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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.

    I had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out.

    There will be a lot of people facing problems like yours with actual family members living abroad, and others will face issues with sharing with friends abroad or friends that used to change often or paid sharing that changed often.

    I am a cynic so I think it is mostly done to hinder paid sharing and sharing with friends and family abroad is collateral damage.

    A second use is probably that child protection is now pushed away from Steam and more towards the parents. I think that was necessary because European countries and maybe others were putting Valve under pressure and they do not want to implement a real age verification (they should imho). Now they can just say: “Kids should not have free access to a PC to be able to make an account, parents need to do that for them and restrict access age appropriate, it is not our concern anymore!” I have my doubt that will be enough for the EU though, but might buy them time.

    I think many people haven’t realized the downsides of this yet and only see where it benefits them. We will have complaints about the one year cooldown soon.





  • In the past I had to upgrade my PC every 4 years (my first PC run on Windows 3.1), but my last one just works and even the GPU only fell out of minimum requirements of the newest and graphical shiny games end of last year (it even managed to run Starfield although it looked bad and lagged in cities terribly), but my backlog is huge, so I don’t care and if I care I can use Geforce Now or Game Pass for PC and stream that one game I can not play on my rig directly anymore.

    Our planet is on fire and consuming less is the only actual solution to that. Everything got more expensive. I literally don’t want to spent a lot of money on a PC that I do not need, because the one I have plays the games I want to play just fine (currently Dave the Diver) and on top throw a perfectly fine machine away, add to CO2 production and need to cut back on other needs I have because everything is so expensive.

    My machine is an i7-6700K 4GHz with a GTX 970 and 16 GB DDR 4. And the only reason this is not working with Windows 11 is the CPU and upgrading that would need a new board and at that point I need a new PC. Oh and I tested it at the beginning when Windows 11 came out, I can circumvent the restriction and install Windows 11 anyway, it’s just not guaranteed it will stay working and getting upgrades can be a hassle, but at least for the time I tried it I did get automated updates.

    I do not hate Windows, I tried to get Windows 11, I just don’t want to accept that a security feature for businesses makes my consumer PC invalid for it. I am a gamer and I would like to stay with Windows, but I am not buying a new PC unless a vital part of my old one breaks. I rather stay with an unpatched system and do anything that needs security on my phone/tablet on android. And no, I am 58 y.o. and I am not learning Linux, maybe if I were interested in the Steam handheld it would make sense, but I am not.




  • Plants vs Zombies on PC.

    Great, unique, iconic, still fun to play. Its biggest achievement: I have brought a lot of people into the hobby by making them play this as their first video game and there wasn’t a single one not having fun. Tower defense is as a whole an underrated genre if we talk about the best games of all time. It also is a game that offers achievements that add a lot to the gameplay by challenging you to change your tactics.

    They of course had to make the second one mobile only and on top ruin it with microtransactions. :( Greed is why we can’t have nice things.




  • More than 500 people were sent to hospital after the incident … 423 people have been discharged from hospital … 25 in serious condition

    What is stupid is the headline, why not “500+ injured in subway crash” instead of using the number of one kind of injury. As stupid as writing “two people lost a tooth in subway crash”. Still one of the seriously injured could die, but of course I wish everyone a speedy recovery, from injuries but also from the shock of the accident.




  • A large dyke is being constructed to divert potential lava flows around the plant

    Lava, like water, prefers to go the easy route. You do not build a wall to stop it face to face, but offer a more easy route right and left of your “wall”, so the force of the lava is halved AND it will likely take the more easy routes and not bother to try and crawl over your construct.

    A wall directly in its path only makes sense when you are already somewhat far away from the volcano, so the lava is very slow and not as hot as in the beginning anymore and then it is rather a pile of earth piled against a smaller part of the stream of lava for days again and again and not a real static wall. A video for that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWbQOqaOxjg The scale of this … kudos to people who can live near a volcano, I am way to scared for that.



  • That’s why the kid was distressed and the relationship with the father went south, because he said “no” and tried to help his child. That’s the point when kids start to sell their belongings to school mates, steal from parents purses or take their credit cards or spent all money they make with a job on the game and even when they have no money to spent, their minds are in the game all the time and family life is 99% fighting about screen time.

    This is not solely about parents not restricting money, this is game developers and publishers hiring psychologists to find ways to make their games as addictive as possible vs. normal people and their children, a multi billion industry vs. ordinary customers. To blame this solely on parents is just wrong.

    They probably allowed the kid a decent amount of screen time and some money to spent, like normal parents do. That their kid got pulled into an addiction by an industry that does everything possible to make that happen did happen over time, hard to notice until it is already a problem.

    Most people blaming only the parents do not have children and have watched their child cry for days because it can’t have the skin “all the other kids have” and therefore gets bullied in school. All these games on purpose work with group pressure on top of addictive game and loot mechanics. They prey especially on neurodiverse children and adults, FOMO and more.


  • Whether you are a current player … or maybe you jumped off the WoW train a few expansions ago, now is the time to come home

    Sorry, but I left this abusive relationship years ago for a reason. Not coming back. I am also not sure if multiple expansions in a short time frame will be what the users want that are fine with going back every 2-3 years for a new expansion for three month and quit, if there is not enough time inbetween to forget why they stopped playing. Just saying.

    And for the story side of things, they have messed up everything to the point that I do not even want to read about the story anymore. I am just done with the world and the lore and the graphics. There are so many interesting worlds and ideas out there, so many great games. I have fond memories of the friends I made ingame, but I also regret the massive amount of time I spent in one single game. It wasn’t healthy for me.