Honestly it’s an easy trap to fall into if you enter the space without prior knowledge and taking everyone at their word. I almost fell into it years back when gamergate was just getting rolling. I don’t think anyone can reasonably deny that nepotism, preferential treatment, and paid shills are a major part of modern game marketing. But they’ll get an initial hook in based on that idea and then slow-boil you on the idea that diversity and inclusion are also part of the problem. Soon that becomes the focus and people find themselves arguing that Aloy having visible peach fuzz if you zoom the camera a quarter inch from her face in photo mode is evidence that they’re trying to erase “real women” from games.

It’s crazy.

usually, by “woke” movies people mean movies only made for the sake of being “woke”, no?

This is what people using the term really want you to think. That they’re fine with incidental/statistically correct/non-performative diversity and inclusion and are just pointing out when it happens for the sake of itself to the detriment of the quality of media.

The reality though is quite different, and people will call “woke” at almost any non-white, non-straight, or non-male character in a major role, or a non-cis character in even a passing role.

Completely anecdotal but I was able to add my brother-in-law to my Steam family without any problem and he lives about 125km from me.

The requirement is absolutely something more arcane than “same household” and Valve are keeping quiet on the actual specifics. It’s possible that the fact that I’ve been there multiple times and have logged into Steam on their wifi in the past was enough to confirm that this is a place with close relation to me. Who knows though.

Yeah, there are some disappointing limitations for sure, but it definitely is interesting, and does at least feel more like a human player than the normal CPU opponents.

…if a somewhat schizophrenic one.

I don’t know what it’s using specifically under the hood, but in Street Fighter 6 Capcom recently added a new AI opponent you can fight that they say is trained on actual player ranked matches and fights more like a human opponent. You can even have it try to mimic your own playstyle if you’ve played enough.

It can do some odd things and its mimicry isn’t perfect. But it definitely doesn’t feel like the typical high difficulty CPU opponent which uses things like input reading to react faster than a real player ever could.

…it also has been seen teabagging.

It’s not great.

Our production servers are all Linux and we have a fully Linux dev stack. My request for a Linux work machine was denied and we have to work in WSL.

People complain when EA and Ubisoft do it too. As for Valve, what game that’s not on Steam requires a Steam login? That’s the issue here, being required to use their platform account when not on their platform.

“Easy answers” in that they’re simple, fit into their existing worldview, and don’t require them to change anything. Not easy as in the easiest to find. That’s why it’s a conspiracy, the simple answers that they want to be correct are being hidden from them.

Oh. I think I get it. You put the diverging diamond on the route with less traffic where most is expected to be exiting onto the main highway or whatever. You wouldn’t put one at a place where two equally busy highways intersected.

That makes more sense.

I’ve read descriptions of how they work numerous times and cannot wrap my head around how having traffic going opposite directions cross paths does anything helpful.

Great, you’re now on the appropriate side to make the turn at the far side of the interchange, so the people making the turn don’t have to cross traffic to do so, at the cost of every car that crosses the interchange now having to cross traffic twice.

What?

I wouldn’t buy a new Seagate drive, let alone a refurbished one. Every Seagate I’ve ever owned died in less than five years. Every WD I’ve owned lasted until long after their capacity was so far outpaced by newer drivers as to be useless.

Anecdotal, yes, but it’s happened enough to me that I’ve been soured on them for life.

Their AVC encoding is pretty bad, yes. Simple solution there if you have an AMD card: Don’t use it.

If you’re streaming use x264, it’ll look better than either AMD or Nvidia hardware encoding at streaming bitrates. If you’re recording locally use HEVC or AV1 which AMD does much better with than AVC.

For me I think Street Fighter (and most other fighting games) avoid all the most frustrating parts of PvP.

No teammates to worry about. Whether they’re bad players that need to be carried, or trolls, or just some raging screecher. They’re annoying more often than not in team based games, and even when they’re not usually they’re just… non-entities quietly playing the game. There’s little to no social engagement in modern team based multiplayer, so what’s the point?
Some people might find the lack of a team frustrating as that means there’s no one else to vent at or assign blame for a loss to other than yourself, but those people can piss off and keep playing their MOBAs. They’re just making the experience worse and I’m glad to have something keeping them away.

Very well balanced. While I’m sure there are other balanced fighting games out there this is more specific to SF6. Capcom has done an incredible job balancing the cast. People like to talk about who’s top tier and complain about matchups they don’t like, but looking at the overall win rates online you can see that the best v worst character is only a 3% spread. Some individual character matchups are pretty wildly skewed, but I think that’s fine.

Both players have perfect knowledge. This is a big one, imo. Nothing is hidden from either player. You know where the other person is at all times, exactly how much health you both have, and exactly what resources. Losing to something you were not aware of is one of the worst feelings in any game, and most fighting games avoid it entirely.

For me it’s really a matter of mood and if my friends are available for something co-op.

I do have one PvP pleasure though and that’s Street Fighter. I can’t stand anything team based, but give me two characters on screen 1v1 and I’m all over it.

If there are no nvidia cards that can run your game at 90fps, not even the 4090, then you’re using ray tracing I assume? In which case I’ve already agreed. The gap is too large, and a product tier offset in AMD pricing isn’t going to make up for that gap. My comments about FSR vs DLSS in this scenario assume a superior performance baseline for AMD, where you’re comparing no FSR to DLSS “quality”, or maybe FSR “quality” to DLSS “performance”. AMD would need to tank their prices to an absurd degree to close that gap when ray tracing is involved.

As for why AMD haven’t put more time into their encoder, I have a suspicion they were banking on people moving away from AVC to HEVC or, more recently, AV1. Their HEVC and AV1 encoders are much closer in quality to nvidia than their AVC encoder, and clearly have more attention paid to them. Hell, even as far back as Polaris cards AMD’s HEVC encoder was even faster than their AVC, while also looking better.

RTX HDR does look better than Windows Auto HDR, but also comes with a much larger performance hit. Not saying it isn’t worth it, but something to be aware of when choosing which to use.

But consider that if you get a more powerful card at the same price you don’t need as much upscaling or frame generation. FSR being sightly worse is irrelevant if you can run the game at native.

AMF being worse than NVENC is certainly true, but in my opinion that barely matters. If you care about quality you should use CPU encoding no matter which one you have, and if you just want to capture video locally you can crank up the bitrate where the differences become negligible.

As for ray tracing there’s no counter argument there. Nvidia is better, AMD doesn’t match them. If you want to do anything with heavy ray tracing AMD is basically a non-starter. Though I do think it’s adequate for games with light ray tracing.

Even if you are confident in your Linux skills this isn’t a bad idea. I’ve seen too many OS installers put things on drives other than the one you choose to risk it at this point.

Windows on a handheld is just bad. It’s that simple. A Steam Deck competitor needs a handheld friendly controller focused interface that is at least as good as Valve’s. Our just straight up ship with Steam OS and use Valve’s.

SteamOS still has many instances of awkward UX and some frankly broken behavior, especially while trying to use community features, it’s just that every other offering has been worse.