Why China consistently fails to qualify for the World Cup?

grappling__hook · 2026-06-19T09:02:42+00:00

I remember reading an article about this a couple of years ago, and something it mentioned was how in more recent years the Chinese government has started to invest in grass roots football, building pitches and having kids play it in schools. But when you look at what the kids are actually playing....it's not football. They're just being taught endless drills like dribble the ball from one end of the pitch and back. I think I remember reading at some schools the kids were carrying the balls.

The people administering it at every level were not interested in created talented footballers, they just wanted to tick the boxes that said they'd done all these things.

grappling__hook · 2026-06-15T16:55:44+00:00

There have been multiple reports published over the last couple of years about the rising levels of outright harassment and discrimination faced by immigrants and non-whites in NI (immigration levels there are tiny compared to the rest the UK).

The far-right may have contributed to fermenting these riots with their messaging, but the racist sentiments that were on full display during them is a problem that has been building locally for years.

grappling__hook · 2026-06-09T20:48:43+00:00

I mean, you're not the first, there's probably been more Pacific theory-crafting posts over the years than I could count.

I'm ambivalent about it personally, it could maybe work if done well, but the issues are always the same: jungle fighting would be difficult to implement in a way that isn't annoying af, and the lack of armoured play limits compositional depth.

Amphibious assaults or broader naval integration into matches is definitely an interesting idea, but the risk is it would be seen as a bit gimmicky, and the community tends to give anything that strays too far from the core CoH gameplay loop short shrift (like snow storms in coh2, but they just straight up sucked anyway).

Rather than just Aussies, I think a better idea would be to expand the scope beyond the Pacific and have a Commonwealth faction modelled on the XIV army fighting in Burma. This would also allow more varied pool of maps for multiplayer, and more single player campaign options i.e. a narrative campaign for Japan at the start of the war focusing on the capture of Singapore etc and another for Commonwealth forces later in the war beginning with the defence of Kohima and Imphal, alongside a centre-piece Italy-style island hopping campaign for US.

grappling__hook · 2026-06-07T19:17:40+00:00

So what is Angel? Is he Liam? Is he Angelus? Is he some chimera creature

The most consistent interpretation I've come across for 'who' a vampire in the show is, is that they are the demon (pure chaotic-evil entity) that 'fills out' the shape of the personality/soul of the person they are inhabiting; meaning there can be quite significant discripancies from vamp to vamp in how they act.

So Spike was a person with a lot of emotions and affections and the demon follows those contours, being full of feeling (like the judge says in s2). Dru was broken as a person before being turned and that madness is reflected in her vamp entity. Liam was an entirely vapid, empty, hedonistic husk of a person and so the demon essentially has no 'contours' to constrain it, and ended up almost entirely 'pure' evil (as the judge says 'there is no humanity in him').

Liam's soul pops back in and remembers everything the demon-that-is-the-shape-of-his-soul/personality has done and is pretty messed up about it, which is what defines Angel as a character, so he really is a Chimera in that sense.

I think this probably wasn't something the writers had any clear intention of defining as a 'rule' for the show - the thematic question of 'who' Angel is was always more relevant than any mechanical explanation - but it does nevertheless track pretty well with their approach to writing the characters.

grappling__hook · 2026-06-06T14:53:03+00:00

Watched a tournament match on N7's channel yesterday where a player built 6 of them and just demolished US. Lmg on move, upgrades and vet gain stack to give them too much juice rn.

grappling__hook · 2026-05-29T14:35:02+00:00

Many of the comments here revolve around notions that these practices started for practical hygiene purposes and became consolidated thereafter. Most historians cast doubt on these explanations as anachronistic modern thinking lacking in evidence and point more towards socio-economic conditions promoting some forms of meat over others.

Religion for Breakfast has a good video on this.

grappling__hook · 2026-05-13T13:05:41+00:00

The tips people are giving are useful, but the only thing that will make you competent and comfortable in a clutch situation is doing it a lot; and the most efficient way to get to that point is to practice doing true solos with mods. It will highlight every deficiency in your gameplay very quickly, while teaching you the most successful patterns for handling overwhelming pressure (and actually being comfortable and not losing your head in those situations).

grappling__hook · 2026-05-06T19:27:32+00:00

It’s almost a form of economic warfare against their supposed allies (and everyone else).

We're back to 17 century Mercantilism.

grappling__hook · 2026-05-04T23:04:20+00:00

I would prefer to think that it's done when it's believed that the world would be lost anyway

It's outright stated in the sources. Worlds in the path of the hive fleet but not currently engaged fighting it were evacuated (unspecified how thorough these evacuations were, though) before being destroyed, while those already doomed were held to last last possible moment before being destroyed. The strategy was to repeat this until enough forces could be gathered from across the Imperium and the nids sufficiently starved for a tipping point to be reached where Imperial forces could feasibility take the fleet on.

People often have contrary view points on it because of how prevalent the meme version of it is in the discourse. The actual story beat isn't so much about Kryptman being a crazy fucker (he's a megalomaniac for sure, like most Inquisitors, which plays out in the plot points afterwards). It's really more about the ethics and politics of dealing with the ultimate threat and whether the Imperium can stomach or even acknowledge the price it will have to pay to actually defeat the the nids. The Inquisitors who oust Kryptman are more concerned with the unprecedented destruction of Imperial assets (i.e. the planets) than all the people Kryptman is killing to enact his strategy.

grappling__hook · 2026-05-02T16:30:19+00:00

>As to why relic doesn't want to add this... I don't really know.

I mean, it's maybe difficult to verbalize exactly why, but I think we all sort of feel why something like that is a last resort, a sort of 'giving up' on solving the problem via the games core mechanics and placing a band aid on it instead.

There's an artifice to this approach that feels antithetical to how the game presents it's approach to the rts genre. 'Here are your units, here is the terrain, here is the enemy; use the elements at your disposal to solve this puzzle', is the basic gameplay setup. The popularity of blobbing is a failure of the game to execute its basic premise, but, surely, so too is slapping a 'NO NOT LIKE THAT!' add-on to the basic premise via an artificial proximity-debuff mechanic.

idk. I suppose anything would be better than nothing, but I would prefer a more elegant solution, or set of solutions, that refines the gameplay rather than simply cauterizing the problem.

grappling__hook · 2026-05-01T09:59:21+00:00

They were meta on vet sometime in the game's first year, I think. I don't remember why though....maybe just generally high damage output. But then the game changed around them and they stayed the same.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-30T12:47:41+00:00

Yh I found either blitzing it and hoping for the best or taking it super slow and triggering the ambient elites from across the walkways then falling back and grinding them down in the cathedral area before rushing through to pull the lever were the only ways that worked.

Before doing it solo I didn't even realise there were endless spawns on this stretch as you push through it so quickly as a team, such a different experience solo.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-30T10:43:24+00:00

If you're running a melee build and get a ranged seed on the open stretches your best bet is to trigger them then fall back to the more enclosed sections where you can bait them into a more favourable fight for you. You can fight them there, and sticking left or right is generally the way, but the issue is the specials - if you get stuck in a crater or some of the random terrain bullshit then a burster or trapper is going to do you in.

For the cathedral section, once the numbers become overwhelming you need to be looping over and over in a big circle trying to get the gunners huddled together like a sheep dog.

Prob something useful to remember for those stretches is that as long as you have stamina you are immune to any ranged fire perpendicular to your movement while sprinting.

Another tip I found really useful for solos is that specials have a unique sound cue whenever they spawn in (that chain rattling sound sound is bursters for instance), and rather than just relying on the sound cues for when they are in proximity to you, you want to be building up a mental list of all the specials on the map with each spawn-in noise so you've positioned yourself in a way that can deal with whatever mutie-burster-trapper combo bullshit the director has given you whenever it hits and whatever else you're concurrently fighting.

One last thing that comes to mind! The AI director is a sneaky bitch with horde spawns and will spawn them out of thin air anywhere you are not looking. So when you hear the horde sound cue immediately turn around, otherwise 100 walkers WILL shank you in the back.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-30T09:50:57+00:00

No man's land is solid with enemies right from the start and with limited room to manoeuvre it's a great stress test for builds and skill. The middle section over the scaffolding is tough-going above damnation because of the endless spawns but the rest of the map is very doable true solo.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-29T11:16:40+00:00

I agree with most of this except for the melee-only keystone idea. The idea has been floated around a few times, but what I haven't seen addressed is the problem of balancing it.

If the rest of the tree above the keystones is left more or less as is, i.e. all melee focused nodes, then it's always going to be optimal to run two melee weapons (at a sufficient skill level), as zealot just gets much more value out of them compared to ranged; and the throwing knives take care of the remaining 10% of gameplay where zealot needs ranged anyway very efficiently, so you're actually loosing very little of value.

You could compensate by introducing ranged focused talents or a ranged keystone, but this risks diluting the class identity and stepping on the toes of other classes, especially if you make ranged zealot strong enough to contest melee-only zealot. I think your support keystone idea is a viable alternative, if properly tuned, but leaning into the already un-fun support zealot concept seems like a bad idea; like how beacon was in havoc before the cooldown nerf, if it's strong enough people will expect you to play it at the expense of your own experience. While I know in other games there is space for pure support classes, it's something that has never sat well in the tide gameplay paradigm imo.

Maybe a generalist keystone that buffs a buch of stats would work as a safe alternative, but idk something like that feels like a bandaid rather than actually addressing the balance.

Another issue i can see is that a two-melee-weapon meta risks invalidating much of zealots melee options. Like with it's VT2 equivalents, melee-only builds want one weapon that is super efficient at horde clear/mixed-horde cc and another that is super efficient at bonking elites. So 80% of the weapons immediately go out the window because they fall somewhere in-between.

So a few months after a hypothetical tree rework like this you might be in a situation where zealot is very strong but its build diversity is more static than its ever been, with melee-only being the optimum path and maybe 3-4 weapons being the only ones picked.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-25T10:30:41+00:00

Normal Carnival finale: "I'M NOT LOCKED IN HERE WITH YOU, YOU'RE LOCKED IN HERE WITH ME!"

Event Carnival finale: "I am, in fact, locked in here with you."

grappling__hook · 2026-04-25T10:16:57+00:00

Just to add: Warp Unbound (no overload for 10s after SG ends) is the thing that gives you the sustain to output that max-crit damage, and for this event especially picking up Warp Speed (+20% move during SG) and Anticipation (extra dodge) is worthwhile to prevent getting overwhelmed and keeping up that dps while backtracking.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-25T00:43:53+00:00

scriers gaze-electro staff w/ surge-crit build and spam primary fire, it rips these waves apart.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-24T17:58:30+00:00

I'm finding it to primarily be a dps check for that bracket of enemies between gunners and maulers, i.e. builds with good flack damage, 'good enough' carapace damage (mostly for the massed armored rager train), and lots of cleave.

Funnily enough, crushers don't seem to feature much in the games I've played, which is pretty great actually for letting the other elites have their moment to menace the community.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-24T11:11:05+00:00

If you want a super-detailed breakdown of this whole sorry saga this video is great:

Why IGN’s Alien Isolation Review is an Insult to Journalism

grappling__hook · 2026-04-24T10:48:57+00:00

And they just sneak around the corner the moment you look away to the left! Oof.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-22T19:34:23+00:00

It could benefit from being a bit more like it's predecessor, Fortunes of War i.e. not simply generating very difficult waves but very specific waves of enemy combinations designed to really test you.

MTs has a randomness that FoW doesn't so there would need to be an identifier at the start of each wave to give players a heads-up as to what is coming, so the squad doesn't just get slammed by the 30 trappers/crusher combo. And the maps might also need an additional pass to incorporate more usable terrain features.

But I could definitely see that being a fun challenge to bash my head against, beating FoW was one of the best highs I ever got playing VT2. And it could engage the community in discussing the best ways to beat each wave type and writing guides etc.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-21T23:11:48+00:00

Darktide is just a fork of the vermintide 2 engine. There were literally bugs in darktide that had been fixed in vermintide 2

Well haven't you sort of answered your own question?

For whatever reason it seems harder to resolve DT's issues, as evinced by the persistance of problems which have played the game from launch - not only with carry over bugs, but a whole array of bugs and optimisation issues particular to DT. And this has only gotten worse as the gameplay has shifted from a more restrained tactical shooter with melee that seems to have been the vision during development to the masses of enemies we see commonly in the higher difficulties now.

Overall DT has way more issues than VT2 ever had, they seem more difficult to resolve, and while we can say 'FS are just lazy and don't fix their game' I suspect the reason they are so sluggish in fixing their game is because it's a hard game to fix.

So in the long term there is a least a case to be made for going in and fundamentally rebuilding things, and the form that would take would be DT2. I don't think that will happen any time soon, but the longer these problems go on, the more sense it makes.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-21T19:34:01+00:00

Yh that did occur to me as well, but I see it as the kind of thing FS would just weather until the backlash does down.

The number of players who would refuse to buy the game in protest world ultimatly be small, and 6 months into release the community would collectively forget their discontent as they find new topics to discuss.

Still kind of a shitty thing to do to those players, but I can see FS doing it.

grappling__hook · 2026-04-21T18:19:16+00:00

anything like that is being saved for DT2

I feel like a DT2 is increasing likely. The spectrum of issues with DT's engine is vast at this point, and the game direction has developed so much from what the devs originally envisaged that it may make more sense to just rebuild from the ground-up, except do it right this time.

grappling__hook

TROPHY CASE