We banned basic land destruction of unmodified lands (including mass land destruction that incidentally hits basics like Armageddon and Jokulhaups), some of the more oppressive stax pieces, mostly things that create locks where people can’t play the game, a handful of cEDH caliber cards, and certain types of infinite combos (2-card infinite combos where one card is your commander, for instance). One could argue that this creates an imbalanced environment by favoring strategies that take advantage of these rules, like ramp decks and lands strategies, and one would be correct - we’ve banned a lot of the normal ways to counter those strategies, but we maintain an overarching ‘Don’t be a dick’ rule that has so far covered it.
My local playgroup has moved entirely to playing with proxies. It improved the experience immensely. Knowing that everyone has access to the same card pool and having the less financially stable members of the group able to bring multiple decks to the table rather than just one mediocre one has been a huge boon. Highly recommend anyone else do the same.
That being said, creating a private instance is a relatively difficult hurdle. By providing private communities, an admin can take care of the hosting, along with all of the other communities, while those who want something more controlled and closed can have an easily accessible option.
That’s fair, and I’m honestly probably just thinking about worst-case scenarios that won’t actually happen. There’s plenty of ways malicious actors could already be doing some pretty bad things and they don’t seem to be, so it’s probably fine.
I did mention further down the comment chain the one use case for this I can think of - communities for info and feedback about the specific instance to / from its members; things like donations, financial disclosures, etc. - that you wouldn’t want participation in from anyone not actually using the instance. It has its place; I’m more afraid of seeing popular communities going instance-only for whatever reason, with it being used solely to drive signups on a specific instance.
I mean it’s fine on paper. But like… imagine that a popular instance - lemmy.world, let’s say - has a community that’s very popular and, for whatever motivation, decides they want to push people to move to their instance (or at least create accounts there), so they change one or more of those popular communities to be local-only.
Best case, they fracture the community. Worse case, a very large number of users start making accounts there to use those communities, and abandon other instances. Worst case, they use the large influx of signups they get from such a move to promote themselves, grow even further, and eventually do something malicious.
We can already create private instances that don’t federate for those niche communities; I don’t really see what this feature is adding other than specifically having communities dedicated to that specific instance (With instance-specific information like donations, financials, outage notices, that sort of thing.)
Hopefully these don’t start getting used too frequently, as it kind of… defeats the purpose of federation. Would not want to have to make accounts on multiple instances just to participate in niche communities.
Biden’s whole campaign is riding on “Look how bad it would be if Trump got elected, this is the most important election of your lives!”, yet he seems far less concerned when he’s asked to win back some voter support by stopping the widely unpopular supply of weapons to Israel…
The fact that we have people on minor drug offenses serving years in prison, but these assholes are negotiating when, if ever, they’re going to maybe serve a few-month sentence is such an outrageous failure of the justice system, I feel like there’s really no way to solve any of these issues without just tearing the whole institution down and rebuilding it from the ground up with new, reasonable rules.
The Coors Light of shooters could probably be cel shaded and be just as fun in 2024 as the next release 9-12 months later. And they could save a lot of overhead costs.
The first is XIII (Gamecube), the second is Metal of Honor: Rising Sun (PS2). Both were released in 2003. I’d definitely say XIII holds up better visually.
I can’t control what anyone else does, but I can control what I do, and I’m right there with the post I’m agreeing with: I’ll wait for a sale, and if that sale never comes, I won’t buy it. There’s no disagreement or contradiction there.