Witch hunting is going to quickly destroy Lemmy, and prevent it from flourishing - Lemmy.World

I made a post earlier this week, which was met with an aggressive hostile witch hunter who apparently has nothing better to do then just try to insinuate flaming / witch hunting towards me because they don’t like what they’re reading. https://lemmy.world/comment/13395720 [https://lemmy.world/comment/13395720] This is possibly the third time I’ve dealt with a super, aggressively toxic person who comes in and writes a huge, massively long off-topic rant on one of my posts… and what’s the entire basis of it? Witch hunting. Not responding to the topic or the discussion post, just writing a big wall-length post of “this person bad, pls upvote and shame”. He alleges I’ve used AI to generate my posts or some of my writing, which is absurd and ridiculous, everything I say is written by me, an actual human like tf? But even if he suspected it, why does he have to go on a huge, massive rant and throw it out there, like what does this add to the community? We have to really think about how we want our community to act going forward, because this raises a huge concern. AI is not going anywhere, it’s the future of humanity basically. Students are using it in college or high school, many getting accused falseley of using it. So having people witch hunt like the Salem witch trials “HES AN AI!” on posts is just absurd, it’s baffling. But more importantly, the toxicity. This is what inevitably killed reddit too. Someone with an ego so incredibly fragile they had to resort to reviewing someone’s entire post history, and then comment that in a post just to… make them feel bad? Shame them? like seriously? It undermines the entire purpose of Lemmy or any other discussion board. To discuss things. They can’t be bothered to actually discuss the point, they just resort to insults. Unbelievable.

World of Warcraft's monetization seems to be getting way more aggressive - Lemmy.World

The monetization of World of Warcraft has evolved significantly since I played during Burning Crusade over 10 years ago. Back then, the model was straightforward - you bought the expansion and paid a subscription fee. That was all you needed to access 100% of the game’s content. Today, I’m noticing through my friends’ Discord group that the purchasing model has become much more complex. Beyond the base expansion packs and subscriptions, there are now early access passes, limited-time mounts (like a $90 dinosaur mount), and promotional tie-ins with products like Mountain Dew and Doritos that offer exclusive cosmetic items. Some players are even buying these promotional codes in bulk to resell online. [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/376da771-ee1b-4dc4-9638-8bf73b6c9251.jpeg] [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/61c660a7-8ec3-4206-8f31-784151fbec91.webp] Example above, someone paid over $200 just to get some of the mountain dew codes… This shift in monetization strategy raises interesting questions about the direction of the game and MMOs in general. While additional cosmetic options can add variety and personal expression to the game, I wonder about the impact on the player experience and community. Does having these exclusive items create a divide between players who can afford them and those who can’t? Or is it simply offering more choices for those who want them? I’m particularly curious about the psychological aspect of limited-time offers. The “fear of missing out” seems to be a powerful motivator, especially with items that are advertised as never being available again. But is this enhancing the game experience or just creating artificial scarcity? Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on this, especially from others who’ve witnessed this evolution firsthand. What do you think about the current monetization approach compared to the simpler model of the past? Has it affected how you engage with the game? TLDR: WoW’s monetization has changed dramatically from the simple expansion + subscription model of the past to include various limited-time purchases and promotions. People today are scalping and reselling thousand of dollars of mountain dew for in game codes

Why do WoW players act like rats scurrying around for cheese? - Lemmy.World

When I used to play the game over 10 years ago back in the burning crusade, all you had to do was buy the expansion and get a subscription and that was enough. Nowadays, it’s completely different. I have A friends discord group Where people talk about things that they play and anything about World of Warcraft blows my mind. They pay for the expansion, they buy the subscription, They paid for early access, spent $90 on a single rideable dinosaur just because It’s a limited time thing that will never happen again. Now people are also going out to the store and buying hundreds of dollars worth of mountain dew, Doritos and other items to try and get codes that they can sell online to others for a profit, for some in-game cosmetics that don’t even look that good. I had to look at them and they look just normal… Like, these players act like a bunch of desperate addicted rats scurrying around for cheese. Anytime they release anything extra in the game, you hear about people spending hundreds of dollars on it, in a game that you’re already expected to buy the expansion and the subscription like what the heck…???

Reddit mods locking the comments of every post is getting really old - Lemmy.World

Stores like Epic and Steam basically screw over gamers in the long run - Lemmy.World

Man, these game stores—Steam, Epic, GOG—are straight up screwing us. They’ve trapped us in these separate little worlds where each one has its own “exclusives” and sales, forcing us to juggle multiple accounts just to find a good deal or play the games we want. And once you’ve sunk enough money into one, you’re basically stuck there. Steam especially has this monopoly going where people don’t even think about switching, ‘cause who wants to lose hundreds of dollars in games… And it gets worse—they don’t let us move our games from one platform to another. If you’ve got a ton of games on Steam, but want to switch to GOG for the DRM-free stuff? Nope. The devs and publishers are locked down, too, and we’re all at the mercy of whatever deals these companies cut. It’s like they’re holding our game libraries hostage, and it’s beyond shady. Now, with the way things are going in the U.S., government protections are gonna get GUTTED, data caps, insane internet fees—this situation is only gonna get worse. They’re already planning to scrap the entire FDA, wait til the FCC and FTC get theirs… If Steam decides to mess with us, it’s not like we can just grab our games and go. This whole setup is a disaster waiting to happen for anyone who just wants to game without getting screwed over.

We're never going to have better internet in the USA, are we? - Lemmy.World

I’m an unfortunate captive of the oligopoly of the internet industry in the USA. In many places, you have 2-3 choices of internet, and all of them suck ass. I’m in this situation. All internet providers in my area have a 1-1.5 terabyte data cap. So when I download Call of Duty for 250 gb and it fails and has to update or reinstall, I’ve wasted 500 gb, and have now reached 50% of my data cap in just 1 day. There are crazy fees, for example, Cox Cable [https://www.cox.com/residential/internet/add-internet-data.html#:~:text=Do%20I%20have%20a%20data,%2410%20to%20your%20next%20bill.] says: > If you go over, we’ll automatically add 50 gigabytes of data for $10 to your next bill. That’s enough for about 15 hours of streaming HD video. If you use that 50 gigabytes, we automatically add another 50 gigabytes for $10 and so on until you reach our $100 limit of data overage charges or until your next usage cycle begins. So your $90 a month internet can easily become $190 a month, which is fuckin criminal, like that is so scummy and asinine how that can even be legal. But it is perfectly legal. The FCC is also looking into these data caps [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-406576A1.pdf] but now that we have a new anti-federal government president elect… This is probably toast… Nothing will change… It’s just sad to think about the future of internet in the USA, and knowing we’ll be imprisoned by these data caps for the foreseeable future.

Monthly Subscription costs are no longer affordable - Lemmy.World

When I was a kid in high school, the economy wasn’t nearly as bad as it is right now. People are very very concerned right now with having enough money to pay their bills, housing has skyrocketed, cost of living dramatically up, salaries stagnating… Almost every single friend I have, I asked them why they no longer play World of Warcraft or similar games and the answer was the same. “I cannot justify paying a subscription monthly, I have way too many subscriptions right now like Netflix Hulu HBO max some that I’m even canceling”. This was pretty much the same exact response I heard from most of my friend community on discord. It seems that people find it a horrible value to buy a game and play it when it requires repeated purchases, but you also have to pay to subscribe to the game as well. That amount of money really, honestly adds up to a lot… Simple example: playing Elder scrolls online and World of Warcraft for 2 years World of Warcraft: $15/month x 24 months = $360 $50 expansion every 2 years = $50 Total WoW cost: $410 Elder Scrolls Online: $15/month x 24 months = $360 $90 expansion per year x 2 years = $180 Total ESO cost: $540 Combined total for both games over 2 years: $410 + $540 = $950 Investing this money — Investment Breakdown: Initial Investment: $950 Monthly Contribution: $200 Annual Interest Rate: 8.5% (compounded monthly) Investment Period: 2 years (24 months) Results: Total Amount Invested: $950 (initial) + $4,800 (monthly contributions) = $5,750 Total Accrued Interest: $587.45 Total After 2 Years: $6,337.45 ------ So in short, you are actually spending a huge sum of money on these games, about $950 a year at least by this very very rough estimate, and if you simply invested this money, you could see huge, monstrous returns on this money that could change your damn life. It’s for that reason that I cannot justify playing these games anymore. That’s just a subscription cost!! So astronomically high it’s unbelievable to me. TLDR: - Economic struggles make gaming subscriptions harder to justify. - Rising living costs and stagnant wages have led people to cancel non-essential subscriptions. - Many friends quit games like World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online due to high subscription costs. - Example costs over two years: – WoW: $410 – ESO: $540 – Total: $950 - Investing this amount with $200 monthly contributions at 8.5% interest could grow to $6,337.45 in two years. Overall, game subscription fees seem less worthwhile given the potential for financial growth.

"Florida is a conservative Christian state" - Lemmy.World

An actual quote I saw today posted on Twitter: “Florida is a conservative Christian state, and they voted against murdering unborn babies. The democratic process is complete. They can leave if they want to do that.” There’s a lot to unpack there. I also got into an argument with the guy who posted it, who claimed somehow that it’s not ok for Federal government to regulate Women, but if states wants to do it then it’s ok, and they should just leave to another state then. like… wow. America is a strange place

Language learning models, not AI, are beneficial to society - Lemmy.World

In just a hundred years, we were able to successfully develop a device that has all of the information in the entire world contained in it, handheld and portable, which has expanded our technological capabilities. This has also created an incredibly frustrating problem for us in our daily lives. We have an exponential amount more information to deal with now than we ever had before. Back in the '70s or '80s you wanted to know something, you go to the library, watch a documentary that’s on a DVD. Now? You have to navigate the terrifyingly bad search engines that are out there today like Bing and Google which are increasingly getting more and more unreliable. You have to take notes which are frustratingly complicated, and unless you are some extraordinary gifted college student who is a master at taking good notes, your notes will probably be not perfect… Then you have to search all of the information available to you, to finally make some sort of decision. Even if you know what you want to say or what you want to communicate, you have to put it into the right format… This is exhausting. Dealing with this much information, synthesizing it, changing the format and display of it, trying to figure out how to work with so much information every single day of your life. It is insanity! A language learning model can actually help you, especially if you train it or use roles to help you shape the learning model into whatever you want it to be doing. For example if I want to put together some well organized notes on Tableau, that awful piece of garbage technology that exists out there in the world today, I can simply use my local llama 3.1 AI model that I have personally trained with a ton of my notes and information, and get any sort of information out of it that I need to in order to explain a very complex topic to someone else easily. The web is not accessed at all, everything is stored locally on my own device. Miraculous and lifts a huge ass load off of my shoulders because now I don’t have to go and sift through my notes and spend a day and a half trying to figure out how to word things and then putting it into a PowerPoint that’s only going to be used for 5 minutes… This is what I think The technology should be used for. Not artificial intelligence, no one is ever replaced in this process, And as you can tell, I am utilizing the technology to make myself better, augment my capabilities.

Subscription costs are no longer feasible in live service games - Lemmy.World

When I was a kid in high school, the economy wasn’t nearly as bad as it is right now. People are very very concerned right now with having enough money to pay their bills, housing has skyrocketed, cost of living dramatically up, salaries stagnating… Almost every single friend I have, I asked them why they no longer play World of Warcraft or similar games and the answer was the same. “I cannot justify paying a subscription monthly, I have way too many subscriptions right now like Netflix Hulu HBO max some that I’m even canceling”. This was pretty much the same exact response I heard from most of my friend community on discord. It seems that people find it a horrible value to buy a game and play it when it requires repeated purchases, but you also have to pay to subscribe to the game as well. That amount of money really, honestly adds up to a lot… Simple example: playing Elder scrolls online and World of Warcraft for 2 years World of Warcraft: $15/month x 24 months = $360 $50 expansion every 2 years = $50 Total WoW cost: $410 Elder Scrolls Online: $15/month x 24 months = $360 $90 expansion per year x 2 years = $180 Total ESO cost: $540 Combined total for both games over 2 years: $410 + $540 = $950 Investing this money Here’s a simple breakdown you can post on Reddit: — Investment Breakdown: Initial Investment: $950 Monthly Contribution: $200 Annual Interest Rate: 8.5% (compounded monthly) Investment Period: 2 years (24 months) Results: Total Amount Invested: $950 (initial) + $4,800 (monthly contributions) = $5,750 Total Accrued Interest: $587.45 Total After 2 Years: $6,337.45 ------ So in short, you are actually spending a huge sum of money on these games, about $950 a year at least by this very very rough estimate, and if you simply invested this money, you could see huge, monstrous returns on this money that could change your damn life. It’s for that reason that I cannot justify playing these games anymore. That’s just a subscription cost!! So astronomically high it’s unbelievable to me.