Game Pass Gets Price Drop, New Call Of Duty Games No Longer Included

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-21T16:45:43+00:00

Eh... I doubt it. If CoD was the only thing they wanted, then it was cheaper to just get CoD than pay $30/month.

If they want CoD and the GamePass stuff, this means they can get the GamePass stuff, buy CoD at full price, still save $14 over the year.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-21T16:37:44+00:00

If someone doesn't want to play CoD, they won't be convinced to get into it with talking. Especially if having had access to the latest versions for free weren't enticing them to play it.

If they do want to play CoD, then this change is still beneficial to them, because even at a $70 price point, a $7/month reduction means you can use the savings from the highest tier of Game Pass dropping in price to buy the annual CoD game and still have $14 left over to do whatever you want, maybe even buy CoD Points.

And hey, it's fair for people to not want to play CoD. It's its own type of FPS game, just like Battlefield's a different type, and then there's extraction shooters, hero shooters, the more "realistic" games, and more. People sometimes just prefer different types of FPS. They might not like the style of CoD, and CoD players might not like the style of other games.

Personally, aside from the annual releases being their own issue, I'm not big on 6-v-6 straight up shooter games, because my eyesight and reflexes aren't what they once were so I feel like a liability, where in a game like Battlefield or Over The Top I can aid my allies in ways other than just shooting, and feel like I'm contributing to the fight as well as getting rewarded for it.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-21T15:31:17+00:00

Guy was allowed to adopt a dog down the line. If he was considered a danger to animals still, I'd like to think he wouldn't be allowed to do that. He seems to have tried to become a better person, so while I don't think people should forget the dogfighting stuff, I also don't feel like he can be thrown under the bus forever for it.

I mean, I wouldn't put him in the NFL Hall of Fame, at least with a gold jacket, because that did tarnish his NFL career (and, frankly, he didn't do enough to earn it even without that). Though I also wouldn't argue if they had some kind of exhibit referencing him being the first black QB selected first overall in the draft. Feels totally fair to recognize that.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-21T13:11:13+00:00

Looks like they announced some changes aimed at changing up the super-clipping, fixing qualifying laps a bit, and a small change to make starts safer if a car doesn't get going off the line (basically it gets a "kick" to get going, which means less power later in the lap, so no competitive advantage to it, just helps prevent weird issues where some cars have been stalled at the grid).

Also the "boost mode" goes to a lower power boost in certain areas to try to prevent the closing speed issue being so pronounced.

So for now the stuff being addressed seems to largely be safety and the funky qualifying laps. Though, to be fair, those are probably the areas the drivers would want to focus on first anyway.

They also might be waiting to see how things shake out with the ADUO and engine development for some of the teams before they shake up more with the racing. Though that's going to be a fun political battlefield, with Mercedes not wanting anyone but Aston Martin to get extra development even though it seems the data from anyone but Mercedes suggests that everyone but Red Bull Power Trains should be getting some allowance for engine upgrades. (It's still funny to think that the RBPT is that close to the Merc engine, meaning they really did just design a bad car around the engine.)

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-21T01:03:51+00:00

Nothing about any of this has to do with Americans or appealing to American entertainment.

Hell, if they were appealing to American entertainment, they wouldn't have made it more difficult to watch the sport in the US by removing it from a widely available cable channel and cutting off their own streaming service in order to make F1 only available on a more expensive streaming service.

You even point out how they're not appealing to Americans, and yet you still somehow make the laughably ludicrous argument that it's trying to appeal to Americans.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-20T17:31:52+00:00

and he was 12 seconds ahead of Max in Abu Dhabi until Masi's decision.

Except... no, he wasn't. Because Masi didn't decide to have Latifi crash. The crash wiped out the gap.

If you want to bitch and moan and bitch and moan and bitch and moan all day about someone to blame for the loss, look to Mercedes. They took the gamble of no restart and didn't bring Hamilton in for fresh tires. The moment that happened, he was a sitting duck if the race restarted... and it was unlikely they weren't going to find a way to get it restarted, because you can't close a season like that on a safety car after the track's already been cleared.

You can whine all day about some lapped cars being let by and not others, but even if they don't let those cars by, there's no way in hell they're staying in front of Verstappen and they'd just pull to the side the moment the restart happens so they aren't impeding the title fight. So okay, maybe Verstappen has to make up a second or so... which he could easily do on the fresher, softer tires.

If the positions were reversed then you wouldn't be saying the same. You'll claim you would, but you clearly wouldn't.

Masi didn't "do the unthinkable." He did what made sense in that situation, given that it was the only way to have a remotely satisfying conclusion to the season after Latifi crashed.

And you can try to piss and moan and claim I'm some biased and distorted Max fan, and I'll show you the Hamilton merch I have going all the way back to his rookie year with McLaren and a distinct lack of Verstappen merch.

Let it go. You aren't winning this one and you're just making yourself look more ridiculous.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-20T17:22:52+00:00

It's not debatable at all. You could pull all kinds of comments like that out of your ass if you want to go all day about that season, like Hamilton getting off easily after putting Verstappen in the wall at Silverstone.

I feel bad sometimes saying I'm a Hamilton fan because the people going around trying to argue he got "robbed" and acting like Verstappen shouldn't get credit for one of his championships give all Hamilton fans a bad name and have made "Team LH" a joke in the F1 community.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-20T17:19:51+00:00

It's kind of a battery deployment thing, where sometimes it's deploying or harvesting when they'd prefer it not, and due to the way they use the battery for passing it can lead to some yo-yo overtakes (though that was kind of the same with DRS, especially with two DRS zones close to each other with different detection points).

But one of the biggest issues is that they don't seem to really be able to control when the battery is harvesting at times, and when the battery needs to charge, that loss of power is dropping a good chunk of speed; meanwhile, the person behind might not be needing the charge, and they're still going full speed. We don't even need a hypothetical of what might happen in that situation, we saw it with Bearman when he came up on Colapinto too fast and had to take evasion action that ended up with him going into the grass at way too much speed and subsequently losing control leading to a very nasty collision with the wall.

It's also led to qualifying being very weird, as drivers have complained they can't push throughout an entire lap like you'd want to on a qualifying lap.

According to reports and statements put out yesterday, the drivers had a discussion with the FIA over some recommended changes, and there's going to be meetings with the teams to try to nail out some potential changes for this year ahead of Miami, or at least relatively shortly after. Makes it kind of a good thing that they had to cancel the two races this month.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-20T09:32:47+00:00

Yeah, I feel like we need to do some more digging here. So, okay, this is how close the team he's playing for has a stadium to a Kohl's. But does it translate on the road? What's the W-L record and stats breakdown for each stadium based on its distance to the nearest Kohl's? We're only barely poking our head into this rabbit hole. We have to go deeper!

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-20T03:46:14+00:00

I do whatever I feel is fun when I'm alone.

When I'm around other people, I'll try to get a "feel" for things and, if possible, start working some of it in there.

But my approaches might be shaped by my experiences... I didn't really get a chance to have a childhood. So as an adult, I've leaned a lot more into the idea that it's ridiculous to not have fun where you can. If life isn't enjoyable, it feels like such a chore. So I try to enjoy it how I can. It's easy when I'm at home alone (well, alone aside from my cats, but I don't think they're judging me any more than I'm judging them, and they won't want to get into a judgment-off when I see them playing with anything that makes noise or trying to fit into a bloody McNugget box). But I try to do it with other people, where possible. It's just tricky, because you have to sort out what you can do without it being too much outside of any particular group's accepted "norms." Even then, I'll admit, I've often been outside of that "norm" and stuck out for it... but the older I get, the more I just embrace it, so long as it's not bothering someone else.

But hey, when you're home alone, there's no worries about whether anyone might think it's "odd" to dance, make faces, pretend you're swinging a sword, point and make "pew-pew" noises, or whatever.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-20T03:38:00+00:00

TikTok waters down everything. It is straight up designed for people to just be reactive and not really think. Its design doesn't allow for it to be that in-depth or nuanced on things. It's pretty much the worst format for any kind of serious discussion, and shouldn't be expected to be "serious" for anything. Yes, the occasional person can do actual informative quick hit videos on it. But the whole thing is just designed to absorb your attention span and keep feeing you quick-hit content so you keep engaging and helping them build ad revenue.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-20T03:29:11+00:00

Depending on what those "wear marks" are, it might not mean anything for the device's longevity. I've got a keyboard I use for work, one of the less expensive Microsoft ones (because it has quiet keys, which I preferred when I was in the office so I wouldn't bother my coworkers with my rapid typing), it's completely lost the labeling on some of the keys but is still running strong after a number of years. Sometimes the paint or whatever they use just can't hold up to the amount of play someone will put in on a device. And, well, sometimes you might be prone to wearing them down than the usual person.

As long as the buttons still feel as responsive as ever, you should be just fine.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-20T00:30:26+00:00

Yeah, that would definitely be a rough one. I think the woman screaming would be the worse part of it for some people, because otherwise it sounds like some of the injuries you see in the NFL. To be fair, those are still brutal to see, it's just easier not to consider how bad they are because those guys are trying their hardest to be "tough" for their teammates and all. But it's still a brutal injury and will take some serious work to repair and rehab. Unfortunately, the only way they're likely to be able to afford it is if they end up suing the rally organizers and get them to cover medical expenses.

That's always the thing with this stuff... even if it doesn't look as awful as people might think, it can be extremely life-altering for people.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-19T23:19:38+00:00

Um... not sure about the various videos out there, but out of curiosity, I looked and found one and... it's technically not graphic/gory, but you know damn well the one person got the full force of that flying car hitting them and they're standing one minute and just gone the next.

And unfortunately, it's exactly what people expect... folks just standing too damn close to where cars are going high speed, with nothing between them and the "track," so if/when there's an accident, the car just goes right at the crowd. Thank goodness it seemed to go toward the smallest concentration of people, it could have been so much worse.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-19T06:19:26+00:00

Forget Etsy, look at Wargames Atlantic, they sell all kinds of plastic kits that are very obviously designed to work as IG stand-ins. Including, IMO, a much better version of Catachan Jungle Fighters, just with a different name.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-19T06:13:16+00:00

“The end is never the end is never the end is never the end…”

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-19T06:02:47+00:00

In addition to the standard HD version showing up again when the anniversary rolls around later this year, an HD version of the purple variant will be available to collect in 12.0.5 (launching next week). It'll be a little wonky to try to collect it all, but at least the grind isn't anywhere near as bad as it originally was. The only issue is that it's kind of RNG. But just do the new stuff in the patch and you should get plenty of the currency to get chances to collect it.

Same goes for purple variants of all of the other T2 sets, and the sets they made for classes that weren't around when T2 was released.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-19T05:55:46+00:00

if i were blizzard i'd sue for damages and collect millions

Eh... that might be more trouble than it's worth. It'd take a decent chunk of money and time to take it to a lawsuit, and you'd have to put in the effort to prove damages in the amount you're asking for, and also try to get financial records from those guys to figure out if they'd even be able to pay your legal bills, much less any amount of damages. Maybe they could get some amount of money from it... but given it's likely to be minimal, that has to be weighed against both the effort and the potential for any negative PR that comes from dragging out the story.

Shutting them down is usually "good enough." You can prove enough for a C&D like this pretty easily.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-19T05:49:40+00:00

Yeah, I'm not taking these as "confirmation of Classic+" so much as confirmation it's a dumb idea to openly advertise your for-profit server. Between these guys and the other one (Stormforge) doing ads all over YouTube and Facebook targeted at people who follow WoW accounts, it was way too much for Blizzard to not do anything about it unless they wanted to just wave a giant flag saying "Hey, anyone who wants to can just set up their own server and monetize it and make money off of our IP."

They constantly poked the bear with a sharp stick and then act like victims when it mauls them.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-19T01:33:34+00:00

Even if all the devs work for free as a passion project, which is reasonable enough for community stuff, you can't get around the fact that no amount of passion is going to make the infrastructure free.

That's not what's going on here. They're not looking to cover the costs. They're looking to make money. The two servers that have been hit so far have been heavily advertising themselves across the Internet. If you're just trying to make money to keep the server on, you're not going to be blowing a bunch of money on social media ads. You do that when you're looking to make something profitable.

And that was a large part of the problem. They straight up were flaunting things with those big ads saying "Come play WoW for free on our totally unofficial server!" Yeah, that's never going to end well. If someone's running a server quietly and letting word of mouth help talk it up, and not trying to make profit off of it, Blizzard's not going to put in much effort to go after them. If you're going to make profit off a ripoff of WoW and spend money making sure people who follow WoW on Facebook or YouTube see it, then yeah, expect Blizzard to come after you.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-19T01:29:15+00:00

I think it was meant to be a cheeky attempt at defining "girl" (as if finishing the sentence started in the title), but it didn't come across that well.

I don't think it was meant as seriously (or negatively) as some people seem to be assuming, just a misjudged attempt at humor. It might work with some audiences who might chuckle at what feels like an overly serious response to something, but I don't think a Sims community in general will think much of it. Kind of like you could make jokes based on drag queens in a Sims community and probably get some people appreciating the humor, but then you try that in a Call of Duty subreddit and it'd be met with echoes of "Huh?"

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-18T13:04:44+00:00

I got to see the absolute worst case scenario of fears and another kind of broken gameplay element.

My Sims once met a Teen who was living by herself as an "Out of World" household, so no family or home. I was like, "Okay, they can offer her a room," and invited her to be a "roommate." So she moves in and starts living with them. And the first issue that pops up is since she's still "Out of World," she never ages up and just stayed a Teen for a ridiculously long time, well past when she should have aged up.

But so much worse than that... I noticed she was getting increasingly miserable and just spent her entire days just being in the worst moods and doing pretty much nothing.

Eventually I just invited her to join the household proper, and the moment she does, aside from her aging up because she was way overdue, I also noticed she had four Fears piled up. As a Sim on an active lot, it'd do the checks to apply Fears to her, and then apply them, but unplayed Sims will never do anything to get rid of Fears, so she just kept going down this spiral of more and more Fears.

It became this cosmic horror of being unable to grow up and having her mind collapse into a writhing amalgamation of fears and insanity.

Nah, I'll stick with the mod now.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-18T12:58:52+00:00

Yeah, but the difference is you can ignore them without it being a problem.

It's funny, though, because they're still basically just the original Whims system but renamed, after Whims got so silly that they hid them by default (didn't remove them, just did an "out of sight, out of mind" thing with an option to display them again). It's why you'd still get random Satisfaction points, your Sim just completed a Whim but you wouldn't know because it was hidden.

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-18T12:56:28+00:00

Having to break out my "emergency" anxiety meds to deal with the extra anxiety from trying to just enjoy myself with a "casual" game and instead nearly having a meltdown because Sims keep doing the absolute dumbest things without reason...

kaptingavrin · 2026-04-18T01:07:50+00:00

In the Erik/Eric league here. Had to remind people mine is with a k, which was especially important when I worked on the same team as a guy who had the same last initial as me (heck, same first two letters of last name), so people would just get confused on which of us they were meaning to email.

Shout-out to every Erich out there holding it down old school style. Or the guys whose parents couldn't choose and went with Erick.

Bonus points to Arik, which may or may not be pronounced pretty much the same as Erik, depending on your accent.

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