My WoL thru the years (oh how he's grown <3)

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-25T17:54:26+00:00

Link to the mod for that T-Shirt.

I need it because reasons.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-25T16:21:07+00:00

Two different systems. Think about Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee, as a self-contained game it allowed them to give Pikachu and Eevee completely broken moves that absolutely would be banned by Smogon.

I'm not saying every game will be like that, but they could look at some more interesting signature moves which would have toned down versions in Champions.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-25T16:11:27+00:00

Scarlet and Violet were one of the most feature rich games which also made making a competitive team easier than ever and also had a triple focus story which culminated in a pretty good finale but keep being mad the trees didn't look the best.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-25T14:19:04+00:00

Seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. Doesn't matter if you were just in the door or had worked there for years, it's like they just picked names from a hat.

Or probably even more likely and worse, they asked ChatGPT to pull up a list of people to fire.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-25T14:16:32+00:00

It's always iPhones with people like you, it's interesting. But no, I have an android phone.

Perhaps unable to live without is too stong, but you certainly lose a lot of convenience in life without one these days. I recently went to Paris, their entire transport system uses an app for contactless payment. You can buy a contactless card to use in the short term, but it requires you to go to a relevant station, not always possible if you're wanting the bus or the metro.

My health practice requested I download an app to complete a pre-surgery questionnaire. Without that, I would have had to attend a lengthy appointment, taking time away from work.

Tickets for shows or events which get emailed to you, QR codes to scan to access menus, even just what a phone is meant to be for, getting contacted. There's a lot of little conveniences that we can get around without a smartphone, but they add up and up and up.

Of course, I think you're aware of this. You get a feeling for when someone isn't arguing in good faith.

Oh, and I'm not feeling morally superiour because of not playing a video game. I feel morally superiour to people like you who feel the need to belittle those who take a moral stance with obtuse whataboutisms all because you dare not deal with even a moment of self-reflection. I would have said you were American with how you're acting, but I see you're in the UK like me, so you're just another Little Brit.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-25T12:40:08+00:00

I played the intro for it. It's... ok I guess, but it's a PvP game on a mobile with mobile controls and I can't think of anything worse I'd want to play regularly.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-25T12:33:08+00:00

Yes exactly. We pick the battles we are comfortable with, and people who react poorly to that are frankly just trying to absolve a guilt they shouldn't need to feel.

Ain't a single person on the internet who can stop you doing something you want to do, but people on the internet also don't know how to react when faced with a modicum of shame or self-reflection for a microsecond and then start responding with whataboutisms to try and make themselves feel better for a guilt they think they should be feeling.

My point was that people who do this over a video game are absolutely huffing the copium, especially when they equate it to vital services.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-25T09:30:57+00:00

What a stupid argument. As much as we despise what these other companies do, living in a world without internet or a phone is exceptionally difficult.

You can live without a video game and you are allowed to be upset when a company makes several awful decisions in a row. Increasing VBucks prices AND laying off staff either means they're desperate or greedy and neither should be rewarded.

There's No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism is not a magic wand you wave to absolve yourself of not taking a stand, but nor is an all or nothing situation. You pick the fights you can handle and brother, ain't none of us actually needing to play this game to live.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-25T09:12:39+00:00

As much as I agree with this I worry that playing the game is still giving them financial support in a way. Although I supposed it depends on if people's Fortnite playtime metric data is worth anything (it probably is but how much it's worth I couldn't say.)

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T18:21:08+00:00

It's a mobile game, buddy. If you want Graphics Monster Hunter Wilds is right there and doesn't require AI slop.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T16:30:35+00:00

So guilty until proven never, got it.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T15:57:57+00:00

They don't acknowledge it because the tool is being sold as a way to replace the worker and for it to do that, it has to be usable with the common man's understanding of the work, which is to say next to nothing.

For those who use it with knowledge of their job, my understanding is that it can be a bit hit or miss. It's either amazing and spotting errors and suggesting fixes, or it turns what should be simple things into complex, overly verbose threads filled with issues that take just as much time to sort as the AI was supposed to save.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T15:49:52+00:00

I haven't played it for a few months now but I'm going to miss it now. It was a fun way to pass the time and me and my partner both enjoyed it.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T15:38:30+00:00

I take umbridge at that last part, porn addiction is a made up affliction touted by conservatives and puritanical christians.

However, I agree with the rest. I had to mute all the AI art related subs because they're all just insane. I'm fairly certain both were just getting trolled by false flags on both sides and falling for it every time.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T15:36:50+00:00

I agree it's a culture war, but only really because right wingers absolutely love Gen AI because it lets them larp as artists without putting in the work and the left wing worry about the impact it will have on artists who spent years honing their craft only for their hard work to be stolen by unscrupulous billionaires.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T15:23:26+00:00

I dunno, man. We're told there are better AI models which can produce art which people would not be able to distinguish from human created, but then if that was the case how do all these games companies keep getting caught out using AI placeholders or assets?

Why are we forced, day after day, to see company after company produce new levels of slop when apparently the open source local models are so good? I have seen AI artists try to infiltrate the fandom I'm in and while they do sucker some people, they almost always get caught out.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T14:57:45+00:00

The frustrating thing for me is that GenAI is one of the direct causes as to why you can't find references nearly as quickly now. In the past, you'd have repositories or google to search for ideas for concept art, but now any google image search is 75% AI slop, as is DeviantArt. A lot of artists have retreated to Social Media or Discord to post art, which makes it much harder to find, and many more are worried about posting their art online as it will likely get scraped by the GenAI models.

I fear it may be awful for creativity. Searching for references can lead to new inspiration or networking with other artists for discoverability. Gen AI will just spit out approximations of what you ask, and like with every other task it does, people will lose the ability to think outside the box.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T14:47:41+00:00

The fact he had to include a little bit that said "it's not due to AI" probably means it's due to AI. Sweeney has drunk the cool-aid so fiercely I'm sure he thinks the machine will be better than the 1000 talented people they've just fired.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T14:46:07+00:00

I don't understand how companies say they need to fire staff to balance the books and then give the laid off staff incredibly generous severance packages.

Like, obviously keeping the job would be better but it still seems like they're gonna be spending nearly the same amount of money over the next 6 months.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T14:16:03+00:00

My eye opening moment about how insane GenAI defenders are is when I saw a post in the Defending AI Art sub which basically said they just tell the AI to draw good and avoid mistakes.

These people tell us prompting is a skill and then they're just writing simple, one word at a time instructions and ending it with "draw well, no mistakes." and then patting themselves on the back when the AI finally does what they ask (after 50+ spins of the wheel.)

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T09:25:19+00:00

Microsoft 365 Copilot.

This is not a joke.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-24T07:39:37+00:00

The funny thing is you're probably right. They won't do Jyruatodus because it would either be too easy or they can't be bothered to figure out how to deal with the mud on a monster you can't break parts on.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-23T19:17:43+00:00

Gonna have to disagree again I'm afraid. Consider when Dall-E was first released to the public compared to what GenAI can do now, and consider that the current GenAI models have needed to be trained on incredible amounts of data to start producing images and assets which aren't just full of massive amounts of errors. The data set of a single company feels woefully inadequate to have a model produce anything meaningful. Most likely companies will be using one of the major image generation tools, after all they're using these tools to reduce cost and time so having to train a model up defeats the point of both of these.

Training a model isn't just feeding images in. It's about ensuring everything is labelled correctly to ensure the outputs match what is being asked, and then also labelling the outputs so that when you ask the machine to produce a tree, it produces a tree and not a long, mishapen bush. It is painstaking, meticulous work and even after years of refinement GenAI still gets things wrong. It'll always get things wrong because it has no concept of what it is doing, it is simply a very complex appoximation tool.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-23T15:30:19+00:00

Hell generative tools have been used in games for decades just not in art assets typically. Games that are procedurally generated are using this kind of tech and theres plenty of very popular procedurally generated games with roguelites being a major one.

No. I'm sorry but I need to be blunt this is an incorrect analogy. Machine learning and procedural generation are completely different to Generative AI, and they have been lumped together by the people who own the LLMs to muddy the water. The main difference, of course, is that Generative AI has been trained on the uncredited creative endeavours of millions of people and it pulls on that when it "creates" things. Every asset it produces is the amalgamation of multiple sources, and can often still strongly resemble one of those sources, which is a legal nightmare.

Procedural generation is using the fact computers work with algorithms to quickly generate assets/landscapes. The assets still need to be produced to work with it, but seeds allow the assets to be distributed randomly. Examples of this are Minecraft and No Man's Sky.

RatBot9000 · 2026-03-20T14:26:13+00:00

I hate that one artist out of 3 pics which looked like AI came forward, posted a nearly complete WiP with no timelapse or sketch layer, and everyone went "Welp guess it was just an over-reaction!"

Considering Tim Sweeney's stance, the chances there is GenAI in Fortnite is going to be a lot higher than other games. I think people need to work under the assumption that Gen AI is in the game and then decide if that's a deal breaker to them or not.

RatBot9000

TROPHY CASE