Struggling with both this season 🥀

Play it, yeah?

It ramps up the difficulty of fights and platforming soon into the game, as if it knows you've played and mastered Hollow Knight. I just hope people don't find that prohibitive as the movement feels so good and figuring out the fights is a joy, plenty of room for loadout experimentation too.

The flow of exploration is great, I never felt aimless or like I was being nagged in any direction. I went slowly without guidance (STRONGLY recommend) and got to 94%. Kept discovering bosses, tools that made the game feel 10x better, or entire areas behind inconspicuous openings. Honestly the glee.

The scope of the world is enormous and still dense with beautiful artwork, level design, and environmental storytelling. It has so much personality and sense of place with more tonal variation than Hollow Knight, death and decay are still major themes but there's much more life to contrast with.

I'd even say if you had to own any one single-player game to "get" the medium then I'm struggling to think of a better one.

These are gorgeous

Never been there a day in my life guv

Many are saying this

Something very satisfying about the connection between the physical principle that you can't measure something without altering it, and there being a sad inevitability for an immortal being unable to access their memories without causing irreversible changes to them

Holy negvar

So yeah enjoyable season, the things I am most grateful for are caring about rank less and an apparent decrease in factionalism. Also thankful for Review and Sertalp + the Solio team as ever for making the game so interesting, and ofc my fwends in discord 💖. Hope there's plenty to explore in 25/26

It's common sentiment that the analytics edge has reduced this season with an apparent uptick in competent teams, but imho it's mostly a coincidence that analytics agreed with the wider view of key players. The gulf in Palmer EOs in the last few GWs still shows vastly different processes

With respect to mistakes I made a few xMins/other oversights and missed a couple of deadline news events, but I know I leak EV due to process. Deterministic solving is fab but as long as we could be representing the problem better we don't know how much potential EV per GW is left ungrabbed

Regardless "Early FH and roll a lot" resulted in all subsequent chips practically choosing when to play themselves, something I didn't mind this time. Consecutive GWs in a period otherwise not hungry for transfers made AM24 obvious and a Haaland injury made delaying a WC beyond GW30 untenable

I chose to play FH9 for around 14 EV, being content to not use it as a late season variance tool and believing that the increased roll limit and potentially fewer DGWs would devalue its use. Seems to me those of us that did this got a fortunate outcome. Credit to @analyticf.pl for the image

Better pricing and an increased roll limit were solid changes, was a great chance to break away from received solver-logic wisdom. I'm also one of the apparent minority that enjoyed what Assistant Manager did for planning, though I hope we don't see another delayed chip reveal

Really nice viz, is the random sample totally random or amongst active players?