I'm an European engineer and I can confirm that our tech is often broken and customer-reachable people are usually obtuse and hostile about it. We don't even seem to properly implement our own legal requirements. Sometimes, Americans implement the RGPD better than we do.

- Free without requiring self-hosting;

- Absolutely frictionless community access - here's an invite link, you can start chatting immediately;

- High quality voice calls with screen sharing.

I don't think there is a competitor that hits all three points right now. Screen sharing in particular is often disregarded by developers who have limited interaction with Discord and don't truly understand the platform. It was not an original feature, but it is Discord's killer feature. Because screen sharing is also impromptu videogame streaming.

You don't have to take my word for it, just check it yourself, although it seems that this week, they renamed the NSFW setting to "Age-Restricted Channel" (in preparation for this change, no doubt). The verification-related portion of the behavior I described was implemented for the UK months ago.

The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels are exempt from the explicit content filter."

EDIT: IANAL (or american) but if Discord was policing content for legality rather than age-appropriateness, wouldn't they lose DMCA Safe Harbor protections?

The only way for the server owner to circumvent the filter is to mark a channel as "NSFW", which doesn't necessarily mean the channel actually contains any NSFW content.

This change will not actually require ID for content confirmed to be NSFW. It will require ID for each and every "NSFW mode" (unfiltered) channel. The end result is that you have three choices:

- Ditch Discord features implemented in recent years (or at least this is currently possible) - this prevents a server from being listed as public;

- Require ID checks from all your users (per channel);

- Have everything scanned from all your users (per channel).

My iteration of The Settlers was The Settlers II (also its later 3D remake) which is very much designed around roads that units mostly had to use! This was found in other early instances of RTS but later discarded (including in The Settlers series).

It's true, however, that events like floods or the tax collector were missing. Those are more easily found in board games.

https://vr-compare.com/compare?h1=0jLuwg808-j&h2=w8xCM-oPA

The 1000hz tracking frequency is from the Lighthouse tracking system, which the Frame loses. For that and other reasons, I am not convinced the controllers are better than the Index controllers. Personally I think it's likely I will keep using the Index controllers, since I have the whole lighthouse setup and I own trackers as well.

If as I currently intend I end up purchasing this device, I will definitely endeavour to obtain the controller straps as well as the top strap for the headset at the same time, and I recommend others do the same.

Full color passthrough would have been nice though. Not necessarily for XR, but because it's actually quite useful to be able to switch to a view of the world around you with very low friction when using the headset.

There are currently two much smaller competitors that are perfectly usable but lacking community buy-in. Chillout, which is similar to VRChat, with some improvements the community has wanted for years, but missing some of VRChat's (admittedly excellent) homemade functionality, such as better IK code, better bone dynamics, etc. And Resonite, which is more similar to SecondLife, possessing a cross-world inventory system and in-game content authoring tools.

The issues seem exacerbated in this idea, however I think it's just as cool. I would love to play on it.