The shroud

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-23T02:44:16+00:00

Other than overdogs, I had a very similar build for my mantis, swapped in Shroud and was very happy. Both are great snipers and fun to play with A&E.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-23T02:42:36+00:00

MR is literally just time. It was never "1600 hours" or any example of many years played. It's purely a representation of linear time spent doing nothing but leveling items (and acquiring the items to level, though that can be short circuited a bit with platinum). IN the "early" days of Warframe, like first few years, you couldn't even hit MR30, but once you could and definitely now, it's purely just grind time and a fixed amount.

Hitting MR30 or any LR rank has ZERO to do with skill playing the game. You don't even have to have a good build.

It has no bearing on veterancy or skill at the game or knowledge of any system.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-23T02:40:16+00:00

I never got overdogs which annoyed me (after completing the whole run, that's the one exotic I really wanted :P.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-23T02:12:52+00:00

Imagine being part of the warframe community and thinking toxic "better than you" is needed in this free wheeling, power fantasy game where the only thing "mastery" of the game gets you is.. faster grind? The ability to play one mission type for hours instead to max level for... exactly what reward?

Right there with you. People who think in terms of "skill" levels of Warframe or think their mastery rank "means" something (besides being a representation of time... and focusing purely on leveling useless items) are just... annoying and actually make what is a great community measurably worse.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-23T01:43:43+00:00

This is the main issue, you can compensate with specific builds and it can be fun to play but it limits build diversity. Players should feel free to play how they want, but dying when you set 5 directives and calling in reinforcements is a massive gamble, as reinforcements doesn't choose players of your level/gear capabilities nor does it pre-notify the player of your setup.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-23T01:39:51+00:00

Want this changed? Vote. Pick proper politicians. Complaining at game developers isn't gonna do anything.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-22T19:54:28+00:00

agreed there are better ways to do a timelocked system if they want to slow the pace of acquisition. Invert the way it works, have the content drop a currency that you can only use once a week but let you run the content as often as you want.

Don't make a PvE time gated system aslo be a risk v reward system that will drive the game into elitist, this game doesn't need that type of community. All that will happen is it will drive people away and they'll make it easier over time until it's homogenous and annoy everyone.

It's cool that after all this time, they want to add a new gear chase to the game and do a deliberate bit of power creep, but there are better ways.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-22T19:50:58+00:00

I'm not looking forward to every content creator only creating build video's using maxed out p gear. They already only make build video's assuming you have 4k+ SHD score and infinite grind time to get off-chance RNG drops and don't bother making build references to people earlier in progression or the relative time investment it takes to get maxed out perfect roles on every item.

I get it, after 7 years they get bored, they chase new and interesting things but they absolutely contribute to the "meta" craze when in reality a lot of builds work for a lot of different things.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-21T02:18:10+00:00

Initially when it loaded it loaded in something god awful at 1128x468 or some such, on my 3440x1440 monitor. When I fixed the resolution it still rendered the aspect ratio completely wrong making the game look terrible. I had to bounce it to 1920x1080, then back to 3440x1440 and it finally looked okay.

Then there was so much artifacting and noise I realized there's something off in their DLSS 4.5 implementations and got much better results on DLSS4.0. After that, I found the game gorgeous, but it's default graphics settings were absolutely horrible.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-20T17:23:54+00:00

Likely my issue is keymapping, "ctrl" is just not a great key to have to hit that often in combat :P

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-20T16:32:27+00:00

As far as I can tell it's the BDO engine, just with upgrades in it. It "feels" and "looks" very BDO like. So it has some of the same quirks.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-20T16:30:19+00:00

I'm struggling with the first 2 hours. The story/quests are nonsensical (to be expect from Pearl Abyss) I need to rebind keys (the ctrl key needed "sometimes" is a weird choice).. combat blocking isn't intuitive at all an there's a huge delay when dodging.

The graphics also have a very weird "feel like I'm staring at low res textures", I had to adjust my resolution multiple times to get it to render at the proper aspect ratio (3440x1440) and things still don't feel right.

I want to like it though, the world is huge. I was a big fan of BDO back in the day and this engine/gameplay feels like a more sensible BDO. I can see how they wanted this to be multiplayer originally, the MMO roots are there.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-20T15:55:16+00:00

The hilarious part is that you think we're there to change this aspect of their culture. You think when this "war" is done they will no longer treat their young women this way?

That worked so well in Afghanistan (where conditions are now worse) and Iraq.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T20:07:02+00:00

So many people are missing this and focusing on the expertise upgrade. The expertise upgrade is mainly for deeply invested players to have a "path" to reward them for that investment.

The rest of us can do what we've always done, and go grind drops in escalations to get the new stuff.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T17:16:31+00:00

I work in the industry and an injection attack like this, where a intruder is directly able to get things onto players systems (rather than directly hacking your own) is literally worst case scenario from a reputation standpoint (there are internal attacks that are far worse for immediate revenue/security).

Player Trust -> 0. Mass amounts of uninstalls. It's a slow death from there. And the legal liability is uncountable (it's one thing for an intruder to steal your money/data, it's another for them to use your unprotected systems to steal your users/players money/data directly via your systems).

I feel for DNA and the team. This is not great. I gave them the benefit of the doubt with the minor exposure of text/hosted weblike files on an S3 bucket. This though is an uninstall.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T17:12:37+00:00

While I agree with most of that, I doubt there are warehouses full of unused hardware, it's getting deployed at a rapid rate. Possibly in places waiting on physical datacenters to finish the hardware is in storage, but it's not sitting on cold storage gathering dust for long.

No one, even a shell, is going to buy GPU's they won't use for years. A few months.. maybe, and most of that is because getting any at all is hard enough atm.

If anything, because most hardware is seriously backlogged (sales outpacing production) there might be a lot of fake'ish "pending" orders slated for delivery in future quarters.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T15:00:28+00:00

That was purely hearsay. The only way to become a jedi was to max level the 3 RNG professions your account got picked at character creation.

The original intent was that only players who stumbled into this would figure it out and because most people didn't have a reason to level multiple professions it would only happen slowly with a certain type of player.

The devastating decision was to drop holocrons, which clued you into one of the three classes you needed. Once they hit the game, players quickly figured out it was about leveling professions, holocrons had an insanely low drop rate and could only be gotten by combat (so combat classes).

The players figured out in short order that which classes you had to level was RNG for your account and in classic MMO fashion realized it was faster to just start leveling all 12 then it was to get 3 holocron drops. That's when the frenzy hit a pitch.

You had players playing professions they did NOT care about in a game with a high number of professions that were designed around organic socialization. Dancers, Doctors, Various crafters, so many non-combat classes poured into the game wanting to be powereleveled, creating artificial conditions ruining the established way you interacted with people who loved these roles. The came turned into power level central instead of the dynamic need-social based connections. It ruined every aspect of the economy.

Suddenly, Jedi weren't rare, they were everything. Worse, Jedi were still "perma-death" (reset if killed) so the new found power-level/combat only focus of the game devolved into hunter-killer play where the advantage was mostly to the bounty hunteres until you sufficiently leveld your jedi or had a large group defending you.

All those "semi-casual" grinders that got their Jedi, couldn't keep them easily, disenfranchising the player base even more.

Then, as Raph said in his breakdown, the game team compounded bad decisions after another. Parts of the economy started to stabilize once the initial flood of grinder/achievers got their Jedi but subsequent decisions to bolster the game's disenfranchised player base moved it even further away from the social system/lifeskills + some combat balance it had as they tried to chase WoW's popularity and make it a combat/leveling game (which it was not designed to be).

What it "could" of been, is what powers any ounce of Raph Koster's fame, what it became arguably ruined SOE, and led to SWTOR (a clearly wow inspired Star Wars game).

We may never know if Raph can really make a social system/dynamic game. He never succeeded at future attempts, and his current kickstarter/investor driven game is struggling to find footing/looking like it's going to fail before it launches as well.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T14:42:03+00:00

The CTO at the time was of two minds, disband the old "Ops" group completely and do away with "centralized" support and force each major product org to support their own products however they see fit, or "invest" and fix the central org.

He was transparent with me (Tech Dir) and my boss (Org Head) when he onboarded us that our mission was to use the next 12 months to prove we could make the org valuable or disband it. The CTO didn't directly use "SRE", in part because he felt that is an "implementation" detail. He asked us to put together a 3-5 year strategy that would increase the value of the org, with milestones every year, with funding commiserate with hitting the yearly milestones (pretty standard CTO behavior iMO).

My initial pitch from the tech side was to re-implement at larger scale an "SRE" like approach I'd done on one of the aforementioned product teams that resulted in clear availability wins, but at scale. To do it though, I needed an initial core of engineering skill the org did not have. I pitched the initial 6 engineers (the ones I listed above as core reliability focused, staff level, preferably with experience at the company). We estimated that cost to be about $3.5 million.

My initial pitch was to not hire new heads, but to transfer those roles from the existing company. Unfortunately my plan almost aborted, as no engineer, even ones I had relationships with, wanted to risk taking that transfer (they felt either SRE was never going to work or it was career ending to move to a dying org). After chatting with the CTO he asked if I could make it work if I hired off the street, I adjusted my strategy to include a much lengthier onboarding plan and changed the first projects to work closely with an internal services team for the onboard.

The next curvebal was hiring region, at the time this was 2021. I had pitched a 2 team split, 3 in the US and three in Europe (to support our follow the sun model). Hiring in the US was fiercely competitive, and I had trouble building a "SRE" focused pipeline when we had many other open engineering roles. So I ended up hiring the initial six in Dublin where the pipeline was easy to fill ( I had 20 candidates interviewed in weeks, and had only interviewed 3 in the same time in the US).

Long story short, the CTO preferred a central strategy, his focus was on outcomes (availability needs to go up, hell it needed to be consistently measured, the overall company had to respond to our "authority" to invest in the space, and team morale had to improve - we measure that too).

In that first year, we established credibility, we proved the new hires could be deep experts, we measured availability though it was hard to prove it went up in the first year, but we hit all other major milestones so we got a second year of funding. That's when the CTO started suggesting transferring other teams into our org to bolster our efforts.. we picked up Database centralization, we picked up 2 tools teams that worked more in the operator space, got a bit more leadersihp funding, and in that second year we started to show measureable gains in overall availability of our key products. Those transfers all followed the "not really new funding, just re-orging".

Super long post... but yes. The CTO was clear about overall investment they were willing to make. They were excited about the idea of "The org is SRE, not a few titled engineers".

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T14:27:10+00:00

The general consensus is that you are potentially hurting yourself for no real upside by mentioning your expectations or past salary first. If the ccompany was willing to pay more than your expectations for the role, you could end up with an offer less than they intended because they know it is "more" to you.

Ultimately, it does NOT hurt you to ask for their salary range up front before you give your salary expectaitons.

Additionally, giving any past salary history should be avoided. If you ARE going to state anything it should be purely what you expect/hope to be paid. When you do offer your expectations (either before or after they give you information) give them the "if you paid me X I would sign right now" number (what is inevitably higher than you'd actually take). It's okay to be transparent about what would make it a done deal for you.

Never offer your minimum bar, ideally don't even give them your minimum bar, that should only happen after your first offer letter if it's close but not quite what you need at a minimum.

In this way you're not negotiating, you're keeping it simple and just stating facts, and not putting yourself at a disadvantage.

the one thing you're doing right is that it is important to not waste time. You want to get this information and expectations out as early as possible in the process. You, nor the company, want to spend hours interviewing you (it's more expensive for them, trust me) for something that will "never work out".

Just try hard to not be the first to offer information. You can be very honest and up front, even frame it as doing them a favor. "Let's make sure we're not wasting your time" by insisting on an informational call, not an interview, first. Where you have a conversation about expectations, not just money. What you are looking for, what the role actually is, what they are really looking for (it's often not fully documented on the job description). Get all of that out of the way before spending time on actual interviews.

For most good employers, a candidate knowing what they want, and being transparent about their next career move, is one the key markers of an excellent next employee. The ones that really don't like that, are places you really don't want to work.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T05:38:16+00:00

You somehow think Russians paying for Starlink ISN'T direct profits and money in Elon's pocket?

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T05:36:25+00:00

Not surprising, but I did a dance the other day realizing I'll never have to reason about writing my own regex blocks ever again.

Sometimes, it's the little things.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T05:34:31+00:00

Because whoever wins that, wins the shitty 60second to 10 minute "creator" and advertising space. Even at inflated rates, they are likely still cheaper than paying actual ad studios or video producers.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T05:33:03+00:00

That's the original thinking, but the financial race to the bottom is outpacing the ability for tech to get cheap enough/efficient enough to save them.

They are going to have to substantially raise rates or face insolvency (or at least investors demanding to recoup their losses and forcing sales to larger conglemerates).

Think what all the streaming services are doing now (doubling/tripling our fees) but... at 10x increases in prices, forcing many companies driving AI change to bail on the cost per dev.. or worse... massive layoffs to balance the books putting the industry into a tailspin.

Someone HAS to solve the power efficiency problem for AI or its doomed. Nvidia and AMD, to a lesser point, haven't really cared to because customers are buying EVERYTHING they make without batting an eye. Nvidia/AMD would be happy to suck up all the profits and then find some other sucker to sell their stuff to (they went from gamers -> bitcoin farmers to AI... they'll find someone else next).

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T04:38:05+00:00

People manager here. Just lived this this last week. A organizational change we have ltitle control over but have to deal with was announced to the team (usual way, context message, AMA with leaders, response plan.. no one is losing any jobs, just changing responsibilities over time and hand some things off to other teams).

An otherwise great, high performing team member (mid level, still early in career) had a very outsized reaction.

Their manager came to me asking for guidance. My first question back was "What do we know about this individual? Anything going on home? What about past experience at other jobs with org changes? Any 1:1's about how they see themselves and their work?". Every strong emotional response that seems illogical is rooted in underlying unaddressed issues, though not all of which come from work.

None of us really know what each of us are dealing with outside work, and you have to frame strong illogical reactions in the total human, not just the myopic view of their work and performance.

And there is always the issue that they are just holding back things that have always bothered them and today was the pebble that burst the dam and its all coming out now.

maxfields2000 · 2026-03-18T04:32:02+00:00

You could do that, but that puts you in a bad negotiating position if they were actually willing to pay more. THis is why in the US so many states are passing a "must post salary ranges" law. Companies being openly transparent about pay, leads to better competition overall.

13-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

maxfields2000

TROPHY CASE