Wednesday, February 18, 2026

To Pokimane, pt 24

"Remember when" is sort of like an inside joke, used in cases where someone might not actually remember the thing, like when Sherine said "Remember when my crush favorited my tweet" a few hours after it happened, in case anyone had not noticed.

Remember when I said to Sherine, "there is no reason to be sad"? (Apparently this was before I started documenting my messages to her, so if Tumblr doesn't keep messages there might be no record that I said this to her.) I'm mentioning this because I'm mentioning Demi Rose Mawby, and there is the possibility that she could be sad, if she is not in a relationship. But why would she be sad that she is not in a relationship, if it's because she didn't share the idea? Did she choose not to share the idea and be sad, or was not sharing it the choice that would make her less sad?

I'm mentioning Demi Rose Mawby because of the emotion that I felt she was experiencing at a certain point of time. It was, I think, after I linked the video for 'vanished the life -notreborn' from the album Closed System, which features a cat that disappears and then reappears. I felt there was a definite possibility that Demi Rose misinterpreted why I linked it, because she seemed inappropriately happy and (I think) got a cat soon after, but I wasn't trying to say that "a cat will make you happy". I was the cat.

I wasn't going to say anything more here, after Greta posted on Instagram again. I am doing so because it I think your Valentine's Day videos were filmed at home, which would mean you were back from China and the video you posted today was filmed several days ago (with the intention of later editing and posting it).

Honestly, I disliked this video, introducing two of your best friends, until the very end, where you joked about moving to Shanghai. And I confused your friend with your neighbor, until now.

Most videos on social media are about being happy (or angry). I remember an exception: a Chinese influencer, who regularly got like 500k~1m likes per video, posted a video in which she explained that she was being harassed IRL. It's natural for anyone who is featured in a video to think that they should appear to be happy for the audience.


I searched the file with my messages to Sherine for 'unhappy', in case I said that instead of 'sad', and I still don't see that message, but I do see this:

If you aren't going to support the idea I'm only concerned with making sure you're not unhappy

I think that a smart person would find it obvious that a person who wants other people to be happy might not want others to know this, even if that person is smart enough not to be taken advantage of (anticipating 'defections' in prisoner's dilemma games, and applying 'pre-emptive justice'). Like, on 13 Feb 2026, I thought of this,

Poll for females: Would you prefer to be in a relationship with someone who would reject someone for being ugly, or someone who wouldn't?

(As well as making a note to look up "distance to Erendil star?", which is 28 billion light-years.)

Or, as a character in Love Game in Eastern Fantasy told another character in a scene which I linked before to someone, maybe Giggly aka Madison, males shouldn't be too nice to females other than the one they're most interested in.

I'm copying some thoughts I had about MMOs, which have nothing to do with any of the above.

14 Feb 2026

[...]

Note that even if rogues could use bucklers, bucklers would be useless against casters (without a 'shield bash' ability) and also useless when target is stunned. Again, depends on having a penalty for switching weapons.


WoW: note problem, that when low-level world PvP is nonexistent, people don't think of it when evaluating potential design changes. Effects of power inflation from raiding, or from super-fast flying mounts.

"Option to view damage and health numbers as though future stat squishes have already been applied." A joke because stat squish makes different item qualities more similar, so mobs would die with a similar number of casts, but the 'visual-only version' does not have this consequence, so better gear = same dps but mobs appear to have lower health, which is inconsistent with the stat squish.


15 Feb 2026
top comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM5kLkO8ehk&lc=Ugym635I0XHA0UmDA8N4AaABAg GDKP, gold buying. Just part of the problem of 'game is not fun if you have low progression'. Botting or powerleveling part of the same problem, which is the same problem as 'activities at low levels are not fun when there are high-level players who interfere'. People see the effect (gold buying), and complain about it, but don't understand the cause and support changes to fix it.

bugged VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2696279315 https://youtu.be/swof8BcSjxQ?t=22 but downloads fine with yt-dlp

WoW: perspective: if the game changes to make low levels more relevant and fun, but playerbase doesn't change, then it represents a change in power and importance, away from 'players with a high playtime' and towards 'players with a low playtime'. Most types of content creation are biased towards creators with a high investment in a topic, so many streamers would be disadvantaged by this change, might not feel interested in pushing for it.

Noting that with some games, 'players who have invested enough time to become very skilled' get attention, while in MMOs it's often 'players who have invested enough time to be high level with good gear'. Rarely do players with low playtime do things that interest other people. If they do, game is often 'casual' and not worth 1000 hours of playtime. Riot trying to make LoL more friendly to new players: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/a-major-overhaul-of-league-of-legends-is-reportedly-coming-in-2027-once-were-done-it-should-be-the-best-time-ever-to-get-your-friends-into-league/

Making game more interesting for new players may mean making it less interesting for those with 2k+ hours.

"It's pretty hard to click on someone and then click to move and then click back on someone at super high speeds. This is a skill current players have put a lot of time into so if that skill were obsoleted a lot of players would quit" https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1ql5yi8/comment/o1bw3v0/ (compare https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1pdqick/couldnt_be_happier_wasd_genuinely_sucks_for_high/, and via https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/league-of-legends-just-got-wasd-controls-after-16-years-and-you-can-probably-guess-how-smoothly-the-rollouts-going/)

aka, auto everything

comment https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/league-of-legends-mmo-shows-signs-of-life-as-riot-adds-a-former-world-of-warcraft-lead-producer-to-its-roster/#vf-068b2af5-001b-4c53-bc64-dd0cb29dac29

"Of course, anyone paying attention could've told you Ashes of Creation was DOA before it even came out because PVP-oriented MMOs are guaranteed failures."

Players with more playtime get more attention, and have higher status. PvE MMO: they can do PvE things that new players cannot. But PvP MMO: they can do PvP things that new players cannot, which means winning. And MMO means lack of restrictions between experienced players fighting new players, that a ladder system has. So, the tension between "good for new players, or experienced players feel unrewarded" is a bit more zero-sum in the actual play experiences, as opposed to just in content creation surrounding a game or whether friends care what you do.

Note difficulty in not rewarding high playtime: players like to think that they and their friends are high status. If a particular activity (like a game) does not give them this, they may feel it doesn't reflect their reality of being 'better than average'.

"on live server people will just ask "which faction should i join" (like they always ask "which class is the best") and it results in over/underrepresentation because naturally most people want to join the strongest one and it tends to snowball from there" https://old.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/wdy4xd/comment/iiljs51/

similar to 'aggressor' mechanics for determining whether there are penalties for killing a low-level player: https://web.archive.org/web/20230528023143/https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_flagging

Example of issue: killing bots. "you have the potential of losing your gear. Your combat efficacy decreases based on the amount of corruption you accrue." And if higher level means more powerful, then high level players can still interfere in fights between low-level players with no consequences.

contact: "Intrepid are investigating a potential bidding system, which allows players to bid on items instead of rolling for them." https://web.archive.org/web/20230107192424/https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Hunting_certificates

also suggest 'open loot' model based on damage threshold, re: loot tagging on same page

couldn't access: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/PvP_background does it only contain this section? "While Ashes of Creation took inspiration from Lineage II (and other games) it has also"

around https://youtu.be/9WpG270yUMk?t=400 'affinity score' for encountering friends, compare to intention with layers in WoW Classic, specifically how players are apparently on a layer at the account level, not a character level, so a player who wants to log into a character in a dangerous location, like 'next to enemy guards after using website unstuck feature near Arathi Highlands', can get their alt invited to the party that is helping them on a particular layer.

Ends up failing because after leaving a layer, any association with it is broken, and players randomly change layers from joining new groups etc., so long-term potential to be on the same layer as "players encountered in the world" is completely random. And players naturally accumulate to same layer from process of random invites.

*Ashes of Creation is closing I guess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miMemOWBNpw

watch: folder Riot MMO, 15 Feb 2026

 

I was probably going to say more to you. Ah, yes: when Sherine said, "remember X", where X was a word which means attraction to people with criminal tendencies, which I forget. Basically, she was implying that some people thought that anyone who supported Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was stupid or mentally ill, and I think she was suggesting that this could be a reason that people might not share this idea, if they had learned of it from a group of people who supported Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ("#FreeJahar" and "#JusticeForJahar").

For example, one think I said to Sherine, apparently on Chirp Club as it's not in the comment file, was after she said the only things she cared about were money and another thing that I forget, like her friends or family. I said that taking risks can be less profitable if other people are willing to accept risk.

In the broader sense, this can be seen in finance: if no one in the world was willing to use any leverage when investing except for one person, that one person would easily become incredibly rich. But when many people are taking risks, like through the use of leverage, then it increases price volatility, which decreases the expected profit from a given amount of risk, or changes the optimal amount of leverage downwards.

In the specific sense, I was saying that people are dumb, and even though this idea would solve problems, many people are convinced that problems (like mass shootings, a risk of dying) are not important. They accept these risks, and it makes the risk of trying to fix problems less profitable.

So, while it might not be strictly accurate to say I was trying to discourage her from sharing the idea, I was pointing out information which she might not have been aware of and that could act as a reason not to share the idea due to the possibility of wasting time by doing so.

Or to put it another way, if someone had a 1% chance to win a Nobel prize with a $1 million reward by sharing the idea, and a 100% chance to get a job that pays $150k per year by instead getting a college degree, the job gives a better expected payout.

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