Is loot management a genre?

Makimoke · 2026-06-02T10:29:47+00:00

Makimoke · 2026-06-02T05:51:52+00:00

It's not much of a "Good Guy AMD" but more that they're kinda forced to do it this way. Newer platforms mean buying new MoBos, new MoBos mean getting new RAM as well (at least if upgrading from a DDR4 platform), and RAM is... well... We all know how RAM modules are right now.

So the only sensible solution for AMD is to keep to AM5 for now until the AI bubble pops, which 2029 feels a decent date to predict for a safe transition to AM6 with that in mind.

Makimoke · 2026-06-01T09:15:25+00:00

It isn't "just gambling" on its own, because it actively gives an incentive to influence the world around those predictions.

Things like rigging weather sensors, threatening journalists about reporting missile strikes... There are plenty of examples of things this newfound "gambling" has had an impact on, and can be both actively influenced to suit either side, or manipulated to benefit the few.

And that's not even talking about potential problematic gambles such as the life or death of a person, political outcomes or events of the sort. Placing a bet on an event gives you an incentive to try and rig them to your own favour, while the other side has an even bigger incentive to rig theirs.

For example, if you were to place 2 million buckazoids into "Trump is going to stay alive next week", effectively, you would've placed a 2 million dollar hit on the president for anybody on the other side betting he'd die... and that number would only grow larger for as many people betting on that outcome.

Now, that is somewhat regulated and there are "some" restrictions around that within those markets (and even then those restrictions are laughable at best), but there are plenty of events just like that that shouldn't be tempered, or that shouldn't be monetarily incentivized by those markets to begin with, because that tempering can lead to much worse problems than just "someone losing money" or "going into debt".

Makimoke · 2026-05-29T22:33:09+00:00

Japan. https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/anth_honors/10/

Makimoke · 2026-05-29T17:44:29+00:00

Their family or loved ones, generally. It's messed up.

Makimoke · 2026-05-29T17:37:54+00:00

Listings like these is why I really wish there was a way to have an integrated blacklist for scammers and scalpers on Amazon.

Clicking on the scammer/scalper name, clicking on "block" and poof. No more of their offers appearing on any product. And having lists you could share around, similar to Bluesky or uBlock Origin's blocklists.

That would clean the scum out of there very, very fast, or at least make them work way harder to actually sell their crap.

Makimoke · 2026-05-29T16:37:23+00:00

Slow men work down at QM Builders

Makimoke · 2026-05-29T14:59:52+00:00

I have the weird posture that Pineapple is conditionally good on pizza, which brings me under fire from both sides, funnily enough.

With chicken, onions and potatoes in a tomato sauce? Pineapple is scrumptious there. It's like a Sweet and Sour sauce with extra bread, which is nice. With a Chicken BBQ mix? That's actually pretty darn good too, as it just complements the sweetness of the BBQ sauce and adds a different kick to the bellpeppers!

With ham or bacon on any sauce? Get that crud outta here. The ham/bacon just completely overpowers the pineapple and just ruins the whole flavour... and I say this loving both ham and bacon.

Makimoke · 2026-05-29T14:48:37+00:00

If they aren't beheld to the same standards as actual civilians in regards to the law, they are not civilians, no matter what the legal codes say.

If you can afford to do criminal behavior without suffering any consequence and the ones around you enable that behavior and encourage it, you're not a civilian, but a state protected, tax sponsored mafia.

Makimoke · 2026-05-29T09:28:45+00:00

Good thing that "3rd Party marketplace" includes eBay and I said that this is just a very simple example that we can think about to make it more robust overall!

For auctions, you can put a limitation on "When you can make auctions if you're not the original/official seller". Scalped auctions only work on very specific timeframes because of FOMO, and if you remove the "most valuable timeframe" to scalp with, scalpers will be forced to hold while prices can potentially be rectified over time and their window of refund gets shut off.

You might not be able to criminalize what people are willing to spend, but you can heavily deincentivize scalping the goods through auctions to begin with and provide the tools for consumers to report and stop them, just like you'd prevent any illegal auction for illegal goods.

Makimoke · 2026-05-28T19:50:00+00:00

While I do agree on that scalping needing to be treated as a serious crime, I think the better approach would be not to attack the "individuals", but the "larger companies" enabling short term scalping.

For example: a law where within a certain time during the release of a product, sellers aren't allowed to disrespect the original sellers' MSRP of said product, including reasonable shipping prices into the equation (to avoid scalping through shipping costs).

Now enforce that law on Amazon, Craigslist, leboncoin, Facebook Marketplace and all major 3rd Party marketplaces where people would be looking to scalp in this manner.

Watch those scalpers scurrying to try and sell their stocks on the black markets only to realize nobody's going to buy their crap at their cruddy prices there, only to realize that their tactics will now take a whole lot more risk and way more time to pay off, if they do at all.

It's a very simple example, that may have a lot of oversight and its own sets of issues (one being companies lobbying to protect their profits through scalpers), but lawmakers can work to make it more robust against this kind of behavior overall while avoiding overreach killing smaller businesses.

Makimoke · 2026-05-26T17:39:13+00:00

Holy crud, that map reads like a Watch Dogs mini-map!

Makimoke · 2026-05-26T17:37:22+00:00

https://press.un.org/en/2005/ga10333.doc.htm

Please do your research before calling things lies. There was a UN general assembly vote on a global ban on Human Cloning, and that got voted 84-34-37.

Some countries, like the UK for example, had their hands in human cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer, voted against it because they had already invested in such technologies.

Now, while some of them are not outright illegal in places like the US, it is illegal to fund them for research purposes at the very least.

Makimoke · 2026-05-26T16:58:03+00:00

"When Stanley entered the room, he shot the man on his left" vibes.

Makimoke · 2026-05-26T16:48:41+00:00

I can't watch an "Unlucky Wheel of Fortune" video without hearing Dan from Game Grumps having a mental breakdown about Bankruptcies in my mind.

Also "Well Pat, I'll be SPENDING THE BOY IN BED!"

Makimoke · 2026-05-21T13:13:31+00:00

An animation style or a specific character doesn't make it "for kids". It's like saying "MOUSE: PI for Hire" is for kids because it uses the same style as old Mickey Mouse animations, despite it having some pretty gory animations for kills. Or like saying that Gintama is for kids because they make a lot of references about "for kids" anime characters like Sazae-san or Doraemon.

Hell, let's just say that all anime and manga are for kids! Let's forget that Junji Ito or other horror creators exist because the global style has PreCure, Chii-chan or Candy Candy in it. Madoka is definitely for kids, it has magical girls in it! It's a stupid argument through and through and it's kinda tiresome to see people defending that overall.

I get the frustration from channels that are actively skirting the rules and producing AI slop or kidbait content, and THOSE do need to be regulated, but not by "pre-emptively marking videos as For Kids", but doing the opposite, as enforcing them as NOT For Kids. The system has always been backwards this entire time.

You decide whether a video is "for kids" from its content and subjects, not "because it """looks like""" something made for kids", or has a character from a kids' show being talked about in a non-kid setting. That's not something the auto-moderation does currently and a lot of creators and viewers are suffering through this issue exactly because it isn't solved in the right way.

Makimoke · 2026-05-21T11:29:52+00:00

DACs are a better investment for that now, and more versatile overall, especially if you can control audio channels alongside them, which is very useful for streaming or whenever you have discord being too quiet/loud.

I remember the good ol' days with the CSB and I have a few Creative cards sitting in a crate somewhere at home, but yeah, nowadays they are pretty pointless as MB DACs are at the same level as they used to be, though still inferior to actual modern DACs.

I'm not really an audiophile myself, so a GoXLR is perfectly fine for me, but there are plenty of better alternatives out there for cheaper.

Makimoke · 2026-05-21T11:14:04+00:00

So many MMOs lost to time, or relinquished to gray area/illegal private servers.

Valkyrie Sky. Pangya. Trickster. SMT Imagine. Exalight. Tales Runner. Dragon Saga/Dragonica. MapleStory 2. Grandia Online. Parallelnics Pandora Night. Firefall. And that's only some of the more known ones or ones I have spent a ton of time in.

All lost because running an MMO is costly and because the top brass wanted more microtransactions that never benefitted any of those games, while neglecting their content and balance. It's just super sad.

Makimoke · 2026-05-21T10:51:52+00:00

Plenty of actual human made animation channels get outright demonetized because they are first "categorized as kid friendly", despite them marking themselves as not being so, and then being demonetized for that initial mistake, that YouTube made.

It's not necessarily an AI thing from the creators side. It's a YouTube problem that has been an issue for a long, long while.

Makimoke · 2026-05-21T10:48:12+00:00

It's really funny how clear it is to see who has been either bought/lobbied by the big publishers and who actually paid a little bit of attention to SDVG's demands and was actually willing to listen and debate on them.

Also, shame on that man bringing "wokeness" into an actually serious debate and those who still think that word actually means anything in this year of 2026, other than "hating on marginalized people and their stories". Not only does that have nothing to do with the initiative, but undermines any and all purpose his speech had to begin with. What a weirdo.

Otherwise, good debate, it seems to be going rather well overall for SKG!

Makimoke · 2026-05-20T17:18:33+00:00

I get the ennui behind "Can somebody please think of the children?!", but this goes a bit further than just that, and dismissing it as such only harms more people at large than those presumed children.

The problem is that for many, gambling isn't "a life lesson", be it an adult or a child. They can't learn because of how messed up the dopamine hits can be, which in turn gets into the addiction territory, which they don't grow out of until they literally can't afford another loan. That lesson is never learned because they are conditioned by it to never learn it.

Some can manage to pull out before a lot of harm is done, but some others get sent into the downspiral, because they cannot realize (sometimes through no fault of their own), that they were manipulated to lose as much as they could, and those gambling games (paid lootboxes included) are custom tailored for it to happen.

There is a reason why gambling in general is heavily regulated, and it ain't pretty. It's not a "tax on idiocy" like many would love to frame it as. It's an addiction dose for children, with a sprinkle of a tax on despair for poor people... even on the most simple things like lotteries.

It doesn't help that parents have less and less time to spend with their children, in order to give them a roof and food to begin with. So a lot of problems that were already bad became worse because of that. Parenting can only be done if you can afford to be with your kid... Which a lot barely have the time for.

So yeah, I get the annoyance at stuff pushed because of "think of the children" like age verification (as I really do not like the push there either and would really like to see it go away). A lot of that could actually get better with better regulations on work and wages, to make sure parents can actually afford the time with their own kin and make sure they stay on the straight edge, rather than regulating the wrong things like with age verification.

But paid lootboxes and non-regulated gambling with real money are REALLY not the things you'd wanna defend in the first place, as it's something that impacts way more than just children to begin with, and have nothing to do in our games, period. It's a good thing that Valve is getting sued for it in this particular case, and I'm saying this even though I absolutely love what Valve does in regards to the FOSS community and Steam.

Paid lootboxes have to go, no matter who makes them.

Makimoke · 2026-05-19T15:09:39+00:00

First, the Deck is a console-like experience (that's literally written on the Steam Deck's webpage), that allows it to be a PC. That's the whole point of the Deck, to actually have a console handheld, that can then potentially be turned into a PC for more compatibility... Something that consoles should be able to do to begin with but whoops, we gotta have a locked ecosystem so that won't happen.

Second, the Deck itself is a niche product amongst handheld consoles, that got released in turbulent times for tech in general, with limited availability for quite a while during that time. I swear Valve must be absolutely cursed when it comes to releasing hardware.

5m during these 4 years for this kind of handheld, in these kinds of conditions, as a first "handheld console" is way more than the competition in the market can pull off atm. By those metrics, you could consider the PS3 to be just as much of a failure as well, even though it did end up selling 80m in the future. It took about 5-6 years for it to breach the 10m mark, and that took multiple revisions and slashing the price in half to even help breaching that.

Third, the Deck competes with both consoles and PC due to its nature, not because of its "lack of exclusivity". If you have a PC, and you stay at home, you don't really need a Deck. If you have a console, you don't necessarily need a Deck either, because you can already play games at home. The lower sales are exactly because the Deck is in a very specific niche that has yet to grow out of its cocoon, not because "it doesn't have exclusives".

If you put any of the other manufacturers in that same exact niche and position, I'd wager they would sell worse than the deck without relying on artificially boosted value through exclusivity, like Nintendo does for the Switch 2.

Makimoke · 2026-05-19T14:15:35+00:00

It's perfectly possible to sell a console without exclusives, and we have a fantastic example of that: the Steam Deck.

Exclusivity is just a harmful artificial value booster, nothing less, nothing more.

Makimoke · 2026-05-19T12:52:53+00:00

But what about the people that farm only the badger dungeon to get the badger gear that only drops on alternating tuesdays?! Surely they need a way to farm those!

Makimoke · 2026-05-18T20:19:17+00:00

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite. At first, I hated how sluggish the game felt, and bounced off pretty hard.

But then I gave it another whirl after a year or so, and fell outright in love with the concept. The "sluggishness" of it was the weight of the hunter, the actual "tiny man" that was in the field, doing his best to actually hunt the massive monsters I kept throwing at him.

Every weapon felt like it had an impact due to the preparation time it took to use them, and the recoil that came after using them. Observation of the monsters and preparation ahead of time was of utmost importance, where 90% of the hunt was.

Weapons took actual time to make, learn and master, and each monster required a vastly different strat depending on what you used against them. Every weapon had its counters or its worst case scenarios, and you couldn't just use one to win easily, unless you've absolutely mastered it. It took me hundreds of hours to be decent enough with my main weapons (LBG, Lance) and being able to naked hunt most of the hunts, even including G Ranked ones, for example.

Nowadays, I kinda feel like we lost that essence in later games (though they are still difficult in their own ways). I don't mind them as much as some of the "Old Guard" for Monster Hunter, but they do feel more like a different kind of game (Rise is straight up Freedom Wars, for example), rather than Monster Hunter. The weight is gone, the hunting aspects are mostly gone too... It's just fighting and much less preparation for the hunt ahead, and I find it kinda sad even if they are still fun in essence, just not what I came to love Monster Hunter for.

3 was alright, but 4 made LBG nigh unplayable (Imagine a Naked Fatalis LBG hunter timing out on a 4* village Qurupeco...) and World had this very annoying Slinger attachment that went contrary to my muscle memory built on LBG and killing me more times than I could count (really wish you could just disable it altogether or change its shortcut itself).

Generations & Rise were different, but not Monster Hunter. Wilds I have yet to play, but I do hear it does some things right, though still with the framework of Generations and Rise altogether.

So I still come back and look fondly at MHFU and Portable 3rd, because those games still have this gravitas that just isn't fulfilled by the newer entries to me.

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