They are absolutely not separate issues. How can I be expected to shell out $15 per month for 10 different content subscriptions if I can only just afford to put food on my table?
Anomandaris
Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they're barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.
The problem starts with corporate greed, hoarding revenue by keeping employee's salaries to the minimum acceptable, providing as little functionality as possible to reduce overheads, double dipping by selling a product/subscription and then selling their customer's data, and then complaining they aren't getting more money for what little they are doing.
Then inevitably a little guy like Kbin comes along and suffers because the internet is filled with soulless, ultra-capitalist corpo scumbags.
RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
All are good choices.
I don't think so, the ARPG I have in mind wouldn't be open world, would have no campaign and much less focus on story overall, a much more detailed crafting system akin to Path Of Exile but perhaps less punishing, and much more focus on stacking up as many extra modifiers as possible rather than being limited, push your team to get the best rewards.
No timegating, no daily/weekly quests you must log in for, the only limitation is your skill.
I've been thinking about an ARPG based around World of Warcraft's mythic dungeons.
Scalable, multi-player, enhanceable instances where completion of more difficult versions of the instance rewards in better gear and crafting options.
The idea is that the content is created for a 5-man party (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps) but you can try solo it, or bring up to 20 people to massively increase the difficulty and the rewards. Instances would follow WoW dungeon's formula of trash mobs (which drop crafting materials and have rare drop chances for certain gear) pathing you towards a succession of bosses with very different, complex mechanics with stages, signaled abilities, and skill requirements.
This would include a character levelling system to unlock new class abilities and mechanisms, a party finder system, certain dungeons locked behind character level and the completion of other dungeons at a certain difficulty level. Perhaps you could extend it to add in "world bosses", massive 200-man bosses with a chance at particularly unique loot, but of course that would require a certain level of infrastructure and a game population making it justifiable.
To provide a different perspective to everyone else, I would say that it's not the right time if you want everything to "just work".
I tried out Ubuntu 22.04 just a couple of months ago, and only one game of the several I tried "just worked". Everything else either didn't work at all, or required hours of searching and troubleshooting and problem solving, with mixed success. And I'm not a technophobe, I'm a software developer with experience in system support.
People keep saying there's lots of guides out there for most things, and that's true. But that doesn't necessarily mean the guide will work for you. I tried multiple "guides" to get my games working and most of them didn't help. Either they were too old, or there was a step that I couldn't complete, or I completed the guide and there was an error that isn't mentioned in the guide. Or any number of other problems.
Regardless of what people say, it may not be as simple as "switch to Proton and install Lutris". In the end I just got frustrated with having to work so hard to get my own computer to do the things I wanted it to do, and so I reverted back to Windows and had all my software working as expected within a couple of hours.
Honestly I don't get why this is so surprising, humans have been drawing graffiti for thousands of years. There's plenty of Ancient Roman graffiti to attest to that.
While yes, we should discourage it where possible, we also need to acknowledge that it's just as big a part of human nature, and culture, as the colosseum itself.
That's fine, but what happens when this expands with the the increasing effects of climate change? What happens when Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas health insurance costs triple because of the risks of extreme heat? What about New Orleans or locations prone to extreme storms or hurricanes?
Huge patches of countries all over the world are soon to become uninsurable because climate change makes it too dangerous to live there.
tbf I think a lot of the Starcraft devs moved to work on Stormgate so hopefully that'll cover the RTS portion.
And once again millions of jobs are saved from Bill Gates' nano-5G-AI-homoglobo agenda, praise god ong ong fr fr 100
To me this just illustrates that using tests meant for humans to test AIs produces questionable results.
Of course an AI is going to be able to produce a larger number of original ideas, it's designed to have much more data at its disposal than humans and be much better at using it, and correspondingly with access to more data it can produce more unique combinations from that data.
If anything, the fact that it's simply near the top of the pack rather than massively outstripping human minds, which are essentially hunks of wet meat with a slight electrical charge, demonstrates how far this technology has yet to go.
But a massive amount of them are. Small and solo creators on Youtube or Twitch need to conform to the rules of Google and Amazon, and even medium size creators are influenced and coerced by the precedents and market trends set by the much larger corporations.
And it doesn't matter if not all content is provided by large corporations, those large corporations employ the most people, and dictate in a lot of ways, the rules of the employment market. It's due to their habits and practices that wages are artificially low and expenses are inflated for record profits.
Until corporate greed is managed properly, consumers will always struggle to have enough expendable income to pay content creators, and therefore will always be searching for free content.