📚┃off-topic

[simple needle]

it just got uploaded so the quality is bad

[vagrant topaz]

Pretty empty yeah ...

[placid yarrow]

Holy shit that's one sad cow "level"

[simple needle]

i hope its a puzzle in that cellar, and theres more to it

but you have to kill 666 cows 3 times to get here one time

[eternal sky]

Cut cow level out of ur message and it truly makes sense

[elfin stream]

ep

[junior oyster]

All that just for a stamina potion?

[simple needle]

so far. Maybe you need 666 stam potion to truly open the portal to the true cow level

[junior oyster]

Lol

Or other consumables that you find elsewhere.Cough Staff of Herding Cough

[eternal sky]

another banger name

[waxen sonnet]

Cut banger out of your message and it truly makes sense

[eternal sky]

[waxen sonnet]

Gottem

[humble moth]

d4 bad

[stable shore]

Baseg

[junior oyster]

@eternal sky I know it's nothing for you but fucking yes!

[waxen sonnet]

Bro that's huge for any Poe player.

[junior oyster]

Had to spend 136d though on the cards

[waxen sonnet]

Well yeah, I assume you didn't find them organically

[junior oyster]

Nope

Did find a doctor card recently though

[faint mauve]

ooo gz

[junior oyster]

Ty ty

Was worth the gamba

[faint mauve]

did you harvest gamba

[junior oyster]

Yes

2 cards into 5

Failed a few times but I only gamba one card at a time

[faint mauve]

nice to do at the end haha

id play more POE but im not a fan of TOTA

[stable shore]

@waxen sonnet

took 5 devil'jho for the rare mat, pretty decent

and i just mined for 30 minutes to get fuel for a celestial print

[waxen sonnet]

Oooh you're looking solid now

[stable shore]

for the safi rare mat

the base stats are solid af ngl

3 evade windown, 2 blight resistance, 3 crit boost

[waxen sonnet]

I love evade window

Such comfy qol

Window plus extender is awesome

[stable shore]

yeah this helps with ankward arena to dodge

like, earlier i couldn't dodge a devil'jho slam cause the way out was blocked by a wall

[eternal sky]

unethical

[stable shore]

so i don't need any critical eye passives ?

that's fucking silly

[faint mauve]

you always want to maintain 100% crit on tenderized spots in MHW

[stable shore]

yeah i know

[faint mauve]

eva mantle and temporal mantle triggers me lol

[waxen sonnet]

I think he means with the setup, he is capped

[faint mauve]

mhw is like d4 to me haha

[waxen sonnet]

We know hellen, you don't need any of that lol

[stable shore]

i'm back from a cheese part break safi run

i actually don't use temporal, only when there are two monsters at the same time

[faint mauve]

by the time you get fatty full set you can dump even more skills on

[stable shore]

to not accidentaly die to a roar

[junior oyster]

I barely did tota or sanctum lol

[stable shore]

yup i'm aware, i plan to go 5 resentment, 5 agitator

3 crit boost

6 ele

and rest idk we'll see

[junior oyster]

I mainly did blight ravaged but that's kinda dead now

[faint mauve]

yeah its kinda balanced on trade that way but then still gotta engage if you care about challenges

[junior oyster]

Yea dc about challenges. Maybe another league

[faint mauve]

on ruth my tota rank is like 473

which is really low haha

[junior oyster]

This is the first league I made so much profit

Before I'd only make like 10ex

Or 10d in today's world

[faint mauve]

dang from povo to rich

[junior oyster]

In normal trade I'm under 400 xd

[stable shore]

so that's how my gear looks like atm

i don't have any rank 4 resentment or agitator sadly

so it will have to do

[junior oyster]

I got super lucky with insane cat early and a bit later ashes from third eater kill

[waxen sonnet]

You'll get there. You're on the true farm now

[faint mauve]

my issue with TOTA and ruthless is that TOTA is just so much more safer for exp and big loot

[stable shore]

yes, now my damage should be bonkers

it was already good

[junior oyster]

I would rather have the opposite of ruthless lol

[faint mauve]

stuff like omen of amelioration is low key d4 elixir of death evasion

[junior oyster]

Ez mode that is unjoinable with trade league

Are you able to leave ruthless?

[faint mauve]

nope

[junior oyster]

Wow

[faint mauve]

on HC ruth if you die your char gets deleted , as it should lol

[junior oyster]

Lol nice

What happens to std hc though

Does it move to std sc or delete?

[faint mauve]

you get an option to transfer to sc including your stash

[junior oyster]

Oh i see

[faint mauve]

next league ill either do ruth or hc again

havent decide yet probably last minute when the challenges are released haha

i think ez mode exists if its a private league but will cost money lol

[humble moth]

d4 bad

[turbid trail]

Okay my private league ended. Need some build idea, have like 200 div + mageblood budget (or 500 if I sell my spark path)

Would love to play something unconventional

But with good clear

Any ideas?

[waxen sonnet]

Spellblade plus battlemage bladefall 😉

Kidding btw. But bladefall is actually a fun build

[turbid trail]

That build with Energy Blade is actually broken

[waxen sonnet]

Just convert to phys 🙂

[turbid trail]

Bladefall is one of the best skills to play with spellblade energyblade

You cant convert to phys

Its phys -> lightning -> cold -> fire -> chaos

Thats the order, you cant convert backwards

I was thinking about original sin discharge slayer

But getting wither stacks would be a problem cuz I dont wanna use totems

Withering step with enhance is an option but still

[waxen sonnet]

Oh yeah your right

Well phys to light convert works just as well 🙂

[stable shore]

why is banbaro the weakest mf yet he wants to pick a fight with every monster i fight and ruin it for me

[stable shore]

@waxen sonnet i'm cooking

i'm about to show you peak male transmog

i'm just working on the finishing touch

for 1h lmao

[humble moth]

d4 bad

[faint mauve]

why are you spamming d4 bad lol

[junior oyster]

Nope no such thing

[faint mauve]

it only takes a day or two to reach red maps for an experienced player on sc anyway kek

[junior oyster]

Yea I just want a mode that increases drop rate quite a lot. I know it won't happen but I dream of it xd

[faint mauve]

the drop rate quantity wise is way too high as it is

[turbid trail]

Disagree, t0 uniqies takes weeks to farm on SSF even with decent mf character

But in terms of private leagues you can make game harder not easier

[faint mauve]

yeah hence quantity not rarity and weightings taken in

[junior oyster]

I mean I'd go fully ssf if drop rates were adjusted for ssf and make it so you can't join trade league

I've found that other than levelling and/or farming for gear you generally tend to play alone anyway.

It also doesn't help that I have no friends to play with lol

[faint mauve]

ssf is fine as long as you are prepared to spend a few hundred hours at least

haha

[junior oyster]

I spent that amount on trade

SSF is absolutely not worth it for me until they adjust some droprates or w/e

But I know they won't so it doesn't matter in the end

[turbid trail]

I would say that trade is too easy and SSF/GroupSF is the best spot in current poe

You can have everything in 1/2 weeks on trade

But yea, SSF drops rates are fine

Especially since they added sanctum and tota, you can easily print high tier currency with it and that was the biggest problem on ssf before

[junior oyster]

I mean I'm just starting to get better at poe but I can't do sanctum lol.

Oh well it's a skill issue and not the game being at fault

[faint mauve]

sanctum is not for all builds and that is fine , you can just skip it

in ruthless well alva temple is there to help you flip uniques on zero mf lol

[eternal sky]

I mean the issue with sanctum is its the best curr generator in the game atm

Some dude just dropped 8 mirrors

It feels really shit doing anything other then sanc atm

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/s/emzGfZE3GR

Also if they dont fix ralakesh boots im doing discharge again next league

Though chances are its going to be a meta build next league

[turbid trail]

They will 100% fix that

[solar elk]

Yummy ?

[junior oyster]

I mean people eat these raw so chocolate might help those of us like me if I ever wanted to try one

By raw I mean just cooked in oil with maybe some salt or something

[solar elk]

and how about ?

[junior oyster]

That's going too far. You keep them as pets not eating.

But I would never eat these regardless. I don't even eat meat lol

[eternal sky]

bug eaters are

[copper pawn]

vegan?

[junior oyster]

Nope

I do eat fish and eat cheese (not on it's own though lol)

[shadow sundial]

i dunno. people also keep pigs as pets. and bacon is delicious

[shadow sundial]

years ago i ordered a sample pack of a couple energy bars made from cricket flour. they were fine, if a bit dry (but energy bars in general don't have a great texture usually)

[junior oyster]

Yea true. To each their own I guess.

[placid yarrow]

yeah personally i feel like the only moral lines to be drawn is if you're putting the animal in danger of extinction

otherwise go ahead tbh

[eternal sky]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/193278651020738561/1089953419726442657/attachment-5-1.gif

[ember lake]

Clothes. Want to anthropomorphise animals? They need clothes... please

[placid yarrow]

Tell em!

[eternal sky]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/1129968388756746260.gif?size=96&quality=lossless

[junior oyster]

I instablocked him lol

[ember lake]

Do tag the team if something like that is posted again - even if you think it's borderline, that's a decision we can make

[junior oyster]

Cheers

[fervent hazel]

It wasn't me it was the deepstate

[eternal sky]

https://tenor.com/view/black-cat-angry-black-cat-gif-12152698

[humble moth]

d4 bad

[real sable]

https://tenor.com/view/manul-gif-22066197

[shadow sundial]

D4 druids are so uncouth

[fervent hazel]

[waxen sonnet]

@placid yarrow nice

[placid yarrow]

Nice

[placid yarrow]

Almost at 69000 miles too

[waxen sonnet]

I saw that as well, about had the double play

[fervent hazel]

You need gas! :0

[eternal sky]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/864194031205482516/1166214456548798514/image.png?ex=6549acd9&is=653737d9&hm=96c837d8195c5036e0d500d7861a4f107938ced64cc3f9bf4d3adf6e63fc85a7&=

just made this thing

feelsgoodman

buy fracture roll some essences hit t1 int lock suffixes use veiled chaos get wed open craft spot life

[humble moth]

d4 bad

[eternal sky]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITo-WbpANi0

this has big nem energy

[toxic prairie]

I can't believe even gav is calling nem out

When gav joined the server for very similar reason

[eternal sky]

i joined in march

u dent

also if ur trying to defend d4 at this point idk

ur hooked up to the cope train

[waxen sonnet]

Yeah but at least your not desperately and pathetically craving attention lol

[eternal sky]

yea idk i think like

50% of nems message is just

d4 bad

majority of the shit i said about d4 is true and was proven true by the game itself

i watched the podcast with ziz wudijo and the rest

season 2 of d4 is basicly what every season of d4 is going to look like

and even then when i tuned into most streams they were all using the same vamp power where it literally just clears the screen with blood looking tendrils every like 3 seconds

[near hedge]

d4 good

[eternal sky]

idk if a game can be considered good when the inventory stashing system is bricked

20 year old game has better stash system

too many things core to a arpg these days that d4 doesnt have

[simple needle]

Quin good takes on quin69tv

[solar elk]

Not bothered with D4 didn't see the point of getting it when we have LE that beats all arpg's and when 1.0 comes out well no contenders really.

[turbid trail]

As much as I agree that LE is great game its not even close to PoE in terms of content, it has good ideas but needs time to really compete

[clever hollow]

well at least they will have a good start with releasing 1.0 before PoE2 beta, i guess?

[turbid trail]

Thats true, I really hope we will get some new endgame in 1.0

Maybe new dungeon or at least some new bosses

Uber Orobys maybe

[simple needle]

things that frustrates me most is definitely the bugs , unstable server, unpredictable load times, memory leaks, generally not a fan of the art/graphic approach, end game content is ???/mystery, sometimes weird decision in balancing choice and unique design

otherwise its a solid arpg

[copper pawn]

that's assuming people play arpg for 1 single purpose only, which is really a bold assumption

[real sable]

You're just choosing to ignore poe which is the genre standard right now. Like, we get it, it's the LE discord, but intentionally ignoring the objectively most feature mature and (jokes aside) best feeling arpg on the market is naive.

[simple needle]

i always thought anya forger was bocchi

didnt realise they were 2 diff characyter

[warped wren]

[junior oyster]

Sorry I enjoy other arpgs more than LE as much as I do like it. Grim Dawn is overall the better offline experience with mods and PoE is just too good with the content it has.
I used to have an issue with the amount of content but with the atlas system that no longer is an issue.

The worst "big" arpg for me currently is D4. I just had a look at their patch notes and I was like "nope". And as much as I hate to say it I'd rather have rifts (not necessarily grs) back.
Just keep those rifts with mostly big open maps instead of caves and caverns lol.

[eternal sky]

last epoch needs years still to catch up to PoE

echos are cool but like

they literally need things like breach legion

etc in them

because atm they are just blast the echo as fast as possible

with 1 objective in them

[warped wren]

D4 isn't meant for the average ARPG player who spends time on Discord or YouTube to understand and improve their play. It's meant for the literal lowest common denominator who goes "flashy ability cool" and mindlessly plays an hour a day and buys their season pass

[eternal sky]

like last epoch has promise but saying it beats all arpgs while having only 1 endgame loop with side activites that sometimes dont work aka dungeon keys

crafting is cool but it quickly turns into waiting for an exalted item to drop on the base you want

and thats all you're looking for

[waxen sonnet]

Damn lil bro getting dogpiled up in here

[eternal sky]

real all these frothy men

just gave him the time of his life

[waxen sonnet]

Imagine saying "LE gud BASEG"

In the LE discord

[eternal sky]

woulda been fine if he typed LE gud baseg

[waxen sonnet]

Haha he and nem can battle it out two words at a time

[eternal sky]

[shadow sundial]

Real talk though, you guys. Cities:Skylines 2 launches in half an hour and if you don’t have a potato PC it’s gonna be top notch city sim/builder

Anyone else jumping in that pool with me?

I played the shiiiiit out of the first one

[waxen sonnet]

Def not my cup of tea

[shadow sundial]

yeah i dont think there's a huge overlap between ARPG enjoyers and city sim games. although i do anecdotally see a decent amount of factory/logistics genre (Factorio/DSP/Satisfactory) overlap in the occasional reddit comments and whatnot

i am an equal opportunity lover of all three genres

[waxen sonnet]

I've seen people go off on the factory management games hrre

Also not my thing lol.

[real sable]

because we're all autistic about number go up and less input required

why do you think the goal of any min-max build in ARPGs is to do the most damage with the least amount of button presses, it's all automation/optimization at its heart

[shadow sundial]

yeah, the premise of games like Factorio is you build a complicated automation chain to Make Stuff Faster/Better, which is, in essence, kind of like building your own bot to play the game for you (very loosely "pseudo-code" i would say, except physical chunks of factory parts linking together)

[real sable]

yep, and why no matter what the "autobomber" builds will always be the flavor of the month

[shadow sundial]

i've never enjoyed the mindless ARPG builds like that. i like the complexity of having to manually weave multiple skills together to make it work, even if it is repetitive most of the time. probably why i'm more inclined to enjoy those other genres too. but yeah, lots of people just want a chill experience of press-button-demons-die-get-loot

and thats cool too

[waxen sonnet]

I do love a good piano build

[real sable]

disgusting, never mention your weird fetishes again

[waxen sonnet]

Pineapple

[real sable]

in what orientation is said pineapple?

[shadow sundial]

on pizza? e-friendship is now over

[waxen sonnet]

Don't worry about it. I'll tell you when you're older

[real sable]

my wife wants to know, stop cucking me and let me get cucked

[eternal sky]

factorio is good autism game

haha min max go brrr brrr

[waxen sonnet]

I see the appeal of those games for sure

[eternal sky]

production go up

[real sable]

and now production go up IN SPACE

https://tenor.com/view/space-tim-curry-gif-7935778

[junior oyster]

The best rts game. At least for the comedy.

[real sable]

unpopular opinion: red alerts were a pain in the ass to actually play. We just have rose tinted goggles because haha funny man with accent and robot dolphins

[humble moth]

d4 bad

[waxen sonnet]

I do like the occasional RTS

[real sable]

[eternal sky]

yea he's broken

[real sable]

7 years on discord and that's HIS ENTIRE personality

mental illness go wild

[humble moth]

cant have discussion with d4 andys so i just type in a language they can understand

[real sable]

bro who

[eternal sky]

bro what

[real sable]

it's the LE discord

you're the only one mentioning it

[waxen sonnet]

And you just fed the pathetic lil kid

Way to go!!!

[eternal sky]

FUCKKK!!!!!

[real sable]

gotta save his classmates somehow

[eternal sky]

[humble moth]

anyway

d4 bad

[real sable]

damn gav I apologize for giving you shit about it in the other discord, this guy is so much worse

[eternal sky]

[real sable]

blizzard living rent free in that guy's spacious cranium

[humble moth]

bliz andy i cant

so much bliz andys getting triggered by my 2 words classic

[waxen sonnet]

This is why you don't engage atello. He only has like 3 pre-programmed responses

[humble moth]

this guy engages with me every time

[waxen sonnet]

He isn't old enough to have learned more

[real sable]

this is the one time I give him attention, don't worry

[humble moth]

not even engaging just saying insults

[shadow sundial]

you guys do realize there's a very easy way to deal with idiot trolls, right? block them, and then nobody sees their nonsense, and then nobody is inclined to respond to it. and if you see the occasional discord wanderer responding to it, just quietly move on with your life

[real sable]

it's not that serious

[humble moth]

damn im getting blocked

this guy rly doesnt wanna see d4 bad

[eternal sky]

i find blocking people to be a weakness

[real sable]

how dare you, blocked

[waxen sonnet]

Lol gav

Giga Chad statement there

[shadow sundial]

i've never blocked anyone in any forum for having opinions that i disagree with (politically or w/e). i do occasionally block worthless trolls though when i come across them. adding zero value to the community discourse is one of the two mortal sins you can commit on social media

[eternal sky]

buy ring for 75c with the tri stats spend 40c on catalysts suffix lock veil gg

banger ring made

[waxen sonnet]

Dude idk how you go so hard for so long on EVERY single league gav. You are a fucking machine

Don't you get bored

[real sable]

vaguely passive-aggressive mentions still count as feeding, just change topics or he'll still think he's doing something

[eternal sky]

because i kiss poe

and no i have 8 chars this league

have played 10 builds

going on my 11th

building the gear set now

[real sable]

and they're all named some form of GAV_THIGH_HIGHS

prove me wrong

[waxen sonnet]

Like I get it but Jesus. Eventually it's still the same game. I love Poe too

[eternal sky]

cant really get bored when you just make new builds all the time

[waxen sonnet]

But my god

[eternal sky]

its the mathil effect

keep rolling new builds

[shadow sundial]

yeah i know. but i cant really put the "hey guys just block it and move on" vibe out into the universe without saying a few sentences about it to start off 😛

[real sable]

how many times can you clear mesa in 3 minutes bro come on

[eternal sky]

bro ive done mesa like 3 times this league

[waxen sonnet]

Blocked and moving on. 😉

[eternal sky]

i farm invitations atm

[real sable]

just ignoring the most efficient map in the game, couldn't be me

absolute degenerate

[eternal sky]

doing a rotation of 4 guardian/elder/elderslayer

max quant for gilded sulphite scarab

then i go do like 40k sulphite

rinse repeat

[shadow sundial]

3 minutes until C:S2 goes live

[real sable]

cool, hit 100 on a single character

[eternal sky]

yea nah

[waxen sonnet]

I thought cs2 has been out for a while? No?

[eternal sky]

my discharge char could do it

but thats just alch running every t16 map

in my stash

[real sable]

it doesn't count because it doesn't fucking work on half the hardware people use

[eternal sky]

to get 100

[shadow sundial]

C:S1 has been out for like, 8 years? this sequel has been out to reviewers / content creators for a month or so, with the NDA released like a week ago so they could release their content

[waxen sonnet]

I just thought maybe it was beta testing or something. Idfk lol

I can't keep up with everything!

[real sable]

oh cities skylines 2

I thought you meant counterstrike 2

[waxen sonnet]

Lol so did i

[real sable]

disregard my regarded message

[waxen sonnet]

Also disregard

I should have known, you literally said it 15 mins ago

I'm dum

[shadow sundial]

you probably saw the recent reviews injected into your media feeds

[real sable]

cs2 is a shitshow, straight up doesn't work long enough on AMD gpus to unfuck the default settings that make the drivers crash

[tawny sand]

i heard cities 2 runs like ass

[shadow sundial]

and yeah i'm super curious to see how the game actually starts to degrade performance on my PC. apparently it's only a couple graphics settings that are causing issues right now, and the studio has released a public statement acknowledging that they missed their performance/optimization targets and are actively working on it. i've got a GPU with 24GB of VRAM and a ryzen 7800x3D CPU, so hopefully that can keep me pushing even further into big-city territory before it slows down too much

the reviews for it have been mixed though, as far as the "how much PC do you need"... some people have been just fine, some have had issues where FPS drops to 15-20 eventually

[eternal sky]

results of slam

[shadow sundial]

i also dont know that 15FPS is a big deal breaker on a game that has no twitch-reflex requirement

[tawny sand]

i have a mid range pc so idk if it's worth it

my friend has a high end one so i'm waiting to see what he says on performance i guess

but cities 1 already ran pretty bad on big cities for me

[shadow sundial]

but yeah, this is the top priority for the studio to fix right now, so i dont think it's going to be a major issue forever

[real sable]

if a 7800x3D struggles with a game, the game isn't optimized yet

it's literally top 3 fastest desktop consumer CPU's ever

[shadow sundial]

from the reviews i've seen there really isnt much if anything broken as far as the actual game mechanics (i.e. bugs), it's just the shitty way they implemented the level-of-detail rendering and some other graphics stuff that will slow it down in a huge city if your graphics settings are too high

[eternal sky]

honestly isnt it just game optimization is just

really shit these days

[real sable]

I run a whole-ass local server for another game that simulates 20+ AIs with dozens and dozens of subroutines each, in addtion to real-time events and shit, and playing as a client at the same time and my 7800x3D doesn't give a single shit

[shadow sundial]

what they are missing is the eight years of the fanatical modding community providing a huge library of mods to improve the game though, like C:S1 had. which will come in time. and this time around they're implementing the mods directly through their own modding platform, so it'll be easier for players to download/install them

[real sable]

no, it's just that there's a bare minimum that devs can get away with not doing because processing power is so powerful at even a baseline budget

[tawny sand]

i feel like devs use dlss / fsr to excuse shitty performance currently

[shadow sundial]

yeah lots of dev studios are leaning really hard into DLSS to save them... which isn't really the right answer

[real sable]

that's all irrelevant to cities btw, that game is notoriously CPU heavy

it's all the simulations it does that are the problem

[tawny sand]

sounds like the similar issue x4 has, i love that game cause of its simulation but it tanks performance

[shadow sundial]

simulation games will eat up every bit of local CPU cache you throw at them

all of the CPUs right under the X3D ryzens on there are superfast top end chips, but they have less local cache

[real sable]

yep, and if you don't know what to look for it can appear like a gpu bottleneck because all the assets and shit still need to pipe through your main bus

[shadow sundial]

DONE! lets goooooooooo

[warped wren]

I am waffling on whether or not to buy Return to Moria

on the one hand, I've never been interested in a survival game in my life. On the other, from all the vids and interviews I've seen, this studio has poured their heart and soul into trying to stay true to LOTR lore and I LOVE that and I grew up on LOTR

[real sable]

as long as it's not tied to amazon's vision of LOTR, it should be fine

[shadow sundial]

hold up, there's a LOTR survival game?

like Valheim style survival game?

[warped wren]

launched today on Epic

[warped wren]

yes

set in the Fourth Age, as the reclamation of Moria

[shadow sundial]

i read Tolkien's work all the way through almost every summer when i was in middle/high school

[warped wren]

I've inhaled everything LOTR throughout my life

so this game interests me but idk if the gameplay itself will be something I will enjoy because I

[shadow sundial]

reading it now to my oldest daughter (10) as our bedtime reading. we're almost done with The Two Towers

[warped wren]

I've never played survival games before

[warped wren]

true parenting

[shadow sundial]

my girls aren't gonna grow up to be basic bitches

[tawny sand]

i used to love survival games, but once you've played a few of them you've played them all i feel like

my friends might like the LOTR one tho

does it need servers to play co-op?

[warped wren]

I don't know honestly

[real sable]

painfully true

every so often something comes along to hold your attention through novelty or actual innovation in the genre

[warped wren]

luckily I've never played any, so that issue won't be relevant to me

[real sable]

that changes really quickly, don't worry

[shadow sundial]

fuck it i'm just going to leave these C:S2 settings on 5120x1440 max graphics and see how far that takes me. i went in to tweak stuff but i guess i should give my system a chance

i wonder who asked for Kelvin as an option

[real sable]

ah yes, our city temperature needs to be referenced to SPACE

[shadow sundial]

i mean, not a difficult conversion from celsius, just amusing heh

crowdsourcing my landmass here... vote now or forever hold your peace

[waxen sonnet]

I vote to hold my peace

Looks pretty though

[shadow sundial]

Twin Mountain seems like it could turn into a pretty decent vista eventually

oh that's cool. they modeled their local geography as one of the map options (i verified it with google maps)

[real sable]

Alternatively: saved a bunch of asset time by ripping terrain data from google maps api

[shadow sundial]

heh i'm sure more than one of their maps were built that way 😉 gotta get that content out

[real sable]

If it works it works

Hell microsoft flight sim uses the entirety of bing maps data

And it works and looks awesome because it's the literal world

[placid yarrow]

cities 2 is out?

pog

[humble moth]

damn thats crazy

d4 bad

[real sable]

@shadow sundial so how's C:S2 lookin so far?

[shadow sundial]

dawn in Entropia

[real sable]

scenic af

[shadow sundial]

30-40FPS with graphics cranked to max

[waxen sonnet]

Sure looks like the skyline of a city

[shadow sundial]

i'm keeping them maxed until it consistently drops to 20ish. which might be a function moreso of the simulation aspect rather than rendering. there's an option in settings somewhere to bind those together though (i.e. either adjust framerate or simulation rate, depending which method you prefer)

there are skill trees now too. you get basic versions of each service as you grow, but you spend points (gained by hitting milestones) to unlock more advanced stuff

[rugged island]

Is that portal 2

[ember lake]

Reminder to everyone - It's okay to disagree, but we will do so respectfully!

Please remember to follow the Server Rules, namely 1 and 4, thank you!

[waxen sonnet]

Subtle ave. Subtle 🙂

[humble moth]

wow totally not biased work beign done by cm

[waxen sonnet]

Hah

[warped wren]

@shadow sundial take?
https://youtu.be/QnMsT2S2vzA?si=ODJhbQH3JYbDabvY

[ember lake]

This goes for everyone -

I overlooked the repeated posts as they were harmless and didn't disrupt the server, however now it is causing an issue. That doesn't mean the reactions to these posts are in the clear either.

Going forwards, Rule Violations will be handled to the letter. This includes Time-outs, Warnings and potential bans. I would like to believe that everyone can all behave within the Rules so this will not be necessary.

The block tool also works both ways.

[humble moth]

oh okay so me saying "d4 bad" is worse than them calling me names? my bad this server cant handle literally two words then

guess i should start calling people names

[warped wren]

"start"

[humble moth]

go get therapy

[ember lake]

Rule 4 : Don't spam - regardless of message length, this rule applies.

Rule 1 : Respect each other - name calling, insinuations regarding mental health and Slur terms are not acceptable.

I expect all Rules to be followed by everyone, to the letter.

Please do not make me have to explain to Kain why I have had to time out multiple players.

[humble moth]

?

i was literally the only one instantly timed out

these other regular andys didnt get shit

whatever

[ember lake]

And you know what term you used that was responsible for that

[humble moth]

?

[ember lake]

The discussion on this is over. Follow the Rules please, everyone.

[humble moth]

yeah okay , discussion is done

they are just very pathetic and need some therapy

which is fine

[waxen sonnet]

Throwing in the passive aggressive insults when arguing with a mod. Classic.

[ember lake]

This also applies to everyone else - any instances of Rule 1 being broken will result in Moderation actions.

[shadow sundial]

fair take. the game seems to be "complete" in terms of features and whatnot. i wish reviewers would stop using "incomplete game" term in their reviews, because it's not. given sufficient hardware, it's a fully playable simulation game. the criticisms over how much hardware you need are valid. seems like there was some mix of the dev team being forward-looking for hardware minimums, and also not optimizing it well enough to account for people using 5+ year old hardware

[warped wren]

hmmm

[shadow sundial]

i can't personally relate because i generally replace my hardware with current gen stuff every 2 years or so. i know that's not feasible for everyone though

[warped wren]

honestly, as someone who owns a very average laptop., the increasing hardware specs are a little scary in modern gaming lol

I use GFN to play BG3 even

just because I don't have a large enough SSD

[maiden widget]

tbh compared to 2005-2010s its still really manageable mostly

[shadow sundial]

i spend some extra bucks to know that i wont be short on RAM, VRAM, or CPU horsepower. so for instance, i dont experience the "crash every 1-2 hours" problem that some people have in games with memory leaks, because they're booting that game up when they're already close to maxing their system out just from background/OS processes.

but from a business perspective, if you want to maximize market penetration, you figure out how to accommodate everyone, instead of just the top quintile of hardware specs

[tawny sand]

alan wake 2's recs are kind of scary, i'm over here with just a 3060ti. I hope that's not the sign of future games to come

rn a console feels more cost effective, but i prefer pc gaming

[shadow sundial]

GFN and similar streaming services are a really nice mitigation for this whole trend

[warped wren]

yeah

[maiden widget]

i think we're just used to a weird market where you'd be fine with midrange for 5y give or take

thankfully only a few games crap out with performance issues

[eager ridge]

shit did i miss all the fun

[shadow sundial]

putting on my tinfoil hat though, it does feel like there's some mild conspiracy between dev studios and GPU developers to try to push the new hardware, and focusing on the top part of the product stack (i know there's probably not, but damn sometimes it feels like those backchannel discussions are happening sometimes with the huge studios)

[eager ridge]

rule 1 breakers ayo?

who callin who names

@ember lake is a cute kitty cat

NAME CALLING

[waxen sonnet]

Why ama. Whyyyyyyyy

[fervent hazel]

Anyone play Digimon TCG?

[eternal sky]

fuckin veil chaos slapped 5 life

[waxen sonnet]

Big roller

[waxen sonnet]

Oh man. That's a retro callback right there

[hardy crane]

in 12yrs of playing PoE - I got my first mirror this league

[warped wren]

pog, gratz!

[hardy crane]

I was so hyped I couldn't even fall asleep when I went to bed that night lmao

about fell out of my chair

it was from a Ritual too

[waxen sonnet]

Wait. Did you drop one naturally?

[warped wren]

wow lol

[hardy crane]

from a Ritual

lol

[waxen sonnet]

What

[warped wren]

specced Ritual?

or just random ass

[turbid trail]

Time to mirror something

[fervent hazel]

The card game is no longer retro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLq9DIxouR0

[hardy crane]

https://twitter.com/TheOneOnDruryLn/status/1710561534236066146

spec'd ritual

I sold it and giga-juiced my build lol

[waxen sonnet]

That's still crazy

[hardy crane]

got a mageblood and a bunch of other stuff

[waxen sonnet]

idk what I would do if I saw a mirror just drop

[hardy crane]

I had to walk away and come back with a clear head the next day

lmao

[waxen sonnet]

That sounds fair

[placid yarrow]

SHEEESH GZ

Ops sorry for ping

Don't tell Kain

[hardy crane]

Dead to me

[placid yarrow]

Nooooooo

[waxen sonnet]

Rip in peace

[placid yarrow]

I haven't played nearly enough to drop a mirror yet, but I've still held one a couple times from liquidating

[real sable]

you've finally reached the end of the path of exile, congrats

[turbid trail]

If you want to drop mirror The Feared and sanctum are the best way to get those

[waxen sonnet]

Wth is the feared?

[real sable]

maven invitation

[waxen sonnet]

Ohh ok

Never pay attention to the names haha

[real sable]

it's a good time

[shadow sundial]

i never dropped a mirror, but one league i did liquidate my stuff towards the end and i had like 1.5mirrors or something

[real sable]

excuse me?

[turbid trail]

Yea, feared has something like 0.5% chance to drop drop a mirror

So its not that bad

[shadow sundial]

yeah i've been playing better games since then. like Last Epoch. and Factorio. and Satisfactory. and Dyson Sphere Program. and Cities:Skylines. with a brief stint to try Vampire Survivors in there somewhere too

[turbid trail]

Back in 3.13 was running feared rotations with friends and we got one

[shadow sundial]

oh shit and i cant forget this wasteland of a game. i think i blocked it out mentally

[real sable]

it's not fair to say better, poe has come a long way since 2021

[shadow sundial]

i gave myself a few days to recover from my lost ark poisoning and then got into Last Epoch hard at the end of july

[turbid trail]

Yea, its a totally different game

[shadow sundial]

which coincided with my wife taking our girls and her mom back to her home state to visit family there. so i was an unemployed (recently retired) bachelor for like 10 days. it was epic. i logged an average of 14 hours a day in LE during my first week or so

[real sable]

I remember everyone gushing over lost ark until they got to end game and realized it's another p2w grindfest, except you can't actually win lol

[shadow sundial]

there were a lot of things i really liked about LA, and then there were a few i absoluted hated

[real sable]

yeah definitely

[shadow sundial]

the raid boss design was great, and raids felt fun and appropriately challenging. that was its high point

[real sable]

some good ideas lost in the sauce of korean grindfest mmo design

which wouldn't have been bad if it wasn't so blatantly cash shop centric. If it was a diablo-like lineage 2 it would have absolutely killed.

[turbid trail]

Only things that I liked in lost ark were Combat and Raids

[real sable]

now it's just 99% bots

[turbid trail]

Everything else was turbo boring and grindy

[real sable]

to be fair, that's exactly what the korean market loves. They're hardcore over there in terms of mmos

[turbid trail]

Poe 2 has some good parts of LA combat

[real sable]

I played quite a bit of lineage 2 back in my day, it's easy to see the appeal of amassing wealth bit by bit via pure time investment and efficiency, but that all went out the window once I got out of high school and didn't have time for anything anymore.

[waxen sonnet]

Being an adult fucking blows

Who designed this shit

[real sable]

I dunno, the romans I guess

[waxen sonnet]

Jerks

[eternal sky]

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3445755/page/1#p25136426

Harness the power of ancient Sentinels and explore the mysterious Lake of Kalandra! The Blast from the Past event offers you an opportunity to return to these Path of Exile leagues from the past or experience them for the first time in case you missed them.

In this event, almost every Path of Exile area has both the Sentinel and Kalandra mechanics active. For more information on how these leagues work, check out the Challenge League sections in the patch notes here and here.

By the way, this event is not voided, so have fun crafting with Recombinators!

[turbid trail]

That sounds soo good

Sadly you cant recombinate mirrored items

[narrow token]

Shame what that game is, the classes are so much fun. I wish the Scrapper, Wardancer, and Soulfist were in LE tbh.

[shadow sundial]

I had a ton of alts for solo task farming stuff, but I really only cared about my Gunlancer. Every time someone brings it up in the Monster Hunter chats I get a little bit nostalgic. I never played MH but I read that LA just straight up copied the class and most of its skills

[placid yarrow]

@shadow sundial I abandoned ship as soon as i hit the T3 wall doing argos

i blasted hard af for a month

and then quit

[waxen sonnet]

Oh gunlance. Why aren't you... Better

[shadow sundial]

In LA or MH?

[placid yarrow]

ignite sorc all the way, that shit was so fun

LA

[waxen sonnet]

Mh

Lol

[placid yarrow]

ah didn't know who you were asking lol

[shadow sundial]

Gunlancer in LA was one of the least played and most desired raid group classes

[placid yarrow]

yeah gunlancer in LA was so nice to have

my static had one

you could just ignore a mechanic sometimes

because of the fat fuck off shield

[shadow sundial]

Everyone on reddit be complaining about gatekeeping in party finder, meanwhile im getting basically insta-invites to any group

[warped wren]

are you gonna no-life this event like me Gav

[placid yarrow]

i didn't really need to party find at all but yeah i heard

[warped wren]

[placid yarrow]

i'd party find for guardian raids sometimes but those were instant pops

[shadow sundial]

I played bluelancer the entire time, so yeah, fat fuck-you shield indeed

[placid yarrow]

but man i really miss doing dungeons and raids in LA, they're designed so well and the combat was amazing imo

but honing can just go fuck itself in the endgame

[shadow sundial]

Every time I saw some boss video guide say “this mechanic is a one-shot kill” I’d be like… maybe for all you peasants

[placid yarrow]

you're stuck doing the exact same guardian, dungeons, chaos dungeons, gates and so on for wayyyy too long until you can get to the next stage

and like yeah i was ahead of the curve

but fuck off lol

just tell me there's no more content and hard block me instead

[shadow sundial]

I was in a competitive GVG guild so we had to be pushing hard on our iLvl

[placid yarrow]

i'd rather max out and wait for a content drop instead of trying to hone at like sub 1% odds for weeks

ah i never did GVG

[shadow sundial]

Never could compete with the Korean and Chinese whale guilds, but we damn well held our own against the rest of the server in GVG

[placid yarrow]

yeah i just barely touched pvp after i had gotten tired of the normal game but it wasn't really for me tbh

but yeah if they somehow make a comeback and make honing at the high end not so aids i'll play again honestly

[shadow sundial]

When people call some game “P2W”, I always wondered if they ever played lost ark. Whales there spending $50-100k per year

[placid yarrow]

yeah, same in black desert i think right

never really played that one though

[warped wren]

the fuck

[placid yarrow]

ngl though it did feel nice having people call you p2w when you were f2p just because of how hard i was pumping in the first couple weeks lol

being in a static helped efficiency a lot tbh

[shadow sundial]

Yeah man it’s a thing. Imagine you’re the son of a rich CCP member. Daddy is fed untold hundreds of millions through a combination of legitimate business and govt corruption. You get a big allowance. Spend it each year or daddy lowers it next year

Only so many fancy cars and clothes you can justify buying

[placid yarrow]

Hall of the twisted warlord (T1 third dungeon) is still one of the most memorable dungeons in any mmo i've played

idk why

but it's stuck with me as such a great experience when we were doing it for the first time

Gate of paradise was aids af to PUG but really fun with my static

and i remember we wiped so many times on the second boss in Oreha preveza that we had to quit for the day and come back the next day to beat it because people had their gear break and they didn't have a hammer

and someone ran out of pots too

it was a mess

but yeah after doing that dungeon a few times is when it started going downhill tbh, they revealed argos iLvl and it was like nah, i'm just gonna not

[narrow token]

I gave up before I even GOT to Argos.

[placid yarrow]

i got to the first gate

and after i did it i realized it just wasn't worth it

so i quit

[narrow token]

I was having fun doing the solo boss content. Didn't want to get a group

[rugged island]

https://tenor.com/view/stellaris-gif-24668106

[placid yarrow]

https://tenor.com/view/minions-me-raise-hands-pick-me-gif-22034641

[rugged island]

I got a friend into stellaris back when it came out, he says he hates me for it

bc he put 3k hours into it since then

[placid yarrow]

Sheeesh

[stable shore]

@waxen sonnet so i'm not gonna see any nergigante until mr99 for ruiner right ? i miss my spikey boi

[waxen sonnet]

Correct

[shadow sundial]

Stellaris!

[stable shore]

stygian zinogre is my new second favourite monster btw

it's definitive now

at least he's here to let me have fun until nergigante comes back

[eternal sky]

@waxen sonnet make a new build and it still worse then my discharge char

did a few invitation n stuff with it

its a good build but like

[waxen sonnet]

haha rip, explosive trap?

[eternal sky]

nah that chars already passed

[waxen sonnet]

haha double rip

[eternal sky]

tornado shot inquis tri attri stacking

with manaforged ts burning arrow and LA

[waxen sonnet]

nice nice

[eternal sky]

does huge dam killed mino in 2 seconds but like

discharge chars a fucking racecar

[waxen sonnet]

not as epileptic so not as fun 🙂

[real sable]

gav can wax poetic about his discharge build all he wants

it will never compete with this monstrosity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtU5mT1B0I0

[faint mauve]

only a few mirrors lol

i'd like to explore more melee options but boneshit is as good as it gets

[waxen sonnet]

I had a lot of fun with viper/pestilent strike this league, for the little but i got to play

[faint mauve]

i respect carn for just staying on melee and just git gud

[waxen sonnet]

i love melee in arpgs

[faint mauve]

same

[waxen sonnet]

except spin2win

[faint mauve]

im not into just min max currency and copy unethical builds online

i like doing ubers with less than 10 mil dps lool, failed at it this ruthless league though

[warped wren]

any Hades enjoyers here

I just finally fucking beat the final battle on a fresh Hell mode save and I feel pumped

[placid yarrow]

GZ

[stable laurel]

Yep, love it - but mostly stuck to easier difficulty to see the story. Congratulations, must be such a relief getting through it!

[warped wren]

It was rough

I've done 32 Heat a few times on my main save, and this was legitimately way harder

Got him on the 21st attempt finally

[stable laurel]

Which weapon did you do it with?

[warped wren]

Achilles Spear lv 1

very few aspects are good with low titan blood, one of them being that spear

I guess Eril Rail is good too but I suck at the Rail in general, the most I got with it on my normal save was like 12 Heat I think

[rugged island]

In case anyone missed it we're going to play a round of stellaris later tonight, open to anyone https://discord.com/channels/368953963267096586/1166525539314577448

[waxen sonnet]

Are you guys gonna stream it?

If I have some time I'll tune in and laugh

[warped wren]

this is the victory screenshot

I think the auto god gauge generation + Demeter Call carried a lot of it defensively

[placid yarrow]

if you want your eyes to burn from how bad i'll play i can stream it lol

[waxen sonnet]

I've never even seen the game, much less played it lol

So I won't know anything about anything

You will be the best

[placid yarrow]

ah good lul

because i've played like three games with two of my friends who are also noobs

[waxen sonnet]

What even is it? Like a 4X strategy?

[placid yarrow]

yea

but real time

wtf did youtube just recommend me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a-DHZrEijY

this woman is a legend wth

[eternal sky]

discord broke my better discord theme

[trim portal]

https://youtu.be/7WtDhSk0TGc?si=zm-wmfu0hjdsJa8K does anybody know what genre this game is? It looks really addictive but what they're playing is only a demo and I've tried it and I love it but I want to know the genre so I can find more like it

[waxen sonnet]

I think it might be an inventory management auto battler

[eternal sky]

backpack hero

[placid yarrow]

yeah it's like super auto pets kinda

but more complicated i think

never played it tbh

[simple needle]

auto battler for sure

[waxen sonnet]

We're all so smart

[eternal sky]

truly a collective consciousness of our times

[maiden widget]

that demo was fun

[real sable]

ROGUELIKE TETRIS-LIKE AUTOBATTLER OPEN WORLD PVPVMVP SSFBTW

[shadow sundial]

at some point in every city builder, i always give up on the steady organic development of my city and just lay down a giant grid for expansion

i do this a few times, and then go back to finer detailing for the surrounding areas

https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17fg9jq/cs2_vs_cs1_modded_map_size/ in other news, apparently modders have already found a way (not implemented yet as a mod) to massively unlock more possible map space. 3000 sqKm+

[eternal sky]

common modder W

[shadow sundial]

also i'd like to take a moment to appreciate how, in one day, that sub went from OH FUCK THIS GAME AND ITS TERRIBLE PERFORMANCE (<--- pre-release), to "yeah i just turned a couple settings down that didn't really change the graphics too much and it's running fine on my 37 year old laptop"

[restive geyser]

It's just an autobattler you get the same experience and I'll even say better in games like TFT

[restive geyser]

You should try out https://store.steampowered.com/app/2439710/Skybreakers/ demo, the gameplay is so satisfying, I don't think it's as deep as Hades unfortunately 😦

[real sable]

gross, real cities gamers make giant single-road spirals. Premium pricing is on the outside edge because it doesn't take 6 fucking hours to leave the neighborhood

[waxen sonnet]

I want to live on a giant spiral staircase. Yes please

You just need to pay 25 schmeckels to get to work every day

[shadow sundial]

i did make a spiral (not a giant one) in C:S1 at one point

[real sable]

What's that in Schrute bucks?

[waxen sonnet]

Gotta ask slippery stair for the conversion

[real sable]

That's a slippery slope to inflation

[waxen sonnet]

I have a feeling you don't know what I'm referencing lol

[atomic burrow]

rate her 1 to 10

[waxen sonnet]

i rate her a D4 sorceress

[atomic burrow]

that's 1 W 😄

[shadow sundial]

No side boob or underboob. 1.5/5 stars

[copper pawn]

may as well rate this cosmetics lol
https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/17epyc2/i_guess_theyre_starting_to_realize_what_people/?force_seo=1

[faint mauve]

[hardy crane]

dear god lol

is that legit real? lol

25$ bundle... wtf

[faint mauve]

LOL hard game

need to cleanse myself off season 2 d4 by playing hc project diablo 2

[warped wren]

took only one single hit in the final fight. Quite proud of this run

Hell mode is definitely forcing me to git gud

[warped wren]

Also my first perfect run, no deaths at all

[eternal sky]

[warped wren]

Vivid vulture prison?

[eternal sky]

nah

[warped wren]

Or just randomly using up crafts

[eternal sky]

ye

[warped wren]

Most of them are bait honestly

I've never gotten anything good off Bestiary unless it was a targeted craft or a beast boss

Early league unique flasks can sometimes be good I guess, I think once I sold a Witchfire for 40c on day 2 or 3 or something

[faint mauve]

some legendaries like farruls fur from bestiary bosses are worth something

or just heist for replica farruls fur

ruthless bestiary is probably the worst out of the 4 masters. you still do some bestiary to enchant the utility potions

[turbid trail]

Bestiary is very good on early SSF

Easy access to orbs of binding and some uniques

[eager ridge]

She aint got no tiddies, but thats blizz for ya

[simple needle]

Monster hunter world with expansion is a steal right now

[copper pawn]

I heard city skyline 2 is having quite a rough time

[shadow sundial]

If it sounds overly negative, then you should probably just ignore most things that video gamers say on forums. This goes for any game. It’s almost always a gross exaggeration, because most of these people are incapable of independent, analytical thought

[copper pawn]

not overly negative, but mixed, mostly about how much of a bugfest the game is right now

and if the bugfest case is true, yeah it deserves that kind of rating

[shadow sundial]

it for sure needs some optimization on the graphics rendering. in particular, Level of Detail scaling does not work well at all. they need to improve downscaling on the polygons

but as far as "bugs", as in things that are broken with the gameplay itself, i'm not tracking this huge list of problems. i've been playing it almost every waking hour since launch on tuesday and i haven't encountered anything

and a bunch of the complaints in the subreddit are actually player misinterpretations of how something works. biggest one being the Zone Demand bars, heh

i'm not white knighting the game. it needs some graphics tuning so people can actually play with it on cranked settings and enjoy the majestic glory without having a top end PC (circa 2025 technology hah)

but yeah, whether it's diablo4 or whatever, over the last couple years i've seen this growing trend where games get dogpiled by the hivemind of angry bees. and then the media picks up on that and makes it worse. when in reality, it's (D4 for ex) a game with a solid core and a top notch campaign, that just needed some time to cook in some player feedback and dev tuning incubator in order to tune some facets or iron out a couple things (D4 mounts feel 500% better to use now, for example).

my hot take: a lot of gamers are inherently shy or lonely people, and they are following a very basic human desire to fit in... thus the echo chamber that pops up anytime something isn't perfect. (or, alternatively, the fanatical groupthink that sometimes defends broken games when they do need fundamental fixing)

[warped wren]

Problem is that people are (justifiably) sick of "barely good enough"

Especially with price tags of $90+

• paid DLCs and in game cash shops

One of my best purchases of the year was Remnant 2. Reasonable price? Yes. Good working game? Yes. Needed more tuning and feedback? Only in the sense of some balancing and QoL, nothing game breakingly awful. No nickel and diming the player? Hell yes.

Games like D4 deserve to get dogpiled. Studios like Blizzard / EA / Ubisoft deserve all the hate they're getting until their entire top management gets overhauled.

[shadow sundial]

i would separate cosmetics from DLC/expansions. D4's (and basically every game's) shop is purely cosmetic. there may very well be a paid expansion at some point, years down the road, but until then (and after that) we're getting seasonal content for free as part of the live service model.

i dont have a problem with cosmetic game shops... even at stupid price points. you arent required to buy whatever fancy outfit in order to enjoy the game. you have a bunch of options available to you through armor/transmogs in most games that you can still look badass for free

[shadow sundial]

and similar applies to the Deluxe/Ultimate versions of games. you dont need the extra cosmetics or the pewter figurine or whatever you're getting for that extra money, heh. that's a choice, not a requirement to take part in the game content

i think the base version of D4 that i bought was $70. adjusted for inflation back to the release dates of D3 and D2, that's $52 and $39, respectively. people getting twitchy about paying $60 for a Nintendo Switch game or $70 for a AAA PC game aren't factoring in inflation/CPI

that $60 Switch game today, adjusted backwards for inflation, would be $22 for the NES game that my parents were buying me in the mid 80s when i was a wee lad. and i remember seeing the price tags... they were paying more than that. games have gotten generally a bit cheaper over the decades, relative to cost of living

[warped wren]

There is no world in which $70 for D4 is justified

None

Even in the state it's in now

[shadow sundial]

studios like Paradox have gotten flak for nickel/diming players with constant DLC, so that's a legitimate complaint. they did it with Cities 1

[warped wren]

And that's the case with a LOT of AAA titles

People don't mind paying $70 for Spiderman 2

[shadow sundial]

is the base game $90 or are you including whatever deluxe version?

ah ok i see your edit

[warped wren]

70 sorry, it's 90 CAD

[shadow sundial]

canadabucks!

[warped wren]

Point being, people hate paying full price for half baked or quarter baked product

[shadow sundial]

that's your opinion, and that's fine to have. i personally enjoyed the hell out of the campaign. it was smooth, polished, top notch CGI cutscenes, etc. lots of players buy into the Diablo franchise for the lore and the campaign, and they got their money's worth probably. the endgame gameplay loop is a different discussion; i happened to be ok (not satisfied, not dissatisfied) with it on launch. it's gotten a lot better over the two seasons

[warped wren]

That's not my opinion, it's a literal fact that the game was underdeveloped on launch

[shadow sundial]

what's not ok is a studio releasing unfinished crap and then basically ghosting your players. ex. KSP2

hmm. are we going to have a discussion on "opinion vs fact" here?

i like these

i'll start, if you'd like. i just stated some facts about inflation-adjusted prices above. and a few messages ago, i stated an opinion about the state of a game (KSP2) and dev support

ok, now you go

[warped wren]

Are you claiming that releasing a self-labelled MMO-ARPG with next to no endgame content, barely any item crafting, almost no trading, is releasing a full-price product?

[shadow sundial]

On launch:

• Endgame content: NM dungeons, helltides, world bosses, legions, one pinnacle boss
• Crafting: Affix rerolls, gem slot carving, aspect imprinting
• Trading: Uh, they had player trading on release, what? Did you want a fucking auction house? Because that's a whole echelon beyond basic "player trading"

At any point did Blizzard ever promise or hint at a POE/LE-like crafting system? Did they do similar for AH/bazaar?

I would personally like every ARPG to have a robust crafting system like POE/LE (<-- opinion) with a ton of ways to interact with items and affixes. However, that has never been the model for any previous Diablo game in the franchise (<-- fact).

this is where analysis runs into pitfalls. player says "i like [feature X] from [this other game], why can't we have it here?!". devs say, "i get it, but that's not part of our core design philosophy, sorry." playerbase then rages because they want that feature.

i don't think (<-- opinion) we need to have a homogenized genre where every ARPG is basically reskinned versions of eachother, with different graphics and campaign lore

this is all smack in the middle of #firstworldproblems territory. we have a wide variety of good games in all genres these days. embarrassment of riches. instead of spending all of our energy trying to make the genres converge back into a common-standard of feature sets, perhaps we could appreciate games for what they are, and what they're trying to be as an individual game

if a game isn't enjoyable for you as a player, go try another one. or another genre. i jump around between 4-6 genres to keep things fresh for myself

but i've never paid X dollars for a game, played it for Y hours, and then said to myself "well i didnt get my entertainment value out of this"

ok, "never" may be an exaggeration. but i can't think of one off the top of my head, and i have a huge library of games

[warped wren]

1. That's barely any endgame content for an ARPG. That's like saying LE has a lot of endgame content (it doesn't)
2. That's the most barebones "crafting" possible, actually less than D3 even
3. It's severely limited but I'll grant you this one as there was no major promise or anything from Blizzard's part on this

[warped wren]

That might be a you thing because I've had the misfortune to play a handful of games that I squarely felt had charged me for half baked tripe

[warped wren]

It is not. Saying that we as gamers are constantly getting shittier products for the same amount of money or higher is not a "first world" problem. If anything it's a global issue. I lived in India before moving to Canada and affording games on launch was becoming a real problem. My worst regret was buying CP2077 on launch, but thank fuck they rescued that eventually

First world folks have it way easier because $70 is 10 hrs minimum wage. INR 6000 on the other hand can be 10% the household income of a student

[shadow sundial]

i was using #fwp in the sense of "finding something to complain about because your life is comfortable enough to not have any real complaints"

not a literal FOREX discussion. but that's a valid one, and we can have that separately

[warped wren]

I mean, excuse me I guess for trying to hold service providers to a reasonable standard if the game had been $50 on launch I don't think it would have been unjustified

[shadow sundial]

i think you may be slightly hung up on the price; i'd reference you back to my inflation comments above. AAA games are likely going to be at the $70 price point for the next few years. if inflation is around 3-5%, it won't be long before they're $100. studios have to pay current market rates for developers and cloud clusters to host their games.

referencing your last comment, i'm also not sure where Blizzard would have recouped the extra $20 to get back to their intended price point derived from their business model. DLC? charge players for the major balance and content patch they've brought for each new season?

see where i'm going with this?

[restive geyser]

I mean anyone can tell D4 was rushed for a deadline. The game is pretty barren. Build variety was lackluster until recent seasons too. I would also disagree with the hive mind negativity. I'd actually say that D4 was overhyped at launched and defended from the very start and then people started to realize what others were complaining about were actually right.

I had this experience first hand were I stated the progression was lackluster, itemization was boring, and there was no endgame. I gave credit where it's due the game is made very well in terms of moment to moment combat and feel. The campaign was even amazing as you'd expect. But it fell flat in almost every other major category for an ARPG. I'm glad people complained because it seems to be working and they are improving the game. Hopefully by S3 or S4 end game will be better.

[warped wren]

You keep talking about inflation while ignoring the fact that AAA titles used to release in a functional, non broken, largely complete way

If you're increasing price to keep up with inflation, stop shitting on the quality. That's a very reasonable ask from a customer to a firm

[copper pawn]

I don't think that's considered reasonable nowadays, maybe 10y ago

[shadow sundial]

we can probably blame whatever studios pioneered the Early Access model years ago

[copper pawn]

honestly I hear tons of complaints about d4, many of which are valid, but the most ridiculous one is about the cosmetics shop

[shadow sundial]

betas used to be closed/internal, followed by a slightly larger closed beta (players had to apply), sometimes followed by an open beta

parts of the industry (ARPGs for sure) have shifted towards this buy-now-play-now Early Access model. which has its pros for sure. but it appears to have shifted every studio, even the ones not following that model, towards feeling pressured to release something, even if it might need a bit more tweaking. the Live Service model is the other half of this too

[shadow sundial]

the reddit thread on that new female Rogue skin was appx half of the people going full coomer "shut up and take my money" mode, and the other half ranting about the cost of it. like, don't buy cosmetics if you think they're too expensive?

a skin pack is going to cost $20-25 as long as enough people are willing to pay that. nobody gives a shit if you personally think that $5 is the right price point for cosmetics

[restive geyser]

They are right to make their complaints. D4 uses every angle to get player's money except for p2w

[shadow sundial]

explain. "cosmetics" are one category. list others.

[restive geyser]

Battle Pass, Box Price, Paid Xpacs, Cosmetics

[simple needle]

D4 needed early access like LE for development hot take

but big companies wont do it

[shadow sundial]

battle pass = cosmetics. the only difference between the paid and unpaid ones is more cosmetic MTX. so same category

(and you end up paying like $2-3 bucks per season because you get most of the platinum back, so that actually ends up being super cheap cosmetics)

box price = see above discussion on inflation and AAA price point

[restive geyser]

I'm not separating the 2, they are different profit models. And Blizz used them all except the one most hate, which is fine. But like they don't need to price to the max all these options.

[shadow sundial]

paid xpacs = i guess? but we dont know yet if this is a thing or how much of it there will be

[restive geyser]

inflation

[shadow sundial]

i just feel bad for all the GFX artists of the video game design world

sorry, not all... just the ones who do the cosmetic design for player skins

[copper pawn]

I don't get it, what kind of entitlement lets players think that cosmetics should all be given for free? are you given a free iphone to flex with friends just by going to school long and hard enough?

[shadow sundial]

lifelong ambition to be a great artist. all of the schooling. you get to your job. two weeks in, Monday morning design review. boss says: "Yeah, this one is going to need at least twice as much boob showing. Maybe some nip flaps; remember that Janet Jackson thing? Oh, and how much cameltoe can we work in here without getting fined?"

[restive geyser]

No one is saying free. lmao

a cosmetic being 1/3 of the box price of the game seems a bit off, no?

[copper pawn]

I don't condone the unfinished game (at least unfinished imo), but I fully support their model of cosmetics and battle pass

[copper pawn]

no, 1/3 is child play

[shadow sundial]

cosmetics can be $125, i dont fucking care. i know what i'll personally pay for them and i won't pay more and that's fine with me

[restive geyser]

Yeah... that's cool. Some people are vocal about issues they have and they have that right to argue against the pricing structure.

[shadow sundial]

the market demand drives any price

[copper pawn]

I mean, 90% world population will complain about pricing model of mercedes or a gucci bag, so what

[shadow sundial]

you can sell 100k copies of the skin at $5, or 10k copies of it at $50, and you make the same profit. except in that second case the skin is much more rare in game, so it has that cool "exclusive!!!111!!" factor

[copper pawn]

skins are always about those 10%, even 1% of the players, not about the 90%, so it's always 90% that will dislike the pricing anyway

take lol for example, free to play, and yet I already spent easily 5 times the box price of d4 into lol skins

[restive geyser]

MTX models aren't based on market demand They are based on psychological tactics and perception. This isn't a commodity or stock that has some quantitative value. It's a digital good with no finite supply or pressure to change it's price.

[copper pawn]

neither are luxury goods, they are on demand only to a certain group of people, while of zero demand to most others

in a sense, cosmetics in game and luxury goods irl share very much similarity

business model, pricing, customer spectrum

[restive geyser]

Cool and people still can say they are unfairly priced, especially when compared against all the other models they use to profit

[copper pawn]

to most people (including me), $25 skin is 1/3 of box price, but to their targeted customers, both the box price and the skins are like less than 1/10 of their daily leisure money

[shadow sundial]

i dont believe the concept of "unfairly prices" applies to luxury goods, by definition of luxury goods

bread, rice, and meat can be "unfairly priced", because you require food to subsist

[restive geyser]

Unfairly priced is subjective regardless of the item discussed.

[copper pawn]

that's true, but it also doesn't matter

[shadow sundial]

no, it's not. i think the term you're looking for is "not worth the price". fairness is a separate concept

[restive geyser]

It does matter, to people who are vocal about it. Idc if it matters to you or not. That's your opinion.

And yes, unfair works in the same way. What's right and just isn't the same for everyone. So while you may perceive something as fair, I don't have to share that perception.

[shadow sundial]

i'm not getting into an argument on the fundamental properties and dynamics of luxury vs subsistence goods. back to Cities 2

[restive geyser]

Enjoy your gaming

[shadow sundial]

i always do 🙂

[copper pawn]

back to d4 too
I mean, you can be vocal, but as long as you are not their customers, they don't care, that's true for any business, like a truck company won't give a fuck about car customers complaining that their trucks are too expensive

[restive geyser]

Listen, I make complaints/points from understanding perspective. It's not like I have a leg to stand on, as I'm going to go home and play Undecember after work

[warped wren]

How about we blame incompetent executives and short term profit thinking, which is the actual cause. Everything else, early access / open betas / cosmetics funding development - all of these things have been done well and used well by multiple firms. Shit firms with shit executives can cock anything up, because when you don't understand the foundations of your own business model and consumer base, this is what happens. Blizzard, Ubi and EA are just egregious examples that are actively making gaming worse for everyone, both employees as well as gamers

[shadow sundial]

i do blame them as a driving force behind the "push early / tune and fix later" problem

[warped wren]

Supergiant Games did Early Access with Hades, and holy hell did they do it well. Larian did the same thing with BG3

The reason short term approaches are still in fad is because people still pay for shoddy product. If / once profits start dropping they'll eventually be forced to pick up their pants

[simple needle]

Early access isnt a bad concept

[copper pawn]

I think not having EA got something to do with the pride of being a giant company like blizz?

or overconfidence, or whatever shit that might be

can even be delusion of past power

[simple needle]

not pride or overconfidence but contracts and shareholders

[real sable]

never ever do blood raven in PD2 unless you have capped fire res, that's a troll quest / noob trap

[placid yarrow]

Tbh EA isn't always the play, since you can build up way more hype for a release if it's not already out on EA. So if you're sure your game will be a "hit" (doesn't mean good), then not doing EA might be the better financial decision tbh

obviously EA helps a ton with smoothing out gameplay issues and stuff though, and you get lots of feedback and bug reports for free basically, so the good outweighs the bad by a lot for smaller companies

[real sable]

the main issue with EA is that at least half the people will read big bold red text that says "EA IS NOT FINISHED, THINGS ARE GONNA BE BROKEN AND WILL CHANGE/IMPROVE" and still whine for months about every tiny little thing that they don't like.

also a lot of early access games in the past have turned out to be scams/asset flips so the term has some negativity built in by default

a drop of piss in a bucket of water still makes it pisswater, ya know?

[placid yarrow]

Yeah for sure, but usually if a game makes consistent progress and is convincing in that they won't just give up at some point the scam talk usually dwindles after a while

But the EA label for sure has a stigma around it

And it should tbh, with how many bad examples there are

It's like paying for a house before it's built just to have the company pay the cheapest bidder to build it

It's just a risky endeavour so people approach with caution and skepticism

But yeah people saying that bugs and issues are unacceptable while a game is in EA are just a vocal minority I feel

Obviously they can sway the thoughts of others but I think most rational people wouldn't just label the game as being bad but instead maybe wait for release instead of getting it right away when hearing stuff like that

And for the people that permanently label the game as trash because they heard someone say it was really buggy in the beta stage, we're better off without those people in the community

[faint mauve]

isit just blood raven thats remixed ? im at act 5 now lol

[faint mauve]

hows the AH ?

[restive geyser]

It's still somewhat the same, but I think since they removed most of the other P2W or QoL elements the AH isn't really used or something. It's not that impactful. I think Zizaran recently did an overview on how he thinks their monetization structure is if you wanna see an updated overview.

They are making more improvements next season too to remove more complaints people have had with the auto-loot pet and such being like a monthly sub.

But I haven't paid, except tabs, even at launch and didn't ever feel a pressure or need to buy stuff, which is where I draw the line for monetization structures. I forgive stuff like tabs if the game is f2p. So PoE and a portion of this game didn't bother me.

[faint mauve]

i probably wont try undecember ever, its a very saturated market nowadays

[restive geyser]

That's fair, I'll enjoy it for you 😉

[faint mauve]

i wont be surprised if its still better than d4

[junior oyster]

It's an mmo isn't it? It'd never be better than d4 for me

[faint mauve]

its an arpg

as much as d4 is an "mmo arpg" without mmo features

[real sable]

the real issue with undecember is their use of gameguard

probably the most intrusive and untrustworthy anticheat on the market

[faint mauve]

to be fair d4 is carving their own niche with the open world thats unlike the d2/poe/LE classic arpg design but the "base" is still very undeveloped

itemization needs to be overhauled asap and not just something to slowly introduce over the years cause live service

[real sable]

they're already firmly in the same D3 niche of "just enough new stuff each season to get people to come back for a week or two"

the itemization is fine in my opinion, it's not a deep hypersperg arpg like poe is, it doesn't need complexity for the sake of complexity. Just needs a rudimentary loot filter so we don't have to sort through 500 rares to find one with 2 stats we need.

[faint mauve]

a unique in d2 can just be a nice stat stick and not something that only effects one skill

[real sable]

at least 80% of the uniques in diablo 2 are utter garbage

that's a bigger problem than "all these uniques only work for specific builds"

[faint mauve]

it can still be an upgrade on progression

[real sable]

almost never to be honest

name a unique

from d2, any unique

[faint mauve]

hey i found a duskdeep yesterday with 15 all res

and being melee the minimum damage affix helps

otherwise id be making a lore or use some rare

[real sable]

leveling uniques are whatever, they're not gonna carry you into endgame (not that there's much of one in D2 to begin with but you get the point)

[faint mauve]

i dont have a shael or sol yet , i have the pd2 rune wizard up to keep track

its still good to pick up

i'm not new to d2 ive done laddering to 99 multiple times on base game lol

[real sable]

also pd2 is not d2, there's so little in common with vanilla d2 or even d2r even though it's using the same base progression

everything has been touched up in some way

[faint mauve]

yeah

the shit uniques can also serve to make the good uniques better

haha

if you drop a unique that doesnt do anything for your build in d4 its as good as vendor trash anyway

[real sable]

but I mean the original point was that I see it time and time again that people are upset over D4 not being poe and it's like, they never promised anything like that. Thinking D4 wasn't going to be a monetized prettier d3 is naive.

[real sable]

no different than any other arpg

[faint mauve]

unless you actually want to .... play an alt in d4? and refarm the league mechanic ?

and suffer through no stash space

[real sable]

yeah the stash space sucks

they need to finally fix that database dumping they do for some reason

[faint mauve]

you already cant die in HC d4

[real sable]

if you DC you count as dead, you can't NOT die in hc d4 bro

[faint mauve]

other than dc and scroll of escape not working

or you just switch off your brain entirely while playing

[real sable]

it might be an unpopular opinion but playing hc in always-online ARPGs is smoothbrain behavior

[faint mauve]

its not really an issue for me since i almost always play HC

[real sable]

I'm not dumping hundreds of hours of my life into something that can go poof because some packets decided to stop for mcdonalds

and don't even get me started on all the hc poe logout macro apologists

they're all delusional

[faint mauve]

dont play HC if your internet connection isnt good

[real sable]

every time you use a logout macro in hc poe, you admit to dying

[faint mauve]

i actually havent died from DC for years for some reason

so my experience is different lol

[real sable]

must be nice to have such reliable internet

[faint mauve]

its wifi too

[real sable]

laughing in the face of the devil

[faint mauve]

logging out is an old trick that goes back to d2 so im not against it

i dont use logout macro on POE, i use esc > exit

[real sable]

the problem is when the servers don't immediately recognize it

also you're playing pd2, better get used to the servers taking a shit out of nowhere every half hour or so

[faint mauve]

even on ruthless this league i use esc > exit all the time haha

[real sable]

and it's only gonna get worse because they're not getting the funding they need

[faint mauve]

its not just a HC thing

[real sable]

yeah quick exit is a better town portal in poe

that's why I refuse to use keyboards without a numpad, that enter next to my right thumb is a godsend

[faint mauve]

at lvl 93 ruth i see a rare with corpse explode, always crit, life regen and its taking too long to kill i either run away or just exit

[real sable]

yeah for sure those are not worth it

sometimes you just see a rare's mods in an ARPG and you're immediately like "absolutely not, have a nice day"

[faint mauve]

not every hc player uses logout macro im sure

[real sable]

you'd be surprised

for poe at least, 100% every streamer uses one

[faint mauve]

also you get a logout button with awakened POE , but its not as effective as logout macro

[real sable]

logout macro cuts the connection

manually logging out doesn't always inform the server that you're gone right away

and ggg said they're okay with the connection cutting approach

since they don't want to actually build around HC mainline

[faint mauve]

i still prefer HC anyway that said

hc ruthless im just not ready yet

you are never gonna die in d4 playing the game when you have a window to scroll of escape out of a situation when cheat death potions procs

[humble hill]

I keep trying to play season 2 in D4... I can only take it for about 15 minutes

keep coming back to beta LE

[faint mauve]

i just need to max my renown so i dont need to ever farm it again but i stopped playing cause its just that boring haha

with cheat death potions, which only procced once in my first attempt at one of the end game bosses it just lacks any real danger or preparation for me

[humble hill]

the gear feels meaningless... the zones are annoying to traverse.... the builds feel horrible until higher levels

[shadow sundial]

while they fixed a lot of broken or annoying things this season in D4, i feel like they swung the loot pendulum way too far to the overflow side. i spent so much damn time doing loot/stash/salvage management

if they were doing it to calm down players whining about last season or pre-S1, then i think they made a bad decision, because that's going to be considered the new normal and people are going to whine if it ever goes back somewhere in the middle/normal

[narrow token]

Only reason I'm not playing is because they don't have a class that looks fun to me. If they ever make a monk or something, I'm down. But I'm not an arpg connoisseur or aficionado, so D4 is legit made for folks like me.

[faint mauve]

whats up with affixes with damage to close/distant/crowdcontrolled/stunned/etc etc haha

its like they are so scared to give like simple damage up affixes, but people still can make builds to one shot ubers

[eternal sky]

lazy game design

d4 is supposed to be a train ride for casual players

[faint mauve]

d2 and even early POE didnt start with the features they have now. those games had a good base

[eternal sky]

D4 is missing things that have been staple for years now

thats like the main issue

[faint mauve]

you can still drop gear in normal difficulty d2 thats actually semi usable in end game

[eternal sky]

gearing is simple number go up in d4 choice really isnt there to customize

you simply use the uniques that synergize with the build etc etc

[faint mauve]

yeah hence the rest is reduced to vendor trash

in games like d2 and POE trade you have the option of converting it to currency

[eternal sky]

also doesnt help they have some how managed to go back in time

with the stash system

to something thats worse then their 20 year old game

[faint mauve]

its not "the same" like mentioned above earlier

[eternal sky]

idk diablo 4 just isnt for people that want to actually grind a arpg

its a quick 3 day burst

sure its gonna turn into 4-5 day burst in like a year and a bit

but its going to be the same baseline d4

they cant add anything too complex because its casualfriendlyTM

[faint mauve]

ehh this d4 season i rolled a yolo build to test how far i can push it, its more than a few days on HC for me

but yeah if i copy a meta build then i can push NM tiers much higher than normal and progress real fast

on SC with no death penalty i imagine you just push even higher