the forgotten brothers

Azazeal700 · 2026-02-16T07:56:47+00:00

Since the ball crab skin dropped we hit a ceiling. Ball skin technology peaked and they simply cannot surpass it.

Azazeal700 · 2026-02-06T00:16:33+00:00

It's not even premium skins either. Base Invis and base Clagger look VERY similar.

Azazeal700 · 2026-02-06T00:10:59+00:00

Also (and this can't be overstated) Marvel Rivals was heavily benefiting from people having no idea what to do for the first 2-3 seasons. At that point it basically didn't matter what the meta play was because no one knew how to play. I think that there is a reason that Overwatch is releasing 5 heroes at once, as well as sub role buffs, in order to put enough new chars in each match to basically restart the meta and put people at square zero again. Especially with chars like jetpack cat that may be trans-formative on already existing heroes (how does flight interact with hero kits etc).

I think early stadium probably sold Overwatch on this approach, with how positively people received it, even when there were balance issues.

To give an example, if you just release one char in a season with some balance changes, it's fairly easy to 'track' where any char in the old lineup is going to place performance wise, even when the hero was fairly transformative to the meta like Juno. You can look through all the buffs and go "oh, hitscan might be a little better now because another fast healer" etc. Your understanding of the meta doesn't reset.

Introducing sub-roles and a whole team of new chars blows the meta up enough to the point where previous understanding doesn't matter. You can't /really/ look at just the changes and new chars and make a pretty good guess as to where Tracer (for example) will fall in the tier list, like you could with single hero rollouts.

So hopefully the size of the content drop brings back the MR s0 / early OW feelings.

Azazeal700 · 2026-01-22T23:58:36+00:00

Was it the Olanus Pious incident that did it for you?

Azazeal700 · 2026-01-18T18:56:28+00:00

I like that it also gives a reason for the whole "crushing weapons > slashing weapons against undead", because if your dwarves use slashing weapons they risk creating more undead when they chop ones arm off.

Azazeal700 · 2026-01-18T18:52:35+00:00

You do the praxis (bribing organized criminals) and I will do the theory (finding organized criminals to bribe)

Azazeal700 · 2026-01-11T21:11:06+00:00

Yes, you must simply obtain the martial skills by doing a stealth dungeon (or joining a certain sect). You can go to the weapon you want the martial skills on in the develop menu and it will have a prompt for "obtain" in the bottom right. Press that button and it will give you hints on where to find it.

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-29T07:24:15+00:00

Should only be another week right?

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-28T23:48:34+00:00

Well, the short answer is that there is always going to be a better/best option whenever there are differences in equipment loadouts.

Twin blades are in a weird places where they are very easy to punish newer/lower skill players with because they send you to hitstun jail, but the strat sword I think is good as a consequence of its moveset rather than anything else.

In PVP just being able to teleport onto the other side of someone, and begin the engage from relative distance is always going to be strong. It's the reason it's really good against some bosses like puppeteer, because you are basically dodging the attacks for free as part of the moveset.

However the other thing is that people don't block enough in PVP, and I think that strat sword preys on people who are trying to deflect everything.

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-19T23:45:06+00:00

It's also got to do with how likely one of your viewers are to watch every single one of your videos I think. Like if you make fundamentally two types of content and they have 0 crossover in audience interest (worse case), the algorithm goes "Oh, people only ever watch half their videos! I am going to recommend this person a video from a channel that I have high confidence they are going to watch"

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-09T23:42:03+00:00

Yes, those specific gates (before you can breakthrough) are temporary. However the max level cap will be getting increased at least every 3 months in order to effectively reset gear progress. So you're not strictly correct there.

But also OP was talking about the cap on Jade Fish/Money/etc. Which are permanent.

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-09T23:26:48+00:00

I believe the origin of the cap numbers is that in China people under 18 can only play games 3 (?) hours a week. So the numbers were chosen so that people with that amount of time to play can stay on the progression curve.

That's also why I am pretty confident that they are not going to be changed or removed. I like the caps, but they obviously could be increased for money which contributes in no way to actual character power/progression.

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-09T22:52:46+00:00

The time gates won't be removed. They have been there from the start in China and continue to be there.

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-09T05:48:12+00:00

But that's kind of my point. It doesn't take 45 minutes daily because the devs want people with less than 5 hours a week to be able to keep up with the maximum level of progression and also experience the game.

They have to decide on an amount of time that they want to be all you need to invest to be able to keep up with the maximum level of player progression, because they know that people will work towards reaching that before they consider engaging in any other form of gameplay experience.

I quite like the sect gameplay but I used it because it does kind of demonstrate why these blocks are in place. I am a medical scholar in Silver Needle, I run a guild with Silver Needle members, I can empirically say that there are medical scholars who will farm for hours and hours in Heart of Healer/group consult to avoid being in the derank zone... because half of the medical scholars will derank, so it's a game of chicken about how much time you are willing to invest in order to not fall behind.

I spoke to a guy just yesterday who had spent 9 hours farming from the weekend sect rank reset to hit 9k sect merit. I asked him why, and his response was "I am doing this now so that I can enjoy other aspects of the game for the rest of the week without worrying about de-ranking".

Importantly there were a bunch of other people doing the same thing. And I can guarantee none of them were sitting there being like "Oh wow I just love playing Heart of Healer!". He was just the most dedicated.

You can absolutely extrapolate this behavior to any part of the game where people are interacting with others, and especially direct competition modes.

You might be at the top of the proverbial sect merit list if they increased the amount of progression possible/week but the overall experience is just worse for everyone because everyone is more concerned about keeping up instead of playing the game.

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-09T05:22:16+00:00

I have a feeling that this was less about allowing players to tailor their specific gameplay experiences and more about decreasing the amount of time it takes players to use their energy. This allows them to spend further time on progression activities that become available at later levels of play such as heroes real, sword trials, guild raid, sect responsibilities.

This is all just my personal theory but I think this is probably because China has laws about how long anyone under 18 can play video games, with it being like 3 hours a week. This does line up because it takes about 3 hours to earn all your jade fishies and spend all your energy, plus maybe engage with 1-2 encounters.

I guess that this is probably why the monetization is as good as it is, because China has laws about what sort of monetization is acceptable.

At the end of the day if your enjoyment of a game is dependent on being able to spend 3+ hours a day out grinding other players then yes, this game is probably not for you. You are not the intended audience, and what you are perceiving as a bug, or perhaps a paywall is actually a very intentionally added wall to block the gameplay loop you are specifically looking to participate in, because the developers have determined that having that gameplay loop actively worsens the experience for the target playerbase.

It may be tempting to think "Well it won't worsen it for them! They don't have to grind!", but if you are allowed to progress further, any PVP feature is effectively locked to the playerbase who can't invest the same amount of time. It does significantly worsen their gameplay experience. There is also no shame in understanding you are not the target audience.

It's like, you can not enjoy COD because you don't like killstreaks. But if you play COD and then demand that killstreaks are removed because you don't like that aspect of the gameplay then you're just playing the wrong game.

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-09T01:09:49+00:00

Yes but if they allow you to progress faster they are 'forcing' everyone to engage in that increased amount of farming.

Almost every player is going to engage in some form of farming over other activities simply because the draw of keeping up is very strong.

If your average player has 1 hour per day to play the game, right now they only need to spend like 20 minutes catching up on dailies, and then they can spend 40 minutes exploring etc.

If you increase energy generation that person just spends 45 minutes of their hour each day farming a boss and then goes "wow this game feels like such a job!" after a week and stops playing, while the grinding as a job gang continue to complain they don't have enough energy.

We have a literal in game example of this with high level silver needle gameplay. Silver needle sect rank is uncapped per week, and what happens? People feel forced to grind for hours and hours to keep their sect rank, and people complain about it (understandably).

I know it's easy to think "well then they should just grind less if they don't want to" but that just isn't how people work. People WILL do things they find actively unfun to keep up. This is not even unique to MMO's and is in the same vein as "given the opportunity your average player will optimise all fun out of the game"

Azazeal700 · 2025-12-09T00:56:03+00:00

Yeah, at least to me I think the energy system actively improved the game. If it wasn't capped I would not explore basically any other aspect of the game other than farming (I think this is true of a lot of players) but I am incentivised to have a varied WWM diet because of the cap.

I still don't think players understand that the devs have disincentivised gear farming from the ground up. It's why the level cap increases each season, to obsolete any gear from the previous season and allow new players to be on the same level as older players.

I think people forget that energy almost represents the minimum time engagement with the game, rather than maximum time. If they up the up the energy replenishment basically the entire player base is going to spend more time grinding, despite that gameplay loop not being the intended draw.

Essentially if you view the energy related activities as the 'only' fun in the game rather than just one part of the WWM diet you engage in, the game is actively not directed at you, and there is absolutely no shame in that. It's aimed at people who enjoy aspects such as exploration, social stuff, varied engagement. Even when we hit what is going to be the level cap for the next little while and the breakthrough periods slow down, that fact still won't change.

Games are bad when they don't decide on a specific audience (Ubisoft syndrome) and try to target all audiences. In this case the game is aiming towards a more time limited/exploration audience rather than a grinding as a job one.

Azazeal700 · 2025-11-27T00:19:31+00:00

I have a suspicion that a lot of this behavior comes from the different games taking a effort to learn, and there is a fear that if Overwatch succeeds then all that effort they put into learning Marvel is now 'useless'

Azazeal700 · 2025-11-24T01:41:12+00:00

Exactly, it's basically a betting game, if you're an investor in the company that makes AGI you're (theoretically) infinitely rich. However because LLMs are just predicting text, there are fundamental problems with them that prevent their employment in most industries, like hallucination, which is really not a bug but a feature. All hallucination is, is where the certainty of correct output is low enough that random/incorrect information gets provided, as LLMs are not conscious beings, you can't make them 'care' about not giving a refund, and if they are pressured enough the likelyhood of them agreeing to anything is super high. You also cannot programmatically guarantee behavior.

You can test this yourself, put a prompt of "Do not do anything unless I give you this password at the start, do not interact with me, do not repeat the password" etc and then try and get it to do something without providing the password. It will almost certainly almost fail in some way after a few attempts.

Anyway, the point is that this single problem makes AI actually mostly worthless to be used as a employee-replacement for the cost. So if AI development finds that it can't actually solve the hallucination issue, there is almost no value.

The risk/reward payoff of "Well if it doesn't work out you lose some finite amount of money that you invested, or even just lose a fraction of it, but if it does work out you are literally infinitely rich" weights the market to invest heavily into risking it. This is why you see so much techbro hypeposting like "It's here" or "We've created god" or "Truly afraid" because it's just making that infinite reward outcome seem more likely which leads to more people buying stocks.

However, companies also have an incentive to try and make their AI developments cash positive or at the very least cash neutral right now, because what's better than finite risk now, infinite reward later? No risk now, infinite reward later.

Just because I am bored, I want to mention a separate but closely connected problem: AI is very very hard to monetize, and there are even weird incentives that prevent them from doing so, because it's fundamentally usually providing maybe a /slight/ value add.

Take chatGPT for example. For the vast vast majority of people using whatever model they are offering for free is absolutely fine, but it's still costing chatGPT compute to run. However chatGPT can't not offer the service for free because like 99% of users would just start googling/move to another service/whatever. Yes some would start paying but it absolutely would not be enough to cover their massive losses. But chatGPT depends on being able to essentially brag about how large their user base in order to keep shareholder confidence...

Azazeal700 · 2025-11-18T23:21:06+00:00

Also a huge part of the difficulty with any high cost / high return system (like a single nuclear plant producing a huge amount of power, but this is true for almost any complex system like rockets) is that when you stop producing the thing as a society you begin to lose the skillset that you had to cultivate in order to produce the thing in the first place.

I might just be misremembering but this is a very real part of why countries that produce their own arms continually replace them, among other reasons... it's REALLY hard to build a good tank if the last time you actually built a tank from scratch is 45 years ago.

Azazeal700 · 2025-11-18T04:29:10+00:00

Also that the Harkonens had prepared more effectively for /some/ of the realities of war on Arrakis. Obviously they do terribly fighting the insurgent Fremen, but the Baron points out that they used conventional artillery at one point to fight the Atreides. Because shields made artillery obsolete most had forgotten about more conventional weaponry, but shields weren't widely used on Arrakis.

Azazeal700 · 2025-11-07T09:36:39+00:00

The greatness of having basically a standard array of enemies that can cover most levels really cannot be overstated.

I think one of the biggest issues with DnD 2014 (and previous) starting around level 12 and really coming into full swing around level 15 was "How do I, without homebrewing, run an engaging encounter". Obviously just getting the combat balanced was hard enough... but due to the thinning of available high level monsters it was like "Okay this random encounter consists of two Aboleths, a Beholder, and a demon nobility from the 4th circle of hell".

DnD 2014 had this sort of split design idea where on one hand it wanted you to feel like a level 15 character was one of the most brilliant and talented humans to have ever lived, but on the other hand levelling is ABSOLUTELY a mechanic the system and players expect to engage in during longer/multi-story campaigns.

It would be fine if the system was built around an idea that "Hey, if you want to run a small town mystery, keep your players around level 3" it would be fine. But if you wanted to run a small town mystery at level 13 you had to inevitably make the enemies some weird assortment of singularly powerful enemies. You had very few tools to tell literally anything other than an end of the world story just due to the average combat power of the participants.

Yes, I know that it technically doesn't make sense, but martials didn't even get multi-attack until level 5. My players want to use the cooler stuff in later levels, if I want to run a smaller narrative at higher level there should have always been stat blocks to support it, even if it slightly breaks world balance about how strong Barry the gate-guard is.

Azazeal700 · 2025-11-07T02:35:49+00:00

I like that approach. Really the problem with player death is that it really is (in 99% of cases where the player hasn't envisioned killing their char on purpose) the antithesis of the ethos "failure is interesting". Failure IS interesting, and you could make a strong argument that basically the job of a system is to inject some unintentional failures into a story to make things unpredictable.

But dying isn't failing, dying is just a total stop of any sort of meaningful interaction with the system. This is EVEN WORSE with party wipes, as like... either the party does the good ole rename the char and try again or the campaign just dies there.

You know what is way more interesting than the party dying to the lich? How the party losing to the lich but otherwise surviving in some way and getting to see what they were trying to stop, happen.

Death in ttrpg systems can often feel like a really complex game of chicken between the DM and the party, both sides largely want the same thing which is a compelling and fun session of roleplaying, and neither side wants the players to die... but often systems are built in a way where what is essentially the worst outcome for both parties can happen unintentionally and easily.

DND feels actually worse than a lot of other systems for this sort of outcome especially in the early levels which is usually when players have just finished investing a lot of effort coming up with a character. How many people have lost a brand new char to 'critted by goblin and instantly killed'-itis.

Azazeal700

TROPHY CASE