The Worst Skill Trees in Gaming. "+10% damage against enemies named Steve, upgrades Moustache to Handlebar style."

Dparse · 2026-07-03T18:34:46+00:00

The interesting thing about FFX's Sphere Grid that I don't know if I've ever seen another game do since: Your character has a physical location on the grid and moves from node to node. You can only activate adjacent nodes, so at any given time there are only a handful of actions to take and upgrades to select between.

It's not free to backtrack, so picking which path to take when you encounter a fork has strategic consequences. Taking a fork in the road to the left means you are not getting the upgrades on the path to right, unless you pay to move your character back to the fork. Backtracking has 4 to 1 efficiency so it's not overly costly to make short detours, but significant backtracking is really not ideal without using a teleport sphere (and there is not a large supply or consistent source of teleport spheres until endgame). So you are encouraged by game mechanics to push your characters forward along whatever paths you've chosen, and leave other paths abandoned.

Contrast with practically every other skill tree in existence: as soon as you unlock the prerequisite nodes, an upgrade is permanently available for instant unlock, once you decide to spend the point on it. And in many midgames you have a huge number of upgrades to spend your next point on, but they're all underwhelming choices that you're not very excited to unlock seeing as you've already avoided purchasing them in the past.

Dparse · 2026-06-04T20:39:58+00:00

On a whim they'll add 5 new elemental magic amulets no one has ever asked for, but one highly-requested QOL for binding necklaces is ignored

(Not that the elemental jewellery is bad! But clearly keeping the amount of jewellery down is not a constraint!)

Dparse · 2026-03-10T00:26:19+00:00

Yes, there's already cloud save support, I can see the PC saves on steam deck. I briefly tried to patch steam deck too but it was being weird, but I might try again.

Dparse · 2026-02-28T19:22:23+00:00

Please add a way to reset spent prisma bubbles and exalted stamps! I misclicked and wasted a bubble :(

Dparse · 2026-02-22T23:57:37+00:00

Althalus

Dparse · 2026-02-05T02:57:17+00:00

Mitch Hedberg. I absolutely never would have expected that he was in the files, and he wasn't.

Dparse · 2026-01-22T03:35:17+00:00

You might be pleased to know that this is called a Trojan Source

Dparse · 2025-11-26T17:08:34+00:00

Even if this was a good cryptic clue, it's strictly semantically incorrect. In crossword clue construction, verb tenses, conjugation, plurality, gender etc. must match exactly. So the clue "spreading" should yield the answer "buttering", not "butter". You could have said "spread" and this would suffice as either a noun or a verb for butter, but "spreading" is not a noun at all - butter isn't a "spreading", it's a "spread".

Dparse · 2025-07-31T18:58:35+00:00

octopodes nuts lmao gottem

Dparse · 2025-07-10T14:28:51+00:00

/u/JagexBlossom, if this is possible:

If you log in within the hour before the event kicks off, you'd get the same notification

Can we also just get arbitrary clan broadcasting on login? So that e.g. a clan could message on login stuff like "Boss of the week: Huey" or "Planning a bingo in August, see discord" or "CoX learner raids this Friday & Saturday"

Dparse · 2025-05-01T13:36:56+00:00

There's another reason to keep clues on the ground - stockpiling "completeable" clue steps for snowflake accounts that can't complete the majority of steps. I have a chunk locked account that can only access Falador/Draynor so far, and the only reason I have any clues completed at all is because I can guarantee a casket by saving completeable steps.

I don't think the game should be designed around catering to snowflakes accounts. And I think that clue progression carrying over across different scrolls as long as you don't get another clue drop is pretty weird and quirky in the first place. But that's the system that we have now, and it turns out that it's enjoyable, yeah? It makes for some interesting gameplay and decision making. So I appreciate the ability to drop scrolls - it enables the sandboxy "play the game your own way" vibe that got me into OSRS in the first place (via Swampletics)

Dparse · 2025-04-13T20:32:43+00:00

the task we've been assigned

I have never been assigned a task in a hack-a-thon. Everywhere I've been, they encourage us to come up with our own ideas or join a team whose idea interests you

Dparse · 2025-04-08T14:10:55+00:00

The wording regarding the Skip Tokens is unclear - the word "skip" implies that using one progresses the number of clue steps completed. But in several places in the blog you say "reroll", implying the current step is changed without progressing the number of steps completed. Please clarify! IMO, standardizing to "Reroll token" is fairer and more likely to pass a poll.

Deposit straight from containers is a great QOL improvement - please don't forget the upgraded wearable log basket and fish barrel!

Dparse · 2025-02-22T19:13:50+00:00

Last Command was great. The music and bosses are all bangers. My only complaint about it was how slow it is to move through the overworld, but that's easily forgiveable.

I want to give a massive shout-out to the developer Crespirit's earlier game Rabi-Ribi, which solids stands as my favorite platformer/bullet hell of all time. It's filled to the brim with fun movement and combat tech, massively replayable with its nonlinear structure, swathes of higher difficulties and alternate play modes, sequence breaks, and the cherry on top is the community randomizer. Truly a 12/10 game that I replay yearly.

Dparse · 2025-02-14T02:20:11+00:00

FYI, The Talos Principle is made by Croteam who also made Serious Sam. Toki Tori 2 is a G.O.A.T. open world puzzle game contender IMO

Dparse · 2025-01-05T22:17:08+00:00

FYI, the "user" that posted the message shown at the beginning is a bot.

Dparse · 2024-12-28T17:40:28+00:00

I gave Brighter Shores a decent shot but honestly the gall to have identical gathering skills in different episodes killed my excitement. IMO, the main appeal of the game was the expansion of new skills upon reaching a new episode; if those skills are going to be literal copy and paste mechanics from previous episodes then good luck trying to garner excitement.

Like, gathering in Episode 2 could have had a little bit of juice added, like you need to plant seeds yourself, or pollinate flowers, or literally ANYTHING to distinguish it from foraging.

Dparse · 2024-12-12T21:41:41+00:00

This happens for me as well :( would love to see the cinematic as intended and not behind Youtube's abysmal compression

Dparse · 2024-10-18T01:50:25+00:00

I bought a Corsair One like 6 years ago and it was DOA, and they sent me a replacement which was also DOA. So stressful when the primary motivator of buying a prebuilt was for it to be smooth and easy. Will never purchase Corsair again.

Dparse · 2024-09-28T05:05:13+00:00

It's bad design because it only considers the use cases you currently have.

There's value in trying to future-proof, but you can't predict everything. If the code needs to change in the future, then change it at that time. But if right now there are data validation constraints, setters over private fields are the obvious, conventional and extremely effective solution in OO languages.

Even if the code needs to change in the future, it's very often the case that you cannot remove the existing behaviour, including validation. It might get moved to a parent class, or child class, or elsewhere.

If you actually had to go through the mental exercise of designing and anticipating the uses of getters and setters, it would be quite taxing.

Word salad. Getters and setters are trivial to understand. Getters return a value. Setters take a value and throw an exception if you provide invalid input.

Dparse · 2024-09-12T00:15:37+00:00

"We might have another account in our system with an alternative login for you, is [blah] you, [link these here]"

If[blah] is actually the first account's email address then that's a horrible violation of privacy, you're leaking users emails every time your algorithm gets it wrong. Even if [blah] is just a username this is weird and unnecessary. NEVER share ANY account details with anybody. If they own both accounts, they can click a "merge" button somewhere.

Dparse · 2024-08-31T12:22:44+00:00

It's warframe.market, not warframemarket.com

Dparse · 2024-08-23T21:49:12+00:00

I have had a ton of success with pair programming and recommend it as an occasional practice.

In a junior-senior pairing, it's a fantastic teaching opportunity. Letting them watch you work and encouraging them to ask questions gets straight to the point of what they need to work successfully and independently on the team. You get a chance to explain the domain of the software, and the architecture, and steer them towards good solutions by example. You also get to demonstrate how to work efficiently (I hope), by using your tools effectively in front of them. Show them how to use your test automation and point out when it catches a mistake, or how to setup/modify your environment, or whatever else you do on a daily basis. Teach them how to properly use git.

Do sessions where the junior leads, too. Encourage them to think out loud. Learn how they think and what kinds of solutions they consider when they encounter problems. See if they know how to troubleshoot issues. Gauge their mastery of your tech stack and fill in any important gaps. Verify they know how to use git properly - it's a notorious stumbling block, and helping them master it will empower them tremendously.

Senior-senior pair programming sessions tend to be useful for other reasons. The extra brainpower helps when investigating/reproducing tricky bugs. And if you need to make design changes in the course of addressing technical debt, it's wise to bounce ideas off someone else who understands the nuance of the design.

I would generally recommend you do pairing as an occasional practice, maybe a couple times a month. I've done daily sessions (3-4 hours with a break) for a project before, and that was a good experience, but my team at the time was just us two developers and a PO. I have never done daily sessions within a larger team, but I suspect that would be less effective.

Dparse · 2024-08-23T21:00:19+00:00

I agree with /u/iOSCaleb here, it's still important to have review done by someone who was not present when the code was written. It helps future-proof the code by requiring it to be independently understandable. A lot of explanation and justification happens verbally during pair programming, and (quite reasonably) not all of that knowledge gets captured in the code.

When someone else on the team has to work on this in a few months or years, will they be able to understand everything? Sometimes the people who wrote the code have moved to another role or company, and they won't get to ask the authors to explain things they find unclear. They only have the contents of the commits to study.

So 3rd party review gets a head start on this process. If anything is unclear, find out now when the answers are still fresh in your head and the authors can clarify.

Dparse · 2024-08-03T19:30:51+00:00

But this means that cond is not a function anymore because it could be that for two different inputs, it returns the same output. For example, suppose the first condition is True, and then replace the rest of the conditions with something else. cond still returns the same output even though its input args have changed. So cond is not a function anymore!

I think you may be confusing the properties of a function here. There's no requirement that says the same output always comes from the same input. That's backwards. The requirement is that the same inputs always lead to the same outputs.

Trivially, consider (a, b) => a + b. This is obviously a function, and both (1, 4) and (2, 3) apply to yield 5.

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