I mean also it just seems like a case of normalization. You start out with slow meaningless MTX then you move it more and more. Hell its a bit odd since I’m glad there was some outrage over the MTX in this game but as you said its most likely due to the increase to $70 usd which is a slap in the face to deal with MTX in a fucking single player game but Capcom is one of the shittiest companies when it comes to dumb/pointless MTX.

Monster Hunter, Devil may cry, Dead Rising, and Resident Evil all have this kind of shit with very little peeps about it. So you basically hit the nail on the head on this on why there was such a big outrage this time around. Also I’m really surprised fucking Street Fighter doesn’t, the literal poster child of pointless/odd additions which in a funny way has actually only gotten better in the digital age. I’m not a big fighting game fan but season passes have sort of solved having so many fucking editions of a single game. Like holy shit there were 5 fucking versions of Street Fighter 2 in a span of 3 years. 3 versions of SF3 in 3 years.

Edit: marked by bold, I was tired when writing this comment and seems I just forgot to finish my full thought before posting.

I mean sort of. While I get what you are saying but it seems a bit weird, as long as the person isn’t being fired for being part of a protected class I see no issue with a company trying to distance themselves from someone who function is to be a “Brand Mascot” where what they say will be associated with the company hiring them. Fame is a rather fickled thing and reputation sort of plays into the worth of a “celebrity”, like sure behind closed doors these asshats can be as vile and shitty as they want to be but the second they are exposed in the public, the public’s desire to see said person probably drops dramatically since they are isolating a section(s) of the audience who will be wanting to watch something with them in it.

Hell a decent example would be Ellen Degeneres, after it came out publicly that she was a bit of a cunt to her workers. The rating for her show dropped quite a bit (apparently about 40%) after the backlash leading to many of her side shows getting canned and her not getting renewed for a new season for her talk show. At the end of the day its just a big popularity contest where everyone is vying for people’s attention in an already saturated market.

I mean the only reason smallpox was wiped from this earth is because it took 20 years of dedication by the WHO to fully wipe it out.

The top 10 countries with measels cases as per the CDC are

1. Yemen
2. India *
3. Kazakhstan
4. Ethiopia
5. Russian Federation
6. Pakistan
7. Kyrgyzstan
8. Democratic Republic of the Congo
9. Iraq
10. Azerbaijan

The top 10 is based on data from the dates of June 2023 - November 2023. Each one of these are over 3k cases and the top one being at 23k and #2 being 13k.

So yes, some parts of the world has problem with Measles and unless we dedicate the time to fully eradicate it, it will never truly be gone. The antivax nonsense in the first world countries will only make this worse. Can’t wait for the fucking return of Polio (however polio may be the next disease eradicated since its currently only in 2 countries and there were 6 reported cases in 2021) or TB

Note: WHO classifies all suspected measles cases reported from India as measles clinically compatible if a specimen was not collected as per the algorithm for classification of suspected measles in the WHO VPD Surveillance Standards. Thus numbers might be different between what WHO reports and what India reports.

No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.

I mean couldn’t they just still make their own “class base” shooter in S&box without the TF2 IP involved? So you get the enjoyment of those tropes while not “stepping on the toes” of Valve and out compete the game.

Edit: hell it would even let them try new and different things with the formula. Change up the look of the game maybe even bring it closer to the classic TF look.

Clearly following the religious text.

Deuteronomy 22:28–29

28 If a man encounters a young woman, a virgin who is not engaged, takes hold of her and rapes her, and they are discovered, 29 the man who raped her is to give the young woman’s father fifty silver shekels, and she will become his wife because he violated her. He cannot divorce her as long as he lives.

While not the same, it sort of catch the drift. Like people can worship whatever religion they want but Jesus this section of the bible is horrific and sort of highlight women as mere property (one of the countless examples in the bible), which should be expected coming from that time period but crazy this kind of thing is still expected to be followed unquestioned.

but but we saved them from the evil doctors and liberals when they were in the womb, they should be thanking us.

I think it is a mixed bag. Maybe there are people who are god damn idiots especially looking at these parents trying to deny “proven” vaccines, this isn’t a comment on the covid vaccines, I’m vaxxed and had the most recent booster but I can at least in a way understand people’s fear around it. I think Covid was able to slip on by because “2% VeRy SmAlL NuMbEr, StOp BeInG CoWaRdS!” maybe I’m wrong and this whole thing was a trial run for the next super bug that will come out in the coming decade but I think a disease with a mortality rate comparable to the black death (30-60%) with a spreadability of covid though may lead to people taking it slightly more seriously. There will be obvious exceptions, hell I imagine many industrial leaders will still push the front line staff saying its “fake news” so they keep making profit while not caring about their people. Then again a disease with that kind of mortality rate would probably collapse modern society for better or worse at the bare minimum greatly reform it, the after effects of black death are fascinating read.

once we have gotten past the ethical quandaries and doing it the right way. It would be cool to just synthesize voices for npcs and PC from a list of “character types” and maybe add accents for the main PC. So all games can have voiced audio (could be cool if it can also work in a retroactive way, like play a classic CRPG but have fully voiced characters would be pretty neat), which can be a mixed bag in modern day since realistically there is a budget and voice acting can take a ton of money if done right. So it means we as gamer if we can mod in new quests, we can use such system to truly expand thee game. Like I love real VA performances so I can see this as a “stopgap” so you can get the main questline done and many of the “good” side quests done but you can use this AI trained voice for the more smaller tasks that may not get as much love or as I said use it for modding.

In some ways I agree, people love to tear each other down but one of their examples is around “Genshin Impact players”, Like cool you can enjoy those games but god damn them getting popular is fucking scary to me as a gamer since it means Gatcha gaming is coming to the west and I’m sorry to all you Genshin impact player but those mechanics are some of the most cancerous things in modern gaming. The huge gambling aspects, paying for power, just the constant daily grinds, etc. The same is said for sports titles and other things. So people use it as a “Har har I feel I’m better than you” but I think there is a fear of such monetization catching on. We as gamers should be fighting against these things because we are becoming nothing but a god damn piggy bank for these large gaming corporations, who are trying to make us gamblers. Its honestly the reason why I try to stick with the PC market and indie games since the biggest problem area is the AAA scene since they are trying to extract the most amount of wealth. I want a developer to succeed and I think there is a fair place for monetization in the gaming scene but right now a ton of devs (realistically publishers) don’t respect players and their money.

I mean even from a core concept, melee with big animations just seems like an odd way to go for that style of game as you point out with multiple enemies. Also its brain dead simple unless they have changed it where you just go left, right, left, right. So difficulty setting basically just goes down to how tanky is this enemy (which is a pretty common way to artificially inflate a game’s difficulty).

He was certainly above that. Hell his story “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” also known as “White Ape”. Is literally a book about the “one drop rule” to the point its actually funny because of how absurd it comes off as. Its so insanely racist, it fucking becomes funny based on the character’s reaction. Its not a great short story but basically he find out his great great great great grandmother was a “white ape” (which is not human per say but lets read between the lines since the white apes come from the congo region), his response to this news was pouring gasoline on himself and burning himself alive. Like yes its fiction but the fact he made a fucking short story where the focal point is discovering that you are mixed race and learning that is so mind breaking, death was the only logical option is god damn hilarious.

I mean even federal holidays don’t help. At least for the lower classes since businesses are not forced to follow said holidays. It may be good for federal/government workers but from the private sector it will mean very little.

Focus 2

meshify 2

Pop Air

Enthoo Pro 2

Evolv Shift 2 Air

Eclipse p400

Like these aren’t the “boring cases” you are referring to but they are black boxes with at least decent airflow since those boring HP,Dell, and other big system integrator use are pretty horrid for cpus/gpus gamers actually use. That was just from a cursory look of 2 case manufacturers .

I mean games that finally make use of SSD speeds sure but most people have games before SSDs were standardized. Hell most people’s libraries are filled with those. Hell you don’t even need NVME drives since most games never make use of them. Until games start actually using direct storage the difference between sata and NVME are very minor for games at least.

I have a 6TB one and yes mostly for single player games since loading screens typically aren’t that big of a deal. OS always goes on your best drive and you know you can have multiple drives in a singular pc since you are sort of implying you can only have 1 drive.

You know ignoring your comment that the war has been going on for 3 years. Its only been a year and halfish maybe closing into 2 years. Its laughable that a country like Ukraine whom’s military budget before this was several fractions of Russia’s is able to hold them back in open fucking warfare. I know you are gonna say whatabout Vietnam or “War on Terror” but those were insurgencies (ignoring the ethics of the US being in those wars since really we shouldn’t have been) the US and Nato trying to capture territory typically goes smoothly as we seen in the Gulf War and Desert Storm basically being called the 100 hour land war

Also even the last time there were travel bans, we just got it from Europe, it was too late to contain it in china.

While yes that is the level headed answer but gamers aren’t level headed. People associate people with their game choices with the decisions of the developers/publishers all the time. We see this with people who do Gacha, COD, Etc. Where people’s hatred is for these people for supporting said things. The “true gamers” see most mobile gamers as gamblers and children because of the industry/monetization around it.

Sure there is a ton of elitism in gaming but are we going to ignore mobile games are the birthplace of the shit monetization we see in modern AAA gaming. There is a reason why sports games and mobile games were the only gaming related things Konami wanted to do for the longest time (now they are just cashing in on lazy ports). Low expenses, high turnout! Like there are a likely a ton of great games on mobile phones but we can’t ignore the market is filled with glorified slot machines. Many mobile gamers have been pushing for this unfortunately.