People vote with their wallet repeatedly against live service games, and they keep releasing them. Eventually they’ll stop, right? Right?

I’m a former player, but played continuously from release for 11 years. This is undoubtedly ridiculously expensive, but the convenience of having your mail and auction house anywhere in the world - the value to certain players is immense. I think if I played still today, it would probably be a struggle deciding whether this limited time offering was worth jumping on - I certainly don’t need it even a little bit, but when I want it, this thing would be incredibly convenient to have. Maybe that would just be the addiction talking. But when you spend all your free time with one game, you do feel a sense of good value relative to things like drinks at the bar or a movie or buying 1 or 2 full priced games a month.

But truly, the utility this provides for you and your guild is immense and impossible to replicate. They definitely shouldn’t be selling mounts on the shop for $90. That’s fucked. But compared to some of the video game devs selling weapon or character skins for as much or more, there IS at least a unique value proposition to the player. I guarantee there will be people with it the second it releases, for better or worse.

Did people get bitchy on the internet when they released the PS One, the PS2 slim, 5 generations of PS3, or the PS4 Pro? Or the Xbox One X, Xbox 360 E, the Switch OLED, 2DS, DS lite, Gameboy Advance SP, Sega Genesis 2, Sega Genesis 3, Sega Saturn 2? I certainly don’t remember this much discourse back then. It’s like every gamer on the internet has collective amnesia about mid generation refreshes and how they have existed since the dawn of console gaming.

Just as always - it’s probably not meant for you if you’re perfectly happy with your base model.

And just like all those multitude of prior examples - no, they certainly will not release games that ONLY work on the mid cycle refresh device. Because that would be a really poor financial decision. And can you imagine the discourse if you had to buy a $700 console to replace your $500 console so you could play all the newest first party titles? On a device that has likely 4 years max before it is subplanted by the PS6? That would be a far more justified upset in my opinion.

She’s not a teacher, shes in the library. But - she is allowed absolutely zero ot. She’s already had her time card adjusted on days that she worked early or late to match her scheduled hours. And they only pay her for 7 hours a day, but it’s an 8 hour work day and she hasn’t once had the time to take a hour for lunch.

What even IS the recourse when it’s not a comproration, but the government that is stealing your wages? 🤷 I think I’m more upset about it all than she is, because the quality of life is way higher than her last job. And so I’ll just keep it all to myself.

My wife got her first pay check last week at her new job in a US school district. I was certain something was wrong when it came in, but the pay stub did nothing to show the breakdown of hours, rate, etc. She finally got a response today - and I’ve learned that school breaks are NOT PTO. She gets zero PTO she can take during the school year, and while frustrating not to be able to choose when you take your time off, I assumed that was just because she gets the summer off. But apparently she gets no PTO AND takes 71 days out of the year off without pay, effectively. So they do you the favor of paying you over 12 months, but you still only get paid for hours worked. The rate of pay seemed like it would be a pay raise on the surface, but I never anticipated needing to dock it by 20%.

Zero PTO. Just the perks of American life.

And then if it doesn’t sell well, they’ll use that as an excuse to discontinue private server development; and when they cancel their live service, it’ll be dead forever.

There is also just the one straight path from the US east coast (Florida) to Asia.