Learning to play the guitar or code also doesn’t have a difficulty slider, but people of all abled-ness manage it anyways.

Games are about entertainment. They’re not a career. Nobody is paying me to play a Fromsoft game. More importantly, nobody is gatekeeping the entertainment, immersion, and story of music or coding behind me being able to “Git Gud”.

And let’s look at music and coding. Since I can speak a bit to both. For music, OF COURSE there are difficulty sliders. When I took recorder back in school, they had 2 different versions of many songs. When I first learned Christmas music on piano, I learned special “simplified” tracks for the songs. I never “Got Gud” at music, but I still got to the end of the book.

And coding. Coding is the opposite of a Fromsoft game. You’re surrounded by mountains of tools that try to make it easier. When I bring in a junior developer, I’m not giving them some unforgiving code challenge to power through. Maybe they’ll never be good enough to design a specialized cache or optimize queries. So I give them the things they CAN do, and hold their hand so they always succeed. Junior devs don’t ever fail, not because they “git gud” but because I set them up to succeed by this little difficulty slider called “how hard is this ticket to do and how much help do they need from me?”

I hear what you’re saying, but to be fair, younger players don’t start out with those reflexes either. It’s probably harder for older players, but I’m not convinced it’s that much more of a challenge that it’s not worth trying

It’s not about the reflexes, though. It’s that they have opted to take actions that make the game unenjoyable for a significant number of gamers despite it having no positive benefit for ANY gamer.

And much of my Letsplay complaints weren’t about Elden Ring. I mod that. I don’t have the tools to mod Bloodborne, a game I otherwise would like more than Elden Ring because of its storyline.

It is a great apple to apple comparison.

This is the “nuh uh” answer. You never quantified anything. it’s sorta a “fuck you, I know you showed my argument was a fallacy, but I’m better than you so I’m doubling down”. I spend too much time in places where that shit gets laughed at. I’m going back to those places. Enjoy your shit game.

They made a piece of art. You chose to buy it knowing what it was. Git gud

No. I chose to buy Bloodborne because people convinced me that wasn’t the case. Git blocked.

Solar is so much cheaper than Nuclear and the efficiency sway is so reasonable, it’s still the better option in non-ideal circumstances.

With initial cost of deployment being the biggest obstacle to nuclear, I’m not sure it will ever be the best green option for developing countries.

This is doubly true since it’s lifetime cost-per-kwh is much higher than that of solar.

You have so many options to make it easier.

Like the third-party Easy Mode mod.

You bought a game that you knew would be full of “difficult” bosses

I bought a game that I knew had a working Easy Mode mod. I would not have bought it if it hadn’t. Because the designers are assholes, but assholes who can write a decent story.

And now you sit and complain about there not being an official “difficulty slider”.

Yes, I do. And you sit and complain about another human being having an opinion despite the fact you could just NOT complain about other human beings having an opinion. Funny how people “sit and” do things.

Do you also go to a vegan restaurant and complain they’re not inclusive because you can’t order meat?

No, but that’s not an apple-to-apple comparison, making that a False Analogy fallacy. For two reasons. First, whether I agree with it or not, veganism is an ethical position and they’re refusing to serve any meat on the menu because they think it’s morally wrong to. Do you think Fromsoft thinks they’re “going to hell” if they put in a difficulty slider? Second, vegan restaurants are ABOUT veganism. There’s no reason to choose to eat at a vegan restaurant unless you or someone in your party is looking to have a meal without meat in it for some reason. There’s plenty of reasons to play Fromsoft games but at lower difficulty. Most people don’t like Bloodborne or Elden Ring “because it’s difficult/unforgiving”. They like it because of the story. Anyone who would opt out of playing those games because someone else could play them on easier has serious issues.

Soooo a game, which is not paid for nor developed by the community, and is rather purchased with the knowledge that it is a difficult game which will require ample skill to surpass its many challenges, should put in difficulty sliders despite them fundamentally going against the very nature of the game itself?

Fucking YES it should. I didn’t buy ER until I was 100% certain it had an easymode mod. So I got what I wanted out of it despite them shoving both their middles fingers at me and telling me I’m not worthy to buy their product because they’re intentionally hiding the good part (the story) behind gameplay I didn’t want. I’m still pissed that I wasted my money buying Bloodborne. You want me to get over that, cut me a check.

As I said to the other hater, what is with the ER-fanboys turning the chat into full-on-reddit level bitchfest defending it? Why don’t you just let me have my valid opinions? I know, heaven forbid there exists someone who has an opinion that doesn’t match yours.

I found it. It’s in Nexusmods instead of in the game.

If you don’t like spicy food. Don’t buy spicy food

I don’t know about you, but every spicy restaurant I know has a little “difficulty slider” where you get to ask them not to pour a gallon of ghost pepper into it. It’s about making the customer happy.

If you don’t want to “git gud”. You can use summoned spirits. NPCs, other players

Or I can fucking mod the piece of shit and complain about it on forums because it’s fucking stupid. But I want BURN Bloodborne because I can’t mod it.

There already is a difficulty slider. It’s one you set for yourself.

Yeah. I’m getting really good at archery. Think I’ll cut my eye out. Natural difficulty slider

Why is it every time I express a valid criticism about an otherwise story-heavy game with a stupid difficulty-related gimmic the cringe-posse comes out and tries to convince me the game is perfect and no human being would find my opinion valid. Like seriously what I tell my little nieces and nephews, if you don’t have anything nice to say, move along.

In other news, I DO respect the Viva La Dirt League reference.

I think it’d be a bit more difficult than you are assuming however since it is also a multiplayer game. I guess they could limit the difficulty options to offline players only.

For online play, you can just match people who are using the same difficulty, and perhaps disable PVP entirely for Easy difficulty. For everything but PVP, it’s not that big a deal. Seamless Co-Op Mod works with the Easy Mode mod. If modders can make a coherent experience, I’m sure From could. If they wanted to. Which they don’t.

Making it a game about ambiance and story makes it a different game, doesn’t it?

Not really. The experience with the Easy Mode mod in place is pretty much the same. I saw more “You Died” screens on easymode than the typical player sees on regular mode. The only difference is that I didn’t waste my money on Elden Ring by having to give up less than 10% into the game like I did on Bloodborne after 50 hours or so.

Some of us, especially older gamers, just don’t have the reflexes for that type of game. Unfortunately for us, Fromsoft writes GREAT stories and Let’sPlays are still kinda boring.

Honestly how is this gatekeeping?

“Gatekeeping: the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.”

The lack of difficulty sliders make the game inaccessible to people who have no ability or desire for the unforgiving experience, nor any ability/desire to “Git Gud Scrubs”. It’s intentionally left out to exclude those people. That makes it “gatekeeping” by the definition for the word.

This is substantiated by the fact that a mode to make the game easier and a mode to make the game harder are in the top 10 downloaded mods for Elden Ring. If you leave out the loaders and modutils, those same mods are top-5. This is basically unheard of in most games.

You can argue that you approve of this gatekeeping, but it’s silly to die on the “it’s not really gatekeeping” hill.

The article I had found on the topic suggested linux users provided higher quality bug reports, in addition to more bug reports.

The real issue is that some game companies don’t want bug reports because they don’t want to fix bugs.

Actually, I think they don’t want linux gamers, with their higher technical savvy. Some game dev companies love how 90% of their bug reports come from 10% of their users (and even brag about it). Other companies would rather just not get those 90% of bug reports.

What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.

I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.

And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.

I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.

What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.

I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.

I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.

In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.

From a political point of view, irreligion is religion. Telling every single person who works at a location how they are or aren’t allowed to peacably express their religious views or lack thereof is a religious action by government. By definition, not secularism.

It’s ok (-ish) to actively seek an atheist state, but it’s duplicitous to do it under the guise of secularism. The separation of Church and government (secularism) most accurately means that government “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise”. I hate to go all “Murica”, but the concept is secularism is often tied to that prior quote. How is telling people they can’t wear a cross or pentacle or anything in between anything but “prohibiting its free exercise”?

I’m a non-Christian who has feared for my safety around atheists before.

But I shouldn’t have a right to demand atheists act differently so I stop being scared.

I don’t have the right not to be offended. Nor do I have the right to have irrational phobias honored. Neither does anyone else.

People wearing clothes at all makes some people uncomfortable. Women not covering their hair is as bad to some people as “walking with your dick out”. People (of religions I don’t believe) being forced to remove attire makes me feel VERY uncomfortable and tyrranized. I’ve always been part of the movement to push back against dress codes and uniforms in workplaces because authorities having power of “style” is unacceptable to me.

Why do only a small number of people get a say on what everyone must do, and everyone else who feels uncomfortable or oppressed “needs to suck it up”?

If your goal is to make the fewest people uncomfortable, you let them wear their religious attire. If your goal is to make the most people uncomfortable… dicks out. If your goal is to discriminate against classes of people you don’t like, you shouldn’t be the one making decisions.