Most of the EU has missed the target GDP spend by a significant margin for decades. The failure to penalize the annexation of Crimea and the EU’s almost wholesale inability to provide material to Ukraine without compromising their own defensive postures can be traced heavily to this funding failure.

Obama’s soft stance on Russia was certainly a large part of our current situation, but Merkel and the overly pacified EU were major contributors as well.

I do the same thing, and I’ve noticed my modem has been absolutely bricked probably 3-4 times this month. I wonder if this is why.

I’ve read this 4 times now hoping I was just missing something, but nope… it’s just entirely incomprehensible.

What the fuck?

Do you understand why people play games though?

I understand why I do. I can’t speak to your motivations, I’m not you. I can, however, point to studies that discuss groups of people’s preferences in aggregate, as I have done. You’re an outlier, and that’s ok! Play what you want how you want!

SBMM is, unfortunately for you, the current utilitarian optimal for multiplayer PvP gaming. It maximizes both adoption and retention metrics, as well as self-reported enjoyment scores (Likert scale) for the highest number of people. Bummer that it doesn’t optimize for you, but the other good part is that there are plenty of games that still support custom lobbies. Find one you like and have fun!

If you can’t make it 10 matches in a new game, I don’t think SBMM is your problem with the game.

10 matches should be like, between 3-10 hours. Assuming an hour a night, you’ll be approximately ranked for SBMM within a week.

It’s based on overall usage metrics - number of active users, number of matches played per user, length of a session per user, etc.

It does account for people quitting.

I pulled that number out of my bootyhole because I knew it was a safe bet for a stable ELO.

US Chess Federation uses 25 games as your provisional ELO stage, many video games will use 10 matches. Assuming a large enough variety of ELO in the player base, you can be confident your ELO is mostly accurate after a shockingly small number of matches.

If you’re curious about the mechanics behind ELO and ELO confidence distributions after X matches, chess ELO is actually a well studied way to learn about the algorithm used by almost all SBMM. After a shockingly small number of matches, your ELO is going to end up being in the right neighborhood for you have +/- 50% WR.

Yes, I am.

This is just one study I could find quickly but the results are consistent.

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/activision-secretly-experimented-on-50-of-call-of-duty-players-by-decreasing-skill-based-matchmaking-and-determined-players-like-sbmm-even-if-they-don-t-know-it/

Because from what I’ve seen, when automated matchmaking is used, you NEED to play the game like a job just to reach your “correct” ranking and actually enjoy the game.

This is not accurate. Most people’s ELOs don’t shift much after settling into your “natural” rank, which should happen after about 50 matches or so. Probably what you’re referring to is the publicly available “rank” which is per “season”, wherein every few months your rank gets reset. This is FAR less opaque than SBMM but results in lower playtime and lower retention for casual players who don’t want to be grinding the 50 matches to settle at their ELO every 3 months.

Actual opaque SBMM (the algorithm you mentioned originally) that never resets creates, on average, much more fun MP experiences for most people.

As much as that may be true for you, on average people enjoy MP games with SBMM more than without by a decent margin. Studies have shown that people play more matches and play longer sessions when SBMM creates more balanced matches.

Teşekkürler!

I hope where you are now is more stable.

My girlfriend and her sister are also in the brain drain. Definitely a sad state of affairs, so many of her friends and friends family’s have been either political prisoners, or had ongoing court cases, etc.

I’ve been trying to learn Turkish so we can move her family over here too and I can actually chat with them, but I fear they’ll need to work on their English so they can get around.

I was just in Göcek and Ankara and I had some wildly interesting interactions with locals when they asked me how I liked Turkey.

“I like it, very beautiful country, lovely people, great food.”

“So you’d move here?”

“Uh… perhaps not”

“So you don’t like Turkey”

👀

lol

My brother in christ you have less than a TB of storage. you’re very far from being a hoarder.

I still have my first 512GB HDD from when I was in high school and I’ve got over 32TB on my latest build, plus my archive of old drives I leave off until I need to access them. Join us, it’s better.

Idk… lotta people on mics in pre/post-game lobbies in Splitgate for it to be bot matches

New account pushing a confirmed-to-be-false narrative only backed by Russian orgs and far-right politicians? It’s more likely than you think!

Igor Shushko should not be trusted for OSINT. He has claimed repeatedly that the FSB was going to stage a coup, etc. since the beginning of the invasion. He also just makes stuff up pretty frequently.

He’s in the “completely ignore” category in the OSINT community.

Yeah, the US military has been built since WW2 explicitly with the intention of being able to fight in Europe and in the Pacific at the same time and win both.

Ukraine has basically just gotten ammunition + existing older US equipment, it’s not like we’re draining our military capabilities supporting them right now.

These are the “right by accident” people that make it so hard to have meaningful discussions.

You’re absolutely correct and we shouldn’t ignore genuine acts of antisemitism just because Israel’s government is doing terrible things.

That’s not true. Tankies love to shit on the US for “meddling” in Africa when a lot of the time its providing funding and weapons for regimes where the opponents are funded by Russia/Wagner/China. Depending on which way the wind blows, the US is either “overthrowing a legitimate regime” or “restoring the democratic process”.

It’s a no win. Africa is too weak to stabilize by itself after centuries of meddling, and if the US goes hands-off, Russia and China will just economically enslave them via predatory loans, like how neoliberal policies economically enslaved South/Central America to the US. I’d trust the US installed people for their own populace over Chinese/Russia installed people, given the respective human rights records of all involved.

Anyways, while 2003 onwards was a huge fuck up and absolutely abhorrent, Desert Shield/Storm was incredibly justified defending an ally under armed occupation and still gets shit on by Tankies.

One man’s humanitarian mission to shut down a warlord is another man’s mission to overthrow a regime and install US-friendly government.