Agreed, perhaps it's easier on a mobile device but I found the first two levels after the tutorial way to fast using a touchpad and left a little frustrated :-(
Easing into the difficulty slower sounds like a good plan!
I was on mobile and it felt like by the time I saw what was happening I was already losing. Very little reaction time available. I thought maybe it would be easier on a desktop, but I guess not.. maybe with a mouse instead of a trackpad.
Or maybe the author is going for the flappy bird effect. Make it punishingly hard, so players celebrate hitting level 4. But I didn’t have the same intant addiction as I did with Flappy Bird. Probably due to more complex gameplay and each level having 3 ways to play it.
Yes if you don’t already know where the bubbles are gonna fall it’s very hard to get to them in time with a trackpad. Although I play with a trackpad myself and can beat most levels.
I had a friend suggest a “course preview” during the countdown screen so that users can anticipate the bubbles without memorizing them.
I replayed it some more and I improved with each go. It’s kind of like older games, where the levels have to be learned over time to get good. I think we’ve forgotten about that with the more gentle on-ramp most games give these days.
That policy covers in-game content too - the same page mentions:
"Steam does not contain any paid advertising, nor are advertising models supported in games distributed on Steam. There are varying interpretations for what constitutes ‘advertising’ in a game, so the examples below are meant to help guide developers as to what is and is not supported on Steam."
Under not supported:
"Developers should not utilize paid advertising as a business model in their game"
The Borderlands 4 adverts in BL3 are not paid adverts, and they don't advertise anything other than their own games.
Yep, the page does, but the specific section you named, suggesting it was an answer, does not. At least it does not alone address the issue.
But leaving that section aside, I'll say that these ads are paid. They're paid by the company to itself, with the intent of future monetary gain. Now, if you think that's too much of a technicality, which I would understand, I'll say this: would it be a violation of the policy to show unskippable first-party advertisements repeatedly during gameplay? I think most people would agree that it would be a violation of the intention of the policy.
I don't think the specific section needs to mention it - the entire page is about Advertising on Steam, which according to the opening paragraph, includes in-game adverts. The rest of the page elaborates with examples of things they do and don't condone.
These ads are indeed paid for by the company itself, but seem to be permitted by the policy. The intent/spirit of the policy seems to be to prevent games showing ads for arbitrary other games/things, for example BL3 showing ads for Candy Crush Saga - this isn't allowed by this policy, i.e. games that are paid to show other people's ads.
Gearbox showing BL4 ads in BL3 etc, it seems to count as cross promotion, they're not being paid for the act of showing the ad and is OK according to Steam - "These types of promotions are encouraged and many customers find value in them."
Perhaps the wording of the policy could use some work to make things clearer.
I also have an @ alias on my domains, and give unique addreses to companies/services which identifies them. I'm only had a couple accusations of "fraud", but they were easily dispelled by asking them to explain what "fraud" I was committing (they couldn't) and explaining why I do this.
Addresses which have been lost/stolen and start receiving spam become spam traps, and I change the email address with the company/service to a new alias so their legitimate mail is delivered normally.
In some of the few cases where the loss/theft was identified, it didn't happen at company/service directly, but with one of their suppliers, for example, a breach at the marketing email provider they used.
The interference should be minimal as the microwaves should be contained within the units Faraday cage.
If your microwave is causing interference with your WiFi, it could be faulty and leaking EMR and if so, should probably be replaced as soon as possible!
Moxie Marlinspike (legendary cryptographer, security researcher and creator of the Signal protocol which powers Signal and WhatsApp) wrote an apt article on privacy 10 years ago, and I highly recommend it.
Self-hosted for about 20 years now. Currently running a few VMs in a Hetzner cloud project built with terraform and managed with Ansible - dovecot proxy, postfix and rspamd on the public host, dovecot with encrypted-at-rest storage (mail-crypt) on the private host and another host running monitoring (Prometheus, graylog etc etc)
It isn't even a Google employee that the author is complaining about - it's a volunteer on the Google support forums. I agree, the author does not come across in a good light at all.
