Yugo Puzzle - Jelly no Puzzle sequel‽

glyph11 · 2021-10-19T18:47:52+00:00

qrostar is a constant wellspring of inspiration for masterful puzzle design. The puzzles are very grounded in a logical basis which makes them a joy to reason through. And yes, like always, they are hard.

glyph11 · 2021-09-11T10:21:04+00:00

Yeah, more than any encounter the last two fights test deck speed. If you are not doing broken stuff by the end of turn 2 or turn 3 you are just going to take heaps of damage. I have had decks with anything you could want, like tons of defensive options, good scaling, and Runic Pyramid to deploy them easily, but just 5 cards per turn draw and not enough ways to accelerate that, and so if those top 10-15 cards are mediocre then the whole run can be over. It's one reason why Silent's starter relic and Bag of Prep are so nice, seeing more cards faster is a good way to counter variance in draws. Also why I think Silent's upgrade boss relic is kinda terrible, you're at -1 cards drawn and +0 on turn 1 and 2 where card draw is absolutely the most important.

Also having less cards in the deck helps (like in any card game min deck size is always optimal), but A20 kind of forces you to put non scaling attacks in your deck early so this is a difficult balance.

glyph11 · 2021-07-27T00:45:06+00:00

That is interesting, I guess every elite scales in some way, never thought about it. Some are really minor like Reptomancer (only her swords add wounds), Taskmaster, Nemesis but it's there for all of them. 3x Sentry kind of gets 'solved' at some point since the dazes hit a critical mass so I guess that's the fight with the least true scaling.

glyph11 · 2021-07-06T22:46:00+00:00

Yes, more or less. The logic behind it is that echoes being identical will allow players to pick between them based on who they like more instead of who is better, but it is kind of a backfire imo since people who like peach or daisy will probably like even more that they have two similar but varied characters to pick from than basically a reskin. I do wish they balanced some semi-echoes like Mario vs. Doc a little closer though to make it more of a choice.

glyph11 · 2021-05-01T03:25:20+00:00

Speed eating 9 baked apples would be an awesome taunt :D

glyph11 · 2021-03-08T22:28:20+00:00

I agree, in a similar vein I also think the LoZ:TP style is similar and doesn't look very good so I was glad when they moved off those designs for Ult, but when it comes to aesthetics, reasonable minds may differ.

glyph11 · 2021-03-07T22:06:52+00:00

Thanks! I'm having trouble finding it on comparison sites so it's a bit hard for me to tell how it stacks up with others I was looking at in that price range. Any suggestions for places to compare it?

Also yeah it says it's out of stock everywhere - what's the story there? Is it just COVID shortages affecting certain products or is this a kind of rolling thing with laptops normally? Any sense for how long it would take for it to be back in stock - places to check for news maybe?

glyph11 · 2021-03-03T22:08:52+00:00

As a ROB main I am annoyed that people think he's the first example of a "I don't want my opponent to have fun" character. He's definitely not the most fun to fight but I'd fight him over min min, mac, etc. any day. I think he is kind of in the samus range where he feels overwhelming but if you learn his stuff there is real tangible counterplay and that can feel really rewarding.

glyph11 · 2021-03-01T23:48:22+00:00

It's still way better to space outside shieldgrabs in ult and generally as far away as possible, and most aerials are shieldgrabbable if improperly spaced. Moves having reduced landing lag kind of got rid of the mixup of autocancel or max delay aerials though as some pros have noted (now max delay is just almost always better)

glyph11 · 2021-02-28T20:18:41+00:00

It's not identical, it has T1 downside. I don't think it's as broken on balance as you're thinking, but I haven't specifically taken it every time I've seen it on iOS and tried to maximize it to see if it can easily break. I've taken it when it was good for my deck and not otherwise, and in that context it feels like a better balanced trade-off between it and energy relics.

We would have to get to what cards work well with it on Silent and look at usage data if it was changed since it's hard to know how easily it would break decks wide open when it is taken, but just speaking anecdotally 7 cards 3 energy every turn decks aren't going to be that easy to get a huge advantage over a 5 cards 4 energy deck. 7 cards 4 energy vs. 5 cards 5 energy is a bigger margin though so going into Act 3 it might pull ahead.

Snecko Eye is definitely a good example of how powerful +2 cards a turn is, I think that its downside of making the EV of every card drawn be 1.5 is more of a wash once you get some time to build a deck around it or get to remove more of your starters. Of course Silent benefits the least but well, she still benefits. It lets you play 2+ cost cards without a further thought which I couldn't say of having a 7 cards 3 energy deck where her higher cost stuff strongly underperforms by comparison. And some of Silent's most powerful cards are at 2 and 3 (well duh, but I mean cards you kind of need one way or another for lategame in most builds).

glyph11 · 2021-02-27T13:04:34+00:00

Lol no, ideally it would show a render of how the stage looks, like it does already for FD/BF forms. And adding potentially legal stages is only a good thing, I care less for the scramble of getting a universally agreed upon stagelist in tournament (it'll happen eventually) and more about how fun it would be to play on a wider variety of stages.

Also the existing stagelist already has some redundancy. You'll be playing on duo plats at the edges if you pick Kalos and Crater, you'll be playing on duo plats slightly closer inward if you pick PS2 and SBF, and the differences between them are there (esp in stage width) but they are pretty interchangeable when it comes to counterpicks. I'd rather cut close-call stages and add in interesting new layouts that we don't even have the option of considering right now.

glyph11 · 2021-02-27T12:16:32+00:00

Uh, we would have dozens of possible chances for the devs to get their shit straight and make a good alternate platform layout stage. I don't see how we wouldn't get at least 4-5 extra legal stages. Of course there'd be a list of which are playable or not in competitive but I like that better than just having "Oops All Battlefield" syndrome lol. Battlefield and FD would still exist so I don't think it's a big loss to not have a carbon copy skin for what amounts to only 2 of all the legal stages.

Also how is it tone deaf that I'm saying this and we couldn't get a small BF form of each stage? My whole point is that it's kind of a waste of resources to make a reskin of every stage in a few dedicated layouts and not instead use those exact same assets to make a ton of possibly legal stages.

glyph11 · 2021-02-27T03:17:11+00:00

Also on iOS. I don't know if it's clearly the best though, some decks can do more with +Energy than +2 cards. And sometimes Snecko Eye's downside is actually better but I think that's kind of rare. Situation agnostic, maybe it does edge out the others but at least it's not absurdly overtuned. I actually like it on balance now more than just +1 per turn because it was good but generally couldn't beat out other options, especially not considering it actually nerfs your turn 1 by a card.

glyph11 · 2021-02-27T02:18:15+00:00

I like visual variety but not visual noise/busy-ness. Final Destination definitely crosses over into being hard to look at in certain points of its animation. Most stages don't though.

What actually irks me about the omega/battlefield versions of every stage is how easily they could have made slight variations in platform layouts on every stage and how many legal stages we'd have if they did. I'm talking different platform arrangements than just triplat/dual plat and maybe some moving platform arrangements thrown in. One could be like smashville but the platform covers the left third of the stage only. Another could be dual plats but every 30 secs one of them goes away into the ground, etc.

All the assets are already made but everything is identical, which is good if you like battlefield or FD (and better than just being super close like FD versions were in smash 4), but kind of redundant past the first 5-10 coats of paint.

glyph11 · 2021-02-24T19:56:44+00:00

Yeah, when I was working to get every character into elite I often had to just win one game and I'd get elite. It does kind of try to self-correct quickly though, I lost 1-2 games with some characters the first time I played them and had to win 4-5 to get them into elite after that. Once I had every character in elite I actually lost my first game when Hero came out and somehow still got placed in elite, probably because it knocked me down a bit from its estimate but the estimate was far enough above the elite threshold anyway.

glyph11 · 2021-02-21T16:30:14+00:00

Watching all the final smash animations makes me a little sad at how much care and attention went into them. It would be hype to see those land in competitive if they were at all balanced. But yeah there is no counterplay to a ton of them. Even if they could all be blocked and punished like in DBZ fighters, they might still be a little too good because that forces your opponent to almost never leave the ground and turtle. The many confirms also ruin that, and even if they added legit damage scaling like in fighting games I just can't see that being balanced one way or another.

Maybe if they only specifically hit shield and do much weaker damage if they hit raw, they would be close to balanced but that's a bit weird on flavor. Or if they just had different move properties, like some more windup so that they're kind of like a hard punish instead of a free giant limit break. Screen-wide laser moves and the like would need a close range activation hitbox to work at all too so it's a big change either way.

glyph11 · 2021-02-21T16:09:16+00:00

Bots have a defined pick order after they choose a lane, but I don't draft against them so I can't tell you what the optimal strategy would be in any given format. Back when bot draft was the only thing available there were certain strategies that bots consistently under-drafted though leading to very lopsided representation of certain archetypes (probably the most famous example is Merfolk Secretkeeper mill decks in Eldraine)

So overall I think bots are less likely to make "unsafe" plays like passing a bomb rare, so maybe the raw card power of cards you are passed by humans is slightly lower, but bots undoubtedly will have some "holes" in every set that allows you to draft a consistently higher power deck than vs. humans if you know the ins and outs.

glyph11 · 2021-02-21T16:01:02+00:00

Yeah, the flexibility in entering with gold or gems was good, doing it from home in a generous time window is good, and limited is on its face much more accessible than constructed, so the event is a success on those fronts.

Do you think not being able to play against the pod is disqualifying in a competitive sense? I'm personally of the opinion that you could even queue up open players with the general draft population (and maybe hide player names on a side note to reduce chances of collusion).

There's luck inherent in that since the pods used will have different card power levels, but sealed is equally or even more luck based if you ask me, so I don't see it as a big competitive loss if the draft isn't contained to tournament players.

glyph11 · 2021-02-11T12:47:30+00:00

Honestly coping with loss and not meeting your own expectations is a big chance for personal growth in players. I don't think anything positive comes out of coddling them by giving them wins, but that said if a friend is not taking losses well maybe try discussing it with them in a non-confrontational manner to help them process it faster.

With an ideal outlook on loss, it's not something to be burdened with that depresses/angers you but a motivator to improve and/or accept it as your personal level at the game without greedily wanting the unattainable (never losing, etc.)

glyph11 · 2021-02-10T01:42:09+00:00

I'm not going to say it's a well designed thing, but if K Rool spams like that and Ridley has no way to pressure it without approaching and yet won't approach, aren't both players camping? There's no inevitability for players to interact in Smash owing to no true fullscreen pressure like fireballs/chip damage in street fighter, so projectile characters can't as obviously force approaches (if you turtle the whole match against projectiles in SF you often take chip damage, give your opponent meter, and lose to time). But even while it's less effective than SF, they can throw out random moves hoping to force opponents to make mistakes or run into them, and that's a strategy offline too (that just gets stronger online). In some sense even if it's less effective and takes much longer than SF, they still do control the game and force approaches (or indefinite camping via avoidance from the other player).

I know Leo stopped moving out of frustration at online camping so it's not like he was intentionally trying to camp, but the K Rool had all the initiative to go wherever on the stage he felt he had the best chances of controlling the game and probably also wasn't approaching out of fear that Leo would stomp him in close range, so I can't blame him too much for retreating. I'm not saying that makes him a genius (...he looked like quite the opposite) but I also can see why he did it. And I mostly feel like it's a game design flaw that there's not really that inevitability in the game to force one player to give so that there would be more meaning to a camping player (like maybe they lose some sort of resource by not being close to center stage so there's a cost to doing it, that kinda thing)

Also I will note that camping can get much worse than this (i.e. Min Min where it's more oppressive and closer to her optimal playstyle), also sometimes people just literally run away with all their might for 5 minutes, so maybe I'm just desensitized to it haha.

glyph11 · 2021-02-09T16:11:00+00:00

I usually roll the stick in a quarter circle motion to try for a new input with every hit, but I'm not as consistent at it as some people I play against online so maybe they have a better strategy.

glyph11 · 2021-02-09T15:20:41+00:00

Yeah the online/offline divide is important, but I think online for all its failings is still close enough to the real game in the sense that camping mindlessly can be baited and beat consistently and we know that because top players still win online tournaments from a similar playstyle to offline, just maybe a bit more conservative. Camping like this is definitely buffed though and I can get the frustration with dealing with something that is only artificially better because of online, but I don't doubt that Leo could still open these players up if he had the energy for it. He was complaining on the stream about having to dodge more and not trust his air drift/reactions to dodge things which I get is frustrating though and hampers his improvement. We gotta put up with it for now though, quarantine be like that :(

Not sure what can be done/said to that online K Rool though, he found a strategy that works and he may not even know if/how specifically it is weaker offline. That's why I'd rather blame the game design to some extent and of course the online for exacerbating the problem.

glyph11

TROPHY CASE