I play FFXIV. I’ll break it down by expansions, but it’s the one that didn’t follow the general downwards trend so much.

1.0 - trash. They couldn’t figure out how to work together. One guy spends forever making the best looking water wheel ever, in the background, that you never interact with. It’s too graphically intensive, and flows the wrong way from the water. It doesn’t match the building it’s attached to. Meanwhile, they forget to add roads towards main cities. It’s an unplayable mess. It’s literally unplayable, as they killed it off to replace it with:

2.0, A Realm Reborn - they really fixed it under one guy’s leadership. It’s playable, and works. It’s outdated somewhat today, but has a lot of moral grey areas and twists. There’s a lot of running around and time wasting, which was common back then.

Heavenward - they made a great story. It’s one of the best expansions. Streamlined and faster. No needless “talk to 5 villagers” quests like previously.

Stormblood - not as great. There’s a lot of setup they use later. The world building is really great, though. Some of the best looking areas.

Shadowbringers - the best expansion they’ve ever made. Perfectly balanced world building and characters, and story. This is peak FF, with the best music as well. Probably because they can ditch much of the old A Realm Reborn story.

Endwalker - ties it all together. The story leads up to “death is inevitable for everything that has ever lived, so just die now” kind of depression hopelessness that you wonder how they’ll get out of it. Well, because it’s Japanese and FF, it’s the power of friendship that saves the day. But, this really feels like the culmination of everything they’ve learned in the previous expansions.

Dawntrail - this is the downward slide. They force you into a role to support someone for ruler that is almost slapstick bad. Characters don’t make logical choices. The theme is all over the place and can’t decide what it wants to be. Many people say to stop at endwalker, but we’ll see how the next expansion goes, which is years away.

There’s plenty to say about the game otherwise, but the general thought is that they’re gradually cutting corners, taking longer, and under delivering as they’re stretched too thin. They’re feeling the same pressure everyone else in the world is - not enough money. Which is crazy, because FFXIV is THE game keeping Square Enix alive.

Oh, gross. I haven’t seen many videos of him (especially lately) so I guess I hadn’t seen enough of his stuff for his personality to come through.

Why is Musk mad at AsmonGold? Did he dunk on Elon for paying others to play his account?

I just… Fail to see the reason Elon should dedicate his time to fighting with a neet shut in. Asmon turned off donations on his stream. He doesn’t care about money, political influence, or bathing. Just games. What possible gain would there be in trying to mess with him? The richest person to have ever existed in history, in a slap fight with a dude that lives in a dirty hovel? It almost sounds like trying to fight Diogenes.

And exposing his editors isn’t the “gotcha” you think it is. They just protect him from YouTube’s crappy rules.

It sure seems like a cool accessibility tool, but he spent the whole time taking about why he did it, and magnets, that it glosses over the “how does it work?” Part that really matters. It’s not just a keyboard, so I’m sure there’s more to it. I’m hoping he has other videos that explain the concept.

IDK, that could be different. I bought some surfaces ~2 years ago that apparently aren’t capable of upgrading to 11. They’re perfectly usable, so I’ll have to put Linux on them. I think anyone that’s capable will find that they have to do that, or throw out perfectly good hardware to buy the next shiny thing.

The only problem is I did switch my laptop to Ubuntu back in the day to avoid W7. Or maybe to was 10? All I did was stream video, like Netflix, on it. Turns out, Netflix wouldn’t run because they locked it down to specific OSes. WINE could run it, with a horrible stutter. So I had to dual boot, then I switched to a VM of Windows in Linux, which ended up just being another step to get to stream a movie. Coupled with hours of driver problems to solve, it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

Now, it’s a matter of “can I stream?” Because otherwise, they’re e-waste. I really hope they can, because while I’ll have to keep my gaming PC on w11, my htpc and tablets I will gladly switch.

I can’t imagine I’m alone. If people can get their programs out of the walled garden of Microsoft, I think they will. Not so much new features, but that they can just do what they always do. We’re creatures of habit. We probably won’t see adoption in high numbers, but more than before.

Also, it’s entirely possible I’ll have to eat these words if streaming still doesn’t work right.

Maybe I suck, cause I typically have to watch the YouTube guide on the fight, and take a few tries to not die/debuff and get it down. And it seemed more complicated than last raid tier, which I was able to just do all of Pandemonium fine. Usually first try.

Maybe it’s better to just wait until they unlock the weekly rewards so you can spam it and get good.

I haven’t even done the last raid. Spent all my time doing ranked CC matches to Crystal rank and took a break until ranged rewards come in after Jan 1st. It’s a very different skill set, and you kind of have to relearn it all when you switch.

Anecdotal, you still learn people and you can build a community reputation playing PvP in FFXIV. We don’t get to choose the map, and you’ll still see some people only once, but you get to know who’s who. The problem is, it’s not as fast as fortnite or other games. Which is a large turn off for many. But the slower (just barely slower) pace is more forgiving towards people that are middle aged and can’t compete with top tier fortnite/ League of Legends, etc types.

Not to trivialize your experience, but Deloused the the Comatorium by The Mars Volta is a true story about a guy that tried to kill himself by drinking rat poison, going into a coma, coming out of it, and realizing that the coma world was more preferable/he couldn’t cope with the waking world and jumps off of a building to get back. He died.

It’s an interesting album that might help? There’s a lot of disconnected, out there nonsense in his dreams that they express in the songs.

I’m sure it’s not nearly as intense as being in a dreaming coma, but I found music that touches upon a traumatic situation helps me sort it out.

I get things like “enlightenment”, etc. But the average person (at least in the US) that isn’t already Catholic has a strong possibility of already being told they aren’t real Christians, and isn’t going to know or care about etymology, and will assume it’s Lucifer. They could call the main character Satin after the cloth and it’s have the same effect, even though they aren’t related.

It’s simple word association. I’m aware of the Latin translations. I’m also aware that most people are not going to think about it too long, and immediately going to jump to conclusions. They also believe in Bigfoot. What end of the Bell curve are we talking about, here?

I dunno, he’s a serial killer trying to remake the world by looking everyone he doesn’t like and it’s pretty mainstream.

Even without that, drawing attention to Light seems weird. Could’ve been “Peace”, “Faith”, or “Love” or whatever.

This is just 12 years of Catholic school talking, but it’s a strange name to pick that ties to a lot of less than desirable stuff.

So they choose Luce, so close to Lucifer, and they expect the Internet to NOT bring it up? There’s Lucy, Daughter of the Devil on Cartoon Network for shit’s sake.

Nevermind the connections to Death Note, a far more popular anime about Light Yagami, and the subtle connections between his name and Lucifer the Lightbringer.

This seems so much worse on it’s face, even if you leave out the undertones of children’s abuse by the church and Rule 34 that will come out (which are worse, but the church keeps trying to bury it)

I’m speaking mainly of the distrust against the public having access for fear that we’d abuse it and not give them a cut. We can’t have access to these things now, but we used to. Regardless of form, regardless of piracy.

It’s more of a move to restrict ownership when you make a purchase, that has a farther reach than just games. I could see this being applied to cars, houses, etc. In that you only rent a license, and don’t actually own anything. I see this as just a first step, and the logic they use to justify it doesn’t make sense.

We used to rent these games from Blockbuster Video! On DVD when we had DVD burners and little to no drm! How did it suddenly not become acceptable?

I bought a cheap Vizio, and never connected it or let it connect to anything. All it does is power on, and go to HDMI-1. My pc it connects to does everything else.

If you’re concerned about privacy on your tv, I would recommend migrating away from Roku as well.

Elon funded PayPal, and they forced him out when it became successful and he wanted to change its name to X. I’m not making that up. So you likely used PayPal at some point.

They didn’t think you were homeless. They correctly saw you struggle to buy a 10 dollar pizza with change from your pockets.

Most people will use a 20 or a card.

Yeah, you didn’t “need” the help, but that helped you nonetheless.

Also I know this isn’t OP so my breath is wasted, but people need to realize you don’t need to be homeless to be in a rough spot. You can be working poor.

I really enjoyed the first one, so I’m looking forward to this as well. They made a pretty good historical have that was also entertaining, and felt much more realistic than something like Skyrim without being too hardcore.

Walmart.com didn’t work for me on FF for about a week, and it did work on edge and chrome (still broken on FF when I disabled all my add ons). However, they fixed it and it works now. I think it was just a problem with the build of the website, and wasn’t intentional because it definitely works now.

I think that’s what’s more likely - temp problems that could affect any browser until their web dev fixes it. Not anything malicious like intentionally blocking a browser.

And then, it’s just Walmart. It’s nothing that really mattered.

To add to that, I very much doubt any big company tests and verifies anything anymore.

Boeing ships planes with missing bolts and proper software, Crowdstrike pushes updates with no testing, we’ve all seen Microsoft push updates that break stuff because there’s no testing, and that’s just what comes to mind.

That’s how they maximize profits - get rid of testing environments, do minimal checks, and have the one guy doing 3 jobs at once just push it to production.

I’ve been in IT for the banking industry for over a decade and I promise you, we’re all a missed cup of coffee or a comma away from another massive outage due to a program or network misconfig.

As long as business culture is set to maximize profits for one quarter, I wouldn’t trust a sales website about “verification” or “disaster recovery backups” any more than I trust a used car salesman.

That goes for Crowdstrike, but also all of their competitors.