sailsperson

Starfield is a classic case of some misleading marketing on purpose, and, well, it just falls into the perpetually doomed category of games/media that will always suffer from extremely high expectations: sci-fi/space/cyberpunk. The imagination wanders especially far with games like these, and there’s little to none us, the consumers, and they, the devs and publishers, can ever do about it.

That being said, you’re right in not praising the game. It’s a niche fun in my opinion, and only shines if you take it for what it is, but not for what it seemed to have been marketed as.

TL;DR Stafield is a Bethesda game through and through, but with a coating some Microsoft PG-13 “play it safe” attitude.

That’s what I was going to suggest as well. Basically, the planets and whatever is on the could benefit from a greater degree of procedural generation, even if as trivial as variable room layouts, but a deeper system (variable objects, contents, colors, designs based on the module manufacturer like with ship habs, etc.) would greatly remedy the repetitiveness, as with the current system, you’ve basically seen all the POIs or the type once you’ve seen one of them.

Planet surface is nice, though, because I agree with Bethesda’s idea of barren and deserted planets being much more prevalent than those that support any kind of life or even atmosphere. Elevation and scenery changes are also fine by me.

But still, POIs are oddly repetitive, even if somewhat numerous. They definitely should’ve gone for the more roguelike approach or something and use more proc gen with these.

Microsoft will likely do fuck all and have us all rely on third-party solutions.

If you were a faceless algorithm

There are people behind algorithms. They don’t exist for the sole purpose of gathering the data for the sake of it - the data is later accessed and processed by people.

I’m giving my address and information to plenty of companies I get services from.

And how is that different from giving any of information to me? I’m just trying to gather some statistics here, nothing more.

Those false equivalences are why people don’t take you seriously.

Is this why Zuckerberg went to trial and the EU is preventing apps and services whose sole purpose is to hoover up some data about you to become available in its domain?

If you don’t mind such things one bit, would you mind sharing with all of here all of the following:

• your physical address (preferably in the format that would let anyone of us send you whatever we desire)
• your age
• your full legal name
• your phone number that you use most often
• your school
• your work (its address, your title, company, etc)
• your income
• your expenses
• the stores you go to and what for, also when and how often
• your hometown
• your pet names
• your mother’s maiden name
• your bank of choice
• what tech you own in detail
• your schedule
• your search history
• your browser bookmarks

And many other things, too. Somehow I doubt you’d ever do that, but you’re fine trusting this kind of data to be handed away to many corporations for absolutely no benefit on your end. They’ll just sell it for cash money, only to be bought by con-artsists to try and scam you out of something later.

I mean being a contempt consumer is one thing, but defending some entities hoarding more data about you than your entire family knows is just delusional. Especially given the fact that you are most likely more careful with your data in other circumstances, like talking to strangers or using the Internet for at least some things, but then you defend careless and irresponsible handling of your data when it comes to what, mobile apps?

You should really learn more on the topic.

Also, Zuck can point to us feddies not wanting to federate with him, and say “see? Interoperability is pointless, even the geeks don’t want it”. Which is oddly accurate…

I think the easiest counter-argument here is healthy disagreement.

Being exposed to multiple opinions is undoubtedly important and is far, far better for us all in the long run than only limiting ourselves to only those opinions and views we already share or at least like, but having an option to wall somebody off on an Internet platform has its benefits, too, like not actually wasting your time in endless and fruitless arguments. As great as it would for everyone to be able to have a healthy and productive conversation about the differences in their views, it simply isn’t wise to honestly expect that from everyone.

Besides, having two opposing ideas communicate on the same platform is not what the fediverse is for - not exclusively for sure. It’s the freedom to self-host and self-regulate places dedicated to specific things to various degrees: lemmy.world, for instance, is wide and large and encompasses many things at once, and has an option to federate and communicate with smaller, more niche communities and vise versa, while letting the users open a single account with either.

Otherwise it’s just the old Facebook formula of encouraging opposing views to constantly clash for the sake of engagement. That’s just not real, not healthy, and only exists for the purpose of being some sort of KPI in a corporation perpetually hungry for money and influence. So yeah, we don’t want that.

YMusic is great Android app, too. It’s mostly intended for being able to properly use your phone when you want to focus on the audio, i.e. you can freely disable the screen, browse other apps, set timers, tweak the built-in equalizer, that kinda stuff, but it is perfectly functional and complete video player for YouTube as well.

And it doesn’t roll YouTube ads.