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SINGAPORE, Feb 28, 2022 - (ACN Newswire) - Xplr Me (Explore Me) is a digital platform that connects students to tutors, life coaches and mentors from anywhere in the world, while they are sitting in the comfort of their living room. Picking up a new hobby, learning a new skill, or just plain understanding themselves better with the assortment of classes and courses on offer.
Xplr Me goes beyond academics, and is for all age groups and life stages, putting students in touch with educators and coaches from all around the world, who will guide them to success. With life coaches teaching students how to set goals and meet them, to career coaches who will help nail the perfect resume, Xplr Me is not an average enrichment site. Be constantly enriched with continuous guidance and mentorship that will set students up for success.

THE BIRTH OF XPLR ME

Founded by Nirali Mehta in 2021, Xplr Me was born from the frustration of having to find teachers and mentors for herself and her two kids. Traditional classes and teachers were bound by distance and location, and by logistics, especially with the limitations brought by the global pandemic. There was always that feeling of compromise between the best teacher and mentor, and what was on offer and convenient.

Xplr Me completely eradicated this pain point by bringing educational providers and professionals together on to one platform from across the globe. Now, with Xplr Me, anyone on the hunt for classes, mentorship or guidance can visit the website, find a course that best fits their needs, at a time slot that is convenient to them. Imagine, learning a whole new language from a native speaker to the basics of photography with a professional photographer.

Nirali says, "Learning has always been a passion of mine and it has always been a source of frustration when I was unable to sign up for the classes I wanted. When I became a mom to two kids, I began to juggle their schedules with mine, to search for classes that balanced their learning, between academics and life skills. This experience really opened my eyes, to how it's really difficult to find the right person to teach you what you need to learn at that time. That was the starting point for Xplr Me. After all, learning should be part of our life's journey, but struggling to learn need not be."

EXPLORE WITH EASE

Xplr Me features a wide variety of classes from academics to alternative healing, mentorship, counseling, photography, and anything else under the sun. Enthusiasts could pick from an Ayurveda course one day to a Crochet class the next.

With the classes happening completely online, students and teachers don't even have to be in the same country. This gives students the opportunity to learn from people all around the world, and not have to settle with what is closest to them.

On the tech front, Xplr Me uses virtual tools integrated within the platform, and a custom-built calendar and appointment function to empower students to pick and choose timings, class options and tutors. Students can also pick from pre-recorded sessions to live private one-on-one classes, and group classes.

Nirali adds, "The emphasis on non-academic topics was a very mindful one. Life and social skills are just as important, and I wanted to offer that to enhance learning. Furthermore, for adults, especially, it is so difficult to pick up a new hobby with either the stressors of time, work or family coming into play. Xplr Me removes all that so adults can explore and get excited about learning new things, or picking up old hobbies again. Because Xplr Me is so flexible, there really is a whole world to explore and it all starts on Xplr Me!"

Nirali's goal for Xplr Me is to be a platform that will empower not only students but everyone to be able to come home and learn a new hobby, a new experience, or a new learning opportunity without feeling constrained by geographical location.

About Xplr Me

Founded by Nirali X in Nov 2021, Xplr Me (Explore Me) is an unconventional online learning platform that brings a diverse range of academic and non-academic courses to anyone in the comfort of their own homes. Xplr Me goes beyond academics and is for all age groups and life stages, putting students in touch with educators and coaches from all around the world. With courses from life coaches, guitar players, tour guides, and counselors, Xplr Me is not an average enrichment site. https://xplrme.com.

For more information, please contact:
Danielle Chow, +65 9727 7766, danielle@madhat.asia
Krisha Ramos, +65 9181 8408, krisha@madhat.asia

Copyright 2022 ACN Newswire. All rights reserved. www.acnnewswire.comXplr Me (Explore Me) is a digital platform that connects students to tutors, life coaches, and mentors from anywhere in the world, while they are sitting in the comfort of their living room. Pick up a new hobby, learn a new skill, or just plain understand yourself better with the assortment of classes and courses on offer.

One of the coolest things included with Destiny 2's latest expansion, The Witch Queen, is a story campaign that includes adjustable difficulty levels. The campaign itself is a good time, with a story that digs deep into some of Destiny 2's best lore, and a ton of really memorable moments and encounters. Legendary really feels like the way the campaign is meant to be played, though, ratcheting up the difficulty just enough to make those fights against Lightbearer Hive warriors feel like serious battles for survival.

If you're taking on the Legendary campaign, though, you should know a few things before you begin. You're not going to breeze through these missions, whether playing alone or with a team--the difficulty scales dynamically based on the size of your fireteam, so adding more players to your squad won't necessarily give you an advantage. We've put together a few tips that might help you survive and a few tidbits of information that might help you overcome the might of Savathun and her Lucent Brood.

Stay at range and use cover

You're likely to find lots of different weapons in the campaign, but it's a good idea to mostly stick with the ones that allow you to find cover and deal with enemies from a solid distance. The campaign has a lot of big arenas and often throws many enemies at you at once, so the ability to find cover and clear the field a bit with a pulse or scout rifle can be extremely handy. Enemies are tough to stagger in the Legendary campaign, so you usually need to commit to taking them down in order to stop them from shooting back at you. Something with some range that'll allow you to duck out of harm's way can be very helpful, but in any event, plan for your safety and avoid overextending yourself--the campaign will punish you for it.

If you've got Arbalest, try it

Lots of Exotics are extremely useful in the Legendary campaign, especially since primary Exotics were buffed significantly in PvE activities--which means they rip through minor enemies much more than in the past. But while there are many good options, personally, I found Arbalest to be indispensable. The Kinetic linear fusion rifle rips through enemy shields, usually popping them in one blast. It also does serious precision damage, making it great for taking out any tough, shielded enemies as quickly as possible. Arbalest is also great against Hive Guardians; even the toughest go down after a few headshots, provided you can land them. It's a great secondary weapon for those situations when you have priority targets that need quick eliminations.

Suppression grenades are your friend

Void abilities can allow you to suppress the abilities of other enemies, including Hive Lightbearers--even if they're using their Super attacks.

Void 3.0 blows the doors off the Void subclasses, allowing you to mix elements from the Titan, Warlock, and Hunter classes that previously were off-limits. One thing you should absolutely take advantage of in the Legendary campaign is Suppression grenades, which all classes can now access. These grenades are excellent against Hive Lightbearers; they can instantly shut down an enemy's abilities, including their Super attacks. They make Hive Guardians a whole lot less deadly, and they can get you out of a jam against tougher enemies by slowing and blinding them briefly. Just make sure you check in with Ikora in the Tower to purchase grenades for your class.

Do big damage fast with rocket launchers

The Legendary campaign is filled with tough enemies that need to be eliminated as quickly as possible, and for those jobs, rocket launchers are key. Whether you're fighting Hive Guardians, other bosses, or just big numbers of enemies, you're going to want the means to do massive damage as quickly as you can. Rocket launchers are great for this point, especially if you have something like Gjallarhorn. They can help you clear out problematic targets before they can hassle you, like Ogres, or help you slam through Lightbearers fast so they don't take up too much of your attention. Keep in mind how handy it can be to knock out tough enemies in one or two shots when choosing your weapons.

Shield yourself with the Glaive

The Glaive is a gun, a melee weapon, and a shield, so use it to its full potential.

The story campaign starts with you unlocking the new weapon type found in The Witch Queen, the Glaive. This is a powerful and versatile weapon that can be used up close with melee attacks and at mid-range with energy blasts. Don't discount its slightly less-clear feature, though: The Glaive can generate a shield in front of you to block incoming fire. That can make it great for getting around and creating mobile cover in tough fights, allowing you to close ground on enemies or find your way to a safer position. The Glaive can be very powerful, so make sure you're making the most of it. You can activate the shield after powering up the Glaive by landing some shots with it, but watch the meter under your crosshair to keep track of how long the shield will last.

Don't be afraid to die

Bungie has dramatically changed the design of its story campaigns with The Witch Queen. This one is filled with new "major encounters," which are big fights that clearly mark your progress through a mission. These are also "Darkness zones" where players can't automatically respawn if they're killed. In these places, you want to try to stay alive--but you also shouldn't be afraid to die.

Because of the way the campaign has been revamped, every major encounter also comes with a checkpoint. In fact, you can head to orbit at any point in the campaign and return to the last major encounter you reached. If you die during one of these fights, you'll need to retry the encounter--but only the encounter. The checkpoint system is an excellent new approach that keeps deaths from being especially punishing, so don't be afraid to use up a few lives learning the ropes of a given fight, exploring the corners of the space so you know what you're dealing with, or trying different strategies.

Feel free to infuse your gear

You get lots of infusion materials throughout the Legendary campaign, so boost your favorite gear and keep your level up.

The Legendary campaign comes with all the leveling rewards you'd expect from a normal Destiny 2 campaign, plus a second set of rewards. After every maj or encounter, you receive two treasure chests worth of gear that can help you level up. The Legendary chest also drops a whole bunch of Enhancement Cores after every encounter, giving you an income of infusion materials that allow you to enhance your existing gear, rather than switch to the new stuff that just dropped. There are a lot of Enhancement Cores to be grabbed throughout the course of the Legendary campaign, so don't be afraid to infuse high-level drops into your best stuff. Enhancing your good gear can be a great way to give yourself the advantage during the campaign, and Bungie clearly intended for players to do so along the way.

Always drop a Rally Banner--they're free

At the start of each major encounter, you'll find a white circle on the ground that will prompt you to drop a Rally Banner. These special flags refill all your ammo, your ability energy, and your Super energy, giving you the best possible start to a fight. Veterans will recognize these from higher-level activities such as Nightfalls, dungeons, and raids. In the Legendary campaign, however, Rally Banners are free--they aren't consumed from the stock that's in your inventory. That means you should absolutely drop a banner before every single major encounter. You don't have to go to Hawthorne in the Tower and buy more banners to get through the campaign, so make sure you give yourself a leg-up with full ammo and Super energy.

Check the Power level cap

If you're close to the Power level cap anyway, you can skip spending time messing with your gear.

Each mission in the Legendary campaign has a suggested Power level, just like every other activity, but it also comes with an additional caveat: in the Legendary campaign, player Power levels are capped at 15 below the suggested level. This handicap increases the campaign's difficulty, and it also means that if a mission has a Power level of, say, 1450, your Power for that mission can't go higher than 1435, no matter what gear you equip. Keep this in mind when choosing your loadout, because if you're capped at 1435, there's no reason not to use your favorite gear that will get you 1435, rather than just your highest-level gear. This can also save you the time and effort of infusing a bunch of gear to push your level as high as you can, when the cap means it won't matter for the mission you're facing.

Adjust your loadout to the mission

Different missions have different requirements, and it's worth messing with your gear if a major encounter is beating you down over and over. If snipers are ripping you up, put on some mods that will protect you from sniper fire; if a boss is pummeling you with an Arc cannon, use Arc defense mods. Spend a few minutes getting the right tools for the job as you're moving through the campaign to save yourself some frustration, and don't be afraid to try a different subclass, gun combination, or slate of armor mods. Experiment to find what's most effective so you don't stall on your way through the throne world.

Use your class's specific abilities

With Void 3.0, you have a lot of new options at your disposal, and it's important to use them. Titans can spec to provide themselves with overshields that can get them out of bad situations and protect them in the heat of battle. Warlocks are able to drain energy from enemies and restore themselves. Hunters can become invisible to slip away from some foes and get the drop on others. The changes to the Void subclass can help you make it through the Legendary campaign, as can the other subclasses in the game--but only if you spend some time thinking about what your capabilities are and how best to utilize them. Mess around with different combinations, like using a Shadowshot tether as a Hunter to control a crowd, then pairing the attack with invisibility to get yourself to better cover. These strategies are essential to staying alive, so don't sleep on them or ignore your specific abilities.

Elden Ring is out now, the latest in the critically acclaimed but often esoteric Soulsborne genre. The notoriously challenging From Software games tend to be love-them-or-hate-them affairs, but several notable voices in games say this one is more approachable and less off-putting, and deserves a chance even from those who have struggled to get into Soulsbornes before. As someone who fits that exact definition, I would love to try Elden Ring and see if this is finally the game where it clicks, but there's just no simple, consistent way for players to sample a game--Elden Ring or otherwise--that they may end up wishing they hadn't purchased. It's time for that to change, and platforms themselves should be leading the way.

Again, this isn't a problem unique to Elden Ring, but the game serves as a useful example. More than most games, Elden Ring is likely to stymie some players, feeling impenetrable from the outset. Some will push through that initial frustration and find a rewarding experience on the other side, while others will quickly assess that this is simply not the game for them.

The paths to try-before-you-buy have been slowly constricting to nothingness. Rental options have become fractured and inconsistent. It is more difficult to share games, and downright impossible to share digital copies on consoles. In the case of Elden Ring, a trial of the game would help players like me, who feel compelled to try it, to have an avenue aside from seeking out a rental or potentially wasting $70. Even as an adult with a stable income who can afford it, this is a big ask, and there are many more potential fans who don't even have that luxury.

At the same time, I can't blame From Software, or any other developer, for failing to put out a demo. Creating one is time-consuming, putting extra strain on studios that are already facing a crunch. The result is the status quo: a hodgepodge of studios and publishers sometimes offering demos as promotional tools before release, sometimes long after, sometimes with progress carrying over into the full game, sometimes without, and with no rhyme or reason between them. It is, to be frank, an absolute mess, and an unnecessary one.

It's unnecessary because the platform-holders--Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve, and Epic--should be taking the lead on this problem. In an era of always-online consoles, there's no reason developers should have to custom-build demos at all. Instead, consoles and PC platforms could simply let you download a full game and play for a designated amount of time. If piracy is a concern, this feature could be disabled if you attempt to play offline.

Rather than create bespoke demos for each game, developers could simply choose the amount of time a game trial should last. For shorter games, a trial may only last a half-hour. For a longer game like Elden Ring, From Soft might decide you could use a few hours in the world to really understand if the game is for you.

As a matter of fact, we already know that this tech works, because platform holders are already using it. Free play weekends are a regular occurrence on both PlayStation and Xbox, wherein you download a full game and try it for a limited time, and EA Play offers longer trials as a standard feature. Any security concerns with such a system have apparently already been resolved to developers' satisfaction, so all that's left is to give them the option to make trials a feature for individual players. Similarly, Steam already has a fairly generous return policy, which some players treat like a trial system. Why not remove the artifice entirely?

Removing the difficulty of offering a demo-like service would likely increase participation among developers. Granted, some developers may opt out entirely or still choose to create custom demos that show off a particular slice of their games. They may want to skip ahead to a later point when your character has more abilities, or circumvent trial players discovering some particular plot point. That option can and should still exist, but it could be in tandem with the broader universal game trials.

The philosophy is similar to the one Xbox executives often cite when promoting Game Pass: When you make games more readily available to try, more players find the games they'd love. The inverse is also true: fewer gamers feel annoyed by wasting money on games they don't love. This ultimately pushes many gamers to be risk-averse when it comes to full game purchases, only spending on sure-bets that provide the most bang for their buck. When games are so ubiquitous, it's easy to let games pass you by if you're not sure you'll love them. That's a sale that Elden Ring and games like it could have if they'd given us an on-ramp. What's more, Soulsbornes tend to create very ardent devotees; giving their unsure friends an opportunity for a taste of the latest game could lead to more sales and more fans.

When Microsoft pitched the Xbox One, its always-online console in 2013, it was widely and rightly derided. Microsoft tried to rush a vision of the future that consumers did not want and that internet infrastructure at the time could not support. The proposed benefits may have been enticing, but they were outweighed by the downsides. Technology has continued to advance, and we've essentially reached that same point organically. Many players treat their consoles like they're always-online anyway, which means it's time we start taking advantage of the proposed benefits from that vision of the future. Players shouldn't have to guess at which games they'll enjoy and hope they didn't waste their money on a game that just isn't for them. The technology is already there to avoid this outcome forever. We just need to tell platform-holders to start using it.

Mushrooms are becoming the next big thing, and that means more questions being asked. Like how to grow them? And if they mix well with weed. And whether or not you can smoke magic mushrooms. So, let’s take a look at that question today, and go over the different ways that magic mushrooms can be […]

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