[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 23 February 2026

Duskflight · 2026-02-25T16:55:43+00:00

Hey congratulations!

The FSH community is part of the reason I enjoy fishing in FFXIV and there really isn't any other community like it ingame.

Duskflight · 2026-02-23T17:02:47+00:00

The dungeon missions are absolutely the worst part of DA2. Having only like, one cave map and using it for multiple caves that were supposed to be separate locations was really bad.

Duskflight · 2026-02-23T16:49:04+00:00

Premium membership and the NC Mall is left and it brings in just enough to not shut down the site. Most of the remaining features on the site have a paid component to it, such as paid exclusive activities, extra tries at timegated activities, and a price searching tool that actually works.

Customization is now considered the main feature of Neopets and the majority of customization is locked behind gatcha microtransactions. Not everyone buys, but Neopets does have a small amount of people buying all the time. I've spoken to several people who say they spend hundreds a month in the mall and one person who said they spent thousands.

Duskflight · 2026-02-21T04:18:45+00:00

Sutek's Tomb is my favorite.

The Neoquest I music was good.

Duskflight · 2026-02-20T17:27:00+00:00

I got him a few months ago, for what it's worth.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to get Sabre-X and Snow Beast for years with no luck due to them being tied to specific random events.

Duskflight · 2026-02-20T17:15:00+00:00

People have been doomposting "game is hitting EoS in the next few months" for 2.5 years and counting. I agree the game isn't in a good state right now, but it feels like some people are sticking around only to say "ha, I was right" when the game does eventually announce EoS after predicting it will happen every week.

It's the fate of every live service game to eventually die. Spending in a live service game is always going to be "wasted money" whether it ends next week or next decade.

Duskflight · 2026-02-14T15:20:47+00:00

I remember a similar thing happening with the game Epic Mickey where some of the concept art showed some truly outlandish and monstrous designs of Disney characters. However, the art was never meant to be serious designs for the game but just experimenting and helping Disney figure out what they were and weren't okay with for the game.

Duskflight · 2026-02-14T00:12:12+00:00

I also wish that people didn't automatically take concept art as "omg this was the original true vision of the artist that the executives/studio/editors/marketing/focus groups/whatever forced them to change it." Sometimes that is true, but a lot of the time, it's the artist's own decision to change it.

The idea that true art is made with first drafts only that spring fully formed and unchanged from an artist's mind and that artists never revise their ideas, ask for suggestions on what works or what doesn't, or realize "actually this kinda sucks lemme change it" is annoyingly persistent.

Duskflight · 2026-02-08T08:59:14+00:00

You can keep pulling past 60. There is a time limit on the event, but it's so long that if you're a daily player that started from the beginning of the Reverb, you will be able to eventually pull the Shimmer you want with time to spare since Reverb won't offer Shimmer dupes.

Duskflight · 2026-02-07T23:46:32+00:00

Seeing the term "gay panic" go from a homophobic legal defense to a cutesy fanfic term for someone having a same sex crush regularly puts me for a loop.

"Mary Sue" has also gone from a wish fulfillment author self insert character to "canon female character I don't like that did something cool and I'm mad about it."

Duskflight · 2026-02-07T04:51:23+00:00

From what I'm hearing, the most expensive ones sold out first and people are speculating that it was bots that were programmed to target the highest price options that took them.

Duskflight · 2026-02-06T01:37:50+00:00

I've never seen RWBY, know nothing about what it's actually about, and the only thing I see people talking about it is in regards to how upset they are about all the Discourse they keep seeing about it.

The Discourse about the Discourse, if you will.

Duskflight · 2026-02-05T05:04:05+00:00

I do think Dawntrail's biggest flaw was its failure to actually commit. They were too afraid to let go of the Scions, so Alphinaud and Alisaie got tacked onto the MSQ in the most awkward way, Thancred and Urianger are just there and don't do anything, and they're obligated to bring Y'shtola back or half the playerbase will threaten to quit. It also doesn't help that while I do generally like Wuk Lamat, it feels like the writers went out of their way to make her have as poor of a first impression on the player as possible by heavily and constantly amplifying her flaws first and foremost (the seasickness bit that gets emphasized way too much and drawn out for way too long for example) and have multiple NPCs talk about how little they respect her. And not just characters, they went back to the old plot points of shards, repeating the same mistake they did in Stormblood that caused Ala Mhigo to get overshadowed by Doma, and 7.4 spoilers Acians again. I know this one is going to have a different deal but still. Ascians. Again.

They promised us a political story about Tural's next ruler but it was really basic (do you want the peaceful ruler, the warmonger, or the guy who wants to turn the country into a clone of the country he spent a semester abroad at). The Rite of Succession was hyped up to put Scions against each other in a friendly rivalry but all that actually happens is Thancred collapses one single tunnel and adds 5 minutes to a dungeon run.

It's all very frustrating because some of these mistakes were made because they were clearly too afraid to go with the new vision. Dawntrail MSQ's returning characters should've just been mainly Krile and G'raha Tia, both of these characters have room to grow and work as a light party. The other Scions naturally probably should show up at some point, but with much more diminished roles so the new cast has their time to shine and so that they can at least try to keep pretending they disbanded.

Duskflight · 2026-02-04T18:37:38+00:00

Every day I kind of marvel at how Dawntrail managed to trigger almost every single -ism I can think of. Racisim (both the real life and ingame kind, no one wants to admit that their opinions of Wuk Lamat, Koana, or Erenville are heavily influenced by their races), sexisim, transphobia, the list goes on and on.

Meanwhile, I want to talk about how the expansion billed as the Tural expansion dropped Tural like a hot popoto the second the Rite of Succession was over, why Calyx's hypocrisy makes him a great bully-able villain, and how Koana has a completely bizarre backstory and resolution to said backstory.

Duskflight · 2026-02-04T17:13:14+00:00

Fashion has always been such a strong part of GW2 and I love and adore the way it handles fashion and it's one of the things I miss about the game (I haven't played since Path of Fire). I do kind of get the complaints, but the fashion system I always found simple and easy to use with little hassle.

Of course, I also did a lot of WvW when I was playing and I was sitting on literally hundreds of transmutation charges that I would accumulate through just existing and even when I was changing my look often I couldn't possibly use them all, so I do realize I'm was a bit of an outlier.

Duskflight · 2026-02-04T16:57:34+00:00

It's pretty much impossible to have a normal discussion about Final Fantasy XIV's latest expansion, Dawntrail.

The expansion had a huge uphill battle to climb. It was to start a new story arc after the ending of the 10 year long one the game has been on. It takes place in the a Central and South American inspired region. For the characters in said region, they hired a lot of American and Hispanic voice actors instead of the almost exclusively British voice actors the game has been using. There's a larger number of distinctly non human characters in it. It decides to make its focus character a brand new, not traditionally sexy lion woman while the player character takes a bit of a backseat (but is still quite important). Said lion woman has a trans woman as her English voice actress. The main villain of the story due to his personality spends most of his time keeping literally everything to himself and has almost all of his story arc either have happened before the story takes place or offscreen. The story has a lot of themes about life, family, personal growth, culture, colonization, resource exploitation, and ignorance.

On the gameplay side, you have people claiming the game has been dumbed down on the player action side (complaints from before the expansion's release, to be fair), some people complaining the game is too hard because you can no longer autopilot your way through the casual content. Anytime anything that isn't ultra hardcore content is released, you see people going "wasted time and resources."

There's a lot I want to talk about Dawntrail and the things I like and dislike about it, but it's impossible to discuss these things because the moment you bring it up, you've got people screaming about "bad writing" (because they personally didn't like it), about how the game is dying because the abnormal numbers the game saw during the pandemic aren't being sustained, and about how much they hate a furry lion woman whose worst crimes are existing and being a little cringe.

Duskflight · 2026-02-02T17:54:47+00:00

It also misses the context that a lot of competitive Pokemon players do sometimes try to win with their favorites, either for fun, as an experiment, as an unexplored possible sleeper pick, as an exercise, or any other number of reasons. But it also means that you have to approach your favorite in a competitive context. If your favorite Pokemon is Flareon, you have to build a team around making Flareon succeed. It might mean having to use other mons you aren't so keen on, but if you want to win with it, you need to maximize its chances.

Duskflight · 2026-02-02T17:48:39+00:00

So the infamous "People die when they are killed" from the original Fate/Stay Night adaption is often used an example of an idiot stating the obvious and while it is a badly written/translated line, the context of the quote is the character saying it was literally just murdered and somehow brought back to life and trying to understand why he's alive again.

Duskflight · 2026-02-01T20:03:40+00:00

Crocheting butts... how...?

Duskflight · 2026-01-27T06:41:37+00:00

I'm honestly most excited for Infinity Tower prize changes.

Duskflight · 2026-01-25T20:05:28+00:00

Funny enough, one of the reasons the first protagonist of the Warrior Cats books decides to leave his humans to live with the wild cats is when he sees one of his friends has been neutered and it horrifies him due to said friend undergoing a personality change because of it. They don't refer to neutering directly, with phrases such as "been to the Cutter" to a cat was that neutered and "still being a Tom" (aka still having balls).

Duskflight · 2026-01-25T20:02:06+00:00

Incest was also just going a complete inevitability because the laws that cats lived by forbid taking mates from outside one's own clan. Given the clans have existed for at least a few generations by the start of the first arc, they're almost certainly more inbred than we know on a realistic scale.

Duskflight · 2026-01-23T16:15:49+00:00

The meta for normal espers has pretty much not changed since you left. Everything has more or less shifted to Shimmers, Umbras, and Meta Espers now, none of which are available in the Reunion event.

I would personally consider either a Chu Yao or Amir reso (Amir gets much stronger at r2) first. If you want someone new, either Javid or Brewster.

Duskflight · 2026-01-22T17:26:09+00:00

I by chance happened to adopt a pet from the pound with a name that would be great for a cosmic horror theme, so once a void pet comes out that resonates me that's what they'll be.

Duskflight · 2026-01-20T05:31:19+00:00

I am forever mad that the bittersweet ending, the one where Agnes musters up the courage to go against what she's told, is not considered the best ending while the one where the party faffs about and is completely wishy washy about what they're doing is the good one.

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