If you want the cheapest, go with Cloudfare. They guarantee to ask for the wholesale price, which is the price the registrar pays to the top level domain owner, so they can’t go lower without footing the bill.

What most of registrars do is foot the difference for the first year, so you get a domain for super cheap, then add 50%+ cut on top, so you pay i.e 5$ for the first year for a TLD that has wholesale cost of 10$, while they loose 5$ on that sale, and then you pay 25$ for the second, so they now gain 15$ on holding your domain hostage.

Cloudfare guarantees that they will sell you that domain for 10$, and only raise it when the TLD owner raises the price.

I’m not aware of any other registrar that guarantees wholesale prices, but LMK if anyone knows any.

If you want to get the best deal, buy your first year (or maybe 10 years, if they let you buy 10 for the sale price) with the scammy registrar, i.e get the 5$ sale on Namecheap, and before it expires transfer it to Cloudfare so you don’t pay extra for the second year and can continue with the (much lower now) wholesale price.

Each TLD has a different wholesale price, but every registrar pays the same to them for selling the domain to you. The differences you see is exactly in how much are they willing to foot the bill at first (most have a massive sale on first year, then huge markup on renewals), some just add a flat fee and have markup from the start.

Cloudfare just states “you will pay wholesale”, and don’t do any sheninegans. At least that’s how it was last time I checked.

Thanks for mentioning NS2, I would’ve scrolled past this game otherwise. NS2 was my most favorite competitive game, that I never found people to play with for (aside from once being approached by someone at a bar, who overheard me talking about NS2 and that I play Starcraft, that they’re looking for an RTS player for their e-sport NS2 team. I… wasn’t good at Starcraft, so it didn’t work out, but it was a funny random happenstance).

I love asymmetric games, and the mix of RTS + FPS for the rest seems like a really interesting game from the competitive/meta standpoint.

I’ll check out these two games, sounds like it might be right up my alley.

I highly recommend Space Station 14.

It’s an amazing roleplaying disaster simulator, where around 100 players are trying to keep a Space Station afloat. From doctors, through police, scientist, engineers, to cargo and barmans. Every role has a way how to blow up the station - Engineers generate energy through a contained singularity or a Tesla ball. If that escapes because you forgot to repair the cage, the station is fucked.

Scientists experiment with artifacts that give you research for doing stuff with it, and it’s generate what does doing stuff with it do, i.e if you wrench it, it does something. Something can be “spawn a monkey”, “print money” to “thermonuclear explosion”.

And add to that tower of cards some people getting the roles of antagonists, which can be anything between “Syndycate agent that has to kill the captaion”, “a blood cult needing to steahltily sacrifice people to ascend”, “pantient zero that turns into a zombie”, or a “syndicate deathsquad that has to fight to the station nuke and trigger selfdestruction”.

It’s massive fun, and I highly recommend it.

Oh, and that’s basic SS14. There’s also a very popular mod - Roundy Marine Crops, which si basically ~ 100vs100 Alien vs Predator, where you play every role imaginable from Marines that are deploying planetside to fight Aliens who are digging in.

If you need convincing, this is the best short story video that absolutly sold me the game. It’s aboslute cinema, the way it’s told. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfjz1MnlxzE

Then there’s also the almost legendary video about Space Station 13 from Sseth (SS14 is basically a reimplementation/modernization of SS13 into C#) that can also give you the vibe of the game. But I’d recommend the previous video more.

Note: There’s currently some drama with main maintainer, who had control of the launcher and server hub, starting to act extremely egoistically and hostile, holding the whole game and it’s auth database hostage, hacking discord servers, banning random people, and in general being a dick. That is why I have linked the playss14 launcher, which is a fork from the rest of the community to sidestep the demands and general dickery the maintainer is doing. It’s pretty ugly. The game is on Steam, just like it has other web pages, but that would lead you to the launcher that’s currently being ransomed. You’re better off just getting the alt launcher from playss14.com linked above.

Element

This is my most used app on my phone. It does comes with a little extensive setup, because you need to have your own Matrix server, but thanks to the amazing Matrix Ansible Project, which is one of those rare docker/ansible projects that actually work and are very robustly set-up, deploying a server took me like an hour max, incuding bridge setup and getting hosting (for around 8$ a month on Hetzner).

I replaced Messenger, Discord, WhatsApp and Telegram apps with this, by setting up bridges in Matrix. The setup was relatively simple, the ansible is well documented and I mostly had to just add lile two config lines into the ansible. So far I haven’t had much issues and I’ve been using it for the past few years.

There might be better clients than Element, haven’t really looked into it. It’s not frictionless and it took some getting used to, but not having a ton of spyware appson my phone is worth it.