Quoting: scaineBut regardless, I doubt Chinese citizens, fearing for their lives would care to take any risks.

I think you need to turn down the drama wheel just a wee bit.
You started with arrest and now we're suddenly in a life or death situation.

The average Chinese citizen playing some video games are not fearing for their lives.
Even in China, committing a minor law infraction such as using VPN to circumvent restrictions to play a game will not get you thrown off the Wall...

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Quoting: F.UltraSince the survey have to be sent manually it would not be triggered by their computers accidentally being able to connect to steam for a few seconds.

You are just making stuff up here.
"For a few seconds"? Why would you assume that? Could easily be a lot longer.
I have no clue what time frame is needed for Steam to trigger that popup on your end, or under what conditions it fires, or if it is just random, or...

Could just be a "user X who was selected for survey has come online" trigger, which would be fine with even just some seconds...

Quoting: F.UltraSo people trying to fly under the radar of the Chinese Gouvernment would be perfectly fine with sending telemetry to a western company? and also not being 100% vigilant on what they click and agree to?

Yes, absolutely.
You radically overestimate how much people care about stuff like that.
We are not talking about some (rightfully) paranoid dissenters, but just a gamer who wants to play a game.

Quoting: F.UltraWhy would these people (who most likely are bots anyway) bother by also agreeing to the survey? AFAIK new accounts also don't get sent the survey in the first place.

I don't know. Seems the most unlikely to me as well.

Quoting: F.UltraOk so this one might be true since I don't even know what it would mean, to be completely fair I missed to read this one before my first comment.

Also seems the most likely to me.
It has to be either a mess up or a very, very specific reason.

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Quoting: F.Ultrayou have to agree to send it to Valve once it pops up and I have a hard time seeing anyone performing either of your points as thinking "yeah lets have Valve receive some telemetry".

You seriously think 99% of people care about their data being used?


You start Steam.
The popup about the survey comes up.
You click through it half-blind like you click through most popups of that style.
Done.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicIt's because, in my opinion, the experience for Non-English speaking users on Linux isn't particularly great.

That's definitely an issue that will never get resolved unless someone took a humongous amount of cash into their hands and just made it happen.

Even when restricting it to Latin alphabet languages, you can get distros themselves with pretty good language support in some languages (German for sure, probably French, not sure about Spanish) - but as you said, as soon as you leave the confines of the distro interface, it's English or bust.
There is no "Microsoft help"-equivalent that would offer support for basically every question in basically every language - yes, I know those pages are crap, but at least they exist.
Or an automatically translated StackOverflow (and likes) that would be search-indexed for helping non-English speakers.

In my own experience, support is especially terrible for Chinese.
For a while I tried learning it and the hoops I had to jump through just to get keyboard support for Pinyin was absolutely crazy. Meanwhile on Windows, you can just go to languages, install Simplified/Traditional Chinese and you're done.

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My own participation got messed up by a bug triggered by whatever Steam uses to do a hardware survey - that bug causes a complete amdgpu reset (probably not on all GPUs, but at least a few).

I am unsure how common that bug is, but if a percentage of Linux users are affected, it could lead to some skewing as well.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9267

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Quoting: scaineAnyone who's tried (good) VR and didn't feel sick wants more of it, but the cost is still sky high.

Nah. Plenty people tried at this point and it's just not something they care a lot about.

You could give it away for free and it still wouldn't become the next big thing (though obviously it would grow a lot).
Unless you somehow remove the need to have a big "thing" on your head, remove the need for extra space, remove the awkward movement solutions and bunch of other things that simply won't ever get resolved unless we enter Star Trek holodeck technology era and that aren't even really related to the quality of games, it will always remain limited (in how attractive it is to people).

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Quoting: GroganNow I just have to figure out how not to suck at flying a ship.

For me, I was completely unable to fly with keyboard + mouse (in any flight game, btw, I just can't).
But even a controller (like XBoxOne controller) makes it very comfortable for me.
Or a hotas for a bit more immersion, but that's IMO optional.

Since X4 is a lot more than just the "fly spaceship" part, controller + keyboard might be the best variant to me, as you'll need a lot of keys to do all the things you can do in the game - more keys than any controller and most hotas have.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: TrainDocI'm begging y'all to not play the game like this. I understand the point of this mod but the game is entirely built around VR amd stripping such a core concite of the game out reduces what makes it so good. The total immersion in the environment and manipulation of items directly cannot just be removed without the game becoming a shell of it's former self.

Many people don't have the money for VR. That simple, man.

It's not the cost that's keeping people away but lack of interest. VR is running into the same brick wall as 3D television: people simply don't care.

Exactly this.
If you can afford a PC that could run Alyx, you could affort a VR headset. Nobody needs a Valve Index to get into VR.
Hell, if you can throw the 60$ at the game, you could just not do that for a few months, save it up and afford a VR headset later.
It's still very much in the region of money people tend to throw at hobbies.

The "I don't have the money" in most cases really means "I don't care enough to save up the money", which is fair enough, of course - not blaming anyone.
People who really don't have the money aren't gonna spend their time worrying about VR to begin with, and, well... they are not the target audience, either, obviously.

A much more valid point is lack of space IMO.
In many countries, living space is nowadays not only an expensive commodity, but simply a rare one.
And for VR, you definitely need some space. I'm living in a pretty average sized flat for the country (2 peepos, 70m²) - and we can barely fit the space for VR, have to move our couch around each time someone uses it or would risk just bumping into stuff.

Maybe we just have a lot of space-intensive stuff (definitely have a huge space need for musical and sewing hobbies), I'm not sure.

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Quoting: KlaasWolfenstein 3D is another example. It's lot easier if you can strafe and turn (with a mouse) at the same time instead of being stuck with the strafe modifier key.

Absolutely!

And once we had mouse aiming established, games became a lot more difficult because of it.
The player got "stronger" and the enemies had to follow suit or the games would have become too easy.
It would be a severe challenge to try and get through some later FPS without mouse aim - might be funny to try, though. Doom Eternal run?

Removing the VR from Alyx is the same thing - except I don't think the mod actually makes enemies more dangerous to balance the more powerful player, hence the game becomes a lot easier that way.

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Quoting: damarrinObviously, reloading a weapon is so much easier if you just press a button instead of ejecting the clip, taking another one and inserting it. If only soldiers on the battlefield could do that.

Just in case you were wondering: We are talking about video games here.
Otherwise, we can start talking about how it doesn't really hurt when you get shot in an FPS... or any of the other things in games that are not actually like in real life.

Specifically, we are talking about a first person shooter.
Putting something in VR doesn't change its genre. It just changes the camera and/or controls.

Reloading in a first person shooter has been around for.. eh... 30 years?
Yeah, it's the press of a button. Got that figured out a few decades ago.
Introducing additions to the process isn't even something VR-specific. You could easily do that with a keyboard as well - and now comes the kicker: Why do you think that isn't done? Some food for thought.

You can argue it is done for immersion. And I'd even agree.
But that comes at a cost, which I described.

Quoting: damarrinIf you want to just sit on the couch and press buttons go right ahead, don’t diss people who enjoy doing something else.

I don't sit on a couch while gaming. Usually.
And I also didn't diss anyone.
Are you maybe projecting something here?

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