Too many buzzwords, pass.

Woohoo, now people can burn out their video cards and waste energy to earn literally pennies per day!

Well, I'm still interested in Dying Light 2, in spite of their staffing troubles. I just hope they aren't as anti-mod with this game as they were with Dying Light 1... if I want to use a mod to stop all of my weapons breaking, let me use the fucking mod.

Interesting that Ready Player One got brought up. A key part of that dystopian setting is that regular people are so destitute that they are living in vertical slums and wreckage.

NFTs and Cryptocurrency in games will add nothing beneficial to users that couldn't be done some traditional way. It's another scam to siphon off additional cash, multiple times, depending on how the Store/Exchange gets set up.

*Sigh* I remember the good old pre-Covid days, when a thread like this would just draw complaints about yet another MOBA clone.

It'll be a decade for humanity to recover, if it ever does.

PHJF wrote on Jan 7, 2022, 08:58:
There is no discount on just this DLC... but it's $5.

There is a somewhat hidden 'Complete Pack' or 'Complete Bundle' or something discount if you have the game and all other DLCs, I think my final price through steam with that was $4.58.

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 7, 2022, 11:49:
Keeping GameStop alive was the best idea the wall basement street incels ever had.

Well, considering how shitty their other ideas are, you are technically correct, but Gamestop is/was a predatory company vs gamers for years, and apparently according to this article they are going to jump into the world burning scam of cryptocoins and NFTs... great.

theglaze wrote on Jan 6, 2022, 17:20:

Tom wrote on Jan 6, 2022, 15:58:
BC2 was probably the peak IMO.

Agreed.

The development and management teams involved now, are so far removed from the best years of BF, the corporation has lost the memory and knowledge on how to build a "new" one. Corporate amnesia impacts most businesses over time, but I find it astounding to see it unfold so dramatically in the gaming industry. Unfortunately for us who remember those good ol' BF days, another developer has not filled that gameplay void.

Interesting; I enjoyed BFBC2, but I thought it was one of the 'least BF' Battlefield games... small maps, low sky cap, insanely dominant helos and... no jets? I think?

Best Battlefield was probably later BF3 and patched BF4. DICE completely shit the bed by not just doing upscaled BF4 with BFV's fortification and movement upgrades.

More on topic, BF2042 will get patched into working order eventually; it's already happening. But I think a lot of players are way too fickle now, and have already quit and moved onto Vanguard or some other lesser game. PC only servers are empty, I can only find a BF2042 game with crossplay turned on. And Console teammates are ATROCIOUS.

The number values that get tossed around Star Citizen are fucking insane. $1000 spent on the game, to join a 'club' to be able to spend $40,000 on ships? Rofl! No one would believe you, if you tried to tell them that story about a video game prior to this cult. Those numbers literally don't even make sense, no game will be worth that kind of money in terms of entertainment experienced, even if this game actually ever gets released.

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 4, 2022, 10:26:

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jan 4, 2022, 09:06:
Amazon has sneakily had some nice freebie games. I have been picking up all of their Prime Games the past couple months, their free library rivals the Epic GS library, at least in pure numbers, if not always in quality.

One major difference, Amazon PRIME isn't Free meaning Amazon Prime Game freebies aren't free either.

Well, true. Amazon Prime isn't free. Included at no additional cost games?

Hrm, pretty glowing praise for Hunt: Showdown, now I'm tempted to buy it and try it before the sale ends in 24 hours...

BF2042 has been frustrating. You can find games if you turn on crossplay with consoles, but wow... teammates NOT reviving, dropping ammo, letting you get in vehicles, letting you repair vehicles, helping to cap flags... basically do anything useful at all.. seems like it's 10 times worse in BF2042, or maybe I'm just getting jaded.

Amazon has sneakily had some nice freebie games. I have been picking up all of their Prime Games the past couple months, their free library rivals the Epic GS library, at least in pure numbers, if not always in quality.

Very nice to get Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order though!

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 3, 2022, 04:00:
O&O ShutUp10++ blocks the mothership from spying on your every keystroke and more.
Ihttps://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Thanks for this, assuming it's not a horrific virus.

jdreyer wrote on Dec 31, 2021, 17:38:
Diablo didn't ruin RPGs. There have been hundreds of traditional grognard RPGs released since Diablo came out.

Hey. I love traditional and non-traditional grognard RPGs!

Honestly though, I did rage against Diablo 1 and 2 a bit when they came out, and practically everybody was playing them. I enjoyed D2 quite a bit though once I started using it like IRC with extra gameplay, and then later with mods. I never really got insanely deep into D1 like a lot of people did at the time, however.

Slightly off topic, I had some free time last night, so I tried to play some BF2042. Scanning for games, 128 player Conquest and Breakthrough, for like 30 minutes, no luck. Either people got too impatient and kept disconnecting as players were gathering, or there is some issue with their servers (is/was, haven't tried today.) People would get put into my squads, wait a few minutes at the loading screen, then leave.

They need to just go 100% to traditional servers, with bot options if necessary. The automatch feels like a complete failure now. Portal has traditional servers but I didn't feel like parsing through weird gravity and other bullshit yesterday.

So I went back to my second playthrough of Riftbreaker... what a deliciously enjoyable waste of time that game can be.

Thanks for the replies, and Burrito of Peace, way to feed my personal paranoia about mobile phone apps. I almost entirely avoid phone apps, unless I have to use one for work or something, because there doesn't seem to be any trustworthy authority vetting all of these sufficiently in the first place, then of course, if the phone itself is compromised...

I will look into professionally made USB keys or making my own as you suggest, (your link seems broken at the moment but I will google it later) but I definitely don't see all my various work sites and others supporting these USB Keys, unless you are getting them to act as basically an authenticator application? I do see support for things like Yubikey listed on bigger websites like Amazon/Google etc. obviously. What the hell happens if you old-school lose the dongle, or it breaks? 2 hour phone call to support?

I know you suggest VPNs, but of course those can be compromised, bought out or outright run by nefarious agents in the first place too...

I guess I will also read up on using virtual machines as you say.

Now I'm tempted to just throw all my computers into a pile and sledgehammer them to pieces though, knowledge = depression.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Dec 29, 2021, 19:58:
Passwords alone are insufficient security, no matter where you store them. 2FA is barely sufficient for most things if that 2FA is based on randomized codes sent by SMS.

My setup is to use a USB key via passthrough plus password in a sanitized, sandboxed environment for critical tasks. Naturally, neither the host nor the guest OS are Windows based.

What does this mean exactly, for most websites, banking etc. ? I have several websites I have to use for work or banking, and they only have an option for Password plus Phone SMS; only one website even has an option for Password + 'Secure' Phone App, which I just have to hope is valid, since it's not like I personally vetted each of those few App options or anything, or that those apps won't get hacked in the future without anybody knowing.

I know you basically run IT for one company, so I guess you mean you setup your own USB key(homebrew application or commercial program/device?) setup there, but a lot of places don't even give those kinds of options, as far as I can tell.

That said, I do all my banking or job work online via a Linux box and the above, but a lot of those decisions are really out of the end user's control.

It probably bores you guys to tears to talk any sort of 'work' topic on a game website of old farts, but it seems like hacking is only going to get worse as time goes on, and I'd like to not get online robbed anytime soon.

*EDIT* Quick google: like these hardware devices? Bringing back Dongles?

Further googling: Apparently some banks such as Evil Bank of America have that dongle option, but as I said, the vast majority of sites I have don't seem to support it, although I guess I need to start asking around.

*EDIT 2* Okay, multiple pages deep, some financial institutions do seem to have at least Password + My Proprietary Phone App, or Corporate Security App, as options. Sigh, now to read up on each one of these fucking apps.

This comment was edited on Dec 30, 2021, 11:27.

This isn't exactly a bad thing, BFV is pretty fucking awesome at this point, it has the best subsystem of the BF series, and it looks fucking amazing. It's also pretty well balanced and patched out now, years later.

BF2042 will probably get there eventually, in like a year or so, but they left out the BFV fortification system. Gigantic mistake.

How fitting, Blockchain.com, moving their headquarters to Miami. They can be one of the first groups to be put underwater by their wasted CO2 emissions.

This game was based off a pretty great sci-fi story, but I couldn't really get into the game. Maybe if I had stumbled upon it in 1995, I might have made it through.