A 1970 Corvette

30 minutes ago, John Caveson said:

As for maps? Yeah, I think we have enough maps bloating the file-size now. Feels like everyone is trying either one-up each other with v-script after VSH and ZI got added with the holiday maps, or try and topple the Payload Dual Monarchy of Upward and Badwater on the regular rotation and failing miserably. I mean if you're going to continue adding maps, add maps for neglected gamemodes, like Payload Race, CTF, Medieval Mode. I wanna see a decent crack at Territorial Control, even. See if the gamemode is the problem or just Hydro. Now not only is the base install of the game bigger, the queue times for Casual are longer because of all the Fortnite maps you have to checkmark for. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing and these phoned-in updates are proof of that.

CTF and to a lesser extent PLR are unfortunately tainted by fr*endly players or at the very least some kind of insipid brainworm that makes people think that you should never actually try to play the map as intended. The new maps involved a CTF map, and while it's complete dogshit, we were getting non-lobbies on day one, if not HOUR one of the update. People apparently log in, see CTF and think "oh this is that trade server gamemode!!" It happens with PLR too but not as much. Banana Bay at least has normal games broken up by people begging for someone to help them with their contracts. I've said it before that I think there maybe could be actually fun to play CTF maps if anyone fucking played the mode.

I don't blame mapmakers for continuously trying to push gimmicks because that's the kind of stuff that Valve puts in the game. I'm convinced that they noclip through the map a bit, look at the community page, and if they see something that makes them chuckle they pipeline it to an update. The cart building gimmick for citadel (aka pl_dropstab) is completely pointless and the water gameplay in Aquarius literally just means you should have seven heavies for the first two caps while some classes like Pyro and Spy are extremely hamstringed.

Despite saying that I do blame mapmakers if their map idea sucks, like Demolition does.

30 minutes ago, John Caveson said:

All that being said, halving the post-game vote time is definitely a step in the right direction. And I'm sure most people would be satisfied with some simple changes. Bring back the missing voting options: Team Scramble (or even make it automatic when one side is stomped in a round), Extend Map (very useful for meme maps like 2Fort, DeGroot Keep, and Hightower, where people will just vote for the same map again anyway post-match), and Next Level (as a manual alternative to the post-match vote). Even something as simple as upping the round limits would help dramatically. Make symmetrical modes best of 5 or even 7, instead of best of three. And on the asymmetrical modes, give each team two chances as RED and BLU instead of one swap. Because the main issue facing Casual (other than bots) is that you're stuck more waiting to the play the video game, instead of playing the video game. And even when you do get into a match, it's over before you know it and the map vote starts, which is more waiting, then the ready-up phase, more waiting, then the final 10 second pre-start, and then  the match begins and you can play. There's a reason why Payload is the most popular gamemode, because of how PL works, it lasts the longest other than de facto DM maps like 2Fort and Hightower.

I agree there needs to be more downtime cut from the game but I think speed boosts for RED and setup time cuts would be a good step. I don't really know if I'd want casual maps to go longer than they are but that's extremely dependent on the map. You couldn't fucking PAY me to do defense and offense twice for Thundermountain or Citadel, but short AD maps like Fortezza feel like they go over too quickly. I'd say KOTH generally feels fine as is except for boardwalk which has a longer timer and I feel it every time.

31 minutes ago, Razputin said:

Generally I am quite content with TF2's end-of-life balance but if I stare to hard the cracks start to show.

yeah I wish I could turn off my armchair forum game designer brain because I constantly overthink "weapon tweaks that would totally fix X" 

Like there are plenty of things that are baaasically fine, but I still feel like could use juuuuust a little change, and then I end up wasting an entire night mentally outlining a complete class rework

Admittedly, I picked up the game near the tail end of the block structure with RTR-Theros-Khans so maybe it was all so fresh and new to me and others were getting sick of it. But it didn't seem that way to me from the player side. People will always cite shit that wotc themselves had said about how the second sets never sold or the third sets were always OP as justification for abolishment of blocks but I didn't see much hate for the structure from the player side. It at least let the ideas breathe so people could absorb what the hell was going on, that's kind of where I'm coming from when I say I don't have any chance to parse flavor anymore since it's all just in a one-set vacuum that will be gone in two weeks.

I can tell you that in a block structure we wouldn't have a Standard format featuring Vehicles, Mounts, and Stations all at once with varying degrees of interoperability between them all their support because they'd have been in the same block and there would have been some kind of attempt to keep the theming together. But then again Standard isn't even Standard anymore with how long the rotation window is, it's basically Pioneer 2. And fuck vehicles too, I've hated vehicles since they first came out. They're a complete failure in gameplay and flavor but for some reason they just want them to work so badly.

I kind of hate the cyclical arguments I've seen of "you don't like current magic storytelling, you must prefer crossover ip SLOP" followed by "don't like crossover IP stuff? you must like nu-magic SLOP storytelling!!" it's like bitch they both suck I just want them to take their time and actually build a fucking world without having to crunch half the cards into "story spotlights" and literally who legendaries

I think at this point my brain just glosses over anything that's not the rules text. It could be good or it could be bad but there's not enough space to fit anything else at this point, and I think it's by design at this point since you have like two weeks between spoiler seasons nowadays.

Though with how on rails draft environments are nowadays I can barely read the rules text too. It feels like for the last two years they've had 15 "archetypes" they rotate through and they think shifting the colors on an existing one counts as an entirely new gameplay mechanic.

6 hours ago, Razputin said:

My "main" loadout for Pyro is Stock - Scorch Shot - Powerjack. TF2's weapon swap speed is already quite fast and I feel that the extra airblast cost and crippled afterburn hurt a lot so I rarely ever use the degreaser. Meanwhile Scorch Shot is just the best secondary by far with its splash burn, stun bounce and comparable damage to Flare Gun on a direct hit. It's a common complaint that the Scorch Shot is spammable but honestly it outranking the other secondaries by so much bothers me much more, every time I equip something else I feel like I'm nerfing myself

I basically agree, it's just that I see specifically deg-scorch when almost every other flamethrower works better with it (because every flamethrower works better period than the Deg lol). It's a mystery to me.

I've completely gotten over the idea of optimizing Pyro loadouts mainly because Valve's vision for Pyro clearly wanted the "general" loadout for Pyro to be Stock/Scorch/Powerjack with audibles into Phlog being the most common change and that's the most fucking mind numbingly boring loadout you could construct where you just be a drain on enemy resources and the closest thing to a flashy or skilled play you can do is reflect your opponent's direct hit rocket into their pocket medic. Well, that AND that Pyro is kind of rarely the "right" pick to begin with so I'm usually playing it because I want to use something in particular

I'd rather play Deg/Flare and try to get funny flarepunches even if Valve basically just made rolling into the enemy with the FT equally as effective in most cases. Or the Dragon's Fury which is juuuust unreliable enough that nobody wants to use it. Or Backburner/Thermal Thruster.

6 hours ago, Razputin said:

Also just straight up revert the Axtinguisher to full crit and it would still be way worse than the Powerjack

You could bring the entire old combo pyro back and it wouldn't do jack shit. I fucking hate the powerjack honestly, it's stupidly centralizing and boring as fuck at the same time. I miss the old gas jockey set so much.

As an aside to removing gas jockey and what they did to the Deg I also still don't understand why we gave everyone faster switch speed to begin with? Who was clamoring for that change?

1 hour ago, hugthebed2 said:

Also my main pyro loadout lately has been backburner thermal thruster backscratcher. If the enemy team or map isn't suited for it, I just run stock panic attack and a filler melee (homewrecker/hot hand/third degree)

all the thermal thruster haters* just need to learn you can use the magical loadout bind when it's not good and wait for a situation where it will be good again, which is the fix for a lot of other items in TF2 that are situationally powerful as fuck like the scottish resistance

*I don't think it's perfect but it's hardly unusable like a lot of sentiment I've seen out there seems to imply

6 hours ago, Razputin said:

The summer update hit and yet again I see so many posts of people complaining that it is not a ''real'' update and asking when we will get new weapons. 

 

Never, man, it's over, it's been over for years now. And that's fine!

it's definitely a lack of experience issue (not just with TF2 but with games in general perhaps) and maybe a bit of nu-gamer zeitgeist where games have to be getting big updates or they are "dead" and no in between state can possibly exist. Not to be a Ross Scott here but when people expect online games to die within like two years of launch it makes them hard to imagine a game staying the same for a decade I guess. I don't like everything about TF2 but you just have to accept stuff as it is at this point

6 hours ago, Razputin said:

(I could go without the halloween ones though)

based

i don't understand the scorch shot degreaser loadout despite it being somewhat common

Like what's the goal of the loadout? To cover up the bad afterburn by just scorch shotting enemies? If you wanted good afterburn wouldn't you just use stock? It can't be because the Deg synergizes with the Scorch Shot best because Phlog and Dragon's Fury both synergize with it more. Is it because you want airblasts (something the aforementioned two weapons suck at) but can't unequip the scorch shot? It can't be that because stock is better at airblasting. It can't be because of scorch shot's flexibility because the Det is more flexible since its way better at mobility and does almost the same thing as the scorch shot elsewhere. If your purpose is to give the enemy medics more healing by being a passive annoyance why not just equip the phlog and get stupidly rewarded for being passive?

I might just be stuck in my own ways though because I don't see a point to using the Degreaser at all unless you're using Flares or Shotgun, and even for shotgun pyro panic attack + stock does the same thing but has more damage across the board, so like what does it do?

This goes beyond me despising the scorch shot, I just so often run into a pyro using the loadout and they just can't output damage. Especially if they airblast and hit you with the scorch shot its like "wow you really dealt like 60 damage to me that's crazy bro"

god help me this season has way too much stuff yet I can't seem to find a good reason to drop anything

I especially love City right now

Every now and then I get a dream where it's all very vague but one single part will be super coherent, but that only makes it more confusing. 

In a dream I got a discord message from my friend asking if my FGO account was banned. I haven't played FGO for years, and I didn't do anything banworthy on it, AND my friend doesn't care about any mobage, AND he also would understand that I don't do stuff that'd get me banned, AND he also knows how games work nowadays so he couldn't  be asking if it was banned due to inactivity, AND he doesn't even know I played it at all, AND even if he did see me play it like seven years ago he'd have forgotten by now!

None of it makes sense.

38 minutes ago, Moby said:

The main problem(?) with Saints Row 2 is that you are forced to do side activity to get the respect points to do main missions.

If you do several side missions, you eventually get infinite respect points, but you also end with infinite ammo and other overpowered stuff.

Ah okay, I definitely frontloaded my dicking around so I never hit a respect wall for the missions. I kind of got the feeling that the gameplay loop pushed you towards doing that, though I suppose it does deflate the difficulty curve... Though I also feel like maybe there's no curve to be spoken of since basically the only thing I noticed increasing difficultywise was that some enemies started having RPGs and rarely grenades, but they died just as easily and rarely hit you with them out of nowhere. Well that and the forced melee sections which weren't really difficult but took waaaay longer on account of not letting you hold M1 on the boss's head with an LMG.

Another thing that may have broken the difficulty curve is that it's easy enough to aim with PC controls, ESPECIALLY while driving. I imagine some missions got way harder if you were playing on a controller, whereas a lot of "chase and kill that guy!" missions I completed within ten seconds of the chase starting since I could easily headshot them even while chasing. Funnily enough, GTA IV had several chases like that too but Rockstar cheated and just made them invincible until they got to the set piece they wanted you to see. That didn't happen nearly as often in SR2 (I think I only saw it happen once or twice?).

38 minutes ago, Moby said:

Sad that there were people that were working on a remaster for 2, they even managed to find the source code of the PC version and were working to fix several glitches and even readding the DLC, but the main programmer died due cancer and on THE SAME DAY he died, Volotion announced the zoomer student loans Saints Row reboot.

Fuck, that's terrible in so many ways.

I actually got a random backlog game out of the way with Saints Row 2. Game itself is still fun, and kind of interesting to look at in relation to what modern sandbox games are... I.E. they're basically the same as this 2008 game but with more gimmicks crammed in. I liked trying the side missions and learning organically that they unlocked stuff for you made me go on a side activity spree and I kind of ended up with a ton of infinite ammo and health perks before I even really started the campaign. Oops. I enjoyed the writing for the most part and I really enjoyed the in-depth character creator. I ended up trying to make a younger Mallory Archer because the thought of her being a street thug made me laugh.

I'm absolutely floored that there are several community quality of life mods that are still being updated to this day (as in, I got notifications that there was a new version mid-playthrough) and enable so many nice features like borderless windowing and 4k plus a ton of configurable utilities that I didn't really touch other than removing color grading. I only had two crashes in my entire 20 hour playthrough which is astounding considering it's a terrible PC port for a 2008 game (okay well 'terrible PC port' and 'mid-late 2000s game' is repeating myself admittedly) and I think one of them was due to me not setting up the cutscene fixing mod settings correctly.

It's funny to compare and contrast it with GTAIV which isn't a groundbreaking thing since I remember even back then that being the most common comparison ever. I think GTA IV aged a lot better overall but SR2 definitely did a WAY better job of making me want to do side content and engage with the sandbox. GTA IV's only side activity I enjoyed enough to do a lot was the glitchy swingset.

3 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

None of this advice is bad but when you bombard new players with they don't have the experience for any of it to make sense in context.  What  I mean is that if you've been playing the game for a while, you'll understand how even having a single unit in a stack allows you to do certain things, so splitting off trash units early on can be a powerful technique.  You'll also understand that you can definitely beat almost any map without ever doing this; it's an optimization technique.  So if you want to be just a bit better when you already know the basics and intermediate stuff, you can use it.  But a new player doesn't understand any of that stuff, so he'll blindly follow the advice and likely get annoyed at the tedium of doing it (on top of all the other stuff he is blindly memorizing.)

There's a paradox because the people who know enough to write guides about games that are confusing or rather deep are too in the weeds to fully emulate the new player experience in their heads often enough. I've experienced this on both sides of the equation (though probably more often as the person in the weeds I'll be the first to admit) and it's not great but it's an easy situation to end up in. Some of the best guides focus more on base level questions a new player will have and only point out stuff that is either very unintuitive or opens up content that might be easy to miss.

I have kind of accepted if I'm going to play a clunky game, I'll skim for literal game-breaking things a little bit, fumble around on my own, and return with some game knowledge if what I think would work doesn't end up working. I did it it with Stalker and I think that gave me a much better experience than getting a speedrunner setup to beeline to a broken weapon cache and breeze through everything afterwards.

Now that doesn't apply as much to games that just give a ton of options and tell you to tweak them as you see fit. Honestly offering all that choice only works if the player likes the base game, because then they'll have ideas about what could be different and how that would impact the way it's played, which only further emphasizes your point. Imagine if GoldenEye 64 gave you the enemy stats tweak mode at the start and told you to set it up to however difficult you wanted.

Just now, Gyokuyoutama said:

Also Chuck Mangione.  Though we can pretend that he's still hiding out at the Mega Lo Mart.

Wait that's real? I thought people were joking, what the fuck

To be fair that's western porn games dying, so not a big loss*, though actually they've tried to pressure eastern outlets like dlsite too in various ways which sucks. I do wonder what the rest of the week has in store for us though

*user was banned for this opinion

I think Tedin is a great pick too actually, he's done the art for a lot of really iconic cards from several different "eras" of magic (more than I remembered until I checked a list). His Vanguard art for Urza is probably the most iconic depiction of Urza to me and I think a lot of people would agree considering WotC took it and put it on a physical Urza card later on. Maddocks definitely has that ABUR feeling down though, where it was the serious wild west in terms of what art would be on cards.

Though once you get past more broad prompts magic artist discussion always gets to a lot of hair splitting, I mean most magic player I know would then start saying "well for LANDS in particular you can't forget to mention John Avon" and almost everyone has one artist in particular that did the art for a pet card that they'd bring up too, and so on.

Hey I know several of those names from when Magic: the Gathering's art was good!

Would it be safe to say Wayne Reynolds defined Pathfinder? His art was all over a lot of the materials I saw, I definitely saw his art on Pathfinder books/sites before I saw it on Magic cards at the very leasst

In my case it was less annoying obviously since it worked much more smoothly but also due to my laptop being a secondary computer where losing some functionality while I figured out how to make it work didn't matter much. Or it was something I could tinker with at work and pretend like I was doing my actual job. 

It gets more annoying and confusing when your main computer is the one running into the issues

I dipped into everyday linux usage using my random laptops too, I even started with linux mint. I had a much better time though because mine was post-uefi and basically autoconfigured itself with all the random distros I've tried so far. 

41 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

The real fun thing about this process was diving through ten years of Linux forum posts and having to ignore the constant distribution wars and the number of people who say "oh, you should have just done something else, obviously" without explaining the process at all.

lol this is too real tho, I'm still running into this issue with my current linux migration plans and some of my display settings (mainly different resolution and refresh rates for multi-monitor setups) and it's a nightmare trying to tell if a user's actually got a solution or not

Yeah the video blew my mind for a few different reasons. Obviously first how it was Marphy Black who made it all those years ago, but also just the little parts that were put together to make it.

I remember looking into what it was made out of a while ago out of curiosity, but previous examinations of the original missed a few of the sources. Thank god we have it all laid out now

2 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

I had a dream where I went to the library on a walk.  I looked through the a few non-fiction books but didn't find anything I was interested in, so I left.

 

Then the whole thing turned into a Kafka story.

 

Despite not checking anything out I was called over by an employee and forced to do a "sign-out".  This annoyed me as a matter of principle, kind of like when stores say "do you we have your phone number yet?" when you are buying something.  I complained more about this than I would in real life, but went along with it.  In theory I just had to put my name down and something that was a number (it wasn't a phone number, might have been something like "how long have you lived in the neighborhood.")  But every time I did this I would be sent to another person and forced to fill it out again.  Eventually I got to someone who asked me "why have you been giving us a name for a person who doesn't exist?"  I took out my driver's license and even my library card to show that I was in fact real and in the system and then got told "such things can be forged" without them even being looked at.

 

Things continued in that way for over an hour of dream time, and then I decided to leave.  I was warned that the police would be called on me but I was firmly in "fuck this" mode.  The door to leave was actually locked, but it was one of those internal house locks that you can just pop by sticking something into the knob so I got out that way.  Then I saw it was pouring rain outside, and I had walked to the library, so now I either had to wait for the rain to stop or get absolutely soaked.

Please don't let any corporation or government measure your brain patterns while asleep. If they get a hold of these nightmares it will revolutionize the torture game

I am fraught with internal turmoil around how I cannot enjoy myself at family gatherings anymore because everyone has kids and you can't get a quiet moment or any time to do anything requiring concentration or focus as a group. I feel like I show up out of obligation, spend hours wondering why I'm there while killing time on a mobile game or something, then leave wishing I had just stayed home.

It may be getting worse since one of my brothers keeps trying to force interactions between me and his toddler and it just makes me more uncomfortable. I'm sorry, I can't make myself like kids, and pushing them on me is not going to improve that either. I feel like my friend who has kids has a much better understanding of my preferred distance level but maybe that's a difference between family and friends.

I guess this is a problem that goes away with time either way at least

Went to Anime Expo yesterday just for the day. The actual expo was pretty impressive in size (the only anime cons I've been to are pretty small Vegas ones previously) but had too much Hololive. I picked up some merch I probably could've got online for cheaper and saw some funny stuff (including an artist I never thought I'd see in person).

The real reason I went was for the concert happening that night which you needed an AX pass to get into anyway, pretty much 95% to see Togenashi Togeari.

They killed it, just as good as they were at Avoid Note. I popped off for Bleeding Hearts in particular. On the upside I even knew some of the other songs played by other artists. Colors (aka JIBUN WO) was pretty damn hype too. Honestly not sure how much of the lineup really counted as j-pop (sakurazaka46 definitely counted at least, and I liked their performances way more than I was expecting to) but hey, I had a ton of fun. Totally worth flying out for a day trip.

Spooked everyone near me cheering for togetoge at the end. Don't think I ever yelled that hard. 

On 6/28/2025 at 10:15 PM, Gyokuyoutama said:

On a slightly related topic, I was watching some South Park videos on Nico Nico (as you do) and got to a Canada episode.  One of the comments was something like "ah! so Canada is like America's South Korea."  And I was enlightened.

I wish I had that image (which may have just been edited and not real?) of a Japanese TV show poll with something along the lines of "If America attacked China should Japan intervene?" and there were three normal options (Yes, no, maybe) and then one was "we should then attack korea" 

11 minutes ago, Moby said:

I wonder if we ever talked about what happened on the day this forum got almost a thousand people at once.

 

Was it a bot attack?

Did that happen more than once? I swear there was one incident before I joined like that, and then another when I was here.

6 hours ago, Razputin said:

I've been eyeing the TIAM post number count a while and wondering if we can still get to another 10k

I don't think it's impossible but TIAM is kind of in a weird spot since we've got topics spread out even though the forum is kind of small enough at this point to have everyone post on the same thread.

I mean it still is probably good to use threads for a specific purpose like the anime thread for anime and I don't really think we would even want to just put everything in TIAM, but it's just a thought

6 hours ago, Razputin said:

Man reading through the mausoleum is fun

I'm afraid to go in there

51 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

She was but a girl, younger than myself, but what a girl! Her body was encased in a transparent glitter; her skin a rosy pale purple; her legs, mottled with white, ended in a pair of cloven hooves. And as my brain struggled to grasp her colorful young perfection— she wagged her tail!

Twilight Sparkle?!

50 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

If you are familiar with Francis E. Dec, some of this may remind you of stuff that he ranted about.  Really, it's astonishing that Shaver didn't just go down as another paranoid schizophrenic.  It could be because the original alphabet article was pretty innocuous, and when Palmer wanted a follow-up he was already invested.  Or maybe Shaver wasn't as incoherent as his beliefs might lead you to think.  It's hard to say because I don't think much if any of Shaver's original writings are extant.  What would happen instead is that he would mail things to Palmer (and later to other magazines) and these would be edited into more palatable forms.  Most famously, Shaver's memories of being "Mutan Mion" were published in novella form ("touched up" by Palmer) as I Remember Lemuria.

I'm sure that many an editor would proudly proclaim the difference between schizophrenic rambling and a publishable article is a good editor. Unfortunately I don't have an editor to hand this statement to so they can make it actually work.

6 minutes ago, Moby said:

Isn't account creation working but no one outside us can figure out what "spuf" meant?

Unfortunately I don't want the mods to ban me for alt accounts so I'm too afraid to check.