And the proposed fix (which if I remember correctly is the exact same solution Ferrari originally suggested) will leave the Ferrari engine worse off because they had to compromise on the turbo to solve this problem. Everyone else wants to have their cake turbo and eat use it.

I’m just going to complain a bit. Why didn’t Kimi Antonelli get a penalty for blocking Norris? Norris literally said he’s was going to push this lap and Antonelli was in the way and ruined his push lap. Even if it wasn’t a push lap for Norris, he was still driving fast and Antonelli was driving slow and being in the way. They literally gave Verstappen a penalty for blocking Russell when Russel was on a warmup lap, sped up all on his own and then got blocked by Verstappen when his speeding made him catch up to Verstappen. We have two almost identical scenarios with two completely opposite verdicts.

I’ve got nothing against Antonelli. I’m not a Norris fan. I don’t have a stake in the matter. I just want some fucking consistency in the stewarding.

Oh yeah, I completely forgot to mention that part because for some reason I thought everyone knew you can’t open Valve lootboxes without paying for it. That’s a very important distinction to make because if you could open them for free there’s an argument that because you’re not putting money in it’s not legally gambling.

The solution of “Just collect blood samples from all users” is the law. Gambling laws require that the company providing a gambling service verify the age of the user to prevent underage gambling. If Valve is providing a gambling service then by law they should have age verification. So far, legally, what Valve has been doing is not gambling and part of this lawsuit is proving that what Valve is doing is gambling, and if it is gambling then Valve is doing an inadequate job at verifying the ages of the users and thus is breaking the law.

I’d like the NYAG to equalize pressure on sports betting sites.

As far as I know online sports betting sites are already required to verify the age and identity of the user. Outside of changing the laws I don’t see what pressure you’re expecting.

The biggest difference compared to the likes of EA and Activision is that the items have real monetary value. In Activision or EA games the money spent on the lootbox is effectively wasted. You generally can’t trade the content to recoup the costs and in some cases where you can those trades tend to happen for in-game currency which again, has no real monetary value. There’s no monetary incentive to “gamble” because from a monetary point of view it’s always a loss. The lawsuit actually makes a case that with Valve there is a monetary incentive to “gamble” because the value of the item you receive from the lootbox translates to real world money. And while the lawsuit has to take sort of a roundabout way of proving that, I think most people agree that the stuff you pull from Valve’s lootboxes has real monetary value.

The second point is supporting the infrastructure to make trades happen. One of the things that separates trading cards from gambling is that the cards themselves officially have no value. You can buy a pack of MTG cards and get something really valuable but you can’t sell that back to WotC (Wizards of the Coast, the makers of MTG) and actually WotC doesn’t even acknowledge that you pulled something really valuable because they claim all the cards have their value based on rarity and not the card itself. But it’s valuable because there’s a secondary market that has nothing to do with WotC. That’s not entirely true for Valve because all trades happen on Valve’s infrastructure and Valve literally shows the real world value of the items. Now Valve gets to claim they don’t set the price, the market does, and that’s not an acknowledgement of the value, but Valve still benefits and supports that market which itself is a vessel for gambling. Worth mentioning that it’s not an argument that is being made in the lawsuit (at least I didn’t notice it there) so it’s less relevant or even completely irrelevant from a legal perspective, at least for now.

It’s about targeting the ones you can legally target. I’m not going to get into it again but Valve does their lootboxes differently to almost every other big developer/publisher and that way of doing things has gotten them in trouble. Should all companies that in practice are gambling get into legal trouble? Yes. Should Valve get a pass because others get away scot-free? No. If 6 people rape someone but legally there’s evidence to convict one of them you don’t give that one person a free pass because the other 5 can’t be convicted.

In this case there’s one company, Valve, where you have some legal basis to get them in the court and there’s no legal basis for other companies even though they’re largely doing the same thing. You may not like it and might consider it unfair but that’s just how the legal system works.

The outright opposite strategy is good if the strategy itself is also somewhat solid. Ferrari opposite strategy was to gamble on a fortunate SC or VSC. They gambled for the possibility of 1,2 and ended up 3,4. If they wanted to fight with Russell they should’ve gone for the split in hopes of pincering Russell and if that doesn’t work you can still use the split strategy to pincer Antonelli. If they thought Russell was too good to fight they should’ve gone with the Merc strategy and fight with Antonelli for 2,3.

I think Ferrari could’ve walked away with more points if they hadn’t taken the riskiest strategy.

I guess the only way RBR gets to keep Max in F1 is if they let him do some real racing outside of F1.

I guess I was too shocked from Piastri not starting that I didn’t notice Hülkenberg wasn’t on the grid.

The problem with this solution is that there’s been a free solution for over 30 years now, it’s called the difficulty select. If this solution is going to replace difficulty select it should be free. Just because they decide to reinvent the wheel doesn’t mean we should be paying for it.

The coverage was absolutely weird. I remember looking at the standings mid race and suddenly going “hold on, when did Hulkenberg drop out?” and when Alonso came back on track and retired again I was like “when did that happen?” And I didn’t even know about the absolutely shocking Colapinto almost driving into Lawson until after the race when I saw Russell react to it in the cooldown room. I’m 100% sure I missed some fights because the broadcast was too busy showing Merc and Ferrari and then Max and Lando.

I think Max vs Lando showed that the new regs actually make it harder to pass because last year DRS gave you a huge boost in speed due to the car ahead having much bigger drag. This year the active aero makes the car ahead faster and cuts down on the slipstream hole that would help the car behind. If the car ahead is as good if not better the attacker has nothing to help them pass the line. Russell having the faster car is why he was able to continue attacking Leclerc for as long as he did. Had the positions been reversed Leclerc probably would’ve had no chance of attacking Russell.

I hope I’m wrong but it seems the defenders get a huge advantage this year. You get to set the pace and then use the battery to instantly retake the position if lost.

Ironically I gave up on the community for the complete opposite reason, you can’t criticize the game because criticism is always met with “you’re an enemy of super earth”. I get it, Super earth is a fascist civilization and Helldivers are the extension of that fascism and a lot of it is on the nose and it’s okay to joke about dissenters, sometimes. But you don’t need to scream “enemies of democracy” every single time someone criticizes the game. The game is fun but it’s not perfect. There are real problems with the game, one of which has lead to this complete embarrassment of the community.

In short, the Helldivers 2 community is toxic in every aspect and anyone interested in Helldivers is better off ignoring the subreddit, the steam community and probably also the official discord. Instead join !helldivers2@lemmy.ca where this drama isn’t even mentioned.

Of what? The officiant FIA document?

In their latest earnings call they said the focus is on monetizing the existing user base. I wondered what that means, now I know.

The Red bull second seat curse strikes again. Verstappen out 20th, Hadjar in 3rd.

You do know that almost all Windows games can run on Linux? The biggest reason you can’t play some Windows games on Linux is anticheat and even there in most cases it’s the developer deciding to not ship the version of anticheat that works with Linux.

If there was pressure on the developers to make sure their anticheat wouldn’t stop games running on Linux you could just as easily game on Linux as you do on windows.

And why exactly does Hamas exist in the first place? Surely not because Isreal has been killing Palestinians before Isreal was even an official state.

I didn’t have a lot of time for the next fest but I did give three games a try that were on my radar before the next fest.

The first was Allumeria. It was recently in the news because it got DMCA’d for looking like Minecraft. Having played it I would say that while the artstyle is somewhat Minecraft inspired the game felt more like 3D Terraria than Minecraft. But I still consider it to be too raw to really get into it. The forest boss was kind of just running around to avoid getting hit by projectile spam while spamming projectiles back at the boss. I don’t know if I was supposed to have better gear for the boss but it was like 10 minutes of just running around taking potshots at the boss because the boss was too tanky. I followed up the boss fight with the forest dungeon and after literally spending an hour inside the dungeon I gave up because I had no idea where I was supposed to go what I was supposed to do. That said, I’ll still keep it on my radar because the concept was appealing.

The second game I played was Let’s build a dungeon. This was probably the best game I played and the whole concept of the game is so novel I’d definitely recommend keeping an eye on it. Basically the core gameplay of let’s build a dungeon is to build an MMO world. You throw in a spawn point, build roads, scenery, and then add quests and dungeons (which you also build manually) and then get NPC players come in to play your MMO world. Except that is not all that the game is. The game is also a game dev studio management game where you deal with hiring talent, managing the popularity of your MMO, budgeting etc. Except that’s not all that the game is. You also get to play the very MMO world you create. You can make a character and play through all the quests and dungeons you’ve made and if I remember correctly you can also play the MMO worlds other players have created. I would also recommend their previous game, let’s build a zoo, which is a game where you build a zoo (with a twist that I’m not going to spoil).

The last game I tried was Cargo hunters. It’s essentially a single-player extraction shooter where you play as humanoid robot. The novel idea in cargo shooters is that any other bot you destroy you can saw into pieces and then you can take those pieces back into your base and rebuilt your own bot using the pieces from the other bots. And that’s pretty much all I can say about the game because the demo was so barebones I couldn’t really tell anything more about the game beyond that it worked and didn’t play like ass. In fact I’d say the demo was an excellent example how not to do a demo. The game is supposed to have crafting, but most of the crafting stations are not available in the demo. It’s supposed to have trading, but trading station is not available in the demo. You can find gun parts to modify your guns, except the modification station is not available in the demo so you can’t do that. There’s a leveling system in the game but beyond being a requirement for some crafting stations I didn’t see any reason for there to be a leveling system. The demo felt like a mash of all sorts of things that an extraction shooter should have, except more than half of those things weren’t even in the game yet. So the game boils down to running the same level over and over again killing the same bots over and over again while you become weaker and weaker because you can’t really replace the gear your started the game with. I’m keeping it wishlisted because their trailer showed far more content than what the demo had so maybe there’s a quick jump into something with more substance when the early access launch happens, but overall this was the demo I was the most disappointed by.

I think AM is as much to blame as Honda. Imagine if instead of the Honda engine it was a Merc engine. You would never blame it on Merc, you’d blame it on AM (unless Merc was having the same issues). We don’t actually know whose fault it is. Maybe Honda made an engine that vibrates too much, maybe AM made a chassis that can’t handle the engine.

IMO it’s a bad look on Newey because AM is on this together with Honda. Not sharing the blame just strains the relationship.