Mirodir

I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn't be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.

It's also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.

Edit: I just wanna mention, I am saying this as someone who is usually "RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK".

Simply blocking steam in your local firewall was enough with the old system, if the last thing the account saw was the library being open to play on or being the owner of the game.

There are a lot of weird, convoluted tricks you could do with the old system to get around most of the issues. For example: I've recently managed to play Outlast: Trials with my brother despite only one of us owning it by turning on the firewall between sending the invite and accepting it and then accepting the invite and launching the game before the invite receiving account (who has to be the owner of the game) sees the invite sending account as offline.

We've discovered this firewall trick relatively soon after Valve fixed the offline mode "exploit", but we never shared it publically so it wouldn't get fixed too. I have seen a few people talk about it over the years though.

Assuming it is store country that is checked: Simply VPN-ing doesn't change that. Instead you have to make a purchase in the new place with "a payment method from the region you have moved to". From experience this locks your account to the new region for 3 months. What would be interesting to know is if you can be in a family and then change regions afterwards without getting auto-kicked.

Needless to say, my experiments ended at trying to see if they have any kinds of restrictions in place (unlike for the original family share) and I don't wanna buy a throwaway game and lock an account into a different region for 3 months just for shits and giggles.

I experimented around with it in the beta out of curiosity.

Failed to accept the family invite. Your account must be in the same country as all current family members.

I'm assuming this is based on account region (i.e. purchase region) and not IP.

What really rubbed me the wrong way with ffxiv's monetization past the regular subscription was the additional retainer service.

I know it's not a large benefit to have, even if one's main focus is on crafting/AH gameplay, but it still annoys me to no end that I could be more efficient by forking over an extra 2USD up to 6 times (iirc) PER MONTH. This means to max out one's efficiency, one has to nearly double their monthly sub. Ultimately this was one of the many small frustrations with that game that lead to me dropping it, despite overall liking it.

Without knowing any specifics of the TOS or the exact setup beyond what I could gather in this thread: generally speaking they could still send you a bill through email or otherwise.

After that, if you're not paying up, they might be able to successfully get the money out of you through court regardless, depending on a few factors. What's more likely for smaller sums is that they'll just drop it and ban you though.

IANAL of course.

Unless it changed over the last year, she still uses Eddie Izzard as stage name, so you're fine either way. (Also it's Suzy, not Susie for her)

I sunk a lot of hours into Port Royale 2 many years ago. I'm not sure how well it holds up today or on its sequels. I think 3 was well received and 4 poorly.

Out of curiosity, what was your original choice and why do you think it's not a good fit anymore?

In decreasing popularity (estimated by me):

• Creeper World: A mix of tower defense and rts (with pause function) against a ever expanding goo called creep. The fourth installment is 3D and the next one will be a side-view spinoff.

• Tales of Maj'Eyal: Quite popular among the people who are into traditional roguelikes, but I very very rarely see it mentioned outside that community. It's definitely the (nearly) traditional roguelike I put the most time into thanks to its class/ability system that bridges the gap between roguelike and turn based rpg really well.

• The Captain: Technically not indie as it was published by Tomorrow Corp (of World of Goo/Little Inferno/etc. fame) instead of the devs themselves. A mix between old school point and click game, but as a highly episodic space adventure. You travel from planet to planet on an overarching mission and each planet has its own interactive short story. Some are longer, some are very short and you never quite know what you'll find before you land. All of the short stories have multiple endings depending on how you tackle the moral dilemmas it throws at you.

• Infinity Wars actually released before the rise of Hearthstone and also before the popular Avengers movie of the same name. It is to this day one of my favorite digital TCGs, and I played so many of them. Before I get into the main thing that I love about it, I wanna mention that every single card's base version (colorless) is free, anyone can build any deck for free the moment they pick up the game and be 100% competitive with everyone else. The only thing they monetize is bling. Unlike in most mainstream TCGs both players do their turns at the same time in secret, once they both lock in, their moves play out. This gives way for some insane mindgames and outplays that eclipse those in any other TCG I've played. It is a bit rough around the edges, so it might be more of a "hidden diamond in the rough" than a hidden gem.

• Bombernauts is a really fun party game. To sum it up in one sentence: "Imagine if Bomberman was a platform fighter." If you have friends to play with it, buy it on a sale, crank powerup drops up to the max (they stack, which took us hours to figure out), maybe download a mappack and I'm sure you'll have a blast if the trailer looked any fun to you. There's virtually no chance to play it with strangers through as it is super dead.

• Lastly I wanna give a shoutout to Clonk. Clonk is (or was) a 2D sidescrolling game-series that is visually reminiscent of Lemmings. The gameplay is a sort of mix between Minecraft or Terraria (predating it by many many years) and very very very low-pop RTS. It's a mission based game where you control around 1-3 Clonks (the lemmings) and has full online multiplayer support. The missions can range from "build a base in this active volcano", "take out the enemy team's castle", "win this wizarding duel" to "build a bridge across this canyon". What made it truly unique was the community and community creations though. It was created with the explicit purpose to be customizable and users made many, many different maps and modes. It was to me what Minecraft was to the kids in the generation after me (without all the content creators, of course). Some people made an entire RPG in it. Others made what was essentially Among Us, just to give you an idea. Sadly the spiritual open source successor Open Clonk could never recapture the magic for me, and I guess I'm not alone in that because it pretty much died around 5 years ago. If I could make one game popular overnight, it would be Clonk. It did warm my heart to see that some of the celebrated custom map/mode creators from back then ended up getting into gamedev. One of the games developed by someone I remember from back then is Vintage Story.

Holy fuck I rambled a lot about Clonk and I still feel like I'd have so much more to say but this isn't the most fitting thread for that.

That was a response I got from ChatGPT with the following prompt:

Please write a one sentence answer someone would write on a forum in a response to the following two posts:
post 1: "You sure? If it’s another bot at the other end, yeah, but a real person, you recognize ChatGPT in 2 sentences."
post 2: "I was going to disagree with you by using AI to generate my response, but the generated response was easily recognizable as non-human. You may be onto something lol"

It's does indeed have an AI vibe, but I've seen scammers fall for more obvious pranks than this one, so I think it'd be good enough. I hope it fooled at least a minority of people for a second or made them do a double take.

Yeah, I've noticed that too—there's a distinct 'AI vibe' that comes through in the generated responses, even if it's subtle.