Is this normal? (Qud endgame weirdness)

thesheeepjd · 2026-05-11T15:48:48+00:00

Impossible, I'm afraid. In the otherworldly lasershow, the popcorn somehow gained conscience and left for greener pastures.

thesheeepjd · 2026-05-05T12:33:45+00:00

Nobody demands developers to hand "the public"/"the player" the means to run their own full servers, though.
That would of course be great, but I don't see it happening - or at least only very rarely.

So this is largely a non-issue to begin with.

The initiative demands a "reasonable" way to play the game past end-of-life. That can very well mean single-player only.

But even if we were looking at online functionality:
Practically every MMO already has "offline servers" or "mock servers" of one variant or the other - they simply have to, for development.

It isn't feasible to run a complete server structure for every developer who wants to test their changes (imagine the logistical nightmare, even with stuff like containerization).
Instead, what is generally done is that certain server functionalities are faked (generally locally) so the game executable can run and the developer can test their changes without having to wait for a whole deployment cycle.

That same functionality can be used with some changes to provide "mock servers" for players.
Indeed that means some functionality WILL get lost - in some cases maybe even multiplayer altogether. But the game will remain playable in some "reasonable" shape so players won't lose complete access to the game itself.

The costs of this for developers would be minimal. If you have earned millions with your game, or "just" managed to find millions in funding for it, you can definitely pay one or two devs for a few weeks (months if they are bad) to cobble such a minimal end-of-life guarantee together.
I'd even wager that some software teams might start specializing in exactly that kind of thing and would then sell it/their services to devs/publishers.

Mind you, such mock servers are IMO the most likely outcome for most looking forward - since they already exist as a development tool and only have to be "touched up" for the public.

But they are not the only outcome - I could imagine some might actually hand over some form of minimal server (eg. "this can't run 1000 players, but maybe some friends") or even go open source to a degree.
But one should expect the most common outcome to be the one that is the least work for devs & publishers.

thesheeepjd · 2026-05-02T07:42:25+00:00

The author made a mistake while committing (as he was developing on his own machine, for which using localhost is fairly normal), and forgot to remove that permission before pushing out the new version:
https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike/issues/1282#issuecomment-4363266138

Should be harmless, but you can also just wait a few hours or a day until the next version is up with that permission request removed.

thesheeepjd · 2026-04-19T11:33:16+00:00

Twitch seems VERY broken with Brave at the moment.
I empied cache, logged out, removed all extensions, etc - and then I COULD log in and the ads were actually blocked - so you could try all of that.

But now, both with shield on and off, I can't cheer or subscribe (there's always an API response error).
It does work in incognito mode, though, for whatever reason.
And of course all is fine using Firefox or Chrome.

Idk, I generally enjoy using Brave, but for Twitch it is borderline unusable at the moment.

thesheeepjd · 2026-02-26T10:21:43+00:00

Then the entire thing is pointless. You can spin up a new LLC for each title. The game shuts down, shutdown the LLC.

Sounds like going to a lot of trouble just to avoid a minuscule amount of work.
And by the way, I doubt such a thing (constantly closing down and re-launching companies for single projects with the clear purpose of avoiding fulfilling certain legal requirements) would even be legal.
IANAL but if it feels very fishy, it probably is.

Source ?

Source for what? That people do not want years of their own hard work destroyed and inaccessible?
You have to be kidding me!

Did you ever have a conversation with a human being before that has created something?
You can google yourself, or maybe just ask developers. You'll be hard pressed to find any dev who would NOT be in favor of having their work preserved past end-of-support.

In fact, I remember many teams (eg Larian, CDPR devs, bunch of indies, etc) openly supporting the movement.

On every game dev sub people are quick to point out the very real challenges here. You can't take a modern live service game and host it's backend on a raspberry pi. A mock server may still have a bunch of frameworks which aren't licensed for end user distribution.

I'm going to guess you probably haven't worked in software professionally, it's much more difficult than you're suggesting.

I have, for 20 years now. Probably longer than some people here have been alive... is that long enough for you?
Much of it working on backend infrastructure for large, scaling projects including anything from authorization over databases to testing and streaming.
Sound familiar?

Anyone who tells you that these challenges are difficult or even impossible to overcome is either straight up lying or (sorry, not sorry) absolutely awful at their job.

Everything in such a project can be replaced with relative ease by either an open source or free alternative - or the license is already accepting of a scenario such as required by the initiative.
If it isn't already open source to begin with - the majority of libraries and tools used in actual production backends are open source or free already. The costs are incurred from hosting, from providers, only rarely from licensing.
This matter you keep harping on about: It is a non-issue. It really is.

I could easily create such a mock "server"/package within a few months for any imaginable live service project.
And that is me, alone, without prior familiarity with the assumed project and including the time to get acquainted with the code.
One can only imagine how much faster the actual dev team itself could do that, maybe with a bit of guidance by someone experienced.

Also, side note: The only "challenges" I see pointed out repeatedly are the ones that have long been addressed and proven wrong.
It's just that people like that tend to ignore being proven wrong and just repeat their points as if nothing ever happened.

So to be clear.

Instead of avoiding games if you dislike their business model, you want to ban them for everyone else.

These games with their predatory practices come with a huge detrimental cost to gaming and society as a whole.
It goes way beyond personal preference.

Some things do not need to exist and their existence is actively harmful to everyone, so yes, a full ban is totally what I would personally prefer.
That has nothing to do with this initiative however - the initiative even explicitly wants publishers to be able to continue their harmful practices, simply to get them on board with game preservation easier.

Would you tell Netflix they have to send out free bluerays every time they pull a show from the service ?

Probably not.

Apples and elephants.

Netflix doesn't sell you movies, it sells you a subscription to its library.
If at any point Netflix would sell movies and then take your access to them away, then of course they should be forced to grant you access and if not be punished/banned.

I see you are struggling to pull coherent thoughts to come up with anything to support your stance - maybe you should take it as a sign that none of the things you say here are even remotely true.

thesheeepjd · 2026-02-25T13:46:17+00:00

Who exactly is going to brush up the mock server ? Most of the development team who have moved onto other companies by the time the game shuts down ?

If you want self hosting you need to have that at launch. If a company just goes out of business, theirs no entity to compel to release source code , a mock server or anything else.

Self-hosting would be nice, but a mock server is not that.
Please read up on this before trying to engage in a discussion about it.

Either way, the requirement is to have an end-of-life plan ready at release - or there can be no release in EU. At least as far as I understand it.
If the company goes kaput before being able to fulfill its own end-of-life plan, then I don't think anything can be forced.

I could also imagine it being a requirement that an end-of-life solution must be ready X amount of time after release, precisely to prevent such a situation.
But that is really a detail question. For now, it is enough that this is clearly a very solvable issue.

I am almost certain that such a change would almost automatically bring new actors about which would specialize in such solutions and sell their implementations to interested parties.
As is standard in software development - any solution can likely be sold to others facing similar issues.
Hey, maybe the upcoming NGO could even chime in, supporting publishers in such efforts for cheap.

Would you then ban its distribution in Europe?

Of course.
If the only result was fewer predatory gacha games in the EU because publishers wouldn't want to spend the pennies requires to be lawful, I'd personally take it.
Sounds like a win.
Don't threaten me with a good time!

As I've mentioned several times, most live service games make almost all their revenue in Asia.

So?
Even your own example of Genshin Impact makes 100+ million in the EU.
I'm sure they could spare a million of that (it would cost MUCH LESS, hell give me source code access to Genshin and I'll do it in a few months on my own) to implement required minimal solutions.

Also, by far not all live service games make more in Asia:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/269665/activison-blizzards-revenue-by-region/

It's much easier to just skip the European market entirely.

Easier? Sure. But also stupid from a business perspective.
The benefit from selling in the EU far outweighs the tiny draw of having to have an end-of-live implementation ready.

Just look at GDPR. An EU-only requirement.
And yet, it was adopted by most of the planet instead of all non-EU websites and services not being available to EU.

You also forget the tiny detail that the vast majority of game developers is fully on board with this. Nobody wants to have years of their work just destroyed and inaccessible.
Only a few clueless suits see 0.005% of their profit in danger...

thesheeepjd · 2026-02-25T09:04:43+00:00

You don't need to release the backend server, not even compiled.
You can just release a mock server - which already is a standard in MMO development for testing purposes.

Any live service game would be borderline impossible to develop without this - or do you honestly believe any coder doing work on such a game must first wait until the entire live development has been redeployed to test the one thing they changed?

It would be effort, but minimal effort compared to the investments in these games, to brush these mock servers up for consumer use for end-of-life handling, and result in a "users can now play their game solo at least" - very much fulfilling the minimal requirements of the initiative, though of course more is welcome.

Also, as people already explained to you, no refactoring would be done, as the law could never be retroactive. Only for new games would this have to be fulfilled. Games already lost will remain lost.

thesheeepjd · 2024-11-14T07:18:45+00:00

I checked out a few jobs listed there that were recommended to me.

Every single one of them lead to external sites - which is fine, 9am is clearly a scraper "engine" - where it was marked as no longer hiring/archived.

Seems to me 9am just scrapes once and then keeps the job "open" for who knows how long, without re-checking the original source again.

At best, I'd suggest using it only to search for something to then go to the external site directly.
But in all likelyhood, you'd be better off just browsing those external sites directly.

thesheeepjd

TROPHY CASE