True, but the point was mostly that in this case, it’s extremely apparent that there were 0 QA checks before they released it or they simply don’t care. As someone who worked in QA, I can imagine them missing a lot of bugs that are happening on Remix or the main game, because they could require some obscure combination of finished past quests and an account state that can be hard/impossible to properly test for all cases, while also having millions of players, so some may encounter it.

But in the case of a major class campaign quest being impossible with 100% repro rate, because it needs items that are not even in the Remix, that’s inexcusable. It’s also easy to fix, and should be marked as critical because it’s a progress blocker. The only conclusion is that they either didn’t know about it, or just don’t care becuase they know that the community will just suck it up. It shows extreme disrespect for the players. Hell, when Remix released, you couldn’t even finish the first quest and if you tried re-logging, it didn’t let you login. It was extremely broken to the point of being unplayable for the first two days.

I’ve had similar experiences even in retail. Just getting through the main campaign of last patch required re-logging to unstuck a quest 4 times (which I specifically counted), not to mention the desyncs.

I could understand something like this if it was a developer that doesn’t have the resources, but Blizzard has and had in the past, but they decided to reduce quality just so they can increase their (already astronomical) profits.

If I could choose not to start WoW again, I would avoid it like a plague.

I wouldn’t call it adiction per-se, but my problem with WoW is that even though I hate what Blizzard is doing, the extreme loss of quality both in game (recent example - they released a patch where one of the main feature are class campaigns, and 8/12 questlines didn’t work and had major 100% repro blockers, like requiring items that do not exist) and in Customer Support, and how it’s more and more obvious that they just want to milk the playerbase of their money without any kind of effort, I still keep playing. It’s not love-hate relationship, I actively dislike Blizzard.

But, it’s one of the only games my partner is playing and that we can play together, and I also have a lot of friends in the guild I’ve been playing for the past two years with. I mostly just log in for a dungeon or two with her, or a regular raid night with my guild, which I enjoy.

If I stopped playing, I’d give up a lot of friends and also an activity with my partner that we’re mostly used to. She doesn’t really play other games. So far, it’s still worth it, but I’m really conflicted every time I have to give Blizzard more money, since I’m basically held hostage.

I highly recommend looking for a free server, i.e Turtle WoW (assuming it won’t get shut down, they are getting sued IIRC), because those people are actually making an effort to make a game they love better. Blizzard is just exploiting people like me, and their nostalgia, without any regard for the game. It’s a shame Morhaim lost the battle against capitalism and was driven out, and it’s extremely aparent on the quality of the game and direction Blizzard is going.

Just to be clear - the game in itself is pretty all right and fun to play, what I have issue with is the way how extremely obvious is that Blizzard does not give a fuck, produces low-quality slop without any semblance of QA, and just plain exploits the playerbase. It could’ve been so much better with the resources they have, but they chose not to, and just cut corners more and more. And I highly despise that. Patches are broken, there’s reskinned content that’s heavily time-gated, and it just screams “low effort”.

Do yourself a favor and don’t think about giving Blizzard money.

The major advantage of Matrix (not sure if DeltaChat can do the same) is the support for a lot of bridges, and how easily can you host it.

Matrix has a really good and robust ansible project, with which you can set up your own sever in like an hour, assuming you have a place where to host it (I use Hetzner for like 7$ a month) and a domain. Adding bridges and configuring the ansible only needed like changing 5 config lines at most, and it’s very well documented. It’s also super easy to maintain, I “just update” every few weeks and it’s so robustly written, that it lets me know what changed and what config I need to update. I never had an issue with it in the past two or three years I’ve been using it.

And then the bridges - I did not need to convince others to switch, becuase I run Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Messenger bridges on my Matrix server, which does bridge all of the apps into my Matrix server. Sure, they still get your conversations data, but at least you don’t have to have their spyware installed on your phone/PC and have it all consolidated into one Matrix app. I can also slowly convince people to switch to the more secure messengers like Signal, but don’t have to drop contact if they decide not to.

I second this. I only started slowly switching to nvim few months ago, and I already can feel slightly annoyed when I have to take off my hands of the keyboard to reach for a mouse, or when I’m editting a text in i.e a browser, want to make an edit few words back, and I have to spam keys like a madman instead of just jumping where I need to be.

It’s addicting and extremely comfortable, having a good keyboard navigation controls.

I really need to look into tiled window managers and a browser.

I do also like all the alt and ctrl combinations with arrow keys to move lines, blocks and jump over words.

That’s what I love the most about VIM, that it has dozen little tricks like these. Need to jump over a word? Jump to next occurance of letter L? Jump five words? Jump to second parameter of a function definition? Jump to matching bracket? There’s a motion for all of that, and more. Including “go to definition” or “go to references”, if you set up your vim correctly.

I don’t even know where to start to make vim or neovim do all that.

What I did was simply install IdeaVIM into my Rider, so I can start learning the motions while also keep the features of the IDE I’m used to, but also more importantly installed LazyVim, which is a pre-made config for nvim that can do most of that by default, or has a simple addon menu (LazyExtras) that automatically download and install plugins relevant for a language you are working on. I.e I need to work in Zig, I just open LazyExtras menu, find zig-lang, and it install LSP, debugger, linter, etc that’s specific for that language.

They already have a really cool solution for that, which they talked about in their GDC talk.. I don’t think there’s any need to slap a glorified chatbot into this, it already seems to work well and have just the right amount of human input to be reliable, while also leaving the “testcase replay gruntwork” to a script instead of a human.

Square Enix actually has a pretty sick automated QA already. There’s a cool talk about how they did that for FFVII remake in GDC vault, and I highly recommend watching it, if you’re at all interested in QA.

It has nothing to do with AI, it’s just plain old automation, but they solve most of the issues you get with making automated tests in non-discrete 3D playspace and they do that in a pretty solid way. It’s definitely something I’d love to have implemented in the games I’m working on, as someone who worked in QA and now works in development. Being able to have mostly reliable way how to smoke-test levels for basic gameplay without having to torture QA to run the test-case again is good, and allows QA to focus on something else - but the tools also need oversight, so it’s not really a job lost. In summary - I think the talk is cool tech and worth the watch.

However, I don’t think AI will help in this regard, and something as unreliable and random as AI models are not a good fit for this job. You want to have deterministic testcases that you can quanitfy, and if something doesn’t match have an actual human to look at why. AI also probably won’t be able to find clever corner-cases and bugs that need human ingenuity.

Fuck AI, I kind of hope this is just a marketing talk and they are actually just improving the (deterministic) tools they already have (which actually are AI by definition, since they also do level exploration on top of recorded inputs), and they are calling it an “AI” to satisfy investors/management without actually slapping a glorified chat-bot into the tech for no reason.

Large companies probably do that anyway.

Take Blizzard for example. They just released a new patch, where class campaign quests for 8/12 classes do not work. Sure, it’s a remixed version of older expansion, and with all the phasing stuff I can kind of imagine some of the phasing issues being caused by, I don’t know, the player having a weird combination of completed stuff that’s hard to properly catch in testing, since there’s quite a lot of variables.

But the fact that one of the class quests requires crafted items to be completed, while crafting isn’t available by design in the Remix, there’s just no excuse. They either just don’t give a fuck about an issue that’s literally a progression blocker with 100% repro rate (while also being pretty easy to fix), or no one ever tested it even once. And it’s not just some random sidequest, it’s literally the main class campaign, one of the main features of the expansion.

As someone who worked in QA and gamedev, I can’t imagine how could something as obvious as this ever get approved for release. That’s something you catch immediately. Hell, you don’t even have to play through it to realize that this might be a problem.

unless they’re running GrapheneOS.

Nice, this is good to know.

That’s literally the plot of Watch Dogs, no?

I hope we’ll also get Dedsec with it. While the game had it’s flaws, the Dedsec broadcasts are such a cool visual feat.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SoDM9wwYpFw

I’ve been having issues with Battle.net, or rather - WoW getting stuck at endless black screen, in a window that’s minimizing and maximizing it.

Just doing a Bazzite rollback fixed it, but I also tried a lot of different runners to no success, so it might not be it. I was also able to launch the game in dx11, but it did not recognize my NVIDIA card, and only ran on the CPU emulation at like 1 FPS, so it sounds like a deeper driver issue. Other games worked fine, though.

Hopefully this will fix it, having to rollback all the time, since I CBA to figure out how to rollback permanently isn’t fun.

Hahaha. Not gonna lie, I really hope we will see as much similar stories as posible. Will make for at least slight case against mandatory age verification for other countries, to not follow in UKs footsteps.

If I got a Copilot license, I’d definitely make sure to expend my quota every single day and use it as much as possible. Especially if I was “highly encouraged” to use it.

Just run a markov chain and let it talk to the thing. It’s expensive to make the queries, for MS.

IIRC there is at least one dumbphone that runs signal, https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/, but that’s expensive and not something you’d usually get if you think dumbphones.

But yeah, the point of having a dumbphone is not security or privacy, at least for me and most of the people I spoke with about it. The point is you have your phone as a backup emergency comms, and just learn not to use and rely on instant communication and internet access. Maybe an occasional “I’m running late” messages, but other than that, the point is you just wait until you get to a PC.

And even for emergency comms, I had a dumbphone that can make a 4G hotspot, and had a GrapheneOS smarthphone without a sim or internet powered off in my bag. And if I needed to sort out anything, I just fired up a hotspot and turned on the second phone.

The fact that it was annoying several steps was the point, so you do it only when absolutely neccessary, and eventually quickly learn not to do it. It has improved my life by a lot, getting rid of this “always online” addiction/reliance.

I only found out about ODD recently, and it explains so much. It should be talked about more.

I know almost nothing about the situation, and I vaguely know it’s a geopolitical mess, but do I get it right that it’s basically a situation that can be (in a very simplified methaphor) compared to a Police, that solves a hostage and an active shooter situation in a Hospital by first sieging and starving everyone involved, then shelling and leveling the building along with a school next door, and then capturing and torturing all involved that managed to survive, including the hospital staff and patients?

This of course ignores the geopolitical aspect, but it’s basically what’s happening, no?

I’d say it’s the other way around - you’re paying extra for not consenting to tracking, so it’s similar (and even worse) model that i.e Facebook has. There’s no way the discount card discount is not factored in the normal price calculation, and I vager most shops are counting on the product not being sold for a bit until it’s it’s turn for a discount.

How does IronFox compare to LibreWolf?

Am dumb, missed the “for android” part.

The biggest step you can take is making sure that you are hosting the repo anonymously, and that it can not be linked to you (or anyone), so they can’t go after you.

Github probably isn’t a good place for that, but I don’t know if anonymous alternatives exist.

You can just host your own decentralized instance, right?

Right?