battlewraith

Do you have a rough estimate of how many 50s you have? Are those pages full of 50s or mostly not? What this tells me is that you play this game a lot and a great deal of time is spent playing the same characters repeatedly. If we had to characterize each other in terms of addiction--you are clearly the addict here, not me. I've played this game on and off since it came back, but nowhere near every day, let alone on the same character. I often will go months without logging in, because I don't have time, I'm playing another game, or some other reason. I know there are a lot of people in this community that are like this--they are only interested in this game or this is the only game their computer will run. The aging players that are all-in on formulas that date back to the retail days are a niche subset of video game players. It's not the players who want to kit out some concept build that are unusual in the broader scheme of things.

A lot of the discussions on this forums recently hinge on vocal players that simply cannot relate to other people being different. You don't see what the rush is to do something.....so? Should everything revolve around people like you or should this be an actual community with disparate viewpoints? You never answered the question about how many 50s you have. That would give people an idea of what your pacing is like.

Ozzy's response to the testing: "The only gene I know anything about is in Kiss."

Would like this option too.

To be honest it doesn't. I don't bother posting there. But if someone starts a discussion taking issue with the culture of the forum, I'll chime in. Because I have a similar perspective and still engage with this community. I think that's hitting the nail on the head. There is a contingent of players that view teardown of ideas as a game. Telling them to dial down the dev time litany is like nerfing their t9 and buffing the enemies. I was responding to someone else who mentioned hubris. On these forums, people will say something like: "I'm tired of dealing with people's stupid ideas over and over again." And then accuse people of hubris for not listening to them. I know you keep making the same point about saying something and then moving on. It's good advice--unless you're dealing with human beings and how they actually are.

So you're jumping tracks again. No one is forcing you to do this. I'm allowed to do that. None of that is in question. None of that is the point of the criticism. And it's already been answered earlier in the discussion. I'm perfectly fine handling online feedback. I have nobody on ignore, and kind of pity people that do. Once Rudra complained to me about me and it was heartbreaking. Need I say more? Also, the purpose of all such boxes is to provide a degree of anonymity, if not from the recipient of the suggestion then to the randos present in the area--thus cramming slips of paper into a box (prior to digital versions).

Except you know the game will not be adjusted around their lack of understanding. The devs do things according to their agenda. So the frustration you gave and received was for what exactly? The constant insistence that there is little dev time to spend on big changes seems to go hand in hand with this fear that some fanciful idea presents an existential threat to the game if forum regulars aren't there to dismantle it. Actually it seems very different. A suggestion box is a way to submit anonymous feedback so that people won't get backlash from coworkers, etc. This is like having a bunch of people standing around the box and demanding you answer their criticisms, even though they have no say in the matter. If you refuse to do that, apparently it's hubris.

This community is so old, and so crotchety that almost everything is "beating a dead horse" the minute you open your mouth. You just don't realize it yet. Simply put, the issue for me is what purpose the suggestions forum serves. If it's an aid to development then I think it's demonstrably horrible. A small tweak or proliferation of an existing power gets mentioned and then 4 years later something gets implemented. Maybe. If it's about player engagement and community it seems unnecessarily bad. A band of grognards lurks in the shadows to tear apart ideas that are too fanciful or impractical (or that they just don't like, let's not forget). This is drives away bold ideas, which in my view is a loss. No impact on the game, but makes that subforum stale and dreary. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask the mods/devs/whatever to tweak things. Change the name of the subforum to something like "minor improvements". Or suggest to the usual suspects that they simply lighten up. It might be fun to speculate about a unicorn themed AT. Fun.....there's that word again....

Niceness died in the wake of your foul memes sir. 🫠

Well despite subsisting on vodka and cocaine for years, he lasted long than Bowie, Prince, and a whole bunch of other people. And he went out with a banger show, so well done Ozzy!

The patrol xp rage was a psyop to throw us off the trail.

So...the devs have very little time or resources to implement changes, so they spend time logging on to personal accounts to remind people that they don't have time? Is Rudra a dev? Is that the shocking reveal?

Some cool kids told me that the way to play the game is to go all in on damage and pop purples whenever you actually need a defense. In other words, whenever you're actually fighting something. So I was toying with the idea of doing a theme character that is a drug addicted superhero nepo-baby. I would only slot damage procs and then pop fatty insps to get me through. This proposal would stand in the way of me hypothetically every possibly pursuing this idea. So I must respectfully decline. Actually I don't care, let's do it. Guzzle some more cough syrup and give us more thoughts.

Idea police, arrest this man He talks in maths, and balance is his fix He's like a human Hammi-O. Idea police, arrest this girl Her harping about dev time is making me feel ill And we just wanted to party This is what you get This is what you get This is what you get Calling Widower Idea police, I've given all I can It's not enough, I've given all I can It's still full price for SOs For a minute there I lost the thread, I lost the thread Phew, for a minute there I lost the thread, I lost the thread For a minute there I lost the thread, I lost the thread Phew for a minute there They locked the thread, they locked the thread

Of course not. But maybe we should stop subsidizing automated processes that are trained on human art (without the consent of artists) to generate revenue for large tech companies. It's not just artists. I've said that. Imagine you're working your factory job and the manager comes in and informs you that they want you to train a robot that will replace you. Stuff like that is happening. But I guess, based on your comments, the manager could just say "hey it's technological progress. Think of all the people that lost their job because of the light bulb." And the workers would be like "dang man, you got me" and they'd go train the automatons that would make them irrelevant. Yup. Just not as a career. And as long as they can afford supplies. And energy after a long day collecting trash--although I see that being increasingly automated as well. What you can't seem to grasp is a historical process that shifts people from one job to another vs. modern automation that replaces human labor altogether. A technological advance in the past may have eliminated jobs but opened up new industries. Automation with AI will eliminate jobs AND probably be able to automate whatever new related industries pop up, if anything pops up at all. If you replace all human workers at a call center with AI, the technological advancement is no longer needing people. Other than that, the call center is the same. There is no technological advancement that will prompt a bunch of new jobs from that. So after spending years to develop skills as an artist and taking on considerable debt if you're not wealthy, people are just expected to jump ship and hop on to a different career. Which puts them in competition with people who actually were seeking those jobs to begin with. A more reasonable plan is to simply resist AI bullshit. Form communities that don't allow it. Support businesses that don't use it. Educate the general public about what it entails. AI models require an enormous amount of data to train. Good artists will strive to prevent theirs from being used. Without their input, companies will have to rely on inputing AI generated data which leads to model collapse.

I don't think it's really about once you hit 50. Picture hitting 50 dozens of times, if not hundreds, over a period of 20 years. Think of the things you're learning now, how fun it is to earn an SO or flip some thing on the market. Then picture having done it hundreds of thousands of times. Some people are content to do the same repetitive tasks seemingly forever. Others aren't, that why proposals like this pop up.

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-index-state-ai-13-charts The overwhelming investment in AI technologies is in the corporate sector, not academia. The investment seems aimed at streamlining business rather than developing new products. And although it isn't spelled out in this article--there seems to be emphasis on generative AI (ie replacing artists) than the thing's you mentioned. Because human beings made it? As opposed to an automated process that vastly increases that negative consequences for human beings over previous technological change. Your profound disconnect here is that you simply view art as a vocation as another paycheck, rather than something that creatives do as part of there psychological makeup. So rather than limit AI, we should shuffle artists, musicians, writers, etc. into garbage collection, trades, etc., which sounds like a great plan to have a healthy society. Then you have these vocations suddenly deluged by people who were replaced with AI, so the availability of positions, assuming there were that many to begin with, goes away and the wages drop because there are so many people desperate to get in. Artists have skills--related to creating art. So if you lose your job doing conceptart, you might try to land something in graphic design. Except that all of these things are likely to be impacted by AI, so every domain in which an artist has competency might go away. And it's not just artists that are this predicament. Well, the machine required me to put in a quarter and then hit some buttons. Generative AI is, I guess, very different. "imagine/ a cat riding a motorcycle, in the style of Jack Kirby" phew.....damn that was intense. Really...took a lot out of me.

How far forward would you like to take it? We could develop the technology to blow up the sun, engineer a virus to instantly kill off unprotected populations, etc. And you're just going to shrug and say it's all good as long as there are still some people left alive? Lol. No I didn't. Go back and read it. It was about AI in general. You also glossed over everything about power consumption and climate change. Yeah it's very common for AI advocates to write things off as human progress because it relieves them of any kind of ethical responsibility. And if it fucks up human society it will all have been in the name of progress (ie not them). Artists, writers, and musicians will maybe just try to hack it as plumbers, electricians, etc. so that the general public can have an unending stream of AI slop that was based on the work of previous artists, writers, etc. I think you're right. It can be argued that is the case. And it's a jaw-droppingly stupid argument. Generally speaking, it's as true as someone going up to a vending machine, punching a few buttons, and when it spits out a sandwich declaring that they are a chef.

The equivalence wasn't between nuclear weapons and AI generated art--it was AI in general. Guess you missed that despite the examples I raised. And yes, humanity is still here even with nuclear weapons. Except the descendants of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the people killed in wars related to or affected by the issue of nuclear weaponry. And the nuclear scientist who are yeeted every year because they are involved in a program developing such weapons. Stuff like that. Nope, that stuff is great. Rhetorically you've deployed the "it's just a tool argument." Okay so the point is that the tool is very bad under certain circumstances. We should do something to avoid those circumstances. The argument that this has always been a complaint about technology is true but it fails to acknowledge a couple things. First of all, technology has effectively destroyed a lot of human endeavors. Photography largely ended artists paining portraits for a vocation. Film destroyed live theater as a source of entertainment for most people. Etc. It's disingenuous to say that, since these things still persist in niche circumstances that the complaints about AI are shallow or ignorant of history. Secondly, automation in the past has been about replacing human physical labor. AI is about replacing aspects of human intelligence. As these two branches of technology continue to advance--what exactly is the need going to be for actual human beings? Is there going to be a technological wonderland where all human needs are provided for? Or are the people in control of the tech going to make bank while the have-nots struggle to find a way to scrape by? I'm guessing the latter. Artist's that had work stolen have legal recourse to deal with it. And the general public is against that sort of theft and will generally help artists. With AI, a lot of people don't understand the nature of the theft and have no grasp of the consequences for the people affected. The people that do support the artists though are firm in their resolve and are taking a stand for creatives. Praise be on them. If someone copies your work, they first of all have to have the skill to do so. That immediately restricts it, unlike AI where anyone can generate thousands of knock offs a day without being able to draw a straight line. If people have the ability to copy, generally they will find their own voice rather than cosplay as some other artist. Copying is also an important part of how humans learn. AI doesn't have the capacity to learn anything from emulating people's art.

Any artist posting online now has to contend with their work being scraped and used in AI training models. Apart from that, AI applications like Midjourney allow individual users to upload images into the application as style or character reference. This was openly discussed on the Midjourney forums--a user liked an artist on Instagram and began using that artists work directly in their prompts, to produce stuff that looked the same. Due to the rate at which AI can produce stuff, and the way frequent posting drives the algorithm, the copycat's audience on the site dwarfed the guy that was being ripped off. Pardon the exaggerated comparison, but from an artist's perspective Homecoming offering space for this stuff would be like a small town allowing a NAMBLA convention right next to a children's playground.

A nuclear arsenal is just a tool, yet nations will go to war to prevent other nations from acquiring one. People thought nuclear weapons would be bad--and guess what, they were bad. Possible human extinction level bad. Is is reasonable to discuss AI in relation to the impact of nuclear weapons. Yes. AI is disrupting education, science research, creative industries, and so on. Whole divisions of companies are being eliminated in favor of AI. Meanwhile, governments are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into training centers to support a technology that would be used by industry to eliminate labor and used by government for things like surveillance. The USA is probably the world leader in energy consumption. I read a report recently that estimated that the added consumption from the planned investment in AI would be the equivalent of taking the already high level and adding Italy's level of consumption. At a time when the destructive effects of climate change are being increasingly felt all over the world. There is a scenario where, in the future a small subset of humanity controls technology and it's uses, while the vast majority of people do manual labor that is difficult to automate. Under this scenario, you'd be right. Humanity didn't go anywhere and jobs didn't go anywhere. Yeee-haw.

I was referencing comments made in the other thread. I have no emotional investment in echoes.

Achievement unlocked: base level self awareness.

So what is the positive from telling people that in a suggestion thread? I would like to see (x) implemented in the game. Ok, if the devs like this idea you can maybe see them act on it in 4-5 years. Wouldn’t it be more enjoyable to have less restrictive and disincentivizing conversations?

Thanks for your valuable input. I didn’t think you’d be able to top stuff like “are you ok?” But you managed to do it.