I think the Galaxy Store occasionally has some offers, like 50% discount on purchases and stuff. If you play gacha games, you can “save” a lot of money.

Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.

Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).

Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.

The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.

Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).

If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.

So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).

World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).

But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.

What keeps them engaged with Destiny 2 despite its apparent lack of a clear path forward?

There is no alternative. The First Descendant is p2w. Once Human has different structure and resets your progress every season. Warframe is pretty different and similar to First Descendant. Overwatch basically cancelled its pve. Darktide is clunky.

And none of these games have the polish and shooting satisfaction that Destiny has. If people want a pve game, with long term progression that has enjoyable shooting, Destiny is all there is. What keeps them playing? Copium.

Slowly but steadily Destiny will die. And thats when Marathon will come out. But Marathon is very different, so i am not even so sure that most Destiny players will migrate to that.

I am not even playing Destiny. Destiny is the game that i want to love so much but always shits on me, so i gave up. It seems to me that the easiest thing in the world, is to keep Destiny going and address its minor issues. But somehow Bungie doesnt think so.

With geforce now(and other similar cloud gaming services), you can play all kinds of AAA games in your browser, including diablo 4.

If your phone has stopped getting security updates, then that is a big issue. Even if the phone is working fine. People are using their phones for banking, paying stuff, email, saving personal photos, etc. You dont want people hacking into your phone and an unpatched phone is an insecure phone.

Which is why samsung/google(and apple before them), have started offering 7 years of OS support. Modern phone hardware, especially flagship tier one, can last for a long time. Other than the battery degrading, the rest of the phone is still powerful enough for everything.

The map is outdated.

Greece legalized gay marriage because the current conservative government(which opposed it in the past) decided that it was more useful to deny the “gay marriage” as a weapon for the opposition and made it legal.

Still, only half of their mp supported the bill and the bill passed because the opposition supported it.

I think all Xiaomis(sold in Europe) have Google Store. Huawei is the one without Google Store.

True, i dont know the network situation in the US.

Because Lenovo is a chinese company and people think motorola is an american one. Either way, you are better off buying xiaomi/poco but americans are ignorant of these brands(because they are not being sold in the US).

So every time some chinese company like motorola or nothing, markets a phone to America, americans have their minds blown that there are cheaper but good phones available. But in Europe, these phones are available and very popular. Xiaomi is probably more popular than samsung and apple, especially in poorer countries. Even in “western” Europe, xiaomi has 15% market share, samsung 35% and apple 33%.

If you are willing to ignore the fact that xiaomi is a chinese company, they are offering amazing value for money products. Which is why they keep offering more and more products, including cars. And while i cannot speak for their other products, xiaomi/poco phones are great. Especially poco, if you dont care about cameras but care about performance/soc. Poco is a subbrand of xiaomi.

Some of the books are small stories that take part throughout the ages and have different characters. In the series they decided to have the same protagonists, so they went through insanely convoluted plot devices to achieve that and to move them around the place and have them being related.

But my real issue is that they really changed not only Hari Seldon’s and “Demerzel”'s characters but what the series is about. They are kinda making it a religion and then say “oh it isnt a religion thing, it is just a tool, oh nvm, it is a religion, ha just kidding, not a religion or maybe it is”. The foundation series is pretty atheistic in nature. And while religion is used(as a tool against the outsiders), the tv series makes Seldon a televangelist.

The tv series is full of deus ex machina and not even good deus ex machina. Maybe they felt the initial stories would appear somewhat simplistic and tried to modernize them and make them “edgy”. Generally, 90% of the plot isnt from the books.

“Demerzel” is a couple characters combined from the books but ultimately she is the most important character of the show(well i assume so, because she isnt a 1:1 character from the books). And she cannot be religious.

Most of these issues could be solved by simply renaming the series and some story editing to make it tighter and less convoluted. You dont need to have the same characters be everywhere, at every period and be related to each other, it is silly and cringe, just like Rey Palpatine Skywalker.

I will still watch future seasons and the show has many stories and scenes that are great(most of the Empire stuff, which are original). But even without knowledge of the books, i feel those artificial story arcs that try to connect characters are bad.

TLDR : If the books are Star Trek TNG, the series is Star Trek Discovery

Blue lives matter.

If you have read the Foundation books, the series will piss you off. Not just because it has very little in common with the books but because it goes against what the books stood for. And the most interesting parts of the Foundation tv series are the emperor arcs, which are original and arent from the books.

It seems to me that the creator wanted to make a scifi series of his own but just used the Foundation name for branding, name dropping and some abstract story elements. And then try to marry all the elements with some inane movie alchemy bullshit.

I want wireless headphones that can play audio sound from 2 devices simultaneously. And while doing that, you can still use your microphone and your audio wont have shit quality.

I know in windows, when you want to use your microphone on your wireless headphones, audio quality goes to shit because it doesnt have enough bandwidth to drive both excellent sound quality and microphone recording.

I want to be able to play a game on my phone(with audio), while watching a video on my pc and voice chatting on discord, all at the same time with perfect audio quality. This cant be that hard yet for some reason, even after 10 years of wireless headphones, we cant do that.