I started off on an Ender 3 V2 a few years back. The AnkerMake M5C and Bambu A1 Mini are both down to $199 and can’t believe how much faster / more reliable they are for the price.

I’m actually blown away by how good of a 3D Printer you can get for ~$200 now. Huge improvement from just a few years ago.

That’s a good example! I have a RG35XX, and definitely fun to see how far gaming tech has come.

I was thinking of something that would be considered futuristic to an average person today. So, maybe something uncommon, with impressive capabilities, but still affordable?

Not sure if many items fit that criteria, but was curious if any!

Agreed, I think the first game I saw this in was Tunic. It was a great addition!

Right? When I was a kid I would specifically enjoy the “challenge” of trying to beat something over and over. Nowadays though… I just like playing a game for the experience. I still like feeling “progression”, so things go from difficult to easy as my character advances. But having to repeat something multiple times? Eh… just not my jam anymore.

That’s actually what I tend to do, but would be nice (for laziness) to have two different settings. Or for cases where games don’t allow adjustment after starting.

Funny you bring up Kena, because that is actually probably a prime example for me too. Loved the rest of the game, but the boss fights were a bit too difficult imo!

I played a ton of StarCraft back in the day! I was never too serious about joining a clan (just dabbled), but I now remember some of the things you mentioned with the chat rooms, and clan “tags”. I might be imagining it, but wasn’t there also some way to set colors on letters in names too (holding down alt and pressing numbers or something…) That might have honestly been my first experience with “bots” for things adjacent to games.

Good memories, thanks very much for sharing!

Wow, that’s a crazy coincidence! That “patron” system sounds pretty interesting too, seems like a good way to incentivize veterans to help new players. Interesting that I haven’t really heard of any more recent games having that (as far as I know).

That sounds amazing, it is good to hear there are still some groups that have kept in contact, even after all that time!

That’s awesome when you can organize an in-game group like that to achieve something you couldn’t do alone. Sounds like fun times for sure! :)

It was a server-side block, from Cloudflare (security rule specifically). I’m very familiar with it, having used the same service over a decade. They are able to tweak the overall security level, or specific WAF rules for the endpoint in Cloudflare. They also have analytics that will show them exactly how many cancellation requests would be blocked. The fact that they totally ignored these details in my ticket, is concerning.

Maybe, but it would also be very easy to blame on misconfiguration / mistake. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if the behavior itself isn’t purposeful, but ignoring / not fixing it is. I’ve definitely seen such behavior at other companies, where they drag their feet on fixing a bug that is bad for the user, but helping them.

On a related note… I went to cancel a membership a few weeks back, and the site displayed a message “you don’t have an active membership to cancel”. I thought it was strange, so I checked out the network requests being made, and turned out the cancel API call was getting blocked for “security reasons”. Nothing else on the site was blocked for me, just the cancellation endpoint.

I opened a ticket, and it took them nearly 2 weeks to respond, and there was zero acknowledgement on why cancellation would be blocked.

Not sure if it’s a purposeful dark pattern, but it sure seems like it!

Just makes me wonder if the same thing happens in other communities. Say someone posts a photo of a National Park, are there replies how they’ve hiked most of the trails at that park and decided it’s not worth visiting?

I can see both sides too, “well we are informing people about the cons of that park, so they aren’t eaten by the vicious bears!”. I get that, I do! People have an opinion they want to share, nothing really wrong with that. Does that understanding make it enjoyable for me as the person just sharing the photo? Not so much…😂

Sorry, not that I know of! Poor phrasing on my part, should have said “more excited than if there were a Portal 3 announcement”.

I’m honestly more excited about this than a Portal 3 announcement! :) Loved both the puzzles and the story / vibe of the first one!

It isn’t how it works today. I’m talking about sometime in the distant (or near) future. Surely at some point AI will have the capabilities on par with at least a low level hacker.

Or, if you still think that’s a stretch, just imagine all the ways perfectly legitimate software can cost companies money. Not through malicious design, but just by mistakes.

There are some archives of the service here -

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire

Supposedly most of the videos, and 20% of the screenshots? I’m not sure if there’s a way to easily search the archive contents, rather than download.

There’s quite a few profiles on Web Archive too -

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.xfire.com/profile/*

It was definitely ahead of its time! Not really sure why it faded away, I guess pressure from Steam (pun intended), and games moving to private in-game server browsers? Along with many other options for voice chat.