MVHVTMV

I don't fully understand the hate some people have for Twitter (above and beyond social media itself). It's filled with toxic dickheads, but no-more than any other part of the internet. The things that make it the most dysfunctional social media platform also make it the best IMO.

It's so incredibly easy to block every single brand that hoves into view, and most of the more annoying blue-checkmark dorks too. Once you've put in a tiny bit of effort you're left with an ad-free feed of mostly interesting folks.

I think it gets a bad rap for toxicity because of the way political bubbles end up rubbing up against each other in ways that don't really happen much elsewhere. That ends up being unpleasant sometimes, but it does help expose folks to ideas they wouldn't have encountered otherwise (for better and for worse I suppose).

It certainly isn't a good place for long-form discourse, but it's held it's place as the social-media-for-annoying-politics-nerds for a reason.

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Been playing a bunch lately and looking for some people to complete the starter quests and trade gifts with in the current event.

I'm usually the kind of person who enjoys change, but man I'm really not digging this new design. There were some issues with the old site, especially around organising shows and stuff, but it seems like this has just made them worse. It has some significant layout problems and IMO it looks kind of amateurish, like it was done for a university web-dev project.

Everything on the front page is wayyyyy too large. It looks like something has gone wrong and I've been served tablet optimised version of the site by mistake.

@th3watch3r: Sorry, you're definitely on the wrong website my dude. This forum is specially for the Giant Bomb API, not just API development in general. You should try asking at Stack Overflow if you haven't already.

It's funny to hear people talking about how things feel too small at 1440p. I've been using a 1440p monitor for nearly 5 years, and I'm currently at the point where 1080p feels like a bit of a claustrophobic blurry mess.

I instinctively disliked Dekker at first like everyone else, I suppose mostly because of his flakey starting Spider, but he quickly became my dedicated spotter/sensor lock pilot in the ShadowHawk. Eventually he worked his way up to be one of my most distinguished sharpshooters too, but uhh...

The last time I saw Dekker was also (not coincidentally) the first time I saw an SRM-Carrier. He was piloting my heavy JagerMech, and the carrier ambushed him around a corner on turn 5, almost all of the 60 SRM-6 missiles hit him at point blank range tearing up his armour, knocking him to the ground, and pushing him back into turn 5 for the next round. Because of bad terrain I couldn't get line of sight from any of my other mechs to the carrier, so when the SRM-Carrier got another chance to move before Dekker, it opened up on him and cored him out.

I was so bummed out by it, I turned the game off and I haven't come back to it yet. I know it's been that way since the table-top game, but a tank with 10xSRM-6 launchers just seems broken.

I want to play more, but the metagame is so stressful that I don't know if I'm actually having fun with it. I really appreciate the brutal-blow-for-blow wargame nature of the combat, but it clashes horribly with the story and progression mechanics that feel much softer and more personal. It makes me wish the meta was more grand-strategy and less XCOM, or that combat was a little more "correctly winnable", and less about getting constantly worn down by out of range missile fire.

@jjweatherman said:

I get where you're coming from, and yeah it's obviously worth noting the difference between real money and purely in-game blind-boxes, but I don't think these terms really indicate notably different things. I'd say that the distinction is pretty much based on your cultural reference point, i.e. "loot box" is just a westernised term that came about because it doesn't require you to know about Japanese gashapon to get the idea. You see a lot of games that explicitly replicate the idea of a capsule toy machine, but don't make you put in real money, and you also see plenty of games that have boxes-with-loot that have important effects that you have to pay for, etc.

Gacha and Loot Boxes are just two different names for the same thing. They're both blind-boxes of some variety, whether or not the rewards are gameplay focused or not is irrelevant, just that you put in money, and get a randomised reward.

This is a dumb old thread that should probably be locked, but it's worth saying that the benefit of the SI isn't just in the ease of conversion between metres and kilometres etc., but the that the base units are defined in terms of natural constants, and then all other units are derived from them. The real benefit being that you remove almost all constant factors from calculations. There are simple examples like 1 m^3 = 1 kL vs. the weirdness of 1 ft^3 = 7.48052 liquid gallons, but the real beauty comes when you get into things like 1 Nm = 1 J/radian. (Yes, I know radians are dimensionless, don't @ me)

Chess is a very good little wargame that's basically been ruined by centuries of analysis. It's fun to play with people who are at your skill level who haven't memorised moves and counter-moves, but as soon as there's any kind of outside research being done, it becomes extremely unfun.