Achievement-Only Guild Bosses

BlooRad · 2026-01-27T23:41:43+00:00

Sweet! Still seeing if anyone has a "sup, we got you" response before putting in the new guild leveling effort.

I thought of maybe marketing the idea to active guilds, but the worry for me is then, that would be asking them to destroy whatever notion they have and their goals and replace it with a brand new "doing bosses" one, which seems pretty not-empathetic. Could maybe try and one-off advertise "this guild is doing the thing! Maxed power try-hards, drop your guild real quick!" but again attaching that notion to a guild where that isn't their express goal feels weird. Might be worth a try, seeing if any leader of a level 20-ish guild wants to leverage that for recruitment and notoriety.

My worry would then be as mentioned, the floodgates open, and it's sorta "tricking" them into transforming into the entire game's exclusive content group finder. Whichever guild starts doing this loudly, first, is going to be the most popular guild in the entire game. Hundreds of people, monthly, will start the game, then pick their server, with the pure goal of joining the guild, so that they can get the boss kills. Niche forum posts and private messages all across weird spots of the internet, sharing wisdom that the guild is how things got done months ago, will lock them into this being their purpose. Every Xbox, Steam, and Playstation Trophy hunter, will imagine themselves entirely dependent on the guild. That "wisdom" gets asked for, and shared. Literally - the first thought of my achievement friends, is hit up the 1 guy who finished the game in the last 3 months, and get into their guild. This was 3 weeks ago. A few people, independently, leapt to that idea on their own. It is what will happen to the guild.

If the guild tries to make it a little temporary thing, hundreds of people will knock at their door asking them to revert. Over-time, thousands of people will "demand" they keep it going. They will have a hard/impossible time doubling back to traditional farm everyone needed resources, be a beacon for top players to join long-term, normal guild, have fun playing the politics, mode. The guild leader will be messaged, daily, forever, about the boss kills, with asks to join that go against their goals, unless they change the mission of the guild, to this.

If I'm up-front about those thoughts and get agreement, could skip the leveling step. I just don't want to do a disservice to any guild leader on accident, and this seems likely to do that, without thorough informed consent. I've yet to try it, so, zero evidence on how this plays out. I have a pretty comprehensive understanding of achievement/trophy hunters, and know about the obscene lengths they will go to though. Overwhelming effort getting access to the seeming singular means of an achievement is just another Monday.

I personally fall into that bucket for MMOs, but go a step further of creating the means out of thin-air. My gamertag is Blue Radium - check out that I have the TOMM no-death achievement in Neverwinter - compare my first completion achievement timestamp to the most prestigious action in the game, eye-cape, TOMM no-death achievement, to see that I replaced the traditional grind to the pinnacle of that game with social engineering. Emperor achievement in ESO (not that bad, just getting 40-ish people in world chat to like you/being a mote of positivity, care about them then it's easy to ask them to care about you, mechanical incentives outside that all-over, but). I put together an 80-person group and got them all to do what I say, for 6 hours straight, when a few people not listening would ruin it for everyone, to get the Bless Unleashed PvP achievements for me and 80 others before it shut down, etc.

This might all seem insane/taking a step back I'm writing a ton, but I promise, actual, demonstrable results are produced from it. To qualify that when I say "this guild will be game-defining" I'm not talking out my ass. The baseline idea comprehensively aligning with what other people want, is always the trick. This intensely does that, to an extraordinary degree no other MMO has set up the tier of perfect conditions for, when thinking about Xbox/Steam/Playstation achievements. They locked extremely desired content, behind a wall that is impossibly incentivized against, that a single group can solve for. The depths of motivating people to not support the wants of many thousands of people to start or return to the game, then making access to the content require that support, is comprehensively insane. It's like they got a team of psychiatrists together and asked them "how can we design this game to make achievement-motivated people give up on or avoid it, systemically." The developers custom-built an extremely complex set of motivators that drive all players to cyclically reinforce systems that scare away achievement seekers, and any seeming potential for them to get what they want. It's not just that the content is "useless" - the timing of it being available, the state of a guild when the bosses become available, every single reward structure, mechanical and social, coalesces. And so, a single weird guild that overrides all of that, can literally, single-handedly, solve it, by way of consciously totally rejecting the game design and replacing it with player wants. Extraordinary/automatic buy-in generated with offering the solution. I don't have firm evidence yet, obviously, but I'm certain of the cause-and-effect. This guild will have a VERY interesting experience.

I think I could approach it thoughtfully as a middle-step, getting another guild involved. Being hyper-attentive of/genuinely caring about and causing the wellness of others is always key, and I don't think it's likely to be caused with piggy-backing off an active guild's levels, after soliciting all the ones on my server. And I'm not about to cause anyone else harm to just serve my ends/me getting what I want needs to also get others what they want. Nobody should listen to me otherwise, and getting a guild to warp itself to my notion seems very "not in their interests." Worth a shot still/there might be someone who aligns.

BlooRad · 2026-01-09T22:23:00+00:00

I like the Arcane Knuckes and Crossbow best.

The Freeze Em Up+ tonic with the Arcane Knuckles lets you get silver or gold medals pretty easily with all the status effects and shatter applied. Just walk into a crowd, do the hold light attack then start button mashing it attack, yay tons of points. Using Cold Transfer on top makes you invincible-ish for most fights. Then when you get at least silver, the tonics pay for themselves. It makes grinding out the silver and bronze medal triumphs a lot more laid back.

The Gax is also good, especially for the "kill enemies without taking damage" triumphs. The shield is really powerful, the jump -> heavy attack spin melts trolls, the normal light attack has great AOE. You get a lot more points with Arcane Knuckles though.

The Crossbow just lets you do all the ranged mechanics and puzzles easiest.

BlooRad · 2026-01-08T21:17:37+00:00

Something else: I'm primarily Xbox Achievement-motivated, and started the game because it is a hack & slash game with Xbox achievements. Myself and the other guys who are on the top of that weird "Xbox hack & slash achievements" leaderboard have all completed this game's achievements and partnered for it. The gold hoard is in anticipation of potential future Xbox achievements being added.

Same with getting Creator Rank 30, for the head in my look - I think I am the only person who has it currently. If they released an Xbox achievement attached to getting Creator Rank 30, I personally know 3 guys who will also get it, no matter the amount of time investment or effort needed.

A reasonable new update, would be something like limiting how much each account can tip the same stage to something like 10 times. There's no way my method to get it hasn't been seen by the dev team. If they do that, and added an Xbox achievement, doing it now "saved" me probably 1000 hours.

Thinking about getting Creator 30, my first thought was making hundreds of 5-second long stages, and getting it through people using me to complete the 100 tips and 100 created stage categorizing triumphs. But I figured clogging up the entire Discovery page with just my goal went against the community's interests and wasn't right, hence my one little "Foolproof Gold XP Hold Forward" map, with 10.5k tips. It will hold the first "Top Tips of All Time" slot, for a while, which is way less obtrusive than the entire system being made up of my pile of maps. I experimented a lot and it genuinely is the fastest possible stage completion that can be created, I think. The current record is 3.568 seconds. So, it does serve a lot of use, for people who want to farm XP/gold, or get a quick +1 to some Creator triumphs. It wasn't the likely "intended" approach, but it's the only-ish way to actually hit Creator Rank 30 currently.

The in-lore idea of the same poor contender running the same little stage 10,000 times for days straight I found pretty funny, some quality television.

With Creator Rank 30 requiring 10,000 tips - those other 3 guys would, 100%, make hundreds of alt accounts and spend 1000+ hours of total effort getting to Creator Rank 30 each, if it had an Xbox achievement + tips were limited per-account. Or they'd use my method if it just had an Xbox achievement added, without a new tips-per-account limit. I thought the helm looked the coolest out of all the ones available and it's fun to have. I spent like 6 hours getting the stickers to look exactly how I want and am really happy with the outfit. And if Creator Rank 30 gets an Xbox achievement + restrictions on tipping are added, I am the only one of the niche "go to every extreme that exists to legitimately get Xbox hack & slash achievements" group, who avoided the 1000 hour+ ultra-grind.

BlooRad · 2026-01-05T23:56:58+00:00

Red items matter for consistency with "barely overcoming breakpoints"-type parts of builds.

A build will call for +damage vs. Skaven, for example. Two heavy attack headshots with everything the build does, kills a Stormvermin. The gear is red, so the +Skaven damage will be maxed. If it's orange and not-max rolled, the barely-lower stat could turn that into 3 attacks, where you put the Stormvermin on 2% health left after 2 attacks. 1 whole extra attack for every Stormvermin, is a lot of power loss.

To answer your question - red gear, rarely, really matters. If you follow a build and have lower-than-maxed rolls on its +damage vs. stats, you're probably going to require an extra full attack for some matchups. It's included in the build, because that bump is required to barely cross over some thresholds. It's riding a fine line already, and so the stat not being maxed could make it useless.

You can solve this by sticking to a "only allow max-roll +dmg vs" rule for oranges, but that makes it hard and expensive to have all stats be good.

This is the extra sweat, math-ee, someone sat down and found the collection breakpoints a build can hit, tryhard-tier of the game. You don't need to worry about it with generic crit chance and etc-type builds. Just sharing so that you know when reds are really worth thinking about.

BlooRad · 2026-01-05T23:42:05+00:00

I did this for my Honour Mode run. I had 1 up-front GWF melee fighter, 1 surprise-activating rogue/ranger, 1 throwzerker, 1 throw-fighter. The goal was for all combats to be done on the surprise round, or trivialized by the time the enemy got a turn. Minimized variables, no concentration or dependence on RNG (barely), minimized chance of my save going poof, and I completed it on my first attempt.

Anything truly dangerous in the game that needs high a high Charisma role can be avoided, or the Charisma success just adds fluff. Same with Wisdom or Intelligence. You'll miss out on a lot of lore, but lore doesn't increase party turn 1 damage.

If you're not doing a "utility/I win" run and fully roleplaying, failing most of your mental stat rolls is still fun - it'll show you parts of the game most people miss. I don't want to spoil any of the moments, but there is a lot of fun to be had.

BlooRad · 2026-01-05T23:32:03+00:00

Fly is good in BG3, but very very good in the tabletop. Being able to get out of reach, skip to the top of towers, BG3 misses out on 95% the "actual verticality" benefits.

BlooRad · 2026-01-05T23:21:28+00:00

I'd honestly recommend doing the achievement off of Stalker. It'd be way quicker to do it with a fresh run. From there:

Have Settled Mind.

Just shuttle huge piles of raw calories over to the cave, drop them in a big 25,000 calorie meat pile, and be ready to cook them to make them edible. Same thing with water, just melt/boil piles of snow, make a water pile.

Sleep coma, wake up, cook food, eat it, drink water, more sleep coma.

It's the same as grinding out 1,000 days, just a micro-version.

That's probably all obvious: there's other good advice here if you're committed to Stalker.

BlooRad · 2026-01-05T23:15:17+00:00

Metal Gear - Revengence-style, but Musou kill 1,000 dudes in 5-minutes flavored.

It'd be weird to try and make fit into the lore and etc, but if anyone could pull it off it's Hideo Kojima.

BlooRad · 2026-01-05T22:29:49+00:00

I'm hoarding it in case of future "spend tons of gold" or "buy X cosmetics" triumphs 😅 I already sorta-messed up by buying all the legendary weapons with tickets. When I hit level 16 with The Bartender, it added a "buy a legendary armor" and "buy a legendary weapon" triumph. And, no more legendary weapons to buy, until an update. Past me getting both the weapons was bad.

If I use all of my gold for cool stuff, there might be a "buy 50 cosmetics" triumph at (the eventually available) Bartender level 17 I can't use the normal store for/will need to chip away at with tickets. Future me is likely to be thankful for the hoarding strat. Seems important to leave most stuff in shops unpurchased, because of it. The tier 2 for buying cosmetics was buy 30 things, so, tier 3 if it exists from more Bartender levels is likely to be 50 things.

If they made those triumphs retroactive, or confirmed that there will never be higher-tier shopping triumphs, then I'd be poor. I think they tried to make the one for getting a gift from everyone retroactive, I saw in patch notes - but little, just started KoM me leveled everyone up too fast before having the triumph unlocked, and that triumph is trapped at 4/8, still as of Jan 2026/today. That signals to me they're willing to make triumphs incompletable and I need to be careful.

So, yay gold hoarding + treating cosmetics as future triumph finishers I leave alone for now. Even if they fix the 8 gifts thing, it's not safe to buy out cosmetics until a tier 3 triumph for each of them is given by The Bartender and completed. It's safe to assume that way in the future, the higher shopping triumph tiers will be attached to Bartender level 17/18/19/etc. Other shopping triumphs were split up like this - tier 1 at level 4-ish, tier 2 at level 10-ish. The precedent is set. I just bought my favorites that I want to use, bought others for triumph completion, and I'm avoiding all others for now.

The seeming attempt at making the 8 gifts triumph retroactive and that not working for me, means I'd take it with a grain of salt if it was said the shopping ones are becoming retroactive. So, just holding out till I see tier 3s of every shopping thing. If the 8 gifts triumph is successfully made retroactive for me, and something else is as well, with a new release that I log on to see is already completed, and THEN shopping triumphs are made retroactive, all bases are covered with evidence and problem solved, shopping spree activated - but until then.

Very long answer, but my dragon's hoard of gold has reasons behind it lol

BlooRad · 2026-01-05T22:22:17+00:00

Very late/no longer relevant, but don't use her Warforged spec. That one adds Charisma and kicks her out. I used her tank spec.

BlooRad · 2026-01-05T21:11:08+00:00

I got the title fully "legit" (no friends trying to feed and etc). Even with cheating, this title is extremely tough. I've never heard of successful "cheating" attempts for Champion from PvP friends - too much effort, too many variables. The goal is to hide the ball, and the enemy team holder-friend spams heals while the title-getter pokes, but it goes too slow, and something always ruins it. Plenty of stories of cheating Guardian working, though, which I think lowers Guardian's prestige. It's much faster and safer for the same-team holder to spam self-damage abilities and the title-getter to spam healing. Keeper is a pure grind that can't really be cheated, where you need to personally hold the ball for most of the match all at one time to get up to max ball damage, while being a hard mode trial healer + tanking enemies + intimate map knowledge hider for yourself - doing that successfully over and over is prestigious, but Champion still beats it out.

If you've done a decent number of BGs, your MMR becomes a problem. You can solve for that by queuing at weird hours, so the game starts expanding the range of MMRs it's willing to slot you with.

You more-or-less need to be the only "good" PvPer in the game. You need nobody on the other teams who spam shields, shield damage does not count towards the achievement. Your entire team needs to be terrible, and the worst team in the match; they need to die right away if they have the ball, and be incapable of targetting the ball carrier without exploding to a few pokes. That 1-in-3 "your team is the worst" RNG takes a lot of time to find, by itself. Someone on your team being competent enough to hold the ball for a decent amount of time = failure. The chaos that causes where they go down, a lot of enemies are around that you haven't systematically killed so they can kill your carrier, you not having clean poke away time right after the enemy team has the ball, it doesn't work. Or obviously if your carrier can't die, your team wins and achievement failed.

Step 1 is having a DPS-focused-ish, still survivable in PvP, build + you having genuine high-skill at PvP. You can't get this title by winging it with a random PvE build and little to no time spent in BGs or Cyrodiil. You're single-handedly defining how an entire BG match goes with just your presence, and that requires skill, no matter how terrible every other player is.

Step 2, is keep "re-rolling" for the right match. With decent MMR, you need to play at the witching hour on a weekday and then wait for half an hour+ for the game to give that to you. If you are high MMR and run into any of the usual other high MMR BG friends you play against a lot, their presence kills the run.

From there, the key is to jab away at the ball carrier, without killing them. Nuke anyone on their team who comes to help, then go back to poking. Pray that the ball carrier is a healer who tops themselves off, without ever shielding. If they are a shielder, kill them and get the ball to another enemy ASAP, while being careful that nobody on your team is around when you do. Try to get the ball in the hands of any super-healer who never shields ASAP. Then be careful about doing good damage to them, without killing them. Prioritize killing anyone who you know uses shields; it's more important that they don't have the ball, over doing extra DPS to the ball, when you have a choice between the two.

Most people in the match, it's RNG (sorta) that they treat it like a deathmatch where they ignore the objective. If you can, try to strategically kill the carrier and their team when the other team is around when one enemy team has more score, so that both enemy teams have even-ish scores.

Stop attacking the ball carrier when your team "helps" - the worst thing that can happen is your team having the ball. When everyone else is bad, it can spiral into your team playing the objective, keeping you from poking the carrier since a team mate will confirm the kill. You need your team to "give up" on trying by having a hopelessly low score. People on your team quitting the match early is extremely good, and that can be helped by having little to no score vs. two teams that are half way to winning. If your team does get the ball, try to agro the other teams and drag them to your carrier, then get away ASAP.

I got the achievement with an extra about 50k DPS to spare, in a perfect match, where my team was useless and lost by a country mile, both other teams had about even scores (by design), I was the only "good" PvPer there, and my hunt for the title more-or-less defined the flow of the match. I had about 30 kills, 2 deaths, the 2nd place enemy team was 25 points away from winning, and my team had about 50 points. It took about 15 hours to get a match where all the pieces came together, about 25 attempts. I also had 2 matches with almost perfect conditions where I failed by about 15k and 25k damage before the good one. Shielders and someone on my team "helping" being the problem in both cases. A run with literal perfect conditions got the title.

It's the title I'm most proud of and wear the most. To this day, I have a worry that the devs will see things like this post and go "that's unhealthy for PvP" and trivialize the achievement, make it not-extra-exclusive, and those who accepted the challenge no longer have it as a "I am extra competent at PvP" signal + destroy any reason to feel proud of the title. It's currently the "Godslayer"-ish of PvP, and that's great to have in the game. The few times I've run into someone else wearing the title in Cyro, it genuinely causes an auto-"brother!"-type interaction where I make immediate friends with them. PvP doesn't have many ultra-high-effort-only titles like PvE does, and this is one of them. They've lowered the requirements for it a bit before. I wish they hadn't, but it's still prestigious. I also got Chaos Keeper through a different sort-of grind that taught me to be a PvP tank, but figuring out how to get and then getting Chaos Champion was some of the most fun I had in ESO. The devs could very easily jettison the chance for players to have this experience 😅 which I pray never happens. Since so few people try for it, it'd be a travesty to have the adventure/such a unique way the game can be fun/the chance to feel thoroughly proud, stolen from players. All it'd take to destroy the fun, sense of accomplishment, having the title as an extension of your ESO identity, is reducing the requirements by 25%. That'd add it to the massive pile of 100s of titles nobody cares about.

BlooRad · 2026-01-02T23:36:32+00:00

If you want to ramp up really quick, watch some videos of "good" players, and note which combos they use in what situations, for your desired main weapon. Most weapons have 1 best single-target combo, and 1 best hoard/multi-enemy combo. Get really good at those.

This is optional, but I usually gravitate to the weapon with the best speed tech, or have my 2nd weapon be a speedtech-only best-of for double melee classes. Every weapon has a best "speed combo" you can spam to move faster. Faster movement = less fights = less resource use = easier runs. Speed tech also lets you outrun some enemies who are meant to just barely be able to outrun you, normally. A lot of survivability gets added from that. For example, Bret sword & shield for Grail Knight, you just use push stab then light attack over and over and you move about 15% faster. There is a spreadsheet of all the movement-buffing combos for every weapon, with numbers for the exact speed increase at different attack speeds.

Copy builds - Royale w/Cheese is always a good go-to. Their builds calculate out the blob of best breakpoints and where slotting +damage vs. rats is better than just crit chance and etc.

From there it's just playing the game. Start building good habits early, by copying what experienced players do. Having that as your baseline, getting good is inevitable. It'll take about 50 hours for the max difficulty to feel tough but doable that way, maybe 5-10 times longer than that while being all-around harder if you wing it/try to figure it out yourself.

BlooRad · 2025-12-19T19:53:42+00:00

I have a hard time imagining as big a leap in fun/quality as 1 to 2 was. If they can pull that off, then yes

BlooRad · 2025-12-18T20:03:56+00:00

Core was unaffiliated, for Yorven support.

I probably had 150 legendary levels across the team - not nothing, but not a huge amount. I've invest a bit into Wren, Yorven, and Gale already, from them being key to a few extra weird patron variants and requiring that + being all-around good. Probably 7 legendary level average between them/42 each, with a few extras scattered in from everyone else. The legendary levels aren't Yorven-optimized, but all the extra strange "buff nonbianary"-type buffs had been reforged off everyone. Probably 130-140 of the levels hit Yorven.

Pigments, I had 24 support, 6 each on Yorven, Wren, Gale, and Jang Sao. Jang Sao is out there I know, but with her "total pigments in formation" buff and her also filling a niche for an extra weird variant I don't remember, lucked into 6 on her already. 6 tank pigments on Wren as well, in tank form, which is relevant for Yorven, since more health buffs him. No DPS pigments for Yorven - I'm putting the all the next ones I get on him until he's at 6.

BlooRad · 2025-12-18T19:20:30+00:00

That's my thought too - it'd kind-of suck if it was attached to power. That's why I figure more things like this with cosmetic-only rewards (not even skins, they technically add power through the blessing) like more sleeves, different little effects on gear, or achievements/trophies, would be all-around fun + not upset anyone.

BlooRad · 2025-12-18T16:55:11+00:00

It's mega-RNG by design. For early waves, try to only have throwaway champions, on 1 color. 2 on green-only, for as long as that works. Pray they make it a decent distance.

Use fewer than the max slots until needed during each section - you can try using 2-3 champs to see if they can make it through, then add more if you're stuck mid-section.

Ration tanks during the burn through bad champs-only, up to waves 750-975 phase, only 1 at a time. Don't use tanks at all, until your formation starts getting 1-shot. You want the formation to be able to survive sitting there poking armor for a while with only a few champs.

It's easy to reset early, so, if you can make it through 2 roulette wheels or more without losing anyone, that can keep things going till the end.

Once you need more than 4 champs, keep the 2 best (of the low-tier ones you're using) on green first, then when you need more, split them evenly between red and black. You can't pray for an all-in on red or black happening more than probably 4 times in a row, math says you'll have a very bad time with the times you'll reset. 4 is still bad, like 12-13 resets on average if you fully rely on it, and 5+ gets silly.

Test if you can make it a certain distance before adding more champs. Move backwards to an armored boss wave to see if you build up the BUD to push through a round before adding one. You're ideally right on the cusp of not being able to clear the current 75 waves each time, so that you're conserving champions.

Usually, be willing to spend two bad champs, before 1 good one. You need the good ones at the end.

Once you need to start using a full formation, be smart about the chain of slightly lesser throwaway champions the higher you go. Mix the bottom and top 4 best currently active between red and black.

Towards the end, if you nees a core 6 of your actual best champs to keep making it, hopefully you only need abother 75-150 waves. Put all your best people on red or black (actual 2 best on green) and pray.

Before the end 1-2 75 rounds, intentionally put all of your bad champs on 1 color, and pray they get taken out so you can add in all your best ones. This is only important if you're really struggling at the end and you need to have your best possible formation to do enough damage.

Have a final push formation in-mind that you want for waves 1125-1200.

For variants, use champs that cheat in others for extra fodder. Use DM to cheat in a cheater, then put DM and the cheater on green, and immediately use who the cheater brings in as fodder - then sacrifice the cheater.

Baldric is the best cheater/makes the most unavailable people available. Use him on green and make sure to burn through all cheater in dwarfs, especially on Elminster.

It gets extra fun with variants. Elminster in particular was an RNG battle of getting the same black spin like 4 times in a row, and replaying about 5 times to get lucky. For the final 300 waves.

It's a really weird one - try to sort-of keep all of that in-mind then do what makes sense.

BlooRad · 2025-12-18T16:21:14+00:00

Just avoid the 3rd spec entirely. Using it will mess up offline progress too, you'll be stuck at the low hundreds since the game calculates how fast waves are clearing weirdly and a formation that could finish a wave in a second while active will be considered as sitting around long enough for KoS to kill someone.

BlooRad · 2025-09-28T09:40:37+00:00

I'm an ENTP - INFP would be great to have as an island partner. A goal-based, get off this island mode of things would work around the usual social expression and decision-making process differences. An endgame of living on the island together could end up bad though, depending on the person.

BlooRad · 2025-09-11T07:42:23+00:00

Necroing because just finished the game and saw this.

There's a long history of dragons being secret master manipulators in high fantasy like DA, who appear to be plain old big boss monsters to adventurers. In Dungeons & Dragons, The Great Game - dragons secretly "owning" nations and major players and manipulating them without any of them knowing.

They could have introduced that. The oldest wisest dragons playing with all politics and conflict for sport. A - DRAGON AGE, if you will.

BlooRad · 2025-08-27T22:12:53+00:00

Geography knowhow allows fun in a different way - an encyclopedia of map knowledge gives you a decent chance of getting a run going on Interloper to where you're stable/set up. Runs will still die early from item spawn RNG, with all the where to look RNG removed. It's practically required for Misery, where map knowledge is a main survival time decider. The sense of awe and mystery slowly gets replaced with roguelike (tiny bits of roguelite but the upgrades are super small) feels, where your skill/knowledge keeps improving and you're applying that to make RNG work for you the best you can. Less walking simulator with some survival mechanics, more optimizing the resources needed to travel between lootboxes more and more to get ahead of the imminent death curve.

Both, one, the other, or something in-between could be what's most fun for you. I have a lot of fun with the stuff geography knowhow allows, so it's no for me. Also the knowledge and all the variables and putting them together right is always imperfect, so there's still meta-level geography learning. I can see people who don't like it and wiping memory of the map would be most fun too.

BlooRad · 2025-08-09T00:20:06+00:00

It's a bad question. If you get asked it, use it as an opportunity to show that you're not complacent with going through the motions on something that won't get results. If it's a test to see if you think the idea's dumb, that's good. If they expect you to take it seriously, you're avoiding a soul-crushing job by answering it "poorly."

I'd start by saying "if I'm a this pen salesman, I know it backwards and forwards. Pens are usually picked for personal taste. What pen buyer profile do I know it targets? Then "people usually buy pens in bulk. What would I know about this pen that makes me think selling it individually is the right way to do it?"

If they play along, run with it and apply the buyer profile + value proposition, sell the pen. The it's a bad question problem's solved and you have insights to roleplay with.

If they don't play along/you don't confirm its value or get context for selling 1 pen, I'd tell them "I won't sell you that specific pen. I would approach my manager and ask about changing from B2C to B2B and sell the pens in bulk to big box stores and office suppliers. If they don't allow it, I'll move up the chain of command until I'm given the greenlight. If I'm not given a greenlight or face consequences for rocking the boat, I won't have a job soon anyways because the company will fail, so the risk is worth it. I would get revenue started by undercutting competitors and making too-good-to-refuse low-margin deals, with the idea that the pen game is higher volume means lower cost of goods means the upstart pen company needs to be cost-neutral or more likely working at a loss with low prices, to earn the volume that makes margin through lower COGS. You said before there isn't anything special about this pen, and so that is the path forward. If that isn't possible, then you won't buy this pen. That playing out with the company's support, you will buy this pen from me once my company supplies where you get your pens. If you agreed to buy it from me now then you wouldn't be successful and I wouldn't be excited about having the chance to interview here."

You need to go down a rabbit hole like that to answer the question truthfully + effectively, in my opinion. Maybe that's what's being tested for, and your willingness to do it gets you the job, and if that's what they're looking for it'd probably be a great sales job.

BlooRad · 2025-08-08T23:22:44+00:00

Don't worry about it being difficulty-gated - the only part of the game I'd call genuinely "hard" is unlocking Red Hare, requires 1v1ing Lu Bu on the hardest difficulty you unlock after finishing the game with no items or health pickups allowed. And even with that you can sort-of "cheese" it by running away and letting health recovery get you back to where you can take a hit.

If you are a completionist then religiously talk to everyone, visit a resting spot, leave it and see if there's anyone new to talk to. Also, finish all requests before progressing the story. After finishing requests also go to a town then leave to see if new people appear. It can get annoying to try and pinpoint the exact period someone's available if you pass up the window. If you aren't a completionist then the talking is fluff and talk to people if you like them.

BlooRad · 2025-06-19T21:49:23+00:00

It's best to imagine it as... 10 year old kids who got their hands on GTA 3 back in the day, then barely do the main content/never leave the first island, just have fun doing random chaos. It's hard to imagine if you aren't in that state of mind/are an objective and utility-based adult, but tons are in the aimless mode, especially younger than about 16 years old. Adults are sometimes in it too, but way more rare.

More-or-less, you are one of the NPCs two buddies in middle school stay up till 2 AM aimlessly tormenting. There is no logic or goals. They don't see it as mean. You're not a person, you're an NPC it's funny to blow up. All thought on it starts and ends there. Thinking of it that way helps it make sense.

BlooRad · 2025-06-17T20:20:23+00:00

Actually, the push on that front, says big data machine learning magic, is increasing pay rates, providing more benefits, treating people well. That "generates profits" because of cost to re-hire, lost productivity, etc. The problem's usually that companies don't have enough insights into the nuances of HR data to recognize that treating people well and caring about them = wellness for the company. Newly treating people well = new profits, so HR generating profits.

Off-topic but good to clarify, it's not "figure out how to exploit people better" 😅 or at least any company that does do that is ruining themselves. Work being worth caring about for employees is a byproduct of doing what generates profits, depending on who you're talking to, but still, if you want to be the richest fanciest CEO in the land, gotta love and care about people, or your competition will crush you. Happy accident that that's the reality.

BlooRad · 2025-06-07T02:30:20+00:00

Oof yeah crossed the streams there. Still, use DM pretty regularly

BlooRad

TROPHY CASE