In 2011, Gabe Newell was a regular reader of Yanis Varoufakis’s economics blog. At the time, Valve was struggling with how to link the virtual economies of their games (like Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2).

Gabe sent Varoufakis a “cold email” that essentially said:

“I have been following your blog for a while… here at my company we were discussing an issue of linking economies in two virtual environments… when it occurred to me ‘this is Germany and Greece.’ Rather than continuing to run an emulator of you in my head, I thought I’d check to see if we couldn’t get the real you interested in what we are doing.”

He spend only 2 years but his impact on Valve was significant. At Valve he…

• analyzed the trade and “balance of payments” between different Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2)to prevent virtual inflation or economic collapse.
• used Valve’s “perfect data” (where every transaction is recorded) to …

Some of you were asking for some vaporizer action so here you are, in this clip I took on 2 vaporizers on top of Spaceport Towers. Since these guys only show up in the Close Scrutiny game mode I don’t get much time to practice on Spaceport since it’s only a few hours but they behave somewhat similar to rocketeers.

Surely we have a knife and bowl available to craft such an intricate item

At least that’s what the translator says - can any Italian clarify?

I was on a night raid looting Space Travel when I heard footsteps. So of course I go investigate, round the corner with my weapon drawn, ready to smoke this guy.

And what does he do?

He drops his weapon, turns on the mic, and goes “what’s up man?”

I’m already committed to the kill but then he asks if I want a BP.

This dude straight up drops me a TEMPEST BP and says he literally just found it.

I’ve been trying to PvP more because I’m trash in trios/duos, but I physically cannot do it in solos. Every encounter turns into the most chill interaction imaginable and I can’t bring myself to shoot.

Seriously.

QUIT BEING SO NICE.

At this point I might just disable voice chat because every time someone talks I suddenly don’t want to shoot another raider again.

wow

LOL this has been the longest grind of the game for me. I love that Embark creates such wonderful models for items that aren’t intended to be kept or used, and I love checking the “Inspect” function on each new item I get, but it always broke my heart to hand these intended-to-be-short-lived items over to the Traders and never see them again.

Over the course of two Expeditions, an alt account, and being lucky enough to have two consoles in the house, I was finally able to collect/pool every item into a stash. Has anybody else done this? I doubt it! Nobody else could possibly be this stupid/obsessed.

Hey Embark, you love to keep track of weird stats… how about acknowledging the first account to gather every in-Quest item that’s worth a grand total of zero coin?

BTW, here are the items (in alphabetical order, as pictured) to-date:

Celeste’s Journal  

Dodger’s Note  

Dusty Film Reel  

Espresso Machine Parts  

ESR Analyzer  

Experimental Seed …