The contents of the chat messages are e2e encrypted, so meta can’t see what you are sending.
Even if we assume correct e2ee is used (which we have no way of knowing), Meta can still see what you are sending and receiving, because they control the endpoints. It's their app, after all.
I actually found the side quests' writing pretty good, and indeed, sometimes even memorable. Unfortunately, most of those quests share a handful of nearly identical tasks, so the good writing started to feel like little more than window dressing before long.
The map encounters were worse, though: Lots of question marks telling me exactly where to go meant there was nearly no real exploration to be had in this open world, and arriving at them led to the same copypasta events over and over again. If you happen to enjoy those events enough that you can't get enough of them, then that's great, but I was bored after the first dozen or so. (Skyrim was far better in this department.)
I remember liking a lot of the main quests, and the characters, and the story, and the world building. It's just that the bulk of the gameplay felt like filler content, with forgettable combat and awkward controls. (I swear, Geralt, if you plod forward one more time when I pull back on the stick, or let one more candle get in the way when I try to interact with something useful, I'm gonna smack you.)
I hope Witcher 4 maintains (or even improves upon) the writing quality of its predecessor, and adds responsive controls and interesting gameplay beyond the main plot points.
Unpopular opinion: I liked the characters and lore a lot, but I found that the sloppy controls and sluggish movement made the world frustrating to interact with, and most of the encounters were so repetitive that I was bored before long. I ended up switching to easy mode so I could finish the story without having to spend much time on the tedious gameplay.
IMHO, if you were to rush through W3 in story mode and skip the side quests, just to get the background before playing W4, I don't think you'd be missing much.
This is not about FOSS. (As you could have deduced from my mention of Foundry.)
It's about services like Discord collecting and owning our words, our voices, our stories, our communities.
It's also about us retaining access to those things, and having agency over our personal information. Discord has been known to lock people out of their accounts if they don't hand over their phone numbers or photo IDs, for example.
There are perfectly good tools available that serve their users, rather than exploiting us for the benefit of corporations, and I choose to use them.
(It's also nice that Mumble has superior voice quality, which I find helpful to role playing, although that's not its main advantage IMHO.)
My only experience in this area was back when I was using reddit. It seemed that most tables expected everyone to use Discord (or some other closed system), so I stopped looking.
I wonder if fediverse folks would be more likely to use tools like Mumble, Matrix, and Foundry.
To be fair, $260 is far beyond what a board game should cost. I would prefer to buy from a local shop, but that price would drive me to look online, too.
Fyi, there’s now a fedi alternative called Faircamp.
I wish people would stop saying that. It might be useful for certain things, but it's not an alternative to Bandcamp. Unless something has changed very recently, it has no means of selling music at all.
I would expect any random headset to plug into the headset and microphone ports and Just Work, and ditto for USB
For the most part these days, they do. But OP asked about wireless.
or Bluetooth headsets that report themselves as the appropriate device class.
The problem with Bluetooth is not the operating system or drivers, but Bluetooth itself. The spec famously lacks provisions for good quality stereo output with good quality input at the same time. This is why many wireless headsets use a (non-Bluetooth) dongle.
a headset that supports at least AptX, which supports full-duplex communication at reasonable bandwidth and thus quality
Specifically, I think you mean AptX Low Latency. FastStream can reportedly do this as well. Both are nonstandard extensions to Bluetooth, so we have to look for them as features rather than assuming they'll be present.