I don’t think so, the ARPG I have in mind wouldn’t be open world, would have no campaign and much less focus on story overall, a much more detailed crafting system akin to Path Of Exile but perhaps less punishing, and much more focus on stacking up as many extra modifiers as possible rather than being limited, push your team to get the best rewards.

No timegating, no daily/weekly quests you must log in for, the only limitation is your skill.

I’ve been thinking about an ARPG based around World of Warcraft’s mythic dungeons.

Scalable, multi-player, enhanceable instances where completion of more difficult versions of the instance rewards in better gear and crafting options.

The idea is that the content is created for a 5-man party (1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps) but you can try solo it, or bring up to 20 people to massively increase the difficulty and the rewards. Instances would follow WoW dungeon’s formula of trash mobs (which drop crafting materials and have rare drop chances for certain gear) pathing you towards a succession of bosses with very different, complex mechanics with stages, signaled abilities, and skill requirements.

This would include a character levelling system to unlock new class abilities and mechanisms, a party finder system, certain dungeons locked behind character level and the completion of other dungeons at a certain difficulty level. Perhaps you could extend it to add in “world bosses”, massive 200-man bosses with a chance at particularly unique loot, but of course that would require a certain level of infrastructure and a game population making it justifiable.

Honestly I’m not very bothered. I struggle to see this as false advertising when they’re declaring on public forums that physical copies will not include a disc, and it’s quite likely that those physical copies will also state on them that it includes a code and not a disc.

Given our increasing environmental concerns the idea that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of discs are not going to be produced for this is a good thing, I think. I imagine the only reason a physical version exists at all is to ensure the game has a presence in physical stores, so large advertisements can catch people’s eye, so stores can do related promotions. In essence, all those empty boxes will be produced purely for advertising purposes, otherwise I imagine they would scrap physical copies all together to save the related production, transportation, and logistics costs.

I believe it ensures a much much sooner end, yes, but exactly when depends on who wins.

If Putin wins his authority will be significantly weakened, his army will be significantly weakened, and it’s likely he’d have to pull more of them away to ensure his leadership and security even after Wagner is defeated.

If Wagner wins the army will likely be immediately recalled out of Ukraine, they will want to confirm the army’s submission to new rule and ensure no counter coup attempts, but also it would be very easy to blame Putin for everything and win popularity with the Russian people by bringing back soldiers who would likely have died pointlessly.

Crimea, however, may be a point of contention, depending on the opinions of the winners.

There have been a bunch of mixed reports, I think it’s tough to say exactly what’s true. I saw one person suggesting that given Wagner’s numbers in Africa it’s likely there’s really only half that number there. But there have also been reports of Russian military and intelligence personnel switched to support Wagner.

As someone else said, I think for most people it’s just a matter of wait and see what shakes out.

That’s a reasonable response, but the other guy’s concerns are absolutely not meritless. Tech platforms demonstrating and offering up these kinds of currencies or tokens do explicitly talk about ideas such as limiting certain currencies from being spent on certain things, or enabling/disabling from a central authority.

China is already rolling out this type of currency albeit with limited success, and while I haven’t heard anything about the e-CNY being tied to their social credit system, or punishments being inflicted in the shape of limiting access to funds, it’s absolutely a possible option.