Ser Salty

It’s more like Brian in 2F2F, although I guess a pimped Skyline isn’t much of a sleeper

The thing that gets me is how little creators actually get per individual ad view. Now, collectively, with tens of thousands and millions of views, they get a good bag. But my watchtimes of that minute worth of ads per video? Literally nothing. A fraction of a cent so small it doesn’t exist. I could watch a creator semi-regularly for like 2 years and my contribution to their income by watching ads would be in the single digits. I give them two bucks over Patreon or something just once and that’s worth as much as me giving up hours upon hours of my life watching ads. Now, I can’t afford to give literally everyone I watch more than once a dollar or two. But I give some money here and there to a couple I watch a lot. To make up for my using an adblocker.

Honestly, I’d probably get YouTube Premium if it wasn’t fucking Google behind it.

I didn’t mind the ads back in the day, like 10+ years ago. They were ads for cars, cleaning products, food and drink, movies, games, theme parks, shit like that. Regular products, wasn’t really any super scummy stuff there. Now half the ads are scummy mobile games designed to cause a gambling addiction, impersonation frauds and scams, crypto doubling scams like it’s fucking Runescape, and a whole bunch of other shit that is actively harmful or brainrotting. I don’t mind seeing a funny little fox selling me laundry detergent, but the fart-piss-and-shit mobile ads are just genuinely revolting. If YouTube wants to make me watch ads, they should have some standards and vetting processes for those ads. Like, I still listen to the radio. I hardly notice the ads there because they aren’t actively making me feel worse physically for having listened to them. Very rarely I’ll watch regular TV and, again, don’t really mind the ads there 90% of the time.

And that’s not even touching on what the creators actually get from the hours of my life I would end up watching ads. If you donate 2 bucks to your favorite creator or sub to their patreon or whatever, you’ve probably given them more money than they would get from your ad views in a year. It’s not the loss of adblock revenue that’s making so many creators take sponsorships, it’s the lack of revenue in the first place.

Haven’t done Ryujin yet myself, but I hear it’s great. Supposedly lots of covert stealth stuff. I personally also enjoyed the Freestar Rangers quest. It’s got more political intrigue than the others I’ve done. (Also leads you to the Porrima system, which has one of the more interesting and bigger sidequests in it.)

One compliment I will also give the factions as a whole is that you don’t immediately become the leader or second in command. Hell, you stay a Deputy until the end of the Rangers quest and only then become a full ranger. It actually feels like an earned promotion.

That works too

I don’t know. I didn’t manage to talk them down on my first playthrough, so who knows, but I don’t think so. But I also don’t think every game or even every RPG needs to be designed with a complete pacifist route in mind. The Shaw Gang mission is also about the only one I can think of that actually fits completely with the “formula” you described, outside of maybe the tutorial.

Also, yeah, Space Pirates might actually be a quest for you, or rather being an undercover agent in the space pirates. You just get straight up thrown out of UC SysDef and have them as your enemy if you run and gun those missions, so you have to sneaky, use your persuasion and actually look around your environments if you want to stay with the good guy faction. The part on the cruise ship is especially good for this. Your choices there definitely matter in that regard.

Maybe it’s just a game for people that are really into space in a specific way. Like, sometimes I’ll just look at pictures of the surface of Venus or Mars and think about the fact that there’s billions of these worlds just existing with no observer. Just rocks, dust, storms, rain, volcanoes, all types of things being there and happening, even though no one can see it.

Half the damn quests don’t even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don’t know, I wasn’t there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It’s not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you’re either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.

And if you don’t believe me and don’t want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.

It’s actually not an issue in Starfield, people just don’t have a clue about the game. Everyone that touches one of the artifacts for the first time gets the vision and can get the temple power. There’s an entire quest where you go to a temple with Barrett and get him a power as well. When you talk to the Emissary and the Hunter, it’s revealed that you die in quite a lot of the other universes. You’re not the chosen one in any capacity, you’re just a random person, there’s nothing special about you.

The main quest also gives you literally zero urgency to complete it. The fate of the universe isn’t at stake, no great threat is looming that requires you to collect them (at least not until way later and even then not really), they’re just a mystery that a group of scientists and explorers is investigating.

A lot of people forget that there’s different kinds of RPGs. Or just games in general. To them, every RPG has to be Baldurs Gate 3 now. Just like previously, every open world now had to be Elden Ring or else it sucks. Sandbox RPG? Never heard of it. Like, can you fuck off to the wilderness and start producing drugs in BG3? Can you build a spaceship that looks like a massive cock? That’s the sort of freedom you get in a Bethesda RPG, where doing random shit in the world is a viable way to play. Are you gonna finish the main story by making drugs? No, but you’re gonna level up and make money.

I think Bethesda games are like the remnants of a genre that has become rarer and rarer. I mean, how many games released these days are actual sandboxes, and not just regular open world games pretending to be sandboxes? Zelda is one that comes to mind, but not really many more outside of Bethesda. Sandbox games are a dying breed in the AAA space, and for some reason some people really just want to deliver the killing blow to it.

Feel like they should’ve shortened them after the first one or two times you do it, so you only have to collect two of the things. Explain it as your connection to the temples growing as you gain their power or something, or even just don’t explain it at all.

Huh? Starfield is the best RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind, because it’s an actual RPG. It has the best quest design since Oblivion, with almost none of the quests boiling down to “Go there, kill guys”, but actually needing to talk to people, pay attention to the environment, interact with the world and make choices (and your Background, Traits, Skills and faction membership all add new ways for you to go about a quest.) The weapon design is an incredible improvement over Fallout 4. Almost everything in Starfield is either a massive step up or a return to form compared to their previous work and you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.

And that’s not even to mention things like the ship building system, which is genuinely extremely impressive.

Idk man, I think there’s a difference between a titty in a painting and triple anal piss porn

Also you have to spend a lot more for good bluetooth ear buds compared to wired. Like, you can get a pair of KZ ZSN Pros for 20 bucks or so. They sound great, have nice material quality (they got metal bits on em!), good quality cable, great sounding mic… you get the idea. To get bluetooth ear buds that sound just as good you’d probably have to spend like 80 bucks? And they’d be made of plastic and not have the mic quality anywhere near the KZs. It’s just so much easier to get good audio quality with a wire.

Also, just a cool thing, you can generally sell the cosmetics from TF2 and CSGO (never played DotA, so don’t know), so If you don’t care about it, sell it on the marketplace, some enthusiast will buy it, and you get 3 bucks to spend on the next sale.

It will imply my spermia being in them, though

Was it at least on a sandwich?

Well, we have a dishwasher and I guess it maybe helps a little? The plates still stack, though it is a bit easier to convince yourself to just put them in the dishwasher real quick, takes less than 10 minutes, than washing them by hand.

Lay off the crack man

Facebook has basically become irrelevant for any discourse outside of “the olds are being radicalized by it”

You could talk about blind people without them knowing