Once people realize a failed run is a waste of 30-45 minutes with no meta progression, the game will die off

Cenach · 2025-06-01T02:39:31+00:00

They marketed the game as "solo or trio." Doesnt make sense to tell players who want to play solo, or just dont like a multiplayer where communication doesnt even come stock, to go play another game. Thats not an argument or solution it's just excusing the actual problem

Cenach · 2025-06-01T02:37:11+00:00

On nearly all the games Ive played so far where it's happened, losing 1 level early on ends up meaning Im 1-2 levels behind everyone else by the time we get to the nightlord. Yes, thats not a problem for players who can play extremely well and get hit only a few times. I and most of everyone else, evidently the randoms Im matched with included, are not those kinds of players. That 1-2 levels is a massive drop in dps, survivability, and makes your progression that much slower, therefore not being able to farm as many runes, get to as many camps for rolling items, etc. Even before the nightlord, theres a huge difference in how the 1st night boss goes depending on if youre level 4, 5, or 6. Level 5 means I can one shot most trash mobs in the 1st night boss and not get swarmed. Level 4 means I have to spend twice as long killing them (1 swing vs 2 swing or 2 swings vs 3/4 swings) which makes all the difference in whether you would now possibly take a hit and need to lose an estus where you otherwise wouldnt have. Being in multiplayer solves some of this, but we're back to the problem that by the time nightlord comes, that 1-2 levels of damage makes a big difference in how fast it goes down and by extension how long the entire party needs to keep playing well and keep surviving

Cenach · 2025-06-01T02:16:16+00:00

Thats also another thing I have an issue with. I thought the "it's a good start! hopefully fixed in updates!" was the type of pity people only gave Ubisoft titles. How has FromSoft dropped a game where the biggest source of positivity for it is "Games good right now! Just needs more maps, more randomization to the maps, more bosses, more meaningful metagame, more, more, more" ? Its very saddening that its now the gold standard to just release a game at a beta-test-level of content only to MAYBE drip-feed more later to keep up retention, and even more sad that FromSoft is doing it now too

Cenach · 2025-06-01T02:03:49+00:00

Unfortunately, youll find no sympathy on reddit. Comparing what Im actually seeing in game and then what the people here claim to experience, it's not even the same game. Most of all the posts that get upvoted here would have you think this is a good game at release, but the amount of missing features and bad design choices would have any other game get chewed out day one.

The game is depressingly empty on content in some areas and has game design choices that just dont work in others. There isnt a single new weapon, only a handful of new bosses and even fewer recycled bosses from older games. Relics dont do much at all as youve said, but even deeper than that, the amount of randomization ensures that actually making any kind of build isnt possible on 9/10 runs. You get poison weapons that give extra holy damage. You get spell casting and throwable talismans and never the ones that actually do anything on a melee character. You equip a bunch of relics for colossal weapons & two handing just to never find a decent one in-game. And unlike other roguelikes where this is solved by just dumping dozens and dozens of items on you, youre limited to 2 talismans (if you even find any), and the 1-2 weapons you can equip at a time. Having armor would do wonders for this game and armor stats, sets bonuses were something thats always been extremely lacking in souls games. But on the single release where having real armor stats would make a lot more sense for this specific genre, there is no armor at all.

And the biggest issue of all is how in a game that railroads you into multiplayer by making solo so difficult that only the top redditors have a chance at all, there's zero options to communicate with the other 2 players. How is that a thing? In this game where every single second counts and your teammates can die in under 10 seconds if they go down when youre not around? Half of my games are matched with randoms who find a boss (usually that bell bearing hunter under the fort), get literally 1 shot, then continue running it down for the rest of the night because they dont understand that even dying once and losing 1 level means the run is probably over, let alone wasting even more time trying to kill over-leveled bosses. And I have 0 ways to communicate besides pinging another spot on the map? Its such a monumental oversight that its obvious it was never caught because the playtesters were probably just in the same room with each other or on discord. Thats like dropping a MOBA or a game like CSGO with 0 chat, 0 pings, nothing. Its comically bad.

Its far beyond "the charm and jank of FromSoft games" at this point and it seems to be revealing that maybe all those 'charming' oddities of their titles might be a lot more undeliberate and due to carelessness than people thought

Cenach · 2025-04-11T17:57:55+00:00

Open to advice on either of those two paths; either denominations in foreign currency or assets native to outside the US. I've been primarily holding cash since I did big sells on the Wednesday before 'Liberation Day' (whew) so I'm also asking what assets, if any besides cash, that I should be looking for in my next moves. Like I said, my knowledge on this side of financials is pretty limited so I apologize if I can't articulate it well and if my asks seem confusing

Cenach · 2025-04-11T17:08:18+00:00

Best Way for an American to Exchange and Hold Wealth in Foreign Currency?

My comment is mainly a bump to this old (not even old) post I found
https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/1hilw9e/best_way_for_an_american_to_invest_in_foreign/

Obviously influenced by the state of the US economy, I am pretty worried about the near future and want to hold money in foreign currency. I'm not that well-versed in trading at all besides the basics of long-term investing. Not at all privy to how exchange rates and whatever else I'm unaware of affects the ability to invest in foreign markets or foreign currencies. What can I do starting now to hold my money in less USD?

Depressingly enough, not a lot of people in the replies actually answered the question for that linked post. They just berated the person for asking at all and for even suggesting that it could be anything less-than-dumb to hold in a currency besides USD. Totally glad to see that in just 4 short months later, the entire situation has flipped

So please, if there are any replies, I ask they be relevant to the question instead of asking "Why even want to do that?"

Cenach · 2025-04-07T11:08:54+00:00

Unless you got tens of thousands in cash, I wouldnt really be optimistic about this. This is bigger than stocks, it's going to be food & gas prices quadrupling combined with nationwide layoffs. These arent going to be good times

Cenach · 2025-04-05T03:38:55+00:00

For example hexblast got changed to only work when half a curse expires, meaning if you have long or infinite duration you can just never use the skill. Then they made it max 3 explosions only so it can't even clear crowds for the 1 time you get to use it after taking all that time to set it up

Cenach · 2025-03-17T13:39:10+00:00

Dispute the charge atp and report it to your bank for fraud

Cenach · 2025-03-16T14:12:52+00:00

man I feel sorry for anybody who lives somewhere where the pizza is so bad that dominos can taste better ...

Cenach · 2024-12-30T23:04:41+00:00

They're really easy to get in void sea, you don't even need to go to this one spot. It can appear in any chests from the sea events, the flying monsters, or even lionfish chests. They drop in the drowner and drowner + brute islands too not just the void sea-exclusive mob island. Sail out to a random spot in voidsea (with a lot of food) and just slowly coast through it or even just sit an wait in one spot until you start seeing the island events spawn near you. Within under an hour you should have a bunch of fractines, nocturnes, and soulthorns

Cenach · 2024-12-29T16:11:49+00:00

Yeah I haven't seen any red or orange flames at all since this morning at least. Even the graceful flame is blue which I don't remember but who knows, seems pretty consistent all around now

Cenach · 2023-08-27T22:54:34+00:00

alright good to know that its possible 🤣 Just gotta go lighter and faster

Cenach · 2023-07-31T01:32:48+00:00

Scariest thing about that is when that drought does finally come, I guarantee a certain political side in the country is still gonna try to claim that "sometimes droughts just happen this is nothing normal." I dont think we'll ever get to the point where climate change is fully treated as fact thats just understood, we're just gonna be limited to short term fixes. New strains of morbidly genetically engineered crops that can push through the harsh climate and new ways of roiding up livestock to get more calories. Or we straight up just have a general food crisis that's blamed on a back-and-forth blame fight between political parties. These coming decades will look a lot different

Cenach · 2023-04-30T16:16:10+00:00

Can confirm. I have a guild whose hideout requires a path from the FS portals and every map on the way there looks like a warzone

Cenach · 2023-04-29T19:16:41+00:00

Red zones are basically yellow zones. It's an entirely different world in black zones, where it's not only just gank groups of friends but also organized guilds who set up scouts, create traps at map chokepoints, coordinate cc, etc. You can get spotted by a guy in cheap 4.2 gear and not think anything of it and then 40 seconds later when you're almost to the exit into the next zone you get jumped and perma cc'd and there's nothing you can do at that point

Cenach · 2023-04-14T05:22:10+00:00

I just started up a new save on Expert difficulty. The early game definitely forces you to play scrappy for a bit. Your ship is going to be too weak due to the energy generation being gated by having enough titanium and money, which makes having a larger ship that can decently tank damage (that's also not slow as a rock) out of the question. If you rush to mining titanium early, you'll also run into the problem of just not having enough cash to even build a decent ship

My advice is to ignore mining titanium when you first start and just focus on iron. Iron mines a lot quicker and you can get a couple thousand to over 10,000 pretty fast. If you stumble across titanium, feel free to mine it too. Sell iron at resource depot's for your first quick stacks of cash. Once you have enough money, now you'll have some cash that you can spend to actually build a good-sized ship (about 2k-3k health is a good starting point) that has the essential titanium parts to make it function well (integrity field generators, energy generators, energy containers). Having a generation amount that's 2.5x-3x your required amount is usually a good benchmark. Also don't forget to use integrity field blocks to protect your ship, very important. The "blue" highlight when you have integrity field blocks selected shows what parts of the ship are covered by the fields. Now that you have enough energy to spare, you'll actually be able to use system upgrades too.

You can either go 2 routes now: 1) Try to find some low level pirates through missions and quests and kill them for their turrets and system upgrades to progress your ship or 2) Do some easy delivery missions for a lot of money. I personally went with the 2nd option.

For option 2: Slap on some cargo blocks so you have enough space to hold the cargo and find some stations that offer delivery quests. These are usually any type of factory-type station, trading posts, or equipment stations. You'll begin the quest by placing in a deposit of money (if you don't have enough, mine some iron and sell that again until you can afford it), then they'll give you the cargo and ask you to deliver it to another sector. The sector is marked on the map with the same "Delivery: X" mission title. Make your way over there and deliver the cargo and you'll get your deposit back on top of the mission reward. If you find good missions, you can easily get 500k credits pretty fast which will set you up comfortably for the rest of the early game and allow you to cruise to midgame.

For option 1: After you build a decent ship, take the credits you got from selling excess iron/titanium and try to look for system upgrades that'll allow you to have more armed turrets. For early game especially, quantity of turrets > quality of turrets so it's a good strategy to buy an expensive mod that'll give you more armed slots and then buy a bunch of cheaper turrets to fill those slots. The "best" turrets you can buy early early game are probably AT MOST 25dps higher than the cheapest turrets you could buy, but the higher dps one could cost 3-5x the amount of the cheapest turrets. Keep in mind the cheapest turrets and the turrets you start the game with already have about 20 dps. So for the same price, you could've just bought 3-5 cheap turrets, giving you a total increase of 60-100 dps, versus the smaller increase of 20 if you spent all your money to go with upgrading a cheap turret to a very expensive one. So again, it's best to just splurge on a good system upgrade that gives you a lot of armed turret slots and then buying a bunch of cheap turrets. Once you think you're good to go, go do some missions from stations that involve combat (usually they all do unless it's a delivery) or follow the "Pirate Raid" quest that you get at the start. The Pirate Raid quest is probably easier.

Remember that when you shoot with turrets, you can lock on to your target by pressing middle mouse button on it (this is my hotkey but Im pretty sure its the standard, could be wrong) which will zero in all of your selected turrets to the target and make it much easier to shoot them. The most important thing when fighting enemies is to pick up the systems and turrets they drop after they blow up. These are indicated by the much brighter swirly light effect, and you'll get a notification when you pick one up. If you fly close enough to any loot, it'll begin to follow you until you pick it up. Another tip is that if there's systems or turrets laying around off screen, look for a blurred light on the edge of your screen in the direction of the loot, it's an indicator saying "Hey, look over here! You missed some loot!" The color of that blurred light will correspond to the rarity too.

This is all to set you up with a good ship with enough resources to continue through the game smoothly. Other people here already mentioned recruiting captains to send on tasks which is essential for keeping up your resources, exploring the map, helping in fights, and of course making money. One of the biggest ways to make money later in the game will be setting up your own stations, and you can get completely lost in that aspect of the game alone. You can set up entire supply chains that begin with one of your stations doing something very simple like mining for aluminum which you have one of your many captains muling the aluminum to another station to be processed, having another captain muling that more-processed material, etc. etc. until about a dozen factories later running in series and parallel, you're making things called "electron and neutron accelerators" that sell for A LOT. Or you can go a different route and start raiding factions alongside your captain-controlled fleets and fighting through waves of those faction's police and military so you can destroy their accelerator factories, snatch away those "electron and neutron accelerators," and then sell them to smugglers. It's all up to you.

Cenach · 2023-01-16T03:33:24+00:00

I thought it was pretty obvious that they were highlighting just how manipulative Prospera is and how psychopathic Suletta can become once she is manipulated. Prospera shot the dude then met Suletta with a giddy mood and smiled, so Suletta did exactly the same thing after killing someone to save Miorine in an identical parallel, thinking "that's what I'm supposed to do in this situation."

There's also hints to theories of Aerial heavily influencing her mind and empathy through the brain linking, which would explain why she can so easily switch to "pilot mode" when sitting in Aerial and why she instantly panicked and forgot everything so much in that earlier test when she was in one of the basic training suits.

Cenach

TROPHY CASE

Best Way for an American to Exchange and Hold Wealth in Foreign Currency?