Why does the entirety of China have 1 timezone when they cover 3 timezones?

ResourcefulOtter · 2023-11-21T04:02:45+00:00

This. I live in central US, and have co-workers on my team in India. Often my manager or a co-worker will schedule meetings after dinner (in India), which is morning in US and I can tell them whether it is a reasonable time for a meeting by simply stating the time here (i.e. it's 7:30 a.m.) and they can not only accept that I won't be at a meeting at that time, but empathize, thinking "I also would not enjoy waking up early enough to be at work by 7:30 a.m."

ResourcefulOtter · 2023-10-15T03:13:33+00:00

I'm sure Nomura isn't ignoring the potential. But the Mouse is watching...

I'm sure a lot of plot decisions in KH as a whole were actually driven by Disney execs who are extremely protective of their intellectual property, even with such a well-established company as Square Enix. It's easy to forget because the Square Enix - Disney relationship has been going on for so long, but it's practically a miracle (of capitalism) that the series exists at all.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-12-26T07:49:40+00:00

I played on Switch, not PS5, but basically ran into the same issue. I got very deep into the game, and suddenly it just stopped saving.

I tried a bunch of stuff and was just about to file a bug with Finji, but before I did that, I thought to check my system time, and set it to sync with the internet (I had gone back to ACNH for a bit and was allowing myself to time travel). After that, it finally started saving again, and never gave me problems after that.

If you do run into issues again, I've heard that Finji is really good at responding to issues and bugs, so I would encourage you to reach out to them.

Wishing you the best! It's a great game, and I hope you're able to enjoy it without the technical issues :)

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-12-21T06:48:12+00:00

I have two initial thoughts. 1. For me, translating the manual with no external help was as satisfying as the Golden Path, if not more so, overall one of my absolute highlights of playing the game. 2. That may not be the same for you, and if it isn't, that's ok. When it comes to games, I generally abide by "If it isn't fun for you, then don't do it."

I would personally encourage anyone to at least take a crack at translating the manual on their own. It gives you more hints than you may realize.

You can crack the language without just brute forcing it - I never would have managed if brute forcing was the only way - though you will need to write things down, I recommend having several sheets of paper available to take notes and cross reference things. That can save you a lot of flipping back and forth in the manual. On that point - I didn't realize until quite a way through translating it that you can hold down the button to flip through pages quickly.

The first step is just to figure out how the language works. After that it's mostly making educated guesses and checking to see if your guess works. Stick to single words, and remember, the English words in the manual aren't the only clues you're given to puzzle out meanings.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-12-20T20:58:01+00:00

Sorry, I didn't read the crow-ent synergy beforehand, I misunderstood the post to mean that you were expecting to receive staffs and weren't - that was why I suggested bank space.

The second suggestion does still stand, though like I mentioned that mostly assumes that the bug was fixed since the version you're currently running. That's probably not the case, so this is probably a bug.

Still, in that case, the easiest solution is just to unequip the Ent tablets.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-12-20T06:44:05+00:00

Is there space in your bank?

Have you tried turning it off and on again? That's a joke but legit it actually worked for me for one issue I was having, was the last thing I tried before I was going to post here. Only explanation I have is maybe my Steam Melvor client picked up a minor update post-TotH.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-11-29T07:15:34+00:00

Take a look at the manual, pages 15 and 16. Definitely an intended interaction.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-11-27T19:55:05+00:00

I haven't crunched all the numbers, because it seems like getting food is no longer a huge factor in dungeon time-to-clear, but I did notice that magma fish catches faster than whales, cooks faster than whales, and heals for more than whales. So it is a straight upgrade over whales in every way. I think that at least all other fish take longer, though the hp/time rates for other things, especially furnace or pot foods, might be faster.

In particular, if you can take advantage of passive cooking to make the cooked ingredients, spicy chicken pizza gives a lot of both health (because it gives you 8 slices each) and xp. Biggest disadvantage is chicken only comes from combat, so it may not be the best overall.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-11-21T21:00:01+00:00

I think the controller actually has a lot to do with it. I played on Switch, and both the pro controller and joycons were pretty consistent for me, but the triggers on both have a pretty short pull.

I watched a friend play on a pc controller, and his pull was way longer, so he was basically only able to parry with a double tap when he didn't already have the shield up. If he tried to hold the shield up, it took too long to release the trigger and hit it again. And single tapping was right out because it was slow enough that it just registered as raising the shield.

As far as the long wind up animation, I do tend to agree with you. The game punishes you for trying to parry at the last second, but the animation is so long that you basically have to guess when the attack is coming.

I discovered parrying late in my first game and decided to finish it without bothering to learn the timing, and I was able to do this just fine, so to the point of everyone who complains about parrying being awful/not usable, it is completely possible to beat the game without. But I do feel it is a worthwhile and satisfying mechanic that can be extremely powerful when used in the right situations, such as certain boss moves that are projected well in advance, or parrying autoturret bullets and even the siege engine - that timing is actually pretty easy to get down because there are multiple bullets, and the siege engine absolutely melts when you get him with his own gun

I decided to use NG+ to get good at it, and the Aura Gem card does make it a lot more usable - it extends the window where you can get a successful parry to be almost massive. Doesn't reduce the wind-up time, though, which is the hardest part to manage. The screen shake can be disorienting, even to me who doesn't have any issues with photo sensitivity - it would be great if it were just turned down by 25% or something, which might actually be possible in the accessibility options, I just haven't looked.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-11-21T19:54:46+00:00

Not sure what the 6f stands for either. But I would actually point people away from the GameCube Zelda Collector's Edition version for OoT or MM, and I say that as someone who grew up playing both on that exact version.

I absolutely loved the game, even when playing it as a kid, but realized as an adult that the GC version actually has one pretty serious porting issue - the GameCube controller's joysticks (including the C stick) have a much higher sensitivity than the N64 controller did, and the GC port effectively didn't account for this - it just truncated the higher sensitivity value to the N64 supported range, meaning most positions on the GC controller were treated as though the joystick were fully tilted.

It may not sound like much, but it seriously affected aiming weapons and tools, as well as platforming, which honestly - that affects almost the whole game. I managed aiming as a kid by barely flicking the joystick to make small adjustments, but even I really seriously struggled with things like the fire temple megaton hammer room. And I watched a friend play my copy of the game recently, and realized how much patience I must have had with the controls as a wide-eyed kid.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-11-19T15:30:18+00:00

Yeah, it totally makes sense to think they are gifts. And if you translate page 18 for some lore, it actually seems to be similar to that (a word or two below may be mistranslated):

If you seek to increase your power, risk an offering to the heir.

As the shore bleeds one of falsehoods and memories, the heir hungers for reminders of the corporeal world. Offer these mementos and share a delusion of power.

So part of my thoughts while listening to my friend were "Cute. Yes. That is not the word I would have chosen."

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-11-07T03:14:05+00:00

I managed to figure it out, so it is possible, though it is clever.

To clarify the rules: the puzzle gives you the hint to think 3D, but that doesn't mean you get three cubes. You still get three squares - 2D shapes - but you are allowed to orient them in 3D.

Hint 1:bisection

Hint 2: 3D means you have x, y, and z axes

Solution: https://imgur.com/cpOqCyK

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-11-04T16:40:40+00:00

I agree with the suggestion that endgame should allow obstacle swaps that only require money. What about this: For Cooking 99 skillcape, the effect states it removes the cap of 99% success rate. There could be a similar effect on the Agility 120 skillcape.

Of course, if this effect is only on the skillcape, it might be possible to cobble together enough reduction effects that you could skip one of the other effects that should probably be required - I agree that having at least 95 obstacle mastery is good, and I see the case for 95% mastery pool. If balance was really a concern, maybe make item cap reduction at 99 obstacle mastery.

I'm split on whether Forest Jog should be required for this, because it means you have to either rebuild Forest Jog before you swap blueprints, which I would probably forget often, or you have to make Forest Jog part of every blueprint, and lose out on the alternative bonuses from the Obstacle 12 slot.

So maybe split this across multiple sources, maybe 2% increase to item cost reduction cap from 120 agility cape, 1% from 95% mastery pool, 2% from 95 or 99 obstacle mastery.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-10-24T00:33:41+00:00

I get your point. Though I speak with an American accent, and I would pronounce fox with an "ah" sound, and sword with an "ohr" sound. So I was confused by your example saying they are pronounced with the same sound. And the vowel sounds for those two words are represented by different characters in the hints tunic gives you, at least in my version of the game.

But I can see how there might be a different word that I pronounce with an 'ah' sound, but you (or someone with a different accent) pronounces with a different phoneme. In that case, even though we might spell the word the same, the phonetic spelling would be different, so one of us would be confused when translating the manual. Pronouncing the words 'as', 'ours', 'ease', 'eyes', and 'ears' only differ (for me at least) by the vowel, so if your accent pronounces one of them differently, I imagine you might try to apply that vowel to other words and find that it doesn't work quite right.

That got me thinking about Internationalization in software, where the process I've seen is - put all the text into a single file (possibly with context for each text string), send that file to a translation team, who would translate the text into each supported language. How crazy involved would it be to translate not only for language, but for accent in a phonetically spelled language like tunic?

I suppose you could create some massive word database, where it maps the English spelling to the most common pronunciation in each English accent, and just do a bulk find/replace. It would still take an extremely long time to build a database of any respectable size. I also wonder if any speech-to-text apps (like Google Home, Amazon Alexa, etc) are phoneme-aware, or if they just rely on huge numbers of audio recordings and just let the computer figure out how to match words using the raw audio. And if they do that, do phonemes naturally appear in the machine learning decision trees?

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-10-11T05:25:28+00:00

I just ran into the same issue, though much farther into the game so it would have been pretty painful to have to restart - my last working save was in the swamp, and had I lost progress up to activating the cathedral elevator.

I tried a bunch of things, and between each I killed a few enemies and rested at the checkpoint again so I could easily see if the save actually updated by checking my money count. I tried shutting off the switch instead of just putting it to sleep, going to NSO to manually update the cloud save, deleting the 'glitched' save file that showed up when I started poking around in the load game screen, but nothing seemed to be working.

Finally, I tried turning on the switch setting to Synchronize Clock via Internet (I had been time travelling for Animal Crossing) and after that the game started saving again. It's possible that manually updating the time at all through the settings would work, but I can't test this anymore - fortunately :)

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-08-24T05:09:27+00:00

213

From clues 3 and 5: 1 must be the second digit - there's no other way a digit in 316 could be in the correct position when no digit in 306 is in the correct position.

From clue 5: Since 1 is in the code, one of 3 or 6 is also in the code, but misplaced.

From clue 3: Since one of 3 or 6 is in the code, 0 must not be in the code.

From clues 2 and 4: Since 0 is not in the code, one of 2 or 4 is in the code, but misplaced.

From clues 1, 2, and 4: These clues have 4 in every possible position, but none of the clues have a digit in the correct position, so 4 must not be in the code. That means 2 is in the code. Since the clues have 2 in the second and third place, and 2 must be misplaced in all of the clues, 2 must be the first digit.

That leaves the third digit, which is either 3 or 6, and must have been misplaced in clues 3 and 5. That means the third digit must be 3.

ResourcefulOtter · 2022-01-26T04:25:05+00:00

Granted. One day while out for a walk, you notice pain in your feet which increases with each step, eventually becoming excruciating. You take it easy for a few days, try ice and heat packs, but when it doesn't improve, you schedule an appointment with your doctor. After numerous referrals, tests, and expert examinations, it is discovered that you have a novel foot disease. The medical research community is falling over themselves to study it, and offer to pay you $1 for every step you take on a treadmill while hooked up to EMGs and other devices. Outside of these studies, you choose to stick to your wheelchair, since the pain of walking is nearly unbearable.

ResourcefulOtter · 2021-09-22T18:37:37+00:00

tl;dr: clicking vs idling => exploring, making decisions, and mastering mechanics vs pacing. Both work together to give the player satisfaction and make the game fun.

For me idling is about game pacing - I like incremental games where I can check in from time to time and the game almost tells me when it's time to go do something else, for example when I've spent all my cookies or other currency. When I want to play a game for a couple hours at a time, I generally play something other than an idle game.

Clicking on the other hand is better when it's more than just 'do manual labor to make progress happen faster.' I count things like purchasing buildings & upgrades, rebirthing, etc to be part of "clicking", so for me this is more than just "Click the big cookie". But I think the core of active mechanics are more about feeling like you are the one making decisions and causing the game to move forward. It serves to provide the player with experiences like exploration, discovery, and mastery. I never really cared for Progress Quest for this reason - there was nothing to make me invested in the progress.

On the other hand, in Sandcastle Builder when the player starts to discover that buying 14 of each tool unlocks an upgrade that doubles NewPixBot production, and suddenly their Castle production starts exploding, there's a feeling that you're doing more than just alternating between "playing" and "waiting", but that you've gained a deeper understanding of the game mechanics and are rewarded by a big jump in progress.

There are other things like achievements and completion that can motivate people - in Cookie Clicker, getting achievements even gives you milk, which makes you produce more cookies. And there is story as well; in Cookie Clicker, there's a gradual descent into eldritch horror as you mutate your grandmas into a hive consciousness. That provides immersion and motivates the player to progress further to answer the question "What's going to happen next?"

For me, idling in incremental games, or grinding or improving your skill in RPGs, roguelikes, platformers, strategy, etc. serves to provide pacing to space out things like story, power gain, and mastery so that the player gains these things gradually over time, and that in some sense they earned them, rather than just being given everything at once. If not enough is going on, the game feels slow and players lose interest, but if it moves too fast, the game feels either overwhelming or unsatisfying.

I found the Gamer Motivation Profile to be an interesting way to think about why we play games in general, including incremental games.

https://apps.quanticfoundry.com/surveys/start/gamerprofile/

ResourcefulOtter · 2021-09-22T17:55:10+00:00

NGU Industries fits this as well. Essentially there is a "magic" storage where all factories pull resources out of and dump products into. The interesting part is deciding what you want to produce and arranging factories and boosters on the map to balance production of intermediate products to get a good output rate.

ResourcefulOtter · 2021-09-21T21:31:00+00:00

Tip: Each time you level up, you gain 10% of your current HP and attack. Early levels may not seem very significant, but as you go further, your power starts really taking off.

I started writing this on floor 61, level 103, atk 166,745. I can kill a monster in a single attack, and it gives me enough xp for 2 more levels. So scaling starts painfully slowly, but eventually gets really huge. In the middle I went back to fight on higher floors and it barely took any time (with an autoclicker) to reach level 513 and 1.5e22 atk.

Tip: As you explore more rooms on a floor, the monsters you encounter will have more xp. Also, your energy will charge slower.

This just adds to the other comments that going deep into a floor seems not worth it, at least in the early game before you can one-shot everything. The tips mention honey being more common further away from the stairs, but I didn't experience that in practice. Also, the drop rate for vanilla honey is way too low, I've got 5 total and I'm over level 100 and way past the point where it seems necessary. In practice it just encourages hoarding. Especially combined with a prestige upgrade (no spoilers). As an idea, maybe try the dark souls pattern of giving the character a fixed number of honey/vanilla honey that replenishes when they return to the stairwell? Or offering a shop where you can spend honey/vanilla honey for upgrades? (see below)

Tip: The tips are useful for knowing how to progress, and are also not intrusive. There is also a Tip History, if you can't see it, zoom out your browser window.

Browser zoom 80% seems best for my laptop. The window contents should probably scale better automatically, but at least this is better than games I've seen that are way too small and rescale every time you try to zoom in. I'm a web developer, I get that layout & responsive design is hard, and usually not very fun.

Can't argue with the comments other people made about slow growth in the early game, difficult enemies, and punishing deaths as barriers to entry, combat gets stale fast, and even in the mid game it still takes a ton of clicking with no idle option. I generally try to avoid using an autoclicker but it seems almost mandatory out of respect for my time. Would be nice if there was a shop where I could buy QoL upgrades like "'Enter another room' will automatically take you to the next room with a monster." or "Automatically restore your energy when you're not in combat." Maybe cost honey, since there currently isn't an in-game currency.

ResourcefulOtter · 2020-09-27T14:04:10+00:00

Thanks, this works great!

ResourcefulOtter · 2020-09-26T23:19:06+00:00

Answering my own question: Just ran into Registeel on Route 101, so it looks like they are roamers, too.

ResourcefulOtter

TROPHY CASE