This isn’t going me trying to be sarcastic, or hyperbolic, or whatever. I take things seriously and, naively, won’t read beyond what is written.

I think it should be fair enough to read this and “weigh” its meaning and intent:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models

Alright then. There are two groups, one asking for explicit bans, the other supporting open weights. Anthropic here saying they don’t belong to the first group, but as we’ll see in a moment, not quite to the second as well. I add a simple observation to this, but if you notice whoever ends up subscribing to one group or the other is ALMOST ALWAYS guessable (like 99% success of this heuristic) by looking at personal interests. OpenGPT asks for a ban, Nvidia, selling the hardware, wants it going on and on. It’s not like there’s any relevant analysis or logic, everyone is simply pulling toward the side that is more convenient. Not the one that is more correct, or complete. In “technical terms” they ALL come after the processes that drive them, not before. They are driven, they don’t drive this process.

The rest of this quote is irrelevant, but the thesis as well. Is this just pure and simple imperialism? An American dude worrying of losing supremacy? China is certainly worrying, but the primary, worldwide threat, RIGHT NOW, is US fascism and imperialism. China isn’t actively bombing anyone, right now, the US are.

“Authoritarian governments” are worrying whether it’s the CCP, or US, or whatever, whoever else. It’s this whole SHITHOLE to be worrying. Bombs land whether or not driven by AI. Claiming this authoritarian problem as it is somewhat dependent on AI misses the point by miles. Authoritarianism is a problem WELL BEFORE AI. And AI is a problem, right now, because it is ALREADY in US authoritarian hands. Not as a powerful tool, but as an economic-destroying tool. It is devouring human resources in a way that is unprecedented on this planet.

The bottom line of all this, what Amodei is saying, is that the race to supremacy is legitimate. Whoever is at the top subjugates everyone else. Therefore, it’s better if it’s “us”, rather than “them.” Both can be authoritarian and destructive, but if it’s us being destructive, at least we destroy them, more.

Or: the problem is not the killing as a moral ground. The problem is seizing the means to kill, so that we are killers rather than killed.

Lex Luthor dilemma once again, as anticipated.

“Powerful AI models may be misused,” so what? The only distinction here is not epistemic, as it should be, it’s pure, once again, ownership.

WHAT IS MISUSE of AI? Who applies “guardrails”, and to defend whose interests?

Amodei here has already sidestepped and deleted any pretense of general regulation, any idea of universal, collective policies to apply outside biases. There are no rules, only control.

Here he’s saying that he’s not against a ban of Chinese AIs, but merely because he thinks the practical means as ineffective. He WANTS to ban Chinese AI, but in a way that actually works. The goal is the same, the debate is: how can US industry + US government continue to impose their own fascist control on the world? How can they stay on top?

The reason why this is all factual description is that he doesn’t acknowledge anywhere that the “misuse” can be THEIR OWN. They are FULLY RACIST in their own views (or in this case it’s less about racism and more as universally nationalist, but it amounts to the exact same thing). Whatever they do is right, whatever “the other party” does is dangerous and threatening.

(We’ll see below he’s for regulation, but it’s regulation of the public-facing offer, not internal development. So there are two halves, the risk posed by models available to everyone, where he wants to put “safeguards”, and the internal ones. In this case, since regulation is not as easy, he merely wants to seize power and be on top. Self-righteous dominance. Which is what I’m commenting, to be precise.)

US businesses are “legitimate.” Non-US businesses are illegitimate, or they decide if they are. They set safeguards, for you. Not for themselves, as they are the law, they have already ascribed to themselves the superior morality. They do not simply act as Kings of the whole world, they theorize their supremacy.

I have no idea about Amodei, the man behind the name. Haven’t done any research, or read interviews to gleam what kind of man he might be. I have no previous bias. But this is, if very slightly masked, the exact same white nationalist fascist supremacy that Elon Musk ascribes too. Slight different language, but exact same meaning.

If it was even in doubt if Amodei was in support of fair competition: he’s clearly not.

He’s saying: let them compete without the hardware to do the work. They likely will be able to do something, but starting with a significant disadvantage means we’ll always be far ahead.

This too was anticipated: AI companies cannot control USE of AI, so they are trying to close down ACCESS. They aren’t trying to use this tactics against China, but also against ALL other competitors. They are trying to seize the process UPSTREAM: control hardware producers, and through corruption, government contracts and sheer power, lock in those hardware producers to themselves, so that no one else can interfere.

This is pure delirium as it is both factually incorrect, and also going nowhere. If just above he complained that some policies aren’t wrong, in his mind, but don’t work in practice, here he propose exactly the same: something vague and with no practical application.

Even assuming that the initial statement is correct, and is not, what are these policies that “deter this behavior”? How?

A reminder that “distillation” is equal to the process that allowed these AI businesses to exist in the first place. They all started by stealing, now demand policies so that stealing stays as their own personal privilege.

Yeah, not much to add here because this is the only reasonable point.

But WHY it is the only reasonable point, compared to all the others? Because this is the only one where the problem is seen from an epistemic point of view that applies outside interests and biases. Everything else he wrote amounts to: how can we have universal policies where Anthropic makes all rules? Here we move to: how can we have universal rules that apply uniformly to everyone, INCLUDING ANTHROPIC?

Why all other points are intended to favor Anthropic, while damaging or hindering competitors, and only one is intended to operate outside bias? How can you think that is proposal is acceptable for anyone that isn’t you?

And please tell, how do you guarantee that these tests are enforced? How do you make sure that what’s hidden is not? Because it’s all self-defeating: if this regulates the public space, so the AI offered AS A SERVICE, it still does nothing for AI that is internally developed and used.

And here comes a well known pattern, now defined as “end times fascism”:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk

The problem of this (fascist) rhetoric, depicting a chilling scenario, is that it would like to be all about AI, but in the actual reality the leverage of this danger given by AI is quite minimal.

You could make maybe a case about “weaponize pandemic-level viruses with widely available materials,” through help of AI, but this is really a minuscule risk in front of a giant one that is ignored.

There are ALREADY giant capabilities of doing damage on an unprecedented scale, through viruses. This is nothing new, and we’ve been here a while. Only reason this hasn’t happened is that, as Covid has shown, no one has any control. While viruses can do more damage and slip out of control compared to atomic bombs, it’s not like, as humanity, we face these types of large scale threats for the first time.

AI moves close to nothing. It’s still the same stupid human beings, with too much power. It’s already a risk. It has always been a risk.

Amodei here just wants to be the man with his finger on the button. Because he thinks he knows better. Because he thinks he is the responsible king no one has elected. Because he happens to be rich and influential.

Who watches the watchmen? The Devil.

Hand them off, then.

You are the owner of authoritarian hands, working for an authoritarian, fascist government.

And if distillation was stopped, your business wouldn’t exist.

As previously seen, if STEP 1 was evoking of good old RED SCARE, STEP 2 is all about remembering they already infiltrated the government, so it’s time to precisely use the law for its purpose: protect the thieves.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/us-threatens-sanctions-against-chinese-ai-models-over-ip-theft/

AI companies that exist solely because they stole everything they could lay their collective (but oligarchic) hands on, that illegally appropriated the whole breadth of open source domain, tightly licensed if any government existed to have these rules respected, rather than taking bribes precisely to avert their eyes and pretend not to know. So they appropriate what has been built and exists to be public, to make it all their own. Then CRY and demand governments to defend their bogus IPs from Chinese competitors. Not the American ones, who do the exact same thing, since they are all in the same scam and they all collaborate to their petty crimes. Nope, it’s the Chinese specifically who are the enemies since they oppose their fascist nationalism.

So, how is it?

Steal from open source to build AI, absolutely fine. Even if you’ve just made a crime to steal from EVERYONE and appropriate what is public. You profit from this, everyone else is damaged.

Then you copy this rebranded IP, to deliver back to the community, and this is very, very bad. Against the rules. You are hurting single entities in order to serve the whole community. BAD. COMMUNIST BADNESS.

America: we protect the abusers, we are the abusers. Our rule of law is the abuse.

How they love their laws when they can be exploited for personal interest, and how they immediately vanish when it comes to preserve and further their crimes.

To be fascist is the American state, and to call it so is mere accurate description, not hyperbole or projection.

Of course it doesn’t matter whether or not these accusations are even plausible:

It’s only ironical that the following unrelated news was a fuckup of OpenAI, that eventually was fixed through Chinese technology, because the American tools were unreliable:

At least this prelude to the apocalypse is quite funny.

Kimi K3 comes public, a new AI model that seems performing quite well, in a way that is at least somewhat comparable to the most advanced “frontier” models available right now.

This is relevant for a couple of reason: it’s Chinese, and it’s open source.

Open source here means a few different things, but mainly you can use it locally in some capacity.

You should see how this is a significant threat to US hyperscalers, because everything they are spending money on might as well be close to worthless.

This being the overall main discourse between those who are AI-savvy and trying to figure out “what happens next.”

The bulk of these conclusions is roughly this: the difference between “frontier” AI models and everything else is quite minimal, especially in practice. It means that for a daily common use the difference between having access to the best AI resources and the average ones is negligible. There’s almost no difference in practice.

But the real threat is that this higher performance gap also gets closed within 3 months, or less. AI models get better, but all AI models get better. Those who spend the most, whether OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or whatever, spend INSANE amount of money for a minuscule advantage. An advantage that gets smaller and more negligible over time. Something with immense costs, to produce an advantage, that vanishes immediately after.

We all know already “the bubble is gonna pop” (and it should have popped already, if it wasn’t for fascist government protection). But the point here is how badly, because these big US companies have literally nothing to sell.

At a basic level AI was a trojan horse that stole the breadth of human knowledge, siphoning it out of public hands and handing it to private companies. They stole everything so that they could “launder” it through AI mastication, and sell it again as their own. So, banally, if your company produces and sells software, you feel the lure of AI, to accelerate that production. Only to realize that you are handing out your own competence, BACK to the AI private company. The AI company appropriates your work, and at that point two things happen. Either your software company shuts down, or is bought. In the meantime “layoffs”, all around the world, in order to support that “capex” (the expenses, the crazy amount of money needed to build data centers). Large capitals that move from people’s salaries, to hardware (mainly).

Why these AI companies spend so much money, money they do not have? Why taking these risks? Because it’s merely a giant ongoing robbery & looting, “take everything you can, as fast as possible”. What AI is doing, in the eyes of these (few, very large) private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, is to CENTRALIZE knowledge. The more they sell AI services to other, external companies, the more they send trojan horses out to these companies, to steal their knowledge and shut them down. They progressively APPROPRIATE everything there is. The classic capitalist model of starving large majorities of people so that a few rich get richer. The widening of the gap. They started by stealing books, art, code from every corner of the internet, and so erasing the concept of licenses, since no one in politics cared to stop them. And now they use AI as trojan horses to appropriate production everywhere around the world.

The crack in this system is that it would all work only if then these AI companies could protect the giant hoard they accumulated. What the public Chinese models show is that THEY CANNOT. Because AI was built by stealing, now stealing is the norm. So what prevents another AI company to “steal” from you? (it doesn’t work technically like this, but it amounts to it)

If the genesis of AI has been stealing everything there is, as fast as possible, the unintended consequence is that now these AI companies can’t build any wall, any moat, in order to defend their hoard. The giant tank of knowledge they built, by stealing, is leaking everywhere not so much as a flaw, but as an embedded structural feature. They are now realizing they can’t keep anything in, and that they have NOTHING LEFT(*).

(*) They have the hardware in the data centers, that as Cory Doctorow has said so many times, are fleeting too. Because technology supposedly moves so fast that by the time a new data center is complete, it is also OBSOLETE and needs to be torn down and rebuilt. Why do you think TECHNOLOGY is stalling? Why do you think no new GPUs are out? Why do you think the hyperscalers are trying to block access to hardware components like SSDs and RAM? Because of scarcity? Nope, because they are trying to lock in the hardware, since they couldn’t lock in the software. They are trying to merge the hardware companies, lock them to themselves in a co-dependent way, so that they can control the process. They are trying to build their moat by significantly reducing ACCESS, since they cannot control the USE of AI.

If the model is public, if you can run it locally and it works well enough to cover 98% of practical uses without any perceivable difference… What have these big AI companies to sell you, after they invested TRILLIONS of dollars?

If you were precisely in that position, how would you feel other than being scared and shitting your pants?

I introduce you to Dean W. Ball, head of “strategic futures” at OpenAI.

https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412

He starts by being direct-honest. Why should he? Because of what I already described. These models are public, therefore there’s no PR gaslighting to be done. Whoever is within this discussion has easily the means to verify these claims, so there’s no room to try and deny the obvious. Doing so you’d lose your leverage because everyone would know you’re lying.

So yeah, these two should be both truths: it’s a “very good model”, and it is “token hungry.”

When he says “it seems on par with the best public models”, he saying including those his own company sells. Notice the specifics, emphasis on Q1 2026. Models seem to evolve quickly, so maybe now he has a better product to sell next, to be a step ahead… See what I already described above. That advantage is eroding quickly.

Why, oh why, China is allowing this?

It does make sense, for a centralized type of government/dictatorship that existed by enforcing censorship everywhere, obsessed with control… why would they allow the “open sourcing of models this good,” why wouldn’t they try to keep a tight control, top-down. It all makes sense just as long you have a comic-book, cartoon-parodistic view of China government. Of course the real world is more complex than this. (not to glaze Chinese government)

(I’m not going to comment in detail on the sprinkled rhetorical-fascist propaganda jargon, merely pointing at “AGI-pilledness”, “decelerations/accelerationists”, this individual seems to be rather deep fried by political propaganda. But in this case you could even say that these “descriptions” still work well enough in practice to signify directly.)

“all this money we’re investing, we are investing FOR YOU!!!”

Cry more tears. He’s complaining that what the Chinese model is doing compromises his own business. Does not like competition. The trick here is by twisting “capex” as a contextual term, outside the level of the single business. ALL capex is reduced, so all investments on AI are reduced = bad.

He’s thinking he’s the center of the world, just like all AI psychopaths. Once you bank all your life and futures on AI, you’re living in hell and permanently committed to its demonic(*) deliverance.

(*) I’m not using “demonic” here as a moral pejorative. AI is demonic IN THEIR OWN accurate views. The part I omitted from the quote implies he sees AI as much more than what’s available today, and believes in true general AGI. In that pure, precise sense of something other than human with metaphysical connotations. It’s literally demonic in the way it exists outside the plane of current knowledge. These techno-fascists see themselves as literal sorcerers to access a new plane of reality.

Here comes A CLASSIC. THE RED SCARE. Communism fearmongering.

Oh my! Full AI communism. Dystopian hellscape. AI needs to be exclusive to the hands of sociopathic fascist billionaires, because if instead you make it public there are SECURITY RISKS.

Security risks that VANISH just as long this powerful and dangerous technology is reserved to the private hands of none other than LEX LUTHOR.

You cannot trust governments! You cannot trust the people! YOU CAN TRUST LEX LUTHOR!

Who will certainly always do what’s in YOUR, public interest. Not his!

Security risks! Dystopian hellscape!

Only the billionaires can save you! Trust them, not China!

And here comes the lobbying through oblique language. (You might not know, but this dude was a Trump official just before quitting and going to work for OpenAI. As these people are moved back and forth to lobby public governments into doing their own private interests.)

“I would guess”, because I’m humble. Reads instead as: I would pressure the Trump Administration to realize that OUR best strategy is to CREATE (not analyze, not detect, but create out of thin air) large amounts of regulatory risks. In order to stifle the competition when it comes to sell OUR services to OUR US companies.

Because without doing this there would be fastidious capitalist competition in the free market, and our clients might as well be choosing to buy the Chinese services rather than ours.

We can’t have that in this free market system, right? Here comes tariffs, blocks, bans, open market manipulation, lobbying, corruption and everything else that we’ve seen happening under the sun, shamelessly, in the last couple of years.

China offers a competitive product that disrupts the US interests? Block them. We’re libertarian = we’re selfish egomaniacs. Rules only apply to others, not ourselves. There are no morals other than winning advantages at all costs.

And we conclude with the icing on the cake of the baseless fearmongering (remember? “it needn’t be well justified”).

Open-weight models make the world a bit more dangerous. But you won’t notice, until you have a nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a lab.

(and notice how he uses a debunked Covid conspiracy theory to bank on his fascists fans sympathies, who love these types of alt histories)

Just remember a basic truth: when fascists detail apocalyptic scenarios, it’s because it’s what they are planning to enact.

Corruption is the state.

You should be aware that this is just the beginning, and doesn’t end (won’t end) with Trump.

AI cannot ontologically make mistakes. It just can’t.

This might be vaguely philosophical and trivial, but it’s relevant: the moment you accept in the general discourse that AIs make mistakes, is the moment you have already consigned yourself and embraced the narrative that humanizes those AIs.

You’ve shifted the context and now stand on faulty field. AIs follow instructions accurately, they may or may not satisfy the intended product, but are never wrong.

Precisely as expected AIs have now addled the brains (*) of an handful of tech overlords to the point of no return. This is something unprecedented in the history of humanity: never before so much collective effort and resources are focused on a single point: AIs. The same concept of “private property” that has addled our brains. If these individuals decide to pour all their money into one giant bet, then they have their rights to do it. It’s their own money. But it’s not, because these are collective human resources, in the actual real world. It’s all “our” money, that we collectively decided to gift these billionaries and trillionaries, because they are visionaries that will deliver us a better future. Same as in politics, we decide to consign collective power to individuals that we expect will lead us through their exceptional wisdom.

So, someone like Elon Musk, can now burn our collective trillions on his personal gamble. Because he can “afford” it.

There are layoffs everywhere. All technology not only has now stalled, but costs are increasing to absurd levels. Same as it’s absurd that an handful of individuals are so rich that they can single-handedly disrupt entire supply chains. The entire WORLDWIDE demand has been uprooted and supplanted by these individuals that buy everything through infinite resources, and where they cannot reach, corruption compensates.

All this doesn’t make any sense, logically, because when individuals do so much collective DAMAGE. In such a plain and objective, evident “fashion”, then politics steps in to regulate it.

But all this happens AFTER. After democracies have been wiped, after corruption became the rule. After we handed out so much power that individuals have just enough control to rig elections and manipulate. Just enough to bend the world to their own delusions. Just enough to seize the collective day, and shatter it into a wall.

The world is complex, so you need to be precise and divide problems into smaller pieces. People in the game industry look around and see layoffs everywhere. Hardware prices are destroying the whole sector. It’s all one giant FATALISM. We just cannot to anything do stop this. We can just watch it happen. Just like with Covid, we’ve accepted that we might as well get ill, and maybe die. Or be scarred for life.

It’s all the same cause. If people lose their jobs in the game industry, is because someone gotta feed all those AIs. It all one “market.” Because it’s all one world.

Consider all the people that the moon landing in 1969 never actually happened and is one giant conspiracy. The point is, it was one example of giant collective effort. Similar to Manhattan Project. Now we see what happens with something that dwarfs those scales. Now we see how it ends.

(*)
Considering AIs as a mind-virus precisely built to destroy the minds of our richest people might sound quite similar to the “woke mind-virus”… because it is. One core concept of fascist propaganda is accuse your enemy of what you are planning to do. Trump accuses Democrats of cheating in the elections because he’s always has planned and is planning to do it. You can find countless examples. The problem here is that the suicidal tendencies of these individuals are applied to out collective resources. But if we decided to give everything we have to them, then we certainly deserve the apocalyptic outcome. We are collectively building our own deserved annihilation. Once again, enjoy the ride to the ultimate destination.

The reason why literally all these tech giants have sharply pivoted to fascism is simply because the right-wing has evolved through core concepts that are easily exploitable. It all goes around the concept of egoism. The self, the private property, your own personal satisfaction. The right to personal freedom. Right or wrong, they are a lever, used as a tool to manipulate people where they are the most vulnerable. The personal space, the personal anxieties. A capitalist world, made into politics, so that could be exploitable. So that it could move people when they are weakest.

About a year ago I went through a wild modding spree, across several Monster Hunter games. The modding spree, for me, never stops as I simply avoid writing about it. This time it is worth chronicling once again, it started a few months ago. I often completely forget what the trigger is, but in this case it was some post from Dominic Tarason. I mention this because he often indirectly sends me through these insane journeys, so it’s an excellent source to get an entrance to many different interesting spaces. You just need being curious and willingly to explore.

At the time it was probably the mention of the mod “Reforged”, for Elden Ring. He wrote that a number of people ended up criticizing the mod being way too hard and unfun, but because there was this trend of setting it at the hardest difficulty, intended precisely to be unbalanced. So he was essentially complaining that the mod got criticized in an unfair way.

But of course my brain read that in a completely different way. And it became a “what if.” I’ve never played Elden Ring. Saw it played, a whole lot, but never played it myself, not even for a minute. And even if I watched it, the game is so sprawling that all I remember is completely scattershot, there’s nothing truly coherent that I know and can effectively spoil me the experience. So, what if…

What if I play the current version of Elden Ring, expansion included. What if my very first experience of the game is directly with the mod Reforged. What if I play Reforged at MASTER difficulty.

A game that I know is great, but not enough to trigger for me the desire of playing it, right now (and I’m also a completist type of brain, so for me it would mean playing methodically from the beginning, where the “beginning” is not Dark Souls 1, is not Demon’s Souls… but is probably King’s Field). But nope. WHAT IF. This isn’t PEDESTRIAN Elden Ring. This isn’t everyone else’s experience. This is new. This is likely something never attempted.

This is something I can do. And I want to do, right now.

Oh yes. Master mode = me. Here I am. (the mod can be customized in TONS of ways, you can read about them all here)

I have to specify here. I don’t write to brag. I’m not a “good” player, I’m probably quite average or worse. But I like challenge in games and very often mod games extensively to increase that challenge. Many other people do this, but what distinguishes me is that I do it FROM THE START. Especially from the start. I’m not that kind of player who goes through the same game several times, and I’m also not the kind of player who enjoys the shallow difficulty curve, early on. My preference is for a game that starts already challenging. In most cases these games start with a very narrow space. You have close to no equipment, not much choices, and not many actions. This actually enhances the game for me because having limited tools means I can explore everything technically possible in a more “complete” way. That’s why, a quirk of mine, I spend tons of time in tutorial areas, and by the time I exit them I’m already a very competent player.

I play first and foremost with the engine itself. Get a physical feel of how it controls and behaves. I work to master it from the first second. Whatever the game offers, I exhaust. I’m the very opposite of rushing in and figuring it out later.

This type of mindset made my experience with the first two hours Elden Ring Reforged, at Master difficulty, one of the MOST FUN I’ve ever had. Just by trying to defeat the tutorial boss…

The tutorial area, I think, is somewhat similar to the one in the base game, modified to teach you specific new mechanics that exist within Reforged. But there’s a scripted boss at the end of this tutorial, and it’s built specifically to FORCE you into using the new combat moves in the mod. The boss itself is optional, but I spent close to an hour trying and failing to defeat it… And it was one hell of a fun.

The encounter is built so you don’t damage this enemy normally, but you have to instead dodge its attacks. If you dodge the boss suffers damage, if you make a mistake it gains back some health. You essentially need to go through a string of correct moves to defeat it. Seems straightforward but the way Reforged is built, you have different countermeasures to different attacks. I can’t remember exactly now, but there were four or five different ones. You can jump, you can dodge, you can duck, you can parry. I think? Each of these actions corresponds to a different button to press, and to defeat the boss you need to figure out the attack, and then press the correct countermeasure. Match the attack type with the correct defense action, without making mistakes, or as few as possible (the difference of having already set this to Master mode is that you aren’t allowed many mistakes). And so I tried, learned all the animations, all the hints and cues… and still kept dying over and over.

Funny that the first attempt is always the best one. Every time after that, you perform worse. This is actually real and has a real motivation. When you go in a fight blind, you fight with instincts. You don’t know what to expect, so you just react to what you see. And it works, somewhat. But from the second time onward, you know what to expect to a certain degree, so you start with at least an idea of what to do. You start from an expectation and a plan about it. But while you’re still “young” in this process, you just don’t have any familiarity. Just a vague strategic plan, something you intend to do, but not really knowing HOW to do it. This means that the intention to do something within a context that you still don’t control, ends up going very, very badly. It’s better to go in with just instincts because you are more reactive overall. Whereas if your mind is busy trying to match its rough plan, then you simply see the plan failing in the most stupid ways. This is somewhat helpful to understand the tutorial boss I’m describing here.

I died countless times, trying to develop a certain familiarity with the controls. I already memorized all the boss attacks, and figured out every correct counter. The problem is that some attacks were too fast to simply observe the animation and move my fingers to do the counter. I could chain two or three successes, but then something else at random would trip me, and the moment I made a mistake then produced a string of following mistakes. So try again. What’s interesting about this process is that there was a very sharp divide: on one side countless attempts and failures, and then, in just one moment, I got the complete control of it. So, how?

First I realized that the enemy was doing a certain lunge attack that very often killed me. I figured that I was “dodging in” the attack. So my counter and timing was correct, but I ended up dodging with my animation ending in the direction of the attack, and so getting killed. Testing this a few times, I realized that my intuition was completely wrong. I didn’t get killed because of the direction of my dodge. What was actually happening is that the dodge move gave the character some immunity frames. Since I was playing with full focus on reacting as fast as possible, what was happening is that I was dodging TOO SOON. The boss would start the lunge, I would dodge, but by the time the dodge animation ended my invulnerability frames also ended, before the enemy attack was complete, and so hitting me. I realized that by delaying my dodge, and so moving the invulnerability frames forward in the attack sequence, would protect me from damage. No matter the position of the character. I could dodge to end right in front of the enemy sword, but I wouldn’t get killed because the invulnerability frames were still active. I simply had to be patient and dodge at the right time, slower than usual.

This allowed me to turn what for me was one critical point in the enemy attack patterns, into a strength. But it wasn’t the tipping point, because I still kept dying. The real game changer, literally, was a relatively simple switch in my mindset. It wasn’t boss analysis, it wasn’t practice and familiarity. I just changed how I thought. Up to that point, the way I was playing, I was simply focused on reacting FAST. Clear the mind, press the correct button, don’t get distracted. Because again, this is tricky only because it’s a protracted sequence. You often do things right, then you trip on something and everything goes badly from there and suddenly you start failing even those things that were easier before. But “clearing the mind” wasn’t enough. The winning strategy was that I started to partition the controls on the gamepad. There were certain counters that were easy and automatic for me, and others that I could only execute with a small delay. The before/after sharp distinction was that, before, 100% of my attention was on observation. Observe what the boss does, so that I can figure out as fast as possible what to press with my hands, to counter. I figured that this focus on the boss wasn’t working, and it was better instead to think about my hands. I started anticipating the boss moves, rather than WAIT for them to happen. The attack patterns are completely random, but I would deliberately fantasize: ok, now the boss can do either this, or that. I’d think of two possible following attacks and “prepare my hands” to execute those two specific counters. Essentially what is called “pre-fire” in FPS. I wasn’t pressing any button, but I was preparing my mind with only two alternatives, out of the four or five.

The great aspect of all of this, and why I’m writing about it, is that it sounds completely absurd and silly: so this boss has five different attacks, requiring five specific counters, and you “solve” it by simply thinking of two of them and ignore the others? That sounds incredibly stupid. It’s like gambling on what the boss would do, and getting punished by guessing wrong. BUT IT WORKS! I went from an hour of failures to complete control and ease. In one single instant.

The idea is that I could pick those two “pre-fire” counters so that they were the tricky ones. Those that I failed more often. Preparing my brain to send my fingers that specific signal meant that I could actually act much faster, specifically for that one or two actions where I was the slowest. It really made a MASSIVE difference. Rather than keeping the mind blank, and so purely reactive, I switched to be proactive by thinking ahead, even if random chance wouldn’t allow it. I was preparing the counters, and so preparing the movement of my fingers. The winning trick in all this is that, as written above, in these five attacks/counters, certain ones came quite easy. By pre-firing two of them, and leaving out of my mind the easy ones, as if they didn’t exist, gave me a definite advantage on those counters that were hard to execute and that I failed constantly. But, on the other hand, if I was preparing for X, and the boss would execute Y, it would happen that this Y was the “easy one.” So the one where my brain has all the time to switch course. Those counters that were out of my mind were the ones that I could readjust to…

It’s hard to explain here how MASSIVE this psychological difference is. How it completely transformed the fight. In a fight where you are forced to simply observe and react to enemy attacks, so you can just wait, the winning strategy is to think ahead, even if it sounds silly. It’s counter-intuitive. And yet it works because you anticipate your own movement, shaped just so that this anticipation doesn’t turn into a weakness, by pre-firing only those counters that you know are more tricky, and leaving out of your mind the easy one that allow you a switchback. Rather than observe the boss, you fantasize an attack, and even if you guessed wrong, you win.

Now you can imagine that this experience where you keep trying winning a fight and keep losing, is precisely the kind of experience no one wants to have. Something other players won’t have and won’t see. No one is going to play a tutorial fight for an hour. Yet I was there, trying over and over. I remember that when I figured out this mental trick I was there with the boss still at 60% health, and yet I was laughing because I was now in total control. It’s the typical moment of confidence that the Souls game love to destroy, when the boss has 1% of life left, you know you won, and yet you die. But this time it was completely different. I was in confidence from the beginning. Everything FELT different. It felt like I discovered a SUPERPOWER.

I’ve never tried before this strategy, I never even thought about it. I arrived at it through a lengthy analysis that I tried to illustrate here, somewhat poorly. But imagine having this kind of experience after a life playing games. FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME. Something entirely new. And by playing a mod at its Master difficulty. During a tutorial.

This experience, of a fucking TUTORIAL enemy, was entirely unique for me. But not just for me, because it was probably unique in absolute terms. I’m playing Elden Ring, one of the most popular games ever. Yet just by slightly changing the angle you play something, can make something unique. Something FUN.

There went 2k words lost on a sidetrack. This was meant as a modding guide.

Play Reforged: https://www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/541

Once you get the file, the installation is quite straightforward and won’t affect the base game. It means you can launch the standard game and you can launch the modded one without any more work. Switch freely between them without any more work. The mod works outside the main game, and you simply use a .bat file to launch the mod externally.

Play it whether or not you already know Elden Ring, play it no matter your gaming skill. You don’t even need to follow my path, as already said there are tons of different mode to customize your own experience. The mod is like a massive free experience, but it also preserves the feel and flow of the original game. You can follow the story and quests just the same. It’s not an odd, wonky remix, it’s just a “better” Elden Ring, arguably.

Oh, they also recently added some bosses from… Nightreign.

That is where I went to mod, after Elden Ring. And you wonder, what is there to mod in Nightreign? It’s online, almost extraction-like. Well, this time the intention was radically different. I don’t like jumping in a cooperative game without a clue about what to do. As I said my mode of playing is to start slow and experiment. This is a game where you start fast and figure it out later. This game is my very opposite. I just can’t play it. I’m clueless.

So this time the strategy was reversed. There’s a mod called “Storm Control.”

It does what it says. In Nightreign you need to be fast because you are on a timer, and there’s a “storm” that is a circle closing progressively on the map, similar to battle royale games. Storm Control allows you to bind a couple of keys, so that you can speed up or slow down this circle. Or even entirely stop it. Meaning that now you can explore the world of Nightreign as if it was Elden Ring. Stop to sip some tea and generally have a good time at your own pace.

Obviously in single player, offline. By why? It’s obviously built to work in a different way, and removing the storm would make it wildly imbalanced. But again, the goal here for me was to have a playground to at least learn the mechanics. Not to “play.” And the other goal was to enable that specific content “only online”, that cycles through different weeks but is never available at all times.

I can’t say much here because it was a while ago and I forgot the specifics. I know I spent a whole lot of time experimenting with things. Changing calibration files, even doing some editing myself and trying different other mods. In the end I found a solution that worked without any editing, but I can’t remember what it was specifically. It was some kind of offline single-player that had all the online content available at once. I wish I could be more helpful. I still have it on the hard disk and it works. Maybe at some later point I’ll revisit and document better. I can only say that it can be done. All the game with all the online game content, all playable online, in single player, and with Storm Control active.

After Nightreign I went to… Sekiro.

I tried looking for a relatively updated content mod that would enhance the game a little bit, and found this: Sekiro Resurrection

But then I went a step further and started editing the files myself for some fun experiments.

I have another interesting anecdote here. During some of these tests I ended up not so much as reducing damage done to enemies, but completely remove it. Zero damage done to enemies. While this was an unintended mistake, what makes it funny is that close to nothing changed in the actual game. It was just as playable as before.

How is this even possible, if your weapons’ damage is zero? Well, Sekiro is a game where you don’t just heave health points, you also have a “stance.” If your stance happens to be broken, you can then make a special attack that kills the enemy, or removes “one health bar”, if the enemy has more than one. It’s basically a one-hit kill trigger. This concretely means that only the stance really matters. As long you hit the enemy, and the stance can be broken, the special attack it triggers doesn’t use the damage value in any way. It’s like you trigger a script. The special animation that you trigger after breaking stance, causes the enemy to lose one health bar. Whatever damage your sword does is irrelevant.

It’s irrelevant in general, really, even in the base game. There are occasional situations where lesser enemies can be killed by just doing them enough damage and without finishing moves, but this is so situational that it doesn’t make a big difference in practice.

So yes, you can play Sekiro even if your sword does zero damage…

In the end I only wanted to apply to the mod a further 20% nerf to enemy damage. Sekiro is a game where you are in control at all times. Hard but fair. But because of how it works sometimes you can win fights even before mastering them, because the game rewards a more “aggressive” approach. I like more protracted fights. And so I spent like half an hour trying to beat that first bigger dude straight down the first area. This was again the Resurrection mod plus my 20% nerf to damage. No particular lesson here. I sometime got hit even by the normal dudes before the encounter, because enemy patterns are erratic enough that with every different attempt something slightly different happens and so even honed timings can get completely wrong. You suddenly get massive damage from the weakest enemies that were never a threat until that point.

After Sekiro I though the modding journey was done, but then came… Dark Souls 2.

Dark Souls 2 is the unloved son among From Software games, but it is also one of those known to be more replayable. Many still remember the giant controversy when it launched, but maybe not how relevant it was. DS2 was a cross-gen game but even when it came out on PS4 and PC it was very disappointing since it didn’t even remotely look as it was advertised and shown. In tons and tons of promotional material. It felt almost like a conspiracy, as if someone had hidden the real game and replaced it with this poor imitation. Some people will tell you it was about the lighting engine being different, but the scope of this transformation was instead pervasive and much, much larger.

I remember I saw tons and tons of documentation, showing screenshots side by side between all the promotional material and the actual game. It was simply completely different. Textures, geometry, everything was radically different. Dark Souls 2 used to look better than Bloodborne. We never had that game. And you just cannot understand now, but coming after the explosion of Dark Souls, this new title was perceived bigger than whatever you can think about. This was some kind of gaming Jesus Christ because it was supposed to take everything that Dark Souls was, and push it far above. Expectations were higher than the sky, and not entirely unfounded.

It didn’t turn out that well, despite DS2 is still quite loved. It simply cracked under its own ambition, and when it was time to release a product, From decided to backpedal. At the time of release I remembered I tinkered with it quite a while, far more than playing it, but it was only at the level of screen shaders presets to make it darker and make light sources count a little more. But it was simple stuff.

The same Dominic Tarason mentioned, though the years, of a semi-secret project of some guy who was completely remaking DS2. A labor of love, but that has never been made public outside of some screenshots.

More recently he mentioned a new mod, this time adding… ray tracing. I usually don’t like ray tracing at all, but for projects that are freely available for older titles it’s a different matter. And here it counts. It’s not the stupid brand of ray tracing, about shitty reflections and flickering shadows, just adding more noise and imprecise rendering to the screen. This is about the lighting itself. And for many players it finally evokes a very similar feel of that original DS2 that never came out.

I tried it, and it works. So this will be a DS2 modding guide.

Starting from “Scholar of the First Sin” which is the version of DS2 being used here. Some prefer the original for various reasons, but when it comes to modding this is the version.

– Download “Scholar” from Steam, wait for it to complete
– Open the game directory, within “game”, delete the “shader” folder (or better, move it somewhere else, in case you want to restore the unmodded game)
– Download https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls2/mods/1146
– Unpacking it you notice there are some “.dll” files, and a couple other folders. Collect all this and copy it over to the game executable directory.
– Already at this point you should have a fully working DS2 with ray tracing enabled. And you can play online regularly.

But of course we go some steps further here:

– Download Seeker of Fire mod
– This comes in two files, at this time, the main version 2.1.2, and and a smaller patch version 2.1.4, you download both
– Unpack these two, and copy over the content to merge the patch with the main, overwriting those files
– Then copy over the whole to the game directory, this one adding “dinput8.dll” and “modengine.ini” at the root
– WHEN using ray tracing mod, like we’re doing, go in “SeekerOfFire_2” directory and delete the “filter” directory (I’m not sure if it’s even needed, but better safe)
– Download https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls2/mods/1611
– Unpack it and copy over to the game directory, but beware that this unpacks as a “FaraamPresetPT” directory, you have to copy only the two directory it contains so they merge with those from the ray tracing mod, do not copy the “FaraamPresetPT” directory itself.
– You’re essentially done. Launch the game. If installed correctly you should see a “Seeker of Fire” splash screen.
– On the main menu, set the standard graphic options, then exit back to main menu, press “F1”.
– If installed correctly, pressing F1 opens an imGui panel that lets you set ray tracing mod options specifically.

This is how I set it. Consider that the mod should actually run well, and from a 3070 and above you should be generally fine. But I try to maximize how things look without wasting performance on what’s trivial. I think by default the mod is set to use DLSS in DLAA mode, which is the most expensive as far as I know. Here I use “quality” because it works already perfectly well. In the bottom part you see that “GI Quality” is set to “HWRT – Pathtracing” this is the real deal. But I then set water reflections to “Game only” and sun shadows to “raster shadows”. I’ve run tons of different tests. Reflections and shadows look different, but they do not look BETTER. So, where I can I prefer to spare processing power. Believe me, the game looks insanely good if you follow all the above.

Under this section there’s another for motion blur and depth of field. I always turn these off in games but DS2 is built to use DoF. The assets on the distance are made to look that way. But while I’d specifically turn on DoF, in the base game, it doesn’t look like this setting works as it should in the modded version. And so I disabled both of these as well.

Again under it, there’s another important section where you load a lighting preset. It’s important to use “atmospheres_extended.ini” if you followed instructions above it’s likely that the default was switched to some “Alva_Preset_beta.ini” but do not use that one, unless you just want to experiment. Load the correct preset, and you’re done.

Enjoy the modded game. (EDIT: forgot to mention, start as Deprived and take the infinite torch as gift. It’s not even truly infinite but lasts 42 hours. You can always light up the torch at any campfire, and other places you light up. It’s quite useful with ray tracing.)

The Ray tracing isn’t perfect. There are sharp shifts in lighting as you move between different areas. There’s some pop-up of detail of geometry and textures. Especially with torches you sometimes end up bright visual glitches about things, but these usually sort themselves out after a few moments. In general it’s very much playable, and a true spectacle to see. In some cases it easily rivals with Elden ring. And the game is more fun from the beginning, as it appears a slightly bit harder thanks to the modded content. If you’re familiar with the game you’ll notice a number of different things, especially as you reach Majula.

But was I done? Well, nope. I stumbled onto this other mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls2/mods/1097

This is for another version of the mod above, but it mentioned a few details on how it works, in its description. Instructions really aren’t very clear, but I decided to experiment.

Goal was for me, as usual, to set “Seeker of Fire” slightly harder than it already was. When this is done by other players it’s usually by increasing damage to the player, as it is the simplest way to make a game harder, by making it more deadly. But for me the fun is in protracted fights. Shifting balance more toward observation and strategy. I like to take some time to observe and learn bosses, and I like the effort. That leads to what most people consider “damage sponges”, but it strikes a good balance for me. So the goal for me was to make enemies suffer a bit less damage from player’s attacks. Let’s say a 20%.

All From games are quite ridiculous in how they are built in their innards. It’s really tons more complex than how it should be. But in some cases there are shortcuts. The tools, though, here work in a poor way.

The editor I found for some reason is unable to load and edit a single specific file. It needs to load up the entire game. So that then you can edit a single tiny file in it, okay. I’m making it “short” here but for me this process took a while. As I went through a bunch of other tools, Yabber, BinderTool, and other stuff, to unpack .dcx regulation files, onto .bnd files, onto .param files, but then without a way to read and edit them, and then repackaging them back…

First you need a tool to unpack the game: UXM

It’s a simple tool, you point it at the game directory, and you wait until it’s done.

Then you can finally load the actual editor, DSMapStudio

Once launched you have to create a project, however empty, and for this to work the game has to be unpacked. Once you create a project, you can save and exit. It should have left, in your project directory, a “Param” directory.

Since my goal was to modify “Seeker of Fire” files, I could then pick only two of them. “ChrCommonParam.param” and “EnemyCommonParam.param” The first if you want to edit damage received by the player, the second if you want to edit damage dealt to the enemies. In my case it was the second. So you go in the “SeekerOfFire_2/Param” directory, copy that single param file over to your “Param” directory in your project directory. Then load again the editor.

Now the editing. You just browse to the correct entry “EnemyCommonParam”. In the center tab you have a list of numbers. In the rightmost tab you have all their values. Since we need to edit them all, and it takes a week if you go one by one, it’s possible to select ALL the entries in the center tab. Then with all of them selected, you scroll the rightmost tab to find the field that needs editing. There are several but all similar and easy to spot. Let’s start with “Absorption: Slash (absorption_slash)” If you right click on the label a menu appears, at the very bottom you should see “> Mass Edit”, you expand this, down below, between other options you see “? *” and a field. Click on that field and type “0.8” This because all different monster listed here, over 200, all have different values. If we multiply them, though, it means they will all retain their native balance and only scale by a certain portion. In this case (I tested this) damage to enemies get reduced by reducing this absorption values (however counterintuitively). So multiplying all of those values by 0.8 means reducing damage dealt to them by 20%. Exactly as it was intended. So you type 0.8 in that field, then click on the asterisk just above and a new menu appears, where you click on “Submit”, done. Repeat for all the “absorption” values, slash, thrust, strike. Further below there are critical fields and bullet fields that is probably wise to adjust in the same way.

It can also be tricky because the UI is coded stupidly. So when you go click on a field at the bottom of the screen, the editing menu clips down off the screen when you click on mass edit. With some effort you can work around this by dragging up the bottom of the window, opening the menu, and dragging the window back down. Alternatively, click on the field, click on the “mass edit”, then click again on the same field and the mass edit menu should be already open without clipping off.

Save it all in the editor and close it. I’ve tested this and you don’t need to recompress files or doing anything fancy. Just going in the “Param” directory of your project, fish out the “EnemyCommonParam” you just edited and copy it over to the “SeekerOfFire_2/Param” this will load correctly. Now enemies should receive 20% less damage. But remember to use again UXM to “restore” the game in its compressed state. As long you’re done using the editor, since you have to unpack it once again to use it. You can download here my own file if you don’t care to go through this whole process. Just copy over and no need for any unpacking, compressing or editing. But remember that it only works on this mod and the current version listed above, it won’t work on the base game.

Oh, by the way. I already knew that by default DS2 includes in the base game something similar in the form of “covenants.” In particular the “Company of Champions” “increases the game’s difficulty level by making every enemy deal 50% more damage and decreasing the player damage by 20%” this can be activated at the other end of Majula, within 5 minutes of starting the game. Problem is, as you can see, it mostly increases damage to the player, only a small portion the damage to the enemies. My idea instead is to turn those around. But it’s nice to have options, and you can also turn this on, on top of other changes. I died some 30 times just exploring the tutorial area. I love tutorials.

Well, enjoy. I promised myself that I wouldn’t include any screenshot to show the spectacle. I already wasted enough effort here.

At some point I also tested the Ascended mod. But… nope. Lets leave it at that. (but you can watch an Italian player going through it, if you care)

No, I don’t think even a single person will read all of this. But I write it down mostly for myself, in case I revisit some of this in some future. As seen above I’ve done stuff within Nightreign and Sekiro, but now can’t remember how or even what.

Fuck, I promised myself I wouldn’t say anything else about this, but this is too juicy fruit not to bite.

There was this official tl;dr about Marathon upcoming development. And I find it profoundly aggressive to the quietness of my brain, not to address:

1- start with a false premise
2- build on top of the false premise
3- blame the gods
4- reinforce the false premise

Bungie represents the true nature of evil.

More prosaically:

1- No, you didn’t.
2- Only if the money supports it. This isn’t under your control, therefore useless to say (noise, not information).
3- The “pain points” aren’t in the performance, they are in the original design. You are either blind, or decided not to see.
4- “we’re adding more fun”, see point 2.

Reiterating:
“building systems to make progression more interesting” = “more interesting” = nothing.
“adding new fun content” = nothing.

You either have things to say, offer information, or you don’t. “We’re making the game more fun” is not information, it’s just illustrating baseless wishes and desires. You aren’t a cult, you aren’t a church. You aren’t propaganda. SAY SOMETHING REAL, PLEASE.

I utterly despise people who promise something they have no control on, just to be patronizing and pandering. “Don’t worry, it will be alright” is the true message of the Devil, but at least the Devil would have some control on what it promises.

If you promise something, to me, that you have no direct control on, then you obtain the very opposite result because my brain light up: ALARM! ALAAAAAARM! This person is trying to deceive you!

The last point, point 5, is where it counts. But it depends on execution.

As I wrote, yes, you need the whole range of the experience. But they shouldn’t overlap. You need to work on the HINGES (hinges = progression) of the game. PvE maps need be separate. (but you don’t know any of this)

So we already know the outcome: this merging of PvE with PvP, the way they intend it, will dilute the PvP experience.

Therefore the game will only get blander, if broader in scope. Some new players in, but still bad retention.

The core design here, about the hinges of the game, and so its progression: PvE and PvP should minimally overlap, to work. They need to be structured adjacent to each other. ADJACENT, not overlapping!
If you add PvE modes to PvP content, you DILUTE it, not make it better.

It’s even philosophical:
if your ideas overlap, you have a contradiction = you’re wrong
if your ideas are adjacent, then it means you have a coherent, possibly more complete description of your own reality

P.S.
Later in that article there’s a “WHAT WE’VE LEARNED” section, “Where do we start? Developing a new game is always a challenge, and creating a live game in 2026 is no simple effort. There are millions of moving parts to a game, especially a player-driven and systems-dense game such as Marathon.”

No, I’m sorry. This is a load of bullshit. Either you already knew all those things, and so there was nothing to learn other than a deliberate choice, or you’re plainly incompetent.

Don’t like this “know-it-all” arrogant attitude of mine? It doesn’t matter, there are out there plenty of random youtube videos that I remember I’ve watched, both in the original reveal a year ago, to the last beta a few months ago. They all more or less covered and criticized the same design points, that are the same ones addressed in this article and flagged as “lessons learned.”

(the fact much of that space is used to explain the tricky act of balancing queues: offering more options without diluting players across and therefore increase queue times, is precisely the tangible sign of the contradiction I highlighted above. You can’t overlap PvE and PvP, you’re diluting them, exactly as you’re already seen in these “experiments” but worse, because the more you embrace this the more you AMPLIFY this. See my original idea on how to solve this design knot. If PvE and PvP content are SEPARATE, and PvE progression precedes PvP progression with a tiny overlap, then you reduce, close to zero, the “sloshing” of PvP players DOWN to PvE modes, to farm. Because PvE progression doesn’t bring any PvP progression, therefore it’s useless for established PvP players to farm PvE. There’s no reward or practical use. You preserve the PvP pool exactly as it is, while GETTING NEW PLAYERS into the PvE, that in a further phase will grow the PvP pool. Without a true contamination and without dilution. But if you can’t learn from the lessons of the past, you certainly cannot anticipate the lessons that will come from the future)

You either have eyes to see, or you don’t. I don’t even truly think you are THAT incompetent. I simply believe that Marathon, just like Destiny, is a game conceived from elitism.

Now you die by your own poison.

P.P.S.
This needs emphasis. This is literally the soul of game design and one of the main lessons. I’ve written often how game design is split between art and rationality. The side of rationality can be solved. You learn from it same as you learn another discipline.

In this case, in your own words, you’re witnessing precisely the problem without having it into focus, as it should. You’re obsessively tweaking those matchmaking queues because you’re stuck in the problem. In the contradiction. Rather than SOLVING that knot, you keep nudging it back and forth without a satisfying solution. Because the tweaking is, clearly, not the solution. The contradiction, the knot, the tension between contradicting goals is precisely what you should expect to obtain, given the unsolved nature of the problem.

Throughout the season we added more queues which inevitably split the population more and led to some increased queue times.

were focused on making sure players with less experience and knowledge were being kept away from those with more. This resulted in some good, which is newer players being protected for longer, and some bad, which is some unfortunate small pooling happening in the later parts of the season. The result was a constant battle we fought between match quality and queue times.

The more you go into this, the more the contradiction comes out. Your goal isn’t to scatter players across an even larger surface. Your goal is to host more players. Grow the number of players, or the game is dead. Your efforts shouldn’t be about moving your current players, but moving IN new players along those who already left. They need a new piece of game that is built for them, as you simply neglected all of this (see the cause: deliberate elitism). If your idea for a solution is break down already existing pieces of the game, to make them more accessible, then the result is that you directly dilute them. IT IS SIMPLY THE LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE. Precisely as you have ALREADY observed and will CERTAINLY observe in your “upcoming experiments.”

In science you don’t test everything. You can’t. You go test precisely the breaking points where you can maximize what you learn from. Obvious lessons you don’t need to test, to learn.

PvE maps and modes need be SEPARATE (from PvP).
PvE progression need to be at the very bottom of PvP progression. Adjacent, not overlapping, not replacing.
If built this way, PvP players would have no purpose other than deliberate choice, to “slosh” back to PvE modes (and diluting their presence in PvP queues) because they are already past this progression, therefore the practical progression goal is not there
PvE modes would be there to attract PvE players, WHO DON’T CURRENTLY PLAY THE GAME. It’s not there to attract PvP players, hence again diluting them across several modes.

UNDERSTAND THE SHAPE OF THE GAME. UNDERSTAND PROGRESSION SYSTEMS. DO NOT CROSS THE STREAMS, DO NOT GENERATE MORE CONTRADICTIONS THAN THOSE ALREADY PLAGUING THIS WORLD.

Despite what the title says, this will be mostly about the cosmetic skin system, but as it is my habit I’ll go off-track to comment other aspects.

The shop skins, that you buy for real money, are very expensive in Diablo IV, but also of an excellent quality. I don’t like all of them, but some are really a wonder, something that for me has unparalleled artistic quality. Those that I don’t like aren’t poorly made, but just not matching my preference and style. But this is, unambiguously, one aspect where the game excels and is above any other competitor. No matter how good Path of Exile I&II can be, along with all the other titles, no one comes close. I also especially like the gritty and gloomy overall aesthetic of the game. The texture of the floors, the light shining. The style of the tooltips themselves, something that in a loot-based game has your attention for most of the time, aesthetically look so good to me. I like the look and style of this game a lot more than its gameplay.

Problem is that, for me, those cosmetic skins have zero appeal. Blizzard will never persuade me to spend even a single dollar (more than I’ve already spent for the very basic version of the expansion, and that was a good move, because I didn’t buy the game until last September when it was heavily discounted on Steam and bundled with the first expansion. So they got me onboard and made me buy this one expansion at full price, rather than wait another year for another significant price reduction). In a loot based game, I want the look of my character to reflect the items I find. I want, ideally, to start using poor scraps and see the character evolve in power, but also in its “visual might,” as I find better and more powerful items. The visual progression is a fundamental part of a game like this, just as the stats written inside those items. You can sacrifice it, but it needs to be done consciously, knowing the significance of what you’re losing.

From my perspective, the game as it presents itself to me, I wouldn’t use those gorgeous skins EVEN IF THEY WERE FREE. I don’t want to start a campaign, a new character, with it looking like an ultimate god. It feels WRONG. It robs the progression these games are based on.

I’m also a weird and I suppose uncommon type of player because I’m naturally immune to addiction and gambling. Not because I have a strong will to flaunt, but merely because it always required me very little effort to resist these. My brain is simply wired differently. Even worse, I seek my challenge and enjoy slowing gameplay down, rather than speeding up. All these free to play and gatchas out there indeed fall within my interests. I’m not a snob and will gladly play some Genshin Impact, ZZZ, Endfield and so on. ZZZ I’ve played recently and sunk a few hours. The game strongly pushes you not just to get new characters, but also all those materials and power ups that make the whole structure of the progression in these games. But since these games are generally designed, until very much later, to be PISS EASY, and in order for me to hold my very own attention, my overall strategy is to NEVER USE ANY MATERIAL. In the case of ZZZ meaning to repeatedly trying to EXIT the forced tutorials (*), because I just don’t want to level up. And so I went through the first part of the game, with missions starting to climb to level 20 and above, but my party of three being still level 1 and utterly unequipped.

(*)
This is really out of this world to make sense. Have you noticed how all these free to play gacha FORCE you into unskippable, unending tutorials where all the screen is blacked out, so that you are forced to click on that very button left out they want you to press. OVER AND OVER (Arknight Endfield, 20+ hours of tutorials). And then you’re thankfully free, you inadvertently press a button on the UI because you’re looking for something, AND ANOTHER LENGTHY TUTORIAL TRIGGERS, and you start spamming ESC trying to GET THE FUCK OUT, and you can’t, you have to go through the tutorial, making you irritatingly, compulsively click as fast as possible to get out, please let me out of this hellscape, no you have TO READ THIS. It makes no sense, these game companies print money, yet they are objectively in the STONE AGE of game design. It’s so simple to improve these systems and still guide players. How it’s possible that this is a thing, in commercial products, in 2026?

And it was fun. Because even if this was just an introduction, it already required me to figure out how to play rather than smashing buttons, to figure out a certain rotation of combos. Until eventually I reached a stage where I was able, despite the very frantic nature of the gameplay, to survive more or less indefinitely (just need to avoid damage entirely), but doing close to zero damage to a boss. This is precisely the signal I wait for, to start climbing up the progression. My default strategy is TO AVOID all built-in progression until I smash against a wall that I cannot climb by simply playing better, and start using what’s available to go higher just enough that the game stays challenging, but doable. You can imagine that, playing this way and always consuming the bare minimum, leaves you SWIMMING in materials. The game never reaches the point where spending money becomes desirable.

If it was for me, all free to play games would be dead. But again, not because I’m campaigning against them, not because I’m adamant of not spending any money… It’s just how I play. If it’s free to play, I can get the most out of the game, AS LONG I don’t spend any money. Because spending money equals disrupting the game loop itself that I find fun. It makes things WORSE.

Last September, when I bought Diablo IV, I started playing following the same philosophy. Loot would drop, the character would gain skill points, but I would use that loot and allocate those skill points only in the case I reached a wall in difficulty. And I found MANY. The game (that I set to “hard” as soon as possible, I tried a level above that too but(**)) was plenty challenging and early bosses required me preparation. This despite me knowing the game being very easy throughout its campaign. I suppose I’m not that awful, so the difficulty was caused by my character spending most of the early game without equipping anything at all…

(**)
I’ve seen other players complaining about this, so it’s likely true. But it seems like Diablo difficulty curve is really flat. If you pick an higher world-difficulty, everything levels to that standard. Problem is, it seems way too “flat”. Not in the sense that the gap between one difficulty and the next is too steep, but that every single monster seem to pose the same challenge. You can get two-shotted by a random monster on a road. A “good” difficulty behaves like a wave, it can stay moderately high, requiring effort, but it cannot be simply flat. It needs going up and down depending on the monster types you face, to then climb more with bosses (***). If it’s too flat then it either feels too irritating, or just plain boring. You need to weave a modulation there.

(***)
About bosses, due to my way of playing, bosses I faced during the campaign, even early on, were a real challenge, to repeat 20 times or more and sorting through the inventory to improve certain aspects. If the boss dies on the first try then, objectively, it has been a waste of development time. Of designing it, the work going into animating it… A standard monster can die easily, because you encounter more of them, you reuse them. But a single boss encounter needs its spotlight. Ideally, you spend an handful attempts to observe what the boss does, the patterns it goes through, if it has phases. After you observed the boss, then more attempts are needed to figure out your half of the deal, your strategy, how to use your very own toolkit. Elaborate a strategy, figure out what works and what doesn’t. Then, third phase, after figuring out the strategy you will need more attempts to execute it properly. To develop a familiarity and “perform” it well. A good boss makes you go through all three phases. It is never frustrating, no matter how many attempts, because you are never out of options. The frustration shows up if you can’t figure out what to do, and still fail. But as long you see a path, walking it is THE FUN. If the walk is a shortcut, then you’ve missed the whole show.

But we were talking about skins. While playing I was wondering… Since the cosmetic skins have zero appeal to me, the only solution would be to integrate them into the actual game. But of course this would disrupt their whole purpose: to earn real money. The simple fact that a ton of skins have cycled through the game, across several seasons and years, their very high quality and sheer amount, all indicate that this isn’t merely Blizzard being “greedy”. Without that incoming money those skins simply wouldn’t exist. The money is the fuel that makes this process work, in the way it does work.

Is there a better way, then? Of course there is.

The design goal, here, is that whatever solution you contrive, it cannot disrupt the system already in place. You cannot make those paid skins less desirable. You cannot compromise even the FOMO that powers the system, because those skins are available for a limited time, and this creates an important past of the compulsion to obtain them. You cannot delay the purchase indefinitely. If you design a better system, then, you need to preserve all this (unless, of course, you rebuild the whole scope).

So here’s my solution: as in the case of Marathon, my idea would be about adding options, rather than removing or adjusting those already in the game. But doing so also means avoiding a conflict between these new options and those that already exist. The idea is that, whatever option you add, it needs to avoid “sharing market” with the current ones. If they avoid the overlap, and so if the value of paid skins is left as it is, then great!

My idea is that EVERY skin piece that ever appeared on the shop, now enters the game loot pool. You can tweak those drop values to be very rare, whatever. But they all have a potential to drop as items while you play, within or outside a season. The benefit of this is obvious. Without the work of even a single artist, you would have massively expanded a potential loot pool. You can go wild there, do whatever you want. But at the same time, it’s dumb. Of course you can do that, but it directly disrupts what I’ve just stated: no one will ever buy skins anymore in the shop if they can be obtained in the game for free…

But here’s the point. After you solved the design knot upstream, everything unravels quite naturally and quite beautifully. Follow me. In the current system you have a sort of armory panel. Whenever an item is dropped and acquired, you unlock its cosmetic look, so that you can then freely apply that same visual look to any new item you want to use that shares that slot. If you buy a skin, obviously, you’d have unlocked the corresponding cosmetics, so that you can then freely apply at any point of the game. If then our goal is to avoid sharing market with paid skins, then let’s simply do it. The rule would be: any item that drops in the world and that uses the visual appearance of a shop skin, is LOCKED to that physical item in game. This means you cannot reuse it. After your outlevel that item, even in the chance that its own randomly rolled stats were good, you’ll have to discard it because you keep progressing further. If the drop rates are rare, then good luck even finding and equipping a matching set. You’d have to sink hundred of hours into the game to have something actually “good looking.” Even then, Diablo works in season of 2/3 months. Being limited to use the look of a dropped item means that this is character bound. Even if you managed to complete a whole set of items that look as you’d like, with decent stats, all that would be achieved on that one character. You’d have to do it all over again for every single new character you create, every time you go into a new season.

It is easily proven that this cannot impact the desirability of the paid skins. Enabling ALL previous shop skins at once, to drop, making those rare drops, means you just realistically will never find what you want. You’ll always end with mismatching parts. Buying a skin would still make it properly available, would preserve its value. These two systems wouldn’t overlap.

But more than this, you open brand new paths to sell things meaningfully. Add generic single-use items, that you can buy for real money, that will “generify” the cosmetic on a item you find. Foe a low price, even if it’s $5 (tho, I’d put it lower, like $2, to make it an almost thoughtless process). Use this special item and you unlock the “cosmetic” visual of the object that dropped, but now you get to apply freely that cosmetic, so that you can transfer that look to a better item, when you find it. You first need to acquire it as a drop, spend $5 or whatever to turn it onto a cosmetic to freely apply, but this continues to be CHARACTER LOCKED. Only valid on that one character, for that one equipment slot. You’d have one more thing to sell, you’d let players acquire “cosmetics” coming from all previous shop seasons, and you’d have made it RENEWABLE, because as long players play, they’ll join new seasons, make new characters, and spend a few dollars here and few there to unlock specific cosmetics on that single character being played. Repeating this over and over and over. Blizzard having stuff to sell over and over, at zero development cost.

It doesn’t invalidate the current paid skin system, because if you don’t find the new character-bound single-item cosmetics appealing, then you still have the option of the paid shop skins, that you buy once but that will always be available even on new characters. Unlocked at any time, rather than having to wait a very rare actual drop.

All three classes of players benefit from this:
– Current system players, still have a motive to go in the shop and buy new paid skins, since this is the only way to have them unlocked permanently. Preserving the same FOMO, since once the skin is gone from the shop, even if it drops in the game, is still very, very unlikely to obtain, and requiring hundred if not thousands of hour, if you want to obtain that specific piece.
– New system, something that looks cool drops, and you can pay a small amount to turn it into a cosmetic, bound to that single character that randomly obtained the drop. As a renewable system that encourages purchases through the whole lifespan of the game.
– All other players who never spent a dollar on cosmetics, the totality of Diablo players since this includes the previous two pools, get a massively expanded loot pool with much greater visual variance. It’s like a giant game expansion that costs NOTHING, to both players and developers, as it’s built with assets that are already in the game but largely not used.

Everyone wins massively. Blizzard gets even more money, because tons more players are likely to spend a few dollars on single specific items, rather than having to decide buying only complete, but also very expensive sets. Those sets still keep their full value, since the overlap is simply not there.

Those skins are too good to be left at the margins of the game. These ideas pull them back into the core of the game without endangering the shop.

Everyone’s comes out happier.

Having written all this, I can now launch the game and play. Plan is to make a new character, necromancer, and start all over again at the beginning of the first campaign, and take my time with it. Having the game a bad reputation for being “too easy”, I got the idea of a necromancer without minions. This before I found out that the class is also designed to support this option explicitly. In my mind this was secondary. If playing without minions is counter intuitive for the class, this means the game was going to be quite a bit harder. That I would manufacture my own challenge. So be it, bring it on :)

P.S.
I forgot to address two additional points:

1- You can fine tune the system so that shop skins stay exclusive to the shop for a season or two before entering the game pool. Better preserving that exclusivity.

2- There’s also the other way that this could be criticized. Not as a convenient option, but even a more greedy one, since cosmetics would turn to single-slot single-character. Again, this is a new option offered. If you want to ignore it, nothing changes from the current state of the game. But if a cool looking item drops, maybe you accept paying a small fee to have it active as a cosmetic, even if it’s limited to that one character.

Expanding this system, I’d have three tiers:
– The single-slot, single-character-bound item, it drops and you convert to cosmetic for a small fee, like $2-5
– The shop skin, as it is right now, for a whole set, unlocked permanently on all current and future characters.
– Another option to convert a dropped item into cosmetic, like the first tier, but so that it unlocks permanently on all characters. Balancing it so the price of acquiring a full set, using this third option, would be greater than the shop complete skin bought when still available. So, if used, this third option would take more money for the same result, so without competing with the second option, but also opening the way to acquire cosmetics that aren’t on the shop anymore for an higher price. But STILL conditioned by the fact you have to have these dropping, FIRST, as an in-game item. You can’t just unlock the cosmetic until it has dropped at least once. And maybe you play for 200 hours and that one thing you want just won’t drop. Preserving almost entirely the FOMO of acquiring as set as long it’s available on the shop, but still capitalizing on the fact that you still have a chance of acquiring it later.

Game design is the art of hitting ALL your targets, all bonked squarely on their head.

At some point during one Easter of my youth I was in France, Paris, at something I remember as a technology museum, but that apparently does not exist and so might have been some isolated, smaller exhibition. But I’m pretty sure it took place at Centre Pompidou.

I mention this because I remember a row of terminals whose purpose was to show something resembling a “Turing Test.” You could type something there and wait for an answer, not knowing if it was a (rudimentary) chatbot answering you, or a real person facing another terminal across the room. Nowadays we know something like ChatGPT can pass rigorous Turing Tests quite easily, yet no one recognizes this as “real” intelligence. More than a graduation of AI, we’ve observed a devaluation of the test.

Then the other day I saw a small quote from Ted Chiang, that made me chuckle:

“Less than what we are” Really??!

This is funny because one subject of some stories Ted Chiang wrote (and whose substance I’ve criticized, over to the other side of this website) is precisely that “intention.”

So I ended up thinking, precisely as in one of those stories, we actually have a real Ultimate Turing Test that, if executed, would undo all humanity. It would unambiguously destroy all debate, all possibilities of debate.

Just as it happens in Westworld, what you would recognize as a living human being could be immediately unmade by a command, “cease all your motor functions.” As some kind of kernel, deeper command, its power is in disregarding whatever this robot was thinking or doing. It preempts. It comes before, in Bakker’s speech. Its power lies specifically in neutralizing all traces of intention. It destroys the world of internal, introspective fiction. You cannot resist any of this, there is no fight back. Your brain, your consciousness is in the hands of someone else. So you don’t control anything at all, someone else decides what you do and what you think. You are, radically, unmade. You are not what you think you are. And there are no arguments, no opinions. Because you are radically rewritten at the root.

What “more” humans are, then? A story? A load of temporary bullshit waiting to fall apart and being rewritten?

Yes, it might be “fundamentally dehumanizing,” but not because it treats us as less than we are, but because we are far less than what we think we are. As the example I just wrote, it destroys the assumptions we have.

This is precisely what the Ultimate Turing Test would deliver: a magic spell that when uttered it destroys humanity, at once. It would unmake all of us. No appeals, no defenses. It would be over.

Just as the Turing Test itself, it’s also quite simpler, actually MUCH simpler.

If the Turning Test essentially is about guessing a plausible answer, the Ultimate Turning Test would be about guessing… the question.

Rather than aping human behavior, to harmlessly come after, it could come before: it could predict human behavior. Rather than giving you a good answer to a question, it could predict what you are just about to say. And, if it could just do that, then game over.

We know that one of the threats of current generative AIs is that some writer might think, why should I make a great deal of effort to write my next book, I’ll use some AI and use that instead. Which brings all kind of following considerations. But what if instead we look ahead about the possibility of this Ultimate Turing Test. The one that destroys the FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH of our conceptions: what if a writer would use this next gen AI, what if this AI, rather than produce some possible text, it would predict what an author would write. It could step five years in the future and take a book that this author will write, and bring it back. This is not anymore some generative slop, that would mess deeply even with copyrights and sense of ownership. This is your book, your very own exclusive art and talent, the book that you’ll spend five years working hard to write. Now delivered back to you, at no effort. By predicting human behavior AI could utterly annihilate the base assumption of humanity. Without appeal.

Famously (?), Scott Aaronson touched this subject, in much greater depth, in a free .pdf that I often refer to. You can follow that link to the blog, and the first link on “The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine”, for the pdf itself. I think the example is explained at page 16.

Ultimately, the real key to general intelligence is what would erase it. By proving it false.

P.S.
Much as everything pertaining “free will,” including my own personal “work,” proves that this cannot fundamentally happen. It’s simply scientifically false. We know it, or at least I do. Problem is, as I understood a while ago, it’s not a binary state, same as the original Turing test isn’t a binary state. When it comes to predictions, as well all know, see “PolyMarket”, is that there’s a whole range of possibilities. Being the world too complex, so not deterministic, you cannot step five years into the future and “predict” a book that is going to be written, because it doesn’t happen in a vacuum and it is dependent on all of reality. But again, there’s a whole world between accurate, unfailing prediction, and something “close enough” to be effective. But again, if you watched the latter seasons of Westworld you have seen this playing out as well.

Curiously, this could be hypothetically related to the P ≠ NP problem. What happens if you merely compare the costs? On one side the energy cost of a human being, writing a book across five year, compared to the cost of an AI, computing/calculating the prediction of the same.