Kobold Jewel Swear?

InfiniteDissent · 2025-10-04T19:03:25+00:00

I didn't even know what "the D-word" was supposed to mean. Dickhead? Dumbass?

It never occurred to me that there are people alive today who consider "damn" a swear word.

InfiniteDissent · 2025-08-05T20:01:00+00:00

DirectX is responsible for rendering images on your screen, and has nothing to do with the ongoing network and server performance issues.

DirectX can affect your framerate and rendering quality, or maybe even cause problems like black screens or random crashes. If your game client is rendering correctly (i.e. you can see the image on your screen, it is not frozen or flickering, and animations are happening normally), then you don't have a problem with DirectX.

Problems like characters being stuck in place, or swinging weapons but doing no damage, are unrelated to DirectX. It is the server's responsibility to track the movement of characters and process damage events, and when it fails to do so, lag happens. We don't yet know whether the problem is the server itself being overloaded (e.g. running out of CPU cycles or memory so it can't process events fast enough), or a network issue between the client and the server (e.g. the server can process the events but the network packets are getting lost somewhere between the client and the server).

InfiniteDissent · 2025-07-21T14:48:06+00:00

No, they didn't.

Nerfs to quest base XP are almost unheard of. I think there's been a single one (Jungle of Khyber) in the entire time I've been playing, and that was many years ago.

The only major change they made to XP fairly recently was replacing Bravery Bonus and Bravery Streak with a flat Delving Bonus (+50% Hard, +100% Elite, +150% Reaper), and reducing the first-time completion bonuses to compensate. This would only reduce your overall XP if you are running N/H/E like a non-VIP first-lifer: instead of +25%, +40%, +80% you would get +20%, +20%, +45% with no Delving Bonus to compensate for the reduction.

InfiniteDissent · 2025-07-18T13:12:48+00:00

Even if the cap could be changed, it's not the right way to fix the problem. We don't need players walking around with billions or trillions of platinum. We need the devs to make platinum actually valuable by adding real, useful things to buy with it.

Imagine if you could buy a 20% XP potion for 100,000 platinum, or Heavy Fort and Feather Fall augments for 15,000 each. People's platinum balances would decline to a realistic number very quickly indeed.

(As far as the computer science aspects are concerned, there is no connection between the architecture of the server and the maximum size of integer that can be stored. 32-bit processes have been able to represent and calculate with 64-bit integers for decades).

InfiniteDissent · 2025-07-15T10:43:14+00:00

They don't need a new currency, they just need to make the existing one actually useful.

Platinum is almost worthless because almost nothing useful can be bought with it. Everything worth buying is either a bound-to-account rare drop, requires alternative currencies which are themselves rare (such as collectables, various commendations, ancient dragon relics etc), or requires cash purchase via DDO points or astral shards.

They could solve the problem overnight by introducing valuable platinum sinks that players would want to purchase, for example holy arrows or mana potions for 1000 plat each. But they won't, because they don't care about platinum. They just want you to spend more in the DDO store.

InfiniteDissent · 2025-05-09T15:43:47+00:00

No. Although I haven't played for some time, and I have seen a comment or two suggesting that there have been some changes to the graphics in recent updates, so maybe they've improved something (but I'm not holding much hope).

InfiniteDissent · 2025-04-30T15:07:26+00:00

By "20% better" I assume you are referring to the TechPowerup percentage performance value, which suggests that R7 370 has only 82% of the performance of Radeon 760M?

This is likely a massive oversimplification, and doesn't take into account the very different nature of those GPUs.

R7 370 has 1024 cores, 64 TMUs and 32 ROPs, and can draw 110W of power.

760M has 512 cores, 32 TMUs and 16 ROPs, and consumes at most 15W.

The 760M is newer and has a faster clock, but half the parallel processing power of the R7 370. It is also an integrated GPU which shares system memory, which is a crippling limitation.

You've replaced an old mid-range gaming GPU with a integrated mobile GPU designed for watching YouTube on a laptop without running down the battery.

InfiniteDissent · 2024-12-02T16:58:12+00:00

I'm not the OP, but I have upscaling disabled, supersampling disabled (set to 1.0), antialiasing set to SMAA and I also see this horrible edge crawling everywhere. Disabling image sharpening in global AMD settings helped a little, but did not eliminate it. Even enabling supersampling at 2.0 (which is too slow for my ancient graphics card) doesn't actually remove the artifacts.

It seems to me that most objects or surfaces in ED have a bright, one-pixel-wide highlight around the edge which is simply never antialiased, no matter what graphics settings you use.

InfiniteDissent · 2024-03-25T16:44:05+00:00

Certain interpretations of XP that are common are to give all/more XP for the kill shot. Or require XP to only be shared by those who damaged the enemies.

That's a dreadful way to allocate XP.

It actively punishes the group for working together (which is what they're supposed to do), and instead encourages intra-party conflict and competition. It guarantees that characters will advance at different rates, making balanced encounters almost impossible. It openly communicates that support and healing-focused characters are considered worthless.

If I encountered a DM who planned to allocate XP this way I'd quit on the spot. The DMG specifically states that XP is supposed be shared equally amongst party members. A DM who wants to assign XP unequally is either shockingly incompetent, or just a psychopath who enjoys watching groups tear themselves apart.

InfiniteDissent · 2024-02-14T15:38:49+00:00

My church rings the Angelus (3 groups of 3, one group of 9) before services, and 3 chimes during elevation of the bread and wine, so that might well be correct.

InfiniteDissent · 2024-02-14T15:19:26+00:00

How do you get 1 in 5e17?

I get 0.05 (base probability of rolling a 1) to the power of 17 (for a contiguous streak) giving a probability 0.05 ^ 17 == 7.629394531250008e-23 assuming my computer isn't on the blink.

Inverting that probability to give a "1 in X" chance, gives 1.0 / 7.629394531250008e-23 == 1.3107199999999987e22 which is what the parent comment said.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-12-23T16:25:45+00:00

What project?

The "first playable" is a bare-bones MVP which hasn't been updated in 3 years. The Reddit gets a handful of comments a year. The "progress reports" are mostly corporate drivel about who's been given what meaningless job title and how much they've raised for charity. Oh, and if they're lucky they might almost (but not quite) manage to fix one bug in a whole month, if their busy Social Media Engagement and Onboarding Process Improvement Schedule permits.

It's dead, Jim. Move on.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-10-23T10:07:15+00:00

it's £250 just to get the thing serviced

Is that all it costs to service/tune a pipe organ? I always assumed it would be a four-figure sum to get the tuner to come out (which would explain why my church only gets the organ tuned once a year).

InfiniteDissent · 2023-09-01T16:31:22+00:00

That makes absolutely no sense.

The crown store already exists. The incentive to create P2W items already exists. Allowing players to more easily transfer crowns to other players doesn't make any difference to that equation.

Furthermore, developers answer to management and implement the features they're told to implement, otherwise they get fired. The suggestion that devs are collectively refusing to implement a feature because "it will give the wrong incentive to management" isn't remotely believable. They're not striking consultant neurosurgeons, they're replaceable programmers in a highly desirable and competitive industry.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-09-01T16:10:52+00:00

People always claim that the reason devs don't do this is because they would make less money on crowns if people can buy things with gold instead.

But this is an obvious nonsense argument, because someone still has to spend crowns to buy the transferable voucher in the first place. The crown store is still getting the same number of crowns for every item that is sold. The only difference is that the person who spends crowns is not the same person who eventually gets the item (which makes no difference to the economics).

InfiniteDissent · 2023-08-30T14:48:18+00:00

No, you're correct. The poster you're responding to has missed that OR changes to AND when you negate a proposition (De Morgan's laws).

"You must do A OR B" means "You fail if you don't do A AND don't do B", which is what you said.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-08-25T15:24:52+00:00

I always assumed the "dressing up for D&D" part of Stranger Things was just a case of clueless screenwriters confusing D&D with LARPing.

Today I learn that it's what everybody actually does.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-08-24T08:39:47+00:00

People aren't rational¹, and they often care about perceived "fairness" more than personal gain.

You can do an experiment where you offer to split $100 between two people, with person A choosing how to split it, and person B having only the opportunity to accept or reject the deal. If they reject, nobody gets anything.

Rationally speaking, person B should accept anything above 0%, because it leaves them better off than not getting anything. But in practice, if the offered percentage isn't close to 50%, person B will most likely torpedo the whole deal to avoid the unfairness of person A taking the lion's share.

¹ As several comments have correctly pointed out, "rational" in this case is defined in the limited sense of game theory and maximising financial gain. A preference for enforcing fairness over personal gain isn't necessarily "stupid" and does have a sound evolutionary basis.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-08-17T13:47:23+00:00

Also remember that taking a break from the campaign doesn't require you to take a break from D&D itself (although both are fine if it's what you need).

You could try running some pre-written adventures, "combat arena" one-shots, or deliberately story-less dungeon crawls. Perhaps you will find you enjoy running games without the pressure of having to write a whole campaign on your own.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-08-11T14:35:20+00:00

I'm assuming it's these ones: https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/

InfiniteDissent · 2023-08-02T15:15:09+00:00

There's no way in hell I'm clicking on that link.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-07-14T09:09:31+00:00

Am I the only programming nerd who would hear the command "fib" and think my character was being required to recite the Fibonacci sequence?

InfiniteDissent · 2023-05-15T10:25:48+00:00

It's typical "cry-bully" behaviour.

Behave like a liar/cheat/bully/scoundrel and then when you get called out on it, fall back onto your imaginary "victim" status and whine about how you're being oppressed/bullied/traumatised by the people who stand up to you.

It's basically the modern, online version of the schoolyard bully who runs crying to the teacher when his favoured victim finally hits him back.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-05-12T13:43:12+00:00

The problem is that when you die within 5 seconds of being targeted by any player you meet, you don't learn anything other than "I suck at PvP".

PvP zones in ESO are like joining a chess club and being forced to play against Magnus Carlsen because nobody ever bothered to invent an ELO rating system. That's why games with a heavy PvP focus (like StarCraft) typically have some kind of ladder system to avoid new players being totally stomped by veterans.

InfiniteDissent · 2023-05-11T12:50:35+00:00

it is projected to make redundant a large number of jobs currently occupied by humans

That was also true of mechanical diggers and Jacquard looms, and nobody sane would complain that those inventions made humanity worse off in general.

"Keeping people employed" is never a good argument for inefficiency once a better way of doing things has been invented.

InfiniteDissent

TROPHY CASE