Haha, I think they should have made that option 0%, to further the paradox

I’m not certain, I think it’s an infinite loop.

I.E. If the answer is 25%, you have a 50% chance, if the answer is 50%, you have a 25% chance, if the answer is 25%, you have a 50% chance…

Yeah, I totally ate the onion on this headline lol, it’s basically just saying the quiet part out loud, which he does all the time.

This is my main thought. Once the immediate threat of Trump is past, the country will return to the global standard of “elect whoever wasn’t running things when everything got worse”. I hope the liberals see that writing on the wall and put electoral reform in place so that the smaller parties stand a chance and aren’t all killed by the usual “strategic voting” nonsense.

I really think it’s Canada’s best shot at not electing a Conservative majority when the party seems to be at peak crazy. I’d really rather not count on them returning to the center over the next 4 years when global politics is more divided than I’ve ever seen.

I can provide an earnest argument, if you like. I put 400+ hours into DotA in college, and enjoy games like Valheim, Lethal Company, and Monster Hunter with friends regularly, but pretty adamantly avoid competitive anonymous multiplayer these days.

1. I dislike the increased commitment of multiplayer games. When playing with a group, I have to worry about “letting down” the group, and must play fully sweaty at all times. Learning is also much more stressful and frustrating due to the social element. Even if the group isn’t toxic, I’m more aware of my failures and their consequences.
2. There are engaging and difficult PvE games that challenge me, with good AI. Souls, Sekiro, DOOM Eternal, and Hollow Knight are all excellent examples with lots of unique and interesting challenges. I also enjoy stuff like speedrunning, which can take easy but fun games like Mario Odyssey and raise the skill ceiling infinitely.
3. Matchmaking eliminates the feeling of progression. I love the satisfaction of improving. I.E. Beating Sekiro and starting NG+ only to crush the opening areas that took hours because your skills have improved so much, travelling through an earlier area in Dark Souls and marvelling at how easy it feels now, or setting a huge new PB in a speedrun. Matchmaking with strangers eliminates these moments, because your MMR increases with your skill, trapping you at a 50-ish% win rate permanently, unless you smurf, which is short lived and kinda scummy. You may improve and hit a win streak, but will quickly be slapped back as your MMR increases. And I don’t find seeing that number climb up to be nearly as satisfying as real moments that prove your skill.
4. I enjoy some atmosphere and narrative. It’s tough to deliver a cool world via character trailers exclusively, and most multiplayer games never get an “Arcane”. A single player experience will always have some of that, and it can be awesome.
5. Pacing and variety. A good game experience is paced out with moments of calm, maybe some puzzle solving or narrative, and moments of intensity and tough fights. That stuff is good when done well. Something like DOOM Eternal gets my heart pounding like nothing else in arenas on higher difficulties, but knows to let you breathe in between, so I can enjoy that heart pounding pace for more than 30m at a time. Online games will try with something like spreading players out in a Battle Royale, but it’s not the same.
6. Also, I just like pausing, lol. If my wife needs something, it’s nice to be able to just put the game down, I don’t like being chained to my desk for 20-40 minutes depending on how the game goes because I’ll lose rank and disappoint the team.

Also, I say anonymous because a lot of these problems disappear if you play exclusively with friends. I love the Smash series, for example. You have an objective skill benchmark in the friend you’re playing with, as well as someone who’s understanding when you have to go or do something. That’s really cool, but also damn hard to schedule and not something I do often for PvP.

Competitive anonymous multiplayer is great, for those that like it. More than happy to let you enjoy that. But personally these cons outweigh the pros for me, and I’ll continue to be disappointed when something I’m excited for turns out to be competitive anonymous PvP.

Nothing like the games you’re describing, but Tunic is an utter delight, and was made by an amazing solo dev in Halifax!

At this point I think it’s just fun. So much of the conversation around Elon is deadly serious, doom and gloom, and this is just… lighthearted mocking about something that doesn’t matter. It’s a refreshing change.

And it does seem to matter to him, so undermining that image he works hard to curate is an added bonus. And hell, if Path of Exile is what makes someone realize what a pathetic lying moron he can be, then that’s fantastic as well, even if it’s an odd thing to have that epiphany for.

GraphQL man… the whole thing does this by design. Just in the last week I had to implement a custom retry function because the python requests one very reasonably doesn’t consider a 200 status code to be an error.

Yeah, HDR is one of my main hangups as well. Very interested in moving my living room gaming PC over (the only place I deal with Windows), but I need a lot of things to just work with little to no hassle, and also no hit to performance. I didn’t build a very expensive PC for a compromised experience, as much as Windows is regularly a massive PITA.

This is uh… one of the worst examples of “internet horoscope” I’ve ever read lol. I’ve been diagnosed, am currently unmedicated, and resonate with… practically none of this.

And one of them is literally “explaining things with metaphors”. That’s one of the most generic things I’ve heard in my life lol.

Not nearly the same, but I had a similarly odd experience in that I worked from home for years prior to Covid. For a while, the biggest change for me was that suddenly my coworkers were scheduling “beers over zoom” and other such oddities to not go crazy over… my daily routine.

First time I’d spoken to many of them since going remote and moving away. Was kinda grateful when they all seemed to get bored of that and returned to leaving me alone lol.

Since then, I’ve switched to a different job, where the whole team is generally remote, and have much better relationships with my coworkers, which is nice.

Yeah, at a fundamental level it requires an elected leader to change the system that just elected them. It’ll never be in their best interest.

I think a lot is being made of this headline, honestly. Indiana Jones did the same thing using the same engine… and runs well on a broad variety of hardware, including AMD cards with no dedicated RT accelerators. And that’s not an experience designed with high framerate competitive action in mind.

I also literally booted Doom Eternal for the first time in a while today, enabled raytracing, and played at 120FPS with 4K native on a 7900XTX, all settings on High. Id knows how to frigging optimize a title, and you can bet their raytracing implementation will be substantially better optimized than the RT we’re used to seeing. So long as you don’t run it with Path Tracing (a future forward feature, like Crysis back in the day), I fully expect you’ll still be able to get high framerates and incredible visuals.

Wait for the Digital Foundry tests before buying if you’re uncertain, absolutely, but I really don’t see any reason to be concerned with the way idTech 8 has been shaping up.

Exactly. Consoles exist as a super low barrier to entry, value play for casual gaming. If you just want to have something on your living room tv, a console instantly achieves that, with no debugging or technical know-how required whatsoever.

I switched from a Series X to a living room gaming PC last year and absolutely adore it, but I’m also willing to spend hours tinkering with emulators, playnite, settings, etc. I actually enjoy messing with it, so this is way better for me, but I’m absolutely aware that it’s been a massive amount of fiddling to get my experience this clean and integrated, and I’ll never manage something like Quick Resume.

If you want it to “just work” absolutely go with a console. If you like to tinker, are bothered by nitpicky details, play a lot and need to cut costs, or just really care about features like higher refresh rates, and aren’t put off by a lot of settings and performance testing, then 100% go for a PC.

It’s definitely an odd one, but hey, if Path of Exile is the thing that gets many people to go “hey, he’s a liar”, I’ll certainly take it.

More than happy to see this story spread, as it’s hilarious enough to spread virally, but also makes Musk look pathetic and like a compulsive liar.

I mean, seriously, he’s the richest man on earth, why is his ego so fragile as to need to “prove” himself as a gamer, and to need to prove that so badly as to take a risk like faking that accomplishment live.

Drives me crazy how many churches still manage to conclude that drinking is an outright sin. Like… forget the conversations we can have about the particulars of drunkenness versus drinking basically everywhere it’s mentioned, how did we ever get past Jesus turning water into wine to believe this was a sin in the first place?

You have to jump through so many hoops of ignoring the obvious in scripture to even begin to argue for it, and yet it’s a widespread belief.

Picked up the game just last week here, and also introduced it to my wife, who barely plays any video games at all, but likes card games in general. We were both immediately pretty addicted.

It doesn’t start off with nearly the level of complexity you’ll see discussed here, and you can enjoy yourself with it basically immediately. The complexity will come in as you play more and unlock more cards/push to do challenges and harder stuff once you’ve won the game many times.

I’m no patent lawyer, but every graphic in that patent describes a 540p image being upscaled to a 1080p image. No mentions of a 2160p image, although I didn’t read the full text.

I suspect this feature is more intended to allow games like The Witcher 3 or Wolfenstein that output a really low resolution to present a better image.

Although, having tinkered with FSR3, I’m generally not impressed with AI upscaling at low source resolutions. I’ve heard DLSS does better in those conditions, but even at 1080p->4k there’s noticeable artifacts and temporal instability. I much prefer it at 1440p->4k. So I’m somewhat unsure how much I’d even want 1080p->4k, although I’d certainly try it and see, and I kinda think I don’t want 540p->1080p.

Honestly, I had no idea there was a related tradition. Song’s a banger though, more than happy to have it.

Politely, no one asked? OP asked a direct question, I’m doing my best to answer it, and you’re… dunking on me about a point nobody was talking about?

At best, this is an odd non-sequitur. At worst, it’s toxic behaviour meant to shut down any discussion about a topic you personally dislike.