Aurix

Edit: Official Riot confirmation the Asus Xonar audio driver is blocked due to a cheating exploit by user Baconspleet who received following statement by official support: "... the driver is indeed blocked by vanguard as it was reportedly being used as a way to cheat. In this case, I'm afraid the only option to have sound in the game is a hardware upgrade, though that is understandably, not ideal."

https://maxedtech.com/asus-xonar-unified-drivers/comment-page-230/#show-comments

As Valorant players with all kinds of Asus Xonar sound cards have noticed since the 9.x patch series, the support for these devices has been dropped and the game will no longer function acceptably. After roughly half a minute, the entire system, not just the game, loses its audio output. Reddit user /u/travishenrichs has contacted support and received following statement: "In order to protect the competitive integrity and security of our games, some pieces of hardware are not supported with VALORANT and will not function properly with the game. Having said that, this is something being looked into by our QA team, but I can't provide an ETA at this time."

Since this critical bug is known for half-year, is not fixed by 9.10, it is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon as the doubtful support response suggests. I hope software developers avoid situations such as these to avoid forced obsolescence of hardware devices, as these devices do function correctly on Windows 10 and 11.

Happened after the newest Valorant update.

I want to express my deepest gratitude to the support and development team for adding third party HRTF support and fixing the primary mouse key issue. They listen and care about their customers (but definitely not the wallets, 100€ skin bundle incoming).

Metacritic changed not so long ago their posting format and adopted a microblogging like Twitter with 140 signs stance in that regard. Why was that done? I understand there are different demands between expressing the overall feel towards something in few sentences, but why is even a mid sized review, like many on Steam not welcome anymore? Even 200 words just become a wall of text and sometimes that is needed to express complex feelings.

After I found in Ghostblade a fun character for me I had some great time, but the online is so terrible without any ping indicators or blocking. The game design was criticized plenty, and I also don't see it replacing the big titles for me, perhaps for a local evening with friends it is quite good. Shame the online is so bad though for as an alternative game.

Gaming communities can be rough, but I can't think of another forum like Steam which is across so many games consistently incredibly toxic towards developers, even if their product is fine with only minor issues and no predatory monetization. They are my least favorite place of conversation.

What would you do to improve the culture around them?

Loved it. The visuals are great, the feel is really there, the Arcade mode was joyful and the Story fight was very epic. I touched Tekken as a series only briefly on PSP and it was not at all my cup of tea and later installments didn't interest me. But this one is a winner so far.

Updated.

I have used Microsoft Office for many years and wanted to see how LibreOffice has come along in the meantime and it does not do as well as I would have hoped for on Windows. There is no included updater tool as in Firefox, so my old version stopped working completely (frozen UI) and the ancient hassle to download .exe files. Not a great start.

The dark mode switch causes buttons to be in the wrong colour looking like a buggy mess until a restart, but even then some of the icons and application colours were not applied correctly until I manually changed them so.

The ribbon view in Calc has its setting burger button on the right and it opens on another screen next to it?

What completely breaks it for me is the broken window resize. The ribbon tab titles are not rescaled and become inconveniently small. I then discovered the the compact grouped view and it made a better initial impression on me. Then I snapped the the window to the left and the UI is just cut off. Manually resizing it horizontally just breaks everything even more until the UI is empty and the rest is moved into the arrow.

The old school UI view meanwhile works and resizes, but it might be the slowest and laggiest UI on resize with goofy stretching I have seen in quite some time.

Also I really think the default theming and the 6 presets are questionable in fashion, but this is the least of its problems.

Wondering what happened to the development of LibreOffice? There are definitive improvements and probably there are even better under the hood changes, but why would such a large project ship such a bad experience? Was the core of the UI never touched the past 15 years? I have to to use an alternative.

EDIT: Resize runs better after forcing Skia Software renderer. Should not have to do that with an up to date AMD driver. Skia/Vulkan was the culprit. Disabling Skia leads to flicker on resize, so even more rendering bugs.

I see a temperature map of the sea around Italy reaching above 30 C today. Obviously the sea water hasn't this cozy temperature deep beneath the surface yet, maybe in a few decades, so where is the measurement taken depth wise?

One of the reasons I liked to visit the reddit formula1 community is that it had a beautiful overview over the upcoming events and UTC times. Could we have something like that too?

Also I am wondering why the community has multiple threads active at the same time. As in, why the Race discussion thread doesn't start with the actual race or pre-race show?

With the recent influx my instance is barely able to keep up. I am talking about loading times of 10 seconds and more for thread comments which are near instantaneous for smaller servers. Search is technically unusable.

So how is your experience with that? Have you had to migrate your account because of that?