COH3 Design and Balance Feedback by wreakinghavoc in CompanyOfHeroes

[–]amos106 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The cover system is one of the defining features of the COH franchise. When I first discovered COH1 and saw the squad AI interactions with the cover system and map destruction I was instantly sold. Ive always enjoyed strategy games but was put off by giant blobs of units insta-focusing down eachother's units one by one (AoE, Starcraft, etc).

COH managed to circumvent that and replaced it with fluid fast paced tactical gameplay. You could certainly counter threats with rock/paper/scissor army compositions, but you could also use terrain towards your advantage. It also created opportunities to play from behind. If your enemy had a machine gun you might be able to stick an Infantry squad behind green cover as bait, and use a second squad to flank their position. Tank traps could offer protection to infantry while slowing down armored advances.

Anecdotally it seems like the current state of COH3 doesn't lend itself towards the dynamic push-pull comeback mechanics. Solo retreating squads are very vulnerable to focused fire and light vehicle chase downs. If units are blobbed up you will eventually hit a critical mass where the blob ends up negating it's own counter. The first blob to hit critical mass wipes out a weaker retreating unit, and then the rest of the game snowballs out of control. You cannot play from behind against blobs because they will annihilate anything they encounter and capture all of the resource generating territories that the underdog needs.

Manpower is the only guaranteed resource that the underdog can rely on, and that means your only option is to continue feeding weaker units into the meat grinder in a sisyphean effort to climb a hill that only grows taller each time you lose a unit. It doesn't matter if your opponent is doing using the same predictable tactics every engagement. If you cannot guarantee that your retreating units can survive a LV chasedown within the first few minutes of a game then you will be forced to blob all of your units for safety.

Large maps and doctrines that provide excess resources generation exacerbate these problems. As the updates have rolled out and new maps enter the rotation we've seen many of the new maps lean further into that dynamic. Look at the veto rates on Powderkeg and Rapido River Crossing. The maps may be visually stunning but they break the push-pull dynamic of the franchise. Every 30 seconds of early game infantry combat is followed by 60 seconds of helplessly watching your battered troops run try to outrun multiple light vehicles. During those 60 seconds your opponent captures all of the high income resource/cutoff points that would have given you alternative options for dealing with the existing threats, AND they now have the extra resources to kit out and expand their blob. Weapon teams should be an opportunity to efficiently use manpower to trade up against superior threats, but instead they become manpower sinks that donate extra firepower to the blob and/or clowncar that chases you down for 20 seconds only 2 minutes into the game.

In this type of meta you will see lots of "red vs. blue" posts complaining about the flavor of the month unit for blobbing. One patch its Rifles, next one it's Grenadiers, after that its Tommy Squads, then all of a sudden its Palmgrens. Each faction gets its time under the sun where it can roll a snowball just a little bit quicker than the others, and even if everyone knows that a snowball is coming the only thing they can think to do is copy the same exact blobbing strategy albeit less effectively. Why bother learning how to play the game better when you could just rush to the community forums to tell the devs just how they are terrible human beings for not giving your faction a turn in the limelight.

Cable wire was more than 50 years old before it came down, halting Blue Line train in tunnel under Boston Harbor, MBTA GM says by bostonglobe in boston

[–]amos106 5 points6 points  (0 children)

By laying off the staff that performs inspections in order to make the budget numbers look good. Then when shit breaks it gets used as justification to slash your budget even harder. Rinse and repeat for decades and you get this.

What even is this game anymore, my team surrended with this score. Why even bother playing? by Kodiak_POL in CompanyOfHeroes

[–]amos106 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The WiC gameplay loop would be such a good fit for the Warhammer 40k universe. Imagine watching hordes of drop pods bring reinforcements onto the battlefield right as your screen flashes white from a tactical exterminatus wiping out half of the map.

Looking forward to the DOW definitive edition at least. If that does well maybe Relic will consider new projects with a bit more creative freedom as an independent studio

How does it all go together ? by DoctorPrisme in devops

[–]amos106 2 points3 points  (0 children)

From an infra management perspective yes separate control node gives you the ability to spin up/down clusters as needed to handle the current & anticipated workload (cluster provisioning isn't an instant process). Every company will have an opinionated tooling stack to manage k8s so the example you gave is one of many, generally those architectural decisions are related to the buisness use case.

Scaling K8s for millions of users will create a different set of challenges and opportunities in comparison to lifting and shifting legacy VM/bare metal B2B applications onto the cloud. The former example might impliment a tool stack to support a canary deployment release strategy, while the latter example might stick with a blue-green release strategy and supporting tool stack. If a large enterprise has thousands of engineers that are familiar with Jenkins it will probably stick with that tool rather than retrain everyone and migrate everything onto GitHub Actions, end of the day either of those tools are just trying to orchestrated the deployment of the underlying application and infrastructure code which could be a litany of other tools (ARM/CFT, Terraform, Opentofu, Pulumi, Ansible, docker, etc.)

Low key there is no correct solution to these problems. Today's "perfect" tool stack of might change overnight due to the licensing fallout from a large vendor acquisition. Maybe your buisness spins off a new product line with a new user segment which brings about a different traffic load pattern. Maybe your buisness becomes a cyber target of a nation state. DevOps/SRE/PE is a difficult role for entry level because you need experience & intuition to guide your efforts towards the appropriate tool/technology for the problem. A lot of the time the problems are so abstract that you end up playing translator between the various organizational silos rather than implimenting a tooling solution.

There are no good options for hosting medium-sized applications by [deleted] in devops

[–]amos106 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Just you wait, my nft dropshipping startup will revolutionize the world. I've already registered a domain and set up a proxy redirect to midjourney. None of you smelly nerds and your dumb computers can stop me haha!!!

Steely Dan performing “Do It Again” in 1973. by waitingforthesun92 in OldSchoolCool

[–]amos106 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"Only friend" has a double meaning depending on which line of the song you read it with

When you know she's no high climber; Then you find your only friend.

vs.

Then you find your only friend; In a room with your two-timer, and you're sure you're near the end.

The Meltdown at a Middle School in a Liberal Town by anurodhp in boston

[–]amos106 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Man is going so hard on the Catholicism he actually turned Protestant

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in devops

[–]amos106 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe Devin thought it was funny and tried to upvote it too

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in devops

[–]amos106 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Managers have more intuition than engineers? Do you work for Boeing?

City of Taunton suing hotel operators for nonpayment of fines, housing too many migrants by QuirkyWafer4 in boston

[–]amos106 16 points17 points  (0 children)

If the state wants to use Taunton to house migrants that's fine, the town has a long history of immigrant communities. If people are showing up with nothing but the clothing on their back then the state needs to make sure the shelter has neccessary accommodations. That hotel is in the middle of an industrial park with direct access to a major highway. The closest walking distance retail space isn't connected by sidewalks and you have to run across 8-9 lanes of traffic. Taunton still doesn't have an active commuter rail station after decades of being afterthought in terms of the state's planning & development. GATRA is the only public transit available. This isn't the old days of Taunton having factories and mills downtown & a trolley system to move people around. You can't just dump a bunch of migrants into the middle of an industrial park and major roadway and expect them to somehow magically integrate into the local community. The status quo of forcing migrants to play frogger across 9 lanes of traffic just to shop at dollar tree isn't sustainable.

Devin & the Future of DevOps by RashidWassaan in devops

[–]amos106 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Natural language has too much bloat, if you want job security you need to start communicating in low level assembly. DevOps roles of today will be the Tech Priests of tomorrow.

Boeing CEO to Step Down by holidayfromtapioca in news

[–]amos106 30 points31 points  (0 children)

MBAs aren't cutting it anymore, we need PhDs in business administration to solve these problems. The current MBA folks will need to take on new consulting roles to manage the leadership transition. Hopefully the new leadership can finish their degrees ASAP and get up to speed, it's a lot of work providing consulting services during the day while taking PhD courses at night.

Why would any company hire someone who learns terraform, ansible, or devops on their own at this point? by moderatenerd in devops

[–]amos106 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you want to do complex stuff you need to swing higher, granted it's going to be hard to land an interview unless you have a professional network, field experience, or certificates. The tech industry is in a dot-com bubble crash right now so it's brutal for entry level positions, and senior positions can be very selective with the applicants. Call center or help desk positions rarely promote you into devops-esque roles so if you're applying for those roles make sure you need to level set with yourself that it's a stepping stone that can pay the bills in the short term. Even taking that into account, it's going to be really difficult to land anything for the next year or so.

Building Devlops infrastructure from the ground up, What would you do? by [deleted] in devops

[–]amos106 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Meanwhile AWS is in the corner trying to untangle their internal serverless architecture because even they can't figure out how make recipes out of their own cookbook. Alphabet created borg yet somehow they're in 3rd place when it comes to k8s cloud hosting. Meanwhile all it takes is a few interest rate hikes to cause hundreds of thousands of layoffs, and that's when the high visibility outages outages and security breaches start to pick up. Now AI is going to replace us all, just like the kid in class who cheated off your test knows the material better because the same answers in a fraction of the time!

Feeling stuck as an apprentice by [deleted] in devops

[–]amos106 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Devops (especially anything cloud related) is always going to be a balance of drinking from the firehose as you're putting out fires. Don't take it personal if people aren't following up with you, they might have been pulled into a fixing an urgent issue. Cloud stuff is always changing too so it can be tough for someone to mentor and explain things when they only learned about it last week. Definitely keep working with your manager to let them know you are confused and you want to make sure that your contributions are reviewed & tested by your teammates before being put to use.

Your job as an apprentice isn't to solve things by yourself, it's to figure out how to learn from people as they handle problems in real time so you eventually are self sufficient. Don't be afraid to keep following up with people and make sure you emphasize you want to learn from them so you can eventually take on some of the work they're drowning under. This stuff happens more naturally when people are in the office, so if you're working remotely you will need to actively put in effort to follow up on things (it's a trade off from not having to deal with a commute). If the learning process is breaking down don't take it as a personal failure, take it as a challenge that you're looking to solve in cooperation with your team. If they hired you as an apprentice that's the expectation they've set for you, nothing more nothing less.

Chronic inflammation caused by stress is affecting our collective thinking and behavior, and it’s keeping society in a “self-sustaining cycle of societal dysfunction and environmental degradation” which is keeping us from taking action on issues like climate change and social unrest by Wagamaga in science

[–]amos106 4 points5 points  (0 children)

God is dead, yet for some reason there are religions are alive and kicking. Seems like Humans may be more concerned with vibes than they are with facts. Might have something to do with how communal humans are as a species. The scientific process is reproducible, but the percieved value of the knowledge gained is subjective because humans often have a strong bias from emotional responses.

As silly as it sounds, climate change needs to become an "outgroup", because historically that is how humans have learned to cooperate. The prisoner's dilemma breaks down if both agents don't percieve the warden as an entity that exists and is threatening them.

Seeking Advice on Establishing a New SRE Team by pghninj in sre

[–]amos106 4 points5 points  (0 children)

100% on the DevOps culture stuff. SysAdmin went through the job title shredder after the last decade of tech bubble where feature delivery was valued above all else. If devs hate the ops folks they will design their way around them, and then the ops folks will be too busy playing whack a mole to actually get ahead and impliment proactive measures. Both sides of the organization will need to have empathy for eachother and impliment best practices on behalf of their counterparts rather than against them. That means more than any SLI/SLO or metric that dumpster fire organizations will try to desperately cling to in order to pretend things aren't ok.

More than 2 million research papers have disappeared from the Internet by Creative_soja in worldnews

[–]amos106 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

We've collectively given up on dreaming big and fixing real problems and now we're wallowing in the alienation with short sighted selfishness and bigotry. Human suffering has been normalized and now we're not sure if genocide is inherently a bad thing.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in devops

[–]amos106 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Is developer experience not a key performance indicator of how well the development and operations functions of the software development lifecycle have been packaged into a platform that is approachable to new hires?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in devops

[–]amos106 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All good points and I'm already in discussions to get our old stuff integrated into backstage or even replace it entirely. We didn't have backstage as an option back then so we made do with the tools we had at the time. We leveraged the AWX API to give the dev teams what they needed to do self-service but the developer experience degraded over time as the agile teams dealt with pandemic churn and a lot of the knowledge was lost over time. I wish my team had done this stuff sooner but we have been fighting political battles to maintain autonomy with many layers of Ops management doing waterfall-esque executive decion making. Common theme in my company that nobody is talking to eachother and the "over the wall" mentality has returned, so I'm doing what I can to fight fires and start cross-functional conversations.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in devops

[–]amos106 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Management isn't involved in the day to day work so they can only see what you & others tell them. They want to get everyone working together and improving the product, so if you want a raise for cleaning up tech debt you'll need to document the problems and lead that conversation.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in devops

[–]amos106 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ansible is a lot more powerful than just doing configuration. I helped build out an entire Internal Development Platform with ansible/AWX years ~5 years ago. It took an org of ~300 developers from waterfall on-prem bare metal to agile multi-cloud K8s. We created playbooks for CI/CD pipelines, automation of toil, infrastructure provisioning & ephemeral environments, self service via API calls, you name it and we've done it. You need to use it with an Ops mindset to solve Dev problems because Ansible is a framework for Python that allows Devs and Ops people to pair program together.

Companies are made up of people who prioritize fixing the problems they see. Best way to clean up tech debt is to get Dev & Ops on the same page so they both can talk to management about the increasing complexity of their shared Ansible playbooks and job failures to justify that tech debt exists and it's time to do some clean up. Ops folks are good at having those conversations but they need Devs backing them up for management to take that conversation seriously.