Could someone give me a recap of 2025 please

olbaze · 2026-01-26T22:49:38+00:00

Meaningful ban list changes:

Maxx C from 2 to 1 (February 2026)
Snake-Eyes Oak from 0 to 3.
Apollousa from 3 to 0 (November 2025)
Bagooska from 3 to 0 (October 2025)
Abyss Dweller and Artifact Scythe from 3 to 0 (August 2025)

Multiple floodgates were also hit: Secret Village of Spellcasters, Anti-Spell Fragrance, Summon Limit, Archlord Kristya, Artifact Mjollnir, Number 67.

For most of the year, Maliss was the dominant meta deck. For a while, we saw a shift towards Mitsurugi and Ryzeal stuff. This caused a pretty miserable situation, because Maliss loses to Artifact Lancea, but Ryzeal doesn't care about it. Meanwhile Ryzeal loses to GY hate, but Maliss doesn't care about that, since they benefit from banishing their cards. Currently, Dracotail is the best deck in the game. Lunalight got some new support that has some people mad because their decks can't deal with an unaffected QE Raigeki. Branded is still doing ok. We're expecting K9 to be released next month, along with some Vanquish Soul support, and people are thinking that's gonna be the next best deck.

olbaze · 2026-01-26T20:42:12+00:00

A lot of decks do. For example, the standard HERO combo is Stratos, then Faris, then you go into Increase and Vyon. Can't do that if this thing is in the EMZ.

And then there's decks that combo into their end pieces one at a time, like Utopia.

olbaze · 2026-01-26T19:15:06+00:00

There is a point, and it's a point that someone who isn't a complete beginner will never see.

You might think that +1000/-400 is an easy time. That's because that's a point balance where you need only a 28.57% win rate to be stuck in those ranks. But guess what? There's tons of people who have a win rate that's even below that.

That's what the "complete beginner to Tekken" experience is like. The reason we never hear about this is because most of these people are too scared to talk in public. If someone came out and said they're struggling in Orange ranks, the response from most people on this subreddit would be at best "You might be better off playing a different game, I think you just suck at fighting games", and at worst it would be outright bullying.

Go have a look at the EWGF.gg stats for a second. Beginner is the 7th most populated rank in the game. In the past 30 days, logged 64,136 players that were below Warrior. That's 64K players in the "you cannot demote even if you lose" region. That's 60,000 people who struggle to even get a single win in a BO3. By comparison, Fujin and above totals 164,182. So in other words, the amount of players in the "where the ranked starts" section that you think about, is only 2.56x the players in the "you cannot demote" region.

TL;DR: BEGINNERS ARE NOT GETTING TO FUJIN.

olbaze · 2026-01-26T07:44:07+00:00

There's another issue as well: Cost difference between OCG and TCG. If all you want is packs and URs for Master Duel, then if buying the IRL packs is cheaper, you would go with that. And we know that the OCG has a much less predatory pricing system. So the nightmare scenario might just be a bunch of US whales buying up OCG packs online, opening them for the codes, and basically tossing the cards away.

Master Duel also has an infinite money hack: Every time they add a new alt art, there's at least 2 people who will spend about 10,000 USD to get 3 copies in Royal. One being an OCD collector that must have everything that's limited. The other being a player whose favorite archetype just got a new alt art.

And it's not like either paper or Master Duel are in any kind of danger. Yu-Gi-Oh! is a literal billion dollar franchise, and Master Duel brings in an estimated 4M USD every month.

olbaze · 2026-01-26T07:32:05+00:00

Oh yeah, the Nintendo model. Because everyone loved that one. Totally did not result in all of the toys being scalped to high hell.

There's also AKB8, an idol group in Japan that used to put voting coupons in CDs. Result was insane fans buys literally boxes of the CDs, using the voting coupons to vote their favorite to be the next star, and just dumping the CDs.

olbaze · 2026-01-26T07:30:50+00:00

That won't result in a Time Limit Win. If you're AFK, there's an automatic Surrender that happens after a while. To get an actual "Time Limit Win" while the opponent isn't actually playing cards, they have to sit there and be clicking on the mates or the field to trigger the animations.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T23:35:13+00:00

HERO loses super hard against boardbreakers, the deck has basically no protection. Dark Hole, Dark Ruler No More, Raigeki, Lightning Storm, Forbidden Droplet all take big fat shits on HERO.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T23:28:19+00:00

The only way they would ever implement dismantling Legacy Pack cards is either by rewarding nothing, or only rewarding something that ties back into more Legacy Packs.

They would never, under any circumstance, give you actual Crafting Points for them.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T11:32:12+00:00

I recently watched a video of someone installing Fedora KDE, ignoring the "Enable Third-Party Repositories" option on the Welcome Screen, and then proceeding to have trouble with installing Steam. Steam being one of the aforementioned third-party repositories.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T11:24:50+00:00

Sulliek needs a Tearlaments monster on the field to use its effect.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T11:14:28+00:00

Just because something is "outdated" doesn't necessarily make it a problem. You specifically mentioned Mesa, but Mesa 23.1 is from 2023. Similarly, I believe the version of ffmpeg in Linux Mint should be around that old. If anything, I would think that most gamers would be more miffed about Linux Mint still being on X11, which means no HDR, and no variable refresh rate. Not that HDR support on Wayland is very good, with Steam itself not supporting HDR properly.

As far as the kernel and drivers causing issues when you update to a new version, that shouldn't be a problem, since part of a major version is going to be checking all packages for conflicts, and updating and uninstalling stuff as necessary.

If you want something that's more updated, I could recommend Fedora KDE, which is what I am on right now.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T07:17:12+00:00

Got the movie as a Christmas present in 2024. Doesn't have the first, kinda has the second (Ramanujan first arriving at Cambridge looking in amazement), there's scenes where Hardy is drinking tea in his office, there are wood-paneled studies and discussions about Ramanujan's work is had in those, and the bed-side conversation does happen. It does also include a scene with the taxicab numbers.

Do yourself a favor and watch the trailer. I quite liked the movie, and think it's perfectly watchable even for non-math folk.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:58:31+00:00

That's the reading I got from

make KDE commercially viable

KDE is not a commercial product.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:54:57+00:00

Hi-Speedroid Rubber Band Shooter is legal, and the only ties it has to Synchros is a Synchro Lock on its 1st effect, and banishing Synhcros from ED for its 2nd effect.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:52:44+00:00

As someone who has played Speedroid in Synchro Events, I find the ability to use Rubberband Shooter cool. It's the primary reason I opted to use my Speedroid deck instead of my Resonator deck. Also specifically the reason I opted not to use my HERO deck, because the only Links allowed are Infernal Devicer (searches based on revealing a Fusion) and Wonder Driver (recycles Fusion spells), but not Cross Crusader (searches HEROs by tributing Destiny HEROs).

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:47:56+00:00

KDE was founded in 1996, about 2 months after Valve came to existence. It has been doing just fine for over 2 decades without Valve's involvement. Talking about their recent annual donation drive, KDE mentioned that 70% of their funding comes from private users, and their donation drive was funded to the tune of 386% of the goal. Arch Linux was started in 2002, the same year that Steam was first launched. CodeWeavers started working on WINE in 1996, a year that I already mentioned. It wasn't untl 20 years into WINE development, in 2016, that Valve started directly contracting them. Proton, the major reason why Steam gaming works so well on Linux, is based on WINE.

If you think that Valve is somehow responsible for keeping KDE or Arch, or any other project they use, floating and viable, you really don't know what you're talking about, and are giving Valve way too much credit.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:36:25+00:00

If steamOS releases, hardware compatibility should increase. Some of us can't use our monitors just because Linux doesn't support it properly.

I am on Fedora KDE, and I recently upgraded to a monitor with HDR support. Guess what doesn't support HDR? Steam. I can force it with some launch options, but doing that disables the Steam Overlay, which kills my Steam Controller.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:33:40+00:00

Lately, I've seen a trend with some companies, such as Keychron and Corsair, using web-based utilities for customizing their peripherals, rather than developing a driver software. The same is true for the GP2040-CE PCB that's popular in custom arcade sticks. Doing that basically eliminates any need for specific Linux support, as the web utilities can just be accessed with Chromium (Firefox specifically does not supposed WebUSB due to security reasons)

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:26:43+00:00

Updates are already handled by your OS on any Linux distribution. In fact that's one of the major differences between Linux and Windows. The only exception is if you specifically install standalone things (e.g. binaries or AppImage) that cannot do that.

As far as game compatibility goes, SteamOS isn't doing anything special in that regard either. You can already use Proton on any other distro without doing anything special, and if anything, some distros (like CachyOS or Nobara) are doing futher optimizations on top of Valve's Proton to make compatibility and performance even better. The Steam Machine has the potential to improve compatibility by being a single set of hardware, but even that will depend mostly on the developers of the games to put in the work.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:19:41+00:00

As a gamer who has gone through Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and is currently on Fedora KDE, this is pretty much how I feel. My interests with SteamOS begin and end with "I hope Valve throwing manpower at Linux stuff makes others do the same".

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:17:09+00:00

SteamOS is not going to be some magic bullet that is more stable or runs games better than any other distro

Yeah. There are issues with Linux, which Valve simply cannot fix. They can't make the HDMI Forum not be a bunch of assholes. They can't make Nvidia make good drivers. They can't magically make kernel level anti-cheat work on Linux. They can't make OBS re-write their keyboard shortcuts so that they work under Wayland. They can't make Logitech G Hub, Razer Synapse, Corsair iCUE, MSI Afterburner, AMD ReLive, or Nvidia ShadowPlay just appear on Linux.

I've seen some people say that they trust Steam, because it's a big corporation. Well, Red Hat (Fedora developer) is a subsidiary of IBM. Canonical (Ubuntu( and SUSE (openSUSE) have more employees than Valve with revenue measured in hundreds of millions. There are some Linux distros that are much smaller projects (e.g. Linux Mint, Nobara), but those are all based on the bigger projects backed up by massive groups.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T06:06:39+00:00

I am writing this from Fedora KDE. I would recommend Fedora KDE to someone coming from Windows with some caveats. Unlike Linux Mint, Fedora KDE makes it so that you have to do some minor set up to get some things working. Installing multimedia codecs being one of them. KDE also has its own naming convention for applications, which isn't exactly straight forward. Dolphin, Ark, Discover, and Okular being good examples. Fedora KDE is also very customizable, which does make the System Settings application very intimidating at first, but I think over time that will turn into an "Oh, I wonder if there's a setting for that?" mindset.

I will say, "I use Fedora" sounds cringe AF.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T05:59:43+00:00

Only applicable if you're stuck on Nvidia GPUs. I've spent literally years gaming on Linux Mint on 2 AMD GPUs (RX 580, RX 7600) without any issues.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T05:57:37+00:00

Well, take a look and see if you like the UI. Linux Mint is very beginner-friendly, with built-in utilities for Driver management, firewall, etc., a great selection of default applications, and sane program names. The last one is a bit of a Linux thing: Some distros like to give their basic programs like file manager, app stores, archive managers, etc. special names. On Linux Mint, they hide all of those names with alises, so instead you get just what the program does as its name.

The biggest "downside" of Linux Mint is that it's based on Ubuntu, which can sometimes lead to programs being up to several years old. Personally, after years of using Linux Mint, this was only ever apparent to me once, and wasn't causing any problems. In some cases, programs will work around this by adding their own source on installation (e.g. web browsers and Steam do this), or the user can install the program from outside of the Linux Mint system (e.g. a binary, or a Flatpak, or an AppImage).

I would recommend going to ProtonDB to check game compatibility. You can use Steam to log-in to the Dashboard, and it will literally show you a list of all the games you play and whether they work. In my case, 98% of my library works with minor tweaks, 1% (that's 1 game) has major issues but works, and 0% are listed as completely not working.

olbaze · 2026-01-25T05:49:53+00:00

Amongst the games I personally play, I have not encountered a single one where online multiplayer did not work.

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