I will summarise my experience.

When I bought an LG Oled C5 TV and started it up I read the EULA and privacy agreements, there were five of them for some reason. I declined all except for the first.

Buried in the fourth agreement are details of screenshot capture of content being watched, of photos of viewers, facial recognition for age and demographic identification and voice recording of key words for advertising purposes.

So my LG TV doesn’t get internet access.

You mean a common user experience that leaves many new users frustrated.

He works with software so it’s probably because it occasionally snows where he lives and his micropenis.

Huh that’s embarrassing… given I worked for a company that worked on Fallout. Not the company you expect.

I’ve never played them though.

I have no idea what is on the right.

No you described the exact same core business model, and then complained about other tactics.

That you don’t comprehend business models is very unsurprising given you don’t understand how comment chains work.

What are you even doing, man?

Quoting you.

That’s a quote from four posts ago.

Yes that’s how comment chains work.

Out of context, at that.

It is perfectly in context as you’re describing the Gamestop business model in that quote.

where they’re self-dealing by selling the games at full price, re-purchasing them for pennies and then reselling them for near-full price again.

Replace games with books in that sentence, that you typed, and tell me what the difference is. I will wait.

As I’m telling the other person with selective amnesia

Pointing out that you managed to precisely describe the used bookstore business model and unilateraly declare it wasn’t the same isn’t amnesia, it is having reading comprehension.

Gamestop and its contemporaries scamming little kids out of their videogame money by paying them next to nothing for games, reselling them at a huge markup and giving exactly nothing back to the people who made the games.

Bookstores apparently scam readers when they buy books off of people and sell them to other people at a markup, and don’t pay the publisher or author a cent.

It is literally the same business model.

You’ve described the business model of used book stores.

I don’t see anything inherently wrong with that model.

We were using the IPs and post times to identify accounts, then checking IPs that connected to our VOIP servers so we could identify spies and either remove them or feed them false intel.

Basic counter-intel work and all for a video game heh.

We used to do this on the EVE online forums until CCP caught on and banned inline images.

Can confirm this is normal in Aus, Ive regularly been asked how much I paid for the house as well, which I have no problem answering.

I’ve seen what happens when one flies into a persons ear canal and gets stuck.

And people wonder why the only bugs that freak me out are cockroaches.

It was the dead silence right before the sound of a measuring tape being retracted followed by crying over a pinched finger today.

The stronghold, at the very least. It was a major problem in the first game to have your base of operations be a thing that you had to return to with travel time, so it’s a significant course correction to have it come with you.

Sure but that’s a mechanics improvement that people aren’t going to realise because they never bought the game… because an Age of Sail / Pirates setting has never been popular in CRPGs. They should have stuck with high fantasy.

Having a turn-based mode as an option is always welcome especially with large parties but again… people need to play the game to get a feel for any potential improvements there. They didn’t buy it, didn’t play it, and still didn’t do either when turn-based was added.

Larian had zero reason to change a winning formula so I’m not sure why that factors in your mind? Literally a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

I agree that budget isn’t the defining difference, the setting is. DOS2 starts you off on a ship then dumps you on a tropical island. Did it suffer? No… because their game is clearly not a Pirates (Age of Sail) game. You even see a shot of the characters on a big ship during the trailer but then go straight back to combat on land.

There are many discussions on this particular issue and John absolutely refuses to acknowledge it because he likes the setting.

PoE2 actively addressed every criticism I had from the first game

Which of those issues you criticised are highlighted in the game trailers and ads that were run?

People buy games based on impressions, some people do research and watch streams but most CRPG buyers are going to avoid spoilers.

Half of the game trailer on Steam is ship, ship combat, upgrade your ship.

The sales numbers really say the rest. PoE as a setting died and there won’t be a third entry.

There’s a decent Post Mortem by Josh Sawyer but he still just doesn’t hit on the Age of Sail being an unpopular setting for this kind of game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xChOXFJ83

In my defence your comment was a little too realistic…

I didn’t like the gunpowder in PoE1 but could overlook it.

I absolutely hated the initial impression I got that PoE2 was an Age of Sail sort of setting. I wanted more in depth Castle and town building with story not to trade it in for a leaky ship.

It was never a mechanics or art or story thing for me… because I have never bought it and I’m hardly alone there.

I’m simply not interested in ships, guns and naval settings in RPGs.