Random thing you loathe right now.

Coldstream wrote:

It took a hard-redirect to get him back on the fence, and once again he was perfectly pleasant. What a weird experience.

It always mildly surprises me when such people are surprised when you don't agree with them. Not quite in the same category but I had a similar conversation about climate change with a random older chap back during the summer. To provide context, where I live on the coast we currently have a line of 6 very large Wind Turbines about 1-2 miles off the coast line. They aren't universally popular because they "spoil the view" behind the lighthouse which is our main local landmark, but they do generate enough power for the local town to keep all the lights on during the course of a year.

Anyway his dog stopped me on one of the evening walks and we got talking. He proceeded with how much he disliked the turbines and asked me my opinion on why they needed to be got rid of, and was visible surprised when I said I didn't mind them and they were the cost of not destroying the planet through climate change. We had quite a long if narrow conversation about that "it's all a conspiracy!" "er, no, it really isn't" etc etc and I don't think I changed his mind or anything, but that look of surprise someone didn't agree with them. Never fails to get me.

Some of Ace Combat 7's level design. Escort missions, planes that defy the laws of physics for no reason other than making it harder....

....that said, I'm the kind of person who would be playing DCS if he had the time, so it's no wonder AC's approach to war and air combat can grate sometimes.

Spiders on the security cam, I keep thinking Earth Defense Force is real.

My mother's partner just left in an ambulance with difficulty breathing. They both got diagnosed with COVID earlier this week.

f*cking COVID.

Fingers crossed on a recovery for both of them, Bobby.

Hope they’re ok.

Prederick wrote:

Some of Ace Combat 7's level design. Escort missions, planes that defy the laws of physics for no reason other than making it harder....

....that said, I'm the kind of person who would be playing DCS if he had the time, so it's no wonder AC's approach to war and air combat can grate sometimes.

Escort missions. This *might* deserve it's own thread. Tom Clancy's HAWX has one that should just delete itself. Not to mention the Dead Rising escort missions.

MaxShrek wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Some of Ace Combat 7's level design. Escort missions, planes that defy the laws of physics for no reason other than making it harder....

....that said, I'm the kind of person who would be playing DCS if he had the time, so it's no wonder AC's approach to war and air combat can grate sometimes.

Escort missions. This *might* deserve it's own thread. Tom Clancy's HAWX has one that should just delete itself. Not to mention the Dead Rising escort missions.

Remember Natalia from Goldeneye and her AI that would make her jump directly into your friendly fire.

Vanilla WoW deserves a dishonorable mention for its terrible escort quests. The NPCs always moved at a pace that was faster than your walking speed but slower than your running speed so you'd have to just keep running ahead and then stop and wait for them to catch up, over and over and over. Plus the NPCs always had a huge aggro radius so every time you passed a random mob they would suddenly sprint off to attack it, then sprint back to their predetermined path and resume slowly sauntering along.
Then, when you were inches away from the objective the game would invariably throw a huge ambush at you to try and kill the NPC and force you to start the whole stupid process all over again. It's been well over a decade and I'm still salty about it.

muttonchop wrote:

Vanilla WoW deserves a dishonorable mention for its terrible escort quests. The NPCs always moved at a pace that was faster than your walking speed but slower than your running speed so you'd have to just keep running ahead and then stop and wait for them to catch up, over and over and over. Plus the NPCs always had a huge aggro radius so every time you passed a random mob they would suddenly sprint off to attack it, then sprint back to their predetermined path and resume slowly sauntering along.
Then, when you were inches away from the objective the game would invariably throw a huge ambush at you to try and kill the NPC and force you to start the whole stupid process all over again. It's been well over a decade and I'm still salty about it.

they STILL do that, i did one of those wow quests last week leveling an alt.. I really liked the way it worked in Ghost of Tsushima, with the person changing speed based on your speed.

Remember that loathe a few weeks ago where I lamented my children's treatment of headphones? See, I came to the conclusion that the issue was really the cords. So I bought my kids dirt-cheap bluetooth headphones. But sure enough, one of those has now been broken, too. In a fit of rage, my middlest threw his set across the room, and now they no longer function. Two of the buttons are seemingly broken, and the audio no longer works, even when plugged in. That kid has no headphones now, and he will not receive a new pair.

What I really loathe, though, is that headphones for kids are really for MY sanity. Having them all on their own classes in the same room results in blissful peace. Now all of us are being subjected to his class over the speakers, and I'm going nuts. Time for me to go out to the garage and put on my own noise cancelling cans so I can try and get work done.

This is pretty much why I've stuck with the super cheap headsets I've found at discount stores around here. Yeah, they break fairly often, but most of the time it's an easy repair with a soldering iron. I actually just fixed Tristan's again the other night because he pulled on the cable and his negative wires snapped off the board. Normally I won't pay more than about $5 a set though.

If you don't mind a bit of risk, there's always Wish.com. I might go ahead and order a few from there, because you can get knock-off gaming headsets that look cool for about $4. I wouldn't trust anything with USB, but a 3.5mm jack shouldn't be any kind of risk to a PC.

Morrowind is probably my most favorite game of all time, but the escort quests drove me BONKERS. First, you go and find some NPC that is out in the middle of nowhere, wearing no armor and carrying no weapons, surrounded by all sorts of hostiles and yet somehow has survived out there for days (standing in the open), and then you have to lead them back to town or wherever halfway across the game map.

So then you are attacked by cliff races and various other things the entire way and you spend most of your time trying to desperately keep the NPC alive because do they go run and hide under a rock while your very heavily armored and weaponed self easily dispatches the hostile?

No, of course not.

They go running at each and every one full speed to face it head on with their BARE FISTS! And when you try to engage the hostile, guess who is standing in your way?

Yep! Bare-fist wonder NPC!

And then when you DO manage to get a strike in, guess who leaps in front of you at the last minute, so that instead of landing a solid hit on the mob, it lands on the NPC and instantly kills him or her.

And then 25 reloads later, you might finally get them to their destination. Maybe.

thrawn82 wrote:
MaxShrek wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Some of Ace Combat 7's level design. Escort missions, planes that defy the laws of physics for no reason other than making it harder....

....that said, I'm the kind of person who would be playing DCS if he had the time, so it's no wonder AC's approach to war and air combat can grate sometimes.

Escort missions. This *might* deserve it's own thread. Tom Clancy's HAWX has one that should just delete itself. Not to mention the Dead Rising escort missions.

Remember Natalia from Goldeneye and her AI that would make her jump directly into your friendly fire.

I think I wouldn't mind the missions so much if it didn't lead to instant fails. At least Dead Rising just says "they died." Still annoying though.

Not quite an escort quest, but there are different world events in Division 2 that aren't far off. One of them has you rescuing two civilians that are about to be executed, and you have to kill the people around them, then defend them from a couple waves of enemies. The issue being that there's nothing stopping the two civilians from running a half of a mile down the road, but if you go too far outside the event area you can't talk to them to complete it. If you are running with someone else you can have one person stay in the area and have the second person go hunt them down, but if you're solo you're screwed.

Maybe a game could put in a command for the person you are escorting like "Come with me or you want to live ," and you give them a weapon. Again, sort of like Dead Rising.

I want to say that in the elder scrolls games it was possible to pickpocket a weapon onto them and they'd use it.

This is something that has been bothering me ever since I've had an Xbox. I can't count the number of times I've sat down to play a game or watch a video only to be met with the dreaded, "Xbox is ready for an update" screen. You can't say no or else you aren't allowed to be online, which makes watching streaming videos impossible and screws up achievements in games. You can't reschedule for a different time, you know, like in the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT when I'm sleeping and not wanting to use the console for something. No, your only real choice is to agree and then maybe 30 minutes later after it's finally downloaded everythings, restarted one or two times, and then spends an eternity "installing" you might get to use the console.

Of course by then, the 30 to 40 minutes you had in your schedule is already over.

Interesting. I've never had that happen to me. Do you have it set to automatically download and install updates?

Oh, this is for system updates? I always thought that as long as you hahve the power settings set to Instant On and the box for shutting down storage unchecked that it would at least download system updates.

I've been having an issue with game updates not automatically downloading and updating. Every day I have to turn on the Box, go to updates, wait for about 5-10 minutes while the console spins, then I get a list of all games that need an update (it's usually Fortnite). Funny thing is that when I first got the Xbox One X there were no problems. Not entirely sure what happened, but maybe I need to double check the settings.

(Might be P&C territory, but couldn't figure out where to drop this over there)

Getting into a Teams call only to hear colleagues (and bosses) complain about the latest lockdown plans (which only last for three weeks and cancels bars, in-person restaurants, in-person learning, etc) in MI and how the governor is trying to "cancel Thanksgiving".

Just...what.

CptDomano wrote:

Oh, this is for system updates? I always thought that as long as you hahve the power settings set to Instant On and the box for shutting down storage unchecked that it would at least download system updates.

I've been having an issue with game updates not automatically downloading and updating. Every day I have to turn on the Box, go to updates, wait for about 5-10 minutes while the console spins, then I get a list of all games that need an update (it's usually Fortnite). Funny thing is that when I first got the Xbox One X there were no problems. Not entirely sure what happened, but maybe I need to double check the settings.

I have had it do the same thing with system updates despite having the instant-on mode and keep games and updates settings on. It is just kind of hit or miss at times.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Interesting. I've never had that happen to me. Do you have it set to automatically download and install updates?

No because I didn't want it automatically downloading and installing games. At the time I made the decision it was trying to download things I didn't want to install yet.

CptDomano wrote:

Oh, this is for system updates? I always thought that as long as you hahve the power settings set to Instant On and the box for shutting down storage unchecked that it would at least download system updates.

Yes, for system updates. I don't use Instant On. I just either leave it on all the time or just turn it completely off.

bekkilyn wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

Interesting. I've never had that happen to me. Do you have it set to automatically download and install updates?

No because I didn't want it automatically downloading and installing games. At the time I made the decision it was trying to download things I didn't want to install yet.

CptDomano wrote:

Oh, this is for system updates? I always thought that as long as you hahve the power settings set to Instant On and the box for shutting down storage unchecked that it would at least download system updates.

Yes, for system updates. I don't use Instant On. I just either leave it on all the time or just turn it completely off.

So I think we found your issue: you have the two required features turned off

Rykin wrote:
bekkilyn wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

Interesting. I've never had that happen to me. Do you have it set to automatically download and install updates?

No because I didn't want it automatically downloading and installing games. At the time I made the decision it was trying to download things I didn't want to install yet.

CptDomano wrote:

Oh, this is for system updates? I always thought that as long as you hahve the power settings set to Instant On and the box for shutting down storage unchecked that it would at least download system updates.

Yes, for system updates. I don't use Instant On. I just either leave it on all the time or just turn it completely off.

So I think we found your issue: you have the two required features turned off ;)

It's still a loathe because if I turned the features on, then I'd be back to having the previous issues that I also loathed!

COVID Cure/Vaccine clickbait headlines in reputable news sources.

From today: "MOUTH WASH CAN SERIOUSLY DIMINISH COVID SPREAD, NEW STUDY SAYS"

Only to get a zillion disclaimers in the article itself. Bah.

Online games without cross-save. It feels so archaic in 2020 to have an online game that I can't play on whatever platform I'd like, but a surprising number still link your character or progress to the platform you started on.

Specifically, I'm grouchy that my Elder Scrolls Online character is stuck on PlayStation. A few times a year, I get an urge to play that game, but I'd rather play it on a platform other than the PlayStation. Since I can't, I just don't play it at all.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Online games without cross-save. It feels so archaic in 2020 to have an online game that I can't play on whatever platform I'd like, but a surprising number still link your character or progress to the platform you started on.

Specifically, I'm grouchy that my Elder Scrolls Online character is stuck on PlayStation. A few times a year, I get an urge to play that game, but I'd rather play it on a platform other than the PlayStation. Since I can't, I just don't play it at all.

Yeah, this is dumb. But, more than likely, the party to blame is not the developer/publisher, but the platform. Sony is notably stingy about this kind of thing - if you play once on their platform, you must always play on their platform. It's moronic, but somehow they must think this helps drive business to them. In reality, nobody likes it.

Yet they allow FF14 cross play between PlayStation and PC players. Maybe it’s just Square Enix’s special relationship with Sony but the differences in approach are baffling.

Console fanbois.