Like I said, I don’t play Smash competitively, but if, to use your example, a bomb could give a player an advantage if they get it, why is the community’s answer to get rid of items instead of counterplaying them? Dodge the bomb, man!

Believe it or not, I was not saying that Smash’s items are the same thing as SF’s fireballs. I was drawing an analogy to show a relationship between two similar but different things - the arbitrary exclusion of a part of the game to set a standard for how the game ‘should’ be played.

I’ve never been more serious about Smash than playing a few rounds with friends or family, but I genuinely don’t understand why Smash pros are so against items.

As long as we’re making nerdy observations about how powerful Santa is, DnD 3rd edition had him as a 19th level Druid/Cleric/Rogue, and with a spell list apparently 100% targeted at taking on Godzilla:

Savage.

I like my Possessed Pharah skin, myself, but I feel your pain, Nathan.

The bizarre thing is it’s not even GOOD laziness, since this endless struggle to balance two fundamentally opposed game modes HAS to be infinitely harder than just balancing each separately.

It’s really simple: One set of developers made Destiny 1. A different set, the Live Team, made Destiny 1 good. Meanwhile, that first set of developers were making Destiny 2, and apparently ignoring everything the Live Team did to fix their mistakes.

So to be clear, angry over having to align themselves with European regulations, the pro-Brexit people have... agreed to align themselves with European regulations, but without getting any of the benefits they got from doing that before? Do I have that right?

That’s definitely true. As I’ve said elsewhere, with Destiny 1, I totally drank the Kool-Aid. I devoured every bit of lore and each teaser Bungie put out there.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me that’s changed (or I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses), but I liked launch Destiny 1 much more than I am D2 to this point.

Even a one-time account migration or copy would have been enough, but no.

I did that the first time around, only to see them toss every improvement they made overboard when D2 came around. Why invest my time when Bungie’s track record with Destiny suggests it’ll be the same thing all over again when Destiny 3 comes out?

Thinking back on Gothic and Gothic 2 (which I couldn’t beat because there was a door before the FINAL BOSS that I couldn’t open), that all sounds about right.

Speaking mostly from my experience with WoW, most raids can also be soloed once you’re enough expansions past. Plus (and again, I’m referring to WoW here), transmog, achievements, and raid pets mean you can usually find one or two people willing to come with for the fights you can’t solo.

ZA and ZG, yes. In Blizzard’s defense, those were done in, what, Cata or MoP (I forget which), literally years after they’d been relevant - ZG was a vanilla raid, while ZA toward the tail-end of Burning Crusade, the first expansion. And, of course, Blizzard was up front about it for months ahead of redoing them,…

Fair enough, except that Destiny 2 launched with less content than (to name to big name MMOs) WoW’s Legion expansion or FFXIV’s Stormblood. Destiny 2 is really a Destiny expansion, and these ‘expansions’ are just the content patches that every other MMO parcels out for free.

I doubt this kind of stuff is Activision’s fault, since it’s the same playbook as Destiny 1. The culprit here, I think, is largely that all the improvements that made D1 the excellent game it was by the end were done by the Live Team, while the Destiny 2 team was heads down working on this and, apparently, ignoring…

No MMO would be willing to charge for what Bungie’s including in this ‘expansion’, either. The fact is, Destiny 2 is an expansion; these are just content patches you have to pay for.

That’s true, Jason, but I’m not sure Destiny’s expansions really fill the same niche as, for example, WoW’s Legion expansion. They’re more akin (both in scale and frequency) to the free content patches that traditional MMOs roll out.