I play FFXIV. I’ll break it down by expansions, but it’s the one that didn’t follow the general downwards trend so much.

1.0 - trash. They couldn’t figure out how to work together. One guy spends forever making the best looking water wheel ever, in the background, that you never interact with. It’s too graphically intensive, and flows the wrong way from the water. It doesn’t match the building it’s attached to. Meanwhile, they forget to add roads towards main cities. It’s an unplayable mess. It’s literally unplayable, as they killed it off to replace it with:

2.0, A Realm Reborn - they really fixed it under one guy’s leadership. It’s playable, and works. It’s outdated somewhat today, but has a lot of moral grey areas and twists. There’s a lot of running around and time wasting, which was common back then.

Heavenward - they made a great story. It’s one of the best expansions. Streamlined and faster. No needless “talk to 5 villagers” quests like previously.

Stormblood - not as great. There’s a lot of setup they use later. The world building is really great, though. Some of the best looking areas.

Shadowbringers - the best expansion they’ve ever made. Perfectly balanced world building and characters, and story. This is peak FF, with the best music as well. Probably because they can ditch much of the old A Realm Reborn story.

Endwalker - ties it all together. The story leads up to “death is inevitable for everything that has ever lived, so just die now” kind of depression hopelessness that you wonder how they’ll get out of it. Well, because it’s Japanese and FF, it’s the power of friendship that saves the day. But, this really feels like the culmination of everything they’ve learned in the previous expansions.

Dawntrail - this is the downward slide. They force you into a role to support someone for ruler that is almost slapstick bad. Characters don’t make logical choices. The theme is all over the place and can’t decide what it wants to be. Many people say to stop at endwalker, but we’ll see how the next expansion goes, which is years away.

There’s plenty to say about the game otherwise, but the general thought is that they’re gradually cutting corners, taking longer, and under delivering as they’re stretched too thin. They’re feeling the same pressure everyone else in the world is - not enough money. Which is crazy, because FFXIV is THE game keeping Square Enix alive.

Thank you so much for reporting back how you fixed it! This will definitely help others at some point.

Oh, gross. I haven’t seen many videos of him (especially lately) so I guess I hadn’t seen enough of his stuff for his personality to come through.

Why is Musk mad at AsmonGold? Did he dunk on Elon for paying others to play his account?

I just… Fail to see the reason Elon should dedicate his time to fighting with a neet shut in. Asmon turned off donations on his stream. He doesn’t care about money, political influence, or bathing. Just games. What possible gain would there be in trying to mess with him? The richest person to have ever existed in history, in a slap fight with a dude that lives in a dirty hovel? It almost sounds like trying to fight Diogenes.

And exposing his editors isn’t the “gotcha” you think it is. They just protect him from YouTube’s crappy rules.

It sure seems like a cool accessibility tool, but he spent the whole time taking about why he did it, and magnets, that it glosses over the “how does it work?” Part that really matters. It’s not just a keyboard, so I’m sure there’s more to it. I’m hoping he has other videos that explain the concept.

IDK, that could be different. I bought some surfaces ~2 years ago that apparently aren’t capable of upgrading to 11. They’re perfectly usable, so I’ll have to put Linux on them. I think anyone that’s capable will find that they have to do that, or throw out perfectly good hardware to buy the next shiny thing.

The only problem is I did switch my laptop to Ubuntu back in the day to avoid W7. Or maybe to was 10? All I did was stream video, like Netflix, on it. Turns out, Netflix wouldn’t run because they locked it down to specific OSes. WINE could run it, with a horrible stutter. So I had to dual boot, then I switched to a VM of Windows in Linux, which ended up just being another step to get to stream a movie. Coupled with hours of driver problems to solve, it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

Now, it’s a matter of “can I stream?” Because otherwise, they’re e-waste. I really hope they can, because while I’ll have to keep my gaming PC on w11, my htpc and tablets I will gladly switch.

I can’t imagine I’m alone. If people can get their programs out of the walled garden of Microsoft, I think they will. Not so much new features, but that they can just do what they always do. We’re creatures of habit. We probably won’t see adoption in high numbers, but more than before.

Also, it’s entirely possible I’ll have to eat these words if streaming still doesn’t work right.

Maybe I suck, cause I typically have to watch the YouTube guide on the fight, and take a few tries to not die/debuff and get it down. And it seemed more complicated than last raid tier, which I was able to just do all of Pandemonium fine. Usually first try.

Maybe it’s better to just wait until they unlock the weekly rewards so you can spam it and get good.

I haven’t even done the last raid. Spent all my time doing ranked CC matches to Crystal rank and took a break until ranged rewards come in after Jan 1st. It’s a very different skill set, and you kind of have to relearn it all when you switch.

I’m speaking mainly of the distrust against the public having access for fear that we’d abuse it and not give them a cut. We can’t have access to these things now, but we used to. Regardless of form, regardless of piracy.

It’s more of a move to restrict ownership when you make a purchase, that has a farther reach than just games. I could see this being applied to cars, houses, etc. In that you only rent a license, and don’t actually own anything. I see this as just a first step, and the logic they use to justify it doesn’t make sense.

We used to rent these games from Blockbuster Video! On DVD when we had DVD burners and little to no drm! How did it suddenly not become acceptable?

I bought a cheap Vizio, and never connected it or let it connect to anything. All it does is power on, and go to HDMI-1. My pc it connects to does everything else.

If you’re concerned about privacy on your tv, I would recommend migrating away from Roku as well.

It’s so weird you immediately list the differences between Stein and Harris, but not Trump. Totally unprompted. Considering that a third party is going against the other two, that’s odd. Almost like you know exactly what you’re doing, but won’t admit it.

I really enjoyed the first one, so I’m looking forward to this as well. They made a pretty good historical have that was also entertaining, and felt much more realistic than something like Skyrim without being too hardcore.

Walmart.com didn’t work for me on FF for about a week, and it did work on edge and chrome (still broken on FF when I disabled all my add ons). However, they fixed it and it works now. I think it was just a problem with the build of the website, and wasn’t intentional because it definitely works now.

I think that’s what’s more likely - temp problems that could affect any browser until their web dev fixes it. Not anything malicious like intentionally blocking a browser.

And then, it’s just Walmart. It’s nothing that really mattered.

To add to that, I very much doubt any big company tests and verifies anything anymore.

Boeing ships planes with missing bolts and proper software, Crowdstrike pushes updates with no testing, we’ve all seen Microsoft push updates that break stuff because there’s no testing, and that’s just what comes to mind.

That’s how they maximize profits - get rid of testing environments, do minimal checks, and have the one guy doing 3 jobs at once just push it to production.

I’ve been in IT for the banking industry for over a decade and I promise you, we’re all a missed cup of coffee or a comma away from another massive outage due to a program or network misconfig.

As long as business culture is set to maximize profits for one quarter, I wouldn’t trust a sales website about “verification” or “disaster recovery backups” any more than I trust a used car salesman.

That goes for Crowdstrike, but also all of their competitors.

It died in my area when they dropped the amount of spawn nodes to the point where you couldn’t really walk around. You had to drive pretty far at that point, and that kill let most people’s enthusiasm.

I don’t know if it was complaints by local businesses or what, but after that I never saw large groups walking around again.

I have a great business idea - sell a roku-like device for half the price and a .99 cent subscription fee. Then when I’ve captured the market I force them to accept draconian new terms that cost way more or I brick the device. By then it’s too late and I can suck all the money out of it from the people that can’t switch.

And if they don’t like it? Too bad; they signed away their rights to sue.

It’s a foolproof plan! As long as I don’t get shot in the street but justifiably angry customers.

Why would a TV need an update? What’s changed that would require updating to continue to display the signal it’s getting?

I have a Vizio that isn’t connected to the Internet and it’s essentially a computer monitor for my htpc that I control.

If it ever forces me to update I’m getting rid of it.

My real concern is that in 10 years, my htpc loophole will be closed and they’ll datamine me anyway and force me into subscriptions regardless.

I’d be interested in knowing how you’ve got more experience and knowledge about EVs, if you could share. There’s a lot of misinformation out there but I’m open to hearing about your credentials. We always hear about “gasoline powered cars putting X tons of pollution into the air” but no one I’ve heard mentions replacing the batteries on an EV. I don’t think the general public really even thinks about it. I’d love to know more.

Back in 2010 my friend group and I tried. Google kept changing their chat programs and we’d keep having to migrate or change what we did. Eventually we went to discord and it was at least stable.

We tried, Google. We tried. I won’t go back.

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