Chebucto Regional Softball Club

>If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company's efforts on Mac. >Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode, because the underlying Source engine was 32-bit across both Windows and Mac (with the exception of CS:GO). Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019, with the release of macOS 10.15, making all of those games inaccessible on newer Mac hardware. I think that this one is on Apple, not Valve. Windows maintained 32-bit compatibility. Linux maintained 32-bit compatibility. Apple could have maintained 32-bit compatibility. >Steam for Mac no longer exists to sell Valve's own games, and it has visibly suffered as a result. Steam is still not updated to run natively on Apple Silicon-based Mac computers, nearly four years after Apple's transition away from Intel CPUs started. It's now a slow and clunky barrier to playing the games I own on my Mac computers—a far cry from the pro-consumer persona that Valve and Steam usually enjoy. Ditto about this being on Apple --- there's no ARM-native Steam package for Linux, nor for Windows. >Valve isn't obligated to continue supporting all its games and software features on Mac, especially when Apple's reluctance to natively support Vulkan and other cross-platform technologies makes game development more complex. There's no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though. The stuff you are asking for is areas where Apple made changes that created problems for application software vendors that weren't created by Microsoft on Windows and weren't created by Linux distros, and where you're upset with Valve for not patching over platform issues.

I'm not sure that it's the physical location of a server that's the germane issue -- if it were, most law related to Internet services would be easy to ignore, since there's always somewhere else in the world. Rather, I'd bet that the law applies to businesses doing business with consumers in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dead > In 2023, the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the Online Safety Act. By 2025 Davis found it unfeasible to implement the stricter age verification and child-protection measures called for in the act. At the beginning of February, Davis announced the site would shut down February 14.[1][2][3]

*Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set* Don't know what revision, though. *goes looking through cover art of different revisions* I believe it was the 1983 revision.

> It’s the same idea with a game like chess, where we’ve developed essentially “perfect” computers that can compute every possible board state from a given point onward and give you an optimal move Chess isn't solved: chess computers have outplayed the best current human players, but they can't always provide an optimal move, can't look down branches far enough. Although they do use Minimax! But it is similar to the extent that you can get not-perfectly-optimal play that will probably do better than a human. > When dealing with humans, there will always be weaknesses to exploit That's probably true.

> And I don’t think you can solve “bluffing” either, because just knowing the theory behind bluffing changes how and when you bluff. *Any* theory, to have any impact, must change how you act. You can't get an edge over someone playing game-theoretic optimal bluffing strategy in poker. The best you can do is exploit what I mentioned -- information leaks, or try to find someone who isn't playing an optimal strategy and exploit that. But if *poker player X* is playing according to what von Neumann would advise, they have a bluffing approach where, no matter the strategy you adopt, you will not tend to come out ahead in the long run. They can tell you that that's their strategy, say "I went and read up on game theory, and here's how I'm playing", and it still won't permit you to do so. Now, that's a conservative strategy. Minimax relies on the assumption that the other player will play optimally, given the information available to them. A "von Neumann" player won't necessarily exploit weaknesses that someone else has as strongly as some other strategy might. So, let's say that a player absolutely never folds, for example. It's possible to adopt some non-von-Neumann strategy that permits a player to "win more" against a player playing suboptimally. It just means that no other player in poker can get an advantage, over the long run, over someone playing what von Neumann would recommend. >None of that relates to Balatro at all. I agree --- bluffing is outside its scope. *Balatro* is similar to video poker, not traditional, multiplayer poker.

> “Maybe next game will give me cooler jokers that will get me further”. I mean yes all games have some extent of these, there’s a reason why there’s such a large overlap. As well as why basically all mobile app developers, and a good portion of big corporate monstrocities turned their games to build on gambling mechanics. The psychological term at the core of the mechanic is a variable reward schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_reinforcement_schedules >In behavioral psychology, reinforcement refers to consequences that increase the likelihood of an organism's future behavior, typically in the presence of a particular antecedent stimulus >Variable ratio schedule (VR) – reinforced on average every nth response, but not always on the nth response.[14]: 88  >Variable ratio: rapid, steady rate of responding; most resistant to extinction. >Applications > >Reinforcement and punishment are ubiquitous in human social interactions, and a great many applications of operant principles have been suggested and implemented. Following are a few examples. > >Addiction and dependence > >Positive and negative reinforcement play central roles in the development and maintenance of addiction and drug dependence. An addictive drug is intrinsically rewarding; that is, it functions as a primary positive reinforcer of drug use. The brain's reward system assigns it incentive salience (i.e., it is "wanted" or "desired"),[31][32][33] so as an addiction develops, deprivation of the drug leads to craving. In addition, stimuli associated with drug use – e.g., the sight of a syringe, and the location of use – become associated with the intense reinforcement induced by the drug.[31][32][33] These previously neutral stimuli acquire several properties: their appearance can induce craving, and they can become conditioned positive reinforcers of continued use. The thing is that *many* games use an aspect of random reward, which leverages the conditioning effect of a variable ratio schedule to get people to want to play. [*Rogue*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_%28video_game%29) had random drops in 1980, for something early that I can name off-the-cuff. Like, having random rewards are all over video games, were around long before F2P or pay-to-win lootboxes. Like, banning games for leveraging that mechanic would ban a huge range of video games, card games, board games, etc. I think that the reason that people worry about it with gambling is that a runaway impact on someone *directly* results in draining money from them, especially since someone can hope to "make money back". "This will help encourage someone to buy an expansion or sequel" is acceptable, but "money is spent on a per-roll basis in the hopes of getting money" is not. *Balatro* definitely makes use of random rewards...but many, many games do that. *Balatro* looks a little like a gambling game. You can go and play video poker with actual money, and the first round or so of *Balatro* is simply video poker, with virtual money, before *Balatro*'s mechanics enter. But...I'm not sure that that makes *Balatro* particularly problematic. Maybe, I guess, someone could play *Balatro*, then think that "video poker is cool" and then go play video poker for money. I guess maybe that's what the PEGI people were upset about. I don't know how much any special *Balatro* convertability into an actual gambling game is a factor. I mean, I am pretty confident that you could take virtually any video game and turn it into a gambling game. Hell, a number of free-to-play games spanning many genres *do* have some degree of winning at least in-game stuff when you insert money.

> Also I would say, balatro is like 2 or 3 very minor changes away from easily being a “suck crazy amount of money from gambling addicts” game. That's an interesting point. *thinks* Countries do have various restrictions, and because there's only one store (in Apple's case) or only one *default* store (in Google's case). A number of countries have restrictions on gambling games. My guess is that if a country wants to tamp down on mobile gambling games, it probably can.

> So it being based on poker neither improved nor hurt my opinion of it, it’s just a design decision to reuse poker concepts. It's not so much "poker" as a broad theme that I have an issue with, but specifically video poker: >I held off getting the game for a while because I’d played video poker before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_poker > Video poker is a casino game based on five-card draw poker. It is played on a computerized console similar in size to a slot machine. Video poker is a single-player game. The problem with video poker is that it's a pretty simple game. It's been solved. You can go dig up the numbers for when to do what to play optimally, given the information you have. It's repetitive. There's just...not a lot going on with it as a game, even if it kinda looks like traditional poker. Traditional poker is a multiplayer game. Different players are playing against each other. That introduces bluffing, and *that* makes for a more-complicated game. That being said, even traditional poker is mostly solved. It's just complicated-enough enough to do that most people aren't going to play optimally. Von Neumann solved poker -- including bluffing -- for optimal play against opponents that play optimally back when he developed [game theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory) (and in fact, did his work with the initial *goal* of solving poker). https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/neumann.html >For Von Neumann, the inspiration for game theory was poker, a game he played occasionally and not terribly well. Von Neumann realized that poker was not guided by probability theory alone, as an unfortunate player who would use only probability theory would find out. Von Neumann wanted to formalize the idea of "bluffing," a strategy that is meant to deceive the other players and hide information from them. > >In his 1928 article, "Theory of Parlor Games," Von Neumann first approached the discussion of game theory, and proved the famous Minimax theorem. From the outset, Von Neumann knew that game theory would prove invaluable to economists. He teamed up with Oskar Morgenstern, an Austrian economist at Princeton, to develop his theory. > >Their book, *Theory of Games and Economic Behavior*, revolutionized the field of economics. Although the work itself was intended solely for economists, its applications to psychology, sociology, politics, warfare, recreational games, and many other fields soon became apparent. To the extent that poker remains unsolved, it's trying to determine whether someone is playing non-optimally or has other weaknesses and trying to take advantage of that (e.g. exploiting information leaks via tells, something like that).

Honestly, *Balatro* probably would have had an easier time if it had just been a card game that wasn't based on a poker theme. Being based on poker *does* mean that players enter with probably already knowing the hands, but honestly...I'm not even sure that that buys *that* much. And in the past, I've wondered whether use of poker "hands" is actually a good idea -- that is, *Balatro* has one "build around" a hand, and in that context, the hands aren't really balanced the way they are in poker. I think that what *Balatro* accomplished is to show that there's a lot of unexplored space in computer deckbuilding games. I'm not sure that the decision to use a standard playing card deck or to theme the game on an existing card game (which doesn't actually bear all that much resemblance to the real challenges in *Balatro*) actually contributed that much to *Balatro*'s success. It was actually a net negative from my standpoint -- I held off getting the game for a while because I'd played video poker before and considered it to be pretty boring, and the fact that *Balatro* looked like that wasn't a plus.

I haven't heard of this, but I'm assuming from the past that this is a sale and based on the image, it runs from February 24th to March 3rd.

> In case you’ve not previously heard of this project, it’s a huge PC mod that overhauls *Starfield* and gives it a much-needed Star Wars update. The title and brief description doesn't mention it, but it's a mod for *Starfield*, rather than a commercial game, just to clarify.

Most investors are going to care about what kind of return they're making. It's the capital they provide that pays the paychecks. If you want to do volunteer work on video games -- I have -- then that's not an issue. But typically games are made by paid workers, and those workers won't work without their paychecks. So they're going to need to attract investors.