Buttflapper

I'm an unfortunate captive of the oligopoly of the internet industry in the USA. In many places, you have 2-3 choices of internet, and all of them suck ass. I'm in this situation. All internet providers in my area have a 1-1.5 terabyte data cap. So when I download Call of Duty for 250 gb and it fails and has to update or reinstall, I've wasted 500 gb, and have now reached 50% of my data cap in just 1 day. There are crazy fees, for example, Cox Cable says:

If you go over, we’ll automatically add 50 gigabytes of data for $10 to your next bill. That's enough for about 15 hours of streaming HD video. If you use that 50 gigabytes, we automatically add another 50 gigabytes for $10 and so on until you reach our $100 limit of data overage charges or until your next usage cycle begins.

So your $90 a month internet can easily become $190 a month, which is fuckin criminal, like that is so scummy and asinine how that can even be legal. But it is perfectly legal. The FCC is also looking into these data caps but now that we have a new anti-federal government president elect... This is probably toast.... Nothing will change now that most federal agencies are about to be deleted.

From a technology standpoint too, nothing is really getting better

Comcast is still using Coax instead of Fiber Optic and desperately trying to convince people that somehow, someway coax can be just as good. Do with that info what you will, I have no opinions on it. There was a Federal program started recently to expand rural internet access, which will probably be gutted in 2025 leaving many without suitable internet again. Fiber Optic is fast, but still, not new technology, and doesn't solve a critical issue.... It doesn't matter if you have 2 Gigabit internet if no one in the world is uploading even half that fast. A single download on Steam is like 450 Mbps, Epic Games launcher is horrifically slow. I get like 120 Mbps max when downloading Fortnite updates even with 1500 Mbps internet hard wired to my router with top tier hardware

It's just sad to think about the future of internet in the USA, and knowing we'll be imprisoned by these data caps for the foreseeable future.

When I was a kid in high school, the economy wasn't nearly as bad as it is right now. People are very very concerned right now with having enough money to pay their bills, housing has skyrocketed, cost of living dramatically up, salaries stagnating..... Almost every single friend I have, I asked them why they no longer play World of Warcraft or similar games and the answer was the same. "I cannot justify paying a subscription monthly, I have way too many subscriptions right now like Netflix Hulu HBO max some that I'm even canceling". This was pretty much the same exact response I heard from most of my friend community on discord. It seems that people find it a horrible value to buy a game and play it when it requires repeated purchases, but you also have to pay to subscribe to the game as well. That amount of money really, honestly adds up to a lot....

Simple example: playing Elder scrolls online and World of Warcraft for 2 years

World of Warcraft:

$15/month x 24 months = $360

$50 expansion every 2 years = $50

Total WoW cost: $410

Elder Scrolls Online:

$15/month x 24 months = $360

$90 expansion per year x 2 years = $180

Total ESO cost: $540

Combined total for both games over 2 years:

$410 + $540 = $950

Investing this money: Simple example

Please note: This is just a rough estimate, it's figuratively impossible to realistically estimate an exact 100% accurate figure of an investment, I went for a worst-case scenario based on some of my past earnings in Fidelity. These are almost exactly what I earned over a 2 year period saving from WoW and ESO, with some small margin of error.

Investment Breakdown:

• Initial Investment: $0
• Monthly Contribution: $39.58 (950 ÷ 24 months)
• Annual Interest Rate: 8.5% (compounded monthly)
• Investment Period: 2 years (24 months)

Results:

• Total Amount Contributed: $950.00
• Total Accrued Interest: $89.76
• Total After 2 Years: $1,039.76

After 10 years, here's how the money would grow:

• Initial Amount: $1,039.76
• Total Interest Earned: $1,352.31
• Final Amount: $2,392.07

So your initial game subscription savings of $950 that grew to $1,039.76 after 2 years would more than double over the next 10 years, growing to $2,392.07 just from compound interest alone.

So in short, you are actually spending a huge sum of money on these games, about $950 a year at least by this very very rough estimate, and if you simply invested this money, you could see huge, monstrous returns on this money that could change your damn life. It's for that reason that I cannot justify playing these games anymore. That's just a subscription cost!! So astronomically high it's unbelievable to me.

TLDR:

• Economic struggles make gaming subscriptions harder to justify.

• Rising living costs and stagnant wages have led people to cancel non-essential subscriptions.

• Many friends quit games like World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online due to high subscription costs.

• Example costs over two years: -- WoW: $410 -- ESO: $540 -- Total: $950

• Investing this amount with $200 monthly contributions at 8.5% interest could grow to $1,039.76 in two years. Overall, game subscription fees seem less worthwhile given the potential for financial growth.

An actual quote I saw today posted on Twitter: "Florida is a conservative Christian state, and they voted against murdering unborn babies. The democratic process is complete. They can leave if they want to do that." There's a lot to unpack there. I also got into an argument with the guy who posted it, who claimed somehow that it's not ok for Federal government to regulate Women, but if states wants to do it then it's ok, and they should just leave to another state then. like.. wow. America is a strange place

In just a hundred years, we were able to successfully develop a device that has all of the information in the entire world contained in it, handheld and portable, which has expanded our technological capabilities. This has also created an incredibly frustrating problem for us in our daily lives. We have an exponential amount more information to deal with now than we ever had before. Back in the '70s or '80s you wanted to know something, you go to the library, watch a documentary that's on a DVD. Now? You have to navigate the terrifyingly bad search engines that are out there today like Bing and Google which are increasingly getting more and more unreliable. You have to take notes which are frustratingly complicated, and unless you are some extraordinary gifted college student who is a master at taking good notes, your notes will probably be not perfect.... Then you have to search all of the information available to you, to finally make some sort of decision. Even if you know what you want to say or what you want to communicate, you have to put it into the right format....

This is exhausting. Dealing with this much information, synthesizing it, changing the format and display of it, trying to figure out how to work with so much information every single day of your life. It is insanity! A language learning model can actually help you, especially if you train it or use roles to help you shape the learning model into whatever you want it to be doing. For example if I want to put together some well organized notes on Tableau, that awful piece of garbage technology that exists out there in the world today, I can simply use my local llama 3.1 AI model that I have personally trained with a ton of my notes and information, and get any sort of information out of it that I need to in order to explain a very complex topic to someone else easily. The web is not accessed at all, everything is stored locally on my own device. Miraculous and lifts a huge ass load off of my shoulders because now I don't have to go and sift through my notes and spend a day and a half trying to figure out how to word things and then putting it into a PowerPoint that's only going to be used for 5 minutes....

This is what I think The technology should be used for. Not artificial intelligence, no one is ever replaced in this process, And as you can tell, I am utilizing the technology to make myself better, augment my capabilities.

I flew for the first time on a plane last week and I've seen planes take off at the airport. It looks crazy. But being on one is totally different like holy shit. The thing just FLIES. It just.... Soars... Through the sky! Like whoa man. Wtf... It's crazy. With how much these things weigh, it's insane to me the thing can just go up and bam, there we are, we're flying now. Like wow... Dude crazy.

BEFORE DOWNVOTING ME, PLEASE READ: This is my opinion, you can disagree with it all you want, but it would be really nice to at least respect what I have to say just the same as I respect that people really enjoy this game

I played this game before I started Stardew Valley, I have never played either of them, the look and feel of Stardew did not really appeal to me. So I decided to try this game. Instantly love the anime style characters and graphics of the game, love the color palette, love the world design. It's beautiful. So that was what really drew me in...

They made the game way too easy so it's not even remotely challenging at all. There is so much unnecessary silly hand holding in this game. I wasn't expecting something sweaty and hardcore but seriously, anytime you plant a crop and harvest it for the first time you get the recipe for it in the mail. Like what? We can't even just go to a place and just browse for recipes normally, it's just given to you automatically in the mail for no reason.

Lots of things in this game are like this, as well. No effort put into getting anything, everything's just handed to you given to you or spoon-fed to you. This makes it very boring because you don't get to just wander around and explore and find stuff at vendors or look online or elsewhere to try and figure out how to do something. Even certain major things like crafting or blacksmithing... You can just do it right out the gate with no training, and no need to wait any time at all for the blacksmith to craft it.

There are too many similarities to Stardew, making it feel copy pasted. Again I played this game first, but I knew that Stardew was out there before this game was. So after playing this game and pretty much doing everything that there was to do, I decided to try Stardew Valley since that game is mostly complete and finished, this game is early access and will change... I was shocked to find out that they pretty much copied huge aspects of Stardew and didn't even try to do anything differently.

• The mine system and the elevators, they literally carbon copied Stardew Valley verbatim. You go into the mine and break rocks and then a ladder appears, then you unlock the mine level every five levels. They didn't even try to do anything different just copied it.

• The museum. Wow like... They just copied it exactly wtf? There's literally nothing different.

• Some characters are too similar to Stardew. Abigail, the purple-haired girl in Stardew is the most popular to romance. Who is the most popular one in this game? Juniper, another purple-haired lady. Celia, blonde lady, very similar to Haley. I could go on for about 5 minutes about this but I won't. Just look, too many similarities

• Seasons. Why are they the exact same? They didn't even try to do anything differently.

There's virtually no passion at all put into Fields of Mistria

Concerned ape, developer of Stardew, has a whole beautiful backstory about how he came to develop one of the most popular indie games in the world. It wasn't his first game that he developed, and it was extremely difficult, challenging, a very long-winded effort for him to develop the entire game, and get it to be state that it is in today. A true passion project and the more you hear about it and see the changes made to the game over time, the more you can understand how freaking passionate he was about the game.... This is nowhere to be found in Fields of Mistria! There is no intricate story of how the game was a labor of love, or how hard they worked to bring the game to life. All you can find when looking at their website is that it's developed by a huge team of people, and a huge amount of marketing hype, game streaming videos where they showcase the game. There's nothing inspiring, or beautiful, or gripping about the development of the game. It's just a generic indie game that looks really cool. To me, this was really disappointing. It just feels like there's some mid-sized gaming company behind this, and that's the end of it.

There's virtually nothing to find or discover on your own

Due to the insane amount of hand holding and early access status, and the fact that they just basically copied all the main parts of Stardew Valley, there's virtually nothing to find or discover on your own.

In Stardew, there are huge amount of things that I was able to discover on my own just wandering around or purely by chance, which made the game so much more exciting and enjoyable. For example, there was randomly this thing called Green rain, it's raining green, no explanation for it but people in town are like scared of it and huddled up in the local tavern, and Moss grows all over trees and stuff like that. Pretty awesome. There's also a spa that you are not introduced to You can just basically stumble onto it on your own and it restores all your energy.

Fields of Mistria has literally nothing right now that you can find or stumble onto by chance. Even stuff like a destroyed bridge, you get a quest and hand holding, you don't even repair it yourself.

Community team is non-existent

I barely hear of any updates from the community team. All I have seen over the past several months are marketing hype videos, streaming, updates but not on a platform most people use. People don't use x or Twitter or whatever the hell it is. So it's hard to follow the game's updates. They have an entire team of people listen on the website, but can't be bothered to actually connect with the community and actively work with them like Concerned Ape who makes Stardew does. I asked if it were possible for them to post updates on a platform that people actually use. Reddit? Meta's threads? Facebook? I mean they have a discord but it's a community discord, and they have nothing to do with it, they hardly ever react or reach out to anyone there. There's just no community presents at all other than trying to grab people's attention and get them to try the game. That to me sounds like a cash grab. Like, they don't really care about the people who have purchased it and are holding on for future updates, they just want to get as many people to get it as possible

Summary

I give Fields of Mistria a 4/10. It's lovely looking, but why would I want to play a low effort copy and paste of another game that came first?

TLDR:

• Graphics: Attractive anime-style visuals and color palette

• Lacks any challenge, overly simplistic. Constant handholding removes any sense of choice.

• Copy-Pasted Stardew Mechanics: Mining, museum, seasons, and characters feel blatantly lifted from Stardew Valley with almost no originality.

• Passionless Development: Feels like a corporate indie product with no genuine vision or passion behind it.

• Weak Community Engagement: Dev team’s communication is poor and scattered across low-traffic platforms, hinting at more interest in marketing than in actual player connection.

• Limited Discovery: Exploration is nonexistent; everything is handed to the player, stifling any real sense of adventure.

• Overall: Fields of Mistria is a 4/10. visually decent but ultimately a hollow, uninspired Stardew Valley clone. Nothing to justify its cost

Wanted to see more photos of a place that I want to try, but cannot view more than literally one single photo without downloading an entire app that will take up a huge amount of space and lots of my data

My salary didn't change at all, but homes went up 82%. The money I saved for a down payment and my salary no longer are good enough for this home and many others. This ain't even a "good" home either. It was a 200k meh average ok home before. Now it's simply unaffordable

I stayed at an Airbnb recently And I was curious what the actual value of it was so I looked it up on Zillow. Sold in 2015 for 350k, sold again in 2022 for $750k, now listed for sale 1.2 million. It's a cabin in North Carolina, literally nothing special. I remember back before 2020 there was tons of mountain and cabins and homes and stuff like that anywhere from 2:50 to 500K. Now you won't find a single one less than 800k....

Regular homes are just as bad. I'm seeing homes in my area that sold for around $200 to 300K in 2019, now they are 500k and above. I don't understand how this makes any sense? Salaries were not doubled, but somehow the price of all homes are now twice as much. Is this some sort of cost fixing scheme by the real estate industry to just drive up the price of homes and double them or something? Because it doesn't really make sense to me I guess.

Amazing how this cash grab of a game has been in early access alpha development for about 8 years now, finally releases, and this is the best they can do

I thought this was a joke but it seems like it's actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?

Seems like hundreds of people bought it immediately

Out of my friends list of 45 people, I know that's not a lot but still, small list of friends that I have that have played this game actively since the very beginning, two of them still play the game and one of them does not even subscribe full-time. Only when there's a major update.... When I asked every single one of my friends why they no longer play anymore the same exact reason was said. “They were taking over by an investment company, and now it just seems like a silly cash grab. They keep raising the prices, keep missing the mark, don't listen to players.” <<< One of my friends said this to me....

So let's get the facts straight here

According to Jagex full accounts report in 2008 from the UK government website, they made $10 million in profit back in 2008. So they were not operating at a loss. Their profit for the year 2022 is up to 38 million. Jagex's profit rose from £10 million in 2008 to £38 million in 2022, a 280% increase. From 2008's price of $7.95 to the current price of $13.99, the RuneScape membership price has increased by approximately 76%.

So in other words, Jagex profit has risen by 280% since 2008, and They raised the subscription by over 80%. If we count the entire lifespan of RuneScape, it's gone up by 180%. This is: corporate greed.

For reference, by the way, World of Warcraft has never once had to increase their subscription price ever. We also have bonds in our game, and RS3 is completely monetized. A monetized game and a subscription is absolutely insanity, when you add in percentage increases to the subscription price, that's just silly

Edit: A reddit user also pointed out that you have to pay $14 a month for EVERY character, even if you're part of the same account. WoW let's you have 60+ characters in your subscription.