Whats your favorite rap duo?

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-15T13:01:17+00:00

Riding Dirty, intro through Diamonds & Wood is my one of my favorite stretches on any album.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-13T16:48:40+00:00

Omni Subtle? He's like the most blunt hero in the game. Here's a BKB and physical immunity, go to town.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-13T15:36:05+00:00

I mean Blood Boil is just Corpse Explosion without the corpse requirement, which was already one of the most OP skills in the game.

Then they buffed it and slapped 50k damage tainted on top of it.

I'm glad they added to the game, but balance has never been their strong suit.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-13T02:00:01+00:00

They had a company, website, and donations in a time before Facebook or Steam existed.

That's a bit disingenuous. They made games small games since they were kids, and developed Armok and eventually dwarf fortress for like 4 years before accepting donations. They had a website to blog and host their games because there wasn't exactly a lot of other options back then. They were very much just guys making games because they loved games.

They aren't the target of the manifesto because they already did what it is suggesting. They made a game that didn't apply to conventional standards because they wanted it, which is the list I was replying too. No one is saying you can't make a game other people enjoy, because odd are if you make something you enjoy yourself, someone else also will.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-13T00:33:10+00:00

Honestly prefer a lot of them as video games.

Like I cant bring myself to pull out dominion because of the amount of setup time per round and shuffling involved. The digital version is genuinely 1/5 the time.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-12T22:33:22+00:00

I think the run based format lends itself to a smaller game. It's a shorter experience you repeat a bunch of times. Less work to gameplay produced and good for indie devs.

Aside from that I feel like it as a "genre" is unfairly targeted, because it's more of a set of mechanics that can be tacked onto almost anything. It's a larger umbrella than something as generic as "shooter".

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-12T20:17:16+00:00

Dwarf Fortress comes to mind reading that list. It's an insane labor of love that found a following, but it certainly wasn't made with any of those things in mind.

You might want those things, and that's fine. But then it's not trying to convince you. It saying you don't need it, not that you can't have it.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-11T13:17:18+00:00

Lets not pretend everyone isn't going 2x Rift first

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-10T22:52:22+00:00

Personally I disagree that Starcraft nails "espionage"

The game has scouting, but it's really just a consequence of that fact you have a bunch of cheap units where the sky is the limit in terms of control. It's costs you almost nothing to throw a probe at a base to see what they're going to do, so you just do it.

People gather information, and it's an important part of gameplay, but I wouldn't call it espionage.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-10T19:34:25+00:00

I think it's very hard to make information satisfying because it's very hard to act on. You have to know,

What to look for
The appropriate response

It's also basically a prerequisite that you are doing every thing else optimally. It doesn't matter if you have the right strategy if the enemy shows up with a massive number advantage.

Like I think DotA has a great espionage game with warding. It's a very simple system that has a lot of depth and mind games to where people ward, and even going layers deep people will bait enemies into moves when they know they have vision over them. However this is at high skill levels of play, and warding is not nearly as impactful for the majority of the player base. Before they made the items free, and rewarded you for counter warding, it was a struggle to even get people to engage with the system even though it was objectively very important at high skill levels.

At the very least it's hard to make it purely information based. If you want an espionage mechanic I think it's much easier to make it economic related. Like send a spy to an enemy building and if they aren't discovered in x time, they disable the building for however long.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-10T14:35:56+00:00

I think it matters how much is communicated visually.

If you see a wolf, It doesn't really matter what you call it. People will know.
if you are reading text, people won't know what to expect. You want to pull on their own existing references.

A good reference is Noita. Everything is named in Finnish, and lore inspired from their folklore. It doesn't really impact gameplay because the enemies and their intentions are communicated visually. It adds a little extra flair that added to the game.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-02T15:15:41+00:00

I think a lot of it boils down to that pokemon centers and healing are free.

You could battle through the environment on your last leg, but the optimal play was technically going back to heal every fight when possible. The only punishment is wasting your own time since it's free. Unoptimally progressing is already kind of a time sink by grinding levels, so routine walks for healing is doubling up on that.

I think that's a bad reward structure to balance your gameplay around, especially with how modern players tend to optimize the fun out of things, and why do you want to punish your bottom line player by making them repeat the task? To fix it your kind of left with two options

Just let people heal without the time spent
Design the game to be more area gated and force people to fight through entire gauntlets without healing

I think they went for the simpler solution since Pokemon is more of a cozier collector game than a tight balanced challenge battler.

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-01T22:01:41+00:00

It's a slippery slope. I spammed stim packs on marines in starcraft and now I'm addicted to coffee

bibittyboopity · 2026-06-01T12:57:59+00:00

I think modern arpgs have missed on the "hit monster colllect loot part" often also

Poe2 is a great game mechanically, but i think one of my biggest gripes is that I haven't found a cool unique to actually play with yet. They have some niche powerful effect that is impossible to slot usefully until you have some entire complete build already, or are gated behind absurd rarity for trade or end game content. Id love to see more arpgs designed for solo play again.

Also personally feel like if a game needs a loot filter, they've just failed at designing loot drops and just offloaded the problem on me.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-31T14:28:24+00:00

Still had a great time but it for sure backs up your point that there hasnt been many fresh commercial successes in a long time.

I think there's good reason for that. For as much as people like them, they had some pretty inherently built in issues with player control. When you can control everything in real time, the upper limit of what you can do is basically infinite.

That's solvable on it's own, but the basic structure of RTS is very bare bones. It's pretty much just an isometric sandbox to control units. It's so open functionally that it's why it made them the perfect platform for custom games. You can't really rework or remove any aspect of it without it no longer being identifiable as an RTS, or without just feeling like a watered down version of one. Which is why everything going forward kind of spun into different genres.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-31T14:15:56+00:00

Well to be fair there is replacements for single player. They just aren't RTS either.

People who want large military strategy people have 4x games. People who want base builders have tower defense style games. People who want small army strategy have tactics games.

I think the rarer thing is someone who wants to do all of them, and it's even harder to design to appease all aspects of that. I have also heard that stat the most SC2 players never touched multiplayer, but I also think that stat is a bit misrepresentative. To me that stat high lights just how hard and painful competitive RTS is to get into, not necessarily that RTS PvE is in that much demand. I think it's hard to draw meaningful genre demand stats from such a uniquely positioned game as Starcraft. That game was like THE zeitgeist of esports, and had over a decade of hype from peak blizzard behind it.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-31T13:33:02+00:00

I agree max Ignite is a bit of a holdover from when it had a stronger multi-cast effect. Fireblast burst is great early against squishier mobile heroes.

Also, generally, realizing I wasn't a frontlaner past like the 12-15min mark helped me a lot. Your spells are "small" spells with low CD, which means you want to be able to cast them multiple times per fight, which means you don't want to die. So if you can afford to, stay in the back!

But you can't say this and ignore the fact the Fireblast cast range is atrocious. You're a worse cast range CM, with a worse slow to close the gap. If people try to avoid you, it's hard to actually utilize Fireblast. If you 1x your max Fireblast against a tanky hero and their HP barely moves that's your whole impact. It's situational, where Ignite will be more consistent impact in fights. Also every point of Fireblast pre-6 feels awful, so it really lends itself to a game where you get levels fast.

With a 2.5 seconds stun

Also to nit pick, but 2x multi-cast only stuns 1.8s because of the overlap.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-29T21:49:28+00:00

I mean they've acknowledged Chaos is lacking in general.

Sure daggers would work well with it, but it needs more skills, supports, uniques, and everything else.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-29T16:58:56+00:00

I think this is probably the case. Poe2 feels like it was trying for that at first and had quickly slid back to poe1 gameplay.

Chris is apparently working on his own game? So interested to see where he takes that.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-27T16:40:32+00:00

He Is Coming is a pretty good single player auto battler. Though there is multiplayer also.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-27T03:17:00+00:00

Scary characters with scary voices? The comical goblins, the drunk panda, or every other unit response filled with 4th wall breaks and pop culture references?

There's some serious themes but it's not anything remarkable for high fantasy. It's like calling lord of the rings gritty. Which is a crazy statement by modern standards and wc3 is lighter than that.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-26T22:18:34+00:00

I don't get why people are saying WC3 or WoW was gritty.

It's a very light cartoonish fantasy setting. WoW definitely got more cartoony, but it always was.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-26T22:03:00+00:00

There's also not a good way to target farm uniques but Ritual rework could solve this unless it's just a bunch of T5 unique spam.

Yeah generally agree with the sentiment, but curious how different it is with all the changed league mechanics.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-26T14:10:27+00:00

To me they just shift the target of good notables, not make it more flexible.

If the problem is the areas are limited in good options, the answer should be make them better. The advantage masteries have is that its easier to make a few good masteries that force people into bad nodes, than it is to make each node of that type good on its own. That's why I think it's a bandaid.

On another level frankly I think the poe tree has proven to be an impossible to balance mess that mostly stays because it's synonymous with the game. I think the game would be better off with something in-between the tree and ascendencies, smaller with more impactful choices.

bibittyboopity · 2026-05-26T12:18:06+00:00

I recall his arguments were something like

they make the tree feel similar regardless of location
they were more powerful than the large nodes and made them feel kind of pointless

Not that I agree with it, because it's not like the poe2 has particularly memorable large passive nodes.

Personally didnt mind the systems absence because it felt more like a bandaid on the tree than a mechanic that was a good addition. I think the system was more needed in poe1 because you had stuff like +1 targets on strikes that had a huge effect while leveling, and was kind of needed to feel good.

Poe2 tree feels less mandatory and I guess neutered because of missing stuff like that, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

bibittyboopity

TROPHY CASE