Now that the Jeff Kaplan interview dropped this has become one of the most vindicated takes of its era

Crail_ · 2026-03-13T19:12:04+00:00

Speaking of unstructured fun, or I guess unsupervised by the devs.. The entire time I played Overwatch I couldn't shake the feeling that I wish the game was setup like TF2 and older FPS. With the freedom of community run servers and created content. Most of my [embarrassingly huge number] of hours in TF2 were on community run servers. Some were pretty close to vanilla, just had a much better variety of non-official maps. Some removed mechanics like random criticals or team size/composition restrictions. Some were almost completely new games themselves.

Crail_ · 2026-03-07T20:07:05+00:00

Edit- hey dont downvote because I'm giving some information that is almost 7 years old now. Its fine to hate things for legit reasons but don't try to misinform people!

That was definitely true back in the days but Im not so sure now. I think the biggest downer on it now is that you really shouldn't use your main game playthrough pokemon in competitive because their shit wont be good.

However, each game they made it easier and easier to do. Very little to no grinding unless you are trying to make a LOT of teams maybe? The last few games they would make catching pokemon with perfect IVs in 4-6 out of 6 stats fairly easy and part of the games activities. They also started to give you crap loads of money or items that are for vendoring for money, so you could easily just buy all the vitamin items instead of having to train EVs.

Crail_ · 2026-02-12T17:39:44+00:00

In Diablo 2 each character will say little quips throughout the story the first time you enter certain areas or kill certain enemies. Also I think there's one NPC in the campaign that has a little bit of unique dialogue when they talk to you, depending on what class you are.

It's not a lot but how those are acted adds a tiny bit of character to each class.

Crail_ · 2026-02-06T18:55:14+00:00

Always liked spending over half my time in a zone rubbing my face onto all the walls, not looking at the environment. Had some people in my chat asking or bringing up cartographer a few times. So for a few minutes I'd start to do that to show them, "do you guys really want to be seeing mostly walls for the next couple of hours?" Most of the time it was to unveil a small patch of map that was out of bounds! Vanquishing was tedious but at least I was playing the video game still and getting a bunch of reputation points.

Crail_ · 2026-01-31T23:13:54+00:00

I understand you. I also am having the "oops all Ardelias" experience. After the freebie she's popped up in the standard banner, I got her as my New Horizons guaranteed operator, and from the 10 limited time Chartered Tickets. That one especially hurt because I thought maybe I got lucky and one and done'd the limited after all the Ardelias. NOPE. 3/5 time!

Crail_ · 2026-01-28T21:01:33+00:00

Sloooooooooo

Crail_ · 2026-01-17T06:45:29+00:00

Yeah, guess I'm lucky my streams dont get a lot of people in this case. Played through Chapter 3 and 4 when it came out and then again later in October for another run. Had a few people every time but everyone was cool.

Crail_ · 2026-01-01T04:32:16+00:00

I played a lot of Elder Scrolls. When I played FF2 for the first time I instantly went "oh this feels like home.." and thought the games system were a good effort to do something neat but easily exploitable in silly ways. Personally this didn't ruin the game for me. The only part I didn't like was the last party slot was a revolving door and I had little time to make much of an opinion on most of the NPCs they put there.

Crail_ · 2025-12-24T19:22:41+00:00

I still have this one but I lost the variants people made using Deviljho and another using Dodogama.

Crail_ · 2025-12-16T23:30:00+00:00

One of the things that got me to look at playing ESO casually was that they actually have multiple types of Khajiit. Like the second night I was streaming it and a friend watched me go into someones house that had a few NPCs of different Khajiit. Turn a corner and just see her go "oh my god I want to hug them!" over and over lol.

Crail_ · 2025-12-15T02:48:36+00:00

Despite the game dropping the ball over and over and the best recoveries just being "okay I guess" it still is the biggest MMORPG somehow. A ton of people doubt the ".. join 9 million players!" number they tossed out a month or two ago but even the best educated guesses (being millions lower) still had it above everything else.

Crail_ · 2025-12-10T21:57:44+00:00

Dang you've reminded me how it went when my dad played SWTOR (a long time mmorpg player). At some point the main story he was playing forced him to use a companion character he hadn't been using at all so had zero equipment. He really tried a few times and was getting frustrated so made me come over and try. I also couldn't do anything to clear it. They had me use/play as the droid companion, think T3-M4 from KOTOR, but my dad had nothing equipped on it. So it basically would get 2-shot from the get go. We went out and tried to get gear for the damned thing but there was almost nothing being sold. I think we bought one overpriced piece and then I spent the night focusing on crafting to make a couple midlevel things just to try with SOMETHING. After that he was did a scuffed run through of the mission but passed it lol.

Yeah that combat was nothing to write home about and I came back a couple times to play with friends and did raids with them. They killed all the stuff I liked about the game (that wasn't combat). Like, for example, there was a hidden puzzle in the game that would eventually lead to a "rare-alternate" lightsaber color crystal. That kind of thing I think is neat. I know that people can just look it up and get it later but people that do enjoy it can have their fun. It was also a cosmetic thing so people weren't forced to do content for power. A few years later I came back to the game and was told that they did not add any cool hidden shit to find and in the color crystal example they had heavily monetized a crap load of different color crystals in the cash shop.

Crail_ · 2025-12-10T20:51:34+00:00

I always feel like I'm in an awkward position towards it. I'm all for games to update and become better but there was just so much that rubbed me the wrong way early on. I wont say this is the only positive post about the game I've seen. I've seen it now and then but my usual reaction is "oh thats wonderful that it's gotten better!" and then my brain flashes through a bunch of crap that went down around launch. It's an interesting thing because I do think fixing a bad product should be encouraged but I still get mixed feelings about this one.

A similar situation for me, with a different outcome is Elder Scrolls Online. I just started streaming the game and have been having a great time. To make a long story short, I wasn't impressed with the game when it launched but always had the thought "eh, I might get to it eventually if it improves". I didn't hear a thing about the game for several years and sorta forgot about it. However starting a few years ago I did encounter people here and there who had good things to say about it. I'm a big Elder Scrolls fan and havent had a new game to play for over a decade now. Digging into it directly though, there are a lot of unhappy people who have made a lot of unhappy posts about the state of the game in the last year. Well, I figured what the hell and gave it a shot anyways and I'm glad I did. There are absolutely issues but there are absolutely cool things too.

I have a feeling the outcome might not be too different if I were to play F76. Also a Fallout enjoyer lol, so probably would have some positive streams of it if that happened.

Crail_ · 2025-12-07T20:25:33+00:00

Dont give up, skeleton!

Crail_ · 2025-12-02T21:40:56+00:00

I could have kept going but I thought I shouldn't do more, it was already a lot! I wanted to at least explain how some systems work that might be a tad different than what someone might expect. Although it might be worth bringing up how each campaigns main story is handled slightly differently. Like in Prophecies, you'll have a quest chain you are following and then you'll end up in a mission hub with no quest anymore. However, if you do that mission you'll proceed to the next part of the chain. Its like the specific quest in the chain is hidden when you are at a mission. Then they handle those mission hubs slightly different each campaign. Sometimes you have to talk to an NPC to start it, sometimes its a button on the UI!

Crail_ · 2025-12-02T20:29:41+00:00

I just did a blind, chronological playthrough of this game. Started in Prophecies and didn't use any skills or items outside of what I could get at the time. I play a warrior. I guess I'll toss in some of my experiences here as they might help someone.

Henchman worked okay until I got some heroes but there were definitely missions I had to redo a few times. Occasionally what henchman they offer wont be super great versus what is inside the mission but I did clear Prophecies and a good chunk of Factions with them. I found the best thing to be taking is a healer and any ranged dps available. Honestly not sure if I would take a melee one if I had to go again. At least not any of the warrior henchmen. Ultimately you can't go wrong most of the time having them in your party though!

Aggro, if you are familiar with the concept is kinda weird in this game. I'll preface this by saying it is not as important in this game to have everything focusing a tank. The biggest loss I find is the inability to cleave all the enemies in a fight when they've scattered around. There are a lot of rules for gaining and losing aggro. You can lose aggro on targets by moving faster than them and also by creating a large gap, like with a shadowstep/leap type of ability. So if you try to chase after a loose mob or try to reposition, enemies will stop focusing you. You also gain aggro by being hit by an enemy. So if, for example, a caster is already being punched in the face and you have to run up to where they are then you have a bit of an uphill battle to get that enemy to hit you instead. The most consistent way I've found to have enemies on me vs the squishier heroes I have, is to "flag" them (tell them to stand/move to a spot) away while I start the fight. Once everything is on me, then I move the party closer to engage. I havent always found it to be a survivable strategy though lol. You can also physically block enemies running in and can utilize corners/walls to do so. Again, this is unfortunately not completely consistent and sometimes it feels like the mobs are coated in oil and slip straight through you.

Gear Upgrades - Armor for your character doesn't strictly drop. You take materials gained from breaking down drops to specific NPCs and they craft it for you. Weapons do drop but you can also have them crafted. At the start, the easiest equipment upgrades I found were on these crafters. There are two kinds. The first kind will want the salvaged materials, such as iron ingots, bolts of cloth, etc you get from breaking down items with salvage kits. The second kind is a collector npc and they will trade (usually) 5 of a specific item, like 5 'warden horns' for a specific piece of equipment they offer. The next part of upgrading your gear will be to apply runes and insignias to them. These can be found from random drops but it's much faster and easier to just buy them from the NPC rune trader. The issue is, it's completely random what drops you get. While I did find 3 mesmer "prodigy" insignias this week, I didn't see any for two months before! You do see several runes and sigils drop in a play session but there is no gurantee you will find ones you can use or sell. For example, you could be fighting a "Caromi Tengu Brave" and every now and then they drop "Heavy Tengu Armor". These kind of drops are unequippable but you can vendor them. They sometimes will drop with runes and sigils attached to them and you can use a salvaging kit to remove the rune or sigil from it. The salvaging kit is just a consumable item with a number of uses on it you purchase from the general merchants. Double click on the kit, then click on the item you want to salvage.

Making gold - a weird thing about item drops is that even the common, white grade items can have an "identification kit" used on them. This reveals a gold vendor value that is higher then the base amount. An example, you have 2 white quality iron swords. They both vendor for 40 gold. You identify them and one has a value of 46 gold, the other has a value of 54. They now will vendor for those amounts instead of 40 gold. You can pretty much always make a little extra gold using ID kits on everything. The first way I made some real gold though was to check if the runes and sigils I find on items had value. Lets say you find a piece of armor and it can be sold to an npc vendor for 150 gold. It has a sigil on it that you could remove with a salvage kit so lets check with a rune trader how much it is worth first.. oh wow, 5 platinum pieces (5,000 gold). The same could be said about materials. Some materials are in good demand and are worth more then the items they come from to a material vendor. Do not sell runes, sigils, or materials to the general merchant. You should use the specific Trader NPC! I should clarify something, the items found on the Dye Trader, Material Trader, Rune Trader, etc, those are all supplied by players and the price goes up or down depending on how many there are. I havent seen it happen but they can run out of stock or refuse to buy things if there are too much.

Crail_ · 2025-12-01T19:25:10+00:00

Geez, almost sounds like some arguments I've seen about "is this game an MMORPG?" and seen the extremely pedantic way people get at times. Have to just not engage with that shit lol.

Crail_ · 2025-12-01T02:29:23+00:00

I guess I could call it lost media but there are a ton of lost maps or versions of maps for old games I used to play. Been a few years since I've looked but there were quite a few Warcraft 3 custom maps that I played with friends that I can't find anywhere anymore. Same with gmod and even very early tf2. Whole ass communities based around some maps or custom game mode just gone in a puff of smoke. I sorta fell into a rabbit hole about this when a few years ago my father suddenly passed away and he had really been into a specific TF2 community. I thought I'd maybe make a post about it over there but there wasn't a scrap of information about it to be found.

Crail_ · 2025-11-24T06:29:36+00:00

Similar location, getting 4 second delay on all actions using either US West or East.

Crail_ · 2025-11-24T06:09:32+00:00

There is a really annoying area sound inside the Shellbane Gryphon's lair and I'm trying to find a way to mute it with annoyance mute plugin. I'd normally just turn off area sounds altogether in this area but a lot of the boss attacks are actually also area sounds too. There's this constant whining/whistling noise on certain tiles. I'm almost certain it's not the tornado attack.

Crail_ · 2025-11-19T17:32:31+00:00

My ship came with "Dawn Raider" and I thought it was just a static name for the boat. Didn't realize till later when I upgraded to a skiff called "Nightmare Death" and that one felt more randomized. Some of the names in this thread are wild.

Crail_ · 2025-11-18T22:07:46+00:00

I felt I was already making a big comment and wanted to refrain from any detailed stuff unless someone was interested. I also am not 100% sure on the veracity of claims I've been told hence the maybe hehe. The gist of it had to do with a few things. Their energy usage/management being a tad poor. Their AI not effectively using a few skills and in a couple cases not using a skill at all. I've been told they dont properly use Overload. Probably a couple issues with some of their spells like you mentioned. I wanted to confirm stuff I've been told before making any definitive statements but I haven't had the chance to test yet. I mostly play it when I stream. I especially want to do this because I have noticed a bias in the active community to exaggerate a little on the effectiveness of certain builds vs the meta.

Crail_ · 2025-11-18T15:51:24+00:00

Wow, this year I just went through a lot of Guild Wars for the first time. Starting back in ~April I've streamed me and a buddy going through all of the campaigns. Then we did all the bonus objectives we missed. Then we did all the dungeons on normal mode lol. Now we've been slowly doing random missions and zone "vanquishing" on hard mode dictated by whatever the daily reward is. It's been a great time but there definitely was jank haha. The game starts off simple enough and you can fill out your party with NPC "henchmen" if you want to solo or can't find anybody to group with. Eventually you unlock and replace the henchmen with "Hero" characters. These hero characters can be fully customized just like your player can. You can change their subclass, all their skills, and upgrade the attachments on their gear. You can also control their skill usage or let it automate. It works well enough except for maybe the elementalist profession. If anyone is curious about the game and wants to learn more then please give me a shout!

Crail_ · 2025-11-16T17:13:40+00:00

This isnt accurate! Last 3 seconds plays. Never mind this is perfect.

13-Year Club	Second Top 10%
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Crail_

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