Quetzalcutlass

There are good live service games, but the blatant monetization bothers some people.

Take Warframe, one of the most popular live service games. Everything can be earned in game, including the premium currency as long as you're willing to put in time and effort. However, every single UI element offers a way to spend that premium currency with higher presentation priority than the actual in-universe methods of doing whatever that menu is for.

Want a specific gun? Only 500 platinum for a fully kitted out model* (or 25,000 credits for the blueprint you actually want, and it wasn't until fairly recently that they added tooltips showing where to earn things in-game). Building something? Only 20 platinum to rush construction, or you could wait a day. Want to customize your frame? Here's a few dozen color palettes, 99% of which cost platinum.

* Which is such an awful newbie trap. Don't buy weapons or frames off the Market in Warframe, kids. Their Prime variants, which are statistically superior, can be bought off other players for a fraction of what DE charges for the inferior regular versions. The Market is hilariously, blatantly overpriced and has been since the very beginning.

Space Engineers is another offender. It's a block-building game and all of its DLC is cosmetic skins, but even if you don't own the DLCs those skins show up as unique blocks in the block picker with a padlock icon that tells you to buy their associated DLC. It clutters up the UI to the point of worthlessness, but there's no way to turn it off because it acts as an advertisement.

Let's not even get into gacha games, which feed off of addictive impulses to have a small percentage of players pay thousands of dollars to subsidize everyone else who plays for free.

Live Service and Dark Patterns go together. Games as a Service requires a constant revenue stream to fund development, which incentivises predatory design patterns.

I get that, but she's already a billionaire. The damage is done; nothing we as consumers can do will have a meaningful effect on her life. And the game studio is obviously against her views, given the positive presence of a clearly MtF trans character* in the first game.

* Which honestly bothered me (the obviousness, not the trans part), because the Potterverse is one where you'd imagine transitioning to be easy and perfect (take that, Jo). I think it would have worked better if that character had a flawlessly feminine voice and only revealed they were born male later in their dialog. The way it was implemented it felt like pandering to negate Rowling's toxic reputation, which tbf it probably was.

Counterpoint: it's WB Games. Nothing they've done in the last few years gives me confidence that their suits won't fuck things up in their attempts to wring ever more money out of their games.

It also mentions that the unannounced title is planned to have a "live ops" phase post-release, suggesting that the Hogwarts Legacy sequel could be a live-service game. WB Games has been quite vocal about doubling down on its live-service push in recent times, seemingly unfazed by the failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

That's all you need to know.

There are over a thousand named characters in the Wheel of Time. I think I actually liked less than ten, and only one of them was part of the Emon's Field crew (Matt, after he stops whining and becomes an actual competent person - due to magic, of course, because positive character development only happens via deus ex machina in this series).

Don't forget Skimming, which is plot relevant like twice after teleporting is introduced (and one of those times isn't even for traveling, it's to throw an invincible murder golem into the void between dimensions).

It's the, ah, finish that's the danger.

Basically this:

(I'm sorry)

Catpuchin.

Felt the deep pit in my stomach

It's depressing how I went from not understanding this expression, to feeling it nearly every time I checked the headlines starting in November of 2016.

A reminder that in Florida in 2000, Republicans were experimenting with these disenfranchisement tactics (roll purges, closing polling stations, convenient road blockages in cities, the works). They won that state* by a few hundred votes in key districts, and these dirty tactics became a mainstay for the party. And that was before the SCOTUS basically said "racism is over, these voter protection laws are unnecessary now". Every vote counts, especially where they've made it difficult to do so.

* Gore probably would have won Florida, and thus the presidency, if the SCOTUS didn't halt the recount - in large part due to Roger Stone, one of the biggest pushers of dirty tactics. There are a small number of people who have caused a great deal of harm in this country.

I remember registering my fingerprints as a kid as part of a Cub or Boy Scout activity. In retrospect that was really messed up.