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[–] 224 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

If it was about money, MasterVisa would have already given up. There are people who claim that MasterVisa bent the knee to Collective Shout for the sake of money, yet when a much bigger demographic speaks, MasterVisa tries to ignore it.

This is about the power to shape society.

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  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago

    The fact that multi-millionaires are doing to most heinous shit with their money and getting a way with it, meanwhile me, a wage slave, has a payment processor telling me what I'm allowed to do with my money, society is built on tiers.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Gamers who care about this are a much smaller group than American regressive religious zealots.

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  • [–] 74 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Australian religious zealots are the ones taking credit for the steam & itch.io censorship.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The hypothesis I've heard is that the zealots have deep enough ties to the Australian government to be pains in the ass for MasterCard and Visa. Though I can't imagine Australia is a big enough demographic to really matter meaningfully, also if you are any type of international entity you should have Australia marked as fuck ass stupid place is the Idaho of the Anglosphere shitty government but with lots of decent folks about.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Uh. No.

    Do you seriously think Australia is a big enough player for mastercard and visa to kowtow despite building pressure planetwide? We're fucking small potatoes and we've always known it.

    Payment processors own upper echelons are full of weird religious fundamentalists, and that's where a lot of this is coming from. Don't give collective shout any credit, very few people in Australia even knew who the fuck they were before they started claiming shit. They're the online version of that weird proselytiser outside st paul's.

    (And if you think Conroy is a tie, lemme describe in detail how much people want to barbecue that idiot...)

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  • [–] 197 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Oh wow, it's like everyone who said MasterCard was lying to protect their image from reality turned out to be correct. Only someone with a functioning brain could have seen this coming.

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  • [–] 77 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    IMO MasterCard leadership already agreed with the nazis and were just looking for an excuse to act.

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  • [–] 138 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [+] 243 points 1 year ago (10 children)
  • [–] 62 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    There was an entire subreddit devoted to porn games but it's not made it over to Lemmy.

    Maybe once I get laid off I'll start a community

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    Make it. I will be there.

    Also, Please play "Ripples" even if you don't like Lewd Game. It's story is so good that the Lewd Scene just feels like reward

    Edit: Forgot to say but it's completely free

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Did you mean "make it"? If you made it already, link the community!

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm pretty sure I saw one, but maybe it was just general anime thirst trapping. There's a lot of niche abandoned communities.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    You need to censor those messages accusing us of censorship!

    Also, If someone was secretly negotiating on their behalf they would be asking the FBI to help arrest the impersonator, and they would probably want the publics help too!

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  • [–] 174 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Ana Valens recently resigned from Vice following an article about the censorship of games. On social media, she shared communication between Mastercard and Riot Games.

    Looks like Vice can't be trusted as a reliable source of information if they're willing to fire journalists after a little outside pressure is put on them.

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  • [–] 70 points 1 year ago*

    Could be great links to share over Riot Games streams.

    • MasterCard has asked Riot to keep an eye out for negative sentiments on official Riot streams
    • Riot has asked esports content creators working with official Riot properties to watch out for any negative sentiments toward MasterCard
    • Moderators have been told to look out for any unusual activity around the MasterCard issue

    No better publicity than getting their own efforts thrown back at their faces.

    MasterCard is running an effective PR campaign against themselves. They can't stop giving their critics all this gold.

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  • [–] 67 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Man wtf can we DO about this shit? I'm planning on calling and shit but damn they don't give a fuck.

    Is it too late??

    Do you have to have assloads of money to file a class action suit? Like would steam or GOG or itch be down to be a part of it or is that just a pipe dream.

    I am not promoting it, but I will say that this is the exact reason shit like cryptocurrency exists. Stupid overreaching shit like this.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I'm super pro crypto but it isn't a magic bullet. The companies being restricted are victims of a monopoly who will retaliate if they try alternatives. It's the same reason NFTs haven't killed Ticketmaster.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Is it possible for us the people to do it then? How do you organize something like a class action lawsuit against a big player like that?

    They JUST finished paying out the 5.5 Billion in a class action lawsuit they've already lost before so we can for sure do it again, right?

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  • [+] -9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Crypto is now a fucking wall street product.

    NFTs are highly regarded.

    The reason you can't kill Ticketmaster is because Everyone who stands to make money benefits from Ticketmaster and the only ones to benefit from an alternative is customers.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    NFTs are highly regarded.

    I'm going to take the day to reflect on how 100.0% out of touch I must be. I've been using crypto for more years than I'll admit, been reading tech news, and talking about it with other real engineers at work. Never once did I hear anything about anyone ever regarding NFTs highly.

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  • [–] 64 points 1 year ago

    Why do payment processors have the ability to control morality in our world? Easily the definition of a monopoly. Absolutely insane.

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  • [–] 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    You can't control what we jack off to, Mastercard.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    What about everyone buy a share of thier stock. Then sue thier board for ignoring thier fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Turning down business is bad for revenue... and the games that got removed probably made decent money all together.

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  • [–] 52 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I remember during world's a couple of years ago, the stream chat was shouting "TY MASTERCARD" everytime their ads came up

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  • [–] 47 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    I'm in Europe and following the news of the MasterCard and Visa censorship I activelly went looking for how else could I pay for things online without using their networks, and as it turns out there are plenty of solutions supported by both Steam and GOG which I was just ignoring before because they just looked as lots of "weirdly named" unrecognized payment options.

    I'm now using those in my purchases and so far they actually look more convenient than the Visa/MasterCard (for example, with iDEA which is Dutch, I can literally pay from my mobile phone banking app by just taking a picture of a QR-Code on my screen). The problem in Europe is just there being lots of local solutions and no EU-wide one yet, though I'm lucky because I have bank accounts in different countries (having lived in several countries in Europe) so I have access to many options.

    Keep in mind that outside Britain, the rest of Europe have long had their own debit card withdrawal and payment networks and not relied on Visa/MasterCard (to me Britain was, frankly, weird in that it relies on mainly VISA Debit and had no local payment solution, probably explained by lack of political will in the UK for that: most such payment networks in Europe were born out of political pressure on banks to come up with a standard and sometimes were even started as state-owned companies) so a lot of these local online payment options are extensions of those existing networks, which is probably why trying come up with an single integrated cross-border payment processor has been slow going.

    That said, thanks to it having been mandated at the EU level, bank transfers are nowadays fully cross-border integrated and you can transfer money between accounts anywhere in EU with the same ease and for the same cost you can for local accounts (the banks really resisted that, by the way, as it took away most of their "international transfers" profits) so we're probably not far from a single EU-wide payment processor (or at least EU-wide account support on existing solutions).

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (9 children)

    The banking sector is very competitive in the UK compared to pretty much any other country, so dodgy behaviour from banks/payment processors wasn't very frequent.

    More recently, however, just like the EU, the UK is working on their own system right now. The EU doesn't have a unified payment processing system either, just a patchwork of different ones.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    I lived in the UK and worked in the Finance Industry there, as well as in a couple of other countries in Europe, and the idea that the UK banking sector is "very competitive [...] compared to pretty much any other country" or there not being frequent dodgy behaviours from banks/payment processors is hilariously.

    Just look at how a physical payment with one's debit card (which goes directly to the bank account) can trigger oversized "uncovered overdraft fees" rather than just deny the payment if there are not enough funds in the account for that card like in countries like Portugal and The Netherlands: I literally dumped the first bank I had in the UK when I moved there from The Netherlands exactly because they charged me £30 overdraft fees on a payment ON A DEBIT CARD because my current account which was directly linked to it had £5 less than the amount I was trying to pay (plenty of money on the savings account though), rather than the payment attempt being rejected, even though when I first got that account I explicitly enquired about it I was told payments attempts on that card without enough funds would be rejected.

    UK banking is riddled with insane fees for every little possible thing imaginable (especially user mistakes), from presential payments where the account doesn't have enough funds (where instead of the payment being denied they charge you money) to things like getting a paper bank statement from the bank and those fees are invariably many times more than the actual cost for the bank of it - "competition" between banks in the UK is purelly slimy "introductory rates" that change after a year or two for highly visibly stuff whilst everything that's standard with the account anywhere else costs extra in the UK and every customer mistake results in a punitive charge.

    Even in my homeland of Portugal, where banking is pretty much a cartel where all the big institutions regularly buy politicians from both main parties with non-executive board memberships and gold-plated consulting gigs (in all fairness, in the UK it's the same), banking is nowhere as slimy and abusive as in Britain.

    I get the impression you never had a bank account anywhere else if you think banking in the UK is "very competitive" and that the frequency of "dodgy behaviours" is low there, because comparativelly with where I lived and banked elsewhere in Europe, retail banking in the UK is a totally disgraceful leech-filled swamp.

    Or maybe it's me having "lived a blessed life" in terms of my banking because I've only ever lived and banked in Europe.

    As for the rest, Europe doesn't have a unified payment processing system but pretty much each country in it has one, whilst in the UK there is no such thing at all and instead mainly Visa is used. As for they're "working on it", in my personal experience in Britain it means nothing at all because all the cunts in leadership positions in both Government and Finance over there are liars who regularly get away with it: going with "it ain't happenning until it actually happens" when it comes to the promises of those people is the most successful posture over there if you're not an insider by far.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    So much text here, and yet so incorrect. Little fees? Lol, so uninformed. The amount of little fees for things you get charged for by banks pretty much anywhere outside of the UK is pretty crazy.

    Then topped off with a "they're working on it? Well I say they're not!!!" lmao

    At least try to make your post believable if you're going to lie.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    So you don't actually have any personal experience of banking anywhere else than Britain and your "even bankings is great in Great Britain" statements are nothing more than nationalistic bollocks.

    Cheers for confirming my earlier impression.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    I've banked in South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Ireland, and the UK. More if you include using British or Polish bank accounts in other countries. The banking sector in the UK is by far and away the most competitive of all those places. Fees are basically non-existent.

    You think it's nationalist to say the UK has a competitive banking sector? Lmao you are crazy. I think you're projecting there.

    I caught you blatantly lying. £30 fee for being overdrawn? That's way above the legal limit. It literally couldn't have happened. The most you will have been charged for being £5 overdrawn is the amount overdrawn with a 40% APR, for the amount of days overdrawn.

    I.e. if you were overdrawn by £5, then didn't move £5 back into your account by the end of the day, you would've been charged (5*1.4)/365=£0.02

    I tell you that in fact, just like the EU, a new payment processing system is being created, and you go straight into denialism and pretend it's not happening.

    Take your weirdly-placed xenophobia out of here. I don't know why you're lying over something so inconsequential.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Sure mate, banking in Britain is the Greatest In The World, you being a Briton rushing to claim Britain's banking sectors is the most competitive "compared to pretty much any other country" is not at all driven by "love of the Fatherland".

    Oh, and by the way, check the law on overdraft fees a decade and a half ago before you call others liars.

    En zeker, het is absoluut gelovelijk dat je in Nederlands en Zuid-Afrika gewoont en bankiered heben.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    You're getting really weird with your whole nationalism/xenophobia angle on this.

    The banking sector in the UK is very competitive. I have no idea why that ruffles your feathers so much, why you keep lying, or what your weird obsession with nationality is.

    I don't know why you find it unbelievable. I was a citizen of South Africa. Do you think South Africa isn't real or something? In addition to the xenophobia and misinformation you're coming across as one of those redditors who argues for the sake of arguing.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [+] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago

    Ah ah ah boost that shit.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago* (12 children)

    Stuff like this is going to make people mostly pay in cash and buy gift cards as needed. I already started buying most of my things in person anyway just to avoid paying for shipping. I'm seriously considering only buying steam games with gift cards I buy at the store and avoiding using my card as much as possible.

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  • [+] -9 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Credit cards should be illegal they are tools of Molloch and everyone loses at least a little from their usage. Credit card payment charges should be itemized on the bill of any purchase and also rewards should be considered taxable income over 1000$/year

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    they are tools of Molloch

    dafuq

    Credit card payment charges should be itemized on the bill of any purchase and also rewards should be considered taxable income over 1000$/year

    I feel like we came to the same conclusions for very different reasons....

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (7 children)

    molloch is the personnified logic of someone doing something selfish for their personnal gain, but when everyone does it, everybody loses. In this case the belief that one can churn rewards and come out on top with using a credit card but the result is that ALL prices are jacked by 3%, nullifying any apparent rewards, at best you can claw back a little bit of this corporate tax. But here's the kicker, if you don't have a credit card, the price is also jacked, because credit card company do not allow passing the fee to end customer. So non-credit card user, still pay the 3% tax, it just gets pocketed by the vendor. I cannot overstate how evil credit card company are. When I am Earth dictator, all credit card employees will spend time getting acquainted with a brick wall

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    But here's the kicker, if you don't have a credit card, the price is also jacked, because credit card company do not allow passing the fee to end customer.

    Tell that to every business that charges a 3% service fee on all card payments, because that's happening whether or not they allow it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I've never seen a place that charges you a fee only if you pay with a credit card. The credit card company rules say you can't do that and they'll threaten you vendor status the same way they threatened Valve and Itch.io.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    molloch is the personnified logic of someone doing something selfish for their personnal gain, but when everyone does it, everybody loses

    uh huh. but why? why express it in biblical fluffery, when it's faster (and clearer) to just say the greedy selfish bastards?

    When I am Earth dictator, all credit card employees will spend time getting acquainted with a brick wall

    if it means the greedies get shot before me I can accept this.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Everyone is selfish, molloch isn't real,
    it's a thinking pattern that everyone is subject to
    my friends admitted to using credit cards because
    "at least they get rewards"
    by personifying the behaviour pattern
    you can demonize it
    without calling your friends "greedy selfish bastards"
    It is much easier to see it and understanding
    that way than if you're being attacked
    and then become defensive about it

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago*

    You do understand that since vendors are not allowed
    on risk of credit excommunication, pass the transaction fee to the vendor
    It forces the vendor to put that fee in the base price.
    Everyone pays the transaction fee
    But what if you pay debit ?
    you don't even get cashback rewards
    but you STILL pay that increased price,
    On everything you buy
    everyone without a credit card still pays a 3% tax

    Credit cards are profoundly immoral

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    looking forward to taler becoming a thing

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    rule34 MasterCard. it's the only way.

    make it a bottom dollar bitch.

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  • Pretty pathetic that corporations are even as smart as the ferengi.

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  • i have it on good historical authority that the nazis loved mastercard

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    How well are Visa Debit or Mastercard Debit as an alternative for paying online?

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That wouldn't make any meaningful impact. They still get the processing fees from the vendor.

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