When I was an intern in IT in the olden days a manager once decided to send an apology gift to every single employee for his botched project. It was a switch from analog phones to VoIP with Skype that really wasn’t so complicated but left a bunch of people without working phones for days. The gift? A snickers bar in a big paper bag with a sticker on it. I had to put three hundred stickers on those bags and then hand them to people who were very confused to find a tiny snickers in them. Now they told me to hand it out with a smile and tell them we’re really sorry but I’d hand them out with my best I’d-really-rather-be-somewhere-else-face and say “trust me, nobody finds this more stupid than me.”

Same here when it comes to food/taste. I criticised vegan mortadella(mostly water and oil) at some point and people absolutely lost it. Got some angry DMs by vegans explaining the concept of enjoyment to me. Not doing that again.

Same as oil companies claiming they care about going green now after denying the mere existence of climate change tooth and nail for decades. Apple even already confirmed that they’ll weasle their way out of the EU law for replacable phone batteries with the waterproof loophole.

When I was in 7th grade I was given the honor of “paper duty”. The fuck is that you ask? Well, our school was giving out free paper-anything (think notebooks, folders, anything a kid could need to write stuff for school) to every student because no student should suffer from his poor family background and a lack of writing utensils. Fantastic concept if you ask me but it had an issue back then. The unlimited power of the paper kid. As such your job would be to hand out paperproducts to those who needed them for the entire school year. How this hasn’t been abused until shithead teenage me came along is a mystery to me. I took a lot and I handed it out to friends, filled up a closet at home and would slip notebooks to kids for personal favors. The corruption was absolute. If I liked you a simple nod would be enough to get some juicy paper ware. If I didn’t care about you, you’d have to show me your full old notebook to get a new one as was protocol. If I didn’t like you I’d give you some anyway but not before breaking your balls for a bit. I was drunk on paper power and loving every second of it. In hindsight I feel very bad about abusing a social system intended to help kids like myself who didn’t have wealthy parents but with 13, growing up poor as fuck I’d take everything I could get. Anyway, at the end of the school year they noticed how many supplies had vanished despite no increase in students but they couldn’t tell who had taken more because guess who had the responsibility to fill up the paper closet with new paper from the unsupervised storage room? They just handed us all the keys and let us do our thing. My thing happened to be paper embezzlement. End of the story was an overhaul of the paper duty concept. From that year onwards it was done in teams of 2 who had to promise not to take anything and keep a detailed inventory spreadsheet that was checked once a month. Additionally only the teacher had the key to the storage room. The moral of the story is that no 13 year old should wield that much raw power.

There are plenty of games like this from the last few years. Elden Ring, Zelda, TLOU2, GoW2 just to name some AAA titles. Many indie games too. It just got a bit more annoying to filter out the cash grabs.

I really don’t think they’ll replace the team nor do I think that’s the cause anyway. This patch was rushed for the season which was rushed to grab cash. Aggressive monetization remains the most toxic factor in game development and it usually comes from upper management rather than your hands on developers.

There were none before the patch two days ago and it wasn’t in the patch notes so they just fixed an accidental change there.

How much are we talking here? If it’s a shitfuckton I’m pretty sure it would get warmer as ice and land mass would get covered by less reflective water and more water vapor would accumulate in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. Also Kevin Costner would be out there doing his shenanigans trying to find some land so we just generally want to avoid this whole scenario because the man is too old for this shit at this point.

My parents would watch a channel that had little pro Russia news segments thrown into commercials. The damage this constant little poking with misinformation does is not easily undone. They didn’t even notice how their opinion was formed by those few lines in-between their favorite shows. Then suddenly they had issues with their satellite dish and when I fixed it somehow, for some totally unknown reason that channel was no longer there. Woops. They found other shows to watch and don’t support the war anymore.

At least in 3 you could choose to play solo which was way less laggy than this open world mess and most important of all you could fucking pause the game. Being in a nightmare dungeon with one of a throusand affixes that force you to move at all times or you die by some shit that’s constantly chasing you and then the door bell rings is great. Just great.

Challenging content isn’t a big part of arpgs because when you look closer at it you realize that the gameplay really isn’t cut out for it. It’s not like a souls game where you dodge and carefully time your attacks. They’re not balanced for this at all. If you play on a difficulty that would be considered challenging this game kinda falls apart. As a barbarian there’s no elegant way of dealing with elite range mobs that drop multiple effects on the ground and then shoot you. You deal with them by having gear good enough to just blast through them. If you actually have to dodge all those things it gets incredibly clunky and frustrating. Tldr; the gear grind is all they have.

In the year 2100 or 2200 the internet as we know it may have been superceded by methodologies we can’t even comprehend right now.

It’s gonna be fax machines again, isn’t it?