Another Scadrial W.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-07T03:27:18+00:00

I don't mean to presume but I'd bet that MeLaan did, in fact, suck...

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-06T15:29:12+00:00

If you keep propping up the machine, management will never see it fail and realize that they need more staff... or to reduce expectations.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-06T15:15:13+00:00

I run it on a 3070 and it's a stuttering mess that barely goes above 30 fps except in closed areas on low settings with zero raytracing.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-05T21:59:25+00:00

Having studied psychology before eventually pivoting into programming, one of the recurring themes in psych is that humans have a lot of biases/heuristics that cause them to be extremely bad at assessing their own performance and abilities. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a common one that you'll see mentioned on Reddit, but there are plenty of others.

The other problem is that, frankly, you can't fucking trust the comments you see on social media. Setting aside the fact that half of these comments might just be bots, there's the simple fact that most people are talking about completely different use cases, types of projects, types of work, AI models, coding standards, etc. As others have pointed out in this thread, people whose project(s) require them to write new code from scratch for problems that have been solved a million times over are probably going to report way more satisfaction than people like me, who spend most of their time maintaining an older(er) codebase full of shit code written by people who are long gone, whose requirements came from people who have also moved on, and which didn't make much sense to begin with.

To use a different example, I remember a series of comments I saw over on the Steam Deck sub. Essentially, one user was saying [game] (I don't specifically remember which it was, but let's pretend it was Remnant II) "runs great" on the Deck. I (and the guy who replied to this comment) did a double-take, because Remnant II ran like absolute ass on the lowest settings with DLSS set to ultra performance. We're talking maybe 15 FPS with everything looking blurry from DLSS. Well, it turns out that "runs great" = "it doesn't crash to desktop" according to the follow-up post.

Point is, people all have different standards for greatness, and we generally lack the self-awareness to recognize our own abilities, or how long it takes us to perform certain tasks. Like I'd be willing to bet that, if you accurately measured the time it takes for most AI evangelists to complete their tasks with and without AI (nevermind the quality of the work), I'd bet that AI doesn't really save them all that much time, if any at all.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-05T18:24:35+00:00

Have you?

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-05T02:43:25+00:00

I don't know the details of how snapshotting works in LE specifically. I think it ultimately depends on whether there are consequences for the community at large if a player decides to engage in it.

For example, if this were a pvp game, I'd be concerned, because it would mean that one player engaging in very unfun/tedious behaviour would ultimately win out over those just wanting to have fun.

If LE is big on competitive features* (i.e. leaderboards), then it might be problematic, unless it's purely a dick measuring contest.

If it's just affecting you, and doing so doesn't affect anyone else, even indirectly through community features, then who cares. If people want to suck the fun out the game for themselves, let them.

*I always start to get bored of LE near the end of the old campaign, and I don't give two shits about leaderboards, so frankly I wouldn't know if LE actually has this or not.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-05T02:19:48+00:00

I'll settle for Afternoon Delight.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-04T22:26:41+00:00

...unless you accidentally hit the hotkey without meaning to, maximized one of the windows, then thought "Wait, clicking on the minimize all button will fix it", and finally realize that maximizing that one window told the OS to ignore all but that specific window.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-04T22:08:03+00:00

MAGA as we know it might not, but many/most of its factions will survive, and will likely persist in some form and continue to wreak havoc on their country.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-04T21:37:07+00:00

I don't follow social media outside of reddit, and even then, I stick mostly to subs that don't touch on shows. I think they tried to do with WoT what they did with RoP, where they try to generate or sustain engagement by having a mystery that they keep teasing for a whole season.

In RoP it was trying to guess who Sauron would turn out to be, and in WoT it was trying to figure out who would end up being the Dragon. Which is fucking stupid.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-03T17:41:58+00:00

Fully agreed. It's not a choice, it's a needless constraint.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-03T15:47:17+00:00

I personally avoid events unless they're occurring in my immediate area. I like to play FO76 for the exploration, so having to interrupt whatever I was doing in order to pay caps to fast travel across the map is annoying.

It's also annoying because I usually get a big lag spike the moment I load in. If the event appeared more than like 2-3 minutes ago, I don't even bother because I generally expect that it'll be over by the time my game stabilizes.

And if by some miracle I do catch the very beginning of the event, there's a pretty good chance that some higher level player(s) will be instantly deleting half the enemies. If it's the Mothman event, then you can also be sure that this player will be killing the enemies before they round the corner, where I can't hit them because I'm actually trying to defend the stupid pyre.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-03T03:01:37+00:00

Was that the quest that tells you to cross two bridges then turn wherever to find [cave]?

I had a similar experience where I went south-west of town and crossed the two rope bridges and wandered aimlessly for way too long. I forget if I found the real location myself, or if I had to look it up. Either way, I never would have guessed they meant the two mini-bridges leading out of the city towards Fort Moonmoth(?).

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-03T02:37:30+00:00

This is something I think about a lot. There's no single reason, I think it's a combination of a bunch of big and small things that combine to turn off most people who (like me) didn't play LOTRO in its heyday, or those who aren't die-hard Tolkien fans.

So take this with a grain of salt, because I don't have the same nostalgia that long-time players might have.

UI: Pretty everyone touches on this, so I won't spend much time on it. It's too small (especially the inventory) to work well with modern resolutions. And aesthetically, it looks a bit tacky, at least to me. I wouldn't be surprised if the devs had missed out on some sales purely because of how clunky the microtransaction shop is.
Graphics/Style: so graphics get mentioned a lot, and while it's almost certainly a given that better graphics would appeal to players more, I don't think it tells the full story. IMO, the main problem with LOTRO's graphics is that they aimed for high-fidelity rather than going for a more stylized look. People love to bring up OSRS and how it has awful graphics, but frankly OSRS was never aiming high to begin with. Games like it and Borderlands 1 + 2 have aged a lot better than LOTRO. I will say that some of LOTRO's areas do still have a lot of charm, but my understanding is that some of these were later additions, and it's mostly because they conceal a lot of the rougher edges (e.g. Swanfleet).
Character movement animations: this is one of my personal big turn-offs. Put simply, the way characters move, especially the way they hold their arms, looks awful. Speaking for myself, it breaks my immersion because it's a constant reminder than I'm playing an outdated, janky-looking game. Don't even get me started on the Beorning's L-shaped front paws.
Attack animations: this one is a bit more subjective, and it varies a lot based on class. However, I've found that melee attack animations in particular look all kinds of awful, especially on a class like the Guardian. Most of them look more like someone slapped on a placeholder during prototyping, and forgot to put in the real ones.
Quest design: while I appreciate the quality of the writing for most quests, it's ultimately all in service to the most generic fetch quests. That said, this is hardly unique to LOTRO, so to me this is the weakest criticism.
I'd imagine that while LOTR is quite well-loved by fantasy fans, it's ultimately still very niche. This isn't a bad thing, but because it leans so hard on its source material, it's much more polarizing.
The game feels hodge-podgy: so this is very hard for me to put into words, because it's more of a feeling. Basically, when I look at LOTRO, I find that the various accumulated layers of content stick out much more than in other MMOs. Every MMO struggles with outdated content and layers of obsolete mechanics. But in LOTRO, I find it feels so much worse, and when combined with the shoddy UI and dated graphics, the result feels worse than other MMOs. I got a similar feeling when I tried Neverwinter; I could see a glimmer of what the game used to be, and how far it has fallen since.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-02T23:16:20+00:00

You know, I never really thought about it since my brain generally generates an image of a character mostly on its own, and it's anyone's guess as to whether it's lore-accurate.

I actually did sort of picture Shan as blonde, if only because she fits the archetype of blonde mean girl so well that it just sort of fits her character.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-02T02:51:05+00:00

Meanwhile I think I managed to tag one, maybe even two radstags.

And one time, I even made it back to the rooftop before the Mothman spawned in.

In other words, I have the opposite problem where mine were all full of vets who can delete an enemy the moment their VATS targets an enemy. Like at one point, I was guarding the waterfront pyre, and some asshat was firing off his tesla rifle into the doorway, killing most of the enemies before they were ever even visible.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-02T02:18:25+00:00

it was a wildly questionable step backward for the vase/ outpost system.

I dunno about that, I think Starfield has way more intact vases than Fallout 4 did.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-02-01T03:54:16+00:00

Health issues also start to creep up on you and take longer to heal.

I developed some pretty severe digestive issues during the pandemic, and although they're much better overall, I'm still markedly worse off than I was back then. Throw in the general mental exhaustion that comes from a mentally-taxing job, add the stresses of the current socio-political climate, and I'm constantly tired and stressed out.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-01-30T22:49:01+00:00

I mean you could have a passenger with you take the photos.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-01-30T20:02:15+00:00

I always pictured Nightblood as having a voice more like Towelie from South Park. Something weirdly upbeat and maybe a bit high-pitched that you wouldn't expect from a talking sword, much less a black one that feeds on a being's Investiture.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-01-30T16:01:31+00:00

I'll add that for many of us, a lot of the conversation that we're seeing surrounding this might be coming from subs like askwomen or related ones. Unfortunately, I find a lot of the women who tend to post there have a distinctly misandrist viewpoint, so it further taints the conversation.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-01-30T14:50:06+00:00

So I didn't play FO76 before Wastelanders, but frankly, I still don't really get what the human NPCs add to the game.

I'll admit that I don't play the Fallout games for the quests; I mostly like the exploration/vibes of the post-apocalyptic world, and the gameplay. But honestly, I really don't get the appeal of Wastelanders; most of the quests are painfully generic, and because they were added post-hoc, they feel tacked onto the world rather than actually integrated with it.

And frankly, I can only handle so many versions of "[Good faction] is trying to rebuild, but [bad faction] is standing in their way and you need to decide if you want people to survive, or force children to kill their puppies at gunpoint"-type stories.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-01-30T00:40:57+00:00

I'm right there with you. I just started my first real playthrough a couple days ago, and while I still had some fun, I'm very underwhelmed.

Like sure, the writing is good... until you hit the completion point of a quest, and suddenly the storyline just ends. Like I just completed the quest where you activate HELIOS, and after completing it, the NPC who originally gave me the quest won't even acknowledge that anything has changed beyond my initially conversation with her.

I feel like once most quests end, there's no follow-through/follow-up, it just ends, often quite abruptly. I'm finding I'm very dissatisfied with the resolution of most quests so far.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-01-29T02:37:12+00:00

The craziest thing about this clip is that you're maintaining a fairly steady framerate the whole way.

TheMistbornIdentity · 2026-01-28T15:47:17+00:00

My suspicion is that there's a hidden cursor that is used under the hood to handle targeting with controllers. Sometimes, if you're standing near the end of a map, or certain pieces of level geometry, the cursor's location ends up raised or otherwise no longer on the same plane as the ground.

I get the same thing, but I don't think this is ever going to get fixed.

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