The bubble hasn't popped. They've all lost value, but they are still worth quite a lot. The bubble bursting would mean they lost like 90%+ of their value or there was some technical flaw found that made it possible to cheat the system. As long as it's possible to make money with GPUs the prices aren't going to come down significantly. Since many places in the world have very cheap electricity, it would take a major crash in value to make mining unprofitable. Unfortunately, we'll probably have to wait for the major coins to move to a proof-of-stake system before we see GPU prices get back to normal.
I looked at them around the time Breath of the Wild came out, but I didn't feel good about paying someone for them. It's probably a silly rationalization, but I generally feel OK about ROMs and that kind of thing if they provided as a free way to play games I otherwise wouldn't be able to play. There's a certain community spirit I appreciate about the emulation community. However, I don't like the idea of anyone making a business out of it. In the case of Amiibo cards, I'd be fine making them myself, but when I looked into it those blank NFC cards were still a little more expensive than I'd like. Way cheaper than actual Amiibos of course, but still too much for some stuff that should have been available in the game in the first place.
@mike: I'm sure they'll figure out a way to make it run like trash, just like Syndicate and Origins. Though, I can't remember how Black Flag ran, so maybe there's some hope.
I usually upgrade my GPU to the second or third highest tier every two years (GTX660-->GTX970-->GTX1070). I only upgrade my CPU when there's a major shift in the market. I was using a 3570K for about four years, then I upgraded to a Ryzen 1700 because I wanted more cores. It all really depends on what you want to do though. If I was still playing at 1080p, I'd probably still be fine with my 970, but I got a 1440p monitor for other stuff and wanted my games to run at native resolution.
It doesn't look much like FTL to me. I mean, it's in space, but otherwise it looks more like a first-person shooter with some ship management. It might be cool, but I can't see it scratching the same itch as FTL.
Also, not a specific dig at this game, but I avoid any paid multi-player VR game. The market is just way too small and littered with dead or as good as dead multiplayer focused games.
While I agree that discussion is important, some of it got really silly this year. Almost everyone started refusing to acknowledge serious flaws with games because they liked the game a whole bunch. A vote could have ended some of those hour long arguments were people were just repeating the same bad arguments over and over.
Just so no one freaks out too much, this is a much bigger problem for enterprise services than it is for normal users. The exploit involves context switching between user programs and the OS kernel. I'm far from an expert, but from what I've read games don't do much (or any) of this, so the fix is unlikely to effect gaming performance very much, if at all. If you're running a server with several virtual machines, you might see that 30% hit in specific tasks, but that's far from what most regular computer users will experience. We'll have to wait for all the patches to roll out before we can know exactly how this effects performance, but it doesn't sound like it will be a big deal for gamers.
The outcomes generated by a random number generator are more than fine for defining a percentage chance of getting something out of a loot box. A well designed algorithm is probably a lot better than flipping a real coin since the coin is almost certainly heavier on one side or slightly oblong.
You're right that if you know how the algorithm works and you have the seed, then you can predict outcomes, but end-users don't have that information. Even if someone figured out the algorithm, the company selling the boxes could just change the seed once every .001s or so and it would make it unpredictable again.
I don't think random number generators being psudorandom is a problem for regulation.
I have some ETH that I mined back when it was worth about $4. Not a lot mind you, but considering it's basically free money (I had free electricity at the time) I'm just going to hold onto it until it's either worth an absurd amount like Bitcoin, or it crashes and burns.
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