WoW has historically worked on a daily limit to progression model for the endgame, so the 3 day early access is potentially a 3 day permanent boost for the people who buy it. I would imagine competitive raiders going for world first and “clearing hard difficulty versions of raids while they’re current content” achievements and their related rewards will be essentially mandated to buy it.

As for gamers obsessing over things at launch, I wish it were different, but I think of it like movies or TV shows. If you go and watch a movie a year after it came out, nobody is gonna be talking about it anymore. And for some people, that social buzz around a new piece of media is half the fun. Playing a game and talking about it with your friends, the sense of discovery finding things out before you can just look it up on some wiki site, etc.

Sometimes you just have to accept that the problem exists between the keyboard and chair and work around it.

People are disagreeing with you, but as somebody from one of the most liberal states in the US, Massachusetts, it’s very much the same thing here - the cities are as progressive as it gets, but you don’t have to drive too far before you start seeing the Trump flags and Bible thumpers in their lifted pickups. It’s very easy to fall into that lifestyle if you’ve never been more than 50 kilometers from the house you were born in and never seen somebody with a different skin color from yours. And it doesn’t matter if that house is among fields, forests, or coastline.

New Hampshire/backwoods Maine.

New England does not consent to being considered a part of the same country as the Bible Belt/Florida.

Jokes aside, New Hampshire is known as “The South of the North” for its very…“conservative” political stances.

I’ve seen people make the argument that no matter what you do if they successfully break adblockers, Google stands to make a profit, but it could actually hurt advertisers.

Obviously, if you stop watching, then that’s less overhead for them, and if you pay for premium, then that’s literal money in their wallet. But if you start watching ads, Google can leverage more money from advertisers for the increased views. But people who use adblockers are unlikely to click ads, so advertisers pay more for their ads to be shown to people who weren’t going to click on them anyway.

Ironically, it’s in both our interest and advertisers to stop Google from breaking adblockers.

On the one hand, you gotta do what you gotta do to put food on the table. But on the other hand, that’s 3 years to be looking for a new employer…

Yes, this is a political issue, and yes, I’m concerned about regulation, because of laws like this that will potentially hurt unrelated people like myself in the process because people who have little understanding of the subject already have an opinion on it. Simply stating the facts can drive somebody who has already formed an opinion based on their immediate emotional response even deeper into their stance without being concerned about how that stance affects others (or they might just jam their fingers in their ears and ignore any facts that don’t align with their worldview, like anti-vaxers).

I’m a trans woman who runs a business on Etsy selling 3d printed earrings. If I had a criminal record and lived in New York, this law could potentially put my ability to put food on the table at risk as collateral damage in the name of fighting ghost guns. Obviously, I have a strong opinion on the matter, as it could directly affect me.

My entire life is a “political issue.” In the first 6 months of this year, Republicans tried to pass at least 235 anti-trans laws. That’s more than 1 law per day, attempting to regulate me out of daily life, with the support of a voting populace with little understanding of the subject who have already formed an opinion on it. Like this law, those laws don’t affect me, but they’re still “political issues” that could put my rights at risk, just like laws like this one.

Obviously, I don’t know your opinion on the matter of 3d printed guns (or if you even have one), but the people who get upset at people who “always make things political” are the people who have never had their rights at risk of being revoked.

I meant to put it in my second paragraph, but I meant 100% printed PLA full auto guns chambered in pistol calibers (with maybe some basic metal parts inside). I’m not really into the gun part of 3d printing, but I keep an eye on it because there’s been a lot of innovation there that has changed manufacturing ideas in the rest of the 3d printing world. They figured out how to rifle a metal barrel with nothing more than a bucket of saltwater and an electric current, no milling machines or anything required! We definitely aren’t in the world of one-shot pistols using rubber bands in the trigger anymore.

There used to be a fantastic documentary on the history of 3d printed guns I would recommend people watch by a channel on YouTube called 3d Print General, which mostly does 3d printer reviews and stuff, but the video recently got deleted by YouTube, despite some of the VICE videos showing more about how to actually make 3d printed guns than his documentary.

But the thing I always want to make clear to people is that the vast majority of people printing guns are the equivalent of the guys making kit cars in their garage - hobbyists, not criminals. Because you can buy a $200+ printer and spend the time learning how to use it, or you can go to a state with no gun laws and buy a cheap pistol for $150 from a gun shop.

Yup. In California, in fact. By a Republican governor named Ronald Reagan.

Your average consumer grade 3d printer cannot print in metal. I looked into this at one point for jewelry, and you need commercial printers that cost thousands upon thousands of dollars for most metals.

Having said that, yes, 3d printing guns has reached a point where people can make 100% 3d printed full auto guns in pistol calibers. In fact, that’s exactly what the Burmese resistance groups are using to fight back against the genocidal regime in their country. Because nobody in the international community cares enough to support them with military arms, but they can get 3d printers to print enough guns that they can kill and loot soldiers for better guns.

I think this also comes from Keanu being an actor and not a voice actor.

I’ve seen it time and time again, from movies to video games. They hire celebrity actors for the name recognition, but who have no experience in a vocal booth and it shows. Just because somebody is a great actor doesn’t mean they’re a great voice actor. Mark Hamill is an example of somebody who’s both, but he’s spent decades at this point working in voice acting.

I don’t think this is really a good comparison since Starfield was in development for years before Microsoft came in. Plus, Redfall was forced by management to shoehorn in a live service model with mtx during its development, butchering what it had been before.

And, this is just my personal opinion, but I think Starfield is a pretty mediocre game. Besides the ship design, it’s largely the same design that Bethesda has had since Oblivion.

Welcome the new management, same as the old management.

I think it’s a bit of both. King is a big name in the market, but mobile gaming is just such a massive revenue stream for companies anyways. IIRC, the mobile market accounts for more money than all other gaming markets combined.

The thing that really gets me is that the game can’t run on a normal HDD. Despite being as sectioned off as it is by loading screens, and the graphics being pretty standard for a modern AAA game, it literally requires an SSD to run.

The only other game I’ve encountered that requires an SSD is Baldur’s Gate 3, and even that runs perfectly fine on a normal HDD, so long as you don’t mind occasionally waiting for stuff to load in after a loading screen.

Basically, we’re only allowed 2 parties per year, and if you want any more, you have to buy a subscription, or else the party police will take away your party privileges. We’re hoping that with enough complaints, they’ll allow us another party before having to pay.

It’s called Simple Tab Groups, and it’s actually a Firefox recommended extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/

We could even use the same photos of the bomb from Die Hard to convince the public that they have WMDs!

I recently switched back to Firefox after using Chrome for like a decade, and one of the first extensions I installed was a tab grouper that allows me to group tabs into my own custom gcontainers while still only using one window. As a tab hoarder, it’s been a life saver.

In a way, though, the culture and environment of the area I grew up in is exactly why we had so many addicts in our ranks and why we did heroin instead of drinking.

The county my hometown is in has had the highest rates of drug and alcohol addiction in the entire state for at least 50 years, probably going back to the 1910s (I wanna say its in the top 3 areas countrywide, but I dont remember), and a lot of it revolves around the tourism economy. A tourism economy means that money is made there during the brief time between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and the rest of the year the jobs dry up and something like 60% of businesses close up until the next year. So not only do many people make the majority of their annual wages during a 3 month period and hope it lasts the rest of the year, but there’s also very little to do in the area because everything’s closed and it’s not like you’re gonna hang out on a beach with 4 inches of snow on it. I used to work with a fisherman who would have his son drive the boat while he leaned over the front and used a chainsaw to break up the ice so they could get the boat out to fish in especially cold winters where the ocean would freeze over. The only thing that comes close to the frequency of drug and alcohol addiction there is homelessness. And it’s the same story no matter what tourist town/vacation spot you’re talking about. A veneer of glitzy vacation beauty and plentiful party drugs hiding the addiction and homelessness beneath.

But my generation turned to heroin because, as you said, it’s illegal and therefore unregulated, which makes it cool to do, but also because alcohol is legal and so our parents were the ones day drinking in bars or at home while we were kids, making it not cool to drink, and heroin was easy to get and plentiful. Post 9/11, as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan grew, heroin from the Middle East began to flood into New England ports, and the guys who sold the tourists and rich people in their summer homes party drugs in the summer, were selling heroin right alongside weed and Adderall to us high schoolers in the winter.

And I just wanna make it clear that my comment wasn’t some kinda dig at you or something, but rather that the greentext of “why would you want to leave the idyllic country life” and your response reminds me of the countless conversations I’ve had with tourists and wealthy summer folk who say “why would you ever want to leave, it’s such a beautiful place,” and how every other person I’ve ever met who came from a tourist town has said the exact same thing as me about where they grew up.

“What you want isn’t that, it’s this ideal where everything is simple and paid for and you’re distant from the things you don’t like about actually living in a community with people but all the amenities of that life are still immediately to hand” exactly sums it up.

On Reddit, it actually got to the point where it was weird how often I would describe living in a tourist town without naming anything specific beyond what I’ve said here, and have people either say “that sounds like (the exact area I grew up in),” or, “I grew up in (the area I grew up in), and it was exactly like that.” I guess I kept bumping into them because Reddit was our addiction of choice. What else was I gonna do sitting in the fish market I worked at waiting for the 10 customers we’d have in the 4 hours we would be open on a winter day.