TheZorch

A few days ago, January 22, Cities Skylines received an update which sparked a major fan revolt. It goes beyond just gamers being angry, the publisher may have violated the EU's GDPR and based on evidence I've seen they are also violating Steam's TOS by manipulating the game's review score.
 
Let me give you some background so you'll understand what the hubbub is all about. As you know, Cities Skylines took the mantle of premier city builder in the wake of the Sim City debacle. The issues with Sim City is that it had to be always online, you had to sign in to play the game. EA would later fix this, sort of, but the damage had already been done. Cities Skylines was announced at Gamescom 2014 and rest was history, until now. Many people who play Cities Skylines today and who maintain the game's many and often essential mods were all Sim City refugees, so what's happened with the game recently now feels like a major betrayal of trust. How the publisher has responded to the fan backlash makes the situation much worse.
 
On the 22nd, Cities Skylines received an update which added a Paradox Interactive launcher. When you launch the game there is no indication that the EULA for the game has changed and there are no warning dialog boxes. Due to how the game works, Cities Skylines can sometimes take 10 minutes to launch even on an M.2 NVMe SSD if several DLC and mods are installed. The launcher adds up to an additional 10 minutes to the launch time. The launcher requires a sign in to play the game. Many players have experienced a drop in CPU performance with the launcher running and others have reported the it is also eating up system memory. Other more technically minded players have found that the launcher is dialing home and send telemetry data some remote server which may include personal information (this requires deeper investigation). The launcher has rendered the native Mac and Linux versions of the game unplayable, and it was installed outside of the Steam game directory under the USER DATA area instead. All of this without any warning or fanfare other than a post in the Steam community forums that says "We're doing this, don't riot". Some antivirus programs detect the Paradox launcher as malware.
 
Where do things stand now? Paradox has only recently responded to the controversy and they haven't taken it very well. To add insult to injury, the game and all of its DLC was put on a steep sale. It doesn't end there, one employee called fans "SJWs who hate change" on the Steam forums. The post has since been deleted, but the Streisand Effect is alive and well. Hundreds of fans of the game have been uninstalling Cities Skylines and changed their reviews on Steam to "not recommended". This influx of negative reviews changed the game's review score from "Mostly Positive" to "Mixed". There has now been an influx of reviews with thumbs up recommendations made by Steam users with simple throwaway account names and the texts are between one to three words each. There is even one review that is just the letter "h" and that's it. All of these positive reviews came in the same day and the users have barely any playtime accumulated. So many of these strange reviews have come in that it has shifted the game's review score back to "Mostly Positive". This is clearly review tampering and a major breach of Steam's TOS which is punishable with exile from the platform. These suspect reviews have been reported to Steam in mass.
 
That is where things stand. The fans are waving their torches and pitchforks and Paradox is acting like a thin-skinned asset flipper. They may have done some things that violate both the GDPR and (potentially) COPPA, and may have certainly committed a bannable offense on Steam.
 
Does anyone have any marshmallows I can roast over this dumpster fire?

There is Shadow which is promoted by a few channels I follow, I think Linus visited their offices once. It gives you a full Windows 10 PC with desktop in the cloud. It is basically a fully accessible PC for running games and apps which you install yourself. What makes them a little different from Stadia and GeForce Now is they're building-out data centers across the country to shorten the distance to their users. The reason why Cloud Gaming hasn't really exploded is due to latency as @Kisai pointed out. The further you are from the data center the higher the latency and this is an issue for FPS and twitchy action games (i.e.; Super Meatboy, Dead Cells, etc). 
 
The best thing though would be to actually build a PC. Yes, PC tech is always advancing but on average you really don't need to upgrade that often. The average lifespan of a good gaming rig is about 4 - 5 years. That's how long it took my old gaming rig (Intel Core i7 4790, 16 GB DDR3, Radeon RX 570 4 GB) to start showing its age. Games don't jump ahead that quickly until there's been a massive CPU/GPU architecture change and even then it is a slow transition. Game Makers want to target as big an audience as they can while also catering to those who like riding the bleeding edge of hardware.
 
TL;DR - If you build a good gaming PC now the games are not going to outpace it in just 1 - 2 years. 

I think some of those are smr, so they will be much slower in some writing workloads.
 
But this is pretty normal, and my hdd for games does the same thing.

A few days ago, January 22, Cities Skylines received an update which sparked a major fan revolt. It goes beyond just gamers being angry, the publisher may have violated the EU's GDPR and based on evidence I've seen they are also violating Steam's TOS by manipulating the game's review score.
 
Let me give you some background so you'll understand what the hubbub is all about. As you know, Cities Skylines took the mantle of premier city builder in the wake of the Sim City debacle. The issues with Sim City is that it had to be always online, you had to sign in to play the game. EA would later fix this, sort of, but the damage had already been done. Cities Skylines was announced at Gamescom 2014 and rest was history, until now. Many people who play Cities Skylines today and who maintain the game's many and often essential mods were all Sim City refugees, so what's happened with the game recently now feels like a major betrayal of trust. How the publisher has responded to the fan backlash makes the situation much worse.
 
On the 22nd, Cities Skylines received an update which added a Paradox Interactive launcher. When you launch the game there is no indication that the EULA for the game has changed and there are no warning dialog boxes. Due to how the game works, Cities Skylines can sometimes take 10 minutes to launch even on an M.2 NVMe SSD if several DLC and mods are installed. The launcher adds up to an additional 10 minutes to the launch time. The launcher requires a sign in to play the game. Many players have experienced a drop in CPU performance with the launcher running and others have reported the it is also eating up system memory. Other more technically minded players have found that the launcher is dialing home and send telemetry data some remote server which may include personal information (this requires deeper investigation). The launcher has rendered the native Mac and Linux versions of the game unplayable, and it was installed outside of the Steam game directory under the USER DATA area instead. All of this without any warning or fanfare other than a post in the Steam community forums that says "We're doing this, don't riot". Some antivirus programs detect the Paradox launcher as malware.
 
Where do things stand now? Paradox has only recently responded to the controversy and they haven't taken it very well. To add insult to injury, the game and all of its DLC was put on a steep sale. It doesn't end there, one employee called fans "SJWs who hate change" on the Steam forums. The post has since been deleted, but the Streisand Effect is alive and well. Hundreds of fans of the game have been uninstalling Cities Skylines and changed their reviews on Steam to "not recommended". This influx of negative reviews changed the game's review score from "Mostly Positive" to "Mixed". There has now been an influx of reviews with thumbs up recommendations made by Steam users with simple throwaway account names and the texts are between one to three words each. There is even one review that is just the letter "h" and that's it. All of these positive reviews came in the same day and the users have barely any playtime accumulated. So many of these strange reviews have come in that it has shifted the game's review score back to "Mostly Positive". This is clearly review tampering and a major breach of Steam's TOS which is punishable with exile from the platform. These suspect reviews have been reported to Steam in mass.
 
That is where things stand. The fans are waving their torches and pitchforks and Paradox is acting like a thin-skinned asset flipper. They may have done some things that violate both the GDPR and (potentially) COPPA, and may have certainly committed a bannable offense on Steam.
 
Does anyone have any marshmallows I can roast over this dumpster fire?

A few days ago, January 22, Cities Skylines received an update which sparked a major fan revolt. It goes beyond just gamers being angry, the publisher may have violated the EU's GDPR and based on evidence I've seen they are also violating Steam's TOS by manipulating the game's review score.
 
Let me give you some background so you'll understand what the hubbub is all about. As you know, Cities Skylines took the mantle of premier city builder in the wake of the Sim City debacle. The issues with Sim City is that it had to be always online, you had to sign in to play the game. EA would later fix this, sort of, but the damage had already been done. Cities Skylines was announced at Gamescom 2014 and rest was history, until now. Many people who play Cities Skylines today and who maintain the game's many and often essential mods were all Sim City refugees, so what's happened with the game recently now feels like a major betrayal of trust. How the publisher has responded to the fan backlash makes the situation much worse.
 
On the 22nd, Cities Skylines received an update which added a Paradox Interactive launcher. When you launch the game there is no indication that the EULA for the game has changed and there are no warning dialog boxes. Due to how the game works, Cities Skylines can sometimes take 10 minutes to launch even on an M.2 NVMe SSD if several DLC and mods are installed. The launcher adds up to an additional 10 minutes to the launch time. The launcher requires a sign in to play the game. Many players have experienced a drop in CPU performance with the launcher running and others have reported the it is also eating up system memory. Other more technically minded players have found that the launcher is dialing home and send telemetry data some remote server which may include personal information (this requires deeper investigation). The launcher has rendered the native Mac and Linux versions of the game unplayable, and it was installed outside of the Steam game directory under the USER DATA area instead. All of this without any warning or fanfare other than a post in the Steam community forums that says "We're doing this, don't riot". Some antivirus programs detect the Paradox launcher as malware.
 
Where do things stand now? Paradox has only recently responded to the controversy and they haven't taken it very well. To add insult to injury, the game and all of its DLC was put on a steep sale. It doesn't end there, one employee called fans "SJWs who hate change" on the Steam forums. The post has since been deleted, but the Streisand Effect is alive and well. Hundreds of fans of the game have been uninstalling Cities Skylines and changed their reviews on Steam to "not recommended". This influx of negative reviews changed the game's review score from "Mostly Positive" to "Mixed". There has now been an influx of reviews with thumbs up recommendations made by Steam users with simple throwaway account names and the texts are between one to three words each. There is even one review that is just the letter "h" and that's it. All of these positive reviews came in the same day and the users have barely any playtime accumulated. So many of these strange reviews have come in that it has shifted the game's review score back to "Mostly Positive". This is clearly review tampering and a major breach of Steam's TOS which is punishable with exile from the platform. These suspect reviews have been reported to Steam in mass.
 
That is where things stand. The fans are waving their torches and pitchforks and Paradox is acting like a thin-skinned asset flipper. They may have done some things that violate both the GDPR and (potentially) COPPA, and may have certainly committed a bannable offense on Steam.
 
Does anyone have any marshmallows I can roast over this dumpster fire?

rip city skylines. I haven't played in a long time but i put so many hours into it

I'm looking for recommendations on a good data recovery service that won't cost an arm, a leg, a kidney, and a virgin sacrifice or two.
 
It's a 3TB HGST internal SATA-III 7200rpm HDD. We can't get it to come up in either Windows or Linux (we were going to see if ddrescue could save the files). It is about 1/2 full, most of it is videos but there are some important project files on there too that we need (which "should" have been backed up!!!). We're in the United States.
 
If you've got any recommendations, thank you in advance.

the troll just got banned

turn off the PSU
unplug the power cable
take the cmos battery out again
Press the power button in for 2 seconds
unplug the EPS and 24pin
wait a few mins
put everything back
 
then see if it will post

So AMD's new graphics cards are here, and they are pretty sick... But what's even more sick than hearing about a new graphics card? Owning one for yourself!

Aw yeah man, we are giving away one Polaris 10 video card and one Polaris 11 video card thanks to our good friends over at AMD.
 
So, how do you enter to win one of these fine graphics cards?
 
1. Post a comment below telling us what graphics card you're using in your rig and why you want an upgrade to AMD's Polaris lineup. The two winners will be selected at random, so no, the content of your comment doesn't REALLY matter, but this is more fun than seeing 800 posts of "I want it" or "gibe nao pls." One comment (entry) per user.
 
2. Check back here in about a week when the names of our two winners will be added to the OP (giveaway execution is an art not a science people, so I apologize in advance if winners aren't announced in exactly one week).
 
3. Check your inbox here on the forum to make sure you didn't miss it. Our winners' usernames will be added to the OP here, so if you have any question about the legitimacy of a congratulatory message regarding this giveaway, please be sure to check back here and see if your name has been added.
 
And, while this isn't a requirement, feel free to give our friends over at @AMDRadeon on Twitter a follow.
 
Winners will be PMed from this account on the forum. Please do not consider winner messages from any other user in regards to this giveaway.
 
This giveaway is worldwide with no age restriction.
 
Best of luck to all!!
 
EDIT: Winners
 
Polaris 10 winner: Alright, SOMEONE needs to take this GPU!  Let's see if @UltraNeonGaming wants it  you have 72 hours to respond @Herb12 UPDATE: New winner for Polaris 10 is
 
Polaris 11 winner: @OnlyNeedJuan
 
Congrats to our winners! They have 72 hours to respond. If we don't hear back in that time, a new winner (or new winners) will be selected.