#but also. trying to boycott the game just isn’t going to work and people need to realize this sooner rather than later.

[garchompsteak]

Yeah no. Posts on Reddit and YouTube are explaining this far better than I can, but basically, my stance on this is: (see tags)

stop making excuses for playing hogwarts legacy.

“the people who worked on the game need to be supported tho 🥺”

the people who worked on the game already got their cut and went home. your money is just going towards jkr and the corporation

“but harry potter was my childhood 🥺”

same. but this isn’t revisiting old media. this is an entirely new product. and you’re allowed to grow out of things and move on when the dead horse gets beaten and your media literacy skills improve.

“but i pirated it 🥺”

playing the game cannot be moralized through piracy because giving money to jk rowling is not the only issue here. the game is violently antisemitic. playing it cannot be evened out through piracy, charity donations, etc. the world doesn’t work like that.

“can’t you just let me have fun? 🥺”

if playing a game made by a racist, transphobic, antisemitic, fatphobic bigot (and a team including at least one alt-right influencer) where the entire plot is to defeat the jews goblins because of white wizard supremacy is fun to you then i think you might need to seriously consider why.

if you are playing hogwarts legacy and/or supporting it online you are choosing to value a video game over the lives of jewish and trans people. you are allying yourself against jewish and trans people. if people hate you for choosing a video game over human lives you have no grounds to be upset.

sometimes doing good things and being an ally is difficult. sometimes it means not doing something that you wanted to do. it’s sucks but that’s life. get over it and shut up.

[illyria-and-her-pet]

The move was the brainchild of her coach, Vladislav Rastorotsky.

“Our coach was such a great innovator,” Yurchenko says. “So, everybody tried to create something that they only can do.”

She and other women training alongside her at Rostov-on-Don got to work one day at the behest of Rastorotsky, who also coached greats like Ludmilla Tourischeva and Natalia Shaposhnikova.

“One time, he just came to the gym and said that we are going to do that vault,” Yurchenko said. “So, we stacked the mats, we thought it's kind of a crazy idea because it seems like it was pretty dangerous doing it on that horse. But OK, let's try it.”

Yurchenko quickly perfected the vault, first performing it six months later at the 1982 Moscow News, she says. She submitted the element to the International Gymnastics Federation later that year at the World Cup, which she won.

The element was controversial at first, Yurchenko explained. Another parallel to Biles’ daring innovations.

“There were a lot of debates to allow it or not to allow it,” Yurchenko recalls. “I performed it in America, and the American judges, some of them, were really against it because it seemed way too dangerous, because probably maybe I missed hands one time on the warmup or in training.”

But not everyone saw it that way, and the vault was allowed in competition.

“I think because a lot of progressive coaches who saw that vault, saw a lot of potential difficult vaults in future of vault, it probably influenced judges, the technical committee, and that's how it came to life,” she says.

A boycott of the 1984 Games in Los Angeles meant Yurchenko never got the chance to compete her element at the Olympics. By the time the 1988 Seoul Olympics came around, she had retired from the sport, but her vault had become the main entry used in women’s gymnastics.

Enter Biles, three decades and a complete redesign of the vault later. The vault table on which Biles performs her daring maneuvers isn’t the same vaulting horse Yurchenko first did the entry on.

Instead of a pommel horse-like piece of apparatus, the new vaulting table, introduced to international competition in 2001, resembles a tongue. It has increased surface area, perfect for the Yurchenko entry where a gymnast doesn’t see the vault before her hands touch it, and springs that help launch athletes into the air.

Yurchenko couldn’t foresee the revolutionised equipment nor Biles’ unmatched athleticism and flawless technique, but that doesn’t mean she and her coach didn’t dream of the possibilities.

Though she never competed the double flipping version Biles displayed at the recent U.S. Classic, Yurchenko says she tried them in training.

“We did try everything into the pits, not over the horse, but over the stacked mats, so we did double backs and double fulls, whatever you can pull in that time,” Yurchenko said. “Because in our gym, like I said, our coach was so innovative. We did a lot of difficult skills that we never competed because it was like ahead of time and not even in mind to develop them for competition.”

It was one of many elements she says she and her teammates worked in practice but never performed in competition. Others include a triple back on floor exercise and a double-twisting back flip balance beam mount.

“I really regret that we couldn't take a video of that time, but we were truly into working on very difficult stuff that when I tell people about, they don't really believe,” Yurchenko lamented about what surely would have been viral content in 2021. “But we have those girls who did that. They’re still alive and they know, they remember that time.”

Seeing Biles so perfectly utilise the entry she pioneered was a dream come true for the 1982 all-around, vault, and balance beam World Cup champion.

“It’s such a joy to see that something that you started doing, getting into such a progress and [allowing] other people to compete with more difficulties and raise the bar even higher and higher,” said Yurchenko. “I was dreaming about seeing it. It was kind of tears of joy because you create something and you wait for the future generation to use it... I don’t think it can be better. It was just so amazing. I was amazed that we have Simone Biles, who can raise us all to that kind of level.”

None of it would have been possible without either groundbreaking woman.

For Yurchenko, it was the culmination of her legacy in the sport and a dream she had as a child to leave something for future generations.

“When it happens that my vault became the future for generation and generation and generation, I looked back and said, ‘how did this happen?’” said Yurchenko. “As I’m becoming older, it feels even more great. When you’re young, you don’t appreciate it… but now when you’re becoming older, you kind of value [it more] and try to analyze, how did this happen?”

To her, it feels like destiny.

“I needed to meet the right people, right coaches, right group of girls who were working with me and who were able to do the same things I was doing,” Yurchenko continued. “Without that, it wouldn’t happen. It kind of happened by surprise, but also it’s meant to happen.”

[neproxrezi]

Are you participating in the proposed dbd boycott to get them to do a game health update?

yeah, i wasn't sure at first caus "dont play the video game for a brief period" isn't going to work but "this company has put all its eggs in one basket and they are frankly quite neglectful of said basket, everyone stop buying anything ingame for 3 months" has me interested

more than 'fix the bugs' or anything else like that what i want to see out of the game is them being less god damn stingy with cosmetics (you should not have to pay $10 for ONE FUCKING COSMETIC) and addressing the grind. holy shit the grind in this game is so rough and it could be fixed fairly simply (i'm in favour of removing perk tiers, to cut a long post short)

hold on im gonna complain about dbd under a cut caus itll get long, i love this game so much but oh boy it has issues

it's been said a million times already but dbd's grind made more sense when there were like 4 or 5 characters per side, there are now over 20 and each new one introduces 3 perks to each side

I want to write about the grind in this game for a moment. There are 95 survivor perks in DBD. Every perk has three tiers. Some of them are great, and many are kind of pointless. Realistically, I'd bet you're only going to see about 15 of those perks in action in most of your games. However, if you unlock a perk to be taught to other survivors (which I tend to do even if I don't particularly want it, out of a mix of completionism and a 'may as well get it out of the way' kind of thing), you can't get rid of it. It's in your bloodwebs forever. 95 perks. 285 perk tiers. Let's talk about how long that takes to claim.

You buy a new character in the next chapter. You have every teachable perk unlocked. The new chapter really excited you, and you want to claim every perk on the new character (who I am going to name... Doug), so you saved a lot of bloodpoints in advance. In fact, you played for days and days and saved the cap, which is a million bloodpoints. You buy Doug, after much excited testing him out in the PTB. You spend all million points on Doug. Doug is now about level 35 to 40, out of 50. Hm. Well, time to keep playing. The bloodwebs kind of gave you a bunch of crap stuff on Doug, and you don't feel like running Power Struggle, Ace in the Hole, Babysitter and Breakdown, so you can't play Doug yet. You go play someone else.

Solo queuing as survivor is a mixed bag, and your games range from getting 10,000 bloodpoints (pretty rough game where everyone got wiped) to 27,000 (a great match, maybe with a bloodpoint offering). You save enough to get Doug to level 50. In the later levels, you start being able to get two perks a level instead of one. Let's say from level 1 to 50, you collect a total of 65 perks, because I don't remember exactly when it starts offering 2 per level. Okay, there are 220 perk levels left. Because of the game's propensity for giving you the same perk over and over to get you lots of perks at level 2 out of 3, of those 65 perk tiers you've probably got something like 20 to 25 actual perks. You're missing like, 70. Best case scenario, the ones you picked up include a lot of what you want. Most likely, you've got like half a good build and some gimmicky crap to slot in alongside it. Worst case scenario, which has happened to me plenty of times, you have like maybe one good perk and a pile of gimmicky crap. So. How long is it going to take you to get what you want?

There are 220 perk levels to go. After level 50, the webs are all the same size. It costs about 50,000 points to level up, and you get two perk levels per bloodweb. That's going to be 110 webs to get everything for Doug. Which is 5.5 million bloodpoints. Oh no. How many points were you earning per game again?

If you play with friends, you're probably going to do better. I find this to be true even if me and my friends are playing without voice comms or anything, because I just sort of know these people a bit better. I know my friend who mains Lisa Garland is a hook-diving bastard, so I don't need to go rescue anyone. Ace, god bless him, makes batshit altruistic plays, so I certainly don't need to go protect my teammates when he's out there doing things like this. I think I'm just going to sit on generators in the distance, think about our final gen spread, and try get us out of here. I'd say if I'm playing well, and accounting for offerings and WGLF stacks, with friends I average 30,000 a match and by myself I average 20,000. Playing killer I average more like 60,000, but playing killer is a bit stressful sometimes and I'm very indecisive about actually queuing up for it, so I probably actually get bp faster as survivor. I'm going to call the average per match across everything 25,000, because for every good game there are plenty where you underperform, or things just go drastically wrong. To earn 5.5 million points like that, you're going to have to play 220 matches. A game, including queue times and whatnot, can take ten to twenty minutes. That's... that's going to take a while. And that's ONE CHARACTER.

Now, on the survivor side you only really need to do this once. They're all just reskins of the same gameplay loop. On the killer side, you need to re-earn those perks for every new character you want to try out, because they're all different. Miiiiillions and millions of points. Hundreds of games. I have no problem with the game having a grind, but at this point it's absolute insanity.

In my opinion, removing perk tiers would cut the grind down to a reasonable level. There'd still be a grind, which I'm completely comfortable with existing, but it wouldn't be excruciatingly long, and you wouldn't have to spend as long dealing with bad perks.

HOWEVER, on top of that is the fact that they just. Holy shit the game updates slowly. I don't want to blame them for that in a way of like "these developers are incompetent and lazy", I really do love DBD to bits and I'm sure they do work very hard on it. That said, its update cycle is really slow. Reeaally slow. I wish they either had a bigger team, made balance updates faster (a handful of perk adjustments once every six weeks is... very very slow) or something to just try make the changes faster. Even when things do change it always feels so anxious and tentative, I wish they'd experiment more often. The time they disabled bloodlust to see what happened was really cool!

Yeah in short I just hope the grind gets addressed more than anything else, caus that's the part I actually think there's a relatively straightforward solution to. Also, I never got to play the older events where you could do shit like earn cosmetics, but they sounded way fucking cooler than the new ones. The halloween one last year was absolute shit, it's weird that their special events would get worse over time rather than better.

Buuut I agree with Scott Jund that the Resident Evil chapter was bad news for DBD's long term health because the one thing that would really give BHVR a kick up the ass is competition, and every time they land an amazing licensed chapter they become harder to compete with. They have an absolute monopoly on asymmetrical horror, and I honestly think the game would be in a better state right now if they had some competition >:[

[artificiallyimplantedmemories]

[ ooc: ep 4 liveblog & opinions under the cut! this one got long winded because I had a lot that I was thinking about (and it took me twice the length of the episode to actually watch through it because I kept pausing to type oops) ]

yeeeesh that’s one way to start. thank you for letting bucky cry.

but also the look of pride on her face when she says “you are free” they’ve been working so hard and she’s so happy with the progress bucky has made ;_;

and now she’s so betrayed :(

but I’m also so glad Bucky learned xhosa that’s super important! <3 part of decolonization of the past involves respecting and learning and propagating languages and cultures that have been trodden over. Wakanda has been something of a safe place in that regard, and are now doing the outreach to help their continent and the world, but it takes the world of people within the majority putting in the effort and learning and embracing those cultures and languages (without appropriation, which I know is a fine line to walk sometimes) in order to really make progress. once it is no longer alien, it is also no longer scary, and can be held in proper esteem.

“sweet of you” shut your mouth Zemo xD

“she’s just a kid” thank you for your compassion Sam. and while she’s an extremist, I’m not sure whether Karli counts as a supremacist or just a terrorist? maybe she counts as genocidal if she’s truly trying to restore things to Blip conditions but it’s kind of unclear.

“the serum never corrupted Steve” “touché” YO EVEN HE ADMITS IT

Sam’s understanding of cultural habits (and there are many overlaps between various cultures and the ways they mourn) is such an asset here, and I’m glad that they’re pulling a contrast between the tech-driven, cold, calculating predictions made by certain people and organizations in other parts of Marvel and the general sort of soulful and instinctive approach here

Turkish delight. Excuse me but Narnia cemented the idea in so many people’s heads that it is this magical thing but it’s like superglue in your mouth. It is not irresistible, Zemo.

Legislation and social change as a result of violent action is nothing new. Every peaceful protest has been backed up by some kind of harm, whether it be economic, like a boycott, or physical, either damage to property or lives. I think instinctively people understand this, but it’s good to see it put in the spotlight.

Sam is “stranger danger” to these kids :/

“I know what happens when people say they’re going to help out... nothing.” Ouch.

The way Sam’s gaze falls at that too, because he knows theoretically that a lot of these injustices are happening and can empathize, but practically hearing it hurts. He doesn’t like not being trusted either, but I think he can probably understand why.

Zemo playing that psychology game! Kids love food and the idea that he must be a good person just for having a kid is dumb as hell but something that kids would gravitate towards. Smart man. Doubly smart for not telling them, Nat would approve if she didn’t hate him :P

Sam de-escalating is gonna be a trend I can just see it.

Cherry blossom tea? Interesting choice.

SHARON HI 

Nat vc: gosh it’s nice to see someone competent around here. 

ooooh they’re really reinforcing the idea of Captain America being a figurehead that inspires people

“heroes these days don’t have the luxury of keeping their hands clean” yeah well it’s because Steve had people like Bucky and Nat do do his dirty work, but sure

“all the people history just left out” OW

okay first of all Sam being the one who is insisting on reasoning with them because he knows what it’s like to come from an oppressed people !!! he knows grief and trauma !!! he can do this !!!!! I just know Walker is gonna fuck it up for them :P

second, Walker trying to emotionally manipulate Bucky? it’s a testament to how far he’s come that he doesn’t punch the guy immediately lol

Hoskins being the voice of reason as a foil for Walker again what?! this version of Lamar isn’t nearly as terrible as I expected.

Zemo calling that itty bitty girl his associate xD He really does understand the people here though... aaaand he’s getting handcuffed. Totally didn’t see that coming (he’ll probably break free anyway)

The conversation between Karli & Sam ;_; 

“you’re either brilliant or hopelessly optimistic” “por quo no los dos.gif”

Walker trying to guilt Bucky again god he’s so dumb. I appreciate the fact that he’s ruthless but he’s so narrow minded in how he approaches problems. oh no I have an issue let’s punch it until it dies! come on man.

Karli is so heartbreakingly naive and that’s becoming more and more obvious. I love Sam opening her up like this wow.

WALKER FUCKING IT UP AS ALWAYS

and the cuffs empty WHAT DID I TELL YOU

god we were getting somewhere ;____;

oh good just what we need, serum in Walker’s hands. he was already awful he doesn’t need to be more awful gdi

“we separate them and then we kill Captain America” ...yes, we’re listening xD

I know crazy because I am crazy... oh boy we got some internalized stuff, but let’s play it off

still a little blame game going in terms of where the shield ended up I see

THE DORA MILAJE ARE HERE -swoon-

pOINTY STICKS I cackled oh boy he gonna get his ass WHOOPED

Sam is enjoying the hell out of this

Zemo watching and drinking

“Looking strong, John!” “Bucky”

oooh dear they tangling and Zemo’s getting away.

your arm’s off! no it’s not

WAIT WHAT DID AYO SAY BEFORE SHE SAID JAMES

they all got their asses kicked ah well. also the look on Walker’s face says he gonna serum himself up, the lil fucker. oh no someone’s better than you how will your ego ever survive.

a lil Battlestar logo!!! shut up that’s cute. they’re really making him halfway likeable here.

“power just makes a person more of themselves”

ohhhh okay time to unlock Walker’s traumatic backstory. at least he feels bad about the things he did. at least he knows that those medals of honor are covered in blood. people are at least partly made by their circumstances, and I wonder what he was like before the war. the only indication we have of it is him being a football star, and while I may not have had the best track record with those in my youth, that doesn’t mean there aren’t decent ones out there...

Sarah’s “my world doesn’t matter to America, so why should I care about its mascot?” Oh, we’re speaking to the disenfranchisement of marginalized people hardcore today okay. if anyone’s gotten this far in my overly long commentary I want you to know that this is the realest alright? it’s hard to be proud of a country and its symbols when it doesn’t do right by you, when the majority doesn’t do right by you. am I glad I was born here? sure. are there worse places to be? sure. am I proud to be an american? oof, man, don’t ask me that.

Karli is not pulling her punches, she’s threatening the whole fam. Sam isn’t gonna like that... He sounds like he’s trying to suppress panic instead of being angry on the phone call with Sarah. I think he understands what Karli is trying to do, even though he hates how. And he’s worried, because he’s always gonna be worried. Poor guy. And there’s the confrontation.

Sharon got their backs!

Oof, seeing the gun with the shield.

Gunshot, run, oh, listening, he’s already got the serum, maybe? Given how deeply that shield is embedded in the wall I’m gonna say yes. YUP I WAS RIGHT.

Something about the water dripping and Lemar’s face makes me think he may have been waterboarded at some point :( but maybe he’s just in a lot of pain.

THE KNIFE CATCH. YES YES YES. THE KNIFE FLIP. Nat is so hearteyes.

Ooh, we gotta upgrade that wingpack with Stark repulsors pls go Sam go

oh no. Lemar. fuck. FUCK.

oh good now you’ve done it. killing a guy as Captain America. fuck.

the blood on the shield as the last shot! ~cinematography~

hoooo I’m chilled. I knew something along these lines was coming but oof. 

[justmeandmythoughtson]

If you don't understand why AO3 needs so much money, here's a few pointers.

First: the difference between making a website and making AO3.

Making a website - like a Carrd - means that you're storing a tiny bit of information on someone else's hard drive, essentially. You might have organized it, but that information isn't being save to your computer - it's being saved to a central server. And you're paying the person who gave you server space in personal information, which they can sell for money to advertisers. OR, they put their own ads on your site, making money whenever someone opens your website.

Making a SERVER, however, means that you own ALL the hard drives that that information is stored on. It means you have to create code to allow outside individuals to access that information remotely. It means you have to create a website to let people accurately navigate your archive of information AND store that website data on that hard drive type thing.

You have to pay for maintenance, all the time, to make sure everything is working properly. And maintenance is physically fixing machinery and circuitry, not just fixing a few lines of code (though if you code you KNOW how annoying and time consuming finding the single issue can be) Like, did you know that the term "debugging" a computer refers to the fact that insects (used to) often nest in these giant computer storage units? And errors with programming would occur because of them, so people actually had to go through and search for the insects causing the problems? That's part of server maintenance - finding the loose connections or faulty lights in the maze of computer parts.

You also have to pay for massive air conditioning costs - have you heard your laptop fan kick on high and noisy when you're running a huge program or video game? Great, imagine that but it's a whole room or building of nothing but giant versions of your computer, just without the screens or anything associated with directly letting you look at the information coded into those machines. It gets HOT, so you need to keep it from overheating. Now imagine MILLIONS of people running that same program in different ways at the same time in the same computer. That's gotta be a HUGE computer to take that load without slowing down.

And, this server ALSO has to keep up with advancing technology! If it becomes obsolete, nobody can use it, and the archive becomes worthless, so it has to be updated every so often. That's more costs to deal with.

And then, you have to PAY people to do all this work! Being a non-profit doesn't mean that the professional coders who come in to fix an issue don't get paid. It doesn't mean that the maintenance crew that keeps the physical computer components running work for free. Non-profit means you're breaking even on costs and expenses and aren't actively trying to do anything but cover operating costs.

Sure, a LOT of people who work on AO3 put their time into this project without asking for anything in return. And we need to thank them for it. It's exceptional. But $300k to maintain a server with MILLIONS of users and millions of fanfics is NOT asking much. Hell. If we assume ten people and ONLY ten people are permanent AO3 staff, and that money ONLY goes to them, they're making 30k a year.

30k a year is LESS than the salary of someone with a 15$ an hour wage that works forty hour work-weeks, 52 weeks a year. That's barely a living wage. Hell, I'm not sure at this point I'd care if the people working in AO3's administration paid themselves from the leftover money, if there is any. They're maintaining an entire server! I mean, think about how much Jeff Bezos is making for doing something similar.

AND AO3 ISN'T EVEN ASKING FOR THAT MUCH MONEY. THEY'RE ASKING FOR 130k.

TL;DR

AO3 isn't a scam. It's a group of volunteers doing what is usually an immensely expensive thing on the cheap, and they're doing it on a massive scale. Sure, it's not Amazon. But it's huge and it's fan-owned. It's for us, by us, and you won't have to worry about your email address being sold for cheap to scammy advertisers to keep the site running.

And in addition: all this information is publicly available on AO3's front page. They not only post a breakdown of the budget, but they even post a link to the google doc that has all of their expenses and costs written out, plain as day.

And

if after reading all this shit, you STILL decide you don't like AO3 and that people shouldn't donate if they want to, well-

Fanfiction.net is right there.

AO3 isn't gonna change because you're whining about it. Either suck it up, or put your money where your mouth is and boycott the site.

Hypocrites

[ranger-report]

Opinion: Don’t Buy HOGWARTS LEGACY, Harry Potter Needs To Step Back A While

Sony’s recent Playstation 5 livestream event brought some interesting news to the gaming world. First and foremost was the reveal of the PS5′s price and release date, but also reveals of new games coming for the system. Final Fantasy XVI, Five Nights At Freddy’s: Security Breach, God of War: Ragnarok, among some other impressive titles. One, however, is garnering controversy for doing nothing other than being associated with the creator of the universe it’s based on, and that is WB Games’s Hogwarts Legacy, an open-world game set in the Harry Potter universe created by JK Rowling, author and noted TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist). Yes, we’re going to get the elephant in the room out of the way with early: Rowling is transphobic, she continues to hammer home this point, and is losing points with fans because of it. It’s been happening for some time, to the point where WB Games has issued an FAQ on their website for Legacy noting that Rowling is not involved with the creation of the game. Others, including website Inverse, have issued a rallying cry stating that the gaming world shouldn’t let Legacy suffer as a result of Rowling’s continued efforts to bury herself in a mire of her transphobia. When a game has to distance itself from the creator of the universe it is set in, you know things are bad. Not simply bad like “Oh we disagree with her statements,” but bad as in “We spent money on this and now we’re really hoping that you will too even though JK Rowling is a TERF.”

Here’s the problem: supporting Hogwarts Legacy isn’t just supporting the developers of the game, it is supporting JK Rowling and the continued use of the Harry Potter universe as a franchise, and we really just need to get off of that train for a while.

Look, JK Rowling already has her money. Let’s face it. With a former net worth of close to $1 billion, now resting somewhere around $60 million due to many charitable contributions, Rowling is not in want or in need of money anytime soon. She continues to write, is involved in the Fantastic Beasts films (a third film of which is in suspended production due to COVID), and is set to release a new book under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. PS: Robert Galbraith is also the name of the real-life person who invented conversion therapy. And her new mystery novel under that name involves the hunt for a cross-dressing serial killer. But we were talking about her money.

Yes, JK Rowling has money, so how would essentially boycotting Harry Potter have any sort of effect on her? After all, wouldn’t the developers of Hogwarts Legacy be most hurt by this? True, these devs are collateral damage in a war that they did not ask to be a part of, but like all boycotts we should not look at the ground floor, but the top. Supporting the ground floor means supporting the top. And Rowling is the very top floor. Despite not being involved in the creation of the game per se, Harry Potter is still her intellectual property. Warner Brothers no doubt paid a hefty licensing fee to be able to publish this game among others, as it did to pay for the rights to the Harry Potter films. Money goes to the top. Supporting the games for the developers doesn’t make sense when they’ve already been paid; yes, hopefully they’ll receive residuals, but they’ve already been paid where WB Games stands to actually be making money on sales. And if WB Games makes money, they’ll spend more money to make more Harry Potter games, meaning JK Rowling makes more money. You can’t simply support the bottom rung without that support going all the way up the tower. It just doesn’t work that way.

But as we’ve said, her net worth is established, so why not spend money on Legacy and have the game we want to have? Legacy looks like the kind of game Potterheads have been salivating for, a deep dive into Hogwarts in the 1800s, the ability to fully explore the Wizarding school, learn magic, it seems simply delightful, albeit engineered. Let’s put money aside for a moment. Do you want to support a transphobic human being? If the answer is yes, good luck and godspeed on your way out the door. If the answer is no, then you shouldn’t buy Legacy. Or, to that effect, anything from Harry Potter, at least for a while. Supporting Harry Potter with your dollars means supporting a human being who is a TERF. That’s the end of the debate. You can’t support the bottom without it going all the way to the top. Companies pay millions every year to make products to sell to the public. Creators like Rowling earn millions from companies who want to license their intellectual property. Purchasing the product creates a demand for more, meaning Rowling’s ideas will continue to generate interest from companies, who will continue to pay her for the rights to do so, etc. You cannot just purchase something with it putting money into the hands of the person at the top, and when it comes to Harry Potter, unfortunately a transphobic woman is the person at the top.

No one likes thinking about this. Harry Potter is a worldwide phenomenon. It is a cultural touchstone, a part of millions of people’s childhoods. It brought us together in ways that hadn’t been seen since Star Wars. The idea of not buying or supporting Harry Potter is akin to not buying or supporting Star Wars. But if George Lucas hated gay people, would you be okay with purchasing that Death Star LEGO kit for your kids?

WB Games and Portkey Games are doing their damnedest to not lose money on Hogwarts Legacy. And I can’t blame them: this is a game that has been rumored to be in development since 2018, possibly earlier, before the majority of Rowling’s views were fumbled out onto the internet, but during the controversy of her defending Johnny Depp’s casting in the Fantastic Beasts film. A lot of money has been invested into Legacy, so of course the publisher and developers are going to try to save face by stating and restating that JK Rowling has nothing to do with this game. But the truth? She has everything to do with this game. She created the universe. Someone paid her to make movies of it. Then someone paid her to make video games out of it. Then someone paid someone to actually develop the video game. Now the people who paid to make the game are hoping to get a return on their investment. Rowling has been paid; she stands to make more on royalties as well. WB Games looks to take the loss if the game doesn’t sell. But if they don’t see a return, they’ll have to consider how profitable it would be to continue to make Harry Potter games. If they don’t see a return, JK Rowling is looking at not seeing future returns for her IP. At some point, the films won’t bring in the returns necessary to continue making films, either. Maybe at some point Rowling will pull a full George Lucas, sell Harry Potter completely to one company, and walk away with her money. Then she can settle into her grumpy chair and tweet about how women are women and something else transphobic while fading away loudly, ignored by people who can finally purchase Harry Potter again knowing that their money -- and support -- doesn’t go to a known transphobe.

We can only hope for that day. But it starts by boycotting Hogwarts Legacy.

One final note: fuck TERFS and fuck JK Rowling. Trans women are women.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Freedom of Speech

So there’s the whole issue with Blizzard and their treatment of the Hearthstone winner who delivered a Free Hong Kong message, and how honestly this is a worrisome bit of bullshit ... and there are also issues with this.

See, I tend towards the outspoken about a lot of things. I boycott where I can, and where I can’t ... well, at the very least I can not pass on the hype. But some people live on hype and try to avoid the problematic elements of a thing, and I don’t know what to do with that.

People should be allowed to enjoy things. It’s disgusting that the people who create the things worth enjoying are such utter shitbirds, but people should be allowed to enjoy things. Just ... sometimes I get caught in the whole issue where I don’t want to stay silent about a thing because the thing needs yelling about, but I also don’t want to judge friends when all they’re trying to just enjoy things.

Disney are assholes. Disney are basically one of the worst companies and they own everything and have so much fucking money and yet they treat their employees like crap. Same goes for Amazon (but I can’t talk because given my wages, Amazon is the only way I can afford to have much of anything that isn’t the bare necessities). Activision Blizzard is also horrible because not only do they have all the money, basically cyber-mug their customers at every opportunity, and generally treat their employees like crap, but they also stand up for the ‘rights’ of China to censor their people at the expense of their own customer base. (EDIT: I mean, okay, it’s impossible to stand up to what’s going on while keeping the market in China, which is too huge to simply cut out entirely, and they’re not the only company having this issue, and yeah, that’s because the CCP is made of bullshit and something probably needs to be done about that, but Activision Blizzard could theoretically find a better way to spin this than they have. So could a lot of other companies.)

But Star Wars. But Overwatch. But WoW. But hype.

I don’t know what to do half the time, you know? We can’t have a better world unless people stand up and speak out. But some people won’t or can’t. And I get that; there are things people need, and enjoyment is one of those things. If people get pleasure out of hype, who am I to say? And then again, boycotting or pirating hurts the little guy more than it ever will the people at the top; take a look at some of what @seananmcguire has been saying on the subject as regards boycotting or pirating Marvel titles and what that does to Marvel’s creatives from a first-person perspective.

The big companies with their shit business practices basically have a hostage situation going where the lives of people who just want to make things that entertain people for a living wage are being held to ransom - “support us no matter how shitty we are or the creatives get it”. But then you speak up about it instead of doing a straight-up boycott so that there’s at least some awareness and bad press and you’re called a hypocrite. (Hell, often you’re called a hypocrite whether you engage in the fandom or not; I haven’t played an Activision Blizzard game in years, but if I speak up at all in a particularly public forum, odds are someone will assume I’m still playing one of their games because “everybody must, given the money they make”.)

There has to be a way to make this bullshit stop. So far, though, I’m not seeing one. Nowhere near enough people are going to boycott this stuff ... and not all of their reasons for not doing so are bad. People should be allowed to enjoy things. I guess the only thing I can hope for is that we at least get to a point where people stop defending the global-scale shittiness of some countries (EDIT: This was a typo, but given China, it works. But companies, too). If you want to enjoy something by a shitty company, that’s cool, but if you go on chats or comment threads where people are actually concerned enough about the behaviour of a company to boycott, don’t jump into the conversation to yell at them about how it doesn’t matter and the company’s not so bad really and they were well within their rights to do the shitty thing.

Companies are not what they produce. You can love the thing and vilify those that produce it. In fact, that’s about the only way we can do to call attention to the shittiness of the company while still indicating that “yes, this is the kind of thing we would like to buy, now stop being an asshole”.

[michaelconlon-blog1]

SW 150 Blog Post 1 

There are many social issues that are represented throughout arts. Many songs, books, pictures, and movies are made to bring awareness to a “Social Norm” that need to be changed. One thing that motivates me to try and fix a social problem is the movie Remember the Titans. I was introduced to this movie when I was in middle school, taking a sports films class. Going into watching this movie, I wasn’t really expecting it to have an impact on me, because I didn’t understand how deep the movie was. This movie motivates me to make a social change in accepting everybody, no matter who they are.

           Remember the Titans is a movie about a high school football team, that was originally an all-white school, but was now allowing everybody to come to the school. Many of the players did not want to have African Americans on their team, and vice versa. They were separated, all because of their social beliefs. They wanted nothing to do with each other when they were assigned to go to a football camp. When the coaches made the rooming arrangements to where it would be one white player and one African American player, they were all unhappy. They just didn’t accept each other because of their beliefs. As the movie progresses, the team begins to untie, ending the separation between the two races. All of the players learn to like one another and treat each other respectfully, and they really become brothers. This movie is a perfect example of whole wrong some social ideas are, and when they are put into a situation of that social norm, they prove that it isn’t how things should be. At the time of the film, the two races didn’t think they were supposed to like each other, didn’t think they could sit in the same room as one another, but when they are put in a situation where they are together, they could actually learn to really like one another. This movie inspired so many people across our country, to accept one another for who they are, and put a big dent in segregation issues.

           Growing up, I never looked at anyone different from myself. I never thought low of anyone because of their race. What this movie made me realize, however, is that at the time, all of the people in my life where the same race as me. Not that I wouldn’t become friends with different kinds of people, but because in my town, there wasn’t a big mix of people. According to a demographic chart of my town, Seaford, New York, of the 1,507 people of my town, 91.2% of people are white, 1.8% are Asian, and 6.4% are Hispanic. This list may be a few years off, but it shows how I never really had experience with different races of people growing up. Shortly after I saw this movie, there was a new kid in my class, who happened to be African American, and I was inspired from that movie to make sure that he didn’t feel different from anyone else. I couldn’t imagine how nervous he must have been when he came to school, with new people he has never met, and I wanted to make him feel welcome. Well, about 4 years later, he is one of my best and closest friends. Nobody in my school gave him issues about his race, and he seemed to be liked by everybody. I was very proud that he was able to fit right in to my town, and that really shows me that not only Remember the Titans, but the entire social act of bringing people together was accepted by people.

           When I came to the University at Buffalo, I was in almost a completely different world coming out of my town. The demographics of UB are so spread out, I was excited to meet a bunch of new people from different areas that I would probably never meet back in my town. I transferred here after a semester of community college, and I was put in a dorm room with three Chinese boys. I will forever be grateful that I was put in that room, because I became friends with the most respectful, caring people I have ever encountered in my life. They helped me successfully adapt to life here at UB. As I walk around the campus, I see groups of people of different races who seem to be very close and like each other, and it makes me very happy. This movie made me realize the importance of bringing people together and how much of a better place the world will be.

           Not only has the movie, “Remember the Titans”, made a big impact in my life, but it has around the world. The movie is about fighting racism and separation through football. This was portrayed in real life by a famous quarterback named Colin Kaepernick. He started to kneel during the national anthem before every game, saying that he is doing it to fight for minorities. This quote comes from an article about Colin’s movement. “I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed. … If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right.” While his heart is in the right place, and he’s only trying to bring people together, it is a very controversial topic in the US. People say if he wants to bring awareness to this issue, he should do it another way. Standing up to the flag is disrespecting the men who fought for us to live our lives. Me personally, I am torn between the issue. I like the message he is sending, but I also don’t want to kneel for the national anthem. I have two grandfathers who both risked their lives for our country, and I will always be grateful for their sacrifice. This movement has been a big topic in the US for years, and that’s exactly what Kaepernick wanted, to have people talk about what he’s doing, and why he’s doing it. This is a successful movement. It didn’t completely end the problem that he is trying to fix, but he definitely spread awareness to his issue or everyone being treated equally.

           Many athletes all over the world have been using their fame and status to spread awareness through civil rights. Many NBA players have spread awareness through their social media accounts about how there still needs to be a change. A Log Angeles clippers owner, Donald Sterling, stated that he didn’t want anyone of a different race attending his teams’ games. This was something that all of the athletes knew they needed to step in and get their message across that this kind of disrespect will not be allowed in today’s world. Not only clippers players wanted him to get banned from the NBA for life, but other players around the league, including Star Lebron James, wanted him gone, and were going to protest if he wasn’t. “Last May, the Clippers protested team owner Donald Sterling’s racist comments—in which he said he didn’t want black people coming to his games—by turning their warmups inside out and hiding the team’s name and logo. In the days that followed, Golden State was prepared to walk off the court and boycott a playoff game against Los Angeles and there were rumblings that LeBron James would lead a league-wide sit-out if Sterling were allowed to remain owner in power.” This quote is from an article about how NBA players have fought racism through using their high status to spread awareness. I am very proud that people who are well known around the world are trying to fight this social issue. Social Media allows these famous men and women to talk about social issues and try and fight them.

           “Remember the Titans” has made a huge impact on me. I would never be as focused on people being equal if I haven’t watched that movie. Even though even before that movie I knew that this was a problem, seeing it in the movie made me realize that this issue has to be resolved, because although there is progress, this movie came out in 2000, and it is now 2019 and there are still many issues on this topic that come up around the world. I know throughout my life, I will put an extra effort to make everyone around me feel equal, and fight against racism, through all races. I was inspired by “Remember the Titans”, and I will always be grateful that this movie was brought in to my life.

Works Cited:

“NBA Players Making Their Voices Heard on More than Just Basketball.” SI.com, 26 May 2015, www.si.com/nba/2015/05/26/nba-civil-rights-lebron-james-carmelo-anthony-trayvon-martin-eric-garner.

Schiller, Andrew. “Seaford, NY Demographic Data.” NeighborhoodScout, NeighborhoodScout, 10 June 2019, www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/seaford/demographics.

TheUndefeated. “Colin Kaepernick Protests Anthem over Treatment of Minorities.” The Undefeated, The Undefeated, 3 Sept. 2016, theundefeated.com/features/colin-kaepernick-protests-anthem-over-treatment-of-minorities/.

[relatablepicturesofpatrickgill]

I’m sorry if this is cynical, but I’d really like your input on it (as an experience polygon vid/pat stream viewer): Do you think Pat is pushing the after hours streaming stuff because Polygon is ending? Or, at least, to try and maintain the ‘funny video/personality’ fans? I’ve noticed a lot of other polygon vid personalities are doing similar things, and main polygon video content keeps slowing down and changing, presumably in compliance w/ vox media strategy? Have you noticed too?

First of all real bold of you sending this to a Pat fanblog where all I do is make dumbass shitposts and post cat clips, as if I know a single goddamn thing about anything, but since you asked I’ll try to answer as many of your questions as possible. (I’m not mad about being asked btw I just really find it funny you’d send it here of all places lmao). Disclaimer time: I am not in any way affiliated with Polygon or Vox Media nor do I know how they operate behind the scenes.

Do I personally think Polygon is ending and that Pat streams because of that? Short answer, no. However, I believe Polygon’s necessary (yes, I said necessary) and inevitable (yes, INEVITABLE) change in content is due to a lot of deeper issues people might not know about, which I’ve gathered from research and being an idiot whomst has watched Youtube for 10+ years. Let me just say, the last year or so has pretty much been the “Everybody Knows Shits Fucked” song on repeat until we die so this is going to be a long ass post. Buckle up kiddos we’re warp speeding into this fuckfest together.

Youtube Advertiser Boycott And The Algorithms

Every social media website employs the use of algorithms to decide how content gets sorted, and Youtube isn’t any different. That’s why Youtubers constantly ask you to “like, comment and subscribe” because it helps their content get noticed through Youtube’s internal system – such as search priority, the trending section, your homepage and your recommended tab, as well as the recommended sidebar on individual videos. As for content, one of the more effective models was to find a niche and cater to it, something Polygon did by creating Monster Factory and similar humored series alongside their serious content.

And for a while, it worked. Except things change.

Before we get any further I highly suggest you read this article written by Julia Alexander about the complicated history of Youtube’s monetization system, but I’ll try to give a quick summary. Something controversial will happen on Youtube, causing brands to pull their business from the platform until they can get more security on what types of videos their ads play on, then Youtube refines the system to give brands more control. Rinse and repeat. The new system results in a massive amount of videos being demonetized, causing creators to lose revenue and viewer engagement and then request appeals to have their content reviewed by humans, which in turn improves the algorithm. Those most negatively affected by the system must diversify their payments either through Patreon, Twitch, merch, etc, or in worst case scenarios, give up on their dreams of being a Youtuber.

Youtube has a lot of incentive to keep creators updated on changes, so when users ask, “hey, can we know what’s going on with the website?” Youtube responds with an informative, “absolutely not. Die.” The userbase, as a result, is forced to run their own investigations. Nerd City published a video revealing another algorithm (one just as prone to mistakes) assigns all videos with an MPAA-style rating to make it easier for businesses to decide what sort of content they’re comfortable advertising on. This rating – hidden from both the uploader and their audience – Cannot. Be. Appealed. Good fucking system am I right!!! (Also, please watch the video if you get the chance, it brings up some points about machine learning and how the system negatively affects marginalized creators).

One more thing, do you remember what I said earlier about how a video gets popular on Youtube’s internal system? Well, creators have reason to believe a higher rating attributes to view suppression – meaning their videos might end up exempt from the things I listed. This makes it so much harder for a channel to grow their userbase outside of an already established audience. If you’re following along you might be able to tell where I’m going with this, but if not…

What Does This Have To Do With Video Games Polygon?

Once again, I do not know any of the behind the scenes Polygon lore and a lot of this is guesswork on my part. I’d imagine as a branch of Vox Media, Polygon would have a higher priority getting any potentially demonetized videos appealed than smaller, independent channels do. However, when your own website is reporting the system responsible for sorting and rating videos goes deeper than just demonetization, with a full MPAA-style ranking that’s been shown to suppress the growth of certain content not deemed advertiser friendly, such as excessive profanity and sexually suggestive content, which turns out is a subset of the niche your channel has developed – that’s a problem.

This isn’t me being critical of their content or saying what they make is bad (considering I’m a fan of it as well), this is an objective look at the reality of a rapidly changing platform. Unfortunately, the biggest flags in my head for Polygon happen to be the Jackbox series and… Monster Factory. There’s absolutely no way some of those videos are getting a kid-friendly rating, and it’s possible the bot is slapping some of them with a mature rating – the worst one where enough of those could potentially affect the rating of the entire channel. Griffin, in one of the Spore MF videos, emphatically yells, “come fuck this” to the heavens; lo and behold, a few years later Youtube finally does.

Of course, this is just one of a few different problems Polygon is facing. The Mcelroys left to focus on their own businesses, taking some of their fans with them. Other fans who mainly want the video game news might end up unsubscribing if too many videos irrelevant to their interests are posted. Some series, while perfectly funny in their own right, have trouble breaking out and appealing to a wider audience.

Polygone But Not Forgotten?

I’ll try to put it as softly as I can: almost all creators on Youtube have to reevaluate the content they put out and how it fits into Youtube’s ad-friendly guidelines if they want to continue receiving ad revenue and viewer engagement from the site. This is not just a Polygon specific problem, and as a news channel they benefit a lot more by working within the new parameters. Polygon’s primary priority should be their video game website, where I go to read all the articles that aren’t about video games, as ad revenue is probably more stable and allows them more room for sillier content. As for their channel, the “horny niche” appeal doesn’t have as much of a place anymore. Well, on Youtube at least.

Twitch, however, seems like a better home for Polygon’s familiar borderline type of humor. On a stream Pat said, as the live video producer, he’s responsible for getting their channel partnered which will come with some very important benefits, such as the ability to subscribe. I’d assume creating content for Youtube takes priority over this, and there’s also the fact that Pat is just one person and needs to balance this with other things like “having a life” and “eating??? Perhaps???” (maybe even A Vegetable). By the way, to answer one of your other questions, it’s normal for creators to have projects outside of their work and build their own personal brand, like Pat’s Twitch channel, Brian’s Youtube channel, Simone’s author account and everyone’s countless podcasts. It’s not recommended to rely solely on Youtube for your income, even before the ad boycotts, so if you can diversify your content then do so.

Listen, I know this is disappointing and I know it’s not the answer people want. Youtube’s new system isn’t going away and the video team needs to accommodate for these changes or otherwise Perish. I believe in Polygon’s ability to deliver informative, humorous and accessible content, they just need the time to do it. As an audience, a way to offer support during this difficult time is to just be as understanding and patient as possible, and give the content they put out a chance if you can.

Now I am not an expert on any of this, but if you have any questions or comments you can send them to my main @malarcana and I’ll try to answer them. Thanks for reading!

[gikairan]

I just dont have the Energy to read That Article or even all the Discourse surrounding it but let me just say Getting rid of Crunch Culture in game development is going to be a long and slow process, because its so ingrained in the culture of game development.  I was literally told in university that I should get a good sleeping bag, because sleeping at a desk not “something that might happen” but something that will happen. That was around 6 years ago, when no one was talking about this. 

Since then, the scale, scope and budget of games has exploded, and so have our expectations as gamers. These two are feeding into each other in a never ending cycle of Awfulness. Gamers are expecting huge 50+ hour games, with a massive variety of things to do, a massively populated world with THE most cutting edge realistic graphics on top of 0 bugs. The vocal minority are also very anti DLC and microtransactions.  But, contrary to popular opinion, its actually difficult for a game to make a profit. Any delay to a game in order to fix bugs will mean its less likely to make a profit. And game development is primarily a business, even if its staffed by people passionate about it (because all those programmers could get less stressful and better paid jobs outside of the games industry after all).  Developers make a better profit off of DLC, because development costs are lower (you just have to re-use most of your existing work after all). But fewer people buy the DLC. And if you stop playing a game before its DLC comes out, you’re less likely to buy that DLC (Likely because youve moved onto a new game). So developers have to focus on getting you to play their game for as long as possible to make as much money off you as possible.  This is not something that is going to be fixed by a single potentially sensationalised article. Its not something thats going to be fixed this year, or even this console generation. Maybe not even the next.  Its not something a developer boycott will change, because this is something that happens across most studios. Not even unionisation is going to change things quickly, because the unions need to actually have power first (theres a big problem in the US where Unions are demonised significantly) Its something that has to be slowly worked on and improved, and it requires publishers, developers and gamers to change.  Publishers need to be more flexible with deadlines, and try and avoid situations where their studios are crunching. They also need to pull back on the scale of games they fund, so its not so much of a big deal if a deadline slips. Studios need to help the change, and do the best for their developers mental wellbeing.  And us as gamers? We need to accept some games may be buggy upon release, because there just wasn’t the time or money to QA as thoroughly as we may like (Something I’ve been talking about for 6 years). We need to be willing to buy DLC, and less hostile to microtransactions. We also need to be willing to accept smaller games with lower budgets again.

There just isn’t a short term solution to this problem. Its going to be a long and painful struggle to find the right balance to finally kill Crunch once and for all. 

[kikaiz]

If you don’t understand why there’s so many dislikes and uproar about Nintendo’s online service that’s launching tomorrow, let me just provide ya’ll a list, because I feel terrible for the majority of folks that don’t know. And no, this isn’t about the price, it’s about what we’re paying for.

Disclaimer: Let me know if any of this information is wrong with evidence, and I’ll update the info. Everything will be under the Read More so that misinformation doesn’t spread and because frankly, it’s long. 

The overall comparisons!

Note: There is a bit of bias here because I am angry and because I don’t care about NES games. Also not everything I’ve listed are things I care about but I know would bother someone out there so they’re in this list. Also here’s the links for the American and Japanese trailers if you’re curious how the dislike ratio has become since this post.

**Price per year**

❎ $60 (Xbox) 🅿️ $60 (PlayStation) 🆘 $20 (Switch Online Service)

**Servers**

❎ Dedicated server 🅿️ Dedicated server 🆘 Peer to Peer WiFi (your own internet server)

**Online and Party Chat**

❎ Need service to play online however, you don’t need it to access apps and services. Membership required for Party chat (thru the system itself). 🅿️ Need service to play online however, you don’t need it to access apps and services or Party chat (thru the system itself). Members also gain a few extra features, including automatic downloads of game updates, early access to some betas, and extended game trials of certain titles. Allows you to share one subscription with all users of the console. 🆘 Need service to play online. Splatoon becomes unplayable offline. No apps available (Netflix, YouTube, browser). Requires smart phone and app in order to Party chat. No Netflix, YouTube, or browser. No themes or messaging.

**Cloud Saves**

❎ Cloud saving for all games as well as free usb transfers. Cloud is also available Free to Everyone and not just paying members. 🅿️ Cloud saving for all games as well as free usb transfers. Unsubscribed members cloud saves are kept for a 6 month grace period. 🆘 Cloud saves for games except Splatoon 2 and Pokémon. No way to back up data otherwise, despite SD card saving being available on Wii, Wii U, and 3DS. Edit: One week after the service launched, we finally got information that there is indeed a 6 month grace period for your cloud saves if you’ve unsubscribed. (Technically 1 year, 6 months, 22 days for this information if we’re counting from when the switch launched.)

**Free Games**

❎ 2 free Xbox one games and 2 Xbox 360 games every month, all new triple A quality. If you unsubscribe, you’ll lose access to these games. However if you resub, you will have access to them and their saves again. Xbox 360 games can be kept regardless of subbing. (Note: xbox 1 is backwards compatible that’s why I’m listing Xbox 360 info) 🅿️ 2 free new triple A games every month. If you unsubscribe, you’ll lose access to these games. However if you resub, you will have access to them and their saves again. 🆘 20 NES games. That’s it. Just these twenty 33 year old games with “more to come”. However they will cycle. When 20 new ones come the old 20 are gone and you do not own them. If you are away from wifi for 7 days (whether that be a storm or a vacation), you cannot play the NES games you paid for. Edit: The co op plays with friends seems seamless and fun for games I don’t plan on playing. WARNING: Do not use the CRT filter on the NES games because they’ll have a temporary “burn in” effect on your switch screen due to how the pixels vibrate. This eventually goes away on its own over time (and not by turning on and off your system) but I wouldn’t chance it, personally.

**Game Discounts or Special Offers**

❎ Many discounts for members but there are a few sales for non members too. 🅿️ The store regularly has discounts for everyone. However members may get a better deal. If a game is 60% off for a regular, it could be 80% off for a member. 🆘 So far the only special offers are NES controllers (only available if you’re a member of the Online service. This means you’ll be paying $80 total) and exclusive sports gear for Splatoon 2.

**Other Info**  🆘

https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/13/17855056/nintendo-switch-online-launch-user-accounts-unlink-how-to

A personal rant from a Splatoon fan! 🦑🐙

When I’d heard about the online being mandatory for Splatoon 2, I was saddened but I understood, especially under the assumption that I would be paying for servers to run to improve disconnectivity drops. I had no problems with just that. And the price was affordable for me to boot.

Then I learned that I cannot back up my save data. I heard about 3rd party docks bricking switches and losing saves, of people who’s switches were stolen at E3′s and losing their saves.

Then I learned that Splatoon 2′s saves aren’t tied to the account or to Nintendo but to each individual switch itself. 

Then I found out cloud saves will not work on Splatoon 2 and upcoming Pokemon games “to prevent cheating”. So not only can I not back up by SD card like we have been for the last 12 years, but I can’t save my 700+ hours of Splatoon at all. All to prevent save scumming... despite there already being plenty of Splatoon hackers already that do a lot worse than save scumming. And there are solutions to these problems so that cloud saving is possible for every game!

I just can’t protect my Splatoon 2 data... Not all the weapons I’ve bought, every outfit I’ve bought and leveled up, not my ranks. The only game I would actually care about losing my progress cannot be backed up.

Then I found out I’m not even paying for a better server. It’s going to continue to be peer to peer using our own wifi.

I do not play other online games. Sure some games I would love to play with friends like minecraft and dragon quest builders 2 and pokemon, but I can live without it since local multiplayer is still free. Splatoon however becomes unplayable offline. You cannot even go to the store to buy new outfits. The only part of Splatoon I could play offline are the single player mode and DLC but I’ve already 100% those.

The Splatoon series is my favorite... It’s the first time a game made me feel good about myself and my aim and actually made me improve myself irl. I don’t mind paying for online if I’m actually going to get something out of it. It’s been over a year of delaying this online and they haven’t changed anything for me. 

I’ll probably cave in the end... I just love Splatoon so much and I want to play all the new updates and keep getting better. But for now, I’ll try to boycott for as long as possible, maybe use my 1 free week trial for the October splatfest if it’s spooky. But until then, I hope people who will boycott with me will return to Splatoon 1 until Nintendo adds something. I don’t expect this boycott or our message to get to Nintendo in the end. I think there are already too many people blinded by the cheap price and lack of information and upcoming Smash game. I don’t want to pay for something like this. 

What would make me feel better about this service:

I just want to know that I won’t lose my Splatoon progress if my switch gets damaged or stolen. 

I want confirmation that my Splatoon progress is tied to my account not my system. 

I also think Cloud Saves in general should be free for all if there’s no other way to backup saves. (I would say give us SD card backups but I don’t believe games like Splatoon and Pokemon should have those because that’s local save scumming and we don’t want that.) Right now, Nintendo is the only ones charging us to protect our saves. 

I want a word from Nintendo that servers will improve in the future, otherwise Peer to Peer should be free and dedicated servers should be paid for. I know for sure that hardcore Smash players would pay for dedicated servers. 

Personally, I don’t mind about NES (because I won’t play them) or the phone app (splatnet2 is great and I can just keep using discord or like the actual phone). HOWEVER, I really really need a real way to block/ban players in splatoon 2 in-game and not using the App, (as well as a way to Un-yeah a post in the lobby from accidental clicks but that’s more a splatoon problem than a phone problem.)

Sure what I asked for is taking out all the good stuff from the Online service but imagine this. Imagine if Switch Online actually had things worth paying for. Imagine your themes and browser apps and mutual best friend messaging. Imagine games other than NES coming to that service they’re providing eventually. Imagine bigger sales available on eshop that notifies you when games on your wishlist are on sale. It’s so cheap many more people would buy and keep a subscription without all this controversy. It’s taken them a year to pull this off and they’ve got nothing for it. Why? Because they know people will pay for it anyway. 

I want to be wrong about all this, trust me. At the very least, Nintendo is at fault for making about 18k people really really upset and anxious with poor communication.

FAQ

“You knew you were going to have to pay for a service so you shouldn’t have bought a multiplayer game like Splatoon.”

I was under the impression for over a year with no other info that I would be paying for dedicated servers along with the Online.

“Stop complaining, this was a really long free trial and you knew that.”

Yep! And they kept delaying it. And delaying it. And delaying it. So I think we were all assuming Nintendo had a big surprise they were delaying all this for to make it worth the wait. It’s not.

“It’s $20 a year, that’s way cheaper than the competition. Of course it’s not going to have a lot of offers.”

Yes, I agree! But for me this is less than what I expected and trust me I was not expecting much. This is less than the basics.

“So you bought a $300 switch, $60 game, $20 DLC, and $70 pro controller but you can’t pay $20 a year? Sure.”

I want to pay $20 a year for a service not a hostage situation. Sorry if I seem upset about having a gun to my head.

“The Wii U was a failure. Nintendo needs the money. Do you want them to go bankrupt?”

Don’t sympathize with billion dollar companies like they have feelings. We have problem of treating large companies like people instead of money producing companies, especially if there’s nostalgia attached. “Don’t be mean to Nintendo, they’re having a rough time.” The sooner more people realize this, the better. And no they’re not in need of money. They have $10.5 billion in the bank. For some perspective that’s 35 million switches. For further perspective if just one second was a dollar, that’s 333 years. They’re fine.

“Why are you making such a big deal out of this?”

Because I want Nintendo to succeed. I don’t want them to have EA levels of controversy. I don’t want them to worm their way to EA levels of anti-consumerism. We already have loot boxes in a free mobile game. And now the free online we’ve had for 12 years is under a paywall. I’m not mad about either of these. I just don’t want it to get any worse than that. I don’t want Nintendo to think they can get away with the bare minimum just because “they’ll buy it anyway.” Nintendo has been making great leaps forward with the switch but things like this severely set them back.

[stop-yanderedev]

So I was wondering what exactly has yandev done to make everyone so pissy?? The most I’ve heard was that he was a pedo and and like one non-descriptive post about why he is a pedo and that’s pretty much all I’ve found to be truly alarming?? I’m sure that everyone has heard about how he takes too long to code and blah blah blah which I personally feel is a noT a HUGE issue. And for his latest video, I sorta think is was needed but HOLY SHIT it was too long and I didn’t even realize it wasn’t about the game until like 10 minutes in??? I feel like he should of kept it short and sweet and truly apologize for whatever he did to make people mad and explain his actions and try to find some common ground and hopefully make some sort of compromise and as for the yancrits, I think they should calm down a bit and also try to find some common ground, ik that yandev doesn’t listen a lot and it’s very annoying but being so cruel about these things isn’t going to help and making “lol cringe” videos and other harmful posts is only going to end with him making another “I’m being bullied 🥺” video thats 10 minutes too long. I think that if we want him to apologize and change some things about the “V-Slice” game is to firmly and respectfully ask him and if that doesn’t work it should turn into tel then demand then if all else fails just boycott him and don’t give him an ounce of attention since as he said himself, if you give them attention, they’re going to continue. Obviously we’re not going to get the entire fandom on board with it but again with (sorta) quoting yandev, as long as we are the majority in this lil movement we should be fine and havesome kind of affect.

Ik this is long af but at least it’s not a 20 minute video and straight to the point lol

Thanks for reading it ☺️

—

Thanks for being civil and not being condescending in your submission. Let me link you our masterpost- if you also read through the “yandere simulator critical” tag, the kiwifarms thread on him, or the PULL thread on him, you’ll find a lot more. You seem genuinely new to this and uninformed.

https://stop-yanderedev.tumblr.com/post/179573921635/tw-for-rape-pedophilia-sexual-assault-racism

keep in mind that these are mere examples. If you look further, you will find much, much more.

-Isabelle

[squidlauncher64-blog]

Star Wars: The great divide between fans and Disney

Since Disney purchased Star Wars in 2012, Star Wars movies and video games have not been meeting fan expectations. The displeasure of fans, particularly since Episode VIII, has been fueling a divide between the fans and Disney, a divide that has been getting worse because of misunderstandings of what fans want, and Disney releasing products that are falling well short of fan expectations. Disney has had problems with miscommunication, misleading information, and an overall misunderstanding of what fans want.

In what follows, I’m going to argue that, despite what the fans say, this is not all Disney’s fault (just like it wasn’t all Lucas’s fault when it was all Lucas’s fault) even though the majority of the blame lies with Disney. I’ll argue that the fans’ finicky nature makes them hard to please, and that, if we’re ever to love Star Wars again, the fans need to be realistic in their expectations and be patient with Disney. We need to give them multiple chances to get it right. And we need to trust that they can. But ultimately it is Disney’s job to solve this problem.

Star Wars Fans:

To fully understand this divide, we must understand the fanbase. The fans are very passionate; some fans even name their kids after heroes from this universe. They search for books, movies, and fan films to further explore the Star Wars Universe. The Fans bring Star Wars to life. They kept the franchise alive during the decade long hiatuses between trilogies. This intense passion makes high expectations for new film and video game releases. The fans believe that their concerns are not being heard and their expectations are not being met. On the contrary, Disney feels like meeting all of the fans expectations is unrealistic. But the responsibility to fix this problem lies mostly with Disney because they, as a company, are supposed to please customers. Disney will need to be creative in their storytelling but keep in the back of their minds what the fans really want, and if they don’t know, they need to do the research to find out what the fans want. Most of Disney’s Star Wars film and video game sales are sold to Star Wars fans and by listening to the fans, Disney will be more profitable and will repair this relationship. It is Disney’s job to earn the fan’s trust back.

Star Wars Movies:

Disney has felt the wrath of Star Wars fans, particularly with Star Wars episode VIII The Last Jedi (warning spoilers below, skip to the end of the paragraph if you do not want spoilers for episode VIII). Fans were excited with the announcement of a new Star Wars Trilogy starting in 2015. But Disney had the difficult task of meeting up to 30 years of fan expectations and theories of what happened to Luke, Leia, and Han. Luke was a broken, defeated man in episode VIII and fans were expecting him to be more invested in the galaxy and more powerful. They felt that Luke did not behave like he would have after episode VI. In episode VII, Snoke emerged as a mysterious villain without any backstory. The creators killed Snoke in episode VIII without offering any information about who he is. The fans felt let down that this mystery wasn’t solved and isn’t likely to be solved. The biggest mystery from episode VII was Rey’s parentage. Fans spent time pouring over footage trying to determine who her parents are. There were theories about her being a granddaughter of Obi-Wan, Palpatine being her father, Luke being her father, and there was even a theory about Rey being a reincarnation of Anakin. Episode VIII revealed that her parents were nobodies. The fans felt like her parents were going to be anyone from the list of fan theories and they were disappointed that her parents were not. Some fans were so angry that they started a petition to remake episode VIII. Rian Johnson, the director of The Last Jedi, said this about listening to the fans:

I feel like every Star Wars thing that ever gets made has a loud response, because Star Wars fans are passionate, and that’s awesome, I don’t think it’s possible if you're really telling a story you care about, it’s just not possible to be intellectually processing… what everyone else wants. Nor would it be a good thing, a healthy thing. I don’t think that’s a good way to tell a story.

Rian Johnson was basically saying that it is not a good idea to listen to the fans. The fans had so much lingering unhappiness from episode VIII that they started a movement to boycott Solo, the Star Wars movie that came out after episode VIII. Realistically the directors of Star Wars will not please everyone, but they should keep in mind what the fans want when creating Star Wars stories.

Star Wars Video Games:

While Disney works on the movie aspect of Star Wars, Electronic Arts works on the video game aspect. In 2017, Electronic Arts (otherwise known as EA) released a trailer for Star Wars Battlefront 2. The trailer showed new characters and different eras of Star Wars. This game seemed to be an improvement from the original Battlefront game EA released in 2015. Shortly before the release of the game, fans found out that main heroes such as Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader were locked in the game and the time it would take to accumulate the in game currency to unlock one hero would be around forty hours . Fans and gamers expect when you buy a sixty dollar game that they would have access to all iconic characters. Electronic Arts countered with a statement on Reddit: “saying that the high unlock requirements were meant to give players a sense of accomplishment,” this comment became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history. EA then lowered the cost of heroes by 75 percent.

Not only did they lock heroes behind walls of time, they also had loot boxes,  (loot boxes is a reward system where you can spend real currency or fake in-game earned currency to get random rewards) which have a “chance” of unlocking these heroes. To make it worse, the progression system, where you can level up certain abilities for gameplay was based on the loot box system. This was frustrating for fans because they could not choose certain abilities which they preferred to be upgraded because it was randomized. EA is promoting a pay to win system where the more currency you spend the more likely you are to win in a shameless cash grab. The fans wanted a progression system where they can choose which abilities to upgrade. EA has since replaced the progression system about six months after the game came out.

Recently Electronic Arts announced that they would be releasing new Clone Wars content for Star Wars Battlefront 2, much to the fans delight. EA then posted gameplay pictures and the fans scrounged the pictures looking for clues. The fans found what looks to be a droideka. A droideka is a droid from the prequels, that folds into a ball to move around then opens up to walk and fight. Droidekas are formidable enough to even stop Jedi. The fans were ecstatic. 

Pcgamesn reported EA’s response:

Electronic Arts denied that it was a Droideka at all, suggesting that it was merely environmental clutter. Eventually in a post on reddit the developer admits that they loaded up the scene and discovered that it was indeed a Droideka – although it was an unused static asset that somehow made its way into the backdrop. It has zero integration into the game, with no active plans to put Droidekas into Battlefront 2.

The fans felt deceived, and to make matters worse the droideka was a character the fans had been wanting and asking for, for some time. EA needs to communicate better with the fans.

Battlefront 2 isn’t the only Star Wars game created by EA that has been met with controversy. Star Wars Battlefront, Battlefront 2’s predecessor, according to most fans’ opinions, is not a complete game. Star Wars Battlefront was considered incomplete because there wasn’t a lot of content upon release. When the game was released there was only four different locations, six heroes, and nine multiplayer game modes. There wasn’t a single player campaign or much offline single player content. EA then announced that they would be coming out with a season pass (a season pass is where a company comes out with a bundle of new content, usually separated into three or four releases at a few different times for a price). The season pass included eight new heroes, four different locations, along with four new game modes. The season pass fractured the gamers into 2 groups: people who have the season pass and those who do not. The people who have the season pass would play on the new maps and the people without wouldn’t have access to the new content. The separation of gamers would lead to longer wait times for matches and it would make the matches less full. Gamers and fans were disappointed because they felt that in order to get a full game you would have to pay 110 dollars. Fans would have wanted a complete game upon release, with more single player modes, and a fanbase that was not fractured into two groups.     

Since Star Wars was bought by Disney six years ago, there has only been two video games released and both have been controversial. Before this change in ownership, Star Wars video games came out almost every year. Not all video games released before the sale of Star Wars were received well, but the creators took risks in gameplay and storytelling. They looked to explore the Star Wars Universe. Fans want games that explore different parts of this Universe. They want games that have compelling heroes, interesting storylines and gameplay that allows fans to live out their fantasies. But fans have received games that aren’t creative and they miss the frequency of Star Wars video game releases. Disney and EA’s repeated failure to meet expectations has been increasing this divide.  

Star Wars fan’s passion have also increased the divide:

Some critics are stating that the fanbase is to blame for the divide between fans and Disney. They would say that Star Wars fans are toxic. They would point out the death threats sent by fans to Rian Johnson and Ahmed Best (Jar Jar Binks). They’d show the many careers Star Wars has destroyed such as Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker in episodes II-III) and Jake Lloyd (Anakin Skywalker in episode I). They’d display the harassment of people who are associated with Star Wars such as Daisy Ridley (Rey) and Kelly Marie Tran (Rose), both of whom decided to leave social media because of fans bashing them and their characters. George Lucas, the father of Star Wars eventually decided to leave the franchise by selling it to Disney. George did this because he felt that the world was against him, particularly after the backlash of the prequels. Let me be clear, it is never permissible to bully someone and that respect of opinions, respect of persons should be our priority. It is okay to dislike a character or an actor’s performance, but we should not attack the actor/actress. The critic’s argument appears to be incorrect because the people that are doing the bullying are the minority of Star Wars fans. Critics might also be ask, do the fans truly know what they want? Star Wars episode VII was criticized by fans for being too similar to episode IV and relying too heavily on nostalgia. Disney responded by making episode VIII radically different, and the fans replied saying that it was too different. Two explanations can be stated for this. First the fans might not know what they want but they need to figure that out, or fans might not be united enough for their desires to be heard, or maybe both.

Star Wars is big because of its fanbase. Not many franchises could survive three movies that terribly underperformed. But Star Wars fans need to be patient and realistic in their desires. We need to become more united so that Disney can easily hear us. Fans would like movies about Knights of the Old Republic with the Sith Triumverate, Darth Vader hunting jedi’s before episode IV, Kylo Ren’s backstory with Luke and the fall of the Jedi and subsequent turn of Kylo Ren. This is not supposed to be a bash on Disney and EA, if it wasn’t for you the fans wouldn’t be getting new movies, video games, or stories. But listen to fans and take into account their feedback and opinions. It is not realistic for Disney to appease all of the fans, and that is understandable. Listening is enough and would help Disney make more money and by doing this; Disney would close the divide.

[advanced-procrastination]

I’m gonna try to answer this as calm-headed as possible, although it has my undies in quite a knot (I’ll explain why). First off, I think you misunderstood my post. I was not saying “oh dear, Card is an uber-conservative asshat who complains about political correctness, i would NEVER have imagined that!” I’ve known for years just how vile of a man he is. I really started digging around the time the movie was in production and people were calling for a boycott. My reaction today wasn’t of surprise, but of being caught off-guard by something I had let myself believe wasn’t going to come up — I thought, so close to the end of a book written by a bunch of other writers, Card’s shitty opinions wouldn’t rear their ugly head. I ended up being wrong about that at a time when my guard was down. Now, to your question. In short, no. Because context matters. Sure, some words — that one being tippy top of the list — have definite predilections towards being inappropriate in more situations than not, but the scene in question was... complicated in that regard. And it all relies in the context of how the word was used. In that scene, the kids are at battle school joking around and being unnecessarily cruel not for the sake of cruelty, but as a perverse wartime form of bonding, much like that that takes place in the armed forces. Alai refers to Shen as “slanty-eyed”, and Ender replies, “we can’t all be n*****s.” Setting aside the sarcastic tone of that reply, it’s not being used in a “you are lesser for having darker skin than me” way — to the contrary, Ender is openly calling out Alai’s racism towards Shen, but in a way that won’t make him a target to the other kids. That’s kind of Ender’s whole schtick: respond to problems and threats in a way that puts the other person in a corner while keeping himself out of the spotlight. Not only is it perfectly in-line with Ender’s character, it’s the exact opposite of what you are suggesting it to be. The whole crux of this problem is that one word, the one neither of us can bring ourselves to actually type out. Honestly, I only know the public sentiment and unease towards the word in modern day. I don’t know the feelings surrounding the word 30 years ago when the book was written. What I do know is that eventually that part was completely removed from subsequent printings, so clearly somebody eventually went “maybe that word shouldn’t be there.” But then the question becomes, should that word have been a death sentence for the whole scene? And I don’t think so. I feel that the scene was a necessary part of establishing what life was like at battle school, while also showing Ender’s strategic tongue at work yet again. I believe instead of removing the scene, they could have simply replaced The Offending Word with a less-charged but still racist term (again, not for the sake of racism, but for the sake of replying in kind to Alai’s own racism). I won’t list any here, but several come to mind immediately. The scene would still have achieved the same goal, without people crying foul play because of that single word. Now, for why your reply got me so heated: John Mulaney called his wife a bitch. So he’s a misogynist, right? The people who took that small snippet out of context to attack him were simply looking for a reason to stir the pot. We all know (at least, I would hope) that when left in context, that quote isn’t about misogyny or hating your wife, it was actually exactly the opposite — Mulaney was (via the medium of stand-up) responding to men who make misogynist attacks towards their wives by announcing that those very things they claim about their wives is why he loves his own so much. Those same people tried to do the same about his whole “my wife is jewish, i know that [they control everything], but how do you know that?” They tried to take his jab at anti-semitic conspiracy theorists out of context, and claim he is anti-semitic. Your comment flashed me back to that shit, where people intentionally took a very small piece of the full scene out of context in order to mount a deceptive attack on something or somebody that could not be further from the truth. Tl;dr: No. There are plenty of other hints towards his existence as a shitty human being, but that scene in Ender’s Game was not one of them. The word choice may have raised some eyebrows more than intended, but the word itself was not being used as any sort of subliminal racism by Card — it was a completely in-character attempt at calling out racism. When something has to be taken out of context in order to evoke the reaction you want, chances are that the context is to the contrary of your desires; otherwise, why remove it? That is to say, you feel the need to focus on that word without context because then you can view it as evidence of racism in the book, because with context it’s not that cut and dry. Context matters.

[dlamp-dictator]

Allen Rambles about Cross Tag Battle

So I already did an Under Night In-Birth Rambling a few months, and I don’t feel like retreading that game again for the sake of another half-baked Rambling like the Persona 4 Arena one. No, I’ll talk a bit more about Under Night In-Birth and it’s Light Novel elements another day when I actually have the drive to do so. Instead, I’ll  jump straight into talking about about Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, namely, expanding on my initial thoughts of it. 

I had a chance to play the beta of the game when it was available, had a lot of fun playing it, and left it feeling confident this game could sell well, but a bit uneasy as well. 

But first before I get to explaining that...

The DLC Issue

It wouldn’t be my Rambling unless I got out of the elephants in the room straight away, now would it? 

So... that DLC, huh?

I’m not gonna’ bother defending this, but I’ll say this much in its defense. The season pass and the game is about 70 US dollars all together. That’s 50 bucks for the game 1 dollar for every extra character. That’s not a bad deal on paper. Let’s be real here, Dragon Ball FighterZ has more expensive DLC than this and much more expensive season pass combo pack, Blazblue Central Fiction had more expensive DLC than this, and several other fighting games have done worse practices. Dead of Alive has cosmetics that total up to hundred of dollars. From what I’ve seen and played Street Fighter 5 has a handful of costumes can only be purchased with cash rather than the in game fight money, among a few other practices I’m not cool with. And we can probably go on and on about EA’s DLC practices. Worse has been done, and if an extra 20 buck for 20 more characters on an already decent rooster seems bad to you, then... well I think you haven’t been playing fighting games that long to not see this coming.

However, that’s on paper. In context, this is just flat out shady and I’d even say exploitative.

I’m not going to pretend that what Arc System Works is doing is okay. Let’s be real here, a lot of the assets we’re seeing are being ripped and reused from each character’s respective game save for some new animations, the gameplay itself is very simplified, and the fact that they announced such a large amount of DLC before the game was even released is already shady business. I hate it when companies do that, and Arc System Works shouldn’t get a pass for it either. 

Not to mention the fact that a portion of their EVO line up is DLC characters. That just kills me a little. I’ll admit that I have a negative opinion of the FGC and competitive fighting game community as a whole, and I’ve already talked about my opinion of EVO in the past, but I really don’t think this game deserves to be in the EVO line up when it only has a little over half its full cast in the game for competitive play, with about a fifth of that cast being DLC. That means you need to shell out at least 6 extra dollars just to have an idea of certain match ups and playstyles, or worse, play your main. That’s no where near fair on a competitive level, that’s a scam and I hope someone more familiar with the competitive side of the fighting game community calls Arc System Works out on it. If your main is locked behind a paywall then you have a right to be angry and even go as far as to boycott this game for this kind of practice. 

I’m not happy with the idea of paying to just to play as Orie and Naoto, but as I’ve said, worse has been done in the gaming world. If you aren’t buying this game for the reasons I mentioned, then I respect you’re opinion. However, I’ll also ask you to at least try and get this game on sale otherwise, as there is a good fighting game here, just one that needs to shake off a bad first impression. 

Ah, and speaking of the game...

This Game is Simple

Like I said, I took some time to play the Beta, and I have to say this game is a little too simple for my liking. Not that I’m some genius fighting game player that could tell you all the frame data and hitbox nonsense, but I feel like I’m grasping this game’s controls a little too fast for someone of my skill level. 

Let me explain. 

In the majority of fighting games I play I usually maintain a 10%-20% win rate, so I usually win 1 out of 10 matches. For a casual fighting game player that’s not bad considering I’m usually fighting competitive players, but with Cross Tag Battle I left the beta with a 50% win rate. That’s... quite a jump, but I don’t think that’s due to my skill, but how simple it is for someone that’s familiar with fighting game mechanics to understand the system. Now I’m also keeping in mind that everyone was learning the ins and outs of this game along with me during the beta, but this still.

This simplicity isn’t a bad thing. It works in the game’s favor and makes it much easier to grasp how all these characters works, which is needed for a tag-team style game, but it is something that makes me wonder how long this game will be popular. This game has two auto combos, for every character, and all the characters that aren’t from RWBY have a diluted moveset of their original game. It feels like you know everything about a character in about an hour of practice.

I had similar feelings about Dragonball FighterZ, all the character felt too similar to each other outside of some special moves. Cross Tag isn’t as simple and not all characters feel the same, but one of the big appeals of a fighting game is being about to learn a character for months and still find new techniques and strategies with them. Cross Tag Battle doesn’t feel like a game I’ll be able to do that in.

 Again, that’s not a bad thing, but it’s just something that has me wondering about the direction fighting games are taking... or maybe this is just a product of team-based fighters. That simplicity might be needed for the sake of everything meshing well. I mean, if Ragna could do all his rushdown stuff and have an assist to reset combos he’d be a nightmare to fight against. And Nu... don’t get me started on Nu.

 But then again, Skullgirls has a good balance of complexity, and the potential for 3-on-3 combat. All their characters feel and play in very unique ways too, so maybe my worries are founded in some ways...

But speaking of...

How Characters Play/Feel

Like I said, this game is very simple. These characters only play slightly like their original games. I've only played with a few people, namely my mains, but Yosuke doesn’t feel like the Yosuke P4A with his 48 mix-up tools, Linne and Hyde feel like themselves, but with less combo options than in their original game. Sadly, none of my Blazblue mains are in the current roster, so I can’t say much about them, but Ragna feels like a watered down version of himself at the very least. I think that goes for most of the cast. They all feel very watered down. This isn’t bad, it’s just different, and I’m not sure how I feel about that yet. 

I’m excited to know I’ll have Orie and eventually Izayoi in the game to play with, but I’ve seen gameplay of Orie, and she doesn’t play the way I play her in UNIEST. I get the feeling a lot of people are going to be playing around with the cast for the wrong reasons.

That said though...

The RWBY Characters

The RWBY characters play the best too me, but that should be obvious. They were made with this game in mind from the ground up. As such their combo animations are smoother than the rest of the cast, their sprites are a little nicer, and I can really see a lot of love went into make them feel and play like how they are in the show. The references and callbacks are great as someone that’s a fan of show, and I honestly think their voice acting improved a little in this game... then again, I’ve been hearing their voices for a few years now so I might just be a bit numb to how they’re directed in their series, but I’m surprised how well they mesh with the overall cast. I can see the shipping possibilities and fanfics already. I’m definitely going to have Blake in one of my presets when the game comes out, probably pair her up with Linne or Hyde.

Speaking of voice acting...

The English Dub

Thank God we have a dub again. It’s great to hear Patrick Seitz as Ragna again, and the rest of the cast as well. The Under Night In-Birh cast sounds great too, my favorites being Linne and Gordeau. Seriously, the UNIEST cast sounds great and their voice actors really capture their character well from what I’ve heard so far. It really makes me wish we got a dub for that game so those overlong light novel portions didn’t feel as long. 

I did little blurbs about voice actors when Elsword and Persona 5 voice actors were announced, and I’ll definitely do the same kind of blurb for Under Night In-Birth once all the voice actors are known. This game gives me hope that the next Guilty Gear will have a dub and then I can finally care about the story again.

But moving on...

The Roster (AKA Allen Gloats About Being Right)

So we know the full rooster of the game thanks to data miners (the buzzkills), and it looks like I can safely, confidently, and haughtily state that I was right with a few of my calls when I made my speculations. For the sake of maximum gloating I’ll give you all the breakdown from my Rambling on the matter.

Charge Characters

Mitsuru 

Kagura

Vatista 

Puppet Characters 

Carl

Relius 

Chaos 

Ken

Required By Popularity

Tsubaki

Adachi

Yuzuriha

Required by Tier List

Izanami

Margret/Elizabeth

Seth/Merkava

ArcSys’s Persona OCs

Labrys

Sho

Looking back, I wish I stated Nine instead of Izanami, but Izanamis were kicking my ass by the time I wrote up my speculation and I was very salty about that. I also wish I added Mika into my curve ball list instead of my wishlist, but... well, I can’t predict everything. Speaking of that wishlist, a few people made it like Izayoi, Hakumen, and Akihiko, but that was my personal wishlist and not a speculation, so I won’t count those.

Anyway, I got 5/14 right. I’d consider that pretty good for pure speculation.

My Hopes

I’m just gonna’ list these down, as now we’re getting into my unorganized thoughts.

A simple, fanservice-y story mode. Like I originally said, this game is Arc System Works fanservice incarnate. Frankly, trying to tell a serious story with all these properties, while possible, will just be a giant mess, especially trying to deal with all the quantum mechanical, timeline jumping, dimension hopping nonsense of Blazblue, so I really hope this story will be more like Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s Subspace Emissary where the story is simple and more fanservice for fans of all these series and just see everyone interacting with some fights in between. From what we’ve seen of certain cutscenes CGs being released this just might be the case.

Free DLC. I already bought the Season Pass because I’m a degenerate, but I really hope this game does what Skullgirls did and have all their character packs free on at least the first day of their releases. I have major issues with this kind of business practice and completely understand if you guys don’t buy this game because of it. I’m hoping Arc System Works will realize this and make all the packs be free for at least their day-one release to try and dowse the flames a little. And hey, the first pack and the rest of the RWBY team is free for the first while, so I think that’s exactly what their doing.

...

...

... 

I’m gonna’ feel like a chump for waste twenty buck if that’s the case, but hey, I do like the series.

A Good Single Player Experience. I know it’s a fighting game and all, but I hope it’ll have something that’ll make this game fun three years from now when the online community is dead. Something BBCP’s Abyss Mode (because CF’s is garbage) or Persona 4 Arena Ultimax’s Golden Arena Mode. Something like that. I doubt that’ll happen, but it’s a hope for a reason.

Overall, despite my mixed feelings, I hope the best for this game. And as we count down to the final days before release, I hope you all enjoy this game as much as I will.

Unless you roll out with Team UNGA. If you do, then fuck you, fuck your family, fuck your house cat, and everything you stand for.

[glorioustidalwavedefendor]

Nightclub boycott after spiking injections leave women afraid

Nightclub boycotts are planned across UK cities next week as students call for tighter security in nightclubs amid reports of women being attacked with needles.

(...)

Zara Owen says she believes she was spiked during a night out in Nottingham earlier this month

She says she gave up waiting in A&E after it took eight hours and is still waiting for her nearest available GP appointment. She says her doctor advised her to go to a local sexual health clinic.

(...)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/nightclub-spiking-date-rape-nottingham-boycott-b1941668.html

Cool, so not only doesn’t the night-time economy (I am not even gona pertend we can expect anything like protection from society, not if the last millenia are any indication, injuries to womens health and or bodily autonomy have only ever been punished if it diminished their “worth” to their owner (father, husband brother etc ... ) ... )

not only doesn’t the night-time economy keep people safe at night our society then also makes it hard to make corret consequence managment ... I mean ... roofies are nothing new ... would it have been so hard to open an emergency place where you can go, who are specilised in: Taking rape kids, drawing blood for STD tests ... and tests for ... substances ... etc ...

And who also have on call volunteers who then will sit with the victims ... talk to them or listen ... or just lead them to a room where there is stuff you can punsh and kick and smash ...

Would that have been so hard?

No.

No it wouldn’t.

However the fact that countries can find the budged to bomp other countried back in to the stone age and then just leave them to it ... *cough* afghanistan *cough* 

The fact that we can find the budged to fight steal and make presenst to the economy but not the budged to help with the results of this society STILL not beeing able to call their men to heel ... tells me that at the end of the day anyone who has any leverage over budged desicions thinks that beeing roofied and what ever follows is the just desserts for any women (and other people but the majority are female or female presenting) who dares to go out at night unchaperoed by a big strong man ...

And ... I don’t know ... but why are we as a society O.K. with that?

We have seen what even a few month of no income can do to the so called night-time economy ... and we KNOW that it is injured ... on it’s last leg ... the tiniest push could kill them ...

SO lets do it!

Let’s kill the night-time economy!

Let’s boycott it EVERYWHERE, in solidarity.

If they do not give a single flying fuck about the safety of their guest, especially their female gusts, who they shamlessly use as bait to draw costumers (why else are there “Ladies nights”? Why else do women get in cheaper or for free or they get a free drink with their entrance fee ... the night-time economy needs women to be around, as window dressing ... )

If the night-time economy does not protect their guests but instead year in year out ramble on the same mantra of “be careful”, “stay save”, “not our problem”, “No we will not change anthing fundamentally” then maybe you should listen ... maybe you should stay save ... not one evening ... not a week ... so long until the night-time economy are forced to understand that this society will no longer stand by and just let 50% of the population be fair game.

And ... we won’t ... right? ... I mean ... the majority of us isn’t O.K. with that ... right?

Until they are forced to make the night safe.

I mean staying save and beeing carefull is impossible if a policemen can be your murderer

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58747614

Wenn you no longer “just” have to be carefull with your drink, but now you have to wear full body armor to protect yourself from injections.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insane.

We tried: “Be carefull”

We tried: “Stay save”

IT DOESEN’T WORK!

Can we now maybe try something different? Something that will actually work?