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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2491 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A little while ago someone posted asking if it was credible that Musk had achieved a world record in Diablo 4.

In a follow up to that, recently Musk has been streaming another ARPG, Path of Exile 2. For those not in the know PoE is what the true rarified ARPG gamers play. It's the Salty Spitoon. Diablo is Weenie Hut Jrs. Much like in D4, Elon's PoE2 character is absolutely decked out, the work of hundreds of hours. But not his. He also zero grasp of the game. He doesn't understand itemisation, he fumbles with interfaces, doesn't know how to play the build properly. I would bet against him having even having completed the campaign once. I have little doubt that his total misunderstanding of the significance of an item's character level requirement will be a meme in the community for years to come.

Wow, Musk really walked into the wrong neighbourhood here. His earlier D4 claim went mostly unquestioned (to my awareness) because frankly D4 bad nobody really gives enough of a shit, but with how zealous its fanbase is PoE was a bad choice to flex, and specifically PoE2 (brutal and borderline bullshit as it is) was a really bad choice. Other replies already mentioned it but you absolutely do not get this far (in HC to boot!) without considerable knowledge of the game, and the minor things like the item level gaffe instantly betray the lack of underlying knowledge. This whole charade distinctly feels like reading a "budget" starter build guide that has Mageblood or something as a required item. I will be very disappointed if there won't be a new meme unique item that does something with level requirements before the end of the year.

It warms my heart to see gamers(tm) continue to be the community least deceived by, or tolerant of, transparent bullshit. Truly the master race.

From what I've gathered with D4 there wasn't much for the community to judge, just some short gameplay clips without commentary and ladder positions. I assume if he had done longer streams and tried provide commentary on D4 he would betray a similar lack of understanding.

No, he regularly streams Diablo 4 for hours. This captured video is 3 hours long:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7Ca_SCFn8s

If this is what ends up breaking the spell around the guy, I'm going to be bitterly laughing for a very long time.

Is this an indication his diablo records a lie as well? Why?

D4 is just as much as a time sink as PoE so it's a reasonable assumption not all his progression on his D4 character is his own. I'm not a D4 player so I don't understand the specifics of the record. What i've gleaned from the community is if he did get the record illegitimately he didn't leave a smoking gun. Judging from the gameplay it's very item and character dependent, some familiarity with the game is required but it's nowhere near the level of skill typically associated with speedrunning.

Much like in D4, Elon's PoE2 character is absolutely decked out, the work of hundreds of hours. But not his.

What?

His characters in both games are very advanced, meaning he needed to play a lot to get to that point. Anyone that plays that much knows how to play the game very well. Because Elon doesn't play the game well it is a safe bet that he didn't advance his characters but instead he paid someone to advance them for him.

Just as the most glaring example, he offhandedly mentions his staff is "not very good" because its item level is 30 lower that his character level and that he "should find a better staff, y'know, over 30 levels". There is a grand total of 1 staff with better damage per second than Elon's on the trading website (where most players "find" better items, because creating them with crafting orbs is a matter of being rich and lucky, and finding them on the floor is a matter of being go-play-the-lottery lucky). 5 total quarterstaffs in the same ballpark of damage.

He then hovers over his Hands of Wisdom and Action (a unique item, the modifiers of which are unaffected by item level at all) and similarly dismisses it for its item level (even though it's an item likely crucial to his build).

If he had concerned himself even briefly with the gear system of PoE2, he would know that. It goes beyond glossing over the complexities of the game "for the laymen watching", the man playing the game on stream straight-up is not aware of what makes his decked-out character good.

I don't think this is true. I used to be a pretty big World of Warcraft guy and encountered people with much, much more play time than I had and excellent gear that were straight up terrible players. It's interesting to consider why they were getting carried in raids, but they pretty obviously were, because you'd bump into guys with much better gear that you could easily smash on damage meters anyway. In contrast, a buddy of mine that posted top 100 world parses on healing meters for some difficult bosses didn't actually play all that much. Beyond some necessary amount of time to learn a game well, people just kind of get capped out on their skills and stop improving.

If the point is that they're making incredibly basic mistakes... yeah, the above still applies. You could look at damage logs after and see highly geared players doing things like failing to keep DoTs on targets, letting their own buffs fall off for significant chunks of fights, and other egregiously incompetent play.

Healing parses are different from damage though, because you get your best healing parses on the first kill or two, the other players take less damage on later kills and you are also capped by the skill, classes and quantities of the other healers around you.

<-- World top ten Disc priest on one kill one time 15 years ago in "Heroic" SOO (would be called mythic now).

Beyond some necessary amount of time to learn a game well, people just kind of get capped out on their skills and stop improving.

I definitely agree with this. And there are (were) a lot of personality hires in any raid group.

If the point is that they're making incredibly basic mistakes... yeah, the above still applies. You could look at damage logs after and see highly geared players doing things like failing to keep DoTs on targets, letting their own buffs fall off for significant chunks of fights, and other egregiously incompetent play.

This kind of analysis was my favorite thing about raid leading. Making me nostalgic (I haven't played a video game with others in 8 years).

I've described elsewhere in the thread how Elon doesn't just make basic distracted-like mechanical mistakes, he literally doesn't know what his items do and how good they are (despite having had to craft them or more likely search for those specific items from the trading website). It's like if you met a top-level raider in WoW and he said his (best in slot for his class) items are "not very good" because they don't look pretty, which is the best analogy I can come up with for WoW because I don't play it.

This is all on hardcore league also, so it's not only a lack of game knowledge - Elon would have had to spend dozens of hours grinding experience on his character to get to level 90 without dying once, in a game known to ruthlessly punish players for lacking game knowledge.

Gotcha. I was looking more at the skill part of things rather than the game knowledge part of things. Beyond a certain point, yeah, you wouldn't bump into anyone making that sort of basic error when it comes to understand itemization and game mechanics. Even if they couldn't exactly tell you why a certain trinket mathed out to being the best in slot item, they'd still know enough to go check Icy Veins, see that it's best in slot, and cheerfully equip it.

At the extreme end, there are players in PoE who just look for the items the build guide tells them to look for instead of bothering to understand itemization. But they'd still look at item modifiers, not item level. A max level base can (and most often does) drop with complete garbage bonuses that make it worse than a well-rolled item with a much lower level base.

I played WoW circa 2008-2010, TBC-WOTLK era, and one thing you're discounting is that even back then there was a booming black market in selling characters online. Highly decked out characters were being sold online for thousands of dollars each. There were rumors of Chinese farmers, but i think the bigger source was just players who enjoyed grinding up to a high-ish level and then starting over. Which I can understand the appeal of!

i think the bigger source was just players who enjoyed grinding up to a high-ish level and then starting over. Which I can understand the appeal of!

Or they enjoyed it more than getting a real job. Definitely lots of people with a lot of free time selling their characters then and pissing off their raid by expecting to be regeared.

Yeah, I actually looked at selling my character around that time because it was a pretty close to BiS Death Knight at their apex of overpoweredness and I wanted to go do other stuff. I think it was worth about $500 (which would be a bad ROI, but good if you just didn't want to play more).

So, sure, that's a thing, but I also just bumped into quite a few people that just didn't seem all that interested in game mechanics but were willing to play a lot. I know these weren't purchased accounts because some of them were people that I'd hop on Discord or Vent with and they were nice enough guys, they just didn't care to go learn that that you always want to save Swiftmend for when Wild Growth is coming off of cooldown so you can maximize the healing boost on it, or that downtime on Flameshock is immensely costly because you'll wind up wasting free Lava Burst procs. These aren't exactly complicated mechanics, but if you don't know them then you don't know them, and if you don't really internalize them then you'll consistently fail at it under pressure. I ultimately just had to settle on the reality that I'm an obsessive nerd and that if I was going to heal for a casual raiding group (because I don't want to lock up four nights a week playing a game) then I have to tolerate playing with people that are going to put out shit damage and stand in fire. They're not bad guys, they're not even idiots, they're just bad at a game.

On the bright side, healing a mediocre group through difficult content with one of my best friends was one of the more entertaining things I've done in any game and the numbers on the parses wound up being world class precisely because people stand in fire and can't kill things fast.

I was that guy. I liked to make my gnome warlock spam cool spells and send my pet to attack things because it was fun. I think I understood some of the basics of how skills worked together, but I definitely hadn't optimized my DPS. I was pretty good at not standing in fire, though. Thanks for being nice to us normies.

As Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth once phrased it, "I mostly just picked my talents because the icons looked cool".

Why attempt such a brazen, obvious lie, with approximately nothing to gain? Just baffing. Make me think I'm being psyoped somehow.

I think the narrative that he's a deeply insecure man that really, really, really wants to be cool is basically accurate.

It would be a pittance for the world's richest man to buy a character, have one commissioned, or otherwise have it power-leveled by a ghost player when he's not using it. Plenty of Whales who are lazy/time poor do this, that is why there is a market for it. So you could say why not.

But why stream? This type of display isn't going to get him mainstream credibility. It might not be deep insecurity, but there's something going on. What 50+ year old man would pass off a relatively childish achievement as his own? (I mean childish as in how it perceived by the mainstream. We aren't talking Everest here. I say this as a lifelong gamer)

The same man who posts pictures of his face photoshopped onto Iron Man? At least with Iron Man it could be interpreted as some sort of post-meta-irony.

(Epistemic status: I think I saw that post screenshotted somewhere, I don't have a link)

He does retweet AI generated images of himself in costume that are created by his army of sycophants (that are more likely looking for a view/follower boost).

It's bizarre if true. He can't be clueless enough to not understand that this is extremely transparent. It's tempting to declare in the best traditions of armchair psychoanalysis that this is just how top management warps your brain, to truly believe that you get credit for playing your games the same way you run your companies - paying other people to do all the grunt work.

This is bog standard rich dude stuff in many traditional rich guy meatspace sports. Amateur to semipro SCCA motorsports is full of rich guys who are mediocre drivers and spend a ton of money to try to get the car to carry them to wins. Hell, the entire sport of Polo allows the Patron to take one roster spot and the handicap system is designed to make it competitively practical to field him, resulting in last year's US Open where a team owner in his late 50s suffered an accident that left him in a coma. Rich guys hire hunting and fishing guides who line things up for them to take trophies, they get the best gear to help them compete, anything for an edge to claim glory.

We only find this shocking because we're not used to people using videogames as a status flex.

they get the best gear to help them compete, anything for an edge to claim glory

Devil's advocate: people being able to buy the best gear also advances the sport. Competitive shooting does this all the time in its Open divisions, where you can run basically anything you want; if you've discovered a kind of setup that gives you a leg up over the other shooters then it's perfectly valid to use it (and if it came out of your garage you'll probably have people wanting to commercialize it).

Of course, not all divisions are Open (so if you don't have 5000 dollars to spend on the best gear, you can still be competitive with everyone else), and you still need to actually make the shots so if you're bad you'll get beaten by people in lower divisions much less your own... but having a division where you can just push the envelope however you like advances the sport.

I agree!

Spending money on the sport also supports events, a lot of pros in minor sports support themselves coaching or training amateurs.

I'm just saying that buying the appearance of competitive talent is a super-normal thing that rich guys do all the time.

Even things like travel, highbrow art consumption, wine collecting, often resemble trying to spend a lot of money to appear interesting.

I mean, we don't expect the hunter to build his own rifle or a racer to build his own car. But we do expect them to know what their gear is doing.

In racing there are amateur series designed around home-mechanics, with price limits and rules against outside work. 24 Hours of Lemons, junk car races. The idea is you limit the purchase price of the car and forbid anyone outside the team's drivers from working on it. The archetype being four buddies taking turns driving in the endurance race, after fixing up a $500 Ford Taurus on weekends in their garage.

And notoriously you run into teams of four that are three professional mechanics and one investment banker, with the mechanics being paid "friends" of their patron, the car too nice to ever realistically find at the price point they claim, and the patron isn't a great driver but with a better machine he gets the anchor spot on the team and pulls across the finish line in first place excited for his trophy.

Of course the reverse attitude can morph into universal envy and ego protection. Physical culture is a hobby of mine, hardly one in which I've achieved much, but even I've experienced the twin levels of bullshit here: people richer than me comment that they can't work out because they are just so busy with work, people poorer than me say it must be nice to be able to afford all that equipment etc. And both have some point to them, but I'm sure if I dug into my interlocutor's lifestyle I could dispute it.

Interesting thing about physical culture. Arnold said that there are no shortcuts. You can only get an impressive body by working for it. But arnold was full of it. You can buy steroids and speedrun to the finish line pretty much. I doubt that Jeff Bezos knows much about lifting yet he looks more jacked than you or me.

"'roids are not for the lazy" is how it's been put to me by... guys who do a lot of 'roids.

Speak for yourself.

But for that matter, I think the impact of steroids is often overstated. Bezos undoubtedly had to go into the gym to build that muscle. Was it easier than it would have been without steroids? Sure. But he did put in work to get a body like that. Probably more work than half the people bitching about his steroid use have put in.

to truly believe that you get credit for playing your games the same way you run your companies - paying other people to do all the grunt work.

Yes. If he paid the best PoE2 theorycrafters to come up with a few character builds and hired teams of high-APM dudes to playtest each one round the clock, which one of them should get the credit?

If only his team came up with a novel build. Looking at it, it's a fairly standard HoWA monk and the distinguishing part is how much grind went into maxing out his items, not the novelty of theorycrafting.

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