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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • It is a grand jury. That is the practice round for a trial. The prosecutor goes over the evidence and explains what argument they are going to make in court without the defendent or their lawyer present to argue against it. The role of a grand jury is to pump the prosecutor up and say “You got this. I would totally believe you if I was on a real jury.”

    The fact that in this case, the grand jury said “That is stupid. You have no argument. Just let the guy walk,” means that either the prosecutor is an incompetent idiot who did not understand what evidence he was presenting or the jury thought that no crime had been committed.



  • I would play a warrior. I can make combat as interesting as I want. If I want, I can plan out grand tactics of pushing enemies into each other and into traps. If not, I can turn to the reliable “I stab the goblin with my sword” even if I am wielding a mace and fighting a dragon.

    I cannot play mage because I am too loss averse and hate using mana/spell slots. I would never play rogue because the idea of playing a close range damage dealer that wears cloth armor is a good recipe to end up spending most of the combat on death saving throws.


  • I assume it is a case of monopoly abuse. There are things you are allowed to get away with as a minor player in a market because no one has to do business with you.

    For example, GoG can insist that developers give them a game build without DRM since they are a minor software store and a majority of their customers know they can buy software other places.

    Steam, on the other hand, is used by almost all gamers. For many gamers, it is the only game store they use. If a game is listed on the Steam front page, a large portion of the games market will learn about the game. If Steam decides not to list a game, customers may assume that the game is not out yet, regardless of the amount of advertising they see for it. The publisher would need to have a special advertising campaign saying “yes, the game is out already but you have to use this other game store to buy it.”


  • Letting companies sell DLC outside of the Steam Store sounds like a bad deal for Valve but they look like a good company for publicly following through with it. If too many companies are abusing that policy, Valve is well within their rights to revise the policy and ban the behavior, taking the resulting PR hit. What they are not allowed to do is act like the good guy publicly while secretly and selectively enforcing a ban for companies that they are mad at

    P.S. If Valve does ban selling DLC outside of the Steam Store, it would make Steam an unusually restrictive store. I can open up Steam and buy DLC for any game by Wise Wizard Games, associate that DLC with my online multiplayer account, then download the same game (for free) on iOS and Android, open up the new copies, log into my online play account, sync purchases, and play my newly purchased DLC from another app store. I have never heard of an App store not allowing it but most game developers do not implement it because it costs them money to code it up and they make money from people who buy the same contents multiple times.