Lol, instead of addressing what argument? Your argument is entirely “nuh-uh, you are frustrated. I know you are because my argument would fall apart if you weren’t, so you are. It’s just that you like being frustrated.”

It’s just not the case. There are rare good ones out there, and if that frustrates you into claiming I’m some masochist and therefore my enjoyment is somehow invalid, that’s your own whole subscription of issues.

So I’ve heard

You’re writing all live service games as being based on frustration when that absolutely isn’t the case, so I have to think you have too many preconceived notions on this subject to actually be open to a conversation about it.

Oh well. No game is for everyone and sometimes the pay content is worth it just because it’s damn awesome.

While absolutely too many things are charged for in gaming today (exp boosts? skip potions? cheat armor that was already fully developed at launch? all ways to get your company on my high seas list)… in the specific case where (1) new content is continuously being developed AND (2) the game is not asking for mandatory spending to continue playing (e.g. no expansion pack to purchase, no subscription fees), I don’t think the concept of charging for in-game content at all is abusive.

If I buy once and then a year later some optional paid cosmetics or other goodies are added, I think that’s permissible. And if I’m in a free to play live service game, I recognize the ongoing dev costs need to get covered somewhere.

I do vastly prefer those companies that give their games TLC and updates for free, and I’m not saying the standard pricing for optional purchases in the modern market are reasonable. But I think the existence of in-game purchases, if not their current state, can make sense sometimes.

I didn’t say they should cave to fans save give them what they want. I just think there was a way to say this without being mean about wanting it.

Anyway, I don’t have a horse in this race, I still haven’t played this. Just commenting on how I think I’d feel if that were me. I’ve played a fair few games where the ending left me wanting a lot more, and not always because the game was just that good.

I feel like this is an overly negative light to paint something fans of your game seem to want. There’s an undercurrent of “your wish is bad and you should feel bad” to this.

I appreciate that CDPR has a strong vision for what they want their game to be, but I think if I were one of those fans who wanted to see more of the post-ending setting, I would feel a bit gut-punched by how thoroughly dissed and dismissed my kind of love for the game was.

Maybe CDPR is okay with that though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just pick a good frame and wiggle the parts in Live2D or something.

The hilarious part is that hoyo is constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be done with live2d; it’s heavily used in Genshin character teasers, and their otome game uses it extensively. They’re really good at this. Why get AI involved?

I haven’t looked into the benefits of electroshock with BPD, but I’d recommend taking a look at Dr. Daniel Fox’s workbook for an at-home DBT/attachment theory foucsed program. BPD is one of the few PDs that has been provably shown to be able to change. If you have $30 or so to spare, it can’t hurt.

It’s a slow and difficult process, but yes. There are certain personality disorders that can be provably put into “remission,” and if people with conditions that severe can change their personalities, anyone can.

You have to learn how you’ve been conditioned to think and feel the way you do, and get a lot of self-discipline re: stopping to notice your feelings, figure out why they’re arising, think through the consequences of acting on them, and choosing a better way.

I hate to use terms like this since they’re so often the territory of conspiracy nutjobs, but you’re basically deprogramming yourself. For example, a sensitive person who’s been exposed to a lot of bullying might have learned some pretty intense defensive reaction, so you’d have to stop every time you think “what did he mean by that?” and think of why that’s your first reaction, then choose to believe the best possible meaning even though your feelings scream at you not to. And you’d maybe keep a journal to remind yourself of all the times you were right to assume the best, since a defensive mind discards the positive and overemphasizes the negative.

This sort of thing is best accomplished with the aid of a mental health professional, but there are workbooks you can get if that’s out of cost/feasibility reach for you. You’d need to know your deal to know which ones to focus on.

Corrected archive link - OP’s is missing a character so it’s not working

You said you want good faith discussions, but you preemptively dismissed one of the biggest answers because you don’t think it’s a good solution. Then you have people here disagreeing with you, explaining why, and pointing to examples of it being done successfully, and you continue to completely dismiss a donation as nothing more than a “thank you” - how is this in any way a good faith discussion if any opposing viewpoint is immediately met with this kind of “YOU’RE the problem” response?

I do understand your frustration in those cases in which donations fail, but it seems like you’re not willing to meet us halfway and acknowledge that sometimes, donations succeed, and not by accident or luck. There’s data there - test cases we could be picking apart and seeing what critical mass needs to be reached before an instance can reliably secure donations and what we can do for admins until their instances reach that threshold. But you’re just dismissing it as nonviable even though it clearly works for a lot of places.

That is not good faith.

Do you think maybe being from “one of the whitest states” is why the people you know still track their descent so carefully? I’ve lived all over North America, and your experience definitely doesn’t match up with anywhere I’ve lived. Which is not to invalidate your experience, but I would strongly caution you against assuming it’s the norm. Most people I knew when I was still in the US pretty much settled on a color or just plain “American” for anything past about the third generation.

Using a color descriptor like “white” or “black” isn’t inherently racist for those who don’t care so much about which boats all our very distant relatives were on hundreds of years ago, and it definitely doesn’t preclude empathy for those who are different from us.

I feel like you’re describing a pretty EU point of view here. Which is fine!

But please understand that across the pond, we’ve been mixing people of various descents for so long that “white” is honestly the best descriptor many of us have. I allegedly have 5 different EU countries in my lineage and ain’t nobody got time to get into all that, especially when my ancestry isn’t interesting enough for me to know, let alone for me to inflict on others. Those details are just not that important to who I am today, whereas the experience I had over here because of my skin color had more sway over who I am now.

“Ginger” as a term is not, in itself, derogatory or hateful in my experience.

Describing gingers as soulless or hot-tempered is about the same kind of destructive as describing blondes as stupid, which is to say it’s a silly stereotype that’s often the territory of playful insults between friends, while some small minority of people do run it into the ground and cause real hurt.

(This might be exacerbated by tensions between England and Ireland in that specific area, but… for most of the world “ginger” is a pretty harmless thing.)

The same Neuralink whose primate test cases all had to be euthanized after their procedures due to a whole host of problems that were claimed to have nothing to do with the implants? That Neuralink?

I think I’ll stick with my PC, Bob.

I’d be more inclined to say they know it’s smelly waste and want a soft surface to bury it in.

Which begs the question of why they don’t go for the litterbox, but mine do always try to bury it right away.

You’re not wrong of course, but I really need people to understand that this level of detail is not what a top-level reply to a lower-end technical question is aiming for. Maybe this will be helpful to someone, but I already knew it and didn’t need it sent to me, and it’s going to go above OP’s head. For the average end user, this is abstracted somewhere in the “host stuff” layer, and that’s fine.

Yeah, doing that does absolutely nothing. Your image viewer still reads it as the webp it is, and it knows to do so seamlessly because it’s reading the file header (the first few bytes of the file) instead of the file extension.

For an analogy, you’re basically just putting a wig on it and pretending it’s your girlfriend from the next school over when everyone in the room knows it’s your skeezy neighbor and is just humoring you.

if there’s like a step I can take to avoid it being a webp

Formats are chosen by the uploaders and hosts, not the end user.

For easy conversion of images from the web, I recommend the FF addon Save webP as PNG or JPEG. Anytime you open an image in its own tab, it pops up with a menu that gives you a quick button to choose the format you’d like to save it in.

People are clamoring around you in a huge chorus of it’s fine just roll with it but frankly, I think your point of view is totally valid. While Larian did a great job making every path a valid way to the ending, you can really only ever lock yourself out of content with your choices.

Go too far down one of two branching paths? Hope you can pass a big fat skill check or two, or that one companion will bail. Hope you didn’t like that character or want to see more of that content. (Oh, and if you do pass the skill checks, 10 minutes later the companion is like “ugh no it’s fine you were right, forget I ever wanted to go that way even though I’ve been obsessed with it for the last 20 hours” in the name of railroading the character back in line.)

Get interested in the wrong quest too early? Hope you didn’t want to finish the main side objective in that one area. No no, even though all the characters are still present, you don’t get to finish it. Because we said so. Shoo along to the next place. Go. Get.

And here’s hoping you don’t get curious about the “evil” path - you lose multiple companions and a whole-ass cast of side characters that are meant to follow you through the game and gain one (1) bit of interesting new content to replace them. Is it still interesting? Absolutely, but it’s a consolation prize compared to how much you lose.

It took me 3 playthroughs or so before I finally felt like I was on a save where I was having a good 80%+ of the intended experience. And yeah, you can replay it for what you missed, but not everyone has time for that, especially in a game this immense. I know I’ve started it up to make my fourth character about half a dozen times and Alt-F4ed during character creation as soon as I think about going through the parts I’ve thoroughly combed already.

BG3 is my GOTY by a long shot, but people should have more sympathy for this outlook. There are definitely right paths and wrong paths, and while they all lead to the end, the wrong paths have a lot less to look at and a healthy amount of rubbing your face in the fact that you did stuff in the wrong order (“Perhaps you could have…” ok thanks, narrator).