The entire gambling lootboxes were massively popularized by Valve, turning Team Fortress 2 from pay2play to predatory gambling.

You absolutely need to as early as possible for a massive advantage. Pick 3 for white and 3 for black. Look for books, speak ideally to your local chess club.

The New York Times, that’s why. It’s a paper which drastically lost credibility.

External sound cards have the advantage of less electrical interference, but usually the internal ones have external power not coming from the PCIe slot so it isn’t a big problem. Asus left the market leaving you with good old Creative Sound Blaster again. Choose whatever your budget allows, the two upper tier ones just differ in accessories, but that might have changed. And AV receivers the same, I am not the up to date audio guy what is a good deal. Just try to stay >120 dB SNR on sound cards for high end.

Don’t search for computer speakers, just look for normal speakers on which I can’t help out too much on. Unless you want to invest into an expensive sound card, you probably should go for an AV-Receiver which transmits the audio through HDMI as this will give you the maximum quality depending on the supported formats. I have a sound card -> old school amplifier -> speaker setup. Basically it is your choice where the digital to analogue transformation happens, whether through a receiver or sound card. A sound card does have the massive advantage of providing virtual headphone surround sound (yes on stereo headphones, and no, this is really working) which receivers typically don’t have, because reasons and it will provide you with a massive immersion boost. And no onboard sound is not comparable, even the best one is a clear step down.

FC are just social groups, not raid content. For that you should recruit statics or communities which organize old synchronized content.

But would give you a hell of a beating in the spanish Catalan referendum on Independence which was just a bunch of years ago and not some ancient happening.

FFXIV has quite literally a Fellowship and Community Finder to look for groups which have similar interests as you. Be it Mahjongg, Role-Playing, Try-Harding old content or seeing for LGBTQ interactions. And the rest is done over Discord, because that is for sure a better communication tool than whatever the game devs can come up with. Even the content thing is not true. There is seperate content which absolutely requires cooperation, schedules outside the cookie cutter main content like Bozja and Deep/Criterion Dungeons. More similar to old school MMOs. I’m fine with a diverse array of content.

You should still buy sound cards as they are significantly better, at least the ones in the 100€ range. Just because there are premium mainboards with acceptable sound doesn’t mean it is great.

These arguments go for Christianity as well obviously. But I think the theological answer will depend a bit on their interpretation of how omnipotent this God is or if even suffering is part of his ways. And don’t forget that “outside” of our universe there could be one and it’s just a way of destiny. It’s not such a snarky remark.

This is false. It is the login server system which is more powerful. They did add new worlds, data centers and more as well, but the headline is wrong.

How is it now? The release was received very poorly in my memory and Redout 1 had also some design issues, but had something cool to it.

That headline is deeply appreciated.

We are stuck at meme page admin in this timeline.

What else should the PR department say?

It was really bland, not surprised.

Yes, that is indeed left open to large parts. In my opinion Half-Life 2’s story arc is about toppling the tower to give rise to a revolution against the Combine. And that happened as the G-Man froze time again and thus the inferred mission to stop the Combine assault was succesful with it even if we don’t see it with our eyes.

I thought having open questions on G-Man and everything is the point.

What made this cliffhanger so truly bad was the main game’s story was complete as is until Episode 1 unwinded it. And Episode 2, compared to Episode 1, was a much better game in most aspects for me.

I saw it a bit later after the post. But it is a bit of a stretch tbh.