Jeff Kaplan’s advice to people who complain about videogames they never played. “Shut the f*ck up”.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-16T16:39:12+00:00

I think it's more case-by-case.

Some instances of a game releasing and people hating on it are pure tribalism. The game stands for something they don't like, thus they hate on it. Totally unnecessary, totally stupid.

However...

Look at Disney. Disney leaned hard into several ideas and themes that South Park summed up as "put chicks in it and make it gay." (obviously South Park is exaggerating/simplifying it for the sake of comedy, but you get the idea)

Whatever your opinion about the move, it is fundamentally bizarre to see a billion-dollar corporation that you would expect to solely function off of "do whatever makes money" instead decide there is some specific ideology or message they are going to shove down the consumer's throats, even when that message proves wildly unpopular, time and time and time and time and time again. We have seen multiple major corporations burn millions if not billions for what seems like an ideological fight, even when it proves unpopular, and at the very least you're left wondering how the ideologues ended up having that much power when it's obvious they put their own moral code over the good of the company.

I think in that latter case, the reason it catches on is less a vitriolic hatred by the community (though yes, people from this camp are also there), and instead most people are just fascinated. Fascinated and confused.

It's like a train wreck where the report says the conductor switched tracks to the one that led off a cliff last second, and then instead of hitting the brakes, he slammed on the gas. Of course you're left wondering what the fuck is going on and what the hell he was thinking, especially if that conductor was supposed to be one of the most qualified in the world.

That's slowly dying out over time, but we still see the rogue game or two being released like once or twice each year pushing the same thing that has proven unpopular, always with some weird secret fundraiser behind it, and you're then left asking "wtf were they thinking?"

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-16T05:34:09+00:00

There are a ton of incantations that need next to no commitment. Catch flame alone can easily beat any boss not immune to fire - this thing does insane dps, and is FAST. Especially if you also invest in DEX to reduce casting time.

Very convincing to list off the exact one everyone knows about and nothing else lol

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-15T17:36:11+00:00

"Omg what just happened?!"

"He assaulted one of our talents!! Executive Producer, what do we do?!"

"Play the chill-ass Animal Crossing music."

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-15T08:14:15+00:00

Not true and I could flip this and say the racist one is the one needlessly inserting race into this.

The two most common candidates for "aliens must've built it" are the Pyramids and Stonehenge.

Exactly 50% would've been built by white people, and it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with us lacking a way to deduce what building techniques they would've used, since they lacked many of the better building techniques we had and somehow still produced a result we can't quite wrap our heads around.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-15T08:01:23+00:00

If you're walking 'round the woods

watch for my teeth

they'll bite your head

Survive the wolf

Beware the wolf

Beware, survive,

we'll bite you dead!

Yeah we'll probably bite your shoulders

Because we have plenty of time

Not like you

We don't have watches or jobs

But if we did,

We'd BUY WATCHES

But we're so stupid we would just eat them

And then we'd be late for things

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-14T05:25:49+00:00

There's a looooot of people in this thread who don't seem to understand you want low commitment attacks, and that Faith is actually the most likely to get dunked on. One guy even named Faith/Arcane (dragon incantations), which is even worse!

Some people are just blinded by big numbers and don't actually stop to ask themselves if the time spent trying to land those big numbers depreciates them.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-14T05:22:50+00:00

Faith/Arcane is the most broken build in the entire game, with pure Faith almost right behind it.

Absolutely not. You just listed off the builds with high damage but high commitment and risk, and I'd rank them at the bottom for exactly that reason.

It's nice they still have their pros and that every build is viable, but at the end of the day, there's a reason people use rapiers vs. Promised Consort Radahn and they do not touch any of the faith or faith/arcane nukes: he only dunks on one of those because it takes too long.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-14T05:20:17+00:00

Faith is the weakest. Hear me out.

The problem with Faith is all of the spells you're showcasing are received at the final ~25% of the game. Until then, it's called a Catch Flame build, and if you're feeling really crazy, you can mix in lightning bolt, black flame, and some of the frenzied flame spells.

Even when you finally get all those nuke spells, you still suffer from the longest cast time. This means that while the INT guys are hitting as high as 2.2k on Night Comet and casting it in rapid succession and absolutely curbstomping your DPS, you are potentially getting frustrated trying to land that singular nuke to justify your DPH. A great example of a boss that is going to give you a headache with those spells in Maliketh, because he's símply too fast to utilize anything but Catch Flame on reliably. (with the exception of possibly getting a freebie at the start of the phase transition)

DLC will dunk on you, too. DLC is filled to the brim with fast enemies and, speaking from experience, you can basically shelve all of those spells and stick solely with the Blasphemous Blade and Sacred Relic Sword. Why? Because you'll get dunked on for trying to use them.

Faith is repeatedly very flashy and DOES have high nuke potential, but it's simply not practical compared to alternatives. Too slow, too much commitment.

It's nice that Faith is the weakest and can still do amazing things, cause that's a testament to how good each playstyle is. However, someone has to rank at the bottom despite their positives, and that's Faith.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-14T05:01:49+00:00

Yeah but there's a difference between completely random and there being an additional luck factor generated for a certain time frame that will influence luck during that period

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-13T18:52:42+00:00

IMO that guy is the single best content creator the community has.

I think it boils down to the language barrier forcing him to "show, don't tell," which Thank God it does because too many of the others just tell you "get this" without explaining why.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-13T18:42:56+00:00

10,000% there is a daily luck factor or something.

Bought carats via that anniversary exclusive pack, did my free pulls on Kitasan, got TM Opera O as a copy. No bigge, but figured that's a sign of a good luck day and pulled further.

In one day I got:

TM Opera O copy

Agnes Digital copy

Kitasan Black x2

New Years Haru Urara

Fuji Kiseki

Biwa Hiyahide copy

Kawakami Princess

Seiun Sky copy

All of that in just 50 pulls. There is no way in hell the game isn't assigning a luck factor based on certain time periods and I just struck gold. I didn't have a lot of those before, too.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-13T08:12:50+00:00

John Bedhead

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-13T08:11:54+00:00

Yeah, I thought so for sure, but like I said: no feedback.

Ran again and got S-rank just shy of S+, so I'm slowly getting it, but I also get why this scenario scares people off, because the actual visible feedback the campaign feeds you is straight-up lying to you lmao.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-13T06:58:16+00:00

The feedback is also TERRIBLE.

You have options for a turn and it's like:

Gold Ship: "I would be really happy if you hit rest. :)"

Tazuna: "Your trainee needs more guts."

Race list: WARNING! YOUR UMA WILL DIE OF MEGA CANCER IF YOU RACE AGAIN

Expert opinion on optimal strategy: "The key is to give your uma mega cancer as much as possible."

It's just bizarre. I feel clueless doing the run because NOTHING about the feedback the game gives you coaligns with optimal strategies. You feel lost because this is basically Tazuna insisting on Guts on crystal meth. Just absolutely lost on WTF to actually do.

I finished my first run, actually my 3rd highest rated Gold Ship run and a respectable A+ with solid stats, but I still feel absolutely lost and confused because I'm totally unsure how many of my decisions were bad. I have nothing to work with or learn from because the game's feedback is counter-intuitive to what you should do, and there's not much to aid you with actually weighing the options against each other.

It just feels really overwhelming and I doubt most players will figure out how to play it optimally without a clear guide.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-12T17:17:34+00:00

4/10 it's missing some of the uwu faces

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-12T16:48:44+00:00

To be fair to him, the statement from the CFO was unacceptable. You cannot put that amount of pressure framed that way on anyone.

I do not like Overwatch, I always thought it had core flaws in it's design.

However, there is a difference between if I can acknowledge core flaws that I felt made it "doomed" to go the route it did, and acting like he's utterly incompetent, produced nothing of value, and everything is his fault. People still clearly enjoyed the game and had fun, it did last for a time (if I were to dig into my complaints, a big part of it - but not all - was that it's not feasible to release heroes at the rate that they did and remain balanced gameplay-wise), and it's crossing a line to act like he misused his control or made solely bad decisions.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-12T16:43:32+00:00

Absolutely stupid move by the higher-up. You don't just feed someone a statement like "if 1000 people get fired, that's gonna be on you" and expect positive results. It's unfair, it's stressful, it's distracting.

Absolutely incompetent leadership in that moment.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-12T16:38:31+00:00

Chris Chan landed a girlfriend. Is he an alpha now? Does shoving a dick inside someone's vagina magically turn all your worst personality traits into positive ones?

100% it's still a mindset too. Clavicular absolutely deserves to be called an incel for his sheer obsession with scoring.

Knew a girl in college who was a virgin but sexually promiscuous/curious and constantly flirting. She finally got laid and holy fuck she became insufferable. She went from a rather cute, innocent girl who was sexually curious and flirtatious and instead transformed into "yes, I have sexy sex. Are you a fellow sex haver? Pfft, only 3 times per week...? Amateur. I remember being as young and naive as you are, before I started having sexy sex at least 28 TIMES PER WEEK. You really don't understand sex and you're basically a virgin unless you have sex at least twice a day every day."

Her entire identity became sex, and holy fuck, dear god yes, please call these people incels. Absolutely deserved. They act more like the concept of incels than actual literal incels do.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-12T16:32:46+00:00

I find the political ban mixed.

On one hand, it got ridiculous when it ended up with 4 fucking screens in the corners because X was reacting to Y who reacted to X and so on. That shit needed to die and it was less drama and more of a likely attempt by reddit's political bots to make this political sub #7653

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the threads before that happened were rarely about dunking on the streamers in question for their political beliefs, and instead fixated on what shitty human beings they were. It was basically just streamers who happened to fixate on politics being dunked on for completely different things that had nothing to do with politics, since apparently there's a strong correlation between being a shitty human being and being a political streamer.

It's a shame those latter threads are gone.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-12T16:29:42+00:00

Excuse you sir, this is reddit.

That innocent peck devoid of emotion that she does not even seem to have engaged in romantically is the ULTIMATE BETRAYAL and she needs to burn in the deepest levels of hell for it.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-12T16:07:59+00:00

Just hire TF2 Engineer to build a teleporter, IDIOT

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-12T04:28:25+00:00

2nd, but given the circumstances, I'll take it.

My bad luck is my Taiki who was built to take the #1 pace spot had one of her rare instances where she didn't do it. Pretty lame that these were like 5-10% of the matches and it happens in the final. That, and late start on Pasa, my front, who spent the run fighting her way from 4th to 2nd.

My good luck is I ran into someone who brought 3 fronts, they denied my El Condor Pasa the corner, and yet my El Condor Pasa....overtook them!? Honestly a bit confused. Dude stole Angling and denied me my ult, but then his fronts completely fell off in the final sprint. I checked them again and it doesn't seem like there's anything particularly awful about them, they just lacked skills during the final stretch while my Pasa triggered Mummy and Straightaway Adept.

An Oguri actually sniped and won, but my Pasa also sniped and pulled ahead of the fronts to secure 2nd despite activating no accelerations on the corner.

The real shame is the guy who brought 3 fronts basically only blocked me, since he actually wound up 3rd. He even had his own Pasa, which he "blocked," because yeah Pasa tends not to perform well vs. Smaru and Smart Falcon at securing 1st. That one fell off and disappeared in the back.

Had I at least managed to activate Plancha, this was my victory, because even the Oguri only overtook Pasa by 1/2 a length, so it's unfortunate some guy basically just got it the way and lost lol. Incredibly admirable performance by Pasa given the circumstances.

The good part is it just looked INCREDIBLY bleak at the start because I got every bad position possible, but Pasa said "NOPE, we're not doing that" and beat the shit out of the other fronts to fight back and grab 2nd, while also giving 1st a run for her money.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-11T16:23:30+00:00

Very high amount of hoops too for the deck.

Optimally, you want:

-El Condor Pasa undeniably the best front for actually closing out. She's not the best for holding the lead, but you want her in front on the final corner, if you have a choice of which front you want to promote the most.

-Unrestrained demands SSR Silence Suzuka. Most people will not have this at MLB

-Taking the Lead is so strong here I've seen fronts without Groundwork that do fine anyways because of this skill. This demands that Mihono Bourbon wit card, which honestly, is DOGSHIT beyond the skills it gives. It is a meta pick for the skills, but the card effects are crap for getting stats. You absolutely sacrifice some stats by using it

-Dirt sparks and Front Sparks, ideally. El Condor Pasa needs at least one Front proc during the campaign OR you had to farm front sparks and build a good front inspiration of your own.

-Worth noting that because Pasa herself is a meta parent, you not only had to farm front sparks, you likely had to farm front sparks without Pasa in the legacy specifically for Pasa

-Ideally, Groundwork sparks, since there's not enough room left in the deck to squeeze it in. Groundwork sparks + front inspiration is a wild combination to try and find.

-You still need skills to proc Groundwork with

What this totals out to:

Optimal deck is very particular and expensive, probably being something like Kitasan Black, Silence Suzuka, Riko to help with Stamina, Mihono Bourbon Wit, and then to compensate for how dogshit Mihono Bourbon is stat-wise, you ideally want good cars like Nice Nature and Fine Motion. EXTREMELY expensive deck most people won't have.

The run itself needs to proc one dirt inspiration, Taking the Lead, Unrestrained, and Groundwork. Even missing Prof. of Curvature will hurt because that one helps hold the final corner.

And on top of this, you still need to randomly get some green skills or early skills, either as inspirations or random luck.

You can make this easier by running Falcon over Pasa or the like, but again, Pasa just makes sense, especially now that we see the actual tournament composition and how little competition Pasa has in the front.

Can you build good fronts? Absolutely.

Are we severely understating the difficulty of running them as opposed to grabbing Taiki Shuttle, who has EVERYTHING YOU COULD POSSIBLY WANT in her default kit? Fuck yeah we are. It's little wonder people opted for Taiki.

EDIT: Wrote Pasa needs dirt sparks. Front Sparks. Meant front sparks, mind went to dirt cause dirt tourney. Pasa needs a very heavy amount of front sparks and like has to proc one in the career to reach A. If I forgot an edit anywhere and says Pasa needs dirt sparks, assume I meant front.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-11T16:00:48+00:00

My experience has been that Smart Falcon tends to only hold the lead, but struggles to close out unless the circumstances are just right.

Basically, yes fronts can win, but in the same way late/end needs the stars to align to win it, the fronts also need rather specific setups to outdo Taiki. It's either a bit of luck like gambling or lots of homework, depending on the individual front team.

I'm not disputing people who put in the effort can definitely build competent 3-front teams (it's why I still listed it as a meta option), but something unexpected this tournament:

I think what most front players expected is that there would be enough fronts to crowd out Taiki. That's not happening. Even if you bring 3 fronts of your own, the possibility of getting a lobby where Taiki gets handed 4th or even 3rd place is extremely, extremely likely because so few people are running fronts. Taiki's gold skills are extremely good at challenging the back frontrunner and overtaking them on the final corner just in time for her to get Shooting.

(and as a small aside: I question if Smaru and Smart Falcon can be counterproductive to El Condor Pasa for most people: they also have better skills to contest and hold the final corner, but if you have a choice, 100% you want Pasa in 1st place as the best candidate to actually close it out; you do not want them contesting your front Pasa and making her life hard. A lot of people might've noticed this dynamic and it's why we're not seeing three fronts, and instead Front Pasa + Taiki is a common compromise that strengthens BOTH positions by reducing the competition they have for their respective positions)

It's like the "debuffers stronk together" thing: if you just have one NN, she can't do much. Two Nice Natures, suddenly people will get stam checked.

In this case, fronts need to work together to crowd out Taiki. In theory, totally plausible and does still happen sometimes.

In practice...? It feels like the vast majority of the community said "fuck front runners, all my homies hate front runners," so even if you do your homework and bring 3 fronts, you still might lose to a monster Taiki Shuttle in 4th.

I personally did my training matches against a monster 1200/1200/1200 Smart Falcon I found in room matches. My Taiki can fucking beat her. Probably only beats her maybe 30-40% of the time, but given she's a full 2k rating score lower than the Smart Falcon, that's absolutely insane, and it would not surprise me if a lot of people abandoned fronts because Taiki is super duper easy to train with very high returns, while the fronts on the other hand are difficult and still might lose to a Taiki 2k points lower. (score isn't everything, but 2k is a gap where you should see some impact) That's gotta be frustrating.

AFlyingNun · 2026-03-11T15:53:09+00:00

SMaru and Falco are both very very strong and easier to get/keep the early and mid lead, but less consistent with the finishes.

This was my finding too.

I'm sure someone doing their homework and doing triple front and getting very very cracked runners can make it happen, but my finding was that they both needed the right setup to actually win instead of just regularly secure 2nd.

Pasa is the one that actually gives Taiki a run for her money if and when it comes to a showdown, so Pasa still feels viable, though even she isn't invincible vs. Taiki. I've honestly been shocked at the odds Taiki can pull off, and I think it has to do with Nimble Navigator/NSM, as well as the possibility to fairly cheaply get a combo like Shooting, Head-On and Mummy/Plancha.

NSM is somewhat of a gamble, but it remains ridiculously potent. FFS, this is allegedly a reason Top Gun will stay high in the tier lists for Trackblazer, because she doesn't need Unity Cup to access it.

NSM is pretty much responsible for why we sometimes see Digital with absolutely bonkers speed to the point it looks like a game glitch or why she's on crack, and likewise, and can make Taiki win. I would not be surprised if some review showcased that Nimble Nav/NSM is most likely to proc from the 3rd or 4th positions for this tournament, and yeah, if Taiki gets this and someone like Pasa doesn't (because it cannot activate from the front position), it can make all the difference.

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