It almost assuredly was not escalated to global. I received the same canned answer from them earlier and asked to be put in contact with a person from the European company.

Their response was to send me here: https://www.haier-europe.com/en_GB/technical-assistance/contact-us/

If you poke around, you’ll find that there is no effective way to contact anyone by email unless you’ve got a specific support question with a model number attached, so I sent an email directly to support.ecommerce@haier-europe.com

Will it matter for anything? Probably not. Will at least one guy have to read some stern words about an attack on open source development? Yep, and that’s good enough for me I guess :P

Say what you will about the AIs, I normally find it exceedingly difficult to get the GM customer support team to provide me with python script assistance so this is an overall improvement imo

He can say whatever he wants as an individual, but Apple is absolutely preventing him from speaking on their services because he’s saying things they don’t agree with. Don’t be pedantic

Sure, but in Dark Souls there’s still significantly better design at work.

Some differences in Dark Souls:

• tutorial messages before the first major encounter explaining the controls
• the difficulty scale between the entry level monsters and the boss is much smaller
• the player can customize their build at least a little bit by selecting their starting loadout
• the first boss is often difficult, but even if the player fails they can still progress the game since they’re expected to lose.

AC6 on the other hand lacks all of that. It gives you no tutorialization. You’re told to use a sword against shielded enemies and then you’re suppose to somehow infer that the helicopter is also weak to swords. You’re meant to build up a stagger bar to open a window for big damage, but they haven’t even mentioned the stagger bars existence at this point in the game. You’re stuck in a single mech loadout with no way to customize.

Imagine if you had to fully kill the asylum demon the first time you encounter it. You’ve got no plunge damage, no gear, no grasp of the controls, you’re just forced to walk out of the jail door and beat the boss before you can engage with any other elements of the game. That’s much closer to AC6’s presentation

Fair enough. This is indeed my first Armored Core experience and I expected an uphill struggle coming in on iteration 6 of the series, but clearly I wasn’t prepared for this :P

I’ll get there eventually. Just need to keep ramming my head against it until something clicks

It’s not like their complaints are entirely without merit though. I expected difficulty with a From Software game but usually there is an on-ramp to the difficulty.

In AC6 that’s completely missing. You’re given four trivial fights with almost no tutorialization before being put against a boss that expects you to know about the (yet unexplained) stagger bar and also expects you to use your sword against the helicopter which is somewhat unintuitive, especially since you’ve only been told to use the sword once and it was against enemies with a shield which reinforces the idea that sword beats shield, and the helicopter has no shield.