Sordid

It looks cool, but frankly I’m far more interested in how it’s going to be monetized. I bought into PoE early access back in the day but stopped playing after a few years because I got fed up with how its game design is compromised in order to accommodate its business model. Specialized stash tabs for currency, maps, cards, etc. are basically a mandatory purchase, since inventory management is hell without them. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but IMO deliberately introducing game design problems, such as tedious inventory management, so that you can sell the solutions is a scummy practice. The same goes for drop rates, which are frustratingly low in order to force you to trade instead of finding your gear yourself, since in order to trade effectively, you need to buy a few premium tabs. Even though I actually made all these purchases to overcome these artificial hindrances, being squeezed like that left such a bad taste in my mouth that I just couldn’t enjoy the game anymore. If they keep this up in PoE2, I’m going to steer well clear.

Wasn’t that back when PoE2 was supposed to just be a big update to PoE1? I haven’t followed the development news all that closely, but I know that used to be the plan.

I guess I was wrong about Orbán. He seemed to want his boots licked, turns out he wants to be a bootlicker. Go figure.

I unironically wish all controllers were like this. IMO the main way hardware limits game design is the number of buttons on modern controllers; more buttons = more actions that can be performed = more complex and interesting games.

I don’t know if it counts as a controller per se, but I’ve been using an MMO mouse with a big number pad for the thumb for quite a few years now. I used to laugh at these things, but once I tried one, I couldn’t go back. Those extra buttons come in handy a lot more often than you might think, and sometimes I wish it had even more.

I have both PS4 and PS5 controllers for use with my PC, and I prefer the PS4 one because it feels more comfortable in my hands.

More people were killed by US Customs and Border Patrol in 2022 than died at the Berlin Wall in its entire 28-year existence.

Maybe the fact that the US border is almost 80 times longer than the Berlin Wall has something to do with that?

That’s about 1400 per million killed in Berlin and about 60 per million killed in the US. Considering one had shoot-to-kill orders and the other is supposed to be a upstanding country, only 20x better really isn’t that impressive.

Some percentage of people are always going to whip out a gun and start blasting when authorities try to detain them, so you’re never going to get that number down to zero.

According to these numbers, the US police arrested a total of just over ten million people in 2019, and the total number of people fatally shot by cops that year was a thousand. So that’s a fatality rate of 100 per million arrests, almost double the rate of fatalities per attempted border crossing. So, y’know, I think the US Border Patrol is doing relatively well.

I mean… yes, that’s true, but my point is that it’s disingenuous to imply the US is “the baddies” by comparing the number of people killed at its enormous border to the tiny Berlin Wall. Especially when, based on the numbers, the US law enforcement seems to handle border security with kid gloves compared to policing its own citizens.

I don’t really recall any spacewalks so we don’t see any instance of ‘no gravity’

Leia did one in the sequels.