The publicly known dupe exploit that they allowed to exist for weeks is what killed it for me.

400+ hours in the game. Gave up after we lost a city to a cityless guild decked out in the best armor and jewelry.

We owned the highest income city and so I had unlimited funds to spend and I had barely reached the level required to make the highest tier jewelry because there’s only so many jewels available. I knew of one other person (the jewelcrafter of the #2 guild) who was at that level and neither of us were able to equip our entire defense team with good jewelry.

A guy in our guild was really into PvP and spent 12+ hours a day fighting over/farming the 3-4 ore nodes that could drop the rare ore required to make the best crafted armor. He had 4 pieces completed.

We had so many people that we had to run 3 full guilds and we were pooling resources so our city defense team had the best gear possible. We were attacked by some nobody guild who somehow had tens of full sets of the best crafted gear and they also abused the exploit where you could make your character ignore damage (window dragging exploit) to make it impossible to kill their people sitting on the capture points.

None of the exploiting guild were banned and it was literally impossible to take the city back because they could just pile on the capture point and drag their window around to ignore damage and there was a bug with healing that would cause the server to lag to the point of being unplayable.

I quit shortly after. The game had promise and did some thing really well but they were horrible at actually running the game and ensuring a fair and level playing field.

It also incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Anti-Tamper with a 5 machine activation limit.

(For future readers: bricked means completely and irrevocably ceasing to function, unrecoverable, as useful as a brick)

I haven’t checked in a while, but did Valve improve SteamVR on Linux for the Frame’s release or is it still better to use the community stuff?

Finally.

I can play New Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja without paying the console tax. Truly the year of the Linux desktop

It was finicky to get setup and their company was overwhelmed with support requests for months. One of the guys in my makerspace had one and we managed to get it working (it helped that they were EEs). Outside of some rare dropped frames it was pretty smooth without any noticeable latency increase.

The Frame just uses standard Wifi7 which can push around 17-20Gbps, more than enough for low latency compressed video. It would take minimal hardware to connect to Wifi, and run the video through some hardware decoder.

I understand why they’re competing with the Quest, I’m buying one because it’s a good standalone that isn’t made by a data vacuum company (not yet, at least). The privacy aspect and Linux solidarity are what got me (I’m also selling my Index, so it’s a ‘cheap’ upgrade)

A self-contained unit that matched the Quest and wins on not price but privacy was the only reasonable direction for Valve here.

I do agree that the niche they’ve chosen to fill is valuable, having a good self-contained unit free of Meta’s spyware was the entire selling point for me.

I know a lot of people who were looking into PCVR but didn’t buy an Index because they didn’t want to spend $1000 on a VR headset. PCVR is a niche of a niche audience, so I’m not surprised that they didn’t release a product that was just Index v2.

Maybe, in the future they could offer a low-end SKU that was PC-only, without onboard gaming hardware.

There are third party wireless streaming devices that function with the Index. It doesn’t take much compute to operate wifi and process minimally compressed video.

A headset with Chromebook equivalent hardware would be significantly cheaper than a headset with Steam Deck equivalent hardware.

They wanted a device like the Quest that would let people play decent VR without needing a strong PC. I think that was the right decision when it was being planned. But now that we’re mid-RAM apocalypse, the better move may have been to iterate on the Index and not try to make a new platform.

The integrated computer killed it.

If it were just a headset that depended on the Steam Machine/PC it could have been significantly cheaper. Adding enough RAM to make it a useful computer was probably most of the price.

Yeah, it must be my personal bias and not an observation of actual reality to say that trans rights is used as a divisive issue in the US.

I’m glad you’ve educated me that the US population is, in fact, in harmony and without disagreement on this issue.

Fellow ‘Allies’ are always trying to push wedge issues.

I have met a lot of people who go to church. I have not met many Christians.

I only heard of Talarico because they did the same to Colbert.

They should put this on our dollarTrump-America bills

Suddenly a bunch of Americans have to apply for passports to vote. Many will have trouble gathering the required documents, including birth certificates and marriage licenses (for name changes). Many won’t get it done in time.

In addition, the agency that processes the passport requests can use voter data to selectively deny applications.

Oh, you’re a democrat voter in a battleground state… Sorry it took us 6 weeks, but it looks like you forgot to write the date in MM/DD/YYY format so we’re going to need you to to re-apply.

Red voter? Crayons are fine, sir.

More like, Linux supports GOG and they don’t try to stop it.

The thing you want is the Heroic Games Launcher, you can login to your GOG/Epic/Amazon and install/launch games (using WINE/Proton) pretty much like using Steam.

It’s even available as a Flatpak so you can use it on the Steam Deck.

Shitholy states made a bunch of shitty laws around 2018 or so, in response to the standing rock protests and their like, criminalizing protest in effect.

I recall that.

Florida made it a felony to step off the sidewalk onto a road during a protest.

It’s absurd that they were able to be lumped together into a conspiracy. The people were only associated in the sense that they were attending the same protests and had texted one another.

Most of these people are only guilty of misdemeanor vandalism. Elizabeth Soto even left the scene when instructed.

However, one guy shot a police officer and the government was somehow able to prosecute them as if they were a single group (‘antifa’) as if they were all the shooter and, in addition, all of the charges were run consecutively. Typically if you have a bunch of charges you serve them concurrently, i.e. if you’re sentenced on multiple charges to 5yrs, 8yrs, 3yr, you’d only serve 8 years and not 16 years.

That’s pretty chilling, if you attend a protest where there is violence you could be charged as part of a ‘terrorist group’ and given life in prison.

You haven’t lived if you haven’t had a good burgle

Gamers Nexus says it’s about $70 more than self-built. (for the 512GB model)

So, you’re paying $70 for a small form factor PC in a custom case, with SteamOS. Another thing is that you can choose to buy a Steam Controller for $20 less than buying the controller by itself and you also don’t have to wait in the pre-order line for the standalone controller (which is currently extended into 2027).

The hardware shortage makes it not a great time to buy a gaming PC, but in the current market it’s priced competitively and you get to jump the line buying a Steam Controller as well.