#i would honestly be more vocal about my nuanced opinion (that is overall negative) on rpf if the people that also weren’t that keen on it—

[rosesradio]

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[hatefilledpoptarts]

for the salty asks: 7,10, 15, 26?

7. Is there anything you used to like but can’t stand now?

tough to say since my opinion is pretty flippant and I change how I feel about everything constantly (example: flipped between loving sailor moon to thinking the show sucked to liking it again) but I guess if I had to bring up something I enjoyed but absolutely hated after a certain point it’d be Hal Blu for its shitty use in a twist that did not even bother filling in for that ending whatsoever, it had no f@%*ing right to be there at all except to make a ‘clean’ ending I guess instead of you know, handling and acknowledging its core story and themes but nope it was a bs fix-it twist and it showed me what I absolutely despise in a twist, no f*@#ing clue its gonna happen just have twist out of nowhere with no character or story buildup for it to happen!!!#@! bullshit i say just bullshit (ﾉಥ益ಥ)ﾉ

I also once upon a time actually watched family guy and thought it was pretty ok but then I started realizing how much of sleazy dirtbag character brian actually is and just how much I could not stand watching these ugly people anymore, now I just can’t stand it and will use every fibre in my body to shut that crap off or get the hell out of the room

10. Most disliked arc? Why?

mmm for context-wise lets go with arc v, I know s3 wasn’t a walk in the park but if I had to go with an arc I found I just didn’t like, in-spite of interesting things going on, I’d say it was the time between the 2nd half of s2 when Academia comes in and after they took off. I don’t care for that arc in the least and think was a pretty boring and disappointing arc overall just because it was the first instance when what the series had going for it was being put to waste. 

Even the fandom at its most hopeful wasn’t helping when it threw its exhilaration and dissatisfaction at the wrong places imo since the whole merging thing felt ill timely and throwing shades at yuzu was overboard since logically speaking that was what was going to happen, the writers weren’t going to own up to that subplot anyway, least of all at that time, since they didn’t even bother to explore it prior to it happening. It felt like a reminder more than being pivotal plot shit happening to move the series along.

Yuri was equal parts at his weakest during this time since he lost the intimation factor he had in s1 and was much more fun to watch in s3.  He did nothing honestly except remind us that hey he’s apart of this whole counterpart mystery thing going on too oooh *rolls eyes at the yuri fans*

just boring overall imo along with frustration at the clear sign of lack of planning on the staffs part. leaving the night escapades of that arc and heading back into the tournament felt disjointed and ran a bit of whiplash for just needing to happen but not leaving a mark on the series as a whole I guess is what i mean ;;;

15. Unpopular opinion about the manga/show?

I was born with an unpopular opinion in fandom lmao but lets go with love interest female characters, I’m going to go with my thoughts on Orihime’s role in Bleach which was her development both hinged but was not defined by her interest in Ichigo.

ok I have actually haven’t dealt with the fandom in any way but I feel like orihime might be considered a poster child for how to degrade your female into love interest role exclusively but i don’t feel that way, the only thing that degraded her was kubo not following through on the development he set her up for, orihime could have grown as a character from all lot of her negative attributes about being jealous, feeling like she couldn’t contribute and falling behind. she could have taken initiative for her actions and could have pulled through on the merit of her choices but kubo going back to status quo just sucks and brings down an actually steady romantic development. she doens’t have the catharsis to make it go from alright/boring to ‘i may not ship them but they earned it for its exploration.’ He made her role pointless and he made her feelings unimportant and thats a shame because it would have felt less like her role was set from the start to just end up with Ichigo.

She was an enjoyable character with little personalities quirks that made her charming even to a ichiruki shipper like myself so i’ve never found her to be a bother and her docile nature was perfectly in line with who she was, sometimes I enjoy docile character but thats based on certain criteria she luckily didn’t tread on. 

Orihime going from a decent 5-7 in exploring her feelings for him to falling short by going back to the starting point wasn’t the fault of being a shonen love interest, her ‘kuns’ or eventual marriage aren’t the issue, its kubo giving up on her that is.

And I think its important to have some kind of development for it whether it be big, small, nuanced or full heartedly simple. The only thing wrong with a female character in love with the mc is not giving it enough substance, I’m both fine and can enjoy that type of archetype so I’m not one of the more vocal fans who say love interest heroines just suck outright or are pointless. Its fine and if done right can actually be enjoyable.

26. Most shippable character?

since theres no specifications I’ll go into a list of character I find myself shipping most outside of my main ship:

Midoriya Izuku gets way more ships than he has any right to have but I just end up putting him with whoever it seems, I have about 2 otps with him, which is never a thing with me i’m a 1 otp kinda girl, but there are plenty of rare pairs I find that appeal to me with him involved

Yuzu Hiragi is the most shippable imo and I’m constantly finding plenty of matches I like, probably put her with anyone and it just works thanks to who she was is

England from hetalia bizarrely ended being my most shippable character and I don’t know how that happened

Maka Albarn hands down went ahead and just owned everyone ok, best mc and best relationships with whoever fight me on this (งಠ_ಠ)ง girl can have whoever she wants k bye

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Destiny 2 is dead! Long live Destiny 2! A 6 months look at where the game has been, is and still needs to go (PvP)

March 7, 2018

With Destiny 2 now having been out for 6 months, I thought it would be a good time to give a view on the game at this point from a PvE and PvP perspective from my 500+ hours of play so far. Destiny 2 has had a lot of road bumps and obstacles to overcome since launch, but those issues have been very different between PvP and PvE and where overall I feel D2 released with a much stronger PvE component from what we saw in D1, PvP seemed to become almost an afterthought. That is really weird to say considering the effect that a single game mode like Trials dictated not only on D1 over 2 1/2 years, but the impact D1 PvP had on shaping D2 as a whole. From the moment it was announced, we knew that the decision to go to all 4v4 was a mistake. I'm not going to go into all of that because Bungie did end coming to realize this as well and 6v6 and Rumble are returning later this month. However there was a second change that D2 brought which for a long time I didn't think quite as harmful, but now think was probably the biggest mistake overall in D2's PvP philosophy and that was the decision to go with playlists. I have no facts or figures to back it up, but I'd still be willing to bet that maybe the biggest reason people stopped wanting to play Crucible is being forced to play random game modes they don't want to play. I can say for a fact it has made me say the hell with it and stop many times and as recently as 2 days ago. When I played D1 at launch, I played Control exclusively. It allowed me to learn the nuances of play and get better at the game in a static familiar environment and I spent hours and hours logged in playing solo, not for any drops or rewards, but because it's why I bought the game, to play an awesome Bungie shooter. Eventually I started playing a lot of Clash as well (particularly when it got added to Iron Banner) and in year 2 when I met my friends and started playing in Fireteams, we would play almost everything, but even then we played what the group wanted and once we started it was a set game mode to go game to game in. The closest we had was the classic playlists that were a random chance between 2 modes and that for me was a huge reason to not log in and play them even when wanting to play classic maps. The classic playlists were created to gate content and to give those players who didn't own the latest expansions content to still play, but incentive to upgrade as well. The irony is that many of the issues that D2 sought to correct in adopting the playlist format were actually the result of the thinking that gave us playlists to begin with. D1 released with what? Clash, Control, Rumble and Salvage I believe and once a month Iron Banner would roll around and draw people to its playlist. Players had that very limited choice of were to queue, but they did en masse and the game was a huge success and particularly for streamers and YouTubers who put out Crucible content. D1 always had battles with lag, but the biggest issues with play in year 1 was unbalanced matches. By the last IBs of HoW there were better odds of dropping into a match in-progress and losing than getting a fresh match and when you did get a fresh match, odds were 4-5 people would quit out before it ended. Matches would start, one team would get a 1 or 2 thousand point lead and that was it, exodus. The solution to this was to increase the influence of SBMM in year 2 to make matches more even and stop the unmitigated pub-stomps. It worked. Destiny 1 over the course of year 2 saw the most competitive matches I saw over its 3 years, but it also saw other factors which were shaping play and playability as well. The first was the introduction of Trials in HoW and the crazy degree to which it was given carte blanche to dictate balance for not only PvP as a whole, but the entire game was bent to the whims of Trials players. The effects of this were not subtle as we saw meta after meta and the developers nerfing not just weapons, but abilities, ammo and ammo consumption and even artifacts across the board to cater to the whims of those who felt everything should be even and "skill'' should dictate every encounter and not the weapons or abilities. What that failed to take into account is that it's impossible for skill to not factor into every encounter and all it ended up doing was taking away the ability for players to master different sets of skills and made everyone play with the same tools. Not surprisingly it was hated when adopted into D2 by the same player base who thought for sure it would let their ''skill'' shine only to find that others were better at D2's play and so suddenly everything being equal somehow didn't allow for skill to matter. Classic doublespeak and once more showed the lack of self accountability that led to them wanting neutered play to begin with. There was something else happening over the course of D1 that also had a huge negative effect on play though and that goes back to the creation of the classic playlists. While D1 started out with relatively spartan choices for play, that did not last as we saw not only Trials and elimination added to the game, but also Supremacy, Rift, Zone Control, Mayhem and private matches. While it can't be argued that those were positive additions as far as more fun things to do and play, they came with a cost and that was how much they fractured and lowered the player pools for any particular activity amongst them. Instead of everyone playing in 4 (5 if IB was active) possible playlists, suddenly everyone were spread out and the immediate effect was seen with the almost crippling effect lag started having on matches in all modes as the matchmaking system struggled to put together clean matches with the drastically lowered player pools. This had a secondary effect as well as we saw in year 3 the completely bogus and unfounded attack on SBMM as the root of all Destiny's PvP woes and ultimately its demise and the way that shaped D2 as well. SBMM was always a factor in matchmaking going back to launch in Sept 2014, but it was one of many in a complex algorithm that dictated how we were grouped that included not only connections, but regions as well. The attack on SBMM was once again driven by the sweat community who didn't want to always play close matches against evenly skilled opponents, but wanted to pub-stomp for views and subs. So the rallying cry of "why should we always have to play sweaty matches?'' was set forth and adopted by viewers and listeners and then transformed into SBMM is the reason for all the lag and every other ailment. Bungie capitulated and it didn't cure lag, it only brought back the uneven quit'fest that existed in year one. So now we have D2 and as a direct result of the how the game progressed over the course of D1 (and the problems inherent from those changes themselves) we not only ended up with 4v4, but playlists as well. The effect was immediate as we saw a huge backlash against Supremacy always popping up as the game mode when obviously players were hoping for something else. This sadly led to Supremacy being changed because Bungie saw the issue as Supremacy not being fun enough and so ''let's make it more like Clash'' instead of ''hmmm, maybe we should let players just play Clash if they want'' From the start our group was affected by the 4v4 switch as our group of 6 that would go raid and then PvP together suddenly had to split up after raids and it affected not only the raid groups, but friendships as well. But on a solo level, suddenly where if others were grouped and running together, it took away any desire to log in as a solo player when there was no option to play what I wanted and to get stuck playing things I hate to maybe get a game of something I liked at some point. I'm not a streamer but I would guess that this had a huge impact on players who streamed Crucible as well as they were no longer able to just stream modes they preferred and excelled at and were forced into the random hopper. A huge part of any type of competition is getting into a groove and a flow. When you play clash or control or doubles or anything consistently, you can't help but improve and learn and find where you play best within the confines of each games rules and flow of play. That all goes out the window when those rules and games change match to match. There was another aspect of the changes that came home to roost in the playlists as well with the creation of ''competitive and quickplay'' which could now be labeled ''no one plays and let's pub stomp'' I get where Bungie was going with it and what they were trying to do with the SBMM and CBMM splits, but once again, the skilled players don't really have any desire to test those skills in competitive playlists. They want to go in and smear people and what have we seen in D2? Quitting out on a scale not seen since D1 year 1. This has resulted in a future update to give penalties for dropping out, which okay, but honestly I see that as one more deterrent to people playing and not a solution that examines why players are quitting to begin with and trying to change that.

So I've written a lot about where we came from and the issues with the infrastructure the Crucible is played on and haven't yet spoken of the gameplay itself. I know there are a lot of opinions on play and I know a lot of those revolve around kill times and the kinetic/energy setup. I find it odd that there is so little acknowledgement willing to be given for how we got to D2's neutered play and honestly I've found it sickening to read and hear all the attacks on the gameplay and the developers from players who were extremely vocal in getting us here over the life of D1, but for all D2 has gotten wrong with the play itself, I think that it can also very easily become the best Destiny PvP experience we’ve ever seen. The weapon kill times are an issue for a lot of people and the big byproduct being the forced focus on team-shooting and heavy advantages for fireteams. I don’t think kill times are the issue that most do and I’ll explain why. In D2 1 v 1 encounters, there is actually a chance to have real battles on that micro level now and give/take of damage and maneuvering that lead to some epic personal encounters. It’s not the “I saw you first, pop pop pop I win’’ of D1, but it all goes out the window when one player is joined by a teammate. On the surface maybe lower kill times would help, but I honestly don’t think it would change very much because the real issue to me is that we don’t have the full arsenals of weapons and abilities to take into encounters because of the drastically slower cooldowns (for drastically nerfed abilities). We just had Crimson Doubles and to me it highlighted everything that is wrong with D2 on a gameplay level and what it needs to put it not only on par with what D1 could be, but to surpass it. In Doubles we has drastically increased ability cooldowns for our grenades, melee and support abilities. This instantly made 1 v 2 engagements not only survivable, but gave us the real ability to consistently come out on top because it opened up the ability to really use strategy, movement and terrain in ways that primary vs primary can’t come close to achieving. I know that in D1 a huge complaint by the end was that PvP had devolved to just ability spam and that is a big reason for D2’s horrid cooldowns, but even with the ability to spam grenades and support abilities (melee was still trash and needs to be a 2 hit kill), it didn’t dictate play like it did in D1. We actually played some D1 PvP last week and it was all Camping snipers, chucking grenades and players running around OHK Shoulder-Charging. Primaries seemed the afterthought they were by the end of D1. In Crimson Doubles, I had my grenades and abilities to use bring into engagements like I did in D1, but with the still reduced effectiveness of them on their own, weapons still very much played a factor and for me at least; it was the absolute best Destiny PvP I’ve played since HoW. Having the ability to dictate where multiple enemies are able to setup and attack through the use of a full suite of class abilities was game changing and I don’t think that abilities need to be that drastic, but if that play could be translated to the rest of the game, I think it’s a completely different game and to the devs I ask, why not? Why not allow us to have those full arsenals? Why not let us have other options beyond the kinetic/energy combo to take into each engagement? It’s fun, it’s dynamic and most importantly IT’S DESTINY. I know there are plans in the works to increase player movement speeds and to increase the chances of us getting hold of power ammo and while I don’t think these are bad decisions in and of themselves, I don’t think they address the core issue with what ails D2 and makes the play so team-shot oriented and bland overall. I love the weapon system. I love running Time Worn Spire as my primary and being able to run an AR, Scout or Hand Cannon as my secondary. I loved D1 Y1 and my fusion rifles back when they were D2 good in D1, but I can also see through the experience of all the different iterations of play that we’ve seen that Destiny 2 is really only a few changes away from being as good or better than D1 was at its best in HoW. In my opinion what Destiny 2 needs going forward for PvP is this: 1) We need to be able to play the modes we want when we want. To this end, Clash and Control should be set playlists every week and when it’s Iron Banner that can replace the regular playlist that week to not create multiple player pools for it. I believe Rumble should become a regular playlist as well if the player population dictates it. Supremacy, countdown and survival should be rotated as weekly competitive game modes with countdown and survival not appearing the same week they are the Trials game mode. Mayhem and Doubles should be special weekly playlists just like Iron Banner that are available maybe once a month. I would almost put them on rotations with IB with one happening every other week. If you include faction rallies in there, it could really be a solid line-up of activities to log in and play and if SRL ever returns… Destiny’s seasons could really be full and dynamic with weekly activities to log in and play. 2) Destiny needs to back to 6v6 play for all Clash, Control and Mayhem. I would keep 4v4 for the competitive modes to keep consistency with Trials and to that end Supremacy needs to be reverted to its release format. The changes destroyed the game type and just made it Clash 2.0. Want to see players quit a D2 game fast? Watch a full fireteam team-wipe their opponents to start a supremacy match once or twice in the new format and see how fast players drop when the score is 8-0 or 16-0 instead of 4-0 and 8-0. Kill confirm isn’t kill confirm if kills count. 3) Weapons do not need drastic adjustments to kill times but higher risk/reward weapons need to kill faster but again, be harder to use. With many High Impact weapons subclasses in D2 (particularly scouts) missing a shot is fatal. The reason ARs are so much more used than anything else is that when you give everything basically the same kill times, the advantage is going to go to ease of use and that’s that we’ve seen. There is no margin for error with the more skilled weapons and I know we have weapon tunings coming and while I’m excited for the exotic changes (they changed D1 hugely for the better when they happened there), I’m also apprehensive when I hear that Pulse Rifles are getting buffed because to me that is a reaction to usage and not to actual gameplay. Pulse Rifles don’t need to be buffed just like they didn’t need the 9% buff in 1.1.1 of D1. 540 RPM Pulse Rifles are arguably the best weapon subclass in the game at the moment and if they get buffed, I see us potentially going right back to D1 and its metas. 4) Grenades do not need to be buffed but they need drastically reduced cooldowns along with melee and support abilities. Again, I don’t think they need to be as fast as Doubles, but honestly if it were my call I would move them to that system right now and adjust it back from there rather than move them incrementally forward. This game needs fun right now and it needs to let us feel powerful right now and I’d err to the side of being too OP than the too conservative that we have now. Supers I think are actually okay although I think we need to spawn in with some super energy when joining in-progress matches. It’s not fair to not get one at all or to have no counter as you spawn in to everyone hitting you with theirs. 5) Get out of the habit entirely of trying to build a perfectly balanced game. Make weapons, abilities and supers all matter again. Let subclasses stand out again for their own strengths and weaknesses. If something isn’t what was intended, but it’s fun that’s a good thing. Players loving a weapon or play style is a good thing and not something to remove in the name of balance. Let Destiny be Destiny because at the end of the day, it’s still a hell of a good game, but we’ve seen what it can be and we know what it can become and it’s all right there. Thank you.