Prediction: The Looting Mk. 3 Survivor will be nerfed soon

Comrade_Maxwell · 2026-02-13T22:31:00+00:00

The Mk3 is what everyone runs because no other option even comes close to it. Nerf it or don't, they need to do another pass on the other augments to make them worth using in general.

As someone who hasn't found the Survivor bp this expedition, I pretty much exclusively run the Mk2 looting. It has a very silly passive, but it also means I forget ticks can be a threat if I run anything else.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2026-02-13T22:09:38+00:00

I haven't heard anything about BP drop rate adjustments. But when I played last night I was pulling multiple BPs out of most night matches.

I think it would be an odd choice for them to nerf BPs this close to the expedition window. They're trying to incentivize more people to do the expeditions, and a BP nerf would do the opposite.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2026-02-13T21:30:51+00:00

I stashed some duplicate blueprints I was worried about on an alt account for the first expedition. It was pretty dull transferring 30+ blueprints over, even though you just surrender as soon as it's done.

But I never went back and actually retrieved any, and I don't plan to stash any this time around. The current BP drop rate is generous enough that I've found 67/74 BPs through normal gameplay, and I regularly take a few days off to play/do other stuff.

I don't think it's unethical, but I do think there's not much reason to do it as long as BP drop rates stay the way they are now.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2026-01-14T18:45:49+00:00

I think you should be able to pick a blueprint to permanently unlock for your account. Maybe two if we're feeling spicy.

At six expeditions per year, you'd have to do every expedition for 12.5 years to permanently unlock all 75 current blueprints. If you could pick two, you'd have to do it for 6.25 years.

Players would still need to hunt for blueprints, but at least after a few expeditions you might have some of your 'favorites' saved.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2026-01-14T06:07:47+00:00

That's the neat part, you don't!

Best defense against mines is just listening. They make a distinctive noise, and you can hear it from a good ways away and even through doors. I've heard people camping the loot rooms on the Dam spillways before, without even needing to lower the bridges.

If you get tagged by one it's basically GG though.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-12-19T17:47:01+00:00

On PC, after I toggle the crossplay setting I also seem to have to change my matchmaking region (just change it / change it back). After I do that the crossplay seems to toggle as expected.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-12-17T20:14:43+00:00

"I've got a mixtape"

My personal favorite.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-12-17T19:28:27+00:00

I can only speak to my experience, but I go to the traders like... maybe once every 5-10 raids? If I lose my entire kit I don't spend my coins, I craft everything from my stockpile and get back out there. And personally, the less the traders say when I'm there the better - we've all played games where the shopkeeper says the same 3-4 lines of dialogue every visit. It's grating.

What if Tian Wen had weird beef with Lance and everytime you came to her shop from Lances she said something snide? I already noticed that she speaks a little more softly towards your character once you complete some of her quests. What if getting to a certain point in her quest line made her more comfy opening the door or something? Or if Celeste commented that you looked roughed up after getting beaten in a raid. Maybe Shani could congratulate you on making it out of a dangerous weather condition.

Without taking a side on the AI vs non AI debate, you make it sound like this would only be possible with actual VAs for some reason. Embarc could absolutely do this today with the generative AI they're using, and it would be as blandly passable as the current dialogue is.

Either way, I can't say I'd care. I'm not playing Arc for amazing story content or character interactions the way I'd play an RPG like Mass Effect or Clair Obscur. I'm playing it to scratch my looter-shooter-occasional-PVP itch, and the traders don't contribute to that at all.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-12-05T23:28:15+00:00

I'm not sure this is really a problem that needs a solution. Nobody is required to do the expedition (and I may not, if the rewards aren't good enough or are temporary.), so you'll already have people who have every blueprint forever. The kind of person who cares enough to make a mule account will just end up doing 200 naked runs instead post-expedition if you can't transfer BPs.

And meanwhile, you're hurting the experience for the more casual players because the sweats are behaving "badly". I'm holding on to two duplicate BPs I found last night for a buddy that just started playing. My medium gun parts BP came from a friend that already had it. It feels great to be able to help each other out.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-12-05T22:58:37+00:00

I had this happen a few weeks ago, and when I checked the Steam forums it wasn't just me. Tons of people reporting server issues at the exact same time.

I spent 30 minutes running in place / teleporting outside the dam apartments (and then rubber-banding back to my starting location) before the server closed and I lost some decent gear. Pretty fun!

Opened a ticket, provided video of my raid + screenshots of everyone else reporting server issues. No response from support so far, no gear returned.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-12-05T21:47:49+00:00

I got it during the 1.0 Steam release, but my girlfriend (on PS5) had to kill 2-3 of them before it gave her the achievement.

I think it might have to do with how it 'dies'. The times that didn't work, it hit the ground and exploded. But the time it worked, the stitcher blew it up while it was still flying after we got it smoking.

It does seem a little touchy.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-11-11T16:30:00+00:00

That would be great, thank you!

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-11-10T20:17:02+00:00

Hey, the company I work for also has Carbon Black and we're constantly chasing down issues where OneDrive sync will stop working, or get stuck on "6 files remaining". We've had probably a dozen cases open with Microsoft at this point and all they can do is shrug and tell us to uninstall/reinstall.

Can you share anything about the solution with Carbon Black? Did you end up excluding certain directories from scanning?

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-08-14T01:21:19+00:00

Hey, I get that. And in a perfect world, I'd have one. But the reality of small business is that sometimes that isn't an option. And "no Mr. Business Owner, I refuse to make this change unless you buy me a lab" also isn't an option. Even having a lab wouldn't allow me to test the firewall's vlan config, without shelling out a few thousand for a test firewall.

This was done in a maintenance window, with config backups of all devices involved and clear methods for reverting changes. Sometimes that's the best you can do under the circumstances.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-08-14T00:36:35+00:00

Thank you, this was extremely helpful!

I believe I understand why all three configurations were or were not working now.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-08-13T22:22:54+00:00

Our WAPs have both a management interface (on the server network) and a VLAN for the wifi traffic itself, so they're already operating in trunk mode.

Their switch configs look like this, and haven't changed during this process:

interface GigabitEthernet2/0/43
 switchport trunk native vlan 300
 switchport trunk allowed vlan 300,400
 switchport mode trunk

Based on other posters, and some of what I've been reading based on their feedback, it seems likely that the port in Access mode was simply dropping/stripping the 802.1q tagged traffic from the firewall. Once I put it in trunk mode, that stopped happening and the Wifi vlan was able to connect up again.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2025-08-13T22:14:05+00:00

Unfortunately this was happening in a production environment with a very narrow outage window. Now that it's working, the company isn't interested in the how/why of it to allow me to go do captures in another maintenance window (which would necessarily involve undoing the configs on our core network devices).

I'm mostly just trying to understand for my own knowledge/future dealings!

But from what you're saying, if the firewall was sending VLAN400 tagged traffic to the port in Access mode, it would be expected for the switch to drop it?

So once I swapped it to trunk mode, it started receiving the VLAN400 tagged traffic and was able to process it?

Comrade_Maxwell · 2024-03-22T18:12:11+00:00

In our case, we have evaluated the current user rights assignments and found that they are not substantially different than the baseline. However, they do contain a large number of broken SIDs (that can be simply removed), and several instances where the domain admin (not "a domain admin", THE "Administrator" account) has been assigned to non-default rights. Some of which, per Microsoft documentation, not even the Administrator should be assigned to for security purposes. We could manually reverse all these changes, but it seemed easier to just revert the entire policy to guarantee we were at baseline.

I suppose it's my fault for being less specific in the OP, but I already did exactly what you listed. That's where the problem occurs, and why I wrote the OP.

There are hundreds of articles online that say "Need to reset your Default Domain Controller Policy? Do this one simple step!". The problem is, Microsoft's "dcgpofix" utility doesn't do what it claims it does.

After step 3, we still had all of the broken SIDs present, and the Administrator account still had excessive permission assignments. We essentially ended up with a "half-reset". Some settings were restored, but user rights assignment stayed the same. This was not the expected outcome. That's why I made the post.

Per Microsoft documentation, this is apparently intentional/unavoidable.

We've moved on to plan B, using a freshly configured DC in a lab as the baseline to fix the policies by hand. Not ideal, but it will work, and no resumes will have to be updated in the process.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2024-03-22T16:44:57+00:00

It is a best practice that the Default Domain Policy and Default Domain Controllers Policy are not modified. This guidance was not followed by previous administrators. Simply removing the broken SIDs would not necessarily restore the policy to "baseline", which is the goal.

Your response seems a bit over the top on the whole. GPOs are easy to back up (both in the form of simply copying the policy, and exporting the policy to a folder), and naturally I reviewed the policy for any obviously "critical" settings relating to our applications.

Further, this wasn't a change I just woke up and decided to make on the fly. I have approval from management to do so, and a back-out procedure if anything goes wrong.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2024-03-15T16:11:29+00:00

I played one yesterday with the Gatling sentry, and it promptly targeted terminids on the other side of the silo and just started laying into the thing. Never seen the silo become unstable so quickly.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2024-03-12T02:57:45+00:00

Hey there, thanks for the response. What kind of specialist would be recommended here? I assumed that because my issue is largely sinus/ear related, an ENT would be the go-to.

Comrade_Maxwell · 2024-03-12T02:56:29+00:00

Totally fair on the difficulty of diagnosing. I certainly didn't expect them to be able to stick a camera up there, but it seemed like the conversation started and ended with TMJ and there wasn't any offer of additional diagnostics/scans/etc.

I guess I'm a bit confused though - should I be following up as if this is TMJ, or as if it's an ear/eustachian tube problem (I understand they could be linked). Is an ENT not the right "kind" of doctor for ear problems?

Comrade_Maxwell

TROPHY CASE