I don’t mind losing if it was a fun battle and that is generally the bit you remember. I have gone 15+ kills to no deaths in war thunder and lost before but its still one of the more memorable games. The enemy just keep on coming as they stomp over your entire team and you stand alone (likely due to a little bit of skill and huge amount of luck) and hold back the tide but in the end they still manage to capture the objective and you lose.

Not really sure how one sided battles is related to microtransactions tbh. All the WW1 game series games (Verdun, Tannenberg, Isonzo) and Enlisted are games I have played lately. Both to some extent have this issue at times and yet have very different pricing models. Verdun and Tannenberg is a single game to buy and that is it, Isonzo added a few premium cosmetic packs. While Enlisted is apparently really bad for grind premium stuff although tbh I haven’t really noticed because you start with a rifle and a rifle kills people. Not really noticed a difference with any of the other rifles, they all kill people.

Some teams are just useless.

Yep, all my GoG games would be installable without internet if I have the installer downloaded, games without DRM bought from the devs directly like Factorio would also work just fine. Loads of games are available outside of steam, some are even on github for free.

The difference is if steam goes down I might not be able to play a few games. If xbox (what is their service?) goes down you can’t play any games.

My first reason for going 4G was general distaste that all the wired providers leave me with. Awful pricing models where they charge less for 4 months then more for 20 and then loads indefinitely kinda thing and I just decided fuck that. I think there is a bit more competition for the 4G side of things too.

Outages are a thing of the past since I switched to 4G. If you asked me in 2010 if 4G of all things would be better than a wired connection I would never have believed it.

It’s fast enough and never had an outage. Once in the past year I rotated the antenna to point at a different mast because it was being a little slow. I assume cell towers are a higher priority of infrastructure as they serve more people, and as there are multiple I can connect to there is also redundancy.

As bad as the customers I deal with are I am so glad we only work with real companies. The smallest are a few hundred staff. At least 99% of the time they can be professional. The exception so far have been pretty funny though, shame I don’t go on calls with them anymore tbh.

I was born early 90s and always had a bike, so kids not use them anymore, or is it a regional thing?

Isn’t it linear story based though? I prefer open ended, been playing a lot of bannerlord recently

It worked the other way for me, seeing it locked me out because I am not agreeing to that

Damn reading the impact this has is some combination of hilarious and horrifying to see people bought into a service like this. If it was free or simply a monthly sub like Netflix I could kinda understand. But a sub to use things you also had to buy? Fuck that.

I still find it crazy thinking that people are rich enough to pay for services like this.

I even have a couple of things that found ~/.local but missed /share

Normally cheaper on eBay in my experience. Pretty rare that I will use Amazon these days