chameleon

Being a fan of the SNES/GBA Mario Kart games as well as a fan of games with playable lizards, I’m actually kinda excited for it… but even then, Playtonic utterly confuses me. They’re making a very specific game that will be enjoyed by dozens of people, and in the process of doing so they kinda ignored the fanbase’s long-standing demand for a Diddy Kong Racing spiritual successor. Doesn’t seem like a wise decision to me.

The default is that Valve does moderation, and if you don’t opt-out of it, they consider those kinds of topics to be completely on-topic and valid, removing the reports. All of the relevant Steamworks pages aimed at publishers (eg Steam Community) are publicly available and are really enough to blame Valve for the whole state of things.

Even if a publisher opts-out of Valve moderation, they don’t have the tools to deal with sockpuppets or organized attacks, and being banned from one game forum just means those same accounts move elsewhere. Valve could absolutely deal with it by doing community-wide bans, but they don’t.

I ended up wanting an online pseudonymous identity as well as an offline real-life identity, which leads to needing multiple phone numbers when things are tied to said number. That’s extremely annoying to manage, especially with Signal’s current activity and update policies that essentially require you to keep a phone in a drawer, charge it and log into it every so often or risk losing your entire account due to inactivity, as only the mobile device counts for that purpose (this might supposedly be changing).

In that particular scenario, I don’t really care if my least-favorite three-letter-agency or law enforcement can link my identities. It’s a nice bonus if they can’t, but not an absolutely required feature. The main worry is the person on the other end trivially learning it. But the person on the other end might have a different set of worries that makes Signal one of the few available options for them.

That said, Telegram also requires a phone number and has exactly the same issue, so this is a rather weird thread to bring that up.