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Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2022 1:00 pm
by Thad
I'm still salty that the Switch version of Link's Awakening doesn't let you one-shot the last boss with the boomerang.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2022 1:02 pm
by Thad
(Then again, I was also kind of annoyed they cut the reference to '90s Energizer battery commercials, so judge my resistance to change in that context.)

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2022 11:38 pm
by Friday
Thad, come on. You can't expect the same jokes and memes to just keep going and going and going...

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2022 12:59 am
by Mongrel
See here's Friday with the much more obvious joke while I sat around trying to think of a clever play off "resistance" in ohms (Ω).

(ohm my gawd)

(omega'd)

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2022 1:36 am
by nosimpleway
I tracked down the notorious serial killer The Butcher of Windhelm, as he was poised to strike his next victim. I casually walked between them. He didn't stop. He clipped straight through me and drew his dagger to stab the poor woman (who, to be fair, displayed zero self-preservation).

I tapped the button to go "Hey. I see what you're doing here. I gotcha. You should probably stop, seeing as how I'm a goddamn lot stronger than you, I'm armed and armored to the teeth, I've been appointed Archmage of the College of Winterhold, and I can catch a salmon with my bare hands. Knock it off."

Instead of responding, I get the narration "This person is busy." Busy murdering someone while I just stand there, apparently. A stab, a scream, reload from save.

This time I just shot him through the spine with an arrow from 30 feet away, killing him instantly. As I walk up to rifle through his pockets for quest items to turn in, his would-be victim turns around and dryly comments "If the guards would listen to [NPC who made the wrong guess and pointed me at the wrong person], they'd have caught The Butcher ages ago."

She notices the corpse of the man who was moments away from stabbing her to death.
"What a waste."

Of my time? I'm starting to think so, yeah.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2022 2:35 am
by Mongrel
Random "bystander" death comments having no context is never not absurdly, mind-twistingly hilarious.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2022 6:33 pm
by nosimpleway
Either I'm not doin' it right, or the Enchantment Potion -> Alchemy Gear -> Enchantment Potion loop has been patched out/nerfed into obsolescence. Or, possibly, my existing bonuses are so small that when they're increased by 10% or 20% the effects are still single-digit, and eventually round down into themselves instead of exponentially exploding.

The new hotness (inasfar as, yes, this game is over a decade old) the Restoration Loop.

See, potions and passive equips from your gear are considered Restoration magic effects, no matter what the result is. So a potion that boosts Restoration spellcasting can also boost the passives you get from your gear, if you don it while the boost effect is active. So now the loop is

1) Enchant some +Alchemy bonuses onto your gear. As far as I can tell that's helmets, gloves, rings, and necklaces. Four equipment slots ain't bad.
2) Brew a Restoration bonus potion.
3) Drink your new potion.
4) While the potion is in effect, take off your +Alchemy gear, then put it back on. The +% bonus to your Restoration effects now applies to the +% Alchemy on your gear.
Repeat steps 2 through 4. If you can do 2 soon enough after 3, as far as I can tell, the effects of drinking the new potion are also boosted by the effects of the old one. (So if you drink a +10% potion in step 3, and a +20% in step 2 on the next loop, then drinking the +20% while the +10% is still in effect actually gives you +22%. Something like that.)

I haven't gotten the bonuses high enough that I want to start using these things to make +Enchantment or +Smithing to make Godfucker-tier gear yet, because the ingredients for +Restoration potions are uncommon fish. Skyrim is a mountainous region, full of rivers, and I'm pretty sure I've been down half of the waterfalls in the game swimming through the creeks and streams looking for Spadefins.

However, I have found that returning to my regular gear while under the effect of the potion honestly did the thing I was trying to loop into anyway. I don't really want to blow through the game with a Godfucker bow or Armor of Invincibility or whatever, but I am pretty damn tired of getting into random encounters with dragons that give me an extra 75 Encumbrance in dragon bones and dragon scales that I have to drop what I'm doing and deliver to my stash at home if I want to ever move at a reasonable speed again.

I discovered, more or less by accident, that the +Carry Weight bonus you get from your backpack also counts as a Restoration effect. When putting on my usual walkin'-around gear, I also took my backpack off and put it back on again. My carry weight went from about 425 to like 850. It's not a permanent effect, because if you doff and don your gear without the +Restoration potion in effect it goes back to whatever it was enchanted or built to do in the first place. But that's fine, how often do you take your backpack off in a Skyrim run anyway?

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2022 8:03 pm
by Mongrel
Yeah, heard of that one too. I mentioned the game having fortify effects coded as Restoration magic at the end of mey my how-to.

I assumed you were playing straight up vanilla Skyrim, but if you're using USSEP (Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch, which has it's own long hilarious story), yes it patches out the version of the exploit I mentioned.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2022 8:35 pm
by Mongrel
Oh yeah and the frequency of dragon encounters and the relative deadweight of dragon loot is piss-poor in vanilla. In fact, if you spend a lot of time indoors, you will be attacked by a dragon as soon as you head out. So if you do a lot of home crafting, Skyrim turns into a game where you get attacked by a dragon basically every time you leave your home.

I prefer to use mods which make dragons fights much rarer, as well as significantly tougher, then up the value a lot for dragon bones & scales. Was also talking to a modder the other day about how it was weird that, ten years on, no one's ever made a mod which allows you to use dragon bits as alchemy ingredients, and now they're working on that, haha.


Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2022 8:44 pm
by nosimpleway
I'm at the point where some enemies are spawning with Daedric gear and the best I can make for myself, even with the Smithing grind boost I talked about before, is Glass. Assuming I spent the perk points on it, which I haven't. I've seen a pair of dargonbone boots in a shop.

I assumed dargon bones and scales would be rare and precious, and they are neither.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2022 11:39 pm
by Mongrel
The vanilla economy and loot systems are probably the most heavily modded parts of the game after you add the basic necessities, like giant anime tiddies and giant anime dicks.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2022 5:28 pm
by beatbandito
beatbandito wrote:I made it to the point where you form the Saint's now. No play time in the save file, but I'd believe I was controller in hand for 5 hours. That was doing a lot of side fuckery, though. Just the main story missions, probably more like 2 hours.

The path through the story missions is incredibly basic and linear with one surprise for me based on my expectations of the series:

1) You do the above-mentioned first mission shootout as part of Marshall and come home.
2) 2 missions learning about side gigs, stealing cars and other basics with your gang friends. Establishing your relationships.
3) Second Marshall mission, this time you're taking something from one of the local gangs that one of your three friends is in and they're pissed about it.
4) Helping out a friend you end up fighting the second gang which your 2 of 3 friends is a part of, they're pissed about it.
5) Third Marshall mission. You got recognized by the boss and are security on a big party. Surprisingly here instead of the third gang and friend, this is just both the other gangs again. You end up failing to protect something and are fired from Marshall. The missions do not end abruptly with little clarity. You would have to be skipping every single cutscene to not understand what's happening, and even then chatter during the action could give it away most of the time.
6) Your roommates "run in to trouble with the local gangs" when the two gangs go to war with each other. Both ganged up members choose to protect you and the third roommate and are expelled from their gangs. You even start the gang because the pre-established CEO motivational books-on-tape that the shot roommate likes to listen to give a speech that is highly relevant to the current situation you've been placed in.

During the escape mission right before forming the saints you're handed an unlimited RPG and go to town on the pursuers. They did remove ragdolls and launching during crashes, but because they made ramming and towing big parts of vehicle combat, instead of just leaning out a window and shooting. It's just like, every aspect of that article is wrong on purpose, as a joke.

I was disappointed there was no third gang for the third friend. Usually you get 3 street gangs plus the police (Marshall, here) is the final gang to push out. Also, while I do think the writing started to shape up as far as general humor, there's a lot of weird little holes in logic that don't have to exist and feel like either dialogue was never recorded or two parts of a mission got moved around and it originally wouldn't have been issues.

Honestly it's extra disappointing as a EGS exclusive, because other than one hard crash that made me repeat a mission, this has been a pretty fun game so far.


Okay I've gotten quite far into the game and it is generally good as far as gameplay mechanics and variety, the general story and writing. But it has become almost completely unplayable.

The more I play the quicker it is between incidents. They offer DX11, DX12, and Vulcan-based launchers and they will crash outright, stop running scripts, and completely break, graphically. At first after hours of leaving the game running, now I literally can't finish the one mission I wanted to do so, you know, that sucks. I have no patches past launch though, so hopefully this is fixed for paying consumers.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2022 10:06 pm
by Mongrel
So Grinding Gears Games is burning Path of Exile to the ground right now, and goddamn if watching it burn isn't more fun that playing the game.

e.g. GGG as The Fun Police

It's a golden age of PoE memes right now.

If you want to know the full story, see summary below. But the tl;dr is that when your CEO literally sees players as both enemies and playthings* there's really only one way this ends.

*Chris Wilson is a man who, a few years ago, openly admitted on stream he's a clinically-diagnosed sadist, after sending top players to cack it uselessly one after the other in a company-run demo to showcase new content, because the players were not given the gear they needed to pass a particular boss. He thought that that was hilarious and that revealing his diagnosis only made the situation funnier.

⇳ Click to Expand Summary
I didn't play Path of Exile for the past year, because the direction of the game only ever got worse (more Skinnerbox, more RNG, less player agency, vast parts of the skill tree simply unplayable due to their tendency to only ever nerf things, and almost never buff them) but have been tinkering around for a few days here or there recently. This is easy when your shit lives on forever in Standard, which is both the dumping ground for the quarterly temporary League content and the home for the roughly 10% of the playerbase who give no fucks.

Anyway the latest league dropped a week ago, and the collective changes made by GGG might be the greatest disaster in the game's history. While GGG loves to paint sticks orange, beat you with them, and call that giving you a carrot, they managed to destroy crafting, looting, and endgame content, further damage a large number of builds, and spit on the players all at the same time with a huge number of bizarre changes and an even stronger-than-usual round of nerfs.

For just one example they swapped the game's de-facto equivalent of a $10 bill (Divine orbs) with the de facto $100 (Exalt orbs) with basically no planning and no replacement for all the ways the game's own mechanics had adapted to this over 10 years. Overnight most everyone who had large amounts of liquid currency was impoverished and you got to see firsthand an almost textbook perfect example of an economy facing a sudden and massive liquidity crunch. Nobody can buy or trade SHIT.

Obviously the game is genuinely not fun in this state, except maybe some unprofitable and unsustainable niche side content. You could spend hours grinding for basically no reason at all and no hope of anything getting better. To rub it in, huge numbers of drops which used to be good are now hilarious feelbads because they're just a constant reminder of how worthless they are now and how you would have been happy to get that drop before. Using the same example as above, Exalts had little fragments and various other methods you could find sometimes as an alternate means of getting some; Divines only had a single alternate source, an uncommon item you could vendor for one, but they removed that vendor recipe entirely.

In a small twist my Necro, the character I had by far invested the most time and currency over the two years I played, used a very niche skill which was widely regarded as one of the two worst minion skills in the game (she chucks angry flying flaming skulls, which are hilarious but historically were very weak and extremely short-lived). They buffed that skill finally, after like, six, seven years (and by buffed I mean "removed the heavy damage penalty no other minion skill had"), so my old character is actually quite strong right now (having massive amounts of OP legacy Necro gear helps a lot). But Necro as a whole was hit so hard, that no one is playing Necro, so they might not even nerf that skill next league!

But that doesn't mean there's any endgame content to do. Oops! I'll be just as happy to wander off for another year. Or forever.

They are catching hell for it. People aren't just angry-posting or abandoning the game, it's a player strike, a real one. Players are genuinely not buying anything and some are even working on joint efforts to demand large-scale chargebacks for recent purchases or working together to file complaints with their respective consumer protection authorities, mainly a group in the EU doing this. Every major streamer is making grossly negative videos, mocking the utter desolation of the state of play, or just openly quitting the league and telling followers not to play. The absurdly condescending and outright insulting post Chris made about the changes is now on record as one of the most downvoted threads in Reddit history, not that they're doing anything, except tiny sop changes. Everything else is "being monitored".

That "being monitored" nonsense is doing a lot right now. There's a feeling that a large number of players are watching to see if anything does get rolled back, waiting and maybe playing a little here or there to keep a toe in - or not - but as time goes on, they're going to quit too if nothing happens.

To which I say... Good! The only way genuine change might come is through disaster (and being an accelerationist about a video game is a wee bit less unethical than being one IRL), so Let. It. Burn.

If you think that all sounds kind of like a dumb overreaction even if a game really has gone totally to shit, I'd say you're right, only the ARPG genre is maybe the most cursed genre in gaming. PoE is basically the only competitor to Blizzard's offerings and we already know what people think of Diablo these days.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2022 11:56 am
by Yoji
...Luigi's Mansion and Death Stranding are more alike than I thought:
- Blue collar heros
- Fighting ghosts
- Big backpacks
- Not game-of-the-year, but I'm glad it exists

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2022 12:01 pm
by beatbandito
It was apparently long enough ago to be off my radar, but I had seen am image collage with those two, Mario Sunshine, and at least one other game I can't remember under "have a backpack, fight at least one ghost, and lose your friend at the end".

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2022 12:47 pm
by nosimpleway
I'll be honest Skyrim is actually a lot more interesting with Godfucker equipment on

Especially when, like, someone challenges me to a fistfight. Which happens sometimes! Since there's no skill and almost no equipment that boosts unarmed attacks, a fistfight is just hammering the "hit other guy" button and watching the life meters gradually dwindle down for a couple minutes until somebody drops. Now that I have Brawler's Godfucker Gauntlets that tedium is replaced by a single right hook, winning the fight.

I maintain that if there's any one piece of equipment that should be Godfuckered it's the backpack, though. Skipping inventory woes makes the game significantly faster-paced.

Plus, like

FRAME 1:
Dragonborn approaches shopkeeper. "Hi, I'm looking for some potion ingredi--"
Shopkeep: "HOLY CRAP IS THAT A DRAGON"

FRAME 2:
Dragonborn: "Yeah probably, those keep showing up when I'm trying to do errands. Anyway, I need som--
Shopkeep: "WON'T SOMEONE DO SOMETHING?!?!?!?!?!"

FRAME 3:
Dragonborn rolls eyes, draws bow

FRAME 4:
Dragonborn fires an arrow off-panel, without so much as looking

FRAME 5:
Swirly lights surround Dragonborn

FRAME 6:
Shopkeeper: "Y- you... absorbed its very soul..."
Dragonborn: "If you've got any Cyrodilic Spadetails I'll take the lot of 'em."

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2022 1:08 pm
by Thad
nosimpleway wrote:I maintain that if there's any one piece of equipment that should be Godfuckered it's the backpack, though. Skipping inventory woes makes the game significantly faster-paced.

You can do that?

I've been thinking if I ever get back to the game I need to look for a mod that makes me not have to fuck around with my inventory all the time. I married a shopkeeper and I still spend too much time schlepping home to sell shit.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2022 1:31 pm
by Mongrel
There are many mods, yes. With Skyrim, it's basically at the point now where if you can think of it, it probably exists.

Though, because it's so absurdly easy to get ridiculously wealthy in Skyrim, I prefer the type of mods that greatly reduce loot and make most of what's left low-value, so instead of things being a chore there's some excitement when you find that dead bandit with a pair of new boots, or a draugr wearing the armour of whatever adventurer last came loping in thinking he was hot shit.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2022 2:07 pm
by nosimpleway
The +Carry Load effect from a backpack counts as a Restoration effect. So if you brew a couple potions that give like +3000% to Restoration, drink a few (since they also count for themselves, each one boosting the one that comes after it), then put on a backpack.

You're not crafting or enchanting the Godpacker yourself, just letting the pack get the effects of what you're doing to make your other stuff.

Re: Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2022 2:26 pm
by beatbandito
I haven't played a bethesda game close to the vanilla experience in like a decade, so this may be going way off-base for most people. But I highly recommend a combination of item stat and economy squashing mods that make it so there's no benefit from grabbing 90% of loot in the first place. Also gives you the 1-2 hit kills all game. Deaths too, if you're in to that.