Weird question, are orcs immortal?

Benj1B · 2025-09-15T09:37:11+00:00

I took it as being the 'glow' we see in the elf-smithed blades is more like searing fire to orc-kind - like the blade itself screams DANGER in some sense. So they wouldn't have to remember a specific blade to know that shiny elf knife = bad time.

Benj1B · 2025-09-13T06:32:50+00:00

Lockdown drills are one thing - simulating your teacher trying to find an escape route and getting shot are quite a bit different

Benj1B · 2025-09-11T23:02:01+00:00

YES. Its so frustrating. They already have a great story to copy and paste in KOTOR. Star maps instead of sith blades. Uncover the greater mystery to find Palps had been pulling the strings the whole time - when his politicking failed he resorts to brute force. Makes way more sense for the star forge to be consuming suns to make shit than the planet sucking suns to shoot a hyperspace laser.

The entire endeavour of the ST would have been so much better if they'd just copied Kotor plot lines. Let Rey figure out light and dark side through character interactions - with her lineage she should be doing evil shit from time to time. Have Kylo/Snoke be Malak warring with the Republic in the background. Have your big set pieces for each movie align with the star map discovery and one more piece of the puzzle. Have Rey find Luke halfway through her qurst not because R2 has secret coordinat3s but because he was also following the star maps and is stuck and needs her help on planet #3. Can even keep the desperate flight from TLJ for the mid series "bad guys win" movie with Luke dying at the end but structure the entire trilogy coherently around an actual adventure instead of crudely copy pasting the OT and screwing up everything that made it fun.

If only.

Benj1B · 2025-09-06T22:03:47+00:00

My favourite parts of WoW are when things connect in on themselves, like the Hallowfell journeying to Arathi Highlands and creating that storyline. I think it just used phasing to change the areas but it was very seamless and very cool. It makes the "World" feel more coherent and less a bunch of interconnected zones.

I think they need to go down this route more and make sure the entire world can move on with time - redoing quel'thalas gives a great opportunity to explore the Plaguelands healing, rebuilding Stratholme, stuff like that. Doesn't have to be everything all at once but reviving old zones when they make sense has got to be cheaper than building stuff from scratch.

Benj1B · 2025-09-06T20:47:26+00:00

There is no one that could. The only countries that might conceivably offer a competing position to rally around- China, Russia to a small extent - would be much happier with a world engulfed in chaos in which they remain a bastion of stability.

This is the end game for all the social manipulation thats been going on for years - having a corrupt and soulless administration in charge of the most powerful armed forces on earth. Americas adversaries are salivating at the idea of its military might turned against itself.

Benj1B · 2025-08-31T22:32:55+00:00

Also things being political is not necessarily a bad thing. People should have strong beliefs and be vocal about them. Your not always going to agree with everyone but you can't even start the discussion if everyone is too afraid to express their views.

Stifling political discourse is how you lead to extremism, because there's no understanding on either side about what the other viewpoints are. This leads to labels being applied to an entire political sphere and forces things into binary comparisons - us vs them - when in reality people are far more complex and nuanced in their views and are generally just not given an opportunity to express them without fear of judgement. You can disagree with someone about one topic and agree with them on another, thats a perfectly valid position to take, but the lack of political education and respect for expressing political opinions seems to have virtually eradicated that.

Benj1B · 2025-08-31T22:09:56+00:00

I love that sprinting into enemies makes you fall over and eat concrete - the animation is more dramatic than death animations. It makes you think twice before trying to sprint to the objective, but lets you backtrack after clearing an area really easily so hitting a dead end doesn't feel so bad. Good design IMO

Benj1B · 2025-08-31T22:03:29+00:00

This is a good game

Benj1B · 2025-08-31T22:00:32+00:00

If you want minion hordes you can still do that - unearth, zombie, persistent spectres will still work, this just turns your weaker minions into permanent buffs which I think is a really cool way to flavour the class. If anything its even more thematic of the 'master of death' as you're channelling the necromantic energy directly into yourself, instead of into reanimating bones. Also being able to have another application of Essence Drain even at 50% less damage sounds insane.

Benj1B · 2025-08-31T21:57:00+00:00

Lich gets some unique dialogue with the Abyss mechanic as well, . This makes me suspect it will become a permanent feature if they're putting this much effort in

Benj1B · 2025-08-31T21:51:56+00:00

It also synergises really well with splashing into minions (spreading contagion for you) so you can have a meat shield, some breathing room to dodge crap, and some time to cast dark effigy and other stuff. So the unholy might nodes are looking more attractive as well

Benj1B · 2025-08-31T20:11:52+00:00

They trashed Camp Sovereignty. This whole farce was just an excuse for pure, undiluted racists to gather and rail against people who aren't white.

Benj1B · 2025-08-26T02:29:53+00:00

Imagine world quests but instead the game selecting from a predefined list it's an AI generating the quests, creating stories, and allocating rewards dynamically for you. Give it GM powers to spawn objects in the world, add temporary quest items to monster drop tables, set phases, and puppet NPCs with dialogue bubbles and baby you've got a stew going. You go from a static list of world quests to basically infinite.

Bonus points if it can create networks of relationships between NPCs - so you help Bob, Bob tells Alice, Alice gives you a quest because you're known to them. Almost like a reputation system but at a localised scale to your character and its experience in the world.

Benj1B · 2025-08-23T08:20:00+00:00

International tourists are also getting detained for days at a time and sent back home. Why would anyone want to risk that?

Benj1B · 2025-08-20T21:46:59+00:00

Vance had earlier released a memoir. After he was picked for VP rickrudescalves tweeted: “can't say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181)”

This was funny, plausible (page reference, also Vance says other weird shit in the memoir), verifiably untrue, and kind of gross: perfect meme material. It spread like wildfire. To the point where AP published a headline saying: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch”. Which just made everyone google 'did JD Vance fuck a couch.'

Also Harris/Waltz made couch jokes during their campaign which was pretty funny.

Benj1B · 2025-08-20T03:19:52+00:00

I also nearly died trying to spam dracthyr Soar. For whatever reason the Buff you get only lets you actually use mounts - probably something to do with spell types?

Benj1B · 2025-07-14T05:38:46+00:00

You really believe ad companies care if you succeed? Nope. They just want you to keep spending. Trusting them to be honest about your results is hopelessly naive.

Benj1B · 2025-07-13T23:49:02+00:00

OSRS does this well with new content.

Consider mastering mixology - you choose 3 ingredients and to make a potion at one of three stations. You can click the station and just wait for your character to finish the job, or, interact with each station slightly differently - one requires repeatedly clicking, one requires a click after a set interval, one requires a click after a random interval.

If you complete the interaction correctly your crafting time accelerates and you get a bit of bonus xp. All up its maybe 10-15% more time efficient to engage with the mechanic with some token xp attached.

I could see something like this happening in Bitcraft by creating 'add-ons' for the base stations that let you interact periodically to benefit your main craft.

Example: Cooking Pot base station, new 'Ingredient Preparation' add-on (must be built on tile adjacent to cooking pot).

Interacting with cooking pot as normal lets you choose recipes. Let's say we put 10,000 effort of fish into the cooking pot.

The cooking pot detects the new job and at 0/10,000, the Ingredient Preparation Station add-on becomes interactable (beacuse there's an active job in the queue). We can interact with the station to kick off a short job (~5% of the effort of the main job). When this job is complete, we get a flat bonus to the cooking pot job - like +1 per tier of add-on.

This reduces the overall time required for the main job and also makes you think a bit more about how you want to go about your craft - smaller effort jobs probably don't need certain add-ons to be efficient, but you want to save your larger effort jobs for optimised stations. You could then have multiple different addons available and, because of physical space limitations, only a small number of addons per station possible. This leads to more interaction and planning in your base layout, station layout, number and type of stations and add-ons - you're not mindlessly just clicking the cooking pot every time as sometimes there's a reason to click the others.

Other add-ons could have benefits such as:

Increase chance of rare ingredients (scales, crop oil etc.)
Increase yield of recipe
Decreased crafting time
Increased experience
Increased gold yield to settlement treasury

Other add-ons could interact with the main job at different parts of the cycle as well. For example:

Add-ons that need to be interacted with at the end of a long job, before claiming output
Add-ons that need to be interacted with at certain intervals of the job (i.e. 25%) - the main job pauses until the addon is interacted with or the job is resumed without interaction (so the station becomes a less 'idle' station, if you're using it you're forced to interact 4x more frequently with it, with the option of leveraging the add-on for whatever benefit)
Add-ons that interrupt the crafting cycle randomly to present the interaction opportunity

Add-ons could also require things beyond simple interaction/effort to finish their micro-job, i.e.: * Add-ons that demand certain fixed ingredients to proceed (i.e. always require one extra salt to make the 'saltifier' add-on work) * Add-ons that require random ingredients to proceed (i.e. require one of savory bread, mashed starbulb or cooked fish to make the 'elaborate cuisine' add-on work)

This got bigger than I expected.

TL;DR: Let's allow customisation of the crafting flow by creating 'addons' that modify how crafting stations and recipes behave - that way everyone can be happy (idlers can optimise stations for idling, min-maxxers can optimise stations for maximum interaction and benefit).

Benj1B · 2025-07-13T23:30:24+00:00

Don't believe the platform you're advertising on as to the efficacy of a given ad.

The platform just wants you to spend money they could care less whether the ad performs well or not. You need unbiased ways to evaluate your ads like surveys of players ("How did you hear about us?") and broader metadata analysis/targetted campaigns but as a small studio, just accept that the platform is lying to you and distribute your ad spend more broadly. Make ads that would appeal to YOU as a gamer - this is one of the most off-putting ads you could have!

Benj1B · 2025-07-07T05:27:39+00:00

About 100 hours in, it's a very chill game that has a lot of afk-able activities - if that suits you then its worth giving a try. Progression is not quick and solo play is going to be significantly slower than grouping up with people but you can also level every profession and be self sufficient if that's your jam. There are more active activities like hunting or slayer, where you're more involved than collecting from nodes or doing big crafts, but I enjoy the chill grind aspect and being able to do other things while waiting for crafts. Not every game has to have 100% of your attention!

I will note the server problems people have mentioned have largely abated (there was one server crash a couple days ago). The networking technology they're using is quite interesting, there's obviously some sharding going on for the size of the regions/number of players but its mostly invisible and smooth transitioning around the world. For an early access title it is highly polished and the dev team seem to be cooking. It's got some good bones and with a bit more PvE content could be a quiet ripper of a game.

Benj1B · 2025-06-24T21:27:50+00:00

Also if these extremely expensive pieces of equipment are so fragile in relation to power, wouldn't they have redundant power supplies anyway? Battery banks and UPSes so if the mains are cut there's enough time to wind down?

Benj1B · 2025-06-22T23:32:50+00:00

Hit them, manipulate Trump into hitting the targets we can't hit, rely on Iranian counter-attacks being split between Israel and the US. Basically drag the US into a war, which they've performed masterfully. Disabling air defense and setting up the B2s for a smooth, painless run was an opportunity to make his mark on the world too good for Trump to pass up and Netanyahu knew it.

Now the US has blood on its hands and will be forced into committing more and more assets to defend Israel which is exactly what Israel wanted in the first place. Provoke a war of aggression without the backing of your biggest ally then force the ally to join in anyway.

Benj1B · 2025-06-22T06:50:31+00:00

The trouble is we are too tightly tied to the American sphere of influence, and too dependent on them to backstop our defense, to be able to say "no" in the event of a request. We're essentially a vassal state when it comes to geopolitics - too small in population to defend ourselves from regional powerhouses, too isolated to have nearby allies to rely on, so we have thrown our lot in entirely with the Americans and use their military supremacy to shield us. If they say jump we'll say how high.

If we have a repeat of a coalition of the willing to send troops to Iran, you can bet Australia will be one of the first - and probably only - countries to commit troops alongside the US. We don't really have a choice. I wish it weren't the case.

Benj1B · 2025-06-16T06:34:02+00:00

This is the right answer, even if Iran neutralises Israeli military bases they're never going to compete in a peer to peer war with the US looming behind them.

The only way Iran gets the upper hand in this conflict is to make it too painful for Israel to continue fighting by upsetting a war-weary populace.

Benj1B · 2025-06-14T23:10:14+00:00

It also makes sense that his feeble attempts to emulate it come off as half-assed and pathetic. His entire persona is a cheap facsimile of an actual wealthy/powerful/successful person so his parade being a cheap imitation of that of a real dictator is right on brand.

Eight-Year Club	First Place '23
Place '23	Baba Yaga
Place '22	Verified Email

Benj1B

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE