I recently set up a password with a 16 character max, alphanumeric only, no spaces. The service is in no way a security threat but still.

None of that helps low-level play or games without meaningful progression. Continuing to use Rust as an example, because I’m most familiar with it among games with controversial anticheat: people get banned all the time. All the time. And they keep coming back with brand new Steam accounts, and continue to cheat until someone notices and an admin happens to be online. Rinse and repeat. Seemingly an infinite pool of cheaters, or finite cheaters with infinite money for new copies of the game. And it only takes a few minutes to ruin someone’s week.

The most effective prevention method is probably strict gatekeeping: require a minimum hours played in wild west servers or a certain value of games owned in an account before a player can be whitelisted. Proof of investment, that kind of thing.

That kind of stuff catches legitimate users all the time. In Rust for example it’s common to get kicked for “fly hacking” while jumping on vehicles. The more open-ended the game the more weird edge cases become very relevant. Especially if it has a halfway decent physics sim. Tons of ways to give players weird velocities. Then it has to account for the variance ping introduces…

Some stuff, yeah. Should be easy to check if a player has too much HP. But spoofed communication between the client and server is a tough nut to crack when you can only see what the client wants you to see. Keeping everything server-side would help but that introduces latency to every input, unacceptable for anything even moderately paced.

All thay said, it would be a lot easier to swallow the “necessary evil” argument if it actually fucking worked.

Lots of schools have a “freshmen must live on campus” policy, at least.

Are the real communists kept around back with the real scotsmen?

Barley tea is delicious.

Not, like, “haha” funny…

I just put my hand over the hole, takes two seconds. And I don’t have to clear out under the sink and get a bucket. (And it’s only very rarely necessary)

Plungers certainly do help with sinks. Loosens up a partial clog easily in my experience.

Specter! I should replay those games.

Single-handedly? Nah. It pulled a lot of existing ideas together though, and it’s certainly responsible for the popularity. Another Minecraft influence is early-access.

Needs more than that to compare favorably against Triple Triad.

Kuja fell very flat for me. Relation to Zidane is retreading old ground, design is obviously trying to evoke Sephiroth, motivation seemed generically evil. The stuff with the Black Mages and Vivi was great (possibly just because Vivi is a top tier character and his innocence juxtaposed against the tragedy helps it hit). The Genome stuff feels awfully close to the Sephiroth clone stuff, right on down to the lead protagonist full of false memories. The Terra/Gaia angle is kinda cool.

Heartily agree on aging the best, visually. The stylized fantasy aesthetic gives it a pleasant timelessness.

Style is probably the biggest thing IX has going for it, maybe character writing. The main plot wasn’t gripping or novel, you’ve already touched on some gameplay missteps, and Tetra Master is garbage.

It’s been a while since I’ve done kitchen work but I’ve never had an automatic lifter. We just had someone being paid to cook food and watch the fryer. The issues start piling up in places that make the cashier handle front, drive-thru, fryer, whatever else all at once rather than pay an extra $150 in labor for the day.

Fine, I’ll bite.

Salt mining is a human invention, though not at all a recent one. Seeking out natural salt deposits to directly consume is essential herbivore behavior because vegetation alone is an insufficient source of key minerals. Adding animal products, especially seafood, to a diet should be sufficient for minimum healthy intake of not just sodium but all trace minerals and vitamins but concentrated supplements are obviously also available and careful meal planning can get it done with just plant products. That is of course a truth for the modern, developed world and not at all indicative of our biological heritage.

The downsides of slight-to-moderate overindulgence of salt, mostly high blood pressure through water retention, can be offset by a more active lifestyle. (Sweat more, hydrate more, flush the excess out.)

And it’s cue. A queue is a waiting line.

Sodium-potassium pumps are pseudoscience, got it.

Salt is quite possibly the single most important nutrient we take in. Well, sodium is anyway. Is too much salt bad? Sure. That’s what “too much” means. Too much sun is also bad but a little is required for vitamin D production.

Being so reductive with your claims makes the rest of your argument less compelling.

In addition to the other thing, dams have a dramatic and disastrous impact on the ecology in the immediate area and the entire riparian system they connect to. It’s “green” in terms of emissions but they’re still harmful and we should be phasing them out for lower impact alternatives as much as possible.

Lots of people really enjoy competitive games. Competitive multi-player games attract the most cheaters, resulting in the strictest anti-cheat measures (which still barely work, honestly).

Tempered glass is still sharp but it breaks into tiny pieces so it can’t cut deeply.