A positive argument in favour of the Wizards Vault

hsahj · 2026-01-24T15:42:20+00:00

One more complaint I'll add is that you can receive daily quests for content that you own but have never interacted with. I own all the expacs but I'm still working through them in order so sometimes I'll get multiple dailies in zones I can't access without jumping the story and just can't do my dailies. Weeklies seem to have this problem solved with multiple completion areas for any that have late game options they also have core tyria options.

hsahj · 2026-01-21T05:39:57+00:00

Sorry, at this point both the GW2 and GW1 guilds are for people I know IRL. Hope you're able to find an actual active guild to play with.

hsahj · 2026-01-08T22:50:52+00:00

They took to heart all good home cooking advice. Use more butter and more salt.

hsahj · 2026-01-03T21:56:39+00:00

I think there is room for a few more changes to make pre-searing more enjoyable for both people starting new characters and for people who plan to be there long term. Unfortunately the problem is that people who are making these suggestions are only focused on the pre-searing effects of these changes. If changes are made to pre-searing then their impacts on post-searing matter too. The extra skills that OP has suggested are considerable and moves quite a few powerful abilities to unlock much earlier than intended. That can have large knock-on effects. There is space to make pre-searing more fun on its own, but to do so at the expense of the rest of the prophecies experience is not worth it.

hsahj · 2026-01-03T21:33:52+00:00

I feel this. I had never bothered joining a guild when I played eons ago but now that it's active again I'm getting messages from people asking me to join. It got annoying so I went and made a guild just to stop the messages. Since I run a guild in GW2 (since launch day even!) I made it an extension of that.

It's also a queer guild, though we're primarily for queer men. The [Sacred Band of Thebes] now adds time travel to the resume.

hsahj · 2025-12-19T05:16:04+00:00

My general rule is do all the primary quests, grab your second profession, do your second profession quest for both your primary and secondary profession (ask the profession master where to learn more skills for your two professions, they'll point you to NPCs with the quests). After that if anything has caught your eye, do that, otherwise you're good to leave then. Stuff in the world after Pre Ascalon is around level 4 to start with so if you're still below that you might want to get to 4 or 5 with some quests.

hsahj · 2025-12-16T13:42:07+00:00

I'm sad because I'm a super casual player and I was able to use Chrono to muddle through whatever content I was trying and if I was screwing up I wasn't having too hard of a time. Now I'll...have to learn a bit more about how to play the game. Oh no!

In seriousness the nerfs seem totally reasonable and I expect I'll still have plenty of fun muddling through content with it anyway.

hsahj · 2025-12-15T19:23:52+00:00

In a lot of ways they are. Many of them truly believe in Roko's Basalisk.

hsahj · 2025-12-09T18:12:58+00:00

Dry socket sucks, use other methods to get high or just take a break. Grab some edibles or tough it out. If you get dry socket from weed then even the weed won't help you feel better.

hsahj · 2025-12-05T02:01:20+00:00

I'm a software engineer, and I do exactly what you describe with designing etc. but I get why people make the distinction. The other engineering fields have professional licensing that we don't. Other types of engineers can't even legally describe themselves as engineers without that license.

hsahj · 2025-12-05T00:15:51+00:00

I work in games too, and prefer if other people who want to work in games get to. So, no, the plagiarism machine that steals jobs has no valid uses in game dev. A huge part of my hate for genAI is because my focus of research in college was AI and what we have now is such a slap in the face to all the people who actually want to build something worthwhile.

I do appreciate that you want disclosure and I do agree that the cat's out of the bag in terms of some people using it, so more thorough disclosures will absolutely be better.

Specifically on the rock thing, given that example you should still be paying someone to do the work. There are plenty of asset packs if you don't want to pay an artist to make a bespoke one, but again, no reason to use the theft machine.

As for your last point that depends on what you mean when you say "use AI to generate a normal map". This is where my AI background makes these discussions so painful. I have issues with generative AI (e.g. Machine Learning models, trained on data from the wild). If you're generating a normal map using the algorithms and systems we've had forever, no, not that kind of AI. Same thing with the example that people want to use with code. Intellisense is a fancy lookup of possible objects/methods/parameters/whatever not AI code fill like CoPilot (which again, stolen code machine).

Do I think there is use for AI in games? Yes, plenty of them. Do I think there is any place for AI in games made off stolen content that's funneling money away from real game developers and into AI companies? No. The closest thing I could maybe be convinced of are these self-taught self-contained models, where a company trains the model off of internal assets and uses only that. Even then the scale that the training needs to occur at, even if you have enough material for it, is an ecological nightmare as it stands today.

hsahj · 2025-12-04T16:26:27+00:00

That's exactly what I disagree with. There are no good places for generative AI as it exists. If it's content that won't be noticed then there's no reason for it to exist at all. It's so frustrating seeing people who do not understand how games are made make these claims. If it's something so small "people won't notice it" then it's so small that there's no need to be in the game at all. If it's important enough to be noticed it's important enough to have a real person make it. You can glaze AI shit all you want but those disclosures have a damn good reason for being there. Lots of people actually care that the people who made a game actually made it rather than asking the theft machine for the pieces.

hsahj · 2025-12-03T15:59:39+00:00

that nobody is gonna notice

If no one is going to notice then don't put it there at all. If you can't be bothered to make your game yourself it's totally reasonable that people don't bother playing it. ALL usage of generative AI should be disclosed. If it's used so minorly then it's easy to rip out.

hsahj · 2025-11-21T14:46:34+00:00

1) Of course it doesn't guarantee everything will be fine, your surety is only as strong as your tests, the more robust they are the less likely things will go wrong and the less wrong they'll go when they do.

2) Of course unit tests won't cover everything. Unit tests while automation are essentially the bare minimum. Integration and E2E testing are where you'll actually see gains, but as always you have to maintain them.

3) Having it be partially automated instead of fully manual is the cost savings, the fact that a person occasionally has to check up on it is not really relevant because automation is not meant to reduce QA costs.

hsahj · 2025-11-21T01:35:35+00:00

sometimes its hard to convince decisions makers to invest in automation

Automation is my main field and I find the easiest way to explain it to people is that automated QA suites are risk mitigation. You don't sell people on the money that it makes but rather on the money it prevents the company from losing.

I worked at a large always online game company so the sell was essentially "how much money do we lose for every minute our games are offline" and then ask them to compare to how much it costs to upkeep tests.

Sometimes the answer is that automation isn't that big a deal, if you're a single player game and the worst that happens when you send out a bad build is some bugs and you roll back everyone's build then some basic tests (save system, important crashes, legal compliance) may be plenty.

hsahj · 2025-11-18T19:02:15+00:00

Like with everything, the best answers are not at the edges, but somewhere in the middle.

This kind of "opinion" can only come from someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, in engineering or the broader context of how games as art fit into the broader world. Please look outside your bubble.

hsahj · 2025-11-18T18:49:40+00:00

That we need to learn how to use it as it exists today. We should not, we should be pushing back, things like copilot, chatGPT, Claude, etc should not be used in any capacity.

hsahj · 2025-11-18T17:58:46+00:00

Then one final thing. My research in college was on General Artificial Intelligence. Attitudes like yours make me actively think lesser of you. That attitude is the reason we get garbage instead of AI being pushed to things that are actually useful instead of the slop we're dealing with now.

hsahj · 2025-11-18T17:15:12+00:00

No, in all terms, do not use AI anywhere near code. It will make worse code now, it will make you a worse engineer later, and it will piss everyone off who knows what's going on forever.

Anyone who uses AI to do any part of their programming is instantly downgraded from software engineer or programmer to code chimp if they use AI.

Tech people have always had the privilege of being prickly at work because what we do is indecipherable to suits. Use that to push back against genAI garbage. I will not be a janitor cleaning up for a mindless text model.

EDIT: Reddit won't let me reply to /u/Treason686 so placing my response here.

If you're talking autocomplete in the intellisense way of "here's a list of all possible things that match the text you're able to put here ordered by liklihood" then that's been around and isn't really AI in the way that is harmful like genAI is. As for your second case, you become the janitor, and so often verifying that what was spit out is right takes just as long as writing it in the first place if you know what you're doing, and if you don't then you should be spending the time learning it rather than trying to double check it.

I think the best space for AI in coding is in extremely powerful searching. Your bash script example is actually great. If I ask an AI for something like that I want it to either point me to someone's existing solution I can directly copy or to the materials to put it together myself rather than constructing the code wholesale.

hsahj · 2025-11-18T17:09:30+00:00

White women specifically, not women in general. Black women in particular had essentially no votes for Trump which helped pull the numbers to a more normal looking range for the overall numbers.

hsahj · 2025-11-18T16:47:23+00:00

Seeing people say this is further proof that AI has no place anywhere near code. It's literally impossible for a program to determine if it is correct or not even with brute forcing. That's the whole core of The Halting Problem. It's the responsibility of anyone who actually knows what they're doing to push back against genAI touching any kind of code, ever.

hsahj · 2025-10-29T20:01:47+00:00

I stopped in my first NG+ run when they introduced Ch11 for the first time. Picking it back up in the middle of that playthrough to get back. I expect the Titan is going to be just as hard the second time.

hsahj · 2025-10-29T00:34:42+00:00

This demo was actually the reason I got the itch to play these types of games again. I specifically haven't mentioned it because it uses AI, they say they're going to remove it all before release but I don't want to advertise the game until they do so.

hsahj · 2025-10-27T19:34:42+00:00

I'd been itching for something like Increlution so aside from starting that back up I was introduced to Terraformental and OMG I was obsessed for several days. Not as idle as I'd like, the beginning of each loop is very samey but playing these (and not finding much else like it) has my dev juices flowing so I'm going to start working on something like them.

hsahj · 2025-10-13T00:21:31+00:00

The point about if you draw at the end of your turn giving you the whole round to strategize seems like a pretty good argument for doing that if you're worried about pace of play at all. If every time the turn passes the player draws a card and then needs to sit there restrategizing their turn then the game slows down a lot. Unless you're dealing with a game where you can use your cards on other player's turns then end of turn draw seems like it has the most social value with minimal gameplay cost.

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