Kobolds with a keyboard.
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You encounter the merchant where you can buy the MTX stuff in the first few hours of the game. You can’t even use the majority of them before reaching that point.
I would honestly bet money that they’d designed the game to not have microtransactions, then some executive at the 11th hour told them to find a way to include them, and they made them inconsequential as a sort of malicious compliance. Not that I think it’s OK to have them in the first place, it really soured me on the game initially. I think it’s considerably worse for including them, but they are completely meaningless.
There is a fairly nice base location near the center of the map that has ~6 coal and ~6 ore nodes, and is on a plateau making it functionally immune to NPC raids. I found it completely accidentally; there’s the 3 wildlife sanctuaries around the outside of the map and they all face inward at different angles, so I was trying to triangulate where they were “pointing” to see if it was leading somewhere. Turns out it was leading to a sweet base location.
This is noteworthy because there’s 4 resources (ore, coal, sulfur and quartz), so you need a base with access to 2 of them if you want to have all 4 generating passively.
For what it’s worth, if you customize the difficulty of your game (which you can do at any point, including after reaching the 40s), you can change most things, including resource drop rates and how much effort it takes to mine them, xp rates, Pal encounter rates, capture rates, etc.
I had a similar experience as you; by the time I hit 42 or so, I had the capture power maxed out, and most eggs were not giving me anything interesting, and I had the whole map revealed, so exploring had lost its luster and I was not enjoying the thought of grinding out another 6-8 levels to start being able to tackle some of the harder challenges in the game; I set the XP rate to x4, and doubled the resource rates, and it pretty much solved the problem for me.
Obviously if you’re playing on a server this isn’t an option, but if it’s just your own single player game, consider trying it; you might find some settings that smooth it out for you.
What if I want to buy something that costs 1000 points, which equates to $10, and I have 300 points in-game? I want to use those 300 points, but I want to cover the rest with $7 of real money. If they only list two costs - $10 or 1000 points - I can’t do that, but if they let me buy 700 points for $7, I can do it.
It’s only really a problem when you can’t buy the exact amount of points you need to make a purchase (which granted is most of the time). There’s legitimate reasons for using a “points” middle-man, though - for example, in a game where you can earn premium currency while playing, but also buy it; if you were making purchases directly, rather than buying the points you need, you wouldn’t be able to buy something using both earned and purchased currency; it’d be all or nothing.
This is definitely a very small minority, though, and 99 times out of 100, I agree with you, it’s a scam.
I prefer playing characters as little like me as possible. If there’s a non-human option, I will always take it. The further from human available. Weird alien race? That’s my jam.
If I have to be a human, I’ll often play a female character because it’s the furthest from ‘me’ I can get within those constraints. I’ll also usually play a character of a race I am not, for this same reason.
All I could find on a quick, cursory search was this, from their ToS:
What data consumption requirements apply to the Service?
Comcast applies a monthly data consumption threshold to Xfinity Internet accounts. The company retains the right to trial or adopt a different data consumption threshold or other usage plan for the Service at any time. If we do this we will notify customers and, if necessary, post an updated version of this Policy. You can learn about the data plan that applies in your area by going to https://dataplan.xfinity.com/. You can view your current data usage at any time by signing into your account on xfinity.com and viewing the data usage meter at https://customer.xfinity.com/MyServices/Internet/UsageMeter/. You can also use the Xfinity app to view your data usage.
I don’t have Comcast, so I can’t get any further details.
Geez, receiving a couple marketing emails would exceed 250kB. Maybe if you were using a text only email client and doing nothing else, and you only get emails from close friends and family, that could be sufficient…
I guess you’d also have to be using a non-smart phone, or you’d have to go in and disable all telemetrics and similar features of every app you used…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe this falls under net neutrality. Net neutrality would only come into play if they were (for example) throttling you for most things but giving you full bandwidth for Twitch.tv and YouTube and Netflix, but nothing else.
You’d have to read the fine print in the agreement you signed. Comcast is one that I’m aware of that says “unlimited” but if you exceed a large amount of data, they’ll throttle your speed to something unacceptably low for the remainder of the month. (I believe it used to be 350GB but I can’t believe it’s still that low.)
It doesn’t have to be nationalized, but it doesn’t make any sense for a civilian to be able to unilaterally make decisions like that while under military contract. At the very least, any decision to change or influence the contracted service while the contract is active should require some sort of review and approval. Maybe there’s a good reason it’s the way it is, I’m just a layman, but every time I hear about this it just baffles me why it was even allowable for Elon to make the call he did, or any call for that matter.
I tried copying game data when we were replacing our PS4 hard drive, but it just caused a lot of problems (with games having to “verify” the installation when launched, which was a very lengthy process, probably longer than just re-downloading it would have been; I don’t know what it was actually doing). We were able to preserve save data, though.
I don’t think FromSoft ever stated that it was a return to OG form. Reviewers say all kinds of things (including that the tutorial boss is too punishing, heh).
You’re obviously free to dislike the game, though; I’ve been having a great time with it, but I also didn’t come into the experience expecting (or even hoping for, really) AC1/2/3, so maybe that’s got something to do with it. Is it different? Yes, absolutely, but it’s still fun.
I was not referring to you specifically, but rather the significant number of people complaining about the difficulty of that encounter - take a look at the negative Steam reviews, for instance - at least when I was looking at them a day or two ago, about 30-40% of them mentioned that specific fight as being too hard. I’ve also seen it mentioned in a review, which is just unreal to me.
To respond to you directly, though… You seem to want the PS1 / PS2 era AC, which I don’t think this is trying to be. You even note that AC4 and AC5 started to skew away from that; why would you assume that AC6 would be a return to the “old ways”, rather than a continuation of the evolution they’d already started?
I’d also note that the ‘Fly up and hit it with the melee weapon’ boss is the tutorial boss in the first mission, before you get the ability to customize your AC, so your argument is kind of misplaced there.
At this point I would consider a return-to-office mandate at my job to be a massive pay cut. It’d be the equivalent to spending an extra 2-3 hours a day working (because that’s what the total commute would be), plus money on vehicle upkeep. If they weren’t willing to couple it with a ~40% raise, or with letting me reduce my hours worked by 10-15 per week to compensate for the commute time, I’d quit before the change in policy went into effect, no question.
But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.
If that required data and research to realize, they’re simply out of touch or stupid. More likely this is just an excuse for not realizing they couldn’t bully people as effectively as they’d hoped.
You know, it’s funny, I used to feel big FOMO when it came to games I wanted to play. Then the Epic Game Store came along, and started paying for timed exclusives, and I adopted the philosophy that I’d just wait for the games to get a Steam release.
There’s only been a handful of instances where I even bothered buying them once they came to Steam; turns out that by not buying them when they’re being hyped by all of the new release marketing, I’ve mentally moved on to other things by the time they come to Steam, and I just don’t feel the need to buy them anymore. I just needed help getting past that initial mental hurdle.
The same applies to companies whose philosophies I object to; as long as I have a reason to mentally justify not buying them initially, I just lose interest in the products entirely very quickly.
This whole thing seems so weird. Why is Meta using the courts to enforce their ToS, anyway? Theoretically, the penalty for a user violating Meta’s terms would be Meta closing that user’s account. Unless the lawsuits are just frivolous scare tactics intended to drain the defendant’s resources…