Sell games and consoles for Cash Online - Trade in Games
Sell Sony Playstation | Sony Playstation Console Trade In
Sell Game Consoles for Cash | Trade in Old Game Systems
Sell Xbox One video games, consoles and controllers - Swappa
Where to get broken consoles? : consolerepair
Where to Sell a Video Game Console (and Get Cash for Your
Best places to sell video games for the most money in
Sell Your Broken Device - Gamer-Tech. Xbox, Playstation
Sell Game Consoles | Game Console Trade In | musicMagpie
where can i sell my broken game console
where can i sell my broken game console - win
In my 28 years of Gaming Experiences... Cyberpunk 2077 is by far the most unbalanced gaming experience I've had to date.
Hi all, I feel like it's time to share my opinions and thoughts after letting this subreddit cooldown for sometime. Around February of last year, I began work on a massive passion project developing https://NETRUNNER2077.net after following this title and being a massive fan of CD Projekt Red from the original Witcher title. When they announced Cyberpunk 2077 would be their next IP I was immensely excited as I'm a huge Cyberpunk genre nerd in all forms from art, movies, anime, philosophies, books, cultural significance and relation, aesthetics and more. So having my all time favorite game company work on a huge open world Cyberpunk "RPG" instantly generated immediate interest. Now where to even begin? Please note, I've yet to purposely "finish" Cyberpunk 2077 in hopes of CD Projekt Red making a strong come back later on in the future, and hopes that they'll eventually release a REDKit for modders in order to create some incredible work and help flesh the game world out. I have put around close to 200 hours into Cyberpunk 2077 exploring the different Life Paths and their effects on the world. Lots of walking, No fast travel and tons of time lost in an attempt to "Immerse" myself in the experience. I refused to finish Cyberpunk 2077's Main Story for several reasons. The largest being I'm typically against playing titles that are obviously not complete. On top of that, I've invested so much time and effort into researching, designing, learning web design and working towards building an awesome platform in order to properly cover Cyberpunk 2077 with a safe bet of thinking "This couldn't possibly be bad" only to coming around to reality very shortly after and that this title truly needed ATLEAST another year of development time. There are aspects of Cyberpunk 2077 that are, in my opinion, worthy of putting it in the all time legendary category of games. Then.. other parts that make games from even 20 years ago look superior. It's a very "unbalanced" experience. So much that it takes the top spot for me personally. My experience of Cyberpunk 2077 is that it feels unfinished and some what rushed in many areas, if that isn't obvious enough already. But the thing is, as many of you probably already know, it just isn't bugs. Features, Content, Weapons, Immersive Elements, AI, RPG Elements and Game Design Systems are flat out missing or just straight up broken entirely. Here are just a few of the elements that I have a problem with personally..
Weapon Balance - Many weapons are straight up overpowered and unbalanced and easy to find early in the game.
Weapon Variety - CD Projekt Red claimed that the game would have a large variety of weapons - this ended up not being the case with a few showcased weapons not implemented in the game itself although they exist in the game files. Also to note most "Iconic" weapons are just a reskin.
Cyberware Balance & Variety - Same thing as above can also account for Cyberware. Outside of Cyber Arm implants, which has its own bulletin
Very Hard Difficulty - Feels like a joke when compared to a lot titles out there. This is coming from someone who chose Style over Substance in all three playthroughs, typically never using a Jacket, Helmet or Mask. I'm no means great at games. This doesn't help with the extremely bugged out AI.
Perk Balance and Design - All around, most perks feel unrewarding and feel vastly unbalanced, once again making it pretty easy to feel overpowered pretty quickly early on, especially if you end up going down the Quickhacking Sub Skill Tree.
Pedestrian, Water and Car Damage Physics / Collision needs a serious second look - Water as of Patch 1.1 is still a pretty much nothing more than a transparent texture.. fire a bullet, a person, hell.. a fucking car and there is not a single pinch of reaction from that what so ever. The collision from bullets, other cars, people and objects is just bad for a 2020 game.
UI - I'm usually not one to complain about an unintuitive UI but it's quite clunky that takes some time to get around and use to.
Artificial Intelligence - It's either extremely bugged or just barely there. It's very bare bones in EVERY NON SCRIPTED aspect of the game. This has already been covered a thousand times so there's no need to go deep into detail with this. Vehicles, Police, Pedestrians, Etc.
Lack of Immersive Elements - One of CD Projekt Red biggest selling points for many fans was making it sound like there would be many ways to Immerse yourself in Cyberpunk 2077. That is not the case outside of World Design, World Building and Story Telling. It's really hard to actually "Immersive yourself and Roleplay" You can't sit at a bar and grab a drink in real time. You can't grab food anytime you like and eat in real time, the few vendors there are in the game completely rip you out of the game world and into a standard UI vendor menu. Installing Cyberware is just a click of a button in a menu after the initially Eye and hand implant, There's bare minimum interactivity with NPC's or the world itself for that matter, Not a single soul uses an umbrella that I've witnessed when it rains in Night City, There's little to no sense in danger outside of the repetitive Gang hotspots... the list could go on and on with this one.
90% of the choices you make during Cyberpunk 2077 feel like they have little to no consequence - While it's true that there are SOME choices you make in this game change certain outcomes (For the most part - the end of the game as reported by many) It feels like a very bare bones system that doesn't seem fleshed out at all. The majority of the time you're only given the "Illusion of Choice" This was very disappointing to witness. Life path decisions feel utterly meaningless later on down the road.
Side Quests are typically very short when compared to Witcher 3 - On top of that, there are a handful of stunning Side quests but it was very disappointing when a large majority of them lasted around 5-10 minutes at most. If you're looking for another Baron equivalent quest line.. It ain't here chief.
The Main Quest is far too short for a game that attempts to coin itself as being "RPG" - Regardless of not finishing, its pretty obvious that you do a small handful of Main Story Quests (Outside of the Optional ones) and you've reached the end.
Life Paths do not largely impact your overall experience and the way the game and story unfolds - Outside of the VERY beginning of the game, which can roughly take around 10 to 20 minutes to do.. and maybe a single quest depending on your lifepath, They ended up being extremely disappointing. You really aren't missing out on doing multiple life paths as you can basically "choose" your ending at the epilogue of the game and just restart from a save and make a different decision to see different outs. AKA making all the decisions you made throughout the game feel meaningless because in the end, its only what you choose during the epilogue that really matters.
A Second Note on Life Paths and Dialogue Impacting Secondary and Third Playthroughs - Very few side main quests can make a small difference by the end and there is no tension build up for your dialogue options that will lead to consequences that make you afraid of your choices later down the story.
What the hell happened to Meredith Stout? - If you went down the route of siding with Meredith Stout during the Maelstrom Mission and have followed Cyberpunk 2077 for some time you were probably completely thrown off as to how cut off that whole "follow up" went down. Very disappointing.
Dynamic Vehicle Chases / Fights are not a thing and were removed from the game - The one Scav chase in the beginning of the game is scripted.. and that's about it, hell.. you can just sit in the vehicle and watch it crash into the wall without doing a single thing. What the hell? Sorry guys, If you choose to mess with gangs.. they're not going to hunt you down, they aren't going to mow you down while you're in your vehicle. It was all bullshit.
Gangs / Corps will ignore the actions you take against their gang / corp and there are no repercussions for your actions against them at any point in the game - This goes with the one above, but I figured I'd expand on it more. Remember when we thought siding with Maelstrom would cause dire consequences in the long run with Meredith and Militech? Guess what? it definitely isn't a thing. You can go about your business in Night City and not have to worry about that for a split second your entire playthrough, no matter who you decide to fuck over.
Side Gigs are typically just filler content - Very little variety and the only way to really extend your playtime if you choose to not walk the streets of a dead feeling night city attempting to immerse yourself in the world. Which is totally okay if there were also other things to do, but for the most part its just generic Ubisoft tier filler content. There are a very SMALL amount of unique ones with actual dialogue.
Netrunner Enemy Types - The worst they do is upload a low quality damage hack and that's it. Half the time they scan your location and nothing happens. No cool shit like having to tap a button repeatedly to stop you from pulling the trigger on yourself after being hacked.
Pacifica is obviously unfinished - Well, it's not hard to tell that Pacifica wasn't complete after the game came out, I fully know the lore behind what happened to Pacifica, but I don't see how it's acceptable that there are literally unfinished areas from game development.
MAX-TAC and Trauma Team were epic during the early Scav Hideout mission, but that's it - Not much else to say here other than they had some really cool "scripted" events during and after that mission.. but other than that you'll see Trauma Team with their ships in the same exact spots you find them and MAX-TAC basically just spawn in as higher tier cops when your wanted level is high enough.
Cyberpsycho Quest line was a missed opportunity - Quite a disappointing quest after tracking down 17 Cyberpsychos regardless if you choose to let them live or kill them. They could of gone deep into some gritty cyberpunk writing and mystery with this but their approach to this was pretty underwhelming and surface level with no depth other than some logs you find, but this can be said about MANY of the quests during the game.
Collecting Cars is just more checkmark optional filler - Hey? Want another vehicle? Let me flood your quest list and phone letting you know you can GPS right to the location and pick it up. Outside of the few hidden vehicles in the game, Collecting cars was pretty disappointing. You literally walk up to location and buy them, no interactivity with NPC's, just click and buy. Might as well of just given a option to have the vehicle self deliver to the non existent garage where all my other cars reside right?
The Garage outside your Megabuilding serves no purpose and doesn't store your vehicles - Can't find your vehicles there now can you? Yeah..
The 6 Month Montage felt like a giant slap in the face, quite possibly cut missions from early game and is the exact SAME no matter what life path you choose - Going down any life path will grant you the exact same Street Kid themed montage. It really feels like these were cut missions that would of fleshed Jackie Welles as a character out so much better.
Cyberpunk 2077 feels more like a decent "Action Adventure" Game rather than a true "RPG" - Not too hard to see this. While it has RPG elements and Dialogue, it's definitely not on the level of Dues Ex, Vampire Bloodlines, Divinity, Elder Scrolls, Fallout (3 & NV). After you exit the prologue it is all downhill after that.
There isn't much to find and see outside of map markers - While there are a handful of secrets, schematics and weapons it doesn't feel very rewarding when finding these things because of how the weapon, items, currency and game design elements were implemented where things are either easily replaced or you're already easily overpowered as it is.
Cyberpunk tries to be too many things and falls short of most of them - With the Ambitious goals, talk and promises.. The one thing I hoped it would be was a truly Ambitious RPG with some really good Immersive elements. I definitely wasn't expecting the world, but it's just sad as to how many elements it falls flat on.
Black Market Cyberware isn't a thing - You see those four options you have for Cyber arms? Yep, That's it. Nothing else, Everything shown through trailers is what you get.
Brain Dance was a MASSIVE missed opportunity - It's pretty obvious that there was at one time far more to brain dance outside of story missions. Hell, it could of found a way to replace the Gwent Mini Game, but alas - In the end it was used for only story missions and not a single side experience on its own.
Night City just feels like a extremely gorgeous backdrop to a Somewhat Linear story - I've already covered several reasons as to why I feel this way.
It feels more like "Johnny's Story" rather than V's Story - While the writing is indeed excellent most of the time. I personally feel like this story is more about Johnny rather than V.
The sense of urgency after the prologue really makes it hard to "Role Play" V correctly. This conflicts with previous statements made by CDPR "Really wanting players to Role Play the character"- The way this was approached was quite confusing, as CDPR offers this massive world yet having a huge urgency that you need to figure out a solution before you die in a few weeks.
The World does not feel "Alive" by any means.. Lack of Dynamic Events - The world itself just feels pretty dead outside of flying vehicles and ads going off every 4-5 seconds. There is VERY little dynamic content like you see in RDR2 where they put a huge emphasis on the world feeling "alive" and never knowing what could happen.
Customization is severely lacking from a world that begs for more of it - Luckily if you're on PC, a lot of these issues have been solved with customizable Cyber arms, More tattoos, Hair Styles, Face and Neck Cyberware and more. If you're on Console though, you're sadly shit out of luck. The lack of visible Cyberware for V was very surprising. No visible Cyber legs, No visible Netrunning gear outside of "Suits", etc.
Jackie Welles was a brilliant character that was quickly thrown away - Let alone the massive spoiler they decided to showcase via the 2019 E3 CG Trailer, It was extremely disheartening to know that saving Jackie was never an option seeing as we were barely given any time with him and a wasted opportunity for possible great plot points. This could of been remedied by actually going through the missions played out in the 6 month montage. For players unfamiliar following Cyberpunk 2077 for so long, I would assume losing Jackie wasn't near as impactful for them.
Cyberware Arm implants are just alternative weapons for the most part - Which pretty much become useless unless you choose to use Gorilla Fists the whole game. No Utility from them, No useful tool elements, Just weapons that become obsolete very fast.
For a Dystopian World that is hyper sexualized, there sure is a lack of sexual content - Not hard to miss this, You have two Joy Toys and two high end JT's later in the game to choose from in the entirety of Night City outside of the selection of Story related characters you come across. Hell, even a lot of characters that dance on poles in the world are fully clothed. Let alone any real Adult themed clubs.
Trains were a missed opportunity - Let's face it, there were obviously systems in place at one point in development to have an actual train system where you could ride around Night City and be able to enjoy the huge vistas that it offers. Now you can just watch one from a distance disappear right through a building.
Verticality? Sort of..? - Take your Home Megabuilding for example and also prime example of cut areas and content. There were suppose to be several areas of verticality to explore in the world and areas and this is just not the case anymore.
"You'll never run into cool areas where you'll want to get in there but can't" - Yeah, that was definitely not the case now was it? There are several areas you would think would be accessible but just aren't or at any point in the game are.
Acid Rain? Yeah.. No. - Remember this? Yeah I haven't witnessed it either. But hey, at least there's acid fog right?
Then you have this huge dystopic metropolis of a city which looks absolutely phenomenal. I think it'll truly go down in history for its amazing design and the techniques they used to craft this insanely dense city. There's truly nothing like visiting Night City and it surely is a unique experience from a VISUAL and AUDIO design standpoint. The writing is solid most of the time as well. It really just feels like they had a very direct deadline and were forced to wrap systems up after changing the core game several times over and over again which caused loads of bugs in the code. I really hope when I come back to this game in a year it'll be quite different but after what CDPR pulled I find it extremely hard to trust and have faith in them. I had so much faith and love in this company that I ended up spending countless months building, designing, and launching NETRUNNER 2077 almost single handedly but after playing Cyberpunk 2077 for weeks, I couldn't even bring myself to write a review over it. Honestly, I would've been way too critical and harsh. Especially after having to monitor and dissect everything that was "said" to be in the game and how systems were suppose to "work" and it ended up being nothing like that what so ever. At this point and time I have no motivation or confidence to continue the platform due to the recent events and actions of CDPR's upper management as well as the highly manipulative marketing that made Cyberpunk 2077 only a glass half full of what it was intended to actually be. I made sure to set my expectations accordingly from what was told from developers to fans via interviews, deep dives and what was reported to sources that was approved by CDPR. With that and the EXTREMELY misleading marketing, it leaves an extremely sour taste in my mouth. I really want to have faith that they can turn this title around, but something feels off. I understand from a legal perspective that they probably cant at the moment. I just hope one day that this game can truly live up to its potential. There is an incredible foundation set, but it's ultimately up to CD Projekt Red if they choose to deliver their originally intended vision. For other upper management in game development out there possibly reading this- if your game isn't finished, please market it correctly as an "Early Access Game" and not a finished product. That is straight up lying and deceiving fans and consumers out there. It isn't right, and needs to stop.
-Elon Musk Oh Elon, sorry to steal your thunder. But GME will make TSLA vol look like TLT. Jeff haunting your every accomplishment yet again. I’m back with the final warning bell. The next time I post in 2021 will be to recap the squeeze’s results and post gain porn along with u/Deep_Fucking_Value, u/SIR_JACK_A_LOT, u/Tomatotowers, and more. This is the last stop before the moon mission. It’s currently not too late. But after Q3 earnings on Dec 8th, it will be. And of course, as always, not financial advice. Just for bragging rights and entertainment. Here goes: Here’s a comprehensive GME overview for all new and returning WSB-monkeys. Sit down and grab some tea. This is a long one unlike the previous posts. GME Overview: The GME story can be broken up into 2 main theses. The first is a deep value play which has credibility all on its own. The second is an infinity short squeeze like we’ve never seen before in history, which has credibility all on its own. When combining the two, you get the trade of a lifetime. In all my (albeit limited) days, I have never EVER seen a trade set up like this before. I’ve pored over every source of historical finance material I can get my hands on, and still have nothing to reference to. IMO, this will look more like the 2008-MBS bet, or the Ackman 2020-COVID “Hell is coming” bet, than TSLA, OSTK, KBIO, or VW. Just a fucking face-ripping, out-of-nowhere, legendary-HOF-ticker bet that will bankrupt some funds and get people fired - and of course, with no community other than WSB’s name next to it in the history books (and if I could pencil in our lovely GME discord hosted by u/BadElf21 and u/RoaringKitty’s YT stream). Let’s begin. Act 1 - The Set Up: Q: Why is GME so heavily shorted in the first place? Why are we betting the long? Aren’t they going bankrupt ala Blockbuster? If not, are we just trading this short term like a HTZ/CCL meme stonk? A: NO. This is a fundamentally solid deep value play at its core. First let’s go back a few years. We must give the shorts due credit in order to understand where we are now. GME has been profitably shorted since 2013 when the market correctly bet on the digitization of video games and spread of mobile gaming. Some data here:
GME sales have plunged from $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2011 to $6.4 billion in fiscal year 2019.
GME Annual EBITDA has dropped from $839 million in fiscal year 2011 (before the last console cycle) to only $111 million in fiscal year 2019.
Net income has fallen off a cliff from $339 million in fiscal year 2011 to a staggering loss of $470 million in fiscal year 2019.
In the two most recent quarters alone, GME lost another $277 million.
The shorts are betting on $0. However, in the last 12 months, GME has shown that their terminal velocity does not lead to bankruptcy. GME has a strong balance sheet. Cash on hand is worth over $12 a share. Net cash is worth over $5 a share and is FCF positive (nixing the bankruptcy thesis). They also paid off $125M in debt last month just to show Moody’s they are healthy due to their incoming console cycle FCF (which may lead to possible bond upgrade, enticing more institutional investors). So give the shorts credit. They had a legitimate case until the last 12 months, when George Sherman (CEO), Reggie Fils-Aime (ex-Nintendo, current GME board member), and others have been conducting a phenomenally well executed turnaround. That explains why we currently have ~70M shares short out of ~65M shares outstanding - but they’re all now caught on the wrong side of the trade. In case the severity of the short interest hasn’t hit you yet, there is a bigger market for shorting GME than the business of GME itself. This is not even taking into account the long holders (Senvest, Ryan Cohen, Burry, Donald Foss, Sherman, Hestia/Permit) which takes ~25M shares out of circulation. So short interest in reality could be around 180%+ of true float. A true head-scratcher. And a worthy opponent. But they’re wrong. Act 2 - Avengers, Assemble: Q: Why am I so sure GME is prime to blow? Isn’t this just another meme stonk hunch driven by WSB and Michael Burry hype? How can a few online gamblers and a few activist investors turn a dying business into a trade of a lifetime? Couldn’t the shorts be right? Also, hasn’t it blown already? A: NO AGAIN. Let me show you the ridiculous Avengers team we have. By Avengers team, I mean all the bullish cases: 1) Ryan Cohen Iron Man of the bunch, some call him the Dog-Man. This guy is a crazy entrepreneur. He took on Bezos with a pet food company (CHWY) and won. Let me repeat - he beat Jeff Amazon without AWS subsidizing his loss leaders. In other words, he built Markk I (CHWY) in a tiny cave with scraps all by himself with his dad, and now that he has billions, he wants to build nanotech Markk 50 (GME). Read up on this guy. He’s as crazy and as smart as they come. He also wrote a scathing letter to GME leadership, but if you read between the lines, he’s not addressing the existing board, who had only been there temporarily. He’s setting this letter up in order to potentially offer a takeover bid (rumor mill - unconfirmed). Either way, GME leadership needs to address this letter in the Q3 earnings call on Dec 8th - which means they need to either post a good quarter, provide good guidance, or add color to existing developments. Otherwise George Sherman (Cpt America)’s ass is out the door and Cohen takes over as the leader of the Avengers through a vote or buyout. Either of which requires shares to be recalled. One more thing to note about RC. There has been no 13D/A filling since his initial purchases. Which means he is STILL IN. He has not sold a single share. 2) GME Leadership and activist investors - Guardians of the Galaxy, Dr. Very Strange Burry, and the old Captain trying to fit in with the youngsters: Dr. Very Strange Burry - AKA Big Short Man. Supreme numbers aspie who might have a screw loose but is unmatched at spotting contrarian trades. *Edit 2: BTW for those asking about his holdings drop. He's trimming to stay under 5%, but still has a large position:
Q1: 3,000,000 shares worth $10,500,000
Q2: 2,750,000 shares worth $11,935,000
Q3: 1,703,400 shares worth $17,375,000
Hestia/Permit/Senvest - Contrarian, activist investors. Cpt George Sherman - Boomer CEO who knows what he’s doing. Reggie Fils-Aime - Beloved ex-Nintendo President. 3) Bond repurchase GME just bought back $125M of debt maturing in 2021. Who cares? Yes - normally this is a nothing burger even for a micro-cap, but if the shorts are betting on $0 - this is clear evidence against that bet. Secondly, rumor mill has it that this debt repurchase plus positive Q3 earnings/guidance will allow Moody’s to upgrade their 2023 debt to A or maybe higher. This is HUGE because it allows institutional investors to long GME without further restrictions. In other words, they may not be allowed to long companies with B- debt. Once this is upgraded, more buyers are allowed to come in. Very underplayed story here. 4) TA - When the stars and crayons align. Here’s an excerpt from our resident astrologist u/JayAreW:
Ignoring the short squeeze element of GME and just looking at chart action, there are two elements that are important to keep track of. The cup and handle pattern and $15.80. While my trading style is 90% technical analysis, there are certain elements which I shy away from – mainly chart patterns. However, it is important to at least recognize the obvious ones because if you see it, chances are others see it too. The main pattern I keep an eye out for are the massive cup and handle patterns. This is an example from Pring figure 1. The buy signal is traditionally a breakout above the handle, and a good estimate for price target is the distance from the base of the cup to the handle, added to the breakout point. A recent example of this is $JMIA (daily - figure 2). Notice not one, but two failures to break the top of the handle and the subsequent parabolic run. Compare $JMIA with $GME and you see almost the same pattern (daily – figure 3). The traditional buy signal would be a breach above the red line (~$15.80). The difference between $JMIA and $GME is that $JMIA was far more condensed; the pattern played out over a period of a few months where $GME’s cup and handle started in late 2019. Playing this pattern exclusively, I would expect a price target of roughly $27, stretched out over a period of weeks/months and not as explosive as it’s African counterpart (assuming a squeeze doesn't happen between now and then). Typically, any chart pattern calls for a retest of the breakout point, so don’t be surprised if $GME retraces to $15.80 and look for a bounce there as confirmation that the breakout is on. The other important element is the $15.80 price. Not only is it the breakout point for the cup and handle pattern, but it coincides to a price point which I believe was a major short-selling entry point (fig 4). Notice the nearly 20% gap down on 33 million of volume. This type of action doesn’t just happen with selling alone and I believe massive short positions were opened on that day. This $15.80 then represents a breaking even point for those shorts if they have not closed their positions (and we have no real reason to believe they have). Breaking even is a huge psychological barrier for people when a trade isn’t going their way and often times represents an exit point for crowded positions. Most of the shorts were already underwater - above $15.80 and that water begins to boil. I believe this position is becoming borderline untenable for existing short positions and is a crowded and disastrous trade. So to recap, $15.80 not only serves as an important chart pattern breakout point, but the proverbial “line in the sand” for existing short positions.
JeffAmazon here again: Note Jay and I don’t agree on a few major points, but are nevertheless both seeing bullish action to come very very soon. 5) Product Mix GameStop is expanding their product mix to include monitors, PC parts, and more. GME is no longer a Disc-Drive only store (which is fine itself), but an all-things-tech e-commerce growth start up. Or you can at least bet that’s the narrative. GIVE ME THAT F-ING CHWY SALES MULTIPLE. 6) Three signs of a bubble: leverage, lack of liquidity, and consensus. This is an inverse bubble - it will rise as quickly as other bubbles drop. KBIO and VW are often quoted as short squeeze examples. Those are wrong comparisons. The only similarity is the fact that shorts were involved. Instead, think of any other market bubble. It’s simply about leverage, lack of liquidity, and consensus. We have all 3 in GME. Everyone thinks GME will go like BlockBuster to $0 and is using leverage to short (by definition and current SI). So instead, think of Burry’s 2008 MBS trade, Ackman’s 2020 COVID trade, PTJ’s Black Monday Trade, or Chanos’ Enron trade. Same thing, different direction. Will go up as fast as the others went down. And oh boy do we lack liquidity. Crowded party, one exit. 7) Phenomenal numbers due to current console cycle. $GME bull Rod Alzmann (Uberkikz on Stocktwits) has great breakdowns on Q4 EPS/order count due to console cycle. He tracks orders by order number among a slew of other information here. Check out his models. In short, we expect over $5 EPS in Q4 base case. Which is bananas. 8) MSFT Partnership gross margin GME is getting free money from Satya Nadella. Conservative estimate $180M, 100% margin for 2 years. 9) January and April option OI OI in option calls for Jan and April are almost 4X that of Decembers. Is GME going to exercise the ITM calls for a squeeze? Why are they so insanely large? Who are these buyers? WTF are they doing? No clue. But something is about to go down. Note put call skew isn’t that low, so no infinity gamma squeeze yet, but it will come as GME obtains meme status. 10) Most importantly, YOU. CNBC and other misled, egoistic mass media companies and institutional investors continue, time and time again, to look down upon the new generation of traders and laugh at WSB. Tell me, which one of them has read all of Moody’s credit reports on GME? Which one of them live streams collaborative GME DD 20+ hours a week for 6+ months straight? Which one of them tracks order flows by the f-ing second based on skimmed CC data? Who scours GameStop to see how leadership is treating their employees and customers at a testimonial level? Do they even know about the bond repurchase? They don’t know jack s-. Act 3 - The Trade What more evidence do you want? Time for action. First, the PT. u/ronoron summed it up well:
A 3 billion market cap (not even 0.5x of their revenues) would already leave GME at $46/share.Going back to their 2013 peak at around 6 billion market cap would leave them at almost $100/share already, not the $56 peak/share. The algos trading still can't appreciate the fact that GME halved its number of outstanding shares a while ago. For comparison. Bestbuy is trading at almost ~0.7x of revenues with lower gross margins. Nordstrom is almost at 0.4x of revenues despite the bigger liability their department stores are having through corona (never mind their uglier balance sheet). GME is still hovering just above 0.2x revenues because stinky shorts overestimated how bad corona would be for GME (e.g. delayed console cycle, digital consoles becoming widely popular).”
PT can easily be over $100. The JeffAmazon target is $420 which gives them about ~$25B market cap at a P/S ratio of 5, maybe 4 with console cycle revenue. That wouldn’t even be considered an euphoric price with today’s growth stocks. For comparison, NVDA is 22, TSLA is 20, and CHWY is 5. Timing: This all hinges on Dec 8 earnings. If GME misses (it historically has), Cohen will use this opportunity to attack leadership and take over as CEO. Therefore, GME leadership needs to provide a great earnings report or else Sherman will lose his job. Here’s my responsible trade (do whatever you want): All in calls and shares now. If IV and $GME is sky-high before earnings, sell half to secure profit. If GME misses and tanks, bet your bottom dollar a takeover bid will be announced shortly. In all honesty, I'm going to probably hold everything through earnings WSB style. My positions: 1/15/21 $30Cs, shares (I would buy April $30Cs too, but I'm all tapped out of cash). Shorts and longs both have their cases. All the cards are on the table. Which side are you on? If I missed anything, comment and I will update above. I’m aiming to make this the final stop for all high-level GME DD. *Edit 1: Educate yourself right now on IV crush (in short, we expect a lot of vol now, so option prices are high. After earnings, expected vol normally decreases, so your option prices will normally drop). GME is the king of IV crush after earnings. If you're playing FDs, prepare to get destroyed like always. Safer bets are LEAPs or FDs after earnings. *Edit 2: All these beat earnings recently: SNE, MSFT, BBY, BBBY, NTDOY, ATVI, TTWO, JWN, M, KSS
GME Tribe: A Story About How Ryan Cohen is About to Kick Down Sherman's Door and Drink His Milkshake 🚀🚀🚀
Come gather ‘round GME management wherever you roam.And admit that the waters around you have grown and accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth saving, then you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’. Story time for the GME crew. All those who are certain tHis iS bLoCkBusTer or the paper hands that sold yesterday can just keep scrolling. We wish you the best of luck in the best of all possible worlds: this one, dear Pangloss. **I’ve tried to submit this three times now and the moderators keep rejecting it. Maybe because I use too many naughty words? I guess I’ll try to clean that up a bit, which runs counter to all my instincts. Did we have a good day Wednesday after that Q3 call? No, we did not. Do you know who lost over $20M (at least on paper) yesterday? Mr. Ryan Cohen. How do you think he felt about that CC and that inexplicable shelf registration that is, as one stocktwits commentator put it, a “poor man’s poison pill” and as obvious of a FU to Cohen and shareholders that the Board could have possibly designed? Do you think he was happy to see that? I think he was thrilled to see it. And now I’m going to tell you why. This is a long post, so I’m going to give the TL/DR sum up for you Paste Eating Rocket Kids, and this will serve as a warning that there are, in fact, a lot of words that you may choose to read or not. So if I still see one goddamn comment about this being a lot of words and where’s the rockets maaaaan, I might just transport myself through this internet connection and [removed to satisfy the delicate sensibilities of the robot moderators]. So here’s the TL/DR: I believe that Cohen is executing a plan to take out the GME Board. And I think that Sherman just walked right into Cohen’s trap because he’s a dumb, selfish Boomer with a huge ego and a Broken Brain. And Cohen is going to be a legend because of it after he executes this plan, triggers the MOASS, and takes control of GME to convert it to a tech-first gaming juggernaut. Now, if you’re in on this GME shit, you likely know the outlines of the story here. But here’s a good link to refresh your memory about why we’re all here: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/k4csaa/the_real_greatest_short_burn_of_the_century_part/ And for further background, my recent post about the battle here between George Sherman, out-of-touch Hired Gun B&M Boomer CEO with the Boomer-est of all possible Boomer names, and Ryan Cohen, Boy Genius, Actual Good Guy, and Man With The Chewy-fication Plan: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/k9apx5/gme_q3_call_thoughts_on_the_clash_between_cohen/ So: are we ready to start READING and THINKING, children? Good. Now what were you doing in the summer of 2020? I don’t give a shit what you were doing. But I do give a shit about what Ryan Cohen was doing. And there is a decent amount of evidence that Ryan Cohen spent the summer of 2020 hiring a bad ass lawyer and crafting a pretty solid plan to wrest control of a struggling Mall-based gaming retailer from its out of touch Boomer Board and CEO so he can turn it into an ecommerce juggernaut like his baby Chewy. And I think we are about to enter the next phase of that plan here shortly. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s first all get acquainted with Christopher P. Davis, Esquire, the attorney listed on each of the 13Ds filed by RC Ventures. Chris Davis, Activist Attorney Extraordinaire and His Successful Use of the Consent Solicitation to Remove Dipshit Boards/CEOs To cut to the chase, Chris Davis (who is definitely NOT the same dude playing first base for the Orioles) is a badass NYC attorney recently recognized as one of the nation’s premier shareholder activist lawyers. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kleinberg-kaplan-partner-chris-davis-recognized-by-chambers-usa-as-leading-shareholder-activist-lawyer-301090571.html. So what was Chris Davis doing in the summer of 2020? So glad you asked. He was celebrating a major win he helped engineer on behalf of a “first time activist Michael Gorzynski” for a wholesale replacement of the sitting Board at HC2 Holdings, Inc (sounds fancy). He helped engineer this takeover via a “high stakes consent solicitation rather than the more typical proxy contest.” Learn more about this here: https://www.kkwc.com/insights/kleinberg-kaplan-advises-mg-capital-management-in-its-consent-solicitation-and-successful-settlement-with-hc2-holdings/ Here’s a few more links if you care to learn more about that and how it all went down (spoiler alert: the activists settled for two seats on the Board and then the new Board very quickly ousted the dipshit Boomer CEO, Phil Falcone) http://www.shareholderforum.com/shfk/Library/20200611_II.htm http://www.shareholderforum.com/access/Library/20200219_Deal.htm In sum: if you look into Chris Davis, you can see that this guy is dialed the fuck in and knows how to get activist shareholders a win—even in very challenging circumstances. The Summer of ’20 Out-of-the-Blue Boy Genius Media Campaign and Cohen’s 13D Filing in August I’m going to return to the “consent solicitation” thing at the bottom and why I think it matters here, but I don’t want to lose momentum on the timeline and evidence. And the consent solicitation is Advanced Level Shit that I barely understand anyway. But I think it’s likely to be goddamn important so I’ll get to it. Now, where were we? Oh yes, the inexplicable media campaign. RC Ventures files its 13D on August 18th announcing that Ryan Cohen is now the proud owner of 5.8M shares or 9% (later increased to 9.8%) of That Cluttered Video Game Geekery You Used to Pass on Your Way to Jamba Juice or Wherever People Go in Malls. Uh, ok man. But then this is when the SP of this Future Blockbuster™ starts its real run as more catch on that Cohen has taken a huge stake and that is also part of the portfolio of Mr. Big Short himself and a bunch of institutions and they actually have cash and are definitely not going bankrupt and oh have you heard about the insane short percentage of float and the upcoming console cycle that invariably corresponds to a sharp spike in SP? Well have you? But to return to the point: RC was and is the largest shareholder. But prior to the date Cohen filed his 13D, there is a renewed media campaign focused on Ryan Cohen, Ecommerce Billionaire Genius who built Chewy, kicked Amazon’s ass, and then sold it for $3.35B way back in the heady mask-free days of ‘17. Why the sudden re-emergence of Mr. Cohen in the summer of 2020 in such a prominent way with this glowing media campaign about a guy who sold a very successful pet supply business over three years ago? Fawning media exposure like that doesn’t just happen (or not usually). It’s engineered. Or, more charitably, helped along by people who know people and can introduce those people to Interesting Topics to Write About. And my guess is that Chris Davis, bad ass activist attorney based in New York City, Knows People and had a little something to do with it. Here are the links to all of the glowing media pieces starting in the summer of 2020 (all absolutely worth a read to get to know who this guy is and what makes him tick): June 5 (Bloomberg) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-05/chewy-founder-cashes-out-bets-on-apple-wells-fargo August 4 (CNBC) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/04/chewy-co-founder-ryan-cohen-this-is-the-side-hustle-id-start-now.html August 16 (Forbes) https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/08/16/entrepreneur-chewy-founder-ryan-cohen-shares-his-best-advice/?sh=41e1370e5840 October 15 (Business Insider) https://www.businessinsider.com/chewy-ryan-cohen-warren-buffett-lessons-apple-investment-2020-10 And a lot of the speculation I’m wheeling and dealing here was introduced by our man Justin Dopierala at Seeking Alpha way back in a September article not too long after the 13D filings: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4373819-gamestop-chewys-founder-ryan-cohen-finds-whats-next But for now let’s “put a pin” on Mr. Dopierala, as George Sherman or some other Corporate Robot Dipshit might say, as he will be important to the story here again soon. The November 16th “F U Old Man” Letter If you haven’t read this ballsy letter Cohen wrote to the Board last month, you really should. We’ll wait for you. https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/RC_Ventures_Letter_to_GameStop.pdf OK, ready again? I don’t want to question Cohen’s possible writing abilities or give away too many tricks of the lawyer trade here (AI should take care of that in about a decade), but that letter was 100% written by Chris Davis. I’d literally bet my entire portfolio on that fact alone. That’s why you hire gunners like him. The letter has that has deliciously direct and aggressive lawyerly tone—the kind you use when you want to send a very clear message to some asshole without spelling it all out. I fucking love this letter. It was one of the main reasons I put the rest of my chips into the GME basket. I doubt I’m alone there. And what did we learn from this letter? Well: a lot. But I’m going to focus on a few quick things. First, we learned that over the Summer, Cohen had “private conversations” with the Board and Sherman about the need to pivot toward becoming a technology-driven business with a new strategic vision. And he calls out Sherman and the Board directly for lacking this vision, using Mainstreet-Friendly pejoratives like “c-suite” and “boardroom.” He takes a direct shot at Hired Gun Sherman’s Boomer-Ass Business Record (Advanced Auto Parts! Cool!) and his obvious bent towards what he knows: Boring Ass Low Margin B&M Bullshit Companies and straight-up calls him a dumb-ass old man (“twentieth-century focus!”) who Just Doesn’t Fucking Get It. He alleges that he and the Board have presided over “massive value destruction” (almost makes it sound intentional, or at least grossly negligent) and have never taken “full accountability” for all their fuck-ups and intransigence. Some folks have suggested that, sure, Cohen wants change and yeah he seemed like he had a bit of a bee in his bonnet, but if he doesn’t get some good movement in those areas, he’ll just sell his 6.5M shares to tank the stock and take his ball and go home to play with his dog, who loves him No Matter What. In this interpretation, the letter is just Cohen Asking To Speak To The Manager and then if the response is not to his liking, well then, He Will Just Take His Business Elsewhere, thankyouverymuch. I do not think that is what is going on here. Not with Ryan Cohen and Chris Davis. This letter is Ryan Cohen Crossing The Fucking Rubicon. He did the honorable thing and took his vision to the Board and Sherman. How genuine he was in that effort, I have no idea, as my thesis is that he has had a takeover plan in place since he hired Chris Davis. But whatever the initial motivations, it was the honorable thing to do to discuss his vision with Sherman and the Board before he and Chris Davis eventually rip their fucking hearts out (which, spoiler: I believe he is getting ready to do as we speak). Reasonable minds can disagree here, but I do not think you write a letter like that unless you have a plan to handle all possible responses to it. He just torched his collegial relationship, such as there ever was or could have been, with that CEO and that Board. He flaunts Chewy’s world-class infrastructure and market cap versus their lame ass sub-$1B Dying Mall Store Bullshit. And he makes a very public rejection of a seat on the board (and the reason given: because you fuckheads would just ignore me and drive me nuts while you continue doing Dumb Boomer Shit with my money all goddamn day), which made it 100% clear to me that this is Cohen Serving Goddamn Notice that unless they get serious about the scope of their turnaround and start listening to him and convey this new direction to shareholders asap, that he’s coming for them. He even alludes to his own turnaround plan but then tells them to do their jobs like the Big Capable Adults they are. And then Cohen attaches this letter to an amended 13D to ensure that all shareholders see it and also see that he still holds all of his shares. Within hours, the WSJ had an article on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/gamestops-new-billionaire-investor-calls-for-tech-centric-makeover-11605565458?mod=hp_lista_pos5. And guess what’s neat? If you are an interested shareholder or a habitual reader of the Wall Street Journal (I, sir, am not) and you saw that article, you might have wondered what this Cohen guy is all about? You know, Mortimer, the dog guy—made billions. And thanks to the recent out-of-the-blue marketing campaign that was definitely NOT engineered by Chris Davis as part of a takeover plan, your subsequent Google searches, and the recent articles they produced, likely made you think: this guy is a fucking whiz kid and I like the cut of his jib. Cohen Quietly Meets With Funds/Investors In the weeks leading up to earnings, sharp observers also notice something: Ryan Cohen is meeting with various large shareholders for some reason. There were several reports of this on stocktwits (links are lost to eternity in that cluttered hellhole unless some astute commentator can find and link in the comments), so some salt is a necessary accompaniment here (I like to cite my evidence), but we have at least one confirmed meeting with the head of DOMO Capital: Mr. Justin Dopierala. Now, Justin happens to be a pro-GME writer (and a sharp one at that) at Seeking Alpha. You know, that paywall website where people purporting to know what they’re talking about get paid peanuts to write purposefully inane articles for maximum clicks from other idiots? That one. Well Justin is one of the good ones there, and DOMO Capital is also a large shareholder of GME. (Conflict of interest, you say? Shut yo’ mouth!). On November 30, at 9:19 AM (the payin’ for inanity crew can go see this – the comment is still there), Dopierala made the following comment on another SA article: *** “I've recently had the pleasure of having a 1 on 1 video meeting with Ryan Cohen that lasted over an hour. Going forward, I no longer feel comfortable commenting on the topic (of Ryan Cohen), so please understand when I do not respond to any of your questions on this specific topic. Ryan is a very intelligent man, and I remain as bullish as ever on GameStop's future." *** So what can we extrapolate from this? Ryan Cohen likely reached out to DOMO Capital/Dopierala to discuss his strategic vision. I do not know if he announced his plans directly, or what the purpose of the call was (see the very below on how I think this all could relate to a consent solicitation to recall the board) but I’m sure, at the very least, the text, if not the subtext, was heavy as fuck on that Zoom call. And why do I think Cohen contacted him and not the other way around? Because Dopierala, a writer for SA that I’m sure would love to publish even an anodyne Q&A with Ryan Cohen to Get Him All the Clicks, didn’t get an on-the-record interview. Not even some softball about whether his dog prefers his Apple investment decision or his Wells Fargo one. No: he got the concession (assuming he did) to simply acknowledge that a discussion took place (buried in a comment on some other dude’s SA article), but he explicitly says he’s not going to talk about anything related to Cohen going forward. No sir, no how. But if Cohen is just a regular old fellow shareholder (Cue Ryan: “And Justin, please: the pleasure is all mine”), then why the fuck are you making a cagy comment and acting like you Have A Big Fucking Secret and Oh God I Wish I Could Tell You Something But I Just Cant! with that comment, Justin? The Man Doth Protesting and Shit, I say. Here’s the article link for you Seeking Alpha Super Sleuths: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4380313-gamestop-likely-already-digital-revenue-sharing-sony-up-to-10 And even yesterday, Dopierala can’t help himself. In a discussion about Cohen’s tweet yesterday (you saw the tweet right? What kind of GME-to-da-moon! investor are you anyway? https://twitter.com/ryancohen/status/1336775515101949963), Dopierala gets all Jim Carey As The Riddler on us in a response to “EricinPDX,” (some dude living in the Portland Airport) who writes: EricInPDX I take his tweet as a total negative .. the Jim Cramer thing. I have no position at the moment. Our man Dopierala then responds “then you are wrong yet right.” https://seekingalpha.com/article/4393394-gamestop-cohen-right-to-downplay-ps5-xbox-series-mistakes-core-digital-problem So I think he’s having a little fun talking like a slightly less backwardsy Yoda saying: yeah, that Cohen tweet was obviously negative because he’s highlighting how fucked GME seems after that Q3 call (and also, check out how Chewy’s doin’ in that clip!). But it’s also not negative because it means Cohen is about to rip Sherman’s still-beating heart out and Shock And Awe our asses with a vote. And I, Justin Dopierala, head of DOMO Capital, can be a little wink winky about this because, oh I don’t know, on our hour long call Cohen maybe used puppetry to act out “Bryan Flohen’s” plan to call a vote and supplant the Bad Man “Gerald Shorman” while asking “Would You Theoretically Be With Bryan Flohen?” with a few well-timed arch of the eyebrows. Or he got his explicit consent to his plan (see below re consent solicitations). We just do not know. In conclusion: We know that Cohen met with shareholders in the period between the day he sent that letter and the date of the Q3 call. We just do not know what was said. But we do know that Dopierella, either out of a sense of journalistic ethics (Stop laughing you guys! Seriously!) or out of concern about possible SEC lookie-loos, decides to be up-front about his inability to even utter the name Ryan Cohen from now on. General George “Custard” Sherman’s Lame-Ass Empire Striking Back Let’s recall the letter now. I’m guessing a rich, egotistical pampered-ass hired gun Boomer CEO named George goddamn Sherman didn’t like someone who reminds him of his asshole kids talking to him like that. We all know what happened next: the Q3 “Say Omnichannel One More Time Motherfucker!” call. As I mentioned in my prior post on this (link above if you care), Sherman pulled the boomer-ist of boomer moves in an act of self-sabotage that is likely to be studied in business courses once this whole story plays out. You see, that letter that Cohen/Davis sent was a trap. And Sherman and the Board and their Big Fucking Corporate Brains clearly lack an inner Admiral Ackbar. Cohen sent that letter three weeks before the earnings call. And demanded that they conduct *another* strategic review and present a plan to shareholders outlining how they are going to fully pivot into a new technology focused company. Cohen knows they have no intention of doing this. He’s apparently been hectoring them all summer about it. And I’m guessing he talked to Sherman enough to know that the dude is just not on the level (as all of us who listened to that fumbling bland-ass corporate caveat-speak on that call got to experience as well). So he knows, like we all did, that Q3 earnings are likely to be middling at best. But unlike me, who clearly thought that the one way out of this for Sherman and the Board was to give some exciting guidance on Q4, maybe even a share buyback (as they are authorized to do) and some more info on the Microsoft deal, likely revenue, other possible similar deals with Nintendo and Sony. I don’t know, but Something. No, Cohen and Davis are way smarter than me and know Sherman a bit better and probably assumed that Sherman is likely to whiff on a response to his letter. And lo and behold, whiff he does. Nothing. We get no response to the letter and no real plan to transform GME into a tech-driven gaming company (Sherman: “but, but…I said Omnichannel you guys! What do you want from me beyond bland corporate robot speak!?”). But what else happens? Sherman and the Board inexplicably authorize a shelf registration for up to $100M worth of ATM shares. This from a company that just bought back shares, is authorized to buy back more, paid down debt early—and now is about to be flush with Sweet, Sweet New Console Cash. What in the everlasting fuck? And in case you were inclined to give Sherman and the Board the benefit of the doubt here, the reason was simple and straightforward and included within the S3 filing itself. And that is: “Hey Cohen: Fuck Off. And if we have to dilute our shareholders to get you to fuck off, by God that’s the kind of shortsighted ME-first move that got George Sherman where he is today! So go find another company to hassle you ungrateful Millennial Start Up Dog Store Bro and let the adults handle this.” Here is the provision in the S-3 (under the heading: Anti-Takeover Provisions): Authorized But Unissued Shares The authorized but unissued shares of common stock and preferred stock are available for future issuance without stockholder approval. These additional shares may be utilized for a variety of corporate purposes, including future public offerings to raise additional capital, corporate acquisitions and employee benefit plans. The existence of authorized but unissued shares of common stock and preferred stock could render more difficult or discourage an attempt to obtain control of us by means of a proxy contest, tender offer, merger or otherwise. So instead of crushing the call and giving some dope guidance about Q4 and trigger the MOASS so we all revere the name George Sherman for All Eternity, Sherman and the Board make a lame-ass move to try to protect their jobs and--lo and behold!--THIS is the main takeaway of the report and call. And what drives the precipitous dive in SP AH and yesterday. A dive so steep that it removes well over $100M in market cap in value, the kinda-lame amount that you’re trying to stick Cohen with (and dilute all of us) so you can keep your Big Fancy-Man Job and the bonus you’re counting on so you and the misses can jet off to Sandals Jamaica like you always do. George: Whoops? Knew we should have gone with a higher number! A lame ass “poor man’s poison pill” as u/snowk88 on stocktwits put it (shout out because he also helped me flush out this thesis a bit and clued me in on Chris Davis’s work for MC). So back to how I started this missive, back when we were all younger and maybe a bit more naïve, right? Anyway. Yesterday Ryan Cohen lost over $20M on paper because George Sherman thought the best way to handle that Punk-Ass Millennial was to use shareholders as a hostage in any possible fight over control of this company he’s been building his entire—oh, eh, the last 18 months because he’s just a hired gun that goes where the money is and waits for his ka-ching moment before splitting because who gives a fuck he’s George Sherman and You’re Not. But guess what happens when you do that? (Hand down, George: you’ve had your turn). You ENRAGE the shareholders who you want to have your back and vote for you in any possible proxy fight or takeover offer! What strategery! You must have been involved in planning the Iraq war, George. But guess who was likely laughing their ass off yesterday at their colossal good fortune at this misstep? Ryan Cohen and Chris Davis. Because now Sherman has opened the door even wider than it was before and made it that much easier for Cohen to get the votes and kick down his fucking door. And yesterday, to no one’s surprise, the SP falls almost 20% and even Jim Fucking Cramer piles on and tells all his braindead Boomer TV watchers that this is The Next Blockbuster like all the other Super Sophisticated Analysts out there. And now we see the #WeWantCohen and #InstallCohen hashtags (which you all should consider using frequently if you dig all this and think Sherman needs to go). What are you thinking if you’re Ryan Cohen? Take your ball and go home time? Or: maybe that it’s time to Show George Sherman that You Do Not Fuck With a Super Nice Guy With Really Good Ideas That Are Usually Respectfully Presented (Unless You Piss Me Off) Like Ryan Goddamn Cohen? I’m thinking it’s the latter. Taking all of this, I think Cohen and Chris Davis have been planning some kind of takeover, possibly even via consent solicitation like Davis did in his MC matter, since the summer and that George Sherman’s ironic attempt to save his own skin is about to backfire stupendously to help Cohen lock in the votes he needs. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy—excuse me—I mean: Smug Asshole. Epilogue: The Consent Solicitation Ed: the consent solicitation is not likely in play here. But Cohen is definitely still coming for Sherman and Co - we just don't know exactly how yet. Now, just what in the hell is a consent solicitation and why does it matter? I confess that I didn’t know shit about this until I started READING ALL THE WORDS, but our friends at theactivistinvestor.com have some useful information to help those of us with tiny little baby brains understand what it is and why it may be relevant here (relevant excerpts below, but it you really want to geek out on this shit, I would recommend clicking the link, reading the words and THINKING BIG THOUGHTS). And also, hoping that some folks can respond in comments to help flush this out further because it’s late and I’ve already written too many words. But, before I drop some k-n-o knowledge from our friends at theactivistinvestor.com, just to remind you: GameStop is a Delaware Corporation. Now imagine being magically whisked away to…Delaware! (Hi. I’m in Delaware). ******* From: http://www.theactivistinvestor.com/The_Activist_InvestoConsent_Solicitations.html [Ed: removed quoted text] ***** CPT Hubbard here again. I’ll release you momentarily. But study those steps a bit and ponder where Cohen might be in that process. And also recall that we know that Cohen had an “off the record” meeting with our man Dopierala from DOMO Capital and we have no idea what they talked about. Could Cohen have been getting shareholders consent? No idea. But it certainly seems possible. If that is the case, the 60 day clock is ticking. Which means that, assuming Dopierala was stop #1 (probably doubtful, but it’s the one data point we have), we should know something by at least late January if Cohen is actually initiating a consent solicitation on this incompetent Board and probably a lot closer to mid-January (Sorry Jan call holders) since I assume Cohen started reaching out around the time he sent that letter on Nov 16th. To which I say to Cohen: Little old me and my 20,000 shares consent! We consent most emphatically, sir. And no one will ever accuse you, Mr. Cohen, of not seeking consent. You may retain this for your records. To conclude, Cohen is Young, Scrappy and Hungry and He’s Not Throwing Away His Shot. And Fuck George Sherman. “I’M FINISHED” **To be clear: this missive is for information purposes only and I would advise against following my example in any way, shape or form, as this pandemic has quite plainly knocked a screw loose if I'm here writing novelas to a bunch of Paste-Eating Rocket Kids.
[AMA] All the questions and answers from Darian's AMA on January 26th, 2021
Firstly, just want to start off by saying a big thank you to everyone who submitted great questions, but most of all, the hugest thank you in the world tou/Darian_CoC(100% the best community manager ever) for sitting down and grinding through hundreds of your questions over about 3 hours. Due to the sheer amount of questions, putting them all here exceeds reddit's character limit, so I have put the full compilation of questions in this documenthere. You'll probably find a few more of the fun, personal or quirky questions are in the document, with more Clash related stuff on this post. A load of interesting stuff was discussed, including future updates and plans for Clash in the coming year, so lots of great stuff to have a read through! We have compiled all the questions and answers into this post here for your enjoyment, and we hope you come out of this post knowing a lot more than you did previously! So without further ado, here we go: u/non-reddituser:
Is there plans to bring in a new recruitment system or is sc still trying to better it?
Any plans to reduce cost/upgrade time? For me at least 2-3 weeks for upgrades is getting slightly excessive and going further than that. I can’t imagine many players will be very excited to grind it out. Especially casual players.
Currently, Do you think the game is balanced ? I’ve heard quite a lot of complaints saying th13 is too easy.
Any plans to add family clans features ? Like a way to add other clans to chat, white list/ black list players etc.
Has a complete remake/ sequel to clash of clans ever been considered?
Is sc more focused on bringing more tasks, events and in general things to do during the game or are they more focused on bringing new content like troops ,spells ,defences etc?
Are you able to provide any details on what the priorities are/what is being worked on for 2021
How is the cost/ sell price of magic items determined?
Is there a reason as to why all the hammers cost 120 medals ,but the hero hammer is 165 and the opposite happens for books? All the books are 925 gems, but the hero book is set at 500 gems.
Answer:
Regarding the Recruitment Tool, I'll have to repeat something I said a while back .First, the tool isn't developed by the Clash team. I don't say that to try and wipe our hands of any obligation to it, but it genuinely is something the Clash team has little control over. However, with that said, regardless of who the tool is made by we have tried communicating with the community about its features, and even its shortcomings. But because of the nature of social media, online posts, etc. much of that gets lost hours after it's been posted. One of the things we've repeatedly stated is that the Recruitment Tool suffers not from a lack of functionality but from a lack of transparency. The Recruitment Tool actually does a lot of the things behind the scenes that players feel there is a lack of control over. And because they don't see how those work, it can feel like it doesn't work like they expect it to. I'm not saying it's perfect - far from it. We know it could use some improvement, but the biggest area it could be improved on is helping people understand exactly how it works so people are a bit more confident in the searches it pulls up, or at least understand why it gets those results.
As we add more content higher up (TH14, TH15, and beyond) we keep a very close watch on how long it takes for players to start from scratch and climb to max. We try to keep the ranges relatively similar so I would say it's a fair bet we'll adjust the upgrade times and costs in the future. In fact, that is a regular facet of the game that can be expected every so often. I can't say if it'll be once a year, or once every new TH level, but refactoring and rebalancing the costs and time are a regular part of that strategy.
The game will never be 100% perfectly balanced. It's just impossible. There are simply too many moving parts, too much randomness, and too many variables to consider. We try to balance the game the best we can, based on player data as well as feedback from the community. But adding more content will always shift the balance in one direction or another. Sometimes it may skew towards offense, and sometimes more towards defence. When we see the game shifting like that, we start looking at how we can balance the game to bring it back more towards the centre. With that said, we try to balance the game more towards being offense-friendly. Now, before you get out your pitchforks and protest we're making it too easy, what I mean by this is that we try to make the game as rewarding as possible while still keeping it challenging. If defence was always OP, then the win rates would plummet. If you're unable to win, this is incredibly frustrating as a player and would cause players to leave the game. That's not a good thing. Like any other asymmetrical multiplayer game, you almost always tend to win more often than you lose. We try to maintain a degree of balance slightly leaning towards offense.
A Clan Alliance/Family feature has been on our wish list for quite a few years. We simply haven't sat down to truly discuss what we want that feature to be. When we work on a new update, we have to prioritize what new features we're implementing and any additional content must thematically feel appropriate or can be fit in resource-wise (meaning time). Creating a Clan alliance feature should be more than just being able to cross chat and donate troops. That alone isn't worth reprogramming the multiplayer functionality of the game. An alliance system has to be meaningful in order to be something the players enjoy. But what that is, we still have yet to decide.
No. Why create a sequel when we can just keep adding new content to the current game without creating a brand new one? What would the goal of a sequel be? As long as Clash of Clans is live, creating a sequel would cannibalize players from one game to the other. That is not a viable way of game development. Additionally, let's say you've been playing Clash for 8 years now. Now let's say we release Clash of Clans 2. If all this game is is just a prettier version of Clash, you'll be less likely to invest the same amount of time as you did the first one. So you quit Clash 2 but the likelihood of you going back to Clash 1 will be reduced. Also, let's say not all of your friends are willing to play the new one. So now that your friends aren't playing, you're more likely to quit because of split loyalties between the games.The best thing we can do is keep improving Clash so you're not forced to choose between which ones you want to play,
I'd say it's all of the above, depending on the needs of the game. Content will always be the primary driver for Clash of Clans. It's where we see spikes in players returning, players being more active, etc. But in between content releases, it's good to give players more activities to do.
Lots and lots of new content for 2021. Lots. And it is badass.
I had an answer for this and I cannot for the life of me remember what it is. Unfortunately our Live Ops guy has left for the evening so I can't cross check with him. I'll try to ask him tomorrow and I'll post a reply here.
One big reason with the cost discrepancy is due to the resources you spend to upgrade those units. The cost to upgrade a Hero uses Dark Elixir which is a much more premium resource to farm/earn compared to Gold or Elixir. It's far easier to earn Gold and Elixir for upgrading Buildings/Troops. So the cost for the Book of Heroes is to help offset that. Whereas, because it's easier to earn Gold & Elixir, the other Books are more expensive. With the Hammers, the Hammer of Heroes is more expensive because you don't need to farm the DE for it.
Are you able to share any details on ideas/concepts that were designed and/or tested within the team that were then scrapped?
Answer: The Elixir Monster was a troop concept we prototyped during the development of TH12. The Elixir Monster was a troop that gained strength and size as it destroyed things. Similar to the Lumberjack, it would drop a Rage Spell after it was killed. In the end, the mechanic was really cool but way too complex for the average player. Additionally, because the unit required to make the kill attack in order to earn it's level up, with so many other troops attacking it actually rarely made a kill so it didn't morph? Mutate? Evolve? as fast as we thought it would. So it's a troop we might save for a rainy day and tweak it a bit to see if we can get it to balance correctly. u/Drin_CoC:
Is the maximum Experience level, which currently is level 500, gonna be increased any time soon?
If there'll be more than 100 buildings after TH14 update, how will % be calculated? What about bases that have the 6th builder compared to the bases that don't?
Answer:
We might address it in the future, but I wouldn't expect any changes to it in the next couple updates. Apart from vanity purposes it doesn't really do much else so it's not a major priority for us.
We won't hit the 100 building limit just yet so we still have some wiggle room left to go before we start needing to worry about it. But it is something we are worried about for when we finally do hit that limit. We haven't found a solution to how we want to address it, but it is something that comes up every time we start working on new content.
What is the status of World’s 2021? The entire competitive community has been eagerly waiting for news about this. We need time to plan and prepare, and if it’s not happening we deserve to know.
Are there any plans to include any in game e-sports tournaments other than ESL?
Answer:
We are still working on the Worlds stuff and we're inching closer to announcing the 2021 season. We've made a few changes so we're still putting the final polish on those details. But we will announce the 2021 Worlds when we're ready.
There are tons of community-run events around the globe. We simply can't add them all in-game.
Will we ever get a rewind button for replays? 😯 not sure if it’s possible but it would be a small but incredible QoL improvement for many. 😁
Answer: The challenge with this is that replays are not stored as videos. So you're not actually watching an actual "replay" of the match. The game stores your screen taps that you performed when you played your game. So when you watch a replay, you are actually watching a live version of the game where the AI is simply reproducing the same screen taps. Because the pathing algorithm and AI functions the exact same way, the system can recreate the same conclusion of the game every time. So because you're watching the AI play the game using your screen taps, it can only go forward. u/Soft-Decision5935:
Hi Darian! I’ve started 3 mini accounts and I’ve made one big observation: the beginning is by far the worst, slowest section of the game. The rest of the game is fun and it’s a great grind, but those opening 3-or-so days would be very unappealing to newer players who don’t know much about the rest of the game yet. Even for me, I absolutely hate those first few days. While I understand CoC is a game meant for people to grind out, I think something needs to be done to attract newer players. Have you considered fixing this/ is there a reason you haven’t yet?
Answer: This is actually a topic of discussion we're looking at; how to make the lower TH's more engaging and less grindy to make the progression to higher levels more enticing. So we totally understand where you're coming from. It's something we hope we can address in an update this year. u/OverSizedHamster:
Hi Darian! Would you consider Clash of Clans a good representation of mobile gaming? Has its impact matched up to other notable titles on PC and console? Is it Smash Ultimate worthy?
Answer: Every so often, a game will become a cultural icon of the platform it's released on. For consoles that would be the Mario franchise. For MMORPG's, that would be World of Warcraft. For mobile, that's Clash of Clans. What I mean by cultural icon, is that it's a game that has lasted far longer than most others due to the sheer number of people that play it and the popular success it has had because of it. Clash has been out for almost 9 years now. On any game platform that is almost unheard of apart from those other games that are cultural icons themselves. I'm not sure what you mean by "good representation". But I will say this: The Clash community is possibly one of the best gaming communities. Period. It's one of the least toxic, most supportive, and fun communities I've ever had the privilege of working with. u/301023459:
Would it be possible to have custom CC's for friendly challenges implemented into the game? To further explain what I mean, lets say I have my normal raid army set up with the cc troops I would usually take. However I want to practice new armies in friendly challenges but every time I do that, I have to dump old troops and request for new troops but those in my clan who have the troops I need for my friendly challenge army aren't always online. So a feature where I could customize my own cc troops for a friendly army is what I'm getting at.
Answer:
The Friendly Challenge is an interesting facet of the game that was introduced much later in the game's development history. So the functionality of it is wholly based on how the rest of the game functions with regards to troop donations, troop deployment, etc. Creating a unique set of functions for this feature is something the team sees as a priority at the moment. However, that priority could change when we start to look at what QoL changes we want to implement in future updates. Many of the changes implemented into the FC/FW features were based on QoL requests from the community so I wouldn't say it's a ruled out idea. Just not something on the production schedule at the moment.
When are we getting BH10. Lot of people who are more competitive on B-base, but aren’t playing much because it’s the same old thing every season. We’re all feeling kinda forgotten about ☹️
Answer: It's rather interesting that whenever we released new BH content, there was general disdain that we were allocating development resources to it. But now there is a lot of clamouring for when the next BH level will be. :-) We don't have any solid plans for BH10 yet, but we have discussed it on occasion. We're reluctant to simply just do a new level as we're still trying to decide where we want to take the Builder Base feature. We don't want to keep adding features that are already available to the Main Village; otherwise why not just keep developing the Main Village? u/El3veN_:
You said you had a meeting planned about the API, do we have any news regarding the API, your vision on it, whats your plans for it, etc?
Answer: I am not a programmer so I would hate to misrepresent something I know little about. You'll have to forgive my lack of correct vocabulary. There has been some API discussion recently to make certain data more accessible, though what those data are I can't say simply because I didn't understand how that process works. But I can say there has been some movement in the API discussion on the team. u/Hellrazor:
Has an increase to the 30s scout time in legend league been considered along with viewable building radiuses? This was brought up partly last year in one of the TH hour videos where Eino admitted that as new TH levels were released the allotted 30s planning time becomes more & more restrictive the more there is to consider when planning an attack. IMO increasing the time to 45s / 1min in legend league would combat this whilst also separating it from lower leagues.
Are there any plans to restructure the Legend League system i.e rewards / ladder / ranks? The gems rewarded to the top 20 players in the top 3 clans is long outdated & legend trophies don’t have much use besides a visual standpoint. The day to day ladder system could also be taken further - something akin to a weekly system for example whereby your standings at the end of the week determine your placement for the next whilst still maintaining a monthly season would be less stale & more meaningful imo. Additionally ranks / badges could also be included within legend league to further develop the ranking system & possibly tie in to a rewards system somehow.
How does the Eagle Artilleries target prioritisation work? According to the wiki: The Eagle Artillery targets according to a "heat map" or "hitpoint map". In other words, it targets the area with the largest density of hitpoints. However this doesn’t seem to apply most noticeably during a queen charge / walk. 5 healers for example have a greater combined HP than a maxed queen yet 9/10 the eagle will target the queen so I suspect there’s more going on here. Whilst targeting the queen over your healers is far more favourable for the attacker it can be incredibly frustrating when the opposite occurs. As far as I can tell the logic currently appears to operate under RNG although I hope & suspect I’m wrong. Perhaps someone from the dev team could elaborate on this?
Answer:
While it had been discussed, at this time the team feels there's no need for it.
While the LL system could certainly use some new polishing and some shiny chrome, there hasn't been anything internally proposed that has made us say, "YES! That's what it needs!"
There is no RNG in how the AI targets units or paths towards a target. Every target is calculated based on the rules programmed into the algorithm. For the Eagle Artillery, yes population density does factor in. In your particular example, it could be that the Archer Queen had taken damage, where the collection of Healers now collectively had more HP resulting in a more desirable target before the AQ was fully healed again. I would need to see a specific replay of any instance before making a definitive call on what you're seeing.
In an interview with galadon around 11 months ago you said “ Part of it is as we see a lot of activity of a lot of players returning a lot of them are coming back to their old clans” In response to why sc hasn’t added a clan name change. Has this changed, Is there a still a high amount of players returning? If not is sc planning or at least considering adding it?
In the same interview with galadon he pitched you an separate section in the shop were you buy obstacles with legend league trophies. At the end of your answer you said” but, I think it’s an idea that does have some merit and all I can do is to present it to the team” did you present to the team and is there possibility we could see this any time soon?
As my final question I’d like to as you if you could explain the choice of sc censoring the whole clans chat when a kids account join?
Answer:
Clan name changes are still a ruled out idea for now, for the same reason. Additionally, changing your player name is one thing. That's personal to you. Changing a Clan name is something that affects the entire Clan. While sure, many Clans would be ok with the name change but what happens when members don't like the name that it's changed to? If that original Clan name had sentimental value, and someone changes it, that would feel really crappy for those who liked the original Clan name. So rather than try to come up with rules and edge cases for it, and introduce possibly more unnecessary complexity, it's simpler to prohibit for now.
Nothing has come out of that discussion apart from the idea being presented.
The rules for this only applies to new underage accounts created in the US. The reason for this is for compliance with new online regulations that are required for certain kinds of games. We have no control over those regulations.
Does the barrel shaped building where you boost super troops have a name? If not, then what did the dev team call it?
Do you guys plan on adding more achievements?
Will there be more single player campaign levels as part of the next update or th14?
There has been an insane amount of rumours and ideas as to water based troops or gameplay. Is the dev team even considering something among those lines?
Answer:
It's called the Super Sauna. The image of the modern sauna is a Finnish invention, and since we're based out of Finland, it seemed like a nice cultural touch to the game.
Yes!
We really liked the Winter Challenge map and plan on doing more things like that in the future. However, we'd like players to remember that Clash is a multiplayer game and designed around that idea. Adding more single player content, while fun, minimizes that multiplayer aspect so it's not a primary focus of ours.
Water based troops? First time I've heard this rumour. Considering the map is based on land, a water troop would be a bit like...a fish out of water? In other words, I wouldn't listen to rumours.
What was the “big thing” that was meant to be released in the winter?
Answer: We have a super cool feature we're steadily working on. We're not ready to share what that is just yet, but we're hoping we can reveal and release it this year. u/Quna_chan:
Can we expect a goblin map maker where community can make goblin maps and clash team can check them and add it to the game.
Answer: This sounds like a good idea, but moderating all the entries that would come in would require it to be a full time job in itself. Checking to make sure the map isn't broken, or doesn't have inappropriate content, or doesn't cause any problems. It's not a matter of just pulling it up on the screen and say "ok there are no middle fingers hidden in the images so it's good to go." It would require playtesting, feedback, etc. u/Pero_Plays:
Would you consider going to a 24-month instead of a proposed 18-month cycle of new TH levels to sync with World Championships better?
Could we get a double deployment bar on phones?
Answer:
24 months of no new TH content is simply too long. We're really happy with the pace we've been releasing new TH levels. One of the things we have to look at when spacing out the content is how long before maxed players start to get bored and stop playing. New content is always the biggest driver of player activity, and the longer you draw out not having new content results in players becoming more likely to leave the game. The World Championship is an exciting and cool facet of Clash, but it's not the main one and only a very small number of players will ever compete in the Championships. That small percentage of players cannot dictate the pace of content progress.
We tried looking at this but the UI became so small that it was super inconvenient to use, even with a stylus.
Hey Darian, I’m not sure if this question was asked before but do you think it would pose a significant challenge for your team considering what a new a Town Hall would be due to the weaponization of Town Halls 12 and 13?
Answer: Coming up with new and unique content will always be the challenge as we create new features. It came up when we were working on TH13, and is in discussion as we work towards TH14. And it will likely come up again as we work on TH15 and beyond. Making sure something is cool and unique is always a fun challenge, but we shouldn't make something JUST because it's unique. It has to also be fun and exciting. u/LowScrow_Tom:
Will we ever have a troop, or Super Troop, with the capability of switching from Ground to Air? (I think Ice Golem/ Ice Hound could've utilized this feature.)
Without the ability to add new buildings due to percent damages, could you have a "Gear Up" feature at TH14 which would combine all Builder Huts and /or Barracks to 1 main building, which must be upgraded FIRST before being able to purchase new TH14 Defences?. (Multiple problems solved)
Answer:
This is something that has been considered, like making a "Fallen Angel" Healer who is a ground troop but heals air units. This is just an idea and not something being worked on, before everyone starts saying it's confirmed. Changing a unit from air to ground or vice versa is actually pretty complicated because the pathing for ground units is different than air units as is the logic algorithm. So it's not just a matter of allowing it to swap places. But I wouldn't be surprised if we introduce a Super Troop that does do this.
We've contemplated the building fusion idea in the past and we're not convinced that is a good solution.
Hello Darian! Is there any Chance we can get second abilities for Heroes? You can either choose the first or the second for a attack? For example the Barbarian King gets stationary and is immune to all damage for 5 seconds. Queens shoots faster and her shots pierce through buildings for x amount of second. The Royal Champion deflects damage for x amount of seconds. Warden heals troops over time
Answer: We had considered this idea and while it's cool, it doesn't offer quite the flexibility and variability players are looking for in a feature like this. We would want a feature like this to feel like players are able to customize their experiences. A second ability doesn't really do that as players would just choose a favourite one, then set and forget. We think there is a better way to offer that kind of customization. Additionally, balancing new abilities would be super challenging compared to new troops or new spells. u/Immabeloverof15june:
Any plans on player made maps as single player map?
Any plans on mega base type mode?
What are big features which aside from new troops, buildings, townhall levels?
What are your plans on bringing more social features to the game?
Answer:
Player made maps are never a good idea, though they sound neat on paper. We'd need some kind of moderation process to remove inappropriate submissions, and given there'd be thousands upon thousands of entries, it would require full time moderation.
We see this request a lot. Again, on paper it sounds really cool. But what would the overall goal be? What would the benefits be to the Clan? There are a ton of logistics you'd have to look at. Like who would be the caretaker of such a mega base? The leader? What if the leader left or stopped playing? Co-leaders? What if they disagree with how the mega base should be laid out? Would Elders and Members have access to editing the mega base?
We've got something pretty big planned this year (fingers crossed we can finish it in time). We'll announce it when it's ready. And it's a doozy.
It entirely depends on what social features players want (features that aren't Global Chat or similar function).
u/sportsguy3: Could you give us some examples of new charactetroops/heroes/ideas that were very close to making it into the game but eventually didn't make the cut? Answer: When we work on new TH content, we try to prototype new troop ideas. When we were working on TH12, we had several troops we had tested out before we finally settled on the Yeti. One of the troop ideas was a Goblin Glider. It was basically Goblins that flew in on little gliders and dropped down to attack resource storages and collectors. If I remember correctly, the Goblin Glider eventually inspired the Builder Base Hog Glider unit since we liked the glider function. But the Goblin Glider felt a bit TOO spammy. u/NikplaysgamesYT:
Do you guys have plans regarding banning accounts? I see so many times players are perma banned for “account sharing” or “account stealing” when nothing like that ever happened. Even someone in my clan was perma banned, and I see posts on Reddit all the time about this. Do you have plans to change the process of being banned or the criteria to avoid these situations?
What is your opinion regarding queen walks after indirectly nerfing them so hard? This year, you guys added headhunters and super minions, both of which destroy queen walks if your not careful. Did you guys think they were OP before this update, and do you think they’re still OP now?
Do you believe that the game has done a good job balancing progression? For townhall 10, IMO you guys did a perfect job, I finished my hero’s, walls, and defences at almost the same time (got screwed up since at that time there was the event where everything was half off. But for th11, I am currently almost max, just working on my last lab upgrades and walls, but I’ve been full on dark elixir for the past 3 months. Do you think progression overall is super balanced and any plans to change it?
Answer:
In the near-4 years I've been at Supercell, I've had hundreds of requests from players to investigate their account ban. Out of those hundreds, I can count on a single hand how many of them were incorrectly banned due to agent error. A single hand. Time and time again such threads rarely ever reveal any kind of loopholes or weaknesses in the support recovery process and more often than not highlight how players treat their account security by engaging in behaviour that violates our Terms of Service policies. Almost every single one of those players underestimate just how accurately we can investigate an account issue. Many of them start off with a friend who let another friend do their War attacks, but most of the banned accounts have shown very suspicious activity of account sharing, buying, etc.How do these accounts get phished? It's simply because most people don't realize just how manipulative scammers/phishers are. Also most people fail to realize exactly just how much identifiable information they put out for the public to be able to see.That's the thing about scammers/phishers. The good ones rarely make their intentions obvious until it's too late. There's a reason why scamming is a multi-billion dollar industry. Good scammers are charismatic, manipulative, and convincing. They are also relying on the fact you have no idea just how useful the information you gave them really is, especially when you think the information is banal or mundanely useless.The fact they leave you blaming a lax in security instead of blaming yourself shows A) just how manipulative they are and B) how willing you are to deflect blame in order to admit to falling for a scam.Admittedly, that second one is a tough pill to swallow. No one likes admitting they made a mistake, and that's especially so when you have to face severe consequences for those actions. But as I said before, we can tell the difference between someone's compromised account vs. someone who fell victim to a scam or gave/bought/sold their account. Usually if the account is compromised, Support is fairly quick at restoring access to those accounts. But because there's no reason to voice any complaints about it, you don't read about those thousands of success stories. What we do hear about on the forums are those examples where support was unable to restore the account because they can see suspicious or fraudulent activity on the account.
I still use Queen Walk at TH13 so you're asking the wrong person. I find the strategy still viable and very strong.
I do think we've done an overall good job of maintaining balance. It's not perfect, nor will it ever be perfect. This is especially true as we add more content in the future. There is no such thing as a perfectly balanced multiplayePVP game. All we can do is try to balance it to the best of our ability when we release a new troop or keep an eye on the data and balance it as we see the data coming in.
Clan War Leagues and Clan Games are monthly events that last a week. Are there any plans for introducing another monthly event that lasts a few days in between CWL and Clan Games? (Townhall Tournaments, etc.)
As the army camp size increases and the possibility for more troops in battle at any given time increases, will we be seeing troops with higher and higher housing space to avoid overcomplexity?
Will we be able to use two Siege Machines at the same time in the future? More than two Super Troops?
Answer:
Yes. Although what that is we're not ready to reveal yet.
It's unlikely we'll adjust the housing space for older troops like Barbs, however, how much housing space a troop takes up is actually an essential part of the design process as we design a new troop.
Two Siege Machines would be a bit weird since you only have a single Clan Castle. Being able to deploy two and divide up the CC troops between them would genuinely be way OP. As far as allowing more than 2 Super Troops at a time, I mean, we just started allowing 2 recently! We're keeping an eye on their usage to see if allowing 3 or more would be something positive for the game.
Is it true that Supercell is going to remove builder base by June?
Why don't war donations account for donation count?
Why is builder base's attacking AI is different from Home village's?
Do you consider the ideas we post in this sub while adding new features to the game?
Answer:
Wait..what? Remove Builder Base? Where the heck do you guys find this stuff? We're not removing it.
Part of it is because you can remove and edit War donations, at least in the War Leagues. So it would be easy to abuse to edit/remove cc troops and keep redonating just to get your count up.
The AI isn't different, it uses the same logic engine as the main village. However, a big factor in what causes some issues is the Guard Post. The wandering units cause havoc with the pathing AI because the attacking units have to constantly recalculate their position and the targets it's tracking.
Will we ever get a new gamemode like the builder base?
Why are super troops taking up so much space? This makes them almost unusable
Answer:
I'm sure there'll be new game features we'll introduce in the future. It won't be like Builder Base, but will be something completely new. In fact we're working on something that I think will be pretty enjoyable. No release dates yet, as it's a fairly complex system. But we're excited to announce it when it's ready.
The housing space for Super Troops is to balance out how much stronger they are than regular troops.
Can we donate super troops with gem donations, even if we don’t have them unlocked?
Can we have separate clans for home village and builder base (so I don’t get kicked out of my top clan for not having a good builder base)?
Add a clan search filter for CWL league (Champs 1, Champs 3, Master 2, etc.)
Can we cap the level of the CC troops donated to lower town halls / CC levels? (Ex: A level 9 loon donated to a TH3 caps at level 2)? I feel this will make it easier to balance lower THs and make it more fair for those who can’t get CCs
Answer:
No. Being able to donate them without spending the upgrade cost kinda defeats the purpose of spending the upgrade cost.
No. Programming the logistics behind this, having separate chat UI's, Clan logs, match logs, war logs, etc. would be an absolute data nightmare.
As a reflex response, my guess would be that it would lead to just those Clans at the top tiers being bombarded with invitation requests while lower clans would remain unfilled. And because they remain unfilled, it would make it harder for them to climb to those ranks, thus perpetuating a bit of a cycle.
No. The levels they are donated at is intentional.
Hey Darian. Thanks for doing this. Right now, every month we have cwl in the first week and clan games towards the end. I personally feel like this is getting tedious. Are there any plans to mix this up more? Thanks. Luke
Answer: We planned out the calendar of events for a very specific reason and the timing is intentional. Having them set the same time allows players to more efficiently plan out how they upgrade and how they spend resources. Mixing up the schedule would make it more difficult for players to do so. u/One-Decision-6110:
Hello there, Darian, thanks for taking the time to answer my question if you do,one thing I'm recently annoyed about is botters, it seems like they are everywhere, is it possible if you could give me a percentage of how many players out of total players are botters?also, i use the same army, time and time again, I'm worried my account will get banned one day due to SuperCell suspecting me to bot, are there any other measures you take into account when banning botters?
Answer: We never publicly reveal numbers. With regards to bots, it's a constant game of cat and mouse. We improve our systems to detect them and they improve the botting software to avoid detection. So we then improve the system again to detect them and then they improve the botting software to avoid detection. You can see how this goes on. It's one of the reasons why we do mass bans of botters instead of just individual cases. If we banned players who bot on an individual basis, it allows the bot software creators to analyse what it was that allowed them to be detected and make changes even faster. So by banning in mass groups, it slows down their development a bit. To answer your question about using the same attack, that's not how the detection system works so as long as you're not using a bot program we don't care how often you attack with the same army. u/mystic_coc: Hi Darian, what do you think about a new game mode in clash. It can be solo or multi (like clan base or something). You could create multiples worlds with the clash universe like a goblin village etc were we can attack the king of goblin Answer: I'm curious, but you don't really give any kind of idea what kind of feature you're suggesting. It's like saying "have you thought of a new multiplayer game?" Yes I have, but without knowing what kind of game you want, it's kind of an impossible question to answer. If you've made it down here, well done! I hope everyone here has learnt something new, and after reading the sheer amount of answers I'm sure you can all thank Darian for the extraordinary effort he put in (he isn't being payed for this either, he's just that amazing). If you don't see your question on the reddit post or the document it was most likely to avoid duplicates Happy Clashing!
Dr. Srange Recruit or how I learned to Love the Leveling Up
This is recommended to who have already done all missions in game. The idea is to do them out of order. We have to do all the missions in the game to get the unique items. We all also might have some special mission items that we like most. The first arcs of story do not have as much unique rewards as the newer arcs. Instead of waiting to level 50 to farm them, farm them now. Each mission can give you a full level. Also, gear with lower level, gets more chance to quality improvement with the upgrades. If you waited to get it with level 50-60 you will get it with level XII This is the mission reward list link from the wiki I did this list for me, and I am sharing it. The items I like to get are:
Also from time to time I think of doing a turret ship, but it ends not doing all that damage. Well, turret ships work for lower levels quite well, might not vaporize enemies instantly, but might help you with that itch for turret ships. I prefer the visuals of Cannon Rapid Fire with turrets only than Cannon Scatter Volley. TLDR; Do missions with unique rewards out of order; use a turret only ship; do favorite missions; avoid Coliseum and Vault for til the end Edit: Some fixes, and hierarchy boff Edit2: The title is based on the great movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) from Stanley Kubrick If you have not watched it, give it a chance, don´t mind it is black and white, it is a great movie.
EXHAUSTIVE List of the Buggy, the Bad, and the Baffling (LONG)
This might seem like A LOT of preamble and fluff before getting to the main event but I think it's sadly necessary because of the state this sub and the broader conversation around this game. It's very toxic, it's very divided, it's very silly. I'm saying all this stuff to establish context and to show you, dear reader, that I am aware of myself and not pretending to objectivity. This is not a hate post. It's a post-mortem on my personal thoughts and issues with the game. You don't have to read it. Anyway. There will be spoilers. The Deets I played the game on PC with I'd say mid-tier hardware. A ryzen 3600, a GTX 970, an SSD, and a non-4k monitor. I used a controller to play the game. The good news (for me) is that I didn't have many serious bugs of the kind you'd see in crowbcat's video, for example. I can leave most of that stuff out since it's both been exhaustively covered and is the stuff most likely to be fixed as CDPR try to recover or obscure the hit their reputation has taken. I sympathize a lot with you console players who did endure some of these bugs and issues. I find the trolling of you guys embarrassing for all of us. Just because you bought a game they said would work, on hardware they said it would work on, does not mean you're somehow at fault for what you got. Other people made decisions you could not control and being disappointed about it isn't a failing. It'd be like blaming people for getting cold food because of where they sat in a restaurant. It's asinine and we should all ignore people who think and talk that way. I wanted to get this out before 1.1 drops since none of us know how much of this is likely to change and I want this here as a record of where the game was at before whatever happens next. I do this because there is already a natural movement toward revising the narrative around C77 to one of "bad bugs, bad launch, good game, good CDPR" and I think the situation is far more complex and troubling than that. When you see melodramatic demonstrations of loyalty in this subreddit, you KNOW the situation is more complex than that. It's complex because there's a lot to say about this game, it's a major moment in gaming not least of which because it's the biggest and highest profile instance in a series of overhyped AAA release disasters. Only a handful of which ever recover more than a small but ardent fanbase of players. I expect C77 is going to stay relevant and stay widely played. I expect that in a year, with the game patched to a better state, people are going to re-evaluate it and see more of what the game does well. This is a normal part of the process and people trying to rush you through it are doing you both a disservice. Later will be the time to reassess C77 and write about how much the game has improved and how much faith in CDPR that restores for you. For now, it's the time to criticize, hold feet to fires, and try to at least protest the practices that led to this mess. And since others are doing that, I'll record a list of things I think the game does poorly which are not a matter of hype or bugs. I mean, I'm not setting out to create or reflect meme fodder here. I'm not even trying to be especially snarky. The above said, I'll be pleased but not satisfied if many of my issues are addressed in 1.1 or 1.2 or whatever. I think it's a shame that C77 released this way even if they do manage to fix a lot or most of it later. Respect that because I'm not someone who's gonna be convinced that companies get a pass to treat gamers like outsourced QA. This article or essay or list or whatever is subjective. It's personal. It's about what I think. It is not about me telling YOU what to think so you're free to disagree (in good faith) or plain not read it. I don't, and I can't stress this enough, care about objectivity or telling people what to think. If this helps anyone, cool, but I'm writing it for me. I'm expressing my view on a public forum. That's all, nothing more and nothing less. If you don't like what I have to say, be respectful about it and I'll engage you in discussion if that's what you want. Some of the below will seem like nitpicks or stuff that's likely to be fixed. And that's okay. I'm not living or dying on any of the opinions expressed here and I didn't much distinguish between which issues on this list are nitpicks and which are things that really bothered me a lot. The difference is only a matter of degree and that difference is subjective. It'll depend on how YOU want to see it. What I think matters here is that even if you avoided a problem, didn't see a bug, or played such a way that certain mechanics weren't an issue for you, it doesn't mean any of these issues aren't in the game. That logic seems imply that we should all be playing a certain way or is just that classic gamer deflection of "it didn't happen to me, so where's the issue?". Not here for that shit. I accept that C77 is more like The Witcher series than anyone probably expected. Especially people who are new to CDPR's games. I have a lot of the same criticisms for that series and I'm not alone. Never was a CDPR fanboy but like many, I respected them before this. The honest truth as I see it is that C77 carries over many of the same design flaws that were present in their earlier games. CDPR have always been pretty bad at combat balance, itemization, UI/menus, etc. They sometimes fix some of this, but they often don't. There seems to be a bit of a (in design terms) conservative or traditionalist CRPG streak in their design team, is my theory. But C77 is not a CRPG any more than the Witcher games were. So I think these are mistakes. I didn't have overinflated expectations about this game and you won't hear me use the word "promise" except right now. I don't believe in the idea that marketing equates to "promises" and I don't feel personally put out when marketing claims aren't met in reality. I've been playing video games for decades and this is normal bullshit everybody hates then forgets. Marketing is out of control in general and if I have issues with this element of C77's release, it goes way beyond CDPR itself. Not that they get a pass. CDPR notoriously spent more on marketing than the game and it sure as shit shows. That all said, I am totally interested in replies that (respectfully) correct me on any of these points. I may have missed things! I also get it if you're reading this hoping to see me mention a specific thing and I didn't, feel free to sound off. There's a lot of stuff I didn't really cover because it's been covered elsewhere plenty or I didn't care about it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't care about it, either. I bet whatever you like or dislike about this game is perfectly valid for you. This is also why the "things I like" list is relatively short, because right now I care more about the stuff that "doesn't work" which isn't a result of expectations or obvious bugs. Other people can complain from those positions if they want. To me, this is what I have to say right now but I reserve the right to change my mind. Hell, I might even be talked into a more negative outlook on the game rather than more positive. Who knows. TL;DR Your Fucking Essay: COOL. Did you post to tell me that though? C'mon. Don't be surprised if you're confused about the content, then. Mostly it's just me writing an introduction of sorts, like any good essayist would. Though the below isn't formatted like an essay, it's pretty much a deconstructed essay and should be read that way if I at all know what I'm doing (Narrator: he doesn't). This is only this long because I've been jotting these down since I started playing. After 100+ hours, would you expect a weekend grocery list? The Biz: The Buggy, The Bad, The Baffling If you made it this far, buckle up. Things about to get specific. The following is broken down by broad category of gameplay. These are my subjective categories and they might be messy and overlap sometimes. Not gonna debate about this since the only purpose of these categories is this piece. If you can't get your head around that, oh well. We'll start with CRAFTING, ITEMS and GEAR because it's the stuff I think they fucked up that most affected my enjoyment of the base game mechanics:
Legendary Gear seems designed to promote save scumming. Slots are randomized and critical for item progression and keeping gear relevant as the game RNGs you junk.
Armadillo mechanics are a great example of this. The reliance on this modification and its scaling seems bizarre and unintended as it trivializes most gear. If this is intentional, it's an eccentric mechanic that seems stuck in there at the last minute as a patch on item progression issues.
The above mechanics are responsible for a lot of the complaints people had early on about feeling forced to use patchwork gear with aesthetics they didn't like for mechanical reasons. How relevant this actually is in the game is immaterial because the game leads you to believe Armor stat is relevant.
Incomplete, random, and arbitrary craftable clothing list. Same for loot tables, vendor stock, and availability of clothing/armor in general. Lots of repetitive hand-placed gear that is bizarre and useless. How many Arasaka Hazmat Suits did YOU pick up in your run?
Items show up on HUD/scan as lootable but aren't. The terrain, clipping, and physics problems cause some of this (enemy drops getting trapped in debris). Some of these are placed like lootable junk, you can see that it's a pack of cards or w/e, and it shows up on scan, but you still can't pick it up. Probably buggy, but most of this doesn't even need to be in the game in the first place...
...because who even likes "junk" systems in games? I dunno why CDPR insists on this, the Witcher games had it too. If there wasn't so much other loot, I could see the crafting argument, but the junk you do find is baffling. Staplers? It all seems like an afterthought.
Overabundance of consumables, particularly healing items, makes healing tedious and almost meaningless. You can buy and craft the best healing items very early with extremely cheap prices and recipes. Maybe unintended. Baffling anyway.
Buffing is limited to a handful of non-scaling, core stat buffs that are extremely powerful throughout the game and make things like carrying capacity redundant and meaningless. Again, you can craft most of these.
I think the above is the result of "drugs" being cut out of the game for whatever reason, as it seems clear from their marketing that this was one of their planned ways for buffs. This seemed like a good idea, one of the elements I think most people can agree works well in Bethesda's Fallout series, but it's gone. Drugstores and street dealers sell supplements and medicine.
Buffing in C77 didn't have to be as intricate and fiddly as in the Witcher games, but this implementation really makes me nostalgic for the immersion and variety of options in TW3 and the previous games.
Skill Shards do not appear consistently across the game. I am not sure what mechanic determines which gigs and NCPD stuff drop these as rewards but I never saw any until the second half of my run, when I was doing more content in the "lower" districts of NC. Maybe this is just my bad luck. Maybe not.
Armor and damage values of many items, especially quest rewards, are not leveled so it's luck of the draw based on what order you do things in. Which is arbitrary in a game this dynamic. Johnny's Gun is a great example as most people will get this late in the game and its stats will be too disappointing for most to use.
Many of the Gear mods don't work or don't work as intended. This includes most or possibly all of the "Legendary" mods with hidden stat limits on things like crit chance and crit damage. Someday, someone might work out the mechanics behind all this but right now it's mostly meaningless numbers and head-scratching UI discrepancies. More on that later.
A lot of weapons and armor (individual pieces and broader categories) are vanishingly rare, potentially because of RNG or, again, the path a given player takes through the game. I don't think this is intended in most cases.
It's so weird that there's only one LMG in the game and that it has a barrel slot that does nothing.
Backpacker mod is useful only in the early parts of the game where you may not have the Capacity buff (50% increase every time is optimal to other methods).
The mods you can craft and at what tier make no sense. Mods don't follow the tier rules of other equipment types and there's no distinction made in game. This kind of info is left to player discovery but represents weird implementation, not clever design.
No mass-crafting means CDPR expects you to just hold down that button/key over and over and for fun, there's also a progress bar. I imagine they thought it would keep players from accidentally crafting the wrong thing. There are simply better ways to do this.
Recipe requirements for upgrades and SOME crafting are nonsensical, wildly imbalanced, random, and arbitrary. Why is Johnny's gear so much more expensive than others? It's only the best gear if you get lucky with slots or force it by reloading or spending A LOT of resources on recrafting from the earlier tier that the game for some reason forces you to carry. Probably so you could recraft it as you progress in the game. The reason this is baffling is because iconic weapons don't work the same way. Why have a separate system just for Johnny's gear?
Speaking of which, why are some Iconics craftable and others not? These mechanics being inconsistent and poorly explained is the reason a lot of people accidentally disassemble iconics, thinking they can recraft at a higher tier later. The game only lets you do that for some items and either you have the recipe or it's Johnny's Gear or River's Gun (Crash). There may be other gear affected by this but I'd love to hear a reason behind why x gear works one way and y gear works another way. I can't see there being a good one.
Several crafting perks are useless or cause more problems than they are worth. Auto-dissassembing of "junk" also gets rid of valuable sellable junk (the very little that's in the game). Up-cycling materials is weirdly implemented as well, almost like we're missing a perk for the Upgrade portion. With components being available in bulk in most stores and the up-cycle costs being too expensive (people have done math on this one) and unrewarding, this perk is a waste.
Now for the MENUS, UI, and BASIC MECHANICS:
Incorrect stats in various UI windows. Eg: Weapons will report random DPS changes in UI. It's unclear how much this is being affected by perks, but you can slide over the same weapon in the crafting menu and it'll change stats. Crafting it with different numbers seems to actually change the outcome stats SOME of the time. Again, figuring this out is left to player discovery rather than explained in game. That's bad.
Many tooltips are incorrect. Some are clearly from a previous version of the game and were never rewritten or updated. The clearest example of this is in cyberware, particularly the "arm" upgrades.
A LOT of perks don't work. A lot of em. Not just the crafting ones. There are lists on this sub and elsewhere.
Numbers in the game are misleading, unresponsive to perks or mods, or flat out incorrect. Resistances, crit stats, etc are either misunderstood or just buggy/unfinished/poorly thought out. Again. Unclear.
Endless list of shards separated by tabs but with no other sorting and a Menu system that can't decide whether to remember your place or not each time you go in the menu. In my run, I had two blank tabs, several blank shards, etc by the end. I didn't read a lot of these because it was a pain in the ass to go through them.
The "hold" button mechanic and mouse-like floating cursor suck and have always sucked. For controllers. This'll be one of the things others will consider a nitpick or just flat disagree with and you know what? I'm okay with that. I hate this shit and if I'm honest, I suspect no one actually prefers it, they just tolerate it in otherwise good games.
Odd item behavior in menu like items failing to disassemble, Johnny Gear (and River's Gun for some reason) duplicating, etc. Could be a bug but I have a theory above on what they could have been going for if this is intentional.
Many perks are redundant with cyberware and this can be difficult to spot. Tooltips can be misleading because the same ability might be worded differently from menu to menu. Some handgun perks are especially good examples of this.
All of the inventory management UI is subpar. Difficult to work with, follows design principles of games like Destiny which aren't well suited here, etc. For example, why is the crafting menu a huge unsortable list of item icons in a block configuration? The game doesn't use space for encumbrance like a Resident Evil game. It uses weight. Why implement the representation this way?
Item tabs are nice to see but they feel like they were afterthoughts. The game remembers which tab you're using inconsistently and stuff like DPS has its own tab, even for armor. My own google docs are better indexed than this.
Many items don't belong to any particular tab and are only visible if you look at ALL items, which again is a mess to look at. Some items are blanks or duplicates or have no actual in-game effect with no indicators either way.
Some scannable things in environments retain the "yellow" scanning icon for no discernible reason, or are already grayed out before you look. Why is Joss Ward scannable every time I see her? This is probably a bug but I found the scanning mechanics, outside of combat situations, to be unevenly implemented and often feeling like afterthoughts.
The minimap is mostly bad. I didn't hate it as much as some but I agree with the criticisms. It's another feature that feels like an afterthought or like someone wrote the code for it 10 years ago and hasn't played a single open world game since.
Vehicles appear as full fledged side missions for no reason. They clutter up the map and in game language, are displayed as urgent objectives. The psychology behind this is intentional -- developers and UI designers use bright colors and symbols like exclamation points to draw a player's attention. Anyone can ignore this, but the intent is clear. Question then is... why?
Variety of shops, bars, etc isn't really bad, but that they are unnamed adds a sense that they are all generic points of interest. The bars especially have a lot of personality but it's easy to lose track of which one is where. If they can have names pop up over quests, they could have had names pop up over other locations. Why make it harder for players to find specific things they are looking for?
Police System is notoriously bad and undercooked. A tacked on afterthought or a buggy mess. Either way, no fun for anyone.
Why is there a blank Attribute category? And don't say DLC because the question is really, why is it there and unexplained? The DLC explanation is make believe for now, no one really knows. That I know of.
What do the three progression meters at the top of the menu even mean? It seems like it's based on what priorities you have as aggregate of all the choices you make? We're supposed to just figure it out?
Stashes are not shared except for in vehicles. This makes the few additional "quarters" V gets useless. Can't sleep in 'em either so why are they in the game? Bug?
There isn't much I can add to the issues already well established with CONTROLS and DRIVING, so it's a short list:
Pace of driving is bizarrely slow especially with how fast most vehicles accelerate.
Brakes are bad and it's difficult to stop suddenly (in most vehicles) -- which leads to accidents which leads to NPC deaths which leads to dealing with the bad cop mechanics
Bikes show stashes but not one I used actually had a stash. It's just broken.
The driving AI and road mechanics are notoriously bad.
Button remapping is limited or nonexistent (especially on controller)
No alternate layouts.
The default control layout is a mess. Everyone hates the crouch/dodge bit and in general, the functionality of the "B" or "O" button is a mess.
I have a bit less to say about COMBAT than other fields, even though it is one of the primary pillars of the gameplay. This is because I mostly liked the combat, or at least didn't think it was much worse than many other Open World games. Still, there were some things that stood out to me:
Enemy AI is notoriously bad. Get behind their cover and see.
Most combat scenarios are shooting galleries. You have almost full control over entering and exiting combat (enemies won't even chase you most of the time).
Netrunning trivializes stealth and vice versa. They seem set up to synergize well, but the combo is both seductive (it's cool, dammit) and destabilizing to the thin veneer of balance the game already has. Bad balancing in a game like this is hard to avoid, but with the perks system being broken the way it is... there's a lot to fix here. Lots of people have pointed this out but for some, this kind of thing is fun and I don't wanna take that from anyone. Tricky one.
Grenades are mostly useless (maaaybe depending on build) because of their physics. It is difficult to use them "tactically" though I feel like they represent some interesting utility. Homing grenades don't seem to work right, but other types do. It's just hard to throw them to the right place, the game seems to be pretty finnicky about the spread and I've hit enemies on the face with grenades that did no damage to them (and they didn't have resistances to em soooo). The "quick throw" with just a light press of the button seems to work better than aiming your throw in my experience. It should be... the opposite?
This next part is really hard to pin down. Questions of IMMERSION, FLOW, and PACING are even more subjective than other categories of the list.
Quests with downtime between phases are nearly all set at 12 or 24 hrs. Kerry Eurodyne's quests were the one exception where it felt like I needed to wait a reasonable amount of time between phases. In other cases, it's way too fast and discourages freeplay. It suggested to me that I should stick to questlines until completion, and sometimes this feels narratively appropriate, but I wish they stretched these out or let us approach the quest-givers ourselves like in most Open World games. Even the ones with phones usually work this way for a reason.
The phone system here is a mess in terms of pacing and flow. Fixers and story characters call on top of each other because of conditions that trigger the calls. Everyone has missed dialogue in the game because of this stuff. This can even cause a bad bug that breaks phone calls and rewards from fixers (I know how to fix this at least).
Fixer texts about missions are overwritten and all sound like they are mostly written by the same person in the same voice. It's a weird choice to even offer this very redundant information after the phone call sections, which are arguably more immersive anyway.
Fixer calls tumbling over each other in the early and mid-game add a Preston Garvey feel of being badgered by the game. No one likes this.
Texts for cars can occur basically all at once after you get your first call from a fixer. This is dependent on what order you play the game in and how early or often you branch out to new districts so YMMV.
The relic malfunctions were a bad idea and occur so frequently it feels like the game is trolling me. I half-expected to find out that Johnny was doing it to test your defenses or by accident. Nah, it's just one of those annoying "forced immersion" things that wastes your time, reminds you that eating noodles and buying clothes makes no sense when you're about to die (for in-game weeks and months, but I digress). These malfunctions are completely unnecessary outside the handful of scripted moments where they feel appropriate. The ludonarrative dissonance here is jarring and would have been easy to fix.
The game's progression is a bit messed up thanks to the Street Cred system, which might be my least favorite novel mechanic in the game. It's responsible for many of the knock-on effects described above and elsewhere. If you level up this stat fast, which you almost certainly will, it contributes to almost all the pacing issues in the game. More open gigs means more calls from fixers as you wander around. I had 20+ Street Cred by the time I left Watson and I couldn't get 3 steps down the street without calls and texts. Choosing not to do these jobs right away meant forgetting the context hours later when I returned to them. I am sure I'm not the only one who felt overwhelmed by this.
Game, in general, doesn't have enough progression to fit its massive amount of content. If you do the side stuff, you're going to hit max SC fast. You're going to run through the gear progression fast (without crafting), etc. You can choose to avoid side stuff, sure, but it's still in the game the way it is.
General debris and junk on the ground is a waste of resources outside of aesthetic clutter which is often buggy (floating in the air and shit) anyway. See: the whole junkyard area.
Characters are often missing items they are holding or using. Misty's Tarot Cards only showed up during a reading in the final scene. NPCs have guns, food, and cigarettes disappear or float in the air. Almost every time I had a Johnny Smoking bit, his cigarette would stay in the air while he zapped around. Probably a bug. Still really annoying.
The game has notoriously thin customization options for an Open World RPG (it is an RPG, part of a subgenre that used to be called "Action RPG" but now everyone thinks RPG means whatever they want it to, smh). The appearance options are limited in ways that are arbitrary and uneven. Why have two digits worth of options for ears and almost none for other categories? Why show us a plethora of interesting cybernetics but allow us to have none of it? We hardly even see a change in V based on the cyberware we CAN install. Devs also still can't seem to get hair to clip with heads in a realistic way (where the hair doesn't float off the head) yet manage to get everything else on your avatar to clip in the bad way. Never ceases to amaze me.
The NARRATIVE and story elements are the strongest part of this game, no surprise with CDPR. I don't agree with people who say the story is bad, but there are certainly issues:
Text convos present texts in the wrong order in many cases and don't always alert for every new text. They also typically come all at once even before you respond. You should have more control over this, or the game should have had a slower-paced, more realistic flow for this. Probably a bug in some cases, but in general the button controls and UI for texts don't feel great either. Try finding them in the menu.
Shards are mostly not worth reading and there are way too many. They provide shallow context for shallow in-game activities. They are cheesy, over the top, and written in the NC street vernacular that falls flat without good voice actors to sell it. I'm sure there are hidden gems, even found a few, but overall I think it's baffling.
A lot of dialogue is choppy and disjointed because characters will gormlessly repeat back info or questions that the other character just finished saying -- screams that there was lackluster quality control for this and VOs recorded lines in a vacuum with flow being arranged in the edit, and often not very well. Lots of scenes where the inflection and volume changes are inappropriate and weird. V growling one line and then the next he's yelling cheerfully. It doesn't happen all the time, but it's noticeable. Probably unavoidable in a game like this but can be improved on.
The core relationship with Johnny is inconsistent and oddly paced. You'll be friends one minute and enemies the next and the game doesn't respond well to previous choices you've made which reflect your attitude toward Johnny and his role in the story. Some of this is down to "order of play" but there are cases like the Johnny-focused missions that have to be done right before the end of the game. Your relationship with Johnny can veer wildly and inorganically from scene to scene in what is a largely linear quest chain with predictable patterns.
There are occasional broken triggers and NPC locations, for example my Judy was still in her apartment while she was texting me pics from Oregon and so on (she left the city in my run) -- probably a bug but par for course, right?
The game treats sex like a reward and personally, I'm tired of seeing that. It corresponds too much with naive and ignorant attitudes about sex in real life and caters specifically to young (and underage, ffs) players who don't have a mature perspective on sex or relationships. That the relationships in this game are so well done, only to lead to a perfunctory "final reward" sex scene adds a level of gamification to sex that I could forgive on its own if C77's whole approach to sexual content wasn't so warped, backward and forward, and poorly conceived/designed to be faux-edgy, inconsistent, and patronizing to pretty much everyone. The game treats its extreme violence more responsibly than it treats sex. It treats drinking a beer in a cutscene with more sensitivity. This subject is complex, though, and probably deserves its own lengthy post. I'll spare you guys for now.
TL;DR Your Fucking List: I did say it was exhaustive. You made it this far (or skipped here) and since before was the tea, here's the cookie: I liked a lot about C77. I have played through it only the one time, but I did play through all the lifepath intros. I went with Street Kid in the end. I think C77 has a good game lost somewhere under the poor decisions, bad bugs, and incomplete features. I think, in the end, that C77 will be a game I enjoy more as I became more aware of these flaws and their place in the game. I think that's often the case for most flawed games: you stick with it and you learn to live with the problems. C77 is like that. The people claiming it's a perfect game are just signaling brand loyalty or lying through their teeth. This doesn't at all mean that people don't or can't like the game. Of course they can! We all like flawed stuff. It's only recently that trolls have made it all about such extreme loyalty and fan tribalism that they feel like they are personally attacked when something they liked is criticized. Criticism is not an attack, it's an evaluation. All things are worthy of criticism if they're worthy of attention at all. Anyway. Here are things I liked about the game, mostly small things I thought went largely overlooked, in no certain order:
I liked the V graffiti that shows up in some districts. I wasn't sure if this was showing up more as I played or is just random or pre-placed. I liked the idea that V was getting known and chose to see it that way. Immersion is more than half what you make up in your own head, after all.
I liked that players always had a choice to drink or not drink, except in some Johnny scenes. I thought this was a nice touch for people who want to play sober Vs. Why not?
Sometimes NPCs will respond to V in a way that gives players something they always ask for in games like this: a certain amount of responsiveness to who the character is throughout. They did a good job with this in the Witcher games as well.
I thought the vast majority of the beefier missions were well-written, well-conceived, and obviously given a lot of attention and love. They obviously worked hard on these and they must have been in the game from an early state.
I loved that many of the missions were just hangouts and dialogue scenes to deepen relationships between V and other characters. Again, this is something CDPR are great at. It's all here in C77 in spite of the issues.
I liked the side chatter you could have with vendors, even though a lot of is out of place and disjointed. Asking about the good drugs a medicine vendor has only to find... supplements. Still, this is a nice little touch.
I like the variance of NPCs on the street and how many of them deliver information via their appearance, where in the city they are, etc. They can tell a story if you can get over the duplicating, weird pathing/movement routes, and bad AI. A lot of them also have funny, antagonistic shit to say when you talk to them. It does get old, but I'm glad it's there.
Like in some of the better Open World games, there are a ton of ambient conversations V can overhear and many of these are well-written and occasionally even touching -- if they don't bug out.
I'm not sure I'll like all the endings, but I really like that they are each their own ending SEQUENCE. This is better than other games that offer a static ending choice, some cutscenes, and then credits. C77 offers an hour or more of gameplay for each of 4-5 ending sequences. I only played Panam's so far.
The romantic relationships in the game are as well done as the friendships. They are well written, believable, and sidestep some of the problems in relationships like this in games by allowing you to spend some downtime, not making it too obviously easy to game the result you want, and so on. The Panam sex scene weirded me out, but I appreciate that each sex scene in the game has its own gimmicks and aren't as generic as ones you see in other games.
The FRIENDSHIPS THOUGH. I thought this game did an excellent job with giving the player a lot of side characters you could form attachments to. Even the fixers all have distinct personalities (if you ignore their texts) and different attitudes toward V. The ones that come into play in the endgame are also a nice surprise. I didn't get any calls from them during the credits, but I wish I had because characters like Regina, Padre, Okada, and Dakota all made an impact on me.
The Nomads earned my preference for their ending. It was not an arbitrary or "gamed" choice. I thought that the Rogue path made more sense for my V in some ways, but I couldn't forget the Nomads and particularly Panam (even if I hadn't romanced her, I think she'd be hard to turn your back on). So I went with them and I'm glad I did, it was a satisfying ending (and I hear the best one). I'm probably gonna save all the other endings for other playthroughs or future experiments because I thought this ending made my V feel complete for now.
Cyberpunk is my favorite genre of fiction for a lot of reasons. I grew up reading William Gibson and I was an early adopter of new technology. I stayed a technological optimist for most of my 20s and have become more pessimistic and cynical since. I have watched Cyberpunk become more or less real, killing the genre for years before our current "ironic cyberpunk" phase. Outside of the themes and philosophical shit, I love the aesthtic of classic 80s Cyberpunk which C77 delivers in spades. The single greatest achievement in this game is its aesthetics. From the city design to the clothes and weapon skins, a lot of love went into at least how things LOOK. That's not the only thing that matters, but it's not nothing.
PHEW. THAT WAS A LOT. If you read all that, thanks. Even if you hated every second of it, you're still my hero. I feel seen. The tears and the hate that'll no doubt come streaming down atop me if this post gets attention will be worth it if even one person read all this and was like "yeah, I get some of that". See ya, Night City.
Where can I get the most money for my video game console? The first thing you need to do is find out where you’ll make the most money for your game console. After all, you spent a lot of money on your PlayStation 4, Xbox One, or Switch — it’s only fair that you get a decent amount when it comes time to sell!. We recently covered the differences between selling to trade-in programs versus Sell your Xbox One video games, consoles and controllers for more on Swappa and get paid fast. Listing your video games for sale is fast and easy. Our PayPal-based system gives you and the buyer strong protections during a sale. Make room for new games and put some extra cash in your pocket by selling your video games on Swappa today! So 6 can be fixed with little effort. I also install mm3 modchips on all my refurb ps1s. So figure 8-9 bucks for the console (figuring in the loss from unrepairables), 1-2 bucks in components, 8 bucks for a modchip, ive got roughly 20 bucks in it. Console by itself i can now sell for 50 online. Throw a couple refurb controllers and cheapy games We’re the best place to sell your broken console because unlike other trade-in sites, we’ll pay you a fair price. You can sell old game systems that are missing original accessories or essential cables. You can even sell used game consoles that are physically damaged or account-blocked. That’s where musicMagpie comes in, and we’ve made it easy to sell your games consoles to us. All you have to do is pop them in a box, any box, and then send them using one of our convenient FREE send options. Sell your Sony Playstation video game console for cash with BuyBackWorld. Our Sony Playsation gaming console trade in site makes selling your PS3 or PS4 easy. Sell Your Game Console. We will happily buy all your unwanted consoles, including but not limited to these popular models: Nintendo Switch, Wii U, Xbox One & Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 & 3. Find your console in the search box above or in category menu. Get the best price for your console now. You can contact any of these Trust Verified stores through their contact forms to receive a quote for your video game console (be sure to mention any condition issues to get an accurate price). It only takes a few minutes to complete the forms, and they typically reply with a cash offer within one day. Sell Your Video Gaming Console for Cash Online Sell your gaming console for cash at BuyBackWorld.com. You can use our video game console trade-in program to quickly and easily sell your device. Every order gets a free shipping kit, there are no listing hassles, and you can get an Instant Quote for your video game system trade in and be on your way to extra cash in less than a minute. You can use our new Self Service website SellMyBroken. Just run through the site and create an order. Click the logo below to get there. Prefer to talk to us? Please call or use our contact page to get in touch. We will help you with creating an account on our website so you can track the progress of the device on its way to us.
I Bought a PALLET of BROKEN PS4's - How Many Can I Fix ...
I bought a lot of salvage electronics to resell on eBay. I own an electronics repair business but I also like to buy broken stuff to fix and resell. I normal... Hope it works!If you want a shout out, leave a comment or tweet! [ @PandaBearHugzz ] (or a private message)SUBSCRIBE!: [ www.youtube.com/user/SlenderM3xican ... Start listening with a free 30-day Audible trial, one free audio book plus 2 Audible Originals. Visit http://audible.com/spawnwave or text spawnwave to 50050... I Had to Sell My Body in Order to SurviveSubscribe if you like! + http://bit.ly/1PG8z9GWatch More Strange Simulator Games Here! + https://youtube.com/watch?... I Bought a PALLET of BROKEN PS4's - How Many Can I Fix? I paid $2,387 for a pallet of 22 broken PS4's. There ended up being 15 PS4 Originals, 4 PS4 Slims, an... I bought 18 broken Xboxes - Can I Fix Them and Make Money? These Xbox One S and X consoles came from a liquidation company. I'm hoping to be able to make mon... From Wii to Switch and PS3 to Xbox One we decided to see exactly what GameStop has...Is the Nintendo Switch Lite worth it? https://youtu.be/0geM5WxBtcMShould... Returning old video games to GameStop!Make sure to Like, comment, and subscribe and don’t forget to turn on post notifcations to stay tuned for more videos.F...
