As someone who just has no interest whatsoever in competitive multiplayer games (even ‘passive’ competitive, like this sounds to be), or live service titles, I feel completely left behind by AAA developers. It’s a good thing the indie scene is so vibrant, or I’d just have to find a new hobby at this point.

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Even if there weren’t a million examples of prior art, the fact that patents on game mechanics are even allowed is just awful for the industry as a whole, and we as players should absolutely rail against this. Every game borrows from other games’ ideas and mechanics - I’d bet money that there hasn’t been a single fully “original” game in 20+ years. If companies are allowed to patent every little mechanic (even ones they didn’t come up with), the industry as a whole will just become impossible to operate in.

This would also spawn a Captcha% speedrun category, where the goal is to beat Doom before the Captcha considers itself solved.

“Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, B, then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.”

Halo Infinite: Post-season 5, battle passes are now free during their introductory season, but cost $5 to unlock afterward

Marvel Rivals: Battle passes will not expire if you bought the $10 Luxury pass during the season

These are not FOMO-less. Marvel Rivals sounds like the worst of the three in that regard. The ‘old’ method incentivized you to skip buying a battle pass if you weren’t going to finish it (because you’d lose rewards); MR’s system gives you a FOMO CTA to make that purchase to stop you from losing rewards.

Compare this to, say, Dead By Daylight, where there’s “seasons” with unlockable rewards, you can get them for free, and you can keep unlocking them after the season ends.

Sure, and I mean, I’m not suggesting you just roll up at random with a trunk full of board games and set up shop. You talk to the library staff, arrange a time when they’re okay with you using the space and being a little louder, and advertise that time. It feels like you’re being argumentative just for the sake of being argumentative; in towns and cities with actual, functional communities, this is a normal thing. Heck, I grew up in a town with 1700 people in it; we had scheduled special events in the library and it was never a problem, so this isn’t just exclusive to big cities.

We’d need something like a communal boardgame hall, supported by donations that anyone can come to without needing to pay anything.

All I’m getting at is, you have this - it’s the library. If you have the population to support a boardgame hall, you have the population to support a gathering at the library. Even if this doesn’t apply to you, it surely applies to other people who might not have considered the possibility.

Do you mean that you have no library, or the library doesn’t have a game night? If the latter, you could try to start it; it’d just be a matter of getting their permission to use the space, setting a schedule, and putting up a sign. It might not take off immediately; it’d probably help if you brought a friend or two the first few times, but if there’s interest in your community, I bet folks would start coming once it became clear something was happening.

Where I live, the library serves this purpose. They even have advertised game nights for various age groups on weekly to monthly basis. Maybe reach out to your public library and see if they would host.

There’s also a wide range of player skill levels to consider. If you aim to make a game not be frustrating for most players, it’s going to be boring for a large percentage of the best players. If you aim to make a game challenging for the best players, it’s going to be unapproachable for most. Different difficulty tiers of the same fight helps to address that but still alienates players if they find even the lower difficulties too challenging. It’s a delicate dance.

The other half of it is, the older generations tend heavily towards being Republicans. So even if they aren’t rich, they’re still voting for this.

Even with insurance, medical payments were hundreds of thousands of dollars each month.

Jesus. My father died of lymphoma after fighting it for 8 years or so, and he was miserable for a lot of that time. Luckily (if you can call it that), he was a military veteran and the VA took care of the treatment, but even with the treatment, his quality of life wasn’t good. If I get cancer, I’d rather just kill myself before it reaches that point than bankrupt my family. It’s pretty fucked that that’s something we have to think about.

Our political news is divisive, polarizing and isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know. There’s basically no objective news outlets in the country. They’re either heavily left-leaning or heavily right-leaning, and everyone watches the ones that align with their pre-existing views, which is only reinforcing what we already believe, or is designed to make us angry without offering any actual solutions, which is just tiring.

Well, this all but guarantees that we’ll see more ridiculously high priced consoles in the future, too. Good going, folks!

Headline makes it sound like he’s managed to get out of it somehow, but in fact he’s just literally been dodging being served; he’s still pretty fucked.

If he was working class, it definitely would, but for him? Probably not.

Good for him. Hope they never catch him.

Imagine being this guy’s grieving family, and finding out that 9 out of ten people are going out of their way to let everyone know they’re glad he’s dead.

Do you give this same consideration to other people who get shot? What if he had been the kingpin of a drug cartel - would you still be saying ‘Oh, won’t anyone think of his family!’ if the police raided his meth lab and he got shot?

If a mass shooter kills a dozen people then gets shot and killed, people applaud the one who shot them.

If a CEO directly contributes to the suffering and death of an untold number of people, then gets shot and killed, why should anyone respond differently?

The fact that the deaths he caused were within the bounds of our legal system should be seen as a condemnation of our policies, not as justification for what he did. When other avenues have been exhausted, what did they think people were going to do - just sit around forever and say ‘Well, that sucks’?