Thanks for the update, glad you are not ded!

What if he got ill, or has an upcoming holiday and has to make up his quota? I am not sure I want to take that chance.

I would easily say no to his face… but he has a guna nd is willing to use it.

It’s been 8 hours. Either they ded. Or are too ashamed and embarrassed after getting covered in their drink.

PAIGE NO!

This analogy is so bad, it is not even close to what is happening.

I will try and adapt to cars for you(I dont know why), but this is just really really bad.

Say you have designed a car, you can produce them on a very small scale, but you have come to valve(they make cars now) to mass produce. They do so, for a 30% cut(that reduces the more they sell) for everything they sell from their direct sales at the price you have set. There is no material costs or labour costs, just that cut of the price you have set.

Now valve have a sales page and are selling, and you decide that actually I would like more people to see the car, and so you consider selling it at other dealers. Valve says, sure, you can even have the cars for free from us(no 30% cut) and you can have basically an unlimited supply of free fully built cars to sell else where. We only ask that you sell the car at the same price you have set with us if you are selling a car we made.

You want to go sell it new cheaper? You are more than welcome too, but you cant sell the car we produced.

Such a bad analogy, but that is closer to what is actually happening.

Just think about how this works.

Steam currently allows you to generate keys and sell them for free, only stipulating that they must be sold for the same price as on steam.

Let’s say they are told that stipulation can’t be enforced.

Valve, will probably go with 1 of 2 options.

1 - you can no longer generate keys. So all the great key sites(GMG, Fanatical and so on) no longer exist, because no steam keys.

2 - Valve charge an upfront fee for keys generated. Now smaller pmdevs and publishers can no longer supply keys to sites, because they can’t afford the upfront costs.

What incentive does valve have to continue offering this free service? If it can be exploited for the detriment of steam, they will stop providing it.

Phone tech is really boring. Almost everything looks the same, they are all x% faster than last year’s model which still does everything perfectly fine. In terms of hardware, the phone has kinda reached the optimal place.

I’m not the target audience for bleeding edge phones though. I take photos, listen to music(using Bluetooth and wired headphones), browse the web and message people. I don’t really play games or use it for work.

By far the most interesting thing to me is foldable phones. I really like the idea of a flip phone, but I don’t think it would be too happy sitting in my sweaty pocket while I cycle.

Trust me, you could absolutely follow the example of other drivers and use your phone while driving.

I don’t know if I would call it spicy, been a long time since I had just celery though. But I am really sensitive to the taste of it.

Even if you chop it up small and cook it into something, for me it ruins a meal and gives it this horrible aftertaste. Probably best described as puke, that kinda acidic taste

Ohhh can I partake in this.

Fluoride contamination, consequences and removal techniques in water - https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/va/d1va00039j

See look at the scary headline, and the first sentence - “Fluoride contamination has created a drinking water crisis globally.”

Only downside to this paper… it kinda mentions how great it is for humans to consume low levels of flouride.

Yes, where it can be moved and stored or potentially used in other applications.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsengineeringau.3c00049

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/innovators-trying-bring-down-sky-high-cost-direct-air-capture-2023-10-24/

Wasnt a difficult search.

And yes, more money(realistically probably a lot more) is needed to refine and improve the technology. No it isnt going to end climate change, but it is a small part of what is needed.

Paige NO!

I wouldn’t pick 8, but I am a dog person. Oh,and I just don’t want to be insulted by cats all the time.

Pretty sure he means a deluxe edition upgrade as a mtx.

Where some games allow you to get the base game, try it out and upgrade if you want. Rather than diving in at the deep end and not knowing if you’ll enjoy the game.

I feel the Linux - Linux fanboy is very wrong these days. It does not have a monitor at 22 degrees

So for fighting games, character passes are a good thing(overall).

If you bought SF4 at launch and continued to play the game throughout it’s life, you ended up buying the same game multiple times. This was essentially a few characters and a balance patch(had new mechanics as well). This the fragmented the player base a lot, so if you were playing the base game you couldn’t play with someone on the latest version.

Street Fighter 5 however, switched to character passes and even being able to unlock characters with in-game currency(difficult if you came to the game later but possible). This means everyone got the balance patches and major system updates, so the player base stayed as a single entity.

For a niche genre, this is significantly better than multiple purchases of the same game, and allows for a game to get more updates over a longer time.

However I do wish they kept in more unlockable content like costumes, colours and stages.

Specific to Street Fighter 6 though, they have a battlepass(which is not good, but isn’t terrible either) which the free version gave/gives out a bunch of character rental tokens, so you can play with DLC characters you haven’t purchased.

I think it is a bit more difficult than that. I have really enjoywd watching downhill bike racing in the past, and both the men’s and women’s races are incredible.

If you don’t know, It is a single rider time trial down incredibly technical courses on a mountain bike.

Unfortunately I don’t think it would be good to mix men and women, because the men are faster. This year’s world champs race had the men finishing 30s faster, the fastest woman would have been 66th. Results

I would love to see more mixed competitions in the elite level of sports where it makes sense.

I feel like neither of you have played it with your description.

For those that havent played -

The game has 4 types of currency, Medals, Requisition Slips, Samples and Super Credits. Medals, Requisition and Samples are only rewarded through playing the game(Either for completeing missions, or found in missions).

Super Credits can be bought with real money, but can also be found in mission.

You unlock Strategems with Requisition Slips and upgrade them(Ship Upgrades) with the Samples.

You then have “War Bonds” which are where you unlock the rest of the gear(Weapons, Armour, Boosts and more). This is where you use Medals. The War bonds are most equivilant to a Battlepass, but they are not timed and do not disappear so even if you come to the game a year later you will be able to buy and unlock everything on the very first one. The game shipped with the basic war bond that everyone had, and the first premium war bond, this is 1000 Super Credits to unlock, then you use Medals to unlock items with in it.

As for other micro transactions, there is a “Super Store” that has 4 items in it that rotate ever few days(I cant remember the time it is 2 or 3 days), that has surprisingly cheap items especially compared to what other companies are doing. They are not just purely cosmetic though, but they do not really offer anything you can not already unlock through the warbonds. Armour has different classes(Light Medium Heavy), and they have a different bonus(More Stims, More Grenades, throw grenades further) and so you might find a combination that you can not get on a warbond that you want(Light Armour with more range on grenades for example). I don’t know if I would class it as P2W, no bonus is overpowered or game changing, but it is definitely not just cosmetic.