Firstly, just wanted to say that the 400 hours is me restarting the game...four times over? I've also not been following this game, I knew it was coming out but I put at the back of my mind, never gave into the hype and only bought the game when a guy from work was talking about it.
Gameplay TL;DR:
Game is broken. By level 50, enemies either did 1 damage or buffed me to do more damage. Some of the guns are insanely fun but break the game. It's fun, but if you want a challenging experience wait till some good addons come out.
Story TL;DR
Main story is quite short, it's not effected by any side quests you just get different endings that you can choose, one ending feels more finalised but open to a sequel/DLC the others either just end (which is intented) or just end on a "To be continued."
Romance quests are very good but the romance is just do quest, sleep with them, end of romance, apart from one character.
Some of the side quests are VERY VERY good however and the overall theme of Cyberpunk is in my opinion, excellent, it's just let down by the main plot.
Bugs/Glitches TL;DR:
No crash to desktop, main problems were only for those strange people like myself who play non lethal but some of the endings are bugged, one of the end cut-scenes is bugged.
Overall TL;DR:
I think if you really really want to play this game, play it. I had a lot of fun and got my moneys worth, though I would be lying if I didn't say that I'm not dissapointed with the end product. If you're on the fence and you're reading this to see if it's worth £40-50 then I would say don't get the game, wait till next year when the modding scene has expanded more and all the DLC has come out, get it on a sale.
When the ending cutscene is bugged and after what...3-4 patches and the lead dev has said how proud he is of the PC version, I would say that it's best to hold off.

Gameplay:
I played purely on Very Hard and tried a no kill playthrough which...I couldn't do all the way due to certain sections of the game but for majority of the game I didn't kill anyone. What I liked about the game is that it didn't say "Oh well, you best get used to the taser weapon or the stun gun, because that's all you get!" like so many other FPS RPGs that offer that, I was using shotguns, sniperrifles, assault rifles, SMGs...anything, really. That's good!
My build:
https://nukesdragons.com/cyberpunk-2077/character?v=1&a=if4ig&s=iiifff44iigg&p=h42h83hd1hg2hh1u11u41ua3uh1b13b32b42b72b83b93bc1bd2be2bf2a01a41a62a81a91ab3ah1ai2aj1ak1al2w01w11w31w63w72wa3wb2wc2n01n21n43n73n82na1nc2nf1nh2s51sc1sk1c01c11c42c61c72c82c93ca2cb1cc1cf2r32e62eb2eh2ei1 If/When I replay, it will either be:
https://nukesdragons.com/cyberpunk-2077/character?v=1&a=a9kck&s=111999kkcckk&p=p02p11p21p32p42p51p61p72p81p91pj1pa1pb1pc2pd2pe2pf2pg2ph1pi1q01q12q23q41q51q63q71q81q93qa3qb3qd2qe1qf3qi1aa1ab3af3s31sa1sb1se2sf1si2sj1c01c11c32c51c61c82c93cb1cc1cf2cg2ch1ci1eh2
I did make my gear and I put all epic armour increasing mods into the slots, then with my weapons all epic crit chance or if they had 100% crit by default, Crit damage. I used Qiant Sandevistan which would slow down time and lowered the CD on it so I could use it every 19 seconds.
To put this into perspective of how this was at level 50, the most damage done to me was the end boss and it was about...20-30 damage, other than that, everything was 1 damage. With Katana and Cold Blood I had about 14-15k armour, with just the Katana it was about 6k and with any other gun it was 5k armour. I got this by upgrading everything to as far as the game would allow which when you hit 50 is just one extra upgrade. My health thanks to the consumable perk and health perk was about 850 to 1k with all consumables. My Cyberware made me immune to bleeding, my perk made me immune to poision, if I took shock damage my armour would increase by 10% and I would take no damage and fire would increase my damage by 10%.
So...I took 1 damage with a 800+ health pool, I could kill everything very easily dealing about 24k damage on some enemies and I could slow down time and kill everything before they could even react. This is on VERY HARD.
"Why complain about it being broken if you broke it?"
Because I was told that the secret ending was very difficult and I was also told, by the game, that in very hard, you have to use EVERYTHING to survive. The problem is the game devs...for some reason...lets you out level all the mobs in the game, at level 50 the only "yellow" enemies were two mechs on the secret ending and the end boss, all of which died super quick anyway because the damage is broken.
The other problems I had and the other reason I hit 50 was I was told "Do the sidequests, they effect the ending." and with the Cyberpsycho being all about keeping them alive, I thought "There's gotta be a moment where she comes in and helps me or someone out." But...nope, you don't get anything other than money. Nothing happened when I did all the police side quests, nothing happened when I did all the races, the only quests that did matter were two side quest chains, Panam and Johnny...maybe the boxing ones.
"But you get tons of cash!"
If you go down the hacker route, it's kinda pointless because you get all your hacks via crafting or random drops from terminals.
"Ah! But you went guns blazing, all guns, must've cost a ton to get all your armour up, weapons and ammo!"
Afraid not. Once you get the epic grenade blueprints you can make your set for a lot of your upgrades, you just buy cans of soda from vending machines and take them apart which doesn't cost that much anyway. The legendaries are a bit difficult, granted and that's why I said the boxing quest chain is actually very useful if you want to play a non hacker route.
Outside of upgrades once you get any weapon mod and the perk that grants a 20% chance to get an extra item when you make gear, you're set as they all use the materials you get from soda cans or random junk items.
General view
I suppose when it's all said and done, I can't say I didn't enjoy the gameplay. I played 400 hours of it. It is to easy and if I wanted to do a "All guns blazing" build again, maybe just stick to epic gear. If we get a new game plus or some difficulty mods that would be perfect, something like enemies using tech weapons more to shoot through walls, more smart weapons hitting you behind cover, more netrunners hacking you all the time and having them stun/blind you or something, just anything other than setting you on fire...a cyberware mod makes them buff you for crying out loud.
One of the main reasons I went the gunner route was because I saw so many great guns I thought, at the time, I couldn't use so...I will say that with my build, all the guns I had, it was a lot of fun, I really really enjoyed it...it's just far far to easy, I wanted something to say "Ok, you think you got this, let's put it to the test!"
Story:
I didn't really know all that much about Cyberpunk coming in, I love Bladerunner and Ghost in the shell, distopian stories where it has a message and hopefully a nice ending.
Cyberpunks story was good, there are some side quests that I will remember, I won't say which ones but I will say that if you like story, it's good to pick them up. There aren't that many of them, a lot of side quest will be just "Kill the dude. Steal the thing. Hack the thing." with a text being sent to you on why you should care, most of the time I didn't really care all that much but those that did offer something a bit more, did make me pause and think about it, even think about them as I walked away from the game on what was the "best" option.
The romances are...ok. There is certainly more effort in Panam than the others, who, do have their own quest lines and they're the best quest lines in the game but Panam, as a romance story line does seem more fleshed out. The others are sadly very much a "Do my quests, then do me, ok see you at the end of the game!" Panam fights alongside you, you both go on a big character journey together and the fact she joins you in one of the best endings says a lot. A bit dissapointing for me, as I liked Judy and one of her endings was very nice but when I saw what Panam got...argh, was frustrating.
The main plot itself is unfinished. If you can be bothered (like I was) do all the side quests, everything, then do the main plot. Not only will you find that during your time the main plot is very short only about...10-15 quests? Of which none of the side quests you can do effect them, at all, no dialogue options that I could see, none of them alter the story a bit...nothing. The endings aren't effected by sidequests either, you get extra endings, two if you do two side quests but that's it.
I won't spoil what the endings contain, but I will say, for the sake of saving your time if you're reading this before doing them, that the secret ending is pointless and lazy. It's basically one of the endings but they removed the NPC's from the ending and just spawn some mechs, then after that you get the same boss fight you would get regardless of the ending and then you get a rehashed ending of another ending and an epilogue from another ending. Basically they just took apart the endings and stuck them together to get the "Secret" ending, you get about...a few bits of dialogue from a character but...it's not that great honestly.
The biggest problem is this is a "The ending will be in the DLC!" kinda game, where, even the main character points out how pointless the whole thing was. I HATE these kind of endings, the only saving grace is that...I HOPE, this is going to be in the free DLC they're doing this year.
Glitches and Bugs:
At this point in time, I came across TONS of bugs. Nothing that crashed me to desktop par once (which is a deal breaker for me if it happens to many times) the only issue I did come across was playing non lethal, where, if you grab a enemy and drop them during stealth...for some reason, they are more prone to glitching and exploding in a bloody mess. If you stand and drop them, make sure the ground is as flat as it can be, you might, MIGHT be ok. The other thing to do is enemies would show the death animation (no breathing) BUT if you pick them up, drop them, turn around, sometimes the animation will change to show they're still alive. If you hit them whilst they're on the ground, even if it's a stungrenade touching them, yes, touching, not exploding, you throw a grenade at them and it bounces off of them, they die.
Cars would smash into concrete, textures would take ages to load, sound would be to loud from time to time, some dialogue had the tech distorted effect some didn't, Tech guns randomly not charging up to shoot...all of which I could ignore as they either didn't effect me to much, I could fix by saving the game and reloading or were just funny.
When the endings are bugged, that to me is very different and that's what made me go from "This is one of the best games I've played!" to "They just stop caring."
So during the "Bad" ending, dialogue wouldn't play I just saw text, I had to reload a save to make it work. On the "Good" ending, during a quest I was told to drive a vehicle and then park it in a tent, the only problem is I couldn't do it because an invisible wall was blocking it and I would just flip over, I couldn't get out to continue the quest or fail it, but luckily you can skip it. Then on the "Good" ending, on the very last cutscene I drove into the sunset...literally into the sunset as the Vehicle was driving on the skybox.
When you haven't even tested the ending, worse, you say "We're proud of our PC version!" it's such a slap in the face, yes, I'm sure these will be fixed...I hope, but I don't want games in the future to be like this, I want a finished game, certainly if you're asking £40 for it. The free DLC better be something decent and not "Paint your car!" but either way, the damage has been done and it's a real real shame. This game deserved to be polished, it has so much potential and there's so much to like here it's just sad to see it be this...messy and uncared for.
Overall:
400 hours of gameplay, do I regret it? ...No? I mean, I've come away disappointed because of how bad some of the flaws are, more so with the lead dev saying how proud he is of the PC version but...I would be lying if I didn't say that if they brought out new game plus, there was some mods that made the game a lot harder...I wouldn't go back.
I will play Male V romancing Panam as I have a very strong feeling that's the "intended" storyline and though my choices won't matter in the end, there would be some things I would do differently. I did enjoy my playthrough, I like Judy as a character I just wished I could do more, like...something as simple as hang out on her couch and watch TV with her would've been fine, doesn't have to be grand and epic, just simple character interactions...which you get through quests with Panam.
Could I recommend this game to others though? Not really...If the glitches and bugs was just the odd here and there, ok, fine, it's an open world game with amazing graphics, sure, you will get some problems..but when your endings are bugged? Nah, it's not acceptable.
Maybe some people can look past it, I would like to but I just feel...like a chump. Here's hoping it gets better, they did say they were working on it more and didn't find it acceptable but...not sure if that's just console, we'll see.

Learn from my mistakes. I got a job, but it took me a year, 1100+ applications, and failing 11 final interviews. Here is what you don't do while job searching.

Sure, there are plenty of posts from people who applied to a job and got an offer 30 seconds later. Good for them. But if you're on this sub, you're probably running into more difficulty. I did. Job hunting these days is inherently pretty hard, but there are plenty of things I did wrong during my job hunt that could have saved me time and trouble. I'm a 35 year old in product marketing in the bay area, so this advice may or may not apply to you.
Most of this advice is not new, you may have seen it elsewhere. Well, HEED MY WORDS! You should take that advice.
Here are my don'ts of job hunting:
e: Here's the real #1 piece of advice because someone brought it up in the comments: Don't Not Have A Network. The main reason I had such a hard time was I moved to a new city where I didn't have a professional relationship with ANYONE. I think if you're applying without a friend on the inside, it reduces your odds by 80-90%, based on random factoids we've all seen that say 80% of jobs are never posted publicly.
I went to networking events and coffee meetups and blah blah blah, but COVID put a stop to that before I could make much progress. The biggest piece of advice (by far) is just to have a friend who can get you a job. But if you're reading this, you would have done that already if you could have.
Don't try to get by without doing the standard "best practice" stuff.
I spent a while thinking I could get away without making a customized resume for different jobs. I also thought I would probably have the right keywords naturally, and that I didn't have to worry about that either. WRONG. I wasted many weeks submitting poorly optimized resumes and getting few interviews.
What you should do is have at least one version of your resume customized for each job title you're applying to. That means if you're applying for Sr. Widget Fiddler and Director of Widget Fiddling, you need 2 versions.
Keyword optimize each resume version by copy-pasting 50+ job descriptions for that job's title into a tool like Voyant Tools, which will spit out all the most common words and phrases. Find the most frequent ones that seem important and relevant, and work them into your resume, even if it seems weird to refer to yourself as a "team player" or "entrepreneurial".
Don't be bad at interviewing, not even a little bit bad.
Being a good interviewee is a skill. Most of us aren't born with that skill, and most of us are rusty when it comes time to look for a job. I knew I wasn't great at interviewing, but I really didn't want to go through awkward practice interviews with friends, so I told myself people would understand why I was all nervous, and realize I was still super talented and experienced despite my 'rough edges'. WRONG. I blew it on a lot of interviews before admitting that I had to practice, a lot. I did a bunch of practice interviews, got feedback, and I even talked to an interview coach. The latter was expensive, but I think the dose of outside perspective really helped. YMMV.
I practiced enough that I started getting to final rounds instead of washing out in the first couple rounds. It made a huge difference. Practice.
Don't wing it during the interview.
For 'behavioral' questions (i.e. "tell me about a time when..." questions) everyone says you need to have multiple answers memorized for every major category of question. Ugh! So much work. Greatest weakness. Success story. Failure story. Conflict story. Collaboration story. YAWN. I thought I could come up with good answers on the spot. It's "supposed to be a conversation", right? WRONG. I blew it on a couple interviews before realizing I was coming across as both unprepared AND inexperienced.
Sit down and work out your bullet points for every answer, BEFORE you land an interview. Pain in the butt? Yes. But not as big a pain as getting an interview, blowing it, then ending up doing the work anyway.
Don't apply to old job listings.
If it's still up, they're still hiring, right? WRONG. I have found that job listings are good for about as long as fresh bread. You mostly want to apply the day they're posted, 2-3 days is OK, 5 days is pushing it, beyond that, it's literal trash. I started out applying to anything relevant that was less than a month old, and my app-to-interview yield was around 1%. Started applying to new listings exclusively, and my yield went to more like 3%. YMMV.
Don't apply to listings that aren't on the employer's own site.
It's become disturbingly common for 3rd-party sites to steal and re-post job listings they have nothing to do with. You click on a link on LinkedIn or Indeed, and you end up on Neuvoo or some random BS. Don't submit any of your info on those sites. Very often the jobs are expired already, but these 3rd-party scammers are still re-posting them to steal your info. Even if they're not expired, there's no reason to think they actually send your application to the employer.
If you land somewhere unexpected, go to the employer's actual careers section on their site and find the listing yourself. Otherwise you're just giving your info to someone to sell, and the employer probably never sees it. Please report these listings as you go.
Don't be too picky with job titles.
Unless your resume precisely "fits the profile" employers are looking for, you're going to have to apply a lot. I had to apply a lot. At first, I was exclusively applying to one title, because although I didn't "fit the profile" I didn't want to compromise. I ended up getting a really solid job with a different title, after I loosened my criteria JUST a tad.
Have a serious talk with yourself about how many months you're willing to apply before broadening your search, and don't talk yourself out of good jobs because they have the "wrong" title.
Don't be too loose with companies you apply to.
At a couple points in the process, I ended up with interviews at companies that I seriously didn't want to work for. I was playing the numbers game and I would apply to anything with the right title, even if I hadn't heard of the company. I figured if I got an interview, I would worry about the company later.
Difficulty: If you are on unemployment, this can lead to a sticky situation - if you turn down an offer, you legally can't collect unemployment anymore in many places. It's also pretty hard to justify to yourself turning down ANY interview if you actually need the money.
Have a loose idea of who the company is before applying, to avoid those awkward moments.
Don't stop applying until the ink is dry on your offer letter.
My advice is to apply to every suitable listing as soon as it's posted, which could be as many as 10-30 per day depending on your field and geography. If things are going well, you'll also have interviews going on during any given week, which also put heavy demands on your mental energy and prep time.
It is tempting to stop applying for jobs if you are doing multiple interviews and they seem to be going well. You need the time, and one of them has to work out, right? WRONG. It happened to me multiple times - I'd get further along in an interview process, I'd be focusing on prep, and I'd let my application routine slip. Bad idea. If your application pipeline runs dry, it can be another 2-6 weeks before the interviews start flowing again. ABA - always be applying.
Don't get your hopes up. (maybe the most important tip.)
Your mental resilience to rejection and your self-regard are finite resources. They are resources you need to conserve to maintain your overall mental health and good job-hunting habits. Job hunting can burn through these resources like Joe Exotic through a bag of meth. Don't be like me and get emotionally invested in any given job before you get an offer. Don't start picking out all the stuff you're going to buy with the new salary. Don't start thinking of what doors are going to open up for you with this step in your career. Don't mentally pick out outfits for your new commute. Just don't.
I consider myself a mentally tough person, so I should be able to handle the repeated rejection, right? WRONG. If you allow yourself to start caring about a job before you GET the job, you WILL be crushed to bits. Maybe not the first time, but after the 5th, or the 10th, it becomes hard to take.
To some of the newer job hunters I've seen on this sub: Caring about a job from the day you APPLY? Sheer lunacy. You shouldn't even remember where you applied by the time you go to bed that day.
Keep in mind: It's a numbers game. It's not personal. You WILL get the right job eventually, if you keep going. You have to maintain faith in yourself, but hold no hope for any particular job.
In emotional terms, treat it less like a poker game, (where any hand can be a big deal) more like a slot machine (where you care zero until you finally win). No matter how tough you think you are, take care to maintain your mental state, especially during COVID where so many aspects of life are also wearing down our mental health.
Don't be afraid to be a try-hard.
The role I finally got was based largely on a "take home project" used to demonstrate my working style. It was paid, also really long, the minimum suggested time was 10 hours. Usually I put 70% effort into trial projects, because I don't want to bust my ass for a throwaway, and I don't want to look desperate. My thinking is "Well, we're all professionals, so as long as I mention a few of the right things, they'll know we're on the same level, right?" WRONG.
On this one, I decided to go HAM on the project. All or nothing. I ended up putting over 20 hours into it, (the max time they suggested was 20) and came up with a total overkill amount of material, it was probably 20 pages worth, if not more. To give some idea, I spent like 4 hours just doing addressable market sizing, which everyone including me acknowledges is fairly pointless.
Part of the project was also to see how we communicate about our work - they put me on their company slack, so I logged onto it pretty much every day to update them on my progress. It was firmly in try-hard weirdo territory. But it worked!
So I guess my lesson from this is, if you're going to bother with these projects, be the one who turns in the blue ribbon material.
NB: Be aware of "free work" scams where they try to get you to do the actual job without hiring you for the job. If it's pertinent to the actual job and it's more than an hour or two of work, it should be paid. Unpaid trial projects that don't relate to the actual business are OK, but you'll have to decide for yourself how much time you're willing to put in for free.
Don't assume ***anything*** until it's final.
In 3 instances, I got much further than I expected in a hiring process, and in one I was blindsided by a rejection where I thought I was a shoo-in. #1, they interviewed me for the role (up to the final round) even though the job called for an actual engineer and I have zero engineering experience.
In #2, I blew an interview and got rejected. I knew exactly how I blew it, I got the yips and did poorly. So I sent an email reply explaining what I SHOULD have said, and that I really believed in the company's mission, and that I realize I was a poor interviewee, but I was working on it - they actually gave me another shot and I made it to the final round.
In the last unexpected twist story, they actually scheduled a final interview, then CANCELLED IT. I have been rejected for about a million jobs, but I've never been cancelled on. They said that instead of an interview, they would just review my trial project. I couldn't imagine cancelling an interview with someone you intend to hire, so I assumed this 'review' was just a consolation prize and the job was going to someone else. On the day the cancelled interview was meant to take place, they offered me the job. Huh???? Later that day I rode to heck on a flying pig and bought a snowcone there. But I also got a job.
On the other side of things, I was told directly I was the top candidate for a role, the only one who was really qualified, but because of COVID they were putting the role on hold. OK cool, I figured I was a shoo-in once they actually hired for it. Well, they re-listed the job about 45 days later. They didn't reach out to me. I messaged them. They told me I wasn't even going to get a phone screen for it. WTF? They lied to my face for no reason whatsoever? Yep. They did.
The lesson: Do not assume anything! ANYTHING!

Old Austin Tales: Forgotten Video Arcades of The 1970s & 80s

In the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was a young teen growing up in far North Austin, it was a popular custom for many boys in the neighborhood to assemble at the local Stop-N-Go after school on a regular basis for some Grand Champion level tournaments in Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. The collective insistence of our mothers and fathers to get out of the house, get some exercise, and refrain from playing NES or Sega on the television only led us to seek out more video games at the convenience store down the road. Much allowance and lunch money was spent as well as hours that should have been devoted to homework among the 8 or 9 regular boys in attendance, often challenging each other to 'Best of 5' matches. I myself played Dhalsim and SubZero, and not very well, so I rarely ever made it to the 5th match. The store workers frequently kicked us out for the day only to have us return when they weren't working the counter anymore if not the next day.
There is something about that which has been lost in the present day. While people can today download the latest games on Steam or PSN or in the app store on your smartphone, you can't just find arcade games in stores and restaurants like you used to be able to. And so the fun of a spontaneous 8 or 10 person multiplayer video game tournament has been confined to places like bars, pool halls, Pinballz or Dave&Busters.
But in truth it was that ubiquity of arcade video games, how you could find them in any old 7-11 or Laundromat, which is what killed the original arcades of the early 1980s before the Great Crash of 1983 when home video game consoles started to catch up to what you saw in the arcade.
I was born in the mid 1970s so I missed out on Pong. I was kindergarten age when the Golden Age of Arcade Games took place in the early 1980s. There used to be a place called Skateworld on Anderson Mill Road that was primarily for roller skating but had a respectable arcade in its own right. It was there that I honed my skills on the original Tron, Pac Man, Galaga, Pole Position, Defender, and so many others. In the 1980s I remember visiting all the same mall arcades as others in my age group. There was Aladdin's Castle in Barton Creek Mall, The Gold Mine in Highland, and another Gold Mine in Northcross which was eventually renamed Tilt. Westgate Mall also had an arcade but being a north austin kid I never went there until later in the mid 1990s. There were also places like Malibu Grand Prix and Showbiz Pizza and Chuck-E-Cheeze, all of which had fairly large arcades for kids which were the secondary attraction.
If you're of a certain age you will remember Einsteins and LeFun on the Drag. They were there for a few decades going back way before the Slacker era. Lesser known is that the UT Student Union basement used to have an arcade that was comparable to either or both of those places. Back in the pre-9/11 days it was much easier to sneak in if you even vaguely looked like you could be a UT student.
But there was another place I was too young to have experienced called Smitty's up further north on 183 at Lake Creek in the early 1980s. I never got to go there but I always heard about it from older kids at the time. It was supposed to have been two stories of wall to wall games with a small snack bar. I guess at the time it served a mostly older teen crowd from Westwood High School and for that reason younger kids my age weren't having birthday parties there. It wasn't around very long, just a few years during the Golden Age of Arcades.
It is with almost-forgotten early arcades like that in mind that I wanted to share with y'all some examples of places from The Golden Age of the Video Arcade in Austin using some old Statesman articles I've found. Maybe someone of a certain age on here will remember them. I was curious what they were like, having missed out by being slightly too young to have experienced most of them first hand. I also wanted to see the original reaction to them in the press. I had a feeling there was some pushback from school/parent/civic groups on these facilities showing up in neighborhood strip malls or next to schools, and I was right to suspect. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First let's list off some places of interest. Be sure to speak up if you remember going to any of these, even if it was just for some other kid's birthday party. Unfortunately some of the only mentions about a place are reports of a crime being committed there, such as our first few examples.
Forgotten Arcade #1
Fun House/Play Time Arcade - 2820 Guadalupe
June 15, 1975

ARCADE ENTHUSIASM
A gang fight involving 20 30 people erupted early Saturday morning in front of an arcade on Guadalupe Street. The owner of the Fun House Arcade at 282J Guadalupe told police pool cues, lug wrenches, fists and a shotgun were displayed during the flurry. Police are unsure what started the fisticuffs, but one witness at the scene said it pitted Chicanos against Anglos. During the fight the owner of the arcade said a green car stopped at the side of the arcade and witnesses reported the barrel of a shotgun sticking out. The crowd wisely scattered and only a 23-year-old man was left lying on the ground. He told police he doesn't know what happened.

March 3, 1976

ARCADE ROBBED
A former employee of Play Time Arcade, 2820 Guadalupe, was charged Tuesday in connection with the Tuesday afternoon robbery of his former business. Police have issued a warrant for the arrest of Ronnie Magee, 22, of 1009 Aggie Lane, Apt. 306. Arcade attendant Sam Garner said he had played pool with the suspect an hour before the robbery. He told police the man had been fired from the business two weeks earlier. Police said a man walked in the arcade about 2:45 p m. with a blue steel pistol and took $180. Magee is charged with first degree aggravated robbery. Bond was set on the charge at $15,000.

First it was called Fun House and then renamed Play Time a year later. I'm not sure what kind of arcade games beyond Pong and maybe Asteroids they could have had at this place. The peak of the Pinball craze was supposed to be around 1979, so they might have had a few pinball machines as well. A quick search of youtube will show you a few examples of 1976 video games like Death Race. The location is next to Ken's Donuts where PokeBowl is today where the old Baskin Robbins location was for many years.
Forgotten Arcade #2
Green Goth - 1121 Springdale Road
May 15, 1984

A 23-year-old man pleaded guilty Monday to a January 1983 murder in East Austin and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Jim Crowell Jr. of Austin admitted shooting 17-year-old Anthony Rodriguez in the chest with a shotgun after the two argued outside the Green Goth, a games arcade at 1121 Springdale Road, on Jan. 23, 1983. Crowell had argued with Rodriguez and a friend of Rodriguez at the arcade, police said. Crowell then went to his house, got a shotgun and returned to the arcade, witnesses said. When the two friends left the arcade, Rodriguez was shot Several weeks ago Crowell had reached a plea bargain with prosecutors for an eight-year prison term, but District Judge Bob Perkins would not accept the sentence, saying it was shorter than sentences in similar cases. After further plea bargaining, Crowell accepted the 15-year prison sentence.

I can't find anything else on Green Goth except reports about this incident with a murder there. There is at least one other report from 1983 around the time of Crowell's arrest that also refer to it as an arcade but reports the manager said the argument started over a game of pool. It's possible this place might have been more known for pool.
Forgotten Arcades #3 & #4
Games, Etc. - 1302 S. First St
Muther's Arcade - 2532 Guadalupe St
August 23, 1983

Losing the magic touch - Video Arcades have trouble winning the money game
It was going to be so easy for Lawrence Villegas, a video game junkie who thought he could make a fast buck by opening up an arcade where kids could plunk down an endless supply of quarters to play Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids. Villegas got together with a few friends, purchased about 30 video games and opened Games, Etc. at 1302 S. First St in 1980. .,--.... For a while, things, went great Kids waited in line to spend their money to drive race cars, slay dragons and save the universe.
AT THE BEGINNING of 1982, however, the bottom fell out, and Villegas' revenues fell from $400 a week to $25. Today, Games, Etc. is vacant Villegas, 30, who is now working for his parents at Tony's Tortilla Factory, hasn't decided what he'll do with the building. "I was hooked on Asteroids, and I opened the business to get other people hooked, too," Villegas said. "But people started getting bored, and it wasn't worth keeping the place open. In the end, I sold some machines for so little it made me sick."
VILLEGAS ISNT the only video game operator to experience hard times, video game manufacturers and distributors 'It used to be fairly common to get $300 a week from a machine. Now we rarely get more than $100 .
Pac-Man's a lost cause. Six months ago, you could resell a Pac-Man machine for $1,600. Now, you're lucky to get $950 if you can find a buyer." Ronnie Roark says. In the past year, business has dropped 25 percent to 65 percent throughout the country, they say. Most predict business will get even worse before the market stabilizes. Video game manufacturers and operators say there are several reasons for the sharp and rapid decline: Many video games can now be played at home on television, so there's no reason to go to an arcade. The novelty of video games has worn off. It has been more than a decade since the first ones hit the market The decline can be traced directly to oversaturation or the market arcade owners say. The number of games in Austin has quadrupled since 1981, and it's not uncommon to see them in coin-operated laundries, convenience stores and restaurants.
WITH SO MANY games to choose from, local operators say, Austinites be came bored. Arcades still take in thousands of dollars each week, but managers and owners say most of the money is going to a select group of newer games, while dozens of others sit idle.
"After awhile, they all seem the same," said Dan Moyed, 22, as he relaxed at Muther's Arcade at 2532 Guadalupe St "You get to know what the game is going to do before it does. You can play without even thinking about it" Arcade owners say that that, in a nutshell, is why the market is stagnating.
IN THE PAST 18 months, Ronnie Roark, owner of the Back Room at 2015 E. Riverside Drive, said his video business has dropped 65 to 75 percent Roark, . who supplied about 160 video games to several Austin bars and arcades, said the instant success of the games is what led to their demise. "The technology is not keeping up with people's demand for change," said Roark, who bought his first video game in 1972. "The average game is popular for two or three months. We're sending back games that are less than five months old."
Roark said the market began dropping in March 1982 and has been declining steadily ever since. "The drop started before University of Texas students left for the summer in 1982," Roark said. "We expected a 25 percent drop in business, and we got that, and more. It's never really picked up since then. - "It used to be fairly common to get $300 a week from a machine. Now we rarely get more than $100. 1 was shocked when I looked over my books and saw how much things had dropped."
TO COMBAT THE slump, Roark said, he and some arcade owners last year cut the price of playing. Even that didn't help, he said. Old favorites, such as Pac-Man, which once took in hundreds of dollars each week, he said, now make less than $3 each. "Pac-Man's a lost cause," he said. "Six months ago, you could resell a Pac-Man machine for $1,600. Now, you're lucky to get $950 if you can find a buyer." Hardest hit by the slump are the owners of the machines, who pay $3,500 to $5,000 for new products and split the proceeds with the businesses that house them.
SALEM JOSEPH, owner of Austin Amusement and Vending Co., said his business is off 40 percent in the past year. Worse yet, some of his customers began returning their machines, and he's having a hard time putting them back in service. "Two years ago, a machine would generate enough money to pay for itself in six months,' said Joseph, who supplies about 250 games to arcades. "Now that same machine takes 18 months to pay for itself." As a result, Joseph said, he'll buy fewer than 15 new machines this year, down from the 30 to 50 he used to buy. And about 50 machines are sitting idle in his warehouse.
"I get calls every day from people who want to sell me their machines," Joseph said. "But I can't buy them. The manufacturers won't buy them from me." ARCADE OWNERS and game manufacturers hope the advent of laser disc video games will buoy the market Don Osborne, vice president of marketing for Atari, one of the largest manufacturers of video games, said he expects laser disc games to bring a 25 percent increase in revenues next year. The new games are programmed to give players choices that may affect the outcome of the game, Os borne said. "Like the record and movie industries, the video game industry is dependent on products that stimulate the imagination," Osborne said "One of the reasons we're in a valley is that we weren't coming up with those kinds of products."
THE FIRST of the laser dis games, Dragonslayer and Star Wan hit the market about two months ago. Noel Kerns, assistant manager of The Gold Mine Arcade in Northcross Mall, says the new games are responsible for a $l,000-a-week increase in revenues. Still, Kerns said, the Gold Mine' total sales are down 20 percent iron last summer. However, he remain optimistic about the future of the video game industry. "Where else can you come out of the rain and drive a Formula One race car or save the universe?" hi asked.
Others aren't so optimistic. Roark predicted the slump will force half of all operators out of business and will last two more years. "Right now, we've got a great sup ply and almost no demand," Roark said. "That's going to have to change before things get- significantly better."

Well there is a lot to take from that long article, among other things, that the author confused "Dragonslayer" with "Dragon's Lair". I lol'd.
Anyone who has been to Emo's East, formerly known as The Back Room, knows they have arcade games and pool, but it's mostly closed when there isn't a show. That shouldn't count as an arcade, even though the former owner Ronnie Roark was apparently one of the top suppliers of cabinet games to the area during the Golden Era. Any pool hall probably had a few arcade games at the time, too, but that's not the same as being an arcade.
We also learn from the same article of two forgotten arcades: Muthers at 2522 Guadalupe where today there is a Mediterranean food restaurant, and another called Games, Etc. at 1302 S.First that today is the site of an El Mercado restaurant. But the article is mostly about showing us how bad the effects were from the crash at the end of the Golden Era. It was very hard for the early arcades to survive with increasing competition from home game consoles and personal computers, and the proliferation of the games into stores and restaurants.
Forgotten Arcades #5 #6 & #7
Computer Madness - 2414 S. Lamar Blvd.
Electronic Encounters - 1701 W Ben White Blvd (Southwood Mall)
The Outer Limits Amusements Center - 1409 W. Oltorf
March 4, 1982

'Quartermania' stalks South Austin
School officials, parents worried about effects of video games
A fear Is haunting the video game business. "We call it 'quartermania.' That's fear of running out of quarters," said Steve Stackable, co-owner of Computer Madness, a video game and foosball arcade at 2414 S. Lamar Blvd. The "quartermania" fear extends to South Austin households and schools, as well. There it's a fear of students running out of lunch money and classes to play the games. Local school officials and Austin police are monitoring the craze. They're concerned that computer hotspots could become undesirable "hangouts" for students, or that truancy could increase because students (high-school age and younger) will skip school to defend their galaxies against The Tempest.
So far police fears have not been substantiated. Department spokesmen say that although more than half the burglaries in the city are committed by juveniles during the daytime, they know of no connection between the break-ins and kids trying to feed their video habit But school and parental worries about misspent time and money continue. The public outcry in September 1980 against proposals to put electronic game arcades near two South Austin schools helped persuade city officials to reject the applications. One proposed location was near Barton Hills Elementary School. The other was South Ridge Plaza at William Cannon Drive and South First Street across from Bedlchek Junior High School.
Bedichek principal B.G. Henry said he spoke against the arcade because "of the potential attraction it had for our kids. I personally feel kids are so drawn to these things, that It might encourage them to leave the school building and play hookey. Those things have so much compulsion, kids are drawn to them like a magnet Kids can get addicted to them and throw away money, maybe their lunch money. I'm not against the video games. They may be beneficial with eye-hand coordination or even with mathematics, but when you mix the video games during school hours and near school buildings, you might be asking for problems you don't need."
A contingent from nearby Pleasant Hill Elementary School joined Bedichek in the fight back in 1980, although principal Kay Beyer said she received her first formal call about the games last Week from a mother complaining that her child was spending lunch money on them. Beyer added that no truancy problems have been related to video game-playing at a nearby 7-11 store. Allen Poehl, amusement game coordinator for Austin's 7-11 stores, said company policy rules out any game-playing by school-age youth during school hours. Fulmore Junior High principal Bill Armentrout said he is working closely with operators of a nearby 7-1 1 store to make sure their policy is enforced.
The convenience store itself, and not necessarily the video games, is a drawing card for older students and drop-outs, Armentrout said. Porter Junior High principal Marjorie Ball said that while video games aren't a big cause of truancy, "the money (spent on the games) is a big factor." Ball said she has made arrangements with nearby businesses to call the school it students are playing the games during school hours. "My concern is that kids are basically unsupervised, especially at the 24-hour grocery stores. That's a late hour for kids to be out. I would like to see them (games) unplugged at 10 p.m.," adds Joslin Elementary principal Wayne Rider.
Several proprietors of video game hot-spots say they sympathize with the concerns of parents and school officials. No one under 18 is admitted without a parent to Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre at 4211 S. Lamar. That rule, says night manager David Dunagan, "keeps it from being a high school hangout. This is a family place." Jerry Zollar, owner of J.J. Subs in West Wood Shopping Center on Bee Cave Road, rewards the A's on the report cards of Eanes school district students with free video games. "It's kind of a community thing we do in a different way. I've heard from both teachers and parents . . . they thought this was a good idea," said Zollar.
Electronic Encounters in Southwood Mall last year was renovated into a brightly lit arcade. "We're trying to get away from the dark, barroom-type place. We want this to be a place for family entertainment We won't let kids stay here during school hours without a written note from their parents, and we're pretty strict about that," said manager Kelly Roberts. Joyce Houston, who manages The Outer Limits amusements center at 1409 W. Oltorf St. along with her husband, said, "I wouldn't let my children go into some of the arcades I've visited. I'm a concerned parent, too. We wanted a place where the whole family could come and enjoy themselves."

Well you can see which way the tone of all these articles is going. There were some crimes committed at some arcades but all of them tended to have a negative reputation for various reasons. Parents and teachers were very skeptical of the arcades being in the neighborhoods to the point of petitioning the City Government to restrict them. Three arcades are mentioned besides Chuck-E-Cheese. Electronic Encounters in Southwood Mall, The Outer Limits amusements center at 1409 W. Oltorf, and Computer Madness, a "video game and foosball arcade" at 2414 S. Lamar Blvd.
Forgotten Arcade #8
Smitty's Galaxy of Games - Lake Creek Parkway
February 25, 1982

Arcades fighting negative image
Video games have swept across America, and Williamson and Travis counties have not been immune. In a two-part series, Neighbor examines the effects the coin-operated machines have had on suburban and small-town life.
Cities have outlawed them, religious leaders have denounced them and distraught mothers have lost countless children to their voracious appetites. And still they march on, stronger and more numerous than before. A new disease? Maybe. A wave of invading aliens from outer space? On occasion. A new type of addiction? Certainly. The culprit? Video games. Although the electronic game explosion has been mushrooming throughout the nation's urban areas for the past few years, its rippling effects have just recently been felt in the suburban fringes of North Austin and Williamson County.
In the past year, at least seven arcades armed with dozens of neon quarter-snatchers have sprung up to lure teens with thundering noises and thousands of flashing seek-and-destroy commands. Critics say arcades are dens of iniquity where children fall prey to the evils of gambling. But arcade owners say something entirely different. "Everybody fights them (arcades), they think they are a haven for drug addicts. It's just not true," said Larry Grant of Austin, who opened Eagle's Nest Fun and Games on North Austin Avenue in Georgetown last September. "These kids are great" Grant said the gameroom "gives teenagers a place to come. Some only play the games and some only talk.
In Georgetown, if you're from the high school, this is it." He said he's had very few disturbances, and asks "undesirables" to leave. "We've had a couple of rowdies. That's why I don't have any pool tables they tend to attract that type of crowd," Grant said.
Providing a place for teens to congregate was also the reason behind Ron and Carol Smith's decision to open Smitty's Galaxy of Games on Lake Creek Parkway at the entrance to Anderson Mill. "We have three teenage sons, and as soon as the oldest could drive, it became immediately apparent that there was no place to go around here," said Ron, an IBM employee who lives in Spicewood at Balcones. "This prompted us to want to open something." The business, which opened in August, has been a huge success with both parents and youngsters. "Hundreds of parents have come to check out our establishment before allowing their children to come, and what they see is a clean, safe environment managed by adults and parents," Ron said. "We've developed an outstanding rapport with the community." Video arcades "have a reputation that we have to fight," said Carol.
Kathy McCoy of Georgetown, who last October opened Krazy Korner on Willis Street in Leander, agrees. "We've got a real good group of kids," she said. "There's no violence, no nothing. Parents can always find their kids at Krazy Korner."
While all the arcade owners contacted reported that business is healthy, if not necessarily lucrative, it's not as easy for video entrepreneurs to turn a profit as one might imagine. A sizeable investment is required. Ron Smith paid between $2,800 and $5,000 for each of the 30 electronic diversions at his gameroom.
Grant said his average video game grosses about $50 a week, and his "absolute worst" game, Armor Attack, only $20 a week. The top machines (Defender and Pac-Man) can suck in an easy $125 a week. That's a lot of quarters, 500 to be exact but the Eagle's Nest and Krazy Korner pass half of them on to Neelley Vending Company of Austin which rents them their machines. "At 25 cents a shot, it takes an awful lot of people to pay the bills," said Tom Hatfield, district manager for Neelley.
He added that an owner's personality and the arcade's location can make or break the venture. The game parlor must be run "by an understanding person, someone with patience," Hatfield said. "They cannot be too demanding on the kids, yet they can't let them run all over them." And they must be located in a spot "with lots of foot traffic," such as a shopping center or near a good restaurant, he said. "And being close to a school really helps." "Video games are going to be here permanently, but we're going to see some operations not going because of the competition," which includes machines in virtually every convenience store and supermarket, Hatfield said.

This article talks about three arcades. One in Georgetown called Eagles Nest, another in Leander called Krazy Korner, and a third called Smitty's Galaxy of Games on Lake Creek Parkway "on the fringes of North Austin". This is the one I remember the older kids talking about when I was a little kid. There was once a movie theater across the street from the Westwood High School football stadium and behind that was Smitty's. Today I think the building was bulldozed long ago and the space is part of the expanded onramp to 183 today. Eventually another unrelated arcade was built next to the theater that became Alamo Lakeline. It was another site of some unrecorded epic Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat tournaments in the 90s.
But the article written before the end of the Golden Era tell us much about the pushback I was talking about earlier. Early arcades were seen as "dirty" places in some circles, and the owners of the arcades in Williamson County had to stress how "clean" their establishments were. This other article from a couple of weeks later tells of how area school officials weren't worried about video games and tells us more arcades in Round Rock and Cedar Park. Apparently the end of the golden age lasted a bit longer than usual in this area.
At some point in the next few years the bubble burst, and places like Smitty's were gone by the late 80s. But the distributors quoted earlier were right that arcade games weren't going completely away. In the mid 1980s LeFun opened up next in the Scientology building at 2200 Guadalupe on the drag. Down a few doors past what used be a coffee shop and a CVS was Einsteins Arcade. Both of those survived into the 21st century. I remember the last time I was at Einsteins I got my ass beat in Tekken by a kid half my age. heheh
That's all for today. There were no Bonus Pics in the UT archive of arcades (other than the classical architectural definition). I wanted to pass on some Bonus newspaper articles (remember to click and zoom in with the buttons on the right to read) about Austin arcades anyway but first a small story.
I mentioned earlier the secret of the UT Student Union. I have no idea what it looks like now but in the 90s there was a sizable arcade in with the bowling alley in the basement. Back in 1994 when I used to sneak in, they featured this bizarre early attempt at virtual reality games. I found an old Michael Barnes Statesman article about it dated February 11, 1994. Some highlights:

Hundreds of students and curiosity-seekers lined up at the University of Texas Union to play three to five minutes of Dactyl Nightmare, Flying Aces or V-Tol, three-dimensional games from Kramer Entertainment. Nasty weather delayed the unloading of four huge trunks containing the machines, which resemble low pulpits. Still, players waited intently for a chance to shoot down a fighter jet, operate a tilt-wing Harrier or tangle with a pterodactyl. Today, tickets will go on sale in the Texas Union lobby at 11:30 a.m. for playing slots between noon and 6 p.m.
Players, fitted with full helmets, throttles and power packs, stood on shiny gray and yellow platforms surrounded by a circular guard rail. Seen behind the helmet's goggles were computer simulated landscapes, not unlike the most sophisticated video games, with controls and enemies viewed in deep space. "You're on a platform waiting to fight a human figure," said Jeff Vaughn, 19, of Dactyl Nightmare. "A pterodactyl swoops down and tries to pick you up. You have to fight it off. You are in the space and can see your own body and all around you. But if you try to walk, you have to use that joy stick to get around."
"I let the pterodactyl carry me away so I could look down and scan the board," said Tom Bowen of the same game. "That was the way I found out where the other player was." "Yeah, it's cool just to stand there and not do anything," Vaughn said. The mostly young, mostly male crowd included the usual gaming fanatics, looking haggard and tense behind glasses and beards. A smattering of women and children also pressed forward in a line that snaked past the lobby and into the Union's retail shops.
"I don't know why more women don't play. Maybe because the games are so violent," said Jennifer Webb, 24, a psychology major whose poor eyesight kept her from becoming a fighter pilot in real life. "If the Air Force won't take me, virtual reality will." "They use stereo optics moving at something like 60 frames a second," said computer science major Alex Aquila, 19. "The images are still pretty blocky. But once you play it, you'll want to play it again and again." With such demand for virtual reality, some gamesters wondered why an Austin video arcade has not invested in at least one machine.

The gameplay looked like this.
Bonus Article #1 - "Video fans play for own reasons" (Malibu Grand Prix) - March 11, 1982
Bonus Article #2 - "Pac-Man Cartridge Piques Interest" - April 13, 1982
Bonus Article #3 - "Video Games Fail Consumer" - January 29, 1984
Bonus Article #4 - "Nintendoholics/Modems Unite" - January 25, 1989
Bonus Article #5 and pt 2 "Two girls missing for a night found at arcade" (truly dedicated young gamers) - August 7, 2003

Competitive Budget Deck Masterpost (January 2021)

i'm starting to feel like modern Yugioh is a clown car, and every time the banlist apprehends the first few clowns that lead the format, 4-5 more step out to take their place. we didn't even have Linkross in handcuffs yet before VFD took the wheel and Vanity's Ruler got into the passenger seat. happy new year

This post will give recommendations for decks that can generally do well while generally remaining in the $50 to $150 price range.

Estimated pricing includes a sample completed main deck and some or all of an extra deck, but no side.
Pricing is based mainly on singles and you can easily save a lot of money by buying cores for most of these lists all at once.
Decks were chosen usually based on having some degree of success in recent TCG formats.
- These deck choices and rankings are heavily based on online tournaments such as Konami's Remote Duel Invitationals, LCS, and other assorted online events.
- Performance on DuelingBook's ranked ladder also slightly factors in to the placement of these decks, with data taken from Ygoscope.
Many decklists will include some middle-range power cards that might drive the price point up, which can be cut for players on an extreme budget. For instance, a set of Ash is $25-30 currently, but Ash is included in many of these lists as a generic staple that players might already own.
Conversely, decklists are oftentimes easily upgraded by adding power cards such as Forbidden Droplet and Triple Tactics Talent.

Decks are grouped into four "tiers" and listed alphabetically by tier. Decklists are built prioritizing simplicity and effectiveness on a budget. Not all of them are perfect, but this post is not an F. Unless there is a particularly offensive deckbuilding error that you want to point out, please don't use this thread to nitpick at the sample decklists. Don't feel obligated to stick to the sample lists either; you should experiment and play cards that feel comfortable and/or optimal to you.
Feel free to leave suggestions for budget players, whether it's a budget tech choice for one of the decks on this list or whether it's a different deck that you think can compete in the coming months.
[Last updated: 23 Jan 2021]
Previous version: October 2020 Post

S Tier

The best bang for your buck. Decks in this category have the capacity to top premier events, though they're almost always supplemented with expensive power cards.

Drytron

Price: $100 Imgur | DuelingBook

New Ritual-based combo deck from Genesis Impact that has a lot of recursion from the Graveyard, boasting a strong grind game as well as potent turn 1 boards that can win the game outright.
The level 1 Drytron cards tribute other Drytron cards or Ritual cards in hand/field, so this deck abuses Cyber Angel Benten's lack of a once per turn clause to gain a ton of resources and search a lot of power LIGHT Fairy cards, such as Herald of Orange Light and Vanity's Ruler.
Drytron Nova is an automatic 3-of inclusion in every competitive version of this deck, but also currently sits at around $40 each in NA. Novas are a massive boost in consistency, though the deck is honestly still playable without it, and is quite cheap otherwise. With even one copy of Nova, you should look to also include three copies of Drytron Fafnir (their Field Spell) which can search Nova as well.
The absence of Nova + Fafnir from the main leaves a lot of space to be filled. There are many ways you can go about this.
- The sample list plays a small Pre-Prep engine with Herald of Perfection. It's very simple to play, especially if you're unfamiliar with the deck, and helps raise your overall ceiling - athough optimized competitive builds have generally moved away from Pre-Prep.
- Another viable Ritual engine is the Megalith engine, which provides numerous options. These variants generally also suffer from consistency issues, made worse by the lack of Novas in the budget version. Less consistent access to Alpha means less consistent usage of extra Ritual monsters.
- You could play cards that search Drytron monsters in an attempt to patch up consistency. Examples include Where Arf Thou, or normal summons that fetch Drytrons such as Cyber Dragon Core (getting Emergency) and Mathematician. Also viable is Neo-Spacian Aqua Dolphin, which is an interesting tech in Drytron that helps you beat handtraps like Droll & Lock Bird.
- Finally, you can always just play more handtraps or generic power cards.
This deck is a relatively new deck, and is getting support in Lightning Overdrive, which might indicate that it's relatively safe from the next banlist. However, there's no telling what Konami will do, so don't take my word as gospel.

Virtual World

Price: $150 Imgur | DuelingBook

Combo deck with an extra deck toolbox, using Synchro and Xyz monsters to break boards or to win the game with True King of All Calamities and their recurring boss monster, Shenshen. The Virtual World monsters have a shared restriction which means that Link monsters are usually not played in this deck at all.
Most of the main deck VW monsters can dump other VW cards from Deck to GY, and their continuous spell Qinglong is a searcher in the GY. Combined with Virtual World Mai-Hime - Lulu's ability to search for VW cards as well, the deck is consistent at doing the same combos and executing its gameplan almost every game, as most combinations of 2 Virtual World cards result in some type of combo.
Despite being one of the top decks in the format, this deck is also quite cheap. Staples aside, the most pricey card in the main is Lulu at around $18-20 each. Can you get away with fewer copies of her? Probably, but you really want to get 3 due to Desires, and her being one of the best cards in your deck.
Saw success immediately after PHRA release, even in the previous combo-infested format where Virtual World took the most representation and top cut spots at LCS 8, eventually winning the entire tournament. Post-banlist, they also took the most top cut spots and then won LCS 9, versus an entirely different playing field full of Zoodiac, Drytron, and Eldlich variants.
Recent combos using Chaofeng, Phantom of the Yang Zing to search either one of the Virtual World tuners (Lulu or Laolao) have opened up some new combo routes that make Foolish Burial Goods a lot more forgiving to play, allowing you to still end on impressive boards despite using Qinglong somewhat suboptimally. On the other hand, Chaofeng's price also spiked quite heavily after LCS 9, so you may not want to play it.
Non-budget players will first and foremost want to add Zeus to the Extra Deck, as it helps greatly with going second and also dealing with threats like Dragoon. Another common inclusion is Triple Tactics Talents, though this card is by no means mandatory in the deck, and has also seen a decline in popularity lately.

A Tier

Strong decks, but limited either by a lack of access to powerful staples or by the natural ceiling of the deck. You could still top a regional with one of these decks on a good day.

Altergeist

Price: $75+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Control + backrow deck with incredible recursion and the ability to come back from almost no resources
Altergeist have seen sparse success ever since FLOD, and are a respectable budget contender. They've have had a fairly modest showing online, and saw recent success with a top 8 finish at LCS 9. That deck was a Dogmatika variant piloted by Lars Junginger, playing the recently released Artemis, the Magistus Moon Maiden to make it slightly easier to summon Ecclesia in some hands.
The Dogmatika engine is viable even on a modest budget. It's possible to simply play Dogmatika Punishment as a powerful trap capable of utilizing your extra deck, and even a single copy of Ecclesia (around $20 each right now) goes a long way for improving the power of this package. Of course, the deck is also perfectly playable as pure Altergeist.
Budget players are most hurt by a lack of Pot of Extravagance, Infinite Impermanence, and Evenly Matched. The first three of these cards have reprints, but none are quite cheap enough yet to be easily accessible on a budget.
The extra deck is extremely flexible (as Altergeist are typically played with Extravagance, anyway) and several options are simply tech cards, such as Elder Entity N'tss.
Main deck trap choices are also extremely flexible. Torrential is quite powerful against Virtual World, but this could easily be swapped out for many other cards depending on your budget, available card pool, and locals demographics.
The release of Blazing Vortex in early February also brings along an incredibly powerful staple card in Pot of Prosperity. Altergeist, along with virtually every other deck that enjoys running Pot of Extravagance currently, will appreciate Prosperity as well. Many OCG decks are choosing to play both Extrav + Prosperity in their decklists. Of course, Prosperity is also a Secret Rare, and is virtually guaranteed to be around $100, so this is not applicable on a budget.

Prank-Kids

Price: $150 Imgur | DuelingBook

Floaty combo/control deck with 4 maindeck Prank-Kids that all float into any other Prank-Kid when used for a Link or Fusion summon
Got a great boost in Phantom Rage with Prank-Kids Meow-Meow-Mu, a Link 1 Prank-Kid monster that makes this deck incredibly consistent and turns any single Prank monster into full combo.
Prank-Kids Place is a little pricey, currently sitting at around $17 per copy in NA. While it contributes to your overall consistency (as it's equivalent to any Prank name), you can definitely get away with cutting copies of Place if your budget is tight.
Notably took 1st place at the Canadian Remote Duel Invitational in mid-January, piloted by Hanko Chow.
This deck appreciates the inclusion of Predaplant Verte Anaconda (currently over $30 apiece in NA) which can dump Thunder Dragon Fusion to help field Battle Butler, your main win condition. It was dropped from the provided list for budget reasons, but it's a great inclusion if you have a copy already. In conjunction with cards like Link Spider, it also improves your ability to play through disruption and through Nibiru.
This deck has many characteristics of a great deck, but suffers from similar problems as Zoodiac in that it struggles to play through disruption on your normal summon, or cards like Ash negating your first Prank-Kid effect. The inclusion of Polymerization in the main deck helps to combat this, but also popular are builds that don't play Poly at all and instead just load the main deck with handtraps and powerful staples like Forbidden Droplet.
Pot of Desires is included in this example main deck to help boost consistency and overall power, but some players opt not to run it.

Salamangreat

Price: $50+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Link-based midrange deck with a lot of recursion and a special in-archetype technique, where 1 Link Monster is used as the entire Link material to summon another copy of that monster, granting bonus effects
The deck is somewhat halfway between control and combo, establishing respectable boards turn 1 with a fairly compact engine, allowing many handtraps to be played. Their real strength comes in turn 3 and beyond, where their arsenal of free summons from the GY, coupled with their stellar resource recycling, easily overwhelm the opponent.
The majority of the deck is dirt cheap and is mostly able to be built with commons from SOFU+SAST supplementing 3 copies of Structure Deck: Soulburner.
Accesscode Talker is a huge part of this deck's success, able to steal games easily with the help of Update Jammer. Accesscode is not at all affordable on a budget, so the sample list plays Zeroboros instead. Owning one copy of Accesscode is a tremendous improvement to this deck's strength.
Salamangreat has found little competitive success in bigger online tournaments this format, but still regularly performs well in smaller events, remote duel locals, and the like. It's also a fairly safe choice, as it's somewhat unlikely we see further Salamangreat hits on the next banlist.
The provided list plays Rivalry + Strike, a potent option allowing you to sometimes win games even into established boards. Strike is quite solid in the current format, as even the combo decks don't usually end on ways to punish a lot of set backrow.
Parallel eXceed is an optional card, and can be cut in favor of more backrow or handtraps. On one hand, it allows you to more easily link climb when going second, and can easily add a Dweller or Bagooska to your board going first (Dweller is very good right now, as well). On the other hand, players may prefer to run more defensive cards instead of eXceed.

Subterror

Price: $100+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Subterrors are a control deck with a focus on flipping monsters face-down and generating constant advantage with Subterror Guru.
Pure Guru control is the most played variant, and is more or less a stun deck that tries to abuse Guru as much as possible. While most Guru lists online are Numeron and/or Dragoon hybrids, the pure version saw some success earlier this format at the Benelux Remote Duel Extravaganza, finishing top 4. You can watch that deck profile here, and the sample list is generally based off of that list.
- While Dragoon isn't budget-friendly, the Numeron engine is very accessible for little cost, and is a viable variant of this deck as well. Numeron cards aim to make Number S0: Utopic ZEXAL going first or simply OTK going second. S0 is an extremely powerful card that can prevent the opponent from playing the game entirely if it resolves. If you are interested in this version, you can check the Subterror list on the previous budget post.
The sample list doesn't have a complete extra deck, mainly because it doesn't play Extravagance and you barely go into the Extra Deck to begin with. Relinquished Anima is a decent option if you can shell out the $7-8 for it, since sometimes you can turn Fiendess into Anima. Apart from that, provided Extra Deck options include anti-Maximus cards for the Dogmatika matchup, and Aussa + Zoodiac Drident in case you face a Zoodiac player. Taking their Zoo monster and then slapping your Drident on top can be potent.
This deck usually plays Extravagance over Desires, but Desires is quite a serviceable replacement. Similarly to Altergeist, this deck also enjoys Pot of Prosperity post-BLVO.

B Tier

Like the above category, but generally weaker, less consistent, and/or impacted harder by a lack of access to a certain card(s).

Dinosaurs

Price: $100+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Dinosaurs are an aggressive deck with consistent access to Evolzar Laggia/Dolkka and Ultimate Conductor Tyranno, a formidable boss monster with incredible OTK power and disruption.
Dinosaur's strength tends to be largely meta-dependent, particularly how well it can counter the existing top decks. During the previous two combo-infested formats with decks like Dragon Link and Adamancipator running around, Dinos had several extremely impressive showing at events, such as TeamSamuraiX1's win at the first NA Remote Duel Invitational, as well as all three first-place players at LCS 7 (a 3v3 event) playing Dino.
In the current format, Dinosaurs are struggling. The Virtual World matchup is difficult, and it's hard for Dinosaur to build to beat all of VW, Drytron, Eldlich variants, and the plethora of rogue decks running around. Additionally, Mystic Mine is not very potent this format as both Virtual World and Eldlich have in-engine outs to the card, which is another blow to the Dinosaur strategy. Finally, the popularity of handtraps like Skull Meister and Artifact Lancea in the side or even the main deck are also reasons this deck has declined.
The provided variant still plays Mine, as it has utility breaking boards. Deckout is a much less reliable strategy against VW and Eldlich, but you can still stall for some turns until you can make a push for game. The addition of Cosmic Cyclone is also an attempt at neutering cards like Chuche and Conquistador.
If you wanted to build this deck without Mines, you would have to find replacements for quite a few cards (and frankly, Dinosaur does not have very many good ones). Most power staples are not budget, such as Lightning Storm, Talents, Droplet, etc. This deck also really appreciates Pot of Extravagance, which still sits barely out of budget range at around $25 each in NA.
Budget Dino must also deal with the lack of Animadorned Archosaur, an extremely powerful addition to the deck that opens up many new combos. However, sitting at around $60 per copy, the card is inaccessible on a budget.
The provided list plays the Simorgh combo, bringing out the WIND barrier statue on turn 1 to steal games. Though a full extra deck is provided, very few cards are actually needed, as the deck typically plays Extravagance anyway.

Dragon Link

Price: $100-150+ (depending on Extra Deck) Imgur | DuelingBook

Dragon Link is a Link-centric combo deck that was a dominant force in the meta for about half a year, but lost a lot of resilience and power with the recent bans to Linkross and Dragon Buster Destruction Sword.
The provided budget version of this deck actually has a ton of extra deck flexibility due to not needing to play Synchro/Link cards related to the Halq/Kross package, meaning that you can play Knightmares, anti-Dogmatika cards, etc. This also means that the budget version doesn't actually care about the Linkross ban at all.
This deck has seen a great deal of variation online, playing a variety of different engines and tech cards. A few of these include Vylon Cube + Smoke Grenade, the Rose Dragons, several different Dragonmaid cards, and even an FTK variant involving Earthbound Immortal Aslla piscu. However, few of these are viable for budget players, especially if you do not own a copy of Halqifibrax.
An interesting option the deck has is to use Union Carrier to equip handtraps such as Artifact Lancea. On the opponent's turn, Hieratic Seal can be used to return the handtrap to your hand, making it live immediately. This is something you may want to consider in the main deck if you frequently have to deal with decks like Virtual World and Dinosaur. Another option is to equip Ally of Justice Cycle Reader to Carrier (they're both machines) and then bounce it to hand, as a weapon against Drytron. Carrier isn't in the example list, but this is a really interesting option to consider.
With Linkross out of the picture, playing Fibrax alone is an option if you either already own a copy or can afford the $20 needed to obtain one. You may have to retool your combos to incorporate Fiber, but the card can definitely add flexibility and resilience to your deck if you use it well.

Paleozoic Frogs

Price: $50+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Backrow-heavy control deck that summons its Traps to the field as monsters and pressures the opponent with Toadally Awesome
After being absent from the budget post for about a year, Paleo makes its triumphant return as its boss monster, Toad, returns to 3. Toad's reprint in Maximum Gold also brought this card down from $20 each to just a few bucks, making the entire deck extremely cheap.
As a control deck, Paleo suffers from more weaknesses compared to Eldlich, Altergeist, and Subterror. Notably, the engine tends to bleed advantage unless you've managed to maintain access to Swap Frog, and you can be quickly outpaced by stronger decks. However, in games where you can establish a Toad early, or where you can maintain control with your backrow, you can do quite well.
Paleo saw a surprising amount of success in various remote duel events this format, though some of that success is likely due to the format being unexplored and some sort of "new toy syndrome" as Toad recently went from 2 to 3.
Paleo struggles to out Dragoon, especially without access to Ice Dragon's Prison, a $40 card. An interesting option catching on in the meta lately is the use of Mirror Force cards, particularly Quaking and Storming, as they both pressure Dragoon. Still, the card puts quite a lot of pressure on this deck.
Speaking of Dragoon, some Paleo players opt to play that package in this deck as well. Swap Frog is a one card Dragoon as you can simply dump Ronin, turn Swap into Almiraj, and then revive Ronin to make Verte from there.
Fiend Griefing is presented as an interesting option which is very decent in the current meta, particularly vs Drytron. Combining it with Absolute King Back Jack is a classic combo that Paleo played a long time ago in 2017, during early Zoo formats.

Shaddoll (Magistus)

Price: $100+, can be closer to $50 with fewer copies of Schism Imgur | DuelingBook

Classic Fusion-based archetype from 2014, debuting in Duelist Alliance. Somewhat of a midrange combo deck that can slow the game down with El Shaddoll Winda or be very aggressive with El Shaddoll Construct
Winda is a troublesome floodgate that many decks struggle to out, especially combo decks such as Drytron. Shaddoll cards are currently played in several Dogmatika variants due to the sheer power of Winda and the utility of Shaddoll Schism.
The current meta is favorable for Shaddoll not only due to Winda being effective vs Drytron, but also due to Ariel being very strong against a large chunk of the format, including Eldlich variants. Her ability to banish 3 cards from the GY is so strong that some decks are splashing in Sinister Shadow Games + Ariel just for that option, which we saw played in some of the 60-card Eldlich decks at LCS 9.
- The growing popularity of Shaddoll cards has also caused Shaddoll Schism to go up in price substantially. Currently, it's around $17, but it may continue to rise.
The deck's biggest problem has always been its inability to consistently resolve a fusion spell on turn 1. Invoked Shaddoll was a popular hybrid in earlier formats, but with the release of the Magistus archetype in GEIM, Shaddolls got access to Rilliona and Magistus Invocation. This is an improvement since Magistus Invocation can fuse from hand and field whereas the regular Invocation can only fuse from hand when summoning Shaddolls. Additionally, Artemis provides a super convenient way for the deck to turn any Shaddoll into a LIGHT monster, which is important for summoning Construct.
While the full Dogmatika package is very expensive due to Nadir Servant being a $75 card, one option is to play just one copy of Ecclesia (around $20) along with Maximus and a playset of Dogmatika Punishment. Maximus and Punishment have a ton of synergy in the Shaddoll deck in conjunction with Apkallone's GY effect, and this combination is deadly even on a budget.
Other normal summons such as Mathematician and even Gale Dogra are potent on this deck, and can be played in addition to Rilliona or as a replacement for her. Yet another option is to run 1 copy of the now-cheap Eldlich the Golden Lord as a LIGHT monster for Shaddoll Fusion that can easily revive itself.
Another popular variant is a very trap-heavy list, sometimes cutting the Magistus cards entirely. PAK and SirEmanon's YouTube channels both have their own takes on this, if you're interested.

Unchained

Price: $50+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Floaty destruction-based archetype that generates advantage when its cards are destroyed, enabling its gimmick of using your opponent's monsters to Link Summon.
Can be built to go first or to go second quite effectively. Since going second is very difficult this format, the provided list aims to go first, playing a bunch of trap cards.
Fairly modest online performance, doing alright at smaller events and more recently finishing top 8 at the second YuGiJoe online series as well as occasional Luxury events. After the December banlist, Unchained has rapidly gained popularity in online remote duel events, and is one of the more prominent rogue decks this format. This success could be because the format is generally slower compared to previous ones, and many destruction-based cards such as Torrential Tribute are very popular currently, which this deck enjoys.
Mega-Tin reprints of Abomination's Prison as well as their Link 2 have helped make this deck a great deal more affordable. I:P Masquerena being more affordable is also a nice boost, though it's by no means essential in this deck.
This deck's best weapon is its opponents being unprepared for it. Playing improperly into backrow or Unchained floats can very quickly be fatal. It also matches up decently into some backrow decks as well as Dogmatika variants, which rely on destruction-based removal from Dogmatika Punishment and Elder Entity N'tss.

C Tier

Decks in this category have the capability to be just as good as the ones above at times, but often tend to suffer from multiple problems including consistency and power.

Burning Abyss

Price: $100+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Versatile control-based Graveyard toolbox deck that has been swinging in and out of meta relevance since its release way back in 2014.
Gradually got more and more cards back from the banlist, with Cir and Graff being unlimited on the December 2020 list. The deck is now more or less "full power" with the exception of Beatrice, who is still limited.
The deck aims to establish Beatrice on turn 1 backed up with trap cards. The BA cards as well as Beatrice are extremely floaty, so this deck can put up quite a fight in grind games. Fiend Griefing is a solid card in the current meta, and is excellent in the Burning Abyss deck as you can send Farfa for further disruption, Graff/Scarm for followup, or Back Jack for more traps.
This deck was frequently mixed with Phantom Knight cards back in 2016 (often called PK Fire). Nowadays, Phantom Knight decks are typically either built pure or with an extremely compact BA engine. While it's possible to play a more dedicated hybrid build, the release of PK Torn Scales combined with most key BA cards being unlimited means that it's just better to focus on one or the other.
Many other options are playable - Desires for draw power, playing more traps, more handtraps, etc. Consider Needle Ceiling over Torrential as it can be harder to pull off, but combos better with Trap Trick. Players with access to Ice Dragon's Prison should play it, and adventurous duelists can even opt to play Fire Lake of the Burning Abyss.
As a deck easily capable of churning out Rank 3 Xyzs, you also have easy access to Divine Arsenal AA-ZEUS Sky Thunder, one of the most powerful extra deck cards in the format. If this is an accessible option, it should be played.

Sky Striker

Price: $100+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Spell-heavy control deck that usually maintains only one monster on the field at a time, in the extra monster zone.
Formerly an extremely dominant control deck, modern-day Striker no longer accrues infinite resources through resolving Engage multiple times, but instead is easily able to kill you with an Accesscode Talker push after whittling down your LP and resources for a turn or two. The standard combo involves laddering from Halqifibrax -> Selene -> Accesscode and then dismantling your opponent's board before swinging for game.
You may have noticed a problem: if you're on a budget, you can't use Accesscode. This is a pretty big blow to the deck's overall strength. Some players opt for alternatives such as the Utopia Double package, which Zoé Weber played in the second EU Remote Duel Invitational last format. Another option is to simply not run it at all, and close games the old-fashioned way.
In previous formats, this deck was oftentimes played like an anti-meta going second deck, packing tons of removal cards and usually 3 copies of Mystic Mine in the main deck. In the current format, this strategy is a lot more difficult due to several factors - it's very hard to go second this format in general, and Mine is a lot less effective vs the top decks right now.
Instead, the sample list plays a going-first strategy with powerful trap cards like There Can Be Only One and Solemn Strike. It's possible to build this deck to go second, but you'd probably want to play board breakers instead of trap cards, and potentially also maindeck PSY-Framegear Gamma.
Yet another way to play this deck involves (surprise) Red-Eyes Dark Dragoon and multiple copies of Red-Eyes Fusion. Instead of using cards like Widow Anchor and Afterburners to muscle through disruption and stick a Mystic Mine on the field, you use them to get to your Dragoon and either win the game immediately or put yourself in a position where your opponent can't play through the Dragoon disrupt.
Roze is the most expensive card in this list. If your budget is tight, you can definitely cut her down to 1.

Zoodiac

Price: $100+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Xyz-focused deck with a gimmick allowing you to use any one Zoodiac as the entire Xyz material requirement for another Zoodiac. This lets you stack Zoo Xyz monsters on top of each other, making use of their effects.
Plays a compact engine combined with around 20 slots dedicated to handtraps, traps, and draw power. This deck is also commonly played as a hybrid deck, oftentimes with Eldlich and sometimes with Dogmatika cards. Both of these options are quite expensive, so they are not shown.
The deck's strength in competitive play comes almost entirely from Divine Arsenal AA-ZEUS Sky Thunder, an extremely powerful Xyz monster that Zoodiac can effortlessly make due to Zoodiac Boarbow. Zoo is also easily able to summon Zeus with many materials, allowing it to repeatedly nuke the board.
Budget Zoo without Zeus is extremely weak by comparison. Relying solely on Drident + handtraps is not a reliable win condition, so cards like Parallel eXceed and Pot of Avarice are included in the sample list to give this deck a boost. While Megaclops is a troublesome boss monster in some matchups, the big three decks (Drytron, Virtual World, and Eldlich) generally don't have much trouble dealing with it.
Even with Zeus, the deck has been struggling in the current competitive meta. Noteworthy is its performance at LCS 9, where out of a whopping 51 Zoodiac variants that entered the tournament, only 1 survived until top 16.

Up-And-Coming

Decks to watch out for, oftentimes due to recent online success or new support being announced. Some might also be decks that could potentially be on the main body of the post, but need a little more time to prove themselves.

Tri-Brigade

Price: $100 (for now) Imgur | DuelingBook

Link-focused deck that plays a variety of Beast, Beast-Warrior, and Winged Beast monsters. The maindeck Tri-Brigades cheat out powerful Link monsters, provided your GY is set up. This deck also trivially access the Simorgh link, which can sometimes seal games on its own through the WIND Barrier Statue.
In the current format, Tri-Brigade has seen fairly sparse success, usually mixed with Zoodiac. However, BLVO gives us Tri-Brigade Kitt, a great boost to this deck and a fantastic combo piece.
Further support in LIOV and beyond is also very promising, making this deck a potentially solid investment for the future.
The Tri-Brigade core is currently quite cheap, but this could change in the future depending on hype and the market.
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Traptrix

Price: $100-150 Imgur | DuelingBook

Control deck with an extremely powerful Link 1 monster, Traptrix Sera, that pumps out constant advantage.
The sample list incorporates a very small Dogmatika engine. Dogmatika Punishment itself is very cheap, and is one of the best generic traps in the game right now. Just 1 copy of Ecclesia (around $20) provides a substantial power boost to this mini-engine, as dumping one copy of Titaniklad with Punishment and grabbing an Ecclesia for next turn is extremely powerful. Another option is to dump El Shaddoll Apkallone, then adding and discarding Ariel in order to trigger her effect and banish 3 cards, which is insane value.
If you can't get Ecclesia, you could simply play just Punishment as a generic trap. Another option is to play pure Traptrix, incorporating more power traps/handtraps, and quite frequently the Utopia Double package as well.
This deck is definitely still getting support, as LIOV brings a new Link 2 and main deck monster.

Plunder Patroll

Price: $100+ Imgur | DuelingBook

Pirate archetype with ridiculous recursion and a unique tag-out and equip mechanic based on Attributes being used in the game.
The pirates become equips for one of (currently) three Patrollships, extra deck monsters that can all discard Plunder Patroll cards in hand to fuel powerful effects. The ships become stronger when manned (equipped with) a Plunder card, with bonuses such as ignition effects becoming quick effects, or being able to replace the discarded card with a new one from the deck.
Many Plunder lists play Forbidden Droplet, as it has great synergy with the cards. Without Droplet, you could fill the space with several different options. This deck chooses to play the Undine package, but you can also go for cards like Foolish Burial Goods, Salvage, Silent Angler, Tenyi Spirit - Shthana, Toadally Awesome + Bahamut Shark, or just more generic staples.
This deck is getting at least one more support card in LIOV, that being Ravenwing. Many people speculate that they'll also get another Patrollship of a new attribute, which would be a huge buff to the deck.

Honorable Mentions

Megalith, Madolche, Pendulum decks, Cyber Dragon, Orcust, Mermail Atlantean, Magical Musketeers, Crusadia (Guardragon), ABC, D/D, Generaider, and more - Decks that are fairly decent but have been left off of the post to make room for other decks that have seen more recent success or have fewer budget resources online.
Dragonmaid, Eldlich, Infernoid, Invoked variants, HERO, etc - Decks that are pretty good but are sorta in limbo due to some expensive individual cards, such as Chamber Dragonmaid, Cursed Eldland, Invocation, etc.
Cubics, Phantasm, Chain Burn, Evilswarm, Yosenju, Dinomist, and much, much more - Unfortunately, there is not enough room to cover every single decent, super-cheap deck.

I hope to keep this post updated for the foreseeable future. Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions.

Make The Chicago Bears Great Again 2: Electric Boogaloo

this event made me consider whether to keep playing

This is mostly my reactions and rationalizations to the Brave event and how it's affected me a a player of DMK. I've been playing for nearly a year. I've experienced Onward, Pocahontas, Hercules, two Tower Challenges, the Lock Shock and Barrel Halloween event, Mandalorian, and now Brave.
At first I was okay with not completing things since I just didn't have storyline characters unlocked or leveled up to be of any use. But starting around that second Tower Challenge, the one where they offered Rabbit for a second time in a row, things started feeling off. The Halloween event was brutal. Lock, the premium character, was surprising in that he not only was 500 gems but despite being useful to the point of being necessary for one of the tasks he ended up being not that useful for the rest. Meaning even people who purchased Lock found out they couldn't get Shock unless they got lucky with drops or burned through a ton of elixir buying the needed tokens. Then the Mandalorian came out a few weeks later, and I didn't participate much but I did hear that once again the premium character wasn't as useful as expected. Kuiil needed to be leveled up before he could be properly used, and he had some token conflicts with characters.
And now we are at Brave, where people who had both premium characters and the premium attraction and the parade float and discovered they could not finish the event. They did everything right, and it wasn't enough. The RNG was just too strong - there were too many stages where people got screwed over by RNG or bottle necked by arbitrary cooldown times. Some people even had full Frozen collections to help, and were struggling! I had Fergus, Dingwall, and the Ring of Stones at level 2. Up until the last hour, I had no idea if I would be able to complete the event or if I would come up short.
And I realize it's only going to get harder.
This isn't fun anymore. I've never played a game where I needed to wake myself up repeatedly during the night, to stand a chance at completing it. For days at a time. I've never played a game that made me wonder if I could 'get away' with sneaking my phone into my phone-hating teacher's class because lectures cut into a character's task completion. This is supposed to be a game, not a job.
With Brave, the difficulty is entirely intentional. Gameloft didn't want people completing the event. Gameloft wanted people so frustrated that they caved in and bought a sack of gems. Merida herself was 10USD, and without any tokens her costume was 970 gems. Two 500 gem deals bring her costume to just under 40USD. Let's say you did your best, got all the Glitched Fabric, but still came up short 7 comfy fabrics. That's still 560 gems that Gameloft wants you to spend.
You just busted your ass for the "privilege" of giving Gameloft an additional 24USD of your money. Nice hustle.
And then there's the fact that Gameloft made sure only Frozen characters can get Glitched Fabric. And not just Frozen characters, but you needed Anna and her traveling costume (so 2 legendary chests, minimum) or the Fire Spirit with the Enchanted Forest attraction upgraded to level 1 (another 2 legendary chests).
You could also have it dropped from the Dressing Room if you have it at level 2, but with an 8 hour cooldown most people couldn't collect enough fabric before the event ended and were forced to spend more gems. Some people were lucky enough to have the Dressing Room upgraded all the way to level 5, which requires a total of 475 relic tokens to do. And the odds of getting WIR relic tokens have decreased, now that Gameloft has added Brave relic tokens to the chest pools.
And when an event ends...does it even feel good having those event characters you earned? Thanks to the 75 character limit, you're going to spend the next few weeks leveling them up and then be forced to box them up and send them Home by the time the next event starts. There are so many storyline characters that have so many tasks needed to collect more tokens, but event characters are mostly isolated and very rarely are able to collect tokens for characters not in their collection. So their main purpose becomes slot machine bait: they'll eventually be the next helper collection for a future event (that you'll have to lose sleep, buy all the premiums, and even then burn through more elixir or gems or even real money in order to complete), and anyone who wasn't able to get all the characters can try their luck opening a legendary chest.
I'm not even done with the story. I'm at the brink of my game getting bottle necked because I have over 75 characters which can be out and about doing tasks. But with recent events, they prove it won't matter how far along in the story I am. It won't be enough to complete events.
Now, each new event character feels like it bloats regular chests. All those event character tokens taking up space, all those event relic tokens that you don't need anymore because the relic token system is utterly broken and Gamelot isn't interested in fixing it.
All for what? For shoring up for the next hustle. For making sure you have fewer gems ready for the next event, tempting you to give in and pay cash. And maybe this is because I've only been playing for about a year while others have been playing much longer, but it is discouraging knowing that I'll never be able to complete many collections because it all lies within the slot machine legendary chests. At first I thought Tower Challenges were going to be a chance to make up for it, but I realized Gameloft hardly ever offers Tower Challenges and when they do happen you get...one or two returning characters plus an attraction, common tier. It's been a year and Gameloft has offered a grand total of 5 returning event characters. They have also added 25 event characters.
Free legendary chests are sporadic, sometimes a few will be offered as milestone prizes during events but for the most part we get one, maybe two a month. But not in January though, we get nothing this month. Spending gems is the only way to really complete a collection, but of course you don't want to spend your gems because you need those for the next event, but of course what's the point when the 75 character limit prevents you from really enjoying and showing off your completed collections. DMK operates on FOMO: fear of missing out. If you don't complete a collection during its event, it is extremely difficult to do so after without spending money, and Gameloft ensures that the rate of free offers is outpaced by new events. "If I don't get the comfy, it won't be available again for years. And when they release it again, it will be just as hard to obtain, so I might as well spend money/gems now." That's how they get you. "If I don't get Merida now, she'll be in a Legendary Chest, but she'll only have a base 2% chance to get, so I might as well spend money/gems now." Same thing.
I've come to realize I don't feel like I'm playing a game anymore. I feel more like I'm trying to see how much I can get away with an abuser. This is no longer a fun time waster, but something negatively influencing my life. Between the 75 character limit, the lack of usefulness for premium characters, and the absurd hoops needed to complete an event to screw people over with RNG and tempt them into spending more gems/cash, this isn't a game anymore it's just a chore. I don't see DMK getting better. So, I'm done. Let it go, as a certain Snow Queen would say.
I hope I don't come off as sounding dramatic. I only want to rationalize my decision, and help others understand if they are feeling the same way. I am not demanding that anyone quit or stop spending their own money if they still find enjoyment and satisfaction. I am not angry at anyone, but I will note that the more people spend real money the more it encourages Gameloft to rig things with less and less fairness. If anyone is feeling reluctant to stop playing or reduce playing due to the time and money they have already spent, this is a phenomenon called the sunk cost fallacy. It's harder to walk away from something when you feel you have invested in it. But this is a tapping game, and the only investment is whether you still find it fun and rewarding to play. You're never going to get that money back, there will be no payout at the "end". The only real loss is your money and time if you continue to play a game that is no longer fun.
In case anyone was wondering if I was able to get Merida's comfy costume at the very end, it doesn't matter if I did or not. Because I'm walking away.
I thank everyone here, and hope whatever decisions you make, you base them on your own satisfaction. Stay healthy and happy.
And in case anyone is wondering what else to do for a time waster, I picked up the inexpensive Stardew Valley and have been having a blast with it. Yes, I traded my kingdom for a farm.

Galactic Economics 7: Leapfrogging

RoyalRoad
First
Previous
Next
I ended up splitting off some of 8 into 9 based on feedback. The story I've thought of will end on 10, and then it's back to the drawing board for me. I'm not sure if I would continue with this universe or come back with another idea, let me know if you have an opinion either way.
I'll start posting these onto a site I found called RoyalRoad in addition to reddit. I won't take donations, but it does seem like it has nice utilities to manage all the stories even if the audience is smaller. Any advice on this welcome too.
And as always, I'm still a new writer trying to improve. Feedback about the story or my writing are all very welcome, and I read every one of them.
Galactic Credits weren't technically a currency yet. They had a lot of GCs in the bank, but as the aliens would say, that's just numbers on a screen. You couldn't pay rent and taxes with GCs, not yet.
As some human traders switched to exclusively buying goods from the market, they paid hard earned Dollars in exchange for virtual GC, and that became the revenue stream. This revenue balanced out almost perfectly with sellers who were instantly cashing out.
For every Dollar that someone paid GC to convert to credits, only about 95 cents would be asked to be paid out by a seller trying to withdraw their GCs for cash.
The transaction fees that GC made on every transaction can be visualized as credits disappearing into an untouched locked account. This was effectively a profit for GC, because it meant less credits that had to be exchanged for $. That 5% margin was a steady Dollar revenue stream that they could safely cash out.
But because all the humans needed to pay bills and taxes, they would withdraw their money almost immediately, which meant that they would always be stuck around that 5% margin. Unlike a regular bank, they couldn't make a lot of investments.
That's when the universe decided to give them a break.
Or rather, their interests had aligned with the self interest of some very rich people who had just started paying attention.
At first, the financial systems on Earth did not care much about GCs. They were used in spaceports all around Earth, and space was very exciting, but it was inaccessible to most people and the actual trade volume was a small percentage of total businesses done on Earth.
The aliens directly made a few people very, very rich, mostly traders and GC. But what were of more interest to financial institutions were the reverse engineered alien technology products that they predicted were coming shortly. At the same time Sarah and her friends were trying to fix a famine, the human economy was booming.
Like GC, banks were in the business of selling gold prospecting equipment, not looking for gold themselves.
Naturally, banks started allowing deposits and withdrawal of GC. This wasn't unusual. Banks have no issues holding onto cryptocurrency and non-USD currencies for customers' savings accounts. That was their business, after all. There were some costs, but it was generally a good business: fat transaction fees led to fat profit margins.
In the case of GC, banks needed to charge their customers a high transaction fee because GC itself charged a high transaction fee. This was bad for business. Not many people kept their credits in other banks because GC itself was a bank and they kept their money in there just fine without having to pay an even higher transaction fee.
They were understandably unhappy about several of their wealthier customers keeping a lot of money in another bank, but not enough to want to choke out GC's business. That would be killing their golden goose that is the booming alien knockoff economy.
So when GC decided to raise liquidity, as they would need to do to continue to bankroll a multi-planetary relief mission indefinitely, the banks saw an opportunity. Or rather, VISA did.
It was an incredibly generous offer: VISA would treat Galactic Credits like Dollars and allow full convertibility on their own network, in exchange for GC waiving their entire transaction fee for bank transfers. Their lawyers didn't want GC to go ahead and print money without limits, so they put a contingency that allowed them to cut off GC whenever they wanted and clauses that allowed for regular auditing.
Sarah and her friends thought about it, but not for very long.
Galactic Credit became no longer the only bank that could deal in credits.
Credits were now freely transferable between banks.
Now, you could pay taxes in credits converted to USD.
Which meant people stopped withdrawing their Dollars from GC immediately, and GC could "borrow" that money to pay for supplies, equipment, and then use some to invest in companies on Earth.
It was like a limited run of fractional reserve banking.
The aid operation to Gak continued.
"Isn't this technically a blatant violation of minimum wage laws?" Asked Sarah over the FTL video comms, the crisp and quick quality of which was a testament of how much human infrastructure had been shipped into Gakrek orbit, "doing some quick maths with the average fuel and maintenance costs here… it looks like we're basically paying the space traders only about $10 for every hour of shipping they do for us."
Kathleen Bryce, GC's head counsel shifted uncomfortably in a conference room chair 50 light years away, though her immediate reply indicated she had indeed thought the problem through, "Not if anyone asks."
She continued, "the short story is nobody has tested the courts to see if aliens working for us in space are subject to California employment and labor regulations, or federal minimum wage laws, or perhaps, even no laws."
"What's the long story?" Jen asked, slightly interested.
"We're pretty sure they're at most contractors, definitely not employees. Cali Prop 22 took care of that. The spaceport is probably considered international territory, or else the traders would be considered 'illegal aliens' every time they landed," Kathleen did a little chuckle at that most unoriginal pun around the GC legal team watercooler, "In which case, the lower federal minimum wage applies. Or maybe it's not even international territory, maybe it's some new thing. Too many edge cases to descri-"
"Ok," Sarah said after a moment, "it'll probably look bad though."
"What will?" Jen countered, rolling her eyes, "that they're being asked to voluntarily work just above cost to help save a billion hungry aliens, a problem that, let's not forget, most people in the galaxy think they helped create in the first place? Give me a break. There's fifty thousand Red Cross workers working for free on Gakrek and you're telling me we-"
"Ok, ok, we'll save this discussion for later, interesting as the implications are," Stearns interrupted, "until the labor board starts sniffing around, we'll let Legal deal with it. The other item I wanted to get to today is what we're going to do for Gak in the medium and long term."
"Right, the immediate crisis is over, but the moment we pull our people out and stop sending food constantly, the Gaks are back to square one in two months," Sarah returned to her presentation, "over the past two weeks, our models keep having to be revised down on the future of Gakrek farming. Their climate system has been dramatically spiraling downwards for decades now. With this disaster: the out of control burning and flooding, the trashed ecosystems, and the Gaks literally selling off their farming tools to squeeze out some more fruits from traders, they added up to one conclusion: traditional subsistence agriculture is no longer viable on Gakrek."
Here she put up a chart on screen. There were two lines. There's a straight horizontal line, marking the average calories that healthy Gaks needed, and then there's a quickly plummeting line denoting the drastic decrease of Gak agricultural productivity over time. They crossed about ten years ago. The meaning was clear.
"It's increasingly obvious that all Gak food will need to be shipped in from offworld sources until we completely overhaul their agricultural economy," Sarah continued.
"What kind of overhaul are we even talking about?" Benny chimed in. He owned a good portion of the company, but rarely came to these executive meetings. Today, he was making an exception for his son Benny Jr, who was on the view screen with the rest of the offworld team on Gakrek.
Stearns replied, "in a word: industrialization."
"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," wrote Ted Kaczynski, known more famously as his press nickname, the Unabomber. When this was published in the Washington Post in 1995 in response to a threat, a number of people thought he was making a lot of sense.
It made all the headlines, inspired countless hours of political debate, and gave a major boost to anarcho-primitive ideas in the academic sphere.
But as many historians knew, his ideas were not wildly original. Industrialization, like every major economic change, created winners and losers. Sometimes there were more of one, and sometimes the other.
In human society, previously skilled workers, usually guild craftsmen who made up the upper-middle class of late feudal Europe, became the biggest losers of industrialization as their labor was replaced by machines that could do what they did at hundreds if not thousands of times faster. Without skill, without rest, and without emotion. Some of them were so angry, they even went out and smashed the machines, but mechanization continued anyway.
The biggest winners of the Industrial Revolution were the subsistence farmers who made up the vast majority of lower class workers in feudal Europe. They went into cities, to work mind-numbingly boring jobs, doing the same thing day after day, on risky and dangerous assembly lines for excruciatingly long hours. Many got injured. Some died. A few were even children.
And yet mostly, they did so willingly.
That's not because they were all tricked, under some grand illusion that factory work was comfortable, safe, and enriching.
It was because subsistence farming on its worst day was a hecking nightmare.
The Gaks were living it.
"Why can't we just build a tractor factory there then?" Sarah demanded.
In her mind, tractors were synonymous with food. She'd been on a road trip through the American Midwest once, on the way to the Yellowstone. There, she'd seen rows of gigantic tractors plowing fields, endless food from horizon to horizon. To Sarah, the massive scale of the corn fields of America was just how industrialization was done.
"Because tractor factories depend on a thousand different parts. Who's gonna make the tires? Who's gonna make the motors? Who's gonna make the onboard computer?" Stearns explained, "and who's gonna bring them gasoline to keep running? And each of those components have a thousand factories to make them, and each have dependencies on thousands of other factories! It would literally be easier to move Los Angeles onto Gak than it would be to help them mass manufacture tractors."
Sarah made a facepalming gesture, but Stearns cut her off before she launched into despair, "there actually is a much easier solution to this problem."
"On Earth, most economists agree that the most efficient way to send foreign aid to areas that consistently couldn't produce enough food is not to send them food; it's to send them money so they can buy food, or if they have good soil, they can buy some tools to grow their own," said Stearns, leading Sarah to the obvious conclusion.
"But they don't use money here, we can't just send them money!"
"Exactly. So let's talk about that."
Gordorker's family had finally cleaned up his house from the dust storm. The broken roof was re-tiled as best as he could. His children had helped on some of the menial tasks, but that's what children were for.
It was nice to have purpose again.
The humans had said that their mission would be here for months, maybe years, but Gordorker was not so naive to believe that he wouldn't have to work for food again. He was certainly not so stupid to take this to mean he should be lounging around all day.
Winters on Gakrek were not bad in terms of freezing people to death, but the dry winds would not allow crop planting until spring again.
Next time, he would have 21 mouths to feed, not including his, and he'd have to get the fields plowed without poor Grunger. He was lucky he had so many children.
Traders Only
New Thread: Bohor spaceports have just banned bartering!
Body: If your friends want to do any business at Bohor, they better get themselves a GC Terminal fast! The Bohor are banning barter at their main port. You will only be able to conduct trades by credits starting in a few days!
Comment: Whaaaaat? Are you crazy??? Only two of my friends have Terminals. How is everyone else supposed to make a living?!
Comment: Get a Terminal lol
Comment: We told you guys last week this was gonna happen if you assholes keep holding up the line with your obnoxious rare fruit peddling. Newsflash, we don't care about how exotic your stuff is on Bohor. Just unload it. We weigh it, read the price list for food items, do the math, you get your credits, and you're out of there in minutes. You want air filters? We've got air filters for 2,800 GCs, no haggling, no bartering. If you don't like it, someone else will take it. Don't waste our time! -- Bohor Spaceport Management Team
Comment: Hey Bohor, have you considered maybe getting a Terminal yourself so that everyone else don't all need to get one just to get some fuel?
Comment: I'm selling air filters for 3,000 GCs in orbit above Bohor for traders who don't have Terminals.
"Our plan for the leasing model for the Terminals is not going to work," Sarah observed.
"Yup, the famine crisis on Gakrek is forcing our hand," admitted Stearns, "and we'd expected a much slower rollout to bring the aliens on board over the course of years, not weeks. In hindsight, it was obvious how this was different to how humans popularized credit and debit cards in the 1970s. We were replacing cash, which was just slightly inferior to a card, but with the aliens, we're replacing their entire dumpster fire of an economy. We earned a lot of goodwill with our relief effort and the galaxy is buying in."
"So what, we just abandon the original timeline and move to phase two immediately?" Asked Sarah.
"Exactly right. When the iron is hot, you gotta strike it," replied Stearns, "we'll give the merchants already with Terminals an option to opt out of their lease and switch to the new devices, but I doubt most will. Our internal data shows that they've universally been getting their money's worth out of those."
"Are our manufacturers even ready to handle the inevitable barrage of orders?" Asked Jen, eager to move onto the logistics and technology discussion.
They were not.
Version two of the offworld trading terminals were actually a downgrade to the original Terminals. The originals were prototypes, modified out of consumer tablets that cost hundreds of dollars to produce.
The new ones, branded Mini Terminals, were basic card readers with pin pads and a tiny OLED display, attached to a now mass produced FTL antenna you could get at RadioShack for $3.99. There wasn't even a thermal printer for receipts.
The whole device costs no more than $20 to make on a mass production line in Vietnam. GC was going to sell it at cost in credits.
Galactic Credit had prepared supply lines to ramp up production, ready to start rolling them out in a couple years. They've made a test batch of tens of thousands of units sitting in storage, but did not expect to need to start actually selling them for a while.
Carefully made plans were abandoned, schedules were expedited, employees in SE Asia worked overtime, and the company took on extra cost to push the schedule up.
It still wasn't enough.
On day one, all reserve units sold out. Some of the well connected human traders, unburdened with a strong conscience or ethics, bought them by the truckload as they were leaving their warehouses. They sold them at a large markup at the spaceport.
That was not very cash money of them.
GC sent a representative to the spaceport to let traders know that they were out of stock, but more would be made available shortly. Customers should just wait a week for the prices to come down.
The scalpers instantly sold out anyway. The alien traders lucky enough to be on the non-relief landing pads filled their cargo with the Mini Terminals.
Then, those traders sold them at a markup at other ports. And so on.
By the time the Mini Terminals reached average spaceport merchants on the other side of the galaxy, they were being sold for almost half the price of the original tablet Terminals.
By the end of the week, the craze died down. These electronics really were cheap and easy for human factories to make, and many of the production lines just needed time to start the machines. Prices returned to normal, and the average merchant could afford them with a bit of honest work and savings.
The Gakrek Spacelift was slowing down. The turnaround time had been increased to a leisurely 10 minutes, and the Livermore space traffic controller was occasionally allowing non-relief traders to land at open pads, which Zikzik was doing now.
Zikzik needed to refuel, but apparently that was still only allowed for the landing pads that had been designated for relief. He called up the Livermore port manager, pointed to his number one position on the relief pilot leaderboard, but she just shrugged her shoulders and said apologetically, "rules are rules".
Oh well, he could always refuel at Olgix on the way.
As he landed in Olgix, he realized this was the first time he landed at a non human or Gak port for at least a week.
He greeted the Olg who was running a reactor fuel line to his ship with a nod, and asked, "how much fruit to full?"
The Olg took one look at the sign on his booth, and said, "you know we also take credits on Olgix now, right?"
A little surprised, Zikzik took out his card and terminal and allowed the Olg to swipe his. He'd used his Terminal when doing exchanges with other traders, but this was the first time he'd been to a non-Earth port where goods and services could be paid for using his credits.
"That's 295.50 GCs, pleasure doing business with you."
Grob was one of the wealthier Gaks in the world. The famine had affected everyone, but he and his wife did not have to go hungry because the spaceport management made sure to keep feeding the people that kept the mobs at bay.
Everything else stopped working though. He used to pad his income by making sure that the vendors at the spaceport knew exactly who was protecting their livelihoods. Only very rarely did new ones not cooperate.
Grob really wasn't a bad Gak, but he did what everyone else in his position also did. This was just how business was done on Gakrek. You didn't get to survive to become a security guard family if you didn't do that. Another Gak would come along, take your place, and do what you didn't want to do anyway.
When the humans arrived, things changed. They started peddling these credits business, which he'd seen some of the traders used.
Of course, he didn't think much of it. Instead of getting goods, you just get a card, and use the card to trade for food and items? Seems unnecessarily complicated.
He'd heard that they charged a cut just for you to use the card, a concept that he was intimately familiar with and in no hurry to be subjected to. The humans had insisted on giving one to him and setting it up. Which he had to do because they were in charge now, but that was fine by him. Just because he had a card didn't mean he had to use it right?
A few days later, when he was on a patrol route at the spaceport, checking off the vendor stands, one of the luxury item vendors asked him if she could pay her next cycle's fee with her card because she had traded away all her wares.
"You gotta make sure to save wares for me next time," he'd told her, "but I'll take it this time." He ruffled through his backpack to find the card, handed it to her, and she inserted it into her machine, typed in her code, and showed him that it had deposited 18 GC into his account.
Hoping that she didn't stiff him, he went on with his route.
"Let me say this again," Zarko said at the edge of his patience limit, "you can trade these credits for food on Earth. Lots of food, shiploads of food. So much food, everywhere."
"But I don't have a ship," whined the spare parts vendor at the spaceport, "why don't you just bring food with you next time you want my parts?"
"You can exchange credits for food from some of the other traders that come down here too! Some of them have the new Terminals now, look, that guy over there, he takes GC," Zarko was almost shouting while pointing at a fellow Zeepil food merchant who had a I ❤️ GC sign on his booth across the spaceport.
This was frustrating. Every time he came across one of these less traveled planets he had to explain himself to these yokels all over again.
The vendor looked over skeptically and said, "how do I know that you two aren't working some scam together?"
That was it for Zarko. It had been a long day, this guy wasn't making it any shorter, and he had just been accused of being a dishonest trader. It was probably because of his species. Just because he was a Zeepil didn't mean he was a scammer!
He internally cursed the unjustified stereotype of his people and blew up at the racist:
"Listen to me very carefully. You're going to give me the secondary fuel modulator. You're going to walk over to the food merchant over there. Then you're going to swipe this card over here, on his machine. He's going to give you at least a month's worth of food. And if you don't, I'm going to leave a one star review on your spaceport on Traders Only, and nobody is going to come back here to trade anything with you ever again, got it?"
The vendor whined some more under his breath, but eventually relented. The threat had sounded real.
He got plenty of food. Whatever scam these Zeepils were running, they didn't rip him off this time at least. Whatever.
Zarko was fuming as he took off. Didn't these ignorant primitives know that a liquid currency to facilitate free and fair exchange of goods and services was obviously the bedrock upon which a modern economy needed to be built?
When Grob got home from work, he handed his wife the credits card saying, "hey darling, one of the luxury traders gave me her protection share using the card. I trusted her because she normally always pays on time. Did I get scammed?"
His wife was a teacher at a nearby school. Ever the practical one, she asked, "oh, how much did she put on it?"
"It said 18."
She did some math in her head and replied, "yeah that sounds about right," and to his surprise, she pulled out a card and said, "I got one from the humans at the school too, and I used it to buy a new pair of shoes for you!"
He tried them on. They weren't very fitting shoes, but neither were his previous pair so he couldn't complain. They did seem very well made even though the little holes in them seemed to be a design choice.
Pretty soon, he noticed that the other guards at the spaceport started extracting their share of protection fees using cards too. Oh well, if everyone else was taking fees with a card, he supposed it couldn't hurt if he did it too. It somewhat lightened his load on patrols, which he didn't mind at all.
Besides, his blue shoes were really pretty. He was not sure why there was a big check mark on its side though.
"They're doing what?!" Sarah asked, her temper threatening to go off.
"It's a protection racket. A practice as old as time. The security guards have basically been taking a percentage of the vendors' wares, and recently switched onto using cards to take payment. It's been going on forever and it's probably just how they do things there. Using cards is pretty innovative of them, I'll give them that," Jen said, "but it made it pretty easy for us to track down all of them. Should we revert the transactions?"
"No, probably not," Sarah said, calming down and seeing a slight head shake from her head counsel Bryce, "but we need to make it clear to them that they can't be allowed to do that anymore."
Grob wasn't sure how to feel about the cards anymore.
The humans had found the practice of protection fees distasteful, and they'd warned that anyone caught doing it again would face severe consequences. They made their point pretty clear when one of the other guards was made an example of: her card stopped working. She had to get a new one that didn't have any of her credits in it!
On the other hand, the humans also made the spaceport authorities start paying them with credits, which was good because now they were being paid on time and Grob knew he didn't have to worry about not being paid as long as the humans were there.
His wife had been buying them new clothes with credits she was getting paid as a teacher too. One of his human friends had giggled when she saw his shirt, which apparently said "2016 NBA Champions Golden State Warriors". He wasn't sure what was so funny about that, but it was a very comfortable shirt.
Maybe this whole credits thing wasn't as ridiculous as he thought at first.
By the universal inheritance path known as "dibs", Gordorker inherited his neighbors Gyuotin and Gyuovin's farmable land and possessions. They didn't have much.
Trinkets, gadgets, and a bunch of junk. It was mostly items that couldn't be traded for food during the worst periods of the shortage. With his immediate food needs taken care of by the relative abundance of food items the humans have brought, Gordorker thought perhaps he should go buy a stasis box with the trinkets he got from his deceased neighbors.
When he arrived at the offworld market, he saw a high end luxury merchant proudly displaying some fresh new wares from offworld, including a number of stasis boxes. These were apparently new ones made by humans. These were slightly bigger than the ones he'd have before, but he'd brought his neighbors' life possessions, so he thought maybe he'd be able to trade for one of those with some haggling.
Gordorker started laying out his items on the table, but the trader cut him off, hastily saying the weirdest thing he'd ever heard from a trader in his life, "no barter, credits only." The merchant then pointed him towards a human tent.
A human volunteer, his nametag said Marco, asked his name and gave him a shiny card, then told him to memorize 6 numbers. "As the head of your household, you have also been given a small stimulus by the GC corporation," he said.
Then Marco took him to a junk trader stall, where he gave the trader all his items. Marco showed an increasingly confused Gordorker how to insert his card into a small machine slot to "receive payment".
Marco guided him back to the merchant selling stasis boxes. Gordorker was instructed on how to insert his card and enter his pin code, which he mastered with no difficulty.
Marco then took him to a farm tools stall, where Gordorker repeated the same process with a steel plow, a small box of "semi-dwarf wheat seeds", a long garden hose, and a hand pump, all loaded onto a brand new wooden wheelbarrow.
"BAL: 12.50," the small screen had read.
Gordorker was not sure what unnatural ritual he had taken part in, but he was in possession of the most farm tools he had ever been in his life and he had the stasis box he was looking for.
"Alright, that should be enough. Make sure to keep the card safe and remember your 6 digit code. Ask a volunteer if you need to know what the tools do.."
Gordorker put his card in his stasis box. Then, being the prudent Gak he was, he wrote down his pin code and put it in the box as well.
Whatever else it did, he was sure one of his descendants could probably find a use for it in an emergency one day.
In hindsight, there were obvious economic side effects for Earth becoming a mass producer of everything from food to cheap consumer electronics, the reverse engineering of millions of years of alien tech, and ripping down the barriers that the barter based economies of the galaxy had erected.
A young forward thinking economist wrote a whole journal article about it with a typical economic study title: "Development Osmosis: Capital Outflow, Argentina, and Extreme Poverty in Offworld Economies".
Three other economists read the pre-print as part of the peer review, who all sent him an email saying something along the lines of "wow, this gave me a lot to think about. Somebody important should read this!"
Nobody else did, for a while.
It didn't make the news.
The reference to high yield semi-dwarf wheat seeds in the story refers to the research of Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Norman Borlaug. Borlaug noticed that stalks of wheat that are too high yield would bend and then break their stalks, so he solved that problem by breeding these plants with dwarfed plants. Shorter stalk, supports more wheat. His work in improving food security in developing nations is credited with saving the lives of over a billion humans. A real life HFY.
The next chapter's working title is:
Rising Tide
RoyalRoad
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Part 3- $BB DD no Meems – FUCK THE MEMES

Part 3- $BB DD no Meems – FUCK THE MEMES

It’s called degrossing, and is what caused the broader market to perform inversely to $BANG.

TLDR the TLDR - $BB #BANG GANG IS IN FOR THE LONG HAUL. WE’RE TERRAFORMING MARS, AND TAKING MATT DAMON WITH US.

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this event made me consider whether to keep playing

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