This gives you tons more privacy, and the system performance is positive. Like an adblocker, you’ll burn less bandwidth and CPU by using it.  I don’t want to oversell that, you probably won’t even notice any difference, but it is going to make it a teeny bit faster.

Fun fact: If you use this (I do), your Win10 installation is now spying on you even less than a Win7 or Win8 installation, since they backported a lot of that telemetry to those.

Oh shit, you’re right, the divorce. Probably still some Activision thinking there then. That’s hard to wash off.

A lot of the potential ‘positives’ in here are exactly what we heard about Anthem too.

How about just giving the dang money back rather than just making the item completely unusable for six months?

It would probably be healthy (for themselves) for those people to stop frothing every time the game is mentioned at this point. They’ve been lied to about a lot of games, and this is one of the few that’s actually been updated over many years, for free, to meet those initial promises.

Certain corners of the internet just wallowed in the launch issues (and yes, there were lies) like pigs in shit. They loved to hate it. And at the time the game maybe deserved it, but this became a self-licking lollipop that has sustained itself to this day. Like some gamers still sneer at Kotaku as a source just…

Difficulty for Anthem: EA

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.