Deep Dive Devin

I'm around.

Having been playing the game for the past several days, I can say the bot crisis in casual has died down quite a bit. I see two a day at most, and unless the server's full of them, they get votekicked pretty quickly. I hear one of the mid-July updates broke a lot of botting software, so this is a good start. I hope they can keep that momentum going.

We're not talking about perpetually hosting a dedicated master server or anything, we're talking about the bare minimum to play the game at all. Like, SRB2, the Sonic game built in a dead fork of the Doom engine, will always be playable in multiplayer, because you can run the server yourself even if the multiplayer master server (which, for perspective, has run for fifteen years on a non-profit fangame) were to be taken down completely. It doesn't cost anything for me to open my ports to play co-op with my friends. A few months back, darkflame released their own custom software to run private Lego Universe servers specifically because there were legal issues with trying to host a public one. That game is now officially rescued from being dead, whether or not anyone actually uses that software.

But the point isn't about whether the server will have a bunch of people on it, it's about being able to run it at all. Plenty of games will go unplayed whether a publisher kills them or not, but the focus is that publishers shouldn't be able to kill them regardless. You can't predict whether a game will stay popular, but you can choose whether to deny anyone the right to ever play it again, and that's a shitty thing to do which shouldn't be allowed, at least if they paid for any part of it.

I'm not sure that's fair. The internet as a collective needs to be more descriptive about what "game journalism" means. Sure, people have been memeing on the incompetence of games media for years now, but why they do that is much more important. Best I can tell, "lol games journalism" started in 2014 with gamergate. I'm not getting into the varied, often-contradictory claims of that movement, but it should be clear those claims aren't the same as the killing games problem. The shutdown craze has increased since 2014, but in my experience gamergate was more angry about individuals who represented social values they disagreed with, and the connection to "game journalism" was a story where one of them allegedly used underhanded tactics for good press. My skepticism of that story aside, it should be clear why the internet decided "game journalism" meant corrupt, sycophantic or incompetent actors. It's thinking in terms of individuals. I'm sure everyone here has seen someone talk about Kotaku like it's a person, not a site full of differing, sometimes-conflicting viewpoints. But games being killed is a systemic issue, an industry-wide practice that needs major legislative decisions to counteract, not started by individuals or even a specific company. The connection to journalism isn't just under-reporting, but what reports there are treat it with kid-gloves and fail to hold the publishers accountable for this decision. Games coverage has for a very very long time been in the pocket of publishers, and their tendency to play defense for them (even without actual sponsorships) hasn't wavered a bit since people started going "lol games journalism", because the problem goes further up than that, and I think saying "well game journalism has been bad a long time" kinda ignores this, because it's still treating it with the individualist mindset.

He brought it up because of the rhetoric in the article, not specific to anything about the game itself. I mean, purging online aspects of a game with no way to recover them is still wrong, even if it doesn't render the entire product unplayable. Maybe instead, just burn the last ten pages or so of every copy of Dracula if you want a comparison. The popularity doesn't really matter, as well. If someone -- anyone -- wants to, the art they're trying to access should be...y'know, accessible. The only limitation to accessing art should be the physical limitation of stuff that hasn't already been preserved digitally. It could be friggin' Empress Theresa and it would still be wrong to permanently damage or remove every copy in existence.

I would agree if not for the fact that this came right after they directly responded to the twitter campaign saying they were going to make some more substantive changes. Obviously current-era Valve is a disappointing company, but I think it remains to be seen whether they were outright lying.

Well, that #savetf2 thing did get it a pretty good bugfix patch just a couple days ago, actually. The fact that Valve's updates prior to this have been kind of bad and the servers being overrun with bots and cheaters hasn't changed, but hey, maybe it's the start to something better. Honestly, all I want at this point is for them to release the last comic. How the fuck does this company keep teasing people with final-act cliffhangers?

So I've heard. I haven't personally checked back with the manga since several months before I wrote that. All I've really gleamed is that Luffy finally got his super saiyan form. I'm honestly fucked either way, since I feel like I've probably forgotten most of Wano (frankly, I've forgotten most of Whole Cake too) and will probably start from the beginning of the arc whenever I get back to the series. Oh, and on an unrelated note, Berserk is coming back, in case anyone here hadn't heard yet. Lead by Miura's close friend and established mangaka Kouji Mori, along with the rest of the assist team from Miura's manga studio, they're going to try and close out Elfhelm (with TWO chapters coming on the 24th) and then base the final arc on Miura's unfinished plans. I honestly couldn't be happier, because even if this conclusion ends up sucking (which, I'm optimistic, I think it'll be "okay" at worst), Miura's work stands on its own and I don't think it will be brought down by a poor attempt at an ending any more than it was by not having one at all.

Well you actually didn't say that, but it was the thing you're not doing that I had a problem with, so it doesn't really matter if you care or not.

Well you can kind of see how you gave the impression that "what you like to do" included the scam that is NFTs, until you said you didn't even know much about them. I'm not shitting on you just for making 3D models. If that's all it is, I'm sorry for jumping to conclusions.

Thankfully Ross is not economically braindead (and I suspect having his assets previously stolen for NFT shit does not make him more sympathetic to the idea), so no, I don't think advertising your crypto scam will be very lucrative here.

I admit it's been a good half a decade since I started up the game, but I know starting with Water Hazard there have been map edits in these videos. I'm pretty sure *some* of the alleys in Ravenholm include such edits.

Siofra River in Elden Ring really managed to "wow" me, it was the point I realized both A. how insanely much content they crammed into the game, and B. how far it was willing to depart from Dark Souls thematically. A lot of people hate the Meat Circus from Psychonauts for its difficulty, but I think the music and theme of the level being a big gross weird circus made out of nightmares is the perfect final level setting for such a unique game. I honestly felt kind of disappointed that Psychonauts 2's climax didn't manage to hit the same high. Fatherland Follies only really gets surreal or crazy for a few seconds. Sonic 06 fucking sucks, but the final part of Kingdom Valley would actually be genuinely breathtaking in a good game. I guess ChaosX's Remaster Project does okay?

The intro both surprised me with a hilarious non-sequitur, and reminded me that I haven't had a pop-tart in like ten years. I wonder if they were actually good or if that was just my broken high-school brain reacting to the sugar.

Glad to have an update. Sorry if the delays are bugging you, but I hope you know the we're happy to wait a while for new content if it means things go okay on your end. Don't wear yourself out for our benefit.

I mean, other than good guys being the underdogs being a pretty good rule for storytelling, the usual answer is "because this is a dumb action story and we don't want to be too tied down to real events". Or you just make them not be around for those parts. Because otherwise, you end up with the much worse problem: writers trying to answer the question of "why didn't they stop the holocaust", and that's how you get Fantastic Beasts, a living joke of an intellectual property.

Someone hasn't rewatched the TrackMania video recently.

It costs more than a sandwich.

If I had to guess, I'd say that they averaged out the scores people gave it out of ten, and it came out to around 8.3

A community small, insular and self-governed enough to have that sort of protocol is pretty different from this forum. Nonetheless, if a paranoid schizophrenic is saying it because he has delusions of grandure and genuinely believes it, and a holocaust denier is saying it because he wants to encourage violence against jewish people, there's not actually a difference in how an internet community should treat them. The majority of people following this doctrine skipped past an actual conclusion. It functions off a lot of the same principles as cults -- charismatic (to them, not us) leaders that know everything they say is crap, and an audience that is so convinced of those leaders' viability or divinity that whether the things they say reason out are simply not a part of the argument. It's not their brain working wrong, they deliberately refuse to use it because their investment in great leader's end goal is more important. You can see smaller versions of this all over society (don't get me started on crypto scams), but I don't think someone who has been indoctrinated into a cult is succumbing to brainrot, either. The rub with fascists is that a greater number of them know that holocaust denial, race science and the like are bunk, but are just belligerent assholes who enjoy violence being done to people different from them. I just don't think crazy is the term for it. Also, be careful when talking about satanists. There's a big difference between the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan for example, bigger than differences between christian sects a lot of the time. You're probably thinking of "irrational", but the main reason to ban them is still not because they're simply incorrect, but because the things they want and do are harmful. If someone has an irrational argument about whether One Piece or Naruto is better, that's probably okay. (One Piece is better, in case you were wondering) Uhh, "Woke Cancel Culture" aside, I think we can agree that an obscure forum for a video game youtube channel is probably not among the most vital connections a person could lose. Well, I've kind of accidentally locked the majority of my discussion here into complaining about how the forum handles the reactionary end of the political spectrum. It isn't unsalvageable, I just think allowing that rhetoric to spread in the first place is worse than a rule restricting hate speech more than the mere letter of the law. Even if we were really interested in growing the community, the demographic of fascists is necessarily a lot smaller than the demographic of people they seek to harm. I'd go for the latter, personally.

Okay, I may need to break this down Are we implying that people asking the jewish question are simply insane, a threat that extends no further than mental institutions? Because I don't think that's true. When I look at Richard Spencer or David Duke or whoever, I don't see someone whose brain is wrong. Personality disorders, unhealthy coping mechanisms, a facade of belief to cover up deep existential emptiness? Sure, that's all there, but I also see that in much less-horrible people, that's just a consequence of living in the world a lot of the time. They are not traits unique to "crazy people", nor do I think most mental health professionals would characterize them as such. Evil cannot be rebranded so easily. An individual does not inherently create a community of creeps, but that's usually because they remain individual. Hate speech moderation isn't just to keep forums clean, but because a place that's safe for one creep is a place that's safe for many. The moment these types are allowed to congregate uncontested, they start bringing their friends, and they will try to enforce themselves on the rest of the community. This went down in a lot of comics and anime fandom spaces in the early 2010s, and is a big part of the toxicity in nerd fandoms to this day. This is generally incorrect. Pretty much all the data we have on deplatforming has shown it to be effective both in reducing harmful influence and in decreasing that attitude in users spreading it. Hell, back in high school I frequented some pretty nasty forums, a couple that promoted Unite the Right, and when those places got banned, I didn't exactly retain a lot of the opinions I absorbed from there. Also, saying "but they're a member of the community!" sounds like an argument against having rules at all, doesn't it? I could argue that someone spamming porn all over the forum is also a "member of the community", would it also be wrong to ban them? I mean, I'm far less offended by pornography than antisemitic conspiracy theories.