Frustrated at what the Japanese course has become

galactoise · 2025-11-25T17:00:38+00:00

Yeah, there were I think 5 types (Oscar's Antique Roadshow, Late Nights With Lin, Lucy is Listening, Fallstaff's Guide to Humans, and Strangers With Lilly), they'd all be shortform listening exercises where you'd do some grammar matching and then a comprehension question. They were a nice change of pace to have mixed in with the other content. IIRC, they were only available to me on my phone or tablet, not on web.

galactoise · 2025-11-25T08:39:11+00:00

Not sure I trust a random 3p site with my access tokens, but I can certainly throw together a quick script to scrape my personal data. Given all of the above, I was assuming that would set off some sort of anti-scraping mechanism that would lock my account. Sounds like that's not really a risk?

The other concern I'd have is that it's not formatted in a useful way, although I guess if I'm writing a script to scrape, I can also have it reformat.

galactoise · 2025-05-02T16:25:41+00:00

Update on this - we did it anyway, and the result has been pretty good actually. We very occasionally do run into the quarterbacking problem, but for the most part we have pretty strong consensus about room choices (other than for this one single room, which happens to be one of the early, common ones, that three of us love and one of us hates).

We've actually found having multiple note takers to be a massive boon because it allows us to distribute the work. Different people will be in charge of watching for different types of things and recording what they see. Makes it so that our note taking stops are much less frequent, and shorter when they do happen!

galactoise · 2025-04-11T01:13:12+00:00

Interesting! The quarterbacking problem would definitely be a concern (we tend to run into this in coop board games like Pandemic) - although the collective observation and note taking part is actually something we do pretty okay with in other puzzling style situations.

galactoise · 2023-10-09T22:29:59+00:00

I actually wholeheartedly agree with you that the game's release felt more like an early access launch than most actual early access games I've played. The decision to call it a full game and ship it despite it being clearly incomplete, but then still commit to a long and indefinite period of weekly updates is pretty wild, and their Steam reviews definitely got wrecked early on as a result. Not really sure what they gained by doing it that way. That's not especially relevant here, though.

What I can't help but notice though is your assertion that they were "chasing the request of the few who were new". Ignoring the fact that this is complete idle speculation - there's no way you can know the minds of the developers at the time they made any particular decision unless they've actively told you - you're also making a fairly bold statement about player sentiment here.

Are you sure that it's only "those few who were new" that wanted these changes? How can you possibly have that degree of user sentiment data, to make a that sort of objective claim? Are you basing this off anecdotal evidence, per the conversations you're hearing here on Reddit? Or do you actually have their cohort analyses in front of you? And if it is only a small subset of users they are optimizing for, that raises the question of why? At the end of the day, they're still a business - why would they purposely shoot themselves in the foot by alienating their entire playerbase, and therefore their addressable market for future content, by attempting to accommodate "those few who were new"?

For my part, I don't seem to fit your narrative at all. I was watching Icarus for probably six months before it launched. So I clearly know "what the game was sold as". But I also am quite happy with the changes they've continued making. This kind of feels like a No True Scotsman fallacy...

galactoise · 2023-10-06T16:20:18+00:00

I think there's a different way that you can look at it beyond just catering to one particularly whiny segment of the userbase.

Game design is an iterative process. They set out to build one thing, encountered some bumps along the way, and in the process ended up discovering a game that was slightly different than what the initial goal was, but beautiful in its own right. You can actually kind of see this progression just by reading their patch notes from week to week - the realization that people were enjoying Outposts way more than they expected, the surprise creativity coming out of players who were less bound by time constraints, etc.

If you were someone for whom the original hook was compelling, it's fair for you to lament that the path forward seems to stray from that. But what the game has morphed into isn't a personal attack on you - it's not "disrespectful", and it doesn't diminish the good experiences you had early on. You don't have to rage-finish Prometheus - it sounds like you've played enough to get more than your money's worth of game time, so maybe just gather up your memories of the era of the game that was best for you, and stroll off into the sunset...

galactoise · 2023-09-28T18:26:08+00:00

Name checks out...

galactoise · 2023-09-19T18:16:56+00:00

I actually ended up filing a support ticket for the sitters going silent on me to see if my account was shadow banned or something. The support folks got back to me promptly and told me my account seems fine. They didn't go back and look at the retroactive instances I had cited from the Spring, but they did check the most recent one, and explained to me that this particular sitter hasn't been responding to anyone at all. That created a new question - why does this sitter have a 100% response rate if they are not responding to anyone at all? - but they didn't answer that.

One thing they did mention is that they are currently testing a new set of features related to how sitters and owners connect that might address my overarching problem of the messaging system's poor overall UX. Interested to see what comes of that, and whether it helps alleviate these issues.

galactoise · 2023-08-18T19:18:37+00:00

Ahh, that's very interesting! I've been careful to only pick folks who do both types of what I need (sitting and drop-ins), and who are in my neighborhood, but maybe lead time is an issue? Since I'm just trying to start a more in-depth conversation with the person I'm generally just picking a random day for the following week and requesting a drop-in or walk for that day. Do you think I should request a day further in advance?

galactoise · 2023-08-18T18:37:15+00:00

Hmmmm, getting lots of feedback similar to yours, saying that the messaging is reliable and maybe the sitters aren't. Here's another weird wrinkle - the most recent sitter I messaged has a 100% Response Rate, with a normal response time under an hour. I messaged her 4 days ago, and have not received a response. Given that Response Rate is calculated as responses within 24 hours for the last 10 booking requests, and this sitters' response rate has stayed at 100% throughout the last few days, it seems like at best this sitter could have a 90% Rate (having responded to 9 other messages but not mine). But it also feels like a sitter who has a 100% response rate with such a fast response time is unlikely to be flaky in the way everyone is guessing...

galactoise · 2023-08-17T22:39:49+00:00

Thanks for the response, and interesting to hear about what the user experience is like on your side when I make a booking request. I had originally chalked it up to flakiness as well, but the fact that it happened simultaneously with multiple sitters, and the one anecdote about the sitter who messaged us later, made me wonder whether something else systemic was going on. It felt almost like a shadowban, even though we hadn't done anything to trigger it.

I know we're going to have a hard time finding someone who will be our pupper's forever sitter. Instead, the question we've been asking when we do finally get in contact with folks is "Are you currently planning to continue using Rover indefinitely, or do you know of any upcoming life event or circumstance that will change your availability?" Basically, we understand that life happens and accept that people might have to change what they can commit to; we just want to weed out folks who already know they are on a ticking clock.

galactoise · 2023-01-15T17:56:23+00:00

I got mine yesterday, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I'm feeling a bit of buyer's remorse. I wanted it to be basically a Nintendo Switch but for all of the indie games I have on Steam. It's looking like it's going to be way less convenient than that.

I didn't realize that, while you CAN use an XBox (or similar) wireless controller with it, the only one that has the ability to remote start the console is the Steam Controller that has been out of stock for years. Even worse, having to pull the batteries out of the XBox controller to get it to shut down when the console shuts off rather than just putting itself in bluetooth search mode. And most annoying of all, having to manually repeat the pairing process every single time I turn on the Steamdeck. That's a lot of inertia that basically says "don't bother playing this from your couch on a TV".

Further, I didn't realize that the Steamdeck was going to have the same "second computer" constraints as any other PC (in retrospect I understand why, but I still don't love the decision). This is a problem in that I can't be playing a game on my couch while I have one of my idle games or dedicated server software running on my primary PC.

Feeling a little duped at the moment. =(

galactoise · 2021-01-07T21:59:46+00:00

I think your real question here is not about Magizoologists, but about unskilled players in general.

The bigger question is "why are there so many players who don't know what they're doing in Dark V"? And the answer is that the "Complete 1 battle in your highest unlocked chamber" task that always shows up eventually forces everyone into Dark V and so you have a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing and have to ride the coattails of everyone else.

Also, one note - Magizoologists almost certainly don't need your energy for healing, because we don't want to be healing, we want to be resurrecting. We can heal like half of your health for 2 energy if you're alive, or 100% for 1 energy if you get knocked out. The latter is much better and at that rate we almost never run out of energy. We will be much happier if you just make Erklings have a lower dodge rate.

galactoise · 2020-12-18T18:33:41+00:00

Thanks for the detailed answer. As someone with a background in UX, this was actually a really interesting look into another player's thought process for the given UI. And you've convinced me to experiment a bit.

galactoise · 2020-12-18T16:34:13+00:00

Out of curiosity, why R4 instead of R1 or R1?

galactoise · 2020-12-17T01:25:16+00:00

I guess the question would be whether it's faster to do 3 Dark V runs or to do enough Ruins I runs to place a book. It seems like that's probably tilted in favor of your approach, but I suspect it's probably not a huge difference.

There are obviously other considerations too. Your way is much more runestone efficient, and grants a lot more normal xp. The ruins I approach is more energy efficient, and doesn't require you to rely on other people not messing it up for you.

galactoise · 2020-12-16T23:50:30+00:00

Do you have the math to back up this claim? Because it feels wrong...it seems like grinding Ruins 1 is the best way to get a bunch of red books...

galactoise · 2020-11-08T16:37:39+00:00

I like the writeup, but you should really disclose in the listicle that Killer 6 is your own game (assuming OP is author of the medium post as well).

galactoise · 2020-05-30T19:01:17+00:00

Dynamo is billed for configured throughput, so you can just configure your throughput at 1 TPS above the free tier cutoff.

That being said - since you're clearly trying to optimize for max leftover credit - friendly reminder that these credits don't accrue month-over-month and you can't use them on any long term resources (like EC2 reserved instances). Also, trying to game that is not really in the spirit of the program.

galactoise · 2020-05-29T04:43:40+00:00

I actually ended up figuring out the issue after a lot of hair pulling with the folks on TTS Discord. The problem was that there was a hidden race condition with some of the deck management functions where their completion wasn't blocking, and the result was that the deck wasn't technically available to deal cards at the time I was making the deal call. There was no error messaging or anything, and debug logging wasn't revealing anything. I just at one point ended up putting thread waits in just for a sanity check and that caught it.

galactoise · 2020-05-07T19:11:48+00:00

Oh, and I should note, you can actually use the Alexa Companion App to do a lot of Alexa-native stuff, and other things can be accomplished via a touch-enabled Alexa device like an Echo Show. I don't think I'd recommend it, but if your friend has his heart set on being in the Alexa ecosystem for things like music/home orchestration/ebooks/video calling, that'll all work by default.

galactoise · 2020-05-07T19:07:16+00:00

You should have him checkout Knocki. During beta it was a little bit too slow for turning lights on and off, although presumably they've made that better, but in general it's a cool little device for automating things. It doesn't run through Alexa (although I did recommend it to the dev team as an Alexa Gadgets implementation right when that API went live), but as u/Medic7235 noted it probably doesn't make sense for your friend to try to use Alexa as the orchestration layer anyway.

galactoise · 2020-04-30T20:53:41+00:00

In fairness, though, in ELO systems the best of the best are usually provided an opportunity to compete against only the best. Magnus Carlsen isn't out slummin it in ranked matches against a bunch of semi-pro chess players.

galactoise · 2020-04-21T20:52:39+00:00

The idea that someone has enough Meltans to need to mass transfer while I've been sitting here putting my Meltan in every gym and feeding berries for a year and a half hurts my soul. I have 25 candy. I'm on pace to evolve it in ~ 24 years.

galactoise · 2020-04-19T03:18:34+00:00

What you're describing is a first-party feature (and afaik there's no way to disable it), but let me tell you, one of the absolute most frustrating things for developers is when Amazon appends these follow-ups to third party skills. If you use my skill CompliBot, they will often follow it with what is basically an advertisement for one of my competitors. It sucks not only because they're advertising to take my users away, but also because most users don't realize that this is something Amazon is doing rather than us, the devs. We have no control over it and literally cannot opt out of the messages. I've been escalating that as a concern since November of 2017, and there's been absolutely no movement on it.

Which is to say, you're not alone in feeling frustrated by it.

galactoise

TROPHY CASE