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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2023

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  • They may be overcharging, they are most likely overcharging if it can make a billionaire among them. Is it anti-consumer? In the context of current capitalist economy and comparable, even rival companies present? And if you have reading comprehension, you’ll notice that there is a paragraph in all of my comments to you mentioning Gaben’s yatches being obscene and shouldn’t be. Anyway, skip to the part below, ending it there:

    I never had a dream of becoming a billionaire, or dreaming about those yatches. Or being aspired to and been jealous of through riches. As you have noted, I’m from Turkey and we don’t have the fucking American Dream here, dude. But what we had is: Cheapest gaming PC game purchases thanks to Steam for all the goddamn years. Even when we had quite a competitive economy before our glorious economist-god-emperor Tayyip fucked our economy, we were able to buy your 60€ all-stores-including-own-store triple-A games for like 5€-10€. Indie games? Man you won:t believe it, but cents. Now you make the calculations about how much Steam exploited us.

    Anyway, I, too, can enjoy this criticism-deflection game, so here goes my response to your personal background digging: Go suck Tim Swiney’s epic child-addiction-exploitating-Fortnite-whatever-the-fuck-ever-is-exclusive-dick after you find solace that you supported grinding down the best gaming store that is practicing the most pro-customer policies reliably in a stable and self-sustaining capacity over more than a decade and a half.


  • And what you don’t understand is that this whole affair about “Valve taking 30% cut is overcharging” is bogus. Valve and whole others can sell fully-fledged carrots at $1M each, with Valve adding better packaging and better preservation while doing discounts regularly, all the while Epic can sell a malnourished and cut-out one at $500k each and give away a stale and cut-out one for free regularly.

    Both are expensive if their base prices can be discounted by electing smaller margin of profits. (That is another topic as Steam is doing jackload of live-service that can’t be served as an offline service, without any form of subscription or recurring payments.) Even so, picking on the one that offers a sustainable price plan and fully-fledged product with extra benefits just because it is pricey for your wallet while all others in the market do a poorer job at the same prices or price-per-value is just grabbing your pitchfork because someone else started a riot against your cordial and caring overseer while the world around you is rife with jackals who’d like to be your king.

    Go bug Gaben to spend more of his personal wealth gained through Valve’s distributed earnings on betterment of the product they serve rather than on the yatches. Don’t go around asking just Valve to get less cushion for experimentation, being generous in return, lax bout worker load and project development, etc., while they are the sole company doing that. Better yet, push your governments to install blanket resolutions against exorbitant wealth accumulations or uneven wealth distributions so that both better product development is prioritized and all employees are rewarded fairly if any single one is to be rewarded.

    Anyway, I’m changing the discussion to be about how Stephen Hawking’s name is on Epstein’s list. Lets talk about this, I don’t care whether there are more concerning people named on that list or whether Hawking is unique for his contributions in some fields. Hell, I am not even interested in if the discussion is worthwhile through the factuality of the claim or the scope of the claim because why, this is a discussion about Stephen Hawking being on Epstein’s list now.


  • What everyone is debating with you is that you are wrong in picking your target while your base claim of enabling someone, anyone at all, to be a billionaire is correct.

    You are wrong in picking Valve or Gaben as exploitative wealthy scum, because Valve is the closest thing to something that is not exploitative corporation, while Gaben as the head and sole person having the final say in which direction to go and which not to go, has been the best guardian of unexploitative gaming entertainment. If you think I’m making these up, please search around to see if you can find the equivalent of these features in any of the meaningfully-accessible companies: Family sharing, Proton, Steam Friends, Steam Network, Steam Workshop, Steam Community Hub.

    Steam Family sharing: The current version enables players to have access to the games in other’s libraries as long as those accounts are not having access at the same time. The upcoming version allows for access to other’s games as long as there are enough copies in the sharing pool. In the age others in the entertainment industry is cracking down accessibility with ever increasing prices, like Netflix’ oppression on password sharing or even having access to your own account on multiple devices, please don’t tell me this Family sharing improvements by Valve isn’t extremely pro-consumer.

    Proton: Provides an almost silver bullet, or an easily configurable base template, for gaming on Linux. You can be a Windows or Mac user all you want and never give a thought to Linux, but you can’t argue not letting Windows have monopoly over PC gaming by enabling access to gaming on free OS isn’t a completely pro-consumer endeavour. It is also open source, so they are not even gatekeeping their own work on this.

    Friends and Network: While having no-DRM copies from GOG is great and all, having your games connect to your friend’s games, or forming completely random lobbies in seconds, with just a couple clicks requires some always-present middleman. Your no-DRM copies can stay with you till eternity, but you’ll have to configure your own methods of connection to your friends outside your local network.

    Workshop: Mods hosting for games that support it, and easy installation with 1 click. Yes, there are still free alternatives like Nexus, but they show you ads to meet their hosting needs, so in that sense they are as free as Valve sparing budget from their 30% cut from game sales to Workshop.

    Community Hub: A catalogue of all game-related stuff, from guides to memes, troubleshooting threads to feedback, promotion space for developers to knowledge database for players. Open to the whole world wide web and not restricted to account walls or pay walls.

    Now, I agree that even providing these services with the best quality-and-features-per-buck option out there, there shouldn’t be billionaires while there are starvation and wage slaving ones life this prominent in the world. While these issues persist, having yatches to one person’s or a few people’s name is an indecent behaviour that should not be allowed in a working social contract. However, when you look at the rest of the companies in the same industry, or even other industries, there are way worse offenders of this wealth inequality that don’t even come close to Valve in providing the same quality-and-features-per-buck value, while having billionaires and actually striving to make them more wealthy instead of providing more for the customers and workers.

    Case in point: You are not even looking a gift horse in the mouth; you are beating your most hard working horse for eating a hearty meal, claiming you are right in that amount of meal is not needed to survive, all the while letting the rest of your slacking horses raid your pantry without batting an eye. Pressure the others to provide better services per buck, also at a self-sustaining rate so as to not be deprived of it a year later, first.




  • Yeah, I think Exodus made quite a unique blend of linear and half-open world gameplay. It is still very much different from the openness of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but a Metro game with that much of a different atmosphere could only be done in that way while being as good as it is. Hacking through the vanilla S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl was quite hard after that, and not having the time to try to manually mod such an old game on core mechanics was something I didn’t have time for then. Finding OGSR was right at the breaking point for me about the series, but I’m glad I’ve found it even if it took 3 tries.

    Link is what I remember downloading back then (should be a “standalone” file meaning it has all the game files, exes etc and won’t need any vanilla installs at all). For the other 2 games, Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, I went with the big community bugfix mod called SRP only iirc. For Clear Sky and Gunslinger for Call of Pripyat, both of which being smaller in scope but good enough for the latter games than needing OGSR-equivalent for them.

    There is also a whole lotta different “game” called Anomaly that is basically a tremendous engine upgrade by the community and an open mod ecosystem, which you keep adding to build something yourself. It is a hassle, as much as modding Skyrim with 200 mods, but Anomaly is quite the technical improvement on the base games. It is rather storyless and with bits of “go here, meet this person, go here and fetch this”, kind of thing making the whole progression. And yes, it, too, has curated modpacks, one of the biggest ones being G.A.M.M.A with its own setup of mods on a tidy Mod Organizer profile, with the options to add or remove mods yourself.

    I apologize if this turned out to be an overhaul/modpack advertisement. There surely were many more overhauls I tried briefly before settling on these, so when you have the time, go ahead and try. Hope you’ll have quite the nice experience to overcome the difficulty in adjusting to such an old gem’s quirks.


  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an open world game whereas Metro is linear. As such, there are many differences between the two:

    • Open, outside maps vs literal underground metro tubes.

    • Almost no stealth (bonked) vs split into stealth/combat gameplay.

    • Regular, duplicates and misc and survival inventory management with wide variety vs limited choice and specialized upgrades.

    • Wonky but unrestrictive vs fine-tuned but channeled.

    • Simple but great story (rather small scale and non-heroic, like the inspiring book “Roadside Picnic”) where you wake up and try to find an #1NPC called Strelok to kill him vs journey of a hero through the gutters in a post-apocalyptic world.

    • Anomalies crancked up to 11 and are a core part of the gameplay vs anomalies are rather world-building elements.

    • Extensive modding (Oblivion-era game still keeping its modding community alive and theiving with tens of complete overhauls and completely new games, few-click-install modpacks and complete modding frameworks) vs out-of-the-box and as-is experience.

    The similarities are:

    • Great storytelling. Both do good storytelling that hooks the player, although with different types of stories.

    • Good character writing. Metro has memorable characters with names and actions attached, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has no name loners and misers that will leave you with great campfire/guitar memories and novel-like stories.

    • Excellent environment design. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are older games so graphics are rather worn out compared to Metro, but the environment design is so good that places hook you up anyway.

    I have simply glossed over the Metro parts because you already know about them. So don’t think I’m thinking less of them. On the contrary, as someone who played all Metro games on their authentic experience difficulty first, played Exodus when it was released, then later a couple years ago struggled to start playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. due to how old and what a slog it was unmodded. Even though I am still fond of the games from my childhood and can play them despite (actually sometimes thanks to) their old graphics and rough mechanics, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. took me 3 attempts and finding OGSE/OGSR (Old Good Stalker Evolution/Remastered) overhaul to enjoy them in 2021. And boy, what an enjoyment that was, taking up about 300-400 across all 3 games.




  • 5.15. isn’t that bad of a kernel version in my experience. Admittedly, I’m don’t have any latest gen hardware at the moment, but using one generation back RX 6700XT without problems on it with Mint. Alternatively, one can install the newer 6.x kernels with a few clicks if needed, they are not actively blocked or unlisted.