legend

15 minutes ago, best3444 said:

Fuck I'm bored to tears in chapter 10. It's like they completely dropped everything about the game to explore nonsense in XII homeland. This better pickup fast or this is another FF16. Jesus I'm tired of games starting out amazing then slowly getting boring and uneventful. 

Honestly Best, I think you just need to take a break. You blew through the previous game right before this one which is a lot of FF. Chapter 10 is not slow and all of its pretty relevant. I think rather than just forcing yourself to finish through it, you should take a break for a little while and come back to later when you can enjoy it more.

3 minutes ago, MarSolo said:

Holy shit. That was EXTREMELY helpful. I was using the ones you do by pressing R1, but I was about the abilities and how to actually activate them, which you explained way better than the game did.

 

Thank you!

Glad to help  

1 hour ago, MarSolo said:

Okay, there’s my next question: I feel like I don’t know how synergy works.

You should definitely remedy that because they are a lot of fun and *very* useful!

So there are two kinds of synergy combat things you can do:

1. Synergy skills

2. Synergy abilities.

You unlock both of these through the "folio" skill trees for each character. And both skills and abilities are attacks you make with two people at a time. For example, there are skills/abilities you can do with Cloud and Tifa, and if both Cloud and Tifa are in the party, you can activate them. If one of them are not in the party, you cannot do those synergy skills/abilities. But you if you have one unlocked for another pair of characters in the party you can use them.**

Let's start with synergy skills because they're the easiest to understand.

Synergy skills can *always* be activated (if you have the corresponding people in your party). It does *not* require ATB to do. To pull one off, you hold the block button (R1), and when you do so, you'll see your menu will change to show you the different skills you can do with other party members, each assigned to a face button. So then all you do is press the face button and the two characters will execute that synergy skill.

For example, one of my favorites with Cloud and Tifa is if you choose Tifa as the PC and then do her synergy skill with Cloud, she'll leap onto Cloud's sword and Cloud with throw her through the air at an enemy. Since Tifa has limited aerial moves, this is a great way to let her attack flying enemies. 

Now let's talk about synergy abilities. For synergy abilities you cannot just activate them whenever like you can with skills. You have to build up the ability to do so for each character. That is, if you look at the character name in the UI, you may see these little vertical line notches that when you start combat are unfilled. You need to fill them up for both characters involved in the synergy ability to do it. To fill them up you need each character to use ATB commands. If you go through the menu when selecting an ATB command, you'll see in the bottom left corner a little text describing what the ability does as well as an indicator of how many of those vertical lines for synergy abilities it will grant you. (I believe that not all abilities will give you them, but most will). E.g., Cloud's Braver or Focused Thrust will grant you some of the synergy notches.

If you get usually around 4 notches for both characters you can use a synergy ability with them. This fact encourages you to not just play as one character and ignore the others. You really benefit from switching between characters to quickly build up ATB and use synergy-building ATB moves with them.

Once you have enough with both characters, when you open the combat menu, you'll see the menu item "Synergy Ability" is now highlighted and you can go into it and select a synergy ability you want to use. If multiple characters have enough, you can choose which pair of characters abilities you will do. And you can have multiple abilities for the same pair of characters that do different things.

Activating a synergy ability does *not* consume any ATB, and they are often very powerful. But not only are they powerful, there are a few different kinds that have extra special benefits. For example, one will make MP cost for both characters zero for a temporary period of time allowing them to cast the most powerful spells for no cost. Another is you should do after staggering an enemy because it will do more damage and extend the stagger time.

Since these are powerful and do not consume ATB, they are very useful to use and build up.

Hope that helps!

** Once per battle, you can actually use a synergy ability with someone outside the party, but I almost never do that.

1 hour ago, MarSolo said:

I’m at the Crow’s Nest getting my ass kicked by the guitar playing Queen’s Blood player. His cards have high numbers!

 

Also, the “relationship” thing with each character, I’m assuming leads to the

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Gold Saucer date night from the original game?

 

My issue is I feel like I have the same relationship with every character currently because I’ve been giving the correct answers to make Cloud not seem like a shut off dick.

Yes, the relationship is tied to that.

Some notes though: first, Aerith and Tifa will just have more opportunities so they're going to be the default if you're doing everyone right. Second, there are specific non-dialog moments where you must choose someone over the other which can lead to a tie breaker. Third, an additional tie breaker is how much you use synergy skills and abilities with each character.

So you should be able to do everyone well and still have a preferred person.

I have, however, deliberately tipped the scales a couple of times  

5 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

I (date spoilers)

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Kissed Tifa!

She’s mine, internet! Back off. 

I'm doing what I can to ensure this fate.

1 hour ago, best3444 said:

 

I'm into chapter 9 at the reactor. I'm back to this so I can wrap it up for next Friday. 

it’s probably a lot less time if you just do the main quests. 
 

But your final date might be lackluster  

I started chapter 12 when they open *everything* back up again. This will be a while  

I have zero a priori interest in this, but I feel obligated to give it a try given it's overwhelming positive reception. But it will have to wait.

Quote

• Custom machine learning architecture
• AI Accelerator, supporting 300 TOPS of 8 bit computation / 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point

I don't think this kind of game is for me, but it looks well constructed for what it is.

4 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

They hyped up that Queen’s Blood tournament a lot for how easy it was.

They just didn't want people to miss out on Red's entrance and relationship points  

Let's assume we want to age restrict porn access. I don't think having the porn sites manage the verification is the right mechanism. Instead, sites should be required to sign their server with an age requirement which is simple to implement. Then web browsers provide verification. Ideally, there should be a common protocol for that used by all web browsers with open source implementations for it. I would suggest using a government issued pass-key like system with a government hosted database of valid public keys (but no identity), but I'd have to think about the details.

This lowers the barriers for websites and, puts the burden on the government for regulating the keys, and makes it easy for all browsers to set up so that you get very easy and immediate broad protection across all sites.

1 hour ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

It's not crazy. However, I will say that for Valve it's a combination of things. They offer those sweetheart deals to keep the bigger publishers specifically to keep them from going their own thing while also being perfectly happy taking the full percentage from mega indie hits like Stardew Valley. Does anyone expect Valve to float a sweetheart deal over at Concerned Ape ahead of Haunted Chocolatier or Team Cherry ahead of Silksong?

 

Sweeney isn't wrong for calling Valve and Apple out for buying publishers this way. The only reason it doesn't bother PC gamers is because so many of them desperately want all their games in one location.

I do think it would be nice if they made it a more objective sales metric that could then extend to the smaller groups.

25 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

Apple based their 30% cut on the horrific carrier controlled app distribution of the early 00s and Valve based theirs off of the cost of physical distribution. At the time, neither was really a bad deal. Now that digital distribution has become the norm it's basically unjustifiable for that high of a cut to become standard and the only reason that fees have remained that high is monopoly control.

 

If you're selling a product outside of one of those monopolies, fees go down very quickly. Etsy runs a store, and their fee is 6.5%+payment processing, so call it 10%. On Squarespace once you're paying them more than $23/month the transaction fees go to zero and you're only paying the 3% payment processing fee. If you're only paying for their cheapest plan, then their fee is 10% (which includes payment processing). Those are imperfect comparisons and I'm well aware that Steam offers a bit more value than just a website, but it's not 27% more value.

 

Sweeney and Epic aren't saints and I'm not necessarily defending them, but these fees are way higher than they should be and I think it's bad for consumers that they've persisted for so long.

Yeah I'm not defending 30% being right, I'm more so defending the notion that it's cheaper for games that are expected to sell a lot. That or a policy that has the same effect seems appropriate.

2 hours ago, Ghost_MH said:

I mean, I'll say it. He's not wrong. Apple and Valve, both, giving some major publishers sweetheart deals and others not is bullshit. Especially when others includes ALL the indie devs.

 

 

On it's face that doesn't seem wrong to me? I mean I'm not saying that 30% is appropriate, but I don't think the fact that bigger games get better deals is all that wrong. There is going to be a higher purchase rate for bigger games so it's easier to justify hosting them and any of the other stuff that goes with hosting the game on steam, just like buying in bulk is cheaper.

Maybe there is a better policy where you change the rate based on sales so it gets cheaper the more you sell or something, and that way it's not limited to special deals with the big players, but on it's face it's not crazy to me that this kind of economic dynamic exists.

16 minutes ago, SuperSpreader said:

 

Not when you still have to deliver 8 hours of work after spending 4+ hours a day explaining what work you're delivering and how it would be more helpful to not be in the meeting 

Haha yeah I understand. Not uncommonly you may hear me shouting into the void "All I do is make slides and go to meetings!"

(I work from home so I can get away with shouting)

How would this interact for salaried employees? Are you supposed to get overtime as a salaried employee if you work more than 40 hours per week now? Because, uh, that doesn't happen  Or would this be introducing new regulations about overtime for salaried employees as well?

(Not that I expect this to push though, just curious)

3 hours ago, SuperSpreader said:

Yes please. Also make it illegal to have more than 4 hours of different meetings with the same people. 

Counterpoint: I'm sure it's a pleasure and privilege to be in meetings all day with me  

Played through the gears and gambits main mini games. Pretty fun. But you know would make it even more fun? No arbitrary timers!  

The timer seemed much more forgiving in this one, but I stand by it being a shit game design! It would have been far more interesting to remove it and just keep the waves coming until someone died.

4 minutes ago, chakoo said:

 

Yeah it's called Segment Anything. It's really impressive and the work done with forks of it HQ Segment Anything has been used in some really awesome projects. I'm kind of sad I didn't try to get some VC funding last year to build an idea I wanted for AR space because people are now actually releasing stuff close to what I wanted to make back then. If I do it now I'll probably be playing catchup for a long time. 

Yeah I thought it was a really great model and with a fantastic interface (in terms of the kinds of inputs the model can work from) that allowed for a lot of great uses. It's wild to me that word of mouth for it didn't take off the way LLMs did, but I suppose that's because LLMs are a magic trick that fool people into thinking there's a ghost in the machine, whereas segment anything is actual practical tool  

(For the record I think eventually we can build systems with a "ghost in the machine" -- at least as much as one exists for people, but LLMs aint it)

8 minutes ago, SuperSpreader said:

 

lmao 10,000 GPUs gets you this;

 

 

 

To be fair, that’s not really where the AI researchers go. The AI researchers do work on building some big models and they do release the models. They released one of the better open LLMs, and have a bunch of vision models like segment anything (or something like that). 
 

Meta is much better in the open research department than OpenAI. It’s just that all the actual stuff where Meta makes money is toxic and I wouldn’t want to support that company. 

19 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

Haha, I know what you mean, I was bad at this at first too, because the wording was a bit strange. It literally means just look at which arm is hanging lower once the enemy is "tired" and has that blue aura. You have like a full 3 seconds to swing, so no need to rush it. At first I thought they were talking about during punches or something, as I kept thinking about the original minigame which was just "fuck you": the game.

Yeah I did eventually realize that it was very literal and did better at it after that. But there was something super weird about it where for some of them my mind would want to read their other side as being more "open" even though technically the other arm was "lower."   Something about the pose seemed weird. I don't think I ever quite put my finger on why it intuitively signaled the exact opposite to me for some of the opponent models.

1 hour ago, Remarkableriots said:

Recruiting AI Talent Is Ruthless Right Now

WWW.BUSINESSINSIDER.COM

---

The CEO of an AI startup said he wasn't able to hire a Meta researcher because it didn't have enough GPUs.

 

Easy employer response: come back to me when you don't want to work for a company making the world worse.

(under the assumption the start up is not equally awful, but less funded  )

This makes me think of computation graphs for tensors computations/neural nets, which are not the most pleasant experience. But it's plausible this is either (a) not like that or (b) still better than the current situation  

5 minutes ago, best3444 said:

BTW, I'm exactly halfway finished with FF16 and so far it's been great. It has to hit a wall soon though, right?

You can probably go back through the 16 thread and find where you dropped it and see how close you are  

5 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

Well it's because of the mini games! I was having an absolute blast in the beginning. It has nothing to do with me rather than the games obsession with completely slowing down the stories momentum to pad hours with boring ridiculous mini games. I'll still like the game and hope to beat it. But saying this is a typical move by me in this instance is inaccurate. 

Are you saying the other times there were not actual reasons you would cite for dropping off hard?

TBC, I don't mean this as some serious criticism of you. We all feel how we feel. But it is a common pattern that something will suddenly start bugging you really hard and you drop a game and then come back to it later when it won't bother you as much. You might just get fatigued with games more easily.