Even if Blizzard games haven’t had a high note since 2016, I would like to remind everyone that the company still had absurd amounts of goodwill and customer loyalty for a large and corporate studio at the time, with fans owning and actively collecting literal decades of merchendise.
Things only really truly collapsed for Blizzard and saw their goodwill vanish when they openly supported and endorsed the chinese oppression of Hong Kong.
Specifically, the winner of a Hearthstone tournament was interviewed after his win and gave the pro-Hong Kong slogan “free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times”, which there was absolutely no rule or stipulation against. China demanded that the company not endorse that (because authoritarianism), but Blizzard ACTIVELY WENT THE EXTRA MILE to strip the player of his prize money and ban him from all future events alongside other punishments, specifically in the name of appeasing the chinese government.
It wouldn’t be fair to expect a game company to singlehandedly stand up to an authoritarian regime that loves to make people disappear. But it is absolutely fair to recognize that Blizzard’s actions very clearly demonstrated that they weren’t just doing this because they were threatened into it- they were more than happy to actively endorse the chinese government’s oppression of Hong Kong. And THAT is what we should always remember about Blizzard’s morals and principles, or lack thereof.
Same, was just starting wow classic with my partner as she’d never played wow before, that made us both cancel immediately and never give them another cent.
There are a couple of VERY GOOD classic pservers out there which are not only better maintained than the Blizz servers, these have also much less bots and way healthier populations and economies.
I can absolutely recommend Turtle WoW. It is such a good classic+ experience: imagine if there never were any of the wow addons but instead the base game got expanded in a meaningful and in terms of Warcraft 3 lore-friendly way. There are new and very well-done zones which were empty before. There are new items and professions without nullifying the existing ones, there are two new races and new race/class combos (to keep close to WC3 lore), there are new dungeons and raids, tons of new quests and a lot of quality of life improvements. You have many options to play how you want: restrict yourself on how much exp you get and play slow & steady, opt in for a built-in hardcore mode, activate warmode to be flagged for pvp or a combination of those. Also, pretty much all classes got rebalanced (some more than others, though) to make more builds viable without altering the game to much (more balance updates are in the roadmap). The dev team is very active and dedicated.
All the sex pests felt like a “good” reason to quit WoW but I’d say my real reason was it had become a piece of shit that didn’t value my time, and I’d honestly been looking for a reason to quit for a long time.
I might just be too casual, but I remember that half the fun of WoW was traveling. Of course, I never got into raids or pvp anyway, I leveled up and did dungeons lol
Travel (especially in older zones where you would be using portals) consists of:
Mount flying mount, point in the right direction, hit auto-run, wait.
Not really the most exciting game play experience when you’ve already flown over the area a dozen times before. Taxis are also just as bad. Other MMOs (Guldwars 2, FF14) have no problem with players teleporting directly to somewhere close to their destination. They already traveled their once, no need to force them to do it again.
SoT is the only game I find a particular satisfaction with running a script once asshats get punchy. I’m fine just fishing or plinkin’ around with the hang, but when dealing with squeakers, they all go down to Davey Jones asap until they rage quit. Fuckem.
Cheating in a multiplayer game is a shitty move, regardless of motivation.
They released safer seas (pvp-less servers) if you don’t want to be hassled.
If child voices bug you (squeakers), go to the options, mute voice chat from non-crewmates. Turn on auto captions for voice chat if you’re worried about missing something or them sneaking up on you because you can’t hear them.
I guess I kind of enjoy the challenge when other players get aggressive. I’ll never instigate combat, but if someone else does I have a lot of fun fighting back. It’s kind of thrilling and fun for me.
I don’t disagree with that basic sentiment, but it’s the griefers and whiners that get pissy when they FAFO. Downvote all you want, fellas; the fact remains: if you’re being a dick, no one cares if you get your ass handed to you. “Cheating” or not.
I’m absolutely loving it, it’s unbelievably gorgeous and the gameplay is fun.
My only real complaint is that I’m the story is too short, I was so surprised when the “this is the end mission, you’ll be locked out of the rest of the game until this is finished” warning popped up, I thought I was only halfway there. So I’ve put that on hold and I’m now fully exploring everything else. I really hope they make several big expansion for it, with new planets etc.
Oh. No. My bad. I was still running off the exhilaration of the escape. We never lost the loot. My partner hid with it on the island in a pile of barrels using a Emote that puts him in a barrel (while they were sinking our ship), then I swung by and picked him up with the loot and we managed to sell it while they were chasing our asses by using me as the distraction.
I’d be curious to see if you can install the patch that reintroduces the E3 graphics and how that’s handled on the Deck. Not sure on the how-to with SteamOS.
Hulu was really good a decade ago. Then they put ads in and created a higher tier. Nobody was surprised when it happened again some years later.
In Ukraine starlink was being hailed as a hero before Elon decided to turn off Internet access in areas he deemed Ukraine to be “too aggressive”.
Goodwill doesn’t deserve it’s reputation. It uses minimum wage exemptions for disabled people to pay it’s staff below minimum wage.
Edit to add - Destiny 2 was the other one I was thinking of and couldn’t quite place. Great PvE shooter with great story, and they killed it to force people to buy DLC.
D2’s problem is different. To succeed critically they needed to produce The Taken King or The Witch Queen every content cycle, but there’s no way to do that except release only once a year — but they wanted to release every 3 months, so they made shitty DLCs that everyone mildly disliked and hyped them up so people actively disliked them on release.
Then the shitty mini DLCs began cannibalizing the dev, time and monetary budget from the main DLCs and it fell into a downward spiral.
Yeah that wasn’t great but I think it was the part where they literally deleted a bunch of the story so you either bought the DLC or wandered the maps aimlessly killing stuff that really broke any good will left.
Or worse… you bought the DLC and had no idea what was going on because you’re a newer player and they deleted the story that this DLC is a follow up.too…
It’s amazing how people still get things wrong ages after it’s been corrected by the author and spread misinformation and the hate involved with it.
Elon didn’t turn starlink off. It was always off. It was never ON to be turned OFF.
Further, allowing ukraine to use starlink as a weapon in an offensive attack was against the terms of service and would put spacex in a very difficult position with regulations. That’s why the DoD took it over, and it’s okay now.
They lost internet because they went out of range of where it was on. They assumed it was on everywhere.
They strapped them onto boats where the internet was on, and drove them to where the internet was off. Then they begged SpaceX to turn them on, and they refused.
Not turning it on to allow the attack was in line with the terms of service and weapons export rules. SpaceX doesn’t want their consuner service to be considered a weapon.
Russia was getting satellites from 3rd parties and using them in ukraine because they work in ukraine.
Edit: and just to clarify, now that the DoD is managing this for ukraine through a contract with SpaceX, the DoD is allowing its use as a weapon AFAIK.
Lol, service absolutely can be turned on and off based on regions. SpaceX doesn’t turn it on in a region until the local government had an agreement with them. Just because the US gov sees Crimea as Ukraine does not mean SpaceX is obliged to turn it on there.
And no, there was no DoD contract in place at the time. SpaceX was providing services for free out of their own goodwill.
The DoD had a formal contact in place in June 2023, the incident falsely commented on by OP was in 2022.
You can go read it all in the wiki yourself but the relevant part
In June 2023, the Department of Defense officialized a contract with Shotwell’s SpaceX to buy Starlink satellite services for Ukraine.[10] The deal includes the Pentagon buying 400-500 Starlink terminals for Ukraine, giving the Pentagon control of where Starlink works inside the country without fear of interruption.[79] The terms of services of the final contract were undisclosed for security issues.[10] Following the contract, The Pentagon stated Starlink was a “vital layer in Ukraine’s overall communications network” amidst “a range of global partners to ensure Ukraine has the capabilities they need.”[10]
I’m not going to read the wiki on an active war with a cult of personality involved. It’s not going to be unbiased.
News reports from the period make the situation very clear. As well as whistle blowers straight up telling us Elon personally shut down their Internet.
I’ll wait for a verified source that shows spacex had a formal contract to supply starlink services to Ukraine with the DoD prior to this. I imagine I’ll die before you can do that since you can’t.
“We could address the frat boy culture at our company and give reparations to the women who had their boob juice stolen… But will you settle for us changing McCree’s name to.something the fanbase still won’t acknowledge three years later?”
I miss the Warcraft II and StarCraft days. You could tell they were serious by their cutscenes, but also knew they were having fun, and wanted the player to as well, by the gameplay and Easter eggs. “Line must go up” took over, now it’s all cash grabs. I will not buy a game from them at full price again.
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Aktywne