You make mostly good points but its stupid to call the game dead or dying. They don’t currently have a bunch of players they never expected to have in the first place. They still sold their product to those people which makes it a huge net win for them. It’s a wildly successful game by any reasonable metric you can choose to evaluate it against.

Honest question, what’s there to be hyped about? I haven’t ever looked into its feature set because it looks like ass. Do people just like the Tesla name or what?

What’s there to learn that isn’t already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That’s America in a nutshell.

Nothing for people who know what DNS is. They’re targeting the people who don’t.

Hey now, there’s a guy in a wheelchair in this one. That’s progress if I’ve ever seen it.

You’re directly contradicting the argument that every trans activist has been making for decades by saying that sex and gender are “effectively the same thing”. Is that really what you want to be doing here?

I think that’s too far out in left field from these people’s perspective for it to be as effective as Islam would be. They need to think they’re being outcompeted by a legitimate religion. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit but I think enough people would see that as an intentionally contrarian organization and not as a competing religious ideology. I don’t think that would evoke the genuine fear of becoming a religious minority. Maybe I’m wrong about that but that’s my take at least.

In the same way that I think the quickest way for stricter gun control laws to be passed is for minorities to start open carrying firearms en-masse, I think the best way to educate Christian nationalists on the importance of the separation of church and state is for everyone to start attending their local mosque and preaching the virtues of Islam when discussing politics. Conservatives are incapable of understanding the negatives of any policy position until they experience them personally. Force them to experience what it’s like to be a religious minority and they will change their tune very quickly.

I don’t think you need to deface it. You could even display it if you’re so inclined. Just make it clear to people who see it that you aren’t a Nazi sympathizer in the same way you’ve done here and you’ll be fine.

People do hate change. The bigger the change the more they hate it. That’s exactly why Windows to Linux is much worse for them than Windows 10 to Windows 11.

Your grandma probably hates the fact that you did though. There’s a small chance that’s not the case but I’d be shocked if she hadn’t complained about it many times to other people.

Exactly. I would say an MBA is only useful if your undergrad degree was in something other than business. It is meant to add management skills to an already skilled individual. If you don’t have any other skills it’s just an expensive piece of paper that, at least to me, signifies essentially the same thing as being the boss’s son would. You probably aren’t very good at anything but always think you’re the smartest person in the room.

My kid regularly gets a little bit of shit in his underwear and I’ll catch him sneakily changing his pants. When I ask him what happened he always says he was having too much fun to stop and go to the bathroom. If a kid was sick and excited about something, like the Hornet’s mascot showing up to school, I could easily see something like this happening.

MBAs have no useful skills and yet they run every company in existence.

You can say there’s no issues with that system as many times as you like but it’s not going to make it true. Some people definitely disagree with you on that point and I know that because I’m one of them. You don’t seem all that interested in having that opinion challenged so I’m not going to bother writing out why here but I’ve said more on the topic in this thread if you’d like to understand another perspective more clearly.

Just because they’re already doing it doesn’t mean there’s no issues with it.

It does talk about some steps they’re taking right at the beginning. I missed those initially because on mobile it looks like an ad before the actual article starts so I skimmed over it.

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Sure, but who decides who the assholes are? What standard of proof do they use? What happens to people who almost meet that definition but don’t quite? Some cases are pretty straightforward but many have too much grey area for a simple concept like ‘ban all the assholes’ to hold up without a huge amount of effort that often can’t be provided effectively.

Evidence is key and that can be difficult to get. Additionally, players often edit clips to get the reaction they want from moderators or the community as a whole. The video in the linked article could potentially be a great example of this. The streamer obviously wants you to think they were attacked unprovoked but is that really what happened? We have no context for what led to the recorded exchange. Did the streamer refer to him using a racial slur for failing to hold what they thought was the proper position during the round immediately before the video begins? That doesn’t excuse what the player said in response but it does change the context significantly. If you ban the rape guy and then he releases a video showing the streamer saying even more outrageous things do you reverse the ban, ban them both, or give them both a warning not to be dicks in the future? This is not an isolated incident either. Multiple situations just like this happen every day on platforms with any significant number of users. How do you give each one the time it requires to be resolved correctly? Will you have any players left if you ban everyone who offends someone else?

The point is, policing people’s behavior is very challenging. There are tons of ways to abuse any system you can design unless you record literally everything your users do and that comes with it’s own set of moral and logistical issues. The simplest and most universally applicable solution is to enable users to block other players themselves. Making that impact matchmaking is kind of dumb in my opinion as it just opens up the potential for abuse as you noted. Set up a few very simple ground rules and then let players sort out who they want to be able to communicate with based on how they treat them. That’s the only solution I can see that is realistic and sustainable but it requires users to take an active role in maintaining the community, which they should be doing anyway if they want it to be the kind of place you’re describing.

For most people gaming is a social activity. The popularity and prevalence of multiplayer games vs single player games bears this out. Playing single player games is not a viable solution to avoiding harassment for people who are interested in the social and/or multiplayer aspects of gaming. Muting people who are dicks is a viable solution and that’s exactly what I’ve been advocating for in this discussion. Many others seem to think they shouldn’t need to be involved in the process and game devs or other communication platforms should do all the work for them. I don’t think that’s a realistic suggestion.