🤦‍♀️

The entire thing is completely off topic and doesn’t even sort of make any point you tried to make anywhere in the thread.

Play isn’t relevant in any way to the discussion.

You understand the difference between fiction and pretending fiction is reality?

I like difficulty, and I love stealth, but I really, really don’t enjoy insta-fail stealth. Having the enemy react and start hunting you is half the fun.

If the alternative is corporations violating privacy even more? Absolutely.

The absolute maximum information it’s legal for corporations should be a dozen orders of magnitude less than they do right now, and asking a single user for an ID without a clear, bulletproof cause should be an instant corporate death penalty with every bit of data they’ve ever collected erased.

Privacy is a fundamental right and you shouldn’t be allowed to operate anywhere if you don’t respect it absolutely.

I played like 900 hours of D1 with the same or mostly the same gear because shooting stuff in the face felt better than anything else I’ve ever played.

The actual gunplay is really good. It’s just killed by all the other shit.

Usually “expensive money” means that it’s hard to borrow.

“Devalued” refers to purchasing power. “How much food will $1 buy me?”

They’re describing different things. In terms of the economic relationships that result in the current scenario, I’m not even going to try. Ignoring that we don’t really know and a lot of traditional economics rely on the assumption that actors are rational (which we now know is absurd), I’m far from an expert in macro-economic theory. Systems are complicated.

I could pop cabal heads with [insert high impact scout, bonus if firefly] for days. Hell, I pretty much did on D1. Then D2, in addition to all the other bad design stuff to satisfy live service, also decided they wanted to try to dictate your gun choice in certain game modes with all the bullshit seasonal modifiers on untouchable enemies without specific perks.

All I want to do is run strikes on the basic races by myself. But they can’t milk me for money like that.

Yeah, autocorrect is bad enough without the extra emphasis on it with swipe.

Because the gunplay is really good. I never had a shred of interest in the story.

I don’t still play because the level and enemy design tanked when they went into expansion treadmill mode, but “a path forward” was never something I cared even a little bit about. “The path forward” is what killed my fun.

Use smart lights. Have the light gradually ramp up intensity until it peaks a few minutes before your alarm goes off.

Also make sure you’re going to bed with enough time to fall asleep and get a full night’s sleep consistently.

Pictures.

Which are automatically downloaded by every active user of the chat on every individual client, and many people do at least tens per day.

Google’s proprietary “RCS” and iMessage are the same thing. They’re proprietary apps that work on their OS and are useless for intercommunication.

Their proprietary extensions are for the same reason Apple took forever to implement it.

RCS still sucks.

They’ve been full on unstable nonsense since the day Ryzen dropped.

They immediately started playing games with their metric to make Intel win.

Take this with a grain of salt, because I haven’t played in years, and am only vaguely aware of others playing it.

But my understanding is that you have ads, then get finite lives per day, which you can buy with actual money, and you can buy powerups with money, and (without seeing the code to verify) over time they get you to the point where most of the levels are generated to be either impossible without powerups or you have to get really lucky with how the level plays out to succeed without powerups. I know someone who gets like 5-10 minutes a day (with ads, of course) of gameplay without spending money.

Also candy crush at least is exploitive as absolute fuck. It starts out playable to make you an addict, but it’s tuned very carefully to become as unplayable as possible without just shoveling money at them.

I went in expecting a space-skyrim with typical Bethesda jank, and that’s exactly what we got

I won’t say I disliked it. There was a lot of stuff I liked, and the gunplay was substantially less painful than fallout. But the thing with Skyrim that makes it easy to get hooked for me is the fact that from wherever I am, I can just wander, and I’ll find cool places to go. I’ll find a cave to wander down that goes through more than one civilization before letting me out somewhere different, that I can also just pick a direction and wander.

There’s nothing really in Starfield that does that. I still really liked a lot about it, and some of the city stuff pushes into feeling immersive-sim-like. But I would have preferred less solar systems, but ones that were (or had been) more fully populated by humans and felt like you were really exploring each world instead of a small area.

It’s still worth playing, and the base is potentially there for some really cool total conversion type mods. But it doesn’t really do the open world feeling that Bethesda was one of the few who consistently did really well.

Many of the kids affected have no access to another device. The whole reason schools supply hardware now is because it’s needed to access their educational materials, and it’s massively inequitable to only have students who have money able to develop their skills at home.

That’s fine.

But third parties should still be heavily limited on the information they can gather from just class work usage.