RTS games are currently in a big slump (nobody’s really making them, and the player base on the ones that exist has seriously dried up) because most people only like half the game.

The people who love the micro end up going to MOBAs like League or Smite. The people who love the macro end up going to 4X/Grand Strategy like Stellaris or Crusader Kings. The market of people who equally enjoy both aspects is pretty small. Like, I’ll never buy a bag of Chex mix again, now that I know I can get a whole bag of just rye chips.

To make the scene even more anemic, the skill cap right now is so high. I know several people (including me) who tried to get into Starcraft 2, only for their first random opponent to be a person with 20,000 APM who thinks a match lasting longer than two and a half minutes is a slog. It’s not even possible to learn from your mistakes when you get stomped that hard, that fast. But the single-player part does nothing to prepare you (other than maybe letting you figure out what the buttons do), and it’s going to happen just about every time (because the only people still playing are the people who have been playing for a decade or more).

I did report it. The problem is many of these arguments come clothed in the fabric of politeness.

Yup. And Beehaw is already doing the thing I predicted they’d do back during the Reddit blackouts: They allow polite genocide endorsements but warn/suspend/ban people who tell those people to fuck themselves because we’re not “being nice”. Shocked Pikachu when Beehaw ends up being no different from shit-just-works.

I was just commenting on that I don’t think that aggression against -lets call them- consevatives, neo-Nazi’s, right wingers, whatver, works or is wanted

I’ve been nice to them and trying to politely educate them for over 20 years now, since W was in office. I’ve convinced a grand total of 2, and in the meantime, 30 million worse ones have arisen.

Fuck them. I’m done assuming they only hate me because they’re uneducated. They hate me because they get off on hate, and all the education in the fucking world doesn’t matter to them. So I treat them like scum, and their arguments like jokes, because they are.

Don’t like it? Too bad. Cry more, salty.

You must not be that interested in staying in contact with your family if you’re only willing to use one, specific way to do it and simply refuse to use any other method.

I’d be furious with any company if they pulled that sort of shit with a product I owned.

On the other hand, feature parity means that the full potential of the X because everything also has to run on the S. So all the things that the X can do that the S can’t will, probably, not be used much, if at all, going forward, just to avoid this kind of hassle.

Great deal for people who bought the S, but sucks shit for people who paid a couple hundred bucks more for the X, for features that simply won’t be utilized.

How about texting? Does texting work?

Amazon has become an expensive version of Wish.com.

If North Korea wants us to know something different, they could tell us themselves. Or, even better, let the people talk to foreign journalists without handlers and threats of repercussions.

Otherwise, we’re forced to wonder about how weird it is that it seems like every news organization in the world is dead-set on spreading lies about this one, tiny, geopolitically insignificant country (and no, being able to launch toy rockets into the ocean once every couple of years does not make them geopolitically significant). Like, why did the BBC and RFA and Reuters and the AP and Al Jazeera all get together in a dark, smoky room and cook up a conspiracy to defame North Korea, of all countries? Why not, say, Thailand, or Malaysia, or Morocco, or something?

We’ll make a deal.

Our schools will teach more about the horrors of the atomic bomb, and their schools will teach more about the horrors of Unit 731. I think that’s a fair trade.

This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How’s that?

but D4 just doesn’t scratch that right itch for me at the moment.

Try Grim Dawn. The graphics are mildly dated, but it’s my favorite entry in the ARPG genre. Tons of replayability.

Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

Because most of us consider the idea that Hillary Clinton is a world-class assassin who never leaves a shred of evidence behind to be a hilarious and absurd concept.

I want this to get ported to PC so bad.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

after around five generations or so God would have to appear and kill a bunch of people once again, because apperently your decendants don’t belive in him anymore.

Well, yeah. Dude vanishes for a thousand years, and I’m supposed to believe the stories of the people who did see his work (people who all died before my most distant tracable ancestor was even born) that were written down by obvious agenda-posters? Seriously?

The quickest way to get more believers is just to show up and do a party trick every once in a while, but for some reason, God hasn’t done anything public and indisputable since cameras were invented. Weird for a guy who wants the whole world to worship him. All he’d have to do is just have a booming voice, audible everywhere on the planet, say “By the way, I’m God, I exist, and [insert holy book] is the correct one, so ya’ll better get on that.” Only the hardcore contrarians would still be non-believers.

I hate how playing in peaceful locks you out of crafting a bunch of very useful items. Since bone chips and slime balls only come from monsters, I can’t make my plants grow big and pretty with bone meal or make a lead rope for my horse. I’m sure there are other examples, but those are the two I care about the most, lol.

Getting access to all the weapon skills is so much faster, which makes trying out new builds a thousand times easier.

Not having to find and speak to the quest giver before I can do the quest is great. I like just having to get into their radius without having to track them down before and after.

I’m a big explorer, so I really appreciate the rewards for exploring the maps (and the compass pointing me towards the things I missed).

The jumping puzzles are amazing.

The free mount not being a boring-ass horse is pretty cool. Mounts having different abilities is also cool. Not having to spend 120 real days upgrading your mounts is really nice.

Getting experience from harvesting and crafting. Not having to spend real-time months researching things to craft them.

Underwater exploration. Yeah, underwater combat is kind of a pain, but it’s still cool to have the option.

The directed story mode complete with boss fights in instances that can be done solo.

Classes are all totally different from each other; there are no “meta” skills for a specific role no matter what class you’re playing (eg, unstable wall, aggressive warhorn).

Enough skill points in the game to learn every skill and every specialization, along with the ability to switch builds on the fly just whenever (without having to go back to a shrine and pay to do it).

I’m not sure how I feel about having a centralized auction house. A lot of my endgame in ESO was shopping and flipping valuable things from one trader to another, but I have to admit it’s really handy to just be able to go buy a bunch of crafting materials in any city for the lowest available price.

Like, I could just keep going; there are so many things, both little and big, that I love about GW2. But for some reason, I just can’t get into it. Maybe it’s that it levels me up so fast that I don’t get to really enjoy the view and learn the class. Maybe it’s because the elite specializations change the class so dramatically that most of what I did learn during leveling is immediately obsolete at 80. Maybe it’s because the combat feels kind of clunky due to being a weird hybrid of action combat and tab targeting. Maybe it’s how complicated the buff system is, that I can’t really wrap my brain around all the different boons and when I need them. None of those are really big deals, just quirks of the game that make it unique, like all games have. But it’s not doing the same thing that ESO did for me.

I left right before High Isle came out, but nothing I’ve tried since has really caught my attention the same way. Even GW2, as awesome as it is, and as many QoL features it has that I deeply missed in ESO, just… isn’t the same.

Did they ever get the Champion Points re-worked into something that doesn’t suck? I hate the way the green constellations worked, particularly; whose idea was it to say “Nobody harvests, chest-hunts, fishes, and searches for crafting recipes at the same time, so obviously it’s silly to let players equip all those bonuses at once”??

Even if not, I think I might drop Netflix and re-up my subscription. If just to remind me why I left, maybe?