u/Ragnaroknight

I was fortunate enough to purchase a home right at the start of Covid when the prices were still low and the interest rates were like 3%. My mortgage was only $1550 at the time, which I think is very affordable for living in New England.

Unfortunately one day, I get home from work and see a car in my front yard with the rear axle ripped off and my front entrance destroyed. The lady across the street backed into my house.

Fortunately insurance paid for the damages, but I still had to make a claim regardless of whose insurance paid out. After this incident my insurance company dropped me out of the blue and I was put on force placed insurance. This insurance was nearly double what I was paying before. So this alone increased my mortgage like $150/month.

Well I tried shopping around for home insurance, turns out they don't like when you have a claim in the last 5 years because you're high risk. They also don't like people on force placed insurance. Also most companies don't even offer insurance where I live because everywhere within 10 miles of the costs is allegedly considered a flood zone. Well that's fan-fucking-tastic because everywhere in Rhode Island is 10 miles from the coast.

So eventually to get out of forced placed insurance (to hopefully eventually transition to a more affordable insurance) I had to settle for insurance even more dogshit than the forced placed insurance. This added another $100 to the mortgage.

But it gets worse, the escrow account that pays out the insurance and taxes, now had to play catch-up to makeup for the new higher insurance cost.

Needless to say my mortgage payments are now $2035/month up $500 from just a few years ago, and it'll be like this for a while.

Which okay, I could manage that maybe, if everything else wasn't going up in price too. I'm basically barely floating on the surface here trying to not go underwater.

This company is still trying to bring people on at Pre-Covid levels of income, and I've never seen it so understaffed.

I work in Massachusetts where the minimum wage right now is $15/hr. I live in Rhode Island where it goes up to $17/hr on January 1st. But this company is still trying to bring people in at $15-18/hr, and these aren't for super "low skill" roles. We are talking machine operators, data entry clerks, machine techs, etc.

So basically they're trying to bring people in on minimum wage to operate machinery and computers. When you can literally go down the road and work at Dunkin and make the same exact money with a fraction of the know-how and responsibility.

They refuse to raise the pay for any roles, Refuse to give loyal employees raises, brag about record profits. Then wonder why for the first time in years it's finally catching up and all going to shit.

Why do companies refuse to pay people? It's infuriating.

For some context this is the first AC game I've ever played. And I've definitely never played the original. As this title is generally considered one of the strongest entries in AC, my expectations were above average.

Also I want to state I don't hate this game, and I can totally see why it was such a big deal when it first released.

But, to me personally, while Black Flag holds up in some ways modern open world games still could take a lesson from, it mostly feels like a product of it's time and very archaic in its game design, and for the longest time I really thought "Ubislop" and Sony games have basically been the same games since the PS3/360 era. But I was totally wrong, these types of games have frankly come a long way.

I'm finding my issue with Black Flag is all of the content is basically the same or serves the same purpose and it's repeated ad nauseum. Combat doesn't evolve basically ever, there're very few ways to handle any given situation, every encounter feels the same. Ship combat always feels the same, boarding ships gets tiring, the game just doesn't evolve. The only thing that ever happens is more and more tedious ways to earn reales for more upgrades. And fes not, no, I don't find harpooning or diving engaging at all.

So, how does that differ from a modern game like Ghost of Yotei or Horizon Forbidden West? Well it's simple, the gameplay between all of that checklist content, is actually engaging. Combat evolves, enemy types grow more and more fierce and complex. Your freedom of gameplay expression and options grows greatly over the course of the game. Side content feels more meaningful, and rewards actually change the game.

I don't hate Black Flag, it's a very competent game. There's nothing super inherently wrong with it. And it gets a huge pass by being basically one of the only pirate games in existence. But I often find myself just plain old bored. A 1 hour session in this game can feel like 3-4 because the way you spend your time in the game is so unchanging.

I think I've taken for granted how far games in this genre have truly come over the years.

I think outside of a few iconic ones, I think most of them are pretty bad, or just a worse version of the original design. I look forward to this era of the TCG being over.

I can't help but feel how much cooler the Mega Darkrai or Mega Rayquaza cards would look if they were just the original designs. Same with Chaos Rising Greninja. Perfect Order Mega Clefable would have been a cool companion card to the Clefairy IR if it wasn't a Mega.

Idk, I am just not feeling Mega designs, maybe it's me. But I can see why these sets aren't as popular as S&V.

Look I'm not saying I'm the main character, and everyone else is an NPCs. More like 20-30% of people can't seem to process more than one thought at a time, and I'm not even talking about having the ability to multitask, I mean they literally have no inner-monologue and can't think about more than a single action at any given moment.

I work in manufacturing, and I see people do things, or not do things that don't even make sense. People who have been at the job for years, who do the same repetitive task but still don't seem to have any pattern recognition.

Like they'll see a problem they see every single day, and still not know how to avoid it or fix it. And I don't think it's simply being bad at the job, or being lazy, it's like they literally can't comprehend it.

Here's an example. There's a machine that puts labels on the products. If it runs out of labels, the conveyors keep moving and there's no labels being placed on the products. The scanners will start rejecting the unlabeled product until the conveyors automatically stop when the rejection bin fills up. If an operator sees the labels run out, they can manually stop the conveyors before the rejection bin fills up, and save themselves a lot of work. Yet everyday, someone who has been working there for years sees this happening, and they enter some sort of panic state and won't react until the bin is full. They'll call over someone else instead of just stopping the line (which they don't need permission to do, because filling up the bin is far more downtime), and then cry about how much work emptying the bin is. Meanwhile having had all the power to stop it immediately.

It just makes no sense, it's like you see this thing happening but you can only think of the event itself, and not the appropriate actions. And I see stuff like this constantly.

How do people like this navigate everyday life? What do they do when they have to make a complex decision? Is life just autopilot for them, are they just programmed to do 1 thing?

I don't know if it's the hero or the players, but I'm inclined to think almost no one below like Diamond/Masters has any idea how to play Rein anymore.

What's crazy is he used to be such a staple pick back in the day, now I absolutely dread seeing him on my team.

All I think is "this guy is gonna do is charge ability into a terrible position, and get melted".

What's going on with Rein these days?

I don't want this game to just be Valheim light where the only goal is to beat the boss, get the next tier of upgrades, then beat the next boss with said upgrades, repeat.

I'd love to see more NPCs, maybe wandering humans that can get into fights with the creatures, have some voice lines, maybe even basic trading or requests. Maybe even random events to save NPCs from attacks or perform other small tasks.

Some more structures that aren't just dilapidated/abandoned buildings. Like actual homes or huts. Maybe even as far as small villages. Even Palworld has a few villages with NPCs and shop keepers.

I think Valheim makes up for a lot of these shortcomings by having the world be randomized every time. Dragonwilds will have to make the world feel more dense with content to make up for the lack of procedural worlds.

F**k You.

Learn another character, the roster is gigantic. I really don't understand being a 1 trick. Especially not now, there's basically a substitute for every play style at this point.

I bought a Pokemon binder form someone, and they also had 2-3 pages of Kayou cards in the binder. I have no idea what to do with them, or what I have.

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This seems to have the most confusing rarity system of all time.

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I have some URs, SSRs, and some HRs.

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Any suggestions?

I have like 45 people in my DMs asking me a million questions.

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Like it's a $1500 piece of shit, you can drive it home. Yes it needs work. If it didn't I'd probably be keeping it. Most of the major issues are in the description.

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Why do people act like they're gonna get a dealership fresh ride? At $1500 you're lucky it's not a "part-out" car.

I'm replaying the game for the first time since launch. I don't think I ever really loved it as much as others, and maybe even less so my second time.

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I wish the game had simply committed to a gameplay style as opposed to copying 3-4 others games and meshing them into this sort of Frankenstein's Monster of action/action rpg games.

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It wanted to homage Nier Automata in almost every respect, but for some reason tried being a Sekiro/Soulslike game too. I think it should have committed to just being an action game . These two styles of games are at odds with each other, like Eve does combos but you get animation locked so you can't parry, so simply never doing the full combo strings seems like the better option most of the time. In a souls style game, you don't have to commit to long flashy animations.

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Also it has 2 really boring open world areas that for some reason are both basically the same exact biome (a desert). And they are book ended by really drawn out linear segments. It's like the game didn't know if it wanted to be an open world checklist game, or a corridor based action game.

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Despite all this, the game still mostly pulls it off. It's not particular amazing at anything, but it's not incompetent at anything either. And when you combine that with the excellent soundtrack, good visuals/performance, mostly good bosses, and a serviceable but generic story. It's kinda hard to fully dislike the game.

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I just can't help but feel every aspect of the game is just a tad bit jank and out of place. Hopefully the sequel picks a lane and really fleshes it out.

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"You live in New England and you don't like seafood?!?!?!" "How?!?!?!?"

And similar conversations for the last 30 years. I've never grown into it, I still dislike it now as much as I did when I was a kid. There's basically nothing from the sea I will eat. It all taste very distinctly from the ocean to me, there's no less "fishy" fish, or anything that could ease me into it.

Oftentimes someone would tell me something is less "fishy" or easy to eat for people who don't like seafood and it would end up being one of the worst things.

The worst part of it to me is the smell. I have a very acute sense of smell. And I feel like I can almost taste it before it even goes in my mouth, and it all smells terrible to me. Someone will say, "fresh fish doesn't stink". Wrong.

I still deal with this conversation constantly lol. People shocked you can live in RI and hate seafood.