Deep dish crust has been surprisingly easy to replicate at home, but for the life of me I can’t get the sauce and especially the sausage anywhere near where I want it. I swear Lou Malnati’s does some outright witchcraft with their sausage. It’s so good.

Plus, it’s amazing how hard it is to find whole milk mozzarella in some places.

Magic’s primary tournament structure is based on a pool of cards that rotates out on a regular basis (every couple years or so). That pool is called Standard. Typically, these cards were all in-universe, but now they will have licensed properties like Final Fantasy in the pool. There’s also a Spider-Man set coming, so this creates official tournament situations where you could have Exdeath and Doctor Octopus facing off on the battlefield. Magic has its own robust setting, so I can’t think of words to convey how bizarre this feels to someone that started playing Magic 25 years ago.

There are also expanded card pools that create their own competitive environments (the recent Lord of the Rings set was legal in one of these). I mentioned drafting, which is drafting cards only from specific sets to build a deck. That’s how I play Magic; I mostly left the Standard scene behind a few years back.

I’ll be drafting this day one. Been looking forward to this a while. Today’s announcement said there will be series artists doing cards. If Akihiko Yoshida is on board, I’m going to have to get his card(s) and probably prints, too.

A bit out of scope for this community discussion, but the news that it’s going to be a Standard-legal set is quite surprising (and will probably drive the price of cards up, unfortunate for those looking to collect).

A lot of those games are still around, just not in legal distribution channels.

The more at-risk stuff is newer games going forward, such as live-service games or games locked down with DRM that requires authentication to play.

Here’s a second person, then. It shouldn’t be too surprising; anyone that works in games media will tell you that new releases are what drive peak engagement.

RSS can be similar to their Twitter feed, with a curated set of highlighted games once a certain amount of reviews are in. I already get a dozen feeds that have reviews in them anyway, and I often read them even if I’m not already interested in the game. Why not an aggregate? I’d subscribe in a heartbeat.

I doubt anyone knows how much of the playerbase it makes up, but the WoW subscription effectively went up to $20 a month for anyone that’s using in-game gold to fund it.

There are certainly people that specifically like that kind of storytelling that puts the onus on the audience to do some digging. It’s why Malazan Book of the Fallen is popular, for example.

It didn’t do as much for me in Elden Ring, but I enjoyed it in Dark Souls 3 and it’s why Demon’s Souls has one of my favorite moments in gaming. Wouldn’t have worked with more explicit narrative.

Oh boy, this makes it sound like there’s another Calvard game after Kai. This series is never going to end, hah.

This succinctly covers my view on it as well. I think it’ll be more of a problem a few years down the road as statist admin culture begins to influence the mods of more communities there, but for now I treat it on an community-by-community, user-by-user basis. I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of community leaders and users in general that went to lemmy.ml simply did because it was one of the larger instances last year and didn’t think much more of it than that.

If I have a choice, though, I’ll still try to grow a community on one of the smaller instances simply because it’s still one of the largest ones, and that’s better for the health of the network.

All I can think about is how this bot is immediately a non-starter because this is the kind of attitude I can expect from the author when asking for support or collaboration. It’s not just in this post, either.

Even if the parent comment here was hostile–it’s borderline, at worst–I can’t possibly understand the mentality of being argumentative in a post trying to encourage the use of a service.