Enttropy

Even then, “being the change you want to see” is futile if the platform itself has tons of issues and doesn’t provide incentives for people of all kinds to join and use over other platforms.

It seems like only hardcore Redditors and hip techies pass the filter to discover the Fediverse and thrive on it, which makes certain communities outright impossible to grow. Case and point; the biggest solo RPG mag on the Fediverse has been running for over a year, and 98% of the ~40 posts have been made by a single dude, most of which have zero interactions. Why? Because the Fediverse’s demographic has no interest on the topic.

And yeah, gaming stuff always make the keyboard wizards rush out of their towers. 🧙‍♂️

I don’t miss it because I keep using it. The communities I follow there are niche and they are completely dead on the Fediverse. I keep opening Kbin every other day just to find that my “new” feed still shows posts from 2 weeks ago without even scrolling.

Also, most of what I dislike from Reddit is still here.

Tons of people on the Fediverse craft their responses to fish upvotes, and circlejerking/echo-chambers are here too. Just last week I got a fresh breeze of downvotes and angry commenters because I expressed that I dislike Steam, on the PCgaming magazine, which is the same thing that would’ve happened on r/gaming, r/pcmasterrace or another similar toxic cesspool on Reddit.

Are Androids picky with this? Shouldn’t 64-bit devices be able to run 32-bit just fine?

Yeah… Well, although I genuinely appreciate experbia’s humour, when the parody is making a joke out of a misinterpretation, the joke just doesn’t land, honey.

Hint: their comment had nothing to do with what I initially expressed here, and my response had very little to do with emoji, just like the parody itself. Two failed swings from your part, let’s see if you get the third strike, smartpants.

OHH!!! EMOJIS! The 200K Karma Redditor inside you is surely raging!

I commented on why I think this announcement is just another corn in the steamy pile of doo-doo… dookie… manure, if you will, that Steam is for me.

I’m not expecting Steam to change for me or people in the same scenario as mine. Steam simply doesn’t fit my needs any more and I won’t support them. But then again, crucify me for my sins, daddy. I might go back to purchasing games on Steam if you do it well enough. 🍆💦

As I’ve said, I’m a bad boy doing bad-boy activities, i.e.: using old PCs with the OS they came from. 🩸🗡️😎🔥

And that’s totally fair. I’m not demanding or even expecting for Steam to support older operating systems. I just stated that this is one of the reasons I avoid VALVE and their products nowadays.

It’s my preference as a consumer, but voicing it seems to have riled up some dudes over here, like, for example, @ryanspeck who seems to be distressed and/or concerned by my consumer habits.

Wrong.

There are companies that have built their customer base out of taking the extra step to cater the “0.0001%” of Steam’s: GOG, Humble Bundle, Kickstarter, and Itch.

1/3 of the Cyberpunk 2077’s pre-orders were made on GOG. I think “0.0001%” is a bit too pessimistic, don’t you think?

I might have worded that wrong. I WANT to run Windows 98 and Windows XP on these old PCs. It’s part of the experience, and the reason I even bothered to put them together. If you’ve ever watched LGR, it’s pretty much that kind of hobby.

Imagine you grew up in the 90s and at the languages school they had indigo and green G3 iMacs. Now that you’re older and drunk in nostalgia, you hunt for one until, after years, you find it. It’s green, beautiful, and it’s all yours.

Now you want to use it to play games of the era. You purchase them on Steam, as opposed to just pirate them. Steam works on this G3 of yours, (just an example since Steam never worked on G3 iMacs, but you get the idea.) and you’re able to play these old games as they were meant to be played, without issues.

Out of the blue, VALVE decides that Steam is just going to support the latest M-iMacs. The game and Steam are installed on your G3, but when you open the game, a pop-up appears reminding you that Steam isn’t compatible with this iMac. You try to run the game out of the executable file but get the same results. You’re effectively fucked, finding yourself crawling back to GOG, MyAbandonwaredotcom, your torrent site of choice, or your M2 iMac which have massive issues running these old games.

Niche case? Sure, but it still happens, and it’s exactly what is going to happen to the current generation of game consoles in the future.

Good for you. Me, on the other hand, I like living on the edge since no one should be running older OSes. B-)

I don’t want Windows 10 or 11, and certainly not Linux, of all things, to run on the retro PCs that I’ve put together to run their respective OS, and games from their respective eras. But what do I know?

Yeah…really. The thing is that, if you like to run older games on era-accurate hardware, Steam was already a pain in the ass to run on older machines. Probably 70% of these games, I purchased on Steam, and a lot of them are old titles.

Maybe this is ludicrous to you, but le good ole Prototype runs like a nasty turd on my main W11 machine that I use for design and 4K video editing. I’m not new to modding, troubleshooting, and I’ve even dabbled in game development, but none of the fixes online seem to help me run the game at more than 10 FPS, with dips to the 3FPS realm.

But guess what? Prototype runs like a dream on my restored Windows XP PC with a Core Quad and GTX260. Same as with Far Cry 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Jade Empire, and so many others. And don’t even get me started on games from the 90s. Even if they run OK on W11 and I get past all the text rendering issues, I still want the experience of running them on W98, with a CRT monitor, metal ball mice and bone white mechanical keyboards. I paid for them, but Valve wants to dictate how I should run 'em.

If you can’t install Steam on older hardware, you can’t install your Steam games that you previously could. 🥸

This is one of the many reasons as to why I’ve avoided buying anything on Steam for the past 5 years. Steam/Valve are a steaming pile of doodoo.

I’d love if they could spark a revival of sports games, like the ones in the days of Activision O2 and EA Sports BIG.

Times have changed and the wackiness of the 90s, the edginess of the early 00’s are long gone now, but I’m also incredibly tired of the clean, hypercorrect, “everyone can do it!” chill vibe, and braindead PG10 humor of the AAA sports titles from the past 15 years… but knowing Microsoft, that’s exactly what they’d go after.

Having kbin.social direct straight to your subscribed magazines just started working since this last update, and yeah, I spent my first day curating my subscribed/blocked mags, but even after weeks, it’s like playing wack-a-mole. You block one community and the next day you go to “All”, and it is there, except now it’s from another instance. Right now, I have six “196” magazines blocked, but what the hell… that’s the current way of the Fediverse, and I’ll accept it.

It’s cool to witness how Kbin takes shape, and hopefully it becomes an easy and attractive platform for the regular Joe, so we have all kinds of neat and diverse communities over here. 😁

Yeah, I had to go back to Reddit.

To be honest, I never had issues with the official app as I barely used it since 95% of my Reddit time was via Safari on my iPad Pro. Slide for Reddit was the only iPadOS app anywhere close to Sync for Android, which I adored, so after trying multiple times basically every single app, I never could stick with any but the official.

I deleted my 30K karma account in solidarity with the people who used third party apps and because I was incredibly angered at the stance that moronic rat-face of a CEO took, but so far the demographic of the Fediverse is huge on topics I couldn’t care less about. My Kbin frontpage was filled with LGBTQ+, US Politics, Ukraine, shitty meme communities, people mourning about their deleted Reddit accounts, and massive circle jerks regarding Reddit, while the communities I used to follow are non-existent here or are depressingly abandoned.

The biggest Solo RPG community on the Fediverse has been running for over a year, and it has ~40 posts, mostly made by a single dude. Others have said “Be the change!” but I’d end up repeating the Solo RPG case of posting literally for my own eyes. I’d definitely do it once Ernest can figure out how to make Kbin show embedded images on posts, instead of just creating hyperlinks to them, but in the meantime, all my communities are still on Reddit and I doubt that will change for a long time.

Oh and tips to keep them engaged, well you need to read the room and identify which parts of the game they enjoy the most and the least, and the reason behind that.

Give them what they want and make all of them participate. With adults it also happens, but it’s way more prominent with kids: some will talk much more than the rest, and some will be ashamed or have shyness to let themselves go. You need to kindly guide the shy ones into the spotlight and reward them for participating.

Also, when you narrate the places and events, ask them to complete your idea. For example: “As the group follow the trails, a vendor interjects them and tries to sell them micro-hamburgers, but Player #4 doesn’t loose focus and realizes that just around the corner, drenched in the glow of the neon lights from the skyscrapers, is the vehicle that Mr. Jenkins gifted to the group… What does this vehicle looks like, Player #4?” Do this every now and then for places, NPC descriptions, the smells and sounds, etc. Make them have as much agency as possible in the world building, instead of just having them react to your dice checks.

Hell yeah! Your daughter is a crunchy-gamer in the making! I can relate to her in the sense of her wanting to play things with a solid structure that she can study and master, to keep her engaged. I think that she will enjoy Savage Worlds.

If 5e is rules-heavy, then SWADE is a rules-medium system. The slowest part is making a character because the system is universal and there are a ton of options, but as a DM, you can curate the options for your players. Also, there are Savage Settings and one of them is “East Texas University.” Teens will be able to relate to the school setting but “rad-idfied”. They get to role play as university students who then solve mysteries, join fraternities, hunt monsters, drive and modify badass combat cars, etc.

Also, maybe it’s time to introduce the kids to Cyberpunk RED. It’s not hard to learn or teach and the game itself is fairly lightweight.

Otherwise, for the smaller, Index Card RPG or EZD6 can work. Both are super streamlined and they retain that D&D feeling. Also, games using the LUMEN system can give the kids a nice dopamine rush. The creator basically states that his system is meant to make players feel like Overwatch or Diablo characters. In contrast with 5e, in which players often hoard spells and powers for the “right event”, LUMEN makes everyone use their spells and special skills all the time in fast paced combat that resolves super quick. Check out ”Nova" and “Light”.

And personally I don’t like them, but you can also show them the FATE and Ironsworn/Starforged systems to broaden their horizons and make them experience a different perspective which they might love.

Who gives a fuckidi fuck?

Though choice! I choose Sagrada just because of how much I like the real game and how well made is the digital version, but Ascension, Mystic Vale, and Through the Ages are close.

Damn, Gameranx is still going hard with the pathetically desperate clickbait titles/thumbnails.