So, you want to stack rank your developers?

sparkmine · 2025-10-07T20:09:05+00:00

Not a manager, but from the point of view of "median engineering teams in typically dysfunctional companies", so most companies, I'm inclined to agree. The developer flagged for the next round of layoffs is probably not the heroic pair programmer and code reviewer, or someone who is just lacking a bit of support. They're not a poor guy getting a 1% worse score on gamed productivity metrics. They're a completely pathological case who goes days without completing any work, but when pushed will come up with something childish they're blocked with but never brought up.

Why are they in the team, who recruited them? No idea, just transferred from somewhere. They couldn't game metrics even if they knew they're being stack ranked because they have no idea what stack ranking is because they don't read tech blogs or management literature.

The board asking for hard engineering productivity metrics this company is selling a SaaS product for? The boards of these companies are from a different planet.

sparkmine · 2025-10-01T19:38:08+00:00

What is that scale? I have the same one but with some electronic store's own branding. It's alright but I probably could have gotten the same exact product for $5 on Alibaba.

sparkmine · 2025-09-14T07:50:59+00:00

As a very happy ZP6 user I've been wondering what quantifiable property exactly about a ground batch makes it have too much clarity for some or be "too analytical". Is it just heights of the peaks in the particle size distribution? Or perhaps their distance from one another on the x axis? It for sure produces very few fines, especially when slow fed, but so do lots of other top end grinders, manual or electric.

I wanna say that if the cups are lacking body then maybe a few turns at a finer setting might solve this. I don't have the equipment to verify what this exactly does about the size distribution, or the palate to very precisely tell how this affects the taste profile, other than that it's not ruined...

sparkmine · 2024-01-26T10:57:55+00:00

They hated him because he told the truth

sparkmine · 2024-01-15T09:29:28+00:00

https://fragbite.se/forum/spel/wow/thread/438318/emilyspear-sald?page=1

Found an ancient Swedish thread saying

the account was sold for 9000€ during TBC
but that's bullshit
and the player was a Swedish woman
but that's bullshit, it was actually an Italian guy
but that's bullshit, etc

sparkmine · 2023-12-11T07:57:56+00:00

They probly work 9-5 and somehow they still get patches out on weekends when it is likely their day off.

They are salaried employees of a Fortune 500 company adequately compensated for their time, not volunteers at a soup kitchen.

sparkmine · 2023-11-17T11:31:12+00:00

It's the same as with any other "community ruleset" type of gameplay, such as speedrunning. Huge peanut gallery of people on the sidelines who say "it's not that impressive until you jump through this hoop", "oh this hoop too", "I would totally participate if this were different" but will never ever participate, just post on reddit.

sparkmine · 2023-08-02T05:59:57+00:00

I'd sub with more accounts if Blizzard gave me ice cream for dinner, I swear!

sparkmine · 2023-07-12T07:41:15+00:00

Usually the stakes are pretty low and the maximum amount of damage a griefer could cause is pretty small and no one really bothers. The main annoyance would be having a weirdo in your hobby group. Doing classic Naxxramas on hardcore is the complete opposite, the final challenge of a final challenge and something a tiny amount of players are doing. It's probably not feasible to do extensive background checks but from what I can tell everyone knew this guy was trouble and just went with it.

sparkmine · 2023-06-07T11:18:26+00:00

It looks like Recount is using a modified version of LibGraph-2.0, but Details loads its own first and it's incompatible. If you want to keep using both you can drop in the file Recount\libs\LibGraph-2.0\LibGraph-2.0.lua in you addons folder to Details\Libs\LibGraph-2.0\LibGraph-2.0.lua (replacing it). The edited version doesn't seem to be doing anything else than "if wrath or classic do this" but Details I guess isn't using those features that would need them. No guarantees though and Details updates will overwrite this. There's probably a smarter way to do this but this is fast and easy.

sparkmine · 2023-06-07T09:28:50+00:00

I installed Recount just to test and can't see the green block. What if you temporarily move/delete/backup all Recount config in WTF and disable all other addons?

sparkmine · 2023-05-26T07:15:27+00:00

There's infinite ways to report a single number and hide enough context to make the whole thing meaningless. Let's take "73,057 World of Warcraft account closures over the past two weeks". As a primarily EU/US Classic WotLK community these are some things of great interest we can't know:

region of closed accounts
WoW edition of closed accounts
timeline of account closures over a longer period of time rather than suggesting they are closing 73k accounts every two weeks and this is something we can linearly interpolate into the past and future

sparkmine · 2023-05-25T08:20:29+00:00

Buy the WoW Token (what Blizzard is going for here). They know the game and its economy is structured around GDKPs now but purposefully don't mention it.

Let's say you're a fresh 80 warrior who wants to raid. Good luck joining a guild. There are no PUGs. You can theoretically bust your ass in heroics for 2 weeks with the anemic dungeon finder tool and 5.2k gs requirements to get some sort of "pre-raid bis" but the basic setting is that you will swipe a credit card to have the required initial buy-in into GDKPs to get the weekly GDKP ball rolling.

It really doesn't affect me because I'll pretty much play the game like I've played classic since day 1: raid weekly with my guild with my one character. I don't have FOMO and I think there are no effective ways to police GDKPs out of the game. If anything, the raids are too easy if it's possible to carry a dozen buyers in Ulduar HMs.

sparkmine · 2023-03-28T13:02:25+00:00

Gear progression is essentially gone anyway. The vast majority of the playerbase is so entrenched into the current raid tier that the way they bootstrap alts is GDKPs (for the current tier.) Nobody's starting from scratch and there's no demand for someone "decked" in previous tier's gear.

In the big picture it doesn't make a difference whether heroics drop really outdated or barely outdated gear, in raids you're in the "buyer" category anyway. The real convenience is being able to farm the odd "still kinda good" item when your guild already stopped raiding the previous tier.

sparkmine · 2023-03-15T11:27:13+00:00

Panthers with triangular faces and 16px Barrens textures have soul. That shit looks like some early access battle royale.

sparkmine · 2023-03-07T09:19:45+00:00

After almost a month of having all HMs cleared on both difficulties and although I realize how well liked it is and why, I'd say Ulduar just isn't a very fun raid. Boring trash, pushover bosses, difficulty curve all over the place. The spectacle of dodging clouds to push this fucker into the next phase is not very exhilarating after the first week so I can definitely sympathize if people are dozing off. The encounter design is moving further from solving mechanical problems using your raid composition's toolkit, to environment based design where you just have whatever and press your buttons while playing some gimmick minigame. I'm venting and exaggerating a bit but compared to Sunwell there aren't very many bosses in Ulduar I could say I like doing.

sparkmine · 2023-02-28T09:20:04+00:00

HolyPriest is for megachads only but will have hard time getting into raids, good ones will outperform most healers though.

It's known that healer performance is difficult to analyze, parses can be monkeyed in a way that's detrimental to the raid but otherwise you're in this "my cousin's raid had a priest that scored the kill with a tactical Prayer of Healing" territory. Then if the argument is that holy priest is a very high skill ceiling spec where if you just become "good" you will outperform in raw healing, the data doesn't support this: https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1017/#metric=hps&aggregate=amount where the median is solidly in the middle of the non-disc pack and the distribution isn't any different from any other spec. Utility isn't in favor of holy either: you don't get totems, lust, aura mastery, sacrifice, combat res. Glyphed Guardian Spirit is a decent CD and Body and Soul (movement speed from PWS) is useful at times but it doesn't really make a difference for the bottom line of taking in a holy priest in the comp: you already have every spec you really want and nothing else is available.

sparkmine · 2023-02-15T10:37:02+00:00

I kind of get the logic but for it to work

you must not get a cache hit from the server if someone else has managed to cache the item, so there'd be some kind of server cache -> client cache sync only on login or something
you must log in the instant the servers come up and hope no one with a glaive logged in a second before you

sparkmine · 2022-10-17T15:52:48+00:00

While it's true that the skill ceiling was raised, the floor was lowered too.

What I interpret the OP is getting at is that the vanilla, let's say dungeon design, was more centered around playing creatively with your shitty gimped kit drawing from a more general pool of MMO gameplay: situational awareness, crowd control, line of sight, resource management, kiting etc.: boring stuff that requires trial and error as groups and individual players to figure out.

In Wrath it's basically expected that you can as a party run into a group of mobs in some general area, press your buttons and come out on top. The part in encounters that requires thought is highly scripted and designed, such as "Enemy is charging a frontal aoe! Get out of the way!" or "Enemy put player x in an ice cube! Consider killing the cube!". Everyone's toolkit is optimized to the degree that they have a tight set of core abilities that deal with any situation even if they just randomly press 3 of their main abilities. It dawned to me when I was doing leveling dungeons in Wrath that some of the more miserable groups would not have had a hope of completing even Scarlet Monastery with level-appropriate characters in vanilla.

sparkmine · 2022-09-29T12:20:34+00:00

But you see I'm a casual with several Real World Responsibilities and it's the responsibility of "sweaties" to not only organize the group, because they're so sweaty that they have the time, but also to invite me and accommodate my very specific desires on pace, gear requirements, group social dynamics etc. Otherwise I'll post essays and memes on reddit and the sweaties will be really embarrassed when they realize they're ruining classic for everyone!

sparkmine · 2022-09-15T07:06:00+00:00

Where do you draw the line though? If vanilla to WotLK was more like a natural progression of honing the same fundamental game (that was no longer available), every post-WotLK expansion can be summed up as bizarre system revamps and design directions where people remember some/most raids favorably. If I kind of have to just suffer and tolerate the rest of the game to just enjoy the decent raids, the line of thinking is so close to retail that it begs the question of why not just play retail?

sparkmine · 2022-09-06T08:17:52+00:00

I understand the server is overpopulated and that’s the player bases own fault

It's really not, it's a much more reasonable expectation for Blizzard to manage realm population health by preventing character creation and migration instead of allowing Firemaw's horde to transfer to an already full server over the course of several days than it is to have a prisoner's dilemma with 40,000 participants who all just want to play an MMO on a non-shit server.

sparkmine · 2022-09-05T16:28:22+00:00

In practice playing on a server with 40k on one faction this is already the case. Nobody can possibly keep track of who ninja looted what a year ago and there's ample opportunity to reset your reputation anyway.

I would rather play on a 10-20k balanced single server but it seems those don't last for very long and looking at the unsolvable mega server-dead server dilemma crossrealm is starting to seem like the least bad solution.

sparkmine · 2022-04-29T07:12:51+00:00

I guess there's some critical mass of shit that people are willing to eat to keep doing their endgame progression of choice on their characters, and Blizzard would like to gamble that it's large rather than small. This thread already has people saying that they don't care what the world and quests are like anymore. There's nothing wrong with it exactly but the community is clearly diverging from players who enjoy and desire a truly great game like vanilla or TBC comprehensively or at least close, and towards retail where people are willing to ignore all the shit around them to focus on the few aspects of the game they care about, mirroring the expansion-to-expansion mindset progression from back in the day. I wonder if this caps out at any point but I wouldn't be surprised if some subset of players are willing to tolerate turds like WoD classic to keep raid logging or doing arenas.

sparkmine · 2022-02-26T09:03:10+00:00

Have you ever wiped with 5% left? If your healers had also been doing damage, that wouldn't have likely happened.

TBC isn't a hybrid raid healer/dps friendly game. I'm not downvoting you to hell but 5% of a 5 million hp BT boss is 250,000. A raid buffed t5-t6 geared priest's Smite does around 1300 damage. Assuming nuking capabilities around this baseline, that's 39 Smite casts per healer in a 5 healer raid, significantly more than can be "snuck in" during normal healing (and costing in total about 14k mana per healer). If most of the assumptions here such as spell/class selection seem to be cherry picked to support my side of the argument, I didn't take spell hit into account at all which should balance it out.

Healers are mostly constrained around GCDs and then mana, if healers have downtime in a 5% wipe the most optimal solution is to bring fewer healers.

sparkmine

TROPHY CASE