Crinklewott 💕 @thingywott@awoo.space

i guess the tl;dr is: people are encouraged to pick LDE because:

• it's a generally very potent ability
• everyone loses matches

but it also has a fun side effect where it also just makes the game more fun with the way the maps/modes have been designed

did you know that a significant number of people only feel a game is "fair" when they win 75% of the time? but online, that's obviously impossible

but what happens if in the 50% you win, some were underdog stories that felt amazing?

of course, this all falls flat if objectives are hard to get

which means the fact that clam blitz needing fewer clams, and rainmaker having checkpoints plays into this really well!

smaller victories matter

they mean that underdog teams can still accomplish things, but also, teams facing others with LDE activated can counter very predictably where those objectives exist

but it does also recontextualize the map chokepoint struggle a bit

on top of that, unlike catchup mechanics in games, it's something we opt into with gear

we know what we are hoping for when we equip last ditch effort, and we are explicitly investing in a main of gear dependence that won't even proc if we do exceptionally well

and for it, the game is just more exciting for us, everyone we play with, and anyone who might be watching!

i can't even be upset about this because coming back from the brink of a knockout with a clean sweep as the timer is ticking down the last 30 seconds feels incredible

the more skilled and coordinated team is still going to win, but also that kind of push and pull makes matches absolutely intoxicating

i don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner

because like, early pushes that nearly knock-out, but don't are extremely common, and so are the snapback victories that often happen immediately afterwards

also pretty much everyone i know runs last ditch effort

HMMM

as a testament to the strength of gear abilities, i've thought, literally since the release of the game, that i had this terrible habit of getting complacent when i had an early lead, causing me to play more defensively and get steamrolled

turns out, i may have just underestimated last ditch effort

@lila ahah, oh my gosh

i should have looked closer. disinformation at a scale no kidding

@Wunkolo there's a fun balance with federation policy too!

like, i enjoy drawing things! but i'm also on a whitelist-only instance, meaning that even though i'm safe from certain types of people--i'm also more insulated, so significantly fewer people even have the chance to see anything i do

this trade-off is worth it for me right now! but it would be a much bigger problem if i relied on commissions as a source of income--and it really does show why someone might want to stick to birdsite

@monorail ahh! i definitely did the most theorycrafting in gen 6, when i wanted to make a competitive team with a lot of pokemon that weren't tiered high on smogon (and mawile, because i love mawile)

so there's a lot of changes since then that i completely missed

@monorail oh huh! you're right

it looks like it was bumped from a 75% cut to a 50% one in gen 7!

@monorail (in case someone reads this without knowing what it does, it also cuts speed by 75%! meaning you can outspeed things otherwise-colossally stronger than you)

@monorail gosh, paralysis used to be the least useful and most intermittent free turn effect imaginable to me

but now, it's basically the "oh hey! now i can topple teams 3 times my level if they don't know what's up" status effect

@codl ohh! that heavy splatling one looks ready to gooo

splatoon pokemon will never not be Kind Of The Best Thing

thrilled to discover how many artists i appreciate are actually good people

is there a name for when someone you've paid attention to for years milkshake ducks, but only for you specifically because you learned the language they were spewing their garbage in?

oh my. i feel like we might be in for some fireworks when usenix security 2023 starts

https://wrv.github.io/h26forge.pdf

tl;dr - h.264, the most ubiquitous video standard on the planet needs direct hardware support to be fast, which places untrusted input at a higher privilege level than pretty much anything

also, the specification for it is so big, and implemented independently by so many different vendors that simply by making a library to mess with it, new exploits basically flowed like water