5 euros a month. Worth it, it’s by far the best VPN.

I’m glad I skipped release day. Definitely waiting to buy it on sale after it’s been fixed with updates and DLC. Sucks to see companies treat buyers like testers.

A real transition will happen in bursts. I’d love to see stats by interest categories, because I suspect what happens is enough prominent people in some community move at to bring the rest with them, but until that happens there’s no budge.

Colossal Order is the dev, Paradox is just the publisher. Paradox deserves crap for their many mistakes, but this one isn’t theirs.

I just bought Fallout 4 GOTY for $5 the other day. Look forward to doing the same in a few years when Cyberpunk 2077 has a final release with everything fixed and polished. There’s so many good old games, why buy anything brand new.

And this doesn’t forgive devs for buggy initial releases either, because I’m not throwing money at something until it’s actually done.

For CK and Vic they changed their design philosophy to be more “sandbox with realistic parameters” vs older games’ “sandbox with prescripted events” to make historical events happen. It’s an ambitious idea but so far the results have been pretty mixed. I’m hopefully they get it right eventually. Stellaris has really only gotten to be as polished as it very recently.

Paradox is just the publisher on this one, Colossal Order is the dev.

What do you use now?

I mean google’s whims as in they’re making decisions on their own and everyone else just has to go with it. I’d rather these problems were solved collectively.

I think it’s a little silly to define extinguish as literally destroyed. I think of it as a permanent wound. With XMPP, the belief by people that both networks would inter-operate and the subsequent change left a permanent wound on XMPP adoption. I’m not sure how things would’ve gone otherwise, and I’m equally skeptical of the people holding onto that as the sole reason for XMPP’s failures, but it certainly was an inflection point for them.

To the email point, it’s actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don’t meet their own standards. It didn’t extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google’s whims to get reliable deliverability.

They’ll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don’t have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It’s the same thing google did to email.

This is all true personal best practices, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad to ask for better retention policies from the services you use. What you’re talking about is true privacy and security; the critiques OP outlines are about reducing exposure when you are public. Will that reduction be verifiably perfect? No. But it’s still better than nothing, especially in cases where you’re just trying to protect from a specific threat, like someone you know irl seeing something that you regret posting.