• 48 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2024

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  • I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that anything “rewarding” doesn’t necessarily affect dopamine chemistry the way we used to talk about regarding game mechanics. After all, I’m not an expert in neurobiology, it might very well be the case that “dopamine rush” is a meme that simply takes a vague intuition of “dopamine is related to feeling of reward in the brain” to the absolute just for the sake of convenience of rhetoric device. But in reality, those things are more nuanced than that. There are many other neurotransmitters, neuromediators and in general things involved in brain signalling like serotonine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc, many of which are involved together in any “rewarding game situation” and interact in complex ways. To try to put it in more simple terms, the way you killed a bunch of goblins, the music that was on background, the scenery and palette, and the chest you open that they were guarding, affects dozens upon dozens of neuromediators that all interplay together in complex ways and form your experience, the way you feel, and gamers usually just ignore all that, focus only on the chest part and say “dopamine”. While in reality even the chest part alone isn’t just dopamine, and reward circuitry also isn’t just dopamine alone, and experiencing it is different depending on what you experience before/after and in parallel, and so on. What I didn’t like about the article is that it’s not about this topic at all and barely mentions it, basically there is a single sentence on it, but it’s used for the sake of clickbait title.








  • Have a lot of those metrics in place & keep the formula private. If leaking the formula into the public seems probable, then make formula polymorphic: certain weights differ based on RNG seeded by hashcode of game’s internal ID. This doesn’t fully protect from gaming the formula, but it makes automated influence unreliable and hits botters business. It’s a questionable approach, but I think it hits botters way more than it hits legitimate reviews, because in legitimate reviews there are zero expectations how certains reviews contribute to overall score. Such expectations can only exist, and thus can only be ruined for malicious actors. This definitely has some limits of how much it can contribute to overall score, because RNG shouldn’t be able to make a good game with legitimate reviews not reach good overall score. Unreliable means that botters were able to take 1000$ from client and bump their game, but then they take 1000$ from their next client and their shit suddenly doesn’t work anymore for unknown reasons and client is mad and botters decide to quit their business and move to something else.


  • Review weighting formula needs updates, if it’s not taking this into account already. There are many many ways to do this. For example, review and it’s score are multiplied by coefficients that are computed from hours spent in the game, percentage of achievements completed, time from the last review posted on the same account, number of people who clicked “this looks like a shopped review” button, etc.








  • FWIW, the thing with killswitch it not due to Bazzite, nor KDE. There’s a f*ck load of user reports all over the internet with different systems that have experienced the same thing; e.g. this one by a GNOME user on Pop!_OS.

    My bad, so it’s probably ProtonVPN client doing tricky hidden things that can break.

    As for your criticism on kdewallet, I was also bothered by it the last few times I engaged with KDE Plasma.

    I also got a kdewallet problem with flatpak VS Code authenticating to github, but that one is so widely known, they even included guidelines in docs on how to solve it.


  • The only real issue I’ve had was that the btrfs partition sometimes shits itself and requires some CLI commands in emergency mode to fix it.

    This sounds scary, not sure I’d be able to fix that. Hopefully, with some search if that happens to me.

    IIRC there was a widget for setting preferred GPU in the taskbar?

    Couldn’t find this one, and in general couldn’t find any UI for configuring GPUs systemwide. It’s possible to set preferred GPU in Lutris settings, but it didn’t work for some reason. I installed most heavy games via Steam, and Lutris doesn’t see my Steam games and setting preferred GPU in its Steam category doesn’t affect games in question.