It did not, you could just not select one and keep scrolling. They did however reward you with stickers for voting in each category which probably had the same result

For a little more context, 196's main rule is that you need to post something before you leave. So it started with people just putting something about having to post because of the rule for the title, which then turned into just putting rule because it's shorter, which then turned into making an actual title then putting rule in it somewhere because it's funny.

Just staring a loading screen essentially, most games will let you click around on the menu still and look at your skins or your settings or whatever. TF2 lets you queue mid match to find another game so you can play on a community server while you wait, and overwatch does let you do warmup DM last I remember (which was years ago so it might have changed). Can't really think of anything else another game does off the top of my head.

The crosshair being locked on the bottom third of the screen makes the game unplayable for me. It's the same feeling as when a game locks you to 60 fov where its slightly nauseating and very annoying at all times making every moment of the game feel terrible when it normally wouldn't be. Forced my self to play it when my friends were online assuming it was just something that I had to get use to, but according to steam I spent 24.8 hours on the game and I still can't stand it to the point where it is one of the 3 games I just straight up refuse to play at this point along with leauge and ark. I was really hoping the devs would add an option to be able to center the crosshair but the lead dev said that they weren't going to change it due to it being too much effort iirc.

Other than that one issue the game seems pretty good, everything seemed well designed at least when I played back in 2021 and I cant think of a another complaint I had. Not sure how people can deal with it but i'm glad that most people can enjoy the game.

TF2 hit it's peak player count of all time when the summer update dropped last month with 253,997 players simultaneously according to steamdb, and has been in the top 10 games on steam by player count pretty consistently for years.

There is one segment in Portal 2 where you need to cut some tubes that transport neurotoxin, and for that small segment only, the game allows moving portals. https://youtu.be/OrAHvenjZpA

Deep rock galactic, https://store.steampowered.com/app/548430/Deep_Rock_Galactic/

WotC's difficulty curve is weird, it starts out harder then base xcom 2, but once you learn the mechanics and figure out what works it becomes a lot easier. Covert operations give you a lot of resources, can stall the avatar project forever, and can be used to power level someone to max rank significantly faster then base game. Lost missions are essentially free xp. Black sites are trivialized by reapers, who can reliably solo them even as squaddies, making stalling the avatar project even easier. Reapers in general are very strong due to the absurd stealth, and remote detonation ability you get at corporal, not to mention banish which lets you one shot just about anything. There is also the training center, which lets you get every ability for a class plus some extra ones assuming you spend the time to get the points (Covering Fire + Threat Assessment + Cool Under Pressure is an insane combo on specialist). The new terror mission variation is significantly easier because the rebels actually shoot back now.
The Chosen can be a mess, but as long as you aren't in a bad situation already they are pretty manageable. The only thing that gets harder overall that I've noticed is the alternate supply raid mission with airlifting crates, still can't figure out how to do that one properly although I think it might just be a skill issue on my end, haven't heard anyone else complaining about it.
(replied to your comment, but it didn't show up, so if there are two comments here sorry about that)

Until someone on kbin subscribes to it via putting in the url directly it doesn't show up as kbin dose not know it exists iirc. Same thing with Lemmy, if someone on your instance isn't subscribed to a community on another instance then it doesn't show up until someone dose

Edit: Getting a 404 error when I try to go there to subscribe, as money_loo said its probably a backend issue with kbin

It's not really a meme. It's from c/196, where the main rule is that you have to post something before you leave, hence why everything is named rule. If you block 196@lemmy.world and 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone that should deal with almost all of the rule posts.

Reusing a comment i made a few days ago, "It's based off r/195, which was a sub where the main rule was that you had to make 1 post before leaving, that sub closed down a few years ago, then r/196 was made to replace it. IIRC r/195 was originally for some peoples apartment, with the name just being their apartment number. Eventually other people joined in because of the rule and it snowballed from there."
To add onto that, r/195 shut down because the mods didn't feel like running it anymore as it became to much to handle.

EDIT: looks like the old head mod commented while I was still writing this. Their comments explain the situation much better.

According to this earlier post (reveddit link), the new head mod was part of the old mod team, and the old head mod willingly stepped down at the same time they reopened. According to the old head mod in the comments they were already planning on stepping down, and the situation with u/spez just sped up the process. As for opening the sub, according to the post the mod team was not happy about reopening the sub, but felt forced too as they did not want to get replaced.

Hopefully they do the thing that some other subs like r/pics are doing and make all the posts about something super specific but not really relevant.