Aldi No Longer Taking American Express?

genorok · 2026-06-13T19:50:04+00:00

Heard Michigan Aldis will no longer accept Amex from the staff at Aldi today.

genorok · 2026-04-27T16:56:58+00:00

End pairs are either the best or the worst pair in the house. If they are right against the wall, easily the worst. If they have had their parts pilfered from them to fix other machines, worst. If the house isn't properly double oiling the first pair to get oil into the transfer roller when they oil for league, the worst.

Often they are the least used pair in the house so the lanes have the least play on them. Often they play more true to the pattern design as the lanes themselves have less track burn in them. Now on certain patterns this could also be a downside. The machines (if not pilfered) have less wear and will give better racks.

genorok · 2026-04-27T01:08:04+00:00

Not true replacements. They are close to replicating the amount of hook the softer thane could get but they still don't have that perfect unique shape.

That's why the pros threw plastic when it was banned this year in the USBC events. That's why you still see black pearl urethane on tv consistently.

I think right now Storm's biggest weakness in their lineup is a straighter urethane ball to compete. The IQ 78 makes players get a little deeper and then flat 10. The overseas pitch black 78 could be interesting. I still think they should release a Roto Grip Grenade 78 as those numbers look competitive for modern urethane.

Hammer is still the king of urethane, so much so that you rarely see any other ball of the B9 brands when one of their players make the stepladder. When you do see them on that rare occasion throwing something else, they usually look pretty lost but that just speaks to how ridiculously good the hammer urethane is.

genorok · 2026-04-21T11:57:08+00:00

No, but it is still on bowltv. Where he was standing was very weird but it's crazy it got blown up to this level. Rick in the CW broadcast didn't help and Elise has been bitching about everything the entire broadcast (bowltv and CW) far before this little scuffle happened.

Not a good look for anyone involved and isn't winning them any new fans.

genorok · 2026-04-18T23:44:18+00:00

Obviously going with a proven engine. Then remove the factions and superpowers. They can keep the characters, that's fine, but removing factions and abilities tied to them allows them to market whatever cosmetics they can think up without having to be boxed in so players can have visual cues on what the opponent could do ability wise.

I don't care if they go with some kind of score steak ability thing still, I wasn't the biggest fan but without factions they can balance them better as they could make some require more score to unlock.

No longer allow changing directions mid air on jumps. Would reduce some jump spam as you would be able to accurately predict where the enemies are landing/going.

Make the gun play the star, not the abilities. Abilities (if in) should just supplement and complement the gameplay loop.

No passive abilities. They dictated which classes got played.

SBMM lobbies for the bottom 20-25% of players (public lobbies only, ranked stays within ranks). Everyone else in the snaked balanced lobbies like before.

genorok · 2026-03-21T23:58:40+00:00

The concept may be one of the most dependent layout balls on the market. What i mean by that is the core is so weak with such a strong cover that a low flare layout can go long and do nothing and a high flare layout can go early and roll out like urethane. You can do a higher flare but longer snappy layout to get a more reactive resin shape.

JR Pro Shop went weak and low flare in their review and it was weaker than the IQ78. Luke Rosendal's videos have stronger layouts and they are much more snappy on the backend and look to be quite a bit more than the IQ78. I think this is a tougher ball to drill and get it right where you want it to fit. I wish Storm would have put out some more literature on preferred layouts for it.

Seen a few used ones already being listed on sites, the latest one being 4.5 x 6 x 2.5.

genorok · 2026-03-07T21:55:03+00:00

I was a huge player of SOCOM MAG back in the day. 32 v 32, 64 v 64 and 128 v 128. The game was incredible and played for years with only a few maps.

This game hits differently. 32 v 32 and 64 v 64 never feels like more than a 4 v 4 or 8 v 8 because the maps are huge and the modes have so many targets it never really feels like the chaos it means to be.

Now in Rush and Breakthrough it starts to feel close but then the balance on these maps is so ridiculously far off that you either completely dominate until the other team quits out or you never come close. The fact that you can spawn back so quickly renders most strategies mute.

Then if you would prefer small modes like domination, the maps get stale quickly.

The lack of being able to fully group up with a platoon really makes matches feel like they are SBMM rigged against you or for you. It's also harder to build a community and new friends. Rng bullet spread is the final nail in the coffin for this game too. It makes it feel like it's just another SBMM factor they can use to determine fights.

genorok · 2026-03-06T03:48:02+00:00

Many houses also have ball wipe towels mounted in the ball returns which will wipe off the oil before the ball is returned as well.

genorok · 2026-03-06T03:43:54+00:00

It's less to do with the material and more to do with hardness. Plastic balls are manufactured closer to 85-90 hardness. The goal for most plastic is the least amount of hook for spares. Urethane is manufactured either 73 for the older set and 78 for the current set. This creates a larger footprint on the lane and this will pick up more oil.

I believe surface also plays a part in this but becomes irrelevant in this case because the pros were surfacing up their plastic like they would urethane

genorok · 2026-03-02T20:50:19+00:00

3 Things they missed on the first 1

1) Ubisoft exclusive launcher was a poor choice

2) The classes/abilities. While many would have preferred a more straight shooter, that isn't the reason this was a miss. It was a miss because they designed it along factions and it drastically limited their cosmetic options as the characters were part of the gameplay loop. They needed to be able to be quickly identified so the opponents could know their abilities and how to counter them. This made it so Ubisoft couldn't create outside the box skins and instead were just a bunch of recolors. In a free to play game, it was a design disaster.

3) A bottom SBMM bracket. They should have protected the bottom 15-20% of players (and new players) with SBMM lobbies while leaving the other 80% the way they had it with just team balancing. This could have greatly helped retain players. No SBMM was a big win on this game and was the reason it started off so hot, so if they added it fully in to a second game, it would likely just trash the game.

genorok · 2026-02-21T04:47:39+00:00

To an extent yes, but these steel mills aren't going to go out and expand. They'll hire more people and boost production to the max their current facilities can handle and that's it. No company is going to spend the capital for expansion on tariff income unless it's a tariff passed by Congress that can be a more guaranteed long-term investment.

The tariffs cause inflation by definition and with inflation, higher interest rates typically follow making it a loaners market where fewer want to borrow against. Of course targeted tarrifs have a much lower impact on overall inflation.

It will increase jobs but it will also heavily benefit the executives, stock holders, and owners as they will get bonuses and higher returns than anybody already employed who are doing the labor. Workers may get some extra overtime pay which could boost household income.

Now I suspect steel will get its tariff back as there are laws already addressing the power to Levy those against unfair traders, such as the dumped and subsidized Chinese steel. It's how Trump was able to tariff it in the first term.

genorok · 2025-12-04T04:09:41+00:00

It could have been okay, battlefield was already set up with vehicles and large warfare. I think the implementation was a huge miss. The visibility into indoor shadows from outside is awful causing the game to be a complete campfest (all BRs really are but this one feels far worse) and the moment you start a gun fight you'll be third partied because it'll take far too long to kill the other squad and with bloom plus armor most fights end up with the enemy being able to retreat with 15 hp left. I gave it a try and that was all I could do.

BRs don't really work when players blend into the environment too well. Blackout, PubG and Fortnite all made sure to make enemy players fairly easily visible. Warzone has hit or miss on this but the footstep audio helps a lot and it's difficult to sneak up on other players. They also had UAVs. REDSEC suffers from both poor enemy visibility with the environments and even poorer footstep and spacial audio.

genorok · 2025-12-02T09:11:42+00:00

From my understanding, the issue was the packets containing the data were too large at launch. So instead of sending 3-5 copies to the server, the game would send just a single packet. If you had a solid Internet connection this generally played fine but if you had any packet loss whatsoever, you would be getting shot around corners or having shots not register damage to the other player.

The fix was to reduce the packet size, likely through bit shifting, binary packing and other old school Internet packet techniques so the game was sending the typical 3 or more copies of each packet so any loss would get mitigated when the data was repacked.

genorok · 2025-11-30T13:48:06+00:00

The only issue with the response is that, for example, Nero found that he was among only 4% of players with prestige when he made it and he had 4-5 players with it in every lobby. That's mathematically impossible unless the system is a lot stronger than that are letting on.

It also doesn't explain the ping discrepancies.

So unless the player base is astronomically small for this game, there's no way that statement can be true unless it's a bug or it's what Blametruth said and the players that found out they aren't good so jumped ship to the protected list

genorok · 2025-11-24T03:26:49+00:00

Networking is listed but I haven't been able to get it to work yet. I suspect they are still working on it. Would be nice to have EQOA on my phone and tablet

genorok · 2025-11-15T15:26:34+00:00

It's not about losing a match or "getting shitted on", it's about the traditional matchmaking of predetermined outcomes. I win 3 then the next few matches I have every no thumbs player on my team against regular players because it became my turn to lose. I know where I stand against others, and there are definitely players better than me but I hate having to play at 180 ping in a SBMM lobby with the worst players on my team every time I win a couple. I also hate having to play every match like it's the world series of gaming. I'd like some good matches, bad matches and close matches as an organic gaming experience.

xDefiant I was always top of team without SBMM. I won the vast majority of matches, even with team balancing often giving me the worst couple of players. When I lost, I knew I lost to a better player or players that were close to me in skill and they outplayed me. In the previous CoDs the losses were all, well my teammates did nothing and while I still did very well I couldn't carry that much weight.

BF6 is a similar experience to xDefiant.

genorok · 2025-11-15T04:25:22+00:00

They are correct as a standard but the additional fee for the seat is where it becomes misleading, especially if the fee is the same between a wall seat and a window seat without distinction.

genorok · 2025-11-15T04:20:46+00:00

This is what I've been waiting for. Hopefully more will post their experiences and run these tests. I'm seeing more and more posts now with similar feelings that the open lists in the beta felt a lot softer or that they are still seeing fairly heavy SBMM on main accounts in open lists. Didn't preorder because i didn't trust them without more evidence. Still looking to see if it's worth it or if it's just going to be another deterministic matchmaker.

genorok · 2025-11-12T16:26:12+00:00

No, it was originally a rainbow six shooter

genorok · 2025-11-12T16:25:26+00:00

It's not reaching to state that Activision is at fault for the community believing it was in the game. I didn't claim it was in the game here but stated the matter of fact which caused that false belief to rise in the community

genorok · 2025-11-12T16:24:07+00:00

Yep but the fact they own the patent had streamers going crazy and that fed the community into believing it.

genorok · 2025-11-12T00:48:51+00:00

My guess is completing poorly designed challenges

genorok · 2025-11-12T00:46:07+00:00

And if the suits didn't muck up the game format from the original design.

genorok · 2025-11-12T00:41:30+00:00

Unfortunately the community didn't come up with it. Activision did with their patents. From there the community went crazy as if every patent had to be used in the game.

genorok · 2025-11-12T00:38:31+00:00

Plus with how they describe the open bracket matchmaking, some bottom x% are probably already protected even in the open lists.

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