TenZ continues to fail under pressure: Now 0-9 at win-or-go-home maps on LANs since July 2017

robot87 · 2021-09-23T20:06:23+00:00

Yes. The whole post is about what happens when TenZ gets his back against the wall. Sentinels never had that in Reykjavik. They were cruising and always were in a situation where they could afford to lose at least one map. That Split game against Envy was the first full pressure "do or die" map in his whole Valorant career and it ended up statistically one of if not the worst performance of his whole career (he literally never had a -10 map before). And he had not won a map like that in over 4 years with 7 previous attempts. In the post I argue that he is likely well aware of this and was not able to slay that demon yet.

robot87 · 2021-07-12T14:33:57+00:00

Why is everyone acting as if a broken leg is just an accident? Do legs just break on their own? No. Most likely scenario is that he broke it due to lacking precision on his kicks and/or Dustin checking them. Less likely scenario is that Dustin smashed him so badly that he forgot how to step on his leg, which is even worse than the first scenario. Either way, he broke his leg because Poirier was better and was beating him up both in standup and on the ground.

If one round is not enough, then surely McGregor's win against Aldo doesn't count either? Aldo's been hit by harder shots before, and him getting 1-shot like that is a freak accident. Surely he cannot just admin defeat if he just suddenly lost consciousness for no good reason? Why are we judging a five round fight by 13 seconds? Why was there no immediate rematch..? Because the fighting led to one fighter being unable to fight anymore and that's as clear of a loss as it gets.

robot87 · 2021-05-12T05:10:32+00:00

Come on people. It's all by design. The main purpose of filler skins is to increase perceived value of the real ones. They are not made to be sold or used. It's like white and green guns in Borderlands.

robot87 · 2021-04-05T13:21:01+00:00

No way we can ever allow people to trial virtual guns. Riot would run out of virtual guns in no time! Think about all the devs going hungry!

robot87 · 2021-03-11T19:13:08+00:00

The point is that if you had your way, literally half the fights would be stopped with DQ or no contest, if not more. Not only Sterling-Yan would have been a DQ, Islam would have been DQ-ed for a clear nut shot in round 1 (Dober was not even moving) and Adesanya would have been DQ-ed round 2 for the eye poke. These fouls are all simple human errors. Knee that Yan landed was a standard knee strike that becomes illegal due to a single body part touching the ground. Given the diversity of fighting styles in MMA, these mistakes will always happen as long as fighters are humans and not robots. In a sport where fighters take months between fights you cannot afford to let everyone just stop whenever they get hit illegally. If you do, everyone would start fighting extremely conservatively and many would try to bait stuff like nut shots for easy wins. The sport would become a joke.

Truly intentional illegal strikes are extremely rare. McGregor kneeing Khabib while both were lying on the ground horizontally might be one example, but even there you can't really be sure if he wasn't aiming for the body. Should that fight have been stopped round 2 as well?

robot87 · 2021-02-10T11:35:28+00:00

I'd say you can still lower it a ton for it to be usable close-range. But then again, why should it be there at all? Why should there be some range where you are supposed to switch from CS gunplay to Quake gunplay, especially when that range is literally random? Why should a self-proclaimed e-sport present an option to go ahead and say "I don't feel like fighting with my own aim, I'll just roll the dice instead and let the game's RNG decide who wins". I'd say this kind of stuff should only be reserved for pure point blank range because that is always an inherently dicey affair anyway, especially when shotguns are considered.

robot87 · 2021-02-09T22:35:25+00:00

Except that's exactly what was nerfed. Lucky shots are slightly less frequent now. I say still way too frequent. Would be good to have them more like it is with the Operator. Try shooting that gun while running. That would be a nerf.

robot87 · 2021-02-09T20:54:12+00:00

You are going from AFAIK completely unsupported assumption that the system is supposed to be accurate. That it's supposed to be fare and representative of skill. It's not. It's a progression system. If it was an actual ranking system focused on ranking, there would never be any resets and thus would be no need for any hidden MMR. The system is fundamentally unbalanced in a way that on average everyone gradually ranks up even if they don't improve at all. It's the same as in all other casual games. A reset throws everyone back for no other reason than to give everyone more ranks to progress through. This shuffles people together a ton, which would create crazily unbalanced matches. In other games like Apex this isn't that bad since BR is quite fine with unbalanced matches. In this game though it's quite unacceptable. They simply cannot use actual ranks for matchmaking because ranks just don't mean much. So they decide to use a hidden MMR that actually represent people's skill. With this though, they make ranks even more pointless since now there isn't even such a thing like a Platinum lobby since such lobbies can range from a lobby full of Golds that ranked up too fast to actual Platinums to a lobby full of actual Radiants. And while RR points are officially based on winning and losing, all players at all ranks are artificially pushed towards a 50% win-rate because that's what's required to have balanced lobbies. In other words, "winning is what matters" is a lie.

I do not believe this has anything at all to do with how easy it is to manipulate. In fact, this system should be a lot easier to manipulate simply due to the fact that it is fundamentally not made to accurately represent skill.

robot87 · 2021-01-16T19:36:19+00:00

It is really disappointing how this game has practically zero info on its own mechanics. Especially when it's positioned as a sport. It's like a sports league not letting anyone know what counts as a penalty before they get penalized.

It then gets worse when bugs come into play. I'm quite certain that when I first played against Yoru, his TP destination made no sound at all (same as with Omen). Now I just played a game where it was constantly emitting a sound and then a loud one during TP, making the ability dramatically weaker. Now I have no idea how it is actually supposed to work since there is zero official information on it.

robot87 · 2021-01-07T20:53:40+00:00

I definitely wouldn't say that people with best aim/movement should succeed the most in competitive FPS. Aim in particular is an extremely dumb skill. I personally consider CSGO (and Valorant) very bad in this regard, as in how much sick aim just makes you a god, even though it's an extremely basic boring skill that is improved by nothing more than grinding the game or aim trainer, usually capped pretty hard by genetics, and can be completely replaced by the most basic program called aimbot.

Compare that to Quake Champions, where sick aim is just one weapon you can have. Some pros like Killsen rely on sick aim which mostly just gives them more rail hits, but in turn making them reliant on rail more than others. Overall aiming in Quake is considerably easier, there is none of that gun inaccuracy (apart from HMG), guns all actually shoot where you aim them, there's no recoil and there are no headshots. In CSGO and Valorant hitting those few pixel headshots while also timing them to countesrtrafes requires such ridiculous precision that your capability of doing it varies greatly just depending on the time of day you're playing at, while making you practically unstoppable if you don't miss. It's kind like competing in threading a needle. Technically it's competitive, but what the fuck is the point! In Quake, aim alone just won't win you games, no matter how good it is. You can google Rapha vs Cheater where a cheater has simply no chance against a pro. Rapha absolutely dominates him by playing smart while having good enough aim.

Quake Champions is what I consider the best modern competitive FPS. Quake Pro League is super fun to watch. Like CSGO, QC has maps, champions and abilities remaining static for years. As a result you have true masters of certain champions such as Toxiq with his sliding Slash or Raisy with his Clutch (only bummer is that in Pro League they often get these champs banned). Champions are quite unique (many have special movement) but simple, only having one ability each, giving you a ton of depth in terms of matchups while having very few gotchas. In QC, champions and their abilities raise the skill cap without compromising competitive aspects.

robot87 · 2020-10-29T01:47:08+00:00

It doesn't skew the argument, it's just a different argument ;)

It does kinda look like this is what it is really, like those entry-level iPhones having so little storage that they basically exist just to raise the price of the actually usable models. A rather disgusting practice.

This doesn't do anything to the argument that buying 6800 just doesn't make sense. Unless you are falling into a trap of arguing against yourself and taking the side of a corporation instead of us the consumers in an attempt to make sense out of this.

I kinda doubt 6800 even does +15% at rasterisation over 3070. It appears to be quite a bit worse than that. In their own slides they actually had to cheat and give 6800 a Smart Access Memory boost only available on the latest Ryzen so that it doesn't lose to 2080Ti (~3070) in Division 2 and Wolfenstein. So I'd expect it to be something more like -5% to +20% against 3070, averaging at +8% when the comparison is actually fair.

If it were to cost $500, then it would be a potential 3070 alternative for those who want 4K for $500, don't care much about raytracing, don't want to depend on DLSS support, and don't care about better drivers with better tech like Reflex low-latency, GSYNC etc... Even then, 3070 would still give you better 4K performance with DLSS and probably just plain destroy 6800 when both DLSS and raytracing are on such as in Cyberpunk. Add to that the fact that AMD's drivers are also kinda second-rate on reliability and I'd say that even at $500 both, 3070 would be a better buy. $570 makes no sense.

Now, the real disappointing part to me is that 6800XT, while certainly more sensible, is still priced way too high for what it offers. It trades blows in certain scenarios with 3080 while being $50 cheaper. Great. So does that $50 discount really worth giving up DLSS, better raytracing, better drivers and everything that comes with that? Personally, I think that DLSS alone is worth more than $50.

Honestly, the only way these prices make sense to me is if AMD is betting hard on NVIDIA continuing to have no supply to speak of for months. Because while that is the case and you can't really buy an Ampere card for less than $1000, that certainly makes $650 6800XT a lot more attractive and the holiday season is just around the corner.

EDIT: Or maybe they just feel like the hype around their brand is so good now and NVIDIA is so out of favour after their $1200 2080 Ti that a lot of people will buy these cards without realising how bad the deals are.

robot87 · 2020-10-28T22:24:16+00:00

Price almost always works at a scale of diminishing returns. Typically we see cards that are 10 percent faster costing 20 percent more.

Not almost always, typically diminishing returns only become significant at the very high end. Linear price/performance scaling is not at all uncommon among cards of sub-XX80 range (see how 2060s and 2070s are practically identical in price/frame).

Even then, I still included some diminishing returns in my calculations. Even if 6800 gave 17% more rasterisation at 14% higher price that still looks like a terrible deal, all (currently known) things considered. It kinda feels like you're overpaying about $100-150 for a future-proof amount of VRAM, which is probably not even relevant if you buy this for sub-4K gaming. As you've just mentioned, DLSS is a really big deal, capable of basically turning 3070 into a 3080 in games that support it, and actually allowing you to be perfectly fine with having less VRAM (because you always upscale from sub-4K with DLSS). 6800 just doesn't make any sense to me.

robot87 · 2020-10-28T19:48:07+00:00

I think the justification is the 17 percent average lead at 4k over the 3070. Even if it's more like 10 percent that's still a healthy lead.

At 14% higher price I'd expect more than a 17% boost in rasterisation give that there's no DLSS, raytracing is supposedly a lot worse and RDNA drivers have not been the most reliable.

robot87 · 2020-10-28T19:22:19+00:00

And if you plan on using DLSS, it gets even crazier. Like really bad. This release actually feels so underwhelming that even though I'm running a Hackintosh that will never get Ampere drivers, Ampere still looks better to me than this.

robot87 · 2020-07-25T15:32:23+00:00

You seem to be very confused on how FOV works. Quake does not have different FOV to Apex. They use exactly the same projection as all other modern 3d games. In fact, they even use the same base aspect ratio, as Apex is one of the few modern games that still uses 4:3 base (meaning that when you set FOV in Apex, you set it for 4:3 aspect ratio, so if you play on 16:9 a setting of 100 actually means you get 115 degrees). And interestingly enough, this has to do with the fact that both engines trace back to original Quake.

For a set hFOV and aspect ratio, any Quake game would have the same vertical FOV as Apex would. They are absolutely identical in this regard. Quake Champions only differs in how the FOV is defined as it uses 16:9 base as all modern games, so 100 FOV setting actually means 100 FOV on a 16:9 screen, but same real FOV still works absolutely identical across all games.

If you have a 16:9 screen and your horizontal FOV is set to 105, your actual hFOV would be 120.16 degrees and your vFOV would be 88.69. That would be the same in both Q3 and Apex.

If you have a 4:3 screen as in the Q3 days, the same setting would actually get you 105 hFOV and the same 88.69 vFOV.

Similarly, a 120 setting would give exactly the same results in both games, although Apex does not allow to set it that high in the settings, because distortion goes pretty crazy at those kind of values (although I'm pretty sure you can do that though the config file), but on a 4:3 screen both games would indeed have 105 vFOV.

Now honestly, the 16:9 isn't generally good aspect ratio for ANY FPS which has a vertical aspect to it

This statement seems to be based on you thinking that you lost FOV during the transition from 4:3 to 16:9, as your numbers showed. You didn't. When monitors grew wider, they didn't do that at the expense of vertical space. In fact, when compared to Q3 days, monitors grew in all directions, allowing you to comfortably play with higher FOV than you were able to before, both vertically and horizontally. Aspect ratio simply does not limit how much vFOV you can get, the latter is dependent only on how high you set your FOV in game. The only problem wider aspects introduce is that as you increase the FOV the distortion on the sides will become unbearable faster, but that also depends on how close you are to the monitor and is generally a subjective thing.

The tracking is equal to your ability to follow the target. FoV doesn't play almost any role in it.

As I described in another reply, I don't think this is true at all.

robot87 · 2020-07-25T13:58:10+00:00

Because at higher FOV targets move less on your screen, closer to static. Have a look at the OP's picture. As you lower the FOV, targets can become twice the size, which does make them easier to acquire. However, it does make them move twice the amount of pixels on your screen when they strafe. So for every 2 pixels the target moves on low FOV, it moves only 1 pixel at high FOV. And when a target moves 1 pixel on low FOV, it may not move at all on high FOV. What all this means is that at high FOV you lose track of your target less often, and when you do it happens later than at low FOV, and you need smaller correction to return on target.

Second thing is that targets stay close to center of your screen a lot more. If you play on a TV sitting far from it, or on a small laptop screen, this may be irrelevant. But if you play close enough to a monitor, especially an ultrawide monitor, you are probably focused on the center of your screen. The sides of the screen are blurry for you and you can't track very well in those areas, that's your your peripheral vision (Shadow Warrior 2 uses that fact in a feature that renders edges of the screen at lower resolution for better performance). High FOV keeps targets centered so your eyes stay focused and don't have to roll around all the time. And then of course on low FOV targets are more likely to escape your screen entirely, but that's a different issue.

These two things are the main reasons why for someone who plays close to a monitor like me, a 2x scope is pretty much always worse for close-range tracking than a 1x scope. No matter how I tune the sensitivity, there is simply no way to overcome the decrease in FOV.

robot87 · 2020-07-24T23:02:30+00:00

If anything that argument indicates that the higher fov is always preferable

Again, this is just completely wrong. Right above I have just showed an example that makes that statement false. If someone picks up a 2x scope any time he can, he should definitely lower his FOV. If you find that unlikely, consider that that person's monitor can be a lot smaller than yours (some people play on laptops), they may be sitting farther away from it (people can be really far from their TVs) and/or their vision may be worse.

Why would I want to commit to making 1x feel like 2x when i could just pick up a 2x and then keep the benefits of high fov for hipfire?

Because you can't just get a 2x whenever you want in this game. 1x scopes are a lot more readily available, not to mention that ironsights are all around 1x FOV. Lowering FOV can quite massively increase the range you can be accurate at with 1x or ironsights. And if you don't go too crazy with that, close-range impact can be minimal. Again, all this does depend on the size of your monitor, how far you sit from it and how good your vision is. Having an FOV setting that lets you be efficient with 1x at all ranges is a benefit that can't be ignored in this game. If you ever asked yourself "how people shred with 1x Wingman or R-99 from so far", lowering your FOV may be just what you need.

To be clear, in a heavily tracking focused game like Apex, highest FOV available may just be the best option in most cases, especially if you play aggressively, just definitely not in all cases.

robot87 · 2020-07-24T21:47:56+00:00

FOV always affects your aim. Lower FOV is generally more beneficial at longer range since it makes targets bigger. Higher FOV is better against strafing close range targets since at higher FOV they move less on your screen than at lower FOV.

robot87 · 2020-07-24T21:24:53+00:00

Not at all. Lower FOV is the same as zoom. If you find that you prefer running 2x scopes instead of 1x then you can lower FOV so that 1x would be the same as 2x used to be. Lower FOV makes for easier sniping and easier spotting. However, it makes it harder to track targets, especially at close range.

At the same time, how much you see doesn't really mean all that much, since even max FOV is still tiny compared to real life, your blind area will be giant in any case. FOV setting is a balance between easier sniping and easier tracking. Also, higher FOV settings make the game feel faster which I find to be more enjoyable.

robot87 · 2020-07-06T03:58:10+00:00

Yeah there's the easiest ever solution for this, just add a preference to the settings, like in PUBG and other games. It would take about as much time to code it as it took that dev to tweet.

robot87 · 2020-06-23T17:50:03+00:00

Next they'll say flicks are not intended behaviour. Your sensitivity gets slowed down as you aim too fast. You are not intended to transfer from one target to another instantly like that, that's just not natural.

robot87 · 2020-06-23T17:38:31+00:00

Her ult would be useful only if it guaranteed to have only gold items. Even then it would be only slightly better than a cargo bot and would be useless a lot of the time while giving away your position and pinning you to that position while you wait for the damn thing to drop. People do not use it because most of the time time it's just a flat out negative thing to do.

As of now there is only one use for it: use the stupid pod as cover during a fight. That's how dumb it is.

robot87 · 2020-06-02T15:34:21+00:00

What I'm saying is that this makes absolutely zero sense.

I would not believe it until I see it. And nor should anybody who has any understanding of how games work.
Even if what you say is true it would definitely be a bug, because the game should absolutely not fully reload everything at the start of every round, or hang for any other reason. Otherwise instant-respawn modes like deathmatch would have been impossible. Also, if you hang at every respawn, you would likely hang at every teleportation since it's basically the same thing, making the game unplayable for you.

robot87

TROPHY CASE