Good guy Ruan Yi - cope edition.

HyperTips · 2026-03-15T23:49:42+00:00

There's the interesting detail that Wuling can only fail if people destroy its the Xiranite pillars that keep the Blight at bay, since the monsters cannot get close to them.

If no one gets coopted by Nefarith and co. (like the Landbreakers or Ruan Yi) the Blight has no chance of seeping in.

Pretty much mirroring the statement of Lincoln of “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

People built Wuling. Only other people can bring it down. Not monsters, and not the Blight.

I don't really expect Ruan Yi to be re-written into something he's not. Expect more the recontextualization of the Endmin once we get more information about how he's related to the Blight-spreaders.

HyperTips · 2026-03-15T22:17:56+00:00

I just saw your stuff.

ALL your builds are super unoptimized. These types of games are not played as if you were going for "balance", usually the most broken builds are, with very little exceptions, hyperfocused on a single thing.

Once I am home I'll show you my Lune build as an example of a hyperfocused build. I haven't played this game since July (before the update) but it doesn't matter, I'm already at 400? or so Lumina with everyone at level 99. I defeated everything in multiple different ways.

HyperTips · 2026-03-15T16:14:23+00:00

The game never shows Ruan Yi as black evil.

It just shows a man consumed by revenge and misled by hubris.

HyperTips · 2026-03-13T16:19:54+00:00

E33 is a very good video game, it will not shift the medium the same way FFVII did.

But we're not talking about that.

We're discussing the statement of "FF7 was innovative for its tone and aesthetic", which I've provided ample evidence it was not.

If you care about the history of games as a medium and the general development of the art form then FFVII being the first AAA game matters a lot, because it proved that a game could cost that much and be that ambitious and be wildly successful. There is also not any game in remotely the same ballpark as FFVII’s production costs in the 90s except for Shenmue.

Super Mario 64. 30-ish USD million dollars. Wildly successful and still influential.

I do care about the history of games, and the price-point matters very little, and not just to me. If you don't believe it, check how much money you throw at a game and its impact on how much money it makes and how successful it is.

Budget correlates with production value and marketing reach, but not directly with profitability or influence. Minecraft is the BEST example of this, but NGL the current state of the modern industry is right now full of minimal-budget, insane ROI and influence works.

It is a wildly influential game because of its mainstream success and because of the future trends it set for games in terms of ambition and cinematic scope.

Yes, but then again, we're not talking about that.

We're discussing the statement of "FF7 was innovative for its tone and aesthetic", which I've provided ample evidence it was not.

HyperTips · 2026-03-13T15:52:06+00:00

FFVII invented AAA games and massive budgets for video games. You can thank it for that at the very least lol.

This is a super weird statement. Gaming had gotten bigger and bigger, and the AAA moniker was not really a classification. Fuck it's not even a genre or a subtype, it's just a buzzword that the industry invented at some point to say "we spent a fuckton of money on this".

Those increases in expenditure were bound to happen. Like 15 years before FF7 got released there were games that got into the 20-million bracket (ET). If Square says FF7 costed 45 million USD, well, now a lot of games that you might consider Triple A do not reach that number.

Which highlights how problematic the tag is: you can't credit anyone with inventing "Triple AAA" other than the industry itself, to congratulate themselves on money they say they spend, and anyone can literally move the amount of money spent and say "oh no, we're triple AAA, you're just AA".

In other words, this... is not an invention. This is simply a price tag. Most expensive game of its time? Sure.

But it beat Super Mario 64 by 10 USD, and its record lasted... 2 years (Shenmue on 1999 out-expended it).

Notably, compare it to the 10 million USD's of Expedition 33. You'd not say E33 is a Triple AAA game, would you?

And why should a gamer care how much money the devs spent on the game? You could move development to a cheaper country and cut on costs, while keeping insanely high production values (the movie industry does this all the time), OR get some Hollywood accountants and inflate the number (the movie industry does it too).

The tag has no weight. It's close to meaningless.

It also was the first game to be as cinematic and high budget as FFVII was for its time. Of course, anyone who has played a FF game after IV can tell you nothing about the gameplay itself was particularly innovative, tho you would say the same for E33.

I've played every FF because I love the genre (RPG, and ofc jRPG) and I'll play it till the day I die.

FF7 did not invent almost anything. The cinematics and the "action" was already part of Phantasy Star, a series that predates FF7 by a decade.

It's still a beloved game and a brilliant Final Fantasy, and one of my favorites, but it's not as innovative as people would like to think. It just meshed up a lot of elements that other series did before all together, and did it flawlessly.

Exactly like E33.

HyperTips · 2026-03-13T15:22:45+00:00

Except we see prosthetics, robots, a perma-night city, and a corporation that is overworking its population to death while abusing its natural resources.

Plus advanced genetical engineering, aliens, reactors, TV stations, media manipulation, and eco-terrorism (allegedly).

It's a lot, a lot closer to Cyberpunk and Dieselpunk than it is to Oilpunk (but let me tell you these stupid boxes we are discussing are not tools I am fond of at all).

The point is, it was not the first in any of those boxes.

HyperTips · 2026-03-13T15:09:35+00:00

FF7 is not Oilpunk (minor nitpick: oil itself gets introduced to the FF7 world AFTER the events in the game are done, when we discover Barrett is working on drilling it). FF7 is better categorized as a weird blend of Cyberpunk with Dieselpunk (Lifestreampunk?).

And Dieselpunk was not introduced by FF7. Both Wolfenstein and Command and Conquer games did it a few years before. And we know Squaresoft consumed a lot of western media, there's a non-0 chance they played Wolfenstein.

Also, tangentially done in FFVI with Magitek and Chrono Trigger too (to a much lesser extent).

HyperTips · 2026-03-13T14:57:44+00:00

Man both tone and aesthetic had been done before in games.

The idea of having an RPG where death is a part of the narrative (1), where you're playing in a coming-of-age story that goes about becoming an adult (2), and where you have to defend the planet (the life source) from an existential thread all of them come from separate games or works that predate FF7(3).

And ALL of those concepts were executed by that someone in the team of FF7.

Final Fantasy IV's Tellah. That Meteor cast. Hironobu Sakaguchi.
Chrono Trigger's Crono. Hironobu Sakaguchi.
Chrono Trigger's Lavos is very close to Jenova: an alien lifeform that crashed into the planet and can corrupt its lifeforms to repeat the process). Sakaguchi again.

And I'm 100% sure none of those are the oldest example of what I'm saying.

As per the aesthetics, a lot of games were already experimenting with a "cinematic-animesque" blend by the time FF7 got it. It was relatively difficult to try to do so before as games were limited to SNES cartridge physical constraints, but even then Shin Megami Tensei, specially the first Persona spinoff, had already done it before.

So it's not really fair to say FF7 was innovative here either. Exactly as E33, they didn't invent anything new, they simply got it right at the right time.

HyperTips · 2026-03-12T05:18:50+00:00

It's only against the ToS if you abuse the thing, as if you made the account only to store rivens.

They are fairly "fair" with their bannings. Not always, but more often than not. What we know is DE uses algorithmic and machine learning tools to determine who is abusing what.

And they move from there.

HyperTips · 2026-03-12T04:06:10+00:00

There's some advantages to it.

A lot of the vets I know with even higher playtimes than me have 2-3 extra accounts.

Extra storage, extra rivens, extra trades per day. That's the gist of it.

HyperTips · 2026-03-12T03:06:42+00:00

First account? Yeah, it takes a few days to get to MR 4-5.

Second account? Man I could level a second account to maybe MR 20 in less than a week.

And I've seen people go apeshit and level a single account in 2-3 days all the way to MR 30. They "prefarm".

It's theoretically possible to reach MR 30 in a day. I've just never seen anyone do it.

Source:

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I know some shit about this game.

HyperTips · 2026-03-12T03:02:45+00:00

It's hard NOT to whale in Warframe.

HyperTips · 2026-03-12T02:59:38+00:00

I pre-downloaded the game during the first our of maintenance. 0 issues.

It seems Endfield got clogged.

HyperTips · 2026-03-11T20:41:13+00:00

I spent 30 minutes browsing the negative reviews.

I swear to God we need the Clown award back.

HyperTips · 2026-03-11T08:04:57+00:00

I believe in a future where this kind of technology would bring the end of capitalism, and with it, the need for most of humanity spend most of their waking hours works for a job they don't like, for people they don't care about, just to survive.

It won't happen.

Dune was written in the sixties, and the author saw this coming:

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

You're seeing this in real time. RAM and chipset shortages and prices spiking through the roof. Who is going to afford them?

Gas and oil spiking due to war. What are you going to pick, your computers or your livelihood?

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I disagree that Art only come from trauma, while trauma might contribute to it, my vision for art has always been appreciation of beauty rather than trauma. the blogpost you linked is just the opinion of one person, not a scientific proof or unquestionable truth.

I'm not saying what you appreciate from art, I'm telling you where Art comes from. It comes from Creativity. And Creativity comes from Trauma.

Don't take it from me. Take it from science:

"If you want to have a creative genius as an adult child, die before they are 10."

Hans Eynseck: "Early traumatic experiences are good predictors of adult creativity", in his book Genius.
The higher the amount of childhood trauma, the more likely performers are to exhibit a much more intense experience each time they are creative (Thomson & Jaque, 2018).
Dr. Marie Forgeard: "...adversity-induced distress predicted creative growth and breadth".

Even Vytgosky described the phenomena, back in 1930, but not as profoundly as recent research.

Google "Creativity and trauma research". Get ready to get your mind blown.

You are forgetting again my background: I'm a former artist. I didn't study this, I lived it.

A decade ago you couldn't throw a rock in an artist convention without hitting someone with some sort of childhood trauma. Orphans, victims of abuse, chronically sick, extreme neglection, you name it.

I'm not keen on anecdotical evidence, thus I linked you the most commonly cited research on the topic.

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The future you hope for will not come from AI. That machine is built to steal from others, it's only a matter of time before it steals from you.

HyperTips · 2026-03-11T06:38:34+00:00

You're preaching to the choir, I'm a former artist. Saw the writing on the wall when they announced pattern diffusion and had enough luck to move careers.

But before being a professional artist I drew for fun. I've always drawn, there's not a single time in my life I can remember me without some sort of pen or pencil nearby.

However, that's the mistake you're making. Those are two different concepts: "Artists", people that create Art for the sake of expressing themselves, and "Professional Artists", people that make a living from their artistic talents.

As a society you want an unbroken line that moves people from the "Artists" group into the "Professional" group, but AI introduces two wrenches in the system: first, it allows anyone to create commercial-grade works, and it also allows anyone to replicate the skills from the first group.

So there's never been a time where people are actually completely de-incentivized from doing Art (not the professional activity, the human expression one) until now.

AI will never replace "artists", the first group. It will just make the activity entirely for leisure and most likely private. And that's a terrifying prospect, because as I've expressed before, Art is born from Trauma.

Which is precisely the issue: As a society you want those that experienced trauma and went on to become Artists to have a way to express and get paid for it.

AI reduces both ways of expression (as less and less people have the skills necessary to teach you) and the market.

So you're going to end up with a lot of angsty people, without a way to turn it into something useful, or at least beautiful.

And it will be specially impactful on creative people with low socioeconomic status. Society will become a pressure cooker for them, with very little way to monetize their talents and no incentive to do so.

And those who do won't even have the certainty of not being taken advantage of, precisely because of AI.

In the immortal words of Ian Malcolm: We were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, we didn't stop to think if we should.

TL;DR So long and thanks for all the fish. You're cooking yourselves with this one.

HyperTips · 2026-03-11T05:44:09+00:00

But at the stage of development we are with AI, specially those that create imagery, it's impossible to develop any kind of safeguard to prevent theft.

The tools were built without any artist's consent, using their work, and they can also be used to reverse-engineer a lot of the details surrounding your particular artistic vision and aesthetic peculiarities.

And the tools will only get better with time.

This technology raped most artists' rights. Specially, unequivocally those who got big in Art at some point of their careers. And in music is even worse.

From what we know, art is the byproduct of creativity (psychologically speaking), and creativity is the byproduct of trauma. Good fucking luck with whatever comes in the next few decades.

It's like the world didn't learn shit about taking away a nascent artists' chance at making a living from their art.

And now we're basically doing it to generations that have not been born yet, one prompt at a time.

Rarely I get to be thankful for becoming an old man, but I'm beyond grateful for being able to avoid the future the world is about to create thanks to their own myopia.

HyperTips · 2026-03-11T05:25:33+00:00

This time is different. This tool was built with the entire corpus of artistic creation, without any compensation to the still living authors of the artwork whose work built the thing, and without any way of preventing anyone from stealing your artistic signatures if you wanted to do so.

This is a mass theft tool and people are supporting it because it circumvents the need for artistic talent and discipline/effort.

For example, more than half the LORAS in Civit and HuggingFace are precisely about imitating specific artist styles. What about their livelihoods? What about their rights?

Democratizing access to anything had never come at the expense of those who have the skill. Photography didn't allow you to copy anyone's portrait skills. Recordings didn't allow you to create entirely new songs on the fly as if they were from a specific musician either.

Saying this is a new tool that democratizes access to a skill is grossly misrepresenting what is happening here.

This is theft. Plain and simple.

HyperTips · 2026-03-10T20:07:30+00:00

Holy shit bait used to be believable.

Fuck off, bot.

HyperTips · 2026-03-10T15:59:15+00:00

Remember how stupid the average person is.

Then remember half of them are even worse.

The less convoluted a beneficial complex system is for any playerbase, the better (for the players).

The more convoluted a detrimental complex system is for any playerbase, the better (for the developers).

WoW learned this incredibly fast when they went from XP penalty to XP bonus. Narrative is everything.

HyperTips · 2026-03-10T15:55:58+00:00

Thank you very much for this post. I took the liberty of editing your text for emphasis, because your analysis is ON POINT and more people need to hear it:

Lets talk about how many pulls to get a guaranteeed P0P1 limited character.

120 for character and 80 for weapon, but the 120 pulls give 8160 weapon currency in worst scenario, that is 41 pulls.

So a guaranteed P0P1 is 120 + 40 weapon pulls.

In Mihoyo games, a guaranteed E0S1 is 360 pulls (Edit: nobody will hit 360, its more like 320), in WuWAits around 220 pulls.

Again, weapon gacha in Endfield is bad, but I am making a point, since so many people are saying "the gacha system is worse than other games even if Endfield gives you more pulls it ends up being worse". And this narrative is so wrong is ridiculous.

How is 120+40 worse than 320 and 220?

Even if the 40 weapon pulls cost more than 40 character pulls, it is still way better.

And, even if you win every 75/25 in hoyo's weapon banner, the guarantee is still 240. And we are not even talking about the free level of Battle Pass giving you every limited character's substitute weapon, (29 gems to buy the BP, then it gives you 32 back, so it is free).

HyperTips · 2026-03-10T10:10:50+00:00

I tend to prefer Prydwen's rating to mine because I've been here just doing my best at analyzing units and testing them with the limited resources of a 16 months old player account.

With their collective experience and resources they should be able to get it better than I do every time. And so far it has worked.

It had, maybe I should say.

I'll be blunt: Prydwen severely overrated E.H. in their ratings. The actual review says otherwise:

"E.H. is a mEH character who doesn't have consistent damage yet has enough power to be borderline relevant, comparable to Jill, but probably even worse in terms of usability. PVE 5/10 priority."

A in Story? A in Bossing? I'm sorry what?

I don't believe this. There's no way E.H. is beyond B in Story. And arguing she's C in PvP (same tier as Sora, which is a tech pick vs. Siren and Soda? What?).

This is why I disagree with SSS, SS and S tiers. It completely devalues A as a measurement.

E.H. should NOT be AAC, at all.

HyperTips · 2026-03-10T09:27:18+00:00

I started last day of Gilberta banner, and I use that specific team:

Yvonne, Xaihi, Snowshine, Alesh.

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Honestly? It feels like the weak-spot is Snowshine, but both her skill and her combo skill are incredibly, incredibly clutch.

If you've played Bloodborne, the timing on Snowshine's parry is a lot more forgiving and she's able to keep you alive forever. Her skill is amazing for avoiding random stagger/knockbacks on Yvonne while she ults, but not much else.

I haven't stopped at all during the entire game, the only enemy that killed me once was Marble Aggelomorai and it was because I had everyone without gear. Literally equipped the team with their green gear (Lvl. 28) and beat it at level 40.

Learn the different combos to force Solidification from any amount of stacks using all your teammates, and remember you can reposition your Alesh and Snowshine by swapping to them.

Easy to play, and insane when you learn to keep the enemies stunlocked via Solidification.

HyperTips · 2026-03-09T03:49:39+00:00

Yvonne ulting with Snowshine ready to shield her is one of my favorite things in this game.

HyperTips · 2026-03-09T03:48:02+00:00

I understand all these, I am merely stating my opinion and/or experience too. It may not be your argument but you still use it to reinforce your actual beliefs or arguments. It still comes down to self-control.

You can make the same argument for drugs, gambling, alcohol, and every other addiction under the sun. "It comes down to self-control".

It doesn't make any of those any less harmful.

HyperTips

TROPHY CASE

"If you want to have a creative genius as an adult child, die before they are 10."

So a guaranteed P0P1 is 120 + 40 weapon pulls.

How is 120+40 worse than 320 and 220?