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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • It might disappoint you to learn that among american english speakers, literacy isn’t a good indication of maturity by age. Barbara Bush made a literacy initiative that’s still around, the One Good Thing® left over from the bush regime. The site has a handy map to show you the 40-60% adult literacy rate counties spread all over the states. It definitely helped me come to terms with the fact that sometimes a kid who is trying is gonna be more eloquent than an adult repeating the same tired take they’ve been rebutted for a thousand times.

    It’s easier for me personally to gauge age as it scales up when anonymity is involved - referential humor, recognizance of the ancient runes (Duckroll, Bill Murray’s face with only the jaw moving), and informed chitchat about presidential behavior predating Bush SR are all dead giveaways that a user is older, but with younger users you have a lot of hobby/interest overlap going all the way up to people in their 40s. You can’t look someone in the eyes and see if the light of youth has gone out yet on forums and imageboards.




  • While it was the complaint, the game did mention a required PSN account on all storefronts. This was disabled when auth/login was unplayably bad on launch week, then not re-enabled until a while later (with a week long heads up for new players and a month long heads up for existing players). Nobody actually got locked out of the game, and as my PSN account is registered somewhere I do not live, I don’t think anyone would’ve been stopped playing by the change if it had been pushed.

    What we “won” and sony “learned” is that they can’t get accurate metrics on playercount since HD2’s statistics aren’t being tracked correctly by the game’s session system and the playerbase is uncooperative. In this era where data is king, this just means we’ll stop seeing Sony funded helldivers ads on youtube while they market their giants that correctly report the data they’re looking for that helps them make a userbase that prints money.

    Oh, and we marred the all-time and recent review score from overwhelmingly positive. Guarantee you the successful action was the steam refund count on the game - truly unsolvable problem. As refund requests that don’t meet an automatic metric need a reply, and resolution usually takes ~an hour, the 6 digit refund count was not realistically solvable without rolling the requirement for a legitimate PSN account back. You can track how many total refund requests steam has day by day, as this is a public count in steam’s support page. There were 800k more than the average weekend.

    Tl;dr: while the complaint was this, the reality was not. The review bomb hurt arrowhead’s relationship with sony more than it hurt sony. The refund bomb didn’t cause steam to change policies this time but damn if it isn’t justified now.


  • It would have killed nintendo to add an ethernet port. As someone who bought the dongle, having a wired connection will NOT save you from nintendo online being the worst gaming networking service ever devised. No game benefits from it, least of all actual nintendo titles like splatoon or smash. It’s not even a problem of speed, it’s wholesale reliability issues, constant loss of connection errors. If an ethernet port was available included rather than needing to be a seperate purchase, more people would realize sooner just how truly awful the paid nintendo online service is.

    I’m just still mad that I could play phantasy star online for ten hours uninterrupted on my gamecube, but now there’s not a single nintendo title that has stable online. Pokémon might let you get a raid or two before needing to reconnect. Splatoon might get a match or three before needing to reconnect completely. Smash won’t stay stable for even one full match. It’s a complete tragedy.



  • SPT and the multiplayer conversion (Now Project Fika, formerly MPT) are the best ways to experience the game now for a multitude of reasons. I think learning heatmaps and dead locations applies no matter how you play - and the same can be said for bullet penetration, it’s just part of the game - but there’s a neverending stream of cheaters that feel far worse to lose to than a boss you weren’t prepared for. I can get trashed by tagila eighty times and accept that gear is just forfeit, I chanced it going to factory; when I am killed by a head/eyes with no audio five seconds into a fresh raid multiple times a day there’s substantially less to learn from and improve on.

    Worth noting you can get mods for SPT that change how AI behave, categorize them so some are doing a common farming route, some are moving to quest locations. It doesn’t make up for what we lost (the awkward vocal exchanges as you agree to not slay a new player at a starting quest location), but it helps retain some of the spice.


  • I see a lot of people saying nintendo will take action against you, but they are young and do not know about Graal Online, which is your actual competitor. Link to the Past style games are fun and interesting, but graal has dominated the space against any similar game for decades now, especially those in the same visual style. Tunic had a good solution (unique visual style) and I hope people don’t have the same initial reaction I did upon seeing it (that this is a graal world)



  • Tiny boat we’re in. I started with the witcher 2 right after having played dragon’s dogma and couldn’t handle the extremely clunky combat. My friends assured me 3 was a huge step forward and I was harassed to play the whole game on stream, and I did. Honestly, not that big of a step, the world felt starkly dead compared to other open world fare, the combat was years behind games that came out at the same time, and the story and setting did not feel very unique to me at all.

    I felt the same way about a lot of the heavier dialogue that people did at large about Forspoken. Plot felt like it was on stilts, barely hitting the points it needed to to keep my interest. Not that it was out of context bits like Forspoken, but the dialogue felt out of touch with the setting really frequently. Poor selection of magic despite what was shown to you in-setting. Build balancing like an mmo where nothing you craft or otherwise come into owning early on actually mattered at all. 15 more armor was not changing the number of hits you could take in a fight it all.

    TW 3 wasn’t super inventive or even really fun compared to other games that launched when it did or even before, and I don’t understand the extreme hype for it when everyone I talk to says the first two games are so wildly different and worth skipping, which has been my experience. If it’s not about the characters’ story arcs across all 3 games, what the hell is it that makes people enjoy it so much? I’ve looked hard, I’ve played hard, and I just never found it.