I'd love to recommend Warframe to you, but the only thing matching is "I have a lot of free time"

It's a no-brainer IMO since they usually get about 2x as many votes than seats (percentage-wise in the past few federal elections). I'm not sure if the previous NDP caucus (I think that's the right term) made an attempt, but I was hoping they would try to.

I went through the list on the linked website. I just highlighted each name and riding, right-clicked and google searched and found out their party affiliation fairly quickly (well, doing that 37 times was a bit time consuming). No NDP or Green party members voted in favour.

The other was told the six-week pathway wasn’t expected to launch until summer — it is now June.

At the time I'm writing this comment, it is approximately an hour BEFORE the start of summer

Article author needs to chill

I'd say "no" to both, but YMMV. They struggled with the launch (their server wasn't able to handle the capacity, but they eventually upgraded it), and they are only providing minimal updates and some critical fixes. As far as I can tell, they haven't added anything new. I don't think Fawkes Games has the resources to make the game much better than it was.

My own personal experience is that it doesn't crash too much (like, maybe once or twice out of 10-15 hours of playtime). Sometimes it could be server-side or client-side or network related. Best place for updates (ie. to check server status) is their Discord. There's a subreddit, but, I don't know if the devs participate or not ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Defiance/ ).

You can play for free, but, there are some limitations (eg. inventory space) that you will come up against fairly quickly. They have a the standard store thing where you buy in-game gems for real money and spend that on stuff (like inventory upgrades). I can't remember what the costs of the original game were. But, with how they have the game set up, you definitely can "try before you buy".

Yes I did. I think the original release version, as well as the 2050 update

I think this is the link to the study that the article is referencing:

https://schoolofcities.github.io/gta-immigration/rightward-minorities

Playing the revived Defiance game (by Fawkes Games). It's not a very in-depth mmo, but, it can be fun