#i need to play thru the early ff games i know this

[leonleonhart]

Top five final fantasy games?

u managed to send the exact question i wanted lol

My Top 5 Final Fantasys

5.) FF4 - admittedly i haven't actually beaten it yet lol but i'm hopelessly attached to cecil for some reason 4.) FF8 - i beat this when i was also an emotionally distant teenager with issues. i will always have space in my heart for squall 3.) FF10 - god, when i beat it i never thought i'd love it as strongly as i do. ironically finally getting through it really set in stone my love for jecht <3 2.) FF16 - i could gush about the games story, which i love, instead i'll say there wasn't a moment where i wasn't hyped up for a fight. it is a bit cutscene heavy if that bothers people. 1.) FF9 - anyone who has beaten ff9 understands it being a top fave. story, setting, characters, and even gameplay are top notch.

[sarasa-cat]

Fwiw, after various casual hypothesis testing (oh so casual, oh so non-scientific) last week on how this latest round of so-called "chatbox AI" (aka, bad investment nonsense) is able to write fanfiction, last night while watching partner play a video game on our big screen, I had a few more pointed/strategic convos with the Stochastic Charlatan.

Actually, the reason why I felt inclined to do so was that I just read an opinion essay by Noam Chomsky (ffs) that gave ChatGPT quite the spanking (I'll provide an unlocked/paywall-pass-thru link in another post) **and then** in the comments section of that essay, I read one truly inane comment by someone who mistakenly believed that the deep conversations they had been having with ChatGPT had been teaching them all sorts of new concepts in a variety of academic topics of their interest.

Now, I know -- from my initial test of chatgpt in late 2022 -- that this software hallucinates all sorts of nonsense. Back then (maybe early December of 2022?) I heard a whole bunch of conservations about how university students were using chatgpt to write essays for homework. I wondered, "hm, can chatgpt do my (prior) job of designing and teaching a university level course?" The answers I received on that lazy saturday afternoon were both HILARIOUS and TROUBLING. It wasn't just that the answer was "omfg NO! It definitely CANNOT" but that the chatbot acted as if it could.

DUNNING KRUGER EFFECT LEVEL CONFIDENCE while giving me horrid results for curriculum design. But boy oh boy did little ChatGPT act super confident while hallucinating nonsense and while propagating certain kinds of bias. Anyhow, back then I just wrote it off as one big whatever.

But then, a few months passed and this nonsense was back in the news full force, hyped up like wild. Last week @sarahawke posted a few hilarious chatgpt-written fanfics, which made my brain start forming casual hypotheses (and, see first sentence of this post).

Last night I had a few ideas for discussion topics that I knew (or strongly assumed) it was trained on: topics that are publicly available on the internet, that tend to have "correct vs incorrect" answers for certain factual things but that base collection of factual propositions also lend themselves to a lot of inferencing/wiggle-room/interpretation in how they are applied, that have contained amounts of controversy (meaning, the topic has reasonably strong signal strength w.r.t. signal-to-noise ratios), AND (most importantly) the topic has some a few sources on the public internet that are considered 'authoritative' for the facts. And, of course, topics that I happen to have relatively deep levels of expertise in -- meaning, I could "easily grade the papers without an answer key" or I could lecture on the topic or demo the topic or discuss it in length or whatever. After all, my interest was in fact checking a hallucinating bot. ;)

The results were ... interesting. As in serious Stochastic Charlatanry. Dunning-Kruger effect a la chatbot.

The things that have me concerned are these:

Unless you actually know your shit about the topic you are asking it to tell you about, you could very easily fooled, especially when the chatbot's results are plausible and some of it passes a fast, cursory-skim google test.

This is troubling because someone with expertise will never feel a need to go through the painful process of getting anything vaguely useful out of this chatbot whereas someone with lower level knowledge will ... but they just won't know which bits are nonsense and which bits are factually correct, much less how valuable the factually correct statements are with regard to context. As in: yes, Fact A is technically correct but impractical or uncommon in the context they are discussing with the chatbot.

The other thing is that once the chatbot says something that is 100% factually wrong, it starts doubling down on that mistake, and it will continue doubling down on that demonstrably wrong statement every time you ask or re-ask the question until you finally prod it hard enough with factual evidence that forces it to correct itself. Alternatively, you could just tell it "dude, you are wrong. X is never the case when Y" and it seems to weigh that input heavily and immediately correct itself (although I have no idea if it always carries this correction over to future conversations with other people -- something for me to test by making a separate account). I have some more "experiments" to continue conducting tonight to look into this further but, also, to see how it carries those corrections forward during future inferences that require knowledge of those corrected facts.

Honestly, chatgpt's lack of being able to correctly inference and apply important contextual knowledge Does Not Shock Me because that doesn't seem to be how it was created.

(Fwiw, I did not click on the thumbs up or thumbs down icons, or the "redo your answer" icon, or provide any feedback via the UI. all I did was chat with it like I was having a text chat with someone else because I wanted to simulate being a person who thinks this thing is providing authoritative info)

Currently, my largest concern about these kinds of "suck up the internet and make massive statistical inferences about """knowledge""" bots" is that their confident charlatanry is very enticing to the lazy, the busy, the overburdened, and the ill-informed.

IRL, I have dealt with my fair share of people who engage in confident charlatanry, or who repeat nonsense and then double down on said nonsense repeatedly. I mean, part of that is being human -- we all carry mistaken info in our heads -- but the confident charlatanry really makes me concerned. It... reminds me too much of dinner table conversations with people I (no longer want to) know in Silly Valley.

[cruddyborderlandstheories]

so i’d really like to finish my guardian takedown lore analysis, but honestly the game isn’t really fun to play at the moment anymore (even with the health debuffs they added) so I think im going to be taking a break for now because I’m just not having fun anymore.

this game has a lotta mechanical problems i think need to be addressed so im gonna summarize it as bullet points below. I’ll play the new dlc when it drops, but idk if i’ll be on more than that (grinding, end-game stuff) until they make some serious changes. I’ve been playing (near) daily since launch, followed the patch/hotfix notes every single week, and my patience has finally, FINALLY run dry, especially with that really disappointing Phase 1 Patch and then the hotfix this week not adding anything else. What is the balancing team doing??? 😩

tl;dr: FIX THE VAULT HUNTERS!!!!

anyway. That’s all I needed to get outta my system. I might log on to this blog every now and again to post some random shit that pops into my head (probably with regards to my AU), but I’m not going to be actively playing and posting for the time being. Goodbye (for now), and here’s hoping the new DLC is good!! 

guardian takedown only problems:

there’s a lot of waiting around, and sometimes it’s not explicitly stated that you’re waiting for something, so you’ll be lost on what to do next (not sure if that’s a dialogue glitch or not)

the crystal charge insta-death is bull. just. what the hell. at least make it so you just have to start over. killing ur players for failing a “puzzle” that they then have to fight all the way back to is so infuriating.

dying because you fell off a platforming puzzle is also bull. 

i remember playing the first DMC on my playstation in middle school and having a conniption over the part in the observatory(? it’s been a hot minute since I played DMC 1) with the disappearing/invisible platforms. I h a t e jumping puzzles. why are they in a section of the game where death is semi-permanent and a detriment to your teammates. i tried the takedown 2x with friends and both times one friend didn’t make the first big jump to the temple and had to wait for our inevitable deaths. that’s so unfair to them.

there’s absolutely no reason for a boss to have 12 fuckin immunity phases. 4 per health bar with 3 health bars? Who the fuck designed this? *pumps shotgun* i just wanna talk. 

i appreciate a tasteful immunity phase every now and again (the ones in the Valkyrie fight are actually p reasonable), but christ. that is overkill. I don’t mind the main boss fight, since u can end those early through certain actions, but jesus. the mid-boss fight is annoying as hell. you spend more time running from the immunity phases and finding the damn boss than u do actually shooting it.

drop rates are crap, which I guess should be expected given what happened with the Maliwan Takedown and the handful of months it took for them to fix that, but also you think they’d have learned.

in the maliwan takedown there’s a sense of progression thru the facility after you kill each area’s batch of enemies, but in this one it’s... dampened by the crystal charging sequences. you kill all the enemies in an area, press a button, and now you have to kill 3x that number of enemies in the same area, expect you’re just standing there motionless. It’s not fun.

the crystal charging stuff is just not fun in general. standing in a square is not entertaining. it’s worse that it was clearly designed for 3+ players when a majority of people play/grind solo

i gotta admit the boss fights just aren’t as fun as the Maliwan Takedown fights overall. I felt like a real badass fighting Wotan for the first time, but the main boss for this Takedown is kind of a bitch. Wotan’s fight is chaos, there’s so much shit happening at once and you don’t really have time to process everything and I love it. This one is p meh...

This would be fine and I’d 100% not care that much if there weren’t all these OTHER problems

General Issues with the Game

There’s no endgame stuff to play outside of the takedowns. 

I assume they’re working on the first raid given some stuff I found in the Guardian Takedown files, but I really wish they’d keep the seasonal events/areas. They give us the option to disable/enable them while they’re ‘active’, just give us the ability to do it whenever we want.

when i hop on i either run through Athenas (my favorite map), or farm a boss or two. I have all the loot i really need from the maliwan takedown/elsewhere, and the guardian takedown just... isn’t fun atm, so i have nothing to do.

I’ve reset my playthru multiple times to play the main story at m10, but u can only play it (and the dlc) so many times

Mayhem levels and modifiers are a hot m e s s

a majority of the modifiers just aren’t fun to play with

they incorporated like 2-3 fun modifiers (from the community), then added a bunch that straight-up aren’t. I’m fine with the game being more difficult, but at least give us modifiers that make it more entertaining to play at a higher level instead of more annoying. I like the ones that have trade-offs or add new ‘enemies’, but I hate the ones that just straight up reduce your damage output.

a majority of the weapons with the mayhem 10 anointment (scaling) do not work on mayhem 10 (we’ll go more in-depth with this later)

Player Characters (Vault Hunters!!!) are also a hot mess and a lot of problems plaguing them haven’t been fixed SINCE LAUNCH

theyre literally the basis of the game and its balance. why havent you guys fixed them yet. stop adding new content until they’re fixed. no new skill trees until the base 3 trees work ON EVERY CHARACTER.

seriously. Why is amara p much limited to using Phasegrasp. Why does Iron Bear not matter to Moze except to proc anointments. MAKE ALL ACTION SKILLS EQUAL AND HAVE HEFT.

i wrote an essay here about it bc i feel that strongly about this

SERIOUSLY FIXING UR VAULT HUNTERS WILL MAKE BALANCING SO MUCH EASIER PLEASE IM BEGGING YOU THEY ARE THE BASE OF UR BALANCING WOES

ZANE IS STILL UNUSABLE WITHOUT THE SEEIN’ DEAD CLASS MOD!!!!!!!!!!!

MOZE IS SCREWED BC HER DAMAGE IS TOO RELIANT ON ASE ANOINTMENTS!!

AMARA DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING MELEE BUILD AS THE ADVERTISED MELEE CHARACTER???

FL4K’S HEADCOUNT SKILL IS S T I L L BROKEN EVER SINCE THE RELEASE OF THE MALIWAN TAKEDOWN

ARE YOU GUYS LISTENING TO THE COMMUNITY *PLEASEEEEEEE*

BUFF AND FIX THE GODDAMN VAULT HUNTERS

Anointments were a mistake. Damage end-game is wayyyy too reliant on them

anoints should have a maximum of, like, a 20% damage bonus. the damage necessary to kill enemies *should be coming from the VHs themselves*. i don’t care if you have to revamp every single Vault Hunter’s skill trees and buff them all by 9000%. THEY DESERVE IT AT THIS POINT

at the moment in m10 there really isn’t much build diversity *even between Vault Hunters*. We’re all using the same 5 guns (OPQ System. Kaoson. idk. fuckin brainstormer? is that still a thing? jesus fuck) with the same 3 anointments (100% on ASE, cryo while SNTL, and 300% while 90%).

you want to diversify builds like you said during the gameplay reveal???? you want our choice in Vault Hunter to actually fuckin matter???? FIX THEM!!!! THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO DEAL DAMAGE WITHOUT STUPID POWERFUL LEGENDARIES AND ANOINTMENTS!!!

Anoints also shouldn’t be common. At all. They should be, like, Pearl rarity. To let that happen, their damage needs to be tuned way the fuck down (again, 20ish % bonus MAX) and ALL ANOINTS NEED TO BE USEFUL IN SOME WAY

NOBODY IS GOING TO USE THE AIRBORNE OR SLIDING ANOINTMENTS JUST REMOVE THEM ALREADY AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

obviously these changes can’t happen because they fucked up and buckled down with everything being anointed in m10, but still

imagine a world where the VHs actually did damage on their own without anointments and the damage buff from them was just an incentive to grind for the 100% perfect weapon and NOT A REQUIREMENT TO DEAL DAMAGE

>:(

A majority of gear is borderline worthless at M10

I’m fine with the difficulty of M10, i should let it be known. The enemy health isn’t really the problem IF ALL GUNS ACTED THE SAME AS THE OPQ SYSTEM

ffs.

you know, if you fixed ur vault hunters so they all did damage with just purple weapons (abt the same damage as legendaries w/o special effects) and removed the anointment requirement from late-game play, balancing your guns would be sooo much easier. you know. just saying.

right now only 10% (im being generous) of guns in the game are viable. 90% are worthless. We need AT LEAST 60-70% viable at M10. WHERE IS MY BUILD DIVERSITY. WHY ARE ALL LEGENDARIES NOW JUST “HEY THIS GUN IS STRONGER THAN THE LAST 4 WE RELEASED. HAVE FUN”

how to fix this problem? do as above: BUFF YOUR PLAYER CHARACTERS. MAKE ANOINTMENTS LESS STRONG.

then, at least the 10% already strong weapons would be stupid strong and OP as fuck, BUT AT LEAST WE COULD HAVE BUILD VARIETY!!! I don’t care if other people are dummy strong one-shotting everything in sight. I don’t! so long as they don’t play with me, I couldn’t care less!!! I want to be able to play with the unique, interesting legendaries. instead of the OPQ System. which, by the way, I dislike compared to the normal Q-System. let me use the frozen heart shield and the infiltrator mod. I don’t wanna be chained to the Seein’ Dead anymore :(

honestly at this point im starting to think removing slag was a mistake bc then at least we could use guns that aren’t solely damage-based guns. you know how fucked up you’ve got me that im thinking maybe slag wouldn’t be so bad this time around??? YOU GOT ME FUCKED UP B A D.

FIX THE GAME

IM TAKING A BREAK

MAYBE I’LL BE LESS UPSET WHEN I COME BACK FOR THE DLC BUT HOT. DIGGITY. SHIT.