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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Its been interesting watching this franchise evolve. Every new sequel feels like its wrestling with the fabric of artistry and cynicism in tandem. The result is somewhere around… ok. I can’t think of any standout, memorable moments in any of the recent entries.

    Might be time to give 4-6 a revisit and see if it’s true or just recency bias.



  • Live service means there are constant “content” updates being released by the developer/publisher.

    This can be character skins, weapon skins or other cosmetics, new maps or modes, new classes, skills or really anything. A lot of times these are wrapped up in to “battle passes” time limited, purchaseable collections of stuff designed to keep players engaging with the game daily for carrots being dangled in front of them. Most of these are also time limited so if you don’t jump through all of the Hoops before the timer expires you no longer have access to the content that you were playing for and paying for.

    To relate to old school gaming think of them like mini-expansion packs. The part that most people take issue with is the strategy behind the majority of them.

    Almost all live service games are designed to keep players running on the hedonistic treadmill looking for the dopamine hit of that next unlock. In the more egregious free-to-play games you see that crafted through dark patterns in a way that incentivizes users to buy shortcut items through the marketplace to either automatically collect the ranks needed for the unlock or provide double accrual rate for whatever the experience marker is.

    The reason they are coined lives service is due the nature of them receiving this constant update drip in a manner that would be live as opposed to static in traditional, Old School multiplayer games where you may see a large expansion every once in awhile but certainly not a weekly or monthly drip feed of new shit for the players to grind away at trying to unlock.





  • vulgarcynictoMemes@lemmy.mlChunky monkey
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    11 days ago

    I think its kinda nice we have a shit poster filling my feed with recycled memes.

    Sure beats the usual spate of climate crisis, muskiness, and Palastenian genocide.

    To each their own I suppose, but filters can be your friend.


  • I grew up waiting tables in the late 90’s - early 00’s. The state I was in had a mandatory 8% tax claim on total sales for the day. So if you did $2000 in food / liquor sales, you had to claim $160 in additional, taxable wages within the time keeping system at the end of your shift. We also received a base wage that was equivalent to the state minimum wage at the time.

    Based on my experiences working everywhere from small chaim restaraunts in mill towns to hipster bars in metropolitan areas, that 5-10% was pretty accurate.

    However, there were usually one or two anomalies every shift that meant you’d clear an overall net closer to 20% for the day.

    The smart ones budgeted around a 0% take home and treated their tips as a supplement, the rest of us lived together so rent was cheap enough we could still waste our money on drinking and partying after shift.