While we’re on the topic of EU initiatives, the tax the rich initiative still needs signatures. It aims to set a floor on tax rates for the very wealthy, and have member states use that new money for environment, employment and social policies.

They’ve hit the threshold for France and Germany, but still need more signatures everywhere else.

Abandon consoles. Embrace the inevitability of the PC master race.

Good thing I double-checked to see if someone else made this point yet.

Yeah. Not only that, but the splash screen when you launch the game makes it incredibly clear that it’s one guy called Greg (very humanizing) and he’s working on it, but he’s not some superhero.

You can always refund it. Even if you’ve gone over the 2 hours for an auto-accept refund, if you explain the issues in the ticket Steam will always accept it in my experience.

Even got a refund for a game after 20 hours of game time due to them adding aggressive client-side anti-cheat.

Very poignant point being made here about employee retention. Mass layoffs are a sledgehammer to institutional knowledge in companies, and retention and advancement of entire teams does the opposite.

A company literally cannot learn lessons from successes and failures. That’s done by employees in the company. Lose the experience, and you have to start again.

Computer-assisted board games are a growing subcategory. Typically they have a companion app that handles the background number crunch, RNG, and guides you through turns with what decisions are possible in each phase.

I very much agree with Bricky’s review of the new Darktide updates.

Basically, I think there was a fundamental disconnect between what most people wanted out of it and what I wanted out of it. As a massive fan of the original L4D and L4D2, the idea of a Warhammer version of L4D was incredibly appealing. As a game where you jump in, play a round or two, and then move on to whatever it is you need to do during the day it functioned incredibly well.

However, it seems the majority wanted a game with an expansive grindy end-game with lots more loot progression and maps. The maps part I can relate to, variety is good, but do we need yet another game that you need to play for 10,000 hours before you get the “good” stuff? Really?

The crafting system was and still is pretty broken, btw. I just really hope fixing it doesn’t remove the possibility of easily getting high-tier weapons to try things out without gimping yourself for the higher difficulty missions.

I like the new maps, the new talent system is kinda interesting to fiddle with, the variant abilities for the 4 classes are awesome, but I had no issues with the way the game was before. The new boss fight is fun to play a few times, the 2 new maps are alright, and the new weapons are very hit and miss.

EDIT: Oh! For those that haven’t figured out how to sidestep the entire janky crafting system, here’s how you do it:

1. Go to Brunt’s Armory and pick the weapon you’d like to have

2. Keep buying copies of it until you get one with good stats (for a level 30 character, stats have a rating cap of 380. Anything 370+ is basically perfect)

3. Sell all except the best one

4. Take your good weapon to Hadron and consecrate it up to max rarity

Paradox as a publisher seems to pull this shit a lot. Was really looking forward to Lamplighter’s League, but the buggy mess that it released in shows very clearly that Paradox shoved it out the door before QA had some serious time with it.

They don’t do this shit with their in-house games, seems to be an issue with them as a publisher.

+1 for transistor. It’s such a strangely compelling, bizarre and emotional story.

They legally can’t. If they tried to disable refunds, the EU would fine them into the ground.