Damien

Live service games are a good way to circumvent Canada's copyright protections which, in my experience, are quite favourable to the consumer. We do not make it quite as criminal here as they tend to on this continent. But since torrenting is effectively decriminalized so u can have backups of games out there, live service means the company can cut off the service. Tho in a lot of cases, community projects arise to fill in the gaps. An example is the community projects that let u play command and conquer generals and red alert 3 online. I tend to steer away from games that kinda hang in the middle, half wanting to be live service games but not committing to the content and quality people expect when u get paid to develop a game for half or more of a decade. I find that avoiding the big studios--many of which are ultimately from the US--tends to increase the value I get from my games. Now if only the Canadian dollar had a bit more independent value on the international market.

There's this game called Rimworld. It's a lot like a lot of other games, but officially it's a "story generator."

Hello. I am biased here because it's the only MOBA I've ever played, but I like Heroes of the Storm. Primarily, I like the team XP approach. Each hero earns XP as in any MOBA but it gets added to a team-wide pool and ur entire team is the same level. U can count ur beans but there's a sort of effective selflessness in gaining lots of XP so that ur team and ultimately win. I haven't played league but I've heard about it. It seems to be a very toxic culture. Heroes has its toxicity, but it isn't tolerated in the public games for the most part. The game is "dead", but customer service is still provided. Another thing I've heard about league is that the heroes all feel kinda samey. Perhaps that's inevitable after u make a game with 150+ heroes. Heroes has like 89? And not getting anymore. But I've heard people say they like the variety of the heroes. Snowballing is also a concern. To be honest, the only real problem with snowballing is in the mind of the player. One player giving up can doom ur team, which makes the teamwork feel good when it works well. But it makes u want to be selective with whom u play. But there are lots of counter-snowball mechanics in heroes of the storm if u are a good player. The game can turn at any moment and I've had some amazing close encounters which happen at the highest levels of play. Each map is also varied so it's not the same mission every game. It's also blizzard so if u have any nostalgia for the origins of League and all MOBAs, well, this is the game. Oh, and shop with optional paid options but overall free-to-play.

I'm just a hobbyist, but I know enough to build my own system. IMO ur processor, not just the processor itself but what's available for the socket, LGA 1200. U may be able to get a post-10th gen processor but lately intel has been quite unreliable as far as consumer CPUs go. I preferred intel for ages ever since my family's first 233mhz pentium 1. But my last upgrade I went for AMD instead and I'm glad I did. Upgrading ur socket means upgrading ur motherboard. I presume most of ur other components would transfer to a motherboard with a new socket and processor. NVMe is one of the newest and fastest connection standards for storage. There are crazy good graphics processors out there, and urs is not what I'd call current gen (like mine), but the gains are mostly for GTA 6 and people doing crypto..... business. With a good X3D AMD cpu and a good motherboard u could really be screaming and ready for the next upgrade. X3D is really good for it's "3D cache" but any AMD that ends is X can be overclocked, which is what I prefer. Even with "just" air cooling, u can get a lot out of the overclock.