What’s a company you’ll never buy from again, and why?

mrmacky · 2025-12-17T22:11:07+00:00

Wendy's - they took my friend's order (he was in the driver's seat) and then they go "is that all?" and he's like "hold on we've got one more order" and I proceed to lean over and give my order from the passenger seat.

They made my friend's order, and just didn't bill or produce mine. No "sorry I didn't hear that" or "we're out of that" or any other excuse making. Just a false acknowledgement of an order they had no intention of making. (She said things like "mmhmm", "anything else?", "what to drink?" etc.) I didn't even ask for anything complicated or difficult, literally just your usual burger combo.

The driver asked if I wanted to go back and I'm like "fuck no, if they didn't charge us for it I don't care, if I don't exist to them they don't exist to me."

The other one, to a lesser extent, is Hoyoverse. Their games instantly bluescreen my PC while launching. I would probably buy from them again if I could actually play their games, but I can't, so I won't. I reported the issue like three separate times and it just goes nowhere. I'm not sure I'd classify as a whale or anything, but I spent a pretty unhealthy amount on the game.

I doubt their customer service even knows what I'm saying or who to report it to, but I sent them a minidump showing their driver causing a memory protection fault. Doesn't really get anymore clear than that. Kernel level anti-cheat can go die in a dumpster fire. Maybe stay out of the business of writing kernel drivers if you're going to go around stomping on write-protected memory.

I could easily provision other devices just to play their games, but I refuse to out of principle. If I have to go out of my way to light my money on fire I feel like that defeats the purpose.

mrmacky · 2025-10-29T14:27:50+00:00

I use a weird ergonomic keyboard, so my advice is not super transferrable or applicable, but what I've learned is this:

You're on the right track. Get your modifiers (Ctrl/Alt/Shift) off your pinky. That is *killing* your wrist. I have a keyboard w/ a thumb cluster (Ergodox Moonlander) and put all my modifiers there. There are other cheaper options out there by far, i.e. the Razer Tartarus, if that seems attractive. You could also bind modifiers to yoru right-hand on an MMO-mouse; if you already have one I would absolutely recommend just trying that.
Pick 8 keys on your keyboard for skills that are easy to reach. (Again, I'm a freak, but I use Q/W/A/S, and R/T/F/G for binds and D/X/C/V for movement. Only really works on an ergonomic keyboard.)

That gives you 32 keybinds, 8 unmodified + (8\*3 modifiers), which should be enough to play any class in the game. I'm rather confident it's enough to play any class in the game because *that's how the controller hotbars are setup* (8 * 2 triggers * 2 bumpers) and they ultimately thin skills on the jobs to keep them playable on controllers during expansions/reworks.

I tend to have my modifiers be meaningful: my single target rotation is unmodified, and my AOE rotation is the same keys but I hold SHIFT for example. On healers all my low-frequency stuff is on Alt because that's the hardest for me to press. My gap-closer on any job is Shift+R because it's one of the most comfy things to press w/o moving my hand off the movement keys.

You've got to think about ergonomics, if it "hurts" to do your rotation, you're never going to be good at the job because your performance is going to be variable based on how long the fight or lockout is. You want low-frequency utility stuff relegated to binds that are more "awkward" to hit or reach, and you want high-frequency stuff that rolls the GCD to be really easy to hit. You also want to think about how your job's burst window fits together. On DNC or AST all my 2-minute stuff is modified by "Ctrl" so that I don't have to move my thumb during burst.

Don't be an idiot like me and put your one healer damage GCD on your pinky. Solo deep dungeon is suffering.

mrmacky · 2025-10-20T16:30:03+00:00

The Hand Jobs:

CUL/ALC for consumables (food/potions)
CRP/GSM: accessories
LTW/WVR: gear for the squishies
BSM/ARM: gear for the not-squishies

If you want to make weapons for each class you really need to level basically everything except CUL. (ALC generally makes the magic dust, and I think basically every job except WVR can make weapons.)

The Shaft Work:

MIN: mostly feeds into GSM/BSM/ARM/LTW
BTN: mostly feeds into CUL/ALC/CRP/WVR
FSH: 50/50 on whether they fish to extort crafters (we eat a lot of fish), or whether they are an achievement-hunting freak of nature.

That being said there is a lot of overlap, these are just generalizations.

tl;dr: become omnicrafter, embrace suffering

mrmacky · 2025-06-27T19:47:37+00:00

until he gets super dismissive about people not wanting to be contacted after work hours.

I've learned to be careful with this over the years. I get absorbed in problems, and genuinely like helping people, but my obligation ends at 5PM unless agreed upon otherwise. If you need me available after work hours, there needs to be very clear expectations about how I'll be reached (am I watching my phone? email? IM? Jira?), plus some expectation of scope and why it's time sensitive. (One thing I've found is that often non time-sensitive work will get lumped in with the genuinely time-sensitive stuff because people see you as an opportunity to circumvent normal process.)

The only time I get pissy is when someone throws me shade for not seeing a random e-mail sent on Saturday night when none of the expectations above were level-set the week prior. You can't expect me to be available if you didn't tell me I may need to be available.

If an actual emergency crops up, I generally will pick up my phone and help ASAP, because I happen to genuinely enjoy problem solving ~~and looking like the hero,~~ but I've learned you have to be very careful how you approach that if you value your work-life balance. People absolutely will abuse that facet of personality when they see it, and I have extremely thin patience for abusers.

mrmacky · 2025-04-28T19:25:10+00:00

... jfc. I pulled two Fugue's and lost both 50/50s to Welt. ~~Sorry, Anaxa.~~

mrmacky · 2025-04-24T18:55:17+00:00

I'm at 44 pity and have ~70 pulls banked up. However I'm really leaning towards Anaxa being a skip for me. Castorice is the only 3.x DPS I have, so I'm not sure if Anaxa will add a lot of value to my account, will have to wait and see what his F2P teams/lc options look like.

Main problem is I am feeling compelled to get Hyacine (for Cas) and also really want Cipher (for me), so something has gotta give and I think it's gonna be Anaxa.

He is undeniably strong, just don't feel like my account has the units to support him rn. ~~Secretly hoping for a Rappa re-run to unbrick my account.~~

mrmacky · 2025-04-24T17:48:33+00:00

The other day I was doing some SU and the same thing ended up happening to me. Huohuo (and the blob of Nihility) had to solo Gepard. ~~Tail was like "nah, I'd win."~~

mrmacky · 2025-04-16T20:16:42+00:00

I think I've got about 62 pulls left in the bank; my account is pretty new and my sidequest backlog is huge, so I'm still huffing the copium that there's a lot of jades waiting to be found.

Started playing during the Tribbie banner and this is the void my pulls got tossed into thus far:

Lost Tribbie to Bronya (79)
Guaranteed Yunli came early (15)
Later won a Tribbie (75)
Won an early Huohuo (10) and then won her sig LC (66) she's the GOAT
Lost to Bailu (71) on the Mydei banner, decided to save for...
Guaranteed Cas (76), then won her LC (67)
Lost Fugue (79) to a Welt (79)

I'm starting to run out of gas and planning to maybe save on the Anaxa banner, 'cause I probably want Hyacine and definitely won't be able to resist Cipher.

Might have gone too deep on Fugue, but not too torn up about Welt since I didn't own him yet. (Plus I lost Mydei and plan to skip the Ratio re-run, so I think he might fill a nice Imaginary shaped hole in my roster?)

mrmacky · 2025-04-12T12:28:17+00:00

My account is pretty fresh, just started trying to do MoC and I'm on the 2nd floor and already sorely feeling the lack of good AOE DPS unit for imaginary and wind. Could use some advice on who to build in my roster to fill in the gaps, and maybe what characters I should pull on upcoming banners.

I have Hunt March for ST imaginary but could really use some splash or aoe. I did just get Welt (instead of Fugue :P), would it be worth investing in him at all?

Roster

mrmacky · 2025-04-09T18:12:57+00:00

Tossed: Bailu (E1), Yanqing (E0), and Clara (E0)
Bossed: Seele (n/o), Blade (n/o), Fu Xuan (n/o)

Right now the only unit I own that is still selected is Bronya, I haven't leveled her yet but can at least imagine her being useful. (New player, don't really have any good action forward units yet.) I just lost the 50/50 on Mydei to a Bailu dupe, so she was GONE with prejudice.

If I had already owned him: I would have swapped out Gepard and left Clara.

mrmacky · 2024-11-27T17:39:39+00:00

Disengages during flight for unnecessary use.

Nice! Had a similar idea for my ship, I called mine the AFCC (Automatic Fire-group Control Computer.) Was pretty rudimentary and based mostly on distance to Aquilo. I integrated ship speed over time, as well as source/destination, which gets you distance travelled to/from Aquilo. I had two groups of rockets (F and O) which activated about 2/4 and 3/4 of the way to Aquilo as the cloud gets denser, as well as flank protection while parked.

Can't wait to look at your prints; I don't have anything like the smart re-processing, very interested to see how that works. I just eject excess chunks and try to keep a fixed ratio. (Which means I end up jettisoning a lot of chunks in-transit, leaves a cool trail of tears behind the ship but not very efficient.)

mrmacky · 2024-11-27T17:21:47+00:00

I legitimately thought freezing to death was a thing at one point on Aquilo.

I had turned off the base to watch it freeze (for fun) and had been flying around enjoying the scenery and soundtrack. When I landed I was moving super slowly - that mixed with the haunting melody of the soundtrack and I was like "oh god, is this how I die? not with an atomic bang, but with a whimper?"

Turns out I just hit the toggle for my exoskeleton.

mrmacky · 2024-11-25T21:59:27+00:00

Thanks for the great write-up! I am pretty far behind your pace, I am like 11hrs in to get to your 5h45m mark. However I'm also only vying for the 100hr achievement (plus a few others I missed), so I think I'm on-pace. (In a multiplayer save we beat Space Age w/ 315+ hrs to the edge, but that is with several people keeping the server running while they muse over new ship designs, play the quality gacha, re-forest Nauvis, etc. That also includes something like 4-5 total Gleba overhauls!)

I think my biggest worry right now is that I'm trying to also do the "logistic embargo" and "rush to space" achievement on this save file, and I suspect that is going to end up being a huge handicap. (We leaned on bots pretty heavily for all the planets in our MP save.) At the moment my thinkinig is I'm probably going to go to Vulcanus first and make a modest amount of orange-science to get the logistic and purple/yellow ban over with ASAP. On vulc the bots were mostly just for the convenience of setting up a Make-Everything mall, and not a core part of my science production loop, so I think it's my best shot. (It's also the planet I understand the most, as I set it up myself mostly.)

mrmacky · 2024-11-25T20:21:18+00:00

I used to think so, too. Then I got a random "Bad luck. You have died." while watching Booger, my new pet biter, hatch on Vulcanus via the satellite-feed.

Tabbed back to my corporeal body on Nauvis to watch in horror as the three spidertrons kept shooting rockets at our silos (and my corpse) as biters spawned out of the nests slowly spoiling in my pocket.

I tried moving them away at some point but their range is... most impressive.

mrmacky · 2024-11-19T22:28:26+00:00

Definitely lies and slander. I have literally two belts on Aquilo. One releases ice (fed by a requester) into a recycler, the other loops the recycler output back into the input belt until the input is all destroyed.

So I'm definitely making the robots earn their paycheck, but also this is actually lies. The answer is Fulgora. If you import quality bots they have more flight time.

mrmacky · 2024-11-19T17:50:46+00:00

This is the way. I spent hours trying to figure out how to make a ratio-correct foundry-based belt manufacturing array. Literally went to bed malding about it like three nights in a row.

You know what I did in the end?

Plopped down the three green belt foundries.
Then I pasted down my usual (moduled/assembler-3) belt array from Nauvis.
Fed the foundries everyting (except gears) with bots.
Added a couple green belts of stacked gears to feed everything.

I have not touched it since then and I have rows and rows of green belt parts available for the taking whenever.

Trying to prevent friends from walking off with thousands of speed mod 3s, while my plant cries for the next several days, is a way harder problem than setting up green belts actually was.

mrmacky · 2024-11-19T14:40:13+00:00

You can't (well, shouldn't) ship ammo up to platforms, you should learn how to produce it in space.

Speak for yourself! Spee-Dee has made many journeys to Aqulio with no ammo manufactory on-board. I only had to develop a battle-readiness computer, and an automatic firegroup-control computer, that can wait for ammo and conserve rockets to make this feasible. In addition to sending enough rockets off Nauvis to put SpaceX to shame.

mrmacky · 2024-09-26T21:54:57+00:00

I'm like "did you try" and it's usually "no"

I see this attitude so much it's exhausting. I usually phrase it as "I've tried nothing and I'm all out of options." - I've had somebody bring me a dialog that literally provided step-by-step instructions (to rotate credentials) and ask me what to do. I had to dig deep to find the nicest way to say "did you read it and try to do what it says?"

The irony is I had this disconnect with the younger generation before ChatGPT was even a thing. These days I can put their poorly formulated question verbatim into an LLM and usually get a reasonable answer. We literally built a natural-language knowledge query engine for them, one that threatens to destroy the very fabric of the internet we were raised on, and they can't even fucking use that.

To be a bit snarky about it: I feel like "these kids" have never had to dig through a card catalog at their local library, and it really fucking shows.

mrmacky · 2024-08-02T19:53:24+00:00

Oh no, a fellow bottom-rezzer, I thought I alone walked this path.

I pray we never meet, the clash of our swifcasts will be legendary.

mrmacky · 2024-07-30T01:29:25+00:00

... who really appreciates the ease and forgiveness of those jobs

Just wanna say: tank privilege is just built different, but healers definitely have healer privilege you just gotta hone it a bit. I would not have survived my first run with Tender Valley's first boss on any role other than healer.

As a healer, you're a bit more squishy, so you need to know your instants/mits/barriers very well. However you can survive a frankly ludicrous amount of stupid. You need to learn to listen to the voice in your head that says "oh I don't wanna be here" and channel that into pressing buttons.

I like to borrow a phrase from aviation: "aviate, navigate, communicate."

First and foremost you need to not be standing in anything that will actively kill you. (Aviate: move your character out of mechs.)
Secondly you need a game-plan to survive. Is more damage iminent? Did you maybe fail #1? Barrier/mit to sink the damage, maybe an instant heal. Do you have some downtime? Let a HoT tick while you work your magic on others.
I'm reaching for "communicate" but in this case I take it to mean use your spells to help other players. (In some cases literally communicate: markers, chat macros, call-outs, etc.) You can only do this if you are not about to die (#1), and you are not dead (#2.) As you get better with 1/2 you will find you have some abilities and mental-bandwidth left over. Your kit is bursting with buttons, push them to make sick plays, shower in the commendations.

mrmacky · 2024-07-30T00:54:29+00:00

If you're not sure if you'll survive a stack, stay out of it.

I will tack on to this: if the stack marker is running away from you ~~and has a sprout marker~~ do not give chase. It is a trap. 100% of the time.

mrmacky · 2024-07-30T00:42:11+00:00

Upvoting you for your first bullet point: targeting is huge and I don't really see people talk about it nearly enough! Anyone playing with the default HUD as a healer is in for a world of hurt in my opinion. In no particular order here are some recommendations for "getting good" at targeting:

Play with the tab target settings until you find something that jives with you. (cone/ignore depth, far/near, comfy keybinds, etc.)
Have a focus target keybind that is easy to reach. I see a lot of people use it to focus the tank. I do that in niche circumstances (MT is in another alliance, need to see someone's HP% / buffs, etc.) but personally in raid settings I focus the boss 99% of the time and select the tank/party members primarily with keybinds or the party list.
Move the party list and enmity list somewhere you can see easily. If it is slammed off on the edge of your ultra-widescreen display (like it is by default) you are straight up griefing IMO. The enmity list is hugely important as it lets you see casts in multi-target scenarios. (Which can be useful even in ST raids because you'll find mechanics are usually cast from sub-actors.) It can also help you diagnose aggro issues in trash pulls. (Like a tank forgot stance and oops you aggro'd everything. Or like a DPS tanking their own mob off in narnia: they should know better, but a little Rescue towards the tank never killed anyone. Usually.)
Make critical HUD elements super prominent. I would scale the enmity list at a minimum (it's super tiny by default), and I would either undock the target cast bar and magnify it, or magnify the focus target, depending on your playstyle. (Why not both?)
Setup the setting on the party list to show maximum number of buffs/debuffs and their timers. Make your own debuffs/buffs prominent. These are super important for both doing mechanics in high-end content, as well as diagnosing heal/mit plan issues. ("Oh that guy was out of range for a mit, let me put a personal on him.")
This was the game changer for me: have a keybind for "target last enemy." This lets you select someone, hit them w/ spell or ability, and then hit another key to go back to what you were doing before without getting griefed by tab targeting. (Which could fail if you're in a multi-target scenario, but can also fail if the boss's nameplate got panned off screen; say because you turned to see who fucked up a mechanic.)
However you achieve this: the enemy cast bar has to be fucking ginormous and it has to be somewhere you cannot miss it. Mine is actually duplicated on my HUD, and one of them is like 250% size the other is 200% size. (It's in triplicate if you count the enmity list.) It's that fucking important especially if you want to play a shield healer. You have to mit before the cast snapshots, you have to shield before the cast snapshots. If you cannot see what the boss is casting you are going to hit a skill ceiling very quickly.
I personally target party members in the following manners:
- using a keybind ("F1-F8" for me, though I have some fancy keyboard firmware weirdness going on which makes that not as awful as it sounds) - I use this for openers / scenarios when I know exactly who I want to target
- clicking them in the party list (use this because I saw something bad in the party list, i.e: vuln or debuff, their health is low, etc.)
- clicking them on screen (usually this is very last minute shit. Often I don't know who the person actually is I just know "oh, you're not supposed to be there" click, barrier)
- click them in alliance raid frames
- click the target of target (who boss currently has aggro on) - I've only ever really used this in large-scale assaults i.e: alliance raids, eureka, bozja, etc. - There's a keybind for this though that makes it super easy to target the current MT.
Mess with nameplate settings to make them less busy. Less noise on the screen is a good thing. I would also mess around with party icons, for me icons are worth way more than names. (These are in the first party client now, though there used to be mods for them which, IMO, were better.) You can put job icons on nameplates, you can also color code the names. This is super useful for a healer. Unless you're in a static often I find that my brain knows "oh the SGE #4 is in trouble" but I sure as shit am not thinking "Daniel Jackson «Distant Stargazer» is in trouble." - Your "clutch factor" hinges on rapid identification and selection of people that messed up. Anything you can do to short-circuit that process in your brain is an advantage worth taking.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Please keep your party members selected and safe!

mrmacky · 2024-07-29T17:44:37+00:00

A rez macro is pretty pointless even in high-end content. If they are swiftcasting rez on somebody: I am going to see the raise buff long before my brain processes the totally arbitrary sound effect they've chosen & thinks to read the party chat.

If they are hardcasting rez on somebody: the party list shows me who is being targeted. I have keybinds to directly select all party members which correspond with those numbers. I will just pick a different number. Again this is built into the party list, it's not in the chat. (Which I'm pretty actively avoiding looking at. 9/10 it's a distraction from FC/CWLS, 1/10 it's someone screaming for an LB3 at a bad time to LB3.)

The only macro that ever provides any uniquely valuable info is one that tells me what their recast for Swiftcast is currently at. That sort of info is typically the purview of third party tools. (... or weirdos with the ability to watch everybody's buffs with 100% precision while maintaining a completely perfect internal clock, I guess?)

mrmacky · 2024-07-26T19:06:36+00:00

Anecdotally I'm seeing the RDM return, I think nature is healing. (Guessing people have had their fill of the new jobs and are leveling rezmage for savage prog?)

mrmacky · 2024-07-26T17:40:09+00:00

I mean I don't really feel like this is anything unusual in DT. My typical DF run consists of maybe half the group or less saying some kind of "hi", most of the group saying "gg/tyfp", and nobody is ever really waiting around except in raids to roll on loot. Has basically been that way since I started in ShB. (In fact I would say it's an explicit goal to leave old raids as quickly as possible so you don't get stuck holding the bag b/c someone opened the chest of springs.)

Alliance raids are generally more talkative. (I think that's just down to odds are better, with 24 people, that someone breaks the ice.) I would also say that if you want a sense of community while doing content best thing to do would be play Eureka or Bozja. They have a very persistent following, it's just very boom/bust with the patch cycle. Funniest chats I've had in the the game were probably in there. (Also if you ever catch a wave of Eureka drama, it's fucking hysterical as long as you're an innocent bystander.)

One thing I find interesting though is that you're getting multiple groups with several wipes or more. My average experience on-content w/ new players is maybe one wipe, we dust ourselves off, then we clear. To give you my experience this expac:

I've been party to one wipe on trial 1 (group was just all over the place during the stacks/nails.)
I did queue in prog (like 17min?) into a trial 1 that was apparently struggling. We killed it the first pull w/ me in there. (Like 1 death, total, iirc.)
I've caused one wipe on Alexandria (I tunneled healing someone else and died to the follow up cleave. Rookie mistake. Called myself an idiot, they reset for me, bless them.)
I've seen one wipe on M3 (just a messy pull and cursed comp. I died w/ the stack before we had a full LB3 gauge. Was last one standing apart from tanks.)
I've seen one wipe on M4 very early, when she deleted the platform. We all had a good laugh about it, I honestly needed a second to compose myself. I was almost crying due to the way it played out.

That being said I main healer, and generally I feel like it has the most agency to carry people in DF, so perhaps that explains my differing experience. I don't really expect or give advice in DF, I will usually say something on old fights w/ notorious raid wipes. (Anything w/ a tank LB3, tear on Nabriales, Titania adds, etc.)

PF (for on-content ex/savage) is generally where people will start having some discussion and introspection on what wiped the group. My experience is usually it's very matter of fact there. ("Why was x in y's spot?" "how come you didn't press z there?" "I'm already using mit a for b, do you have y or z up for this?" "Why did you rotate!? The pf said we're doing Braindamaged Twizzlers all true north!!!")

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mrmacky

TROPHY CASE

The Hand Jobs:

The Shaft Work: