kharla-k

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Being Reed is suffering

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64/100

Eblana

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hoolheya

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Eblana is kind of a freak and a weirdo huh

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I like that this event opens up with Eblana resurrecting her great great great great great great great grandpa, he goes "what the hell, man" followed by "huh, they didn't kill you in the crib? Huh" then Eblana goes "never mind that, I did an oopsie with my necromancy" and he's like "Ok, how big of an oopsie, a city?" and Banana says "a whole country" and his response is

"you WHAT"

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Saw a post somewhere else talking about how it is probably a good thing that Arknights attracts the type of crowd who enjoys F/F stuff a lot given how a lot of the fancontent can tend to skew and it made me kind of happy. Like, ultimately, I agree. I think that Arknights definitely has a pretty strong yuri appeal even if I think the main story often fails to capitalize on that.

Ultimately, yeah, it's pretty yuriful.

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is it really an arknights event if it doesnt hit you with npcs that are really compelling and makes you tear up and then they die

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Mudrock

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ive been lurking in arknights gameplay servers too much for my own good lately so here's a little self-exorcism

complaints about EN players being bad compared to CN pretty much always happen in the context of community efforts towards coming up with new or optimised stage solutions and strategies. advanced CN clears aren't cooked up by individual persons, these are strategy groups in constant discussion with each other. therefore, the complaint is not actually necessarily that EN players are playing arknights Worse, but rather that they don't contribute nearly as much to this conversation. the hypothetical EN player that cooks up their own max risk without ever looking at CN but never posts their findings anywhere is of no use to the people making these complaints.

arknights CN has way more players than EN. at least double if not triple if not more going by my hastily searched download statistics. there are more advanced CN players than EN first of all because there are simply more CN players. I would not be surprised if the ratio of players interested in doing challenge gameplay in a broad sense is actually the same between servers (regardless of how many actually engage with it in practice)

the other servers are at least half a year behind CN, meaning anyone on EN who /is/ interested in pushing strategic limits is always going to be late to that conversation. CN will have had that conversation half a year ago already, and they will have had it with more people. EN players trying to participate in the same kind of challenge and optimisation that CN is doing will basically always be running after CN records while missing half a year's worth of tools to match those records unless they go through the effort of making a CN account, and even then the language barrier will make actually joining the conversation difficult. these are not particularly motivating circumstances for people who would otherwise enjoy being part of this conversation.

east asian gacha players statistically also just spend way more than western ones, so dedicated high end players on CN will statistically have a much broader roster with higher potentials to work with than people trying to be dedicated high end players on EN, further widening the gap. there's half a year heads up for banners sure, but if there's several back to back must-haves, or if an older operator becomes relevant later, that doesn't actually help. if basically every CN IS tournament strat uses some combination of like five different operators I don't have and was not previously interested in getting, that doesn't motivate me to roll those operators after all so that I can do tournament IS, it means i simply will not do tournament IS despite the concept being appealing to me.

these two barriers mean that when EN players want to come up with some way to make things more challenging for themselves, they tend to instead look to arbitrary roster restrictions, which is why nicheknights is so popular. trying to beat stages with the minimum amount of operators isn't all that appealing when the current CN record features operators that EN doesn't even have yet, but you might be the first to beat that stage with operators who all have the same hair color or whatever, and if you restrict the selection of operators you're allowing yourself to use then you can be more frugal in what operators you roll for too. EN players picking up arbitrary niches are opting to just open a whole different conversation instead of futilely trying to join a conversation that has long since moved on from where the EN version of the game is at.

basically, I think the state of EN high end play would look significantly different without this 6 months gap, because then the CN records would be something to actually compete and be in conversation with instead of just something to be overshadowed by. I do not think EN players are actually categorically worse at the game, EN is just generally having different conversations than CN, which means people who are hooked into the CN meta will feel like EN isn't contributing to high end arknights.

i also absolutely guarantee you that for every dumb fuck EN player who can't clear a single stage without some youtube guide holding their hand there are an equivalent percentage of dumb fuck CN players who can't clear a single stage without some bilibili guide holding their hand, those just aren't the CN players that you hear about in EN communities

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found this three year old draft buried in my files. is it funny? I don't remember

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62/100

lappland

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Reed can probably make her chest and tail not actively glow, but it's funny to imagine her trying to be inconspicuous with what amounts to a beacon trailing behind her.

Nevermind the horns that actively resent the idea of wearing a hood.

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Speaking of Arknights fashion, I appreciate that tacticool belts, buckles, zips and plumb-lines have been a thing on Terra for at least 600 years.

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I know that people are easily made irrational, but it's depressing and frustrating to be reminded that people can easily be made to hate; loath one another and want them to suffer.

Berating a child and then beating them with a cane is somehow reasonable because of a matter of nationality?

What's the point of gaining independence if you just exact the same behaviors you were trying to escape from?

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Watching all of the normally competitive and toxic elitism turn into an overwhelming force of optimization in Nightreign has been fascinating to watch. The only thing that people typically agree on is evergaol relics are a bit strong. Past that, no character is totally useless or totally broken. No relic set up is technically optimal, and people are playing for hours and making videos to prove that theirs is better.

While it's a cool thing for the community, I think it speaks more to the masterful craftsmanship that was put into Nightreign for all of the characters to feel broken and powerful in their own ways, and for distinct relics to all be valid without entirely pushing out alternatives (asterisk).

They have strong and weak suits of course, but every boss can be solo'd by each nightfarer. And that's really impressive, to me.

[kharla-k]

children's party