It’s worse than that.

Yes, you can pay for a streak freeze. If you don’t, you’ll probably find that you were given one for free anyhow. You’d have wasted your gems.

Yes, you can pay to undo a streak loss. It’s more than paying for a freeze.

It’ll give you multiple chances to pay for all that, too. If you’re out for days and then come back, you can pay to fix your streak.

What is the point of a streak if you can just buy your way back to it?

Also, I had paid for the last couple years, which (IIRC) includes free streak freezes. It still asked if I want to pay for them. I’d say no, and find I had one anyhow, or a friend had miraculously given me one.

But during the last year (365 days) my streak was actually only at 190 or so because I’d used so many streak freezes that I got for free. I wasn’t even trying to keep my streak.

When I finally let my streak die, the icon started trying to guilt trip me into coming back with horrible icons of Duo being sad, heartbroken, or even dead.

The constant mental manipulation that was well beyond what gamification should ever be was what finally drove me to just quit playing altogether. I had already canceled my sub long ago, but I’m not even going to use the remainder of this year I’ve already paid for.

I was going to say they should only be comparing them under the same driving areas, since I know they aren’t allowed in many areas.

But you’re right, it’s even tighter than that.

There are 2 types of “free”. Liberty, and price. “Free as in beer” means they mean the price version of the word. It’s a really old saying now.

Small size means a smaller battery. If they make the phone’s processor too powerful, the battery will run out in less than a day, and then everyone will be mad about that. There’s also less surface to dissipate heat.

Making things smaller is harder and more expensive, but people who want small phones don’t want to pay more than large phones.

Ahh, financial blackmail. That makes a lot of sense for him.

There are even games that already do this. I still end up second-guessing, but at least “you last saved 8 seconds ago” makes me pretty sure I got it.

to break even with what Netflix would cost in that same time frame

Sure, if you only watch Netflix stuff, but not Disney, Hulu, Peacock, Max, etc etc etc.

But also, if you’re willing to give up a little content and a some quality, it’s cheaper than Netflix. A lot cheaper, if you insist on not having ads in Netflix.

In theory, it’s possible for games that don’t use encryption. None of which are official Switch games.

Normally I’d disagree (because games written for a single console don’t do well with hardware upgrades), but since the old console already runs at different speeds when handheld and docked, I’d expect most games to be able to handle faster processors safely. We’ll have to see how that shakes out. If it really does run them better, and it has drift-proof sticks, I’m quite interested. Otherwise, I’ll wait a year or 2 until there’s a good, cheap library of games for it.

Right, hence I said “greatly reduces the chances”. I know some people are still affected.

I think with careful, controlled exposure, they could greatly lessen this feeling (or maybe even eliminate it), but it’d be a long road and I question how important it actually would be to them, so I don’t actually suggest it.

Personally, I love VR. I’ve always been an avid fan of 3D TV/Games and VR, and I always will be. I long for the day that AR is properly implemented.

But I also understand that others don’t share that love, for personal or even physiological reasons.

No, because they weren’t for games and they pretty much had always-on video passthrough, which greatly reduces the chances of getting nausea.

Sure, but if he wants to play them, he’ll need the client. And it sounds like actually does want to play them.

A couple years ago I signed up for an email provider so I could use my own domain and avoid Google being able to kill my email account. They’ve got a spam filter, but it’s ridiculously bad. I’ve been looking for better ways, but still haven’t found them.

Ironically, I’m hoping a free locally-run LLM will soon be able to filter emails appropriately. I haven’t seen anyone trying yet, but I’m sure they’re out there.

Oh man. There’s only one of those dungeons that I actually like, and I got almost 2/3 through it solo, and decided that I just didn’t care enough. I’m sure I could have done it with enough tries… But ugh. So time consuming.

I totally respect people that do it even once, and people that do it for every dungeon are basically gods.

When I was a kid, Tomb Raider was a pretty easy game, except this one part that required absolutely perfect timing for a some running and jumping between platforms for a bonus item.

At the start, I could make it to the next platform. After a while, I could do 2. Eventually, I got 3. After a long, long time, I finally managed to string all of them together… And screwed up the very last one.

Here’s the thing, though. I got it on the very next attempt. I had learned that sequence so well that it actually wasn’t hard any more, even though it was nearly impossible for me at the start.

Afterwards, my parents (who watched the whole thing) told me they had never seen me focus on something so intently for so long and they couldn’t believe I managed it.

That’s what souls games are, from start to finish. Every single encounter is basically impossible at first, until you die and learn enough to get through it. But you start from the beginning of the game every freaking time.

Honestly, free-2-play economics are so baffling that nothing they do surprises me.

There’s a Genshin Impact McDonalds collab where you have to buy a very specific happy meal to get some in game wings (which I very much want) and some other garbage. I actually considered just buying the meal and giving the food to someone else (homeless?) because I can’t eat that crap on my diet. But instead, I settled for telling everyone around me that I want the code if they get one, and I’ll just hope.

How does that help Genshin Impact? I imagine it helps in the same way as this nonsense physical copy. People get excited about physical copies, even in normal boxes, and they get excited about exclusive items that can’t be obtained any other way. That pulls in a little money directly from the sales of the plastic, but it also creates a ton of buzz around the game like this whole thread.

I think. As I said, it’s pretty baffling. I have to file it under “there’s no such thing as bad PR” most of the time.

The disc is 100% trash. People that buy this want the cards, keychains, and (especially) the exclusive in-game items.

I am surprised that it doesn’t also come with some in-game premium currency, though.

As for $40 in-game… That alone is going to net you some trash. You’ll pull a lot more on the free gems you get just for exploring and playing. Sure, you could get a great character, but the odds are back-loaded so that you generally won’t pull a 5-star in the first 70 pulls. $40 is like 40 pulls, maybe?

Props for using G1 characters, but…

That movement looks like some novice opened up UE4 or Unity and just threw the models in without adjusting anything… And it might even be worse than the default character controller.

I’m on the free trial of DL. It’s still this ugly icon.

Besides the other games mentioned here, there’s also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What’s_Inside_the_Cube%3F . Read the completion section to see just how bad it was.