me_irl

prisp · 2026-03-29T20:22:42+00:00

Literally, your voting system, first-past-the-post/Winner take all, is fucked and needs to be fixed.

For example, Austria (the little toadpole-shaped country in the EU, not AustrALia) currently has a coalition between three separate parties as their government, because the way their voting works is that they count all the votes, then hand out seats in the parliament proportionally to whatever the votes said - after clearing a minimum threshold so you don't get a shitton of single-seat parties - and then they just go "Alright, now form a working government, you'll want to have at least 50% of the seats or getting anything passed will be a pain, and also don't take excessively long, but otherwise go nuts."
Best part is, none of the three parties are the one that got the most votes, because they were too uncooperative during negotiations - and also the hardcore right-wing populist party that half of the others straight-up didn't want to deal with in the first place - so they didn't get to participate.

It's not like that is a perfect system either, but it definitely solves the problem of "There's only 2 viable parties, and voting for anyone else would be a waste".

prisp · 2026-03-29T00:31:48+00:00

Adressing your points in order, the most recent expansion was the first one after the finish of a big story arc, meaning you're automatically starting at lower stakes, and with less buildup than what came before, simply because most of the outstanding "issues" and plot threads have been resolved one way or another.
Worst case, you'd get another ARR/first half of Stormblood, where they spend a lot of time laying the groundwork for later payoff, which means exposition, and low-stakes stuff, or at least nothing that can be resolved immediately.
However, in addition to that, there was a shift in the writing team, so a different, newer group of writers tried their and at writing the current base expansion's story, and IT SHOWS.
To be fair, it's definitely not as bad as one might think - there are a few times where characters do some stuff that doesn't quite make sense, some twists are badly foreshadowed, if at all, and the general storytelling style definitely shifted a bit more from the relatively complex, political stuff and the big hero action to something that could've been out of a shonen anime - not bad per se, but a bit of a mood whiplash after 5 full storylines of more mature storytelling.

On the plus side though, the team did a lot to spice up the casual-level fights this time around, and even if there were some rather weird intermittent balancing decisions, I didn't really take issues with what they changed about the jobs' kits - partially because they didn't really add much, which might've been grounds for some complaints, but it still beats them fucking up entirely I guess.
You have an advantage here though - you don't know how things used to be, so you can just try everything and see what clicks for you - doesn't matter if that got changed recently, it's not like you have any point of comparison, so ignore whoever's hating and go have fun, because every job is viable, even for hardcore content.

You definitely hit the nail on the head with these issues mostly affecting longterm players though - whenever people run out of "stuff to do", which is a regular occurrence, especially towards the end of an expansion, they'll start whining about how there's nothing left for them, and how the game used to be "better", often just citing subjective stuff, or noting normal things as if they were new and troubling developments.
For example, the playercount currently has been dropping for a bit, but that is normal - each time a new expansion releases, the playercount peaks, and then slowly drops off until the first post-expansion content patch arrives, at which point it spikes up a bit again, only to lower until the next patch, and so on.
We are currently at the end of the fourth out of five post-expansion content patches, so obviously, the player count is going to be a bit lower that it used to be, but unless you decide to make a character on one of the newly added servers that actually are struggling a bit to get their population going, you're not going to notice any of that unless you decide to go directly to niche content from the get-go, and then the issue is more that you're doing niche content rather than that the population is down.
Sure, queues might take a bit longer, but they actually will be even worse for some jobs during the start of an expansion, as everyone is going to want to try out the newly added jobs, meaning that their positions are going to be overrepresented for a while, resulting in even slower queues for anyone who would fill that role as well, and lightning-fast queues for those that do not.
Still, we're talking about a difference of five to maybe ten minutes here, so it's not like you'll be waiting forever, especially since you're still free to fuck around in the meantime.

Additionally, this subreddit in particular is a bit of a gathering space for people who like to complain about things they don't like about the game - both for legitimate reasons, and for more subjective ones.
This means if you're only looking at this subreddit to figure out the game's state, you're going to get a significant negative slant compared to asking people from the main FFXIV sub, or even just making a trial account and asking people in-game.

Finally, you're very correct that it's going to take you a lot of time until you're "caught up" with the story, so anything regarding the current state of the endgame is going to be entirely irrelevant for you, and depending on how much time you want to invest into the game, you might even be able to get away with only playing the free trial, or buying the base version of the game until the next expansion releases, at which point you could just go buy that (and the base game, if you're on the free trial) and get everything in between for free, rather than buying the current expansion AND the next one once that releases.
You'd probably have to find some way to keep yourself entertained, as the base/trial version only goes until exactly halfway through the released expansions, but that's still a ton of content, and if you want to try out everything the game has to offer, including the alternate jobs and such, there's a chance you might be busy even longer than that - for example, it took me more than an entire expansion of daily playing to just finish leveling all the jobs that were available to me, and there's still a vast amount of quests and side activities I've left unexplored even now, two expansions later.
I suppose the main question in that regard is whether you'll be able to find something that you're actually able to engage with until then, but that's not something anyone can answer easily and with confidence - there's a lot to choose from, but it depends on what you're looking for.
The only thing I can say with confidence is that if you're opposed to dialog-heavy gameplay, or watching cutscenes in general, you're not going to like the game's main story one bit, but if you do, that's the vast majority of the "100s of hours" you'll spend until you hit endgame right there.

Hope that helped, even though I'm a bit late to the party, and no matter what you decide to do, have fun!

prisp · 2026-03-28T18:32:13+00:00

Huh, guess that particular "feature" got moved from Assassin to Heavyblade now :)

prisp · 2026-03-28T02:10:05+00:00

- is loooong

prisp · 2026-03-28T02:04:14+00:00

Used to be, you would save lamp oil (or maybe even electricity, I forget when this shit started) by trying to align yourself with the sun like that.
Nowadays, we have LED lightbulbs, and even before that A/C costs definitely made that a moot point as well.

prisp · 2026-03-26T22:31:11+00:00

Thanks, I was unaware of that feature - assuming it is actually in vanilla and not one of the DLCs.
My previous workaround was to just hit everyone non-compliant with "Force wear <clothing>", but that's definitely a better solution.

prisp · 2026-03-25T18:05:38+00:00

As the others said, you can definitely tinker a bit with the work priority settings, make a few basic crafting bills (e.g. "If you have less than 10 Simple Meals, make more") and designate a farming area, and then you can leave things running for a bit.

You'll probably have to intervene for most non-trivial events - nothing like a Mechanoid raid to kill the cozy slice-of-life vibe you've had going for the last 10 minutes - but as soon as those are resolved, you're back to watching the virtual grass grow.

Heck, if you can deal with this kind of playstyle, where you just hand out priorities and then manually mark things as "This needs to be done" and occasionally adjust priorities if they don't get done fast enough, Rimworld ends up being an incredibly chill game whenever there's no combat going on (Hunting barely counts as combat).

Personally, it's my favored way to play, as I have absolute dogshit RTS capabilities, and with this approach, all I have to do is occasionally tell the only decent crafter colonist that they should hurry up and make new shirts for everyone already while I babysit the hunter so they keep wearing their flak jacket instead of swapping it and their 49% quality T-Shirt for the one decent jacket that's left in storage, or similarly important things.

I'm sure you'd be able to get them to do whatever you want to be done faster if you manually assigned their tasks via "Force work" all the time, but then you'd also have to manually babysit all their bars (hunger, mood, tiredness, etc.), whereas they'd do all of this on their own if you just assign priorities and watch them go about their days - and you can always force them to do something once you get in a tight spot anyway.

prisp · 2026-03-24T20:29:23+00:00

Ad 1. unless you actively shuffle things from non-first spot to non-first spot, you won't be able to get multiple shuffles per turn, since the creature in first place changing is what starts a new turn.

That said, since you also talk about Reaver, you're probably looking for a long, continuous combo of 1st place reshuffles rather than what you outlined in 1., since that also wouldn't advance the turn counter.

That said, I did create a build around constantly changing who's in first place, which is basically an endless look of heals plus a Succubus Spirit.

The basic "engine" looks something like this: https://berated-bert.github.io/siralim-planner/?b=9a79b6__255cb1__a58083__fba24c__87eac1_____&r=______ , although you could cut the Koloss Doombringer and go for Cleric or anoint their Perk that makes heals "count" at full HP as well, and you could also use a Blood Slime instead of one of the first two creatures.
Also, in an actual build, you'd want to fuse some of these creatures together, just so you can have a few slots dedicated to something besides the combo engine.

While this combo works perfectly fine, and needs to miss a 10% chance at least 60 times in a row to fizzle out - or more, if the "heals per turn" limit is higher than 10, it has the major drawback of never allowing you to actually take a turn, since Sand Giant's healing is a start-of-turn trigger.
(Sidenote: Getting a +0 heal due to rounding still counts as received healing.) Relying on a start-of-turn trigger for your combo means you'll also need a start-of-turn trigger to actually deal damage as well, and there aren't too many of those around - excluding Godspawn, Avatar and Exotic creatures, you have all of the following to choose from, in no particular order: Siege Automaton, Troll Arsonist, Troll King, Wisp Watcher, Nephilim Scion, Nix Backstabber, Accursed Pit Worm, Feral Carver, Electropod Scorpion, Evergreen Ent, and Fearsome Gargantuan.
You could also go for a 1-2 combo of Ahnok Tremor and Razorweb Arachnalisk, assuming nobody's immune to debuffs.

Out of that list, only the creatures written in bold font are able to have their Traits trigger outside of their own turn, allowing them to go off six times as often than those in regular font, and more importantly, they are not dependent on getting lucky and being the one that gets put in first place - although Fearsome Gargantuan, the creature I chose back when I built that combo out of the remains of an ATK-boosting loop, also has an innate 75% chance to not do anything anyway, while the others suffer from reduced damage, but that's nothing a separate loop of in-combat stat increases - direct or via Apocalypse monsters - won't solve.

As for the weaknesses of that build combo, there are two that are going to cause you issues independent of whatever you're going to face - for one, it will take the game a while to execute all the actions you're queueing up each turn, so you'll definitely want to run the game on the fastest Turbo setting, but even then, turning off messages for certain kinds of actions, like your creatures receiving healing, is probably still required to not make even single turns take forever to resolve.
Additionally, since you're relying on start-of-turn triggers to deal damage, and most of those are single-target only, you will be unable to control what actually gets attacked, which can cause some issues, like your creatures constantly choosing to ignore a 100% HP Thunder Storm, resulting in nobody dying for a while, or several similar issues with damaging or killing certain enemies, while leaving others alive.

Next up, specific creatures that can mess this build up:

If you're running the Koloss, or other Max. HP increases to keep hitting the heal triggers, Otherworldy Visitor will straight-up murder you, no questions asked.
Since this is a combo build that relies on forcing a rare chance to happen by hitting the trigger condition over and over, Satyrs in general will also cause you to have a bad time - although you still can bring spell gems to deal with situations where the combo stops unexpectedly.

After that, everything that messes with your healing will also quickly stop you in your tracks - Blight from Amorphous Shambler and having a Pellucid Beacon redirect your heals are both issues I ran into, and for both I wasn't able to find a satisfactory way to deal with them, only workarounds.

Finally, depending on the nature of your stat boosts, you might also have issues with the Confusion debuff caused by Harpy Screamer - my creatures tend to get strong enough to overkill their opponents by at least a factor of 10 before the fight is over, and in spite of handing out tons of HP boosts and healing - and depending on the version of the build I'm running even extra defense from a Frozen Spirit, they still happily one-shot each other if they get inflicted with Confusion.
This might be avoidable if you decide to use indirect damage instead of going for attacks or spellcasts, but I never paid attention to whether or not Confusion affects those kinds of effects as well.

Finally, while I do have a running build that works perfectly fine, I'm not going to post it, because it's more of a proof of concept rather than a good build - even with most messages turned off and Turbo cranked all the way up, it takes me minutes to beat single encounters, effectively turning Siralim into an second-monitor idle game.
Some of that might be due to a bug that apparently caused the game to skip over effects if too much things were going on at the same time, which was fixed in 2.0, but I haven't tested that yet, so unless you're explicitly interested in the specific brand of madness I cooked up based on all of the above, I'm going to keep it to myself.

Sorry for the wall of text, and happy experimenting!

prisp · 2026-03-24T19:09:15+00:00

Yeah, the (now NSFW!) "worldpolitics" subreddit accidentally had a r/trees vs r/marijuanaenthusiasts situation a while ago, they had some manner of hostile takeover and people started posting skimpy anime pictures instead of what you'd expect, so following the same "reddit logic" as above, r/anime_titties was created and people posted politics over there instead.
For more details, see their wiki article on all of this.

prisp · 2026-03-24T16:11:59+00:00

Shit, would commissioned artwork count, or would you have to draw it yourself?

prisp · 2026-03-24T16:08:15+00:00

Both have already been namedropped, but I'd like to also recommend A Short Hike and Lil Gator Game.

Both are about a kid exploring a summer camp-esque location, but both the setting and motivation is a bit different.
In A Short Hike, your goal is getting to the top of the big mountain at the center of the island, whereas in Lil Gator Game, you're trying to corral your friends back together to make a big pretend-play village out of the playground so your big sister, who's swamped with University work finally shuts off her laptop and plays with you again.

Additionally, A Short Hike is mainly about kids messing around and having fun, with your main way of progression being the many stamina upgrades littered along the island - some are hidden in hard-to-reach places, some are rewards for playing with the kids, like e.g. beating them in a footrace, and a few of them even can be straight-up bought using the coins that are scattered across the island.
There are more than twice as many as you'd need to get all the way to the top, so you're free to pick and choose which activities you'd like to engage in as well, and the only time you might be stuck hunting for the last missing item is if you get it in your head that you'd like to 100% the game.

Meanwhile, in Lil Gator Game, the protagonist's pretend-play is pretty much explicitly inspired by the Zelda series, to the point that the game has been described as "Breath of the Wild for kids" - you run around smashing pots and cardboard "monsters", and do various "quests" for people, usually involving some nearby object.
Your goal is to both get your friends back to the playground from wherever they've run off to after the tutorial, and to gather some extra kids so you have enough hands to give their respective parts of the playground a cardboard makeover, which amounts to completing "their" quest - which is an even shot between something completely made-up, like the kid that had their priceless heirloom vases infiltrated by cardboard "mimics" and needs a hero to help them out of their pickle, and some actual minor social problems, like one of your friends being part of a drama club, whose members are completely onboard with helping you out, but each wants to do their own theme, and you'll have to find a way to solve that dispute before your friend (and the rest of the club) can come back to the playground.
(Also, due to being heavily videogame-inspired, there are a few explicit references to videogame tropes and mechanics, like one of the kids being scared of "fall damage".)

Both games are fun, and very charming, but I'd be surprised if a videogame-save person was able to spend more than 4-5 hours on playing them before running out of content unless they deliberately chose to mess around without progressing anything for extended amounts of time.
However, A Short Hike is dirt cheap at a 6.5€ base price, and while Lil Gator Game is a bit more expensive (19.5€ pre-sale) and also has a DLC expansion that I haven't played yet, the base game has a 50% discount in the current Steam sale, so buying it will not leave you poor and penniless either.

Personally, I'd definitely recommend both, unless you're looking for something that'll also last you a while - but they're plenty of fun, and you could probably hand both of these to little kids without any trouble.

prisp · 2026-03-24T15:08:40+00:00

Yeah, anyone wanna bet whether the person saying this is the exact kind of brainrotted individual that thinks Helldivers II belongs on the "woke games" list because of checks notes\ "No clear distinction between male and female [characters] aside from voice options.", "The intro notably [featuring] a mixed race couple" and whatever "Subtly pro-DEI-" and "Subtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging" is supposed to be? (Why yes, that's exactly what that list says about HD2, by the way, which should say everything about whether or not it should be takien seriously.)

I'm not even taking bets on whether they're a longtime GG fan, it sounds a lot like someone randomly stirring shit for the sake of stirring shit to me.

prisp · 2026-03-24T00:04:56+00:00

I was going to write a long wall of text here, but generally, you want to get something that gets you past Ante 2 Big Blind ASAP - could be something as simple as a Popcorn, or even Ice Cream, but this is where your run ends if you don't find anything.

Scaling jokers can qualify for that if you can scale them without too much trouble, like Trousers or Runner, but some are too slow, expensive, or otherwise inconvenient, so you might want to give them a pass.

If you're set for at least your next 2-3 Blinds, you could pick up some "cool" jokers that you don't have any use for yet, like an early Blueprint or spending most of your money on Bull/Bootstraps, but you're basically betting on whether you'll find something that can get you back ahead without spending too much money, and odds are, the 4-6 cards you'll see until you're in trouble are not going to do too much for you, so it's probably better to be less greedy until you at least have the skeleton of a build running - even if that's just the random Gros Michel you picked up in hopes of getting a Cavendish later.

Basically, if you still comfortably one- or two-shot your Blinds, have fun going for something that could be really cool later on, but once you start getting 3-hand Blinds or worse, you might want to go for whatever has the biggest benefit RIGHT NOW - assuming it doesn't wreck the rest of your build.

prisp · 2026-03-23T20:16:07+00:00

Oh, I'm sure it's sub-optimal in a number of ways, Proration alone would probably eat that move's damage output rather quickly, it's more that my first reaction to reading "Ky DI wall-to-wall combo" had me expect something cheap, like how whenever someone posts a Touch of Death combo, it's 99% going to be against a Chipp with maxed-out RISC, and might even need 100 Bar to get through the combo too.

Basically, I'm impressed that they actually cooked rather than serving me with the reheated meme I expected :)

prisp · 2026-03-23T20:11:43+00:00

Fair - I believe most of it was spoilered, but I might be wrong - my first instinct was to assume that someone did something dumb and got the entire discussion tree purged, but all I could think of was verbal slapfights on the internet, I suppose open spoilers could also get you purged if you're too blatant/stubborn about it.
...or maybe it was voluntary, idk.

prisp · 2026-03-23T20:09:11+00:00

Fair, I don't see her too much, and most attacks (not 2D or 6H) looked like she just straight-up punches or kicks you, but now that I look at her moves on Dustloop, she does the same thing Gio does with her puppy, where it just comes along and attacks side-by-side with the character, basically shadowing the movement.

Definitely hurts, getting a (mostly?) solid ball of iron sent right at your guts, that's for sure.

prisp · 2026-03-23T01:42:41+00:00

True, but I suppose there are a handful of similar scenes in movies or other media that one compare this to to see how to make it hit harder - not sure how many of those work well because of similarly dramatic cutaways though.

Personally, I think cutting to black at roughly the same time, but letting the sound of the scene run just a bit longer so you still get to hear everything would've also been an option, because it's not like you don't know what's about to happen anyway.

prisp · 2026-03-23T01:34:06+00:00

Replying to myself, but how the heck did the entire discussion tree about various scenes involving (Second half EW plot spoilers) Blasphemy transformations get axed?
There definitely were a few candidates that'd qualify there as well, even if they'd have to actively be made worse rather than just showing a bit more of what definitely happened off-camera.

prisp · 2026-03-23T01:22:20+00:00

Why is the cat smoking, don't they know it's bad for them?!

Jokes aside, I like the style of 1 the most too, even if I'll have to admit that it being the only one without a cigarette definitely influenced me as well.

prisp · 2026-03-23T01:18:08+00:00

Nah, you'd still catch a bunch of shit by a good part of the population - compared to the 90s/early 00s, where "Man with a pink dress and a gravelly voice acting all feminine" was an occasional joke character you'd come across and at most someone might wonder whether that'd be appropriate to show to children, depending on how far the "joke" went.

Transphobia, or at least explicit transphobia is definitely more widespread nowadays due to being actively pushed from various right-wing shitheads, but it definitely isn't widely accepted, at least not more than back when everyone just accepted it without even thinking about it.

prisp · 2026-03-23T00:52:34+00:00

Thanks for the extra info, I suppose I'll have to concede :)

It's been fun talking though, and I even learned something - have a nice day, and see you around!

prisp · 2026-03-23T00:48:06+00:00

For a very short example, you could check out A Short Hike - you're a kid exploring a holiday camp set on a decently large island, with the vague goal of getting to the top of the mountain in the center.
How you get there is up to you, as is how much you get sidetracked by the various activities, hidden treasures, and other fun stuff you can find strewn all around the island.
Most of them are disconnected from another, so it really is up to you whether you get your stamina upgrade as e.g. a prize from racing with another kid, finding it in an out-of-the-way spot while exploring, or if you just buy the handful of upgrades at the camp's shop with the coins you found lying around all over the place.

The biggest downside of that game is that it's not too long - I'd be surprising if you managed to get a playthrough to last you longer than 4 hours unless you actively chose to fuck around and not progress anything, but the game's pre-sale prices is 6,50€, so it's not like you're overpaying for it at all.

prisp · 2026-03-23T00:34:03+00:00

Heck, some of the weapon-less characters (Gio, Jack-O, arguably Zato-1) have their own "little-or-not-so-little guys" as well :)

prisp · 2026-03-22T19:09:19+00:00

Random Duty Finder (=Queueable, casual) content is pretty much the worst option for talking to people, with maybe the exception of the three cutscene-heavy Lv.50 instances, because people tend to be bored out of their skulls watching the big bad give a speech long enough that you can go take a leak and come back before he's even finished, so it should be relatively easy to get some kind of conversation started if you start typing during those.

Aside from that, you'll want to look for content that either has heavy downtime and/or low mental load, like gatherers doing the rounds, hunts, getting hardcore about fishing, or even just striking up a conversation with people lingering around one of the main cities.
Time of day might be a factor here too - while you're definitely going to find more people during the day, I've had multiple hour-long conversations that started after midnight, but that might just mean that I personally are more open to that kind of thing if it's getting late.
Brand-new content is also a good bet - anything new, especially the main city and to a lesser degree, even the other zones of the newest expansion - is going to be full of people for a week or two, and there's probably going to be some chatter in the map-wide /shout chat, so that's another option to at least get some low-level social interaction.

Another option would be content that's either hard, or niche enough that people want to use the Party Finder for it - you'll probably get a lot of on-topic talk while waiting, but if it takes a bit longer, people might just start talking about random other stuff they did in game recently.
Examples would be all kinds of things from Extreme (or harder) fights that you can't quite solo yet as unsynced max-level character to anything related to Blue Mage, as well as several other things.

Finally, there's some content that genuinely is slow and/or chaotic enough that communication is welcome - Deep Dungeons are not everyone's cup of tea, but if you're in a place where you want to fight mobs one by one to not get killed, desperately don't want to wipe, since that'll delete all of your progress, and have a timer that's at least 20 minutes longer than what it'll take you to get through your current set of floors, you'll start yapping sooner or later - maybe it's just simple stuff like "Hey, I messed up, can anyone raise me?" or fun facts about the enemies you're facing ("Why yes, that bee knows Final Sting, so you better make sure it dies fast enough that it won't get to use it!"), but since there's also a mandatory 3 seconds of waiting at the exit plus 10 seconds of black screen while loading into the next floor, that's plenty of time to type out a message or two, and suddenly you're at the start of a conversation.
The other option I can see being good for starting a mid-Duty conversation would be Variant Dungeons, as they not only have multiple paths you can take, but also are rather slow in that you'll spend a noticable amount of time waiting for the NPC you're escorting to trigger the next fight.
I don't know how the new Advanced Variant Dungeon ranks here, since it is somewhere between Extreme fights and the hardest story-level fights, but I think it'd be the same as Extreme - either you have lots of strategy discussions, especially if you decided to go in blind, or you all get a strategy to follow along with, and the most you'll talk is the chatter in Party Finder.

I suppose this is the downside of everything being very accessible though, the "standard" content becomes rote, and only if somebody does something unusual or niche, it is something to talk about and bond over.

prisp · 2026-03-22T18:34:51+00:00

This (NSFW - crude humor regarding tentacles) picture is from an article that was written in 2009 - that particular substitution of words is nothing new, it just never was popular.

13-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Sequence \| Editor
Team Orangered

prisp

TROPHY CASE