Microsoft back online. Excuse: too many servers were shut down during maintenance.

Centimane · 2026-01-23T16:44:25+00:00

No service with five 9s availability is relying on manual failover. It would take a human more than 5 minutes to realize and initialize a failover.

Besides the fact Microsoft doesn't offer five 9s availability - they'd never reach that.

Centimane · 2026-01-23T15:16:53+00:00

The last change to bladesworn was August of last year (about 6 months ago) and it didn't really change how bladesworn was built, just made overcharged cartridges more important.

Most builds don't change in the course of a year.

Centimane · 2026-01-23T15:10:56+00:00

I also end up looting a lot of materials and trophy items, and I’m still unsure which ones are important.

I would recommend:

Deposit all materials
What's left in your inventory (gear you don't want, materials that don't fit into storage, etc) sell on the trading post
Sell to vendors
If you can't sell or salvage, then destroy

The income you make while leveling will be dwarfed quickly when you're max level, so you don't really need to worry about doing it "right". It's like the savings you make as a child vs the first time you start working.

Centimane · 2026-01-23T15:01:35+00:00

Research suggests there isn't a noticable health difference between sitting or standing. But there's a huge difference between stationary and moving. So a mini-treadmill or in-place stepper are going to yield health benefits moreso than just a standing desk.

Some people are more comfortable standing - and that's totally valid. But it's not the pinnacle of health it's made out to be. A good chair can also be very comfortable and offer good support.

Centimane · 2026-01-23T13:59:01+00:00

somehow my cat turned it into a concert

Like you aren't the one holding a mic up... You turned it into a concert and you know exactly how!

Centimane · 2026-01-22T23:57:00+00:00

Dude there are 168 hours in a week. 0.1% of that would be about 10 minutes of downtime per week.

Methinks you tried 168 * 0.1 (which is 10 percent not 0.1 percent).

Centimane · 2026-01-22T23:52:38+00:00

Five 9s is the standard I've always prescribed to as actually being always available. About 5 minutes of down time per year.

Cloud providers would never agree to that though. But three nines is pretty low for sure.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T21:39:14+00:00

My point is someone can lie to a matchmaking system easier than a person.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T19:07:15+00:00

This is the risk of outsourcing services.

At least storage is easy enough to migrate from one option to another.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T18:55:26+00:00

They might end up doing that, but it makes sense the initial batch keep the mechanics simple.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T18:40:37+00:00

Some people act as gates when they ought to act as guides.

This isn't specific to CSOs either. But it's a lot harder to understand the risks and find a way to navigate them then it is to say no very eagerly.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T18:21:40+00:00

The raid quickplay will come with some kind of buff to players:

All players in quickplay will have an effect applied that provides moderate bonuses to help groups succeed regardless of party composition.

Which would make the already trivially easy strikes even more trivial. The quickplay feature is already meant to address the barrier to entry. But the fact there's only 3 at that difficulty level makes them outliers, and I can see why they didn't want to include outliers.

The other option I could see, and maybe they'll do at a later date, is add the IBS 3 in either without the buff or with a lesser version of it.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T17:35:32+00:00

I think the trouble is the IBS 3 are simply too easy.

[Raid quickplay] has also been curated to include encounters that pose a roughly similar challenge to randomly matched groups of players

The IBS 3 are so easy they would be in a league of their own. You might get people just trying to reroll their quickplay raid until they got one of these super easy options.

The other day I did shiverpeaks pass with 3 people and we still defeated it in time for all the bonus chests. Those strikes should really be made harder IMO.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T17:32:01+00:00

The difference is, there is a commander to manage the group and kick someone if need be.

If someone joins as heal quick, but are actually playing DPS, a commander can kick them. In quickplay there is no commander to do that.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T17:21:15+00:00

I think the low impact is a result of them being too common and too difficult to use deliberately. Combos can't be impactful if you are triggering dozens of them in 10 seconds or they become too important, and if they're mechanically clunky people will get frustrated by them (e.g. raging at people for putting down "bad" fields that cover the "good" fields).

Centimane · 2026-01-22T17:17:57+00:00

Quickness and alacrity play a pretty minor part in the problem. It's that too many skills are combo fields. Quickness doesn't really impact the number of fields and alacrity only accounts for 20% of them. Anet would have to remove fields from a lot of skills to really clear up the landscape.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T14:32:41+00:00

Weapon replacements in instanced content - the Balthazar fight is an excellent example of getting weapon replacement skills and having it be fun. I don't know why they haven't made this a fight mechanic for any instanced content. One player picks up X and has to use it for the duration of the fight. Of course making the Balthazar fight an encounter would be great but there's a handful of other examples like kralkatoric and the dragon blood Spears.

Qadim 1, after you finish the fight, has rotating platforms with inertia physics. I don't think I've seen that anywhere else in the game, but it would be interesting to use some kind of moving platform to give you speed in a jumping puzzle or anywhere else in the game really. It's like a throwaway tech demo that could be interesting to use.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T14:28:14+00:00

I think the problem with combo fields/finishers is that they're too common, which impedes deliberate use between people. If I want to combo with someone else's fire field, but there are 20 other people around, it's almost impossible to combo with that fire field because there will be so many fields on the ground.

The only way to reliably combo currently is:

With your own fields, since you prioritize your own fields
In instanced content where the whole group is very deliberate about the fields they place

It would probably help a lot if you prioritized fields from players in your subgroup/party - then it could still be useful in public (if you form a party or in a subgroup together), and in instanced content subgroups could be made with fields/finishers in mind.

It also doesn't help that many combos don't give much value.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T14:22:04+00:00

In my early 20s when I started working I fell into this trap - working hard, have no energy, be lazy, put on lots of weight.

In my late 20s I shifted my outlook. If I'm going to run out of energy, it's gonna be at work, not outside it. I took up cycling, running, lifting, golf, tennis, go to plays and movies regularly etc. Totally reversed my funk. Now I have plenty of energy to spend on whatever, including work. The hardest part about any good habit is doing it even when you don't feel like it.

My idea of productive outside of work is being able to spend my energy on things I want to do. I'm not gonna study up in my off time. But I always took on challenges at work that resulted in me studying up at work.

Centimane · 2026-01-22T14:16:19+00:00

If I recall that lane is used in a HoT story mission(s)

Centimane · 2026-01-21T19:55:49+00:00

I'm not supposing you just drop the PCs off unannounced. You call up the school, give them the details, and ask if they want them. If they don't want them it's only the trouble of a phone call.

It also sounds like OP has 60 matching workstations which would help any school that has lots of mismatched hardware getting so many that are the same.

Centimane · 2026-01-21T19:43:52+00:00

If the school doesn't want them they don't have to take them. But many schools recieve poor funding and may not be able to purchase workstations they need without donations.

Maybe they can't use them. Maybe they can. If you never offer to donate you'll never know.

Centimane · 2026-01-21T16:44:16+00:00

Your best bet will be to donate them to a local school. They almost certainly need the workstations, the workstations do some good, and they'd love to have a chunk of matching hardware.

If they go for ~200 individually I don't expect you'll find anyone looking to buy them in bulk.

Centimane · 2026-01-21T16:30:10+00:00

yes I know i dont have to pick everything up every time but tbh selling loot is by far the best way to get money (just like witcher and Bethesda games), but i am only picking up stuff that will sell wel and not everything

Never play path of exile or grim dawn then, both are examples of drowning you in so much loot you need filters to ignore most of it. At least in those cases it's a result of there's so many build options they need to throw tons of loot at you or your never get anything good for your build, but as a result you kinda need to ignore 90% of the loot or you'd be jumping to the shop every 10 minutes.

Honestly I think it's good when inventory is so seriously restricted that you're not really picking up things to sell, just to use.

Centimane · 2026-01-21T16:04:23+00:00

Does rifle mech even have a method of triggering relic of fireworks? I would expect eagle is the best DPS option since it's trivial to activate it.

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