From a developer perspective, tonnes of stuff. Shortcuts, power (edit: see Diablo Immortal for some live examples). From a gamer perspective, it’s really the ideal scenario in this day and age, but Blizzard’ll cop hate all the same.
Other similar games like Last Epoch are doing paid alt animations for skills, but Diablo team just aren’t that creative, and the game wasn’t designed well enough to accommodate something like that.
My experience: I do the game sharing trick on xbox where you and a friend can mutually access both of your digital libraries. Preordered collector’s edition, which included 5 days of early access before launch. Blizzard had implemented a special access control on the server side which checked for a unique collector’s edition license. My friend could download and launch the game using my license but couldn’t login during early access. I refunded my purchase because the point of the extra cost was invalidated by that.
I later bought the standard edition. My account still had all the preorder and collector’s edition bonuses, including MTX currency & a battle pass token. Said token was later redeemed by mistake via Blizzard’s dark pattern implementation at the start of S1. There was some backlash about that at the time which was certainly valid, but personally I didn’t feel affected because I got it at no extra cost.
I’ve played for 1000s of hours since but never spent the free in-game currency. I had never seen another player in-game using MTX cosmetics until the wings items were recently added as preorder bonuses for the upcoming expansion. It’s not surprising that only 15% of the revenue came from MTX because the paid cosmetics are pointless, expensive and they aren’t substantially better than the free ones. Using transmog at all robs the player of any sense of cosmetic progression. Paid portal skins are kinda cool the first time you see them, but the free activity-specific ones like for infernal hordes are cool too.
I’m left confused at why someone would boast about these figures given they’re evidence of not having implemented any solid post-launch monetisation strategy, and more generally the half-baked nature of the post-launch development for the game. The MTX is purely for vanity and it doesn’t even achieve that. The skins might as well be a dork sign. I wouldn’t be surprised if their revenue figures included my original purchase as well.
tl;dr my read is that this dude has done more to unintentionally subvert blizzard’s MTX sales than he’s done to generate them
You could just refund it if it doesn’t work well for you. GOG are usually pretty generous
Any significant difference to Dark Reader?
Just used this to load up some concerts for my long haul flights tonight and it worked great, thanks for the rec
I’m really meaning the lack of option not to consume fast-moving consumer goods, rather than the option to pay a premium for them elsewhere. When their market position is similar to like an outlet for government rations except for private profit, their net is essentially what was skimmed off the top of free enterprise. 2.66% is just the current maximum amount that is justifiably worth without doing societal harm
That’s an expected tradeoff of operating an essential service is the point. It’s not as though their margin is that slim by mistake, or out of goodwill, or bad business sense. It’s meant to lead to the situation where we shop at Walmart not by choice, but in lieu of other options.
Another part of this experience was driving through the Canadian Rockies and getting to really appreciate the environment. I think over time that road trip will be even more memorable just due to my attention not being diverted towards my phone. A beautiful place I look forward to visiting again!
I broke my phone on the first day of a music festival a few weeks ago (went without it for 6 days). The living without it part was easy - I was camping at a big multi-day event with friends, and random people were easy/nice to talk to. I made new friends that I otherwise wouldn’t have. Certainly being stimulated by the event made a difference, so I’d recommend finding new things to occupy yourself. But you might find it easier than you think.
The part I had the most trouble with was the banking, which isn’t an issue you’ll have under your conditions. I knew I had money in the bank, but I didn’t know how much was in my chequing account linked to my card. I was worried about health insurance premium etc. being taken out of my account and leaving me no money for food or party favours. The lines for food were long and while waiting I was half expecting to be declined at point of sale.
As such it seems a little bit of a cheat to have continuous access to your banking app, but I’m sure it’ll be a positive experience for you nonetheless and that concession should ensure your ability to practically function for work etc. Good luck!
I don’t think there’s any reason why Oakes’ recollection of McBride’s intent trumps what McBride has publicly said about his intent. Doesn’t the court have a word for that?
It seems fairly logical to me. He had the personal experience of witnessing soldiers unfairly scapegoated by superiors. His substantiation for the unfairness is that those superiors were complicit in war crimes. That the motive was there for superiors to make false specific allegations of misconduct in order to sweep systemic issues under the rug.
If McBride were a perfect witness, he’d have been motivated enough by war crimes to speak up. But the doubt about his awareness of what he was exposing is an appeal to authority which flies in the face of Occam’s razor.
Simply, whistleblowing as a means of recourse only became preferable after his fellow soldiers, whom made the same choice he personally did to sacrifice their normal lives to enlist, presumably with virtuous intent i.e in Australia’s name, were effectively betrayed by their own.
That might leave something to be desired about his morals, but this must be considered in context, and “not whistleblowing” under prior corcumstances isn’t something that could reasonably be prosecuted. Oakes is right to conclude that our military personnel should have been more closely monitored in general. That doesn’t speak to the specific conduct of the soldiers McBride aimed to exonerate, though.
I’m on smoko
I really liked enter the gungeon. It was one of the first roguelites I played. It’s fairly basic in terms of mechanics compared to some newer entries in the genre. But it’s just good arcadey fun. Bonus is that it runs on a lot of systems. It’s still one of my go to’s for plane trips or other offline scenarios
It can become surprisingly complicated with axial deadzone settings, but that’s not really important to understand. The simple concept is it’s the zone in which the stick is moved but no change in movement is registered in-game. The complication that is added is mostly related to more precise calculation of where that zone is
You guys do know that outside the US you can’t generally advertise permanent positions and then just decide it’s temporarily more convenient not to have people on payroll, right?
Y’all need employment reform
Metroid Prime series are more “action games” than FPS’ per se, but they are must-plays if you haven’t, & might scratch that itch. There’s a switch remaster of the first game, none yet for Prime 2 or 3 but it’s likely they’ll come out leading up to the release of the recently-announced Prime 4
Moving a joystick is fundamentally different to moving a mouse. With a joystick there is a spring constantly acting to center it - no equivalent force when using a mouse. So you need to get a feel for estimating that force and accurately counteracting it in various gameplay scenarios. That’s a completely different “muscle” to have a memory of vs. using a mouse I think
Also, modern controller joysticks generally are not great. Most have medium to large deadzones in the center by default. I’d recommend reducing them for more responsiveness. It comes with the tradeoff of being more susceptible to stick drift. But that isn’t something you should be afraid of. It’s a physical impossibility for their design to not wear over time. I’d recommend recalibrating and adjusting settings regularly. At the end of the day, replacing joystick modules only requires screws (no soldering) so it’s cheap and relatively easy.
If you’re really serious you could get some hall effect joystick modules. That way you wouldn’t need to recalibrate often and could keep a consistently small deadzone setting without encountering drift. i.e. default settings from like dualshock 2, when stick drift was just as apparent but people hadn’t gone crazy over it yet.
Minecraft would be fine for learning fps movement in a relaxed setting.
Summit fits image to screen horizontally, ideal layout for me
It was back around 2018 that I was first learning the ropes in b2b sales, but I do think I felt similarly about people being able to detect parts of what I’d written that were copypasted, not lead-specific. So I just stopped copypasting stuff, wrote short nice genuine emails, opened up to the people that wrote back. Called the ones that didn’t. Always hated phone calls beforehand, but some good experiences on a few early calls definitely eased my nervousness.
I remember the first time I had to call the director of a big competitor, he was like “What was that? I can’t hear you, I’ll have to put the top down. I’m joyriding in my [luxury sports car] right now”. I found that extremely funny and it really broke the ice. And once I was able to be casual with him, I found it easy with pretty much everyone.
There has been a lot of investment into exhibition matches over the past few years, and into a Major League Cricket domestic competition which started in 2023.
There have been failed attempts at domestic leagues in the past, but MLC is a T20 competition. That’s a shorter and more accessible form of the game where a match generally takes around 3 hours to complete.
That could make a difference, because it’s a lot easier to keep kids interested for a few hours vs. the more traditional formats that could last anywhere between 8 hours, up to 5 days.
It’s only a 1-month season though, 25 matches over the course of July. I should hopefully make it to a few of them!
D4 has shortcuts for battle pass tiers, i.e. cosmetics. There aren’t any level skips like there is in WoW.
You can skip the campaign at the time you create a new toon, if you have already completed it. It is faster to level that way, because you can stick to activities that reward more XP and don’t have to turn in quests/listen to dialogue. You still start at level 1 though, so it’s not really a shortcut. Rather there are certain things in the game that you’re only required to earn once, given it’s intended to play multiple characters/builds. It’d be a slog to have to continuously go around the game world collecting the minor stat boosts for finding altars, for example. Instead the ones you’ve found will carry over between characters and seasons.
Yeah, P2W is what I mean by paying for power and it’s a good thing for players that it isn’t in D4 (like it is in Immortal for example). I edited my earlier comment to include that other games have come up with more creative ways to monetise cosmetics like you mentioned, but that they aren’t really possible in Diablo for technical reasons. It is very poorly optimised for online play by design - when you load an instance, your client loads the full loadout of every player character in that instance. Their full inventory, stash, everything. That’s part of what I mean - it’s an opportunity to monetise which many players would be amenable to, totally missing from the game.
Personally though, I think that there being minimal compulsion to buy MTX post-game purchase is exactly the way it should be. I wouldn’t expect them to continue a live service with no ongoing revenue, so if MTX is how they do that it should be relegated to rich fuckers with nothing better to spend their fortunes on, so I can point and laugh at them while they fund additional content for me. It’s just weird that a dev would subsequently use “hey 150m big number” to try and claim the situation as some sort of business success, as much as it’s weird players (like some in this thread) would consider this revelation as additional points against D4. Are they completely oblivious to the absolute hellscape in which we exist?!