Hi, I’m Cleo! (he/they) I talk mostly about games and politics. My DMs are always open to chat! :)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.

    For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.

    So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda’s work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.

    Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is… oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.

    Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.



  • The point of what I said isn’t that Project 2025 is actually a joke, it’s that Walsh is making a joke about it being officially implemented (which we have no actual confirmation of) so that he can show the left as irrational when they fall for the obvious bait to report on what he said.

    Do they plan to implement a lot of the project? Probably. Is it serious and scary? Yes. But that’s exactly why he knew people would overreact and he could manipulate them. It’s a smart move by Walsh unfortunately because it just makes the left seem paranoid about the project when it is in fact a real danger.


  • They use a hybrid system now and only use peer to peer when dedicated servers aren’t enough, so they could just swap to purely dedicated servers.

    However ignoring that, even a peer to peer system can do similar tricks if you don’t isolate the host peer to just one machine. That can even be done by spot checking with a company owned server. You use the server as a verification peer and have it as a backup host to the assigned peer. If your verification peer gets different ram values or what not, you shut the server down at the very least and place that peer on a suspicion list.

    But even if they went the cheap route, just distribute the peer network. Let’s say that you have a game of 12 people. You could make it so that each peer is only assigned a certain part of the simulation and players (with overlap on assignments) and cannot track the entire simulation. It’s more complicated than a single server hiding info from you, but they could at least make it to where you’d need multiple infected peers to take over a lobby.


  • I don’t mean individual servers. What I more meant was let’s say a game uses a standardized anti-cheat. Like EasyAntiCheat or Battleye or similar. And whoever runs your game service (Steam, PSN, Xbox) can vet these anti cheat programs and allow them to create a record on your account of cheating.

    And obviously these things get false flags so you can account for that, give people strikes and allow appeals. And games would have the option of banning you for: having too many strikes total, violating only a specific anti-cheat X times, or ignoring this system except to place extra suspicion and resources on those already having strikes.

    Also having an account tied to hardware is a no brainer and I’m surprised that this doesn’t get employed often. I know IDs can be spoofed but that’s another barrier potentially.



  • I’ll expound a bit. Of course there are a portion but that portion of better off conservatives is relatively small. And affluence often doesn’t result in wanting more kids.

    I think most people would agree that the average wage of a dem voter is significantly higher than that of a conservative voter even when adjusting for COL. A lot of their voters lack degrees and lack the financial situation to have a bunch of kids.

    Also keep in mind that this stuff is kind of exponential right. If 10% of women don’t have kids, they’re probably on average not having about 2 kids. So you either need 10% of other women to have 2 kids or 20% of women to have 1 extra child. That’s a big ask for your average American of any political skew. If 10% of women participate, that means 1 in 4 people need to have an extra child. And the larger that portion of participating women becomes, the exponentially greater pressure it puts on other women who want to absorb that impact.


  • The point isn’t to isolate men and create more incels, the point is for women to stop tolerating behavior that is not worthy of rewarding with intimacy or relationship. Women shouldn’t put up with awful men that don’t care about their rights just because they’re worried that they will become even worse men.

    The point isn’t necessarily that women get what they want politically either; it’s a reaction to the majority of men displaying a lack of shared interest in their partners health and wellbeing. Not to mention that most men never have to deal with the results of these elections, now they will.


  • You don’t need to. I’ve run the numbers elsewhere but if we assume 100% of your dating pool are women and 50%-ish are liberal, even if only half of them participate it’s going to put pressure on men very quickly if they don’t want to be alone.

    Now we know those women aren’t spread equally so this movement isn’t going to be consistently effective everywhere. But in places like Texas, it would mean most of the major cities harm Republican men seeking relationships/sex.

    And taken one step further, this creates a child shortage if done for long enough. Even just 10% of women deciding not to have kids will have a big effect. People worry about conservatives just having more kids but realistically they work lower end jobs and don’t have money for that. Imagine raising 3-4 kids in this economy, not many will do that.


  • I think the best thing I’ve heard for long term solutions is to fix a lot of the cheating using server side solutions. In a game like CoD, that means the server doesn’t send you player positions unless you absolutely need to know them.

    The other thing honestly is just increasing the investment required to cheat. That could mean that in order to play competitive game modes, you need to have signed in at least once for 4 weeks straight and played the game. Or you need to be a certain level. Issue hardware bans and IP bans to people. Require phone number verification.

    What those things do as barriers is actually increase the potency of current detection methods. This should also carry over to accounts. I’m not sure why steams VAC ban system isn’t more popular. As in accounts need to be flagged as a whole when cheating in just one game is found.

    There are many solutions but it’s just not a big deal for companies as the prior person said. Plenty could be done to at least make cheating harder and cost more time/money. But that won’t happen




  • This is such an overreaction honestly and I think it’s just giving a false start to the alarmism about Project 2025 which is exactly what these dumb extremists want. Allow me to explain.

    Matt Walsh actually said this as a joke. Bannon is probably only half joking. Both had the intention of making articles like this happen so that when the backlash reaches conservative ears they can swat it away and say hey, it’s an obvious joke. Because it was.

    The point is the same as what they’ve done with other phrases. They’ll point out the unjustified alarmism and use it to take the power out of the Project 2025 criticism. This is the problem with sensationalist media, they’ll raise alarms about everything well before people should listen. Then people ignore them.