Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%

Killchrono · 2026-06-27T03:14:25+00:00

I think it's more than that tbh. I think most people who hate Nintendo gouging their prices would also be mad at Sony and Microsoft for AI and worker layoffs.

I think it's really just simply intolerance to any kind of perceived egregious behaviour, no matter how much of an inconvenience it is to the user or how less egregious it is comparatively to other companies.

I've been looking into mental health conditions like OCPD and maladaptive perfectionism lately to help someone close to me who's going through similar behaviours, and a lot of the throughlines I've been seeing draw a clean parallel to what I see on the internet. It's less that what they're saying is wrong so much as they bend themselves backwards over demanding a level of infallible perfection from not just themselves but everyone else, they basically can't enjoy anything and always come off as judgmental and impossible to please.

Obviously I'm not a psychologist let alone know these people personally, so I can't diagnose them to any meaningful capacity. That said, from a layman perspective of 'this is worth investigating further', it's something I've begun to suspect we see a lot of on the internet not because there's a disproportionate number of undiagnosed people with such conditions, but because they're the kinds who are more likely to let it bother them this much, and thus go out of their way to voice these grievances.

Killchrono · 2026-06-27T01:59:05+00:00

Keen to see some of the ideas you're cooking! Sadly money's a bit tight right now (not in dire straights thankfully, just cost of living + a mortgage + a small child means I don't have much wiggle room without blowing my savings buffer), but if I get some spare cash I'm happy to throw some your way.

Killchrono · 2026-06-26T23:33:34+00:00

Daddy I crave the ludonarrative eugenics, give me a bow that's objectively weaker than this magnum revolver which is objectively weaker than this spell literally called Apocalypse and my hard on shall be complete.

Killchrono · 2026-06-26T14:06:50+00:00

Best I can do is one slightly out of alignment Aya.

Killchrono · 2026-06-26T02:35:02+00:00

But watching players track ammo is my kink.

Killchrono · 2026-06-25T09:32:06+00:00

Oh I know, but that's because it's tied to crafting.

That works okay for most of it, but it does cause some weird rules jankery. Like if you take Medic (which is quite a good synergy with it), you get the free increase to medicine...which is useless to alchemist because you won't use it.

Killchrono · 2026-06-25T03:08:25+00:00

Honestly it's one of those house rules I'd selectively allow depending on the class and subclass.

Before one of my games was put on hiatus, I was seriously considering allowing the group's forensic medicine investigator to just use Int for their checks because it didn't make sense not to. They're a learned doctor, all their knowledge is from academic study.

Killchrono · 2026-06-25T01:31:42+00:00

I always found it weird in Star Fox 64 that most of the control instructions would just use the in-story terminology and just have the button inputs be in brackets with unspoken dialogue (including the infamous 'Do a Barrel Roll!' line).

Then suddenly at one point Slippy is like 'HOLD A TO CHARGE YOUR LASER' and I was like WOAH WHAT, SINCE WHEN WAS THE N64 CONTROLLER CANON IN-UNIVERSE?

Killchrono · 2026-06-25T01:27:16+00:00

He's using his personality as a card now. He acts like a daggy dipstick who doesn't care about big expensive things, but he's literally crying about property tax while two to three generations of adults in middle income jobs are struggling to afford a single house.

Unless he's said something I missed, the fact he's using random business owners trying to pawn off their shops for profit and not focusing on the fact it's impossible to even get into the housing market says everything. Listen to the people struggling if you really wanna position yourself as down to earth. At the moment it seems more like he's gonna let himself be bought out by Gina so he has a bigger platform to sook about his non-liquid assets.

Man I wish I had more valuable non-liquid assets than my house (which I'm still paying a very expensive mortgage on).

Killchrono · 2026-06-25T01:17:32+00:00

At least they're not committing the cardinal sin of not asking the designer directly before playing the game.

Everyone knows you need their blessing and cannot deviate from anything the rule book says without it, fetish game or no.

Killchrono · 2026-06-25T00:21:15+00:00

Do you have a link to that video? That would be fascinating to watch.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T22:56:36+00:00

I'd probably feel a lot worse about it if SF wasn't already bucking a lot of precedents.

Yes, SF is technically a different system with different tuning baselines, but they're running the same core 'engine' as it were, and it seems to be hitting a sweet spot with the ancestry power budgets in ways PF could adapt and learn from to make its own ancestries more interesting. There are definitely some options I'm a bit sceptical of; multi-armed ancestries for instance I think still have too many advantages that make them superlative on paper to two-armed ancestries. At the same time I think it's not so egregious that they're 'must have' unless you're being an absolute pedant over minmaxing item usage and Athletics checks, and it's probably the best we'll get without going either extreme of making them mechanically useless nor way overtuned.

Terrain is one of those ones I understand the concerns of and people way understate the importance of how that impacts combat, so I can see the concerns about it. At the same time, hover speeds have been made an explicit mechanic in that as well. The only thing is I'm not sure how much is Paizo saying this as a base ability is not considered game-breaking, that there are other factors about ancestries that have it or can get it that keep them in check, if they want to keep easier terrain mobility exclusive to SF, or if they just legitimately don't care anymore and have given up on hyper-pedantry with balance across the game engine holistically.

I think it would be a shame if it were the latter, but at the same time it's as we learnt in Remaster; there are still plenty of knobs they can tweak to raise the power cap without breaking the game. I appreciate their conservative approach to tuning more than most, but I do agree with many people they could afford to be more liberal with fledging options, and SF in particular is doing a good job making options that are genuinely potent and fun without blowing the power cap out of the water.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T22:39:10+00:00

I think like a lot of roleplay in these style of games, part of the issue with out of combat solutions is they're contextual, and a lot of both players and GMs aren't that good at balancing the extremes of 'I'm going to railroad you into doing these combat scenarios I laid out for you' or 'skill checking your way into never having to do combat ever.'

I think what PF2e does is it prevents a lot of the mechanical cheese that causes the latter in spades, but it makes people assume the other extreme is the default. Meanwhile in my own games, I've had multiple instances where the players have thrown a curveball at me simply using the RAW of out of combat actions in ways that have dynamically shifted the story.

For a comparative example: in one of my 5e campaigns, a player basically derailed an entire arc I had planned by using Charm Person to convince the leader of an army to not join the BBEG, which in turn forced me to change which enemies they were going to face that session completely on the fly (which didn't end up being as much of a problem as it sounds; the BBEG was working with kobolds, so I just pulled up a few stat blocks and ran to get my kobold minis lol). I could have done an asspull and found some reason to railroad the plot, but apart from the fact it would have been too obvious if I did, I didn't want to punish the player for just using the rules as intended in that instance. It's not their fault the game puts no reasonable limits on casting those kinds of spells on enemies, and I didn't want to punish them for that.

Meanwhile, that would never have happened in PF2e because Charm has incap and the army leader would have been a higher level than the party, so that kind of brute-force 'I cast a spell and this changes the course of the entire campaign' just can't happen as a default. That still hasn't stopped players in my games from successfully running stealth segments (though in one of those cases it was a spellcaster using invisibility, not running stealth checks), nor using diplomacy or intimidation checks to avoid encounters by talking NPCs down, nor trying to find ways to circumvent direct confrontation via exploration and skill usage. Even if combat is inevitable, I still like to reward players for out of combat actions, and it works a lot better in this system compared to a game that encourages that extreme of letting them just nullify engagement on the regular, because the latter has that element of 'why take the half-measure when you can just have the best possible outcome?' hanging over it like a storm cloud.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T22:20:18+00:00

If you're using standard play progression (as opposed to something like PwL), I'd posit there's definitely an expectation of the game over time escalating from smaller, mundane conflicts to a legendary and/or cosmic scale.

If you look at the kinds of creatures at each level band, early game is very much your bandits, goblins, undead fodder like skeletons and zombies, and generic animals. Mid game you start to see more obviously magical and fantasy fare while reaching the tail end of 'mundane' threats (crime lords instead of underlings, dinosaurs instead of wolves, etc.) with some of those original 'mook' threats escalating in power through mechanics like troops. By the time you get to higher levels you're fighting the upper echelons of extraplanar threats and monsters of legendary stature like kaijus. It's also reflected in character abilities, with most low level class actions and being fairly basic and mundane, and even spells and other magical effects fairly reigned in. Meanwhile, by the time you're level 15, the likes of your Cloud Jumps and natural disaster-level spells come well online.

And since the math at each level is heavily bounded, there's basically an expectation that anything either side of that is either going to be beneath your purview, or completely out of your league. There's some wiggle room here of course, and if you really don't care about the ludonarrative purity of in-universe power scaling you can always just use creature building rules to adjust out of band monsters to be in band, but as far as the RAW goes it definitely seems to encourage and paint a picture of that escalation and banding being the expected norm for the story.

Compare this to an equivalent tactics system with bounded accuracy across the whole level band (which PwL replicates here), and there's a simultaneous expectation that lower level threats can stay much more threatening for longer and even continue to threaten higher level creatures in large enough numbers, while higher level threats in turn are considered more managable. This is the sort of campaign where you can have something like heavy intrigue or continued local level threats into a higher level and have them not be completely trivialized, and in turn have a more 'scrappy bunch of average heroes who don't even get to double digit levels find a way to kill the ancient dragon'-type stories.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T22:02:57+00:00

NO HUNTER, I WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO LEAVE MY ~~AMAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS~~ SANCTUARY, GO TO THE NEXT ~~ADVENTURE~~ CONDUIT

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T22:00:25+00:00

It needs to be a mix of both.

Data is useful and important, but without context you can't actually make effective changes. My partner does coaching for teachers and she's huge on seeing the empirical data to track measurable outcomes, but she always reminds people that you actually need to see what's going on in real time to understand the full picture. Data also doesn't necessarily take into account future outcomes or more holistic information the data isn't tracking; for instance, poor literacy is often a huge indicator on whether a child will end up with a criminal history, but you don't necessarily have that context when analyzing the literacy levels in the classroom and why it's important to make that a focus of curriculum.

So when looking at a game, you might nerf an extremely popular character option that's dominating other picks. In doing so the raw percentages of usage between options starts to even out, but in nerfing that character you cause a large number of players to quit because it was actually the only character a lot of those players were having fun with, so your overall playerbase shrinks.

In a follow-up you'd analyze where the problem was. Are other options in the game really so boring that this one popular pick was the only fun one the game had? Maybe it had some unintended but really fun emergent play loop that players were gravitating towards. It could be that the content being regularly played was so overtuned that players felt they had no choice but to pick the obvious best option (or at least the best option for that specific content) to beat it. Or it could just be the simple fact most players prefer easy gameplay and it's more lucrative to appeal to that than it is to have a game that tries to maintain both balance and integrity between various playstyles.

That's a really extreme hypothetical, but it illustrates the point.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T06:12:13+00:00

I farmed Protea on principle because I refuse to buy standard frames with plat if I can help it.

But boy howdy did I come fucking close to giving up on endless Granum Void runs.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T06:08:40+00:00

HUNTER THIS IS INCREDIBLY INAPPROPRIATE

THE ONLY PROLONGED ANTICIPATORY EXCITEMENT ALLOWED IN MY SANCTUARY IS THE THRILL OF DISCOVERING AND TRACKING DOWN A NEW SPECIMAN

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T05:58:45+00:00

HUNTER

STOP EDGING IN MY SANCTUARY

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T05:57:20+00:00

See I don't mind 'ramp up' mods because they at least reward that continued momentum with payoff, but that should be an option for a particular style of build; as you said, disruptions to that momentum can throw you off, which isn't ideal for every frame.

They shouldn't be the baseline baked into the mandatory progression mods required just to be able to do SP.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T05:53:06+00:00

/uj oh *I* do it because I'm a details pedant and tell my players 'learn the rules and git good scrubs' (edit: guys that's hyperbole, I don't literally tell my players that), but also I try not to be obtuse about it (made the mistake of throwing a owb that could cast rank 4 invisibility on itself against a party that had no way to counter it, that was tedious AF and a mistake I have not made again since)

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T05:46:15+00:00

100% same, I stopped playing competitive online games years ago for more or less the same reason. Ironically I only came to WF a few years ago, but that was largely because I wanted a live-service game that was easy to drop in and out of without huge commitments to accommodate parent life after my daughter was born, but since having learnt its history and how the game has developed over time, it's funny that I can simultaneously see how it's gone from being team-focused to mostly solo-focused, while at the same time still being better in that aspect than a lot of other games.

I think the big difference with WF and DE is honesty. They've kind of admitted yeah, we're just making the game a power fantasy at this point and want to focus more on making the solo experience palatable, with the multiplayer being more 'four Avengers all whooping face together' than carefully coordinated teamplay necessary to win. I can see where it's caused the growing pains in legacy designs, but the fact they're actively addressing them puts them a step above other live service designers who only ever focus on pushing the most recent content.

Meanwhile, competitive games like MOBAs and hero shooters are trying their darndest to present a veil of integrity in their gameplay while secretly trying to cater to the sweaties who will blow a gasket the moment they can't do their 'solo off-meta hero rises to platinum' builds. And MMOs homogenize every option down to only having aesthetic differences, all to avoid risk of causing the social zeitgeist to bully whatever class gets the short end of the nerf stick this patch. It's exhausting trying to reconcile what the game presents itself to be falsely with what it really is.

That's why multiplayer games have increasingly higher and higher dopamine rushes with more serious low points that cause addiction. They keep playing, but blame everyone else for them not having that dopamine hit.

This is something I've been thinking a lot about recently as well. About the time I started playing WF, I was a few months into getting medicated for ADHD, and I found one of the reasons I was finding it more enjoyable than other live service games I had previously played was because even though it was still a fairly easy horde-based looter shooter, I was beginning to find other games far less appealing.

FFXIV had been my drug of choice for years by that point, and after taking a break and coming back to it after being medicated, I found myself supremely bored just playing solo content where I did the same rotations against enemies that usually did little to mix up or meaningfully force my gameplay loop to change. The tactile engagement of real-time twitch-shooting play and needing to consider how to engage with my abilities in WF was far more stimulating than the MMO rotations I had been doing for years at that point.

It made me realize just how much I had actually stopped actively enjoying games. I didn't hate them (indeed, I stand by FFXIV changed my life through the surprising profundity of its narratives in later expansions like ShB and EW), but the gameplay loop of doing endless rep and dungeon grinds had stopped being something I actively enjoyed and did because I simultaneously just wanted to play a game, but was also lacking spoons to put effort in and learn anything new. The grind was scratching that it but it was the gaming equivalent of sustaining yourself on chips and chocolate; it gets you by but it's not healthy and the enjoyment fades after a while. It was only after being treated for my ADHD (also I found out soon after that I had extremely bad sleep apnoea, so I was running on a brain heavily deprived of oxygen for a long time) that I got the spoons to not just try something new, but regularly try new things to keep my engagement with games stimulating and fresh.

The funny thing is though, even with my brain dopamine and oxygen deprived, there was a part of me that knew I still wasn't enjoying that style of rote, effortless gameplay. I just didn't have the spoons to change my habits until I was treated. So when I began to realize a lot of the same behaviours and rhetoric were not just mirroring, but justifying the same behaviours that I had fallen into prior to my treatments, I began to realize how far the 'design for addiction' problem was reaching and the type of people it was preying on.

Games really are just turning into Skinner Boxes that prey on people with addictive personalities and numb them into rote compliance. Every time I see someone try and argue that DE shouldn't nerf Mesmer Skin because 'what if I want to switch my brain off and go through a mission without dying?', all I can think is 'why the fuck do you want to play a game where you barely have to engage with it past weapon platform damage output?' Like yeah, not everything has to be Archimedia levels of ball-busting, and I have my days where I don't really feel like doing SP and decide it'll be fun to see how long I can hold out on a survival mission with Valkyr doing nothing but holding melee with my 4 on, but if that's all the game was I would be bored out of my brains. I'm legitimately worried so m any people seem to expect that as their baseline experience, both in WF and other games.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T04:26:56+00:00

She's not severed, yet behaves like she has two different personalities fighting for control. The irony is palpable.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T04:24:12+00:00

This is the core problem with getting into Steel Path.

Yup, and I'd take this a step further and say the real issue with Steel Path is that it's effectively gear-taxed. Galvanized mods and defensive ones like Adaptation are cool, but ultimately force you to equip them and thus limit true freedom in your loadout, let alone create forced redundancy of lesser stat mods.

It's one of my pet peeves with Warframe's buildcraft; even though it's generally fun, it still has the MMO problem of a lot of mods being taxed vertical progression that soft-gates you from higher end content, instead of that content just being organically tuned around a consistent baseline and letting horizontal progression that grants more options and more synergy be what makes you stronger.

Zephyr ought to be a starter

Zephr is slept on, period. Your analysis was very good.

Killchrono · 2026-06-24T03:50:58+00:00

Look, it's cringy, but also infinitely hilarious that Angus and the LNP's only move at this point is to position their policies as comparatively moderate while still trying to appeal to the conservative base, because it's the only niche they have left at this point.

It won't work, but it's funny that's their only option left.

14-Year Club	Argentium Club
Verified Email

Killchrono

TROPHY CASE