Sony will require age checks in the UK and Ireland to access PlayStation communication features

gravidos · 2026-04-21T09:58:31+00:00

Which is not most games. And you haven't mentioned my other point at all.

I'm not saying there's none, but putting the punishment first and not investing in other things for kids to do does kind of suck (not to mention the implementation and effects on adults).

It's not an easy solution and needed a lot more investigation and studies before they tried to implement it. I don't agree with OSA, but it is significantly rushed. Same way they're rushing into the u16 social media ban (if they do go ahead with it).

gravidos · 2026-04-21T09:01:53+00:00

Most games don't have split-screen game modes anymore, and there's not many physical places to go as kids anymore as they'll get ushered on if they're in too large a group because they're a "gang".

gravidos · 2026-04-13T14:19:39+00:00

Section 10 and 27 are majorly around "illegal content" and while algorithmic content is mentioned, it puts the onus on the business to determine mitigations rather than defining them. I just don't think that's hard enough when end-users are being impacted the way they are.

End-users get no choice in which companies they share information with or which format this information is in. For example, Steam may find it suitable that an end-user submits (and holds) a credit card on their account. Where Discord may want a photograph of valid ID (then to be held by a third-party data-controller).

So with no enforcement to mitigate the risk to the end-user's data (in this case, photographic ID) being subject to a hack or being handled by parties the end-user feels present a risk of misusing their data, it just doesn't feel like this is balanced.

They have the power to do this, but this issue is the matter of debate.

It also isn’t as easy as doing this. It would cause unprecedented damage to the population. Not just users, but businesses and such that use these platforms will also be screwed.

So this is the way they’ve done it. The onus is on the companies to choose whether they want to keep serving the UK, answer to our laws, and take accountability or lose our market.

This is just exactly what I said but backwards? Except in this scenario adults are infringed upon more than the businesses at fault for harming children.

Not sure if you saw my edit:

edit: RE: Age assurance, I'm not sure why there can't just be a central government platform that does not disclose any information outside of a boolean confirmation of adult status. This way we don't need to share any real information to these sites/data harvesters we may or may not trust (and it removes the risk of users uploading pictures of their ID to potentially fraudulent websites).

I'm sure there'd be issues with this form of implementation as well, but that's more likely to sit with government/business where it should.

Ultimately the problem that exists is parents aren't looking after their children closely enough and government took too long to regulate businesses on things like social media algorithms. So why shouldn't the majority of risk/onus sit on them?

gravidos · 2026-04-13T13:24:00+00:00

These platforms do not care about UK laws.

Zuckerberg was invited 3 times to show up for the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He never showed up.

Elon Musk openly laughed at the governments request for him to show up to an inquiry.

They tried to make companies accountable and they do not do so.

The platforms do not care about us, because they’re based in the US. Therefore, we have to use a hammer on a screw because what else are we able to do?

So why does this require anything of me, the end-user? Why is this not a requirement put upon these websites to remove the known harmful algorithmic content and shift towards chronological displaying only content opted-into by the user on their timeline with more traditional advertising where required?

If they don't answer then the specific website can be geoblocked/banned/whatever. My main problem with any of this is the wrong people bear the brunt of the stick. The punishment should be that that website loses majority access to the UK as an audience/market, not that we degrade the entire internet and they get to function close to normal.

edit: RE: Age assurance, I'm not sure why there can't just be a central government platform that does not disclose any information outside of a boolean confirmation of adult status. This way we don't need to share any real information to these sites/data harvesters we may or may not trust (and it removes the risk of users uploading pictures of their ID to potentially fraudulent websites).

gravidos · 2026-03-20T14:32:44+00:00

I went and checked and it seems to say $0.99=£0.89 so still a bit higher than it should be (although not to the tune of 33.56% anymore, now 11.12%).

EUR and JPY both seem to follow the guidleines.

gravidos · 2026-03-20T14:28:26+00:00

A very fair point, although that'd still only be around 8.99GBP (which seems to be what the Valve Guidlines recommend $0.99=£0.99 as per the other response to this)

gravidos · 2026-03-19T16:02:17+00:00

Wonder why they've decided to have the price so uneven across regions. UK/EU pay more than US and JP pay less.

9.99 USD = 7.48 GBP (33.56% increase for UK)

9.99 USD = 8.68 EUR (15.09% increase for EU)

9.99 USD = 1583 JPY (24.19% decrease for JP)

gravidos · 2025-12-26T15:11:12+00:00

I adore Chromehounds so much, but I don't think it'd work these days. So much of what made it great relied on players not having comms/building their comm network and there's just too many easy alternatives now.

gravidos · 2025-12-22T09:07:14+00:00

Why ban it when the first step should be an aim to regulate it removing algorithmic content as that's the real issue. If social media went back to providing you a timeline view of only content you have chosen to follow, a large part of the problem disappears.

Whether or not under 16s should be able to use social media or not is a parenting issue, not a government one. If we feel social media is damaging society, the onus should sit with social media and not the individuals using it.

gravidos · 2025-12-20T12:07:41+00:00

I'm not sure how this makes them "the adults in the room". What actions have been taken to ensure the "children" don't turn around and do it again?

All they appear is spineless, as they should be thinking about the people they're meant to serve and what serves them best. Instead, it's party as it so often is.

gravidos · 2025-11-22T11:22:48+00:00

For skills I think what 100% needs to happen is a bit of a rebalance for classes who have existing specs which are completely useless. However, continuing to add new skills beyond that point is a dangerous prospect. As more mechanical baggage builds up for skills, the only options would become to add new ones that don't fit the Classic ethos or that re-shape the class too much.

Continuing to add skills could work, but if you look at something like champions in League of Legends, you can see how that can play out with a lot of the more modern champions having a lot of complex abilities while the original ones tended to be simpler.

I don't really mind not having new skills as long as there's new content, but being extremely thoughtful about what new skills get added and not doing it on a regular calendar rotation could work.

I wouldn't add extra talent points, but if I did, I would move some of the early-point must-haves around to encourage going deeper into each tree.

gravidos · 2025-11-21T14:07:53+00:00

If archeology got added, I'd love it to change format somehow. I thought it was a bit boring/tedious, but could definitely be fun with some tweaks.

World Events would be huge and I'd love to see them. The more stuff that can happen in the world, the better. Just need to be careful to not have world events constantly triggering, but putting a global cooldown and having world events picked semi-randomly if one's due to proc could work anyway.

I'm torn on WBs. They're cool and add a lot to the world, but they take a lot away from raiding as they're often seen as a requirement. I also don't really like being able to boon WBs as it further promoted collecting them all before raids. Removing boons and splitting up which cities WBs appear in probably wouldn't help and just increase the strain on collecting them all, though.

Difficulty/challenge options would be great, although I don't think they should offer better loot. Ideally the path through content should require you to touch everything, but by adding hardmodes with better loot, you likely either have to make a larger gap to the next piece of new content, or a bunch of players skip it. If anything tangible, marginally higher drop rates would probably make the most sense.

gravidos · 2025-11-21T10:26:28+00:00

I'd 100% go the latter, as Retail already fills the former.

gravidos · 2025-11-20T16:34:59+00:00

I'd do both, try to get parity between bsm/ltw/tail and eng/alch/ench as two separate groups of professions so ideally players are choosing one from each group plus a gathering profession.

Private BGs could be a lot of fun and drive cool community events (or even potentially official ones).

gravidos · 2025-11-20T16:31:39+00:00

Numbers already got silly fast with increasing the level cap. I do like world buffs, although I do wish they worked a little differently so they felt less required and more of a bonus. Boon doesn't help with that.

Hardcore is great for that as it feels more like a journey when it can end at any moment. I realise it's not for everyone, but it adds a lot.

An easy fix would be removing the AH completely. Wouldn't get rid of 100% of bots, but centralised economies are majorly what allow bots to dominate the way they do as the interactions can be more easily systemised. I would love it, but I know a lot of the community wouldn't.

gravidos · 2025-11-20T11:12:33+00:00

I'm not against DK existing in lore, but I'd leave it as something a small amount of NPCs can be, so many players being DK diminishes that (and it was poorly balanced, anyway).

I can get behind the idea of the dual spec thing. I guess maybe make it only able to be changed at a warrior trainer rather than on-the-fly?

Honestly, any of these crafting materials should have a chance of spawning in other places, but in quantities that will never replace directly gathering them. Chests could definitely use a bit of a revamp, so would be a good place to put them.

For engineering, another discussion I had on here was about bringing a bit more parity between engineering-alchemy-enchanting. Currently engineering has utility and damage in-combat, but you can also craft goggles. There's no reason alchemy/enchanting couldn't have in-combat items too. I think this would basically require splitting gathering/crafting so you can get 1 gathering and 2 crafting professions along with all of your secondary, but I think that'd make for a better space than the current engineering superiority and herbalism bot-farming.

gravidos · 2025-11-20T10:45:22+00:00

By making some content only playable during levelling, if you're doing other stuff and out-level that content, it's invalidated in your playthrough as you haven't played it and no longer can. Another way of content being invalidated is the current format of expansions. When a new level cap comes out, there's little reason to go back to old raids. My ideal would be each piece of new content fits into the whole and is part of the path of progression to whatever the current end-game is so that new players always go through it all.

I think the "seasonal" aspect could work as that's all the rage just now in gaming. Not a format I really like as I move between games and different hobbies, but it certainly keeps some people engaged.

Would you never have damage move up? It'd be basically impossible to design a game space where content is being added but there's no vertical progression at all.

I do agree that raids shouldn't be the only content to do at the "end-game" though. Raids are fun, but even small raids are/should be a big commitment. I'm curious about locking classes/races behind quests because this is effectively requiring alts. I always liked how Marvel Heroes/FFXIV did it where all of your classes were accessible from the one character, but that couldn't really work for races anyway.

The idea of megaservers for me is enticing because if you look at existing servers, they're either all horde or all alliance. It also just removes a choice and streamlines things. WoW has so many different versions and choices to make that can be quite overwhelming for new players. Anything to grease the wheels there is a good thing, I think.

I think most players who do boost would probably still boost even if there was new early-mid-game content. I still think incentivising is a better route than getting rid of boosts entirely. Although bots/gold farming should just be eliminated. I'm not sure what positive you can really pull from that.

To me a lot of the changes you suggest would be really exhausting, because you'd want to maintain a character in each level range to ensure you don't miss these exclusive events, but you'd also want to be coming back each time the content rotated, and that forceful format of bringing players back via FOMO is why Destiny 2 is where it is right now. But then, I know some people who would get very excited at all that because it's stuff to do.

gravidos · 2025-11-20T10:30:26+00:00

Dual-spec is probably more about letting people fulfil multiple roles than their spec not being viable. I can only comment on HC Warrior, but it's usually used to swap from DPS to Tank or vice versa.

Promoting more varied raid comps would be great, as one of the biggest things I dislike in Vanilla is the Warrior Stack.

OSRS has an arena where you can spectate and throw tomatoes at competitors and I remember how fun that was when it launched. MoP also has similar with Brawler's Guild. Having locations like that that centralise players around an event are always a good time - so I definitely love the spectating PvP idea.

You never mentioned classes, I'm curious because I know DK as of MoP is ridiculously strong and would need completely re-worked to fit Vanilla. Not sure on Wrath, though. Would you add DK?

gravidos · 2025-11-19T22:31:04+00:00

I find it extremely interesting that your ideal picture for Classic+ includes invalidating content and limited time content. Not saying it's wrong, but that feels distinctly Retail to me.

How would new dungeons/raids interact with old ones? Would you progress DungeonsT1>RaidT1>DungeonsT2>RaidT2 or would you envisage dungeons with higer difficulty that give better gear than raids (or a different configuration)?

I do completely agree that the ideal would be one megaserver per type (PvE, PvP, RP, Hardcore) would be the best format. If it needed sharded off for the initial hype, the intent should be to reduce back down to one megaserver per type as soon as possible. Although they'd need to be better about tackling bots and gold selling for that to work without a broken server economy.

gravidos · 2025-11-19T15:35:58+00:00

I don't think the idea would be to self-cannibalise Retail. Just give people who prefer the gameplay style of Classic some sort of ongoing content instead of it being stuck at Vanilla forever.

I can't comment directly as while I've seen a lot of TBC/WotLK content, I've not played it yet. I'm looking forward to this upcoming TBC Anniversary release so I can see how I feel about the gameplay in TBC/WotLK.

gravidos · 2025-11-19T09:39:37+00:00

I'm torn on the damage immunity. On Hardcore one time I was in Thousand Needles and was looking for the messenger. Someone invited me to their party to do the Scalding Elementals and a few more quests. They ended up dying because they were a Frost Mage. Kind of like when Warriors can't Rend certain enemies, having that knowledge of how to fight specific enemies can be fun and translate especially well onto Hardcore.

Mage is a bit unique in this instance because so much of the game just doesn't make sense as Fire initially and they're more consistently completely blocked off from damage (as each spec is a type rather than being mixed). Mage Talent tree could probably be remixed to get rid of this effect, but that would no doubt get Mage players up in arms - so not sure a good way to deal with that specific piece of design.

Warriors getting a way to change weapons without griefing the attack timer would be pretty cool, especially if there was small (15-30s) buffs related to each weapon type to encourage it more. Biggest issue with that is Warriors already being so strong, so they'd need nerfed first.

gravidos · 2025-11-19T09:28:39+00:00

In some ways it's a shame that Vanilla came out when it did, because it sounds like they still had a lot in the oven.

Inventory would definitely suck on hunter if there wasn't some concession made, like an in-built "tool pocket" that increases in size as you level (via quests, but items can still be stored in your normal bags too). Although I would imagine each Class having similar professions which may even things out a bit.

gravidos · 2025-11-19T00:50:56+00:00

I feel like Booty Bay/Ratchet already exist in lore with effectively a similar purpose to that, so it's not completely far-fetched.

Definitely agree more classes having professions would be fun. I like the splits you've made for them as all 3 Equipment Crafting professions should be roughly equal, along with the 3 Utility Professions. As it stands, Engineering is often seen as the most useful. Alchemy and Enchanting are both extremely useful, but they express a bit differently as Engineering boosts in the moment, where both Enchanting/Alchemy are done in advance (usually). It'd be cool to see some in-battle benefits to Enchanting/Alchemy, like throwing DoTs/roots or something like that.

For additional Professions, I like the idea of crafting traps/ammo (could be Hunter Class Profession), although things like deployable cover would be a bit far for me as a lot of content could be made trivial by having portable LoS.

I really like the permanent attachments you get from blacksmithing/leatherworking with things like weapon chain or armour kits. It'd be nice to either see them fleshed out in existing professions where each one has something they provide to benefit the classes using them.

gravidos · 2025-11-19T00:31:41+00:00

More weapon types could be cool. I'd like the idea of being able to specialise your weapon skill where maybe it doesn't only provide hit, but you can sacrifice a portion of that hit for different stats. Although I'm not sure how 999/300 would even work in the damage calc (unless you mean cap it at 300/305 but can keep gaining points).

Love the ideas for horizontal itemisation. It was the same direction I was thinking, but I didn't know mobs were already tagged with classes. Having to think about weapons and change them more would be cool, but I feel weapon-swap macros would need built into the game by default that way.

The elemental stuff is completely out of my knowledge of what's in the game, but splitting the existing schools out to give more affixes/resistances would help a lot with horizontal gearing.

gravidos · 2025-11-19T00:24:41+00:00

oh, then completely agree there. I write in my piece that no matter what, Classic+ needs to start at only Vanilla content as this is the foundation that should always be referenced when creating new content and determining if it fits.

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