It’s a profoundly amazing game and amazingly innovative for a moba imo.

Right, see that’s good data. That’s my only point. Not saying any specific job is or isn’t dangerous, I’m just saying the commenter seemed to be confusing “job that is around dangerous stuff” with “jobs that get people hurt often”.

I think there’s a difference between a job being dangerous and a job having statistically significant dangerous outcomes. What you seem to be describing is a job with many dangers, but you don’t provide data on if the job actually produces outcomes caused by a dangerous environment more than most jobs. Something like this provides evidence on what jobs are statistically dangerous in the US at least: https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-injuries/civilian-occupations-with-high-fatal-work-injury-rates.htm

I would love to see a redesign of the major map conditions and raid bosses that require teamwork to accomplish but provide no system that requires it leading to a ton of bad behavior.

I’d love to see, sorta as you described, them turn into a PvE mode where the Arc are turned up to 11 and their unique rewards are all you’re really getting out with. This would be a good place to bring out and risk your best gear because instead of worrying about a never ending stream of rats, you can just worry about the large volume of arc while trying to accomplish the goal.

Like imagine if the raid bosses were PvE, the map was empty (because it was after another map’s countdown let’s just pretend), the Arc was omnipresent, and the raid boss guaranteed everyone who extracts 1 boss core (obviously the boss would still have more on it that was salvageable to reward players who actually fight and survive). I think that would be way better than the current implementation where they’re incentivizing players to 1) just break leg armor, get a core, leave 2) rat people who are doing the boss and steal their loot 3) rat the boss after it’s complete so people who did all the work get even less rewards.

I like what they’ve done with making it optional. I will say though I think it missed the mark of giving me the feeling of a real seasonal wipe. I didn’t get that magical feeling of playing with all my best gear, losing it, and then having that early game poor life style with everyone.

This is probably because:

• the 5 million goal had me selling everything and playing free kits for the last like two weeks, essentially soft resetting me before the hard reset. This sucked and I hope they never do this again.
• the season change came with zero new content or patches.Because nothing got added or changed or balanced it didn’t feel like a new season it felt like New Game+. Easily the worst season to season transition of a live service game simply because there was nothing new about this season. They dropped everything before the transition and so they became separated mentally. Even the mini event they had start before the expedition and that was a mistake.
• the flip side of the tight gun and gear balance, with very narrow banding, and a relatively quick jump from common to uncommon (and then rare where applicable) meant games didn’t feel drastically different between average end game kit and dirt poor. There wasn’t a bunch of people running around with ferros and kettles, anymore than there always is because free kits are so prevalent. And I barely feel advantaged with im walking around with a link augment, blue shield, and blue guns compared to someone with a stitcher and a green shield. Especially with how tightly packed some of the maps can feel.

All that to say, I think they should consider some changes on the economy and gun balance to make gear feel more deep and impactful. I think they absolutely need to improve their expedition system and season change over.

For the most part, yes. Not a guarantee but I played like ~50 some hours over winter break, all solo, all peaceful. Ended with like 3 deaths due to players.

It is, however, not smart enough to separate solo and party behavior. So if you play aggressive with your buddies but peaceful solo, there is a very painful transition period.

Although I understand and agree with most of what you’re saying you’re making large assumptions about what I’m saying. Intelligence does not make you immune to propaganda, that’s not something I said or even brought up. What I was saying/implying is that east Germans are smart enough to understand what the policies AfD proposes mean and that the AfD proposes Nazi level policies (aka things I don’t think should be suggestable by any party at any time without a well educated and we’ll functioning democracy removing them from ever having power again either socially or systemically) such as reimmigration which you completely moved past. And if someone understands a nazi policy and votes for a nazi party to enact their Nazi policies, regardless of if they specifically agree with any given policy, that makes them a Nazi. Republicans voted for Trump, Trump promised to get rid of immigrants no matter what, he’s now doing that through several horribly inhuman and illegal methods, and every republican is responsible for that inhumanity and racism. They become racists when the actions they take directly support not just closeted racists, not just barely racists, not just mostly harmless racists, but full blown loud and clear and dangerous racists like the Republican party.

I’m not trying to simplify the problem for funsies, I’m trying to make it very clear that the party is evil and that all people should be able to make that judgement call. I understand desperation, I understand propaganda, I understand poverty, at least to the extent at which these things can make you do evil things but the point stands that they’re evil. My only issue with your messaging is you read like you’re playing defense for the AfD. The solution to the AfD party is simple, elect a party that is interested in and capable of addressing the problems of the common man, of the worker, and the AfD - besides the psyops element - will shrivel up.

As long as the CDU worsens the country for the average German. As long as the SPD improves the country slowly and avoiding the big ticket items, AfD will thrive. To me this is the simplistic truth of history. Things decline in the hands of the moderates or conservatives until they become so bad that people become desperate.

You can’t frame support for the AfD as simply scepticism “of traditionally west Germany political parties”. That completely downplays the intelligence of east Germans and the rhetoric of the AfD. They want Nazi level policies such as reimmigration and they are clearly disinterested in solving problems because their solutions are classic, historically proven ways to fail at improving a society.

This is a very terrible take. Arc Raiders has aggression based matchmaking. If you want to play PvE you can almost guarantee that. Play 10 games on a free loadout, shoot no one ever, defib a guy or bandage someone if you can, help them kill arc, extract peacefully. Tell the in-game survey you like it when you get out peacefully and tell it you hate it when you don’t get out because of pvp and you’ll super quickly find yourself essentially playing pve.

For the last two weeks I have played hundreds of rounds solo, talking in mic to anyone who walks by, and have been shot three times. In literally hundreds of slow to fast rounds, almost always a major map condition, Stella Montis or otherwise.

Most of your points are equally as bad, but like this alone is easily disproven.

Adding to the tons of Kobo love but Kobo Clara BW is as good or better than the Kindle for me, and it’s a smaller company with better ethical considerations.

It’s an easy recommendation.

If I ever win a lottery over $10M I’ll give away everything above $10M…

This comment makes no sense in relation to this topic. This is a picture of a winter market in a German city (theoretically, I’m not verifying it but it looks legit). The size of the country as a whole or even really the population makes no difference when comparing this to the US and it’s cities. As someone who’s lived in multiple cities in both countries and visited far more, the population density is the only distinction and that can be designed for. Kansas city is urban sprawled to hell by design and Berlin isn’t all that different, except Berlin has trains galore.

Actually looking up the data on where I live right now, Mannheim, and where I just came from, Kansas City this point is easily driven home.

KC:

• 825 km2 area
• 508k people
• 623 people/km2 density
• 2.2 mil metro

Mannheim:

• 145 km2 area
• 316k people
• 2186 people/km2 density
• 2.3 metro

America is the home of the car. Germany isn’t even considered to have the best public transit and yet any country with that as a priority thrives in human centric metrics.

It was a nightmare to drive downtown in KC, find parking, visit a handful of shops, and drive home. It took time and money and was generally dangerous.

Going anywhere in the entire metropolitan area of Mannheim takes me max 30 minutes, and that’s by tram. I walk most places and that’s 1-10 mins of walking for all my needs. I can walk a block to my nearest Christmas market, 5 blocks to the next and something like 10 to the next. Nothing even remotely as communal or friendly in my suburban neighborhood in KC.

I swapped a laptop over maybe 5 years back at this point and bricked it within a week. I tried a total of 2 or 3 times and something always went wrong (this was Arch btw). I converted it to Mint maybe a year later and it was stable but I wasn’t convinced it was stable enough for my main computer.

I’m also pretty sure before that majority of games were not easily compatible like they are today.

Even as we speak Steam is not constantly resetting my keyboard as of some recent patch and I’m positive this wouldn’t happen on windows. Like Linux is great, it’s come a long way, and I would say it’s mature enough for most of friends to pop over without issue - but there are still clearly situations where I’m fighting the OS’s minority status or hodgepodge structure.

I love it, but claiming it was better than windows for the past 20 years is a bit of a bubble. You must not game, because 20 years ago it would have been worse - to name the one niche I care to point out right now.

I mean I can imagine, but I think it’s fair to say there’s been significant gaming progress and user friendliness to happen over the the past <5 years. It was unthinkable to switch over a decade ago and now it’s practically no different than windows. To me that means a different bar for what maturity is i guess.

I am almost always resting my arms when I’m playing on the steam deck. It’s not mandatory but it’s just more comfortable in general.

Why do we care what some streamers are doing for content? Why does that change the value judgement that rats are shitty people doing shitty behavior?

We can say they suck AND that they’re not going away. Those are two separate thoughts.

This is way better, thank you.

I swapped over to Arch early this year. Very little issues, rather simple compared to the online stigma. Maybe it’s because I have up to date hardware, idk.

Made a guide for friends, one has swapped over and a couple others have voiced interest. It’s only a matter of time with the windows BS and as Linux continues to mature.

I worked for a company in both countries - so I was fortunate enough to use the Blue Card visa. If you can make that work, that lets you work anywhere in the EU which is great for back up.

Path to permanent residency in Germany takes 3 years, low language skill, and a civic test. Will be doing that in 2026.

Citizenship takes 5 years and medium language skill. I’m a bit away from that.

Generally, I think the path to citizenship is fair but the easier they make it the better the country will be (to a point I guess).

Moved to Germany. I feel very welcome here. Theres a very similar political problem growing in Germany, several large political parties that either want things to get only slightly better or a lot worse, and a growing fascist party that wants to enrich themselves by hurting other people. But it doesn’t feel close to the tipping point like the US is, so I still recommend it.

I always feel welcome, except for a drunk white German here and there yelling at me for not knowing the language (I’m working on it, but languages have always been hard for me).

There’s a housing crisis everywhere and immigrants are not the problem, it’s the fact that housing is a financial investment vehicle and the wealthy are only getting wealthier while most everyone else is getting poorer. You’re not oppressing people by moving to their country and paying taxes. You’re the villain if you dodge taxes, are a landlord (and aren’t fighting to tear down the current housing system), or have 5 million+ and aren’t fighting to help people and fix the system.