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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.





  • Not so funny when it actually happens to you:

    Because of really bad experiences with alcoholics as a child, I am afraid of people who drink. My psychologist and my doctor wrote that down.

    When I became seriously ill and could no longer work in my old job, I had to retrain. To do this, you have to go to the German employment office and get an assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, including what your doctor and therapist have to say.

    They read the paper from my doctor and my psychologist, but just skimmed over the words and decided that because the word “alcoholic” was there, I must be the alcoholic. They told me that I could get paid retraining and benefits, but only if I attended a therapy group for alcoholics once a week - me, who is afraid of alcoholics because of the abuse I suffered as a child. … I immediately started crying and swore that I had no problem with alcohol, only with alcoholics!

    It took 6 months to get someone at the job centre to actually read the papers word for word to find out that me saying “I’m not an alcoholic” was not me being an alcoholic in denial. I got a half-assed apology and my retraining 6 months after I could have started it because of this. Not to mention that every time I refused to go to AA meetings they threatened to take away my benefits and I was in such a bad mental state that I probably would have killed myself without the help of my family. Oh, and my family who tried to intervene were labelled as co-alcoholics, holding me back.






  • 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.