I’m not accusing F76 of being P2W, just saying this is exactly what a lot of Asian P2W MMOs do.  The reasons are hopefully different.

The Elites are really nice, but on the inside they’re still the same old soft plastic as the regular controllers.

At least we’re (hopefully) past the point where people would have wanted you to punch Sean Murray in the face.

I was playing it for the free weekend, and while I could mostly deal with towns being full of people with dumb names jumping up and down a lot, having the dungeons be full of spazzes is just the f@#$ing worst.

Is the loot system secretly driven by an elaborate AI system that keeps track of everything you do so it can get you to spend more money on the game? [no]

Another mode that isn’t available currently in the Early Access release of Blades is PVP. So no idea how that will work or if it is any good.

Yeah, that was pretty off the cuff from memory - I found this, which has lots of current info

It’s definitely nicer than pure gacha, but you’ll still be needing to buy a lot of decks. Last time I looked:

The naked P2W of it was probably the most obvious issue that kept people away. Now, you can argue about how P2W it was compared to other games (or M:TG, good lord), but nakedly monetized out of the gate isn’t a great way to draw people in.

I sure hope they fixed the terrible mission scripting, where not doing everything exactly as the outsourced scripting guy in Singapore decided you should do it would insta-kill you. Catch the guy too fast? You die. Kill the guy with the ‘wrong’ weapon? You die. Catch the guy on horseback instead of on foot? You die.…

He’s been writing a monthly column in Edge magazine (about the only print game mag still worth reading) for several months now about the process of making this game. It’s quite interesting.

This is fairly common in Asian P2W MMOs. The low-levels are just there to provide meat for the high level P2W players, who will camp spawns just like this. Eventually the noob gets frustrated and leaves, or pays to become one of the high level P2W players, then he gets to prey on noobs too.

Fixing the Ivy Tunnel stairs is most important patch note, don’t care about anything else.

He should probably apply that bandage to that hideous pubic hair ‘beard’ now.

I take Amtrak frequently up and down the west coast for a couple reasons:

This is a fair point - it seems like it’s for the user but it’s more about dev outreach, maybe to justify that 30% cut.

Do you have some sort of wide-range weapon, like the chem launcher, that’s doing it? Because they’re skittish and run away and thankfully the drone and turret won’t target them. I guess if you’re using an LMG you could get some collateral.

I don’t care about who’s ‘evil’ or not here, and EGS is certainly very primitive at the moment. My point is that the Steam client is a long neglected, terrible UI piece of junk that they’ve had over a decade to make tolerable and haven’t. And they have billions of dollars, so money and resources aren’t an excuse.

Yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of behind the scenes activity, but it’s interesting that right after Epic Store starts eating Steam’s lunch they suddenly announce one of the few user centered client upgrades we’ve seen in a long time. As a user, the client is primitive, long-neglected, ugly crap that needs a complete…

Yes, even if the company has been terrible I start resolutely polite. Usually it gets taken care of, maybe because they’re so relieved to be dealing with someone who’s not attacking them.