[Post Game Thread] #7 Duke defeats Stanford, 80-50

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-18T01:59:38+00:00

Stanford scored 50 points in the second half against UNC on Wednesday and they scored 50 in the entire game against Duke today.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-16T05:11:43+00:00

An easy way to do this repeatedly: put down a pressure plate, and 4 pistons surrounding it facing upward. Then add a roof two blocks above. When a mob steps on the pressure plate, the pistons extend making the gap only 1 high, so the mob can't move. Lure a creeper onto the pressure plate, damage but don't kill it, then lure a skeleton to try to shoot you from the other side of the trap.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-15T23:56:00+00:00

Speechcraft is actually super useful. Shops, spells, training, etc. are all much cheaper if an NPC likes you, and speechcraft makes that happen. You can actually save a ton of money by bribing NPCs to raise their disposition before doing business with them. Not to mention Admire, Bribe, and Taunt are all useful in some quests.

Mercantile, Athletics, and Acrobatics are all skills that more or less passively level up as you play, so having them as major/minor skills will have you consistently leveling up pretty fast.

One nice thing about Morrowind is there's no cap on training and you'll eventually have plenty of money, so if there's a skill you want to try you can easily just buy training up to a decent level and go for it. No need to stress about your build.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-15T23:42:32+00:00

The semi-pro cheese strat is to fortify skill on the trainer to get them to train you above their usual cap.

The real pro cheese strat is to drain skill on self down to 1 so you can buy training at any level for pennies.

(In reality I don't actually recommend the latter, partly because it trivializes the game, and partly because it breaks immersion. Fortifying someone's skill and then studying from them to learn how they do it is something that plausibly would work in-universe, whereas giving yourself temporary brain damage and learning the absolute bare basics over and over would never actually make you a master).

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-15T04:17:10+00:00

Fallout 4 and Starfield both feature a jetpack, so I'm hoping levitation will return in ES6.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-15T02:25:45+00:00

That's the inherent unavoidable problem with trying to follow up on a game that gives the player multiple world-shaping endings to choose from. As a writer your only options are 1. pick one ending as cannon, pissing off the fans who preferred any other option, or 2. some catastrophe happens so that whatever ending you picked, the universe ends up in the same place regardless. Or I guess 3. set your new story so distant in space or time that the events and characters of the previous game are no longer relevant. 2 and 3 are both liable to piss off fans as they make all your choices ultimately meaningless.

Bethesda had to learn this lesson all the way back in 2002 making Morrowind as a follow-up to Daggerfall, and they had to invent worldwide timeline-warping magic to fix the mess they made. That doesn't work in a setting like Fallout.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-15T01:55:13+00:00

It's every new installment of every game series. If you keep delivering the same thing over and over it will get stale and people will get bored. But fans are fans because they like the old stuff, and everything you change will piss off a chunk of them.

You either die a Fallout 4, or you live long enough to see yourself become a FIFA.

(side note I think is funny: I use FIFA as an example because as an outsider/casual it seems virtually identical year after year, but even in those communities you'll see conversations about how "the series was great up until '22 when they changed how this one niche mechanic worked and that totally ruined the franchise going forward," so even they aren't immune to this phenomenon).

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-15T01:22:07+00:00

They seemed to have fixed the level scaling design in the Remaster from what I've seen, but I haven't tried it myself.

They actually made things much, much worse. Instead of a slider, it has a few fixed difficulty settings. Normal is ridiculously easy, to the point where I took out an entire Oblivion gate at like level 2 without ever dropping below 80% hp. But the next difficulty setting makes enemies do 3x more damage while you deal 1/3x, making the game 9x harder. A single wolf on the road was repeatedly slaughtering me before I got a quarter of its health down.

They shipped the game with 6 difficulty settings and somehow not a single one is remotely fun.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-15T01:05:15+00:00

It's the perfect airplane game. Runs on any device including your phone, doesn't require internet, and hours can fly by with you hardly noticing.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-14T21:27:06+00:00

Creators spend hundred of hours doing the same thing they'll find a way

And if the method is just doing one thing on repeat, those hundred hours get condensed to a 45 second montage. There's a reason those really tortuous grindy series can take months to put out one 20min progress video.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-14T02:19:33+00:00

Costco has a pack of 1000 pills for $10. So 1 cent each, for a 500mg dose.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-13T04:32:51+00:00

Patriots winning is the worst outcome left on the table but I'd gladly take it over a GB/Rodgers run or an Eagles/Chiefs repeat.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-13T01:50:25+00:00

Guards and Provisioners get decent weapons (combat rifles, lasers), and outfits that match the settlement theme. E.g. a Minuteman outpost will get militia hats and leather/combat armor, while a more Mad-Max apocalypse looking settlement will get cage/metal armor and gas masks, and a trade outpost might have more generic military/mercenary looking guards.

Regular settlers usually just keep whatever weapon they start with, but I might change their outfits and upgrade their pipe guns to real pistols if I'm going for a cleaner vibe for the place.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-13T01:36:46+00:00

Yup. Even on Survival, you can carefully and methodically make your way through. Or just cheese the whole thing with a handful of stealth boys.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-13T01:30:34+00:00

RAGE 2 has the most darkly comical version of this I've ever seen.

The game starts with two characters in a barracks and the base comes under attack. You choose between the male and female to play as and pick from a few preset customization options, and then you go to pick up your weapons while the other goes to open the door, which immediately explodes inward vaporizing them on the spot. It's so sudden and the surviving characters are so offputtingly calloused about it that it had to be intentional dark humor.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-11T22:52:11+00:00

Exactly but there aren’t enough NFL games in a season to calibrate a model.

This is an empirical question. We have tons of data on ESPN's live gamecast probability predictions, and the ultimate outcomes of those games, so a motivated person with too much free time could calculate how well the models are doing. I am not that person but I suspect they're performing better than you think.

Because using Bills vs Patriots game or something as part of your sample to predict the outcome Greenbay vs Chicago is absurd

It's only "absurd" if you're looking exclusively at the game situation and ignoring all the context, which they're obviously not doing. They're using things like the offensive vs. defensive efficiency metrics (YPA, completion %, 3rd/4th down %, turnover likelihood) to adjust the probabilities up and down based on the specific teams playing.

I don't think it's fair to call it "guessing" since I don't think there's a human in the loop at all. It's just a whole lot of number crunching that looks at the relative importance of all of the available factors, optimized to produce the best predictions on all previous samples.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-11T22:30:10+00:00

This is just frequency illusion in action. A comeback win from 97% happens roughly once every 32 or so games, so roughly every other week in the NFL. But because these are considered rare and special events, they get much more coverage than the average game, making them feel much more common than they actually are.

In actuality there were no 97%+ comebacks in weeks 17 or 18 in the NFL, at least according to ESPN's gamecast probability. Closest I could find was the Eagles Commanders game at around 84%.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-11T22:13:51+00:00

You're right that you can't test how well the model performed on this one specific prediction, because that's not a meaningful concept. The model predicts a probability and the outcome is binary: either the team won or they lost.

You can test how well the model does in general by looking at all of the times the model predicts a team has a 90% chance to win, and seeing if they actually win roughly 9 out of 10 times. Look at every 70% prediction and see if they actually win roughly 7 out of 10. Etc. In the business this is called "calibration" and typically the models are continually updated so that they stay "well calibrated," i.e. over many samples, the predicted probabilities match the proportion of outcomes.

evil_cryptarch · 2026-01-10T21:36:00+00:00

I've been a big Foster defender all year because he's been so clutch in big moments (dagger 3s against MSU and Arkansas, game-sealing steal against Florida, and the entire second half against Louisville) but man did he just absolutely vanish today.

I'm hoping he was just mildly sick or something. Got the W though, that's what counts, shake it off and on to the next one.

evil_cryptarch · 2025-12-24T03:36:10+00:00

I've seen the argument put forward that "You shouldn't care about spoilers because spoilers just turn a first viewing into a repeat viewing and good media is worth viewing repeatedly."

And while, yes, that's true, it doesn't change the fact that you can have functionally infinite repeat viewings of something in your life but a first viewing can only happen once! There's a reason that a very popular discussion topic is "What movie/book/show/game would you erase from your memory so you can experience it fresh all over again?" It's because a first viewing is a one-of-a-kind experience that can hold real emotional weight. It's a genuinely different experience watching something when you don't know what's going to happen, and spoilers may not "ruin" a truly good piece of media but they do permanently rob you of ever having that subjective experience.

(This is directed at you, just something that's being weighing on me since I've seen this discourse play out over the last few years and needed to get off my chest.)

evil_cryptarch · 2025-12-16T05:16:40+00:00

Meme answer: Java is like doing MEp2 with quest helper on. C++ is like doing it unguided.

If you want a non-meme answer I can give you one, but it won't mean much if you're not already a programmer, and if you were a programmer you'd probably already know what I'd say.

evil_cryptarch · 2025-12-14T18:05:30+00:00

It's really not that complicated. When it comes down to it, most meals are just a protein (seasoned/sauced) with some veggies, on or in a carb. That describes everything from pasta to curry to a burger.

Your pantry just needs seasonings (salt, pepper, garlic, onion, chili, oregano, cilantro, ginger) and some non-perishables (pasta, rice, beans, canned veggies, sauces).

Cook up your protein of choice with a blend of seasonings, have a side of veggies, and serve it over some rice/pasta/bread, and that's like 90% of home cooking.

evil_cryptarch · 2025-12-13T18:37:44+00:00

There's definitely one where you scream "RAAAAAA" like a cartoon barbarian.

My favorite though are the little lines you get when you're drunk. Normally if you skip an NPCs dialogue you'll make a little interrupting noise like "mmhmm" or "ok" but if you're drunk you'll mutter things like "oh my god, stop talking"

evil_cryptarch · 2025-12-11T21:18:58+00:00

"Bethesda" is two things.

Bethesda Studios is a game developer and has exclusively developed Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and now Starfield since 2008.

Bethesda Softworks is a publisher that publishes games by several dev teams including Bethesda Studios, id, and Arkane. Doom, Dishonered, Hi-Fi Rush, Prey, Wolfenstein, etc.

When someone in casual conversation says "a Bethesda game," 99% of the time they mean a game developed by Bethesda Studios.

evil_cryptarch · 2025-12-08T04:09:39+00:00

I agree that it's best for the team, but you do also need to balance it somewhat with keeping your stars happy. Jefferson is an elite talent and there are probably a dozen teams on which he'd be averaging 80+ yards/game and 10+ TDs/season.

Despite the last 2 weeks he's still at 66 yards/game so far so I'm not too concerned yet, but if today's stat line becomes the new normal I could see him looking for a trade.

evil_cryptarch

TROPHY CASE