343 has never been good at managing a Halo game. Not sure what OP is referring to specifically but 343 has made tons of awful decisions with the franchise.

Agreed 100%. Halo 4 was the beginning of the end for Halo, imo. I thought Reach was fun, but I was never a big fan of the sprinting, armor classes and weapon bloom. It still felt like Halo overall, though. I remember playing Halo 4 on launch day and immediately being disappointed. I still probably put 100+ hours into it at the time, but I remember thinking it didn’t truly feel like Halo — at least not like its predecessors.

I think specifically in the case of Halo, the surprise is because it was such a powerhouse of a franchise in the 2000s into early 2010s. Halo was the Fortnite and Apex Legends before Fortnite and Apex Legends in terms of player retention.

Halo 2 and 3 had thriving playerbases for years after release. Infinite came out just over 1.5 years ago and has already lost almost all of its players. The Master Chief Collection currently has more players than Infinite with 5,200 to Infinite’s 3,000 on Steam.

I spent countless hours in high school playing Halo 3, and even a few years after release, you’d have hundreds of thousands of players online. Two years after release in October 2009, Halo 3 had close to 759,000 players online in the span of 24 hours, plus about 129,000 playing ODST, which had just come out a month prior.

I’m not a fan of gaming as a service, but it clearly can be a successful business model for sustained success, so you’d think that one of the most iconic gaming franchises of all time would be able to harness that.

Ah, that’s interesting — and makes a lot of sense.

That’s awesome! They’ve been so convenient to use. I just recently tried out these as well, and they’ve been nice for cleaning ash catchers. Rather than soaking them in a bag of iso and salt, I filled the ash catcher, used the plugs on either end and just shook it.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think the 25-year import rule in the US has anything to do with what side drive the car is. It was a law passed in the 80s to shut down gray market imported cars. Importers would buy cars from countries where they sold for much cheaper than the US and then resell them for way less than official dealerships.

The law would’ve been targeting left-hand-drive vehicles, so the right-hand-drive stuff is just a byproduct of it. I mean, the US government had all of its postal service trucks built to be right hand drive.

To add on to the OP, if you’re cleaning any kind of bong or bigger bubbler, these are great. You fill the piece up with a good amount of salt and 91%+ isopropyl alcohol, use the caps to seal it and shake the shit out of it. Prior to ordering a few packs of those, I had always just taken some saran wrap, layered it a few times over the openings and rubber banded it in place to avoid any leaks when shaking.

I think I’m just going to hang onto the app as a keepsake. I can spare the 75mb or so of storage space haha.

I think I’ve posted more on Lemmy in the past 24 hours than I did in the past year on Reddit. It feels way less like shouting into the void.

I think so, too. The comment sections remind me a lot of Reddit’s when I first joined in early 2013 — more thoughtful comments and less shitposting to get the most upvotes.

It seems like the biggest hurdle is going to be getting the more niche communities going on Lemmy.

Granted I used Sync and not RiF (though I initially used RiF from like 2013-2015), but it looks so weird seeing the green Liftoff logo on my home screen, which has been largely unchanged for the past 8 years since I started using Sync.

In terms of losing knowledge, this sort of happened to a longboarding forum that I was a very active member of for like 8 years. The site, Silverfish Longboarding, had been around since the early 2000s and was a massive repository of information. In 2017, the owner announced he was pulling the plug, and there wasn’t enough notice for members to try to archive the entirety of the website.

The website played a pretty substantial role in shaping the longboarding industry, with hundreds, if not thousands, of guides on making your own skateboards using different techniques, tutorials for different tricks, etc., which are now gone forever. It was a niche enough sport that a bunch of brands formed on the website, and the owners of bigger companies frequently posted on the website, so you’d have experts having in in-depth discussions with users about the science behind different board and truck designs, wheel shapes, etc.

The site was basically the de facto knowledge base for longboarding, and there still hasn’t been a replacement as far as I’m aware.

This is going to be a game changer. I’ve been using Sync Pro since 2015 and can’t see myself using anything else for mobile browsing. Thanks for the awesome app!