Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.

Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).

Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.

The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.

Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).

If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.

So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).

World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).

But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.

What keeps them engaged with Destiny 2 despite its apparent lack of a clear path forward?

There is no alternative. The First Descendant is p2w. Once Human has different structure and resets your progress every season. Warframe is pretty different and similar to First Descendant. Overwatch basically cancelled its pve. Darktide is clunky.

And none of these games have the polish and shooting satisfaction that Destiny has. If people want a pve game, with long term progression that has enjoyable shooting, Destiny is all there is. What keeps them playing? Copium.

Slowly but steadily Destiny will die. And thats when Marathon will come out. But Marathon is very different, so i am not even so sure that most Destiny players will migrate to that.

I am not even playing Destiny. Destiny is the game that i want to love so much but always shits on me, so i gave up. It seems to me that the easiest thing in the world, is to keep Destiny going and address its minor issues. But somehow Bungie doesnt think so.

You might be right, though the ears arent floppy.

It kinda looks like a basenji, with relaxed tail. Their tails are usually curled, but when they relax, it can uncurl.

Maybe it is a basenji mix, hence the uncurled tail and kinda off whitebrown colour.

Be aware that basenjis are not normal dogs, they are more like cats. And also there are a billion stray dogs that need companions, no need to breed extra.

Till recently(like 5 years ago), almost all cars in Europe were manuals. Nowadays, automatics are more common, maybe even majority(with all the electric cars coming out).

This is a gaming phone with very mediocre(for a flagship phone) cameras. It’s also slightly thicker than most phones, with bigger battery and active cooling. It isnt waterproof and has no hdr either. And it only has software support for 2? years. But you cant find many other phones that offer this kind of performance for that low price.

It is a phone that has significant strengths and weaknesses.

With geforce now(and other similar cloud gaming services), you can play all kinds of AAA games in your browser, including diablo 4.

Greeks living in current western Turkey were called Ionians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionians

They were mostly athenean settlers, which is why when Persia conquered them, they asked Athens for help. Athens helped them but the ionian revolt failed and Persia was super pissed. The persian emperor had his servant reminding him daily to “remember the athenians”.

This is the main reason behind the persian invasion of mainland Greece. The persians burnt Athens to the ground, which eventually led to Alexander the OK burning Persepolis(Persian Empire’s Capital) to the ground(a couple centuries later).

Since turks came from the East, Ionians were kinda the first greeks they met, so they decided that all greeks are Ionians(Yunans). Or other non greeks in the East were already calling greeks “yunans” and turks just adopted that terminology too. Especially since that term had been mostly depreciated by the time the turks arrived to the neighbourhood.

Most of Sicily was a greek and Syracuse was a greek colony. In fact Archimedes helped defend it against the romans. Most of southern Italy was greek, before Rome became big(and conquered other italians, greeks and carthaginians).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Graecia

And even after the romans conquered “everything”, greek culture was still dominant since the romans were greekaboos(and greek culture was everywhere because of Alexander the OK).

An ai can help a lot of non tech savvy people. Imagine every time they want to do something, they could just ask the ai on how to do it, instead of asking you or having to go through a billion SEO garbage google results.

It’s also available on hbo max.

Because not many europeans primarily identify as “european first”. This is slowly changing but for the most part, people identify by whatever european nation they inhabit. But i bet most chinese identify as “chinese first” instead of whatever region/city they are from.

In fact, China likes to brag about how “advanced” they are, that they solved this “issue” centuries ago, while the EU is currently trying to “copy them”.

TLDR : If you ask a chinese tourist “where are you from?”, they will answer “China”. If you ask a european the same, noone will say “Europe/EU”.

Cyrillic is literally greek+glagolitic and it was partly a diplomatic creation of the Eastern Roman Empire(aka Byzantine Empire), in order to bring the slavs culturally closer to them.

Russians have nothing to do with it, other than them claiming they are the continuation of Eastern Roman Empire, something which is kinda laughable but whatever dont let your dreams be dreams.

Intel was ahead of AMD ever since core 2 duo, in 2006. Amd was behind for almost 10 years and it wasnt until ryzen and especially zen 2 that AMD pulled ahead. And then with zen 3 and zen 4, AMD wiped the floor with intel.

7800x3d is the best cpu ever made for gaming and it succeeded the 5800x3d which was already a legendary cpu. Intel has been getting wrecked so hard that they are literally using tsmc to manufacture their cpus, an obvious admission that their manufacturing is behind the competition(amd is fabless and is also using tsmc).

Intel has the ability to come back on top, at least as far as x86 cpus are concerned. The question is whether x86 is even relevant anymore, considering the insane efficiency gains shown by apple’s m series and even qualcomm’s upcoming snapdragon x series.

Actually Halo Infinite might come out on ps5. Microsoft is publishing a lot of their games to Playstation atm. Sea of Thieves, Hi-fi rush, Grounded, Pentiment are all out on ps5.

Sea of Thieves was one of the big xbox exclusive games, developed by Rare, which is owned by Microsoft since 2002 and all the games they have made in the last 15+ years have been xbox exclusive.

If the cars run over people while going 30kmh because they use cameras and a bug crashed into the camera and that caused the car to go crazy, that is not acceptable, even if the cars crash “less than humans”.

Self driving needs to be highly regulated by law and demand to have some bare minimum sensors, including radars, lidars, etc. Camera only self driving is beyond stupid. Cameras cant see in snow or dark or whatever. Anyone who has a phone knows how fucky the camera can get under specific light exposures, etc.

Noone but tesla is doing camera only “self driving” and they are only doing it in order to cut down the cost. Their older cars had more sensors than their newer cars. But Musk is living in his Bioshock uber capitalistic dream. Who cares if a few people die in the process of developing visual based self driving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm2x6CVIXiE

I mean germanic people/vikings raided/ruled southern Europe. The Mediterranean Sea was hugely important for trade and civilization, throughout the ages. Athens was a french duchy for a couple centuries, ruled by francs. Alps is not as isolating as, the Sahara desert. You have navigable rivers like Danube and southern France with access to the Mediterranean sea.

Does your average norwegian have some greek dna? Maybe not. But ultimately everyone fucked everyone and people fucked people near them. And the Mediterranean Sea facilitated a lot of fucking, trading and conquering between the countries that had access to it.

It’s like saying “the mongols never conquered Greece, therefore greeks dont have mongol dna”. The mongols fucked with turkic people and turkic(turks) people fucked with greek people. So i am sure greeks have some mongol dna.

There is this funny video of turkish youtubers who did dna tests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TStTmMCtgBk

And many of them have majority greek dna or a big part of greek dna.

The greeks had colonies everywhere. Odessa and Marseille started as greek colonies. They copied the phoenician model of “where there is sea, we can colonize, reinforce, conquer and trade with”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation

And then Alexander the OK conquered the “entire” world. After his death, his empire was split into multiple hellenic(ie greek) kingdoms. Greek became the lingua franca, since the ruling class was greek, and greek culture was spread everywhere. Thats why the New Testament was written in greek.

Hanukkah is actually the celebration of the uprising of the jews against their greek rulers. If you are somewhat familiar with the history of the era, you might have heard about the Seleucids or the Ptolemies. Those were greek kingdoms. Cleopatra was a Ptolemy and she was the first in her dynasty who bothered to learn egyptian. All previous Ptolemy rulers only spoke greek, their court was greeks and some hellenized(greekified) jews and egyptians. The Ptolemies were extremely incestuous.

Then the romans came and conquered most of that. Some other greek kingdoms were taken back by their local population. Funnily enough, the last independent “greek” kingdom that survived was the most remote one, the Indo-Greek Kingdom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greek_Kingdom

An indogreek kingdom that fought chinese raiders. Thats an interesting crossover.

Bullets dont create holes. Once inside, they spin and/or deform, causing a lot more damage than a bullet sized hole. Apparently, when your brain is fucked this much, it is over. Of course it doesnt always work perfectly but more often than not, it does. It is by far the most effective way of killing yourself.

The reason death sentences arent done using guns because aiming and shooting at people is hard and has psychological repercussions for the shooters. Even when executions were done by bullet, you had a lot of shooters so that noone had to bare the killing responsibility.