Tavern on the Meta

@JAD oh, they have done something worse for me.

opinion of unknown popularity: no game with lootboxes is good

@user1306322 in 99% of cases I will agree

the exception for me is path of exile, which has cosmetic loot boxes (the items in them are directly available for purchase ~5 months later) and is still pretty good

ok I'm intrugued

otherwise, yeah

3:01 PM

ah

yes I have heard of PoE

even tried to play but couldn't figure out what was wrong (not Diablo 2) about it and I kinda never really went deeper than the first 20 minutes in

it doesnt really have a learning curve

more like a learning mountain

but it's really good when you get into it

D3 I for whatever reason did beat once and then never played again because it felt like the correct way to play it

@user1306322 wasn't the correct way to skip it?

JAD

I've watched a bit of a PoE stream. It looked pretty much like facerolling swathes of enemies

because I am a weird person I decided to make a game about 8 years ago and I'm still developing it daily, and while exploring different ideas from a perspective of a developer and just a gamer enthusiast I tried to figure out what I liked about D2 for so long, and I can't really say even today

3:05 PM

I've got >3000 hours in POE since 2012

what I know is that the D4 videos that Blizzard showed are just D3 with some lighting and color scheme tweaks to make it look kinda similar to D2 but it's D3 alright

@JAD If you have a super optimized build with lots of investment and knowledge, and you know what you're doing, that's what it is

(of course I have a life, lots of it in fact, it's the most important stat if you don't want to die all the time)

In reality there is plenty of challenge in the game for 99% of players

@DanisFiddlingbyFirelight o/

@user1306322 "now with buyable endgame gear!"

3:06 PM

I mustered the will to go for a headhunter build the first time in metamorph

well

yea I remember how many hours I wasted playing counter strike 1.6 back in the day and I'm surprised I am where I am in life, like it was a shadow realm episode of 10 years

there's going to be a new torchlight game :D

and 1 and 2 captured a lot of the actual fun of Diablo

usually I never go headhunter because it seems silly

+ you had a pet :D

3:06 PM

you guys seen Grim Dawn?

quadrupling the end game boss health with the latest patch really made the curve a lot steeper. Lots of builds that were just fine now struggle at boss killing, which is now a lot more important to progress.

there's a diablo 2 full conversion mod (median XL) that is very good also

@Magisch eh it's... someone's different take on D2

@DanisFiddlingbyFirelight I disagree. Most people just really consider builds that take over 30s to kill a boss unviable

I've never played enough to go for an HH (had an offer for one in standard for some old alt-art racing loot; but it was standard so who cares)

3:08 PM

for instance this league I cleared all content with, farmed a ton of currency with, and carried over 100 sirus kills with a 400k dps under 1 ex budget chaos dot build

what'd you do to get that much DoT for under 1ex? With a +3 bow my ED char's doing ~250k PoB and bout the same extra via blight if it's something I can facetank.

@DanisFiddlingbyFirelight Life based Bane Occultist (using any rares, curse unique gloves, any 6L, cane of unravelling 5L to house an extra ED setup)

Bane - Despair - Controlled Dest. - Efficacy - Void Manipulation - Swift Affliction and ED - Efficacy - Void Mani - Controlled Dest - Swift Affliction

temp chains + enfeeble + inc aoe into the gloves.

standard chaos tree (do not take +1 curse as you get +1 from asc and +1 from curse gloves)

imgur, my boi, y u du dis

what's with the arbitrary maximum dimension limits

diablo II sorceress? :D

well, anyway, you can still play d2multires at mad rez

I only ever played assassin

3:17 PM

I league started on that char and with 55% curse effect tempchains and enfeeble and 5.5k hp + 2.1k ES (with doryani vaal jewel near pain attunement) it's super tanky

Feeds

stackoverflow.blog/2020/02/03/…

I think one of the things I found about the games I like most is that it's great when you can figure out a way to play that's fun and doesn't have to be something the developers intentionally thought people would play like

@Magisch might be worth my tinkering around in POB; I'm trickster so couldn't do the exact same thing and really doubt I'll start a new build at this point in the league.

@Feeds no onebox, broken author's avatar image... yea it's time lol

I rarely even do two builds per league; but my league start lightning arrow one never really worked out

3:20 PM

Diablo 2 allows you to spend stat and skill points however you like, but in D3 you don't get any control over stats and the skills are basically without points, just those modifier runes

(unless they changed it all since I played it)

diablo 2 suffers from extreme imbalance though

still fun, imo

sure, but the ways you could play viably were still fun

D3 is probably very balanced, but, see, I didn't have fun playing it, so I'm not :p

D3 is missing the forest for the trees

I think they knew exactly what they were developing

when I'm in a situation where less then 20 hours into the league the only thing I can get are marginally better stat rolls on the exact same items I'm using then you know it's become super boring

3:23 PM

and their entire marketing gaslight "this is what you like, this is D2" worked on many

I would like to say that these days I prefer to check out smaller games often than to just play the same 2-3 games over and over, but… I kinda slipped back to the latter lately :p

I did frequent itch.io and indie tag on steam for a while last year tho

found a bunch of cool games

game jams are also full of interesting stuff

Gothic re-imagining is on its way, they decided just remastering the first game is not enough and they're gonna change some major things

this got me into replaying the original 19 year old game

the world geometry is so bad by modern standards

@user1306322 For Diablo 3? Yep: they knew.

Spoiler warning: a way to make more money with in-game sales of items.

oh yea

real money auction house

they had to close it fairly soon tho

with "can't really prove their origin" items being sold.

but I just meant the genre and art style appeal was something else

microsoft teams is bust, yey

3:34 PM

wdym

Productivity: increasing to dangerous levels!

oh

downdetector.com/status/teams

yes. broked

ms be like 'nothing wrong here'

I wonder when the world will start shifting away from remotely hosted stuff for critical business things

:D

It's not the remote hosting that's the problem

it's the fact you're trusting someone else to run it.

I manage plenty of 'remote' networks

but... I manage them, I am responsible when they go boom

Mithical

4:04 PM

(that's the "daily" pic for today, @Sha ;))

Rob

+1

Just sharing my findings here: someone is systematically trolling Meta.SE at the moment. These 6 posts are *all the same person*: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/339777/why-do-all-the-meta-stacksites-seem-to-require-an-account
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/340214/why-is-the-asked-today-viewed-1-times-bug-never-fixed-not-a-duplicate
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342665/as-an-outsider-listening-to-stack-exchange-users-in-this-meta-category-is-abs
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342684/what-could-be-the-possible-explanation-for-why-people-on-these-sites-…

Perhaps people here can pick up a pattern that we can use to shut their distractions down earlier.

@Mithical very nice! :)

4:20 PM

is the CM team dead or something?

got something that takes them 30 seconds to address but they are just dead

@MartijnPieters I think there are a couple more

but yeah, that discussion came up before.

@ThomasWard the word you need there is "missing"

@ThomasWard CM team was reduced from 6 to 3 so yeah, they have zero time these days.

no, "missing" and "dead" are synonymous in the universe of SE

@Magisch prolly, but my moderator info from the SO side tells me these are one and the same person.

4:21 PM

@ThomasWard AKA "mostly fired"

AKA "Dead"

aka "kicked in their [body part here]"

(you cannot convince me otherwise so...)

@MartijnPieters thats useful info, thanks

There was also someone else with different issues creating new accounts to gripe on Meta about their situation.

4:22 PM

@MartijnPieters how can you be sure it's the same person?

I'm not grouping them with this series, as this person is actively out to troll.

@Shadow9 SO activity.

@ThomasWard "dead" makes it seem like it was their fault. That's what I mean.

"Forcibly removed" is more fitting

I also suspect trolling many times, even flagged one who is likely a sock of suspended user, but flag was pending for a week or so, so I retracted it.

They are linked via info I can see as moderator, I can't say more, sorry.

@MartijnPieters can you report that to the MSE mod team privately?

(if not already done)

4:24 PM

srekets.

@Magisch already long done.

But me and them can't be online and watching for these 24/7.

aight

George Stocker

@ThomasWard give the CM team a break. They lost half their team and have to deal with the private employee fallout and the public community fall out. They are in a rough place.

canon

oof, Jon's blog was pretty damning -particularly given that he was holding back considerably.

I was hoping that if the wider Meta.SE community was aware of the pattern then perhaps we can contain them a bit better.

4:26 PM

@ThomasWard they're 4 people doing the job of what should be 10 or 12

most likely in a crisis of conscience too

@Thomas depends what you need, we have JNat here who is pretty responsive. And Catija.

And seriously, why are you insisting on calling them dead? Some have been fired, but they're still alive. I know you have a thing for evil and darkness, but come on.

They're not dead. They're resting!

pining for the fjords!

Yep!

@terdon hibernating

4:41 PM

Either way, still, I hope, very much alive. I am not comfortable with calling someone who was just fired and left without a job or, apparently, much savings "Dead". That can sometimes be all together too true.

I think they meant dead as in there is no visible signs of things happening.

Shog is strong, I believe this will only make things better for him, in the long run.

'Wow this gig is dead'

He's finally free.

Dunno about Robert, didn't have the chance to know him that well, but from what I saw, he won't have problem to find a good new job too.

@djsmiley2kTMW I know. And I know Thomas well enough to know he really digs the darkness, it just felt wrong to insist quite so much in this case. shrugs

4:43 PM

Digs the darkness? Sounds dark.

;)

@Shadow9 I wanna say I hope they realize they made a pretty gigantic mistake in firing him

maybe they cant take it back now, but I hope they finally see

@Shadow9 It is. Very dark.

🚽

However yes, considering the present situation, referring to people as dead (especially when a small group of people)

@Shadow9 DIGGY DIGGY HOLE

@Magisch they won't

That much is obvious

4:47 PM

to realize that would be to admit making a mistake

They chose a direction. Shog was in their way. Shog is not in their way any more. And that's all.

@terdon where's Lightness? Lost in orbit?

@djsmiley2kTMW now that sounds nasty! Leave my hole alone! :P

@Shadow9 I... don't have a civil answer to that.

digging a new hole to hide in

@terdon then terdon't answer that

;)

oh ouch! That was really bad. Well done! :P

4:52 PM

in better times henders would be here to post the 5-nested "groan" quote

@Shadow9 post disassociation at a user's request I believe is just a button click :p

@ThomasWard Yeah, but there needs to be someone to read it, see that it's just a button click and go down the queue of the hundreds of other things that are more than button clicks in order to get to yours. And we're talking about 3, very overworked people who are probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Also, dissociation is a pain. It is never just done because we ask, they need to look into it, it seems to be relatively complex, actually.

then my conclusion is SE is dying and that's going to be a huge problem going forward. For everyone.

'cause that means moderator elections can't be held either

and such

Gimby

@Magisch slow clap

eh, that won't stop moderator elections from happening on normal stacks

SE meta is just a different case.

4:57 PM

@ThomasWard yeah, yours and everyone else's :)

Forget the company. Hold on as long as you can, but abandon all hope for support from SE.

Mithical

5:10 PM

@terdon "move forward, interact with the good folks left, and actively work on a replacement and don't trust the company one iota" is what I'm working with at the moment

4

Lol

@Mithical pretty much.

@ThomasWard The first election of the year is scheduled for february 17, 2020 on space exploration SE. It seems like it'll be summer before all the mods can be replaced even if they start chaining one election every 2 weeks from now till summer

There are some islands of goodwill and competence left in SE, like the CMs and yaakov, but I wouldn't expect any organizational support from them going forward

if you're gonna stay, stay for your communities and to work with the people who deserve it

I assume they're going to have to run parallel elections to rebuild a number of communities once the badwill dissipates enough to make doing so feasible.

5:26 PM

btw @DanisFiddlingbyFirelight if you're interested in the final PoB for my bane occultist its here: pastebin.com/eGkKVGUQ

~950k shaper dps with 10-15 ex investment

thats what I ended with before I went to make my HH char

The amulet was 4 ex, the lv.4 empower was 6 ex, the +2 on the chest is worth about 100k dps and a similar one will be a bit more, but you can use one without res and life and get one for 2-3 ex. The jewel is basically free and the single jewel sockets are 10c jewels each. The 6L cane was 80c with a perfect dot multi roll when I bought it, the helmet was 5c for the base and I slapped a greed essence on it

i'm enjoying my hoa mana guardian supported by an armor of spiders from the dagger, and using the shield that gives ES equal to a percent of armor on block, with max spell/melee block

at 4ex it was ~ 750k shaper dps, but i've brought it up to 1.1mil

with an HoA ring/jewels etc

i don't have a clarity watchers eye, so i'm only 8.2k es