Beamdog sells computer games like Balder's Gate Enhanced Edition. They advertise features like multiplayer. Multiplayer didn't work on any platform for over 3 years after the game was released. It still doesn't work on the Mac App Store version which they stopped supporting indefinitely. When I wanted the update that finally came out recently, customer support told me to buy another copy of the game on a different platform.

Beamdog also violated my reasonable expectations by not releasing the new expansion pack on the Mac App Store. If i wanted to play the expansion I'd have to buy the base game again on another platform then buy it there. Or wait god only knows how long (3 more years?).

Multiplayer has been unplayable due to game-breaking bugs like being very very laggy, items frequently duplicating, and sometimes being prevented from saving or resting. Also it crashes often. Overall it has not been in a usable state. Beamdog has known this and left it broken from release for over 3 years while advertising the multiplayer feature to prospective customers the whole time. This is fraud.

They said the next update would fix multiplayer. It's finally here. I haven't tested multiplayer with it yet, but there are reports multiplayer still doesn't work.

I bought the game again on Steam, and installed it, it wouldn't run. At all. Customer support replies once per day and wastes your time. They blame my computer for being too old. It's a modern retina iMac. The game has very low system requirements like 1ghz and 512mb ram. I have 4ghz and 32gb ram. What does support say? They say their own website lies to prospective purchasers about the system requirements, the real system requirements are higher. What are the real system requirements? They didn't say. Nevertheless this is an old game and my system is easily good enough. But after telling them my system specs they just reply telling me I need to give them more system specs (but they didn't say which ones). My 10 year old plastic macbook – that was low end when I bought it – could easily run their game. Yet they think somehow my high end iMac has such bad specs it prevents the game from running at all? Bullshit waste of time. And why don't they just ask for a crash log that includes my specs in it? Or actually give instructions for giving them whichever specs they want? Just asking for specs and then blaming people for not including whichever particular ones you wanted is ridiculous (and then demanding more specs and still not saying which you want).

I even deleted my Mac App Store version, deleted all the related files from my computer, deleted the steam version, and reinstalled the steam version to get it nice and clean. Still wouldn't run.

I knew customer support would never help so I bought the game, again, directly from Beamdog, and got a refund from Steam.

Their own version is also broken. When you're downloading it, it shows the patch notes from a couple years ago. They didn't update the installer. After downloading it, it doesn't run. You run their launcher, click "launch", and no game opens. (Fortunately I managed to troubleshoot it myself using advice from other players on the forums. It runs now. Unfortunately it has some new anti-features like they screwed up the way the game map works and there's no option for the old behavior.)

To summarize:

The Mac App Store version is unsupported indefinitely. No refunds. Fuck you. Beamdog blames Apple but they can't seem to get things to work on other platforms either:

The Steam version for Mac doesn't run on a fresh install.

The Beamdog version, from their website with their own installer ... also don't run on a fresh install.

A major feature they advertise, multiplayer, was broken on release and was left broken for over 3 years on all platforms, and may still be broken on all platforms. This is fraud. Want to play with your friends? Buy the game again away from the Mac App Store and they're advertising it works, though reddit suggests otherwise. Can I have steam keys at no cost to you? No, fuck off. (They have a general policy of giving out free steam keys to people who buy the game on their website. They could easily solve this Mac App Store problem at no cost to themselves. They don't want to. They are choosing to have bad customer service after defrauding customers with false advertising. They really seem to think telling people to pay for the game a second time is the best way to handle things.)

The system requirements they list on their website are a lie according to their own customer service.

The system requirements for the game are being increased to get the new patch, according to their own customer service. Anyone who doesn't meet the increased requirements will never be able to play multiplayer. Too bad, you can't have what you paid for.

I really wanted to like Beamdog because they have worked to restore and enhance some of my favorite computer games. But I can't do it. They defraud customers and have really awful customer service. Fuck Beamdog.

Beamdog is also, non-coincidentally, a social justice warrior company. They hire leftwing activists to put transgender characters into their games and rewrite the personalities of existing characters like Safana. At least she got fired after causing a bunch of bad press.

But why would you hire someone for an Enhanced Edition who thinks the original games are bad and need changing? Why not hire a fan who loves the games? Because the company leadership is trendy leftists too. This isn't some accident. Their bad values range from social justice to fraud, awful customer service, and broken game features.

Breitbart has a nice article:

Not only is it grossly out of character for Minsc, it’s a little bit of the Internet’s ugliness that quite simply didn’t need to be there. Where the transgender character is an expression of the developer’s intentions toward inclusion, Minsc’s dig is designed to exclude people with whom Beamdog disagrees. It’s trite, it’s catty, and it makes Beamdog’s other in-game statements come off as posturing rather than sincere.

Beamdog CEO Trent Oster ridiculously calls all the criticism "ridiculous" and expressed sadness that anyone has different values than he does. Read the whole article.

speed reading is a necessary skill for any serious attempt at a good life. like touch typing.

speed reading skills include:

• rapid serial visual presentation
• listening to sped up audio, including with text-to-speech
• effective skimming and searching
• speed reading paper books (optional for most people, who can get ebooks of most stuff they read)
• being able to keep up. being able to understand and retain what you read at higher speeds

(yeah there's a couple exceptions like blind people. not many.)

reading is a huge part of learning. if you read twice as fast then you can read twice as much stuff. then you can learn way more.

if you don't learn this stuff, you're basically just going to have a worse life. you'll spend more time per book. you'll lose time. not learning to read fast is basically just throwing away part of your life (unless you don't read much, which is a different way of throwing your life away).

another skill any reasonable person trying to have a good life would learn is how to use google search well. lots of people suck at finding stuff with google (like they choose search terms poorly and misjudge which search results to click on) and don't realize it and don't do anything to get better. another common way people use google badly is they search the wrong thing and then start clicking links instead of recognizing the got the wrong results and doing a new search immediately.

you want to learn philosophy? except maybe not really.

i bet you couldn't even learn super smash bros melee. that's a challenge.

if you can't learn smash bros, i doubt you'll ever learn philosophy.

if you managed to learn smash, you would have used various methods of learning successfully. you could then re-use some of them for learning philosophy.

if you learned smash, you would have dealt with details. you would have done precise thinking successfully. you could use that for philosophy.

but maybe it's too hard for you. playing smash well requires being able to research information online, understand it, and apply it.

playing smash well requires patience at appropriate times.

playing smash well requires effective practice. you have to practice in such a way you get better.

playing smash well requires succeeding at things you were bad at initially. you will be very bad at lots of the game initially. you'll have to change that.

playing smash well requires asking questions productively.

playing smash well involves running into players who are better than you, and seeing really plainly and clearly they are better than you. no excuses, no denials, you're outclassed. and it involves watching games from top players and learning from them and aspiring to be better.

playing smash well requires learning to do some thinking and situation-handling quickly.

playing smash well requires learning new terminology and physics. the terminology is easier than in biology or philosophy. the physics is much easier than the real physics.

playing smash well requires persistence and effort.

playing smash well requires strategy. you have to think about strategies well and implement them.

playing smash well requires good use of testing. is something a good idea? test it out. you can test out lots of your ideas and see how it goes. to make progress you'll need to choose useful tests, and learn from the results. smash allows doing lots of tests quickly, so if you fail at first, you can try again cheaply.

playing smash well requires discussing smash in a productive way.

playing smash well requires objectivity. biases don't win games. myths you tell yourself (like strategy X or character Y is really great – when actually they aren't) don't win games.

playing smash well requires initiative. no one will hand you smash skills. you have to pursue them.

learning smash requires creative practice techniques. play some slow paced games. play some games where you focus on doing one or two things right and autopilot the rest.

learning smash requires developing some autopilot strategies that you can perform with little attention. but you need to be able to turn them on and off. and you need to be able to make changes to them as you get better.

learning smash requires forming habits but then dropping or improving them as you make progress.

learning smash involves making mistakes and and then fixing it and not making those mistakes anymore.

learning smash involves making many tiny improvements which add up to big progress overall.

learning smash requires judging ideas on their merits, not by how fancy the writing is. there's lots of good ideas about smash that are written casually. here's an example written by a player (MaNg0) who some consider to be the best ever: "My summary for this matchup is..Shielding is your best frienD!!!This match is all about spacing! U gotta like run to them shield but space it.. then fair out of shield..Not much really to say about this match... BEtter Spacing and PATIENCE Wins .."

learning smash requires learning from criticism. if you never seek out criticism, you'll get stuck. if you dislike criticism instead of appreciating it, you'll get stuck. if you don't understand what to do with criticism, you'll get stuck.

if you don't have the initiative, persistence and ability-to-learn to play smash well, you'll never get far with philosophy (which requires far more of those skills).

if you think smash is too much work as a step forward, you'll never get competent at philosophy, which is far more work.

if you're too busy for smash, you'll never get competent at philosophy, which takes far more time.

if you don't want people to see your smash mistakes, and want to learn it all alone in private, you will fail at both smash and philosophy.

if you silently ignore this, you will fail at philosophy.

Smash is available on Windows and Mac for online play.

I've noticed most people move on from fights in a way I find weird. Like they'll just seem to forget about it, and act like it never happened, without solving the problem. Others don't do this.

I had an idea about the difference in perspective.

Most people fight in an emotional way. Once the emotion fades, the issue is usually done for them. Sometimes the issue is unignorable and they can't do that, but they can ignore a lot, even if it's very unreasonable and self-destructive.

By contrast, I think some people look at problems more logically. So e.g. sleeping, or relaxing with the TV for 2 hours, doesn't change it.

This can lead to conflict. One person can no longer be emotional and want to act like a problem never happened. They don't want to revive bad emotions by focusing on that problem. And the other person can logically see the problem still exists and want to try to cooperatively solve it.