I’m echoing your thoughts, almost exactly. It’s the base game, with many of its best and worst aspects cranked up to 11. It’s best parts are its fantastic boss fights.
Rellana was BRUTALLY difficult (at least, at the BL I was at) but I loved every moment of it.
Midra was visually stunning, and EXTREMELY clean to play, while still being a solid challenge.
Messmer was just a solid fight, all around.
Scadutree Avatar initially had me annoyed, but by the time I got through it, it was one of my favorites. Very unique.
Romina needed a massive buff, my goodness. I barely had a chance to DECIDE if I like the fight or not.
The Furnace Golems were a really cool concept, but in gameplay are just tedious and annoying, and had way too many “fuck you, there is no counter to this move, except to abandon the fight for the next 30 seconds” noves that they can just spam repeatedly.
Promised Consort Radahn is also BRUTALLY difficult, but ultimately learnable, like Rellana, but unlike Rellana is 0% fun to fight. One of those bosses that crosses the line from “learnavle because you get more skillful” to “learnable because you figure out how to metagame it”.
Radahn, Consort of Miquella can actually die in a fire. “Let’s take the design concepts that ruined Malenia, even though they were a minority of the fight, and build an entire fight around them, exclusively.” I.E. it’s and entire fight made of Waterfowls. It’s every combat concept that was a step backwards for FromSoft, across the entirety of Elden Ring, rolled up into one. Seriously, guys, your job as devs is to make difficult but learnable challenges that an average gamer can overcome, with enough effort, within the rules that the rest of the game has established, not to engage in an arms race against speedrunners and hitless runners. They are not your core audience.
Overall, an experience thst mostly improves on the base game, but was disappointing due to a few VERY significant lowlights. But it’s still Elden Ring, so still an excellent game.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but this made me bust out laughing…
Boy, if that isn’t just a perfect example of the perversion of our economic system. “You can’t make ACTUAL money with it, you can only make money by participating the meta gambling game.”
No, stock entitles you to dividends, which is just a fancy way of saying “a share of the profits”. Like, a company brings in A amount of money (gross income) in a year, spends B of that on payroll and whatnot (expenses), maybe puts away C of that into a savings or spending account, and everything that’s left, D, gets given to the owners. If you have stock in the company, that’s you.
Of course, dividends are generally very small (like, think savings interest) compared to what you can make trading and speculating, so it’s never good enough for the rich.
It’s also rather common for companies to pay no dividends, because they just put all the leftover money into C. Which isn’t even necessarily bad, it’s generally built on the idea that keeping the money in the company will give the company more room for growth, I.E. raising the stock price, with the assumption that that will be worth more than the dividends may have been. But for so many companies, that just never ends. Sooner or later, the growth won’t be sustainable, and many companies just collapse under their own weight, leaving the stock worthless.