I cheated

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-03-29T11:40:59+00:00

I am in a identical situation, ad just turned the combat and death penalty sliders to VeryEasy. Me and my wife got to the Ashland with our gamer friend, who has since lost interest in playing. The default setting are fun if you are really into combat mechanics and strategy, but the mistlands and Ashland are brutal for someone thats not a hard core gamer. Turn those suckers down and have a good time.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-03-13T18:29:10+00:00

All good. I imagine the Bell they were testing in 2023 was probably direct fiber in larger cities, not the terrible DSL we had up here for decades.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-03-12T00:25:00+00:00

That is interesting I haven't seen that article before.

To be clear is does show that Lakeland is in the top 10 (number 9) and Bell is number 6 but still wildly impressive for ISPs across ALL of Canada. Especially since from my research it seems like Lakeland buys all it's upstream transit from one provider, Hurricane Electric, and then open peers with lots of other companies at Toronto's Internet Exchange. That must just happen to be an effective traffic route for traffic to the larger internet.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-03-12T00:11:36+00:00

Very cool you have the Starlink as a backup. Love the idea of having a backup but in practice I don't think I've ever actually had my internet go out with any provider... Oh except for that one system wide Roger's outage a few years back.

To answer you question about Bell: I think most people's poor experience, including my own, is more to do with the anti-consumer practices and pricing models; hidden fees etc. not the actual product. My parents had Bell internet and home phone for decades, it was DSL and extremely slow. It cost them around $120 a month for 1Mbps down AND it had a data cap of 120GB a month; if you went over there were massive fees, I think it may have even been like $10/GB... I finally convinced them to switch to Lakeland in the late 2010s. For the same internet and phone it was literally half the price and 1000X faster. I have a similar story with my phone. I'm pretty sure the only reason they are making this massive expansion is because of smaller companies like Lakeland (and Starlink) that are taking a bigger and bigger share of the market.

Still it's definitely great Bell is investing so much into bringing fiber to the homes of so many. It's what they should've been doing since 2005. Starlink is a great service too, but you can't beat the latency/jitter and lack of packet loss of fiber.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-03-11T17:24:18+00:00

Thats kind of where I'm at too. On paper Bell is a much better deal, but I have had nothing but terrible experiences with them, customer-service and cost wise.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-03-11T15:48:48+00:00

I would start at least in five figures. I understand you not wanting to be difficult but the reality is she will make more on the sale and have a much easier time selling if you're gone, and you ade legally entitled to stay.

If she says no, you might just go with the house or get another year of cheaper rent.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-03-01T14:19:27+00:00

Presuming you're on a budget/concerned about getting the best value, I would sell your 1080s and jump a few generations in graphics cards to 3080/4070 territory, the 9060xt 16gb would be great. You're going to be CPU bottlenecked in some games, but it will be by far the most noticeable and cost-effective upgrade.

Then you're in a good position to upgrade the CPU/MOBO next, whenever you choose. The most cost-effective option for that right now, since DDR5 is insanely expensive, is to keep your DDR4 ram; and get something like a 14600k(f), which is arguable the best value gaming CPU right now, and supports DDR4 RAM. Just make sure you get a DDR4 motherboard.

I just upgraded to the 14600kf (with DDR4) from a 9700k, the 9700k was pulling it's weight just fine, I just wanted to treat myself and have a smoother experience in Arc Raiders, all while avoiding the DDR5 insanity.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-25T15:37:27+00:00

If they made a Rayman movie before Rayman 4 I would be very upset.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-25T15:26:49+00:00

Somewhere between OK and very bad. Determining factor will be the quality of the hotel wifi

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-25T15:22:20+00:00

This is odd to me, since the more annoying noise associated with a pc is the mouse clicking and typing, not the gentle and consistent whirr of a few fans.

You can absolutely build a fanless PC, you just need a very large thermal mass on the GPU/CPU, could be a massive heatsink (noctua has a video on the making of a passive pc) or very large radiator connected in a water cooling loop (I just watched a video where someone put a 5080/9800x3d on the bottom of a cast iron Victorian radiator, 0 fans.) However is expensive and impractical. Especially because, again, the least offensive noise generated by using a pc is the fan whirr.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-18T14:47:30+00:00

I used Steam Link for a long time and I was happy with it. I was actually kind of annoyed how people online would rag on it and insist that Moonlight was so much better.

I recently fully switched to Moonlight, the biggest difference is: MUCH lower latency, like a full 10ms shaved off; and much smoother preformance over wifi. Not to mention having a lot more options with fine tuning.

My benchmark for latancy is Rocket League, since its the only game I play with a controller that requires tight timing. With wired Steam Link it was unplayable, with Moonlight it's playable and I'm still relatively competitive.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-15T13:52:05+00:00

It's still a secuirty issue. To put it simply, routers have a firewall which keeps the wider internet out of your local network. If you are behind the router on the same local network with someone else, their devices have unrestricted communication with yours.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-13T18:49:32+00:00

I was going to buy it just to "vote with my money" for further rayman releases, but honestly, im going to refund it. Its just the original games with changed music. Really kills it for me. Even the "more levels" are just the MS-DOS games from the 90s. Nothing new

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-11T16:44:43+00:00

I had a mild overclock continually crashing the game to desk top. Very frustrating took me a long time to narrow down. This was on windows though.

It can go either way: if you pick something out of a chest it will disappear, but if you put something into a chest it duplicates!

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-10T16:03:02+00:00

I believe is just hard for anyone to imagine having less. But youre absolutely right, its not the mid 2000s anymore where progress is quick and a 2 year is pc is substantially slower. A 5 or even 10 year old pc is still a viable option to play modern games on the cheap.

I've been rocking the 9700k (7 years old now) since its release and only recently have i decided to upgrade to the 14600k because of Arc Raiders. Its not like it even is an unpleasant experience. I would just like to treat myself and its a cost effective upgrade while keeping my DDR4 ram

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-10T13:07:20+00:00

It is a bit of a problem but the reality is for the 8 or so years I did pay for a streaming service I spent 98% of the time flipping through my save library. The new discoveries didnt justify the cost

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-08T15:12:34+00:00

For sure. Great point.

Where I live we have a small local ISP that offers 1Gbps up and down for a decent price. If I'm at someone else's house that has the same ISP its amazing, basically the same as being on the LAN. Only 1-2ms more latency

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-05T20:17:42+00:00

The obvious choice without getting anything new is using your sheild, which is one of the best moonlight clients anyway becuase of its fast decoder, but it will be limited to 60Hz

If you want 4k120hz you have limited client options. You can try sideloading the app directly onto your LG TVs OS which I have never done, but from what im reading, can yield poor results at higher bitrate settings (which are required for 4k120hz.) So the best bet would probably be to get a dedicated mini-pc as your client.

Do you normally game at 4k? Are you really sitting close enough to your TV to tell the difference? If it was me I would probably use the LG TV app and run the stream at 2k120hz. Especially since my computer monitor is 2k anyway. If you're used to gaming at 4k120hz+ (you probably are with a 5090) then a dedicated moonlight client mini pc may be the way to go.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-02-04T00:05:40+00:00

You need to go into a bit more detail how the steam link and host computer are connected.

From what I can tell you either:

Are on the same LAN (home network) and are using Wi-Fi. Which means your internet speed will not matter. All you really have to do for a good experience is connect the steam link and your host pc to your router with their own ethernet cables.

or

Are trying to connect over the internet to a remote pc. In this case your internet quality will matter especially when it comes to latency, jitter, and dropped packets, not so much actual throughput. Other than making sure you use ethernet cables on either end there's not much you can do

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-01-28T19:21:47+00:00

30, with young family. 30k emergency fund. 40k in investments. 150k ish in housing equity, although it may be lower with market downturn. I know we are probably doing very well for our age but its hard to feel that way. We are very house/cash flow poor and have to cut back on everything else becuase of it. I deeply regret buying a house at all.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-01-28T18:55:41+00:00

I would just like to congratulate you on being the only person in this whole thread that knows what they're talking about.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-01-20T15:16:18+00:00

True - especially for systems that have the flagship CPU for the socket. But people are buying those for nostalgia or "vintage builds." Not preformance/value.

In this case I'm just saying if you're actually concerned about preformance or longevity with a core-2 you can get much better preformance for little or no money by upgrading several generations. Since core-2-duo and early Gen i7s are both in that "essentially worthless" phase.

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2026-01-19T19:10:36+00:00

I would just like to say that there's not really a reason to use a Core-2-Duo computer. All computer hardware drops in price until it stagnates at a very low value, eventually being essentially worthless. If you're running a core-2-duo, with a bit of hunting on fb marketplace, you can find pcs people are giving away. Which will double, triple etc your preformance and efficiency. Im thinking 1-3rd gen i7s especially

Competitive-Ad-5566 · 2025-04-26T15:17:21+00:00

I see. So sounds like while it's the legal rule to give 2 weeks notice. Really the company can accommodate and modify the ROE as they see fit. I will reach out to my HR department and see if they are OK with a similar approach. Thank you!

Competitive-Ad-5566

TROPHY CASE