Absolutely indeed! I’ll never buy an Nvidia card because of how anti-customer they are. It started with them locking out PCI passthrough when I was building a gaming Linux machine like ten years ago.
I wonder if moving people towards the idea of just following the companies that don’t treat them with contempt is an angle that will work. I know Steph Sterling’s video on “consumer” vs “customer” helped crystallize that attitude in me.
I know I’m getting off topic, but Mesmer was such a cool concept in general. Having a CC class focused on mindgames was a stroke of genius, because playing a mental game is a lot more fun than say, WoW style mezzers that take control away from the character. I enjoyed the fact that, aside from Elementalist knocking, hard CC also came at a cost to the mezzer too, in addition to typically being more tactical and of a short duration.
That said some people hate the whole “prison of the mind” thing too. I know zoners are typically pretty reviled in fighting games.
GW1 is actually a really good example in another way: I think its Domination Mesmer was a fantastic offensive spin on the idea of a mezzer a la EQ’s Enchanters. In general the idea of an offensive curse-slinger that CCs vulns enemies is where I’ve been gravitating more and more in Warframe since the big armour strip changes in September of last year.
On the happy brain juice, I think this is something people miss. I know my Sevagoth and Nyx are easily able to get top kills unless there’s a dedicated murder machine like Gyre or Mesa. But I think I have a lot of bias due to having every weapon and almost all mods available to me, so I can easily configure a loadout to be highly performant. The gear-reliance is probably another factor deterring people from playing debuff frames, because it’s not immediately obvious how much offensive potential they have. Even for me it took a while before the murder gremlin hiding in my brain was like, “wait, doesn’t Nyx have a huge offensive potential?”
With the first point, I want to clarify, most “supports” (by my understanding of the term) actually have some kind of debuff that increases their damage. For example Nyx has access to Pacifying Bolts which is functionally a one-handed Tharros Strike, even on SP spawn densities. Enemies with no armour are functionally at a 20x or higher damage multiplier, albeit less assuming you’re running a Corrosive weapon and not building Viral around fullstrip. Frost has access to fullstrip and then some combination of a personal CC/CD buff, or a party-wide Viral amp through Freeze Force. Banshee has Sonic Fracture and optionally Sonar for the funnies or on Demos, Eximus and Acolytes.
The kind of support frame I was focusing on has good personal damage tools, but the support comes from the fact that these tools benefit the whole party as well.
Trinity is a bit of an outlier in that she’s all in on survivability, especially with something like Vampire Leech/Nourish builds which have the potential to shieldgate everyone constantly. Admittedly I think she and Wisp are what people think of a “support” as, and not say debuffers like Frost, Caliban, Sevagoth etc.
Edit:
That said, this is a great answer. It’s very insightful as to where my own personal biases were formed: the kind of content I do, which is primarily long solo runs, 5+ rotations of endless and Duviri, and usually with Alliance members and friends. In these situations, debuffer CCs shine. I do think someone like Nyx is very misunderstood for linear speed missions with pubbies though, as Pacifying Bolts is a very powerful damage booster when you’re moving quickly.
This is a good insight, but I’d say the big appeal for a “support” character in a game where everyone has the same guns and weapons: if you’re making everyone else stronger, you’re making yourself stronger too.
I’m not sure how the tech is progressing, but ChatGPT was completely dysfunctional as an expert system, if the AI field still cares about those. You can adapt the Chinese Room problem to whether a model actually has applicability outside of a particular domain (say, anything requiring guessing words on probabilities, or stabilising a robot).
Another problem is that probabilistic reasoning requires data. Just because a particular problem solving approach is very good at guessing words based on a huge amount of data from a generalist corpus, doesn’t mean it’s good at guessing in areas where data is poor. Could you comment on whether LLMs have good applicability as expert systems in, say, medicine? Especially obscure diseases, or heterogeneous neurological conditions (or both like in bipolar disorders and schizophrenia-related disorders)?