FFXIV's level/stat sync system is also pretty cool for keeping the older stuff playable long past its original release, players get levels and stats and skills scaled down to the max level appropriate for the content
4-player dungeons still end up being a bit of a faceroll, but it's definitely possible to wipe on the 8-player bosses if mechanics are not observed
I found it very unfun. You end up in dungeons with a subset of the abilities you're used to. It felt especially bad, when leveling, if I queued for a random dungeon and got into a lower level one shortly after acquiring a new ability.
I don't know much about FF. But a thing with WoW is that new release often brings a significant rework of many game mechanics; they might squish everyone's level; edit stats for millions of items; rework class talents and abilities, sometimes even bringing up the whole new approach to the talents.
So while just scaling down characters is technically not hard to do and there's tech in WoW for that, it's never the same as playing previous expansion. And players want genuine experience.
And preserving all the old mechanics for 12 of expansions would present a whole new class of challenges to a team. WoW is a huge game. They already plagued by lots of bugs.
In FF, the system is very simple, and indeed is not trying in any way to give the original experience. You can sync to a level 30 dungeon, and your character will be scaled so it has the exact abilities it would have today as a level 30 class. Stats from gear are also scaled down by some formulas that still try to take into account the quality of your gear relative to the current best possible.
But this system exists for an entirely different purpose than a TBC server. It exists mostly to make sure low level content is still full of players, so that new players going through the story or players leveling up new classes can always find parties for dungeons. It also helps break the monotony of doing the same few current dungeons/raids all of the time
Note that in FF you have to do the huge main story quest on any new character before you can really access the latest content, regardless of how much you might level, and the main quest also involves runs through most dungeons. I should add that normally people only do this once on one character, since you can level all different classes (called jobs) on the same character - you can be a level 90 robe-wearing black mage if using a staff, and then you equip daggers and become a level 31 ninja in leather armor, or an axe and become a level 67 tank warrior.
WoW has been doing this for like a decade. A lot of the old expansion content gets level scaled for new players, many dungeon groups get scaled to the same level, some of their time travel events have scaled old dungeons up for current players, etc.
At least in my experience, having worked in both Florida and California, that's more of a wash than people imagine it's going to be -- and more so than the "cost of living calculators" tend to demonstrate, at least if you're a renter.
I actually ran a few numbers based on current costs. If you're making $120K/yr in Florida and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in Tampa ($1,642/mo, as of April 2026 according to Apartments.com), your after-tax take home is $98 (24% federal tax bracket, no state tax) and you have $78.4K after rent. If you're making $180K/yr in California and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in San Jose ($2,705/mo), your after-tax take home is $130.5K (24% federal tax bracket, 9.3% CA state tax bracket) and you have $98K left after housing.
You can keep fiddling with the numbers, but in most cases, the premium for getting a tech job in Silicon Valley is sufficiently high that you really are making more in absolute dollars despite the higher cost of living.
That math breaks down if you have kids and need 4bdrm house commutable distance to work in good school district - prohibitively expensive in Bay Area and affordable on engineer salary in most tier 2 cities. If you do not have kids, Bay Area clearly wins, especially if you are ok with studio/1bdrm.
there used to be a lot more shared hosting in the world when Slashdot ruled the geek news roost
it'd be fine if it's one site on a dedicated machine, but these shared webhosts would routinely cram 500-1000 hosting accounts onto something like a single-core, HT-less 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with two gigs of RAM, running mpm_prefork on Apache 2.0, with single-node MySQL 5.x (maybe even 4.x!) on the same box... which was not terribly efficient as others observed
you carry about 20x the compute power of that machine in your pocket, even a Raspberry Pi 4 could triple the workload
The PIF of Saudi Arabia has been a big investor in Take-Two (the parent of 2K Sports) since 2021, which is relevant to the larger discussion about Saudi "sportswashing".
in the case of Azure, the users are the engineers tasked with implementing the infra
I'm not sure I've ever heard of a shop adopting Azure on pure engineering merit but my anecdata are hardly exhaustive. it tends to be forced for weird business reasons (retailers mistrusting Amazon, data residency requirements, sweetheart credit deal, CIO convinced by Azure rep over golf)
I always liked going to well-stocked stores and browsing for stuff. That was Fry's until they shot themselves in the foot.
Micro Center might not be optimal on price, but sometimes you just want to wander a store full of cool stuff and maybe walk out with something you didn't expect, instead of another anonymous box of schmutz from Amazon or wherever
Unfortunately, Microcenter’s selection often leaves me disappointed. In particular, they stock almost no ECC RAM for AM5 machines. They do not stock many graphics cards that have ECC VRAM either. Their best card in stock that has ECC VRAM is this nearly obsolete ampere card:
I get it, but as "professional" grade equipment, most customers would acquire that through their employers' vendors.
It also depends on your local market; my location seems to carry more server and HEDT gear than others (they stock more A- and W-series GPUs than 5090s, at least). They've also purchased things I've requested, like ECC DRAM for my Threadripper, which I also purchased from them.
I wouldn't be surprised, most retailers can place special orders for things they don't have in stock. I do this at my local record store, book store, and comic store with some frequency.
4-player dungeons still end up being a bit of a faceroll, but it's definitely possible to wipe on the 8-player bosses if mechanics are not observed
reply