Just to be clear, I didn't make this and I have no fucking idea who did. The tweet I stole it from was not the author and there was no credit. To the hero that made this; thank you, and may the bridges we burn light our path.

It is a lax approach to the exact same psychology that makes gambling such an addictive and destructive phenomena. Gambling of which also has statistically the lowest rate of rehabilitation and the highest rate of suicides. Now latently woven into How We Make Video Games.

Gaming's adjacent-to-gambling featuresets and design models have been a sticking point for me for awhile now. It's not even well hidden. There is a purposeful psychological to triggering the reward centres of player's brains, particularly maximising anticipation of reward, to keep people hooked.

BF6's unlock model heavily adopts lessons learned by Call of Duty over the years, namely how to be as obtuse to navigate as possible, and as exploitive of player's time as reasonable in pursuit of maximising player engagement with no actual substance of reasoning.

Oh, and to add to this, you can unlock and activate three different XP boosters: career, gear, and battlepass. These boosters are timed in 15, 30, and 60 minute increments. They count down in real time, adopted from the Call of Duty model. Not in a match after activating? Stuck on a menu? Fuck you.

Literally broken. It's a broken, stupid, exploitive system. That is cooked. I haven't even seen that crop up in the known bugs log?

These games are built and maintained to lure you into these stupid ass skill trees and unlocks around the time of new updates, new modes, and approaching fiscal years. The goal is to maximise the audience at specific times, knowing it'll drop later. And then repeat.

I was speaking to someone the other day about this, them venting their frustration on timed challenges and events (which Battlefield has), and I explained it's all well established manipulation of the reward centre of your brain, same as gambling, and specifically timed around retention.

Oh and don't that original XP levelling fool you. Most of the camos, guns, class variants, etc are all locked behind another set of challenges. They don't expire, but you can't just grind XP to unlock.

What the absolute fuck is DICE/EA doing with this game.

I really need to get a dehumidifier. It'll change my life.

Dramatic? Maybe, but that's how much I hate it and how gravely it impacts my mood and will to live. I envy people who grew up in and enjoy humid climates. I don't know how you do it.

Can't sleep when it's humid. Can't cool down easily. Can't sit in comfort. Air cons work to a point but even those ultimately buckle in the face of humidity. Life becomes a miserable cesspit of unavoidable suffering and every waking moment of my life becomes intolerable.

Humidity is air itself becoming an inescapable wet, hot, sticky blanket of moisture. On your skin, in your lungs. The insulated heat keeps you sweating but the moisture cannot evaporate into the air molecules as they're already holding water, leaving you sticky and sweaty but also still fucking hot.

Hey I just wanna say that "Metroid is for people who read" is a loaded but succinct and absolutely true assertion.

Also the film's entire cast is made up of like all those secondary-character-actors that never get main roles but are immaculate and memorable in everything they do. These enormous personalities with intense physicality in their expressions. Freeman, Dourif, Perlman, Wincott, etc. Killer cast.