Jeff Gerstmann Editor-in-chief, Giant Bomb
So my daughter has reached this point where she loves to push buttons. I mean, I get it. I pretty much push buttons for a living. It's been fascinating to watch her quickly discern which buttons (and, by extention, which game controllers) are the ones worth touching. Generally speaking, whichever controller or button or device my wife and I are touching the most is the thing she wants the most.
As toddlers are, I'm told, tiny people, it's been really wild to watch her grow. She's walking around now, which really just gives her more access to more buttons. She's no longer enthralled by the tiny fake phone that plays bootleg songs from Frozen and bootleg iPhone ringtones when she slams the buttons on the front. Now she wants remote controls and game controllers. She's already tired of the buttons (well, "buttons") on the front of the launch Xbox Ones I still have sitting under the non-gaming TVs of this household. She demands more.
This eventually turned into her grabbing any game controller she could get her hands on, which would keep her occupied for awhile. The first one of those ended up being the original Xbox Elite controller, which is probably the exact wrong controller to give to a baby since its sticks and D-pad pop right off, forming a dangerous (but very well-made) choking hazard. After removing all the removables, it worked out pretty well for a few weeks. It was solid and, most importantly, it wasn't hooked up to anything. But that didn't hold, either. She craves a new level of chaos.
I think that chaos really started to ramp up once I got the new consoles in and connected here in my office. She was already familiar with the power button on the old Xbox One, so finding the same button on the Xbox Series X was easy. I didn't have too much of a problem with her turning the Series X on and off again as, well, it seems like a pretty resiliant piece of technology. It can take it. Maybe that's me prescribing some kind of quiet strength to the console because of its visual stoutness.
The other two items on that shelf are a PlayStation 5 and my home receiver, a rapidly aging Denon AVR-S730H. These are disasters, by comparison. The PlayStation 5, it seems, was mostly designed to be looked at from a distance and is not here to be aggressively touched. At most, you are to gracefully insert a disc into its slot (something I still haven't done, while we're talking about it) and immediately avert your eyes before it throws some kind of firmware error or, more likely, before a baby puts a bit of weight on the top or front of it, shoving it just enough to cause it to pop off of its horizontal stand. While I like the way the PlayStation 5 looks like the type of building that should be erected next to Tokyo Big Sight and viewed as the far-flung future of architecture, it is not the most stable platform as far as babies and their hands are concerned. At least the last batch of firmware and software updates seems to have lessened the number of crashes I've been getting while the thing is actually turned on. Also nice: the all-black front of the unit means that my daughter hasn't yet discovered where that power button is.
That leaves the receiver, which, like all good audio receivers, emits a satisfying "pop" noise every time it turns on and off. It also has the most buttons on the front of it, leaving my daughter a billion different ways to screw it up. This has manifested in situations like "the time when I was trying to buy Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 but she kept changing the input over to something else or just turning the whole thing off completely" and "the time I thought maybe I could put in a little Astro's Playroom speedrun time but that was a stupid thing to think."
As far as controllers goes, that's where the PS5 reigns supreme. She has abandoned all of the various Xbox controllers in this office and really only wants to get her hands on the DualSense. She knows exactly which button to hit to turn the controller (and the console) on, and any time my back is turned or if I've left the controller within reach, she's got it. While the science is still happening over here and we still have a lot of data to analyze, the early results suggest that the PS5 is the best console for babies, but perhaps only the third best consumer electronics device on the market, trailing behind the Denon AVR-S730H and my iPhone, which she is very good at locking me out of by entering incorrect passcodes at an alarming rate.
While writing this, I looked over and discovered that she had turned on the PlayStation 5, logged me in, and downloaded the Disney+ app. The other day she almost signed us up for a $50 ESPN subscription on the Roku. The message is clear--I need to bolt shelves to every single wall in this house and move everything up about five feet.

Hey everyone. I've incorporated the feedback from Pixonic (August 2020, October 2020, December 2020, and January 2021). My goal is to try to get Pixonic to respond directly to this thread periodically (3-4 times a year). This will be linked to the weekly suggestions thread by the auto-moderator. Be sure to use the "Pixonic Suggestion" flair so I can easily sort through all the suggestions!
Ideas & Feature Requests
This thread is a place where you can discuss your ideas for the game or request features you would like to see in coming versions of the game.
This sub appreciates any contributions you can make to existing ideas, but we suggest you do not post your idea before reviewing previous Pixonic ideas / suggestions threads. It is highly likely another Commander already submitted the same idea!
Please be aware that posting a ruled out idea may result in your thread being removed altogether and posting an idea already suggested might result in your thread being closed with a reference back to this thread.
A few tips to submitting an idea or suggestion:
Title: Choose a good title - be very specific. Instead of naming your thread "suggestion", "idea", try something like "Hawks are Over Powered." This will help other users find and contribute to your thread, and drive more discussion around the topic.
Point: Use clear, concise points or explanations, concept art or screenshots where applicable. General, unspecific, high-level ideas are great, but the Pixonic team can't do much without the proper information!
"I think Hawks are way too powerful in the game because of their high firepower. Players running multiple Hawks make the game frustrating and boring for me."
Suggestion: Give constructive and helpful suggestions that are realistic. Why will the idea work?
"Decrease the Hawks firepower so it only impacts Titans and does not cut through bots' defenses. This will allow other bots to effectively counter Hawks and bring better balane to the game."
For all, keep in mind Pixonic is a business. I realize many of us have little experience in owning a gaming company, but try to consider how Pixonic would make a profit or be successful in the business model when giving a suggestion. Pixonic wants players spending money AND playing a lot--so how does your suggestion support that?
Threads will be removed if it includes profanity and / or insults. Comments like "make everything for free" or "XXX (i.e. Matchmaking, the game, targeting, etc.) sucks--solution: make the game better, or un-nerf everything" will just be deleted. This also isn't the place to report bugs or to rant.
Given the nature of the game the developers and producers cannot always say what is coming in the next version or what is being worked on. Also, please don't expect a response to every thread or idea. The best ideas will be discussed frequently by the Community and will surface to the top in that manner (or through up/down votes). Do not spam your thread or ideas just because no one is responding!

• Response (December 2020)
• Response (January 2021)

Frequently Requested Ideas
Below are ideas submitted by users for Pixonic to consider. It does not imply they are being worked on. Please do a search before starting new feature requests, especially if they are listed below.
These ideas and suggestions are either acknowledged and are being worked on, or have been ruled out by the dev team for the time being. Posting these ideas may result in your thread being removed without notice.
Frequently Requested:

• Battle Modes
  • Titan skirmish (Status: in Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: " We agree that it would be a lot of fun. We'll try to introduce Titan Skirmishes next year, but it won't be a priority – there's so much to do.")
  • Additions to custom matches (Status: in Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: "The general idea of Custom Matches is not to provide an additional game mode, but to give you a playground where you can test your builds to understand if they are suitable for real combat. In Max's opinion, current functionality of Custom Matches fits just well in this concept." Detailed comments in original post)
  • Beacon hold time should be considered for HP (Status: in Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: " We already have some ideas on how to expand the honor reward list (e.g. rewarding players for applying Suppression or Lock-down effects). The idea with beacon hold time sounds like a nice addition to our plans. ")
  • Faction vs. Faction skirmish
• Boosters
  • Pause booster timer while waiting for match (Status: in August 2020 the Pixonic producer stated they agreed with this concept and were looking into it; in Dec 2020 Max, the WR Producer stated: "We had plans for a complete rework of Boosters. Unfortunately, we had to cut those plans off to release Drones and prepare for Remastered. We believe we'll have time to work on Boosters in 2021.")
  • Faster reload times (Status: in Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: "Thing is, there is a technical tie between reload animation and reload time. It's one of those legacy mechanics that've been haunting the game for years already. Until we refactor the entire block, it's impossible for us to change the reload speed on most of the weapons. But in general idea is good, though we see it as a Passive Module rather than a Booster.")
• Bots
  • Raijin increased resistance instead of damage
  • Add 3 Passive modules to each bot
  • Allow energy shields to recharge at all times
  • Nuclear Fission Snipers
  • Egyptian Themed Bots
  • Medusa
  • Arbiter Shield Concept
  • Overhead view (like Nightingale) for Invader and Mercury)
  • Altitude control of flying bots
• Community Features
  • Allow friends in-game or via other platforms (i.e. Discord) (Status: in Dec 2020, Max WR Producer stated: " We call it "Platform Merge iteration 2" and it's on the list for 2021."; in January 2021 Max WR Producer stated: "For technical reasons, we don't want to add integrations with other platforms as far as the friends system is concerned. In fact, we'd also like to get rid if the existing integration and make all friends features completely native to the game. There will be a rework of the friends system this year. Stay tuned!"; In Jan 2021 Pix stated ability to invite friends direclty is coming soon)
  • Pixonic sponsored WR Tournament (Status: Oct 2020 Pix CM said it was coming; in Dec 2020 Max WR Producer stated: "We have a couple of competitive features prepared for the next year. We'll tell you more in our New Year videos."; In Jan 2021 Pix stated tournaments will be introduced into each season)
  • Clan Wars
  • Cross-Platform (Status: In Dec 2020, Max WR Producer stated: "This is basically a cross-platform account, like PixAccount. The idea has been around for a couple of years already. It should be implemented on the scale of the whole company, not only War Robots project, of course. But yes, it's something we definitely want to have in the future.")
  • Incorporate lore into rewards or abilities, etc. (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "It's a great idea and it might work! *Promises to talk to the game design department about it*")
  • Story / campaign mode
• Drones (Status: October 2020 Pixonic CM announced Drones were being overhauled)
  • Remove random chip / slot generator
  • Preset hangar to save time in battle
• Hangars
  • Allow useage of bots across hangars in battles (or same bot for multiple hangars)
  • Hangar presets
  • Upgrade / build multiple bots or weapons at a time (possibly benefit of having multiple hangars)
  • Limit number of sambe bots you cna use in active hangar
  • Allow us to see other players' drone hangars (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: " Yes, one day. We have some improvement plans for Drones, including UI. Hopefully, our UI team will find a way to show more info on drones in hangar.")
  • Allow 7 bots per hangar but only use 5 (like Drones)
• In-Game Communication / Clan Management
  • Improved chat and in-game features
  • Active/Live “Online Status” examples: colored icons, on/off indicator, etc.
  • Current League Icon next to all clan members
  • Indicate last online date
  • Clan voice chat
  • Global Chat
  • Report button for players violating the game's ToS or hacking, etc. (Status: according to the Pixonic producer in Aug 2020, a report button is supposed be included in a future release--no further details were given; confirmed by Pix CM in Oct 2020)
• Maps
  • List maps in Alphabetical order in pull down menu (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "With only 13 maps in the game, it isn't difficult to find what you are looking for. However, if it can be done fast, we will try to squeeze it into the production plan.")
  • New map concepts
• Matchmaking / Leagues (Status: This is how the MM works; they constantly do minor tweaks; this is my response on death squads)
  • Modified league points
  • Add additional league (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR producer stated: "We are considering this idea right now, but rather a new league between Masters and Champions."; In Jan 2021 Pix stated a rework to Legendary leagues is coming soon)
• Performance / Technical Features
  • Targeting system rework / improvement (Status: Targeting seems to be part of the base code and allows other features in the game to operate, such as stealth, meaning there are multiple dependencies. Pixonic did minor tweaks to targeting to address shooting Ao Mings in the air from the ground and vice versa, but according to Pixonic CM in Oct 2020 a major rework will not be considered until after Pixonic migrates to new servers in 2021; In Jan 2021 Pix stated improvement to targeting system will be worked with expected release in Aug 2021).
  • Lag (Status: According to Pixonic the 6.4 update should address lag along with server overhaul)
  • Limit character length and types of characters in user names (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR producer stated: "Yes, we'll need to do that sooner or later.")
  • Font size for iPhone users
  • Drones menu rework
  • Purchase confirmation button
  • Add commas to numerical figures
  • Allow weapons and modules to be viewed together at the same time for each bot
  • Allow custom search-organization for hangars and inventory
• Pilots
  • Reduce the gold cost
  • Reduce the randomness of skills
  • Titan pilots
  • Universal pilot skills
  • Legendary Pilots for Fujin and Raijin
  • Legendary Pilots for all Bots
• Rewards / Events / Operations / Chests
  • Remove 2,500 components from Tier 1 prizes in Events
  • More gold-based deal offers
  • Overdrive weekend that reduces or eliminates costs for component conversion in WS
  • Daily Log In Rewards
  • Choose type of crate progression (Status: In jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "The league chests need a rework, that's for sure. We have some plans for an overhaul or even an alternative feature in 2021.")
  • Honor based gold system
  • Pt-Gold-Silver Forge system
  • Announce odds of winning prizes from chests, events, etc.
• Titans
  • New Titan Oasis
  • New Titan Odin
  • Nodens should be able to see stealthed allied bots for healing
  • Add Nodens heal targeting button
  • Make Titans available in custom games
  • Motherboards (like microchips for bots)
  • Additional abilities
• Weapons / Equipment
  • Corrosion Rockets
  • Aegis shield purchase (like Ancile)
  • Antimatter Rail Gun
  • Weapons Inventory Page
  • DoT Shotguns
  • Reload Accelerator Module

​
Ruled Out (for now):

• Reload button (Status: Been requested numerous times over the years. Pixonic had a reload button in a test server in ~2016 but removed it without explanation and has not indicated it will be implemented at all in the future).
• Donating (or trading) any resources to (with) other players or accounts (Status: a type of resource donation system used to be in the game but it was abused by players who created multiple accounts and clan-hopped to exploit it. It does not look like any trading system will be implemented in the future).
• Stats (Status: In Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: "We agree that there are players who love in-depth statistics. However, War Robots is a "midcore" game and we predict that the feature will not be popular enough among our players.")
  • Legends League stats (bots / weapons)
  • Stats of each bot at the end of the battle
  • Specific bot in your hangar stats for last 50 games
  • Advanced stats tab
• E-Sports, community leagues, official API ecosystem (Status: in Dec 2020, Max WR Producer stated: " Nope. That would require too much work and resources.")
• Battle Pass for Operations (points / currency rewards) (Status: in January 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "We are fine with how Operations work in War Robots right now.")
• Allow training hangars to test out bots before buying them (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "It's a nice idea in general and we had it on the roadmap for 2021. However, after the final evaluation, the feature's business value/effort proportion proved to be too unfavorable to include it into the plan. You can still test out some of the new content using Hangar X.")
• Allow factions to add boosts / skills / features to bots and hangars (Status: in Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "It's a very interesting concept, yet as War Robots meta is not built around the lore, it will lead to power players choosing factions that suit the current meta, while the lore factor will be neglected. So the faction power bonus is unlikely to appear in the game. However, we will work on including more lore-based features in War Robots and our other games.")
• New MM formula (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "First of all, big thanks to the author of the original post. You did a great job with the calculations and data! *applause*. The concept of the Hangar Power matchmaking is great. It provides those sought after equal matches in most of the cases... on one condition — all players play fair. Right at the point when someone decides to abuse the system, it all falls apart. We struggled with it really bad before we introduced Leagues. (Yes, tankers are also a problem, but we can at least spot them and suspend or ban their accounts.). Your idea with the high-tier robots contributing more to the HPS is a good one. And still, it doesn't provide a guaranteed solution to the problem. Between Tier 1 (Destrier) and Tier 4 (Ao Jun) there is also Tier 2 and Tier 3. That's where it gets painfully difficult to balance the system so that high-level players aren't able to disintegrate mid-levels with just one bot. We had some attempts at a similar algorithm with the Design and Analytics teams in 2019. During several months of tests we couldn't come up with a solid version, that we ourselves wouldn't be able to abuse as players.")
• Synchronize platform releases (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "It's not possible due to our internal releasing procedures.")
• Give Pt or Gold for selling Titans / Bots / Weapons that used Pt or gold to purchase them (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "No. With the current economy of the game, the availability of resources directly affects the availability of the content. At this point, we don't want to make the powerful content more available.")

Hi everyone! I downloaded the myVegas slots game about a week ago because I want to plan a trip to vegas soon and heard great reviews! I’m looking for the best way to rack up points, and knew reddit would be a great source of info. I’ve read a lot on here over the past hour or so but I still have some questions:

• I exclusively use the iPhone app right now (I didn’t realize there were other ways to play), so what is the best way to play to rack up points?
• I maxed out how many LPs i could get in 24 hours, so I guess I should stop playing in the meantime right? Seeing as I can’t get any more LPs there’s no point in playing until time is up.
• what is the actual benefit of linking my Facebook compared to just linking my apple ID?
• I have played a few different games but seem to only ever win loads of coins on the Excalibur game, like LOADS. if I bet 1,800,000 consistently, i’ll hit 100m+ bonuses pretty consistently. Right now i’m sitting on about 300m coins (but can’t play anything because i maxed out my LPs for the day). Are there any other games in your experience that have this high of a win rate?
• i’m not good at card games, is the poker game worth getting?

I’ve read stories on here of people getting 100s of thousands of points over night with auto spin, and I want to be you!! Any help would be very appreciated!!

Looking to finally upgrade my Galaxy S8 which I've had for almost 4 years. Here is my criteria/wants for a new phone:

1. Prefer to use a USB-C for charging.
   
2. Strong battery life is a major priority.
   
3. No built-in ads into standard apps or on the homescreen. I absolutely despise ads and want to limit them as much as possible.
   
4. Features that prevent robocalls are ideal. I'm plagued with 5+ robocalls per day so if a specific phone/carrier has a feature to best stop this, that's a huge plus (I currently have Sprint and their Call Screen app sucks).
   
5. I would like to still have an AUX cord but this isn't mandatory.
   
6. I would like either at least 128GB of storage, or a micro SD card slot.
   
7. A fingerprint scanner to unlock the phone/remember passwords is mandatory. I love this feature on my S8.
   

That's really it. Price doesn't matter, I don't really play games on my phone (except Pokemon Go sometimes), and I don't watch movies/shows. I use my phone for calling, texting, internet browsing, and apps that don't take a ton of processing power (although the more power the better I suppose for longevity). I don't care much about cameras; they're all good enough for me. Also don't care about the feel/materials since all my phones are put in a rugged case on day 1. I was thinking about the Google Pixel 5, Galaxy S21 lineup, or Galaxy Note20 lineup.
I'm not opposed to iPhones, but my laptop uses a USB-C charger so it's a big convenience not having to carry multiple chargers around for all my devices. If iPhones provide a large enough benefit over other options, I'd make the transition to Apple (might even buy an iPad in the future).

Not only did The Ringer destroy something beautiful, they just handed the Podcast Championship to Barstool.
See that photo above? I snapped it during the Bill and Jalen NBA preview series, right as Episode 3 was winding down in LA. Here’s how I described the moment in my column the following morning.
“Mal pulled Jason a few seconds later. He wandered over to the corner to stand with Chris Ryan, with Fennessy eventually joining them. They stood there with their arms wrapped around each other, watching their year tick away, soaking in every image for those days in September and October when you’re tired of shooting season previews and need a trigger to keep pushing yourself. It was my favorite moment of that last year at ESPN … When I think of it, I will remember Zach Lowe's brilliance first, then Jalen having that crazy sports-movie montage of one liners… And then I’ll think of the Grantland kids huddled in the corner at the end, waiting their turn, knowing that’s how this business works. We’ll see if the industry ever lets them on the ride.”
Never — not in my wildest dreams — did I imagine The Ringer breaking them up. It started to seem possible about 9 months ago (improbable, but definitely not unrealistic), and when their partnership finally unraveled last weekend, for whatever reason, I ended up sifting through 1,200 pictures on my iPhone before finally finding that photo. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. You always hear that Media is a business, something that certainly seemed true during last year’s indefensible union negotiations. But I loved the thought of those three Grantland kids — how they carried themselves as siblings, how they complemented each other in the office, how they kept nailing those same road-to-the-emmy checkpoints that Magary’s Deadspin and Portnoy’s Barstool crossed off once upon a time. 2015 swung on a surprisingly small number of plays during the first quarter — maybe seven or eight total. Grantland didn’t make enough of them. Their three best guys were going to learn from what happened. They were.
And when everyone started playing the blame game after the trade — Jason shouldn’t have been so greedy, The Ringer should have played it out for one more year, the trade never would have happened if Jason played better in the Finals, Simmons didn’t get enough back, etc., etc., etc. — I kept thinking about those three guys with their arms around each other. Do you really want to break THAT up? Weren’t these guys headed somewhere together? Wasn’t that year, and that photo, part of the journey? Wasn’t this like canceling a great TV series after 17 episodes, like if Takehunter just stopped right now and we never found out what happened to Micah and Tyler?
Forget about worrying whether Jason is a max employee (and by the way, he is — 15 companies would have given it to him), or why Jason didn’t play better in the 2019 series of Desktop (um, Titus sucked in College and turned out fine), or if it meant something that Jason didn’t just blindly take less than what he’s worth (when he had already sacrificed time and credits to succeed on that team). The Ringer significantly hindered their chances of long term success — not just this year, but every year. And they did it because, after raking in ridiculous amounts of money these past four years (including a $200 million SALE during last year’s shortened season), they valued their own bottom line ahead of their title window. A window that included the second-best podcaster in the the game, a top-10 podcaster and a top-20 podcaster … all under the age of 45.
That’s why every Barstool fan spent the weekend rejoicing and making 2020 Webby plans. This was the one site that scared the living shit out of them — these past two years, The Ringer was too young, too fast, too relentless, too everything. Even after Barstool added PFT and Big Cat, it’s worth noting that (a) PFT can’t out Pacino Chris Ryan unless he’s allowed to use a soundboard, and (b) Russillo is overpaid mainly because he’s been Big Cat’s Kryptonite these past few seasons, someone with the bizarre ability to frustrate and even neutralize Katz beyond any realm of common sense. After the The Ringer released Jason, every Barstool fan I know e-mailed me. They were overjoyed.
Thank God they released Jason. He scared the hell out of me. We couldn’t stop him from getting the tweet. We can beat them now.
Anytime a workplace departure inspires celebrations from your biggest rival, that’s never a good thing … right? That’s why I thought The Ringer should have rolled the Jason dilemma over to the following summer, waited for someone else’s $300k restricted offer, matched it, then either traded KOC (getting paid like an All-Star when he’s not there yet) or amnestied the overpriced Russillo (who simply can’t stay out of strangers properties). I absolutely loved their top three, especially in this day and age, with low-twitter-post scorers going the way of Quibi and Juicero. Fennessey has already established himself as one of the league’s greatest scorers — not just now, but ever — someone who reaches 30 tweets a night after night more creatively than anyone since Kid Mero. And Chris Ryan wreaks havoc athletically, making up for his infamous streakiness with some of the most breathtaking two-way accentry we’ve ever seen.
Paired together, you definitely have a contender … but that doesn’t mean you’re winning a title. Just ask Big Wos and Zach Harper, Leroux and Duncan, Conan and Sohla, Titus and Tate or even Bomani and Torre way back when. That’s why Jason was so important. Within three seasons, the Shades had evolved into a shockingly efficient scorer and a security blanket of sorts — every time Chris Ryan went into one of his little funks, there was Jason calmly grabbing the steering wheel, running their conversation and even occasionally taking over when it mattered. He eviscerated Shea Serrano in Connect episodes by repeatedly getting to the links; all of our advanced data says Jason ranks among the very best at scoring off 15'5 inch screens. So The Ringer had three elite podcasters, with no drop-off throughout the 2 hours because of Jason’s willingness to come in as the 2nd guest. That was their single biggest asset.
Quick tangent: Before expansion diluted the Podcast networks in the 2010s, many of the greatest networks were built around two signature stars, then a third (and more underrated) high-caliber podder who sacrificed numbers while maintaining a memorable level of clutchness. Everyone points to Sean Jordan as a recent example, but every classic 2000s juggernaut featured that guy, whether it was House, Andy Richter, Victor or Hank. Going back to Howard Stern’s era, the all-time best example was Fred Norris (as I wrote about three weeks ago). Had Jason moved into the aforementioned group while being paid accordingly, he would have embraced it — he’s one of the rare modern podcasters who doesn’t care about being The Man, even writing The Ringer GM Bill Simmons before the 2016 launch and explaining how well he’d blend with Ryan and Rubin.
But sacrificing appearances, credits and listens for the betterment of the website AND taking a discount? That’s a little ludicrous. This wasn’t about $100,00 — the difference between The Ringer’s final offer and the $150,000 offer that Jason requested — as much as Simmons respecting Jason’s unique plight. The Ringer couldn’t offer a five-year extension because Russillo and Van Lathan had already grabbed their two special five-year slots (as mandated by the new CBA). Meanwhile, half the medias networks would have happily given him a five-year max extension ($1 million), so really, Jason was already taking a discount by not getting a five-year deal.
Also, Jason’s offer never included a hard-core assurance that The Ringer wouldn’t use that “discount” against him by eventually trading that enhanced asset (a franchise podcaster now making less than franchise money) for a collection of goodies. Remember when ESPN talked Skip Bayless into accepting a five-year, $11 million “discount” — $6 million less than he would have gotten on the open market the following summer — then dangled him for Katie Nolan two years later? So much for “taking one for the team,” right? What about Henry Abbott signing a two-year, $1 million “discount” extension because ESPN promised to use that extra cap space to fund Truehoop Video and Audio? Remember what happened? They allowed Jade Hoye to leave, brought in a bunch of Wojnarowski's and Bobby Marks and immediately became a loser team. But thanks for taking the discount, Henry.
So here’s The Ringer lowballing Jason for four years and refusing to include a trade kicker — in other words, Sorry, we have to keep our options open, just in case. Jason justifiably turned them down. They played hardball. Jason stood his ground. They threatened to trade him to Crooked Media — which was, in retrospect, their biggest mistake because that meant Jason had a three-year, $2 million offer suddenly waiting for him — and at that point, this was done.
And here’s where the narrative became a little funky. See, we’re supposed to feel sorry for The Ringer, the tiny upstart media company that couldn’t afford to keep its three best employees. We’re supposed to ignore their staggering profits since they hijacked drafting things from All Fantasy Everything in 2017 You know what the biggest advantage is for any non-union recognizing employee? When you lock up your salaries and sponsorships during the spring before your next Book of Basketball Podcast season, that’s 90 percent of the battle — now you have guaranteed income, you don’t have to waste resources on a swollen writing staff or various marketing campaigns, and you can bank the interest from that money instead of crossing your fingers and hoping that revenue shows up later. Yeah, The Ringer is never getting the youtube money of Barstool or ESPN, but so what? You really think their situation is THAT far off from places like The Athletic or Vulture?
For The Ringer, the Jason departure wasn’t about losing money … it was about continuing to make money. Huge, huge difference. The The Ringer realized that, as long as two top-12 podders (Fennessey and Ryan) were under their control, they would keep contending, keep selling out and maintain a certain level of relevancy. And by rebooting with the assets from that Jason trade (Jacko’s offensiveness as a one-year stopgap and Nephew Kyle's Soundcloud as potential trade chips), they could brainwash their fans on the whole “this is a business, not an open mic night” spiel.
Here’s the problem with that mind-set: When you’re this close to winning a primetime Emmy, why screw with it? Why own the company at that point? Look at what happened to Deadspin from 2017 through 2020, as the team wasted genuine assets (hiring a herb, pivoting to video) and lowballed Greenwell out of town, squandering Magary’s glorious prime in the process. Guess what? Everyone on twitter hates Spanfeller for it. What The Ringer did wasn’t as egregious, but in its own little way, it was just as dishonest — a site crying poverty even as it’s selling out every night and even though it’s been printing money these past few years.
And now, they’ve tossed away their 2021 unless Serrano jumps an entire level like Ryan did last spring (unlikely, since Ryan reached a level that we haven’t seen in 20 years) or Kevin O'Connor miraculously matures into a game-changing two-way force (a puncher’s chance of a possibility that Richard Deitsch broke down on his podcast today). After that, who knows what could happen? Relevancy windows have a tendency of slamming shut when you least expect it. Remember when we thought that Grantlan was rolling off four or five years of best site in a row once they added Brian Phillips? Remember when PMT played in the ESPN2 and we expected to see them every Monday at 1am? You never know.
In the The Ringer’s case, we only knew that they had three of the 20 best guys in the world, all under 55, all of whom loved podding together. There are no sure things in the Apple Rankings, but that previous sentence was about as sure as it gets. Less than 100 days ago, I thought the Ringer were headed for another year end top 10 and another chance at toppling PFT and Big Cat. That’s not happening with Dave Chang and Ryan Shazier. Instead, they made a different kind of history: becoming the contender that ever jeopardized multiple years of success for financial reasons and financial reasons only. It’s never happened before.
They also walked away from the photo that adorns this column, as well as everything I ever thought media was about. Other than that, the Jason thing wasn’t that big of a deal. You want predictions for the 2020-21 season from me? I have two and two only.

1. SHES GOT A GREAT ASS.
   
2. Bill Simmons will rue the day he let Jason Concepcion walk away.
   

Source | Previous table
Note: Some of the question-taker's answers were also removed along with corresponding questions, and they have not been recovered below.

Questions	Answers
What is a typical day in your life like?	I get up at 4:30. I watch some YouTube, do some email, work on my writing or similar. I head to the gym at 7, shower and start my day around 8. I work in my home office or shop/lab, code and work on stuff, throughout the day. I could be busy all the way through to 8-9PM if I'm wrapped up in something, but not usually that busy.
the below is a reply to the above
You get up at 4:30 AM? Wow. Have you always been a morning person? Are other people on your team morning people so you decided to start early? I’m asking this because it seems like a lot of successful people wake up very early and work out before starting their workday.	No, I never was until my neck injury. While recovering I couldn't sleep more than about 4-5 hours max and just got into the habit. Since it was so productive for me, I just kept it up!
the below is a reply to the above
Thanks for sharing. I wish you good health.	Thanks!
Did you create Robocopy, or know who did? I use that very regularly and much more efficient than using the GUI.	The secret dirt is that Robocopy was first written by MS colleague Kevin Allen, and he started sharing copies around in 1994ish. From there, and after many iterations and heavy-duty real-world feedback, robocopy ended up in the Windows Resource Kit, and then later merged into the core Windows package. In the beginning, Kevin was a very experienced programmer, but new to the Win32 API; so robocopy was one of his projects to educate himself about Windows programming. Later on, ITG used robocopy to routinely transfer many gigabytes of data around MS global offices, every night; it became very robust and battle-hardened. It is a long time now since Kevin was involved in the robocopy source code at all; it is maintained by the Windows team.
Did you create Microsoft Clippy? Will Clippy ever make a come back?	Noooo... but I was around at the time. We have Clippy now in the form of Siri and Google Assistant and Cortana, but there's no picture. That's all it was though, an early digital assistant.
I read on a Microsoft devblog that when windows got ported to 64bit pinball 3d was not ported because of bugs and the developers not being able to understand the code/not having enough time. It's a shame, because it was such an awesome game and I spent many hours playing it as a kid. Was the code messy due to being ported from Sam and do you think it could have been ported given enough time and expertise?	Basically what I did when I ported it was to maintain the central code "logic" loop of the game unchanged so that it would play just as it did on other platforms, and then "hooked" functionality coming out of it and going into it. So I rewrote the drawing code that did the actual drawing, but not he original code that wanted to do the drawing, if that makes sense. I changed the how, not why.
	That meant, though, that at the very core of the game was a big bunch of code that we didn't touch or monkey with, because it 'just worked'. Apparently sometime after Vista, in 64-bit, there was a collision detection bug in Pinball.
	From what I read, Raymond Chen looked at it and got the general idea of what was wrong but didn't want to touch the fragile old code. Raymond's one of the best debuggers I've met, so it wasn't a question of expertise but of time and resources.
	Anyone on the team could have trivially fixed it I'm sure, but it sounds like no one "owned" the game anymore after I left, and it was more than just a random little bug to fix, it would have required a dev to be assigned to it, and there likely was no one free.
What is your favourite colour please?	Well, I have four cars with blue interiors and I'm wearing a blue shirt and a blue watch and blue jeans. So probably blue.
If my son expresses interest in serious computer programming, where is a good place to start? C for Dummies? (I'm joking and I know terribly little about the topic, only enough to know backend is where it's at)	Python, then Javascript. Build a website!
Hi! Just wanted to say, I still use MS-DOS regularly, on many of my older machines in my collection. Also Win3.x, Win9x etc How do you feel about computers becoming extremely dependent on 'cloud' services? I can still set up an old machine, install an old OS, install old software and have it all up and running within an hour or so, while modern software essentially requires cloud services for literally everything. What happens to that software once some random person out there decides that they don't want to support it anymore? Those cloud services go away? Are you concerned that future generations will not be able to experience anything from this era of computing? Considering computers were designed to be able to continually run the same software over and over as necessary, how can that apply if the bulk of this is lost when the cloud disappears? Or maybe this isn't a concern at all, and I'm just crazy...?	I already have hardware that refused to work because the cloud service that backs it has been abandoned or the company has gone out of business.
	I worry that things become dependent on externals that aren't reliable long term, and I know what you mean... but fortunately Windows, once activated, runs perfectly well offline forever, really.
I'm a fresh graduate with some experience and reading the knowledge you all have in the comments has made me feel very inferior. I only started coding in my university and I don't do it in my past time. Am I doing something wrong? I do enjoy programming but I try to keep a work life balance. Is that a thing in software development? Also did you ever approve a pull request by Bill?	No, as long as you DO enjoy it when you're doing it, you're fine. There's an entire "spectrum" of people in the world and some of us have "special interests" with which we're a little obsessed, and tend to "hyperfocus". I'm one of those people but it's by no means the only way to do it!
	I knew many great programmers who (a) didn't program in their spare time at home and (b) didn't continue to program recreationally after leaving it as a job.
	If you can work regular 40 hours a week as a productive programmer, you'll be set!
the below is a reply to the above
Thank you so much for this! Are there any tips you'd like to give to fresh graduates like me?	If you get a job at a large company like Microsoft, and decide you're not happy, try moving INTERNALLY before looking for another job. You could work for 5 different companies over your career and they could all be Google, for example. Culture goes through and through, but every team has its own.
the following is a later reply	If you can put in a 35-40 hour week of solid work, you'll be fine. There are three buckets: the obsessives, like myself, who work as much as they can. Then the solid pros, who can turn out a ton of quality stuff in 40 hours. And then you have the slackers who surf Facebook at work and read reddit when they should be coding. As long as you're not in that group you're fine, and a balance is important. It is indeed a thing the successful people achieve it. It's not about how much code you write, it's about how much MORE time you spend coding than you want to, and that should be zero!
	Lots of people are in careers they don't practice in their free time, in fact most. So it's a bonus if you're that way, but most people are NOT, so don't despair! You're normal!
If you're still answering, how much of the original Task Manager still lives in the modern Task Manager? Anyway, thanks for the AMA! You're a legend!	I don't know for sure, but from looking at the app, and not the code, I'd expect about 60-70% of it?
Hopefully you’re still taking questions. I get a lot of crap by my peers about command line. Power shell is badass but I’m a cmd guy myself. I know we can do pretty much everything that cmd does in powershell and more, but idk. I like what I like, you know? Where do you stand on this?	Honestly I'd be a CMD guy as well, but I'm really starting to lean towards using bash under WSL.
	Have you ever looked the help for SET and FOR under CMD? It's where we put every piece of extra functionality, since you can't add keywords that might collide with people's script names, etc...
I didn’t use windows after windows 7 for about 5 years. Back in august 2019 I finally rebuilt and upgraded my old PC and installed windows 10. The task manager in windows 10 is so amazing and powerful. I would imagine it’s something you wanted to implement in the 90s but didn’t have the tools or time. Right?	Indeed, I'm a big fan of the current task manager and what they've done with it! I wish there was a Dark mode, I wish it handled file lock tracking, and I've always got wish lists, but they've done a great job with it!
CIA_grade_LSD: Why does the file transfer time remaining progress bar start at like 15 hours and then drop to two minutes and then stick at 99% for five minutes? (An exaggeration I admit. I know you and your colleagues do your best, but I am curious why this hasnt gotten much more accurate over the years.) androidethic: Yes, we need a justification as to why the windows file operation estimations are so random/inaccurate!	They're the worst estimate out there, except for all the others.
	Mac is just as bad. It's a hard problem. I worked on it briefly, and to help solve it I kept track of the average time it had taken for a whole range of operations, like creating, moving, deleting, renaming a file, or moving a block of N bytes, etc. Then multiply by the number of those operations that remain. But even that can be wildly off in degenerate cases.
Do you ever get laid?	Not since your Mom kicked me out.
Why has windows task manager never had a true force quit?	End Process is a true force quit.
What was your team's opinion on linux at the time? And what's yours opinion too?	I like it a lot, I was an early adopter back in 1993-1994 and tried to contribute some code for parsing IIDs, though I don't know if it's still in there. I hope it is, becaue then I'd have code in Windows, Mac Office, and Linux. I'd be everywhere :-)
	Now that we have WSL 2, though, I do most of my Linux work under Windows!
How much of the original DOS code is still in modern OSs?	None whatsoever. In fact, the only commonality at all would likely be the PGM header on disk still traces its original layout to MS-DOS.
	But rest assured there's NO code from MS-DOS inside NT, for example. It was a complete clean-slate design.
Was it you responsible for the atrocious naming conventions in WIN32?	Your username is dhbt12 :-)
What current developments in the world of operating systems are you watching with eager anticipation? File systems and LLVM seem to be the rage right now, at least from where I sit.	Containers are cool to me, like Docker! That's really the biggest development of recent years I think!
the below has been split into two
* What's your compensation?	- Zero, since I'm retired and there's no pension.
* Have you met Bill Gates?	- Yes, a number of times. When I was first hired he had me and a few other recent hires over to his house for burgers and beer and it was quite nice!
What's your opinion of free and open-source software? Broad, I know. I saw your response about WinRAR saying you like to license your software, but do you hold a similar sentiment in tossing a coin to the devs of foss software you might use?	I love it, I just don't have any illusions that making a piece of code open-source somehow leads to higher quality. It makes it more available to me, which is great, but in reality, on a typical project there are going to be 1-5 people who really look at the code and then a dozen the sort of know it to make changes, and then consumers of the code who just call it. I don't see that those 1-5 people are any brighter than the people who'd be responsible for a product in a proprietary environment.
	Now at a certain scale, like the Linux kernel maybe, you've got enough eyeballs looking at it that it makes a difference... that I could see!
What's the idea behind SYSKEY?	As I understand it, its function is to encrypt something called the SAM (Security Account Manager) database. This database stores hashes of user passwords, and is used to authenticate users when they supply their password.
Hey Dave, what do you think the future of the windows OS will be? Is a cloud-based OS possible, potentially limiting computer hardware?	As a total guess, I imagine our experience will eventually be just a UI device locally and everything else happens in the cloud on server hardware. So as you say, at some point your client hardware is "good enough" and then companies compete on the merits of their back-end services.
Do you know Mike Toutonghi? , he used to work at Microsoft, now he started a new blockchain project called The Verus project.	By name and email but not well enough to recognize him at the mall today, I'd say!
If you had to redo windows, what would you most like to change? What do you regret most? What do you like most?	The Format dialog needs to be redone! And Task Manager is likely my favorite...
Android or iPhone? Beer or wine? Ginger or Mary Ann?	iPhone. Beer. Can't it be both? It's an island, after all.
the below is a reply to the above
I figured the iPhone since you have Mac's in the lab. I figured beer also since you can't shift a 4 speed with a glass off wine between your legs. Nice garage BTW. However i wasnt ready for both, it's an island after all. Touche. I tired to compile my first bit of code from GitHub today. I failed miserably. It would install but wouldn't run. I'll keep at it.	Make sure you're in a clean empty folder. Try the code from Episode 11, I just used it so I know that works! Clone it and build it in PlatformIO with no changes, and that'll tell you if your dev environment is set up and working properly.
I cant connect to my cloud, can you download it for me?	I'd love to, but I'm out of paper. Can you fax me some?
What amazes you the most when you compare technology from the 90's to now?	GPUs!
Is it wrong of me to only ever end task manager with itself?	Software Seppuku.
Probably too many comments and very late to the game, but here it goes! I teach Comp Sci at an international school. Would you be willing to give a small webinar talk to my students? They would just be so happy to hear from you as would I! Anyway, regardless, thanks for the many, many hours of enjoyment!	Maybe after Covid, but I'm not a big fan of Zoom lectures! I just did one for the U of R, though, and if you check my channel there are two that I have done for the University of Regina that you might find useful for your students...
	You can email me at [email protected] with info about the school and what topic you would like, etc, and I can see if it's a good fit for schedule and topic!
What computers do you personally at home? Windows? Linux? Mac?	All three!
Why are processes able to hang to the point that task manager is unable to kill them?	At that point there must be kernel corruption or something going on in a driver or well below the surface, I guess. If TM can't kill it, no one can, and it's truly hung.
Did you ever meet the genius who wrote the Space Cadet Pinball theme song?	No, who wrote it? Matt Ridgeway?
Hi Dave, loved the videos on task manager Do you have any thoughts on modern C / C++ replacements like Zig and Rust (respectively)?	I think its cool if memory access is indeed provably safe but you get code nearly as optimal as C, but I've got to learn more about them!
Did you like the windows phone?	Never had one, started after I left, but I heard nice things about the very last one before it went away...
Hi Dave, Why doesn’t File Explorer automatically refresh to show new files in a folder, such as downloads? Seems such an obvious glitch! Also, how do I get the login screen on Windows 10? I push space, esc, mouse clicks, enters... and nothing happens. Then poof, it shows up. Why is this so unresponsive?	It does.
	In fact I know it does, because I have a patent on some of it!
	Not sure why yours wound't be working, your system might have a third party piece of software that has broken File System Change notifications.
Was the time on Microsoft fun?	It really was. I miss the people and the environment, and I especially miss lunch!
i’ve found 15+ 0-days in the shell32 API when doing a vuln analysis of explorer.exe. You can read my work at https://hyp3ri0n-ng.github.io! What’s it like to write really buggy code :P?	I sense that high school was hard for you socially.
I’m sure I remember owning the pinball game as a separate standalone title before it was in windows? Can you explain the deal with that? Or am I misremembering	Plus Pack!
You're a legend, can't believe I missed this. I'll post this here, if you don't answer it I'll have a good copy/paste for later. What are your thoughts on the sethc.exe / accessibility exploit? It's worked as far back as XP, and still works today in Windows 10, last time I checked. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well. Is checking the integrity of OS files before they're executed just not a priority?	https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/222193/description-of-the-windows-file-protection-feature
Why ctl+alt+delete?	An IBM engineer (David Bradley, I think) picked that combination to serve as a hardware reset. You can't fake it, you can't get around it. The PC knows it's really C_A_D when you do it.
	Why that particular combination, you'd have to ask him!
What's the furthest you've gotten into a project that ended up not panning out? Was it something you really wanted to get working or were you relieved to move on? I'm a student studying engineering right now and reading these answers is extremely motivational; your passion for computers is awesome! Thanks for doing this.	I spent about a year on an early prototype of Media Center that I was attached to but got killed. They did do a Media Center later, of course, but I had started 2-3 years ahead, but couldn't get funding.
Why has the Windows she'll been so bad for so long?	I don't know, but I'll see you in he'll.
Do you still work at Microsoft? Do you still use only Microsoft stuff?	No retired in 2003. I use a lot of MS stuff, but my main laptop is a MacBook and I use a Mac for video.
Do you own any Apple products or use them for work?	I own all the Apple products except the new headphones, pretty much! I'm retired now though!
Is the workculture of Microsoft at the time very different than now? How much does Bill Gates' leadership impact the company? What changes had his departure bring?	It is indeed very different under Satya than Bill, and the changes are widespread. But I left before Satya started, so I'm not really qualified to speak on them!
What are your thoughts on the age old trick of "Opening Task Manager to stop programs from freezing or being slow", is there some merit to doing that or is it just a simple coincidence?	Total coincidence, honest! Task Manager, at that level, is just a windows app with a message pump. It's existence doesn't do anything that solitaire or paint would not also!
	No, but there's a great meme with the Star Wars general about how apps work better with Task Manager open because "fear will keep them in line".
	It's purely psychological, though. TM doesn't do anything by running the calc or paint wouldn't also provide!
Did you work on Windows ME? If so.. What the hell happened to that OS that made it so terrible? I had kernal errors every week.	Nope! My work on the shell would have been backported to it, but I didn't work directly on 98 or M3, other than they used our NT version of the shell code by then I think.
Did you make any contingency for when Task Manager stops responding?	Yes, lots! Check the video the "Secret Life of Task Manager" for more dirt, but there are MANY things it does to help prevent you ever being stuck with no task manager:
	https://youtu.be/f8VBOiPV-_M
If not asked yet If this is correct, as posted in Regina awhile ago iirc I saw a post saying you’re from Regina, Canada Is that true? If so that’s awesome to hear that someone from my local area made one of my favourite no internet game and the basic fundamentals of the most used OS for computers	Yes indeed, that's me!
Why is the documentation for WPA so bad and scarce? I have to refer to Bruce Dawson's years old blog to decipher some of the columns names. Are there any plans to add a comprehensive manual for it?	Windows Product Activation? Columns? Sorry, are you using WPA for something else?
Can I intern for you?	If you know how to write a Material-themed admin-style Dashboard in React, can consume a REST api in doing so, and have some experience with iPhone apps an Unity, then maybe yes!
	I was actually looking for an intern this past summer to write a phone and web app...
how did you assured code quality and readability? did you use static analyzers/ unit tests or what?	Check out the "Secret History of Task Manager" video for a description of "NTStress" and how we nightly tested, but there were professional testers, every line of code was code-reviewed, and so on.
	My understanding is it's quite different now, though!
When you say you worked on Windows activation, was it for more than a day?	That's an odd question. Can I ask why you think it might have just been for a day? Clue me in to what you're hinting at and I'll fill you in on the rest!
Why do I need to press 3 buttons and 1 click to open task manager?	Because you choose to fail!
	You can do it with two clicks or one simultaneous multikey press!
Do you think WPA was a success?	I think so! It helped stem casual piracy, wasn't "cracked" for at least 18 months after we released it, and didn't unduly inconvenience users too often, I hope.
	We were really aiming for the 95% case. Trying to catch the 95% of piracy that is people sharing keys, reusing their own keys on too many machines, getting keys off the web, that sort of thing. I think it accomplished that.
How did you feel about windows 8?	Same way you do.
Who invented the blue screen of death?	John Vert. He said:
	"Back in 1991 I wrote the original code for Windows NT 3.1 that put the video screen back into text mode and the routines to put text on it (and a truly gnarly bit of code it was!). I used the white on blue colors for two reasons.
	* The MIPS workstations we were using for the MIPS port had firmware that presented a boot option screen in white on blue, so it made sense that the bugcheck screen would match.
	* I (and many others) were using SlickEdit as our text editor and at the time its default color scheme was also white on blue.
	I believe Mark Lucovsky wrote the original code that dumped a bunch of text to the screen. This was a bugcode and a stack dump, resulting in a bunch of useless hex numbers which product support would occasionally dutifully transcribe from the customers and include in the bug report.
	There was no "typesetting" as we used standard VGA text mode on PCs.
	I don't know the history of the Win3.1/Win9x blue screens, I think the fact they were the same color is just coincidence."
But can you make sick stick figure death match animations in QBASIC?	No, but I do a mean Bill the Cat ascii art!
How could you?	Sometimes you just gotta say WTF.
	https://youtu.be/a0p7rJsYisw
What are you working on these days?	Mostly on programming tutorials and nostalgic "Windows War Stories" on my youtube channel:
	http://www.youtube.com/c/davesgarage
[removed]	That's me! Went to Miller high, worked at ISM and SaskTel during college, etc!
Here is my question. Im a cuban teenager (17) and my dream is work is be a developer. What kind of mini works i can do for learn programation before University?	Do as many little program tasks as you can, and make sure you complete them, and SAVE them for the future so you can look back!
	Try writing a little program to convert back and forth between roman numbers and regular numbers. Or fund the next highest multiple of 32, or count the number of it bits set in a byte. Or the real difference in seconds between two dates, that sort of thing. Real problems that you have to solve will help a great deal as they act as sort of a "forcing function" to make you get to the very end.
Do you like macaroni & cheese?	Kraft Dinner all the way. And I eat with little packets of designer ketchup.
Wait...you didn't built paint? I'm out.	Nope, sorry. But I owned calc for a while, back when we were adding infinite precision math to it!
Hi, If Microsoft wanted to, they could make it impossible to activate a pirated copy of windows using 3rd party software. So why aren't they making it impossible?	Not sure what you meant by 3rd party software. Are you saying Windows can actually be activated even if pirated? That'd be news to me, but anything's possible.
What was the criteria for “tilt” on space cadet pinball? I played that game for hours as a kid.	Spacebar would add a little "action" to the table, if I recall, and you could strike a balance of adding so much so often... but too much (ie: smash space too much) and it'll tilt.
Did you ever have to interview anybody at Microsoft? If so, what types of questions would you ask back then? What was your interview like going into Microsoft?	Oh yeah, I've interviewed dozens or hundreds I'd bet. I'd like to ask "calibrating questons" like "Give me a funtion that takes a number and returns the next highest multiple of 32" or "count the number of bits that are set in it" to see how their basic coding skills were.
	Then I usually liked to give a problem I was working on to see what it'd be like to actually work with the person.
	I interviewed three times, once as an intern, once as full time, and then once to move to the Shell group. Each as an all-day affair, and very arduous. You have 2-3 hour long interviews in the AM, then a lunch interview, then 2-3 more hour long interviews in the PM, then a supper thing, etc... it's a long day!
ImRandyRU: What have you done for me lately? Edit: it was a joke... dabigchina: NT is the foundation that all modern windows OS's build on, so a lot. Zeusifer: I guarantee some of OP's code still exists in Windows 10.	Most of it, to be honest. As a guess I'd say 75% still there.
Hey man, I had a wicked dump this morning and now my toilet is blocked. Any idea's?	More roughage in your diet.
It was so satisfying to push the 3x5 disks into the slot and have the button pop out, and make a vroom vroom sound. Ah, the old days. What's your favorite MS-Dos game from the 90s?	I actually came to the PC after MS-DOS, so I wasn't a DOS gamer... I suppose in those days it was primarily C64 and Amiga games. I do remember being fond of Sim City, like everyone, but also of a game called "Seven Cities of Gold"...

Hey everyone. This is still a work in progress as I try to organize Pixonic Suggestions to bring in some structure. I'll try to get Pixonic to respond directly to them but if they don't I'll attempt to track any progress to the best of my ability. This will be linked to the weekly suggestions thread by the auto-moderator. Be sure to use the "Pixonic Suggestion" flair so I can easily sort through all the suggestions!
Ideas & Feature Requests
This thread is a place where you can discuss your ideas for the game or request features you would like to see in coming versions of the game.
This sub appreciates any contributions you can make to existing ideas, but we suggest you do not post your idea before reviewing previous Pixonic ideas / suggestions threads. It is highly likely another Commander already submitted the same idea!
Please be aware that posting a ruled out idea may result in your thread being removed altogether and posting an idea already suggested might result in your thread being closed with a reference back to this thread.
A few tips to submitting an idea or suggestion:
Title: Choose a good title - be very specific. Instead of naming your thread "suggestion", "idea", try something like "Ao Mings are Over Powered." This will help other users find and contribute to your thread, and drive more discussion around the topic.
Point: Use clear, concise points or explanations, concept art or screenshots where applicable. General, unspecific, high-level ideas are great, but the Pixonic team can't do much without the proper information!
"I think Ao Mings are way too powerful for the current META landscape because of their high firepower and durability. Their appearance in battle makes the game boring and frustrating for me."
Suggestion: Give constructive and helpful suggestions that are realistic. Why will the idea work?
"Decrease the Ao Ming's durability or nerf Titan Plasma weapons so other Titans and and bots can effectively counter Ao Mings or survive Plasma attacks."
For all, keep in mind Pixonic is a business. I realize many of us have little experience in owning a gaming company, but try to consider how Pixonic would make a profit or be successful in the business model when giving a suggestion. Pixonic wants players spending money AND playing a lot--so how does your suggestion support that?
Threads will be removed if it includes profanity and / or insults. Comments like "make everything for free" or "XXX (i.e. Matchmaking, the game, targeting, etc.) sucks--solution: make the game better, or un-nerf everything" will just be deleted. This also isn't the place to report bugs or to rant.
Given the nature of the game the developers and producers cannot always say what is coming in the next version or what is being worked on. Also, please don't expect a response to every thread or idea. The best ideas will be discussed frequently by the Community and will surface to the top in that manner (or through up/down votes). Do not spam your thread or ideas just because no one is responding!

• Response (December 2020)
• Response (January 2021)

Frequently Requested Ideas
Below are ideas submitted by users for Pixonic to consider. It does not imply they are being worked on. Please do a search before starting new feature requests, especially if they are listed below.
These ideas and suggestions are either acknowledged and are being worked on, or have been ruled out by the dev team for the time being. Posting these ideas may result in your thread being removed without notice.
Frequently Requested:

• Battle Modes
  • Titan skirmish (Status: in Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: " We agree that it would be a lot of fun. We'll try to introduce Titan Skirmishes next year, but it won't be a priority – there's so much to do.")
  • Additions to custom matches (Status: in Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: "The general idea of Custom Matches is not to provide an additional game mode, but to give you a playground where you can test your builds to understand if they are suitable for real combat. In Max's opinion, current functionality of Custom Matches fits just well in this concept." Detailed comments in original post)
  • Beacon hold time should be considered for HP (Status: in Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: " We already have some ideas on how to expand the honor reward list (e.g. rewarding players for applying Suppression or Lock-down effects). The idea with beacon hold time sounds like a nice addition to our plans. ")
• Boosters
  • Pause booster timer while waiting for match (Status: in August 2020 the Pixonic producer stated they agreed with this concept and were looking into it; in Dec 2020 Max, the WR Producer stated: "We had plans for a complete rework of Boosters. Unfortunately, we had to cut those plans off to release Drones and prepare for Remastered. We believe we'll have time to work on Boosters in 2021.")
  • Faster reload times (Status: in Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: "Thing is, there is a technical tie between reload animation and reload time. It's one of those legacy mechanics that've been haunting the game for years already. Until we refactor the entire block, it's impossible for us to change the reload speed on most of the weapons. But in general idea is good, though we see it as a Passive Module rather than a Booster.")
• Bots
  • Raijin increased resistance instead of damage
  • Add 3 Passive modules to each bot
  • Allow energy shields to recharge at all times
  • Nuclear Fission Snipers
  • Egyptian Themed Bots
  • Medusa
  • Arbiter Shield Concept
  • Overhead view (like Nightingale) for Invader and Mercury)
  • Altitude control of flying bots
• Community Features
  • Allow friends in-game or via other platforms (i.e. Discord) (Status: in Dec 2020, Max WR Producer stated: " We call it "Platform Merge iteration 2" and it's on the list for 2021."; in January 2021 Max WR Producer stated: "For technical reasons, we don't want to add integrations with other platforms as far as the friends system is concerned. In fact, we'd also like to get rid if the existing integration and make all friends features completely native to the game. There will be a rework of the friends system this year. Stay tuned!")
  • Pixonic sponsored WR Tournament (Status: Oct 2020 Pix CM said it was coming; in Dec 2020 Max WR Producer stated: "We have a couple of competitive features prepared for the next year. We'll tell you more in our New Year videos.")
  • Cross-Platform (Status: In Dec 2020, Max WR Producer stated: "This is basically a cross-platform account, like PixAccount. The idea has been around for a couple of years already. It should be implemented on the scale of the whole company, not only War Robots project, of course. But yes, it's something we definitely want to have in the future.")
  • Incorporate lore into rewards or abilities, etc. (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "It's a great idea and it might work! *Promises to talk to the game design department about it*")
• Drones (Status: October 2020 Pixonic CM announced Drones were being overhauled)
  • Remove random chip / slot generator
  • Preset hangar to save time in battle
• Hangars
  • Allow useage of bots across hangars in battles (or same bot for multiple hangars)
  • Hangar presets
  • Upgrade / build multiple bots or weapons at a time (possibly benefit of having multiple hangars)
  • Limit number of sambe bots you cna use in active hangar
  • Allow us to see other players' drone hangars (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: " Yes, one day. We have some improvement plans for Drones, including UI. Hopefully, our UI team will find a way to show more info on drones in hangar.")
• In-Game Communication
  • Improved chat and in-game features
  • Active/Live “Online Status” examples: colored icons, on/off indicator, etc.
  • Indicate last online date
  • Clan voice chat
  • Global Chat
  • Report button for players violating the game's ToS or hacking, etc. (Status: according to the Pixonic producer in Aug 2020, a report button is supposed be included in a future release--no further details were given; confirmed by Pix CM in Oct 2020)
• Maps
  • List maps in Alphabetical order in pull down menu (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "With only 13 maps in the game, it isn't difficult to find what you are looking for. However, if it can be done fast, we will try to squeeze it into the production plan.")
  • New map concepts
• Matchmaking / Leagues (Status: This is how the MM works; they constantly do minor tweaks; this is my response on death squads)
  • Modified league points
  • Add additional league (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR producer stated: "We are considering this idea right now, but rather a new league between Masters and Champions.")
• Performance / Technical Features
  • Lag (Status: According to Pixonic the 6.4 update should address lag along with server overhaul)
  • Limit character length and types of characters in user names (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR producer stated: "Yes, we'll need to do that sooner or later.")
  • Font size for iPhone users
  • Drones menu rework
• Pilots
  • Reduce the gold cost
  • Reduce the randomness of skills
  • Titan pilots
  • Universal pilot skills
  • Legendary Pilots for Fujin and Raijin
  • Legendary Pilots for all Bots
• Rewards / Events / Operations / Chests
  • Remove 2,500 components from Tier 1 prizes in Events
  • More gold-based deal offers
  • Overdrive weekend that reduces or eliminates costs for component conversion in WS
  • Daily Log In Rewards
  • Choose type of crate progression (Status: In jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "The league chests need a rework, that's for sure. We have some plans for an overhaul or even an alternative feature in 2021.")
• Titans
  • New Titan Oasis
  • New Titan Odin
  • Nodens should be able to see stealthed allied bots for healing
  • Make Titans available in custom games
  • Motherboards (like microchips for bots)
• Weapons / Equipment
  • Corrosion Rockets
  • Aegis shield purchase (like Ancile)
  • Antimatter Rail Gun
  • Weapons Inventory Page
  • DoT Shotguns
  • Reload Accelerator Module

​
Ruled Out (for now):

• Reload button (Status: Been requested numerous times over the years. Pixonic had a reload button in a test server in ~2016 but removed it without explanation and has not indicated it will be implemented at all in the future).
• Targeting system rework / improvement (Status: Targeting seems to be part of the base code and allows other features in the game to operate, such as stealth, meaning there are multiple dependencies. Pixonic did minor tweaks to targeting to address shooting Ao Mings in the air from the ground and vice versa, but according to Pixonic CM in Oct 2020 a major rework will not be considered until after Pixonic migrates to new servers in 2021).
• Donating (or trading) any resources to (with) other players or accounts (Status: a type of resource donation system used to be in the game but it was abused by players who created multiple accounts and clan-hopped to exploit it. It does not look like any trading system will be implemented in the future).
• Stats (Status: In Dec 2020 Max, WR Producer stated: "We agree that there are players who love in-depth statistics. However, War Robots is a "midcore" game and we predict that the feature will not be popular enough among our players.")
  • Legends League stats (bots / weapons)
  • Stats of each bot at the end of the battle
  • Specific bot in your hangar stats for last 50 games
  • Advanced stats tab
• E-Sports, community leagues, official API ecosystem (Status: in Dec 2020, Max WR Producer stated: " Nope. That would require too much work and resources.")
• Battle Pass for Operations (points / currency rewards) (Status: in January 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "We are fine with how Operations work in War Robots right now.")
• Allow training hangars to test out bots before buying them (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "It's a nice idea in general and we had it on the roadmap for 2021. However, after the final evaluation, the feature's business value/effort proportion proved to be too unfavorable to include it into the plan. You can still test out some of the new content using Hangar X.")
• Allow factions to add boosts / skills / features to bots and hangars (Status: in Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "It's a very interesting concept, yet as War Robots meta is not built around the lore, it will lead to power players choosing factions that suit the current meta, while the lore factor will be neglected. So the faction power bonus is unlikely to appear in the game. However, we will work on including more lore-based features in War Robots and our other games.")
• New MM formula (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "First of all, big thanks to the author of the original post. You did a great job with the calculations and data! *applause*. The concept of the Hangar Power matchmaking is great. It provides those sought after equal matches in most of the cases... on one condition — all players play fair. Right at the point when someone decides to abuse the system, it all falls apart. We struggled with it really bad before we introduced Leagues. (Yes, tankers are also a problem, but we can at least spot them and suspend or ban their accounts.). Your idea with the high-tier robots contributing more to the HPS is a good one. And still, it doesn't provide a guaranteed solution to the problem. Between Tier 1 (Destrier) and Tier 4 (Ao Jun) there is also Tier 2 and Tier 3. That's where it gets painfully difficult to balance the system so that high-level players aren't able to disintegrate mid-levels with just one bot. We had some attempts at a similar algorithm with the Design and Analytics teams in 2019. During several months of tests we couldn't come up with a solid version, that we ourselves wouldn't be able to abuse as players.")
• Synchronize platform releases (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "It's not possible due to our internal releasing procedures.")
• Give Pt or Gold for selling Titans / Bots / Weapons that used Pt or gold to purchase them (Status: In Jan 2021, Max WR Producer stated: "No. With the current economy of the game, the availability of resources directly affects the availability of the content. At this point, we don't want to make the powerful content more available.")

​

I've had my Galaxy S9 for 1.5 years, and it was past time I needed to upgrade. So this weekend I went to a reputable used phone shop and got myself a used Note 10+. And while I was there I got my mom a used S10 5G (wanted to upgrade her Note 5 to a S10+ but they only had the 5G.) They were in AAA quality and around $500 & $350 but they didn't come with a box or the earphones. (I'm in S.Korea btw)
First of all, they're BIG. I missed using "phablets" (I wonder when this term died off) and I need to get used to needing two hands again, but my S9 feels like an iPhone 4 now. I love the screen on this phone. Very clear and bright. Sadly it doesn't have a 90-120mhz screen, something I really want on my next phone.
I love the extra RAM. My S9 was always closing apps too often, but now I feel I can quickly return to my 4th, 5th app. This is surprisingly one of my favorite new things.
Of course it has more power. The S9 couldn't run high end games but this can. Everything is just snappier.
Not the best battery I'm told, but bigger & better than the S9.
The pen is a fun new thing, and I'm sure more experienced guys can talk more about how awesome it is. For now, for me it's a I can take it or leave it thing.
I'm not a big camera guy, but the camera seems to have greatly improved. Haven't tried it too much yet.
The speakers seem much loader and better.
Now a few things I don't like about it :
That front facing camera hole... I try to ignore it but I keep noticing it, especially when watching videos. It seems to be always staring back at me.... Hopefully I'll get used it.
The screen fingerprint reader is noticeably slower than the reader that was on the back of the S9. I would rather have that.
The power button is on the left. WTF samsung. Make up your mind.
And let's not forget NO 3.5 earphone jack. I had to spend another $20 to buy and USB C-3.5mm dongle. A hassle, but I can deal with it I guess.
Also my mom wanted a big phone so she's happy with her new S10 5G. Sadly it doesn't have a SD card slot, why I wanted the S10+, but for a non-power user like her, it's not a big deal.
​
Overall I'm happy with my purchases, and it cost me under $1000 for two phones

Ranking in Idolmaster: Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage is not exactly an easy thing. Since the primary method of point gain for any event is to ‘play the game’, usually the solution is to ‘play the game’ more than everyone else to get the highest rank possible. This obviously isn’t always the case, as Parade has no ranking element beyond SSS rank and Carnival is just a glorified high score ranking. To break it down:

• Parade (SSS): Play the game a lot and play the game really well,
• Groove: Play the game a lot and then after half time also play well,
• Token: Play the game a lot.

…The above is all information directly lifted from a post I made nearly a year ago, where I played M@GIC Forte 2258 times in 174 hours to celebrate it being added to the game, and accidently became a Mayu/HinakoP in the process. At the time I only offered the info I had on Token, and not having officially participated in a high-end groove run felt that it would be presumptuous for me to present my expectations for one. Fast forward nearly an entire year, and I now have a perhaps unfortunate level of experience from ranking the most recent Groove, Never Ends. That said, the strategies I utilised did not resemble what is the expected style of play, so I will do my best to provide all the facts I know about Groove here.
 

Groove Ranking Primer

Groove has existed since the debut of Tulip in Starlight Stage (January 2016?), experiencing several evolutions both major and minor since its original conception. It began life taking a random selection of three (non-collab) songs from one of the three types (rainbow included as a wildcard in all three) and slapping a fourth encore song on the end that required reaching a particular point threshold (called applause) during the first three songs to actually play it. Completing the first three songs would award you points for how high you managed to make the applause go, and completing the encore would award a fixed number of points based on your score rank.
Worth noting that the fourth song is the new one people actually wanted to play the event for, thus forcing them to go through filler to reach it. A popular interpretation of the event said by men wiser than I is that Groove is taking the bus through the bad neighbourhood, having to make three shady stops before finally reaching your destination. From a purely casual perspective it at least exposes the player base to more songs they may not have had the time to explore, challenging them to diversify, and offers the chance to run into cool combinations of songs. However, it often causes problems for people trying to achieve full combos or high score runs on the event song, being forced to play three other songs before it every time they fail, which is very detrimental to those who cannot calm their nerves and extremely detrimental to those just want to play the damn song already.
Anyway, the basic mechanics have changed three times since the beginning;

• February 2018, 2x points option added for grooves beyond the half way point,
• Also, February 2018, applause cap raised from 50 to 100,
• November 2018, Live Party can now earn points for live groove.

The 2x points option being added was particularly innocuous, and in fact changed an old strategy where playing the groove and instantly leaving the encore would be more point efficient. The applause cap being raised is likely in response to continued power creep in cards added since the beginning of the game, making it easier and easier to reach 50. The difference in points received for 50 applause versus 100 on a master groove is only a mere 25 points (480 vs 505).
The real devastating calamity here is when Live Party was added as an option for Groove point gain. This would have been a neat feature to be able to casually rank Groove with your friends if it worked as everyone expected, but for some reason the points gain per minute with Live Party is significantly higher than playing Groove, at least during 1x. This change completely modified the way the first half of the event was played when ranking competitively, going from a solo endurance game into a team-based speedtest.net simulator.
 
The basic mechanics when translated into functional requirements for ranking would be as follows:

• Ensure that you spend all 198 hours (may differ) on playing the game,
• Have the fastest possible device to reduce load times,
• Have the lowest ping for connecting to the server to reduce load times,
• Do not disconnect or die in as many songs as possible in Live Party,
• Have 4 other accounts do the same as the above,
• Get the highest Applause possible in every Groove.

Groove is a wretched amalgamation of two different events in one, meaning you should be twice as prepared (or maybe 5x as prepared) to run it than if you were to run something like Token. Having a multiplayer segment means you need several other people to be as prepared as you as well, where those people also need to abide by some of the rules above (fast device, low ping, try not to disconnect). After that, you must jump into one of the most skill demanding score attacks in the game, where combo is the primary aspect that will determine your applause.
Tie the above with the requirement to have your M1 Mac Mini emulating Starlight Stage, living next to the game server in Japan using a hardline to avoid disconnects, be able to invite 4 of your buddies around to also receive the ping benefits and speed benefits, and somehow remain sane enough to press the Play Groove button after hour 190 and not think the entire game has changed into a limbo designed purely to torture you. You start to see why planning to play Groove in at least a slightly effective manner is not simple.
That said, for every insane person out there willing to take on this challenge, there will always be others attempting the exact same thing. Chances are they’re facing the exact same problems, and have likely already reached out on Twitter to find others willing to suffer with them for the first half. While it’s not possible to fill all of the above requirements with maximum efficiency, there’s usually enough instability in the event runtime to allow for mistakes to be made and still come out on top. Usually.
 

Event Preperation

My own preparation for the event saw the completion of, maybe, three and a half of the requirements above? Like I said, there’s a lot of instability surrounding this event, and getting close enough to achieving all of the above was enough to give a chance at a high rank regardless. The rank you end up with is likely dependent on how many other teams of other players were able to be formed for the first half of the event, with very little people choosing to forego Live Party in favour of just playing perfect applause grooves for the entire event, unless you’re a robot. Sorry to all robots out there, but this probably counts as cheating.
I still live in Australia, and must suffer the internet curse I am bound to with horrible stability and slow speeds. Even if I was capable of moving to Japan for a week and playing the game there, there’s the tiny problem of a global pandemic preventing anything like that from being a good idea. Not that it would be a good idea anyway. I would also expect to not play all 198 hours of the event, but more on this later.
I already had an A13 processer in the form of an iPhone 11 I picked up before last year’s December Token that was still in mostly functional condition. Since then, the A14 had been released in the iPhone 12, which would be another accessible upgrade to brainlet simpletons like myself, but it was becoming more and more evident that the increases from device speed were negligible compared to the losses suffered from making mistakes or just from ping. Alternate properties to focus on when selecting the device become apparent, such as the weight when carrying it around for 100+ hours, or the temperature to not feel like your lap is going to get burned from someone spamming the Twitch chat. Worth noting again, the speed of your device will be throttled by the slowest device in your Live Party room during the first half of the event anyway, so if you’re stuck with your pal on his Samsung S5 then you may want to consider buying them a device rather than yourself.
Another addition is to get a secondary device for yourself. This can be used to complete business while still playing the game on the first device; just being careful not to log on in the wrong order and delete your entire play.
Then comes the resource preparation for the two separate parts of the event: The Live Party segment (1st half) and the Groove segment (2nd half). Saying half is a little misleading as the Groove segment is usually always shorter than the Live Party segment, but both feel like they take a lifetime to complete anyway so that’s kind of meaningless.
 
Groove Segment (2nd half)
The Groove part is all about achieving the most applause possible with the least effort. Most of this is controlled by player skill and team composition, but is also assisted by the appeal bonus from the support team. Groove support teams work like normal ones where you get a 50% appeal bonus from the 10 highest appeal counts you have for that type of song (or groove in this case), but with the additional bonus of the Groove type being applied to the cards first. So in the case of a Vocal Groove, the cards with the highest appeal will likely end up being your vocal cards, who receive an incredible 150% bonus to that stat. If you’ve taken a look at your inventory and noticed that one weird card you’ve got with 10,000+ vocal appeal, you should think to yourself: What if I had 11 of these? And one in every colour? Or maybe, you don’t think that, since not everyone has the wallet to make that happen. Nor the stupidity. Or maybe you did have the resources to make it happen, but you spent it all on your Chieri4 instead and it’s a Vocal Groove. You can’t always win.
This is about the only way to increase applause in a passive way. The rest comes down to things that you have to control more actively, as depressing as that is.
The teams you use are going to depend on the circumstances you find yourself in after you have already been playing for hundreds of hours. The objective is to reach 99 applause on every single groove, but this is not going to be a reality, especially after all that time battling with Live Party. In the grand scheme of things, I narrowed down three team compositions that had any relevant difference: High Scoring, Ultimate Defence, and one that sits in the middle of this scale. You can see these teams below:
 

• High Scoring. Syoko5, Shiki4, Asuka4, Yukari2, Nono4.

This team uses Resonance to take full advantage of the stat bonus for the groove and combines several skills with high percentage bonuses for very high scoring per note. The amount of defence on the team is limited to only healing from synergy and nothing else. Worth noting that I had to roll for Syoko5 during the Live Party segment of the event, which was a dramatic endeavour.

• Halfway. Uzuki1, Minami4, Chinami1, Nao3, Rika2.

Offers 3 layers of protection and a plethora of scoring coverage. The combination of Uzuki1 and Minami4 effectively covers 50% of the song for you, while Chinami1 with Tuning and Rika2 with Overload give a near 100% percent resistance to anything other than misses. This offers nearly as much protection as a regular auto team, but scores far, far better. Chinami1 as centre instead of a usual Skill Boost adds 30% extra appeal to the team and gives a better scoring skill, while opening up another slot to use Symphony instead for the far better boost. The only significant difference between this team and the below one is the inclusion of Helen1, which changes the functionality greatly enough to make them worthwhile as two different teams.

• Ultimate Defence. Uzuki1, Rika4, Chinami1, Nao3, HELEN1.

A variant of the above team that allows full auto during the encore song. This team setup worked in principle but when optimising it for vocal attribute, cracks started to show. The centre effect only existed on Cool cards, Helen is the only Damage Guard of her class who is also Cool, Nao3 and Minami3 (both Cool) are the vocal equivalents that sync on 9 seconds with Uzuki1. There was no efficient way to fit a Passion in here without sacrificing either functionality or appeal. I decided to swap Minami4 for Rika4 in the end. Again, having a secondary device to complete business during the groove section can be done while autoing the encore with this team for no loss of appeal (and very little loss of time). This is probably one of the best scoring options to take while still being able to auto, and whether or not this had been figured out by other players was a mystery, but I like to think very little of myself so I assumed I was not alone.
 
Understanding the line-up in these teams requires understanding the minimum required of the player to achieve 99 applause. The most effective method is to keep one’s combo high for the majority of the Groove, trying to only break combo towards the beginning of the first song or the end of the last song to benefit the most from the ridiculously high multipliers offered around 1000 combo. The other effective method is simply having absolutely insane scoring potential per note, where any combo saving pieces are removed in favour that you’ll hopefully just gorilla your way through most of the song and end up with a bunch of applause anyway. The High Scoring and Halfway teams above try to fill those two ends of the scale.
A defensive team ideally can score 99 applause while also giving the player additional benefits, such as the ability to auto the encore song where applause no longer matters. This usually required running one of the many Damage Guard SRs that have a high uptime but low activation chance alongside one of the many cards with a centre effect that raises the chance of skill activation. Since the colour of the groove is random, you cannot plan in advance to use the type of damage guard that corresponds with the groove and get the free on-type chance activation bonus of 30%. It’s also not advisable to change teams too often, as this obviously wastes precious time. Note that while using a Skill Boost in the centre slot would be the expected solution, the existence of the Cross Type cool cards give a 35% bonus to skill activation which when combined with cards like HELEN we can create teams with 100% skill activation chance and still receive additional benefits such as more appeal bonus and a better active skill, since Skill Boost is massively outclassed by Symphony in this day and age.
Beyond that, the only plan for groove is to pray you aren’t too brain dead to play.
 
Live Party Segment (1st half)
I kinda dodged talking about planning for Live Party and talked about Groove related preparations first instead. The reason for this is that I while I did indeed achieve the requirement of having a setup that allowed as little disconnects and deaths as possible, and I did indeed have a full Live Party room with 5 accounts capable of doing the same, I was missing one crucial aspect that I did not explicitly mention. I did not have 4 other people to play the game with me.
I didn’t mention it since it’s technically not required.
 

How not to play Live Party

Cheating is hard to define. I’m not starting out with a vague statement like that to imply I may have cheated, since in reality all I did was solve a problem with a much more convoluted solution due to my extreme lack of trust in other people and myself. I did not realistically expect to get 4 other people to assist me to play a video game for ~100 hours straight, and instead of investing time into making friendships where someone would offer to help me in that situation, I instead spent it all on planning a solution that would give me full control of my fate at the cost of sanity.
I present the Rank 6 Shift Project.
Lovingly named after a certain level 6 shift project which also involved having countless clones die for the sake of one achieving great power, the basic setup was to prepare 4 other accounts that had access to the correct cards with the right potentials to form an auto team in Live Party, and do so on relatively fast devices in a setup accessible by one person with knowledge that they would still need to live as a human during the hours of operation.
What you can see in this image of it in action is 4 iPad Minis, 5th Generation assembled within a large tray with enough room for charge cables to be inserted or removed as necessary. These devices were chosen as they have a relatively fast processer (A12), have a large screen size for ease in pushing buttons, and are ‘cheap’ to afford ($600 AUD). Having all the devices have an identical aspect ratio was important to avoid confusion around the location of on-screen buttons, and to avoid speed throttling by having even one device with a slower processer. Having a high battery life was also desirable as being forced to keep this thing plugged in for too long was not ideal either.
As you’ve probably already figured, yes, this was not a smart idea and I cannot defend my decision. I will continue to explain it however.
 
Live Party Mechanics
The actual mechanics behind how this abomination replaces other players is more than just surface deep. In a regular Live Party room, you would have to complete the following steps to make it through one whole cycle, which would repeat thousands of times:

1. One player hosts the Live Party room.
2. Four other players connect via code, friend list or public lobby.
3. Each player that is not the host hits the Ready button, chooses whether or not to play with stamina, and accepts.
4. The host starts the Live.
5. A random song is selected and all five players are given a fifteen second countdown that can be skipped by all pressing ready again.
6. The song is loaded, played and the results are determined and shown in a secondary screen were players are again given a fifteen second countdown that can be skipped by all pressing ready again.
7. All players continue through the various results screens before being either returned to the lobby, or kicked back to the Live Party main menu due to disconnecting.
8. Repeat from step 3.

This is modified to be the following when controlling 5 accounts:

1. …
2. The four players who are not the hosts forcibly quit and reopen the game, cancelling the rejoin option when prompted.
3. They then manually rejoin the room as in step 2, while the host completes the live and skips through the results screens.
4. Repeat from step 3.

If one player is in control of all 5 players, there is several issues that need solving to not only ensure you can get through a loop, but can do so at a competitive speed. Having all devices be the same ensures that as little mistakes are made as possible when it comes to pushing on-screen buttons such as the Ready Up and Continue buttons. Where possible it is best to avoid having to press buttons all together, or to only do so when time permits. Ideally, you’d play without the use of stamina so the extra players never have to refill, but taking the extra time to check the tickbox is a significant loss of time in the thousands of live party games you’ll have to play. Not to mention that stamina can be refilled in slow time while reconnecting to the room and waiting for the host to finish the live. Since those accounts are already ready and waiting, it is easy for the host to spam through the results screen where the other players are listed as disconnected, and be returned to the lobby again. This also means that the speed of the other devices only throttles the start of the song loading times, and will have no effect on anything at the end of the song.
All devices would be operating on the same network, so it would suffer the same weakness as any other room should connection break, as failure to connect on even one account would break the flow of the room. Having the host device have access to a roaming mobile network as backup allowed me to avoid any connection hiccups which are a severe threat when playing, as connection errors during Live Party are not well understood and can lead to numerous errors such as being stuck in the Live Results screen unable to continue or randomly closing the room and not giving you any points for the play. Another common issue would be if the host starts the live before all accounts are ready, leaving one out and adding in a random from the online queue instead who probably breaks the team comp with his Nanami N card used for fan grinding. This is largely avoided with this setup since all 4 accounts are typically readied in the same hand motion before moving to the main account to start the live. It’s technically an advantage, and I will take any advantage I can get with this disastrous set up.
 
Live Party Autoplay
During the actual song playtime, if a player achieves 30% of notes as misses, the game automatically disconnects you and you receive a 20% penalty to event points. If this happens to the host, the room crashes and needs to be remade. If you die, you aren’t disconnected but you suffer a 50% penalty to event points. Playing on Master+ is required for the highest event point gain, and Passion has the overall fastest songs. Since Live Party teams still operate similar to a regular team (just without a guest) they are also capable of functioning as an auto team. The major difference is that centre effects no longer apply to every character, and instead apply individually to each character regardless of whether they are in the centre or not. This means that Damage Guards that previously would not achieve 100% activation chance could do so if they had a centre affect that gives an increase to activation chance. Cards with 60% chance to activate their affects could already achieve 100% through the on-type bonus of 30% and also the flat bonus from skill potential. Also, notably, score has no affect on the event point gain in Live Party, so you can get a C score and still walk away with maximum efficiency.
With all this in mind, the auto team I replicated on 5 accounts looked like this. Both Passion Perfect Locks are used which offers a 12s/15s setup. A full analysis of all songs reveals that 12s/15s is nearly as robust as the much more popular 9s/12s, with the weakness being that it is safer to play for the first 12 seconds (until first Perfect Lock activation) rather than only the first 9. Since scoring is not an issue, 2 Damage Guards are taken to absolutely ensure death is avoided. Skill Boosts were best for their high uptime, and would still achieve 100% activation regardless of type/colour since their own centre effect still applied to them despite not having a tri-colour team. The timer on the Skill Boost was not relevant, as long as it’s not 7. Ew.
So that’s how it would be. While this is still autoplay, it is potentially more thought-demanding than playing the game normally would be, since all 5 accounts need to be constantly managed to ensure no error is made when re-joining, that they all still have plenty of stamina, that they are not about to run out of battery, and that they are all accessible once the live is complete. This resulted in less than 1.5 minutes of actual auto-time where I did not have to do anything, and 1 minute every loop devoted to hitting ready, starting the live, closing the game, reopening, and re-joining, and playing the first few seconds of the song on my main account at the same time.
I again must repeat, this is not an ideal solution. Having 4 other players back you up and do these tasks for you as was intended is the only strategy I would recommend after trying this, and at least makes you feel like less of a degenerate since you didn’t have to create 4 imaginary friends.
 

Event Run

I already knew that I would be at a disadvantage due to using the Rank 6 Shift Project as a substitute for actual players, both in speed and in mental capability. Staying awake for a long time is incredibly hard even when just autoing a token event. If you’re trying to do the same while needing to keep the mental aptitude to manage 5 accounts at once, you have a much, much more difficult situation facing you. I was under the impression that the ‘measurement’ of remaining focused over long periods of time in sleep studies was known as Vigilance, but I don’t know if it’s fair to put this in the same category. This isn’t something you’ll have people doing research on in any official laboratory anyway, unless it’s happening in some secret underground Starlight Stage lab as we speak. The same place where they developed Haruna2.
What I’m trying to say is that while I would appreciate someone calling the application of this strategy impressive, the reality is that it’s incredibly stupid.
Knowing this disadvantage, I had to plan for as little sleep as possible but still enough to make it through the Live Party section while maintaining sanity. Thanks to the assistance of Zhu, the best in the business when it comes to supporting terrible decisions by rankers, we had prepared a 7-hour-max sleep cycle that would use three sets of sleep; 2 hours, 3 hours, and 2 hours as the expected breakdown. These sleep times would be spread to get maximum advantage of feeling refreshed and to attempt to avoid the usual problems when staying awake for very long periods, such as microsleep choking and total mental shutdown.
Sometime within the first few days the game server went down for about 30 minutes, which I used to get some sleep which overall felt kind of useless and only made my head cloudier, so thanks for nothing Bamco/Cygames. Other than that, I had two hours sleep half way through the Live Party segment, and 3 hours of sleep before the beginning of the 2x Groove segment, with a potential 2 hours of sleep to use during that groove segment if required.
Usual strategies such as quick 2-minute naps in between auto plays were less and less effective due to the immediate mental requirements of setting up the devices after waking and would often lead to making mistakes or just falling back asleep immediately.
My Brother came to stay with me for a few nights to help me out, since he’s a great guy. I feel bad since I made the implication (and truly thought) that I could do other stuff while playing, but this quickly turned out to be impossible. Fortunately, he managed to find plenty of ways to entertain himself, so I really hope he didn’t waste too much of his time here.
The painful reality sets in day by day, where you notice just how boring ranking Groove is. When your hands, brain, and eyes need to be near constantly occupied by the game, there’s really not much you can do outside of continuously managing your game state. I don’t particularly have much to add to the Event Run section because of this; I can’t remember much of what I did since I didn’t really do anything. Just play the game. And often not play the game, due to completely forgetting how to do so on two separate occasions.
 

Results

I often try to keep my personal opinions away from posts like these, beyond inserting the occasional joke that requires a PhD in the history of #cg_general to understand. It is an achievement post technically, but just like my last one about token events I found myself talking mainly about the hard facts of Groove and the strategies that can be used to combat it, not very much about the actual ranking experience from my perspective. I think an entire essay could be written on the psychology surrounding the desire for any human to willingly stay awake for 200+ hours straight, which would be best left completely separate to strategy discussion like this.
But this is a results section, and I haven’t even talked about what result I got, nor why I even chose to rank this event in the first place. I don’t know, it’s got a Cinderella Clock in the background, I guess? I like clocks? Karen and Fumika are pretty great? So are the rest of the singers?
Maybe I just wanted to test the Rank 6 Shift Project to see if it actually had any competitive viability. The conclusion I’ve come to is technically yes, if you’re not in the weak ~99.9999% of the population who can’t seem to stay mentally sane after hour 150, like me. Did I even have a choice? It’s not a muscle I can exercise, or a technique that can be mastered. Every time you want to ‘practice’ you potentially do more damage to yourself and don’t improve at all. You either can, or you can’t. Or you can cheat, I guess. I once again made countless mistakes during the event, many of which are my own fault and are somewhat expected to happen over the course of the event, but the major ones are all tied into the approach I decided to take to even be able to compete in the first place. I didn't even get rank 6, so the name of the technique is a big lie.
Despite everything I just said, I paradoxically still had a lot of fun. I don’t think anyone helping me had fun, I don’t know if any of the runners around me did, but I sure have some interesting memories from the experience. While I didn’t have much community support during the run since I did it in secret, I’d like to thank a few people who have given me information or support in the past (either directly or indirectly) and who have generally been great people to know of:

• Zhu, and the gods in his stream chat,
• Rayvur, for giving me a goal to sink to,
• Lolicore, for being aware that I exist,
• Rafe, for still managing to provide useful information despite not playing the game anymore,
• Dwr3k, and the others in VC (looking at you morstain) for doing god’s work and hosting a CG anime rewatch.

 

Fun Stats

• I earned 16.8 million fans over the event, raising me from a total of 764,079,984 to 781,869,928. This is nearly identical to the 16.5 million fans I earned during my token run last December.
  • My breakdown of fans across Cute, Cool and Passion has evened up a little where Passion was falling behind, with 249, 296, and 235 million respectively. Cool needs to calm down a little.
• I leveled up 0 times, from 500 to 500.
• I have no idea how much gold I earned since I went from 68.9 million to being capped. I haven’t even tried to empty the impossible amount left over in the present box.
• I had 63k jewels prepared, which I knew was more than enough, but I could not doubt the possibility that Syoko5 would be a relevant card to roll for. I’m not sure how much I spent in total on the event and Syoko, but I only have 17k left now.
  • I saved some jewels by using 6,450 stamina from bottles. I still have 21,620 stamina left over in bottles.
• I got 3 memory keys from live party drops.
• I gained:
  • Only 1544 rookie trainers, despite selling 4000 of them in fear of capping.
  • 360 trainers, 160 veteran trainers, 18 master trainers.
  • 158 cute earrings, 134 cute bracelets, 34 cute tiaras.
  • 243 cool earrings, 145 cool bracelets, 33 cool tiaras.
  • 2253 passion earrings, 1173 passion bracelets, 235 passion tiaras.
  • 1692 shoes, and I went from 8k dresses to being capped.
• Natalia, featured on the passion auto team I used, earned over 2 million fans during the event. I only bring this one up because she’s pretty much the only idol I used that wasn’t already 10 million or above.
• I pathetically attempted to use my Live Party Emblems before the event taking them down from 900k to 722k. I ended up capped half way through the Live Party period.