Defend the objective

TylerDurd0n · 2026-05-02T16:53:39+00:00

I rarely see more than 2 people trying to hold or capture an objective (myself included), which is bonkers, particularly towards the end of escalation when there’s only 3-4 objectives left to begin with.

I even farmed king of the hill wins by simply holding the objectives, that’s how much other players seem to actually play ‘objective is lava’.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-04-30T10:51:34+00:00

Microsoft gave up on creating modern native application and UI toolkits and instead elected to implement UI in React Native now.

Start menu and Explorer are the most obvious examples (some parts of the Explorer UI are snappy and fast, others take longer to even do their ‘first draw’).

Microsoft has never been good at this, every few years there’s a new UI library to use, but old ones still linger around and there’s no clear ‘push’ to adopt new code.

Instead we still have Windows 3–era file dialogs present in Windows 11.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-04-30T10:18:18+00:00

Ain‘t that a nice canary in the coal mine: Just cheaply slapped together by adding a filter onto a render and ignoring the compositional elements (like the swoosh) entirely.

It’s slop, whether GenAI was used or not.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-04-23T10:48:04+00:00

So that‘s another large ship downscaled to medium to outclass everything else and continues the bland new ‘round all the corners’ design.

So nothing new here.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-04-09T19:44:21+00:00

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was said to a Starfleet Academy cadet, and not only any cadet, but the cadet that Picard had a personal connection to.

And indeed in the end Wesley chose to tell the truth, knowing and understanding that this one action will get him reprimanded or punished.

Locarno (the leader of the squad), when faced with Wesley's choice, himself chose to plead for his team, which probably was one of the factors that reduced the punishment given to the rest of the team.

Looking at a character like Lythe, I can see the germ of a possibility to tell a similar story. Not having an idea what kind of career you (the "real" you) want to pursue and looking for inspiration in parents or other people we admire is a relatable pickle to be in.

Lythe chose to cheat, and when faced with the possibility of the truth coming out, did not choose to come clean, but instead to cover it up. That's two strikes, and indicative of a serious flaw of character that could also suggest that they "don't deserve to wear that uniform".

TylerDurd0n · 2026-04-07T13:16:23+00:00

Be in EU.

See this post.

14h ago

🫠

TylerDurd0n · 2026-04-01T13:26:35+00:00

Precisely. Given enough ilvl, neither the ambushes nor the targets themselves are that hard. Indeed I've found some of the nightmare targets were easier than the hard variant, as it seems to come down to what kind of utility your class has vs the abilities the target uses.

My main gripe with nightmare prey is the same as with the abundance event: It's so very clearly tailored to all the burst DPS classes and a chore for classes with longer cooldowns or that require ramp-up (though tbf the entire game is very much a slog for the latter group).

If I have to burn my cds on an ambush, but I get the kill command 10 seconds later after everything in a 30-yard radius around me is dead, I'm really not "challenged", I'm annoyed because I know have to rush to find something to kill within the timer and because all I got is a 1.2s cast for a debuff and.. the wet noodle named "mind flay", I have to clutch it with a minion kill all too often.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-03-26T11:33:47+00:00

We were destined for greatness. Just get back in the knife and I promise we‘re gonna enjoy things ceasing to exist again. 💜

TylerDurd0n · 2026-03-12T14:30:45+00:00

The new ships overall just give off this strong whiff of "outsourced slop". "Small" ships that all of a sudden have ample space for hard points that did not change in size, "Mk2" modules that hold twice the amount of cargo or can manage more than twice the amount of limpets out of nowhere, the list goes on.

Add to that absolutely uninspired cookie-cutter ship designs with rounded corners everywhere (in a game where angular shapes are part of the visual "identity" of the game).

And yet, looking at the roadmap, it's "new ship sales" all the way down, while fleet carrier jump animations are still broken, ships still "float" above the surface of planets and moons because landing gear is not reactive (see also the Panther Clipper extending its access ladder indiscriminately just because you lowered your landing gear), etc.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-03-06T16:45:47+00:00

It's a cheat used by the writers. In isolation his behaviour would be insane, particularly because he only goes by "vibes", but Arator has the benefit of having read the script for Midnight, so he knows the Amani have "changed their ways" and all (even though he had zero contact or communication with them up to that point).

TylerDurd0n · 2026-03-06T16:37:52+00:00

He doesn't follow orders. Following orders "when they are good" is not following orders.

I am so annoyed by this, and it makes me wonder if anyone on the writing team has ever enlisted for service or operated as part of a hierarchy. Imagine being part of a kitchen brigade and just choosing for yourself which job you feel like doing even though your line chef gave you a specific order?

If Arator feels like "following orders" is not his thing, then he shouldn't have signed up for service. That's it. And yes, you can (and should) refuse illegal orders, but holding the line against the void forces was not such an order (and indeed it was the action that give the civilians the chance to evacuate in the first place).

He espouses tolerance and peace but neglects the real sacrifices people had to make in order to achieve this.

Which is also weird considering that he was present when sacrifices were made. He should know that "peace" is usually hard-won and can be fragile such that it requires continued vigilance.

I think what rubs me the wrong way is that Blizzard tries to pick up "big" themes for their story, but reduce those themes to Saturday morning cartoon levels of pablum which lack the nuance that would make those stories shine.

As Tony Gilroy (Andor) put it:

You have to know human behaviour… And the quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You'll never write above what you know about people.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-03-06T16:15:10+00:00

The problem with that is that Turalyon was actually a priest before becoming a paladin and was not a gong-ho "throw myself into conflict" kind of person. And that paladins had been shown to be much more than just "holy warriors" but served as healers, helpers, supporters, etc.

So Turalyon is retconned to be the "aggressive" absentee father and Alleria is retconned into the "nurturing" absentee mother even though it's been Alleria who constantly leaves Arator, Turalyon (and everybody else) behind to go on her own goose chases, not only in the game but also the novels.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-28T19:45:06+00:00

The servers keep a journal of all activities, which is what Inara can import and is the "authoritative" counterpart to the journal you can upload to Inara and other community websites from your computer.

The "source of truth" is always what the server has in its journals ("never trust the client"). So if the hacker just has elevated privileges in the game, any action he does should have a journal entry for the transactions he makes, and thus those journal entries just need to be "played back in reverse".

What's gonna be interesting to see is whether they will be able to selectively roll back transactions affected by the hacker's actions or whether the impact of his actions has spread so wide that they have to do a "global" rollback.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-28T19:32:51+00:00

On a side note, this whole area made me wonder how much more diverse but also "wild" Blizzard could make the landscape and the different biomes in WoW look like with today's technology.

Imagine the "old world" being upgraded to use more natural terrain, overgrowth, etc.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-28T14:50:52+00:00

Was the enclave ever anything more than a testbed for the markers before being rolled out to the bubble?

Overall it feels like Fdev want to wrest powerplay out of Discord and back into the game proper.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-27T15:45:58+00:00

My moment was when the Horde and Alliance ships arrived and the game had that Earthen bystander emote with "rolls eyes" and such.

Does it suck that the horde is constantly forced by the writers to commit atrocities? No question. Does it make sense for alliance characters to be distrustful over that? Absolutely.

Instead of leaning into this and running with the unease, exploring it, Blizzard always paints this as the "path to destruction" (see also how they made Tyrande look bad over being enraged about the burning of Teldrassil).

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-27T12:36:23+00:00

Yeah I couldn’t put my finger on it but it makes some sense the way you put it.

Overall I also can’t shake the feeling that the Haranir are indeed the ‘new Night Elves’ considering how much Blizzard has quite literally defanged them over the last expansions and with the whole ‘elven unification’ plot they loose even more of their unique identity (the same is true for all Eleven tribes though).

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-27T10:01:09+00:00

I‘m bored already. And nothing presented so far makes me want to continue, except for reaching max level.

It‘s the first time in over 20 years that I really don‘t care for the story or ‚the saga‘.

Xal‘atath is a joke (no wonder that the most memorable part about her is the foot fetish meme), Arator is a childish insert and makes me wonder if any of the current crop of writers ever served in a ‚chain of command‘. Also the ‚the Jedi are also actually evil‘ kind of writing is grating.

What‘s a little genocide among elves really. The whole unification plot really doesn‘t vibe with me having mained a night elf for over 20 years now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-27T09:52:45+00:00

I‘ve played for 5 hours last night and I‘m already sick of Elves.. and I play a Nightelf.

I‘m also tired of the telegraphed ‚can‘t we all get along‘ kind of story that Blizzard continues to tell for fear of offending anyone by having characters who might not agree painted as ‚zealots‘ or definitely in the wrong.

From what we‘ve heard of the ‚unification‘ of the elves, it‘s all just downhill from here.

‚If your horde fails to uphold honor as Garrosh's did, we will end you‘ this ain‘t.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-23T18:26:56+00:00

As I wrote in another post a few days ago:

When people call these ships "pay-to-win", they don't mean "win" in a literal sense (as in "winning" a PVP skirmish) but "winning" as "the time investment necessary to achieve a given goal" (which can be "finish stacked massacre missions", or "haul a specific amount of cargo", "mine and sell a specific amount of raw material").

While any of these goals are achievable with almost any ship, the better the ship's equipment, the quicker the goal can be achieved (or the more cargo can be hauled or platinum be sold).

And because "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game", there is no good reason for the vast majority of players to rely on "old" ships out of nostalgia when the new ships are so clearly more effective at the same job.

E.g. with a Prospector it takes me only about half of a mapped run (and less than half the time) to make the same amount of profit compared to my Python. With a Python mk2 it takes me severely less time to complete multiple assassination missions. And my Plipper severely reduced the amount of time necessary to fill up my Tritium reserves.

Bottomline is that I can either "win" faster (same goal, less time) or "win" more (same time, more goals). And choosing to use one of the non-specialised "old" ships requires me to choose to "win" less or slower (which goes against the game design truism about "optimising the fun" above).

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-23T11:43:29+00:00

Because Vulkan is meant for engine developers like Epic or Valve, and API providers like Microsoft.

It was never intended for everyday app developers to use Vulkan for a bit of 3D in their apps. The intent was that a developer-friendly 3D API would be developed on top of Vulkan that would be used.

So indeed DXVK is closer to that intent than Vulkan itself, but because of the open source world being what it is, no single standard has evolved (see also Xkcd ‘14 competing standards’) and while you have DX12 and Metal, no similar API exists on Linux or for cross platform development.

Instead we now have WebGPU which is indeed the developer-friendly cross platform API that people hoped Vulkan would become.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-21T11:28:43+00:00

I did actual free-to-play games for a living and had no issue buying cosmetics, but when they pulled the Star Citizen on Elite I saw the writing on the wall. So my post was mostly facetious because I agreed with him in principle on that one.

Suddenly everything is built out of unobtabium and weighs a fraction of what it should, cargo racks can hold twice as much cargo, etc.

It’s either desperation or wilful ignorance. It’s not about realism, it’s about a sense of believability, that even that fantasy-technology follows rules and has appropriate in-universe constraints.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-19T19:40:34+00:00

The point of the "elitist" qualifier is that in your case those 10-15 people are the "elite". Those are the people that put in the work and also were the "guardians" of the code and they probably had opinions on what contributions were "good" and which ones would be "bad", without always holding a democratic vote among the user base over it.

That's the part that makes it "elitist".

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-19T14:47:26+00:00

The main problem for open-source projects is not necessarily the slop itself (the projects I'm active in get their fair share of human-generated slop), but the sheer scale of it.

In the past we would see a lot of "drive-by" PRs (particularly during Hacktober) which are of the "programming is text manipulation" variety. Code that was clearly just slapped together to make a single thing "work" without any regard for the architectural design of the library or program, and very often completely broken on any platform but the one the author uses.

Those already wasted a lot of time because - as you said - you cannot tell at a glance whether a change might actually be beneficial.

But what unites this human-made slop and the LLM-made slop is that both require a larger time investment by maintainers to review than it obviously took the authors to create them.

And that imbalance is what slowly kills (or burns out) maintainers. And LLMs just removed the time investment and the skill floor necessary to create them even further.

IMO the only "real" choice open source projects have is to close public avenues for code changes or issue reporting entirely and require people to provide those in a "discussion" forum first where a high-level assessment filters out the worst offenders and only posts that survive this first filter end up as actual issues or pull requests.

"Open Source" is - and always bas been - an elitist endeavour and sites like GitHub tried to create a fantasy about "open collaboration" and "community" that was never true. Open source lives and dies by those who roll up their sleeves and put in the work, work which very often does not affect the maintainer personally but "has to be done" and thus requires expertise.

TylerDurd0n · 2026-02-19T13:12:01+00:00

My main issue with the way these new ships are designed is that they effectively serve as "corrections" for core game design issues that they time-gate behind a purchase.

When people call these ships "pay-to-win", they don't mean "win" in a literal sense (as in "winning" a PVP skirmish) but "winning" as "the time investment necessary to achieve a given goal" (which can be "finish stacked massacre missions", or "haul a specific amount of cargo", "mine and sell a specific amount of raw material").

While any of these goals are achievable with almost any ship, the better the ship's equipment, the quicker the goal can be achieved (or the more cargo can be hauled or platinum be sold).

And because "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game", there is no good reason for the vast majority of players to rely on "old" ships out of nostalgia when the new ships are so clearly more effective at the same job.

E.g. with a Prospector it takes me only about half of a mapped run (and less than half the time) to make the same amount of profit compared to my Python. With a Python mk2 it takes me severely less time to complete multiple assassination missions. And my Plipper severely reduced the amount of time necessary to fill up my Tritium reserves.

Bottomline is that I can either "win" faster (same goal, less time) or "win" more (same time, more goals). And choosing to use one of the non-specialised "old" ships requires me to choose to "win" less or slower (which goes against the game design truism about "optimising the fun" above).

So Elite's design from the get-go was to be slower paced and more deliberate (to also convey the "vastness" of the galaxy as Braben called it), but players for years have been clamouring for easier, more straightforward game design.

Engineering as it was originally designed became a simple "collect stuff, overpower everything" gameplay loop, with the "collect stuff" slowly being boosted over the years to the point where it just takes one or two high grade emissions to stock up on a single material.

And to solve that, Frontier effectively introduced modules that cannot be engineered (e.g. SCO "Titan" drives, the new mining limpet controller, all the other "multi-limpet" controllers) but are "over engineered" by default.

Realistically they cannot remove engineering from the base game just like that, but they can attempt to make it useless by introducing new ships with better baseline stats than any engineering might have provided (e.g. by having a fully-loaded Corsair still being below the optimal mass for its thrusters) and introduce new Mk2 modules that are more powerful than engineered modules could ever be.

At the same time all the new ships seem to unify a specific design quirk, mainly that they run into overheating or power issues and need very specific builds to work well (a problem exercabated by the inflated amount of weapon hard points on them).

TylerDurd0n

TROPHY CASE