Yes, and you can’t divorce the fact that she profits from all official media associated with the Harry Potter and paying for said media inescapable enriches her more. However, it is also true that the team that made this game did an amazing job of a creating a hogwarts/ Wizarding world that feels real and amazing, that they do not support her bigotry, and that they included a non-token well-respected open trans character (voiced by a trans voice actress) who is a recurring NPC on the main quest line of the game and gets to share more of her story as full side quest too. Supporting the game is not, in itself, support of trans bigotry. It’s complicated.

Cool. Now add Artificer.

Stretching the definition of “feature”

There are alternatives that are arguably better.
You can play the exact same puzzles as on the NYT site without giving them your traffic. There are archives of their puzzles that you can play for free. If you like connections, go to https://www.connectionsunlimited.org/. For wordles, go to https://wordlearchive.com/. Just Google for archived versions of your favorite games.

Then there’s also other publications that have puzzle games live this. For example, as I like the mini crosswords, there’s a student publication, The Observer, that has these mini crosswords too: https://fordhamobserver.com/category/fun-and-games/daily-mini-crossword/.

Supporting the tech workers at NYT doesn’t mean you have to give up your daily game addiction

You are suggesting that the pandas looked badass and that this Dracthyr looks goofy. I’m not a WoW player, but it really sounds to me like you just have a very strong, but subjective ideal about what is “badass” and what is “goofy”. You are treating that ideal as objective, but I promise you that others have a different opinion.

Also it’s a game that let’s you roleplay fantasy races and factions with a bunch of other nerds around the world (using the term “nerds” lovingly here). Why is it unusual that some things in that style of game gets a bit silly sometimes?

It’s kind of hard to have an incredibly varied and versatile powerset in a video game, simply becuase you have a limited set of inputs. So you would normally have a small set of powers that each serve a purpose. But then doing that and still representing 4 elements means each only gets very limited options.

Thinking about it, I can see two ways to make bending feel powerful, versatile and give a good representation to all elements. 1) maybe the best solution would be to have customizable load outs with various bending powers, and let you switch between those load outs on the fly so you can coordinate a few power sets that work well together but swap them when other sets are more useful to the situation. 2) An interesting idea would be to use situational awareness to execute moves without specific user inputs differentiating the exact power used. For example, you could have a single boost button that uses a different element depending on if the player is on land, water, in the air or dodging (fire rocket!). And you could have a close/melee attack and ranged attack for each element that you can specify, but the exact effect/attack it creates can vary depending on the environment and enemy type of the target. Let it feel a little bit like the character is making decisions, not just you, like Batman in combat in the Arkham games. And of course, there would be a charge up to a special attack that uses the Avatar state and all 4 elements at once.

Would be funnier if only scalpers bought it and couldn’t unload them.

Or my favorite class, artificer. :/

That was pretty clear. The apparent player character was a misdirect. The figure that comes in at the end seems to be the “her” referred to, and potentially the main antagonist of the game. I’m sure, just like in all other iterations, you’ll have a custom built player character of any sex/gender.

10+ years ago, it was very common to get an upgrade to your phone ever two years (or less). And at the time, there was a lot more variability in phones. And I mean in more than just battery life, storage capacity, camera quality, processor, etc. There used to be a variety of form factors to consider, sizes, genuinely different features and functionalities. The iPhone came about in 2009, and other smart phones soon followed, but even then there were still phones with physical keyboards, digital keyboards with stylus typing, flip phones, etc. Once smart phones completely dominated the market and all the manufacturers started just copying each other’s features and designs, eventually we got to the status quo of today where they’re all essentially the same. The only major difference now is the OS, and that’s largely just down to iOS vs Android.