#i was pretty much only fishing though & i had the pirate profession and a treasure hunter

[newstfionline]

Monday, December 14, 2020

Loss of ‘snowbirds’ amid pandemic another hit to US tourism (AP) This is the first winter in five years that Steve Monk and his wife, Linda, haven’t driven to Arizona from their home in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. They typically leave Canada to hunker down in warmer climates for six months. They could fly, skirting travel restrictions at the border, but they’d rather “freeze their buns off” than go to the U.S., where COVID-19 infections and deaths are surging. “It’s not worth taking a chance. It’s not nearly as bad in this country as it is down there,” said Monk, 69. “Pretty much every Canadian person we do know that goes down (to the U.S.) is not going. It’s pretty widespread.” “Snowbirds” like the Monks, often retirees who live somewhere warm like Arizona or Florida part time to escape cold weather, won’t be flocking south this winter. For Canadians who drive, nonessential border travel is banned until at least Dec. 21. Snowbirds’ plans have a huge impact on tourism. In Florida, 3.6 million Canadians visited last year, making up a quarter of its foreign tourists, according to the state tourism office. Visit Florida estimates that only 15,000 Canadians arrived between April and September, the last month with available statistics. That’s about an 99% decrease from the same period last year.

Gunman shot by police at NYC cathedral Christmas concert (AP) A man was fatally shot in the head by police on the steps of a landmark New York City cathedral Sunday afternoon after he began firing two semiautomatic handguns at the end of a Christmas choral concert, police said. A detective, a sergeant and an officer fired 15 rounds after the man started shooting just before 4 p.m. at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, mother church of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said. “It is by the grace of God today,” Shea said, that no one besides the gunman was struck. The man had a lengthy criminal history and was carrying a bag containing a can of gasoline, rope, wire, knives and a Bible, Shea said. The police commissioner called the actions of the officers “heroic.”

Ailing newspapers abandon newsrooms as pandemic deepens woes (AFP) The buzzing newsroom has long been the lifeblood of American newspapers. But in recent months the buzz has become virtual as the pandemic deepens the industry crisis and forces journalists to work remotely. In recent months, established dailies such as the New York Daily News, Miami Herald and Baltimore Sun have joined other news outlets abandoning their headquarters, amid pandemic workplace restrictions that had already left them empty. Tribune Publishing, owner of the Baltimore daily and others, has acknowledged it is re-evaluating its real estate needs as it struggles with a difficult environment, with lower print circulation, falling advertising revenues and increased costs for health and safety. Many journalists say the loss of the newsroom has changed the nature of their work and worry that newspapers may not re-establish newsrooms even after the pandemic. The move out of the newsroom follows a long crisis for the sector that has seen consolidation by major chains, the closing of many smaller papers, and hedge funds buying newspapers only to slash costs and squeeze out as much profit as possible. With advertising dropping, there are few alternatives. It’s difficult to remain profitable, so newspapers are going to continue to cut costs.

Donations soar but nonprofits still struggle with pandemic (AP) Despite record amounts of charitable donations this year, the effects of the pandemic are suffocating nonprofits across the country as organizations face soaring costs and demand for help, yet are largely without their own support systems, including volunteers and in-person fundraising events. December is typically the most important month for nonprofit revenues, as Christmas and end-of-year tax deductions drive a flood of charitable giving. The holiday campaign season that charities big and small rely on is underway in full force amid a resurging pandemic that has infected more than 16 million people and claimed nearly 298,000 lives in the U.S. alone. The Salvation Army, already down 18% in funding this year, projects its Red Kettle campaign will net half as much as it did in 2019. That’s a $60 million drop for the iconic fundraising drive being crippled by the pandemic in numerous ways. Thousands of kettle locations were eliminated because the businesses that once hosted them have closed and foot traffic has diminished as much of the public opts to stay at home. Its pool of volunteer bell ringers is smaller, as many older helpers—some who dress up as Santa Claus—are unable to participate because they’re at high-risk for COVID-19. There’s even a national coin shortage, in part because pandemic shopping has turned increasingly digital. But multiple studies and surveys say more people than ever are giving and at greater amounts than usual. Big philanthropic players have also stepped up. The Ford Foundation said it has already surpassed last year’s total giving with $580 million in grants. It’s giving another $400 million through a bond. Ford and four other foundations announced earlier this year they would borrow $1.7 billion through bonds to help keep afloat donations-dependent nonprofits through the crisis.

4 Stabbed and One Shot as Trump Supporters and Opponents Clash (NYT) Incensed by a Supreme Court ruling that further dashed President Trump’s hopes of invalidating his November electoral defeat, thousands of his supporters marched in Washington and several state capitals on Saturday to protest what they contended, against all evidence, was a stolen election. In some places, angry confrontations between protesters and counterprotesters escalated into violence. There were a number of scuffles in the national capital, where four people were stabbed, and the police declared a riot in Olympia, Wash., where one person was shot.

Biden to be the first churchgoing president in decades (CNN) Joe Biden rarely misses Sunday Mass. That’s a level of devotion to regular religious services not seen from recent presidents, who were professed Christians but intermittently attended church or worshipped privately while in office. Donald Trump has not had a habit of attending church services weekly, though he made several appearances at the Episcopal church in West Palm Beach near his resort as well as at various evangelical churches across the country. Barack Obama would go to church for the occasional Christmas or Easter service in Washington or on vacation in Hawaii, but rarely during the rest of the year. And George W. Bush, despite being a high-profile born-again Christian, tended to worship privately as president and only attended church when back home in Texas. But for Biden, who next month will become the second Catholic president in US history, attending weekly Mass is expected to be a fixed part of his schedule. “For Joe, faith is both a private devotion—he prays regularly, he goes to church. But it’s also public. He’s open about and proud that he’s a Catholic,” said Fr. Kevin O’Brien, a friend and spiritual adviser to Biden and his wife Jill.

A Venezuelan village finds gold (NYT) Venezuela’s economic meltdown had pummeled the fishing village of Guaca. Then something glistened in the water. Hundreds of pieces of gold and silver jewelry and ornaments mysteriously surfaced on Guaca’s beach, easing the pain of an economic crisis and creating a local gold rush for villagers. Many of them immediately sold the objects they had discovered and bought food. “It got so bad, I felt as if a rope was tightening around my neck,” said Yolman Lares, who first discovered the gold. The treasure has allowed his family to go back to eating twice a day. Despite weeks of speculation over the discovery—including tales of Caribbean pirates, a sunken colonial frigate and modern smugglers—its origins are still unknown. A chemical test commissioned by The Times on a link of gold chain indicated that the piece had most likely been manufactured in Europe in recent decades.

Boris Johnson dials up warnings of a no-deal Brexit as Britain and E.U. agree to continue talks (Washington Post) Blowing past another deadline, Britain and the European Union said on Sunday they have made enough progress in their seemingly endless trade and security talks to continue negotiations into the coming days. Many had feared Sunday was the final hour to reach a Brexit deal, but the talks will roll on. Businesses on both sides of the English Channel, fearing chaos at the ports and steep, immediate tariffs, sighed a collective “Whew, that was close!” Still, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in a TV address, did not sound optimistic. “I’m afraid we’re still very far apart on some key things,” he said. “But where there is life there’s hope.” Johnson warned “the most likely” outcome would see Britain depart the European Union without a deal, leaving it to trade on what the prime minister insists on calling “Australian terms,” which really means defaulting to do business by the rules set by the World Trade Organization. Europe is Britain’s largest trading partner; reverting to WTO rules would mean taxes, or tariffs, on exports sold to the continent. The average WTO tariff is less than 3 percent. But for automobiles it’s 10 percent, and for fresh meat—such as Welsh lamb—it’s 38 percent or more.

Germany to impose stricter lockdown to battle rise in COVID-19 cases (Reuters) Germany will close most shops from Wednesday until Jan. 10 as it tightens coronavirus restrictions and tries to rein in the spread of the disease, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday. Under the agreement, only essential shops such as supermarkets and pharmacies, as well as banks, are to remain open. Schools will also be closed in principle during the period, and employers will be asked to close operations or have employees work from home. The sale of fireworks will be banned ahead of New Year’s Eve. Germany has been in partial lockdown for six weeks, with bars and restaurants closed, while stores and schools have remained open. Some regions have already imposed tougher measures as infections grew.

Nigeria: Hundreds of pupils feared missing after bandit attack on school (The Guardian) Bandits armed with assault rifles attacked a secondary school in Nigeria’s north-western Katsina state late on Friday, police said, and two local people told Reuters hundreds of students were missing. Police said they were working with the army and air force to determine how many pupils were missing or kidnapped, and to find them. There were chaotic scenes at the school on Saturday as desperate parents and security personnel gathered to search for about half of the school’s 800 students who were still missing, one parent and a school employee told Reuters.

[entergamingxp]

Rare on Sea of Thieves’ radical new Emissaries system and maintaining the PvE-PvP balance • Eurogamer.net

Today sees the launch of Sea of Thieves’ latest update, Ships of Fortune, and it’s big ‘un, redefining and expanding one of the core tenets of the launch-day game: trading companies. It’s a fitting way to begin the multiplayer pirate adventure’s third year of post-launch updates, but, of course, it arrives in strange times.

“We’re lucky in that we work in a digital profession… and we get to pretty much carry on as normal broadly across the whole studio,” explains Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate of the studio’s recent shift to working from home. “Very much during that transition and still now, the focus has been our team and how everyone is, how everyone feels… but seeing loads of people playing Sea of Thieves, hearing loads of great stories, there’s a real great motivation for us to continue servicing that.”

“The rhythm and that process and everything we’ve built around how we update has kind of put us in really good stead,” continues Neate, “but this is still a big moment for us. This’ll be our first update since we’ve shifted to working from home and I think that’s going to be a really good moment for us as a studio and as a team… Not only is it our first update, it’s one that has a tonne of cool stuff in, so I think it’s going to have a real impact.”

Indeed, despite current work challenges, today’s update is perhaps the most substantial to arrive since last year’s mammoth Anniversary offering. There are sweeping changes to Arena mode – which has been seriously streamlined to create a brisker, more combat-focussed loop – there are pet cats, a new revive mechanic, and, most notably, a radical new ’emissaries’ system, expanding on the voyage-giving trading companies at Sea of Thieves’ core.

Come the update’s arrival, players will have the option of paying 20,000 gold to sign up as an faction emissary once they reach Level 15 in a trading company (each now has an increased level cap of 75, although players still only need to be Level 50 in three to become a Pirate Legend). This grants them a special flag that can be raised ahead of any voyage, resulting in dramatically increased rewards – which continue to climb as players complete more voyages and increase their emissary grade, as long as they avoid a watery death.

As Sea of Thieves’ creative director Mike Chapman explains, the new emissary system is, in part, designed to fill a gap in the “quintessential pirate experience” at the game’s core, by introducing the sense of different factions going about their own particular business on the oceans, as if in the real-life Age of Sail. “The one experience we didn’t have… is that sense of standing on the deck of your ship, using your spyglass, looking over at another ship, and not only making a judgement call on [its type and likely crew size], but what flag they’re flying, what they’re choosing to accomplish in this world.”

More crucially, though, “It’s answering a mechanical need,” says Chapman, “where some ships are more than just complete mystery boxes; here, you know more about what a crew’s intent is and that drives more interesting stories.” The emissary system means players can, for example, immediately identify a Gold Hoarder ship and conclude they’re more likely to have high-value treasure onboard – increasing the incentive to target specific vessels, thus introducing greater risk for participants as well as greater rewards.

The fearsome new PvP-focussed Reaper’s Bones trading company is the scourge of the seas for emissaries.

It’s an idea that draws on the learning from previous Sea of Thieves activities such as Gilded Voyages, where rewards were boosted specifically to encourage more high-stakes player interactions. “There’s always a moment in time after these come out,” Chapman explains, “where the world is just more full of loot, and there’s more of these emergent stories happening because you’ve got people going after the loot, and people going after those people, and really [the emissary] system builds that into the game consistently.”

And the stakes are higher than ever, especially given the introduction of the new PvP-focussed Reaper’s Bones trading company in Ships of Fortune, specifically designed to target emissaries. Players that pledge their allegiance to the Reaper’s Bones are charged with hunting down those ships flying an emissary flag, sinking them, and returning that flag to the Reaper’s Hideout in order to claim their rewards.

“The grade of your emissary flag increases based on completing [a trading company’s] activities but you also lose that grade if you sink your ship,” explains Chapman, “and the value of that flag [for Reapers] will reflect what that ship has done in the world. The kind of scenarios we’re designing that for, you could absolutely see a grade one Gold Hoarder emissary in the world, and maybe decide to leave them alone and come back later when they’ve done a few more activities – it allows you to choose when you want to go after them.”

“In terms of knowing when people in the server are emissaries,” continues Chapman, “you can look at the tables next to the trading companies, and there are little wooden ships signifying if that company has any emissaries in the world. If, say, you saw two ships on the Gold Hoarders table, you’d know those are out in the world but you don’t know where they are – so there’s an element of, do you want to hunt them, do you want to wait until you come across them? Whereas Reapers are always visible on the map, so you know where those player boss ships are – which is really what we’re going for, kind of the players being the boss ships in the world.”

Only the fishing-focussed Hunter’s Call trading company escapes the emissary action.

It’s a system that will obviously live or die based on player engagement, especially given Sea of Thieves’ relatively small ship limit per server, so I was curious to hear how Rare plans to ensure it remains attractive to crews.

“We’ve talked about that quite a lot,” says Chapman, “and the main thing is ensuring people understand what makes emissary play special. If you opt-in to play that way, you absolutely will progress faster and gain access to unique rewards, so it’s very much about making sure that rewards are meaningful to players. We’ll always want that consistent, clear benefit for being an emissary, so it’s very likely you’re going to be on a server where there is an active emissary.”

“But we really don’t want this to become too predictable either,” continues Chapman, “that’s the thing we don’t want in Sea of Thieves. It’s about giving people the encouragement to interact with this mechanic, and then really being hands-off with it. We don’t want to guarantee that we’re going to bring servers together and that there are X amount of people that will also be emissaries in your server; we still want that sense of emergent, unpredictable play”.

As Neate puts it, “This is the biggest change-up to our sandbox and to our progression system since we’ve launched really, and it’s going to be one of those things where we’re going to be observing and measuring and seeing how it’s performing, and looking at if we need to evolve it… but we’re as interested to see how it plays out as our players are, because ultimately we’re going to be relying on what they do with those mechanics and how it all comes together.”

The new revive feature is about “having each other’s back in a mechanical way”, says Chapman.

Understandably, there have been fears in the community that the emissaries system – which incentivises ship sinking – might ultimately tip Sea of Thieves’ delicate balance of PvP carnage and quieter PvE thrills too far in the the direction of the former.

Rare, however, believe’s the emissary system’s opt-in nature – and the fact Reaper’s Bones players don’t earn faction rewards for sinking non-emissary ships – will help protect PvP-shy players from unwanted attention in the long run, offering a “hiding space” for non-emissary players as they become lower value targets in the world.

And less confrontational players will be delighted to hear that the developer is looking to lessen the impact of PvP on other core areas of the game where necessary too.

That includes the story driven Tall Tales, which, in their current guise, are all too easily robbed of narrative momentum when players are forced to start over as a result of critical items being lost or stolen during PvP. The good news is that a solution is set to arrive relatively soon, introducing an exceedingly welcome checkpoint system to Tall Tales.

“We always believed that Tall Tales [should be played] in a shared world,” says Chapman, “because of the positivity [around the emergent stories] that comes with that, but the negatives… the kind of excessive PvP leading to loss of time, loss of those physical items… there’s a bunch of improvements that we’ve got planned”.

To that end, starting in the update after Ships of Fortune, checkpoint saves will be added at key junctions during a Tall Tale. “The checkpoint is like an open book,” explains Chapman, “and at any point you can leave the game, come back, vote on that open book, and you’ll be able to pick up your checkpoint right from that point. And any physical items you had with you at that point in the tale… would pop back in on the table.

“So it both protects you against a loss of the items, but it also allows you to play in smaller chunks of play. I think one of the absolute fair criticisms of Tall Tales… was the requirement on players’ time – but getting this to work in a sandbox world, where everyone can have different points of progress and tales can play out differently, has been a little bit more complex, but we’ve got a great solution now and it’s coming very shortly.”

And, of course, there’s plenty more still on the horizon. Sea of Thieves is set to make its Steam debut in the not too distant future, bringing a new influx of players to its dangerous waters, and Rare will continue to deliver new monthly features and adventures – including building on “what it means to be a Pirate Legend”, according to Chapman – for as long as it possibly can. “We’re two years into a hopefully very, very long service for Sea of Thieves,” says Neate, “and definitely our goal is to continue growing both the game and the audience that’s playing.”

“And the fundamental experiences you can have, right?” adds Chapman, “We definitely still want to surprise players as well.”

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/04/rare-on-sea-of-thieves-radical-new-emissaries-system-and-maintaining-the-pve-pvp-balance-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rare-on-sea-of-thieves-radical-new-emissaries-system-and-maintaining-the-pve-pvp-balance-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net