Tassi’s a pretty well-respected and reliable journalist. I would trust his info. And Destiny is one of the games he consistently covers. We know from prior stories he has sources inside Bungie. Using present tense in the hope they weren’t all laid off.
Cobra might as well not even exist for most people.
The two layoffs I’ve been through, Cobra was offered as an option and in both cases it was wildly unaffordable. Like…I couldn’t have afforded it even if I still had the job I had just lost, let alone while unemployed.
In both cases I just basically only had the option to cross my fingers and hope I didn’t need healthcare while letting it lapse completely until I found a new job. Thankfully in the first case I was only unemployed about 3 weeks, but the other time, it was about 6 months.
What eventually came through for me was my state’s version of Medicaid in that situation. Basically it was only available to people earning less than XYZ, but any funds you received as aid from the state didn’t count toward that, meaning that unemployment was exempt and as such, my income was zero. Of course there was like an 8 week waiting period and then it took several more weeks for all the paperwork to go through, but eventually it did kick in.
It’s a dick move for sure, but the clawback of unvested shares is vicious. Not possible to know the total worth without being privy to the employment contracts of those let go, but for a single senior employee of long tenure it might constitute a 6- or 7-figure rip-off. Depending on the number of staff let go, the amount of options each held and what their strike prices were, this layoff could potentially constitute a clawback of options that would have been worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars of Sony shares.
The clawback in general isn't really an issue; that's how restricted stock grants work. You forfeit anything that hasn't vested when you leave the company, no matter whose idea that is.
The problem is that it was Sony stock, and it's going back to Bungie. The stock should revert to Sony. In fact, I don't think it can be any other way, as those boilerplate details would have been included in the contract details of the initial stock grant. This makes me doubt the veracity of the unnamed source.
Hasn’t evolutionary psychology been heavily debunked at this point?
I think it’s much easier to say that dudes have it hammered into their heads that girls are bad at games, so when they underperform and a girl is on their team, they feel emasculated. This isn’t too far off from when dudes end up losing their ‘bread winner’ status in their relationship. They were told they had explicit traits to exhibit and they failed to do so, so it hits them in their self esteem. Classic fragile masculinity.
Patriarchal conditioning makes way more sense than “caveman brain HATE competing with woman!”.
Hasn’t evolutionary psychology been heavily debunked at this point?
No. On the most basic level it shouldn’t really be terribly contentious that evolution has an impact on psychology, on a more detailed level, well, they have their hits and misses just as every other field.
Patriarchal conditioning makes way more sense than
…case in point “everything is socially constructed” is just as bonkers a position as “everything is biologically predetermined”. Why do people have to universalise their specialised area of investigation and “caveman brain HATE competing with woman!” is a rather cartoonish take on evolutionary psychology. If anything it’d be “young male annoyed he can’t hunt for shit while female age-peer can because he wouldn’t be able to provide for her while heavily pregnant”. Note that not being annoyed in that case doesn’t require better hunting skills, only sufficient ones, and “annoyed” can lead to “will work harder on his skills” or “is going to lash out” or “becomes depressive and walks into the desert” or “is going to look around, see all those capable hunters, and focus on hut building instead”. There’s a fuckton of behavioural flexibility left there.
Bad social conditioning then comes into that and shapes tendencies into caricatures of themselves, or good social conditioning comes in and, well, does good things. It’s not an either/or thing, pretty much everything is both nature and nurture.
I was about to point this out - evopsych is an essentialist pseudoscience. Human interactions are governed by culture at least as much as they are by biology.
The entire field of evolutionary psychology debunked? Do you mean the idea that our brains are subject to evolutionary forces like every other part of our anatomy? No, not debunked.
This is conflating specific methodological problems with theoretical claims. Yes, many have criticized the game theoretical methodology typical of evolutionary psychology. There are a lot of highly speculative junk claims out there. It’s also true that some (not all or even most!) cognitive scientists think that we cannot take the perspective that psychology evolved at all. But it is certainly untrue that there is some consensus that evolutionary psychology has been “debunked”.
This criticism is also a bit ironic given the highly speculative nature of the claims you put forward. Your guess sounds plausible I suppose, but I see no reason to think it’s any more methodologically rigorous.
That’s not how science works. I understand that you’re trying to criticize the field, but lack of predictions, even reliable ones, is not itself a problem it has. For one thing, even false theories can make reliable predictions, like Levoisier’s defunct theory of caloric in the 18th century which has now been replaced by modern thermodynamics. The caloric theory can be used to make mathematically accurate predictions, but the underlying theory is still wrong.
Similarly, evo psych can make a lot of reliable predictions without saying anything true. On the contrary, one criticism of the field is that it’s unfalsifiable because an evolutionary theory can always (allegedly) be proposed to fit the data. Which is to say, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
One example: it is proposed that the fusiform face area of the brain is a domain specific module evolved for face detection. It’s present in other animals that recognize conspecifics by their face. In humans, damage to the area leads to face specific agnosia. The theory makes accurate predictions, but is it true? It’s still being debated.
Without predictions and without tangible models you don’t have falsifiability. You unintentionally acknowledged my point without understanding it. The field isn’t a science, just philosophy trying to explain the results from actual sciences, but didn’t itself have any kind of proof of validity.
Your example is much more closely related to neurology and neuropsychology.
If you actually take a graduate level course on scientific methodology or on the philosophy of science, you will learn that “falsifiability” is no longer a viable standard for scientific validity. This is because, logically, no claim is falsifiable: one can always adjust background beliefs to evade a logical contradiction. See the Duheim-Quine thesis.
Moreover, if your argument were correct, we would have to reject evolutionary inferences altogether! What you say about the cognitive system is true for, e.g. the immune system or the endocrine system. But that’s ridiculous. Evolutionary claims are part of the bedrock of the so-called Modern Synthesis in the biological sciences of the last hundred years. Yours is similar to bad arguments made by creationists.
Your “No True Scotsman” response is just deeply confused about what evolutionary psychology even is. What a mess.
Well duh, curve fitting isn’t new, that’s why we try to make predictions before we know the result and try to keep the hypothesis simple. Of course falsifiability isn’t enough alone, but it certainly hasn’t lost its place.
Your comparisons are ridiculous because you’re comparing things which are testable (genetic variances, etc) with hypothetical differences between ancient brains we don’t know the structure of. We still don’t even know enough to make deep comparisons between brains of related animals. Until you can both synthesize and simulate the brain of ancient genomes you have absolutely no idea if you’re on the right track, you can’t know at all. There’s so many different ways a brain can implement the same behavior with so many different unpredictable side effects that you can’t say more than “they behaved in a way that kept them alive long enough” with any reasonable certainty. Do you know at what rate brains have changed biologically? No?
Ugh, your comments are everything I hate about the internet. Both of us know that only one us does research on cognitive science, and it’s not you. Yet, because it’s the internet, you think you can get by with bluster and false confidence.
Of the many mistakes you make: No cognitive neuroscientist would say, without huge caveats, that we can’t make deep comparisons between animal and human brains — not after all the groundbreaking work finding deep functional similarities between bird brains and human brains in the last 10 years. These are groundbreaking findings in comparative neurology, and it’s pretty obvious you know nothing about them. You go on to propose a standard of evidence which require that we can predict protein synthesis based on genetic variances, which is laughable. You also seem to be completely unaware of phylogenetic analysis, which is actually the standard way we make many of our evolutionary inferences.
Look, I’m not even an evolutionary psychologist. I have no skin in that game. But I do hate bullshit artists on the internet.
Why are you spending your time defending the least useful parts of your field? You’re just making it sound more and more like people taking findings from neuropsychology (a science) and making historical guesswork around it (trying to guess what caused changes with zero evidence of how animals behaved in past environments). I’m aware of phylogenetics, but it seems to lose it’s usefulness when most genes have such a weak correlation to behavior and when you can’t actually observe historical behavior. Brains have too high plasticity to predict why a certain region would exist if you don’t know the environment the animal lives in.
You seem to be confused. My claim is not that there are no challenges or criticisms to evolutionary psychology, or that the topic isn’t very hard to study. It’s that these are live debates in a live field because that’s how science works. It is misunderstanding and arrogance like yours that spreads misinformation online.
Your argument is akin to saying “something is hard to study so it doesn’t exist”. We can’t get evidence for how psychology evolved, so psychology didn’t evolve. This was the mistake of radical behaviourists like B.F. Skinner, who thought internal cognitive states were impossible to measure, so cognition must not exist. That is obviously an error in inference, but also a lack of imagination.
Making predictions and conducting manipulation experiments isn’t possible / practical in all fields of science. Medicine, astronomy, archaeology, evolution and climate studies are other examples.
Astronomy at least collects a lot of data from those one-time observations and try to model the physics, hoping to be able to see something similar again to calibrate the models. For medicine it varies, for rare disease and injuries that are unethical to replicate its a valid issue but they still have scientific models of the affected organs, etc, and similarly to above they try to model it and predict what treatments would work. And all your examples have historical data to some extent.
Evopsych have essentially zero usable historical data and adds no new understanding over regular psychology, and I’ve never heard anybody talk about how they expect behaviors to actually have formed over generations (nor does it meaningfully cover learned and taught behavior)
You explained the limitations astronomers and medical researchers face. Psychologists face similar problems, which is why all their results should be treated with a certain amount of scepticism. But that does not mean their work is worthless; just that it is hard. A lot of traditional psychology was based on what one person thought, rather than logical arguments or experimental evidence. Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to place the study of the brain’s workings in the context of evolution.
I’ve never heard anybody talk about how they expect behaviors to actually have formed over generations (nor does it meaningfully cover learned and taught behavior)
Individual human behaviours depend on a lot of other factors. All you can do from an evolutionary perspective is to explain some common trends. For example, in almost all cultures, some people are gay / ace. Traditional psychologists long thought of this as some sort of mental condition. But if you think of society in the context of inclusive fitness and r/K strategy, it makes a lot of sense to have a certain percentage of the population not reproduce. Is this why some people are gay / ace? I don’t know, and I don’t think we’ll ever know. But at least we can try to explain some things.
Yes. It is unethical to give someone a disease so you can study it. Best we have are case studies of people who got the disease and are being treated for it.
In climate studies, it is not practical to increase temperature or humidity by x% and see the effects. Again, you have case studies - either from the past or from parts of the world that are warming much faster than the rest. Or you can do mesocosm experiments where you warm, say, a square metre of grassland, and see the effects. But then there is a lot of uncertainity in scaling up the findings of such small-scale studies.
I tend to think the social angle is more credible Because the behavior of being a dick to female-sounding voices in games is not a universal behavior. Those who aren’t misogynists don’t act that way. How strange.
Dude same, first Roku started putting ads on the main menu and now Microsoft is pulling bullshit. Just another reminder that we don’t actually own anything anymore
You know! That’s what I was originally going to comment but wasn’t sure it’d make sense. Purchasing a product just means another way to sell to you nowadays. It’s ridiculous.
How do the people working fore Microsoft even come up with this shit? Do they not play Xbox? How are they not infuriated with every idea like this that they come up with?
Ambitious exec promotion candidate has an idea, senior executive sees idea and sponsors it as they believe it will make them money, JIRA lands in dev backlog, devs moan about it, devs like having jobs, devs implement.
Gates had a point. Everyone was spending thousands on hardware but wouldn’t spend a little more for Basic. There were free options, they weren’t poor ( computer hardware was very expensive in the 70’s), but everyone was using Basic without buying it.
It’s like today where people will spend thousands for a gaming PC, then complain about Windows when they should be using Linux.
There’s further discussion in the second link where the original authors stand by their claim.
The two use different statistical methods to try to demonstrate the conclusion, and that’s where the difference lies.
I’m not a big stats person, but I’m coming away feeling like the original claim is valid since a) it was shown in two different models the original author used and b) it makes intuitive sense to me.
You know, I’ve read stories on how money was so worthless after Black Friday that workers transported their wage with a wheelbarrow. How come that nowadays, inflation just means that everything is fucking expensive, but you still get the same jack-shit paycheck?
I’m pretty convinced it’s not inflation that drives up prices, it’s greed.
In the past inflation was seen as a bad thing and destabilizing to an economy so governments put actual effort into making it go down. The easiest way to do that is to keep employee wages in line with inflation, but at some point someone, probably with an R next to their name, decided that that was evil socialism, and so shouldn’t be done.
So now inflation goes up and the government just sits there and goes “oh nothing we can do”.
In the past, governments didn’t have inflation targets. The black friday event involved the government flooding the gold market, dramatically reducing the value of gold. At the time the value of a dollar was directly tied to the value of gold. In hyper-inflation events (that don’t often happen in developed countries but do still happen in some countries around the world), inflation may be 50% or 100% or 200%. Sometimes way more.
These days (the last 30 or 40 years), inflation and gold have been decoupled, and instead the government has a target range of approx 1-3% inflation (depending on your exact government, but if you’re in a developed country then it is probably close). This was intended as a target that would allow businesses to have some certainty and was low so they could ignore inflation in their forecasts. The original target range was 0-2% set in New Zealand, but as it spread around the world it got slightly adjusted to a 1-3% range.
The governments now try to directly control inflation by changing the cost of borrowing money. You might have recently had inflation hit as much as 9%, but this is nothing like what happened in the old days.
What I would be really interested in, is how does it play out in reversed scenarios.
How do inexperienced women react to a singular man commenting in a competitive area that is female dominated, do you see the sane sorr of vitriol from lower performing women, vs welcoming behavior from better performing women?
Well if you want a reversal you need to be true to the parameters: get an experienced male operating - not commenting - and you need to do so NOT in an area dominated by women.
Because the gender split in gaming is almost 50/50. A 1% difference is negligible
That’s true for all video games but most competitive games with an esports scene will have many more male players than women. A lot of this is due to the extra toxicity female gamers experience in those scenes. Not only do they have to deal with the usual toxicity that everybody does when playing those kind of games, but also have to deal with the misogynistic and rape comments on top of that.
I wish it wasn’t the case, and it does appear to be changing with time, thankfully. I notice quite a few more women in Counter Strike 2 than I have in past iterations of the game. I hope to see many more women in competitive esports in the future.
Competitive arena shooters have always seemed the worst to me, so if cs2 has more women that’s really good to hear. I think in a combined ~1k hours of csgo and valorant (haven’t played either in years though) i can count the amount of times ive hears women speak in vcs on my hands, and I’m not sure if it was ever not followed by some stupid sexist comments.
Definitely seeing many women in other genres, just waiting for more to reach pro level so we actually see mixed gender or sometimes all women teams in professional esports commonly. As it stands it also still seems like a few too many people would immediately blame any bad performance on being a woman, and no one really wants to deal with that kind of public response.
I was an IT tech in college, and one of our biology professors had a stack of ancient computers in a closet specifically because the electron microscope in his lab had to have a computer as a controller connected to it that ran Windows 3.1 and which had extremely specific hardware specs. He’d Frankenstein them together as parts quit, and was always on the lookout for this very specific computer on eBay. I had to get his microscope back running once by installing Windows and the controller software on the “new” computer, and it was actually really enjoyable. Brought back a ton of memories. But yeah, he is just buying time until his perfectly good microscope quits working all because he ran out of parts.
all of these cliché relationships where people don’t seem to understand basic forms of communication just confuse me. if you feel this way, tell them! If you don’t like something their doing, say something! this isnt highschool; it’s not a guessing game anymore, it’s people.
I’m really glad I was able to develop good communication skills in my life of work. When I just started out I made some pretty bad communication errors and I got to see the effects of the errors and learn from my mistakes.
Pretty much learned from the start to just never assume anything. If it’s important, say it even if you think the other party knows it already. Because at “worst” you just said something obvious but at best you realize there is a communication gap ASAP.
So many people going “opposite sex does X in relationships” and me just being like “you could stop dating people who do X” and they always look at me like I’ve sprouted horns. Like seriously, people who do X in relationships don’t need to be enabled to continue uncriticized
It’s always high school. Always has been, always will be. After generations of learning how to interact with each other in romantic contexts from media, what do you expect? Especially when we spend our formative years watching media that’s written to appeal to people in their formative years, you end up with a lot of people acting like poorly written characters because that’s how they learned to interact with each other.
Not to say that our generation is worse than previous generations, of course. Back then dudes didn’t know how to not hit their wives. Now we just don’t know how to talk. A marked improvement, I’d say
Online gaming requires servers to run, and servers require money. Either the game is more expensive, the online is a subscription, or you have to run the server yourself. There are games that do each of these.
Edit: or microtransactions. Fuck microtransactions.
It’s too bad every dev runs their own (often piss-poor) servers instead of giving us dedicated server hosting software to run our own. Can’t go back to those days even if we wanted!
GameSpy was a bloated piece of garbage that is only fondly remembered because the other options were worse. It crashed constantly which ripped you out of your game and it performed this trick especially often right when the game launched.
Ping was always wrong, lobbies displayed as full when they weren’t, server filtering was non-existent, required login every time you disconnected…
I was thrilled to move off of it to basically anything else
Bloated? It literally did 1 thing, and that was give you a list of servers that you could filter, despite your attestation it had no filtering.
The other options were worse
All Seeing Eye was often considered better; though I remember it being exactly the same program just with a different name.
It crashed constantly, ripping you out of the game
All it did with the game was connect you to the server you selected using the game’s own commands. If GameSpy itself crashed after you’ve connected to the server, the game wouldn’t be affected.
Not exactly. Electricity aside, servers also require maintenance. That requires server admins. Those don't come cheap.
Edit: also network costs. With the requirement of handling high user numbers at stupidly low latency levels, they'll need a seperate internet connection from corp and the data service will also not be cheap.
Online gaming requires servers to run, and servers require money. Either the game is more expensive, the online is a subscription, or you have to run the server yourself. There are games that do each of these.
To be fair though peer to peer has some fairly big flaws like giving other people your IP and in some implementations the connection speed for everyone is set by the weakest link.
Which has its own drawbacks. Community servers are great for something like Battlefield/Battlebit where a single server covers 30-128 players. Less so for smaller groups and as games “die”. Time has no meaning, but I want to say it was mid 00s Unreal Tournament (so after 2k3/2k4 came out, but while UT was still alive) where it increasingly became nigh impossible to find servers not running instagib or “pro” mods. Which made sense since it was mostly the various clans making their servers public when they weren’t practicing.
But also? Look at a live game like Destiny or Warframe. For the purely PVE content, you can get away with users running listen servers. And just ask any Warframe player about how much we just LOVE host migration. But once you add any form of competitive aspect, that is no longer viable. And community hosted servers for eight players in a matchmaking queue are just not going to be a thing.
On the console side of things? That monthly fee covers (some) game servers but also the content servers to download all the patches and games.
On the PC side? Generally you are either dependent on a major publisher/studio that can afford to leave a few racks running in a closet while they make new games. And you are fucked when they realize that and shut down the game. Or you hope that it is subsidized by DLC and microtransactions.
And, if it is your primary platform, I think the multiplayer fees on consoles (other than switch) are handled pretty well these days. You aren’t paying for halo matchmaking. You are paying for an instant game collection every month and gamepass. Which is more or less exactly what sony did after clowning on MS for charging money.
Ok yes, if they’re charging you a subscription to run your own server, there’s profit in that. I don’t know of any companies that do that, but I would not be in favor of them doing that. Considering that is not a common practice in the industry, I think we can move on.
remember Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War? The game that didn’t have dedi servers for Zombies for several months after launch, cost $70, and had a battle pass?
Because people disagree with me? That doesn’t change the fact that that’s how the industry works. Multiplayer is always paid for by something. If nobody bought Shark Cards, GTA Online wouldn’t be free.
Also, consoles are subsidized. Microsoft makes money on your subscription, not your Xbox.
How much money do you pay to login to Mozilla/Chrome/Edge to make this post?
Various PC games before and after Xbox do not charge anything just to be online. it's not an outright requirement. To add consoles usually restrict internet entirely, which is a completely different thing from hosting rounds.
Your second sentence is closer to what the actual reason is, and goes more in line with rockslayer's post.
edit: I will concede that browsers aren't locked anymore behind the payment models it seems. But I will still stand by that everyone is arguing as if individual games don't have to do this, but i'm fairly certain still that no P2P or just outright free online games exist on consoles, which makes the argument moot.
I’m not sure what you mean. PC games usually run on your PC, unless you’re streaming. It’s the multiplayer server software that run on servers. And the servers are paid for by the company that makes the game, usually. Or the publisher. The actual server hardware is rented from cloud providers, if that’s what you mean. Servers aren’t free, that’s my point. If you want multiplayer online functionality, someone has to pay for the server. And ultimately that cost gets passed on to you, the end user.
Xbox: you have to pay to even be able to play online at all, even if the third party servers are paid for and operated by other means. Third party games still require you to pay xbox. They (third party) own the servers and pay for the servers. Even free games require you to pay Xbox.
PC: you can play games online without paying your OS provider.
Most companies aren’t in the business of giving away free services, and it’s wild to expect them to be. You wouldn’t expect a landscaping business to do all your landscaping for free after you pay for the first time.
Alright, then play games where you can host your own server. There are plenty. That doesn’t work for all games though (particularly ranked games where the server software has to be verified or people could easily cheat), so you’ll be limited in what you can play.
I’m not super familiar with current console allowances, but are you suggesting that people can just “host their own server” and not pay the psn or Xbox live fees that are forced onto them? I just don’t think that’s true. You have to pay the fee to connect to any server, even your own.
Most companies aren’t in the business of giving away free services,
First of all, this is wrong. Free to play is an insanely profitable business model.
But also it’s wrong because non-F2P multiplayer games aren’t a free service. You paid $60/$70 for the game, and whatever the cost of the servers is would have been factored into the sale price. The per-unit cost of hosting an online game is nowhere near the cost of the game, especially back in the day when most “servers” were just a matchmaking service for P2P game clients.
Nowadays, the cost of running a multiplayer game is lower than ever. Cloud hosting gives a ton of flexibility to design an online service that is affordable to run, not to mention the money printing machine that are microtransactions (often sold in non-F2P games that also require a subscription to play).
Online subscriptions are not meant to cover server/hosting costs. They’re a monopoly tax from the platform holder, who can charge you money to connect to the internet simply because they can, and they know you have no other option.
Normalizing needless online servers is part of the issue here (only with AAA titles). These companies set up servers and say shit like “well it has to be paid for somehow!”
Games like Diablo 4 where you need internet to play single player. Diablo 2 resurrection removed all the LAN/Self hosting features of original D2.
Blizzard isn’t the only company doing this either.
Your comment is exactly the same type I’d see from toxic users on reddit arguing that people should pay because Microsoft hosts servers for multiplayer and that the commenter gladly pays for it whenever I’d go to look at reddit posts calling out bullshit on pay walled multiplayer on consoles
Oh I don’t pay. I don’t play on PlayStation or Xbox, and I honestly don’t think people should, but I understand why people do. It’s easy, and playing on PC is harder.
The more middlemen you put between the developer of the game and the end user the more money you’re going to pay. You might get a better/easier experience, but it will cost more. That’s just economics. So minimizing that is good for the end user if they’re cool with having a harder time setting things up and playing.
This is basically an argument for itemizing any and all things that can be articulated tbh. I don't pay a "kitchen" fee or an "electrical" fee or a "dishwasher" fee when I go to a restaurant. They calculate what things cost on the whole then price accordingly. That's how 95% of non-single-item transactions occur.
I'm not even necessarily against the concept of paying for the service on consoles (I kind of go back and forth on it personally) but this argument simply doesn't hold water.
I enjoy PC gaming as much as anyone but the simple fact is you can't do what a Series S does for $250 with a $250 PC. Plus with gamepass the math doesn't even need a napkin. It's simply the best deal in gaming right now, whether you're paying for online play or not.
you can't do what a Series S does for $250 with a $250 PC. Plus with gamepass the math doesn't even need a napkin. It's simply the best deal in gaming right now, whether you're paying for online play or not.
The consoles themselves are often sold at a loss because they know they will make that money back on games. Which is a better value proposition is arguable, especially once you factor in how much more you'll be paying per game relative to steam sales, the ability of PCs to do things other than gaming, and the inevitable obsolescence of consoles. I can still play games on a modern PC from when steam was new.
Microsoft also offers a game pass for PC, but I'd rather own my games.
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