I came as quickly as I could - someone told me Pocket Tactics was dead!? Was it peaceful? Was anyone with them at the end!? What do we do now?
But seriously… hello. I’m here just to say a couple of things, and I will leave you all be. You all left PT for a reason and it wouldn’t be right of me to follow you to your new digs like some clingy spectre, trying to get you all to play F2P games with poor spelling.
@Neumannium can even delete my account if he wants when I’m done. The amount of times he’s done drive-bys on the PT forum though, I think I can be forgiven one post 
I would just like to say thank you to everyone here who still reads us - it’s been nice chatting to people every now and then and having some semblance of an engaged community. I’d fight anyone who says PT is dead in the literal sense (nostalgia sense is fair enough), but the forum is well and truly on life-support. I don’t really know what to do about it. Also it’s a GDPR headache.
If anyone see’s the Langrisser content as the final straw, including Dave etc… then I’m sorry. As people have noted, this kind of content is labelled as much as I can. From my POV it’s no different to an advert, and so people should treat it as such. I will pursue more opportunities as they come up because they give me the breathing room to focus on the important content. Like I doubt you’ll be seeing more than one a month, maybe two if we suddenly become hot Sh*t or something.
I would implore you to re-think. I mean, as much as I can’t live up to PT’s glory days, I would defy anyone who thinks we don’t cover the same topics as before. The frequency is lower, we’ve diversified on talking points for sure… but this idea we’re some kind of F2P trash bag is unfair, and you’re all better than that.
Speaking of… recently we reviewed two big releases - C&C Rivals and _Kingdom Rush Vengeance. It’s easy to take a dump on Rivals because it’s EA, F2P and a bastardisation of a beloved franchise. I wasn’t really interested in the easy route - I’ve got all you guys if I want to populate my site with anti-F2P sentiment. Brandon had been playing the closed beta a lot and was genuinely trying to champion it as a game worth playing so I allowed him to review it on his terms. I did stress that I wanted him to take the monetisation to task as much as possible, but there’s only so much I can influence a reviewer in their review. I probably over-stepped just advising him as I did.
Kingdom Rush … well like I said to Biff, I don’t really know what to say. It seemed like a good fit and Richard honestly didn’t find the IAPs a problem. It’s not really my place to tell him he’s wrong.
I do kinda take it personally every time someone claims that an activity we do is a ‘cash-grab’. No offence, you have no idea what you’re talking about or what it takes to run a website - Dave knows, and Dave understands that sometimes we do what we must if we seriously want to keep something we love going. But to think we do anything “just for the money” I mean… wow. Thanks for having faith in me as a person, I guess.
I actually take Dave’s counter-take to heart, and I know that premium games should be supported as much as they can. But I also can’t ignore F2P’s growing role as a legitimate business model (as opposed to the trash that it’s known for). Like, Fortnite is not a trash game. Rivals ok… probably trash but time will tell on that one. And Vengeance is still a relic of an over-bearing IAP system. This is my job, guys, I can’t ignore this stuff.
Finally, @rinelk comments on the Wargamer article on wargaming with spouses - I had my concerns that perhaps something would go wrong with the messaging, but it was not my intent to offend anyone. If anyone wants to email me or something, talk over the piece, I would be very willing to listen to try and do better.
Again, one article shouldn’t erase years’ worth of quality wargaming content, but you each make your own choices. Sorry if we’ve lost you.
I will leave it there - thank you all for your time and you can always email me or w/e if you want to follow up on anything I’ve said. Out of respect for Dave and Kelsey, I will not be replying to any comments unless they give me permission. You know where I am, you are all welcome to hit me up whenever you want.