arun

Early access reviews are notoriously unreliable these days. Think Cyberpunk and DAV just to name two. Sure, you can’t get a refund if you purchase two weeks later. But even though that’s the case, you can still make a more informed decision than going in blind by preordering. 2 weeks later, authentic community sentiment will drown out most of the deceptive marketing and paid-for reviews. Heck, you can even find playthroughs on YouTube to judge a game against your own personal tastes.

Saying that there’s no upside to not preordering just isn’t true.

Bioware was a ghost of its former long before their staff was cut.

My dude, unions without ‘monopolistic control’ have no teeth when negotiating with these parasitic companies. Collective bargaining is only as effective as how many people are in the collective.

Not anymore. Mostly for 3 main reasons.

• The only reason I’d ever preorder something now is if there’s a significant risk of stock running out quickly. That’s not a thing with digital games, ask there’s no need to consider it.

• I’ve been burned far too many times by getting shitty games on day one, after having fallen for all the fake hype, deceptive marketing, sophisticated astroturfing, and paid-for reviews. Now, as a rule, I’ll wait for about 2-4 weeks at least to see what the community sentiment is before I buy something.

• And finally, games are fuck all expensive now. 70 dollars is already a bridge too far for many of the bug-riddled, unfinished slop big corpos push out these days. And then there’s “speculation” that RockStar will price GTA6 at a 100 dollars, giving all the publishers out there the precedent to do the same with their own titles. I’ll just take my time and wait for them to go on sale for at least 50% off before I consider getting something. (P.S. I say speculation, but I’m almost entirely convinced that it’s a deliberate industry psyop to get people primed for this insane price tag and reduce the sticker shock-induced backlash)

Au contraire, I think this might be more harmful than good. Characters who get added to this pool are the ones who have been powercrept so bad that they’re never going to see the light of day anymore, even at E6S5. By comparison, characters in the shop on the other hand, are still decently meta relevant, like RM and Luocha.

If you’ve been playing the game for a long time, you’ve likely got multiple eidolons for most of your standard units. Which means, you’re closer to getting those golden spirits and accessing characters in the new shop. Now, what happens if you replace some of those standard characters with blade, Fu, or Seele, who you’ve likely only got at E0, or maybe E1 tops? You’re going to take much longer till you start getting the golden spirit tokens, and by extension, characters that are relatively more valuable.

That’s my consultancy theory anyway. If you want these 3 charcters, wrll, good for you. But I certainly don’t think this was an altruistic and benign move from Hoyo’s part.

You’re not the only one, friend. The only thing I care about is what sort of pricing hijinks they get up to, which could have industry-wide consequences.

Eh. I’m noticing Mavuika doing this far less than a certain scythe wielding “father”.

This seems to be the theme with a lot of romcoms these days.

Yup. The ban just prohibits you from engaging with communities. Like, you can’t post, comment, or upvote. You still have access to your account and feed. So, you can choose to delete it. And I think you should be able to delete individual posts/comments too, though I didn’t try that myself since I decided to just nuke my account.

God that’s scummy af.