In other news today...
-
players calculated it would take somewhere between 40 and 80 hours of playtime or $80 to unlock the top-tier characters like Darth Vader in the shooterâs online multiplayer
I actually don't have an issue with them wanting to make it really hard to unlock the character; what I have an issue with is if players can reduce that time to zero simply by shelling out an extra $80.
-
@anotherusername
Well, given that they rather publicly went from "all character unlocks will be in lootboxes for ${MICROTRANSACTION_PRICE}" to "oh, hey, we hear you about pay to win in a AAA title, we'll make them all unlockable by just playing the game and the boxes will just be skins and stuff" earlier in the beta... and then they locked two of the most iconic characters in the entire game behind 40+ hours of gameplay (each!), which also means you don't get any other loot boxes during those 40 hours you're saving for Luke and Vader, and you can buy things to make the in-game credit grind go faster...
-
@izzion Call of Duty has been doing something similar for years now with guns (some of them quite good) being purchasable for real money. Or if you don't want to shell out the cash, take your chances with the loot boxes and hope you get lucky. What's the difference here?
-
@bulb said in In other news today...:
@dreikin said in In other news today...:
@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
@lolwhat lightweight paper-mache furniture is more prone to tipping over than the heavy, solid stuff that your grandparents cut out of solid oak with their bare hands (or was it a beaver chainsaw?).
Ugh, old furniture tends to stand on little, fragile legs with a short base for its height. I'd much rather have the modern stuff.
Fragile? A dresser from solid wood weighing over 100 kg can't have fragile legs. And I am not sure what âshort baseâ means, but normally the legs are just continuation of the corner beams, so the base is as wide as the piece, which is as good as it ever gets.
I've seen a lot of fragile legs on the '60s and '70s stuff, but that is already chipboard and much lighter, not what @anotherusername was talking about.
Another observation is that it is much easier to tip furniture standing on carpet than one standing on wooden floor, because soft carpet still provides a bit of support for the higher legs in the first degree or two of banking.
'60s and 70s is old to me. But aside from that, I mean stuff like these:
And by "short base" I mean that the narrowest horizontal dimension between legs is small relative to overall height and weight distribution (i.e., easy to tip).
-
@dreikin said in In other news today...:
'60s and 70s is old to me.
I feel that way sometimes too... (born in early 60s)
-
@erufael said in In other news today...:
@izzion Call of Duty has been doing something similar for years now with guns (some of them quite good) being purchasable for real money. Or if you don't want to shell out the cash, take your chances with the loot boxes and hope you get lucky. What's the difference here?
Call of Duty is already seen as a cash-grab series, and has been for a couple dozen games now?
Slightly more seriously, I think it's a "people are getting tired of this shit" thing.
-
@boner said in In other news today...:
Netsafe has created an artificially intelligent email bot called Re:scam, which is designed to waste scammers' time with a never-ending series of questions and anecdotes.
That's nice and webscale and all but I'm afraid it will be a long time until it can create beautiful works of good old side-splitting art such as this masterpiece of artisan scambaiting
-
@izzion said in In other news today...:
the buzz before its release
The frickin' comment has literally gone viral I think.
At this moment it's
Ho-Li-Thuck.
-
@tsaukpaetra Yes, Sum Ting Wong.
-
@lolwhat said in In other news today...:
@tsaukpaetra Yes, Sum Ting Wong.
Yeah, it's going on 620k now. Methinks the Internet is trolling hard...
-
@hardwaregeek said in In other news today...:
Did they get that backwards? These requests are normally called FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) in the US
They're called that in the UK too, so it's not backwards. I don't know where they got the term they used from.
-
@izzion said in In other news today...:
locked two of the most iconic characters in the entire game behind 40+ hours of gameplay (each!)
While I can understand the outrage at paying $80 to get those, or back-tracking on what they previously said on how to get them, 40 hours of gameplay for the two biggest awards of the game doesn't seem so huge.
Dedicated gamers will easily spend 3-4 hours per day on the game, if not more, so they'll get the rewards in 1-2 weeks, i.e. before their friends will have even bought the game. Slightly more casual gamers who spend 1 h/day average (either every day or maybe twice 3-4 h during week-ends) will get it in about 1 month. Still not outrageous to me. Or is it bad to not get a bonus immediately and have to, shock and horror, actually make an effort to get it?
-
@remi said in In other news today...:
Or is it bad to not get a bonus immediately and have to, shock and horror, actually make an effort to get it?
It depends on how the game handles it. If the game makes it so that you have to do a multitude of different things to prove your worth then it might be fine, if it's "do this pointless thing over and over again, say, oh, a couple of hundred times over" then it starts to reek like work and an attempt to make you shell out money just to escape this hell.
Or are you really waiting for "Sisyphos, The Gameâ˘"?
Either way, best to wait it out.
-
@remi
In all previous versions of Battlefront, Luke and Vader have been available at minute 0. And, if you think Star Wars, what characters are the ones that come immediately to mind as "I want to play that!"? It's gonna be Luke, Vader, Leia, Han...One thing that apparently got swept over in the furor is that there were bonus credits awarded for various single player campaign milestones, which cover quite a bit of the unlock costs. So EA cut the unlock costs by 75% in response to Sunday's Reddit FUBAR, but also cut the achievement bonuses by 75%... Reddit detective consensus seems to be the entire thing was deliberately orchestrated by EA under the "all news is good news" principle.
-
@izzion said in In other news today...:
@remi
In all previous versions of Battlefront, Luke and Vader have been available at minute 0. And, if you think Star Wars, what characters are the ones that come immediately to mind as "I want to play that!"? It's gonna be Luke, Vader, Leia, Han...Well, yes, but that would only make it a good reason for those characters to not be available from start! I mean, you can see it two ways: either you want to give the players the thrill of playing those characters from the start, but then it's harder to come up with additional things that will really feel rewarding. Or, you can count on the fact that everyone will want to get them, and make them as the hardest rewards of the game, because players will be motivated to get them (much more than Jar-Jar or a random secondary character). If your game needs to have those characters available from start to hook players in, then you probable have a bad game to start with...
One of the SW-themed game that I enjoyed was the Lego game, and you definitely did not get those characters with full powers from start.
Reddit detective consensus seems to be the entire thing was deliberately orchestrated by EA under the "all news is good news" principle.
Or incompetence. As always, never attribute to malice what can be caused by incompetence... But even if they're right and it was planned, honestly, that would make sense. I've got the feeling redditors and similar are hugely over-inflating their own influence. They might get a meme rolling but in most cases that'll stay there, or if it spreads it'll become old news in a couple of weeks, and many people (such as those who will buy the latest AAA game for XMas) will not see that in any case. If the game is good, people will buy it whatever reddit says.
@jbert said in In other news today...:
It depends on how the game handles it. If the game makes it so that you have to do a multitude of different things to prove your worth then it might be fine, if it's "do this pointless thing over and over again, say, oh, a couple of hundred times over" then it starts to reek like work and an attempt to make you shell out money just to escape this hell.
Yes, of course. But that would be true of any stuff to unlock, not only the expensive bits. Even if it requires only 1 hour of gameplay, if it's tedious repetitive gameplay, it'll be decried, and justly so.
-
@remi said in In other news today...:
Or incompetence. As always, never attribute to malice what can be caused by incompetence...
<img src="whynotboth.xlsm">
It's EA; odds are it's some combination of both.
-
@pjh As a christian, my opinion is that this couple were just exhibitionists who didn't know it.
-
-
@polygeekery said in In other news today...:
The first was (accidentally) strangled while it was being moved, the second was shot by local authorities after it escaped and was "prowling too close to homes."
-
@izzion said in In other news today...:
@remi
In all previous versions of Battlefront, Luke and Vader have been available at minute 0. And, if you think Star Wars, what characters are the ones that come immediately to mind as "I want to play that!"? It's gonna be Luke, Vader, Leia, Han...One thing that apparently got swept over in the furor is that there were bonus credits awarded for various single player campaign milestones, which cover quite a bit of the unlock costs. So EA cut the unlock costs by 75% in response to Sunday's Reddit FUBAR, but also cut the achievement bonuses by 75%... Reddit detective consensus seems to be the entire thing was deliberately orchestrated by EA under the "all news is good news" principle.
-
@bb36e said in In other news today...:
@boner not using a bidet is
Most places (at least in the USA) don't have one.
-
@Erufael said in In other news today...:
@izzion Call of Duty has been doing something similar for years now with guns (some of them quite good) being purchasable for real money. Or if you don't want to shell out the cash, take your chances with the loot boxes and hope you get lucky. What's the difference here?
The difference is between "pay to play" and "pay to win".
Buying a better gun doesn't necessarily make you a better shot, and other classes, equipment combinations, or player teamwork may still beat out any given "super-gun" in an FPS.
On the other hand, hero characters like Vader or Luke presumably have much higher innate stats and stronger, better abilities, giving players who have them a huge advantage over any who don't. This can quickly make the game unfriendly to newbies, and cause those who would have otherwise kept playing to lose interest because they never feel like they can win without spending loads of cash.
-
-
Fearing that he wouldnât be able to get a good nightâs sleep due to the heat in the poorly ventilated room, the 44-year-old decided to sleep on the floor and plug in no less than three electric fans to keep cool. Unfortunately, he didnât take into consideration Chaiyaphumâs drastic drop in temperature at night, and the problems his body would have adjusting to it.
And then there were those who just posted morbidly funny comments like âhe died in front of his fansâ.
-
-
@boner said in In other news today...:
To clarify (at least how it was reported on the local radio this morning) it was a half-eaten sausage roll.
To the point where I thought "would there be all this fuss if it was a full one?"
Followed by "FFS, get a life you lot," after they got some radom twat on wittering on about "right to not be offended" as if it was a thing. Who then somehow () managed to drag Charlie Hebdo into the conversation/interview.
I gave up listening to him at that point.
-
This post is deleted!
-
@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
Maybe he had no money and she offered to let him work off the debt.
If you think that a woman has to justify killing someone, it means you hate women.
-
@pjh said in In other news today...:
about "right to not be offended" as if it was a thing
What about my right to not be offended by
stupidpeople getting offended by everything and anything ?I hope this offends them
-
@boner said in In other news today...:
Unfortunately, he didnât take into consideration Chaiyaphumâs drastic drop in temperature at night, and the problems his body would have adjusting to it.
Dying from hypothermia in Thailand... clearly not a Canadian
-
@chozang said in In other news today...:
@anotherusername said in In other news today...:
Maybe he had no money and she offered to let him work off the debt.
If you think that a woman has to justify killing someone, it means you hate women.
Apoetion thread is
-
@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@izzion said in In other news today...:
the buzz before its release
The frickin' comment has literally gone viral I think.
At this moment it's
Ho-Li-Thuck.
Seems the storm has settled on 678k.
-
@boner A real case of fan death.
-
Commercial aircrafts are hackable, news at 11
-
@remi said in In other news today...:
As always, never attribute to malice what can be caused by incompetence
Clarke's Corollary: sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
-
"What happened might be considered one of the most stereotypical Canadian political squabbles of all time: a party uses a hockey fight to attack their opponent and ends up apologizing for it."
-
We call that "networking".
-
-
@timebandit I didn't find any indications that he was actually able to access flight control. He probably just got access to a media server or something.
-
@rhywden Yes, the article is seriously devoid of any information indicating how serious the breach would actually be.
It also needs to be mentioned that unlike CAN used in cars, the usual data-link between avionics modules, ARINC 429, is one-way. So any component that has radio data link (on an airplane this old probably only ACARS) most likely can't even transmit to anything critical.
-
-
-
@masonwheeler I will keep that in mind. Need to find a job at one of the poles.
-
-
-
@boner said in In other news today...:
And then there were those who just posted morbidly funny comments like âhe died in front of his fansâ.
The puns are the only redeeming part, everything else is just
That it's a common superstition in Korea may have to do with the fact that Korea gets serious cold at times so it's at least a theoretical possibility although you'd have to be pissed out of your mind anyway not to wake up long before life-threatening hypothermia. Chaiaphum's record low for November over the last 35 years was 13°C, so either this guy had had two longnecks of Mekong Whiskey as a sundowner or someone with good connections to the cops had a disagreement with him so they decided it was a clear case ofsuicideunfortunate accident.
-
@boner said in In other news today...:
Fearing that he wouldnât be able to get a good nightâs sleep due to the heat in the poorly ventilated room, the 44-year-old decided to sleep on the floor and plug in no less than three electric fans to keep cool. Unfortunately, he didnât take into consideration Chaiyaphumâs drastic drop in temperature at night, and the problems his body would have adjusting to it.
Err..
while others confirmed that the differences in temperature between day and night are considerable in Chaiyaphum province and that the fans made the air even colder
If anything they would have made the air warmer.
-
@pjh ically, yes. But they made the perceived temperature of the air colder by adding a windchill factor.
-
More pictures and a video available in TFA.
-
@boner said in In other news today...:
More pictures and a video available in TFA.