Scourge

It’s a really great single player game, but it is a single player game now. They really botched the co-op. Fun game, but huge let down for my wife and I who loved playing Pikmin 3 together all the time. We had even been naïve enough to hope for online PvP, so the contrast was stark.

NFT’s expand digital property rights and allow direct ownership of digital assets in ways that, for example, buying a game on steam doesn’t. That being said, why people wanted to have direct digital ownership of a 2D image of a monkey in various clothing… that’s where I got lost. I can easily understand buying like… a text book, or a video game, music, your copy of microsoft office as an NFT, y’know, things that would actually have a re-sale value to it? But why the fuck would you want a monkey picture?

I cannot give a super accurate account as I actually haven’t played OW2 at all, but that may also be for the same reasons it’s on the bottom.

OW1, when purchased at release, promised to be a “10 year game” or something like that. I played that game a lot and loved it for a long time. I played it so much that at one point I was just under being a top 500 player in NA servers. I never bought more than the original game though. I never bought a gun or character skin because the default skins seemed fine, but I did collect a lot from just the lootbox system. The game had some balance problems, but it was overall good game design.

So, why did I, specifically me not others stop playing?

They entirely nuked team composition in the game. It may not have been a great idea to be a squad with 6 dps, but you could do it if you wanted to, and on a rare occasion it may have even been a good idea. Then they forced set roles, so a team could only have two tanks, two dps, and two healers or something like that. Suddenly the variety of diverse compositions and strategy got restricted to only a handful, and games became much more… I dunno how to put it. Mechanical? Boring? Identical? Gameplay took a turn for the worse.

Then there was the Hong Kong thing which was a huge thing for me. A pro player made a pro-hong kong statement during the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard fuckin took all the guys prize money and banned him from pro-play Then, when the community loudly demanded to amend this, they sent out a letter to the community boot-licking to China and telling the players to fuck off. I think the last time I seriously played was the day the letter came out. Maybe one or two games over the following years total.

Then there was the sexual harassment and workers rights violations from blizzard right after that.

Then they announced that OW2 was going to come out at like year 5 or 6 of the OW1 lifespan, cutting the lifespan of the game in half.

Then they announced the PVE game mode, which was the entire reason they were making OW2 in the first place wasn’t going to be out in OW2, and would never be made.

Then they announced OW2 was going to replace OW1 entirely. They said all the skins and stuff would transfer over, but then a bunch of people couldn’t get their skins transferred over, even if they had paid for them.

Then they changed the lootbox system so that if you did not pay for skins your chances of getting pretty much anything you wanted was gone. You either bought it or you didn’t get it. Probably a slap in the face to the people who already bought it in OW1, had it taken away and then had to either complain to customer service for days or weeks or just buy it again. I still remember forum posts of people losing hundreds of dollars worth of purchases shortly after release, never found out if this was ever resolved.

Then OW2 came out and it was pretty much just OW1 with a couple new characters. They also completely destroyed niche characters for reasons I do not understand. Biggest one I can recall was a tank called Hammond whose whole shtick was being a high mobility-low damage disruption based tank. They turned it into a mobility restricted low damage bullet sponge. They completely fucked characters that were outside “the meta” which made the already stagnant gameplay become even more rigid.

I didn’t even play the game and all this shit pretty much had me swear off buying or playing any other blizzard games. Even if OW2 is playable right now, which I have doubts about, you can pretty much guarantee the company is going to cannibalize the remaining lifespan of the game more and more until they just entirely shut down the servers.

Bots are like 60% of all posts and comments online. Most of the time you’re talking to bots designed to click-bait you. I’m probably talking to only bots right now. Just how it is.

Because I find it unsettling on a personal level when my wife and I, in the privacy of our home away from the world have a conversation where we make a joke about buying a banjo, and then every day for the next three weeks everywhere I go is flooded with targeted banjo ads. Verbal conversations, away from everything but our phones and computers.

Because I find it unsettling when I go to a site I have never gone to before and it greets me with my name and already knows where I live with the shipping details even though I clicked “I do not consent” on every data pop-up that I’ve seen in the past five years.

Because people are selling that data, my data, data about myself, and I get none of that profit and it was done without my consent or knowledge.

Because a company having my information should be something I need to personally allow, not something I need to ask and beg them not to obtain.

Because I can think of very few, if any, benevolent purposes of using that data, but there is a legion of malevolent reasons for it, and of the ones I have seen, all of them fall into this category.

All this being said, I should not need to have a reason. The onus should not rest with the individual to prove that they deserve undisturbed privacy, it should rest with the institutions that want this information; that it is a requirement to obtain this information for valid reasons and not frivolous ones, or ones rooted in greed or ideology. Like a search warrant for example.

Talking with you wouldn’t make anybody smart.

It’s weird seeing an entertainment company try to talk about real world events like they’re qualified to do so.

Seriously though, 4chan is definitely your best bet. If this annoys you when I say it because you don’t want to associate with 4chan, maybe you should realize that’s how you’re coming off already.

If you don’t like talking with average people, people who most likely do not share your viewpoints, you can always stop trying if you want. I’m sure it would be appreciated.

I still laugh when I see people complain about “getting cancelled”. There is no movement “cancelling” them, there is no unification or single group of people doing it. People stop associating with them because they come out as outwardly atrocious people. Coming out as pro-discrimination will and should make people think twice about associating with you.

There is an adage I remember about stuff like this - “If five people sit down at a table with a Nazi, there are six Nazis at the table”

Edit: I see I just commented on a fox clickbait that was posted by a bot. I am sad now.

It may just be that there are a lot more “leftist people” than you think there are. The world is not the U.S., and what is “left” in the U.S. is centre or even rightwing in a lot of other countries. To me, a complaint like this sounds more like “I want a far-right forum online”, in which case 4chan is probably your best bet.

How progression is going to work is a little confusing to me here though. I like farm-sim like stardew valley, I like base/home building, but I’m not sure where the “objective” part is going to be here. I like building a base / home - because I can then use it as a base / home while I go to do things. Improving the base and the interiors in order to unlock something you need to get to the next location, or boss, or blah blah.

Building a home for the sake of building a home would still be fun… until I’m happy with the home I’ve built. Then the game would die for me unless there are objectives to do, or challenges to overcome. Usually building a solid base may take a day or so of gameplay at most, but MMO are usually intended to have a long lifespan and an active community.

I don’t believe you genuinely believe anything you’re saying

So Jeffery Epstein and all the island goers are… left leaning then? And the entire catholic church is also… left leaning? And the constant onslaught of republican politicians in the U.S. being brought up on similar charges are also left leaning in disguise or something?

So if it isn’t sciencey to you, what would you say it is?

I would pretty much accept any technology that brings me closer to being a full android or lengthens my lifespan. Artificial brain, tracking tech, etc. I would be willing to accept a lot of compromise for eternal life and I feel this route is probably has the best chance of actually happening within my lifespan. Cyberhorror aspects aside, I figure once the lifespan increases, given an infinite period of time eventually the problems will sort itself out. If it gets too awful I assume I could probably maintain enough control to off myself at some point so it’s all good.

Also, I know the chances are still very small, fractions of a percent or whatever, but its non-zero and most other avenues seem to be just flat zero outright.

PS3 controller for sure. I used it the most growing up, it never really changed so I got super comfortable with it and always performed well with new models right away, it has the best feel in my hands as it fits perfectly into my palms, and my thumbs are more comfortable with the thumb sticks where they are compared to the X-box controller. PS4 controller was also good overall, but I liked the slender handles on the PS3 one more.

I was very disappointed with discovery. I was okay with season one, but I don’t even like the single long-story arc format to begin with. For me Star Trek is supposed to be episodic, science, philosophy, and ethics heavy content. Screen glare, constant massive explosions, over-the-top action sequences, and thin characters and plot just made it boring and indistinct from any other sci-fi I could watch. Stand alone, if it was not called star trek or in the star trek universe it would still be okay overall, but I showed up looking for Star Trek and got something that didn’t fit in at all with the Star Trek I knew and wanted more of.

Strange New Worlds has taken a big step in blending decent action into episodic content that feels like a back to the roots revival of the what the series was and should continue to be.

On a moderately related note, I fucking hated Picard after season 1 too, and season 1 was ruined (from what I’ve heard because I just didn’t watch anything after halfway through season 2) by taking away what was the final moments of a fan-favourite character.

For some reason I have a hard time understanding, new series and content in Star Trek seems to be following some… I guess I’ll call it “modernization of storytelling” where the structure and soul of previous content is being entirely overwritten with long drawn out epics that don’t challenge the viewer at all and rely on CG and SFX to fill in for the meat of the show. The meat of the show should be good writing, good character development, and yeah, to be a bit preachy about ethics. The story of the show should be the story of Starfleet, not the story of one shitty captain being special.