Not enough to achieve something, but enough to pretend that it might do something.

I can’t really bee nice here, so pardon the language, but as a second generation Fijian Australian…

Fucking LMAO. Australia is an outsized emitter of greenhouse gasses, let alone the hidden emissions caused by how much oil and gas we export. Scott Morrison, the former PM, even went to the Pacific forum during his incumbency and essentially mocked them regarding this. This turn from the Labor government is probably one of the starkest demonstrations of liberal diversionary political theatre and colonial violence.

Absolutely revolting.

I left in February of 2021, but at the time it was competent but unexceptional. Rival Wings and Conquest(?) were the two big battle types, and I think overall Rival Wings was more interesting, while Conquest usually devolved to a round robin rotation of objectives or endless stalemates unless you had a competent caller directing your nation’s team. I didn’t like it at all, but Rival Wings was always dead outside of events. Rival Wings was like a “MOBA mode” plus vehicles, so a big thing was objective and resource management so you could push an organised vehicle fleet down one of the lanes. Engagements were also typically smaller than in Conquest.

5v5s were very unbalanced but fun for casual play due to job variety, although the high end was being griefed by some notorious hackers around November of last year (which is when I lost touch with the PVP community on Twitter).

In terms of activity levels, I could basically always get a Conquest match or a 5v5 match, but I basically finished my 5v5 achievements and then only ever played Rival Wings when there were enough players to start a match. They’ve recently introduced a reward track for all PVP, so maybe Rival Wings has finally seen its Revival Wings.

Definitely not the oldest, FFXI and EQ are still alive and getting updates, and Anarchy Online is in maintenance mode because it’s presumably still turning a profit for Funcom.

I have cognitive impairments and it does my head in that it’s still hit or miss whether games have rewindable text and voiceovers. Definitely my favourite thing in a game is eing ale to open a dialogue log and even replay voiced lines. Should be in every game, it’s such a small accessibility thing.

I’m not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).

Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn’t mean it’s good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?

I’ve deleted and redrafted this several times now… but am I unreasonable for being weirded out and a bit offended by how out of touch rich-and-powerful-people journalism is? Canada, like Australia, is soaked in blood. This is just public image laundry for a country with the same genocide cops and resource extraction monstrosities as all the other colonies, and I’m guessing most of the people reading a niche link aggregator aren’t really the target audience.

If things like this are going to try and memory hole the crimes of a state, we should conscientiously memory hole crappy fluff pieces like this. Who’s moving to Canada? Who has the ability to initiate infrastructure projects or run funding requests up the political ladder?

If nothing else, just as a personal request. I just spent a long time trying to stay calm and articulate (or relative to my original state upon reading this) because this really made my blood boil.

Game budgets are too big.

Reading the responses here, why are people so mad about types? Maybe I’m biased coming from a background of statically typed languages and mathematics. I’d rather have a good typing system that makes me think about data than just hoping I’ve thought about a problem right.

Not just the US, Australia has slavery* for disabled people and the long-term unemployed, as well as private prison slave labour. Guess which group keeps getting sent to prison for no reason too.

(*legally distinct from slavery, as determined by the courts)

I think Austin’s review actually missed the amount of mechanical depth that exists in the game already. One of his complaints was that there’s seemingly no reason to put melee on “ranged” characters or vice-versa, but I can say that’s definitely wrong. I’ve primarily been playing Venomess with a Sword and Shield, since it pushes her to near-guaranteed critical hits. One of the SnS options has a potion interaction that lets it oneshot enemy guard meters, which puts them in a state of vulnerability and stunlocks them until they recover. I will say Gungrave is a bit lacking since his skills have extremely low multipliers, so his ability to clear dungeons with a gun is extremely lacking until you get the railgun with infinite body and terrain punchthrough.

On a related note, I wouldn’t say the itemisation is lacking either. They’re taking the modern Warframe approach of every weapon doing something cool. There are basic store-bought weapons, but all of the crafted weapons do something interesting that changes your playstyle. One pair of daggers is unusually good at breaking guard meters, and also places a unique buff on you that boosts all damage, including ability damage, which is totally unique to that weapon and that weapon alone. Another pair poison enemies, which lets one of the two “ranged” Wayfinders (Silo in this case) keep a damage vulnerability debuff rolling on the enemy.

Also disagree with the comment about buildcraft being lacking. Different weapons and weapon types interact with the heroes in different ways, so there’s quite a good loop of doing some theorycraft to find your optimal stat ratios for particular combinations, and what your playstyle is. Two weeks in, and the Venomess community on the official Discord are still debating whether to focus on weapon attacks or abilities, which weapons to use, how to balance crit vs base damage, etc.

Also being a huge Warframe fan, this is scratching that JRPG fiend itch for games with weird synergies and interactions and a really rich character building space to experiment in. Haven’t had this much fun since the first six weeks of the Incarnon launch.

Some of that is on GNOME. I had to swap back to KDE after a couple years on GNOME due to lack of VR compatibility. GNOME is good for newbies and productivity, but completely unusable for gaming.

Would be nice if there were some kind of open source, cross-platform, low-level graphics API, maybe overseen by some kind of pan-industry group (or “consortium” if you’re feeling fancy). Just spitballing but you could call it “Cape” or “Hephaestos” or something.

Would be great too if there were one or two open-source, MIT- or dual-licensed game engines that target this API. Maybe even some runtimes so you could target PC and the big three console platforms.

I dunno, maybe this is all a pipe dream.

Man just loves the taste of his own feet I guess.

Wasn’t the whole thing with Redfall that it was Bethesda mismanagement? I’m not going to put that on the Redfall team. Does make me completely disinterested in buying any Bethesda games that aren’t mainline TES though.

I know I’m getting off topic, but Mesmer was such a cool concept in general. Having a CC class focused on mindgames was a stroke of genius, because playing a mental game is a lot more fun than say, WoW style mezzers that take control away from the character. I enjoyed the fact that, aside from Elementalist knocking, hard CC also came at a cost to the mezzer too, in addition to typically being more tactical and of a short duration.

That said some people hate the whole “prison of the mind” thing too. I know zoners are typically pretty reviled in fighting games.

GW1 is actually a really good example in another way: I think its Domination Mesmer was a fantastic offensive spin on the idea of a mezzer a la EQ’s Enchanters. In general the idea of an offensive curse-slinger that CCs vulns enemies is where I’ve been gravitating more and more in Warframe since the big armour strip changes in September of last year.

On the happy brain juice, I think this is something people miss. I know my Sevagoth and Nyx are easily able to get top kills unless there’s a dedicated murder machine like Gyre or Mesa. But I think I have a lot of bias due to having every weapon and almost all mods available to me, so I can easily configure a loadout to be highly performant. The gear-reliance is probably another factor deterring people from playing debuff frames, because it’s not immediately obvious how much offensive potential they have. Even for me it took a while before the murder gremlin hiding in my brain was like, “wait, doesn’t Nyx have a huge offensive potential?”

With the first point, I want to clarify, most “supports” (by my understanding of the term) actually have some kind of debuff that increases their damage. For example Nyx has access to Pacifying Bolts which is functionally a one-handed Tharros Strike, even on SP spawn densities. Enemies with no armour are functionally at a 20x or higher damage multiplier, albeit less assuming you’re running a Corrosive weapon and not building Viral around fullstrip. Frost has access to fullstrip and then some combination of a personal CC/CD buff, or a party-wide Viral amp through Freeze Force. Banshee has Sonic Fracture and optionally Sonar for the funnies or on Demos, Eximus and Acolytes.

The kind of support frame I was focusing on has good personal damage tools, but the support comes from the fact that these tools benefit the whole party as well.

Trinity is a bit of an outlier in that she’s all in on survivability, especially with something like Vampire Leech/Nourish builds which have the potential to shieldgate everyone constantly. Admittedly I think she and Wisp are what people think of a “support” as, and not say debuffers like Frost, Caliban, Sevagoth etc.

Edit:

That said, this is a great answer. It’s very insightful as to where my own personal biases were formed: the kind of content I do, which is primarily long solo runs, 5+ rotations of endless and Duviri, and usually with Alliance members and friends. In these situations, debuffer CCs shine. I do think someone like Nyx is very misunderstood for linear speed missions with pubbies though, as Pacifying Bolts is a very powerful damage booster when you’re moving quickly.

This is a good insight, but I’d say the big appeal for a “support” character in a game where everyone has the same guns and weapons: if you’re making everyone else stronger, you’re making yourself stronger too.

I loved Hendrik’s personal quest too. I just love Hendrik in general.