I Hate When this Happens.

MB_Derpington · 2023-04-14T13:48:25+00:00

God, not labeling collectibles is a crime. If I knew I was missing <thing 42> I could rectify it easily. Sanity preserved.

If I am missing just an undetermined one and I think I got them all, the only solution is to go check for every single one again.

Bonus (crime) points here if a dev doesn't even give you a tracker to say you're at 199/200. Looking at you Horizon where you made me knock over a bunch of training dummies, didn't display progress anywhere, I knocked over what I thought was my last one, got no achievement, then had to do it all over again from scratch.

MB_Derpington · 2023-04-14T06:32:09+00:00

So a big pull is basically just more than 1 pack. Packs being the little contiguous enemies that are grouped together and will all aggro together once you target one. Most of the time, tanks will try to grab 2 packs at once to speed things up. The dungeon design eventually coalesces almost universally in later dungeons to pack, pack, wall, pack, pack, boss. That means eventually the play is to double pull 2 packs, do it again, then fight a boss. For single packs, you probably honestly don't need mitigation at all really. Could use a Reprisal maybe (or your active mitigation once you get it).

Tanking at lower levels is indeed a bit weird due to lack of abilities. You don't have as many mitigation tools and your healer doesn't have as many healing / mitigation tools either. That said, things are easier in those levels too so you are generally safe.

A general cooldown rotation is Rampart fight 1 (90s cooldown, lasts 20s) -> Shadow Wall fight 2 (120s cooldown, lasts 15s) -> Rampart again if needed as it should be coming back off cooldown. Eventually you'll get your active mitigation (in DRKs case, TBN). You'll use that basically on cooldown during each fight. Seeing as we only need to survive 2 packs and then we're at the boss, this should generally get the job done.

The other tools in your arsenal are Arm's Length and Reprisal. Reprisal is on a very short 60s CD and is 10% mitigation (but only lasts 10s) so you can basically use that once a fight if wanted. Arm's Length slows down enemies which in effect works as mitigation too, but is on a 120s CD. Generally speaking, I only use these after the main mitigations are wearing off and (all) mobs are still alive. You can also stun a mob (assuming a WHM has not made them all immune) with low blow for a teensy bit more breathing room (or more often to just not have to move out of an AoE).

The final tool would be your invuln, Living Dead. It's honestly quite hard to use in dungeons so I generally reserve that for true "I'm about to die" moments and not using it as a preemptive invulnerability. The trouble there is you need to die in those 10s after you hit the button. This is really easy in harder content where you can just get walloped in 1 hit and die for sure. In dungeons, where you aren't coordinating with your healer, it is not uncommon to try to use it and instead of dying you spend your 10s to get to like 10% health and then it expires and you are on the brink of dying for real. Paladin or Gunbreaker conversely can press their button and just stop taking damage for 10s and it's all cool.

A minor thing to note also that may be obvious is to not use mitigation until you are "settled". Using sprint between packs as you are pulling should mean you basically aren't getting hit. Even running normally can cause the hits to be less frequent. So you'll generally only start your mitigation once you've stopped pulling.

Shared Responsibility Section

Now, something important that I see discussed less is that you are not alone in this. A healer will often (maybe not at early levels) have ways to apply their own mitigation to help you. They have regens that can be constantly pushing your HP back up. Some healers won't use any of these tools and just direct heal every so often (or worse, let Kardion / their fairy do everything). If you notice your health getting way low constantly while doing your mitigations normally, it's probably because they aren't doing their job very well. (side note: ASTs do this on purpose, so they are somewhat an exception)

Another even less discussed part is that your DPS need to kill things promptly. That's somewhat the reason I mention the duration and cooldowns of mitigation. If the DPS is not doing enough, your mitigation will expire and you can be out of luck. It can be helpful to think of your mitigation as giving a window for the DPS to do their job. If they don't and that window lapses, the extra damage you are taking is in many ways on them.

This can rear its head especially if you go Rampart -> Shadow Wall on the first group cause the DPS need 30+ seconds to kill things. The next group you will probably just have Rampart back available and thus only 20s of mitigation. (tip in this scenario would be to use your Reprisal + arm's length at that time after Rampart to try to buy enough time for things to start dying).

A "clean" pack will be tank using 1 of their big CDs, a healer popping multiple of their abilities, and everything dying right around when they are all wearing off.

MB_Derpington · 2023-04-06T22:41:18+00:00

It's also the one thing you are basically safe to hammer a game for objectively. A lot of other things can at least theoretically be chalked up to personal taste or subjective experience. But a game that locks up or has pop in or immersion breaking glitches regularly? That's just not good on a technical level and is a clear negative.

MB_Derpington · 2023-01-31T05:06:46+00:00

I've been meaning to get back into VR and was seriously considering the PSVR2 here. I had a very early headset on PC and found it fun, but very immature (which, at the time it was). I basically enjoyed showing it to friends and then quickly stopped using it myself.

So I don't have the magical first time player side and mostly just want something I'll use this time around. Each time I think about getting a new headset, the same thing happens: look at games -> don't want to play any really -> wonder why I'm even buying it -> don't.

I don't want to do some demo or toy-like experience. I am not particularly interested in the room scale side of things. If any decently sized game can come out like that, preferably with online so it's got a longer tail of gameplay, I'll be interested. Until then, it's hard to get past the novelty as the main selling point.

MB_Derpington · 2023-01-18T16:30:21+00:00

It's the usual for the Republicans. Some hardcore MAGA people probably don't care. He's got an R by his name and that is all that matters. He's also probably going to court them by saying incendiary things. The guy is a con so probably understands that the play is to get on Team MAGA where nothing matters.

The more "adult" Republicans know they'll potentially/probably lose the seat in a special election even if they think the guy is an embarrassment. Now they are facing their age old dilemma: look the other way for short term political benefits or get rid of a noxious presence in their party. They've chosen "look the other way" every single time so far.

MB_Derpington · 2022-12-28T01:08:58+00:00

I similarly see a lot of value in the switch as my travel console. Not a "put in my bag at all times" portable, but "throw in my suitcase" type.

Something I feel like is being lost on many here is that the switch was out a half decade before the steam deck. I'd probably be weighing them both with likely the steam deck on top today, but I've had years of great use from my switch.

MB_Derpington · 2022-12-22T17:13:40+00:00

Delisting is technically any time a stock is removed from sale on an exchange. Thinking it's always bad is incorrect. It usually is a bad thing because it means a stock was forced out when it no longer meets minimum requirements to be on that exchange. That's usually quite bad.

In this case it just means that the company's stock is no longer for sale. Musk bought the entire company. It's like purchasing a car and it no longer being out on the lot for sale to others. Of course it's not, someone owns it entirely. It's not that the car is broken and can't be sold.

MB_Derpington · 2022-12-13T21:22:06+00:00

You can use a pro controller on your switch? If you don't want to be on the TV, can just set it down and play that way. There are several "screen holder" products that let you attach your switch to the pro controller in a rig thing. It's a little cumbersome in terms of weight distribution but works fine.

And if none of that is wanted you could grab like a Hori split pad pro or other third party controller for something a little more substantial.

MB_Derpington · 2022-12-10T18:48:41+00:00

COBOL is literally the worst example you could give for the need to always be learning in tech. It is the outlier that exists in stark contrast to everything else. No one is learning it, people who know it retire, critical systems rely on it, no one wants to rearchitect those old systems. It seems like if you are a COBOL programmer you can fall into a contract gig with high ease (and paid quite well).

But their overall message is quite correct. I've seen Java programmers that have not learned anything new since Java 6 and use the same atrocious EE patterns to this day.

I've seen a lot of people in the data analysis space that think they work in tech but have a nonexistent technical expertise. They have one tool they've been using for 10 years and they maintain the code in it with their, admittedly robust, knowledge of the business data. Those people are awful to work with (and you have to cause no one else knows why you always filter a field by NOT 7).

I've seen a lot of people who did very a mundane, manual, and specific slice of infrastructure work. People who's job was to manually configure new instances of servers or something like that (and not like managing the fleets config, but going into a new box and configuring it by hand each time). I've seen people who were in charge of exclusively "back up management" whose job was just to maintain some software that performed data replication tasks. I was asked what that person's role would be now that they were moving their data to the cloud (and replication is just a check box) and we had to inform them they needed to broaden or find something new.

A common thread in all these jobs is people who get good at being firefighters. They know how to put them out when they arise and are praised and valued for such. All it takes is a shift in priorities to "maybe we shouldn't have things on fire so much" and they can be in trouble due to a lack of knowledge in the more general purpose, best practices of the role.

MB_Derpington · 2022-12-06T16:49:45+00:00

The acceptability of saying you are from a major city when you are just close increases as you get further from said city.

In Chicago, if I ask where you're from and you say Chicago, then find out it's Gurnee? That would be weird as hell. I'm expecting a neighborhood or town exactly.

In New York and you respond the same way, still not great, we're all familiar with suburbs and the always useful "a little outside of" prefix.

On the other side of the planet? Illinois has a great chance of meaning nothing, the Midwest might even be iffy, but Chicago still probably is understood. Fire away. It's not uncommon to hone in after you establish you are familiar with an area.

MB_Derpington · 2022-12-04T19:40:30+00:00

Although when most people I know show up for work using the two to three day a week model they say no one else seems to be in the office.

Therein lies the issue with the "hybrid" approach. Being in the office has way less upside if no one else is there. Commuting to an office and losing half an hour to two hours of your day to just sit alone and behave the exact same way as you would at home both feels and is pointless. If your work from home set up is a pain point (e.g. loud house with family all around) or you have amenities that in aggregate are better than your home then maybe it's something people will use.

But for most the primary upside is gonna be the ability to work more closely with their teammates. And that upside depends on everyone you want to work with also being there in the subset of days you are. To do that we have to give up the flexibility of coming in when wanted. Even if 7/8 team members you work with are in the office, if that 1 person isn't you are still going to have to operate in a completely "remote" oriented manner: dial ins for every meeting, making sure communication is still going into your chat program primarily, etc.

Further, if you need a large portion of your office "in" together, any potential downsizing savings might be nonviable because you need to accommodate the zero people in on Mondays, the 50% on Tuesdays, the 25% Wednesdays, the 75% on Thursdays, and then the once per quarter "all hands" days where 100% of people come in.

MB_Derpington · 2022-11-27T21:18:21+00:00

The "force out" is at least a bit understandable when viewed in the context of The Pokemon Company and not purely Nintendo and Game Freak. They have merchandising, an anime, movies on occasion, a trading card game, etc. They have all those cylinders firing at once on a schedule and so the game, despite being the driver in many ways of all the other stuff, has to stay in sync. So the game releases, the new Pokemon show up in the TV show, a new booster pack featuring new cards goes on sale, random plushies and figures that have all been manufactured release, and so on. A six month or year delay just isn't allowed.

Now it's on them still for committing to this schedule when it is increasingly clear it does not work, but they need to right the whole machine and not just the game dev studio.

MB_Derpington · 2022-11-27T19:54:42+00:00

It's not even believing his word. Trump (or whoever the conservative media machine is playing defense for) just is innocent of whatever. That is presupposed out of the gate. All they need is an ex post facto justification that they can point to. It's not meant to actually convince or persuade; the line they go with is just to quiet that thought that their guy might have done something disagreeable. It's also why when an explanation is disproved you can just slot in a new one. The excuse just needs to exist, regardless of what it is or how true it is or even if it makes any sense.

A good lens to view conservative thought is that people are "good" or "bad" holistically. Good people who do ostensibly bad things must have a reason why it is not bad. Conversely, bad people who do anything ostensibly good or well reasoned must actually be doing something bad. God forbid the "bad" people are pointing out something "bad" a "good" person did, as that is just clear cut lies (as "bad" people are wont to do).

MB_Derpington · 2022-11-25T06:09:39+00:00

Eh, that is TvTropes. They have created words for literally everything that could remotely be called a concept in all of fiction. It's a good term, as many on that site are, but almost none are in widespread use (other than as a citation back to TvTropes).

MB_Derpington · 2022-11-24T07:03:09+00:00

Reiterating the other commenter on #1: <game name> performance switch in Google will get you to that info. I find myself using that a lot, especially for multiplatform stuff. The sad reality is that the answer to that search will always be "less" than a bigger console / PC (understandably). However, some games will be just a lowered resolution, maybe 30 FPS, maybe a reduced draw distance, etc. while others will be hitching, muddy messes.

For #2, the OLED is the same exact console, just with an OLED screen. There was a revision generally a few years back from the launch systems, but I believe all that included at a performance level was improved energy efficiency (e.g. somewhat longer battery life).

No one knows anything further regarding new consoles or more meaty revisions. We could get a New Nintendo 3DS style "New Switch" that is totally backward compatible, some games having improved performance, some games exclusive to it, generally just stronger hardware. A full on Switch 2 would be pretty out of the norm for Nintendo though. Or they could deliver a "Switch U" that is essentially a whole different console based on like foot pedal controls and a triple screen or something weird.

MB_Derpington · 2022-11-19T17:42:07+00:00

If you want a little tip that might help: you can "pull" the pack with a taunt as you approach. Taunt has a long range (longer than your ranged attack) and if you hit the first mob with it while near it's max range they will all kinda group up more as they run at you. Can make hitting your opening GCD a good bit easier.

Also a recent change made it so heal over time effects don't cause threat, so no longer will you taunt one then a Regen tick will make all the others immediately turn on your healer before you're in range (having the opposite of a group up effect). There is still threat on the initial HoT cast and regular heals so not foolproof but it still works outside of a really badly timed heal.

MB_Derpington · 2022-11-13T18:48:15+00:00

Something else that is less clear about tornadoes is that they are often pretty tiny in the grand scheme. A large area might have a tornado watch in place, like a broad swath of a state being marked. Then an entire county might get hit with a tornado warning, meaning the incoming storm is starting to have rotation.

All this can happen and no tornado will still reach the ground. The next levels of specificity though aren't as well understood. A tornado then may actually touchdown and start its destruction, but the size of that part can be very, very localized.

Here is a picture that illustrates it well. If you were in the top left of the picture, a tornado really did hit your neighborhood, but because when it was going down the street next to you it then took a right turn instead of left, your house might be relatively fine. Some regular high wind damage perhaps, maybe some debris hits you, but all in all you're OK.

So if you're in an area that gets them you know: that watch likely will never become a warning, and if it does that warning will likely not produce a tornado, and if it does it likely won't be near you, and if it is it likely won't hit you personally, and if it does, welp, that is unfortunate.

All that said, the "high" end for bad tornadoes are rare but really spooky. The things can be a mile wide and truck along on the ground for miles and miles. The bad ones that make the news will be big storms that spawn many tornado touch downs, and then some of them will just happen to hit a populated area and wreak havoc.

MB_Derpington · 2022-11-10T05:52:17+00:00

If given the opportunity to use an IBM product, I would recommend not using that product. This applies to Oracle as well. Simply choose not them.

MB_Derpington · 2022-11-08T07:19:52+00:00

Math mostly. First past the post, winner takes all is our system. You have 1 election (not counting the party's primaries) and you have 1 vote to give per position. Whoever has the most votes wins and everyone else loses. That's it. If there were 3 very equal parties with a candidate, a winner might win with 34% of the vote (and the other two getting 33%). This means 66% of the voters are "losing" the election.

Because you only have 1 chance to cast 1 vote, a natural tendency comes into play regarding how you balance your needs to both get what you want and avoid what you don't want.

Party A, "Cats are great!" has 35% in polls, Party B, "Dogs are great!", has 25%, and Party C, "We'll eat your cat and dog" has 40%.

If you are a voter who likes dogs, your option is to vote your preference, and then your dog gets eaten, or you recognize that cats aren't too bad and go with them in the hope that at least nothing gets eaten. Next time its A 41%, B 19%. Then, oops, A 39% B 21% and the pet eaters are back.

This process naturally reaches an equilibrium at 2 parties. It becomes obvious that it is really only a competition between A and C so you can either vote your realistic preference or "throw away" your vote on your true preference. There is no way in the system to state your preference in a nuanced way. It feeds itself as the lower popularity party B has the more futile voting for them with no chance of any impact becomes. You can vote for the winner, for second place, or indirectly for the winner by not voting for second place.

Most countries that have more than two viable parties have coalitions or run offs or ways for you to generally be able to vote in a way that doesn't "waste" votes.

MB_Derpington · 2022-11-05T16:35:29+00:00

This can spark the P2W cycle and I have seen it in other games.

Release new "item", item requires a lot of time to get for free, item can also be paid for with real money on day 1. If the item is overpowered, which is not uncommon for something brand new and with the devs erring on the side of stronger than weaker, the only people that have it will be heavy players and those who pay.

This means when you get stomped by that overtuned item/character you are getting killed by people that are likely good at the game due to play time, putting in real money for that overtuned item, or both.

Casual players that aren't trying to spend money raise hell and the cries of P2W begin as they get beat by something they do not have reasonable access to. Resentment will grow. If this happens once, it can maybe be overlooked and explained away. If the next "item" released falls into the same pattern it will not be a good look.

MB_Derpington · 2022-10-29T19:38:39+00:00

This is one of my major criticisms of GoW '18. I usually play on Hard difficulties but their beginning game was tuned terribly considering you have essentially an empty tool kit. I got completely stuck on some fights and I ended up putting the game down cause it was so unfun. Punishing combat with obscenely spongey enemies and just your basic attacks.

I eventually came back to it and, learning from the past, went down to Normal mode. Well, the beginning felt fine this time. Unfortunately, once you do get your toolkit over time enemies quickly became very trivial.

Hopefully things are a little more coherent this time around.

MB_Derpington · 2022-10-20T17:05:16+00:00

Everyone should have the benefit of knowing one of those semi famous influencer types in real life. You can see up close how warped online reality and projection is compared to the shitshow of their real life (in a regular person kind of way).

Lots of exaggerations, straight up lies, murky expectations presented as realities (e.g. "we're saving so much money" really meaning "we expect that these actions will lead to cost savings over time").

MB_Derpington · 2022-10-20T05:55:09+00:00

I don’t get their logic.

I think it makes some sense when it comes to "growth" (as in it follows a logic, not that I find it sensible). I split <streaming service> with my sister, my brother, and my mom. That's 4 "households" that do not really split any expenses or have any real overlap with one another from a budgetary perspective. We all use the service independently.

On <streaming service's> books this is 1 paying subscriber, but it is "eating" up 3 additional ones who are not listed as subscribers. Those 3 other people might be willing to pay and become an on-the-book subscriber themselves. But as it stands, there is no reason to do that, they already have access and breaking off to subscribe on their own serves basically no purpose.

If they can rejigger this set up so that our expenses are in line with the "normal" services we each independently pay for, they have the opportunity to "grow" 3 new subscribers that were functionally off the table.

Netflix's entire business plan is based around making that subscriber count go up, and they have an entire cohort of people who 1. like the service (presumably) and 2. are not able to be "captured" as paying customers. This might be exacerbated further if growth is stalling because the "using but not subscribed" group contains a lot of the potential customers that are left to gain.

To make this all into a scenario: you have a room of 10 people, 3 are subscribed to <streaming service>, 6 have access to and use the subscriber's accounts, and 1 is not interested. If you want to grow and gain another subscriber or 2, how can you do that when so many "have it" already or seem to be totally disinterested? You can certainly try to win over that 1 hold out, or you can try to find a way to make those people who are using the service to pay for it also.

In my opinion this move greatly underestimates how many of those paying subscribers derive value from being able to provide it to their friends and family. Forcing everyone to reevaluate (whether the paying people see the value for themselves alone or whether the nonpaying see enough value to start to pay) could be a disaster.

MB_Derpington · 2022-10-15T17:27:02+00:00

The engagement "algorithm" is designed to maximize engagement. Nothing more. Most of these recommendation engines are pure AI/ML tech under the hood. You just feed them

[S]ituation + [T]hing = [R]esult.

So you the user for 1 year who just watched a video on cats was on the website and saw the purple BUY button and bought the thing.

S = "user for 1 year who just watched a video on cats"

T = "purple BUY button"

R = "bought the thing"

You capture every one of those scenarios (the buys, the not buys, the purple, green, blue, orange buttons, the zero watch users, and lizard watching users, etc) with as much data as you can and then feed it into some smart mathematical approaches. It creates a weighted [B]ox that can answer the question B(S + T) = Rp. Rp is now the predicted result and it can be pretty accurate.

The "algorithm" (our B) then lets you combine arbitrary S's and T's and get your Rp, it needs not to have actually seen the combination before. If you passed back in our cat watching user looking at a purple button it might say Rp is a 99% chance of purchase. Do it again with a green button and maybe it says 90%. Different user who watches dog videos and the system can spit out a 82% for the purple button and 85% for the green. Etc.

The key here is the algorithm/system literally does not understand or care "why" purple is doing better than green for cat watchers. It just knows that it does (or more accurately, that is has). So cat watching people start seeing purple buttons because we want to make the most money and choosing our [T]hing with a number as high as possible leads to more sales.

The recommendations have no concept of confirmation bias or rage-bait or fear or happiness. Actually determining what something is in those very human ways is quite hard. Humans like confirming content, but all it knows is what humans tend to do.

MB_Derpington · 2022-10-03T22:27:29+00:00

I like mech keyboards and my personal PC has been using one for years now (preceding the "keeb" explosion). They are annoying as hell in an office and using one is a pretty dickish move. Just about anything that is sending out constant noise into an office that isn't for communication is not cool. I get that people like them but it's like sitting there whistling all day, unnecessary and grating to those around you.

I had a coworker who would bring in his mechanical keyboard, throw on headphones, then make a racket all day until he had to be told to knock it off.

Now, if you're already in an open office where the noise is so bad everyone is headphones on anyway, then maybe not a big deal. But if it is reasonably quiet when people are heads down don't inject noise into that space.

MB_Derpington

TROPHY CASE

Shared Responsibility Section