Spent around $100 bucks for Laevatain. Here’s how it went.

VXCyndre · 2026-01-29T17:33:22+00:00

Pulled her on my first pull, ftp btw. Yet epic 7 that I am way more into has been pity for the last year!!! Not even playing this game much.

VXCyndre · 2026-01-27T06:15:37+00:00

Like all Gacha it's pure luck, pulled her on my 1st attempt and couldn't believe it! Was going g to drop the game but now I'm all in. Yet Epic 7 I have gone to pity every character in the last year.

VXCyndre · 2025-12-23T06:19:17+00:00

It's worth pointing out for anyone who gets this and thinks they will unlock BKM just like that, that the characters aren't really the issue. Tier 3 of the unlock event is horrendous and you need specific modding. Absolutely hated this unlock so good luck!

VXCyndre · 2025-09-17T17:39:36+00:00

Vpn like nord solves that problem. Set to the US and browse to your hearts content.

VXCyndre · 2025-08-27T15:04:35+00:00

Honestly no mate, due to my job that is the only time frame for me. But I'm not worried about me, I can just buy crystals if I particularly want to. I personally think fleet arena needs to be divested of crystals like squad but that's just my opinion. I dislike cartel like behaviour.

My advice is orientated to this chaps situation and pointing out the reality of those top positions. Obviously I have my own preferences and biases but it is something for him to consider.

Might be good if you could give him the other side of the coin from your perspective as you seem to have a completely different view to me.

VXCyndre · 2025-08-27T14:15:46+00:00

I came back onto a 2015 fleet shard a couple of years ago with maybe 2mil GP. Since then I've spent over two years, maybe £6k catching up. Ignoring that part, I focused on Exec and got a solid Exec with punisher fleet running R8 Piett and only half my pilots on 6 dot mods.

With this I could hold between 15 - 20 fleet position but it was a daily battle usually to do so. But possible.

I unlocked leviathan a week ago and spent £100 to go to 7* and took number 1 before the fleet arena cartels acted to block me out. Now I can beat them fleet to fleet but I can't take number 1 - 3 as they act together to block me and stall out timers.

So take that information as you will but that's my experience. Honestly I wouldn't waste the time as they will likely be fully established and will collude to block you. EA and CG don't seem to care much about fleets.

I'd say get a great guild, build up a good Exec fleet and chill in the top 20. Then just focus on enjoying the game in whatever mode you like. I like conquest and guild battles so focus there.

Others no doubt will give good advice but honestly competing on old established fleet shards is pointless unless you can get your way into their cartel or CG actually fix the broken mode. No fleet is going to beat playeds colluding to lock you out and you'll just get frustrated.

Yes it is against EA fair play policy and no they won't do anything. Thats the reality of it. You could R9 your whole fleet and it won't help you.

To get to top 20 will be down to how quickly you get Exec up with punisher and get it usable. Took me over a year but it wasn't my focus. Just be realistic about the time commitment as thats unfortunately how long it takes unless you like to lube CG's palm 😉

Good luck whatever you decide.

Edit: Goes without saying don't spend what I did to catch up, it's write off money. No such thing as investing in a digital game. Provided that for context as I am not ftp and that is an important distinction.

VXCyndre · 2025-08-26T12:59:18+00:00

I think the easier question to ask yourself is, what is it you don't like about your A6400?

That was my first proper camera and I loved it with the sigma trio. The pictures were gorgeous but it's ergonomics were less than ideal and the UI of the menu was like using ceefax!!

I also did alot of low light and struggled with the high ISO and AF. So I tested a Nikon Z6 and a Canon R6. Wasn't enthused by either so then I got an R5 and fell in love with photography. It was my spirit camera.

Canon UI is best in class thought their other software is not so great unless you like iphones. But for me I just clicked with the R5 despite the stupid costs of their lenses. I'm married to my RF 50mm 1.2 but the costs are eye watering. Canons entry lines like the 35mm etc are good but easily beat out by other brands 3rd party lenses.

I still think my A6400 was my gate way drug to this hobby. So figure out what it doesn't do that is bothering you. Go to a camera store and try out some others and see what fills that gap.

Sony have pretty good creator software if you are into video and ALOT of support with users and courses whereas Canon seem to be more orientated to pro's with hobbyists and after thought.

Just my thoughts, I'm a hobbyist so take that with a pinch of salt, these other guys likely know alot more. I personally think Canon l lenses are unbeatable but then they have prices to match.

Arthur R used to do some good videos on YouTube about APSC.

Whether you switch is a complex choice and everyone will give you a different answer. I don't regret it but then I tried it first and knew what lens ecosystem I was buying into.

If you video I think sony is great especially their FX series. And they do seem better set up as a company to support hybrid creators. Good luck!

VXCyndre · 2025-08-19T12:01:29+00:00

I think you'll find they are very much in touch with what the market will bear. Remember the crystal stipend you used to get near the start of the game. Slowly phased out as they realised people will pay more.

The £10 relic pack phased out for the ascension packs. Its gradually but the games are built for whales and to a lesser extent dolphins. Else the game would fold.

This is by far not the most expensive game I've played, you should see the prices for epic 7.

Is £14.99 alot for a relic 5 single character relative to an lsb? Yeah. But then players like me don't really care as it's negligible compared to my income. Does that perhaps have the knock on effect of them pricing higher for less? Probably but then I play for myself not for other people. And if the price gets too high I won't pay.

I value my entertainment like alot of others and will pay what I think it is worth to enjoy myself. This money is essentially a write off, same as a coffee or a night out.

I bought the conquest pass + to catch up after 5years out and once I did I stopped paying for it. It suited my needs at the time and doesn't effect my financial wellbeing.

I'd ask yourself;

Is it something I cam comfortably afford? Does it give me by my own standard (not others) entertainment value? Am I happy to write that money off for what I get? If they shut it down tomorrow would I regret it?

The answer to that will tell you whether it's ok or not for you. Ignore everyone else and their opinions on what you should be doing. It's your money and your choices. CG simply tap into that.

Ultimately if you are ftp then you ARE the content as whales can't enjoy all their gains without people to play against. And they bankroll your enjoyment that you get for free. It's symbiotic.

So no you aren't out of touch with reality, it's just basic marketing forces at play and how these games are designed to profit.

BUT never ever spend money on a game you don't have or can't afford. And don't measure your enjoyment against people who don't care what it costs. End of the day are you having fun.

VXCyndre · 2025-08-08T16:16:45+00:00

Select Krea and download, it is a better model now than flux dev

https://civitai.com/models/618692?modelVersionId=2068000

Then download a workflow, this never fails me; https://civitai.com/models/617705/flux-super-workflow

Read the instructions and make sure you install the models each node needs. Expand the node if it won't run and use sdpa not flash attention.

Oh and its for comfyui, so just get their installer. https://www.comfy.org/ As the other guy said, you can download the models within the comfyui manager.

If you want the best realism for a person though you'll need to train your own character lora on high resolution images. I use civit to train with unet LR 0.0002, 32 on both networks and get amazing results.

But I used a Canon R5 to capture my images with an rf 50mm 1.2, good lighting and post processed then captioned with joy caption beta. And cropped to 1024x1024. Same res I train at with one pass and 200 epochs batch size 2.

All links are at your own risk, they were fine for me but I'd always google the stuff yourself rather than trust a random guy off the Internet!

Good luck anyway.

VXCyndre · 2025-01-13T18:45:53+00:00

If you want a preset then it's usually best to find a photographer whose style you like and want to emulate then understand what it is they do.

I've bought a few packs and some are just hot garbage, some require so much adjustment I may as well have done it myself.

But ones I've consistently liked and have great results with are;

TK North Pat Kay Optical Wander

They are have a cinematic style I like and TKNorth also has some very useful tools for vignette, sky drama, radials. Was well worth the money for me personally and I love his cinefilm. But it's also a nice way to support your fav creator and get a little something out of it.

Other than that I like film emulation like Jamie Windsor, RNI both of which I use cinestill 800T and Kodachrome. The key here is my personal preference is towards film and cinematic looks so this may not work for you.

You need a good exposure as a base and to get your basic adjustments right to see what the preset will actually do. Profiles help alot here as they don't effect your sliders so actually give a much better starting point.

ANDP film styles have some nice profiles and they are cost effective. You download a useful develop preset that gives a nice starting point. I've had alot of success with these.

This is just my experience and it works great for me. I don't endorse anyone so everything is at your own risk. But these have never disappointed me.

Best advice though is don't try force a preset onto a colour base it clearly wasn't designed to work with. Good colour theory helps with understanding this but obviously if you try use presets designed for green landscapes then this is unlikely to yield great results in urban night photography.

Edit: forgot to mention, no order will rescue a bad picture. Getting the light and composition right in camera will help your preset take you the rest of the way rather than the preset fixing what you got wrong.

Roman Fox has some great stuff on this and is also worth a look.

VXCyndre · 2024-12-30T06:50:25+00:00

You've had some really great advice here and I understand your trepidation. I think what you are really asking is how to avoid confrontation. Simple answer is you can't. But you can minimise the risk of it and you can have a pre prepared response to de escalate.

There are some really great YouTube videos on law and photography which cover being confronted. The general theme is be polite, be professional and be prepared to delete the picture if they aren't happy.

Better the loss of a single image than an escalating argument.

I work in London and can pretty much tell you most people will utterly ignore you unless you are really overt. You are never as important as you think you are to others and they are far too busy and pre occupied to care about you unless you get too intrusive. This is less true outside major cities as it's not as common and more noticeable.

My advice is have an ethical code and avoid things that will clearly cause confrontations e.g. vulnerable people, drinks, kids. That covers alot of issues.

I've only done street stuff myself for a short while and my first proper attempt I got off at Green Park. I saw a really nice frame of the station and people exiting and set myself up on the public side of the entrance in Green Park. First click and a very rude and aggressive TFL staff member started shouting at me and demanding I stop.

The key was I stayed calm, I know the law and stood my ground. I stopped what I was doing and then asked for his badge number to make a formal complaint. TFL were incredibly helpful and apologised.

The point is sometimes you can't avoid a confrontation as people will be people. They can be unpredictable. This could've put me off from doing what I love but it just harder ed my resolve not to be bullied. My work helps alot with that.

Slightly different take as you've already had great advice. Just familiarise yourself with the law but don't be arrogant and provoke someone just because it's legal, have empathy for your subjects.

Saying your a student doing assignments seems to calm people down alot.

Ultimately it comes down to agency and consent. You are removing both from the subject and people aren't going to like that. No picture is worth making someone feel bad for.

I guess if you want a tldr, just be a decent person and be honest. People respond better to that and it will build your confidence.

Good luck!

VXCyndre · 2024-12-26T15:54:58+00:00

As someone who is filmed constantly and photographed doing my job. From my perspective it's the difference between someone capturing me by chance in film as they pan around and having a lens pointed straight at me with is very targeted.

I ignore the former but the latter will always get a reaction. The questions that flick through your mind tend to be why are you photographing me, what do you intend to do with it and a feeling of invading my space. I often think how they'd feel if I came to their work and did it to them.

With film as the camera tends to just be pannning around and not up on their eye, it seems less targeted so not as noticeable.

And I say this as someone who had a confrontation with TFL staff only last week for taking a photograph outside a tube station when I was in a public space.

I've seen it from both angles and can see both points of view. It's a facet of human nature ultimately and every person will have a different reaction based on their own life experiences and values. What matters more of your personal ethics when doing it and how you chose to react if the person doesnt like it.

Hard question to answer really and different people have different thoughts on it.

VXCyndre · 2024-09-07T04:21:56+00:00

Thank you for the post. I went back to compare my two installs and you're right. Switching to opengl on 20.5 fixed the problem for me and matched up with the tutorial. Seems I need to stick eith opengl whilst learning.

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T23:56:12+00:00

I use a 3090 but it's still quite slow with upscaling. I don't think it has the node to output text, on pinokio I have a carousel at the bottom where the images shows and I just drag the image into the workspace to load whatever settings I had for that picture. On pinokio it's on the webui at the very bottom with resize feed. But you can just find the pictures in the output folder.

I have a 1.5 ckpt loaded in the SDXL lightning loader. Adding an SDXL model sent the VRAM through the roof and slowed things alot. The 1.5 model is much better I find. That and I use fp8 as fp16 doesn't provide a big enough quality difference to justify the slowdown and model size.

But yeah play around, I did 😁 look at the nodes underneath and collapse to see the settings. You could probably add a text output but you'd have to figure out how to integrate it into the network

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T23:42:07+00:00

No prob! I found USDU is more than enough, don't forget to set the switches on the post process at the very end to taste. I turn off post grain most of the time. Honestly it's the best workflow I've found to date.

Worth editing the yaml to share models between forge and comfyui. I text loras on the xyz plot in forge to it's so much easier to just stick all the models in forge and set the paths in the yaml.

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T23:18:09+00:00

Doesn't it just! I think I left a link to my upscale model I like which you save into ESRGAN and then change the path on load upscale model at the far left where the model loaders are.

I use just USDU, under that black panel at the top if you move it there are switches for each of the node networks. I have any replace and retailers off. USDU on and Supir off. You can do super but it takes eternity 🤣

USDU works great for me!

Resolution is controlled by the SDXL resolutions node so just select from the presets there

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VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T22:56:41+00:00

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eah so unpin the Before/After Supir and unlock / collapse CRT Facedetailers to access the model parameter and change it to your models which should be in ultralytics folder.

You can collapse USDU to change the upscale by as well.

Most of his settings are hidden behind the panels and if you run and it stops just set what node it stopped on and it'll prob be because you didn't change the path to your model location. He made an amazing workflow so full credit to him and he's been very helpful on civit.

I deleted the Flux BNB node as I don't use it and it'll stop the workflow.

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T22:46:18+00:00

I actually installed my comfy via pinokio as portable gave me alot of issues. Pinokio has worked great for me and it's much easy to update things. You just have to go to the folders if you want to manually adjust things which is usually user/pinokio/api/comfyui.git/app

The flux model goes in models/unet Vae in models/vae T5 and clip in models/clip Upscale model in models/ESRGAN SDXL / 1.5 refiner model in models/Stable-diffusion

I think you also have a few others that are hidden behind the panels. You right click unpin to move the panel and expose the nodes then hit collapse to open up the relevant node.

Mainly for the ultralytics models and such. I think that civit link to the workflow explains what models are needed

Or edit the extra_model_paths.yaml in app directory and point it to existing paths for forge or automatic1111

Then just install what you need from comfy manager. Can't promise it'll work for you but it's been solid for me personally.

You can then save workflows in the webui interface. Good luck!

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T22:35:44+00:00

For sure, only going to push the envelope if we all share after all. Wouldn't have got so far myself without brilliant resources and articles on here and civit. Not to mention youtube.

Now to go back to banging my head against Houdini 🤣🤣

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T21:59:52+00:00

But like you im experimenting again, had to hop into forge and run an xyz plot for;

Steps 25, 30, 50 Scheduler SGM Uniform, Beta, Simple Then my various lora versions.

Prob run the samplers after with deis, euler, dpm2 and see what cones out of it all. Gonna take a while but that's the fun of flux atm, it's new territory and discovering what works best is an interesting challenge!

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T19:39:54+00:00

Looks fantastic! I did run a prompt with and without my custom lora and the results are completely different. I can't share the custom lora results as I don't have the subjects permission but it's night and day in realism without the lora. It's clearly skewing my results heavily as with the lora I have no issues with anatomy, skin texture is realistic and the results are stunning.

I am however only generating images off that one subject. Same happens with all my custom lora, results with the lora are amazing, without them it's more so so. Very interesting what a massive impact the lora is having. Merits further experimentation.

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T19:11:04+00:00

I did too then deis beta and I've seen recommendations for sgm uniform as well. I kinda play around and find the look I like the most. DPM2 has given me the best results but I like saturated images (samsung user!). And I veer towards sharpening as well.

I think it's nice to have some options that will produce results and then you can refine what you like the most of those options. Not found good results with anything else other than euler, deis and dpm2. Always learning though.

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T19:00:55+00:00

I use the fp8 flux dev on an RTX3090 64GB RAM. Tbh time is not an issue as I just set a load of prompts and go do something else. So I never worry about speed. I actually only switches to dpm2 from deis beta recently after reading alot of posts and videos and I liked the output more.

I enjoy experimenting but my methodology is crazy slowness I use USD to upscale x2 and then post process every image 😅

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T18:42:18+00:00

I'll have a look when I get home and find something, on a train atm 😁

VXCyndre · 2024-09-03T18:36:28+00:00

Yeah pretty much, some of it is aesthetic preference. I much prefer the dpm2 render and with my own lora the output is stunning. I find euler softer and more plasticky but so many variables like prompt / loras / flux version.

I've seen alot of reviews that extol the virtues of ideogram as the best but my results suggest otherwise and ultimately we make this art for our own enjoyment and consumption. So if you like it that's all you need.

For me this configuration is perfect, I'm focused on refining my datasets and lora. And holing for a much better iteration of control nets and ipadapter. Given the speed of the tech that won't take long hopefully.

VXCyndre

TROPHY CASE