XPhyro's Blog

A Statistical Analysis of Top Marvel Rivals Players

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 13:17:00 +0300

Introduction

Alwaid and I went through the current (2024-12-12) top 100 players in Marvel Rivals whose profiles were public—so 130 in total including the non-public ones—and analysed the statistics for their top 3 heroes by play time. Below are the results.

Be aware, though, that there are some extreme outliers that are caused by OCR (optical character recognition) mistakes. We didn’t make an effort to thoroughly clean the data up as these should be relatively obvious.

Hunt: Showdown 1896 – A Review

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 13:38:00 +0300

The moment-to-moment gameplay, when the game decides it’d like to function properly, is great; but, if this game is at all representative of the technical prowess & overall stability of CRYENGINE, then Crytek should be wholly ashamed. And well, if not, then they should be doubly ashamed for producing this garbage on their “world-class” engine as they call it.

I’d nonetheless recommend giving it a try. Even though it’ll likely frustrate you due to technical issues and convoluted non-gameplay design, as I’ve said, the moment-to-moment gameplay is actually quite well-made, and more importantly, fun.

Lost Ark – A Review

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 21:06:25 +0300

This game has an abundance of deal-breakers:

Queue times are so large that the game sometimes does not even let you get in queue. When it lets you, expect 6 hours or more.
Booting up takes minutes.
Opening most UI elements in-game freezes the game for a few seconds.
Time-gated end-game: limited chaos dungeons, scheduled raids, timed stronghold upgrades and more.
Uninspired, unchallenging and boring progression until the beginning of the end-game (level 50-ish). Yet another time gate.
Gambling based end-game progression.
Gender-locked classes. Catch up to 2022 before making a game.
Greedy monetisation: Has pay-to-win and pay-to-skip mechanics (plays well with the time gates), cosmetic “micro"transactions and non-required but essential rented privileges.
Exploitative design: MMO players are shown to have addictive tendencies. This game tries to make you form a habit of making it a core part of your life by offering you daily rewards and time-gating the content you can progress per session.
Previously shown-to-be incompetent publisher.

And there are all sorts of other minor but annoying issues:

Setting Up A Personal Blog

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 09:09:28 +0300

Introduction

In this article, I will explain the steps for creating a blog like mine: static, automatically generated and hosted for free.

Framework

I have built this blog using Hugo and the hello-friend-ng theme, and host it on GitHub Pages.

Workflow

I use a private Git repository to version the development side of the blog (such that drafts will not be public), and use a public repository named xphyro.github.io to host the public web site. I do not use GitHub Actions or any other external automations; rather, I set up a client-side pre-push hook in the development repository that builds the web site and pushes the build to the repository acknowledged by GitHub Pages.

About

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 22:39:40 +0300

Me

General Interests

Below are my current interests along with when I got into them.

Interest	Year-Quadrant
Programming	2012-?
Game Development	2014-?
Sketching	2014-4
Target Archery	2015-2
Digital Drawing	2016-1
Mountain Biking	2017-2
Classical Guitar	2018-2
Culinary Arts	2018-3
Classical Piano	2021-3
Kalimba	2023-1

Blog

Topic

I write about anything I want to. Do not expect any single topic or field to be focused.

Language

All my articles are, and, in the foreseeable future, will be in English. I use British spelling and semi-academic language in all articles, but use American spelling and non-academic language in code.