all-knight-party

I like that, suddenly is sudden to the listener, all of a sudden is surprising to the story’s characters, and makes the listener anticipate that surprise without being able to warn them about it

My cats simply act like it’s not happening, no concept of what’s going on. Or any of Marvin Gaye’s other albums for that matter.

Personally I’m on chrome on mobile, so when I’m on that page I can just hit the star up to the right of the web address and it will bookmark it.

I actually set it as my homepage so I can just hit the home button and it takes me there, if you’re also on chrome you should be able to tap the little box icon up there that shows how many tabs you have open, then hit the three dots icon and go to settings, then tap homepage and you can paste in the link

For me, it’s this link: https://fedia.io/sub/threads/newest

This filters it by only my subscribed magazines, and then sorts them by newest

Personally I ended up bookmarking the newest page and just using that

Periphery’s “Periphery II: This Time It’s Personal”

Big ups for Everything You’ve Come to Expect

When the penny drops it means that someone realizes something that had been happening to/around them, while they were unaware.

Chrono Trigger, of course. Some legendary tracks in there that transcend their limitations. The Deadbolt OST, Katana ZERO’s OST. Nier Automata, Street Fighter V.

Oblivion and Skyrim as well. Really there are too many excellent game soundtracks to possibly list in a comment

I think there’s a strong possibility you’re correct, especially with that genre. When it comes to purely competitive games continual new content and adjustments keep the masses coming back, and providing those things long term with no monetization is a business suicidal idea, and I think that strong reasoning like that excuses a lot of the cynicism and bad faith behind MTX in those specific cases provided its still relatively fair.

I give you an A+ for an actual strong argument for MTX (in those and related cases)

Personally, yeah, I find it much less offensive if the extra purchases do not nag you in-game and their presence is not missed or noticed in terms of affecting balance.

For example, Middle Earth Shadow of War infamously let you buy Uruks. Having played the fuck out of that game I can confidently say the game was balanced such that you never needed to do that (apart from the end game grind, but the grind is the gameplay, so if you hit end game and didnt want to grind, you just didn’t wanna keep playing), but having it appear in the menus was jarring and the idea of buying an Uruk with real money juxtaposed next to the mechanical intent of obtaining Uruks through exploration, marking, stalking, and exploiting their weaknesses just stuck out like a cynical sore thumb.

If they put the Uruk purchases outside the game with no in-game ads and I played through Shadow of War and was like “man holy shit, my Uruks cannot keep up with the curve, this is insanely grindy” and I discovered that you could buy them and skip it, I’d say thats dastardly as well.

But the happy medium would be balancing it so it wasn’t necessary, but providing an external purchase to milk that revenue if they really still wanted to. That example is moot now anyway since they eventually removed the MTX Uruks entirely.

I know and understand the whole idea of maximizing artist hours for cosmetic DLC. It’s an understandable reason for it to exist.

However, the big thing about MTX to me is the way it changes my perception of the game and how it feels to interact with it. Playing games without in-game cash shops or MTX allows me to focus on the game itself and feel that what I’ve purchased is one cohesive piece that works in a singular purpose towards a goal of something enjoyable to play and rewarding to explore the content of.

Something like Prey 2016. My entire memory and experience of playing that game is absolutely nothing but the experience of the lore, atmosphere, gameplay, decisions, and the creativity of exploration. At no point was I ever passing over menu options designed to sell me more piecemeal content, I wasn’t wading through a reel of battle pass cosmetics, I wasn’t attempting to ignore little rectangular ads on the main menu asking me to check some skins out.

And again, I totally understand why those things are there and I’m not inherently against their existence, I enjoy many games where those experiences are a part. In the end, I just believe that being free of that stuff absolutely makes a game feel perceptibly better and more pure, more of a game and less of a transparently monetized product.

I also feel like there’s a sort of forbidden knowledge aspect to the whole “maximizing artist labor time for cosmetic MTX”. The best way for cosmetic MTX to happen is to utilize extra possible labor time that couldn’t be used elsewhere. I’d love to believe that any cosmetic MTX took no time or development from any other part of the game. I’d love to believe that no amazing visual design for armor or weapons was held because its more premium appearance would better fit a paid item than a free base game one.

But you’ll never know that for sure. There will always be that inkling of cynical doubt that the cool item got a price tag and the okay one ended up in the base game. That the visual artists are so burnt making constant art for base game and then MTX that their energy couldn’t be focused solely on the core experience. I can assume, I can take the company’s word for it, but I’ll never be able to cleanse my mind of the knowledge that it’s a separate kind of content from the base game.

It’s more of a “are good games with microtransactions good regardless of MTX or in spite of them?”

You can totally have a good game with MTX, but I think it always lowers the quality in some way, and they’re only good in spite. I don’t think OP is suggesting that no MTX guarantees a good game, but that a game should stand on its own merits and sell its whole experience instead of chopping itself up piecemeal

Ohhh, yeah, that is a sort of unique issue. Even then each one would have different vote and boost counts as well as unique comments sections. I think with a clever enough UI you could still work it out, though.

I don’t think there are technically dupes. You could have multiple communities across different instances all called “gaming”. But that wouldn’t mean they all share the same rules and posting formats, etc.

They’d basically be like different subreddits. So you could potentially create a multireddit, but not truly merging “duplicate” communities.

Third parties do it for me. Sadly, I wish Nintendo would release official ergonomic joy cons. Instead I must buy something Chinese with questionable QC, to get something fully featured compared to the feature-neutered but high-quality Hori licensed ones.

I’m supporting you from another angle, not contesting you, my argument goes against OP’s suggestion, and yeah I don’t think OP was being literal, but it’s a fun thought experiment

The other problem is that it’s a slippery slope. Theoretically whoever would be in control of essentially killing these people would be the ones who make the final decision on who those people actually are.

With that level of power corruption will be unavoidable and people that are not even actually flat earthers will die as well due to their deaths being convenient in unrelated ways for the group that decides which flat earthers get jettisoned into space. I don’t think anyone should have that power, humanity has more than proven by now that placing people into positions of that much power never works out squeaky clean.

Traditional game ownership already ended once after the popularization of digital downloads, but you’re right, it could end all over again in an even more dire way if cloud gaming gets popularized as well.

You display the problem with that system in your own comment through your wording of “should be”. Everyone knows what downvotes and upvotes should be, but due to their intent being unenforceable they just become “that person liked or didn’t like this for reasons beyond my knowledge and understanding”