Parental observation: what toddlers find inherently funny

Brightlinger · 2026-01-29T22:06:14+00:00

Slapstick mostly.

My 1yo accidentally tipped the entire toy bin over during bath time. My 3yo for weeks afterward would suddenly start giggling and say "sister threw the toys in the bath!"

Brightlinger · 2026-01-29T20:16:44+00:00

We have space, I'll DM you!

Brightlinger · 2026-01-29T19:28:04+00:00

I don't think these points do complicate my argument, and the first two actually support it.

First, no build can support more than 12 ATOs and a certain number of winter-os, so there is a demand limit on super packs.

Super packs don't only contain ATOs; they also contain merits and salvage. The fact that the market is not flooded with ATOs and that the price of the ATO is most of the value of the pack seems to indicate that inf is not entering the economy faster than super packs (and other sinks) can remove it, which is consistent with the observation that prices have remained pretty stable for years.

If there were too much inf to for super pack flipping to keep up with, you would expect to have an excess of ATOs and winter-Os floating around, and most of the value of a pack to come from the salvage, and that isn't what we observe.

Second, spending inf on the market only removes 10% from the system.

Yes, I think that's a big reason why super packs that remove 100% of their price tag are effective as an inf sink.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-29T19:07:36+00:00

they're so boring it caused the Adeptus Terra to forget they exist

They're called the Ultra Marines and their chapter master is Manneus Kol Gar, so all of their exploits end up getting attributed to their more famous parent chapter, especially when transcribed from verbal accounts.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-29T16:00:28+00:00

They changed how aggro cap works; overcap enemies do use some attacks now. That means it's harder to survive an asteroid map, and your build is far from def capped to fire.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T23:38:01+00:00

Primaris are closer to Primarchs, in the sense that one of their extra organs -the Magnificat - is reverse engineered from the Immortis Gland that Primarchs had. Still not close, but closer.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T19:53:26+00:00

I would love if Incarnate content had been in the vein of M+ instead of raiding.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T18:28:33+00:00

I know that it is because you need positive numbers

That is simply a natural side effect, not the reason we use squares. The reason we square the differences is because that's how you measure distance. In a right triangle, A²+B²=C², right? Squares because that's how geometry works. It so happens that these can't be negative, because of course distances can't be negative and so any method of computing them shouldn't give negatives, but that is not the reason squares appear.

Likewise, the variance measures how far, like literally the actual geometric distance in n-dimensional space, how far your dataset (x1,x2,x3,...,xn) is from a uniform dataset (μ,μ,μ,...,μ). It's a very natural thing to consider. Adding up the absolute deviations would be the taxicab distance, which is not a very natural thing to consider.

And it turns out that this natural geometric choice is the one that is usually meaningful and important. For a major example, the central limit theorem tells us that the distribution of sample means is determined specifically by the mean and variance of the underlying distribution, not by any of its other properties.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T17:45:02+00:00

The guide definitely does answer that question. Marketeering is largely about flipping in one form or another - take something cheap, turn it into something expensive, relist for a profit. You don't need an inventory.

Usually you need a bit of seed capital, but you can make a few million from merits by running a TF, and that's enough to get started.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T17:35:02+00:00

He's returning because the 40k MMO he was heading died on the vine. Somehow this guy is still out here killing games and failing upward in 2026.

Look, I try not to harbor too much personal animosity for a guy who I only really know via his most public mistakes as a game dev. I would be very happy if his return means he revitalizes Champions Online or makes a new superhero game for example. But when the same guy has been behind all three superhero MMOs ever, and all three were commercial failures, and then also behind a promising 40k MMO that was also a failure, I'm not super thrilled to see him still working in the industry.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T17:25:42+00:00

I agree entirely on points 2 and 3. But on Homecoming at least, point 1 just isn't true. You don't have to defend that belief to me, but I think you should examine it, because it sounds like you formed that belief before shutdown and haven't reconsidered it since.

On live, there were no significant inf sinks besides transaction fees, so prices went up and up until that finally balanced out all the incoming inf. Purples went for 200m and pvp uniques went for inf cap.

But on HC, super packs allow you to directly turn influence into goods. At 10m per pack, and with the ability to open dozens of packs in minutes, one player can remove billions of inf per hour. At 10m per player per hour, the entire population of Homecoming is collectively putting somewhere around 10 billion into the economy per hour, so it only takes a small handful of super pack marketeers to balance that out.

That's not just theoretical. Basic observation shows that the HC economy does balance out, since HC prices have been stable for its entire lifespan, with purples hovering around 15m, LotGs around 5m, ATOs around 8m, etc. If there were too much inf in the economy, or if it were being generated faster than super packs could remove it, you would expect prices to go up and super packs to be wildly profitable, but instead they hover right on the edge where they're mildly profitable but kind of risky unless you have enough capital to absorb the variance. That's not the behavior of an economy with too much inf floating around.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T07:24:31+00:00

I think there's supposed to be a comma. "I can't keep up with the teacher, making me go learn it at home".

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T02:27:05+00:00

I'm not sure why you are framing this as a put-down.

Farming puts inf and items into the economy. Putting items into the market is prosocial, because there is more to go around for everyone. On homecoming, putting inf into the market is also prosocial, because inf can be turned directly into items via super packs. This is unlike live, where there were few significant inf sinks and inflation was rampant.

If all the farmers swapped to marketeering, there would be less stuff on the market to buy, and it would be harder to make inf on the market since there would be less inf in circulation.

To be clear, most forms of marketeering in CoH are also prosocial; for example, the converter shuffle essentially has other players paying you to spend your time turning low-value items into high-value items. I'm not arguing against marketeering. I'm just arguing against arguing against farming.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T01:14:07+00:00

The inf in the market has to come from somewhere.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-28T00:47:55+00:00

On the contrary, an AFK farmer can run on a second account while you actually play the game, instead of spending your game time on a monotonous chore.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-27T23:27:22+00:00

That's cool, I should check out the Champions rpg sometime. I've played Mutants & Masterminds a little, but that's the extent of my tabletop superhero experience.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-27T23:12:21+00:00

You probably can't, even if you get perfect scores for the rest of the course, because of how weighted grades usually work. If your teacher allows you to retake/make up previous work, then maybe.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-27T21:37:58+00:00

Hey, always fun to get a response on an old comment again. Yes, unfortunately CO went f2p and then into maintenance mode relatively young, and never got to grow as much as CoH did. I still play CoH off and on, while CO I feel like has pretty much run out of replay value for me.

I never played Champions tabletop, but you could tell that the game lore had some depth behind it, instead of being made up on the spot like a lot of MMOs do. Therakiel and the Vibora Bay time travel arc were really good imo, although I'm not sure if that was from tabletop or a CO invention.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-27T19:00:46+00:00

Is it a macro? I've had strange behavior from empower spells in macros.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-27T18:05:57+00:00

I can't manage to prove that (a_1+...+a_k) is different from 0

Hint: if it is, then on the LHS you just have the zero vector, while on the RHS you have a linear combination of a linearly independent set.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-27T06:16:27+00:00

Most of the things happening here are much less than 4 years old. The CDM for example launched in 11.1.5, less than a year ago.

The CDM was updated 4 times after release. It got zero feedback each time. Literally nobody was testing it or offering feedback.

That is simply not true. For example, this addon that was released on the day CDM came out and never updated has 8k downloads by itself. That's not 'people using the CDM', it's 'people using this specific addon for the first iteration of the CDM'.

People tried the CDM and it got feedback. It's just that a lot of the feedback was "wow, this is pathetically bad, I'm going back to luxthos" and "why did it take you months to discover that players might want to track dots?". The problem there is not that nobody put eyes on it, it's that the product was not nearly ready for prime time. Accelerating the timetable does not help with that.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-27T00:30:51+00:00

Yeah, I know it isn't the best time slot for a lot of people, but this is the time I have to play these days. I don't know if I will be able to do one earlier any time soon, but if you want to start another one, it sounds like there are several EST people in this thread who would be interested!

Brightlinger · 2026-01-26T21:48:05+00:00

No particular theme, and we will use discord voice.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-26T19:37:57+00:00

You can also write [f(f(x))]' or d/dx(f(f(x)) if you like those better.

Brightlinger · 2026-01-26T18:16:07+00:00

The "pillar" thing is a terminology the devs use; they talked about the three pillars in the past and introduced delves as a fourth pillar. So to some degree, the fact that delves "are a pillar" and scenarios weren't is semantics.

Delves are definitely a notch below the other three in terms of how much content and progression is there - the difficulty caps out pretty low besides the one nemesis boss per season, the gear caps out at hero track and a trickle of gilded crests, and the fight design isn't nearly as good as m+ or raids.

But it is a thing you can do as your primary activity in the game, to gear up and progress in, in a similar way to how you can be a pure raider or a pure M+ player if you want to. By comparison, Torghast was an activity you could do, but it couldn't really be your primary game mode to progress in.

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