I tried it like a year ago, maybe more, and it wasn’t ready for that. The battery life was awfull (which was a SW issue of the OS not being able to stand-by properly), and accepting calls wasn’t really reliable. It’s more of a gimmick and great as a side-phone, but I wouldn’t use it as a daily driver.

But the situation might’ve changed.

I can do that and more on my Pinephone running Kali Nethunter. While it’s mostly a gimmick with awfull battery life, I’ve already used it a few times mostly in regards to wifi pentesting for my cyber-sec job, i.e when going to lunch onsite and you notice a new wifi AP you didn’t see when inside the office you’re working on.

And since it has an USB-C, I can simply plug in a dock with two USB-As, Ethernet, PD and HDMI, to turn it into a full-fledged Kali desktop.

I’ve heard that this kind of s(h)itting is (or was?) common in some Asian countries. Learned that when someone left shit all over the toilet at our company, in places where it would be basically impossible to get to unless you were sitting like this.

It has been a while since I played, but afaik ypu can always just self-destruct the ship through one of the side menus or keybinds, and then you can either pay insurace cost to get the same ship repaired, or abandon it for the default ship, which should also respawn you somewhere sensible.

I don’t recall if there’s any story or anything else ypu’d want reset, the tutorial is standalone and since it’s a sandbox I don’t think there’s much else to reset.

For me, I enjoyed Elite Dangerous way more than Freelancer. Freelancer was too much arcadey for me, and I was never able to properly immerse into it.

Elite, on the other way, thanks to it being a MMO where I got a pretty nice semi-RP guild, along with stunning visuals and VR support, was one of the first games I was able to immerse into and just chill, exploring around. Which surprised me, since I usually get bored easily without a fast progress or a goal in mind, due to my short attention span, but this game completely captured me and it was first game that I just simply spent time in.

Of course, it’s just my subjective experience. But there is something Elite must be doing extremely well, because this has not happened to me in any other game to this extent.

If you look at it from this perspective, it sounds way more obvious. I like this PoV.

From what I remember from college, I think what you’re talking about is mostly about intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation, into which there’s a lot of research. Just adding it in case someone wanted to look more into it, and was looking for some keywords.

It’s one of the things that’s worth knowing about, because you can somehow work around it to get motivated better, and it’s one of the more important topics in game design. So, in general a usefull piece of psychology knowledge.

Thanks for this, it actually made me realize that there is another MMO I spent more of my childhood with - Stat Wars Galaxies, and more importantly, that I can still play it on private servers. Which also extends to WoW, playing on a private server might acually be a good compromise, when I get the urge again.

But so far, I’m falling for FFXIV. Hopefully Square Enix isn’t as bad as Blizz. I remember hearing some NFT writings on the wall, but so far it doesn’t sound too bad.

I just got through whole of ARR and started HW, so I should be past that point. Haven’t really noticed it too much, but the difference in pacing is kind of apparent in the hindsight. The story is interesting enough and the game never ceases to amaze me with variety of side activities or QoL things that I don’t mind a slower pace and am greatful for the game as is. Especially comparing it to WoW, its such a breath of fresh air. So far it feels like the game SWTOR wished to be, and it’s great.

I also think that they heavily cut through the amount of slog required for ARR, judging by the list of removed mandatory MSQ quests on wiki.

I started FFXIV trial few weeks ago, and so far I was having a blast. The major issue is that I probably won’t manage to convince my friends and partner to also switch, since they are invested in WoW and are having fun. But the plan is to find a nice FC and get some regular events in, and we’ll see how it goes.

On the other hand, I tried that with GW2 a few years ago, had a blast, found someone random to play with, but eventually I just forgot about the game… Which is something that never happens with WoW 😠

Blizzard. I’ve been recently thinking about how much of a “comfort food” the game is for me, and how no other game could ever get me the same feeling as returing back to a game I’ve spent literally months player over the last 15 years. It’s my escapism, where I don’t have to stress about anything and know so much about the game, that I don’t have to learn anything new or unknown, which makes it even more comfortable. It’s also a game where I have a lot of friends, and since they are in the similar boat, we usually just meet up for an expansion - but investing our whole group into another game usually just fails.

The problem is, that Blizzard knows this and has started to exploit it. Milking players of as much money as they can, while abandoning their “Players First” motto and absolutely shitting over the playerbase by gutting most of the development teams that had some passion left, hiring management who didn’t care about the game in the slightest and only was there to increase revenue and reduce costs as much as possible.

It’s more and more apparent, the game is in the worst and buggiest state as far as I remember, lot of content was cut, there’s literally no customer support - people can be stuck for weeks with their character somewhere, while only response they get is an AI generated “FUCK YOU”, and their only hope being that their post will blow up on reddit and someone will actually look at their case.

The new book about Blizzard is so depressing read, and makes me extremely angry. Fuck all those people who ruined the company, even though one of the founding owners was extremely against it and fought for years to keep at least some semblance of original vision. And he lost.

I hate that I always return to the game when I’m down and just need a serious dose of escapism from real life, that only this game can provide. I’m slowly trying to invest myself into other MMOs, and get rid of this toxic, gaslighting ex WoW has been for me. But what I hate the most is how obvious their change of priorities is in their recent games.

I wish nothing but the worst for people who ruined Blizzard. We could’ve had second Larian, if it was Morhaime instead of Kodick and his greed who won.

Thankfully, we have FFXIV and Path of Exile, that still respect players, and Blizz games can go fuck themselves. I hope I’ll manage to finally transition from WoW for good this time.

What drove the point home for me was seeing a Twitter account (it was years ago) that posts short 6 second segments of every new game released on steam.

It was posting almost hourly, and while there was a lot of trash, most of the games were of pretty “standart” smaller indie quallity. It’s ruthless.

And in addition with the GDC talk of someone who made literally millions by making a generator that generates super basic slot machine games on various themes (as in, generate a theme (cars, bird…), download a few pictures, place them on slot machine) and uploads them to Play Store (back then you had a limit on 20 games a day, and they did include some more rules about quality in reaction to this talk), and the game were getting thousands of downloads and when they checked how is their script doing after few months, they had like over a million in revenue IIRC. Sure, it’s about mobile games, but it is hearbreaking when you realize how do the consumers work in reality.

This is the first time ive heard about microg. How is the app support with it? Can you run every app that needs play service? I have Google Sandbox installed only on a second Graphene profile, and use it for bare minimum of apps that dont work without it, Bolt app, mostly weird MFA for work or package tracking apps i use once per month, while disabling most of their permissions. Will microg improve my situation in this case to be worth switching over? Does it work without root?

I think it’s time to stop and think whether we really need all of those services? We’ve been slowly trapped into social networks and various unecessary services through dark patterns, and now we somehow can’t imagine being without them, even though they actively make everything worse.

What was the last time you watched a Youtube video that actually was worth the time, and wasn’t just a shallow content about something vaguely interesting, but something you’ll probably could live without? Do we really need to agregate news and articles from the whole internet, while there probably are good local newspaper/news sites that will get you up to speed, without giving you clickbait articles? For example, we have a pretty great news company that is independent and funded entierly by users, and it’s enough for keeping up to speed on world events without having to scroll through a lot of bullshit.

The more enshitificated the internet gets, the more I’m starting to realize that I really don’t need almost any of it. Sure, some things are pretty usefull, like cloud storage, but almost anything I needed so far was solved by just getting a NAS with Nextcloud. The only thing I really need the internet for is messaging and email. And if I want to stay up to date, we have amazing smaller local sites for both gaming news and for world news, and those two are enough.

The more that I think about my internet usage, the more I’m realizing that I don’t really mind its enshitification - because ever since it started happening, I’ve been just removing addictions from my life and replacing it with more niche or smaller sites that are updated less frequently, don’t stalk me, and I’ve slowly started to realize that thanks to that I can do a lot more done and don’t get trapped by scrolling through clickbaity dopamine rush made to keep me glued to a screen.

I recommend reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimalism . I’ve already read it several times, and never managed to get into fully implementing it. I did stop using Facebook, and reduced my Reddit usage drastically during those years, but this enshitification is only making it easier to just not using anything I really don’t need. I’m looking forward to WEI and other “You can’t do this” stuff that will come with it, because it’s exactly the trigger that will make me stop and think “Do I really need to do this? Or are there better ways how to solve this.”. And the answer is almost always “Nope”.