And cretins with inside information. Though you have to respect cheaters; at least they're intelligent enough not to gamble.

If you step back a moment and really think about where popular multi-player games come from, the answer is almost always that they start out as some janky mod; not from the original intent of the game's developers. This is especially true for entire genres: CS(Action Quake), TF2(Quakeworld Team Fortress), DotA(DotA mod for Warcraft III and to some extent the Aeon of Strife custom map in StarCraft), PubG(DayZ), even the activity of speedrunning can be seen as a mod.

It seems like a really bad idea to try to forcefully create "the next big thing", instead of just using your eyeballs and looking around to see what people are enjoying, and then developing that into a fully fledged game or game mode. It's the same mindset large companies have when it comes to quality control: we'll make it perfect so we don't have to deal with any issues later. Guess what... you can test it all you like, but once you give your product to a million monkeys, they will find their own unique and unpredictable ways to use and break it. At some point, you need to stop kidding yourself by trying to pre-empt everything and just chuck your product out there and observe what your customers do with it.

If Quake Champions weren't running on a Frankenstein engine and they had put some effort into making a proper defrag mode with interactive tutorials, maps and achievements, I think it would already have drawn in many more players. The game has half a dozen movement styles for heaven's sake, why not play into that more and get players through the door that way?

Edit: This is also why it's absolutely brainless that all these companies want to lock down their games these days, not offering self-hosted servers or modding avenues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FvrrWCmRso

I know this is going to sound like "just buy all of them and you won't have to choose lol", but if you can afford it, get both a large 4K 60-120Hz monitor with excellent colour performance and whatever size 1080p/1440p monitor you prefer to game on with excellent motion clarity. Then you can use the 4k monitor as your desktop and to play single player on, and the 1080p/1440p monitor to play FPS games on and as a second monitor. Having two monitors, or even three depending on what you're doing, is such a boon.

https://youtu.be/1eDaBwmQQOI?t=1253 There were so many absolute gems like that.

https://clips.twitch.tv/ChillyExquisiteCroquetteBloodTrail-coHnbQlBlJHhC51j

So there have been LANs in NA with the reduced round timer that were great to watch, and then there was one international LAN where one team decided to try playing slowly and they lost what is possibly the most important international event of the year. Do you really think this will be an enduring problem and that there should now be a kneejerk reaction to change the round timer back to ten minutes? You're going to change the game because one team went all-in on a strategy that didn't even work? Until teams actually start winning tournaments playing slowly, it makes no sense to blame slow games on the round timer. It's just the result of a team trying out a strategy that involves slow play and they'll stop playing like that sooner or later if it keeps on failing. If people really insist on changing something, start by banning Battalion's instead of overreacting and reverting the round timer.

Am I missing something here? The team that chose to play for round resets lost the game 3-1, it didn't work. If the shorter round timer promoted slow play, then the more proactive team would have lost instead. Snakewater has always been prone to this, remember this?

This may not sound very retrospective, but I'd like to hear you discuss the advent of the shortened round timer in a historical context. It must have periodically come up and been rejected over the life time of the competitive scene, so what's your guys' opinion on it? Why wasn't it tried out before? What do you think it would have been like if there had been say a four-minute round timer at all the big international LANs of the past? Do you think the round reset would have come into play a lot because the big LANs always seemed to slow the game down since everyone wanted to win so badly, or would the presence of the shorter round timer simply have forced the teams to play the game at a different pace in those LAN games?

Get a notebook and write something in it every day, and be honest about it. Random little things that reminded you of him, thoughts you're mulling over in your head wondering if you did them right or not, conversations you had about him with the people around you; things like that. Then read it back every month, or whenever you feel like he's slipping away in your memory.

But the most important thing you can do is to let him live on in your actions for as long as you're alive. Remember all those things your dog did that made you happy? Now it's your turn to make life better for the people you love, by carrying on doing those things in his stead and not letting that goodness disappear from the world.

Check that your sound device is actually on with something like alsamixer. For some reason, it often defaults to being muted after first installation.

This is from the same guy who made the Dark Side of the Moon cover for Pink Floyd, Storm Thorgerson. You're watching through binoculars at two guys who are looking at each other with binoculars in the middle of the ocean and the album is called "Falling Into Infinity". And of course, the binocular lenses form an infinity symbol.

http://dreamtheater.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/falling.jpg

If the sentence were "Any constructors competing in the Formula 1 World Championship will be required to receive $1 billion" and Red Bull were not given $1 billion, rest assured they'd be arguing that "any" does indeed mean "all".

This is the perfect way to end this season, because this race sums up why I have become more and more disenchanted with the state of F1 over the last three seasons after watching F1 for 25 years. If I wanted to watch a jury sport, there are plenty of options to choose from where they actually have rules and at least make some effort to apply them consistently. Imagine how Hamilton must feel, imagine the crap Verstappen is going to get even though he earned the title just as much as Hamilton.

So Verstappen still has the upper hand for the title, because the tiebreaker is races won; he can decide to do a Senna if it comes down to it.