”we imagined the world on the day that the age old struggle of class was finally over. a day that humanity, empathy and community were victorious over the forces that would separate us based on arbitrary systems created by man.The video envisions a society celebrating the fact that the class system we currently exist within has finally imploded. Money is worthless, and we have rejected the desire to bind ourselves to the constraints of capitalism. All creeds and colors unite to burn the system that has so effectively controlled us for over a century. It’s a party, and if there was a song to celebrate the end of the world as it is currently known, “ooh la la” is that song.
this video is a fantasy of waking up on a day that there is no monetary system, no dividing line, no false construct to tell our fellow man that they are less or more than anyone else. not that people are without but that the whole meaning of money has vanished. that we have somehow solved our self created caste system and can now start fresh with love, hope and celebration. its a dream of humanity’s V-DAY… and the party we know would pop off.”
I used to love Bruce, but livin' my vida locaPremo’s expertly cut scratches lead us into the equally hard hitting sample flip of “Misdemeanor”, by Foster Stevens as the basis for the beat to “out of sight”. Lending yet another nod to the old-school greats that laid the foundation for RTJ, “out of sight” samples the same track as The D.O.C.’s “It’s Funky Enough”, only adding a bouncy, electronic synth atop the inverted chord hits, and uptempo, industrial drums, to create an absolutely infectious groove for Mike and El’s dynamic chemistry to shine, rapidly jumping between each other’s two line flows in the first verse.
Helped me understand I'm probably more of a Joker
When we usher in chaos, just know that we did it smiling
Cannibals on this island, inmates run the asylum
We the motivating, devastating, captivatingThe dense, intricate rhyme schemes smack you in the face, almost distracting you from Mike’s delivery and blistering flow on the verse; flexing his legendary status while paying homage to his drug-dealing past. This absolutely stunning display of technical skill, story telling, and complex rhyming illustrates how RTJ seamlessly integrates the best of both old school and new school hip-hop.
Ghost and Rae relating product of the fuckin' '80s
Coke dealin' babies, never regulating, bag accumulating
It would not be overstating to say they are underrating
The pride of Brooklyn and the Grady, baby
We don't need no compliments or confidence
Our attitude and latitude is "fuck you, pay me"
You see a future where Run the Jewels ain’t the shit
Cancel my Hitler-killing trip
Turn the time machine back around a century
Fuck y’all got, another planet on stash?Mike’s verse takes the light-hearted frustration expressed by El-P, and turns the aggression to the next level. Aiming his sights against the ruling class and their society that’s been designed to oppress people for profit, who have very meticulously painted themselves as celebrities and idols to the American public. Mike accepts that he will be villainized by these people for speaking against them, but he welcomes the nefarious role, knowing that the working class will eventually eat the rich, no matter how much they are stomped into the dirt.
Far from the fact of the flames and our trash
That is not snow, it is ash, and you gotta know
The past got a wrath, it’s a lover gone mad
Pseudo-Christians, y’all indifferent, kids in prison ain’t a sin? ShitThe combination of two of the best verses spit by any rapper(s) this year and production help from El-P and long time RTJ collaborator Little Shalimar, create a bouncy, aggressive, deeply truthful banger. “walking in the snow” not only encapsulates the crux of 2020 with lyrics that will become more powerful as they age, but will also forever be associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and the determination to expose continuing racial and societal injustices.
if even one scrap of what Jesus taught connected you’d feel different
what a disingenuous way to piss away existence, I don’t get it
I’d say you lost your goddamn minds if y’all possessed one to begin with
You believe corporations runnin marijuana? Ooh (how that happen?)When corporations are able to sell cannabis legally, but the government continually incarcerates people who trap, our president is a notoriously fraudulent businessman, and the people who helped put him in power run a pedophile ring, yet none of them face consequences and are allowed to continue to profit and remain in power while people suffer; well, we might be closer to slaves than previously imagined.
and your country gettin ran by a casino owner (ooh)
pedophiles sponsor all these fuckin’ racist bastards (they do)
”This week, on Yankee and The Brave”This voiceover paints the duo as brothers on the run from the law and crooked cops, and while this does close this “episode” out as intended, the critic in me is bothered by the slightly kitschy outro to such a spectacular album. The voices singing over and over, “Brave, brave, braaaaaave, Yankee and the Brave” would be, simply put, better left on the cutting room floor. The ending of this track alone is what knocks my score of this album down a few points. Despite its stellar lyrical content, with drums that never seem to reach that “holy shit!” moment, and the easily skippable outro, it’s upsetting to me that an album this great ends on such a low note.
Grips. Let's talk about 'em. submitted by db_inc to dbrand [link] [comments] If you've spent any amount of time on this subreddit, you've likely seen at least one post about a Grip case that has fallen apart. Most of you have seen several. We know this because we've seen every single one. We’d like to see less of them. Ideally, none. Over the past 18 months, we’ve been on an odyssey to fix the underlying problem. What follows is a chronicle of that journey. Our objectives in writing this post are three-fold. There will be a tl;dr version at the end of this post, summarizing each of the three:
PART ONEWhy Do Grips Fall Apart?Most phone cases are made out of a single material. The material itself varies from case to case, though the most common is Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU). The Grip case, as a point of comparison, is made of two different materials: an elastomer and a polycarbonate. The word elastomer is a combination of the words elastic and polymer. That's because it describes polymers that have elastic properties - like the one that forms the outer rim of your Grip case. The elastomer that we use is responsible for two critical properties of the Grip case: impact protection and grip. If you fell off of a rooftop, would you rather land on a hard plastic surface, or a rubber surface? If you value your life at all, you'd choose the rubber - its elastic properties would absorb much more force from the impact. Guess what rubber is? First one to answer "an elastomer" wins a prize! Next, imagine you’re a pervert, gently running your finger across every surface of a No. 2 Pencil. Which part of the pencil do you think would provide the most resistance to the tracing of your finger? If you guessed "the eraser," congratulations: you possess a basic understanding of coefficients of friction. Erasers are made of rubber. Rubber has a high coefficient of friction because of its elastic properties. The Grip case's elastomer isn't rubber - it's our own specially-formulated compound. It's still a useful comparison, as all elastomers share similar properties - provided they have the same degree of Shore Hardness. One person reading this is asking: “Shore Hardness?” The next section is their fault. A Beginner's Guide to Material Science The Shore Hardness scale gauges the hardness of various elastomers. It can be measured with a device called a durometer. You probably don't have one.
If you used an eraser with a high Shore Hardness, you'd find it wouldn't actually do much erasing. Now, what if you made a phone case out of an elastomer with a high Shore Hardness? It wouldn't offer much grip or impact protection. The Grip's outer rim is made from an elastomer with a low Shore Hardness. As a result, the material is grippy and impact-resistant, but much more malleable and thus more likely to deform. That's why we bond the elastomer to a polycarbonate skeleton. Polycarbonates don't require as much explanation as elastomers: they're a category of plastic. On your Grip case, the back plate is made of polycarbonate. The elastomer rim is bonded to the polycarbonate plate on all sides of the Grip, providing structural rigidity to the elastomer, fighting to keep it from deforming. At least, that's the idea. As we've all seen, it hasn't worked out that way. Bonding two distinct materials together is much more complicated than gluing them together. Instead, we rely on a thermal bonding process. Basically, that means we heat both of our polymers to a degree which would turn you from “rare” to “well done” in moments. This heat melts the polymers, which we then inject at a pressure which would turn you from “solid” to “paste” even faster. Once injected, these two materials get fused together along the seams. To further reinforce the bonds, we use a series of interlocking "teeth" to provide a greater surface area on which the bonding process can occur. Consider these teeth the mechanical bond, which exists to strengthen the thermal bond. Pictured: Bonding mechanic between the elastomer and polycarbonate. With that out of the way: why do Grips fall apart? The elastomer rim around the edge of the Grip case is naturally inclined to deform and stretch. The bonding mechanisms we described above are designed to keep that from happening, but it often isn’t strong enough. As soon as the bond fails at any point, it's only a matter of time until a total structural failure occurs. PART TWOHow Are We Stopping Grips From Falling Apart?Philosophically, there are two approaches to take:
We could follow all of these roads, find out exactly which factors are causing the bond to fail, then implement preventative measures to keep it from happening - but that would take a decade. We don't have that long. Much like you, we want this fixed yesterday. So, from the moment we received our first complaint about a Grip deforming around the buttons, we've been making structural, thermal, and mechanical improvements to the design and production process of the Grip case - some visible, some not. Every new phone release has brought a new iteration on the core Grip design, with each one reducing the failure rate, incrementally. We'll bring the receipts in the next chapter. For now, let's highlight the most noteworthy improvements. The Most Noteworthy Improvements The first signs of trouble were the buttons. Months before we'd received our first report of a Grip case de-bonding, we saw the first examples of buttons that had bent out of shape. Pictured: Button deformation. Why the buttons? Because you press down on them. The force from button actuation puts strain on the elastomer, causing displacement of the material in the surrounding area. Through a combination of time, repeated button actuations and the above-mentioned force, the case would permanently deform around the buttons. This concept is called the "compression set" of the elastomer - Google it. The solution to this problem was two-fold:
Pictured: Relief slits to improve button tactility and durability. Another early issue, pre-dating the first reports of total de-bonding, was a deformation of the elastomer along the bottom of the case - where the charging port and speakers are. Since we've covered the basics on how the interlock between the elastomer and the polycarbonate creates a bond, this is how the interlocking teeth along the top edge of the polycarbonate skeleton of the Grip used to look. Pictured: First-gen interlocking teeth on the top of the Grip. ...and here's the bottom of that very same Grip case. Pictured: First-gen interlocking teeth on the bottom of the Grip. Notice anything? Around the charging port, there is absolutely nothing keeping the elastomer in place. No teeth, no structural reinforcements... it's no coincidence that an overwhelming majority of early Grip deformations happened along the bottom. Since then, we’ve added a reinforced polycarbonate structure around the bottom of the Grip case. You'll see what that looks like in a bit. So, why didn't the launch portfolio of Grip cases have mechanical interlocks or a polycarbonate support structure along the bottom? The answer may or may not be complicated, depending on how much you know about plastic injection molding. We'll assume the worst and explain the concept of "undercut" to you with a ridiculous metaphor. The Ridiculous Metaphor Imagine you had a tube full of melted cheese. Next, imagine you emptied that entire tube into your mouth. Rather than swallowing the cheese, you decide to let it sit in your mouth and harden. Why are you doing this? We don't know. Let's just say you want a brick of cheese that's perfectly molded to the contours of your mouth - a very normal thing to want. So, your mouth is completely filled with cheese. It hardens. You reach into your mouth to remove the brick of cheese. As you're removing it, you encounter a problem: your teeth are in the way. This wasn't a problem when you were putting the cheese into your mouth, but that was because the cheese was melted and could flow around your teeth. Now that the cheese has hardened, this is no longer the case. In the world of plastic injection molding, this is an undercut. Our concern was that, by molding a structurally rigid piece of polycarbonate around the charging port and speaker holes, we'd find ourselves unable to remove the Grip Case from the mold once hardened. Imagine spending $30,000 on industrial tooling only to get a $30 phone case stuck inside of it. Once we saw Grip cases deforming along the bottom cutouts, we knew we'd need to find a way to remove the cheese from your mouth without breaking your teeth. To make a long story short: we did it. The cheese is out of your mouth, and you get to keep your teeth. Congratulations! Now, keep reading. On newer models of the Grip case, the result is a polycarbonate bridge extending around the bottom cutouts, adding both structural reinforcement and interlock mechanisms to promote mechanical bond, much like the ones which line the perimeter of the rest of the Grip case. Pictured: Newest-gen structural reinforcement on the bottom of the Grip. On the subject of structural reinforcements, this design revision was around the time we flanked the buttons with some fins, working in tandem with the heightened compression set and button relief slits, detailed above, to further guarantee that button actuation would have no impact on the overall durability of the Grip case. Pictured: Lack of button fins on the first-gen Grip. Pictured: Button fins on the newest-gen Grip. As an aside: Unrelated to the de-bonding issues, we've also made a number of smaller improvements to the Grip case with each new iteration. For instance, we chamfered the front lip of the case to make edge-swiping more pleasant and reduce dust accumulation along the rim. Those raised parallelogram shapes along the sides of your Grip case that create its distinctive handfeel? We made those way bigger for a better in-hand experience. In short: product development is a complex and multifaceted process. Each new iteration of the Grip case is better than the one that came before, and that applies to more than just failure rates. Speaking of failure rates: all of these improvements were in place by the time we launched iPhone 11-series Grip cases. The failure rate for these cases decreased exponentially... but didn't disappear entirely. The Even More Ridiculous Metaphor With these improvements, we achieved our desired outcome: the case was no longer deforming around the buttons or the charging port. Instead, the structure of the case began to fail literally anywhere else around the perimeter of the phone. Think of it this way… you’re a roof carpenter. The greatest roof carpenter of all time. Like the son of God, but if he was a carpenter. Unfortunately, you’ve been paired with the Donald Trump of wall-builders. You're tasked with building a house. You spend all of your time and energy perfecting your roofcraft. You've designed a roof that's so durable, it may as well have been made of Nokia 3310s. Nothing's getting through that bad boy. The wall guy? Instead of building that wall he said Mexico would pay for, he's been tweeting about the miraculous medicinal properties of bleach while a plague kills hundreds of thousands of Americans. The point here is that you can build the greatest roof of all time, but the walls need to be strong enough to match. To strengthen the Grip case's metaphorical walls, we needed to re-design the inside of the Grip case from scratch. More specifically, the mechanical interlock between the springy elastomer and rigid polycarbonate skeleton. We took every tooth at the bonding point between the two materials and made them as large as we possibly could. Then, we added more teeth. Pictured: Polycarbonate teeth on the newest-gen Grip. To jog your memory: this is how the teeth used to look... Pictured: Polycarbonate teeth on the first-gen Grip. If time proves that these changes aren’t enough, our engineers still have a number of ideas on how to improve the bond between the elastomer and polycarbonate. Will we ever need to implement those ideas? Again - that’s a question only time can answer. Each change might be the silver bullet that puts this problem to bed for good... but there's only one way to find out: it involves real-world testing and, with each iteration, months of careful observation. PART THREESo, Where Are We Now?Have the improvements we've made to the Grip case been successful? You bet. For the sake of comparison: we began shipping iPhone 11 series Grips on September 30th, 2019. Within six months of that date, we had received 52 reports of structural failures - a big improvement over the early days, but still not good enough. Fast forward two months. We began shipping Note 10 Plus Grip cases on November 21st, 2019. In the first six months of availability, we received exactly eight reports of Note 10 Plus Grips falling apart. Again, a major improvement over the iPhone series in the same stretch of time. If we'd launched the first Grip cases with a failure rate that low, we wouldn't be writing this post right now and you’d have nothing to read while pretending to do work. How about the Galaxy S20 series, which began shipping on February 10th, 2020? They're the most recent and improved set of SKUs we’ve made to date, leveraging everything we've learned and making further improvements over the Note 10 Plus. No reports so far. Same goes for the iPhone SE and OnePlus 8 series - these SKUs share all the improvements we've made to the underlying design of the Grip case thus far. Does that mean these numbers will hold forever? Who knows. That's the thing: every improvement we make, we need to wait several months to see how effective it's been. No amount of internal testing can replace the real-world data of shipping cases to hundreds of thousands of users across nearly 200 countries. We could always just throw in the towel, make the entire case out of rigid plastic, and call it a solved issue... but that would be the easy way out. The Grip case and its unique design properties can't reach their full potential unless we make incremental improvements - then wait and see how they pan out in the real world. All of which is to say: it's far too early to say the newest set of improvements have officially solved the problem. While the failure rate is still zero, we need to keep watching. We've made a ton of progress, but we're not going to rest until we've killed this issue for good - without sacrificing the unique properties that make the Grip case stand out in a sea of derivative hard plastic and TPU phone cases. That's probably enough to inspire confidence in someone who's on the fence about buying an S20 Ultra Grip, an iPhone SE Grip, or any Grip we release in the future. But what if you're one of the people who bought an older Grip model? "I'm One Of The People Who Bought An Older Grip Model!" We won't sugarcoat it. The failure rates for older Grip models is way higher than we deem acceptable. Why has it taken us this long to publicly address the issue, then? Easy: it's not as widespread as you might think. Some humans reading this might be looking at their iPhone X Grip, purchased in 2019 and still intact, wondering what all the fuss is about. That's an important consideration: most people who have functioning, still-bonded Grip cases aren't posting on /dbrand about how unbroken it is. The people who've had issues around total product failure are in the minority. We're not using the word "minority" as a get-out-of-jail-free card here. It's still a way larger number than we'd ever be comfortable with. We simply don't want our transparency and candor in writing this to be misinterpreted as an admission that every single Grip case we've made for older devices is going to fall apart. Statistically speaking, this is an issue for a minority of Grip owners. Our philosophy at first was that, while it was unfortunate and frustrating that Grip cases were falling apart, dramatic PR action wasn't necessary. Instead, we resolved to:
Where our strategy backfired was in the narrative that began to take root as Grip cases continued to fall apart. Look at it this way: the failure rate of older Grip case SKUs is anywhere between 1% and 20%, depending on how early we released the SKU. Since the improvements we've already made to the underlying design were rolled out incrementally with each new phone release, that number has been on a steady downward trend. For the purpose of this thought experiment, we'll go with the earliest, shittiest Grip cases - putting us at a long-term failure rate of 20%. So, 20% of customers for this device have a Grip case fall apart at some point in the product's lifespan. Every single one of those people writes in to our Customer Experience team about the issue. They all receive a replacement, free of charge. Since this replacement is identical to the first Grip case they'd received, it also has a 20% failure rate. We're now dealing with percentages of percentages. Stop panicking, we'll do the math for you: that means 4% of these hypothetical Grip owners will have a second Grip case fail on them in the long run. Four percent is a lot better than twenty… but it's also a lot of people who've been burned twice. These people are going to be extra vocal about how shitty the Grip case is. To be fair, they've got every right. So, we've got four groups of customers for this SKU:
Group B, having been burned before, reads about Group A's experience. They take it to mean their replacement will inevitably fail on them as well, and they'll one day get the dubious honor of joining Group A. Group C, despite not having had any issues yet, reads the experiences of Groups A and B. Then, a significant portion of this group begins to operate under the assumption that it's only a matter of time before their Grip falls apart as well. Group D reads all of the above and decides they don't have enough confidence in the Grip case to ever purchase one. A narrative begins to form that this hypothetical failure rate is close to 100%. Worse yet: people with newer phones, unaware that each new iteration of the Grip case has a dramatically reduced failure rate over the last, start to assume their case also has a 100% failure rate. That's where our original strategy - the one where we quietly improved the product in the background while offering replacements for defective units - backfired on us. This narrative only exists because we've continued to leverage existing stock with too high a failure rate, which, in hindsight, was like pouring gasoline on a gender reveal forest fire of disappointment and regret. This brings us to our next chapter. Mass Destruction At this point, you're probably aware that a number of Grip SKUs for older phones have been listed as "Sold Out" on our website, and haven't been restocked since. We stopped production on these cases because we knew they'd have all the same issues as the original production runs. See, it's not as simple as pushing a "make the Grip not fall apart" button at the factory - we'd need to redesign the case from scratch, implementing all of the design improvements we've made up to this point, then re-tool our existing machinery to produce this new version. We'll have more to say about re-tooling a bit later - for now, focus on the fact that some Grips have been listed as "Sold Out". If someone's Grip case falls apart while listed as "Sold Out", we don't have any replacements to send them. Instead, dbrand's Customer Experience team has been issuing refunds wherever possible, and store credit otherwise. Just in case you're wondering what we mean by "where possible": PayPal doesn't allow refunds on transactions that are more than six months old. Store credit, on the other hand, can be offered indefinitely. What we've come to realize is that we're never going to be able to escape this downward spiral until we rip the band-aid off and stop stocking these old, flawed SKUs. Today, we're ripping the bandaid off. As you're reading this, we're disposing of all of our old stock. All of the flawed Grip SKUs are now listed as "Sold Out". Head over to our Grip listing and take a look at what's available. Everything that you can currently buy is up to spec with the improvements we've made over the past year - meeting or exceeding the standard of quality set by the Galaxy S20 series, the iPhone SE, and the OnePlus 8 series. In some cases - take, for instance, the iPhone 11 series - this means we've already re-tooled our production lines to meet that quality benchmark. If a Grip case is listed on "Backorder", it means we've begun the process of re-tooling the SKU to match the improved quality standard you've spent the last five hours reading about. However, if a Grip case is now listed as "Sold Out", that means no more reshipments. If you own a sold out Grip case that hasn't fallen apart yet: that's great! Don't assume that your Grip is doomed to fail just because we devoted 5661 words to explaining why it might fall apart. You've still got better odds than you would at a casino. As always, if you run into any issues with your case, sold out or not, shoot an email to one of our Robots. They'll still take care of you - it just won't be with a replacement case… for now. Mass Production Remember when we said we'd talk more about re-tooling a bit later? That's right now. So, why are so many Grip models not being fixed? Why haven't we re-tooled these old SKUs with all of the quality improvements made to the case's build quality? It's a little complicated. Taking the improvements we've made to the most recent suite of Grip models and retroactively applying those changes to older SKUs isn't a simple task - it would require us to throw out our existing production tools and create new ones, from scratch. Suffice it to say that doing so is a wildly expensive endeavor. To recoup that cost, we'd need to produce more Grips than we're likely to ever sell for aging, irrelevant hardware. Let's use the Pixel 3 as an example. If we replaced every single de-bonded Pixel 3 Grip, that would account for about 3% of the MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) on a re-tooled Pixel 3 Grip case. Now we're sitting on 97% of that MOQ as overstock. Pixel 3 owners have had their phone for nearly two years now. If they want a phone case, they already have one. They're not looking for new Pixel 3 cases, they're getting ready to buy a new phone. Simply put, it’s no longer a viable market. Now, say the Pixel 3 was a significantly more popular phone - enough that we'd be shipping out, say, 50% of the MOQ as replacements on day one. Now, that's a lot more tempting to us - we'd still lose boatloads of money, but at least it would go towards some consumer goodwill. To figure out how much money we'd lose on re-tooling, we gave our bean-counting Robots a giant jar of beans and told them to get to work. They emerged three days later. When asked how many beans were in the jar, they gave us a blank stare. When asked if it was possible to re-tool any of our production lines for old Grip SKUs without losing obscene amounts of money, they said: "Absolutely not." Still, we're no strangers to throwing away obscene amounts of money to make the internet happy. Remember Amazon gift cards? Those were the days. The only question that remains is "How much money are we willing to set on fire?" We can't tell you yet. Why? Because we're currently running a detailed cost-benefit analysis on the subject of re-tooling old production lines, on a SKU-by-SKU basis. That's business talk for "the bean-counting Robots have been given more beans to count." The objective is to determine the viability of producing new-and-improved Grip stock for older phones: how many units would be tied up in replacements for that model, how many we could reasonably expect to sell to new customers, and how much overstock would be left from the MOQ. From there, we can determine what the financial impact of re-tooling would be and make the final decision on how much cash we're dumping into the ocean somewhere off the coast of the Seychelles. We'll have our results by early next week. These re-tooled models, if produced, would feature every improvement we’ve made thus far to the Grip case line, plus a few that have yet to be released. Remember how the S20s, the iPhone SE and the OnePlus 8s haven't had any reported failures yet? Picture that, but for the phone you've got. If we go ahead with re-tooling production lines for your phone, a few things will happen:
Take Our Survey This is it: your chance to have some say in how much money we set on fire as a goodwill exercise for this whole R&D clusterfuck. Those simulations we're running? They'll be great for telling us how much money we're going to lose on each Grip SKU, but it won't tell us anything about how much money our customers want us to lose on each Grip SKU. To that end, we've prepared a survey for people who have purchased a Grip case. We'll be taking your feedback into consideration during our decision-making process. We have only one request: don't be a jackass. Answer the questions honestly. Click here to take the survey. In Closing... We're sharing a special moment right now. We're all seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. For us, that light is "we're almost done with a year-long R&D effort to stop the Grip case from falling apart." For you, the light is "the end of a 5661-word marathon of a Reddit post." We just want to take a minute to recognize that we couldn't have gotten this far without your collective support. At any point in the past year, we might have pulled the plug on the Grip project entirely if we'd reached a critical mass of negative sentiment from our customers. Instead, we've got an army of devotees who have no problem paying us for the privilege of being our guinea pigs. Product development isn't a one-and-done process. It's easy to forget, but our skins weren't always to the world-class, record-setting, Michael-Jordan-in-his-prime standard you expect from us today. If you happen to have an iPhone 4 skin lying around, apply it and let us know how it goes. You'll immediately appreciate how many process improvements we've made. We weren’t born as the greatest skin manufacturer in history. We got there through a process of methodical improvement. Each jump in quality was driven by a bottomless well of user feedback, sourced from millions upon millions of customers. That, and the competition was comically inept. It's the same story for the Grip case. Your continued support has enabled us to make huge strides in developing a product that's on the cusp of blowing everyone else out of the water. We're going to keep working until it gets there. TL;DR VERSIONPlease note that by reading this tl;dr, you’re missing out on several outlandish metaphors, including classics such as:
WHY DOES THE GRIP FALL APART?
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO FIX IT?
HOW ABOUT THE GRIPS YOU'VE ALREADY SOLD?
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Greetings, Pilots! submitted by HazzyDevil to EverspaceGame [link] [comments] Today’s production update will be the last for this year. Obviously, we had different topics planned for this one. We’re fully aware that many of you still feel bummed out about our new Early Access release date, even though we have received a lot of understanding for our reasoning from our backers. So thanks again for your support! We’d like to conclude an unprecedentedly rough year for probably all of us on a high note. Thanks to our new timeline, we got some cool new content and features to share that would not have made it into the Early Access release version (our code freeze was pushed back by two weeks, the content freeze by four weeks). Ruins Of The AncientsYou might recall from the Kickstarter campaign that you awesome EVERSPACE fans unlocked the stretch goal “The Ancients’ Rifts,” a sector in the endgame offering extra hard challenges and the best loot in the game. In this area, you will encounter remains of a mysterious alien race first found in EVERSPACE, and you’ll get an early taste of what’s to come in the ruins of Ancients’ structures scattered on an all-new moon in the Union system.Concept art overpaint of ruins of The Ancients on Cephas II, a moon of the gas giant Cephas within the Union system. While you won’t run into any Ancients yet, we squeezed a couple of their mysterious ruins in as a teaser for the initial Early Access release, thanks to the extra time. Encountering the Ancients without any warning whatsoever was a major highlight in EVERSPACE. Their ability to transfer energy into matter as well as control time and space added new challenges in combat, the opportunity of fast-travel, as well as some wicked alien tech to play within the endgame—all must-haves in any great open-world space RPG, right? So, how better to introduce the mysteries of fast-travel as well as “mind-bending” weapon technology and devices (with a chance of surprising side effects) in the universe of EVERSPACE than utilizing some ancient alien tech that nobody seems to know much about yet, hence the generic name. But what if The Ancients turn out to be deeply connected to the established lore? Definitely not a new concept but proven in popular sci-fi classics many times before, and yet endless possibilities for adding new ideas in EVERSPACE 2… Prescott StarbaseAs revealed in production update #19, the star system Union is a bustling trading hub in EVERSPACE 2. While the newly-introduced and independent Freelancers run extremely profitable businesses in high-tech gear, medical supplies, and mining resources in the clouds high above planet Culver, the omnipresent Outlaws, already known from the predecessor, make a killing with loot of any kind from scavenger and piracy hunts and sell it for high profit to the highest bidder at the black market of Prescott Starbase.Think of it as a highly condensed version of an entire city floating in space with various departments, ranging from the neon-light-flooded shopping and entertainment area, the jam-packed residential neighborhood, all the way down to the industrial and dirty space harbor district—you know the gist of such sci-fi megacities because humans and aliens are alike when it comes to basic individuals’ needs and business. Around Prescott Plaza (concept art overpaint), travelers will be able to delve into all the human, as well as alien, guilty pleasures you can think of; as an antipole to the grim reality of living a harsh life in the DMZ, far, far from Earth, moral and ethics have no home in this place, especially in the uptown district. Concept art of the casino’s bar from a story campaign cutscene; this is where experienced shooters hang around when on the hunt for challenging high stakes assignments. Concept art overpaint of the space docks at Prescott Starbase, a rather dark and filthy place. While officially under the control of the Prescott Port Authority, opposing mafia clans call the shots, literally. Even though these families live by different morals and conducts of doing business, unconditional loyalty is non-negotiable. “If you need it, we have it” is the mantra at this infamous black market within the DMZ; just don’t ask where the goods came from. Greed for profit and deep loathing towards the Colonial Fleet and the Okkar Authorities is what holds this sizzling melting pot of questionable human and bizarre alien individuals together. For anyone good at operating under the radar and willing to play by a different set of rules, this is yet another place where to look for risky but very profitable “business opportunities”. While it is still under development and far from being complete, we’re excited to announce that Prescott Starbase will be explorable on day #1 and that we’ll add more functionality and opportunities to interact over the next year during Early Access. Enemy CasterUsing an analogy from the movie industry, NPCs in video games are somewhat like actors that have to be cast for each role from a pool of talents and show up on set at the right time—definitely not all at once, except for the inevitable cast photo, maybe.Our systems were designed to populate locations with the occasional visit from different NPCs for both friend and foe - like background actors, to make a scene lively and convincing that there is more going on in a given fictional world than what you can actually see. No matter if watching a movie or playing a video game (especially in RPGs), it’s all about triggering that amazing Kopfkino to make you believe you are actually present in that fictional world of your choice. If not done right, you may not be able to put your finger on it, but you can tell something is off, immediately making you realize you are just sitting in front of a screen. Obviously, in video games, especially in open-world looter shooter RPGs, you can interact with NPCs in many different ways. At the same time, your current loadout and stats add yet another dimension of complexity “to the scene”. This requires both careful level and combat design to prevent immersion from breaking, no matter what players do. Most of the time, we’ve worked with groups of enemies sufficient for compelling encounters in the Alpha and Beta. However, as the game world of EVERSPACE 2 will grow a lot over the next 12 months, so will the need for more encounter variety. While we’re off to a good start with the closed Beta, keeping you guys and hopefully many more space pilots hooked in EVERSPACE 2 for tens if not hundreds of hours during Early Access and beyond is by far our biggest challenge. This is why we focus on making each location worth visiting beyond exploring and looking at new stuff, which can get old quickly, no matter how pretty the vista might be. To get a tighter grip on things, we established a new in-house tool (the Enemy Caster) to help our designers in trying out different combinations of enemies within seconds and playtesting if they make an exciting challenge without leading to any unfair results—provided players engage within a reasonable level. That said, there's nothing wrong about feeling lucky and testing your skill boundaries against lvl +5 enemies if you so wish… (Erik didn't know that we changed the tool's name to Enemy Caster as the original one was misleading). Youtube: Erik shows off the enemy caster on stream Generally, every enemy ship has its individual stats (hit points, damage output, speed, agility, etc.), all sorts of equipment as well as specific attack and retreat behavior—it’s almost as complex as designing for the player and can easily turn out being an even deeper rabbit hole than what it looks like on paper. However, the more shortcuts game designers are willing to take by limiting what enemies can do and which items they can use compared to what’s at disposal for the player creates a shallower overall combat experience, weaker immersion, and less fun overall. Thanks to the comparatively simple player progression through the predecessor’s linear game world, plus not being able to back-travel made things even easier, we were able to balance all enemy stats within long spreadsheets. Due to the much higher complexity in combat design for our ambitious open-world looter shooter RPG, we already reached the limits of this method within the first star system of EVERSPACE 2, which is why we’re pretty excited about our new tools. Imagine how nasty it would be if you get pinned by a bunch of pesky Webber Drones and before you even had a chance to stun them with an EMP blast and free yourself, a group of self-destructing drones would appear right next to you... Oh, wait! Twitch: Webbed! O_o Long story short, for the Early Access release, we already have quite a few more enemy types than in the Beta, and more to come over the next 12 months. Thanks to our new in-house tools, we’ll be able to offer you guys an even broader gameplay-variety in combat on your journey through six or eight star systems, plus the endgame. To ensure that these new combat encounters are properly balanced and fun for as many pilots as possible, we’ll heavily rely on everyone’s feedback during Early Access, so keep it coming and share your thoughts on our discord or in the forums on Steam and everspace.game. HOTAS/HOSAS SupportDue to popular demand from EVERSPACE players, we added rudimentary HOTAS support post-launch to that title, even though it had never been a promised feature because we believed it wasn’t a great fit for fast-paced 3D space shooters in general. The implementation did work but required some fiddling to assign input parameters for each model, which led to some frustration and quite a few negative user reviews on Steam. To create a better experience for HOTAS fans, we’re putting more emphasis on this feature in EVERSPACE 2 right from the beginning.For initial test purposes, we implemented experimental HOTAS support in the closed Alpha/Beta, which still requires some tweaking depending on your hardware and is not as robust as you can expect from an officially released product. After analyzing feedback from test pilots using HOTAS, we decided to overhaul the entire implementation completely and add presets for the most common setups on day #1 of Early Access for the models below:
Of course, you absolutely can do all that, but fancy dogfight maneuvers won’t help you much because your opponents will turn on a dime anytime, too. We know this probably won’t hold back any die-hard space sim fans using their HOTAS/HOSAS gear and disable inertia dampeners for the extra kick of immersion in EVERSPACE 2, which, admittedly, is a fun experience. We’re just saying: be aware of what you are getting yourselves into… it'll be a tough ride! Having said that, we're working hard to give you the best HOTAS experience for such a fast-paced game as possible. Alrighty, that was quite a lot for our concluding production in 2020. We hope everyone has enjoyed the space ride so far. If you did, don’t be a stranger and join our fun/informative/goofy live streams every Friday on Twitch and YouTube, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm CET / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PDT. I’m pretty sure that Erik, our one-and-only Community Ambassador, and host of the weekly RFG show, will spill a few more beans than we agreed... Well, it probably has been an unexpectedly rough year for everyone. So more than ever, we wish you y’all a wonderful winter holiday with your loved ones and hope to see you super relaxed, happy, and excited for the EVERSPACE 2 launch in January. 🚀👀💥🙌 Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team |
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