It's sad and pathetic. How did we get to the point where people can't even stay together and point at interesting things? We talk about alienation so much but this is it; People cannot communicate or cooperate at the simplest, most basic level.
Frank
I was like "Why is this in the dunk tank?" and then I saw it is neither a proposal to found the turing police nor a plan for initiating the Buterlian Jihad.
I think a big chunk of it is; Normal people cannot cooperate with others.
Like, Vermintide, Darktide? Pretty niche games where cooperation is both necessary and enforced by special disabler and assassin enemies.
HD2, success also required cooperation, but it reached a massive audience and most of those people... just... don't... communicate. They don't ping, they don't use chat, they don't use voice. They don't even passively stick together. I worked out, it actually makes things exponentially worse when you have players that don't cooperate, because they trigger every patrol and spawn, they don't cover or protect each other, the players aren't making use of all their strats together. If you're all together you're rarely ever not going to have some gigantic bomb ready to go. BUt if it's four people running off alone they're gonna get overwhelmed even by minor threats. And since they don't know how to cooperate they don't know they have to cooperate, so when they get absolutely ruined by something that would be trivial for a squad working together they can only think that the game is being mean and punishing them.
A
Nah, in the last month the devs released a "Balance Patch" that fundamentally changes how the game works. The effectiveness of most weapons was dramatically increased while most enemies, especially the big ones, were massively nerfed. The game is not more of a conventional horde shooter than it is Helldivers 2.
Agreed. I don't remember any time where high school showers were presented as something social, communal, soothing. Everyone knew they were embarassing and a place where bullying was particularly vicious.
Meanwhile, when I was really little my father took me to a workout club that was mostly old guys, and they'd all kind of hang out butt ass naked in the locker room, talking about whatever, completely comfortable and unbothered. It was nominally the same - communal bathing, but the absolute opposite vibe.
I absolutely cannot understand it. They added difficulty 10 specifically to be extremely challenging for people who wanted that... and then hordes of people... complained it was too hard? They didn't say that, htey used words like "unfair" and "tedious" and "imbalanced", but in the end they were complainging that the 10th and most challenging of 10 fairly granular difficulty modes was too hard for them and they demanded it be made drastically easier.
They had ten difficulties to choose from, but they demanded to play on 10 and for 10 to be brought down to their level.
The whole episode legitimately caused me to re-assess... uhh... there's no not-arrogant way to say this, but my broad competencies compared to a normal person. I still can't really grasp how people were unable to deal with chargers at all. "Clumsy armored enemy that charges you but is vulnerable from behind" is one of the simplest and oldest stock game bosses and it absoltuely, competely, utterly defeated the problem solving abilities of at minimum hundreds of thousands of people and I'm still struggling to fit that in to how I view the potential and limits of other people.
Agreed. At this point it's about the thrill of hatred and the power of the mob. They don't want to be satisfied with good tv, they want to hate.
Right? The customer is always wrong. If they knew how to make movies, write books, code games, tell stories, then they'd be doing that. But they don't. All they know is consoom, dei, hate women, racism, hot chip, and lie.
How to usher in a brave new era of art and theater
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ai "art"
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al "writers"
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fund one season direct to netflix with no intention of finishing the story
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hire showrunners (i don't know what a showrunner is but every time i hear the term it's associated with some travesty of storytelling so i assume it's bad"
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focus group everything around the loudest, angriest assholes you can assemble in a room
Yup. Making capitulation to whoever can organize the most visible reactionary hate campaign your official policy isn't going to lead anywhere good.
I sincerely think Arrowhead panicked. The core team is only twenty people, they've had their heads down working on the game for years. Then a game that was intended to sell maybe a few hundred k units exploded, outsold most of the most popular games in history, and a niche comedy tactical shooter suddenly had a vast audience that... couldn't figure out how to deal with a a fairly basic charging mini-boss and felt oppressed by anti-tank weapons.
Despite having very good daily player numbers on steam I think the vast social media hate campaign, the endless tirades and histrionics on the main subreddit, and the outright harassment got to them and they basically just caved to the mob's demands. It didn't matter that they had a steady 25k players, all they were seeing was seething, unhinged anger from every direction.
But hey, their 24 peak is went up to 35k as of this writing, so gutting everything that made their labor of love special and unique was probably totally worth it!
It's a running joke in Judge Dredd that the illegal white powder he confiscates is (strictly illegal in MC-1) sugar.