Yes, Fluxer’s self hosting documentation 404s, and Stoat seems to still rely on a central server, which isn’t self hosted enough for my needs. It’s cool that both of them are looking good in the near future, but I want something I can start using in the next few months.

Teamspeak lived long enough to see an exodus from Discord, but that doesn’t mean Discord is dying.

Did you run into the same problems I did with self-hosting? And if not, how did you avoid them?

You can find full playthroughs of most games with no commentary on the YouTube channel MKIceAndFire.

Yup. The only game to really stress test it was Borderlands 4, but…that’s because the performance in that game sucks across the board. Even then, they put out a performance patch that helped a ton, and I can still run it on high settings with some frame gen, or a few settings turned down to medium without it.

RX6800 XT. It did cost me an arm and a leg when I bought it, due to the shortage at the time, but it’s lasted a long, long time.

I’ve been rocking the same graphics card since 2021, and it still plays every new game on high settings. There are very few games that can even afford the production budget that would push a card like that or even a PS5 to its limits anyway. My most-played game is a 2D game from 2012 that can run on a cheap laptop, and the market at large is most focused on games that are so low spec that they can run on phones too.

Steam reviews are one data point in your pocket. And I’ve found they average out to be pretty useful.

The engine is Godot, which he chose specifically because it was open enough that he could rip out the existing rendering code and replace it.

I do think parents have plenty of responsibility here. I don’t think that absolves Valve. We put regulations on who can legally gamble because we know it’s addicting, and I think it’s a problem how little Valve have done to prevent it from being done by those who aren’t legally supposed to. I’m not advocating for government intrusion to collect more PII, nor am I convinced necessarily that that’s what NY state is asking for, but it’s certainly what Valve would like you to believe they’re fighting against. I would love to see things legally categorized as gambling that currently are not, and the space that Valve is operating in may be less of a gray area than their competitors operate in due to the resale market.

Even before you get to the reseller sites that Valve is definitely aware of, benefiting from, and doing nothing to stop, the way the system is intended to work is still using all of the tricks out of the slot machine playbook.

Far more sources than just a credit card. You can sell something from home during lunch period to another student for enough money to buy a Steam gift card, and their parents would never know.

I’m not a big fan of Valve’s use of loot boxes. But I’m also not happy about the proposed solution of “Just collect blood samples from all users”.

It also might not be exactly what NY is asking for, even if that’s how Valve would like to frame it. The actual ask might be to just stop profiting from gambling.

I’m not a lawyer, and even having perused the official filing, it’s still legalese that I can’t swear I fully understand. There are two possibilities of what NY state actually wants:

1. just stop selling loot boxes
2. you can sell loot boxes, but only if you’ve verified that your customers are of legal gambling age

And I don’t know for sure which is true. Of course it’s in Valve’s best interests to represent this to their customers as the government trying to violate your freedoms, because it gets the public on their side. Remember the Epic case against Apple, where Epic knowingly broke a contract with Apple allowing in-game purchases to cut Apple out, then they had a trailer parodying the 1984 Apple ad to garner public support with “Free Fortnite” ready to go.

I don’t really partake, so I’m always hesitant to have a really firm line in the sand, but we’ve seen a ton of harm come from the constant access to gambling that we’ve got now via sports betting that we didn’t have before deregulation in the wake of Draft Kings, so I’m inclined to lean toward it only being in designated locations. The problem here is similar in that you can access it everywhere and definitely exacerbated by not even doing the bare minimum amount of countermeasures against underage gambling, because they want to pretend that it isn’t gambling.

You can buy gift cards for Steam from the drug store or Walmart with cash, and there are many non-gambling ways to spend money on Steam.

I’d highly recommend you check out People Make Games’ videos on Counter-Strike gambling, which include testimonials from child gambling addicts. And if you still need more convincing, there’s also some videos by Coffeezilla.

But I’d also like to see more companies held accountable for this than just Valve.

It’s the project they’re currently working on. I don’t know why they announced it when they did, but at their current pace, I’d expect it to come out in the next two years and change.

I think I’d be okay if we never got another Fallout game. What we’ve got is satisfying, including the Wasteland and Outer Worlds games, and the Fallout show is great too. Maybe if Bethesda had a tendency to knock our socks off with something new every time they put out a game, then I’d be excited, but that’s not the Bethesda we know.

SiN Gold: Online PvP, LAN PvP

SiN Reloaded: Online PvP

Come on, man.