Take this month’s horoscope for Capricorn ... It starts off with an otherwise innocuous call for critical thought and ends with a plug for Prime Now so out of place

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.

Says the guy who’s somehow missed 15 years of Facebook being actively malicious and lying about what they’re actually doing at every opportunity. You’d be forgiven for the first ten years (most people didn’t notice or care), but you’d have to be purposely obtuse to miss it for the last couple years.

Facebook has been actively, intentionally, malicious since the day it was started as a place for Harvard students to say nasty things about girls who wouldn’t have sex with them.

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

“If that’s what’s required to sign up with Facebook, you’re better off not being on Facebook.”

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]

He sees the writing on the wall since all their past crimes are (somewhat) coming home to roost - so now he wants to become a government backed ‘too big to die’ oligopoly utility like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc.

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.

It’s not just graphene either, though graphene is very exciting. It turns out a lot of materials are much more interesting if you make one molecule thick sheets, layer two, and twist one. Like phosphorene. People are hastily trying out all sorts of materials to see what will happen - though making two flat sheets and…