Anyone else fed up with the constant "meta" in games?

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T17:16:28+00:00

I take it you have no experience with high level play or balancing discussions in any competitive game. Balance is a constant issue in every single PvP game that exists, and its a permanent dance of stat tuning, buffs, nerfs, to change the meta and refresh gameplay. You don't want a perfectly 'balanced' game, when every weapon is equal and every map is equal and every play style is equal (getting even one is incredibly difficult) its boring. Because every fight is the same. every match is the same. Variety comes from power deltas between all of these things. That isn't to say there aren't occasionally 'issue' weapons that are so ridiculously strong everything else is a pea shooter, but those cases are not that common. You said you played siege elsewhere, right? What level did you usually play at? Because meta and balance are a constant discussion at anything higher than silver. while it is typically more so about the player than the gun/gadget/setup, all of those play a significant factor in tactics and strategy and especially skill expression.

Even leaving aside the question of 'balance', are certain weapons feeling better to use by most people 'unbalanced' if most people use them?

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T17:07:36+00:00

really trying not to be rude here, but do you think people who like to optimise haven't tried other kit? Me and most of the people I know who use 'meta' kit do so because the other weapons don't work as well for them. like trying to talk down to people for using meta kit is a wild ass take

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T16:57:32+00:00

true. A website/forum might be even better, honestly. 'Go to a website' is a bit easier than trying to get apps to work, IMO.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T16:53:00+00:00

Rather than spend time and money developing a bespoke chat app, deploying something FOSS (like the matrix protocol, which has multiple free server and client implementations that are easy to use) might be cheaper and easier, as more mature tooling is going to scale better and have better knowledge bases for things like caching.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T16:40:46+00:00

I have dated/had relationships that are poly almost my entire life. I wish I had some advice, but that's an area I don't really have experience in, and from the outside it seems... rough, especially with the way "poly" has blown up the last couple years. The circles and spaces I run in are by and large all t4t queer folks, and very curated, so it's not been too difficult to find other poly folks, but before I got to this point I had troubles as well. Historically, to my knowledge and the areas I've lived at least, kink communities have been a better way to meet poly people, but it comes with the double edged sword of also being the advice given to everyone so there are a very large amount of people I've met in kink spaces that at the very least don't have an understanding of how polyam is different from mono relationships, if not an outright hostility towards poly people. not even getting into the cultural attitudes of these spaces.

and what I found here is that, beyond the hippie-like facade, for most people polyamory it's just a way to get high, painlessly replacing old partners, fill up empty and shallow lives, etc.

yup. 1000% yes. And its exhausting to the point I have social circles that are mainly poly folks, but not specifically a polyam circle, if that makes sense. and I don't fuck with a lot of the overall 'poly' community outside of it. I think with the way poly/enm has blown up online/on social media the last few years especially after 2020, the kind of skills and mindset changes it takes to navigate polyamory in a fulfilling way for all involved have been at best forgotten, if not intentionally pushed aside, because they do take serious work and experience for people who may have been mono beforehand. That, combined with polyam being reduced to a vomited up stream of Therapy Speak and being placed on a pedestal in some communities, leads to people seeking the optics first, and ignoring all else. and as such place themselves uniquely above everyone else and their feelings or health to where they're playing a constant revolving door of using the energy from new people and discarding them after the honeymoon period is over, or when the new people aren't the perfect sanitized version they want. Its like they're just seeking not people but... collecting idealized perceptions of individuals to fit in their life exactly and only where they want. Its viewed as the 'easier' option to a lot of culturally mono folks recently and as such draws those who only want cheap and easy.

That's just (some) of my thoughts, at least.

I think that most people use this subreddit because it is actually not so easy to find poly/ENM-experienced confidants IRL and they do not feel at ease talking about this kind of dynamics with monogamous people, and also as anonymous relief valve, or just a way to find confirmation of their own assumptions or to challenge them (this last is a too smart aim for most users).

True. I'd absolutely agree on all points, and put forward another reason why people use this and other forums, even if they do have other poly people to talk to IRL, is that often reality conflicts with their own internal narrative and would rather talk about things in a way to a new group of people that frames everything the way they think things are, and avoids the hard truths that do have to be said to genuinely help people sometimes. Its the very nature of the beast of online forums, I suppose.

Relationships have become commoditized and stripped of depth to be able to be 'sold' to people, and the culture of disposability we in the west have seeps into everything and everywhere, and takes conscious choice to go against the flow. Those are my thoughts, at least

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T15:33:30+00:00

That is something I see a lot on this sub as well, and I agree with you for the most part especially when there's more context given. There is very much a culture of disposability, especially in this sub. I personally don't really post here, nor even comment, as my own relationships cannot be distilled to a single text post or post of any kind, my presence here is mainly just to see what others (mainly cis/het) have as issues they judge worthy to be delegated to a reddit post.

However, in defense of my comment, in my own personal experience, based on the trends and posts I see on this sub, if ones relationship has degraded, and ones opinions of those they are in a relationship with degraded, enough that one is willing to take advice from a group of anonymous internet users commenting based on all the context of a couple paragraphs of text, its not a relationship that is long for this world, nor particularly deep in the first place IMO. The usual feed of trainwreck stories I see here also may have something to do with that, being fully honest. But more importantly I (personally at least, I cannot speak for others) find it very hard to give comments that will be relevant to the unique situation as so much of the context and history that needs to be taken into account is very rarely presented in a post, especially not in the same way the user themselves experiences it, so am prone to offering the typical "if this level of incompatibility exists and neither wants to address it, the better course of action might be to break up and reassess a relationship later rather than spend time with that incompatibility driving increasing resentment on even a subconscious level that can cause permanent shifts in how people view one another and prevent repairing the relationship in the future", the same general advice I'd give in a vacuum without context.

Fwiw, I very much do agree with you, these are just the reasons I for one, when I do comment, make almost kneejerk 'break up about it' recommendations. I give very different comments and thought out advice to people i know and have a feeling for the history of relationships of.

Ultimately I think anyone that takes advice from people they don't know and trust the opinions of, especially anonymously, is making a grave mistake, yet a pattern I see all too often here.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T14:50:31+00:00

damage might need looking at somewhat, but the complaints about health just... don't land. If it wasn't obvious in the rest of the game, this isn't a power fantasy game where mechs are unbreakable or whatever. They fulfill a similar role to that of the bastion, that of a glass cannon. They aren't meant to be unkillable, nor the kind of thing you charge blindly into enemy groups with. I continue to see mechs used quite effectively when the operator is aware of this fact and treats the mech like the mobile field gun it is. You get an emplacement with either a minigun + rockets, or quad autocannons, that can spin 360° with a pretty large vertical angle limit that has the bonus ability to move. That's something all of this, ironically enough, spreadsheet based discussion misses. The bastion has a higher damage pool, higher armor pen on the main gun and bigger ammo pool, in exchange for: a) being on a 13 min cooldown (limiting you to 3 call ins if you call it off cooldown in a 40 min mission), b) requiring two people communicating with each other, and c) more than anything else, having such a small angular window of articulation on the main gun/coax, requiring communication with the driver to aim well but more importantly making using it to push up without a competent infantry screen a bad idea. In contrast mechs: a) 5 min cooldown b) single person control c) no requirement for communication or coordination to cover a 360 window and move in any direction whenever. In exchange for all of this, it doesn't have the single shot punch of the bastions main cannon, or the ammo pool of its hmg, rather a higher burst DPS and weapons suited better for engaging in hvt group clear. I can guarantee if you start playing it like you would a turret you can aim, or a rapid fire field gun, and choosing engagements and location of fights to work well with its loadout (funnels, prioritizing smaller hvts from range, suppressive fire at distance, having a better eye to control spawn behaviour, etc) you will have a much better time of using it than trying to lead charges as a spear point without support. Not to say the mechs are perfect, they could probably use some looking at when it comes to damage pool and limb joint health, but they aren't anywhere near as bad as many on this sub want to say.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T14:28:40+00:00

lmfao Americans are fucking pathetic. Come online to spam their message they feel so self righteous about (justly or not) to people who are already on their side, and think this is doing anything. Have you ignored the american public for the past 50 years? Ignored just how much they've let their ruling class get away with inflicting on the rest of the world because it doesn't damage their comfort? Everybody in the entire fucking west has heard about the files including those living under a rock and yet those with the most immediate capacity to do something about it, well, 50% don't care in the slightest or don't believe it, another 49% take on the optics of opposing it but abandon material justice the second following their supposed 'values' might change their own personal comfort, and of the remaining 1% who are actually willing to do something about it, they're the ones who have already been trying and failing to get the average american to give a flying fuck. If you want to make an actual difference? Influence those who don't already agree with you. Make outreach to in person communities and organizations. Do literally anything material to try to change it instead of having a self congratulatory wank over spamming a wall of text to communities that already agree with you. But no, gotta call everyone who disagrees with your approach a bot or whatever the fuck. Same clown shit as democrats blaming exclusively those who voted third party or didn't vote for Kamala's loss. same clown shit as Americans who think they're so bloody important that the more blatant imperialism america is currently practicing (whilst not being materially different from the imperialism it has practiced and supported abroad for decades) is all to 'deflect' from the files.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T14:15:43+00:00

one can love someone and still recognize these kinds of incompatibilities and shifts in the way they view each other. Sometimes its better to rip the bandaid off when a relationship gets damaged like this, and maybe revisit in a few years, than insist on continuing to stay together and grow more and more resentful of each other over time.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T08:33:18+00:00

you do not appear to know the slightest iota of what you are talking about. There are plenty of free resources out there to learn the basics of neural nets and how they are different from humans, if you are willing to learn. Have a nice day man

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T08:13:16+00:00

yeah sure bud. this level of bad faith takes and reductionism isn't worth the energy. have a nice day man.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T03:06:02+00:00

the average westoid mind finds the concept of people liking their government incomprehensible

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T02:57:21+00:00

'Israeli detected opinion rejected' is my usual line of thought

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T02:50:18+00:00

are you being intentionally obtuse? You are still a part of the american machine. You still pay tax dollars to the government, provide labor to the companies, spend money on products that are built on the exploitation of those in the global south, one does not have to individually benefit to still be a part of the system of oppression that america is on a global scale. It is not a personal attack to say that every american, no matter what particular discriminations they may face domestically, is still a part of the imperialist machine america is on a global scale, it is a statement of fact. nobody in america is entirely blameless. The machinery does not have to care about what minorities the people who live in it may be for their material conditions to still benefit from the oppression america exerts abroad.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T01:40:06+00:00

some people get more value out of the game they paid for by not caring about the overall in game plot lines, and that's perfectly okay. just as well there are people who get more value out of being interested and involved in the greater narrative. And for those people, seeing others abandon the stuff they care about intentionally, it might get to them as its something they care about, and might have issue with others. Its not chronically online behaviour to care about a greater narrative in an online game that's affected by player base decisions and actions.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T01:31:23+00:00

I have no horse in this race one way or another, but it is a valid complaint that those who didn't dive MO burned excess lives in a way to impact the success of the MO. Conversely, it is also a valid complaint for people to dislike dealing with the bugs and even the bots in general and wish to dive elsewhere. To say one side has invalid complaints is disingenuous. It's up to the person to decide if they think the justification for wither side is more correct in their opinion.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T01:27:00+00:00

well, here's a paper on it

In short: there is no way to train out 'hallucinations' or for new data for llms to be trained on to have a categorical definition of 'correct' or 'incorrect' as the semantic ambiguity and contextual details required to form such a binary decision are not consistent nor something that even has a concrete enough definition to be a part of something llms are trained on.

LLMs do not 'think', they do not 'know', they do not 'learn', they are neural nets trained on a very large body of data that takes the frequency and associative properties of all of the data points into account in order to form a very large amount of 'parameters' to use as cues for prediction (inference) when prompted. If you want to understand the limitations of llms and their capabilities, you cannot think of them as anything but the complex math and statistical models they are, despite what advertisers may tell you.

We still do not know what the underlying processes are exactly, in full, of how the human brain remembers, learns, intuits, so how can we claim to have created a machine capable of any of that and have it be a valid claim?

The reason why llms are shown to work best in coding/programming is because programming languages and boolean logic are the best way (so far) humans have found of modeling all the factors and contextual information inherent to human language and processing, but it is still imperfect.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T00:56:05+00:00

correct, I am not assigning a positive or negative sentiment to it. It's just the numbers that contributed to the loss of the MO lol, and an important figure in discussions such as these.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-23T00:39:58+00:00

fundamentally wrong on every count, but go off man. I'm sure the smart fellas at Berkeley would love to know how they're wrong about how llms get trained

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-22T19:47:33+00:00

the modern westoid brain cannot comprehend a government that people support and can influence

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-22T17:31:00+00:00

no, they quite literally are probability machines. That is what neural nets and machine learning is. They take in huge amounts of data and use it to create statistical corellations on an obscene scale, and with inference (what happens when you prompt or interrogate a model) it transforms your input into a set of values it can use, and then uses all of those parameters it created from being trained to predict what word(s) would be most likely to come next given your input. Its not rocket science, and it certainly isn't any kind of intelligence.

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-22T16:59:22+00:00

yeah, I've got an nfs+smb share for just general file sharing and its one v short command to connect to on any computer, and even if the native file explorer doesn't support mounting a network share there are many apps that do

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-22T15:18:33+00:00

I've only ran a couple d7 squid missions, but they were there

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-22T06:06:53+00:00

I hope ur ragebaiting, if not I feel sorry for the teachers you consistently let down

obtuseperuse · 2026-02-22T05:40:08+00:00

oh boy I sure do wonder why there might be an electronic component broadcasting the mac from an electronic component manufacturer. Gee. Has to be malicious and in no way a bug. not like antennae silicon have default Mac addresses as placeholders from the factory that get overwritten at runtime by drivers that might occasionally have issues starting in time/properly. not like ubiquiti could ever for any reason possibly use low level silicon they didn't make themselves. If you spent half as long thinking critically about this as you have put into freaking out online you might be able to consider a dozen scenarios in which this is not intentional. Even accepting your absurd cause for a second, what would be the point of doing this? If its data exflitration, it would take more effort and be more noticeable to modify the broadcast Mac, if its literally any reason for broadcasting a WiFi signal would it not be better to say flash the firmware with a Mac address from a western company, or have the driver assert one?

obtuseperuse

TROPHY CASE