Players have a very simple option, give them the middle finger and play something else.

But we learned a long time ago, with a certain horse armor, that the gaming ecosystem is full of morons that will see this and think "$10 USD isn't really that much". So ... **shrugs**

Pretty much but this explains why they changed the gameplay of Overwatch 2 so drastically. OW2 feels more like individual plays more so than team plays so changing the mechanics the way they did will make it so that having a certain combination of heroes that go well together will have less of an impact. Especially since tanks feel more like dps with more hp than anything in OW2 vs OW1.

But personally, I didn't like such a drastic change. It took away a lot of the uniqueness of OW so we will see how it goes. Least it's F2P and Junker Queen and Sojourn will be unlocked for anyone that logs in before season 1 ends and Kiriko will be unlocked to anyone that owns OW1 as long as you redeem before Season 2 ends. So even if you have little interest, I think everyone should at least log in to redeem them. After that tho... It's gonna get really shitty.

I think at the very least, we now know that 7900XT will be at 375 watts at a minimum. Most likely 400 watts. The question is whether or not AMD will do their usual sneaky tdp numbers or if they will go Nvidia route and provide a more legit tdp numbers. Since as we know, Nvidia does their tdp based on the entire card while AMD does their tdp only based on the GPU die and Vram. If they are more honest about it, I think we can see 7900XT being 450 watts. But the real question is where their feature sets are?

Will RDNA 3 have an actual DLSS competitor? Will they be competitive in Ray Tracing? Will they have a competitor to Reflex? How about Nvenc and Optix? I think at the very least, they need to be competitive in Ray Tracing as well as Raster but I get the feeling that when push comes to shove, they will be slightly more efficient while continuing to not be competitive in many areas outside of Raster while charging Nvidia prices.

The reality is the only way Radeon will have a card that's competitive in hardware against Nvidia in every front is to make a card that's as inefficient if not more than Nvidia. But we will see.

No, AMD won't change the way they rate the power usage of their "boards". They think theire method is smarter than everyone else's and they'll keep using it, for better or worse (and it's worse, no doubt about it).

We had rumora about AMD also going to add some specific hardware to handle upscaling, and I hope that's true and it works well. Will it be comparable to DLSS? I have no idea.

I really hope they improve their ray tracing capabilities because it's not only Nvidia, but Intel has also shown that their RT hardware is better than AMDs. And given that RT is not only not going to disappear but become more relevand going forward, AMD really needs to work on that and show a very clear improvement. But it's AMD so, who knows if they'll do it or wait until RDNA4 or whatever to start taking RT seriously.

As for, and pease excuse me for using the term, "gimmicks" like Reflex and the other two (that I didn't even knew before you mentioned them), no, I don't think AMD will have something like that.

At the end of the day, tho, and now that mining may give us a break, neither AMD nor Nvidia will be able to sell their cards unless consumers think they're worth their asking prices so, just for the sake of competitiveness, let's hope that AMD has improved its game on both scaling and RT and we may see a fight in not only availability, but also features and price.

Sounds like I should play some Overwatch before the sequel is released then. I bought it from Humble when it was quite cheap that one time, but I've only tried it once I think. Sounds like if I want to play the original, I should do it quite soon if I want to experience the original at all... Not really a fan of the original going away in practice (unless I've misunderstood, of course).

Yea the original is officially going away. It wouldn't surprise me if they had a mode in arcade that's similar to the original but the heroes would still be changed so yea, I'd give the original a go and at least you can redeem the free heroes if you decide to play overwatch 2.

I found that statement above so interesting that I decided to check it out myself using the max + average power consumption of the four default cards from both companies, from two different reputable review outlets. Some quick Excel math later...

It turns out Nvidia overdoes the rated power more often and more blatantly than AMD! With just the 3080 being below rated TDP as opposite to both the 6700 and the 6800, while the 6800 XT and the 6900 XT more or less match rated and go just slightly over.

Another interesting fact is that cards tend to cluster roughly at the same spots above or below the rated power indicating BIOS limits are at play here to keep things constant across different quality chips in a rather PS5-like fashion.

Did you read this:

https://www.igorslab.de/en/graphics-cards-and-their-consumption-read-out-rather-than-measured-why-this-is-easy-with-nvidia-and-nearly-impossible-with-amd/

I'm so glad ppl are kicking up a fuss over the BP system on Blizz's end, because my god is it an annoying BP system.

Like just give us the damn heroes and keep the old lootbox system. I was more or less fine with it, and I know all too well that AAA's are never going to go back to the old days of "complete X challenge to unlock Y costume", or "input secret code/complete secret level to unlock X costume", those days are mostly dead (save for the indie dev scene, where some of those games still feature unlockable content without a lootbox/BP/DLC system). 

I miss the days when Blizz let us preserve our shit, but these days it's "uh oh, time to put away yours games billy, we've got new ones!". 

yes I'm still salty as fuck that I lost the copy of WCIII, that I paid for... (and was told to buy Reforged, fuck that shit). 

I think DragonFlight is the only Blizz game I'm actually looking forward to, D4 looks like a monetisation joke, OW2 is just ugh, that Warcraft mobile game looks shit, HOTS is prob gonna die soon, so that's another game I liked going away forever, and they stopped giving 2 shits about a new SC IP.

Like even with some bad apples fired from Blizz, with the founding fathers pretty much gone, the company is def no longer the one I grew up with, and I don't see it returning to form ,if at all. 

I was also gonna look into Wrath Classic, since they're giving out a free mount for Frost DK spec players, but I just remembered how they treated Burning Crusade Classic, servers and all, and I cba dealing with that shit and being dropped when sub numbers for classic drop again. Blizz really do care way too much about MaU's.