Rob is blowing a whistle, over and over.

Bob: “Why are you blowing that whistle, Rob?”

Rob: “To keep the dragons away.”

Bob: “I see no dragons.”

Rob: “It works!”

  • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    “You just turned 100 today - what’s your secret to a long life?” - No matter what the answer will be, I guarantee you that there are millions of people in the world who do the exact same and still die young. But yeah, of course aunt Margharet only managed to live an entire century because she ate three cans of surströmming every week, no doubt. Genetics, healthcare and lifestyle have nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.


    Edit/addendum: Weird specific example

    Something similar was also my no.1 pet peeve on reddit whenever people argued about how the Blood Moon works in Breath of the Wild. It’s an in-game timer of roughly 3 hours, but the game does not tell you about it, nor does it display the timer, and back when the game code wasn’t cracked yet, there were a LOT of outrageously weird theories about how to allegedly make the Blood Moon appear.

    So you just “made” a BM happen by running straight into a wall for 3 hours? Yes you got a BM, but not “because” you were running into a wall for 3 hours, but because the effing timer was up. The game does not care for WHAT you do in that time.

    So you reloaded and ran into a wall again and the BM happened again? It is STILL not because you ran into a wall - you rewinded the effing timer by reloading a save file from before the event you’re trying to trigger, and then the timer was up again. (They never bothered to check whether it would happen if they did not try to trigger it with their chosen tactic)

    It is really really hard to try and convince these people that they’re wrong, because once they’re convinced that a specific action yields a specific result, they WILL keep doing it over and over again until it “works” and then see it as proof. But by the same logic you can also throw tomatoes at a wall until it starts to rain and then claim that the rain happened because you just threw 547 tomatoes against a wall. And then you continue to throw tomatoes because it “worked” last time … and if it doesn’t rain then you just didn’t throw enough tomatoes yet.

    • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Blood Moons will also happen if the system is running low on RAM. The BM resets a bunch of stuff, like monster spawns, and since the game is no longer tracking that you killed a particular set of bokoblins or whatever there is more free RAM. This is called a panic blood moon, is very rare, and difficult to force.

      https://zeldamods.org/wiki/Blood_moon

      • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        A common misconception is that blood moons help replenish system memory by resetting enemy kill flags. This is however total nonsense, because enemy kill flags are just GameData flags, and all GameData flags are loaded at bootup and stay in memory forever

        From the exact same source you just posted.

        • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Well, that was dumb of me. I was going from memory at lunch and just linked a thing. Point is, you can force one, but you need to do something that eats a lot of RAM, not something silly like walking into a particular wall.

          • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            There are only seven very specific cases which can trigger a PBM, most of which the player has no control over (audio and texture loading issues). All listed in the guide.

            The guy who wrote that guide is still on reddit (u/leoetlino to be precise) and has had the same discussions for years in r/breath_of_the_wild ^^° I’ve even argued with him myself back in the day when I didn’t know better, but since he’s a dataminer who reverse-engineered most of the game code, I’m now inclined to believe that he knows what he’s talking about.

            However, I don’t blame anyone for not knowing better, since there are just way too many flat-out wrong but “real looking” guides claiming to know how the gameplay mechanic works, so it is ridiculously easy to fall for false info (I did, too). Heck, even the “Complete Official Guide” claims that the regular Blood Moon happens every seven days and can be forced to happen via skipping time at a campfire, which is super easy to disprove but still widely belived to be true, because how can a book with THAT title be wrong, right?

            (Still, walking into a wall is worthless either way, lol … but it WAS a theory once, regularily posted as a tip/trick for the Mija Rokee Shrine on reddit and gamefaqs, and parrotted by IGN who still haven’t updated their guide even 7 years later and probably never will)