‘Under’ would have worked and been shorter.

Its not anonymous. Its pseudonymous.

Even if your pseudonym isn’t directly linked to you, even if you are not doxxed, your pseudonym carries its own reputation.

Its up to the pseudonym operator to determine how to manage that.

So, the goal here is to prevent ghosting by making ghosting minutely costly to the ghoster.

They pick from an array of multiple reasons why, and the app formulates an exceptionally kindly worded explanation to send to the ghosted person.

I don’t see this as dangerous to people who are ghosting potentially dangerous people.

Instead of getting nothing, and formulating whatever cockamamie explanation in their own minds (or maybe just going ‘sigh, oh well’), they at least get a facsimile of closure from a canned response.

Obviously this does not magically solve the many problems of dating apps, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than just ghosting on its own.

The problem is that its minutely time consuming to provide a ghosting explanation.

This ghost explanation requirement requires people to actually explain themselves, and that’s gonna be very cumbersome to people who are not really looking for a serious, long term relationship.

It makes it very annoying to use the app in a scattershot approach for rapid fire hookups, with tons of potentials on deck, as you’ll be forced to consistently ‘tend’ to all of your simultaneous matches, or drop them…

…and for people who think they’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but consistently ghost people, it will basically cause uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when they realize they don’t like having to do a modicum if effort to explain why no one seems to meet their standards or is due their attention, even though they previously thought they were interested.

Basically, the problem I see with this app is that it forces users toward being honest with themselves.

… Its totally fine to include a casino as a setting so long as interactive gambling is not a thing the player can do.

Did you read the article or the actual government literature it links to and quotes from?

Nothing is going to change about existing Mario game ratings.

I’d say it would be outlandish for family friendly Nintendo to suddenly reverse course on general world cultural/legal perspectives and re introduce gambling games when they have not done so in years, the same years many countries have been cracking down on lootboxes/gambling in games for their target demo, kids.

Finally, I didn’t downvote you. I only downvote people who are being exceptionally idiotic or abrasive or rude. I almost always prefer to engage with ideas or comments I take issue with but are not presented horrifically: the point of a discussion board should be discussion, not an internet points contest.

You’ll have to pay a subscription fee.

I still have not forgiven them for what they did to Maxis.

Same apologies to you for my edit, but again as with the other similar reply, games are not retroactively rated R 18+ unless simulated gambling is added after September 22.

Yes, if older Mario Party games were patched or updated or remastered and released in a week, they’d be R 18+, but thats probably not gonna happen, and the upcoming Mario Party game doesn’t appear to have any casino like minigames.

Apologies for editing after you replied, I have a tendency of making a quick point and then expanding on it with an edit.

Hard to copy and paste lots of shit on a shitty phone.

But basically, its not a retroactive re rating of any game unless the game is patched to add in simulated gambling or loot boxes.

While sure, Mario Party 3 has simulated gambling minigames, I doubt its getting patched any time soon, and the upcoming Super Mario Party Jamboree does not appear to have any mini games simulating a casino type game.

EDIT: sorry for another edit lol, but yes, I do think its stupid that a poker minigame with in game currency only, which cannot be purchased or redeemed for real currency, is rated worse than a game with lootboxes.

… I’m sorry, what?

Do … does any Mario Party game even have microtransactions? You know, specific game content unlocked by an additional purchase with real world currency? Much less ones where the outcome of a purchase is substantially randomized?

EDIT:

Games that feature “simulated gambling,” such as casino games, will be legally restricted to adults aged 18 and over with a minimum classification of ‘R 18+.’ Projects that were classified before September 22 won’t need to be reclassified unless they lose their current rating due to “revocation or modification.”

This sounds like it isn’t a retroactive change, its a going forward change. It’s explained further in the actual guidelines:

Situations where video games may require reclassification Video games that were classified prior to 22 September 2024, but add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance or simulated gambling content may require reclassification if adding this content is likely to affect the classification of the game. For example: – video games classified G or PG that add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification – video games classified G, PG, M or MA 15+ that add simulated gambling content after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification

So… yeah, Mario Party games would have to be patched or re released or something to add more gambling content.

It does seem to indicate that, going forward, a Mario Party game that simulates casino like gambling would get an R 18+ rating, but the Mario Party franchise does not seem to me to have had any minigames that even sort of resemble a casino type game, even with neutered or non existent betting/staking mechanics, in about a decade.

The upcoming Super Mario Jamboree, though public info on the minigames is incomplete, also does not appear to depict any casino like games.

So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new.

The rationale was to make a 128 player battle royale ala PUBG or Fortnite. You know, shameless trend chasing!

It was supposed to basically be a spin off, non mainline BF game with the potential to be the next big thing while the next mainline game was being produced, but that only works if BF5 has staying power.

Which it did not.

And EA want MONEY, BIG MONEY ASAP!

So then BF2042 got massively reworked in a tiny amount of time to try to make it into a mainline series game by throwing a ton more developers at it than originally planned, ending up as a rushed, buggy, undercooked mess with tons of crap (half baked half reworked game modes) thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

That is why distinct armies were replaced with a cadre of mercenaries, as well as the entire 2042 timeframe setting in a world where nation states had basically collapsed already.

It is also why the maps are gigantic and seem like they were designed for a battle royale.

I’m guessing also their original plan was to have the much hyped dynamic weather systems serve a similar function as the the closing force fields or bubbles of death that battle royale’s have to force players into conflict and games to eventually end, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to make that work.

Any questions Vince?

The ligaments animating my meat digits are often quite sore.

Its an enormously overproduced Overwatch clone with zany characters that seem to be going for Guardians of the Galaxy, an art style that is basically just bizarre, and gameplay from a decade ago.

Sony wanted their own Overwatch, after seeing its success, then spent a huge amount of time and money developing it, and this is what they came up with.

Oh, right, it isn’t free to play, costs 40 bucks, and then also has an astounding amount of microtransactions.

EDIT: Based off of current active player count, Concord has cost approximately $200,000 dollars per active player to produce.

Better hope they are all omega class hyper whale spenders, I guess.

Expanding on this concept: Do any of these programs aimed at architects have a capability of easily exporting to blender, such that they could be imported into Unity or UE?

He hyped up a huge groundbreaking project for like a year… and it was a cellphone game that a 16 year old could make in 3 months.

Oops thats just the teaser for the real game!

Which came out years later and was basically what a 21 year old could make in unity in about 6 to 9 months, and was never finished.

Machine Head, Deep Purple.

I can understand an indie game dev with no budget using a vocaloid type thing to generate some voice lines when they cannot afford voice actors, or mockup some concept art of characters to the base models off of, or generate some random background content in an otherwise hand crafted world, maybe even use it to add some contextual spice to a list of prewritten dialogue text.

There are ways that a small or even medium sized team can use ‘AI’ tastefully.

But churning out an entire AI generated script with entirely AI gen art to slap together a ‘dating sim’ is obviously a very crap way to use AI.

And for a larger scale studio, one would think that these kinds of time and cost saving tools would be ultimately pointless or detrimental, as a competent staff should be able to turn out far higher quality content and systems with distinct styles.

Instead they will likely just expect to be able to replace staff and churn out samey looking sounding and feeling garbage because who cares! Saves costs, lowers dev time!

Except they will end up having less staff, being told to use AI, finding its limitations and constantly baby sitting it when it is relied on to do far more than it can actually do.

As a bit on an aside:

What is perhaps most baffling to me as someone who has modded games for a long time is that in this ‘AI’ revolution… I have yet to see any actual improvements to what game devs typically call AI, you know, the little brain of finite state machines or what not that actually governs what NPCs do.

I have not seen any breakthroughs in say making an RTS or FPS or ARPG type enemy do things that you would typically only expect from a human player, better pathfinding or tactics or strategy.

Only thing I can really think of is motion matching, as it uses a fairly complex algorithm to ‘intelligently’ blend anim states into each other far more convincingly than just a tree of anims with blends.

I realize this is because ‘AI’ nowadays refers to ‘generative AI’, but its just very annoying to me, having used the term AI for decades to mean the situational intelligence and decision making capability of NPCs.

Well, for a lot of realism or immersion themed games, its basically taken as a given that reticles are not realistic, that blind firing a weapon is inaccurate, and that ADS should provide an benefit to accuracy whilst usually lowering movement speed and taking a bit to bring up the weapon.

Thats kind of the whole debate back in the early/mid 2000s that led to ADS becoming a thing, but with time, ADS has basically become an expected feature, even if the core mechanics underlying it are now neutered to the point that it is practically cosmetic only.

One solution I can see is doing something like what Arma does, but more immersively, more thought through.

In Arma, your point of viewing is not connected directly to your point of aim. You can look over your shoulder, fire, and the gun will fire at the vector it is pointing, not where your eyes are pointing.

What you could do is make it so that instead of your arms and the gun be pointing directly ahead at all times… they wander about the screen independent of your center of the screen, dependent on your level of woundedness and exhaustion, so that you have a visual indicator of unsteadyness… which is what blooming and closing aiming reticles were originally meant to convey, as 90s FPSs didnt have the technical ability to do that kind of animation.

You could also make it so that the weapon aiming vector chases the eye aiming vector on a delay, and that would go to significant lengths to cut down on the twitch shooter kind of thing where you can do a 180 and basically instantly be on target, cut down on the video gamey ness of many fast paced shooters.

With modern tech its also totally possible to make it so that if you are shot in the arm, maybe you drop your gun, or if shot in the leg, maybe you collapse. It is usually the case that this only happens to NPCs, but never players.

Ive made mods toying with this in Source over a decade ago now, and it was possible then, just the animations were janky as fuck from the viewpoint of anyone who is not the player.

Now we have motion matching doable in Unity and UE5 and that could absolutely make the animations look far better.

One element of online shooters is basically silly animations for a player with high mouse sensitivity doing a 180 and this basically results in them just instantly pierroutting, not needing to take steps and reshoulder the gun. With motion matching and my vector chasing idea, you can make it so there are actually fluid, believable animations, and thus penalties, for doing said 180.

Maybe some day I will be able to mock this up… kind of hard to do game dev with no real internet access (posting on 4g lol)

I know what you are talking about…

The game I recommend to most people looking for a realistic enough multiplayer experience is Squad, as it is a pretty reasonable compromise between gamey aspects that allow for more action and fun, with realistic aspects that make gameplay revolve far more around group tactics rather than everyone just soloing and screaming at everyone.

… though they are apparently currently going through the same crisis that the mod they spawned from (Project Reality for bf2) did: Time to totally revamp how all aiming/weapon spread works!

I think part of the solution to this problem (Squads problem) would be to have better visual feedback, ie, make the players arms weapon and aimpoint actually be drifting around, instead of just having an invisible expanding and contracting reticle.

And oh god yeah, the replenishing health on a timer thing… its halo’s shield mechanic, but now just widely adopted everywhere with no explanation…

Basically, if you had very realistic portrayal of damage in a multiplayer team death match, it is not fun for all but the most hardcore milsim crowd.

I have played various Arma mods that actually go to the extreme to simulate a person realistically and what happens is 99% of people get angry they cannot carry an RPG, 3 rounds for it, as well as an AK and 8 magazines, then sprint for a mile, because they will literally have a heart attack and die.

With mods like that, yep, you take a round to the chest with plate armor, you get knocked to the ground… and then obliterated by 400 other rounds coming downrange.

the AI in Arma has always been basically laughably bad at tactics and movement, especially in any kind of city, but absurdly laser accurate when they do see you.

A medic has to carry morphine, epipens, bandages, tourniquets, splints, and even blood bags. Turns out a realistic portrayal of bullet and explosive damage is…

… yeah you can get lucky and take a through and through that doesnt hit bone, get patched up and maybe be semi combat effective, though you’ll be limping and grunting and barely able to hit anything…

…but the vast majority of the time youre gonna need an evac or have the ability to set up a field hospital on the fly. Presented with this…? most players just suicide and respawn

It would work much better in a single player game, possibly some kind of co-op game, either with a small number of humans vs ai, or possibly something like titanfall, where there are just a few humans on each side and most of both teams are actually well written AI.

The sad truth is that many of the people who say they want realism actually cry and rage when presented with it.

Hah, I didn’t notice that, was a long time ago.

I know that sort of thing often happens in … well just many games, period. It used to be a sign of a less than stellar PC port, or back in the day when mod teams became full game devs, but it is still a persistent problem.

That and timing some things along with the framerate and others not.

Its wild that these kind of things that are basically novice game dev mistakes are still being made by novices and huge studios alike.

One thing about a lot of shooting games is whether or not enemies or the player get ‘stunlocked’ from being shot.

Multiplayer FPS? You shoot a bad guy and this almost always has no stagger effect at all. Maybe ín some more realism themed or tactical games you get a large blood spatter on your screen and a camera punch, but usually it just means your health goes down.

Singleplayer FPS or TPS? All over the place. Some games you can injure an enemy and they’ll do a stun or stagger animation, others none, sometimes the same applies to the player, sometimes not.