That’s really sad. Can we at least have their stuff now? I mean it would be a waste to not open-source all the code and assets they’ve developed and make them available under MIT, CC and similar licenses.

Cool idea, I almost forgot this feature even exists. I think I dismissed it the past when I realized it’s probably not going to be easy to switch VPN servers this way.

It does hurt, your VPN should support proper port-forwarding for soulseek to work well. In most cases, you will only be able to download files, but your shares will be inaccessible. It doesn’t seem to work with ProtonVPN for example, even when you built-in port-forwarding feature. And even if it did work, you would need to reconfigure and restart soulseek every time you reconnect the VPN, because their port-forwarding is randomizing the ports and there’s no way to turn that off.

Let me explain how Honkai Star Rail handles gearing. Every single character has six relic slots: head, hands, body, feet, planar orb, and planar ornament. These relics go from level 0 to level 15, and four of them have a randomized primary stat. They all feature four randomized secondary stats, and every three levels a random one of those secondary stats gets a bonus. Each relic also belongs to a set of relics, and characters benefit from having two or four pieces of a given relic set. That means for every character in your party, you need to get the right items at the maximum rarity, the right primary stats, the right secondary stats, and the right level-ups for those secondary stats.

This is min-maxer mindset and I would hope randomized systems like this will prevent it but unfortunately no: even here some people think they actually need to roll every dice exactly the right way. I don’t think it’s true that this is really necessary. And no, it is not necessary to do top 10 world parses; you can just beat endgame content on modest, casual difficulty and call it a day, rather than try hard to set a record.

Even co-op in gacha games doesn’t qualify as MMO, because for that you need hundreds or thousands of players being simultaneously in the same persistent world. This is the same reason why games like Dota, League of Legends or Counter Strike aren’t considered MMO.

Yes, the cheapest ones might have some risks, I mostly presented it as an example of what the opposite extremity looks like. There is a lot in-between, something a bit more expensive is even more guaranteed win. For example last time I used Hetzner, I had a server with 64gb RAM, 2TB SSD, and 16 cores Ryzen for something like €34/month. Hetzner support is very decent and they’re very well known, have decent reputation and been providing their services for a long time.

I’m talking about 3d software one, and author obviously talks about that one too.

Maybe the problem is that they are using ridiculously overpriced enterprise services like AWS or Azure, which provide their own solutions for a lot of common things like backups, replicas, logging, etc, but cost 100x more than what you can get with DIY on some cheap VPS if you’re fine with spending 1.25x more time.

Also, given that the instance is called “infosec.exchange”, you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.

Why not, though.

I wonder why it needs so much money for infra? Last time I rented a VPS it was €7/month for 8 Core Xeon E5 V4, 12 GB DDR4 RAM, 150 GB SSD/NVME, Unlimited Traffic, 1 Gbps Port.

If Blender had a patreon or coffee or kofi, I would happily subscribe to something like $3/month. I know artists that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers and their minimal plan is $3. Blender could achieve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers eventually imo. To make things interesting, they could release prebuilt binaries of some subprojects like NPR fork, only to subscribers, also they could do partnership and paid plugin giveaways every month to subscribers. It just needs a bit of dedicated SMM work. One-time donations just don’t hit the same. I do those maybe once a year or two, and don’t do another one until I get the feeling “it’s been a while”.

Isn’t it time travel that breaks causality? How can even physical existence of parallel timelines break it?

we’ll just pay artists to produce training data en masse’.

If they want to make sure it was actually drawn specifically for them and not generated by other AI or stolen from internet, they’ll need to ask timeline of work. And people doing commissions like this with also timeline provided will ask considerable payment. The smallest I’d expect is like maybe 30$ per small drawing of beginners. But it might as well be 300$ or more per drawing for pro works. Even with 30$, are they really able to pay that? How many drawings they need? Can they spend millions on this?

Maybe it’s just your subscriptions? I don’t feel the same way. Just curate your list more actively and make sure to browse communities from global pool of instances.

My first guess with this would be: they were read-only, then they wanted to post something or write a reply to someone and at the time considered it to be a one-time thing and created sort of “throwaway account” for that specifically, but then they kept visiting the place and it kind of just stick with them. Yet again, my guess might be completely wrong. But at least this is one of the possible motivations behind such accounts.

What? 😅

That looks like the perfect outfit for a stroll to the Totem of Earth!

Like I mentioned before, “tutorial pulls” are part of that hyper-generosity that gachas will commonly have for new players

I don’t feel it’s “hyper”, it’s only 8 crystals instead of 10 for guaranteed Noelle. Other (non-tutorial) pull categories have something guaranteed for 10 crystals, what exactly they guarantee changes depending on current events and such. Classic pulls category is 10 crystals for guaranteed 4+ star something, which can be character or weapon.

to give them enough of a dopamine rush to hang around and be more likely to spend more later

“Dopamine rush” sounds like a bit of a stretch, because normal gameplay here with tons of randomized minibosses, minigames and puzzles, all of which reward you fancy chests with random loot in open-world, gives way more dopamine every few minutes, and the whole gacha thing feels quite underwhelming compared to that in terms of neurochemistry.

Give it another week and you will find that the supposed good luck runs out, as well as the free currency offered for things like logging in, and then it will start requiring a ton of grinding or real world money to acquire the necessary currency to get to the “pity” in order to ensure you get a top-rarity item. That’s how gacha systems work.

Sure, I will be looking carefully at this dynamics as I progress. I find it quite surprising what you’re describing is still not there.

and can’t last or elee the game will not make nearly as much money

Who knows, maybe it makes enough money even without being that pushy? For me it’s too early to say.

(2) Also, I’m personally more interested in “no money” challenge. I like “gambling elements” tbh and enjoy all kinds of RNG in games: starting from randomized items stats in Diablo and procgen in roguelikes and ending with randomized perks in roguelites and stuff like pulls in Genshin. So for me “gambling elements” themselves aren’t something inherently bad and definitely not something I would want to avoid. For me, it’s social implications of gambling mechanics that are sometimes bad (in context of people who can’t control their spending), but not randomness or mechanics themselves.

(1) Well, all I can say for now is that my week of playing wasn’t enough to be able to say whether this is even possible at all. Maybe there will be more unlocked characters from regular questing later in the game, but so far I only got a single dendro character (Collei) from a random pull. And I think there were some open world mini-puzzles activated by dendro. I don’t think there were a lot of them though. Also they are definitely optional and not a big deal. Could also be possible it was intended for later game players going back with their dendro characters unlocked organically in the later questlines.

vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone

Well said. I think a lot of things in the world work like this, unfortunately. Like, some people have to work long hours or hard jobs because they didn’t choose a career path that would allow them to work less and earn more. I mean, it sounds very different, but it’s also kinda similar in a way. There are people suffering for the benefit of other people. Saying they could choose another job is the same as saying vulnerable people could choose to not be vulnerable.

Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.

Agree, this is a great idea.