… I didn’t say they can’t do so. I said they’re allowed not to. Since it’s allowed, that’s what they do.

Because they’re allowed not to do so. The answer is shitty yet simple.

Someone not tipping won’t change that either; all that will do is stiff a worker. This needs to be fixed by changing labor laws.

Service charge I would presume is primarily paid out to the non-wait staff at the restaurant. The kitchen in particular.
Tips go to the wait staff, and they will pay some of that out to other staff (e.g. front staff) depending on how the restaurant works.

These are going to be separate. The service charge is there so they can increase prices by a tightly controlled amount without needing to fuck up the carefully targeted price points ($8 or $7.99 is a lot better than $9.44). Which is shitty, to be clear: it’s a hidden way to increase prices while still advertising the same price. But it’s not something that replaces or complements the tip, it’s just a shitty price-adjustment.

A waiter or waitress is still going to be dependent on the actual tip.

Not a final decision. SCOTUS (via Kagan) refused to overturn a stay on a decision while legal proceedings continue. Basically just an order to keep things as-is until the case finishes working its way through the courts.

Which as I understand it is generally how things work: if there’s no clear likely winner, go with the interim situation that most easily can be rectified if it is later ruled to have been wrong. In this case, if the ruling goes against Apple than they can be ordered to give money to Epic and other app-owners based on the revenue brought in from them to Apple during the appropriate period. The opposite case would require more complex estimates (how much revenue was shifted away from Apple incorrectly, in the case where Apple wins) and further it’d result in unnecessary consumer friction: users would go from A to B then back to A again.

As someone that has read the books but not watched the show…

For books 7-9, I think of them as an epilogue trilogy. The time jump, the overall ending at the end of book 9, the state of the characters… Basically all of it fills the same purpose that a traditional epilogue fills. It just tells an entire story in the process of doing so and needs 1200-1500 pages.

After a certain point, scores are as much based on hype as quality.

That’s not even a malicious choice, either. Hype influences our experiences and perceptions of whatever is being hyped. It’s intuitively obvious that people will enjoy a good thing that they are hyped about more than a good thing that they are not hyped about. Hype is strongest just before release… which is exactly when reviewers play and assign a score to a game.

A sequel to a well received game is going to have more hype than the predecessor in most circumstances. Morrowind sold something like 5-10x the copies as Daggerfall and came about at a time when there was a lot of upheaval in the industry from a target-audience standpoint: a lot of potential Morrowind players (and reviewers) would have not played Daggerfall.

In essence, Oblivion was reviewed more positively because of the positive reception of Morrowind. The positive reception of Oblivion in turn boosted Skyrim.

This is not to say people would hate the games without the prior game before it or hype, just that there is a “hype boost” for games.

Lots of things.

Use public transportation.
Have multiple experiences available nearby to do as a day activity.
Have a large pool of people available to meet and know.
Walk to anything interesting.
In general just have lots of options and variety for anything: work, groceries, eating out, etc.

Some small towns might have some walkability for downtown but nothing more than that.

I’d tell my friend that this one is on me. If they protested I’d offer to let them take the next time we ate at a restaurant.

I’m a big fan of paying bills separately though.

I find it infinitely more usable than all of the other storefronts I’ve used or seen. Interacting with my library is easy and straight forward. Buying games is easy and straight forward. When it opens I’m not inundated with ads for games I don’t care about, or ads at all.

I doubt anyone will complain if Blizzard’s games are brought to other storefronts too.

I like Steam. Steam has the best features, best UI, good sales, and while they are not without faults (systems can stay unchanged for a long time!), they are run by a company that by and large respects its userbase.

I don’t mind if games are brought to Steam and any or all other storefronts. Put it on GOG, Windows Store, EGS, Itch.io, battlenet, Origin, Uplay… You name it, I approve of it going there also. If those other storefronts want me to use them, they need to provide a comparable or superior experience. GOG comes the closest, but its inability to get games in a timely or predictable manner, if at all, is too much of an obstacle for me.

Yes, it matters. If you’re picking 1 out of 10 each from 10 different sets, you get 100 combinations. This also limits the sample space to what is possible.

For simplicity’s sake so we can do math that we can intuitively figure out, look at it as picking one from binary choices, with three companions. So you have companions A, B, and C. With possible endings A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2.

If you pick 1 from A, 1 from B, and 1 from C you get 2*2*2 possible outcomes, or 8.
If you pick any 3 from the set of 6 (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2) you get 6!/(3!*3!) possible outcomes, or 20.

With the former, you always get one ending for each companion. Every companion has an option selected, and every companion does not have multiple endings selected. With the latter, you might get 1 from each companion. Or you might get A1, A2, and B1 — with no endings for companion C, and two endings for companion A.

How can ending A1 “A lived happily ever after” and ending A2 “A died midway through the player’s journey, never having found happiness” both happen? They cannot. We need to use a system that limits the sample space to exactly 1 per companion, even if that option itself might be “doesn’t show up in the end slides.”

Unless I’m getting the math wrong myself, for any “pick 1” combination set like this we’re dealing with just multiplying the combination sets together. Technically we’re multiplying by the factorial of the sample size, but 1!=1.

We’re not picking any 10 from within the subset of 100; you cannot pick both ending 1 and ending 4 from companion A and then no ending at all for companion C. I’m assuming each individual sub-ending is mutually exclusive with the rest of its sample space. That difference of assumptions is what led to your 1.7x10¹³ combinations.

I agree and I suspect companions are carrying a lot of the weight for this calculation.

Hypothetically, if there’s 10 companions with 10 individual endings each you’d get 100 endings right there. Add in 10 main endings and you get 1000, add in 4 major side quests and 4 variations each and you’re at 16,000 ending variations.

Yes. In fact, I’d say that Firefox runs clearly better than Chrome does these days. An inversion of the past.

If they concluded that they could raise prices to increase profit, they’d do so regardless of theft rates. Those are separate issues.

I feel the core genre identity of RPG is a known thing and not as uncertain as you paint it. There’s the iron-clad center-point with CRPGs and JRPGs. Then games that venture off from those identities into more action-y RPGs (a la The Witcher or Mass Effect). Or games that go more action-y but in a different way (Diablo-clones). There’s games expanding out from the JRPG core like tactical RPGs (though there’s an intersection with CRPGs somewhere there e.g. X-Com). And so on.

Sure, there will be games out there where people will ask “is this truly an RPG?” but that doesn’t mean the genre itself is fuzzy and poorly grasped, even if it will be difficult to come across a satisfying definition.

The name itself is vague and a poor guide… but that’s true across most gaming genres. People use “strategy” in shooters or RPGs or puzzle games, but we all know what a Real Time Strategy game is. Almost every game has “action” and a smaller but still nearly-every game has “adventure” to it, but action-adventure is another known quantity. I’m not sure there’s any genre that is perfectly encapsulated within the name given to it, or one where there are not people questioning games at the fringes of that genre.

I grabbed this in the recent Steam sale. I love it. The Diablo-esque atmosphere was something that I particularly enjoy. The trait system along with the memory+doubling flasks can be “abused” to create some satisfyingly powerful characters.

I put a good amount of time into it already. I think I’ll leave it back on my shelf until they have their 1.0 release, whenever that might be — end of the year?

Yes. It’s not the most graphically demanding game so hardware wise it isn’t much of a test of a new PC. It is, however, rather aesthetically beautiful and worth going for in the context of what you’re going for, IMO.

The sole DLC/expansion for CP2077 is coming out this fall. If you’ve waited this long you might as well wait for it to be complete before you revisit it.

I’ve been waiting for the DLC before doing a first foray, personally.

Microsoft got Zenimax and was then rather excessive in how they handled it, and that is a large part of what prompted this degree of pushback by regulatory bodies.

If Xbox wants to leave the door open for future acquisitions they are very much aware they need to tread carefully moving forward.

This reads like a rather optimistic take to me.

What Microsoft learned here is that they can buy a publisher (Bethesda), make that publisher’s games exclusive, and still get the biggest gaming acquisition in history approved by regulators.

Microsoft will likely pause acquisitions for a bit, but everyone else that wants to get into/stay in gaming is going to look into them even more than before. I’d be surprised if Sony doesn’t end up buying someone decently large (but not as large as Activision: Sony cannot afford anything like that). Everyone seems to think Sony would go for Square Enix but I think they would make a different choice.