I'm playing with a Vive Pro, on Linux of course.

My main grievance is room-scale. No I don't want to stand around, I don't have the space for it, I want to play couch-scale. It's not that difficult to allow me to set my height as I want, dammit. And yes, I'm looking at you Half Life Alyx.

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Quoting: FeistFor me, the fact that I have 95% of my games on steam and all the various steam services/steam benefits connected to all those games is pretty much a permanent "deal breaker" with any other option/alternative.

I stopped buying (even steam keys) from anywhere else, because I have some 4000(!) games on steam, and I want to know whether I already have a specific game before I buy. So everywhere but steam has become a nuisance; except maybe itch.io where most games are not available on steam anyway.

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Brickadia demands I register with them via discord, so far so good, but also wants me to give discord my phone number to be able to put anything into their registration channel.

The Answer is NO to this violation of privacy. Because this is what will happen: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/04/05/facebook-hack-breach-personal-data/9031617634745/ [External Link] -- This breach was due to somebody _enumerating_ all phone numbers and trying them. Which would of course have been impossible with more random identifiers such as email addresses. But basically, you don't want any web platform to have your phone number.

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Isn't that just one of these newer hidden object games? Because they all fit that description.

Yes, the "hidden object" genre has changed, it's much more adventure these days.

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Valheim of course, and Minecraft too, notably the mods All the Mods 6 Sky Block, Sky Bees and Engineers Life 2.

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I played some 35 hours and am slowly getting into the end of the bronze age.

Speaking of which, how come it takes 2 copper ingots and 1 tin ingot to forge(!) 1 bronze ingot? It should be 3 copper and 1 tin ingot (in a smelter), and from the weight alone you should get 4 bronze ingots. And it's not like you loose material, unlike when smelting ore. And that would also reduce the disproportionate grind with bronze.

It's not really a "historical" game; progression is more or less gated behind boss fights; and sometimes ... well there are other idiosyncratic choices; like only being able to mason stone in the iron age. In fact, stone age civilizations like the aztecs did a lot of extreely intricate stone masonry. Or requiring bronze age technology for planting things.

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I didn't write what you quoted as mine.

Quoting: F.UltraI have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

First off, we have a problem with pharmacy inflating these costs by a factor of 10, by including marketing and so on. And they've been doing this for decades.
https://www.thebodypro.com/article/r-d-really-cost [External Link] -- 70 million instead of 700 in 2001. There are more of these papers out there, and they all get to the same conclusion, R&D costs get inflated by roughly a factor of 10. So it's not billions, but millions. See also the article I linked to.

Second, you can't just reproduce these things, even if they're (like the modeRNA vaccine) completely open. Usually competitors need around 3 years to catch up. And that's way enough time to recoup the R&D costs.

Finally, I don't see why I should constantly repeat arguments scientists have already made, and correct your mis-assumptions, just because you're too lazy to read the papers:
http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm [External Link] (and read that chapter about pharmaceuticals here http://dklevine.com/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf [External Link])
https://www.researchoninnovation.org/dopatentswork/ [External Link]

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: SeegrasPatent systems are very broken and need to be abolished.

For anyone interested, here's the book, where they show that in most fields (except chemistry/pharma), patents don't even work as they should according to the patent system itself. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.1.3 [External Link]

The patent system itself isn't broken. The people running the patent system are. There are legitimate reasons for a patent.

No. You obviouly did not even read the summary of the Paper. It's broken according to what the patent system says it should work like. It's only a huge tax on invention. I'll quote: "there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity,".

And that's only according to the patent system itself. If we take adverse effects regarding health or poverty into account, it looks even worse.

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Patent systems are very broken and need to be abolished.

For anyone interested, here's the book, where they show that in most fields (except chemistry/pharma), patents don't even work as they should according to the patent system itself. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.1.3 [External Link]

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What I really would want is the possibility to exchange data with minecraft. It won't perhaps be possible with whole worlds, but mabye in the form of schematics, so I could load specific builds at least.

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