I cannot stress this enough: LLMs are not, have never been, and quite likely never will be search engines. You may as well ask your a auto-complete questions.
My guess, based off of absolutely nothing, is that they expected stronger growth out of the gate, given the rate at which r/Pathfinder2e had been growing, and hoped to see that community choose the Fediverse. But the mods there crated their own forum that drew very little traffic in its own right, a bunch of people shifted to the discord, and then everyone quickly filtered back to the subreddit when it became clear that there mods had no will to actually do anything beyond the symbolic.
Yeah, I haven't been able to access it for several months now. It still seems to be running, frustratingly enough, which makes it seem like it's an issue of absentee admins who just haven't really noticed.
But maybe my experience with it has been uniquely frustrated.
It's a shame. I was really hoping for there to be an active -- if quite small -- Pathfinder community here. The subreddit is... Not my cup of tea.
Did one of your spellcasters know the Gate spell? If so, what stopped the PCs from pulling the BBEG out of their lair and beating them up from the comfort of their homes?
Anti-magic field?
The BBEG has taken great efforts to hide their true name?
Private Sanctum spell?
The fact that Gate is an inter-planar spell, and not an intra-planar spell?
As the GM, one of your jobs is to present challenges for the party to overcome. That means actively countering their abilities list just as often as it means giving them a bone and letting them shine. The big moments of flexing mean a hell of a lot less when all they do is flex.
I was under the impression that the whole thing has been about Tencent wanting to license the digital product rights to D&D, not the actual game. I'm not sure why that's caused an uproar over the actual IP ownership.
And Tencent has a minority stake in, like, every functioning software company that's ever done an investment funding around at this point. They make it a point to diversify their holdings across basically the entire software industry at this point.
They're fairly hands-off in those endeavours, since they're doing it to protect themselves against shifts in the market.
Their in-house made stuff, though, is... Well, let's just say it's efficiently monetized.
The new Starter Kit is out and about now. I grabbed one a few weeks ago for my step-son. Are you able to find that in stock? It seemed pretty good from my quick scan.
I'm not looking for a d6 fantasy game right now, but I'm super interested in their momentum based resource management system. I also appreciate that they actually pay their writers, and am curious as to what kind of modules they'll be releasing in support of the game.
Yeah, it doesn't address the awful and lazy design that is "hardwired tablet in middle of console", but at the very least it provides a way to interact with car functionality without taking your eyes off the road.
They 100% think of it as a lever that makes expenses disappear. They're often just a little bit surprised when it results in labour disappearing along side the expenses, though.
Importantly, though, this kind of dehumanizing language is purposeful, and it's extremely harmful. It makes it easier for management to treat people's livelihoods and lives as disposable.
Keep in mind that "human resources" (sometimes called "human capital" at some especially icky places) is also one of these dehumanizing terms. Treating people as resources that are available to use or process is really gross, and that's literally the name of the department.
And yet it still has a bunch of ads for PC+ littered throughout it. Despite being grandfathered in, I abandoned it earlier this year for Podcast Republic, which hasn't spammed me or locked me out of any features I've tried to play with despite not having paid them anything.