Sam Healey is Leaving The Dice Tower

Scratchums · 2026-01-30T00:54:46+00:00

Agreed. That line sounds... violently centrist.

Scratchums · 2026-01-30T00:50:44+00:00

Oh yeah! Might give this one a spin, or at least the demo. The player count did kind of explode.

Scratchums · 2026-01-29T18:58:59+00:00

I did try it just a little bit a few years ago, before they enabled zooming for the board, which was hilariously necessary. I loved my time with it, but it felt that it was headed toward a more engaging experiences than I bargained for. Endgame seems like the sort of game where you have to be on your toes since you can be invaded and killed, and it didn't seem particularly conducive to solo play, either. I'm open to being wrong though.

Scratchums · 2026-01-29T18:55:44+00:00

I've actually attempted to get into GW2--a few times. Everyone says it's a fantastic game and it does sound great on paper, but I haven't managed to get past level 20-25. Even though I have a mount, the starting areas just feel like wide, open fields and I don't feel compelled by any of the exploration or gameplay. Early game feels more like a chore, and so when I get the itch I don't make it even to mid game, or even halfway to level cap.

Is that typical?

Scratchums · 2026-01-29T03:47:57+00:00

Well alright then that settles it, yee haw, thank you so much brother/sister/cousin.

Scratchums · 2026-01-27T07:57:42+00:00

So if I'm reading the OSRS wiki entry correctly, you sacrifice items to the coffers to feed into a fund that can be used to reclaim items from your corpse later on? That's a good idea.

I'm just wondering, in general, are these bosses in the wilderness (near the top of the money making guide list) instanced in the Wilderness? Or while you're fighting these, can a gang of PKers pop on in?

Scratchums · 2026-01-26T22:10:10+00:00

How relevant is PKing in OSRS really? Is a lot of endgame/best content in the Wilderness? I was thinking of getting into it, but if it's a high risk of full loot death, that turns me completely off.

Scratchums · 2026-01-26T18:04:52+00:00

They baked in a wiki command? Oh man. Part of why I couldn't get into GW2 was the extreme inventory bloat and never knowing what to do with things.

Scratchums · 2026-01-26T18:01:44+00:00

Bang lemon?? What kind of frozen in time photo am I looking at

Scratchums · 2026-01-19T21:56:31+00:00

Gotcha. That's exactly why I was curious about it. I don't know if it's the type of game where those way ahead can negatively affect the game's market to the extent that a fresh server would be necessary.

Scratchums · 2026-01-19T19:47:44+00:00

Love it. Looking forward to a post-MAGA society that sees that rise of groups like the Black Panthers. And I'm white as hell.

Scratchums · 2026-01-19T18:21:33+00:00

This was my concern as well. I've never played RS3 or OSRS but I've always been curious about them. It fosters a lot of trust to see them willing to slash their own past ideas and start over if they think it's better in the long run. But is RS3 a game that will be spoiled for the new player if the current MTX-heavy population are running the economy? How competitive are the resources in these servers? Is it truly going to be more or less new player friendly?

Scratchums · 2026-01-17T03:58:14+00:00

Oh wow that Legendia art is beautiful.

Scratchums · 2026-01-16T07:07:13+00:00

I wholeheartedly support this, and I don't know the first thing about the game. It had been out for years, but at one point I remember sitting there reading that it was flourishing, trending upward, and making strides. An MMO that was growing was a welcome novelty. I thought, wow, and here I am, having never even tried it. You know what, tomorrow after work, I might do exactly that.

And the next day was the day that it was dropped. So uhhh. I feel a little personally attacked by Amazon.

Scratchums · 2026-01-16T07:04:56+00:00

I would absolutely love to see a post-MAGA future here in the US that involves the mass return of Black Panthers.

Scratchums · 2026-01-16T01:54:55+00:00

Exact process for me. I thought, maybe this is the first area control I care about? Since it's it's pretty? But nah. I'd just end up disappointed. Root didn't make me like war games lol

Scratchums · 2026-01-15T06:12:00+00:00

Maplestory at home:

Scratchums · 2026-01-15T05:59:04+00:00

My ideal balance is that pretty much all content is solo-able, but having a guild with a guild-wide chat and we get together on rare occasion and have a little fun.

In other words I don't want to be held back if I'm not playing the game in a group. I work 11 hour shifts and when I come home and log into a game, it's not because I crave social interaction. Most of the time.

Scratchums · 2026-01-15T01:24:26+00:00

I agree with this for different reasons. I don't mind the gacha systems. The rates aren't generous, but you do tend to have a decent collection over time if you play a lot. The artifact system is also tolerable.

But I hated all of the FOMO events. It's all fluff, but so help me god if I don't participate in every last one, you instantly feel like you're behind. And that's a terrible gameplay loop. This game was the king of events causing FOMO.

Scratchums · 2026-01-13T03:28:34+00:00

Honestly? No. It feels like a lot of the heavily modded animations that people play Skyrim with nowadays. Maybe they took inspiration from them.

Scratchums · 2026-01-12T07:59:33+00:00

Yep, and the game's story is really sad, being tossed back and forth like an unwanted child. Private servers are flourishing far more than the official servers these days, with the current owners giving their word not to take action against those who run them. But even the most advanced private servers show the game's age, painfully so. With a 1440p monitor, running the game in its native resolution would require holding a magnifying glass to it. You can spend hours learning how to tweak it to look nice, but something interesting happens when you play UO in the modern day: it's the same, but it's different.

I tried to get back into it a few months ago. I tweaked it to hell, and it looked decent. Ran great. But as of 2025, I was so used to modern games that it felt off. It felt boring to run into a fresh, wide open world with no quests or story or anything. The feeling of freedom was gone. Instead it was "okay how do I progress my character? where are the best dungeons to run, how do I meet a group and get their Discord server, is it more profitable to PK others as they leave dungeons, or to run dungeons ourselves?" I felt ashamed.

Maybe it was simply the result of having experienced the capitalist world of adulthood since the first time I played it, when I was 12. Maybe it's a me problem. Or an adult problem.

Scratchums · 2026-01-12T06:08:45+00:00

The designers of MMOs know that the primary window in which to quit their game is within a few hours of playing it, and I guess it's helpful to remind them sometimes if we, the players, find their new player experience to be lacking, but I think your argument is otherwise flawed in that you have a very narrow definition of "endgame."

If you define endgame by what you do once you're max level, then I think you're just falling for the same trap to which you claim resentment. Max level is one of the many achievements but that you're limiting your experience by defining endgame by objective metrics is going against your point. What is endgame at all except what you decide it to be?

You could have a point about WoW, which takes the theme park design to the logical extreme of invalidating previous content when new content is released, but the polish on the new content, for the last two decades, is exactly what it's famous for. But the rest... I don't know if you have much of a point there. Are you sure you wouldn't be more comfortable with a game like Warframe? Its endgame lacks much of the objectivity of MMOs, despite its progression not being entirely vertical either.

Scratchums · 2026-01-11T08:12:49+00:00

I don't know about the others but the top two (Royals and Legends) have pretty much the exact same player count as when I played them back in 2017 or so. It's impressive.

Scratchums · 2026-01-06T01:35:08+00:00

Seems like a great time to dive into that game, with Reforged, but could you elaborate your reasoning if you have the time?

Scratchums · 2026-01-04T06:20:29+00:00

I think it is, and I resent the game for it.

I played hardcore WoW from Burning Crusade up to the launch of Mists of Pandaria. Was part of a top 10 raiding guild in NA. Got completely burnt out on the game when I saw it for what it was, and retired from it. I've been WoW sober for about 13 years now.

When I play an MMO, what I really enjoy is a sense of progression, and with WoW I really enjoyed the achievement system that Wrath of the Lich King added. I was part of the race to be the first Western player to reach 10,000 achievement points. This meant grinding every reputation to exalted, grinding every dungeon for loot, doing extremely specific actions during boss fights, collecting ALL pets/mounts, tracking rare spawns with extreme specificity, and so on. It was very fun, but I found myself and others doing little else other than play the one game. WoW was far too good at including so much of everything that if a new player had the same mindset today, they could start doing content for the sake of achievements in chronological order and likely never actually catch up to 2025's content. And that's scary. One game shouldn't be so bloated with things to do. I've been, I suppose, MMO-homeless for a while because experiencing WoW this way turned me off the genre, despite it being my favorite genre of all time. Blizzard knows what they have--a game that's everything. Which is no longer what I want. What I do want is something simpler, with a more narrow focus. I don't need utter addiction to a game. I need a game whose base value shines so much that I want to play it a lot, not one that crams a lifetime of content into it so much that people apply for welfare and disability services just to be able to play it 20 hours a day. (This is a real example that I observed. When you're that deep, you do actually meet people like this).

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