somegadgetguy @ somegadgetguy @lemdro.id

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2 yr. ago

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Last one I went to was trashed and most of the shelves were empty. I keep thinking they could make more cash sub-letting kiosk spaces to smaller tech brands. If there's funds rock the flea market look, they might as well go all the way.

It's supremely disappointing, looking up campaign contributions, how little money is required to influence our politicians.

I got in pretty deep on Marvel Future Fight a couple years back. It really bothers me how a family friendly franchise will be packed with pressure points and gambling mechanics.

The game starts fine, as a short mission based story line, and progress happens fairly quickly. You play missions to get character bios (points) to unlock more marvel characters, and then you can build small teams for different missions.

As you start unlocking more characters, you also need to rank up the characters you own to make them more powerful. Again, the basic level upgrades are easy, as you collect material per mission, but as you start getting into the middle game, ranking a character happens through RNG.

You upgrade a character though multiple resource points, Rank, then Tier, then weapons, uniforms, gear, and crystals. There is no set "cost" for upgrading one part of a character. You build up a bunch of materials, and then you take a spin. There's a random amount of progress made spending the material, and each upgrade path becomes its own slot machine, with its own materials to spend. You MIGHT get lucky and get a full upgrade to a power crystal in one turn, but more than likely you'll need to burn HOURS of game time grinding to build up the materials, spend all the materials, and be left with nothing.

If you want to shortcut that progression, it can cost HUNDREDS of dollars to rank ONE character to a point where you can be competitive in online events and in guild play. You won't be competitive with just a couple high ranking players, you need a FULL roster for the multiple events available.

At present, Marvel Future Fight includes over 250 playable characters. Each needs to be ranked and upgraded through multiple game mechanics, and new uniforms are regularly released that also require RNG mechanics to own and upgrade.

Whales will spend THOUSANDS of dollars at the start of a new event, and when new characters are released, to chase the game's meta. Sure, you aren't "buying a lootbox", but players are spending money to build up resources, only to throw those resources away at multiple slot machines built into EVERY character. It's one of the most insidious games I've ever played, and it's marketed at kids and teens.

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Yeah. I'm back to buying discs for the movies I want to support. Then I can always hang on to a copy no matter where it might live on streaming apps.

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Spot on.

A lot of folks are finding out that their bosses never REALLY cared that their job was done well, or even competently. If the company can save money with an AI that gets a bunch of stuff wrong, that's "good enough".

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Damn. Sounds like another LG situation for a phone division. That sucks.

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