justlookingfordragon

justlookingfordragon, 1 day ago

Breath of the Wild. Every time Link steps into the light after opening the shrine, the camera pans over Hyrule, with that glorious music … I always get goosebumps and can’t wait to get the runes, catch a horse and start “exploring” again, even tho I pretty much know the entire map by heart already.

justlookingfordragon, 1 day ago

created various identical communities on various instances…most of which went on to gain no traffic whatsoever

I just want to add here that users can adopt abandoned communities to give them a second chance. So if, in your example, the mods of !nerves would rage quit and just squat on the name out of spite / indifference, then someone interested in cleaning up the mess can go to !support and request to adopt the community. The admins can then decide to either directly transfer mod rights to the new user, or purge the community so another one can reopen it again, so there is technically no need to create additional communities in such a case.

In case of a direct transfer, no posts or comments get deleted either, so you won’t lose content that you would otherwise have to repost or crosspost to the “new default community”. ;)

justlookingfordragon, 1 day ago

I’m glad I’m not the only one who keeps them turned off most (if not all) of the time ^^° it’s a cool concept in theory, and I’m glad that Nintendo is still always experimenting around with new ideas, but to me personally, the sage avatars have been a hindrance more than a help. Especially in my current challenge run … Mineru has accidentally killed me so many times in the dumbest ways possible that she is almost as bad as the enemies she’s supposed to fight.

The only one I occasionally use in the other playthrough is Tulin, and only to get a little boost when I’m gliding somewhere. As soon as we touch ground he goes back into his Pokéba- ehrm… back into the void or wherever he’s stored while he is “off”.

justlookingfordragon, 1 day ago

I wrote a little “new player advice” compilation a while ago, in case you’re interested: lemmy.world/post/225523

justlookingfordragon, 2 days ago

Like others have said already: it sells. It’s the same reason why seemingly every single fantasy/adventure game is called an “RPG” regardless of whether or not it contains actual RPG elements, like creating your own character.

justlookingfordragon, 2 days ago

… drr drr drr …

justlookingfordragon, 3 days ago

A bot is a bot and should be marked as such. No exceptions.

As an alternative, the devs could add the option to whitelist specific bots, so people can first “block all bots” and then make an exception specifically for yours - IF they want to see it, of course. But unmarking a bot just because you want to show it to people who specifically do NOT want to see any bots? That defeats the entire purpose of blocking them in the first place.

justlookingfordragon, 3 days ago

How would it be different if Lemmy allowed scheduled post creation in the platform itself?

It wouldn’t be different. Still annoying useless spam, still something I would immediatly block. It doesn’t matter much whether it is a bot, a person copypasting the same thing daily, or something different entirely - it is daily spam that a lot of people simply do not want to deal with, and blocking bots gets rid of a lot of this stuff easily.

The METHOD with which the spam is posted is not the issue here, and finding a different way to automate spam is not the solution. Un-marking bots like these would only result in the necessity to manually add bot accounts to a block list to get rid of them again, but it would not magically make people interested in the spam in question just because it is shoved down their throats in a different manner.

Seriously, if you’re only trying to make the bot visible to users who specifically, definitely, actively WANT to see it, then a customizable whitelist is the best option. That way, the “I don’t want ANY bot spam” people aren’t forced to deal with random exceptions, and the people who want to see the bot for whatever reason would be able to.

…mostly people unaware of the bot, potentially interested in the daily thread (because after all, why not) and not seeing it due to them blocking them all.

Stickied intro post in the community. “Hey just so you know, we have a bot asking you how you’re doing every single day, and I’d like you to participate, so please uncheck the bot-block-box in your settings, thank you very much.”

Tadah, now people will be aware about the bot and can opt-in IF they want to, without annoying the rest of the Fediverse in the process.

justlookingfordragon, 3 days ago

We have a house rule about this: The real world of course has priority, so if something happens that is out of your control, it is not the end of the world if a session gets cancelled… but if it happens regularily or without a good excuse, then the character gets temporarily removed from the party with a matching in-game excuse so that the people who DID show up can play in peace.

So the party just defeated a big enemy and the next session they wanted to plan their next steps, but the player of the warrior didn’t show up for the third time…? His character is unconscious now while the others talk. Hit to the head during the fight, 5 hours or so knocked out, and the player and character alike can catch up with the rest the next time the player is present. Or maybe the guy had to escort injured villagers to the next healer and heads back to the party a few days later after completing his own little mission “offscreen”. Or he ate something bad and spent a week locked up in the outhouse, whatever. There is always some way to send the missing guy’s character away for a while so the rest of the party doesn’t go empty-handed for the umptheenth time in a row.

justlookingfordragon, 3 days ago

Nothing becomes unobtaineable or unsolvable by completing the game once. Even the boss itself can be refought an infinite amount of times, so don’t worry about it ;)

justlookingfordragon, 3 days ago

… and some of them technically don’t even exist. “Breath of the Wild 2” for example was a placeholder title for Tears of the Kingdom until the title was revealed in September 2022. Why would anyone use a placeholder name that has not been used by anyone in over a year?

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

green feet on Munchlax??

Half-transparent pale-yellow paint on a blue item. It might have been the somewhat correct color if it was painted on a white surface, but the background color shines through.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

Machete, Water Purifier (provided it does not need electricity to work), German Shepherd and the tent. If the water purifier requires electricity, I’d opt for the body armor.

Stuff that requires fuel, electricity or ammo will become obsolete after a certain amount of time, so the flashlight, crossbow, motorcycle, chainsaw etc. only have limited use and become dead weight eventually. The first aid kit might help with “regular” injuries, but is likely useless against zombie bites getting infected with whatever virus is responsible for their mutation. The respirator mask is only useful if there’s something dangerous in the air, and will only stay useful until the filter gets too dirty / too old and needs to be replaced.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

“You just turned 100 today - what’s your secret to a long life?” - No matter what the answer will be, I guarantee you that there are millions of people in the world who do the exact same and still die young. But yeah, of course aunt Margharet only managed to live an entire century because she ate three cans of surströmming every week, no doubt. Genetics, healthcare and lifestyle have nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.

---

Edit/addendum: Weird specific example

Something similar was also my no.1 pet peeve on reddit whenever people argued about how the Blood Moon works in Breath of the Wild. It’s an in-game timer of roughly 3 hours, but the game does not tell you about it, nor does it display the timer, and back when the game code wasn’t cracked yet, there were a LOT of outrageously weird theories about how to allegedly make the Blood Moon appear.

So you just “made” a BM happen by running straight into a wall for 3 hours? Yes you got a BM, but not “because” you were running into a wall for 3 hours, but because the effing timer was up. The game does not care for WHAT you do in that time.

So you reloaded and ran into a wall again and the BM happened again? It is STILL not because you ran into a wall - you rewinded the effing timer by reloading a save file from before the event you’re trying to trigger, and then the timer was up again. (They never bothered to check whether it would happen if they did not try to trigger it with their chosen tactic)

It is really really hard to try and convince these people that they’re wrong, because once they’re convinced that a specific action yields a specific result, they WILL keep doing it over and over again until it “works” and then see it as proof. But by the same logic you can also throw tomatoes at a wall until it starts to rain and then claim that the rain happened because you just threw 547 tomatoes against a wall. And then you continue to throw tomatoes because it “worked” last time … and if it doesn’t rain then you just didn’t throw enough tomatoes yet.

justlookingfordragon, 4 days ago

A common misconception is that blood moons help replenish system memory by resetting enemy kill flags. This is however total nonsense, because enemy kill flags are just GameData flags, and all GameData flags are loaded at bootup and stay in memory forever

From the exact same source you just posted.

justlookingfordragon, 4 days ago

There are only seven very specific cases which can trigger a PBM, most of which the player has no control over (audio and texture loading issues). All listed in the guide.

The guy who wrote that guide is still on reddit (u/leoetlino to be precise) and has had the same discussions for years in r/breath_of_the_wild ^^° I’ve even argued with him myself back in the day when I didn’t know better, but since he’s a dataminer who reverse-engineered most of the game code, I’m now inclined to believe that he knows what he’s talking about.

However, I don’t blame anyone for not knowing better, since there are just way too many flat-out wrong but “real looking” guides claiming to know how the gameplay mechanic works, so it is ridiculously easy to fall for false info (I did, too). Heck, even the “Complete Official Guide” claims that the regular Blood Moon happens every seven days and can be forced to happen via skipping time at a campfire, which is super easy to disprove but still widely belived to be true, because how can a book with THAT title be wrong, right?

(Still, walking into a wall is worthless either way, lol … but it WAS a theory once, regularily posted as a tip/trick for the Mija Rokee Shrine on reddit and gamefaqs, and parrotted by IGN who still haven’t updated their guide even 7 years later and probably never will)

justlookingfordragon, 3 days ago

Perfect, thank you ^^ I’ll get to work right away

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

May I suggest a strawpoll? (strawpoll.com) Most people feel more comfortable “voting” for these matters when they’re anonymous ;)

Personally I think mergig isn’t a bad idea, but don’t delete the community that ends up not being the main one. Rather post a sticky then like “we moved to XYZ” and ask for future content to be posted in the other community. That way, people looking for the keyword “bunny” will end up in the rabbit community or vice versa and you both get more traffic / subscribers.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

Oof … okay, I didn’t check for the mods. That might indeed be a problem.

However, you can also request to take over either one community (or both, seeing as they’re both unmoderated) on !support which would eliminate the need to create a third one, and also keep at least half of the total content in an “active” community that already has a bunch of subscribers. Creating a new one to start from scratch would mean that it will start out empty and without followers unless you repost/crosspost stuff from the other two communities. Adopting an already existing community is less work for the mod(s) and more convenient for the people that are already subscribed. ;)

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

A separate Lemmy account is probably the best at the current time - DMs don’t yet work properly across different instances, so if someone from Lemmy.world would try to reach you via DM (like asking questions about the rules of the community, having beef with another user, making suggestions they don’t feel comfortable with posting publicly etc.) you might not recieve the message. Or you recieve the message but you can’t answer via DM yourself.

It is on the To-Do-list of the supporters, but other issues with the site currently have higher priority so I have no idea when this will be fixed.

On the plus side, creating accounts is unlimited and free, so there’s nothing stopping you from making a Lemmy account in addition to your current one. And once the issue is resolved, you can still decide whether you want to retire or keep the alt account ;)

justlookingfordragon, 6 days ago

Minor addition: Lemmy needs more active users. A lot of redditfugees seem to have created their own instances the moment they arrived here, only to expect other people to fill the communities with content and then abandon the site once they realised they would have to put actual work into their communities instead of just being squatters with mod rights. There are a lot of gaming-related communities here that I personally would be interested in joining if they weren’t abandoned and devoid of content (like Cult of the Lamb or Spiritfarer for example).

It would be really nice if active Lemmy users would “adopt” a few of those abandoned communities to add content and pull in more subscribers. “Only” having more people overall on the site doesn’t do much if this does not lead to more content / discussions / interaction.

justlookingfordragon, 1 day ago

The wrong people pick up the communities and just abandon them or completely mismanage them. Can’t be helped though.

That’s already happening, but the ability to “adopt” communities helps to combat that. You can go to !support and request to take over abandoned communities created by others, provided the original creator has been inactive and the community really IS abandoned / unmoderated. That way, someone who is actually interested in doing something for / with the community gets put in charge for a second chance (instead of the community name squatter being allowed to block the community name forever).

I adopted !totk a couple of months ago for xample. It didn’t have a sidebar, rules, banner, icon, and the original creator had contributed zero content, so even tho that game is popular at the moment, there was barely anything interesting in there (plus some offtopic posts that were simply never removed). Now it has 2.6k subscribers and a steady stream of content, and offtopic stuff / insulting comments and the like actually get removed.

I also adopted !cultofthelamb yesterday by the way, so the above comment that this community is “abandoned and devoid of content” is no longer true ;) maybe I should edit that … hm.

Long story short, I still think adopting abandoned communities is a good thing. provided the “adopter” is active enough themselves to make the community thrive.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

Nostalgia creates some massive rose-tinted glasses.

I’ve used to love FFVIII as a teenager and decided to buy it again for the Switch last year, but I legit couldn’t progress more than a ten-minute-interval without either cringeing at the characters or being angry about them in some way. Why are they all so edgy? Why are their decisions always so incredibly stupid? I eventually realized that the characters are basically what a 12 year old would consider to be cool adults when in reality they’re absolutely immature in every aspect.

I really really tried to complete at least one playthrough again in the hopes that it would eventually get better, but snapped when the oh-so-mighty martial arts character, who had been showing off his melee skills in every effing cutscene, flat-out forgot that he has been fighting literal demons with his bare hands for the entire effing game only to realize AFTER a multiple day long imprisonment that he could just slap the guards around without having to get a weapon first. FFS how do you forget such a thing for longer than a week?!

I guess the same kinda applies to FFVII because everyone I know who had played the game when it initially released still thinks it’s THE best FF game to date and they’re usually very very vocal about that opinion, and everyone who didn’t play it “back in the day” just couldn’t understand what was so great about it. I’m in the latter group BTW. I’m all for letting people enjoy what they want and I won’t try to ruin anyone’s fun with a game they like, but I am convinced that a huge portion of that hype is nothing more than nostalgia.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

I feel similar about Ocarina of Time. Still one of my favorite Zelda games, and absolutely revolutionary for the time it was published in, but horribly outdated compared to basically everything that exists today. Since almost every 3D game today has stuff like Z-targeting and companion NPCs giving in-game hints and context-sensitive buttons and the like, there is nothing new and baffling about that game to someone who is already used to these gimmicks and concepts being the bare minimum standard.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

Chrono Trigger is an absolute classic ♥ even today it’s still one of my favorite SNES games, along with Secret of Mana, Lufia, Terranigma and A Link to the Past. I still replay some of these every other year.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

Rosenmontag is a German holiday that does not seem to be well-known in the rest of the world. Just put a Narrenkappe on Lemmy’s head and you’re good.

Chinese New Year might be another interesting one, but as I’m not exactly well-informed about its holiday customs and traditions, I’d like to leave design ideas to people who know more about it than me.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

You’d need at least 35 Koroks for that to happen =P at “just” 16 pluhies, the worst that can happen is that their wheelbarrow randomly falls apart.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

The most recent one: EA. I had disliked them and their practices for quite some time now, but there was a game on sale that I found interesting enough to purchase … it was like 2 Euro or whatever, so no big loss. AFTER the download they wanted me to sign an electronic agreement to basically harvest all of my data and requiring me to be permanently online in a singleplayer offline game at all times so they could monitor me, and if I didn’t agree I wouldn’t be able to play the game. No refund. I uninstalled it and will never purchase anything from them again - that was the last straw, the last ever chance I was willing to give them. And no there was no warning of any kind before the purchase - they deliberately waited until after they had my money to “ask” for that bullshit.

justlookingfordragon, 5 days ago

Think of those as 3 rows in a table and read them from the top down, then it makes a bit more sense:

Left	Middle	Right
Honk if u love Jesus	Jesus saves	Honk if u love Jesus

…still an absolute clusterf*ck either way tho. And every time I read it, I get the “magic baby” song from Labyrinth stuck in my head.

♫ “Honk Jesus, honk!” ♪

justlookingfordragon, 3 days ago

The thing that really scares me though is the way the problems change at the higher levels.

In case you find yourself in the situation, tell your employer. It may sound awkward to them at first that someone wouldn’t want to be promoted, but in the end it is in their best interest to keep employees who ARE good at doing their jobs, instead of creating a situation where the same employee is suddenly no longer able to do a good job. This is no shallow talk by the way, but a well-documented, scientifically proven effect called the Peter Principle (which basically boils down to “everyone gets promoted until they reach the point of maximum incompetence and then get stuck in that position”)

We as a society are trained to percieve “climbing the corporate ladder” as the main/only goal of working jobs with a hierarchy, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with staying at the level you’re comfortable at. ;)

justlookingfordragon, 1 day ago

Ohh okay. I really misunderstood your point then, but thank you for clarifying ;)

I’ve talked my way into jobs I can’t do, then failed badly

Failing at something is not the end of the world. Sure it sucks at first, and possible setbacks in life aren’t exactly cool either, but you DO sound like someone who refuses to stay down whenever life decided to knock you down, and that is something not everyone can do. That requires an inner strength and determination that a lot of people simply can’t muster.

And you know what? Your idea of working in the social sector sounds like an excellent goal - it IS a hard job with little pay, but since you fought your way up from the bottom already, you have a completely different, deeper insight into related issues than someone who knows homelessness and its struggles only from a textbook. You will be able to understand clients in similar situations on a completely different level, and they in turn might be more inclined to trust your advice. You might be able to actually help people that simply fall through the cracks elsewhere.

Good luck, friend. May your spark never fade.

justlookingfordragon, 2 days ago

Breeding slimes for specific colors. Winter is basically the only time I can do that in relative peace, as “sorting” those little hyperagressive snotballs takes astoundingly long each day, and when I try to do that in any other season I start to neglect everything that isn’t automated (like planting crops, going to festivals, working towards the greenhouse…).

• In spring, summer and autumn: animals > crops > spending the rest of the day foraging, wooing villagers, mining or fishing.
• In winter: animals > slimes > spending the rest of the day foraging, wooing villagers, mining or fishing.

(I still often manage to run out of time and sprint home, cussing, only to break down in front of the bed…)