So far as I know, there aren’t a lot of 8-player local multiplayer games. The only obvious answer is the Jackbox games, using your phones as controllers.

Beyond that, I did find this Steam curator, who seems to specialize in 8-player games. From thier list, I recognize Gang Beasts, and Pico Park: Classic Edition. Party Golf, Screen Cheat, and Cobalt also all looked interesting, but I’ve never seen anyone play them.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think Boomerang Fu or Overcooked support 8 players?

The economy is terrible with both hardware and software becoming more expensive, theres a good selection of free and long-lifetime games (be it live-service or just very long and replayable), and a lot of the newer paid games have become worse.

I’d be significantly more suprised if this wasn’t the case.

Given that you’re on a two day old account, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.

.ml is notoriously run by, and has a large population of tankies - people who support China and Russia, and defend or deny their countless atrocities. I.E. people who deny the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and say Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and all the war crimes they’ve committed are justified. Basically, anything done by a government that opposes the US is considered a good thing, no matter how evil.

Edit: Adding what Brucethemoose said into my comment directly because its important. Being critical of the US or NATO doesn’t make you a tankie. The problem is excusing genocide because it was commited by someone outside NATO or the US allies.

Mastercard? Yes, but then they’d have to admit that they were in the wrong, so it seems unlikely.

What hero is that? The ult looks like Wraith King but the other abilities don’t seem to line up, and its too early-game for the item build to matter.

Tl;dr: Mastercard says they didn’t “force” Valve to remove nsfw games. They just told them that if they didn’t remove the games that were complained about by Collective Shout, they’ll block them.

The comment, for convenience:

In my opinion Luanti is a living proof that top-down extensibility aka “we make monolithic engine in C++ and then provide some APIs for scripting via bindings for some scripting language on the side” doesn’t work well. You can’t change main menu, you can’t fix player controller (and the default one sucks), you can’t write your own renderer, etc. Because developers didn’t imagine someone would want that (actually they probably did, but they simply don’t have capacity to provide this). Good extensibility/modability should be automatic, on binary level. Like what you get by developing in bytecode/JIT-compiled languages like Java/C# or in old Unreal Engines where everything was done in bytecode-(de)compilable special language called Unreal Script.

Assuming you’d have to re-buy Minecraft, I’d.say at least give Luanti a try. At the very least, Its free, so you can switch if you don’t like it.

That said, personally, I had too many issues with it. Specifically, I had performance issues, found that the graphics that looked worse (subjectively) and were much harder to modify, and kept running into roadblocks that were annoying to fix, like having to figure out how to grant myself permissions for a bunch of different actions.

While Luanti is much more accessible for modding, isn’t it more limitted? Maybe the documentation was just out of date or that, but I was trying to look into custom shaders as well as optimization mods (since I was getting suttering on block updates) a year ago or so, but from what I saw at the time, there wasn’t any way to modify these.

Edit: Was trying to find any information to confirm this, or see if its changed. I did find a couple recemt refrences to custom shaders (although they seemed very limitted). That said, there was no official documentation, nor refrences to it on any official page, so I have no idea how functional or supported it is. I found nothing at all about other methods of modifying rendering.

From what I understand, they’ve moved on from that structure. I believe that was one of the things talked about after the release of HL:A, with one of the employees saying that it was part of the reason the game actually got finished. That said, its been a while and even assuming I’m not misremembering information rarely leaves Valve, so I could be wrong.

Edit: I’m wrong. See sp3ctr4l’s comment below.

As much as I like Valve’s work, I don’t think thats a good fit for them. Their staff seem to enjoy working on difficult technical tasks, and lose interest very fast when it comes to mundane maintenance, thus their numerous underutilized and unmaintained features throughout Steam and their games. A payment processor seems like exactly the sort of thing that would get forgotten about a month or two after it gets finished.

Same thing applies, but the article suggests that its probably PayPal in this case.

Not suprising, and given the nature of most of the games removed, debatably reasonably, but it still highlights the need to reduced reliance on the few big American payment processors like PayPal when they can effectively regulate what can and cannot be sold online.

The fact that I can’t tell if this is parody or not is sad.

Thats assuming you already regularly install Windows, which most don’t. It should be the median install, by a normal user. In the same way, I wouldn’t count the experience of a veteran distro-hopper as the standard for setup time on Linux.

To find and quickly vet a cleanup script on Windows, I’d say half an hour to an hour is a fair estimate, esspecially given that there are a lot of fake or outdated ones out there. On top of that, there a bunch of other settings these scripts often ignore, like web search in start, so I’d say up to another half hour for that is reasonable, esspecially if you weren’t thorough when searching for your initial script.

I mean, 10 minutes is pretty optimistic even for a relatively savy user. It took me somewhere around an hour to find and fix everything. On the other hand, it took me and a bunch of people on the Linux support subreddit around 20 hours of troubleshooting to get Linux into a mostly functional state on my PC, at which point I and everyone else had given up, so…

Its been nearly two years since then though, and given what a nightmare Windows 11 is, I guess I’ll have to give it another shot.

I went down this rabbit hole about a year ago, and didn’t have much luck. In the end, the best results I was able to get were from Steam’s Big Picture Mode on a Windows device, mostly launching Firefox (might have been Chrome?) with different launch arguments to immitate a smart TV.

Most available software either doesn’t support Linux well, doesn’t support streaming services and outside software, or doesn’t support non-kb&m input methods. You can get two, but never all three. You could try SteamOS, now that its out, but unfortunately my hopes wouldn’t be high for it to have all the apps you needs functioning.

You seem to be missing what I’m saying. Maybe a biological comparison would help:

An octopus is extrmely smart, moreso than even most mammels. It can solve basic logic puzzles, learn and navigate complex spaces, and plan and execute different and adaptive stratgies to humt prey. In spite of this, it can’t talk or write. No matter what you do, training it, trying to teach it, or even trying to develop an octopus specific language, it will not be able to understand language. This isn’t because the octopus isn’t smart, its because its evolved for the purpose of hunting food and hiding from predators. Its brain has developed to understand how physics works and how to recognize patterns, but it just doesn’t have the ability to understand how to socialize, and nothing can change that short of rewiring its brain. Hand it a letter and it’ll try and catch fish with it rather than even considering trying to read it.

AI is almost the reverse of this. An LLM has “evolved” (been trained) to write stuff that sounds good, but has little emphasis on understanding what it writes. The “understanding” is more about patterns in writting rather than underlying logic. This means that if the LLM encounters something that isn’t standard language, it will “flail” and start trying to apply what it knows, regardless of how well it applies. In the chess example, this might be, for example, just trying to respond with the most common move, regardless of if it can be played. Ultimately, no matter what you input into it, an LLM is trying to find and replicate patterns in language, not underlying logic.