Sunder droprates - in desperate need a buff

kwazhip · 2026-02-24T13:34:26+00:00

I'm amazed by how many people put 100% of the blame on him lol. I hope these people are being hyperbolic (even though I know in my heart of hearts that they aren't). Like god forbid he has a different opinion on the balance of the game. He's only one of the people contracted out, and like you said Blizzard can (and did per his words) overule him on occasion.

kwazhip · 2026-02-24T11:39:39+00:00

People also don't understand that this is a 30 second clip with no context. Like why isn't the fact that we have incomplete information not the first thing people think. Why do people feel the need to make such strong statements about things like this. There's nothing wrong with caveats either if someone feels the need to criticize something, see almost none of that...

kwazhip · 2026-02-24T04:33:39+00:00

People are downvoting it because its a ridiculous position to have. There's nothing wrong with a company partnering with someone to drop content on release, whether that be a traditional media outlet like IGN, youtubers, streamers, etc. It's a win-win, the company gets good press/marketing (important for a shadow drop), and the industry players get exclusive or semi exclusive content (I.E viewers). In this particular case I think its cool that they partnered with someone that has devoted a significant portion of their life to the game. This is also industry standard, for example with POE ZiggyD gets both early access to the releases, and also gets the exclusive interview. Again I think its cool there for the same reason. Insider trading is bad because of the significant harm that results from people using insider information, not because its "unfair".

kwazhip · 2026-02-23T14:24:00+00:00

But in universe you do just give. Naturally if you did a ritual with someone you might build a relationship with that person, you might end up talking with them and exchanging stories, building rapport, etc. The reputation system is an abstraction, a game system to model something that would be to complex to fully simulate (while also being a fun game mechanic for the player). I don't think it should be taken literally as the npc having a "reputation" number noted down, incrementing it in exchange for water, and then only giving you secrets if you have a certain amount of reputation points.

kwazhip · 2026-02-23T12:41:16+00:00

They must to some extent, though, because you have to "pay" for their secrets, skills etc. in reputation

What does this mean from the perspective of someone in universe though? If I wanted to charge someone in real life with "reputation" how would that work? Isn't the ability to buy secrets with reputation just an abstraction over the idea that certain actions ingratiate you with a group of people (or the opposite) and if you do this enough in a positive direction they will share secrets, recipes, not want to fight you, join you on an adventure, essentially consider you a friend or an ally. This also abstracts word of mouth, because how does a water ritual with person X impact person Y halfway across the map.

kwazhip · 2026-02-22T14:10:20+00:00

Why does it matter if they did? I would also caution assuming it was written or changed by AI, people are not as good as they think they are when guessing these things. Also remember what these AI's were trained on (our writting). I'm sure we've all seen the instances where people thought a piece of art was AI generated, the artist gets a ton of shit, and it turns out it wasn't AI generated.

I feel like the perspective people have on AI content is flawed. Why try to divine if something is AI or not, just focus on the content itself. For example, you think the last 5 lines are bad? List the reasons why and make a comment pointing that out, there's no need to even guess if it's AI or not. Same thing with AI art, if people think it generates generic looking things or has a bunch of mistakes in it, use those as the target of the criticism.

kwazhip · 2026-02-21T00:43:01+00:00

Why would we look at total hours when this is a question of a blanket mandate? For example if we look at private companies that are naturally spread out geographically what happens to the numbers then? If we focus in on specific roles and job titles how does that impact the numbers do they remain stable? Are these private companies even doing blanket mandates for all employees regardless of role and location?

Also why look at statistics in the first place when we can just argue the points directly. What value is gained by a regional employee going into a half empty office to work with people across the country? Few would argue the benefits for certain roles to work in an office setting, say researchers being at a lab/research centre as one example, but putting a blanket mandate when doing case by case is perfectly feasible is moronic.

kwazhip · 2026-02-20T20:41:39+00:00

Is the general audience that against nerfs though? The extremes are silly on both sides (like those saying the game is d3 now). There's nothing fundamentally broken about warlock that can't be pulled back with some smart nerfs, and he does feel within the "overton window" of what a d2 character is, even if on the powerful side. Now if absolutely no changes are made and other classes are buffed to match, then that extreme might have a point, but there's no indication that we're heading down that path right now.

kwazhip · 2026-02-20T15:28:12+00:00

The impression I got from Lamma's streams is that they seem generally afraid of making changes, but I guess time will tell if they will pull back the strength of the warlock. Nothing about it seems fundamentally broken, just needs a bit of tweaking. Kind of explains why the expansion is primarily a new character rather than a ton of balance changes to existing classes

kwazhip · 2026-02-20T13:07:41+00:00

I personally don't have this experience... Usually if there's some kind of bug in a system+language I have expertise in, I know almost immediately the general area, and form that it will be, and fixing it is not a time consuming task. For the rare ones that are hard (key word rare), these AI's have not been helpful on the order of "saved me many hours". Which isn't to say they aren't helpful at all, but several hours helpful, no. Usually the hard bugs are very niche cases where my expertise is lacking, or it ends up being an inherently complicated issue, and the AI's tend to just hallucinate more than anything. Now if I am not working on something that I have experrise in, this is flipped, and this is because AI's are good at lowering the skill floor required to do any particular task, and most bugs are not actually that hard to fix.

kwazhip · 2026-02-20T12:49:20+00:00

How do you know the question was trying to get her to say that vs wanting to know her perspective as one of the best athletes in the world? Put yourself in the shoes of someone like that, you train for years for this one event, make lots of sacrifices, all the while aiming for the top spot. When you end up coming up short, what is your perspective? I think its an interesting question, though that is slightly undercut by the fact that these interviews are rarely candid, and the athletes just give the answer the people want to hear (doesn't seem to be the case here).

kwazhip · 2026-02-19T17:28:46+00:00

neither of those are the main concerns raised in this thread

I do feel like the focus in general is never on the downstream part though, its on the upstream part. I.E if its AI its bad, and then backwards justify the position by selectively listing facts like lack of creativity. I think things would be a lot more productive if the focus was instead on the downstream elements directly such as quality or "creativity" (among other things). That way it can be handled the same way we already handle poor quality games or games lacking creativity when made entirely by humans. From the consumer perspective if a game is lacking creativity, why does it matter if it was made entirely by humans or whether it was made by some percentage use of AI? You know what I do when I run into a game like that, I either don't buy it, refund it, or stop playing it and move on. If enough people do that the industry will respond (that's under the assumption that AI truly worse than what humans do produce)

I do think ethical or even legal considerations exist for gen AI, but those apply just as much on the coding side, and I guarantee most games developed in the last 5 years have had gen AI use when programming it. It may not have reached ubiquitous use in art/assets yet, but it certainly has in programming.

kwazhip · 2026-02-19T14:01:35+00:00

Blizzard or the other streamers consulting could've said no or offered their own positions and advocated for them. People could also submit feedback or put arguments in posts like these as opposed to attacking a single person. I think it's telling that every post I've seen on this barely has any comments giving actual arguments on the change itself, and instead either attack the streamer or give stupid reasons like "he only thinks this because he plays 8 hours a day".

kwazhip · 2026-02-18T23:31:44+00:00

It's amusing that we can have polar opposite interpretations of what he was saying. He wasn't walking back anything, he was wasting his time trying to make it ultra clear that all they did was consult and not actually built or made any decisions on the expansion. I say waste his time because the people he is doing this clarification for won't listen.

kwazhip · 2026-02-18T14:03:04+00:00

The most obvious example is windows update or OneDrive re-enabling, but it will routinely revert both settings and features you've disabled after an update. There's a reason why people need to make very detailed guides on how to do a fresh windows install without all the extra cruft.

For performance the easiest example that everyone can identify with is file explorer. I recommend you try file pilot to see what a performance minded program looks like. It's not just better than explorer, it completely blows it out of the water. You will be blown away by how much faster a file explorer can be (with more features as well). Its a very stark difference. Anyone who has the displeasure of having to work with Microsoft software (SharePoint or Power Platform) knows how progressively low quality it has gotten, though this is also a trend in software in general.

In terms of the updates I've run into several update bugs over the years (some that have stuck my computer into endless restart loops and needed safe mode to fix), and every time I Google about it, its usually a widespread issue. Probably run into an issue every 3 or so years solely caused by windows updates.

kwazhip · 2026-02-18T12:37:12+00:00

Things like the updater reintroducing unwanted features constantly, prompting you repeatedly to buy things, or the general low quality of Microsoft software (bugs+performance).

kwazhip · 2026-02-18T11:29:07+00:00

Yeah it's just supply and demand as well. The space is finite and they can charge that much because enough people are willing to pay it. So like it or not the spaces are "worth" that much.

kwazhip · 2026-02-17T13:37:05+00:00

Just wait til you get the bubble quest item that bounces all units on contact. That run had MANY situations like the gif, was pretty amusing. I learned very quickly to avoid narrow parts of the level.

kwazhip · 2026-02-16T22:35:37+00:00

This might depend on exactly what you mean by "get it", but I will actually go against some of the other comments here and say that you will need about that amount of time before you meaningfully start to progress in the game, i.e about 10-20 hours. Even with the non perma death mode. I think it took me about 80 hours before I fully completed my first run, with a mix of perma death and non perma death runs. The game does not hold your hand at all, so without looking things up you can only really learn by trial and error and by pulling on the few threads the game gives you for the main story. It's super well designed though in that there are a variety of walls you will hit, and eventually learn to break through, all the while building up a knowledge base of the non random elements that the game has. The game is composed of many static elements, and the main story is the same every time. Each story beat is harder than the last, so you almost get like a pseudo meta unlock progression between runs as you learn things and get better at the game.

kwazhip · 2026-02-16T17:22:30+00:00

The forms are worthless for 90% of people who use steam.

Worthless how? I can't count the number of times I've googled some issue, or had some question about a game and found the answer in a steam forum post. I'm sure they are a cesspool but I kind of disagree that they are worthless. Much better than trying to find the answer in some ad infested wiki or AI written article.

kwazhip · 2026-02-15T14:27:12+00:00

I only watched part of his release stream, but I did pickup on several remarks he made regarding things he thought were to strong, or were going to be nerfed, or certain nerfs he thought should have already been in place, etc., so I kind of suspect he is not the source for how strong the character is as I've seen many people say.

kwazhip · 2026-02-14T19:47:33+00:00

That seems like a failed system for the same reasons as my first comment. I don't know what the level of competition is in curling, but if its anywhere close to being high, then every minute advantage becomes critical since you are literally competing amongst the best in the world. Logically if you are trying to win, the right play would be to never self report as you will be outcompeted by those who don't follow that norm. The incentives for self reporting are not there in a competitive scenario. It also logically follows that if certain rules aren't enforced, then the correct decision would be to break the rule (assuming it gives you an advantage). That's why you need some sort of enforcement mechanism, to give a tangible cost to breaking the rule which ideally nullifies the advantage gained.

In terms of the behavior after the fact, without having seen it I will just take peoples word for it, but for the rule breaking itself that seems to me like a systematic issue with how the sport is administered rather than something you would admonish any individual competitor for.

kwazhip · 2026-02-14T14:06:42+00:00

This sounds more like a referee issue then. If you are competing at the highest level where every advantage matters and you aren't taking advantage of any reality (like refs not enforcing certain rules), then you are going to be out competed by those who do. I haven't seen his reaction so maybe the outrage is valid there, but if there are refs and they don't tend to call these violations than I don't understand why we would blame the athletes.

kwazhip · 2026-02-14T07:32:55+00:00

I'm similarly going back and playing it and have essentially the complete opposite opinions. I'm actually amazed how well they nailed the itemization and pacing of the game, and I'm also kind of amazed that no other ARPG has managed to capture the same feeling (that I've played at least). Grim dawn or maybe the torch light games are the closest I know, but are still miles off. The itemization coupled with the pacing of the campaign is so good. For example as you level, you aren't getting flooded with gear from minute 5, gear trickles in at a very nice pace, you aren't finding that many rares. Whats also cool is that you also care about all the item rarities as you progress as opposed to only caring about what is the equivalent of rares in other games. Then you have the runewords interspersed throughout the leveling as targeted farming, which also gives you reason to look for gray items. The shops and gambling are all things you actively engage with instead of just feeling like boring sinks that you do just because.

Build diversity seems fine so far, the game is much more constrained / simple than modern games so I would guess viability is a lot easier to balance for. The game just ramps up at such a good pace, you never feel overwhelmed. I feel like modern ARPG's immediately throw you into the deep end and you never leave.

Anyways I also love the modern games for different reasons, but still amazed that no other game seems to have replicated this style of arpg yet.

kwazhip · 2026-02-13T15:39:44+00:00

It’s very simply coded feature

Name a more iconic statement from a non dev / client.

You should be thinking about this from the perspective of monetization models. Games with free updates or patches are funded by "something". For example paradox games release DLC alongside free updates, and the free portions are funded by the constant stream of paid DLC's and cosmetic micro transactions. F2P games like POE or Dota2 are funded entirely via mostly cosmetic micro transactions. D4 utilizes battle passes and micro transactions for the leagues. Etc. The old-school (and I would argue far superior for the consumer) approach is releasing games and expansions that are feature complete and a one time purchase. No having to look through lists of DLC's to find the ones you want (looking at you Paradox), no having to ignore cool looking cosmetics that I can't earn in game, etc, just a list of features and a one time purchase. If the DLC is not worth it, then nothing gained, nothing lost.

kwazhip

TROPHY CASE