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).

I also can’t stand the fact that smokers can take unlimited ‘breaks’ whenever they please just to come back stinking up an entire room with their smoke.

That feels like a workplace problem. Why would a workplace give them unlimited breaks? And why would nonsmokers not be allowed comparable breaks? This feels odd to me. My recent jobs have been ones where nobody is micromanaging my time, so anyone can take whatever breaks they want. As long as productivity doesn’t obviously suffer, nobody cares. My past jobs in retail didn’t allow smokers to take extra breaks. They’d get the same breaks as everyone else (for an 8 hour shift, that meant a 30 min lunch and 2 x 15 min coffee breaks).

Same. I actually love Linux and don’t like to do software dev on anything else. The only reason windows is my main personal computer is for gaming and streaming services. And some of that is inertia, cause I’m aware that Linux gaming has improved a ton in recent years.

I currently have a 7T. It’s not bad. Felt pretty impressive at the time that I got it. These days I feel like the camera is a bit lacklustre and every now and then something freezes. I’m gonna upgrade to something else soon. Probably something much higher end as I’m more comfortable spending money on a high end phone these days. But it’s been a pretty solid phone, especially for its price and age.

The whole CSAM issue is why I’d never personally run an instance, nor any other kind of server that allows users to upload content. It’s an issue I have no desire to have to deal with moderating nor the legal risks of the content even existing on a server I control.

While I’d like to hope that law enforcement would be reasonable and understand “oh, you’re just some small time host, just delete that stuff and you’re good”, my opinion on law enforcement is in the gutter. I wouldn’t trust law enforcement not to throw the book at me if someone did upload illegal content (or if I didn’t handle it correctly). Safest to let someone else deal with that risk.

And even if you can win some case in court, just having to go to court can be ludicrously expensive and risk high impact negative press.

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.

Scammers have long since used bots already for text based scams (though dumb ones). Phone calls are a lot harder, though. And there’s also “pig butchering” scams, which are the long cons. Most commonly those are fake relationships. I suspect those long cons would have a hard time convincing someone for months, as human scammers manage to do.

I suspect that scammers will have a harder time utilizing AI, though. For one thing, scammers are often not that technologically advanced. They can put together some basic scripts, but utilizing AI is difficult. They could use established AI, but it’d almost surely be against their ToS, so the AI will likely try to filter scam attempts out.

That said, it might be just a matter of time. Today, developing your own AI has a barrier to entry, but in the future, it is likely to get a lot easier. And with enough advancements, we could see AI being so good that fooling someone for months may be possible. Especially once AI gets good at generating video (long con scams usually do have scammers video chat their victims).

And honestly, most scams have a hundred red flags anyway. As long as the AI doesn’t outright say something like “as a large language model…”, you could probably convince a non zero number of victims (and maybe even if the AI fucks up like that – I mean, somehow people get convinced the IRS takes app store gift cards, so clearly you don’t have to be that convincing).

Of course, that’s understandable. But there’s too many people here that are interested in the reddit drama such that it ends up taking over many subs, drowning out other content.

It’s like how r/worldnews was created, because despite r/news being general, there was so many Americans that US news dominated the sub. We need to do the same with reddit drama IMO.

You often don’t get paid or don’t get paid nearly enough. Too many people like paycheque to paycheque to be able to do that.

And in extreme cases, you can get sequestered, where you’re expected to basically put your life on hold for the duration of the trial, which complete bullshit and feels as if you’re being punished.

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.

I wish it was illegal to do that. It’s blatantly anti consumer. Exclusivity does absolutely nothing good for consumers and only harms them by pushing them to have to own multiple, otherwise redundant consoles.

All the modern Fallouts are great. While NV is my favourite, I can recommend them all to satisfy this gameplay style itch. That includes Fallout 76. Despite the onlineness of that title, the single player gameplay is pretty much identical.

Elder Scrolls Online is a bit more different and has more of an obvious MMO feel to it, but it still is a lot of fun for single player exploration. And the sheer size of the ESO world is insane. It’s really great for getting to explore the places we’ve only heard mentioned in the earlier Elder Scrolls titles. The single player quests are still quite well done. And if you enjoy doing dungeons with other humans, the dungeons are fantastic and have great lore. It’s one of the best MMOs out there. ESO will easily eat up a thousand hours. I loved the shit out of it and need to return sometime.