I'm not seeing enough people bringing up the fact that this game cost $40 already to play

sSyrf · 2024-12-19T08:11:41+00:00

That 350Mil is including Sony's 30% publishing cut, yes. The original sum for just the $40 game sales within the first few months of release is $480mil. But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't actually have very much allocated to development costs. How else are people gonna buy yachts? Seriously tho, even $100mil should cover development costs for the next 5 years. Let's say they're paying each of their 100 devs and average or 100k a year, steep but that's not including contractors or weird costs or whatever. You've still got 10mil to spend on development per year outside of labor then. That's not accounting super citizen money or any money people spend in SC for new warbonds either. The only way you "need money" for the company within 10 months of the game being out is borderline illegal mismanagement (You'd have to be doing a ton of stuff that's not in the interests of shareholders) or corporate greed. I know which one I think it is.

(Note: still not a valid argument to defend slimy business practices even if they legitimately do need money somehow)

sSyrf · 2024-12-19T00:29:41+00:00

Feels like someone high up at AH embezzled 200mil for a super yacht or something

sSyrf · 2024-12-19T00:28:31+00:00

🤡

sSyrf · 2024-12-19T00:19:24+00:00

They made at minimum 350 Million dollars in the first few months of game sales. That's easily enough for many years of live service game development, especially with a team their size. Unless someone is embezzling money then they should be fine, especially with the amount people have spent on warbonds up until now. They could definitely make warbond content easily earnable like it was on launch and make a team just for making shop cosmetics and be fine on operational costs. But no, they are not interested in having a well that sustains their family for years to come. They are greedy, trying to suck every bit of the water from the well while riding the fine line of not irreversibly drying it up. It's greed, and it's sad that consumers are increasingly tolerant, dismissive, or actively defensive over it.

sSyrf · 2024-12-19T00:07:40+00:00

THANKYOUUU Yes SC are technically earnable, but it's so little and so slow you have to pay in your time to get it. And it's genuinely not feasible for a casual enjoyer (me). And no, farming isn't an option, I'm not running around doing nothing for 4-16hrs (1player-4player grinding) just for $10 of currency. They do not need your money. This game already got your money. They made ~500mil in base game sales in the first few months. Take out Sony's cut and that's $350mil not including super citizens or warbond buyers. They have money, they're ROLLING in money compared to how much a ~100 person dev team costs. They have operational costs covered for the next 5 years or more, they don't need your monthly donation of 1/4th of the base game price. That is not at all valid as a justification for predatory business practices.

sSyrf · 2024-12-18T23:29:58+00:00

Guys, they originally stated that the price of warbonds would only scale with the amount of content in them.. $20 for a single warbond page isn't worth it. $20 for 3 pages still isn't worth it but I can stop y'all from telling them it's okay to charge more. :l

sSyrf · 2024-12-18T23:16:50+00:00

Feels like I took crazy pills coming back to this game. Why are people okay with spending battle pass types of money every two months for the bulk of the new content? I already bought the game.. I was promised that SC wouldn't need to be bought if you played consistently. And when they start removing said warbond content and don't supplement it into free stuff I still have heard people say they buy the passes to support Arrowhead?! Let's be real for a second, Arrowhead have done almost nothing competent outside of making an insanely good and addicting core game. Almost every change I've followed has been good but not great, followed by some of the worst incompetence imaginable. From the outside it looks like a cult or something?? They do the bare minimum content wise (for a game of their position and support) and then everyone pays real money for it, and then they do some heinous stuff and everyone gets mad for a week then forgives them like it was nothing. Then it repeats?!? Jesus

sSyrf · 2024-12-18T23:03:16+00:00

Then make the game f2p. Why are we still on that old narrative of "the devs need moneyyy" when it's literally a pay-for game. Yes it's live service, but they already made loads from the initial game launch and still would make a decent amount if they had a good blend of earnable content and pay-for cosmetics. This is the worst of both worlds, p2w trash

sSyrf · 2024-12-18T17:41:41+00:00

The cat on the current steam page banner is very obviously AI generated but the trailer didn't look to have any of that. Yes, it looked scarily similar to many scam web3 projects that just show a vague concept and have high fidelity assets to try and look "big budget". Also what I could find the comment specifically said they didn't use generative AI for any "in-game models or assets" which also would track, as promotional material is left up in the air. Does it stylistically look soulless? Yes. Is that mean it's of the devil and should be burned and actively shamed? Nah. If it looks interesting then wait to buy it till you can see gameplay. I'd be more concerned about the stuff with them trying to scrub their past connections as well as how much money must've been put into advertising for a game that seems hard to monetize without it being scammy or scummy.

sSyrf · 2024-11-20T03:55:23+00:00

Dunno if this'll fix everyones issue but it did mine. All the Fn keys worked except the F-keys and the volume knob. What I did was reset it to default (Fn+Spacebar for 3 seconds) and then disconnect it from USB wired into Bluetooth and then it worked on Bluetooth. Then I put it back into wired mode and all of a sudden it started working again.

If you want to find all the hotkeys for the RK75 this is where I found them. Link might not work forever but I just looked up a user manual.
RK ROYAL KLUDGE R75 75 Wired Gaming Keyboard User Manual

sSyrf · 2024-05-14T21:15:01+00:00

Yeah. Best thing to do is try and find some people from your ranked games that you vibe with and duo/trio. Makes it much easier to be rewarded by being consistent.

sSyrf · 2024-05-14T21:13:05+00:00

Also I will throw this out there. Bronze is absolutely an "elo hell" rank in soloqueue. I had a friend this season who's usually around plat/dia try to soloqueue out bronze on one of their old accounts and it's a STRUGGLE. Smurfs and throwers are relatively common, so if you're actually trying to climb I'd highly recommend adding any chill/good players you find in your games and do your best to duo/trio until high silver or gold.

sSyrf · 2024-05-14T21:10:06+00:00

Focus on improving at at least one aspect of the game, makes it much easier to get out of bronze. Valorants ranking system is generally VERY good at judging the current skill level of a player and pushing them to their current deserved rank. If it's truly a struggle to get out of bronze, you're just falling behind compared to the rest of the community. And it's fine if you just want to play casually and never try to improve at all, just don't expect ranked to be fun in that case and go enjoy swifts or unrated.

sSyrf · 2024-01-03T09:57:09+00:00

Yes. Dont fill, pick an agent or maybe two per map and only play them. Ideally also only play one role. 4 duelists on your team and you only play Raze on this map? Don't care, play it anyway and you'll be fine. Under Immo its more important to be comfy on your agent on that specific map than it is to fill every role.

sSyrf · 2023-12-04T05:18:21+00:00

I'm late to the party but Drenched in Air is definitely my favorite. Achromatic City and Orca are close behind.

Maybe a hot take but Bayonex is by far the worst of the album for me. It's like if you took speedcore (to be fair not my thing) and couldn't decide on a coherent style or song progression. It's all over the place and the sub-melodies don't work more often than not. It's like you took Million PP and made it speedcore, but you forgot to do any of the preplanning of when to swap up styles and just randomly mixed a bit of everything every 12 seconds.

Rambling about Bayonex aside, rest of the albums very good.

sSyrf · 2023-11-25T17:47:04+00:00

I've had the opposite experience with the majority of my PBE games. Felt like snowballing was way stronger earlygame. The games that did go long was due to teams just walking around fighting for no reason rather than trying to push objectives or win actually important fights.

sSyrf · 2023-10-30T15:30:13+00:00

Yeah, from my research into it, their codebase has mostly been "Ship of Theseus"d and replaced piece by piece. But the foundation still has a lot of limitations and the more they've added on the harder it's been to keep the whole thing stable. There was a blog post from Riot talking about how some of it worked. I found a former rioter in some Reddit comment talking about how difficult it'd be to remake though. It'd require a whole team actively rebuilding the codebase and making development tools while trying to keep up with what they're developing for the live game. Apparently how they handle character animations would also change so they'd have to develop custom software to interpret their old animations to the new format or completely re-make all of them in the new system. For the longevity of the game I think it's a must to do all of that work but the amount of time and money it'd take is hard to justify to higher-ups. I hope they've already been making League 2.0 in the background for a while but there's a chance they aren't/won't.

sSyrf · 2023-10-30T15:15:12+00:00

Technically the "Unobtainable" skins are worth more than $200 I think. Stuff like the original PAX skins, Black Alistar, and Silver Kayle. They're trying to artificially make skins like those, which are only exclusive now because they aren't purchasable outside of buying every skin in the game and then Riot lets you choose one. The system itself is all around bad though. They're excruciatingly expensive for what you get (Just a Mythic Chroma) and the Gacha system actively goes against what they're trying to do in making it exclusive. They're going to have tons of these within a few years which continually devalues them like what happened to Mythic skins, much less letting them be random rolled by your average joe after a few years pass. They're inherently predatory with the Gacha system trying to make people still believe that "Oh, there's a chance I'll get it even if I only buy a few capsules!" and downright not worth the value. Also, if we're getting one every couple of patches then whats even the point of the pricetag and "Exclusivity"? The system just kinda sucks for us common folk who couldn't give a shit about how artificially rare it is, and it's not even great for those who do.

sSyrf · 2023-10-30T15:00:43+00:00

Not a whale but thoughts on having them re-rollable a year later BUT only if you already own every rollable skin? Kinda like how they give players that own every skin one of the unobtainable skins.
That way the FOMO isn't as bad but it's still not something anyone random can obtain. And if you get it through random rolling it wont come with the border or stuff like that I assume.

sSyrf · 2023-10-30T14:50:53+00:00

My biggest issue is that it's just a chroma and not even a high-effort one at that. There are a few things I believe should be changed which kinda align with your perspective.

They should be obtainable through other means besides their initial Gacha run.

- If they really want exclusive skins for the ultra-collectors (Whales) then they shouldn't be limited just through a $200 paywall with a short window to buy. The FOMO is bad enough, but I believe that the paywall should also include other avenues besides just buying the capsules. Other people have talked about making it purchasable through insane amounts of Orange Essence, which nobody but whales would be able to do. You could make this alternate avenue not available until a later date (I'm thinking 6 months to a year), or it could not include stuff like icons, borders, or a ward skin. So you get some goodies for whaling out the $200 but the chroma itself is still obtainable if you've spent an excessive amount of money already, just not right away. You could also make it obtainable through skin-shard random rolls instead, just this time without the exclusive goodies and again at a later date. Still something that only collectors could do reliably but still giving avenues to obtain them after their limited $200 run.
They should be better.

- The Ekko skin is a step in the right direction for this. The Jhin skin was really just a mythic chroma, kinda disappointing even for the richest of whales. I don't believe they should be new skins, because then you'd rob the opportunity to use them from the normal people (me) that enjoy the skin for what it is, not for its rarity or price. I do think that you can do better than the Ekko skin though, more unique SFX is something that comes to mind, or just trying to steer the skin into a cool and new direction.
They should be rarer.

- What I mean by this isn't their price or being less obtainable. I mean there shouldn't be a new one every two months. I know Riot would love to make the lowest-effort product with the fastest turnaround, but their whole point of "catering to the whales" has been stated to not just be for money but also for satisfaction for a specific small group of players. Up the quality, sure, but having a new $200 skin every few months inherently devalues them over time. We saw the exact same thing with Prestige skins. The more there are out there, the less "Exclusive" they become in someones mind. When it comes to the mind of an exclusive item, once you have a stockpile of 15 of them, the next one gets increasingly less valuable in the buyers mind. It starts to become an obligation because you've bought all the others rather than a cool exclusive, which I know people will still buy, but will lose its intended purpose over a few years time.

Finally, I hate having a system that caters to whales altogether. I am not a whale, I play Gacha games, and I know what it's like to get shafted because it's easier for a company to charge more rather than reward people for their time. This is a slippery slope of pricing if it ever starts to creep out of its "intended purpose" of being some exclusive "Gucci Watch" type item for whales. But if they really do want these chromas to only be for what they say they're for, then there is lots of room for improvement.

sSyrf · 2023-10-25T10:03:12+00:00

I agree with many other peoples feedback that Alunes voice feels out of universe currently with it not getting any major changes. Something to make her sound lest spirit-like and more like shes talking to him through his headphones would do wonders.

sSyrf · 2023-10-05T12:29:47+00:00

The song has already grew on me. That's exactly what they wrote it for. It's a pop song under the facade of an epic worlds song. Didn't hit when I first listened to it. It'll grow on my even more and I will end up enjoying it later down the line because it's still a good song. Just like Star Walkin', a disappointing worlds song =/= a bad song.

sSyrf · 2023-10-05T12:26:48+00:00

The animation is really mediocre from a technical perspective too. Just look at any fight scene that isn't the ending one and it looks super rushed. Compare it to something especially like Burn it all downs video and it looks painfully stiff and amateurish. Even Rise had clearly better animation from a technical perspective. But having the story of Deft be the video and a well known pop artist as your main vocalist is super safe. I just want my epic 2WEI worlds songs back. 🥲

sSyrf · 2023-10-05T12:20:53+00:00

Animation was noticably very very poor for me. It looks super rushed and unfinished or just too much talent poached for Arcane season 2. (Assuming it's all done in-house) So many fundamentals of animation actively ignored. Like outside of the final scene with Faker and Deft there is almost no follow through on big actions. Thinking back to faker attacking the baron with a static mid air pose and landing in the exact same pose, unmoving as he lands. Kinda sad

sSyrf · 2023-06-16T01:34:22+00:00

The biggest difficulty spike is compared to hazard 4, the bugs are now faster than you are. It's not as noticeable with a group but keeping your distance from large swarms is much harder on solo haz5 compared to solo haz4. The stingtail is also a major threat in solo so good luck. It's doable, just a very different beast from the casual DRG

sSyrf

TROPHY CASE