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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Short answer: Because their motivation is to win!

    I read something about this in the Book “Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game With Unity and C#” by Jeremy Gibson a while ago, maybe that can explain this a bit.

    Basically, every Player has some Intention or the “Player Intent” which is described by the Personality Types of Richard Bartle. For example, you have:

    • The Achiever who seeks to get the highest score in the game and wants to dominate it
    • The Explorer who seeks to find all the hidden places in the game and wants to understand the game
    • The Socializer wants to play the game with friends and wants to understand other players
    • The Killer who wants to provoke other players and wants to dominate them

    And then you have two others that you will be encountering:

    • The Cheater who only cares about winning and does not care about the integrity of the Game and they will bend or break the rules to win
    • The Spoilsport who doesn’t care about winning or about the game but rather will break the game to ruin the other player’s experience

    So, the motivation to “cheat” could either be that this player doesn’t really care about the game, is able to get away with cheating and just wants to beat the game. According to Jeremy Gibson, a cheater might not cheat if they can win legitimately but I would argue that cheaters are usually not great players in the first place so the bar would be pretty low for them to “win legitimately”.

    As for the spoilsport, this is extremely hard to work against or prevent because the motivation isn’t about the game anymore but other players, to make their experience miserable so that the spoilsport can gain satisfaction from it. Hence also the use of “don’t feed the trolls”.

    With that being said, when you ask why someone would cheat, the question would rather be “What is their motivation” and the answer to that is “to win the game, at all costs”. And, most of the time, they will get away with this because they apparently cannot be caught as quickly as they can still continue doing it, if there is any action against them at all.



  • It goes even beyond that.

    With a dedicated app, you go into the store and install it and then you have it in your apps that you then can place everywhere.

    With a website, you need to have the browser, navigate to that website each time. And yes, you could put a link to that website on your home screen as well but not many user are probably aware of that being an option.

    I know that but I still would prefer a dedicated app because it is easier to manage and use more features of my phone. For example, I just tried it on my android phone and the link to a website always opened a new tab in my Firefox.

    Then I can manage the notifications of that app depending on what I want it to notify me about.

    I can’t do that specifically for a single app or website in a browser.

    On the other hand, I also wouldn’t want to miss a website because I am not always on my phone and, in some cases, it is way more annoying to do something over the phone because I am just not used to it (like writing this comment). Doing that over a website version that I can access on my PC is much easier and convenient.


  • It’s a bit of an infuriating story that I had not so long ago.

    I have a Playstation account and I recently wanted to log into that account on the PlayStation website. The Password I had saved in my Bitwarden Password Manager was apparently wrong. Okay, then I will just reset it, that’s fine.

    I went through the Password reset process and generated a new Password, pasted it into the Password field and sent it and everything was fine. I tried to log in with that password and was told that the username or password was wrong. Okay, that is weird, since I reset the password just now the login name couldn’t be wrong because, well, I just used that for the reset.

    I tried that several times with the same result and gave up.

    A few months later, I wanted to try again and had the same problem. I wanted to sort that out so I went through the same process with the Support bot yet again which then told me that I should come back in the “office hours”. A company making 84 billion in revenue should be able to employ 24/7 customer service or at least tell me that when I request support and not let me go through the bot again.

    So, I waited for the customer service personnel to be available and told them my problem. There I was told that “everything was looking fine on their end” and they quickly ended the support. I mean, yes, I was angry but wasn’t abusive to that person because if you couldn’t help me what should I do with my account, it also definitely wasn’t their specific fault. But I would, at least, have expected more than “Well, works on our end, sucks for you, bye”.

    The next time I tried again and got a more competent Support dude and we ran through the same troubleshooting steps as before. Reset password (even though I just did that, again, through the bot), logged in again and failed again. This time they suggested that I could use a “normal” password that I don’t generate. THAT worked for some reason.

    All of my generated passwords in Bitwarden are up to 32 long with all possible characters, depending on what the website allows or expects. If a website, for example, doesn’t allow 32 characters, I adjust and shorten it to the maximum length they allow. That worked without issues so far.

    Well, turns out that the field that you use to reset your password has a character limit of 30 characters. But, this would be fine if the dialogue tells you that your password is too long, but it doesn’t. It just cuts off at 30 characters and happily saves that.

    However, the Password field that you use to log in doesn’t have that restriction.

    This means that you reset your password with a 32-character long generated password, which is saved in your vault, PlayStation saves a 30-long password and then you use the 32-long password to log in, which fails because it isn’t the same.

    And this isn’t even mentioned in the password guidelines. It only said “min 8 characters” but not the maximum.


  • I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?

    It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.

    When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?

    So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.

    Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.


  • Connectivity or rather the lack of it…

    I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don’t know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?

    But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor’s to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn’t disable that my TV doesn’t even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn’t even connected to the internet.


  • Well, I can only speak from my own experience.

    When the PS5 launched I wanted to upgrade but you literally couldn’t get it because it wasn’t in stock anywhere. You could only find it on eBay of some private seller that started at almost double the price, no, thank you. Then Sony introduced this “Register and on the next event you get a slot to buy one from the official Website” which was great. I got invited the first time and literally couldn’t buy it because the website was broken. Whenever I wanted to select my payment method the checkout got blank and there was nothing you could do. Even worse was that you couldn’t hard refresh the shop because this would have killed the session that the website needed to allow you to buy it. So, even switching browsers with the same “invitation link” didn’t work. I reported this to the support, but they didn’t really care. half a year later, I got my second invitation link and the same happened then as well. I reported it again to the support, but they still didn’t know what to do with that information or wanted to troubleshoot this.

    And now, there isn’t really a need for it anyway. The Games that I would have wanted to buy on the PS5 released on the PC.




  • I would recommend watching the video…

    What you say is “easy” is great for a comment on Reddit or Lemmy but it doesn’t really provide anything to the actual problem.

    The problem is that a company “just” doesn’t, why would they do this anyway? It would open their IP to be forked, modified and used for something else by someone else. That isn’t what they want you to do.

    Since there is no incentive and no one is forcing them to do this they just keep doing whatever they want. It was mentioned in the video that there is absolutely no regulation or anything in that regard available ANYWHERE in the world, not even in the EU.

    THIS is what the video and Ross Scott want to achieve, that there either will be regulations for it so that Game developers and Publishers can’t just create games with some mandatory server backend running that is shut down in a couple of years OR that there is at least some way of saying “well, we don’t care” so that the consumer can actually do anything about it on their own end.

    So it is easy to say they “just” have to do X or Y but the past and the increasing games relying on things like this have shown that they won’t do anything about it because nothing is stopping them.






  • Yes, blind optimism is the way to go here. /s

    I am sorry but if any gaming journalist is not the least amount of sceptical about ANY release today, then they either don’t play games or are sleeping under a rock.

    Without a doubt, Hello Games pulled NMS around and made it into a great title but this took years and we also have seen this blind optimism before with Cyberpunk 2077. Even a “wiser” Game studio can fail and not deliver.

    Too many titles over the last years were lukewarm even highly anticipated and hyped titles either were “meh” or failed at release. The number of games that redeemed themselves is only a few and can be probably counted on one hand. A gaming Journalist should know about this!

    So, I am not even sorry if I am not hyped about it. It does sound interesting but “I believe it when I see it”. There is too much time that has to go down the road for this to come out and there are a lot of things that can/will go wrong in that time.

    I rather wait on the reviews.




  • I use a pihole which is a small computer that checks every domain request and blocks them when they are on one of my blacklists. This works great for browsing the web because you just don’t see most ads anymore. I also use adblocks for, for example, YouTube because pihole can’t distinguish between ads or legitimate requests when they come from the same domain.

    I also download all videos from YouTube to watch. And I also don’t have cable.

    Basically, I see so few instances of ads anymore that any few ads are getting so annoying. The 1-2 ads in front of a YouTube video or in the middle, I just don’t watch that video anymore.

    But when I really noticed that was when I was spending the day with my father and we were watching a TV show on some free provider, every 10 minutes there were 1.5 minutes ads. Which is by far better as normal TV in my country (Germany) but damn, this was really annoying after just a single episode and I’m glad I don’t have to see those at home. It just interrupts the flow.


  • The stupidity is insane.

    Many of those people don’t really care because they don’t think it will affect them or don’t really understand what that whole thing means. All they care about is being able to scroll.

    There was a poll about the future with the protest of a Subreddit I am part of and many voted for staying open with the reasoning “it hurts the community”.

    While I would agree with the Argument that being private on a tech-oriented Subreddit is bad because all of the accumulated knowledge will be inaccessible so troubleshooting will not work or be as good. But then you could just be restricted and have both, keeping the protest going but not locking out help to common troubleshooting.

    All they see now is that they are inconvenienced by the whole thing and they don’t like it without understanding that many others will have a much worse impact and the future state of the Subreddits could be much worse or take longer to moderate impacting everyone.

    But this is not something they can see or understand.