feel good when you’re good at them.
Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful. That’s what luxury goods are. If I go into debt to buy a fancy car, I look rich to other people, and that gives me that dopamine hit. This is just the digital equivalent of that, in many cases.
The F2P players are being used to give these whales an audience so they can flaunt their “skill” (read: how much they paid).
That’s why pretending any of it can have real monetary value is a scam.
And that’s where I disagree. It’s only a scam if you get something other than what was advertised. If the advertising is simply “buy this to instantly complete X” and buying it instantly completes X, then there’s no fraud, therefore no scam. You paid a stupid tax for being impatient, and you did that while understanding that you’re buying a temporary high.
Just because something is addictive doesn’t mean it’s a scam. Cigarettes and alcohol aren’t scams. Gambling isn’t a scam. Lotteries aren’t scams. Using any of them to excess is a really bad idea, but I don’t think they’re scams. And that’s why I think any legislation should be limited to kids, since kids are assumed to be more susceptible to dark patterns and addictions, whereas adults are assumed to have responsibility for their own actions.
Yeah, I think it’s fantastic as well. The SimpleFIN syncinc works fantastically, and I’m happy enough that I cancelled my TillerHQ subscription, which lapses this month. There’s still a little work to do to clean up some of my older data, but once I get it all rolling nicely, I’ll definitely send the developers a substantial portion of what I was paying for Tiller (like $100/year). I’ve only used it for a couple months, and I plan to play with it a bit in the next month or two as I’m preparing EOY stuff.
Nope, which honestly annoys me but is pretty par for the course. That said, when it comes to budgeting, I mostly care about where money is going and care less about the “whole financial picture.” If I need to estimate what retirement looks like, I want more than a simple budgeting tool.
I personally use Fidelity for investment tracking. My main “checking” is their Cash Management Account, my “savings” is a brokerage account (invested in t-bills and money market funds), and I can link all of my other accounts and it pulls in specific investments and shows a consolidated view. It’s awesome because it shows all kinds of stuff, like morningstar-style factor weights, sector exposure, etc. It’s not self-hosted, but I trust them with my banking anyway, so it’s not like I’m opening myself up to some new exploit (oh, and Fidelity also has proper MFA; Symantic VIP, which kinda sucks, but it’s way better than any other financial institution).
I used to track this stuff via a Google spreadsheet (couldn’t find a way to get stock quotes in LibreOffice), but this seems to be good enough for me.
In this case, the mobile UI doesn’t even work properly.
That said, I find value in it because it makes it so much easier for my SO and I to see the same thing. Oh, and it supports importing transactions via SimpleFIN, which is really nice.
The game was made objectively worse for them
And I think Blizzard recognizes that WoW has largely run its course, so it’s trying to extract maximum profit from those who remain. That’s what happens when a company shifts from innovation to profit maximization, and it should be a signal for players to move on.
‘just boycott!’ utterly useless
It’s only useless if your metric for success is Blizzard changing their behavior. But if you shift your metric of success to “less predatory companies are viable,” it can absolutely be a success.
Depending on your metric of “success,” maybe legislation is the only option. But we don’t need every company to behave “properly” (however you define that) in order to have a competitive market for games. If you look beyond the handful of top-grossing games w/ manipulative in-game stores, you’ll find a vibrant market of games to play.
“scam victims.”
A scam is something else entirely. “Problem gambling” is largely a choice, and if you ask any gambler, they’ll be able to confirm that they understand that the casino always wins eventually, but that they continue to play because they think “this time will be different.” However, if you ask a scam victim, they’ll tell you they thought the scammer was legitimate and continued because they honestly believed they were making a good choice. Those are very different things.
Games fall under the “problem gambling” umbrella (players know what they’re paying for), not the “scam” umbrella (it’s rare for players to not know what they’re getting for their money). If there are incidents of the latter (e.g. loot boxes with lower than advertised odds of getting something of value), those should be aggressively litigated by regulators, and honestly anything where there isn’t a guarantee (i.e. not paying X to get Y product) should be considered “gambling” and regulated as such (restricted for minors, age verification required, etc).
Spending $90 for a mount is a stupid decision, but it’s not a fraudulent transaction if you get the mount when you pay. I don’t think that should be regulated, but it should spark outcry from news orgs and players and push people away from the game.
I see spending stupid amounts of money on a game to be similar to spending stupid amounts of money on any other vanity purchase, like lifted trucks, designer clothing, or expensive jewelry. If you want to buy those things, you should absolutely be allowed to, even if a lot of people would say it’s a stupid idea if they understood your finances. Adults must be free to make stupid choices, and the only limits IMO should be if you were deceived and wouldn’t have made the choice if you had more accurate information.
Not unlimited, but certainly a lot of flexibility. As long as they don’t commit fraud, I think they should be allowed to provide whatever services their customers are willing to pay for.
That said, I won’t participate, and I’ll be vocal about calling out their terrible business models. But I won’t go so far as to suggest legislation to solve a “problem” of adults making poor choices. People should always be free to make stupid choices, provided those choices don’t hurt others. I am sympathetic to some limits around kids, but those limits shouldn’t apply to adults. So maybe slap an “M” rating on a game if it has microtransactions or something and restrict direct sales to underage kids (enforcement should be lax though to avoid privacy violations).
The indie game scene is vibrant, and there are still plenty of AAA games without that nonsense. So play those and send a message to these companies that non-abusive games are absolutely still wanted. Also, be vocal about these exploitative practices by companies to convince others to avoid their products.
Only legislation will stop this.
Disagree. Let the whales waste their money, I have plenty of other options. In fact, indie gaming is better than it has ever been.
I certainly don’t like that type of revenue model, but I don’t think it should be banned, especially since the alternatives are plentiful and growing.
I’m going to try this out. I hesitated because I was considering switching to Owncloud Infinite Scale, but I’m not going to bother because I decided the file structure OCIS uses is a deal-breaker (way too complex to recover in a disaster).
Selfhosting vs. writing code is different. But yes for sure if there is some kind of separation that may be fine.
Absolutely. I’m a software dev by day, and a hobbyist admin by night. And cybersecurity involves a bit of both, but honestly, the coding is largely just scripting, which I totally think can be picked up on the side if you’re logically inclined.
A+
I don’t know about the others, but when I got A+ certified years ago, it was pretty worthless. I did it in high school, got pretty much a perfect score, and learned practically nothing. May be worth doing if you don’t have access to a personal computer, but you’d learn way more installing Linux or BSD on a couple of systems and doing some self-hosting.
You shouldnt work your hobby all the time
Unless you really enjoy it.
I self host all kinds of stuff with moderately complex configuration, and I find it relaxing after a day of writing code (I’m a software engineer by day). Cybersecurity is just learning to follow best practices and trying to break your own stuff.
Once you feel comfortable admin-ing something relatively complex (say, something w/ TLS, reverse proxies, and a VPN) and you have a day-job somewhat related to Cybersecurity, then you should look into the InfoSec community and read along with how exploits and whatnot work, and harden your systems against the various types of threats.
But honestly, there’s really no substitute for formal education. If you like this stuff as a kid, consider getting a 4-year degree in IT. If you like this stuff as an adult, maybe do a master’s program and try to land a relevant job.
Yup, $1k for a decent headset, $1k for a decent GPU, and you also need space to play. It’s a pretty big barrier to entry before you even get into the limited selection of games.
Agreed. It has gotten a lot better since I’ve been in the industry, but it still has a long way to go.
Sure, but it doesn’t really pay the bills.
That’s also a huge part of it. Statistically, the women you see in technical positions probably picked it in college instead of being a hobby as a kid, so they see it more as a career than a hobby. Hopefully that’s the case, because I’d love to see more women get into it.
Agreed. Grayjay has something similar, though it’s not actually FOSS (it’s source-available though). I’m happy to pay for software, but donating somehow has a different feel to it and doesn’t feel as “necessary.” So yes, an optional license fee would be awesome for more projects and could encourage more people to actually pay.
They’re moving a lot of code to this internal core, which means this core is unstable. It’s pretty common for projects to hold off on making code public until it’s reached a certain level of stability. I’m guessing they’re not interested in accepting patches, due to the high level of churn from the dev team. Once that churn dies down, there’s a chance they’ll reconsider and make it FOSS.
I’ve seen this in a number of FOSS projects, and it’s also what I do on my own (I don’t want help until I’m happy with the base functionality).
So that’s why I hold out hope. We’ll see once the churn on that internal SDK repo dies down.
It used to be decent, until they sold out a few years ago.