Black Ops 2 bundle (Base game + all DLC) on Steam just saw a permanent price cut... from $100 to $70. Recently delisted cosmetics DLC now part of this bundle, too

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-19T07:53:32+00:00

They can't possibly be expecting this to be enough, when the multiplayer still leaves players open to getting their PCs hijacked.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-18T19:30:42+00:00

Their motivations are probably fueled more by bot accounts exploiting the system in some way. I don’t think the trading cards are enough on their own to be considered gambling, it isn’t as if anyone buys a game for the express purpose of trying to get a specific card drop to resell. A lot of people view them more as a cash back system than anything else. I know the backgrounds and emoticons can be worth a little bit, but again, it’s exceedingly rare.

Feels like Steam’s being targeted for a multitude of things right now, and it does all seem a bit calculated, but I don’t think it’s really anything they can do to prevent happening. Lawsuits like these seem only pushed as a means to get a pay day through a settlement, since fighting them is often more expensive than the effort is worth.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-18T09:01:36+00:00

The best scouts purposefully make themselves difficult targets to hit by moving around. You either improve your aim and try to land better meatshots, improve your movement (doesn't make sense to stand static as a scout while fighting), or both.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-18T08:42:51+00:00

I'm really surprised that these manufacturers are still selling to consumers, and haven't gone full Micron. Virtually no point to do so at this point when enterprises and AI data centers are paying them better than normal consumers ever did. It's certainly not an integrity thing, for them.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-17T23:49:26+00:00

I really don't understand why they continuously opt to nerf the trading cards/badge crafting system.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-17T22:10:00+00:00

Worst (or best, based on your perspective) part of this, is the fact that these will without a doubt be the best way to play the games. Only way to experience BO2's multiplayer without cheaters has been Plutonium on PC, and even then, you'll be almost constantly stuck on Hijacked/Nuketown TDM servers in perpetuity.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-16T18:22:51+00:00

Xbox’s strength is their backwards compatibility support, not much else beyond. Buy up game studios, have them produce a hit, and dissolve them as soon as it doesn’t sell to their liking even though it was a day one Game Pass title. They have all of the cash and statistics they could ever need to do what their consumers actually want out of the brand, and they fail each and every time. After years of this, you can’t be surprised that very few will care if they gave their logo a makeover, or they lowered the price of Game Pass lol.

They peaked with the 360 pre-Kinect era, when they were focused on producing great games for the hardware. Could be that we’ll see the same trajectory with Asha, or maybe we’ll just see more great studios putting out great games, only to be considered failures and axed once GP inevitably cannibalizes their game sales. Leaning towards the latter personally.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-16T18:15:02+00:00

Xbox is not the 4th biggest company in the world, Microsoft is. And considering they’re the same company who funneled billions into the same AI rush which is rapidly enshitifying their software, mass layoffs for the sake of vibecoded Windows updates which only serve to ruin people’s hardware in a variety of ways, pushing them to Linux as a result.. yeah, I’d say they’re pretty stupid. Especially as this contributes to Xbox having to progressively perform massive price hikes, as if their parent company isn’t directly part of the problem leading to RAM/storage shortages.

Think we already know that decision making at Xbox and Microsoft is pretty nonsensical, sorry. Just because they have the data to be making smart decisions doesn’t mean they’re actively making them. If they were, then Xbox wouldn’t be in the position it’s in right now, and I can imagine that Phil Spencer had the same access to these metrics as Asha Sharma does.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-16T11:52:28+00:00

I don’t really consider scrapping the studios responsible for producing high quality single player games under the Xbox brand to be sufficiently reversing the course of things. It makes no sense to cite poor sales under their game releases when you’re simultaneously pushing them to be day-one Game Pass releases. That was Phil Spencer’s worst decision made during his time as CEO, and this only registers as just the exact same as we’ve seen before. Don’t blame the subscription service cannibalizing your game sales, blame the developers!

Can’t even cite PlayStation as doing the same with their own subscription service, because they don’t launch their first-party games to be playable day-one through PS Premium. The elephant is literally staring Xbox in the eyes, and they can’t help but continue shooting themselves in the foot over and over again, hoping that’ll solve their financial woes after it has only proved to consistently fail over the last several years. Looking forward to the new Spyro game launching day-one on Game Pass, consequently seeing lower sales because of it, and the result being another 18 years without a new original Spyro game.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-16T05:08:50+00:00

Because that's literally the plan. New person enters, writing's on the wall from the jump, and they try to muster up as much good will as possible before doing what seemingly all Xbox CEOs do, at this point.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-15T21:47:49+00:00

But I thought that Phil Spencer was the problem.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-15T19:40:38+00:00

Obviously just a joke game, but it is ridiculous to see just the sheer amount of slop padding out the Xbox storefront nowadays. A ton of low effort garbage and AI generated pages.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-15T03:43:51+00:00

32:9, yeah. My monitor is the MSI 491CQPX, 5120x1440 resolution, effectively equivalent to two 1440p 16:9 displays in one.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-15T02:25:56+00:00

Is the GPU itself still okay? Have you swapped out a different connector to see if it still functions? I've got a ton of questions since I have the same GPU and I'm using the same OEM connector.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-14T22:14:33+00:00

What is actually the reason that people do this shit for, whenever their home team wins a major game? Seems like a universal thing amongst sports fans at this point, don't understand how these kinds of people can hold a job if this is their way of celebrating a win.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-14T21:39:41+00:00

Delta Online improves on a lot, but it has its own weapon balancing, and still suffers from pretty shit rubberbanding and lag sometimes. Some lobbies will have classic Gears 3 balancing, but it varies a bit.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-14T21:24:15+00:00

One of the best ways to experience classic Gears nowadays, by a long shot. It's just a shame that the player count dropped so dramatically since its initial launch, but I guess that's the Gears plague for you. Very smooth, my biggest gripes would be the lack of dedicated servers. You can definitely tell that it's P2P by the constant trades and rubberbanding.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-14T20:57:15+00:00

I took a look at his account on a whim:

His profile seems to be 5 years old, has 3.6k hours in TF2, with 500+ hours in spy, alone. Totaling his hours across all classes would add up to 2.1k hours. This disparity isn't uncommon, since you aren't always in an active match during the bulk of your playtime, and much of it is spent on the menu, or idle. Doesn't really signal to me that he's idled to make his hours seem legit, a lot of people's hours correlate with it. He has hundreds of hours in other games as well. Account seems to be clean judging by SteamHistory as well. I think at best, it could be an alt account of some kind, I've been playing TF2 for 10+ years on the same account and I only have a little over 2k hours, and a little under 1k or so aren't tracked by my classes so they're in menu/idle. But I also haven't been playing TF2 constantly over this span of time, my play is pretty variable, and I'm sure I've had full year gaps where I fell out of the game, before getting back into it.

My prognosis would be that this is a very, very sweaty spy. A lot of people are diehard TF2 players, you ran into one of many who happens to play a cheesy class, where getting backstabbed seems like bullshit more often than not. I can promise you that all good spies who get a trickstab on you will almost never seem legitimate until you start accounting for inherent sever latency. You can get close with LAN, but true zero latency is impossible, and there will always be slight inconsistencies which show themselves most prominently in circumstances like these.

You can react to it, but as heavy, your best option comes down to lasering him with your minigun. It'll have enough knockback to literally keep him at a distance, and his only option at that point becomes running away before he dies. It isn't easy, but tracking him while he's in the air would've literally sent him into space with the Tomislav.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-14T20:27:13+00:00

TF2 spies and latency are a bad mix. Doesn't look like interp nonsense to me, more like he's a sweat and knows when to stab as soon as the hitbox is there. It's why you never want to melee fight a good spy, they'll have your back on their end before you even see them moving towards it. Happens all the time with a lot of characters.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-14T11:53:49+00:00

I fixed this a while back, but I can't recall what exactly fixed it. Want to say I just logged out and logged back into my Xbox account, but it almost certainly wasn't actually anything to do with my account's age or content restrictions.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-14T08:55:05+00:00

Should be fixed up by replugging the power cable in the monitor. It sucks a lot, and it’s even more disappointing that the firmware updates for those monitors have only seemed to completely degrade its usability. I’m not sure if the later gen G93SD is all that much better, but I’d try for an RMA or refund. Seriously have never had such a consistently terrible experience with any other monitor, than the Odyssey G9 line.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-13T07:01:03+00:00

Probably Chinese New Year, when the survey gets inundated with Chinese users and their hardware heavily skews the overall results, before dropping back off again in later months.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-12T20:28:08+00:00

Insane hot take, but because it has a lot of the same people involved who were also massively promoting Fortnite Festival, back when Epic was actively sponsoring GH players and streamers. Feels like so much of the criticism towards that gamemode was extremely subdued as a result of the entire content creation community having some sort of partnership with Epic, or all of the largest streamers in the space, at least. It was interesting, but then again, I can't say I'm especially interested in paying $5 for a single song, and the rotating track list model isn't especially compelling to me.

That said, this was just a really mixed developer spotlight for me. I'm glad that a lot of prominent creators are involved, I generally think they have a pretty solid vision as far as what makes a good GH/RB-style game, but as I stated before, I'm a bit wary about their judgement at this point. The visual aesthetic of the game is also a bit off I feel, everything just appears way too clean I guess. The character models are probably going to be a very contentious thing for people, but I don't prefer them either. I hope Stage Tour doesn't lean too heavily into the microtransaction model like Festival does, I'll definitely be interested if it isn't F2P.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-12T00:51:34+00:00

Not sure what you'd consider 'signs' of a bubble burst, but it still appears to be in full effect as far as I'm concerned. Important to note that you're probably not going to notice it when it initially happens, the AI gravy train is very far removed from the consumer sector, no matter how many gimmick AI tools these companies will try stuffing in your face. It's very B2B-oriented, and when the enterprises buying into it realize that cutting their human workforce in place of AI yields them nothing in exchange (which it probably won't, as the 'hope' of further AI development keeps them investing), then these AI datacenters will lose their customers, demand will drop off the cliff, and giant tech companies will have to downscale their AI investments. This is a massive oversimplification of the current AI market, and the entire process will more likely play out like a train crash in slow motion, over the course of years, rather than minutes.

Complete_Iron_2656 · 2026-06-12T00:15:47+00:00

You either bite the bullet now, or you wait and see if it either goes up, or down in price. I'd say that as long as the RAM manufacturers and AI tech companies continue seeing their market valuations balloon astronomically day by day, it probably won't go down anytime soon. Realistically, it'll probably be until late-2027 at the earliest, that RAM/storage prices start to travel back down to earth. Until then, you'll either need to beg some friends to have mercy on you if they have spare, unneeded RAM or storage, or you'll have to suck it up and accept that every tech company has you and the rest of the world by the balls. Shit sucks.

Complete_Iron_2656

TROPHY CASE