TacticsConsort @ TacticsConsort @yiffit.net

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12

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344

Joined

2 yr. ago

Thank god for that. There might be scummier companies than Blizzard out there, but I wholeheartedly believe the only reason that Blizzard aren't on the same level of scum as Nestle and BP Oil is because they make games, and there are only limited opportunities to sell human lives to authoritarian regimes when you just make games.

This may sound strange, but honestly once you understand the game it's really the other way around!

The official 5e devs do NOT have any clue what they're doing in terms of encounter balance and design; almost everything gets crapped on by a good spellcaster or Ranger, and they play it pretty safe and corporate with stories too. Half of 5e adventures are copies of old adventures and it really shows because all the copies of old classics are actually way more respected and generally liked (Curse of Strahd, Sunless Citadel, White Plume Mountain) than 5e originals (Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen). Notable exception being Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. Despite being the smallest original adventure in 5e it's honestly good.

Still, I really appreciate the meme for our community! You're the backbone of lemmy with all your posts my guy

It's pretty modern if you mean popular, although the idea itself is REALLY old.

Rather than going into specific examples because there are a lot of them (especially in gaming and TV), I'd like to say my piece on cliches.

Basically, cliches come to exist because the cliche trope is a really good idea.

"The Butler did it" as a murder mystery trope is a fantastic idea because some people with too much money will use the protection money affords them to mistreat their employees, providing a great motive you can build on to create a great story with relatable morals and characters. It sets up a character with perfect motives, means and a reasonable position of trust to avoid suspicion.

Similarly, "Hell good, Heaven bad" is a fantastic trope because it lets you step back and analyse things like the negative impacts of religion and how authorities (and the bible) will portray themselves as good regardless of their actual actions. Plus of course there were periods of time where people were told doing virtually anything that didn't fit into an extremely narrow worldview meant you were going to hell. You know, stuff like basketball and Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, the problem with cliches is when someone sees a popular idea that's also a very good idea, but doesn't understand why it was a good idea. As a result, when they use the idea, it rings hollow at absolute best, and that kind of terrible execution of something that's already known and popular tends to be especially disappointing. I think the best example is The Hunger Games, which absolutely defined young adult dystopian fiction for years because it showed how the media industry mistreats its workers, and Alleigant, which used a lot of ideas from Hunger Games (and some other things) without actually understanding the ideas.

(TLDR: Hunger Games has a love triangle as a prominent plot element, but the actual reason is that it's perpetuated by the media pretty much on pain of death for Katniss so that she can entertain the viewers. By contrast, Alleigant also has a love triangle but the triangle IS the plot element and the author bends over backwards to make it happen despite the fact none of the characters really feel like they're suitable for it)

Anyways, cliches aren't bad but you need to know how, why, and when to use them in order to actually fulfil their potential, and the heaven-hell one you've mentioned above is no exception.

Gonna say it, this REALLY feels like a case of the news cherry-picking what parts of a protest they show. Between the unreasonable viewpoint that's directly adjacent to a very sensible and popular viewpoint and the fact we KNOW the media have a very vested interest in trying to push pro-genocide narratives (such as anti-Israel protests being pro-terrorist)...

Yeah, even someone as gullible as me? I'm not buying this.

Oh yeah Bethesda's actual valuable talents just straight up don't exist anymore.

Basically it's a lot cheaper to bring in underpaid, non-unionized contract workers with short contracts. So as far as I'm aware, Bethesda got rid of all their skilled programmers who were highly familiar with the coding and engines of Bethesda games, and brought in people who didn't have any talent or familiarity, resulting in terrible outputs just because the actual people that make Bethesda's games good were all fired for being good at making games (and thus being on 'permanent hire' wages instead of 'shitty short contract' wages).

But it gets worse. A lot worse.

See, Bethesda is pretty notorious in the industry for the low quality of their code documentation. Even in their prime they were notoriously bad at this. Code documentation is essential to allowing people to read and understand code, which is notoriously one of the hardest things in the job to do- code is a lot harder to read than to write. Bethesda keeps little to no documentation, which is why most of their games have so many glitches. But not having documentation is a particularly dastardly combo with frequently cycling your workers to keep their wages low. Because their unfamiliar, underpaid workers now don't have any way to quickly learn how the code operates. And adding your own code to existing code in this way makes the problem a LOT worse, since now even if someone understands one part

Frequently cycling workers also makes it a lot harder for workers to communicate with each other. This is primarily useful to companies who want to prevent the formation of unions so they can underpay people, but it's also something that REALLY shows when making games because people need to talk to each other and work together in order to make assets that all go well together. If people aren't talking to each other... well, think of all the ways that tasks and goals can be interpreted. Two people assigned to different sections of the same task can produce fundamentally incompatible work.

I'm sure you can see how this could be all be an obstacle to making classic games with rich environments that are prized for their immersion, storytelling and fun gameplay decades later.

TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK BOYS

I know it got quashed; I'm not saying there was a revolution. "Free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times" was the anti-oppression slogan said by the victor of a heartstone tournament (which there was no rule or stipulation against), which caused Blizzard to ban the player from all tournaments, and refuse to pay him the prize money he'd won in an attempt to suck up to the chinese government.

To clarify: I don't expect a gaming company to stand up to a full blown authoritarian regime. But I certainly won't support a company that willingly goes the extra mile to sell out to them.

Used to, but I'm a little past the age.

It's over bro, the developers who made the game you love are long, long gone. That isn't your company, it's a corporation wearing that company's bloody torn-off face as a mask

Source: Former Blizzard fan (Free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times)

Wew, 10% per year? That's actually pretty solid, if I'm not missing anything. And having a good deal that lasts THIS long actually flips the normal shitty status quo of multi-year contracts on its' head, now they won't need to go to the effort of big strikes for a good few years while they've got these fair wage increases locked in.

I have to ask. What about this movie is so bad

I haven't seen it, I hadn't even heard of it until yesterday. But you don't get a flop THIS epic without some Morbius tier blunders

Adblock my beloved

Isn't this the plot of Fire Emblem Three Houses

Christ, he's ACTUALLY managed to hit the Lizardman Constant with the dems.

Now hit it with the Repubs too. Come on Trump. You wanna turn on your ally. You wanna turn on your ally and throw him to your cult soooooo badly. It'll be really funny I promise

Hot damn, that's EU-level based. Nicely done!

Well the primary reason they would "backfire" is because Trump is perfectly consistent about being full of shit. There is literally no way that he's going to do something that benefits anyone other than himself. We've had 8 years to learn that.

Yeah, seems reasonable. The front lines have proven to be extremely difficult to move once they get set in place, and Russia is provably completely fine with a couple hundred thousand of their Expendables dying every year.

Ending this war quickly definitely requires knocking out other aspects of the russian war machine, anyone should be able to see that. I'm not enough of a military man to tell you WHICH aspects have to be knocked out, but I'd believe those elements are inside Russia in a heartbeat.

Let's just not go and talk about hitting any major population centers though. Collateral damage is not justice, even if the russian brass have absolutely gleefully been hitting population centres as much as possible. Justice for that is seeing them hanged, not hitting some people that had no real say in all this.

Holy sunk cost fallacy, batman. How fucking much does it cost to operate an ENTIRE GODDAMN NUCLEAR REACTOR just to fuel a tech project that nobody wants???

I wonder if a birth rate that stays low for a while might be what it takes to avoid future wars? Just in general, across all nations? Funny that the very things that have damaged society's faith in the future might end up mitigating conflicts in the future.

When manpower can no longer be replenished, then wasting it trying to pull off landgrabs can only be sustained for so long. Not just physically, but politically.

Please please please please please please please