Bitch please. We’ve put up with your crap for so long and we still play it…
Get out of here with that horse shit. Get fucked. Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on. At best, I’ll wait for a sale, at worst, I’m never playing your goddamned franchise again because you’ve run it into the ground with enshittification.
While I get why they want to do all online accounts, no. Just no.
Ironically, for business users, online accounts are basically the way the industry is moving. Some integration with Azure active directory (now known as “Entra ID” - a useless rebranding of the exact same product), you can connect systems using someone’s email, and it can tightly integrate with your work email account on Microsoft 365, and everything just kind of fits together.
This prevents admins from having to go and do prep/setup on each system and/or maintain a library of system images with all the standard settings for the organization, since connecting with AAD/Entra can also enroll the device into Intune and those policies are just as powerful, if not more powerful than what you can do with images and prep; just now is entirely automatic.
For home users, it’s less about the convenience of system management and more data harvesting of their clients. The irony is that a lot of the business versions still have an option to bypass the online account (usually by selecting an option that you will be joining a classic domain).
So business has the option and largely, business is moving away from it, and home users don’t, but that’s something that a large number of home users want.
The only thought I have on it is that: bitlocker is enabled by default on many newer versions of Windows, by signing in with your M$ account to the PC, those bitlocker keys are backed up. If you don’t use an online account, it’s up to you to back then up, and users either don’t do that, or do it in such a way that it’s ineffective, like saving the recovery key to the very drive that needs that key to unlock it in the event of a problem.
I’ve seen more than one person fall victim to their own lack of knowledge and understanding when bitlocker is enabled, and Windows update screws their boot sequence to the point where they need to do a recovery, which requires the recovery key, which they do not have. It basically makes all of their data inaccessible, and gigabytes of data, just from the people I’ve known affected by this, has already been lost as a result.
I hear what you’re saying, but, there have been some pretty significant improvements to Windows, generation after generation.
Windows 10 finally seemed like they were on the right (and hopefully final) track with the direction of the operating system. Probably the last big improvement was to bring basically everyone to 64 bit.
XP moved us from the 9x kernel to the NT kernel that’s used in Windows today. Vista introduced security features and driver updates that help to keep systems free from many common root kits. 7 brought in a very standard UI, that would be the basis for things going forward, 8/8.1 existed… Then 10 basically uplifted everyone to 64 bit as a default.
Of course this is far from a complete list.
What did W11 add that we didn’t have before? A TPM requirement? Ads? AI slop/shovelware/spyware?
I won’t be doing pretty much anything about it. I have 10 pro, I don’t really give a shit about what Microsoft thinks I should do. My computer is behind a firewall, and bluntly, it’ll be a while before the security issues become such a problem that I need to go and upgrade.
However. I already did the legwork. I went out and upgraded the hardware TPM 1.2 in my system to TPM 2.0, and I picked up some (relatively cheap) Windows 11 pro product keys. I can upgrade if I want.
I also have access to W10 LTSC, so I can always pivot to that if I need to.
I get the security and other concerns with Windows 10. I do, but the windows 11 changes, to me seem like they’re changes for the sake of things being changed. Windows 10’s user experience was already quite good, apart from the fact that every feature release seemed to have the settings moved to a different location (see above about making changes for the sake of making changes). IMO, as a professional sysadmin and IT support, the interface and UX changes have made Windows, as a product, worse; it is by far the worst part of the upgrade process and I don’t know why they thought any of it was a good idea. I also hate what M$ has done with printers, but I won’t get started on that right now.
For all the nitpicking I could do, Windows was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what it needed to be, between Windows 7 and 10. There hasn’t been any meaningful progress in the OS that’s mattered since x86-64 support was added. Windows 10 32 bit was extremely rare, I don’t think I ever saw it (where W7 was a mixed bag of 32/64 bit). Having almost everyone standardized on 64 bit, and Windows 10, gave a predictability that is needed in most businesses. The professional products should not follow the same trends as the home products. If they want to put AI shovelware and ads into the home products, fine. Revamp the vast majority of the control panel into the settings menu, sure. But leave the business products as-is. By far the most problems that people have with Windows 11 that I hear about, relate to how everything changes/looks different, and/or having problems navigating the “new look” or whatever the fuck.
Microsoft: you had a good thing with Windows 10, and you pissed it all away when you put out the crap that is Windows 11.
Stop moving shit around, making controls less useful, and stop making it look like the UX was designed by a 10 year old. Fuck off.
I had to stop playing when I saw the review for AC 3 (I think) from Zero punctuation.
He pointed out that the quests were almost entirely “gofer” quests… You know, you go over there and get that, then go fer that other thing and go…
I started the game not long after and I have to say, he was right. And every time I was given a quest to go somewhere only to talk to someone with little to no reason for doing so other than, I have nothing better to do in the game… When that happened, I heard his voice in my head talking about how annoying gofer quests were.
It annoyed me, and I stopped playing as a result. Never got past the first chapter.
Yeah, I have a ton of time into HL/HL2/CS:GO/Audiosurf/PvZ
Pretty much all of that was lost.
I did a quick Google search and according to some commenters on websites, the great reset was around 2010.
I’ve been on steam since the early days, I think I installed it around the time that blue shift came out? I forget. But back then, if you had any HL2 title, and you put that into steam, you would get what is now known as “the orange box” (more or less). So, yeah, I got a bunch of valve games basically free and I’ve only expanded that collection.
Recently I’ve tapered my spending on games because life/work/family doesn’t allow me a lot of time to play. Which is probably why I like satisfactory so much. If I get an hour, I can build my factory, save it half complete and go back and continue building later.
The biggest thing that I feel like SF has going for it, is that they give you all the tools, tell you the objectives and let you figure everything else out. You have 100% control over how you accomplish the task at hand. You can save/quit anytime you would like, and there’s no demands to get things done in a particular timeframe.
You can save halfway through a build, and you’ll come right back to where you left off. Most games now-a-days are match based, once you’re in a match, you feel obligated to finish the match, and there’s seasons or limited time objectives that you must play a minimum amount in order to even have a chance of getting… There’s just so much pressure, micro-transactions, and effort required.
A nontrivial amount of my gaming time was reset by steam around 2010… IDK why, but there are games on my steam account that I know I’ve sunk over 100 hours into that show zero hours.
Right now, one of my highest is satisfactory, sitting around 1500+ hours.