I recently set up a password with a 16 character max, alphanumeric only, no spaces. The service is in no way a security threat but still.

“If we hold the country hostage, they’ll definitely do what I want before the opposition makes everything irreversibly worse.”

None of that helps low-level play or games without meaningful progression. Continuing to use Rust as an example, because I’m most familiar with it among games with controversial anticheat: people get banned all the time. All the time. And they keep coming back with brand new Steam accounts, and continue to cheat until someone notices and an admin happens to be online. Rinse and repeat. Seemingly an infinite pool of cheaters, or finite cheaters with infinite money for new copies of the game. And it only takes a few minutes to ruin someone’s week.

The most effective prevention method is probably strict gatekeeping: require a minimum hours played in wild west servers or a certain value of games owned in an account before a player can be whitelisted. Proof of investment, that kind of thing.

That kind of stuff catches legitimate users all the time. In Rust for example it’s common to get kicked for “fly hacking” while jumping on vehicles. The more open-ended the game the more weird edge cases become very relevant. Especially if it has a halfway decent physics sim. Tons of ways to give players weird velocities. Then it has to account for the variance ping introduces…

Some stuff, yeah. Should be easy to check if a player has too much HP. But spoofed communication between the client and server is a tough nut to crack when you can only see what the client wants you to see. Keeping everything server-side would help but that introduces latency to every input, unacceptable for anything even moderately paced.

All thay said, it would be a lot easier to swallow the “necessary evil” argument if it actually fucking worked.

I don’t know exactly who you’re talking about but there’s a bunch of people on my block list so I hope I already got them.

Where do you live that bears and gangs are both on the table, Anchorage?

The unfiltered boors of the world like to feel valid and important.

It’s almost like things can exist in a cultural context without explicitly defined connections.

Just say “oh, I didn’t realize” instead of digging your heels in.

Lots of schools have a “freshmen must live on campus” policy, at least.

Not, like, “haha” funny…

Because I want to put some shelves up or go to the zoo or go check out that new coffee shop. I like gardening but rarely have time for anything beyond maintenance. “Accomplish” doesn’t have to mean work it just means I didn’t veg out for fourteen hours in recovery mode.

Virtue signalling into the void. Don’t get me wrong, I did it too in 2012 because I was disillusioned with Obama and I live in a deeply blue state. But that’s all it is. You’re better off writing an encouraging letter to your candidate of choice, or talking to your neighbors about the city council, or any number of other things that might actually make a material impact on someone’s life.

Elaborate. Is your position that it is never appropriate to control access to something? That microcultures aren’t worth preserving? That people with money deserve to do anything they want without judgment? Or do you just think I’m being disingenuous and used a commonly unpopular group to defend my position?

Eh, a little gatekeeping is good. Especially when it prevents people with more dollars than sense from overrunning the culture of an enthusiast group.

Specter! I should replay those games.

They sell that. They also sell tea and milkshakes, but you can go into any Starbucks and get a cup of drip coffee, or an espresso, or cold brew, or a mocha. But people like the sweet drinks and Starbucks is happy to oblige.

They roast their beans too dark because they care more about consistency than subtlety or complexity, their anti-union pushes are bad for workers, they displaced a load of small coffee shops (I have seen significant rebound, but that might just be my region), there’s this new “supercommuter” nonsense.

Pointing at a Frappuccino and saying “they don’t even sell coffee!” has no negative impact on their brand or business, it’s a transparently pointless claim to the general public, and it distracts from the very real problems Starbucks has. (I think it mostly sounds like “popular thing bad” with a sprinkling of “America bad” Eurosupremecy)

There’s no need descend to such hyperbolic depths, there are plenty of factually accurate complaints against the company and their product.

Sure, but all bigotry is taught and reinforced. Doesn’t give him a pass.

They aren’t banking on a military coup d’état, they want to delay and obfuscate until their crooked Supreme Court can award them the presidency, then start passing legislation that allows red states to do whatever they want with regards to elections. All this “never vote again” stuff is literal, the GOP wants to take advantage of the fact that there are more red states and that gives them unbalanced voting power, then stuff those governments with loyal cronies.

All this because Lincoln was killed and we subsequently fucked up Reconstruction. Should have changed the rules back to protect citizens instead of land.

Single-handedly? Nah. It pulled a lot of existing ideas together though, and it’s certainly responsible for the popularity. Another Minecraft influence is early-access.