Actually drinking a Soylent Mint Chocolate right now. One of the better flavors!

I loved the trailer opening with the Red Wings theme, one of my favorite songs in the franchise.

You do also kind of put all your eggs in one basket so to speak though. I don't have anything against Proton and the pricing makes sense if you value all their services and pay for Ultimate (though by my estimate, less sense if you are only looking for a smaller handful of services). However, if you go fully into Proton for everything, you're placing your trust into an entire stack of services and it can end up a single point of failure.

Honestly, this is a cute idea and a great little morning exercise and stretch to do regularly!

A lot of it for me is not general communities, but game-specific communities. I usually rely on these for aggregating any news updates on a specific game and they're just not quite as populated around here.

Active raider, still trying for the elusive week 1 clear maybe sometime in 7.X, though I may take a break from hardcore raiding in 7.0! Managed to get to Natural Alignment 2 week 1 for Abyssos, and got to Pangenesis in week 1 for Anabaseios, but no week 1 clear just yet.

Other than that though, I'm an MSQ enjoyer and just generally appreciate different aspects of the game, from story, to music, to boss and encounter designs. Seat of Sacrifice Extreme is the best fight in the game.

In terms of top tier fights relative to floor, I think P3S, P5S, and P10S take the cake here. I think P12S P1 is one of the more fun phase 1 execution-heavy two part fights, whereas I think P4S phase 2 is actually the best second phase. But second phase, I'm probably a little biased because Curtain Call is just significantly better than Dominion and Gaiochos 2 as far as soft-enrage damage mechanics go.

Anabaseios probably had the most even spread of enjoyable fights, with P9S being a slightly worse P5S (which is fine, because P5S is great), and P10S being just the best second floor fight this whole tier. P11S is worse than P3S by a longshot, but it's not a bad fight - it's just an overly safe, comfy design. P12S is fun even if I think phase 2 is largely just a remix of P8S phase 2.

I'm of the opposite opinion when it comes to P3S. I think P3S is the best designed fight of the whole tier, and actually probably still a top tier fight across the whole expansion.

I think oppo is safer because JP really needs the 6 marker to be on top of the ball (or do non-standard positioning, which is actually what I would recommend).

That's largely reasonable!

I can get not wanting to use Discord for a particular reason if someone already isn't using Reddit, but I feel like if you use Reddit, you're running out of reasons to not also use Discord.

For the esoteric or specific questions, I guess that doesn't come up too regularly for me, and I struggle to understand how someone can have enough questions in say a week where the loss of Reddit access would severely hamper their ability to engage with the game. I'm not saying it's impossible either, but if it ends up being a specific question that wasn't already asked or you can't find on Reddit anyhow, your ability to ask in a Discord is about as effective as asking on Reddit (once again looping to the fact that if you use Reddit, I feel like your reasons to not use Discord are limited).

The only other thing I can think of static information for content that minimally changes but is commonly requested. That would be the purpose of older threads that you would look up and find, which is very much better served in some other format. While I understand the FFXIV wiki and Gamerescape aren't ideal due to the lack of these content, there's nothing to stop someone from putting info there rather than making a Reddit post.

I think the only thing that wouldn't fit in is the kind of informational blog posts that come up on occasions. For example, the one that sticks to memory is the person that dissects the dragon language as a conlang. It's more blog post than Wiki resource, and I would struggle to find a better alternative than a place like Reddit or similar short of a personal blog.

I was surprised to see how many complaints about how negatively their gaming experience was affected. As a fairly enfranchised player that has thousands of hours in the game doing content at various levels up to hardcore Savage raiding, the FFXIV subreddit being unavailable did not affect my experience nearly at all. In fact I only ever really go there to occasionally browse if there are interesting posts or answer questions in the Daily Questions thread.

I am wondering about the resources that people rely on the subreddit for. Island Sanctuary is posted on their Discord, which is not ideal but personally I find the Discord formatting easier to understand than the Reddit post, and Fashion Report is just an image posted all over elsewhere.

I've seen it be used and honestly seems pretty good. The only thing that I would prefer is the ranged DPS go true intercardinals (there's no reason to be at a weird position and more likely to clip 1/2 baiters) and that I think the bait should just be done south (main tank moves south once Firestrike cast begins, rather than having all the melee who are used to being behind the boss run north).