franzlska

It'd be possible to sit here and theorize about how bad RV was as a corporate overseer, and some of it is almost certainly accurate. That said, a lot of the talk about RV will always be a game of guessing and assumption, usually about the very personal lives of very real people. Meanwhile, I can directly point to the many ways in which Fandom has deteriorated since they first started to catch on around 2015, both in their own website design and in that of every website they subsumed along the way (RIP CurseForge.) No matter how bad RV may have been, there is zero possibility in my eyes that things will improve under Fandom.

This acquisition is a transparently-blatant attempt to develop more of a monopoly on movies/comic/games fandom than Fandom already has, while also eliminating no fewer than three of Fandom Wikia's few remaining competitors (Comic Vine, GB, and GameFAQs' wikis.) As someone who hates the now-inescapable refrain of bloated megacorps acquiring everyone tangentially related to their business, and also as someone who values immensely the Giant Bomb wiki as well as almost any wiki not powered by Fandom, I fail to see a single angle of this that isn't just bleak.

@undeadpool: I can see the argument that playing on higher difficulty would decrease time in the church and increase time in combat, but that really only works if you're the type of person to go for a harder difficulty.

I personally am not (if I know I'm getting into a 30 hour RPG, I'm probably not going to sign myself up to risk accidentally losing a character I like 20 hours in, I have better ways to spend my time,) and I've also been finding Three Houses to be a bit bogged down in the church segments as I get further in, even though I liked it when I started. Maybe even if there were just some way to skip over the bonding cutscenes I don't care about?

@mindbullet: I feel like I've seen that exact split play out, where a good portion of Fire Emblem fans are "oldheads" who are there for the strategy and are pissed with everything since Awakening focusing more on character bonding and pairing, while an audience is slowly taking over that's there for the character bonding and pairing. As someone who has basically only played Awakening, 3H, and a bit of Heroes, I'm kinda of the mind that Awakening had a pretty solid balance of that stuff, so the idea of them leaning even further in isn't particularly enticing.

Attempting to edit the body text of the Yakuza (Franchise) page returns a Wiki Privileges Suspended message, refusing to take any edits. This truly does seem to be an issue with this page in specific, as I edited a page moments before noticing this behavior (I first noticed it within minutes of Edit #231116), and am still able to submit edits to other pages and (in test edits which I did not submit,) even other parts of the Yakuza (Franchise) page, such as the deck and related pages. Despite this, any attempt to change the body text of the Yakuza (Franchise) page fails with the noted error message, even if nothing was altered before the "done" button was clicked.

If any other pages display this behavior, I am not aware of them.

Steps to recreate: open the stated page, enter edit mode, begin editing the body text/"Overview" section, click done with or without altering text.

• OS: Windows 10
• Browser: Firefox 104.0.2 (Used in private browsing mode.)
• Extensions: Behavior persists with all extensions fully disabled.

Thanks.

Delete:

• Delete F1 Formula 1 '98 (Duplicate of Formula 1 '98)
• Delete or rename Hellfighter (It's a bootleg NES game, otherwise the proper title is Hell Fighter)
• Delete Tension (Duplicate of The Void)
• Delete Lost Mars (Duplicate of Waking Mars)
• Delete Alden Ridge (Duplicate of A Valley Without Wind)
• Delete Warco (Duplicate of Warco: The News Game)
• Delete Taptap Revenge Tour (Duplicate of Tap Tap Revenge: Tour)
• Delete plug.dj (I can almost see why a page got made, plug.dj was a social site built around playing songs off youtube/sc. There was a layer of gamification, but it wasn't nearly to the level of something like a Gaia Online or Neopets.)
• Delete American Idol: The Search For a Superstar (Duplicate of American Idol)
• Delete Chaos;Head Noah? (Arguable duplicate of Chäos;HEAd, which already has Chaos;Head Noah as an alias. Noah is an updated version with new content, but Chaos;HEAd has Noah releases among its releases already.)

Alias:

• Add alias Titular Protagonist to Protagonist's Name in the Title (Alternate phrasing.)
• Change alias "Ryu ga Gotoku Ishin!" on Ryu ga Gotoku Ishin! -> Like a Dragon: Ishin! (Redundant alias -> translated title used for the remake.)
• Add alias Cap'n Cuttlefish to Craig Cuttlefish (Craig is his full name, but he was called Cap'n Cuttlefish in the first two games, due to being a captain at the time.)
• Add alias Chromatic Aberration to Color Separation (Synonym.)
• Add alias Lost Mars to Waking Mars (Development name.)
• Add alias Alden Ridge to A Valley Without Wind (Development name.)
• Add alias PreCure to Pretty Cure (Official shorthand.)

Rename:

• Rename Yakuza (Series) -> Like a Dragon (Keep alias. They're pivoting the series name to match the JP title.)
• Rename Enryu Seiken Xiao-Mei -> Xiaomei and the Flame Dragon's Fist (Keep alias, localized title.)
• Rename Marina -> Marina Ida (Full name.)
• Rename Infinity City -> The Gigglebone Gang: Infinity City (Full Name.)

Is this the quickest a AAA online game that actually launched been shut down? It has to be up there, at least, getting shut down just over six months after.

(Also good god, with my ADHD and that Verge layout I can barely process a single thing happening on Verge's main page now.)

The main ones I played as a kid were Club Penguin, Roblox (if you can call either an MMO), Toontown Online, Pirates of the Caribbean Online (I only remember the ship combat and fighting alligators in a bog), Spiral Knights (no part of it is especially great but it's got a fun visual style), and Realm of the Mad God, each getting a year if not more of my childhood. Then there was Kingdom of Loathing, another dubiously-MMO title, which I heard about from PCG, immediately became obsessed with, and it butterfly-effect style caused me to meet almost all of my friends nowadays.

I also spent a week or so trying to get into Wizard101, Wurm Online, Fusionfall (those 3D models haunt me), Maplestory (some sick part of me thinks I should go back, even though I know it's not the same), Mabinogi, and... I think Battle of the Immortals and Ragnarok Online? Maplestory I heard about from a dude at the local card shop, Mabinogi and Battle of the Immortals I mostly stumbled upon while looking for free MMOs, because Lucky Star had me convinced the cool thing to do was stay up all night playing MMOs. I can't actually remember if I played RO, I just know I signed up for a random MMO that looked a lot like it after seeing a /jp/ post about it and then totally forgot the name.

Then there's a bunch I spent maybe a couple of days if not hours poking at before forgetting about, such as LEGO Universe (probably heard about it from PCG), Rusty Hearts, Glitch, Dream of Mirror Online (for a blog post I was writing at the time), Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online (Steam still gives me suggestions based on my time in STO), and Guild Wars (all three got about 2 hours at the behest of a friend.)

Since then I've put serious time into OSRS (sometimes you just want to watch numbers go up), Worlds Chat (mostly for research), Furcadia (also for research), and MapleStory 2 (some friends and I loved the game until the endgame sucked and the game got totally shut down, and also some of the moderation was dubious.)

Oh, and of course then there's the best MMO ever produced: FFXIV.

...that list is a lot longer than I would have guessed it would be.

@permanentsigh: Huh! Good catch!

I'm used to doing things in private windows, so I didn't think to check for that, but you're totally right, non-private works totally fine. (At least where infinite is concerned, the wiki still pops up random errors.)

In the past couple of months, I've noticed that livestream pages don't load chat anymore. Additionally, Infinite no longer loads the list of recently played videos, and many actions on the wiki pop up an unknown server error message, sometimes refusing to load the sidebar, even though edits can still be made mostly as normal.

Observed behavior on Firefox | Expected behavior, seen in the Steam web browser

Infinite Console Outputs: 1, 2

• OS: Windows 10
• Browser: Firefox 103.0.2
• Extensions: Behavior persists with all extensions fully disabled.

"Let them in the door for free and then charge them once they're there" seems to be the strategy of almost every online game in the past few years. Like others have noted, it's way easier to get someone hooked on a game if they can try it out on a whim rather than needing to pay 30$ up front, and since it's free they'll be a lot more open to the idea of buying microtransactions after they get their feet wet.

@darkvare: A ton of animal-themed platformers released for PS2, although your description of the loading screen does help narrow it down a bit. If none of these are it, I would try peeking at the GB wiki's page for 3D platformers, not that it's by any means comprehensive.

My best guess is Ty The Tasmanian Tiger 2, the loading screen of which seems like Ty in black and white, surrounded by a spinning gear. After that I would point to Kung Fu Panda, which doesn't have a spinning loading screen but has a black-and-white spinning yin-yang save icon, and has a loading screen with Po the Panda standing in the corner, cape billowing.