The intent behind my comment is to point out that cosmetics are by far the least obtrusive way to monetize a free-to-play game, especially one as competitive as LoL. Many of the healthiest, longest-lived free-to-play games use this model, such as those I listed.
So, if you are opposed to "selling skins at the expense of their games", I'm inviting you to present a better alternative.
I don't feel like I've diluted down your argument to a weaker form, but if I have, please correct me.
This is the first time I’ve heard someone criticize the “selling cosmetics” business model. I assume you feel the same about R6, TF2 and CSGO, naturally.
Since selling skins is unacceptable, how would you have them make money given the game is F2P?
IMO this seems fairly similar to abandoned property… if you leave a car sitting on the side of the road, not only does the city get to tow it and eventually auction it off, they also get to bill you for any costs they incur in the process.
If I’m understanding correctly, it was already quasi-legal through a loophole, but formally legalizing it made the loophole much trickier to use?
That does sound frustrating. I hope they simplify the legal rails… having to wait around in pain waiting for multiple rounds of paperwork to clear sounds terrible.
That’s a fair point, but I think the issue is that the other players don’t want to play with you unless you’re running the anti cheat.
Some games do have servers with anti cheat disabled, but a few minutes of playing on one of those servers will reveal why self-selecting into a population not running the anti cheat is not very fun.
This is a long winded way of saying that there isn’t a good way to have a multiplayer game give you the choice while still being fun.
Comments like these seem likely to discourage authors from making more interesting posts about niche topics they specialize in, without actually moving the needle on stuff the commenter is pestering about.
IMO, needing to clear out an entire table is an indicator that something has gone wrong with your design.
Don't get me wrong, I've definitely done it before, but it's in the same bucket as VACUUM for me... high impact interventions used to fix a mistake I made, not "course of business" actions.
#3 is insane, if for no other reason than the VC is signaling that he’s likely going to try and do the same thing to you some day… even if you were totally willing to screw over your team, why would you ever get involved with that VC given you’ll then have to watch your back until the end of time?
That actually doesn’t seem that toxic. Doesn’t seem like a carcinogen either. Obviously still bad, but at least we’re not talking about something on the tier of phenol or benzene here!
Unfortunately I suspect this idea is somewhat dead-on-arrival… anti-renewable people will fight it for obvious reasons, while environmentalists will fight it due to concerns over shading the waterways.
I quite liked this article.
That said, I think it misses the two big advantages of denormalized (one big table) data -
It’s much easier for people to use, especially non-technical stakeholders who tend to just not understand joins.
It doesn’t require anything from the query optimizer… until you’ve had a complex query randomly go from “runs instantly” to “spins for hours” overnight, you can’t appreciate the value of a simple execution plan.
A bonus benefit is that it scares off the architecture astronauts!
The author really lucked out that the government employee was not actually malicious. I can think of a good few ways she could have made life much more difficult for the author, even if he was likely to ultimately succeed.
Lumen, Nanite, Substrate, Metahumans, and Chaos Physics all come to mind as major innovations driven by Epic. Nanite specifically has pretty much no alternatives. Additionally, the developer UX on UE5 gets better from release to release - for instance, being able to recompile your logic or animations while actively running the game is pretty insane.
One comment I found interesting basically argued that if the billionaires are so scared of over the top wealth taxes, they should be pushing/lobbying for more reasonable wealth taxes as a blocking play, otherwise they can’t really complain if the really disruptive versions get passed.
So, if you are opposed to "selling skins at the expense of their games", I'm inviting you to present a better alternative.
I don't feel like I've diluted down your argument to a weaker form, but if I have, please correct me.