Nintendo fans in the U.S. may be feeling pretty hard done by now as the rest of the world fights for a Nintendo Switch 2 pre-order, but some are fighting back by challenging and reporting every Nintendo Switch 2 auction listing they can find.
On eBay.com, Nintendo Switch 2 consoles are, at the time of writing, listed from anywhere between $468 to $855, with a lot listing Buy It Now prices of around $700-$750 — that’s $300 over the recommended retail price.
United in their frustrations both about the pre-order delay and the preponderance of over-priced pre-orders on eBay, however, players are working to take scalpers down together.
“If anyone wants to do their bit for society, go on eBay and report the scalpers,” said one Redditor. “I’ve had about 15 listings removed, spent literally minutes reporting them.”
“Reminder that preselling an eBay item is not allowed unless it will be shipping within 40 days of purchasing off eBay, (impossible for the Switch!), at least in the UK anyways,” said another, racking up almost 6,000 upvotes. The image attached showed a long list of confirmation emails from eBay stating that the content they had reported was removed.
Another jumped on Reddit to confirm they’d had “15 more scalpers removed from eBay,” while another player posted to say their actions saw 20 Switch pre-order listings scrubbed from the site.
So, just why are players having so much luck combating scalpers this time around? Well, that has to do with eBay’s very own terms and conditions concerning pre-sale items, which say “pre-sale listings must clearly state that they are ‘presale’ in the title and description, and guarantee shipment within 40 business days of purchase.”
“You’re not allowed to sell pre-orders on eBay because the seller doesn’t have, and it’s possible they will never actually get, the item they’re selling,” explained rmajor86 on a post that’s also been upvoted hundreds of time. “Just report the listing, and eBay will remove it.”
That said, things may change soon. As formerlyDylan pointed out, June 5 is 40 business days from today, April 10 (excluding Easter), and eBay’s terms and conditions state pre-sale items must “guarantee shipment within 40 business days of purchase.”
While this means scalpers may soon be able to legitimately list their pre-orders for sale across parts of the world where the console will release on June 5, fans may be able to continue to fight scalpers across the U.S. and Canada right up until those countries have a shipping date.
Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
The legend goes that in the 12th century, King Canute plonked his throne down on the seashore and commanded the tide to go out, thereby empirically demonstrating to all the toadies at court that he was not, in fact, God Almighty. You don’t need to order the ocean to piss off in Endless Legend 2: it’s already in headlong retreat. But not from you.
IGN’s Schedule 1 map is here! Our interactive map tracks essential locations across Hyland Point, including Customers and Dealers for players wanting to maximize their business empire. It also includes markers for ATMs, Cash for Trash machines, and more, so you know where to go when you need to make a transaction in Schedule I.
Schedule I Interactive Map
The available map filters for our Schedule 1 interactive map include:
Locations, such as ATMs, Dead Drops, Cash for Trash Machines, and Payphones.
Businesses, including Taco Ticklers, the Car Wash, and the Post Office.
Properties, including the Motel, Bungaloo, and Docks Warehouse.
Shops, such as Dan’s Hardware and Gas Mart, so you always know where to go to purchase essential items for Mixing.
NPCs, including Customers and Dealers.
Schedule 1 Guides
There’s a lot to do in Schedule I, whether that’s mixing up a new strain or saving up to move into a new property. IGN’s Game Help is here to assist with informative guides to help you keep on track. Our coverage includes:
Meg Koepp is a Guides Editor on the IGN Guides team, with a focus on trends. When she’s not working, you can find her playing an RPG or coloring to unwind.
In the boss fights of South Of Midnight, you’ve got to find a pulsing wound on the body of the monster and strike it to cleanse the giant beast of its “stigma”. In truth, these creatures are analogues for human characters, sometimes people who have literally transformed into beasts, afflicted by a thorny curse that drives them into frightening states of rage or panic. This is a game about festering trauma – history as a painful wound you’ve got to poke in order to eventually heal. Strip back the scales and feathers of folk allegory and these are human tales of shame, hunger, neglect, and abuse, some more effective than others. It’s a gorgeous game with a killer approach to music, if sometimes hobbled by the ropey trappings of its action adventure genre.
Nintendo announced Splatoon 3‘s returning SpringFest a few weeks back, but the explosion of Switch 2 news means that the starting date has crept up on us.
As a new piece of SpringFest art from @NintendoUK so rightfully reminded us, the latest Splatfest is almost here, with the three-team competition kicking off on 12th April at 1am BST / 11th April 6pm PT (we’ve specified all the regional times below).
Ubisoft has insisted that buying a game doesn’t give players “unfettered ownership rights” to it, only a “limited license to access the game.”
The megacorp’s comments come as it sought to dismiss a case brought by two unhappy The Crew players who took the company to court for shutting down its original racing game last year.
At the end of last year, two gamers took Ubisoft to court, stating they had been “under the impression” they were “paying to own and possess the video game The Crew instead of paying for a limited license to use The Crew.”
“Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that the all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed,” the initial lawsuit read.
As spotted by Polygon, the claimants accused Ubisoft of violating California’s False Advertising Law, Unfair Competition Law, and Consumer Legal Remedies Act, as well as “common law fraud and breach of warranty claims.” They also suggest Ubisoft broke California’s state law around gift cards, which are not allowed to expire.
The gamers also provided images that depict the activation code for the racer clearly shows that it does not expire until 2099, which they believe implies “that [The Crew] would remain playable during this time and long thereafter.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ubisoft does not agree.
“Plaintiffs allege that they purchased physical copies of The Crew under the belief that they were obtaining unfettered access to the game in perpetuity. Plaintiffs also take issue with the fact that Ubisoft did not offer to create an ‘offline, single-player option of the Game, otherwise known as a ‘patch’ when it shut down The Crew’s servers in March 2024,” Ubisoft’s lawyers wrote.
“The [essence] of the plaintiffs’ complaint is that Ubisoft allegedly misled purchasers of its video game The Crew into believing they were purchasing unfettered ownership rights in the game, rather than a limited license to access the game. But the reality is that consumers received the benefit of their bargain and were explicitly notified, at the time of purchase, that they were purchasing a license.”
The response further adds that the Xbox and PlayStation packaging contain a “clear and conspicuous notice — in all capital letters — that Ubisoft may cancel access to one or more specific online features upon a 30-day prior notice.”
Ubisoft has now filed a motion to dismiss the case. If that fails and the lawsuit does proceed, the two plaintiffs have demanded a jury trial.
It’s worth noting that the new law still doesn’t prevent companies from yanking your content away from you, but at least they’ll have to warn you about the true nature of your purchase before you click that buy button.
Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
I think this is the best deal I’ve seen on a PC controller in a long time. Lenovo just dropped official Xbox wireless controllers (Series X|S variants) to Black Friday equivalent prices. Pulse Red and Shock Blue are going for $34.99 with the code SPRINGGAMES, while other colors like Carbon Black and Astral Purple are $39.99 with SPRINGBACK. These are some of the best gamepads for gaming on PC, and honestly, for a first-party controller that doesn’t feel like it was pulled from a bargain bin, it’s an absurdly good price as well.
Path of Exile 2 developer Grinding Gear Games has issued more emergency changes to the action role-playing game amid a backlash to the nerf-heavy Dawn of the Hunt update that has caused recent Steam user reviews to plummet to ‘mostly negative.’
Dawn of the Hunt launched earlier this month and quickly sparked a backlash among the Path of Exile community. The expansion added the new Huntress class, a Spear and Buckler user specialising in hybrid melee and ranged combat. Elsewhere, there are five new ascension classes: the Ritualist, Amazon, Smith of Kitava, Tactician, and Lich. And along with all that are mechanical overhauls, over one hundred new unique items as well as significantly expanded crafting options.
What should have been a hugely positive moment for Path of Exile 2, its developers and its players became something else entirely, however, as the community complained that GGG had slowed the pace of the game down to the point where it became a “total slog.”
The ‘most helpful’ review of the last 30 days on Steam is a negative one that outlines the current problems with the game:
Every boss fight is incredibly longer than it needs to be. Most of the skills do little to no damage. I understand they said they wanted to slow gameplay down, but I don’t think I will even make it more than one week in this league at this point. It just feels incredibly awful right now, IF you can even get the game to run and be stable. That is a HUGE if.
“If you’re a masochist who enjoys being punished for little to no reward, this game is for you,” reads another negative review. “If you’re not, it’s likely that you won’t enjoy the game.
“The release version (0.1) already had a lot of issues in relation to the size of the areas (too large), the slow movement (which makes those large areas feel even worse) and forced combo gameplay (which was optional thanks to some “unintended” build options found by players).
“However, in this new version (0.2 – Dawn of the Hunt), just as many other reviewers have mentioned, the game was slowed down considerably.
“The loot, which wasn’t too common in 0.1, but acceptable, was nerfed by quite a lot, to the point where you kill a rare monster or boss and get no rare items or crafting currencies.
“The forced combo gameplay is back in full force, with the developers wanting to pigeonhole us into this type of gameplay, which is in direct contrast to what an ARPG of this kind is supposed to be. You’re supposed to have freedom to make your build how you like to play it and not be forced to play only the way the developers have intended.
“Players keep complaining about the map size and slow movement and the developers largely ignored these comments until the community backlash was too much to keep ignoring.
“I have 5k hours in PoE 1 and it’s my favorite game of all time. I love GGG but honestly, I cannot recommend this game to almost anyone as it is now.
“Hopefully they will be able to fix these issues in the future and make the game more enjoyable.”
The question for Path of Exile 2 players now is, are these changes meaningful enough to stem the tide of complaints and get the game back into a positive setting? It’s worth noting that Path of Exile 2 has been a hugely successful release for GGG, to the point where it struggled to cope with the sheer number of players at launch. But this success has brought with it additional problems that have even impacted the development of Path of Exile 1, which retains a sizeable and loyal audience.
Path of Exile 2 update 0.2.0e patch notes:
Monster Speed Changes
Many players have been reported being overwhelmed by monsters. The cause of this is a variety of factors and we are addressing them on a case by case basis. We have listed monster changes act by act below, but we also made the following changes more generally.
Many human monsters including the Cultists in Freythorn, the Faridun and the Tribal Humans in Act Three have behaviour where they can interrupt their melee attacks if the player moves too far out of range during the attack, especially for attacks that have multiple hits like a swipe left into swipe right. These interrupt events have been primarily removed especially on things that were attacking very fast as it caused the monsters to be relentlessly able to pursue and attack you giving you no time to engage or use skills between their attacks.
The Haste Aura monster modifier no longer appears on monsters that are already fast.
Act 1
Werewolf Prowlers and Tendril Prowlers now will enter a walking stance (as opposed to running) after performing a melee action, they will only begin running again if you get a certain distance away from them. This behaviour has been applied to many faster monsters.
Hungering Stalkers now have 12% less Life and Damage, they were already relatively weak but we have lowered it a bit further to account for their high movement speed and attack speed. They are intended to engage and attack quickly, but be weak and die fast.
Reduced the number of Bloom Serpents in The Red Vale.
Halved the number of Venomous Crabs in the Hunting Grounds.
The Cultists in Freythorn no longer have interrupt events on their attacks as described above.
The Cultists in Freythorn wielding Axes and Maces in Freythorn now walk after performing a Melee Action, only running again once you exit a certain distance.
Blood Cretins on death Blood Pools have had their duration decreased from 6 seconds to 4 seconds, and fixed the area of effect to match the visual more closely.
Reduced the overall density of more challenging monsters in Ogham Manor.
Act 2
The Boulder Ants in Titan Valley have been replaced by Risen Maraketh, as the area had too many monsters that had irritating movement.
The Faridun have all been modified to remove the interrupt events on their attacks as described above..
Act 3
Diretusk Boar and Antlion Charger’s are now more likely to push you to the side instead of pushing you along with them when they charge you.
The Lost City monster pack composition has been adjusted to result in less ranged monsters
Massively adjusted the Azak Bog, firstly by the aforementioned changes to interrupt events, but also changed the monster composition of the area to have less Ranged and Elite monsters.
Fixed an issue where the Slitherspitter’s poison spray in Venom Crypts was dealing Chaos Damage instead of Physical Damage unintentionally.
We have also identified another issue that affects some areas in which potential monster spawn locations have inconsistent density in different rooms. This leads to situations where some rooms are much denser with monsters than others in an unintended way. We have a fix for this problem but it did not make it into this patch, and will be deployed in a later patch.
These are not the only changes that we will be making to monsters. Further changes will come in later updates. Some changes we didn’t get time to make today, and others require new animations that will take a little longer.
Boss Changes
Viper Napuatzi is one of the more challenging bosses for players, so we made the following change.
Lowered the amount and size of Chaos Rains (the purple ones) in the Viper Napuatzi fight, and cleaned up the visual left afterwards faster to make the following drop locations more obvious.
Uxmal had various quirks that made him somewhat annoying to fight. We have made a few changes.
Reduced the number of times Uxmal changes locations through the fight
Uxmal can no longer recharge Energy Shield while in the air.
Uxmal uses his Flame Breath less often
Xyclucian had some issues with visibility of his effects
The arena of Xyclucian has had its ground foliage removed in order to make his effects more visible
Player Minion Changes
We have changed the way that minion revive timers work. When your first minion dies, it sets the revive timer to 7.5 seconds as before, but each successive minion that dies increases it by less and less (still capped to a max of 7.5 seconds). This should heavily mitigate the situation where most of your minions are dead, but the revive timer keeps resetting to 7.5 seconds over and over.
Disenchanting a Bind Spectre or Tame Beast gem will unbind them, allowing you to use them again.
Tamed beasts can now fit through gaps of the same size that the player can.
Other Player Balance
We don’t have a lot of other player balance changes on top of the ones described yesterday, but we did manage to sneak in the following additional changes:
Rally support is no longer restricted to Strikes or Slams, and can now support any Melee Attack you use yourself.
Glory (Used by Hammer of the Gods and Spear of Solaris) is now no longer consumed if you are interrupted while using the skill.
Fixed a bug where Blood Boils from the Ritualist ascendancy didn’t propagate if the monster exploded on death, such as when using Herald of Blood.
Crafting Changes
We have now finished adding all of the mods to runes for caster weapons. Desert, Glacial, Storm, Iron, Body, Mind, Rebirth, Inspiration, Stone and Vision runes all now work on Wands and Staves, with their own set of modifiers.
Renly’s abandoned shop in the Burning Village now also has a Blank rune which Renly can forge into any elemental rune of your choosing in case you didn’t find any up to that point. As mentioned yesterday, 12 Artificers Orb’s now drop at fixed locations through the campaign in addition to the random drops and salvageable ones.
Performance Improvements
The ground foliage in many areas has had an optimisation pass to improve performance.
0.2.0E Deployment Timeline
And that’s all that made it for 0.2.0E. The patch will be deployed at around 10AM NZT. We have also made some more changes internally, but they didn’t make it in time for the patch.
The following lists the changes that will be deployed after the weekend. These are not the only changes that will be in that patch. These are just the changes that we already have.
Charm Changes
Charms are a system that we never adequately expanded on, and have had several problems that we will finally be addressing. Overall we want charms to be more useful, and for you to be more easily able to use more of them.
First, the changes to charm slots
Charm slots on belts are now granted by implicit mods that are added to belts depending on the level of the area that dropped them. The number of slots is random up to a cap depending on how high level the belt is. You can use a Divine Orb to reroll the number of slots.
Belts have 1 charm slot until level 32, up to 2 until level 64 and up to 3 from level 65 and onwards.
Unique Belts can always have up to 3 charm slots.
For now, Unique Belts with mods that increase the number of charms will still be capped to 3, later on we will remove the cap.
Then changes to the charms themselves.
Several charms were not protecting you from the hit that activated them, these cases have been fixed to work properly.
We have also done a pass on Charm mods to make them more powerful and rewarding.
Stash Tab Affinities
We are adding Stash Tab Affinities for the following categories of items
Socketables
Fragments [Which includes Tablets and Trial Keys]
Breach
Expedition
Ritual
We will also be allowing Charms to go in the Flask stash tab or any tab with the Flask affinity.
Atlas Bookmarks
We have added the ability to bookmark locations on your atlas to find them easily later.
Right clicking a node will allow you create a bookmark by picking an icon and optionally adding a label you can type in.
You can have up to 16 bookmarks at a time.
They will appear as icons around the outside of the screen with a direction allowing you to scroll to them easily, or you can click on them to instantly take you there
You can also view a list of bookmarks under the legend and click them to go there.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Ubisoft’s lawyers have responded to a legal action from players of defunct racing game The Crew by insisting that those players never owned the game in the first place. The players made their lawsuit to complain about the game being made unplayable when servers were shut down last year, but Ubisoft have now responded to argue that the game was only “licensed” to those playing, and players should never have expected the game to be useable in perpetuity.
Sure, Mario Kart World‘s free-roaming and knockout races are something, but do you remember back when you used to be able to squeeze two racers onto one kart? Now that was a hook.
That’s exactly what Mario Kart: Double Dash!! brought to the table in 2003, the first and last time we would see the mechanic crop up in the series. However, the classic GameCube racer was almost a lot more singular, with Nintendo considering parking the dual-driver gameplay for something more in line with what players had seen before — the horror.
