I like Steam as a platform, I hate it as a service. I can’t appear offline without BEING offline, and I can’t be the only one with friends who don’t get along well. I don’t get to play a game with one without alerting the other, even though just about every social service ever has allowed a proper appear offline…

I’m okay with a company choosing to sell games only on their service - I’m not okay with companies like Ubisoft making it so buying a game on Steam requires me to have the competing service installed to run the game. I bought the first Assassin’s Creed a couple years back during the holiday sale; not only was UPlay…

There’s features such as adding friends and actually participating in most community features that were locked behind owning at least one retail game. It worked right up until F2P games became so prominent, at which point there was a sizeable portion of players actually using the platform that couldn’t access features…

I guess the people who play Steam’s extensive library of F2P titles just don’t matter, right?

Adding friends, for one. For a disgustingly long time you needed at least one retail game license on your account to actually add friends or do anything whatsoever in the community. On paper this prevents the worst of the spambots and trolls; in practice it means people playing F2P games were fucked silly. I don’t…

It was incentivized poorly before - you got a queue of 10 cases per day, and 15 IP for every case (that you voted in the majority on). It shattered any illusions of objectivity for most people - I still voted based on what I felt was necessary, but I definitely got more IP whenever I voted to punish, since people all…

If Tribunal members don’t have access to at LEAST pre-game logs if not post-game, then it’s fucking pointless. The amount of times someone holds their team hostage in champ select with “X or feed” bullshit is too damn high, and all they have to do is act like an angel during the game itself with little to no recourse…

I understood it from the beginning as that, sounds like it was just poor explanation on the part of Nintendo. I promise you that if Smash unlocks were tied wholly to separately purchaseable figures, Nintendo HQ would burn to the ground.

Or probably not, since it’s fucking Nintendo and despite the numerous ways they…

That’s absolutely what’s happening. Most of the characters in Smash also happen to be characters with little to no official merch for their series - Fire Emblem, Earthbound/Mother, Metroid, basically ANYTHING apart from Mario or Pokemon. So fans of those series are going out of their way to get merch for them -…

Given that watchinga video absolutely precludes other activities like responding to a text, this is pretty great. Background isn’t necessarily just “the video keeps playing”, though some people may want that. It’s largely “I can actually do something else on my phone briefly without marking down what time I was at and…

Range reduction makes sense, as it stands it’s INSANE. But it should stay put (and likely will, since it’s not being brought in as part of a temporary mode. It was in Legend of the Poro King during their winter holidays event, but this seems permanent.

It’ll be like... a day after. This is why someone needs to actually review them. Apart from that, this is a great idea, but as it currently stands it’s just Valve shunting even more responsibility onto someone else. Greenlight replaced the vetting process (though they still act like it didn’t and Steam is 100% quality…

I’m not convinced he’ll stick around as some sort of meta toplaner. Ashe is going to be huge for a few months though, they’re taking out all the things that made her stupid to play and easy to fight. There’s still risk, but it’s at least backed up with reward now.

His other huge thing was that it was a fairly static build with little variation. He needed all the big mana items he could get his hands on, so Frozen Heart, Rod of Ages, AA Staff, Lich Bane, then like Mercs/Sorcs and Banshee’s. There was very little variation, that build let you roll most things without needing to…

That’s rough. I took a 5th year to get into a better spot grades-wise and actually cement what I wanted to do, though that blew up on me halfway through actual college. I’d say my victory lap was helpful overall, though my acceptance in February was based on my actual grade 12 year - you think senioritis is bad, it’s…

Er, no. Biological maturity and brain development is not the parents’ fault. I meant it in as literal a term as it could be. Mentally the overwhelming majority of human beings don’t have fully functional brains until at least 18, so forcing people under that age to make decisions that will affect them for at least 40…

Yeah, was probably a gut reaction from me is all. I got a year and a half into college before I realized that I was absolutely not where I had to be, and thankfully I’m in a position where I can salvage most of the credits from that. A lot of people don’t get that chance, unfortunately.

Agreed, but I sort of resent “screw around” as the phrasing there. We as a society are forcing immature humans to make choices that will influence the rest of their lives before they’re even old enough to vote. If my kid took a year to change majors, I’d much prefer it to them being pressed into something they’ll hate…

Yeah, I think the issue is going to be convincing Bethesda to back the fuck off on their cut of the sale. The other big issue is about actually policing content that is used without permission - the flagship mod in this debacle used assets and framework to function, and the author said that he simply didn’t have a…

I see where you’re coming from, but in a sense I could totally see that happening, and as long as the price was right I could live with it. At the end of the day I think the original dev is entitled to SOME portion of the price since it’s their IP being modified, just nowhere near the nearly 75% they’re taking. In the…