I would be careful with phrases like, “there is no contradiction.” There is a comprehensible tension between free speech as the ability for anyone to say what they wish, and a prohibition on hate speech as a prohibition on saying specific things. Denying that risks damaging one’s credibility because it can appear that we are merely refusing to acknowledge that tension.

I argue it’s better to admit these tensions. And that’s not an admission that the arguments for prohibition of hate speech are weak, but it is an admission that as real people in the real world, we can never have the comfort of a tension-free, contradiction-free theory for anything of significance.

If the argument is that SM2 is successful because it limited it’s scope to execute a smaller number of features well, I don’t think that holds up. It took on three different types of games and (imho) executed merely okay. What more could they have added? Open world? MMO?

I think the more plausible explanation for the sales is that it’s Warhammer, it’s pretty, and SM1 was good.

Who praised them? But I don’t know what measure we’d use to determine the general reception of this particular feature. Particularly given that almost all video game journalism is mere marketing. So that’s probably not a fruitful point to argue over.

Instead I’ll offer the things that I think earn the competitive multiplayer a poor rating.

• No skill or even experience based match making. Too many games are blowouts because all of the level 1 players were put on one team.
• Teams are static once a match lobby has formed. If the teams are poorly balanced they will continue to be forever. Players can’t even switch voluntarily. The only remedy is to bail on the lobby and hop into a different random one.
• Classes and weapons are poorly balanced. The Bulwark is a key example of a too strong and not fun design. The Assault class, and melee in general is in a pretty poor state (unless you have an infinite defense shield that lets you walk up to people). Many of the weapon options for the classes are almost unusably weak, so class loadouts tend to be very samey. Grenades are spammy and the shock grenade blind duration is not fun.
• Players are randomly assigned Imperial or Chaos marines. But there is basically no character customization for the Chaos marines, while the Imperial marines have 5 or 6 different sets. Either the enemy team should always appear to be Chaos with their NPC style, or they should have included equivalent Chaos customization.
• Players have minimal control over which game modes they play. It’s either 100% random or selecting a single mode. A configurable selection is a common multiplayer feature.
• Map design is bland. This is perhaps a more personal preference, but I find the symmetrical, arcade arenas with no narrative character boring.

Space marine 2 seems like a good example of this.

Single player campaign: mediocre

CoOp missions: mediocre

Competitive multiplayer: poor

Seems like dropping one of those might have allowed the remaining two to earn a “pretty good”

It would be nice to have some opposition, though. Even if most “conservative” media right now is little more than xenophobia, or cult worship, there do exist sound arguments against the typical internet-left positions. I don’t have a solid enough read on what comes through New in the fediverse to say whether any of that is being submitted and just downvoted off everyone’s feeds, or if all that’s being submitted is the average conservative media junk.

Still, political spaces without opposition/diversity invariably degenerate into purity contests, and circle jerking.

That’s not my experience, and I’m an elder millennial. The only time tiering up has encouraged me to quit a game was when the higher ranked players were just more toxic. Being challenged can be part of the fun.

That’s not to say I think matchmaking is simply better than persistent servers. Having a group of regulars and developing a bit of a server culture is good fun. I guess I like both options depending on the mood.

A truly poor analogy. LLMs don’t remove anything from anywhere. They consume no shared resource.

It’s been wild watching people flail about searching for arguments for why LLMs should be stopped. I’m not even saying they shouldn’t, just that I haven’t seen a solid argument for it.