Live service games, MMOs, gatcha games, and many hardcore multiplayer games are the worst for this. They love to waste player’s time on some repetitive grind because they want players to keep playing their game. They usually have either microtransactions (often for cosmetics) or a subscription.

Personally, I love MMOs, but I try to avoid playing any grindy content (or at least as long as I don’t think I’ll genuinely enjoy it). So I’ll usually play a game for a few months (they’re really big games) and then quit for years, if not permanently (I have a bunch of MMOs I intend to someday return to, but have not yet).

Single player games are generally much better at being genuinely fun. Especially story driven games. I also love open world games because you largely get to make them your own. It’s perfectly valid to beeline the story missions if that’s all you care about. Or you could do just the side quests. Or you could additionally explore like crazy. e.g., with Tears of the Kingdom, you really can ignore most of the shrines and largely focus on the story quests. None of the side quests are necessary, either. You don’t have to explore the depths except for a tiny few places for the story. The vast majority of sky islands can be ignored. But I personally had a lot of fun exploring, so I explored nearly everything and loved it (except most of the depths – they were way too big, empty, and repetitive).

Some people don’t like long games, though. And that’s fine! There’s tons of short or more streamlined games out there that you can have fun with. e.g., The Last of Us is a fantastic one. The sequel is about 24 hours long for the story and it felt like it flew by in the blink of an eye for me cause I was having so much fun.

To be honest, I rarely noticed the votes tally. I think the bot just applied a flair to the post eventually? It wasn’t that relevant to me. I could see from the comments what the top posts were saying. For most posts, it’s usually obviously leaning in one direction, anyway. I always went to the comments for the discussion and drama, anyway.

I do think the existing voting options are good. And think that all top level comments should contain either a clear vote or INFO, because I think the sub doesn’t really work if people aren’t voting in some way.

One rule of perhaps interest is the not accepting your judgement rule. I’m not sure if I care for that rule in the late subreddit. On the surface, it makes sense, since why post here if you’re not going to accept the judgement? But I think we have to be honest here. The sub exists because it’s amusing. The cases where OP doesn’t accept their verdict can be quite dramatic and fun in a certain sense. That seems like it’s conductive to the true goal of the sub. Also, I’d rather have an OP that argues against everyone than one who never replies (especially when there’s so many requests for info).

Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.

I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don’t benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily… that’s frankly most of the benefits there.

Reddit definitely has better features. It’s not even a competition. The reason we’re here is because of the Reddit administration and because of future potential. Eg, the apps are so new right now that Reddit’s official app is better. But in a couple of months, that won’t be the case anymore.

Cyberpunk is soooo much fun. I can’t wait for the DLC. It got a bad rap when it launched, but at least when I played it (on PC about 6 months after launch), it was really great and didn’t experience any major issues.

Though it should be noted for those unaware that it is a very dark and mature game. An NPC is violently raped off camera. That makes the game not for everyone’s taste. Personally, I enjoy when games don’t feel like they’re avoiding subjects like that (which can feel jarring, since it’s a real life concern) and it does add an extra level of emotion to the game. Plus of course, getting to have revenge.

When you do get around to it, you’ll enjoy it! I played it fairly recently. It isn’t quite as hard hitting as the first game, but it still made me cry. More of a “prey on insecurities” kinda hard hitting. The power (because they never want to go back to rewind, do they?) is pretty neat. Second best after the original.

Seconded. And I’d say they’re more than pretty decent. They have amazing level design, particularly with respect to interactions with the level. Eg, you jump on a ledge and the ledge might start to break. Think stuff like that, repeated dozens of times in various ways.

Lara is pretty cool. She has that kinda inquisitive yet “I wanna help everyone” power fantasy that I relate to. They did also try to make it like she doesn’t want to kill bad guys (which is realistic – it’s weird more video game characters have no qualms with the first time they kill someone), but it is a video game where combat plays a prominent part, so it doesn’t really work when Lara is kill people by the dozens.

Specifically the first game (unarguably the best one), its prequel, and True Colours. Life Is Strange 2 has two brothers, instead. They’re all very, very good games that all have made me cry (some multiple times).

They’re also pretty gay if that interests you.

Same for Valhalla. Which interestingly canonically has a female player character for the vast majority of the game (the “real world”), but a male lead for the shorter Norse mythology parts of the game. There’s a lore reason for it. Though the game does let you actually choose whichever gender you want for either part (but it does recommend the canonical choices). The modern day character is also a woman and has been since Origins.

For an older style AC game, AC Syndicate has you play as opposite gender twins in Victorian London. It’s one of my favourite AC games. You do have to play as both twins for some length of the game, but a significant amount of the game lets you choose which to play as (and Evie is more fun to play IMO).

For anyone unaware, Control feels like a triple-A SCP game. Which should appeal strongly to anyone who enjoys SCP.

How about Final Fantasy XIII? The first game has a full sized party, but Lightning is clearly the main character and the focus. Second game costars Lightning’s younger sister and a new male character. Third game is just Lighting.

Why even sell a physical box if it has absolutely no benefit over a digital download? I wonder if it’s at all driven by desire to trick people who want a physical disk copy (ie, a copy that can be resold or traded)?

Given that people generally expect physical copies to have a disk (at least for console games), it feels like false advertising.

A little, but I kinda love it. It’s a feeling of so many options and I find it kinda exciting.

You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there’s utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they’ll only use one.

Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship. It’s a shame because the site is immensely popular and that means it is full of very interesting content. Yet, this is far from the first unreasonable thing they’ve been removing. It’s well known how Tiktok users came up with alternative words to circumvent words that were likely to get their content removed (e.g., “unalived” instead of “killed”).

Plus the kinds of people that migrated to Voat were… Not good people. IIRC, it was particularly the banning of FatPeopleHate that got many to move to Voat. The kind of people who’d quit a website because they said to stop harassing people for being fat are not good people. By comparison, this time, we’re migrating because Reddit is being disrespectful towards frankly all their users, but also particularly mods and the visibility impaired.

Barriers are relative. Everything that makes it slightly harder will stop a large chunk of bots, since bots aren’t able to easily adapt like humans can. Plenty of very basic bots are in fact stopped by lack of emails.

But yeah, email verification is heavily more so that you can verify they have access to the email, and thus the email is safe to use for things like password resetting. Without it, webmasters can get swamped with complaints about people getting locked out of accounts or the likes because they signed up with the wrong email.

In theory, you can also go further by only allowing email providers that have anti bot mechanisms, but it’s difficult to maintain that and it will always exclude some legitimate users.

I’m very skeptical that mCaptcha would actually work besides perhaps temporarily slowing bots down due to being niche. How expensive can you make it without hurting legitimate users? And how expensive does it need to be to discourage bots? Especially when purposefully designed bots can actually do the kinda math we’re talking about in optimized software and hardware while legitimate users can’t.

Oracle of ages/seasons was waaaay too hard. I tried to play it as a kid, got stuck, and gave up very early on. As an adult, I decided to come back to it just to see what I missed out on. Still had to check guides a few times and abused save states.

I can’t remember the details, but there was some kinds puzzle or something that depended on sound and my adult, hearing impaired self could not complete it without save states galore.

Honestly, it’s hard to do that. Chrome’s dominance means much of the internet has been designed for chrome. If you don’t support the same features, people will complain that your browser is broken or sucks.

Myself, I used Firefox for the longest time before I eventually just got too annoyed with the umpteenth site not working correctly and switched to Chrome.