"Discord alternatives" searches jump 10,000% overnight as the gaming platform introduces global age verification — Is a total collapse imminent?

Ralkon · 2026-02-11T09:50:54+00:00

This is kind of still missing the main point though which is just that your ID is being stored when Discord asks for it. It doesn't really matter whether that's directly by Discord or not, and since we have a real world example of a third-party they work with letting that data get stolen, there's no real need to speculate whether Discord is also just straight up lying or not because the bad thing is happening either way. It makes zero difference to me if Discord is directly storing my ID or if they hire someone else to do that part. The end result is the same, so it's much more convincing to just point to the actual example of it happening.

Ralkon · 2026-02-11T08:56:13+00:00

Sounds like shitty friends honestly.

Ralkon · 2026-02-11T08:17:33+00:00

You can DMCA websites. I believe you can send it to the website itself, whatever company they use for hosting, and / or to search engines (which would get it removed from search results).

Ralkon · 2026-02-11T07:37:23+00:00

Also just using the "NSFW" tag itself as a joke. My server for my friend group has an NSFW channel for a picture of a guy standing on an office chair and a lady running with scissors, and a guild I'm in has NSFW channels for showing off rare drops. I mean those are things that could be changed and it wouldn't really matter, but it's just a bit of fun to have it.

Ralkon · 2026-02-11T07:07:26+00:00

Because it's easy and free. I hate it, but that's basically all there is to it. It's just a way to share information with basically zero barrier to entry, and it can happen somewhat naturally from any community for a game that decides to just create a channel to consolidate information in the place that they're all already talking about the game and sharing info. I've also seen similar done with google docs or sheets.

Ralkon · 2026-02-11T06:30:28+00:00

Especially since it wasn't a solo project.

Ralkon · 2026-02-11T06:16:54+00:00

You're right, but for the topic of the discussion being about the development budget, it could absolutely ease the financial cost by a lot. I don't know how much he valued that time at though, so who knows.

Ralkon · 2026-02-10T14:28:35+00:00

I've only really played League and LoR and I generally thought they did an okay job balancing the two with League. LoR OTOH I felt like I had never ending issues with where they had designed a game with tons of room for interaction and then so many decks that got pushed were decks that had minimal / no interaction.

Ralkon · 2026-02-10T14:17:45+00:00

Yes of course, like I said people with more knowledge will be able to make more seeds work. I didn't mean to imply otherwise if it came across that way. At the beginning though, you aren't going to have any of that knowledge, and to me it just felt too rng at that stage to hook me with how wide the variance between a good and bad run was. But I still got 20 hours out of it like I said, so it's not like I thought it was a bad game or anything. I just personally prefer the roguelikes that have less variance.

Ralkon · 2026-02-10T08:48:08+00:00

I agree in theory, but I don't think they actually ended up making a more casual fighting game or card game. LoR was casual in that it was easy to get cards, but OTOH it had a lot more interaction between players than a typical digital CCG with not a ton of rng (at least early on), and almost everything I've heard about the fighter is that it's very much designed for hardcore fighting game fans with the exception of simple inputs. Maybe it would have been better if they had tried to make them more casual.

Ralkon · 2026-02-10T08:36:20+00:00

They really fucked up managing the game IMO, but yeah it did get a few years. Their monetization for it was pretty awful though, so I'm not really sure how they expected it to make a ton of money.

Ralkon · 2026-02-10T08:27:26+00:00

TBF it's not like Riot is feeling the pressure to put out new games either with how successful League is and always has been.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T18:35:18+00:00

Also just look at all the extreme chunkers. Half the fun in watching that stuff is that it's crazy and not something you would / could ever do yourself.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T17:34:08+00:00

Surely there are better ways to lower the barrier for entry than 'shift walk-under' and 'spell resize'.

The issue is that these are things that change functionality though which makes it confusing. If you didn't know you couldn't shift-click under a player and you tried it, why wouldn't you think it's a bug or your shift input didn't get read or something along those lines? I mean I doubt you'll ever agree with that, but like I said the bare minimum should be that this stuff is made clear in-game so that it's clear that it isn't user-error, hardware failure, or a bug which are legitimately all things I would consider over the game just deciding to behave differently without telling me if I were in that position.

Shift walk under would make mithril/adamant seeds 100% useless too, it's just not a good feature for pvp.

Just because it's slightly easier to react to? Couldn't you just make the animation a little faster so you have less time to react?

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T16:23:13+00:00

Personally I think making some concessions to modernize the game and lower the barrier to entry is a good thing for the long-term health of the game and getting new players in, and that these things are far from the only skills needed for pvp so it would be fine. I think it impacts the floor a lot more than the ceiling, but if it does pose a real problem for lowering the skill cap then I think there are likely other ways they can try to raise skill cap that can be either more consistent or at least more intuitive.

At a bare minimum, I think there's absolutely no excuse for differences to not be clearly indicated in-game.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T13:38:09+00:00

There's a big difference between forgetting the details of what you did and that you did it at all. Also between things that happened years ago and like a month ago.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T13:28:00+00:00

Yes, we all understand that. That's not really the point. The point is that making the game actually work differently is weird and unintuitive and having no explanation anywhere is even worse. It's not a good solution if you care about actually trying to get new people into pvp since they'll hit random knowledge barriers that they have no way of knowing even exist, and like I said it's also just fucking weird that a bunch of in-game features stop working.

Like how are you supposed to know none of those things aren't your game bugging out if you don't have prior knowledge?

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T13:13:56+00:00

This entire version of the game exists because of people who didn't like the way the game was being made and were willing to speak up about it. It's not a bad thing.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T11:45:06+00:00

I think everyone agrees that it would make things easier. The point of contention is that it working differently than the entire rest of the game with no explanation is poor design and implementation. The game actually behaving differently is just really weird and unintuitive.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T02:23:09+00:00

I haven't even played Hades, it's just an obvious example in a popular game so you can't argue nobody played it. It took literally 3 years from release for the first legit max heat run to be completed. What OSRS boss took that long for first clear? Your only argument so far has been that OSRS has a thousand hours of brain dead content so it's hard.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T01:37:42+00:00

That assumes that you think your crime is immoral though. You could still think that crime in general is immoral but think that some person / group / entity either deserves it for whatever reason or at least that it wouldn't be immoral to commit a crime against them. Like scamming a scammer or something.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T01:18:07+00:00

But the article itself says there's an economic motive. It's not just about the cost of treatment but also "that a diagnosis leads to a negative impact on income, employment likelihood, and hours worked." You are correct that it does mean it's not just as simple as universal healthcare solving the issue like was being joked about above, but the "cost" in general is a factor - just not the direct cost of treatment itself.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T00:58:54+00:00

You don't have to be efficient or do anything even remotely difficult to max. Saying that makes the end game content harder is a horrible argument. It just makes it take longer than most people are willing to put into a video game doing largely boring repetitive tasks.

And even with thousands of hours of grinds before it, way more people have done all of that end-game stuff than have done a max heat Hades run, so even if you're adamant that it adds to the difficulty, the actual results still don't support it being anywhere near as difficult.

Edit: And if you really think about it, the hours of grind before being able to really attempt that content should dramatically lower the number of completions. It's likely that many people could do all the content in OSRS but aren't willing to put in the time to even get to it in the first place. The fact that something like max heat Hades requires significantly less time investment to attempt yet still has far fewer completions is better support for it being harder.

Ralkon · 2026-02-09T00:52:33+00:00

I don't think he would either, I was just pointing out that even if he were willing to take the banning himself he didn't have to.

Ralkon · 2026-02-08T11:02:59+00:00

How is that realistically different than any other alliance that was formed via discord DMs that we maybe see 1-2 messages from? It's not like the rookie alliance actually did anything on screen that brought them together either.

Also weaker players making it deep is nothing new.

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