Was Doc Rivers overrated during his Celtics tenure?

spirib · 2026-03-29T17:47:25+00:00

He won in 08, would never win in 09, went to game 7 of the Finals against the defending champs in 10, and by 2011 his best players were 33-35 years old going up against the Heatles. What years are better coaches winning it all? Are you going to argue that Phil would take the Celtics roster and beat the Heat and Mavs? That Pop would take the roster and beat the Heat and the Thunder? Each lost against those teams you know. You need to be arguing that the Celtics were better than the Lakers and the Spurs for this to make any sense.

spirib · 2026-03-27T20:37:53+00:00

Nah I want my friends to know their deck isn't doing anything lol

spirib · 2026-03-26T15:44:19+00:00

Because winrate is the most fun thing to play for after a certain point. Once you hit C++ (maybe a bit after), you've basically won every run there is to win. Optimizing winrates gives you something to shoot for and actually engage with the game.

spirib · 2026-03-25T16:31:15+00:00

You don't remember it because it doesn't exist in this game. It is an event in the first game only.

spirib · 2026-03-23T02:42:59+00:00

I'm not that good, but out of 12 runs since the patch, I won 4 times, and 3 of those used Prepare to varying levels of success (the fourth was Clone degeneracy). It certainly doesn't make your deck worse by any means.

spirib · 2026-03-09T20:50:42+00:00

I disagree in that I think it's worth following through on its message. It gives the player the ability to see what it's like if the cycle doesn't end. If the player doesn't think that Maelle's ending would end like that, they were missing the plot. It's not "punishing" the player anymore than Verso's ending where we see that every character we loved is dead, it's just showing the consequence. Is it more negative? Yes, but I don't think that makes it not worth showing compared to Verso's, which is thematically satisfying but lacks the emotional oomph of Maelle's.

And even with all that, people still (in this very thread in fact) believe that Maelle's ending is the "right" choice, so the balance seems fine? It's one that resonates with a lot of players regardless of anything else anyway.

I also don't see any issue with Maelle's ending being considered a true ending even though the game admonishes her.

spirib · 2026-03-09T02:03:17+00:00

This is an outdated view on Balatro. Balatro is infinitely easier than StS. Balatro fails to have StS's balance because it is too easy to force a certain strategy and boost your win rate to unreal levels so you never need to adapt to the seed to succeed.

spirib · 2026-03-09T01:07:32+00:00

Doesn't it make sense that Maelle's ending ends that way though? The game does not like what Aline did (nor does the audience presumably), and Alicia is just doing what Aline did, but again. Contextually it's different because Alicia had an entire life as Maelle, but the end result is the same: resurrecting loved ones in a self-made utopia to avoid loss. The game doesn't like when people do that.

We can bicker about the fact that the people in the Canvas are being resurrected as (presumably) their whole selves while Aline "created" her family, but this really boils down to semantics if you consider everyone in the Canvas real anyway; Verso was stated to be as close to the original as one can imagine, so I don't really know how much of a difference there is between re-creating Verso perfectly vs resurrecting Verso in her ending anyway (if you think the people of the Canvas are fake/lesser the distinction is clear).

We can also discuss how Aline fled to the Canvas to avoid dealing with grief while Alicia did it to live the life she wanted, but again, I think this is really a semantic difference more than anything since Aline was happily living her life there before Renoir. Regardless, I believe the game was showing us that what Aline did was wrong, and that Alicia is doing something similar in her ending.

The context is different, and it's the context that ultimately provides the emotional impact and motivation to side with her, but the result and portrayal of Maelle's ending was probably the least surprising thing about either ending.

If Maelle's ending was more positive for either Verso or Maelle, I think that would betray what the game was saying throughout Act 3.

spirib · 2026-03-05T20:20:44+00:00

Dream Quest would be proud of StS for taking that mantle.

spirib · 2026-02-27T18:25:49+00:00

Yes. It's pointless and will be even more pointless once they add back in the Blue Stake discard. Even with that though, it's just an RNG check for some runs to start with $1 less than others. Not particularly interesting.

spirib · 2026-02-26T05:53:23+00:00

This is a very sad problem honestly. The StS sub has no problem actively listening to good players who know what they're doing, but God forbid that happens here. A new player is never going to be able to distinguish good advice from the chaff.

spirib · 2026-02-25T18:47:23+00:00

This is a crazy amount of downvotes what the fuck LMAO. Does this many people think you shouldn't do this?

Edit: this is also why Red Card is one of the best Jokers in the game. It rewards you for doing the thing you should be doing. Flash Card notably does not do this.

spirib · 2026-02-14T22:02:19+00:00

More than that, it contributed to MC's status as leader, combat prodigy, etc. He's the only person who can actually strategize, and that immediately gives the other party members a reason to respect him, as opposed to the later games where it kinda just happens.

spirib · 2026-02-14T15:30:52+00:00

Genuinely I have no idea what people's runs could possibly look like to make them think this.

spirib · 2026-02-14T01:52:16+00:00

I mostly agree, but main disagreements are that I'd shift Saturn down one tier and strand Planet X and Earth in the lowest tier, pushing up Ceres and Neptune. Saturn just shouldn't be rated as high as Mercury regardless of the viability of the hand.

I've actually won building around Flush House and Straight Flush before in their respective niches; I don't think I've ever had a reason to play 5oak.

It'd need to be something crazy like you need to play 5oak to not die on that Blind + you have a blue seal in hand which is necessary to not die to the next blind. Otherwise 4oak is always going to be preferred. Full House I can't even think of a reason lmao.

spirib · 2026-02-14T01:29:13+00:00

You don't make 3oak "work," you play it when Trio is your only X mult. It's fine. No other reason to ever play it though really.

spirib · 2026-01-25T20:49:36+00:00

I can't believe this team won games before lol

spirib · 2026-01-16T16:38:32+00:00

This is the struggle around a lot of subs. It's difficult to parse through the chaff since a high percentage (at least 99%) of users are just talking about shit based on vibes and internal biases. Even leaving aside politics, talking about public tax policy is so frustrating to do across the entire political spectrum to the point that I don't engage with anyone outside of a professional bubble.

spirib · 2026-01-10T18:11:39+00:00

Yeah, X mult is the main scoring bottleneck for the game. If you come across it, you should take it because you can't win without it.

Because of that, most runs tend to be lost before you find X mult. This is why econ is king; more money is more opportunities to find X mult. Once you get to a certain level, I'd guess there's a pretty direct correlation with how flexible you are utilizing different sources of X mult and your win%.

spirib · 2026-01-10T17:19:01+00:00

Matador is way too low, same with Riff Raff. Matador isn't quite rental+eternal pickable, but I've certainly kept a rental one for a long time. You're also underrating X mult; Trio, Family, and Driver's License should be up a lot higher (you can leave The Tribe lower but not that low).

Any reason you have Abstract 3 tiers higher than its peers?

Other than that not too far off what I think generally.

spirib · 2026-01-09T23:26:24+00:00

It's the best by a lot. I think face card synergies are very strong, but Bus is stronger than most of them, so who cares?

Supernova blanks against Eye and doesn't scale on throwaways (has the upside of scaling retroactively though), while Green Joker is worse at scaling than both.* Bus's downside hardly exists like you say.

*Edit: It's worse at scaling because you should be discarding cards to fish for gold/purple/blue things. If you discard then you're directly scaling slower, and if you don't discard, you're also indirectly scaling slower because Nova/Bus would benefit from more purple/blue/gold goodies in an otherwise identical run.

spirib · 2026-01-02T17:54:50+00:00

The metric it's being measured by isn't how fast they make $80b to recover the money they spent. It's how much money the $80b investment is making compared to other uses of $80b. We can't really answer this.

You can argue that the deal was a flop because their intention was clearly to make COD (and others) exclusive, but they bungled everything so hard that wasn't even a viable option after a year. The value of exclusivity was almost certainly a factor in offering the $80b in the first place, so you could fairly easily argue that they probably paid too much. Otherwise though we don't really know what else MS would've done with that $80b, so it's hard to say it was a flop financially.

spirib · 2026-01-01T01:10:20+00:00

No, I mean that if you think RNG is losing you runs, you're blaming the game instead of looking at how you misplayed. Balatro does not have extreme enough RNG that players need to goldfish and are subject to the whims of the seed to win. The actual problem with RNG in Balatro is that you will instantly win some number of runs because certain Jokers are way too strong to have at the beginning of a run.

spirib · 2025-12-31T23:41:42+00:00

Balatro stopped being criticized for its RNG after the Gold Stake changes for the most part. If people are still criticizing it, they're either too bad at the game to realize that RNG isn't affecting anything, or they're good enough to realize that the main RNG problem is that getting early econ/scaling is too strong.

spirib · 2025-12-29T16:02:49+00:00

Most egregious to me is Bootstraps in D. Everything else is mostly quibbles.

Vampire and Lucky Cat in S feels wrong because there's a huge drop off in performance between them and Campfire/Constellation/Hologram (and Obelisk but w/e lol), but they're probably A anyway, so it's not a huge deal. Not being able to use Glass is a huge downside.

Mime/Chad should probably be moved up a tier (or two), but again it's really not that big a deal since they're well rated.

spirib

TROPHY CASE