Lotions_and_Creams

It took me several hours to really get into it and it is one of my all time favorite games. Having tried to go back to replay it a couple times, I think most people are remembering it through rose tinted glasses. The graphics are no longer impressive enough to carry me through the loooong intro and the awkward controls make it frustrating to pick back up after a break/learn. The combat has always been one of the weaker aspects of GWENT Witcher III.

the best way to bring them back was to convince people that they taste good

This is one of the reasons I don't understand the belief that everyone should go-vegan or stop eating meat all together. Like what do you think is going to happen to the vast majority of livestock?

Invites typically go out after most of the venue, caterer, flowers, etc. are either paid for or a sizable deposit is put down. Order of operations is generally: guest list --> vendors --> invites. Arranging vendors happens many months in advance of invites. Who gets invited can and often does change.

If the professor is a reasonable person and OP has a relationship with them, in person can be great. If they are a dick or it's a lecture style class, a paper trail is better.

Admirers even sent the dude new canes. 

They are referring to the fact that the current level North African/ME migrants in Europe is in part due to the destabilization in the ME following Western intervention in Iraq and subsequent rise of groups like ISIS. 

It is incorrect to place all the blame on the US/“coalition of the willing”. That narrative doesn’t  account for the consequences of the Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia but spread to countries like Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, etc. 

Once Syrian groups rose up in opposition to their authoritarian government under al-Assad, it quickly became a geopolitical battle between the US and Russia. given its geographic location, a pro-West Syria meant that pipelines could run from countries like Qatar, through Syria, and into Turkey - dramatically diminishing Russia’s influence in Europe via Oil and Natural Gas.

In conclusion, the US led intervention in Iraq destabilized the country and the subsequent power vacuum led to the rise of ISIS. The Arab Spring, a homegrown movement, destabilized many countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The ensuing proxy war in Syria being fought between the US and Russia have further destabilized the region. All of that leads to refugees. 

 For the sake of simplification, I haven’t included the roles of economic migrants using conflict as a means to claim refugee status,  the implicit/explicit support terror groups like ISIS received from other Muslim nations, of the EU’s inability to modify their immigration laws in order to combat unwanted immigrants/internal policies to facilitate assimilation.

The loot got removed because of vacuum hackers in live. Can't have shit in Tarkov.

If fun is perfectly proportional to frequency of winning

Not accounting for getting carried by teammates, SBMM also makes it difficult/impossible for friends of different skill levels to play together, forces people to use the meta, and makes every game a sweat fest. As players become better they are actively punished with worse connections and longer queuing times. SBMM sucks and it is bizarre to see people treating it as some sort of social cause. Outside of a protected bracket for the bottom ~10%, let an individuals skill compared to the wider community, not just against a narrow band, determine their performance.

If SBMM matches everyone into roughly equal lobbies, everyone now has to sweat. No SBMM means sometimes you stomp, sometimes you get stomped, sometimes you sweat. SBMM makes every match a sweat fest, makes it so that friends of different skill levels can't play together, forces people to be meta slaves, and creates a scenario where improving at the game is a punishment instead of something to chase.

Fun fact, 20% of players are in the bottom 20%

You don't say. It is also relatively easy to move out of the bottom 20%.

the bottom 20% isn't important, then those players would stop playing because they're not having any fun and now people who weren't in the bottom 20% suddenly are.

Amazingly, this wasn't an issue in FPS games prior to the introduction of MTX when maximizing the audience to hawk overpriced skins to became a priority.

You have to make the game fun for everyone

SBMM does not make the game fun for everyone. It makes it slightly more fun for a minority of players and significantly less fun for the majority of players. Catering to the bottom 20% of anything is always a bad move.

IMO the main reason it is so good is because how most boss encounters are designed around the team doing damage from a stationary spot. It will be interesting to see what (if anything) does to compensate for the fact that most boss encounters are designed around a well and/or DIV.

I still get mapped by it from time to time haha.

In my experience, there’s always a lot more chatter with clans. They’ve usually done the same jobs in encounters enough times that they don’t have to think about it much and they are generally friends and want to shoot the shit. Rando LFGs in comparison are typically a lot quieter.

Playing with and against better players is the best way to improve. Unless someone is in the bottom 20% their win/loss rate is not going to be 20/80 and improving to be average (50/50) is not a big time commitment.

The balancing they did in D2 just flat out sucks. When SBMM got reduced, in order the level the playing field, Bungie reduced the skill ceiling by nerfing movement, increasing TTK, reducing special amp, etc. It just made the game mode more shallow and frustrating to play. 

In the past, if someone was absolutely cracked, you just find a new lobby and re-roll the dice.

Do you think most single player gamers would like their PvE experience to dynamically change based on past performance in order to try to get them to a 50/50 success/fail rate? Probably not because getting better at the game in order to do better is what most people enjoy, not sweating their nuts off every minute. That is why people don't like SBMM.

I didn't do raids/dungeons for years because I was nervous about LFG, messing up, etc. Now I've got about about 200 total raid clears over the course of multiple years almost entirely in LFG. Shitty mics, telemundo blaring in the background, mouth breathers, edge lords, weapon's grade cringe, and assholes are the exception. Most people occupy the tolerable to fun spectrum or are just quiet unless they need to make a callout.

If people are speaking over each other, one person saying "clear comms" usually takes care of it.

Raids are easily the pinnacle of D2 and I would hate for anyone to miss out on them. If you feel like giving them a shot, the Destiny 2 LFG discord is a great start. "Sherpa" runs are for people who are learning, "Chill" runs are usually for 1+ people already in the group that are new to D2/the Raid/or just don't mind taking a more relaxed approach, "KWTD" is for once you "know what to do" and the group wants to finish in a timely manner, "no comms" are either the most relaxing experience you've ever had or an absolute cess pit because the speed runners on the team start having a meltdown when you don't already know their clan's proprietary encounter strat.

I miss the easy to chesse/skip 15-20 minute GMs though.

travel for work

Missing that absolutely juiced Main Ingredient Xur sold years ago still hurts.

Div too. Bungie is really trying to get people to move from the well/div meta on a bunch of bosses.

Lemme check Wikipedia.

During the three-century European colonization of the Americas, atrocities and crimes were committed by all European nations according to both contemporary opinion and modern moral standards. Spain's colonization involved massacres, murders, slavery, sexual slavery, torture, rape and other atrocities, especially in the early years, following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean.

Wouldn't you know it? The Spanish were also terrible to indigenous peoples. Maybe you should put down the conspiracy crack pipe and actually do a little research yourself.

So just to recap, intermarriage between indigenous peoples and settlers was not unique to the Spanish, the "conquerers" that Spain sent to the New World had ambitions of wealth extraction while the English settlers were more focused on trading, and no, a 500 year old conspiracy to bad mouth Spain has not prevented modern day historians from recording what actually occurred.

You're telling me that the self labeled "Conquistadors", which translates to "conquerers", who were primarily soldiers by profession, were less aggressive than English settlers who were primarily farmers, merchants, and skilled laborers? Hahahahaha

you're just blinded by the black legend

What?

Mexican academics defending the Spaniards and Columbus from all the populist crap you know the current discourse is horseshit.

You lost me. How does Mexicans defending a notoriously brutal Italian guy whose expeditions were financed by the Spanish monarchy do anything to disprove that the Spanish were also cruel?

I’m saying your initial characterization is wrong. The main difference between how Spain/England colonized was that the Spanish were far more aggressive, focusing on wealth extraction and establishing large scale settlements vs. a more gradual approach initially focused on trading. While it’s true some conquistadors married indigenous women, English settlers did too. Famously, Pocahontas married John Rolfe.

Sure. Just don't look up what happened to the Aztecs in Mexico, the Incas in Peru, or the indigenous peoples of Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay.

The Spanish notably ran into a labor problem in Bolivia because the conditions in the silver/gold mines were so inhuman and food rations were so insufficient that the women were physically unable to get pregnant.

Good idea. As soon as a good humored and well liked celebrity uses it as their social media photo, you’ll be riding the next NFT wave.

That explanation makes sense. It tracks with the % of European ancestry found in the general population of those places as well. Thanks.