Humanoid

If it's mission critical I'd at least get a 2-bay off-the-shelf NAS. QNAP or Synology products are the most common recommendations I see. If you're willing to get a bit more hands-on, you can build your own NAS of course, and it'd be cost effective if you had an old PC lying around to repurpose with the further advantage of being able to fit many more drives in future.

@melkathi I choose to believe the average Obsidianite is a middle-aged male nihilistic depraved occultist.

And that's only for the first character you level, after that you get the heirloom mount usable at level 1.

I'd sooner have them reuse the Outer Worlds engine to make Descent to Undermountain 2.

The LFG thing is mostly a sidestory for me because the opportunity for it to be relevant was closed by the time it was introduced. By the time WoTLK rolled around, I had long retired from the PUG scene and essentially did dungeons with guildies exclusively - the LFG tool therefore served the one (admittedly convenient) purpose of removing travel time. Yeah, yeah, I know the "it makes the world feel small" argument, but eh, manually flying there also does that. Actually though, I can see the difference it made to the social aspect of the game in my brief experiment at levelling an opposite-faction character, which I did back in Cataclysm. I made it all the way from 1-85 not just without getting to know a single other person, but by literally not ever talking with another person. Granted I'm a very withdrawn person naturally, and will almost never initiate a conversation. All my friendships in the game were initiated by the friend. I started classic blind, like many people. I never expected to do any particular type of content, or to even make a single friend. But I did make a few friends, and managed to build a decent rep (essential as a rogue) on the dungeon PUG scene through networking and (I hope) competent play. Taking this "natural" approach I went maybe 5 months before I felt I had run out of stuff to do, and I think I would have quit soon thereafter if I didn't make the conscious choice to join an established raiding guild.

^ When you mentioned the original my mind went to Spacebase DF-9 instead and thinking this was a reboot of that. Yeah, not a good thing either.

The upshot of this is that I've just learned CP2077 can have a female player character. I am pleased.

If the upgrade fails, there's a rollback feature that you can use within 10 days of the upgrade.

Yeah, I always had the impression that SimCopter Jane's Longbow series was considered the hardcore helicopter sim of the 90s and that Comanche was the more accessible arcadey game. Never played either of them, mind you.

Feels like there's a higher proportion of dodgy Switch ports than there is for any other current platform (no doubt due to its somewhat oddball hardware), so it's something to be cautious about before rushing out to buy it. Even ports of mature, stable games suffer. Not that you shouldn't check feedback about the game on any platform before buying, mind you.

Hope that's the case, it's been either 2 or 3 years since I last played.

I did all the sidequests in my first run as Smuggler way back when, and have now filed them under "never again". I also lost the use of the Smuggler because I lost my name when the Aussie servers shut down and refuse to play a pale imitation of myself. I'm weird that way. There really is no excuse for Star Wars, a series where just about everyone has last names, to not allow people to share first names.

Is the overcapping from doing sidequests? I remember doing a double XP Inquisitor run some time back and by just doing story quests, I ended up barely above the level curve, maybe 2-3 levels over by level 40. Then the double XP ran out and I ran into a brick wall, having absolutely no desire to do sidequests to keep up.

"Loot boxes are fascist evil" No. #ThisPostMayBePaidForInPartOrWholeByVolo

I regret playing Revelation. Partially my mistake to play it right after completing Conquest, so there was an element of burnout, but I also think it's genuinely the worst of the lot in terms of map design. Indeed a lot of the maps are recycled but with crappier, more annoying gimmicks put in.

RTS was the default game genre in the late 90s. If you were a game studio who didn't know what you were making next, you were making an RTS.

GOG's lowest price for it so far has been 28EUR so yeah, wait if you want DRM-free. (Lowest price at the moment is 25.20EUR but it's a Steam key from GMG, pretty much the historical low price though)

I also wish I could literally jump. There are a few places where I keep thinking I can go through some shrubs or whatever but nope, have to walk around them. (I'm only one chapter in so not much else to say about it yet)

There goes my expert knowledge of Horde mechanics. So, uh, how about that Sentry Totem boys?

Why would you ever give Bloodlust to group 1? But yeah, the day they added the combat pulse was a sad day. I felt like such a ninja when on our first Ragnaros kill I was able to vanish and use my jumper cables on a priest, and they in turn were out of combat for a short while too.

The worst evolution of WoW for me is the increasing push to make you do all the content on every character. Your power level is now dependent on many other factors other than just raid gear so if you want to stay competitive. You need to participate in all the auxilliary content to get your correct legendary gear (in Legion), power up your artifact, gain various currencies needed to upgrade your non-raid best-in-slot gear, etc. It's all designed to maximise the time investment needed, because that's what looks good in their metrics. Gone are the days where you can just log into the game for a couple of raids a week and be functional when called upon. The end result is you can no longer really hotswap different characters in unless you've invested just as much into them as you have on your main character. The game is now more alt-unfriendly than it has been at any point in its history.

Looking up the release plans right now, MC will be available at launch, and BWL will be available in "phase 3", so that probably leaves a lot of time to gear up reasonably well and negate some of the time gating. Dire Maul being in the second phase though will mean initial dungeon gear will be fairly unoptimised. Regardless though, I reckon the world "first" will probably just cheese it with an army of level 10 warlocks outside the raid soulstoning anyone without a cloak.

It is, but a lot of it is only in hindsight. Legion had some terrible, terrible issues, and probably marked the peak of RNG reliance as a determinant for success - see the Legendary and Titanforging systems. I'd go so far as to say Warlords of Draenor would have been the better expansion ...if it wasn't only two-thirds the size of the average expansion. Can't say anything about Pandaria as I quit partway through Cataclysm and didn't return for 2.5 years. FF14 isn't the answer though, less than two months in and I'm already feeling fairly burnt out, though to be fair, going through three expansions worth in one go will burn anyone out. I only made it to near the end of the first expansion and haven't progressed any farther for over a week.

Old raids will be mowed down with trivial difficulty. Not just based on everything unknown then now being common knowledge, but the capability of the tools available now will also be much greater. That, and obviously starting at patch 1.12 means the players will be much more powerful too, with the classes having been reworked and thus all being at effectively full power. No more useless 31 point talents for one... I started in January 2005, though only playing for the included month. Got to exactly level 40 on the day the gametime expired. Only returned about three months later, spent a bit of time in the PUG scene thanks to a few friends I made along the way, eventually one - a druid - got into a serious US raiding guild, and I as a rogue managed to tag along, partly because of the nepotism of wanting to appease the new healer, and because they just happened to lose three of their rogues very recently. Latency back then to the US west coast servers approached 400ms. I like to think I was a decent player back then but imagine the performance gain from 400ms back then to 12ms today. That guild broke up at the end of vanilla, but almost by accident, I along with my Aussie/SE Asian friends founded a raiding guild of our own (or rather, commandeered an existing bank alt guild). I'm still in it today, albeit in a very casual, "guild elder" sort of role. We've got maybe about half-a-dozen survivors from BC which is probably pretty good compared to the average retention rate of WoW players these days.

While I have plenty of nostalgia for it, I don't think it's something I would enjoy today. If I'm subscribed when it launches I might try to recreate my original character and tool around a bit, but somehow I doubt I'd even get to double-digit levels. Even if I theoretically got through the slog to level 60, I doubt the old endgame structures would organically return in any way resembling how it was. Raids might be mechanically identical to how they were, but everything around them will be unrecognisable - guild structures, the PUG scene, the gearing process, etc.