Ashtear

It’s digital snake oil.

Products or services that act as fig leaves for C-suites are a growth industry.

Deck Nine is also on this, and I thought their Life is Strange games were pretty good (Before the Storm, True Colors).

A long music video is pretty much how I sell it, lol. Also a good movie to watch while in an altered state (it’s my go-to movie when I get really sick/feverish).

I tend to like sci-fi in this category such as Stargate, Dune (1984), and the Riddick films.

TRON Legacy is my favorite of the bunch, however. Incredible soundtrack, gorgeous costume design, and plenty of character.

Ultimately, this is one of those things that needs subjective judgment and community ambassadors to be handled effectively. That requires human labor with high turnover.

I’m sure at some point one of the big players in the especially bad spaces (like MOBAs) will figure out how to do it on the cheap and create a market efficiency. But until then, all the profit chasers are allergic to creating actual jobs to solve the problem.

I do the tourist thing now with WoW but I’m still talking with players, especially since my duo partner never stops playing.

Less so now, though, since /r/wow was where I participated the most.

I was selling countless pre-orders at retail going back to 2001. I don’t know when this mythical time would have been either.

Ultimately, the vast majority of people making pre-orders aren’t here, on reddit, or any gaming community. And frankly, with the rate at which physical print runs are shrinking, people are going to find they will need to pre-order if they want a physical copy of anything not AAA.

Xenogears is my favorite romance story in gaming. Amazing depth to it.

I also liked the Bastila romance plot in Knights of the Old Republic. Some neat Force shenanigans going on there. Tali is my favorite self-insert Bioware romance, though.

My dude with the Xenogears shout-out.

More than half of my personal follows on Twitter are enthusiastically jumping over. I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter these days, so maybe I hadn’t realized it was bad enough to send people running happily into the arms of Meta.

With Atlus announcing that they are going to add voice lines to all the S-Link level up scenes, I’m guessing that’s why FeMC didn’t get included. They said this will already have the most voice lines of any Persona game. Adding FeMC’s S-Links to that would have been a lot more lines on top of that.

Whether or not expanding the voicing was a better move than not including FeMC is another question entirely.

Something I’ve noticed as I’ve shifted more of my conversations from Reddit to Discord (even before the garbage fire over at the site) is that I’m not looking up stuff as much during instant, short-form communication. Just casual conversation really is okay sometimes. I’ll be trying to keep that in mind as I spend more time on Reddit alternatives.

I also have a theory that message board conversations spend as much time on opinion as they do because all the little shit has been solved now that we have esoteric information at our fingertips. Some people don’t even know what it was like to be sitting around with friends all trying to figure out what 80’s film you saw Robert Loggia in because you couldn’t just look it up on-demand.

Mostly that exactly. The instance is probably the most restrictive general NSFW content platform I’ve ever seen, and that’s ruffling feathers. There’s also a lot of the same power struggle dynamic, too. It’s exhausting. One of the threads publicly descended into name-calling (on both sides) so I doubt it’ll get better in the long run.

Bickering between admins and mods. Only a matter of time, though. It’s already happening again over at lemmynsfw.

Freelancer and Freespace 2 were also peak space sim for me.

Getting about 10 hours in before dropping it, I had two big issues with Everspace 2: experience level progression and immersion.

Once I got to a new system, everything was high level, and in ES2, the level scaling means it’s more of a wall than a slaughter. There’s also no experience point rubber banding to make it worth your while.

I really enjoyed the story so far, more than Freelancer (not exactly a high bar), but I’m at a point now where I have to grind levels to continue. The above already makes me not want to, and then there are immersion problems on top of that.

In Freelancer, the whole system was loading screen free as long as I wasn’t docking. I don’t think I realized how big a deal that was until now. The transitions in and out of “jump drive space” in ES2 are a stark reminder that you’re flying from node to node, and not cruising through a star system. Other little things when off the main questline like lack of radio chatter, no consequences for looting stations, and low traffic add to the immersion problem.

I’ll probably come back to it eventually as it’s good enough, but that’s only because virtually no one is making this kind of game anymore. It feels like it wouldn’t much to surpass this game.