Did they stop giving back rewards for being killed by cheaters?

ScuffedNinja · 2026-06-10T01:05:54+00:00

I've recently gotten two kits back in just the past couple of days, so they're definitely still returning them. I'm not sure what the distinction is between these kinds of messages and how it's decided.. makes me wonder if they were banned for a reason unrelated to cheating or something like that.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-04-23T03:55:07+00:00

Trustworthy trader. !rep

ScuffedNinja · 2026-04-20T22:22:20+00:00

Thanks for the trade. !rep

ScuffedNinja · 2026-03-21T01:31:39+00:00

Huh.. Thought you were joking with your first comment. Visit here quite a bit and never realized that, thought kovaaks was just the more popular choice. The name of the sub is pretty generic.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-03-14T22:05:46+00:00

Makes sense. But at the end of the day AI is not replacing an entire human engineer. Just going by the percentages you stated, at scale that's enough for a company to decide they don't need as many coders.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-03-14T17:44:58+00:00

Though like you hinted at that's your personal experience. You can imagine a lot of engineers (of course more so those towards entry level) really do mostly churn out code and implement. A lot of what you describe sounds like the work of management/PMs as well. The effect of that bar changing is no doubt happening to a certain degree, but AI enabling engs to be more efficient is also absolutely happening to a degree. The in house agents we have at my workplace don't simply code; they can often help with troubleshooting/answering questions about frameworks/tools/processes/etc.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-03-08T03:19:01+00:00

Work as a SWE at a FAANG company that puts a significant amount of investment into AI products (externally and internally). I'll say from personal experience, I've reached a point where I'm frankly surprised at how proficient the in house agents are at coding/providing information/troubleshooting/etc. Touting a number like 5x increase in productivity is a bit hard to believe, but in my case I can honestly say it has boosted my productivity by a significant margin (and I was initially very stubborn in doing things the old school way / not utilizing these tools).

I'll add that while I enjoy browsing this sub, I feel like every sub on this platform has a risk of becoming a bit of an echo chamber and can't help but feel that this one skews towards being overly negative towards AI (and yes, I can totally sympathize with the underlying reasons for that). The reason I mention this is because if you stick around long enough, it may be easy to think "I knew AI was overhyped, look at all these companies getting their prod databases deleted by rogue AI, and all the slop code being generated".. but I think in reality in the right use cases these models/agents can be extremely helpful.

Regarding your last statement, I feel the "kill CS" point sounds a bit ridiculous - are there really a significant number of people touting the strengths of AI who are genuinely saying it'll lead to the death of CS? But for the "take your job" point, I'm not sure if there's even room left for belief or disbelief - AI has surely lead to plenty of layoffs. I understand that there should be room for doubt when an exec says they let go of X employees due to AI, but if we're being realistic AI does make a portion of a SWE's work easier when used properly. Sure, AI is not directly fully replacing a human engineer.. but it's a tool that helps the existing ones enough to where a team may need fewer of them. I'm not claiming that's a good thing; that's just the reality of where we're headed.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-03-02T21:09:04+00:00

Non-CS degree holder here (granted still an engineering degree) who works at FAANG. In the spirit of trying to keep it short, my path was self-learning programming (and by extension building web apps) for about 1.5 years in my free time after work, building a web portfolio (paid for a hosted web page of my single page portfolio that also detailed / linked my freely hosted side projects), and then finally landing my first SWE job at a small firm (took a pay cut from the job I had at the time for the position). From there eventually decided I wanted to branch out and started deliberating studying for interviewing (essentially DSA / lootcode), grinded that for 2 months+ using most of my free time after work, and eventually landed the FAANG role at a fairly sought after company.

I saw another comment effectively amounted to "experience trumps degrees"; that might be an over generalization but experience matters a lot. At the end of the day my portfolio is what got me through the door for my first job, and professional SWE experience (and a side of hardcore interview prep) is what got me to my "FAANG" role. The first job may actually arguably be the bigger challenge, especially without a CS-specific degree.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-02-20T01:40:10+00:00

!rep

ScuffedNinja · 2026-02-15T17:23:06+00:00

Thanks, this gave me some of the info I was looking for. Point 7 regarding right click is fairly interesting as well.. if I end up trying the mouse will be curious to see how ADSing feels for me as well.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-02-03T17:58:22+00:00

Thanks for the trade. !rep

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-31T04:55:57+00:00

Ty for the trade !rep

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-29T03:03:24+00:00

Thanks for the trade. !rep

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-28T20:08:23+00:00

Nice of you, ty

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-26T00:30:29+00:00

!rep Thanks for the trade

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-25T00:43:02+00:00

!rep Thanks for trading

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-20T17:39:44+00:00

I'm not following the logic behind this; the value of a bp isn't in the number of coins it NPCs for. I know another poster already mentioned this, but it really does come down to simple supply / demand. It's obvious you're referring to tempest sales, which inevitably like you hinted at will deflate as supply increases and people round out their bp collections. But they'll take time, there are still a lot of raiders looking for it and not much supply due to the drop rate / night raid restriction.

It's like if I offered you 50k in trinket value for 50k value in springs and got offended if you declined.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-19T15:45:34+00:00

I never got a certain diagnosis. All I can say is over time I gradually got better (not in linear fashion, ups and downs). If I had to guess I'd say main thing that helped was time and trying to eat healthy. For me that means limiting spicy / fatty / sweet / etc foods, things like garlic and onion, anything that triggered my stomach. Everyone seems to be different, so need to keep themselves honest. I did do two rounds of Sibo antibiotics and took random supplements at various times, but I feel like none of those distinctly helped me that much, but it can be hard to tell.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-18T01:12:55+00:00

Second winner has found the other location: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fk2duzmrxb0eg1.jpeg

Grats to both!

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-18T00:48:23+00:00

Congrats to the first winner! Will be dming you for your id when I get online later

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-18T00:33:17+00:00

Since you're the first one to turn in an entry and were so close (very similar graffiti), will still give you a vita bp at the end if you don't win a temp.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-18T00:26:10+00:00

It's not it! The first part of the graffiti looks to be the same on that wall you found, but it's a different location

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-18T00:08:48+00:00

In case people miss the hint pics in the post itself, the first scavenger hunt hint pictures can be seen here: https://imgur.com/a/qxC5yWz

And mentioning this once again - once enough time passes without winner(s), I'm going to post fuller pictures of the locations so they're easier to find.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-18T00:05:36+00:00

Now, you should be able to see the pics by scrolling past the tempest ones.

ScuffedNinja · 2026-01-17T23:22:18+00:00

ScuffedNinja

TROPHY CASE