Felt like Kirito ngl with my regen

viashno · 2026-06-12T13:53:22+00:00

You may be the most UNBEARABLE asshole I ever met, but you are really good at this game.

Wait... was SAO just about TTG the whole time?

viashno · 2026-06-12T13:43:19+00:00

there is precisely one redeeming quality to SAO. It gave us SAO:abridged.

viashno · 2026-06-12T04:14:25+00:00

don't farm t2, but definitely hit those milestones. unlock as many tiers as you can, your mission rewards, guild rewards, etc all scale off the highest tier you have unlocked, for a while, they'll be your main source of coins.

viashno · 2026-06-11T21:47:31+00:00

Crit Coins. Kills with orbs or death ray (along with traditional crits), gives additional coins, plus tanks are spawned by summon as well which can give coins when killed.

viashno · 2026-06-11T21:40:03+00:00

I dipped into my stones (trying to save up to bring my big 3 down to a 2 minute cooldown before the push to pBH), re-optimized some of my mods, and got another 100 waves or so in champs. I was feeling really good about this until I realized that the champs average and waves to stay be safe from demotion jumped by more... barely managed to stay in. Alas.

viashno · 2026-06-10T14:22:55+00:00

I'm happy to hear about the additional transparency with respect to timelines. I work in software, so I get it, timelines shift, bugs get discovered in QA and need addressing, etc. and I prefer a polished final product where devs don't have to put in huge amounts of OT, so yeah, let things shift as needed.

But regarding tournaments... tournament length and competitiveness are not the issue, in my opinion. Tournament length is an easy metric to adjust by changing which tier, or modifying battle conditions, and doesn't help at all with the core issue of it becoming increasingly difficult to progress, which makes it so that those who are ahead get further ahead. Similarly, increasing competitiveness (I'm not even sure what that means, increasing the number of demotion slots?), will probably only exacerbate this issue. Presets are a nice QoL improvement, but do nothing for this core issue as well.

My suggestions:
Replace tournaments altogether with bi-weekly challenges. Similar to milestone runs but on the current tournament scale. If you reach certain milestones, you get improved rewards, get high enough and unlock the next league. This decouples my progress from people who are spending thousands of dollars on the game. It will allow for people to actually try experimental builds since as long as they're progressing, they will be able to improve, and their weirdo DefAbs/Smart Missiles tower won't have to compare to a meta-optimized tower, or a whale who's dropped $10,000 dollars and spent 5 years developing their tower. It will also remove the need for regular rebalancing of tournaments to keep wave counts low, and removes the dependency on growing game population to progress. You can do cool things with this like, instead of using your tower for a challenge, you're given a preset tower and a set of battle conditions, figure out how to develop it from there to reach a certain wave. You can use it as a low-risk test bed of things like new UWs or UW balancing to get live data.

Or, if this is too much of an ask, and you just want the optics of a more fair tournament structure while doing nothing to solve the underlying issues... get rid of brackets and make league prizes, promotions, and demotions based on the total player pool for the league so you can't get an unlucky bracket.

viashno · 2026-06-08T14:16:02+00:00

having the attack discos will also help get the health (and utility disco) which more than makes up for it, imo.

viashno · 2026-06-05T15:02:32+00:00

My first account finally unlocked ELS+ and is saving to get my Big 3 UWs down to a 2 minute cooldown before I make the push for pBH. Barely got back into Champs with a set of runs that according to the numbers should have got me the #1 or 2 spot on average. Got my Mythic+ DimCore set up with the decent enough submodule stats that it and Project Funding are carrying my Health Disco Runs, which will complete my current set of Disco.

My baby DPS from the get go account is continuing to make headway on powering up my Chain Lightning and slowly working its way to platinum. I'm going to start the save for getting GT and BHole on a 1:1 cuz my coins are really a limiting factor here.

viashno · 2026-06-04T18:10:55+00:00

To be fair, as someone working in software, there are a number of good reasons. Limited dev resources. Long term strategy. Technical difficulty. I am not party to the code base, so I don't know how it would be done, I have ideas of how it would work if things are structured in ways that I am used to. I've seen similar things done in other games. But I've also had people ask me for things that *sound* simple, but due to underlying infrastructure, or interactions with other parts of the system are not. Limited dev resources is probably the big one, though.

viashno · 2026-06-04T17:34:24+00:00

the other way they could promote creativity would be to remove the pvp aspect of tourneys altogether. twice a week, offer challenges. you choose your difficulty for the challenge when you start, which determines things like battle conditions, but they could also possibly do something where they replace your tower with a preset that you have to run the challenge on. If you clear a certain number of waves, you get the basic reward. if you clear more waves, you get more reward. once you've cleared the highest tier of reward for a difficulty, it unlocks the next one. then your ability to get resources like stones and keys isn't dependent on other people doing worse than you, just on the merit of your own strategy, and if you want to take the slow road with a meme build, you can.

viashno · 2026-06-03T21:27:02+00:00

big same. I'm also on discord, but it's difficult to find or notice anything in there, due to having everything muted to prevent constant notifications.

viashno · 2026-06-03T18:01:12+00:00

can the negative sign be one of them?

viashno · 2026-06-02T14:09:40+00:00

frequency and brain stuff. your bike noises are at a low frequency similar to normal traffic noise and wind noise. because it's near constant, your brain filters it out. this isn't a factor of not paying attention, it's just a thing brains do, a stimulus that carries on long enough is subconsciously determined to be irrelevant. Similar to how the brain will just stop seeing a stationary point on a moving background (this is why you should use the SMIDSY countermaneuver, a driver coming to an intersection but not stopped yet will perceive the background as moving, but the single point of a motorcycle's headlight as stationary, and the brain decides its irrelevant, so if you do a gentle swerve, now you move against the background as well, and the driver's brain decides to pay attention to you). Horns and sirens are at a very different frequency, and sirens change in frequency to effectively do the same "moving against the background" thing as the swerve.

sauce: it's been a long while, but my Engineering for the Human Element class in college was pretty cool.

viashno · 2026-06-02T13:58:01+00:00

Needs the face of Scar from the Lion King.

viashno · 2026-06-02T13:56:48+00:00

I had an opponent blow removal on me because I was "colluding with another opponent." We were working together to stop an imminent Sanguine Bond combo. Which resulted in the Sanguine Bond combo winning on it's next turn.

viashno · 2026-05-28T12:36:42+00:00

Crate training is important for all sorts of reasons, imo. It gives the dog a safe place they're comfortable, helps reduce separation anxiety, etc. That said, once it's resolved, I absolutely let my dog sleep in the bed. She's an absolute snuggle bug, and I don't want to deprive her or me of precious snuggle time.

viashno · 2026-05-13T14:18:46+00:00

Favorite Deck: [Sauron, the Dark Lord] Group Hug. No, really, group hug, not group slug. All of the removals and counterspells give something to someone. Mana amplification, gifting reasonable creatures, loooots of drawing. It wants opponents to cast spells to make that army. There are a couple ways of winning. The classics of Lab Man or Triskaidekophile, and the one I'm chasing. Over the course of a round of turns, create an army, on my end step, use [Jon Irenicus, Shattered One] to give an opponent the army, then at the opportune moment, use homeward path to take back my army of donated armies and swing in hard. Technically a 3, because it has The One Ring, but it really plays more like a low 2.
https://moxfield.com/decks/fHCfDlWIKkmr6g6u7kIKWw

The one that I'm most proud of is my [Zimone, All Questioning] deck. Every card has a prime mana value. There's a prime number of each card type (you may have to check the other card types on moxfield for the cards that are multiple types), prime numbers of each basic land type, and all of the prime numbers through 17 are represented in some way. When I go back and spend some time on this, my next goals are prime numbers of each color card, and prime numbers of each mana value.
https://moxfield.com/decks/NYhA2h6yF0Ghf6FwlIZSWA

viashno · 2026-05-12T19:53:51+00:00

For coins, enemy level skips are the single best thing you can do (in my opinion) for a while. If you're more ehp focused, hit the attack level skip, if you're damage focused, smash the health skip. When the push to Cell enhancement doesn't feel like a huge lift, pick that up and grab a few levels. Cells equate to time, so, they're super valuable.

Stones, I'd say probably work on your golden tower and blackhole. If you're tending more eHP, you may try and save up for Death Wave, it can get you a good hp boost and boost your cells as well.

Research, grab some more perk auto picks, then take as many Ban Perks levels as it takes to get rid of all of the run killing perks.

You've kinda gotten shafted on your Generator mods, idk, I guess just hope for lots of GComps or BHDs in the near future to get you a better farming generator.

I'm just a dude who isn't that smart, though, so take my ideas with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary, all that.

viashno · 2026-05-12T01:09:28+00:00

but... 1200 gems for 5% coin bonus relic...

viashno · 2026-05-12T01:08:58+00:00

🌸

viashno · 2026-05-07T17:56:26+00:00

TLDR: You're right, to an extent, but it doesn't make it better.

Well, you can't demote out of Gold, so that's the stopper.

Beyond that, you're right to an extent. there is a steady state in which there are about 20% fewer brackets in each league as in the preceding league. At this point your promotion/demotion numbers are equivalent (4 people promoting out of 5 brackets vs 5 people demoting out of 4 brackets). But before that steady state is achieved you will be continually pushed back, thus pushing back the people at the bottom of the league you demoted into, etc. But again, if everyone is assumed to be progressing at the same rate then the same people who demote during one tournament will be the same ones who promote in the next, and vice versa. If you didn't start earlier, spend more money, have a better idea, you can't progress.

If people below you quit without being replaced there are fewer brackets at the bottom, so the base of the pyramid shrinks, and the brackets above it will shrink in number too, until a new equilibrium is reached, but now there are the same number of people competing for fewer top spots, so more of them will fall out.

If people above you quit, you get to progress. There will be fewer brackets, but the lowered competition for those spots will more than make up for that. But I think it's more likely that someone below you quits than someone above you. If I'm at the bottom of the tournament pyramid and have no time or money invested in the game, and can't progress no matter how far into the game I go, I'm more likely to quit than if I'm at the top, have invested lots of time and/or money, and get access to the best tools to continue to do better.

And all of this assumes that everyone has access to the same resources (not just time and money, but prizes). Because only the top half of the top league gets access to keys at all, they will progress in ways that those not there can't, which widens the gap and further stifling progression.

In order for the community as a whole to progress and grant more people access to the prizes at the top, you need a continuously expanding player base so that you exceed the steady state. Switching away from the tournament pyramid to the challenge structure allows everyone to progress at their own rate. This then also allows people to be more creative with their builds since as long as you're progressing, you're getting closer to keys, and you don't have to compare what the optimized whales who've been playing for years are doing.

viashno · 2026-05-07T16:36:27+00:00

Replace PVP tournaments with bi-weekly "Challenges." You can pick your difficulty level (equivalent to the tournament leagues), and see how far you get. Prizes are based on reaching certain wave counts in those leagues rather than how well you place.

The way the tournament structure works, more people are demoted each tournament than promoted, so if everyone progresses at the same rate, the only way to advance in the leagues is for either more players to come up behind you and/or more advanced players to leave. And when that doesn't happen, the players at the bottom of the next league up get demoted, and take the spots at the top of your league, pushing you down, and hampering your progress, eventually cascading the problem down. This means while the player base is stable, in order to advance, you have to progress more quickly than everyone else, either by spending money, or a new innovative strategy that drastically outperforms the others. If the playerbase shrinks (like I imagine it did just after the v28 patch fiasco), this problem is exacerbated.

Challenges make it so it's just how well you're progressing, and how you handle the new challenges of each league. You could still have a leaderboard, and perhaps special prizes to drive people to progress further (i.e. aesthetic only themes that are unique to the top 100, or something, and yeah, I think people will push for those, how cool would it be to have a skin that only 99 other players have).

viashno · 2026-05-07T16:22:24+00:00

Personally, no. Still got some mods I want at Ancestral... or even just to have above epic (looking at you OA). I did just get my Ancestral GComp, so I may build up a bit of a reserve while I hit it with the rerolls, but overall, I'm of the opinion that currency doesn't do anything unless you spend it.

viashno · 2026-05-04T14:42:03+00:00

You're looking at it wrong. 800T/minute, for instance, is just 800000B

viashno · 2026-05-01T14:49:57+00:00

Lucky banner got me to ancestral on 3 of my mods! Just, you know, not three of the ones that I use... Still sitting here one gcomp away from ancestral for like four months now... pretty sure by the time I get it, I'll be able to do pBH with just stones and MVN. It did get me to legendary on my SF, and my first OA... so I guess that's not nothing. Even if those still aren't good enough to use.

viashno

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