The only way to address the AfD is to tax the rich, deal with wealth inequality, improve the lives of the working German, and root out corruption and oligarchy at every level.

The CDU and the SPD allow the AfD to thrive because one of them encourages and cultivates the climate that leads to the AfD and the other refuses to make significant enough changes to reverse the damage conservatives do to a country.

I find that relativity is one of the greatest frictions against doing better - and it’s frustrating for this reason. 5 years is better than most other countries. That’s true. Is that a good number though, or is it just better? That’s the actual conversation I want to have, and I think relativity ruins meaningful progress and improvement.

Eating bland, unseasoned chicken is better than eating raw chicken - but that doesn’t mean we should settle for it.

Just because other nations have antiquated and arguably bad citizenship requirements doesn’t mean we shouldn’t improve ours. And reversing progress is worse than being stagnant, and defending that is encouraging it imo.

This is fucking depressing to read. As someone who moved to Germany two years ago, gaining citizenship is important to us. When we moved here they were just announcing the expedited opportunity and we were stoked to know we were welcome in this country. It reinforced our decision. Now they look to take it away and although the 5 year plan will still exist, it signals clearly that the CDU don’t want highly educated immigration - they will blame immigrants while they raid the coffers of their country - and the SPD will gladly move further to the right if it means they get to stay in power.

This is incredibly disappointing. It’s not enough to change our plans, like if the AFD won, but I consider the grand coalition to be a “continued decline” coalition. If another country offered me and my family a guaranteed path to citizenship, with similar worker rights and benefits as Germany, we’d now have to consider it seriously. As aerospace engineers we’re not exactly struggling to find technical work.

Furthermore the fact that both parties considered revoking citizenship for any reason from anyone is unbelievably terrifying. If anyone’s citizenship can be removed, everyone’s citizenship can be removed and that’s something I completely disagree with. It’s dangerous territory and completely disgusting to read that the SPD considered it.

That’s totally cool by me, it’s a fun game. PoE2 is probably the best ARPG on the market, it’s just falling short of what they sold me (and the community at large) on. But for now, it’s definitely an idle game during mapping with the right build (and the wrong build will see you roadblocked progression-wise).

This is fucking depressing to read. As someone who moved to Germany two years ago, gaining citizenship is important to us. When we moved here they were just announcing the expedited opportunity and we were stoked to know we were welcome in this country. It reinforced our decision. Now they look to take it away and although the 5 year plan will still exist, it signals clearly that the CDU don’t want highly educated immigration - they will blame immigrants while they raid the coffers of their country - and the SPD will gladly move further to the right if it means they get to stay in power.

This is incredibly disappointing. It’s not enough to change our plans, like if the AFD won, but I consider the grand coalition to be a “continued decline” coalition. If another country offered me and my family a guaranteed path to citizenship, with similar worker rights and benefits as Germany, we’d now have to consider it seriously. As aerospace engineers we’re not exactly struggling to find technical work.

Furthermore the fact that both parties considered revoking citizenship for any reason from anyone is unbelievably terrifying. If anyone’s citizenship can be removed, everyone’s citizenship can be removed and that’s something I completely disagree with. It’s dangerous territory and completely disgusting to read that the SPD considered it.

As someone who moved to Germany in the last two years, gaining a permanent right to stay in this country was a part of our thought process. Gaining citizenship, which gives us voting rights and makes us “German” was just as important because we were picking our new home country. Who doesn’t want to feel “at home” in their country, instead of a guest? And earning EU citizenship which further protects us from shitty singular governments like the current grand coalition is even furthermore important.

So yes, this decision sucks ass and it has further cemented my understanding that the grand coalition are centralist or right leaning parties who will continue to allow the decline of society even if it’s more gradual than what the AFD would achieve. Our version of Democrats and Republicans-lite.

I mean to say “idol” as in… Oh fuck. Omg I’ve been misspelling idle in literally weeks worth of comments. Woooooow. Okay. Feeling a bit dumb.

I meant idle mechanics. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense but just in case - I’m making the argument that most modern ARPGs since Diablo 2 have not innovated on the gameplay directly but have innovated on the systems of the genre. This behavior has led to what I consider to be a stale endgame game to game that often or exclusively boils down to trivializing the content such that it’s comparable to a slot machine, an idle game like Eggs Inc., or a “phone” game.

I think PoE2 is working hard to evolve the genre to what id consider to be a “next gen” ARPG, where most or all previous games fall into a large “Diablo 2 inspired” bucket. I think No Rest for the Wicked is similarly attempting to evolve the genre. A counter example for the genre is Titans Quest 2 which seems to be falling squarely in the “Diablo 2 inspired” bucket.

I’d like to see more “No Rest for the Wicked” level of swings regardless of if you consider that EA game a hit or miss in its current state.

The measure of a man (which is to say the measure of a person anyone should strive to be regardless of gender) is, by my account, how much they strive to improve the world in ways they may never have had or which may not directly benefit them. You take the pain, the injustice, the hardships, the inconveniences that you or other people face and you convert them through willpower, through privilege, through money, through luck into improvements for all of society. This is far easier said than done, especially every day, but easy shouldn’t be the primary concern for the kind of person we wish to be.

In creating this sub, in seeking help or community or an opportunity to provide you demonstrate the actions of a man. For this I’m proud of you, and you should be proud of yourself today.

Do not confuse this with love, which from a parent (at least) should be unconditional. Regardless of if your parents are proud of you, they should love you. Regardless of your quality or your work or your current position or state you are deserving of love. You are not beyond love, you are not unlovable, you deserve love. Full stop. I can’t offer that to you stranger, but I hope you experience it in your lifetime - more than once ideally. And even more so I hope you get yourself to a mental, emotional, and fiscal place where you can reciprocate that love (or better yet originate that love for someone else).

All I can offer is this act of love in the hopes you feel it, you appreciate it, and it heals (even partially) whatever you’re feeling.

Strive to be a helper of your community and communities you don’t know, to be a builder of bridges, and a giver of gifts and I promise you regardless of if your biological parents did their duty or not - you will find internal peace. You will inspire. You will love and be loved. I wish you had been given what your parents owe you, but if that fails I hope you can continue to turn that pain into improvement internally and externally.

Good luck and hard work.

I think you did a great job of talking about the various issues and I haven’t played noita yet but I appreciate the example. I think there is a way to create a game with a baseline power level of 1x and give the player a range of 0.8 - 1.6x power creep based on their build and 0.8 - 1.6x power creep based on their mechanical skill. Capping the possible player power range from something like 0.6 (a game twice as difficult as it was designed) to 2.5 (a game that’s a slightly more than twice as easy as it was designed) seems feasible to me - a none game dev. I believe this would allow me to have build expression from a power perspective and not reduce the game to a slot machine’s level of engagement. I think the problem is the lower range is closer to 0.1 or worse in the end game maps and the upper end is 100x+ even on the hardest content in the game. That to me is the core issues.

I think part of the fun in ARPGs, something almost all of them do better than say Dark Souls or Hades, is that the individual abilities are way different per character or per class/weapon/etc. I can play a magma barbarian in PoE2 in a way I just couldn’t in Elden Ring in a satisfactory way. I can play a lightning Amazon and a poison archer and a frost monk and the builds are visually (and in the best cases mechanically) diverse enough to make experience a new power fantasy that in itself is super cool. There are items and powers I can’t or wouldn’t experience on one play through that I could in another, and the best games in the genre provide me a ton of variation. That to me is more important to build expression than the power of my build, at least it’s more important than the share it gets in normal conversation. A build for me becomes bland and identical the moment combat is trivialized, but ideally before it trivializes things it can feel expressive if the moment to moment gameplay is unique compared to other builds.

So personally I’m confident to the extent “the needle has to be threaded (lol)” it’s not critically hard or critically important that it’s gotten perfectly right. I think it just has to be choice from the developers on what the power range is and how much of that is mechanical vs itemization based.

I disagree completely. I think you can have a game that is “about the builds” when engaging in meaningful combat. I think you’re right to hint that people may play these two kinds of games for two different reasons, but I think there’s a massive untapped market for the overlap.

I want the build creation and fantasy expression of typical ARPG’s but I want to use them to do more than just idol click monsters into loot. I don’t like the phone game playstyle of modern ARPGs. It’s not compelling to me to trivialize the gameplay loop in order to get slightly more powerful gear to further trivialize another tier of difficulty.

I think if GGG took their boss combat design philosophy and extended it out to their monsters - mimicking genres like roguelikes or action games - they’d have a lot more success than the hybrid game they’ve produced. I think they’re moving towards that but haven’t quite yet committed publicly to reworking the monsters.

Imagine Hades or Dead Cells or Enter the Gungeon but in Raeclast. I don’t think they’re far off on the player side, a few more abilities per weapon type, especially interactive defensive options, and monsters re crafted to roles in an encounter and they could mimic the compelling gameplay of a rogue-like but give you far more expression than the four guns you have on you or the two weapons and two items or the boons you pick during a run.

I think the genres are wholly compatible. I don’t think the idol vs engaging mindset are and that’s where all the friction seems to be coming from.

I do not believe “everyone” wants to zoom. I like the engaging combat they’re going for. I think the loudest people in the community like the idol game mechanics of most modern ARPGs but I think the genre is ripe for innovation.

Everyone praises their boss design and enjoy that aspect of the game, which to me reads “we like engaging combat with balanced rewards” but when that logic is theoretically applied to monsters we get people throwing online temper tantrums which tells me they don’t know what they want except for the thing they’ve already been given.

They’re missing the mark with the monster design, getting closer than anyone else in the genre (besides maybe No Rest for the Wicked). They need to look at roguelikes such as Hades and make each monster have a “role” when building encounters. Give each monster abilities like the bosses in the game and don’t make it about being auto-hit to death and they’ll have a truly next-gen ARPG.

I’m positive the first team to crack the infinite loot/immense player expression of ARPGs and engaging combat loop of action games (or really all other genres besides idol click farmers) will make the next genre defining game akin to Diablo 2.

I think PoE2 is on the road to doing that but the immense pushback they’re getting online seems to be wearing them thin. Which they asked for, for releasing an unfinished game and not having a clear line in the sand.

I’m still having fun. Pushing T4 maps today.

An API is like a question a service provides that it will programmatically answer. So reddit provided questions for getting all of its content for free. People built front end apps for viewing the content to match their preferences, provide anonymity, avoid ads, etc.

There were a lot of good reasons for reddit to stop providing that service free of charge, but they went full Corporate enshittificatioon where they made the pricing so awful it forced most of the apps to shut down.

Couple that with the protecting of /r/theDonald and other non-humanist political subs and, for me anyway, it was clear that the company wasn’t run by good people but by greedy people and things would only get worse.

Just ban being a landlord guys. Tax owning land that you’re not using out of existence. Rent/leases are simple vectors of wealth transferal - they move money from the poor to the rich. Everyone should own their own flat/house. Every business should own the space they work out of.

There is no good reason housing should be an investment vehicle akin to a stock or a bond.

I left reddit during the API scandal. I had the energy and time to move platforms and so I did. Open software, FOSS, non-for-profit digital solutions are all things I’m trying to support more at the cost of not using those paid or private services. Every dollar out of their pockets (the rich) is another dollar in ours.

It wasn’t a silver bullet. I’ll keep working on this. HL-L2400DW. Freaking nightmare printers are.

Thanks for trying.

Swapped to Arch Linux! I wouldn’t say it’s been a bug free swap but it’s been extremely doable and everything I needed to work worked like a charm. Gaming was uninterrupted and nothing hasn’t worked yet.

I need to figure out how to connect my stupid printer but I couldn’t do that on windows either, which is sad cause I thought printers were gonna be easier on Linux but I guess this brother model is a pain in the ass or something. Oh and connecting to network drives while on a VPN. That’s my list of pending problems and I’ve been on Linux for two months. Not bad really.

I’m on it boss 🫡 the moment I’m home.

Taxing the rich out of existence is the number one way of protecting democracy AND combatting misinformation AND improving your standard of living.

It’s the most important thing everyone should be pushing all of their political representatives to do. Tax wealth, remove the ultra wealthy.

Es tut mir leid, mein Deutsch ist nicht gut. Ich lerne langsam.

A bit of a “knee jerk” reaction to seeing the AFD, which are an anti-humanist party, being compared to Die Linke, a party who’s predominantly interested in making things better for everyone. I apologize if I didn’t understand the meme well enough, it’s good to have fun, I just don’t want the normalization of anti-human policies.

Die linke had the only tax plan that increased taxes on the rich, decreased taxes on workers, and raised the government budget. All other parties put the government in further debt. Their tax plan would have paid for the deficit increase the grand coalition just approved and then some.