Forgive me for not reading all 2500 documents, but I haven't heard anything to suggest there was a bunch of sinister stuff in there -- and there's nothing implicitly evil about having docs leaked.

While the conversion is appreciated, there's no reason to be an ass about it. OP labeled it, so it's not like it was confusing or making unnecessary assumptions about the audience. So really you're the one who just comes across as completely culturally insensitive.

I think the bigger factor is, someone who already thinks they're great probably isn't working on noticing and improving their weaknesses. Someone who thinks they still have a lot to learn is putting a lot of effort into improving.

So, especially if they've felt that way for any significant length of time, it's no wonder which person will end up being better.

One problem it has is that it can be REALLY slow sometimes. Like any turn based strategy game, map size has an exponential effect on how long a game takes, but the mechanics of wesnoth lean a lot more towards larger maps.

I'm mostly talking about multiplayer though. For singleplayer there's about a hundred million campaigns to play so you could probably play it forever.

TWENTY WHOLE DOLLARS

TWENTY BUKAROONIES LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, TWENTY O' DEM BIG ONES

XP-based progression isn't always padding. It definitely isn't hard to find examples where it is, but it's also a pretty good solution to a common problem: you want the game to present a hero's journey, where you start out weak and eventually become powerful, but you want a generic way to handle the players' progress.

It's really the same as the debate in TTRPGs like D&D, where the DM could either reward levels based on XP earned from killing monsters, or could forego that altogether and award levels at set points in the story. In a video game setting where you intend things to be really open ended / the player should have a lot of freedom about what tasks they do and in what order, it's hard to handcraft exactly what each player's adventure and progression should look like, so an XP system is a really simple way to generalize it for everyone.

It's only padding if it requires you to engage with a lot of content that you otherwise wouldn't want to do, before you can progress the story you're actually interested in. But that's not the fault of the system itself, it's in how the designers chose to use it.

Both of the examples you give are Id - and to be honest, I feel like this was always more of an Id thing than it was an overall trend

Maybe the E in your email stands for electronic.

Unfortunately from their perspective that isn't apples to apples. They can charge higher rates for targeted ads.

I had never heard about this, this is absolutely awesome

Plot twist - the nerd in IT was just looking for some new sources for free porn

abolishing the European Union

Ah, yes. I believe this was step 4 of setting up your self-hosted instance.