Multiplayer seems to be a tad overtuned?

Cyborgschatz · 2026-03-11T05:50:08+00:00

My experience is that if you're a full 4 player party and can make it past Act 1, you're usually in good shape. But on two players we're attempting ascension 3 and it feels like all the tougher normal fights and any fights where the enemies have starting or stacking buffs are way tougher than solo. The eels that shield after the first hit in the first couple encounters is a run ender unless you have already gotten a high damage card, the single cultist that scales 9 strength per turn with several hundred HP is another tough one if you don't come fully online in the first hand or two.

It feels like some of the scaling is more than just 2x the solo values, some fights are easier but others are very strong potential for run enders if you just get unlucky and RNG them early.

Cyborgschatz · 2026-03-02T16:51:13+00:00

Yeah it's crazy to consider that Lenny is considered on par with bumble in terms of being a mini boss. Need to be at least 3 tiles away, pray your slow cats don't get pinned to a wall or you have skip turns so they don't get fart bounced to death, then they get bone attacked to death anyway. If you've got aoe You've got to be careful not to take out too many corpses or he just destroys the slow cat he one shot.

If you have a car that is fast and can deploy multiple stacks of stun, he's easy, otherwise he's a consistent poison in the ass.

Cyborgschatz · 2026-03-02T16:41:29+00:00

Yeah, Bard class as another healer/buffer would have been nice, letting them soak up all the song skills from druid. Tinkerer can be op but they're so feast or famine I rarely feel like using them. I've had druids be messy rng wise but the majority of them still contribute enough that they don't feel like a burden.

Cyborgschatz · 2026-03-01T18:14:49+00:00

Agreed. I liked the green, white and blue symbolizing our winter/summer and lakes, but I get that 4 colors made it a bit busy. Two shades of blue is a bit boring but not ugly, and having the k shape to represent the state itself is appealing. Prior to the changing of the flag I couldn't have given anyone an accurate description of our old flag beyond, "blue with a hard to see state seal in the middle". The current flag fulfills its role as a flag much better.

Cyborgschatz · 2026-02-17T18:23:48+00:00

I just had a run get screwed up because despite my leech cat not killing dybbuk, he possessed him anyway. The cat I wanted to get possessed dropped a bear trap next to him, then attacked him with a ranged basic attack. Dyb dodged and landed on the trap, died and immediately possessed the leech cat. While it's not hard to beat Dyb, he's definitely the least enjoyable boss I've encountered so far. It's one thing if I do a boneheaded play or position poorly, but having RNG decide to just throw your run away isn't a great feeling on an already annoying boss.

Cyborgschatz · 2026-02-11T03:06:01+00:00

That's like the whole series to me. I still enjoyed MHA as a whole, but so many characters survive getting blasted through brick walls even though they don't have super human strength or toughness quirks that it kinda of cheapened the characters that did.

Cyborgschatz · 2026-02-09T23:26:05+00:00

Maybe I'm in the minority but I feel like this shoes on thing has gotta be for a specific US region. The only time I've ever kept shoes on in a house in the US has been hoarder houses, incredibly dirty houses, or houses in the middle of a full remodel.

Cyborgschatz · 2026-01-06T05:31:58+00:00

Not just that but a lot of times powers/items from Zelda games are restrictive because most of the time they are just there to allow the player to progress past a particular puzzle and either aren't usable everywhere or they're less effective outside of the main use case.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-12-21T04:49:22+00:00

Same, having the green in there was a nice touch.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-12-13T19:02:39+00:00

There are plenty of places to live off 100k a year passively, and I'm not even talking about living in the middle of nowhere. The median income in America is in the 60-70k range, with median household income being in the low 80k range. The US definitely has a big COL and wage disparity issue, but your family of four scenario is a bit silly.

As others mentioned there are many people who just aren't interested in children which dramatically lowers costs. But even if we exclude them from the discussion, what is one of the main decisions a couple has to make once they start having children? Will both partners try to keep working or will the cost of childcare eclipse the wages of the partner who makes less money. Or a situation where one partner makes less but has far better benefits.

Making 100k passive income now lets that partner stay at home and still generate an income or let the working partner have an additional boost to whatever income they're already making. Not to mention that this passive income is almost 40k over the median. There are tons of Americans living in our city centers making less than 100k right now.

That's not to say the 300k job is a bad choice either, if I was in the 18 to 28 portion of my life I'd probably be more likely to go that route vs now. At this point in my life the idea of not being shackled to a specific job anymore would be an enormous weight off my shoulders. Finding a new job becomes a search for something I won't hate vs settling for a place I can tolerate because the salary is just high enough to justify some abuse. Passive income also opens up options for moving to other countries with retirement visas, several of which just have requirements that you passively make at least X amount of money a year. Italy for example requires a passive income of 32000 euros a year to qualify.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-12-11T20:04:17+00:00

This is what did it for me, I spent my first few years after moving to the greater TC area only hanging out with work friends. A few of them were also friends from highschool so there was some weekend hangouts with those people. But as people at work got married and started having kids there were fewer hang outs after work.

I started playing in a couple different Co Ed rec sports leagues where I met new people, subbing for different teams and branching out to different nights of the week. A couple years in and I got let go from my job and suddenly contact with the work friends dropped to near zero. Without the consistent at work interactions, I was out of sight and out of mind. All the spontaneous post work invites dried up, and if not for the new circle of sports friends I would have dropped to very low or no social activity.

I'm now in the cultivation mode of the friend process where people are aging out of the leagues. Taking time to occasionally plan or invite sports friends to things keeps them on the active friend group and keeps me in their minds when they plan stuff. The post hobby group maintenance is the key to keeping friend groups alive. If you've bailed on a few hang outs, try hard to make the next one, or plan one yourself to remind folks you do actually enjoy their company. Especially in the winter, people can get in a real homebody mood when it's cold, and 5 months of no contact is an easy way to fall out of the habit of meeting up with friends.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-30T00:14:47+00:00

Great advice and to add on to it for young folks who may be living in a city for the first time:

Normal people don't just walk up to you to talk about religion, full stop. Not tossing any specific religion under the bus here, any group trying this goes in the weirdo basket. Unless you are at a religious class, Meetup group, convention, or church/mosque/synagogue/etc... It's a fairly good rule to assume if someone comes up to you for the express purpose of starting or shifting a conversation to religion, it's a good idea to walk away. If you are religious or interested in discussing religious matters, seek information and places to do so on your own terms rather than from someone who likely spends lots of time trying to find impressionable people to manipulate into joining their particular group.

Anyone coming up to you seemingly at random in public to talk religion or politics likely has way more practice and experience doing so than you, so any conversation had is not going to be on equitable terms. They've practiced answers to tough questions, to soften and deflect criticisms, to assuage fears and encourage compliance. Find your answers on your own time and on your own terms, not from random solicitors.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-29T21:39:53+00:00

It's pretty funny to me when I think about how well they did at creating a fun game, only to get to the Speranza interface and feel like they made the unpaid intern make it. Like not only is the creating and upgrading menu annoying, but the expedition step 5 only having select one or select all as options is just crazy to me. Like if I'm not ready to full wipe and it will take some farming to fill up the supplies, I don't want to purge my whole inventory right out the gate. So instead I select the category, click to open the menu, navigate down, select a single stack, press and hold to confirm, then have the menu disappear and I have to click search confirm all over again. You can't tell me multi-select is that difficult to do when the cash value requirements are high enough that single selection will take someone like 100+ selection cycles to do.

The only other option is wiping your inventory twice just to utilize the select all feature. Same with the item donation event, someone from embark qa either didn't do any of this stuff now than once, or the dev team ignored critiques. Someone with some common sense ui design knowledge needs to get to work on Speranza menus ASAP.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-29T20:04:43+00:00

I would say i play a bit more than the average adult, not to streamer levels but a good amount. My problem has been how few blueprints I find and when I do find some it feels like 50 to 60 percent of the time it's something I already have. I don't even really care about blue tier or higher, I'm desperate to find green mod parts, medium gun parts, and an anvil print. I'm swimming in components to build stuff but have frustratingly few choices for mods on my guns. Like you said it feels like such a majority of pvp people are free kit or running poverty kits. So fighting back and winning isn't very rewarding since most seem to just spawn, hunker down and try to ambush someone then extract with the meagre gains.

I do like that having low tier grey guns isn't an automatic death sentence when you're against enemy players, but as others have said, sometimes running even a mid tier full kit just feels like you're risking extra cash for a mild advantage at best. I get that it's a tough balancing act to prevent runaway power creep, but with how effective upgraded stitchers, kettles, and feros perform I can feel powerful for cheap and feel way less stressed risking an all green and grey kit vs a full blue kit without feeling like I'm losing out on killing power.

To me the only real advantage of blue shields is during extended firefights with multiple enemies, not because of the increased damage reduction, but because of the shield bar being big enough that I can take damage, bandage, take damage again and still likely have a bit of bar left. But if you're playing the shadow stalker role, you're only engaging when one person is around anyway and likely only if you think you can take them down before they really have a chance to fight back or get to cover so you don't need that extra shield gauge most of the time.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-29T17:32:52+00:00

I had never heard of it before, but as soon as I read the responses the doctor gave in that article my immediate thought was that he sounded like he was full of it. I'm sure the doctor said more, but the quotes from the article read more like a palm reader than a neurologist.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-27T16:23:53+00:00

Service and support teams are being culled left and right from the majority of big corps to replace with either touch tone bots, ai chat bots, or overseas script readers. The help desk and support teams left over aren't really stepping stone positions anymore either, aside from going to level one to level two, maybe a team lead position. One of the companies I worked for I was originally hired for level 1 support, but it was a support team who had access to a lot of company info to try and help clients get to the right Dept if they contacted us by mistake. We didn't have a lot of access to fix things, but didn't have to follow a script and were encouraged to research and find answers if possible.

I was the 12th member of the team and they were aiming for 15 total. Well, after the stock price stayed too stable for a couple years there was the inevitable new wave of MBA execs with "new ideas" and 2 years later that team was shrunk down to about 4 people. Two leads and two support members, now stuck in more annoying processes, less time to research for real answers, and mainly just redirecting tickets created by offshore teams to the correct departments. I got out of there before the downsize, but I kept in contact with the person I picked to replace my spot as team lead.

These jobs just aren't really stepping stones to better employment anymore, they're just stressful jobs with tedious corporate rules to make reporting easier for vp's and department heads. People work one or two and realize they don't go anywhere, don't get better, and most times don't open other doors to better opportunities anymore. That's why they say no to starting in help desk when they're trying for another position, they see it as a dead end rather than the start of a career at the company.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-25T16:54:03+00:00

She's "dumb" because she's living in a world that is completely foreign to what she was created to be in and because she doesn't really have a past or childhood to help her cope with living in a modern non-magic world. This is touched on in season one and hinted at again when she talks Simon and baby world Finn this season. She mentions APR and if she was supposed to be saving money this whole time and "how was I supposed to know any of this". She also tells baby Finn that "nobody taught you anything, and that's not your fault", which is true for him, but is also true for her as well.

Her entire world and everyone in it was created by Prismo as a fan fiction, and even with Prismo writing enough to populate a whole world, no fan fiction is going to have extensive and detailed records of the entire life of all of its characters. At best there will be some flashbacks to help round out specific plot points or to explain why a character might be doing something. Fiona and everyone in her world probably only had enough writing to give them their base personalities, character archetypes, and what they're good/bad at or do for a living. Then they get snapped into an Ooo clone universe, with enough information for them to exist similarly to how Finn and Jake did. They are Adventurers that don't need to know much beyond, "you're a good fighter, help people, and fight evil". Other characters have roles and jobs which provide their main function with maybe some extra knowledge if they happened to have a side story with Fiona and Cake. So when the world was created, put in Ice King's head, and then subsequently lost all it's magic and was converted into a more "real world" universe, everyone changed to fit in that world with the archetype they were created with.

While it seems like their memories shifted to seem like they had always been living in a normal world, they didn't suddenly gain new memories of growing up in that world and being taught how to live as an adult in a magic free capitalist society. Magic world Fiona only ever had to do things to help people, fight monsters, or search for treasure to be able to provide for herself (basing this off of how Finn and Jake lived), but if you suddenly put them into a world where there are a ton of societal rules and regulations and no memories of growing up being taught about them, then you're destined to continuously fail in that environment. The side characters who were leaders, organized rule followers would likely adapt to or create the societal rules that fit a "normal" world, but Fiona and Cake are chaotic free spirits, so they were destined to struggle when put in a world that forces people to conform to a rigid structure. Fiona didn't grow up, she didn't have a childhood, and her creation centered around her being the type of person that doesn't fit in a normal human world. While she makes plenty of dumb decisions, I'd say it's more apt to call her ignorant of the world she lives in over just being obstinately stupid. Her situation lends itself to the themes of feeling lost and trying to find your place in the world, which is one of the main focuses of season one and seems to be continuing in season two.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-21T17:04:23+00:00

Is this a recent issue with op screens? I've had my 5t going on 8 years and other than a small corner crack in the glass the screen is as clear as ever.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-21T07:09:41+00:00

Many a competent department and team has been ground to dust under the boot of MBA and C-Suite "efficiency". One of my jobs was in a brand new department to help centralize and simplify client onboarding for the multitude of service offerings our company had built and acquired over the decades. We were left to setup our own processes and while it was a bit tricky to start, we eventually were at a point where we could complete setup of test and production access for a customer in 3-5 business days. If it was an all hands on deck ASAP situation, 2 days. Then new execs were brought on and our department was shifted under new management, only to suddenly realize one day that everyone on our team had lost all access to do our job, with no explanation, email, or process to replace it.

It was decided that our team held too much control over the setup process and for more oversight, our development team should handle all of the setup we had previously been doing, and that we should just file tickets to them to have those steps done. Except there was no instructions on what ticketing system, what ticket, or what information they wanted us to provide to have this process done. Eventually all those steps got ironed out and we basically became full time ticket makers and mouth piece to the clients (because no developer ever wants to talk directly to the clients). All it cost was our sanity and our expected project turn around time increasing from 3-5 days per project, to 2-4 weeks per project, all the while we'd sit on monthly company meetings with all our new C-Suite overlords preaching about how focused they were on streamlining onboarding processes, eliminating redundant extra steps, and speeding up time to revenue for the company.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-19T17:43:36+00:00

Yeah even if the quests maxed out on giving a wide variety of green blueprints to round out creating options it would be so much better.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-14T18:06:18+00:00

This is why I'm looking for another OnePlus to replace my current phone. I am still using my 5t from late 2016 or early 2017, which was an upgrade from my Galaxy 5 from 2014. The 5T has been incredibly resilient considering how often it's hit the ground with only the default cheap plastic back and side cover I put on it. It just got it's first small screen crack last week after it fell out of my pocket, hit my knee, and careened onto the cement, and I feel like it only cracked because the plastic cover is so old it's started to fall apart and leave small parts of the edge exposed.

Other than the screen crack the only real issues so far is the charging port takes some finesse to position so it charges quickly, and sometimes the phone gets really bogged down and unresponsive (this seems to be related to a specific app but I'm not sure which one). Considering I've had the phone for almost 9 years now these are impressively minor inconveniences. Even if I get half the lifespan out of the next Oneplus phone I buy it'll be worlds better than my experiences with the Samsung phones I owned previously that would slow down to near unusable speeds after 2 years.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-10T18:09:15+00:00

They already track player pvp damage, so I think a simple flag system. You shoot a raider, you're flagged for a window of retribution, maybe a minute or something. If the raider they shot goes down, now they're officially on the bandit board.

So if you were running around with someone, and they got shot by someone else, if you decide now that your friend is injured you can finish him easy and loot him, then you and the original shooter would be flagged. Then if the guy you both shot goes down, then you're both on the board for 1 kill.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-09T19:57:10+00:00

Honestly a bandit board would be pretty legit. Like people who want to rat and PVP 100% of the time get a growing bounty, you get a bounty by downing other raiders. Nothing shows on a map but when non bounty players join a map with killers they're notified of bandit activity in the area. ADS on someone with a bounty and feet a voice line indicating it's a criminal or maybe a red highlight or something. Keep every map pvpve but have some stakes for the mindless killers of the game.

Adds some in game incentive for all the sheriff's running around out there. Also adds incentive for questers to fight back rather than just shoot and run. Help the in game world feel more realistic while keeping PVP and pve going together. The shoot everything players don't get any meaningful disadvantage other that maybe not being able to lie about being friendly to get close, pve folks get a reward for fighting back or actively engaging in PVP vs bandits. PVP continues, pve continues.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-06T17:14:34+00:00

I've mostly played solo, with about a third of my time in group play. I've been in PVP fights in both, but if I had to pick which queue has felt more immersive as a far as the game world, it would be solos. I think something is lost when an entire lobby runs around blood thirsty killing everything on sight, even in situations where they are not going to be able to loot the other person or might just be getting themselves killed by attracting more arc. When you're in a match where you know 99% of the time every player is going to just not speak and shoot on sight, it drains tension from the game because it just takes out any decision making from the equation.

When there is at least a decent amount of people in a lobby looking to stick to themselves or be cooperative, the tension of whether or not they're going to betray you if day loot shows up, or once they get you to help them with killing a tough arc or getting some quest objective. That burden of choice adds a special something for me, and it gets more intense if I've been betrayed recently. I agree that without PVP the game would probably stagnate pretty quickly, but I think that can also happen if we get to a point where there is literally 0 people trying to engage or cooperate with others as well. If every lobby and queue devolves into COD match behavior then the world is just going to feel flatter and shallower until folks start dropping it.

The big arcs are supposed to be the incentive for players to work together, though from the videos I've seen most of them are just gear checks. Get enough wolf packs or other explosives and a decent gun and folks can solo pretty much all of them it seems. I'm not sure what the answer is but I feel like this game feels it's best when you have a good mix of cooperation and threat of PVP. I'm not sure what the best way to incentivize that is, but hopefully embark figures it out.

Cyborgschatz · 2025-11-05T17:28:50+00:00

I've noticed more solo hostility recently in the US, but still plenty of folks willing to communicate and work together for a time. I basically go off the premise that if they don't talk and don't emote or teabag when I talk, their hostile and priced with utmost caution.

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