yep, if you owe someone a little money they have control. If you owe someone a lot of money, you have control. The whales use SaaS companies to develop things they dont want in house and demand features because they know they're one of the biggest customers.
yeah this is some nonsense. I'm at a highly successful startup serving 40,000 requests per minute on a rails app. We're starting to split out into services but that's purely from an organizational standpoint as it's becoming unwieldy for 60 developers to all work in the same code base.
That's exactly what the ISPs want though. If we try to tackle all of these loopholes then they get to draw this out in a thousand different court cases which they can easily afford.
OR how about we attack them directly because it's obvious that they have malicious intentions.
That doesn't make sense. If they buy the competitor, why would they tank the business which is now their own instead of gaining the combined revenue and market share?
"Buy and trash competitor" isn't a real strategy. When an acquisition fails, it's usually poor management or vision, or just a lack of synergy in the first place, not a purposeful tanking.
e.g. "The Framers worried about demagogic excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on."
If I can track down any of the book titles I'll follow up.
I'd argue that many of these "features" really ended up being poorly conceived in the long run and caused all kinds of unforeseeable side effects. In particular they completely failed to anticipate the explosion in urban population which has caused the voting power of those in urban areas to be greatly diminished. As a result of the electoral college and winner-take-all systems the interests of urban voters are generally grossly underrepresented at the federal level with respect to population size.
The founding fathers were smart, but nobody in the 18th century was smart enough to anticipate the requirements of a modern electoral system. Their real mistake though was making the electoral system both incredibly complicated and very hard to change.
It isn't ok to insinuate astroturfing, shillage, etc., in HN arguments. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please don't do it here, regardless of how much people are doing it everywhere else.
If you have evidence of abuse, or are worried that it might be happening, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look. Obviously, if we find abuse we'll deal with it. But not without looking at the data.
What's not ok is to cheaply invoke these categories because someone holds different views from you or posted a bad comment to HN.
And yet folks will keep falling for the CGI trailers and marketing hype EA churns out for every game. The only solution is to wholesale stop supporting ANY game EA produces.
Exactly! Microtransactions are there to grab the big spenders. Mobile "games" follow this pattern to the extreme. For example some guy spent $1M playing a mobile game ([0] and HN discussion [1]). Honestly I don't understand why game companies are left to exploit gullible people (adults and/or kinds) into what is essentially gambling.
I think at this point it's important to differentiate: Loot-Crate systems with resellable content (CS:Go etc) are gambling. Loot-Crate systems without resellable content function by the same mechanism but are different legally.
On the other hand pay-to-win or pay-to-skip are very different from gambling and work by completely different mechanisms. Being ahead of everyone else allows whales to either feel superior or to help fellow players, making the whales feel useful and depended upon. All of these feelings can be hard to get in the offline world, so instead whales pay to get them online.
I'm not condoning predatory microtransaction systems at all, but I think it's important to differentiate them instead of treating them all as if they were gambling
I think it's also important to note that this is not a scenario which was imagined when those rules were put into place and that gacha systems exploit the same psychological responses in order to get you to spend more.
Yup, and making the game pay to win (as opposed to offering only cosmetic items for sale) means the whales are going to come out in full force. It really is gambling and I think it should be treated as such.
Technically, to be gambling the company would need to give out prizes with monetary value.
I agree that it's perhaps an oversight that dopamine release is not considered a prize under the existing 3-part test for gambling - chance, prizes, risk of loss.
Yeah I think it's really murky too. The interpretation of 'monetary value' is not 100% clear. For example, Japan has a very different stance on these sort of mechanisms.
The only reason the ESRB (admittedly not a regulatory body) does not consider loot crates gambling is because there is no chance of getting nothing from a loot box. Of course, you are almost guaranteed to get items which, in practice, have no value to you.
Let's also not ignore the fact that the micro-transaction model exploits the same exact psychological responses used by gambling houses to get you to spend more money. Combine that with the fact that these games are rated teen and I think you have a problem, regardless of whether or not you call it 'gambling'.
I thought one of the ways they get around being regulated as gambling is that you technically can not lose and get nothing. You will always "win" at least something, even if the item is worthless to you.
Sure, but now you're describing a massive boycott and that simply isn't going to happen. Most people just don't care all that much. They'll buy the game, put in their ~20 hours, and move on. Then you have the next group which will keep playing, but still doesn't care very much about the drama over on reddit and the forums. The issue simply isn't big enough to get e.g. 1M people to decide not to buy.
People say this but look at the online passesEA started then finally got rid up due to overwhelming negative feedback.
Absolutely boycott publishers you feel are harming the industry. It takes time but it does work. Besides, there's so many wonderful games you're not missing anything and you're helping to make the industry better.
Season passes are one thing, not buying a game to begin with is another. EA has a monopoly on the Star Wars license and the game itself is pretty good. So unless you never want to play another Star Wars game, you can't boycott. Your friends are probably playing too, so you miss out playing with them now. People complain and complain, but they still buy the games.
Keep in mind there's also the fact that little 10 year old Timmy doesn't actually care about any of this. He just wants to play star wars damn it! It's mommy's money that EA is taking, and mom doesn't know what's going on and likely doesn't have the time to notice that games are doing what they are
Interesting idea. In Denver, they're partnering with our regional transportation district to evaluate a hyperloop system here. Unfortunately RTD has been completely incompetent with existing rail programs to date so there isn't much confidence in their ability to pull this off. Could potentially be designed to fail.
Yeah, Denver being chosen just convinced me that this whole thing is pump and dump cash grab.
CDOT has this thing for "public/private partnerships" which are just thinly veiled schemes siphoning off taxpayer money. The whole US36 debacle proved to me that they aren't capable of negotiating a good deal on the part of the taxpayers.
What whole thing? The Denver partnership was made by Hyperloop One, which is just one of the companies trying to build it, and is not affiliated with Elon Musk.
I've tried that but it kept damaging the pieces. Is there a way to 'tame' a screw feed so that it doesn't eat up pieces that are sloped between the tube and the screw?
