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Buttflapper

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Buttflapper OP ,

I wouldn’t say the movie industry is struggling, I would say that people that work for a living are struggling. Actors are still getting paid huge sums of money, so are directors and producers. They are getting their pound of flesh one way or another. They are just not producing anything that people want to watch. For example all this marvel post-infinity War bullshit, no one wants to see that. No one cares about marvel Disney anything right now, it’s low quality drivel. But Beetlejuice, Barbie, oppenheimer… These are proof that people do still want to see movies, they just don’t want to produce anything meaningful.

The people struggling that I’m talking about, however, are the supporting roles. People doing the filming, set dressing, makeup, special effects. Lots of these lower levels supporting roles get almost nothing compared to their cost of living in California, while some of the main actors can get tens of millions

Buttflapper OP ,

Shows that You are in the UK. Just want to clarify I’m talking specifically about the USA but I agree with everything you said. Tech stocks became so inflated! Don’t know if people are seeing it in Europe, but here in the USA, there is this really toxic and very cringe behavior from these tech companies to get people back to office, they can force people to return to office across the country, basically you have to relocate and upend your entire life which could cost you $50,000 and they’re not paying for that, if you don’t do that you get fired. Easy way to start laying off people without having to pay them anything because you can call it insubordination, since they refuse to return to office. Now they supposedly have cause to get rid of people or deny them promotions for more money. IBM for example is doing this right now, Cisco was doing it as well. One of the most major networking software companies in the market. Scumbag behavior

Buttflapper OP ,

Gameplay is still more important than game resolution

In your opinion*. You forgot that part. For lots of people, graphics are way more important because they want a beautiful and immersive experience. They are not wrong to want that. I respect that you feel the way you do, but I respect others who care more about graphics. I’ll even go so far as to say that I am of the same mind as you, I don’t care about the graphics much at all but there are some games where the graphics have truly wowed me, or the visual effects. For example two that come to mind, Ori and the will of the wisps, or No Man’s sky. Two very different games but absolutely crazy visual effects and graphics on high-end computers. Another game that I play a lot is World of Warcraft, gameplay is so damn fun but it’s hard to get any of my friends to play it because it’s so ugly, looks like a poorly rendered PS3 game. That horrible quality of graphics prevents people from even trying it

Most gamers don’t even have hardware that would allow that type of resolution.

This is because they refuse to innovate. Think of the DVD player. You think a DVD player costs a lot today? Of course not, there’s a million of them and no one wants them anymore. If they actually innovated and created drastic leaps and technology, then older technology would be cheaper. It’s not expensive to go out and get an RTX 2080, which is the graphics card I currently have. Is about 250 or $300 now, pretty damn solid card. If they actually innovated and kept pushing the limits, technology would accelerate faster. Instead they want the inverse of that. They want as slow growth in technology as feasibly possible, maximum amount of time to innovate, maximum amount of revenue, and maximized impact on the environment. All those carbon emissions and waste of graphics cards being thrown out

Buttflapper OP ,

you don’t see Apple and Samsung going out of business.

Samsung is damn near the point of going bankrupt. Samsung saw a 95% drop in profits for a second consecutive quarter 2023

Buttflapper OP ,

Damn that’s wild. Any business that has that drastic of spikes of profit and loss cannot possibly be sustainable. I can’t see how it could be. Look at the automobile giants in the USA. All it took was one major economic event to bankrupt them, and they got bailed out which should’ve never happened. It’s bullshit.

Buttflapper OP ,

VR is on the verge of collapse in the USA thanks to the US government banning byte dance. We can’t even order the new Pico 4 ultra, which is one of the most anticipated VR sets in the world right now. Meta basically has a monopoly and just announced they’re cutting funding to VR

Buttflapper OP ,

That unfortunately is the consequence of letting a company have a monopoly. The US govt should’ve opposed that, and should’ve forced them to sell it. They own such a huge share of the entire VR market right now it’s unbelievable, and Pico by byte dance isn’t legally able to be sold on the USA

Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread

As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...

Buttflapper OP ,

I agree with you, to an extent. I would say it’s a lot more complicated than that with World of Warcraft, which is an MMO, and does not revolve on gambling except in the aspect of random number generated loot. This is probably the majority of looter shooters out there today as well and a large number of other games. Pure chance in just the loot and rewards. Personally, World of Warcraft did not affect me adversely, because I have very strong self-control, and was able to develop very strict limitations for my own personal life which was important in college.

But I think there’s something you’re definitely missing. Sure, while World of Warcraft can be blamed by some people flunking out of college or high school due to its addictive and fun nature, Have you considered the fact that the world we live in is simply so boring that they don’t want to pay attention to those things? Over a 20-year time span since I have graduated, high school and college has not evolved. It’s the same boring ass mess that it was when I went to school. Unnecessary classes, study only for the test and never use that information ever again, very rarely are their projects and when there are, they are silly group projects in which two out of the four members of your group are lazy and don’t want to do a damn thing. You also are faced with constant demoralizing facts thrown at you from the media and the outside world that your college degree won’t help you get a job, you won’t see any student loan relief, the wealthy elites are in positions of power and rising faster in companies than you ever will be… Reality is so disappointing. So I can understand why these people have trouble paying attention in school and want to turn to stuff like World of Warcraft, theme park MMO that has so much fun and enjoyment in it

But when we’re talking about a gacha, This feels so much more insidious. Every aspect of the entire game, not just the loot, is gambling, and you’re gambling with real money. Not your time. In World of Warcraft you don’t get a drop, oh well, try again next time. You still paid $15 for that entire month, so you can try as many times as you want on as many characters as you want. But when you pay 50 bucks for Genshin impact and you get nothing, you know what that money goes towards? Absolutely nothing. You lose that money forever. Now you are mentally afflicted with that, and you’re already considering whether or not you should pay another 50 bucks to try and get it again with the gamblers fallacy in the back of your mind that if I pay another $50 I’m already $50 in, so I have a much better chance of getting it now. It’s sickening

Buttflapper OP , (edited )

Also sounds like you haven’t played in a while.

No, I’m a current member of World of Warcraft.

The addition of real currency to gold trading creates an even more direct pipeline from one’s wallet to in-game gear dice rolls. Guilds selling raid gear is even more common now, and with crafting orders, a whale can spend to reroll secondary stats on crafted gear.

It has literally always been like this. Where have you been? People were selling power leveling runs through stockades back when the game first started. They were selling BOE gear for gold, and that gold was obtained with a credit card through gold selling websites. The introduction of wow tokens just changed the recipient of the money from Gold farmers to Blizzard entertainment. I assure you that most people who are active players of the game are not buying tons of gear with gold that has been obtained through their credit card, and even if they were, it doesn’t affect you at all. The guilds that sell runs through challenging content, they have always been doing that, since the very beginning. I remember back in burning crusade people spamming chat that they would carry you through black temple near the end of the expansion. So there’s not like some new shift towards that. It’s always happens like that. The only thing that has shifted is that now, more than ever, you can play the game on your own and get your own gear. The introduction of solo delves has made it possible to gear up your character completely on your own without any additional help from others

With the way Warcraft is throwing currencies at players now, it’s clear Blizzard has taken more than a few cues from how gacha and other live-service outfits are doing things these days. Plenty of opportunities for ruinous, addictive behavior.

I fully agree with this and they have been ignoring player feedback about it for a while now, it’s completely bullshit how many stupid currencies we have and it almost feels like they are AI generating the game design at this point. Like they are going to chat GPT and asking, “what’s a good way to create an addictive loop of currencies for players?” Because some of them are in your bags, some of them are in the currency pane, some of them are bind on character, bind on account, some of them can be traded and some can’t. It’s utter insanity. Truly ass game design. This is the first time they finally made a shift back to using a single currency for PVE though, the flight stones and valor stones. Kind of like marks of valor back in wrath.

Buttflapper OP ,

We both know that legitimizing the RMT system increased the number of gold buyers and normalized the process

Really? Where is your data to back that up? Games like old school RuneScape and World of Warcraft still have people who buy gold and get banned for it all the time. You’re also conveniently disregarding lots of the benefits of this system. People can now earn currency fully in game to pay for their subscription. Completely for free, and other players are making a choice the purchase the tokens. There’s virtually no pressure in game whatsoever in World of Warcraft that prompts you to purchase them. There’s no pop-ups, no advertisements for tokens at all. This is the least predatory form of microtransaction I have ever seen. Compare this to Destiny, in which you are constantly given currency for free to use in the eververse, and repeatedly going there back and forth being flashed with bullshit items that you’ll never have enough currency to afford.

Buttflapper OP ,

This is extremely interesting and in general kind of touches on a point that I heard that’s kind of funny… People are just bored, and all of Good and bad things that we do in this world are a result of that boredom. Gambling, our hobbies, picking up another job. If it cures your boredom there’s nothing wrong with it

Buttflapper OP ,

Report that shit to the EU or your government. At least in Europe they care…

Buttflapper ,

Black mirror is getting closer everyday

This is definitely one of the strangest cash grabs I've ever seen (lemmy.world)

Honkai Star Rail, a free-to-play gacha game (basically, gambling game of chance) in which players spend anywhere from $5 to $10,000 to get characters, gear, equipment… is now releasing a disc version of their game on PlayStation 5. First issue with this is that many people don’t have a disk drive in their PlayStation, and...

Buttflapper OP ,

This isn’t a collectors edition though? It’s not even a steelbook. The word collector isn’t even used in the marketing. It’s just a physical release of a free to play game.

Buttflapper OP ,

People that buy this want the cards, keychains, and (especially) the exclusive in-game items.

Yeah, but at that rate, why not just launch a store then and sell those items? Blizzard has their own store. Plenty of franchises do. It’s so weird to see a disc version of a free game. Can you imagine if fortnite did that? I don’t remember if they ever had a disc version of their game, but if they did launch one today, people would be scratching their heads

Buttflapper OP ,

I worked at GameStop a long, long time ago. Lots of old console games that couldn’t be sold went right to the landfill. Xbox 360 for example. So many niche small games that no one wanted even when marked down to a dollar each. We’re talking tens of thousands of them just in one small city alone. I’ve also been to a lot of thrift and antique specialty stores in my area, and there are so many plastic case games there people are trying to get rid of. Hundreds of them. No one wants them anymore. Eventually all this plastic is just going to be thrown into a landfill. Those who actually keep this stuff long-term, maybe they don’t have a lot of games or they have the space for it. But consumerism is a major issue across the world that we are struggling to keep up with.

Buttflapper OP ,

The Lemmy user base is so out of touch with the average consumer.

This is probably true. I don’t know many people who aren’t super heavy into tech, I’ve had a gaming PC half my life, but I do have a couple friends who don’t even have a laptop, PC, computer, or anything. They just have a phone. I don’t know how they get by.

Buttflapper OP ,

Yea… I kind of went into this one blind. When someone gives you a gift, you don’t go and look up a bunch of reviews on it and stuff. You open the present and start figuring it out yourself. So uhh yeah 😅 I did that… To myself kinda

Buttflapper OP ,

What LMAO That one’s even worse! How do you find this stuff?! 🙀

Buttflapper OP , (edited )

Huh, interesting. For “research purposes”, does one find a “good” one of these games? 🤔 Like, are there ones with decent story or actual gameplay? I was honestly surprised by how well the rendering and textures were in this game, but it was created entirely in unreal.

Is overwatch 2 really that bad?

I’ve played maybe 10 hours total of Overwatch 2 and it is incredibly boring (to me). But it seems to get lots of updates often, heavy monetization which sucks. The steam reviews are scalding. It really makes me wonder… is it that bad? Like really? It’s hard to gauge if the game is thriving or on deaath’s door…

Buttflapper OP ,

It’s a decent game but a terrible one if you are comparing it to the original Overwatch.

I’m just genuinely curious why/how it’s still getting updates and people are playing it with the way it’s talked about, they make it sound like the worst game ever

Buttflapper OP ,

Thanks for the awesome response. What do you recommend as an alternative? Valorant? TF2?

People on Tik Tok peddling these scams (lemmy.world)

I don’t see how this is legal, but people on Tik Tok peddling miracle “medicine” are becoming more common every day. No FDA approval, no research. Just their marketing hype and false promises. This one, lady is showing some sort of probiotic and claiming it can help people suffering from severe acid reflux and...

Why Do People Still Play Destiny 2?

With the release of “The Final Shape,” the main storyline has concluded, and it seems like the developers are now just churning out random content and seasonal passes without a clear direction for the game’s future. I’m genuinely curious about what motivates players to stick around. Are there aspects of the game that...

Buttflapper OP ,

I feel as if the “lack of clear path forward” is a bit over an overreaction from the community.

I don’t think it’s an overreaction considering the fact that they have been building up to the end of this story for about a decade now, it was the grand finale of everything in the entire game’s overarching dialogue, and frankly, no one even considered what would come after that other than the release of Destiny 3 if there even would be one

Bungie is still announcing plans at the same rate they used to

This is just the first time the players haven’t known the 3 year plan in a long time.

Now all we have are leaks from some twitter accounts and the title of the next year of content.

You’re contradicting yourself. You’re saying that they are still announcing things at the rate that they used to, but players don’t know what’s going on, and all we have are leaks from Twitter accounts. How does that make any logical sense? We have no idea what’s going on, but we also know exactly what’s coming, but we also don’t because it’s just leaks and rumors… ummm

Buttflapper OP ,

Seems like most live service games these days are built off of addiction or gambling. For example, gacha gaming is becoming more popular everyday, with their rolls and gambling loops. You can see this in games like Genshin impact. Kind of makes me miss the old days where we had games like battlefield and Call of Duty old school style, just running around playing something that we enjoy for fun.

Buttflapper OP ,

Monkey see, monkey do

Buttflapper OP ,

Chat is non-existent in World of Warcraft anymore. You can get banned or muted for basically anything now because people have a right click report button and often abuse it for no reason. I was completely banned from the game for an entire week for this exact same username that I have here, someone reported me and said my name was inappropriate. I’ve had it for 15 years, and was randomly deemed to be not allowed anymore, so banned. Also had guild members that I was very close with through discord banned for a week for simply making a joke or saying the word fuck.

Are we ever going to see a remake of any Bethesda game?

Fallout 3, New Vegas, Elder scrolls Oblivion are my three favorite games of all time If I had to put my finger on them. But it’s not enjoyable anymore to simply download them and try to play through them again. There’s just something about trying to replay them and it just doesn’t work. Maybe I spent too much time playing...

Buttflapper OP ,

I’ve known about this for a while. Sadly, I don’t think it’ll ever be finished. Even if it is, Skyrim is an extremely old engine and looks like crap, runs like crap. I modded the hell out of it with 4k graphics on an RTX 4070… It’s just awful. The engine isn’t great. They need to make something new. Even Starfield had the same old ass dated engine.

Buttflapper OP ,

I wouldn’t hold your breath on it. That mod collection has been in development for many years now. They keep pushing the release date forward, and even when it is released, it’s still built off of the really old Skyrim game engine. People who want a remake, not a remaster, want a game that has the same capabilities but with a newer game engine. It really does matter, because it affects what is possible to do in the game. You can’t just use the old outdated game engine and upscale the graphics. It’s simply will not be possible and will be sluggish, slow as hell. Look at Starfield. Utter failure because many people expected it to have a new game engine. The one it has now is just not up to par

Buttflapper OP ,

Imo, this is most likely AI. Facebook and Instagram both have incredibly sophisticated spam preventative measures. These companies are likely using artificial intelligence to generate brand new and highly intelligent scripts that continuously change to evade spam detection tools. Same thing happened on Twitter (You can look at my post history for an example). There was a bot spamming on Twitter and it had run out of credits for GPT resulting in the AI instructions to start being spit out instead of the fake messages it was supposed to produce.

Buttflapper OP ,

No, actually, I did my own research on it

npr.org/…/ai-spam-images-facebook-linkedin-thread…

When researchers at Georgetown and Stanford universities investigated more than 100 Facebook pages that routinely post AI content — sometimes dozens of times a day — they found that many are engaging in scams and spam.

Other people have found the same conclusion that I have

Buttflapper OP ,

This is a big reason why inceldom has risen imo

I haven’t seen it nearly this bad until this year. This is the worst year I’ve ever seen for it, and Hoyo games are by far the worst

hey if impregnation is your kink, you do you

It seems like it’s worse than that. I’ve seen people making extremely inappropriate comments about young characters. For example in Zenless Zone Zero subreddit, there are people that post pictures of the young characters that look like children, Piper and a few others that I don’t recall off the top of my head. But they are half naked and fan art of them in extremely suggestive positions. Borderline pedophilia but it’s a made up fictional character so they claim it doesn’t count and it’s perfectly fine. Such a strange view on reality

Buttflapper OP ,

I hate the phrase “borderline pedophillia.” Either they’re sexualizing children or not.

They hide behind the fact that character age isn’t expressly stated anywhere, so it’s technically not pedo behavior since it’s unknown what age it is. But me personally, I think they’re underage.

Example from Zenless subreddit. Piper is a character that looks like she’s anywhere from 10 to 15 years of age, and people are posting her half naked.

Here’s another post with a very one-sided discussion about NSFW art for characters who are clearly minors, in which the community basically downvotes anyone who tries to voice their opinion that creating erotica and other NSFW art for minors and adolescents is wrong. Truly disgusting behavior, and I’m in disbelief that there’s a gaming community out there today like this…

Buttflapper OP ,

In the game, she supposedly has well defined muscles, and slightly larger breasts I guess? I haven’t looked at her enough in the game to really remember it by heart.

Buttflapper OP ,

I agree with you. I think this is definitely one of their cutest characters. I really like the cat girl character design when it’s harmless and light-hearted. People get so into this stuff and act like they are real

Buttflapper OP ,

You say this, but on TikTok people are genuinely so serious when they comment on stuff about the game and Zenless. “I need her bro” or “I’d do anything for her"

Why is Facebook filled with so much random junk now? (lemmy.world)

I remember when you could go on Facebook and look through your feed at what your friends are saying, catch up with them, and browse posts that they have made. Now, it’s just completely random and chaotic, almost nonsensical. There’s no logical sense to my Facebook feed at all. As you can see in the image, they are showing me...

Buttflapper OP ,

It wasn’t that bad several years ago, I remember during the pandemic, lots of people were interacting with each other. It gets progressively worse every year.

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