#changelingirl

[prince-liest]

Val: hey what do you call it when hands are bisexual? Vox: Vox: a-do you mean ambidextrous?????

Val:

[zarla-s]

Why are there so many bots on TF2 in the first place? It's a free game, and afaik most of the bots were idling--how are they making any money or gain out of it?

Well the aimbotters were just trolling and being destructive, that's simple enough. The idlebotters are a bit more complicated though.

In TF2 you get random item drops as you play, I think capped to about ten a week. They're usually just different weapons for each class, although rarely it'll be a hat or something cool (in all my time playing I have gotten ONE cosmetic drop, a wintery coat for Medic, but I've gotten some cool name tags and such). You can smelt down extras of those weapons into metal that you can use to make other hats or weapons. Easy way for actual players to keep their inventory clean and maybe make a hat or two (I've made a few! But it takes a while to get enough metal). You can also get loot crate/case drops as you play, these are unrelated to the item drops and can't be smelted down.

So basically what these idlers do is they set up private servers and have their bots (which can range in the hundreds or thousands) constantly farm for drops. They then usually sell what they get in bulk to traders - they can sell bulk crate/cases to traders, smelt down weapons into metal and bulk sell that to traders, use the metal to craft hats and sell those, or use the metal to buy keys (which are used to open loot crates/cases) and then sell what they get out of the crates, or sell the keys for a profit. Either way.

A piece of scrap metal or a weapon is worth less than a penny and most everything you can make out of metal is also extremely cheap (because of this very thing), so the only way to really make a profit off of this is do it in bulk. It doesn't seem like a lot of money if you're in America, but in other countries a few dollars can go a longer way, and a lot of the bot farms seem to be in Russia or Turkey. I don't know exactly how much money is made doing this but it's enough for a whole ton of idlers to hang around in TF2 doing it, so.

The end result of all this is massive inflation in the TF2 market - originally when the crafting system was first introduced you could get a key (about 2$) for something like 3 refined metal (there are three tiers of metal you can get, with ref taking 18 weapons to make), while now it takes 60ref to buy a key, and it just keeps going higher as the market is flooded with more metal/items/cases. The recent banwave removed some like 20k cases from the steam market according to one person, which again points to it hitting the idlers.

It's an interesting thing for Valve to do... getting rid of the aimbots is obvious because they make the game unplayable, but getting rid of idlers points to interest in cleaning up the TF2 economy, which is completely unexpected. What is Valve up to...

[marzipanandminutiae]

there's a Seanan McGuire short story called "there is no place for sorrow in the kingdom of cold" about dollmaking and i think you would like it very much. i have included the link in a separate ask in case the link eats the ask.

Didn't work, but I have read it! In an anthology of horror stories involving dolls were the brief was "the doll cannot be evil." Unfortunately I felt like too many of them relied more heavily than I would prefer on gore, which was kind of frustrating to me because I had been looking for spooky/scary stories about dolls where the doll was not evil for a very long time. I'm sure other people wouldn't have minded as much, but in most of the stories it just felt gratuitous to me- like they thought horror had to be gory to be effective.

This particular story was not without any gore elements, but they were much more minimal and I felt it was very effective. It ended up being pretty much the only one in the book that I liked, actually

[capn-twitchery]

....ok but what book is that and where can I read it, I need to brush up on my Victorian letterwriting. (love the twitch fellow btw. strange creature of a man.)

it's the absurdly long winded-ly titled: "Putnam’s Phrase Book: An Aid to Social Letter Writing and to Ready and Effective Conversation, with Over 100 Model Social Letters and 6000 of the World’s Best English Phrases" from 1921! i got it from over here !!

it's too late to be victorian but it's useful enough anyway! it's mostly a lot of phrases. there's also

the 1870s "Ladies & Gentleman's Model Letter Writer" over here, which only has a bunch of example letters

the "The New Universal Letter Writer, or, Complete Art of Plain Correspondence" from 1818, which is useful but the pdf i use is a german ebook on google books and anytime i try to link it the link breaks. so you might have to find that one yourself sorry!!

there's a lot of letter writing guides out there but those are the only ones i can vouch for personally for now, enjoy! >:3

(also thank you!! ;;❤❤ glad you like my bizarre little guy)

[dying-suffering-french-stalkers]

you reblog that post about jareth. i reblog it from you with a tag mentioning that i've been meaning to reread roommates. i click open your tags. you mention roommates. i am immediately struck with a sense of delight.

that comic was WEIRDLY formative for me i swear to god

oh my god same. literally LITERALLY rewired my brain and introduced me to so much other excellent/formative media. need somebody to hit me over the head once a week so i continue archiving it bc if it disappears i WILL be inconsolable.

[ink-ghoul]

(i tried to ask this the other day but idk if it sent and it's been bugging me so forgive me if i have asked this twice but) do you by chance take commissions for cit work?

Hi! I'm not too familiar with CIT, most of my models are supported by CustomModelData

[modmad]

ok ok quick question as to whether this was intentional: back in the Market chapters. Tinker (tinker). Tailor (tailor). Click (soldier). Dial, *spy*. I'm weirdly fond of the phrase so idk if this was intentional or me reading into it?

absolutely intentional- there was also the double bluff of having Watcher (the owl) who could be interpreted as the ‘spy’ :D

[vivi-the-sky-kid]

i went to do eden today and i usually try to pick up someone who looks about the same skill as me at the start to hang with and today i picked someone who i thought was a moth bc they had six stars and default hair and they proceeded to glitch me sTRAIGHT THROUGH EDEN to sacrifice and my greatest regret is that after spending all my candles to unlock chat just so i could say "hot damn" they were Chinese and definitely did not understand the cultural connotations of "hot damn"

Oh man, I feel ya, bro. Language/communication barriers make it hard to get some things across 😔. But! I'm glad you had a great time! And you made a cool new friend, too, so I'd say it wasn't a total waste :D