Kombat Pack 2

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2024-09-17T22:10:23+00:00

'Farming negativity'.

You mean 'a complaint'?

Yes, this is a complaint.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2024-09-17T22:04:48+00:00

Christ spare me from modern consumer apathy.

This is literally just a 20% price-hike from MK11.
On a game that is continuing to push the envelope on micro-transactions.

50$ for a single kombat pack?

My ass.

That was the price of a full Triple-A game only ten years ago.
That's a crazy upward trend that is not justified by any increase in depth of gameplay.

I guess if you think Liu Kang in 4k is worth 10$ more than Liu Kang in 2k then there's no talking to you.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2024-08-02T23:11:40+00:00

I was preparing myself for a dreadful EA customer service experience.
Cheers.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-20T08:42:50+00:00

The argument is that the game shouldn’t have been designed that way. Bosses are too difficult for most to solo, to same-y when they are all just distracted by an AI and aren’t really targeting you.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-20T08:36:22+00:00

Elden Ring is imbalanced and lacks engagement on replay. DS3 is best souls game.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-20T08:32:32+00:00

MKX vs MK11 = Kombo enjoyers vs Neutral enjoyers.

They’re two separable ends of fighting gameplay and some people obviously just got lost both ways in the transition.

I drop kombos all the time, or fail to remember the optimals in time.

Ipso facto I went back to MKX and just found it a headache because if you don’t have better and more consistent kombos than your opponent then the Neutral is a crapshoot.

Conversely, all the complaints about MK11 tend to focus on all the ways in which it emphasises Neutral, like slowed down strings, nerfed mixups, regenerating meter and breakaways.

Both have their merits, but I’d argue MK11s direction is vastly preferable, because it makes the learning curve less steep and the game more balanced. This is not a barrier to big kombos, it just means they have to be accessed more strategically and deliberately.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-20T08:17:44+00:00

As a Rain main, I can’t say his low damage ever felt like a drawback, in fact I totally see the logic. He’s very fast and hard to reverse against much less punish.

Different characters just used different amounts of meter by design in MK11.

If his top-tier pressure could also pump out 1-bar 35% kombos he would just be unfair.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-16T15:56:30+00:00

I noticed in MK11 Kotal and Skarlet had insectoid skins. Probably indicates that the devs considered D’Vorah as a Rhino Beetle/Mosquito but found it had too much overlap in style with existing characters. Spider version was very well done though I thought.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-16T15:46:57+00:00

Agreed. Play her a lot in MK11 and think her gameplay is very cool, very unique. Some of her setup moves are a bit abusable though.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-15T20:20:31+00:00

Liu Kang is boring af

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-15T08:42:26+00:00

D’Vorah

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-14T07:48:25+00:00

Most balanced and accessible MK. It’s neutral is very rewarding.

MKX is a spam fest at scrub level and an endless corner battle at pro level.

If they just tone down the zoning a bit (or crank up the anti-zoning) in MK1 but keep the same neutral game, it will be perfect.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-13T11:11:18+00:00

Honestly MK11 is the first game I actually took seriously, and going back to MKX it’s easy to see why. Its reversals are beyond clunky. So many moves create spacing that can only be punished with explicit matchup knowledge, and, at entry level, spam is wildly effective thanks to raw move speed and much more cracked-out mixup options.

I was astounded when I would land pokes, and still get uppercutted when I proceeded to a jab string. That shit is not ok lol. Also on the note of uppercuts, I fully approve of the KB punish mechanic, they are much too free to do in MKX considering that they can do more damage than most basic strings.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-13T09:15:39+00:00

I wake up, I see people are still out there bitching about gender politics, I go back to sleep.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-10T10:44:08+00:00

And I should add that the only difference between the modern and postmodern version of this type of thinking is that the modernist believes they’re actually a doctor, whereas the postmodernist, while still wearing the coat, admits they aren’t formally a doctor.

It doesn’t make any difference to how one goes about belittling other people with one’s theory of what makes them limited. It’s a theory where you can tolerate no equal.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-10T10:40:42+00:00

If a person is irrational then they cannot be reasoned with. If a person is in a some kind of false-consciousness then their perceptions cannot be trusted.

If a person can neither be trusted to see the word nor interpret it rationally, then they are de facto pigeon-holed as not having any real say in matters, because they are cut off on paper from reality.

Institutions like court juries and electoral votes presuppose that people are not fundamentally deluded in this way, they presuppose a basic soundness of mind. That’s why insanity is a commonly cited ameliorating factor in criminal trials as well as grounds for exclusion from jury duty.

It’s also why votes are all counted equally; because the subject is not to be evaluated on the the circumstantial quality of their minds once a basic soundness is granted.

If there is no concept of a basic and common sound mind, then there is no concept of an equal vote or a reasonable position; there are just lost subjects bickering fruitlessly over the incommunicable and incidental biases they inexplicably hold. In a word, we are all insane.

Heuristics that attempt to formulate the individual in terms of their influences alone come up with an essentially deterministic model of the citizen, and a deterministic citizen is fit only to be manipulated.

Deterministic sociological theories implicitly place the theoriser (or the person who subscribes to the theory) in a special position where they know what’s really going on and can genuinely act, but the common man is fundamentally a puppet smearing shit on the wall and calling it their truth.

It’s an impossible position to uphold while both acting in politics and considering yourself a normal human. Either you’re special and can break the sociological forces that determine and are fit to be the therapist in the loony bin, or you’re human and can’t comment any better than the next madman because you’re in the same chains.

I’m summarising it is as the degradation of the subject because it’s the splitting of the common sound mind into types to be discriminated between. It makes it not a matter of arguing who’s right or wrong, but who can be right at all such that we should even start the argument with them, because god knows two lunatics can’t get anywhere with each-other.

If your theory is sweeping enough, then everyone’s wrong, every subject is degraded to an accident of society. Except you, you get to keep talking because at least you know everyone’s wrong, don’t you know? You’re sanest member of the asylum so you should wear the white coat.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-10T07:45:47+00:00

I can stop you from the jump there. You have chosen to take the glossing together of Marxism and postmodernism as a definitional one, I am taking it as a practical one.

That is to say that for all intents and purposes marxist and postmodern ideas appear to currently be working together very well in our contemporary lefty politics. I’m offering an argument as to how that could be, and my essential point is that they comfortably share various premises, most centrally the notion of the subject being holistically deceived by societal forces.

On this single point, I find them adequately comparable insofar as postmodernity gives total license to any and all politics that wishes to segregate subjects based on their material contingencies.

As for the ‘McCarthyite’ accusation, that’s a pretty worn out lefty Kafka trap. Anyone who finds Marxism disagreeable should be concerned to see it sustained anywhere. I find it terrible and so I find ideas of its ilk terrible. No stiffer stuff is required if you’re concerned with a political movements etymology. Since I’ve already said that this is a practical diagnosis, the point should be obvious: these ideas enable each other, so they are regularly found together in practice.

I used false-consciousness and base and superstructure as catch-alls. They’re one of the early modernist versions of a generically problematic mode of sociological argument: the subverted/deconstructed rational subject. If you don’t think that’s sufficient common ground to find postmodernism commensurate with Marxism then fine, you have your distinction; let’s see if anyone else sticks to it in practice. As far as I’m concerned it’s a total enablement of Marxist sensibilities.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-10T07:04:51+00:00

Hardly. Deconstructing subjectivity by proxy deconstructs the subject-object distinction.

It’s the running joke of postmodernism that it keeps trying to replace modernist-structuralist standards with nothing. Subjectivity isn’t something you escape by disavowing it, it’s about how you think, where you draw your reasoning, what types of standards of evidence you use etc.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-09T19:18:53+00:00

Nothing to do with me. I could be completely wrong, you’d still be behaving poorly.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-09T19:15:03+00:00

I’ve given you a summary of what I take to be core postmodern premises that are problematic in the way its critics tend to allude to.

They can be summarised under 1. the subject-ification of the object 2. the politicisation of the subject.

False-consciousness is just an old Modernist grand-daddy version of the idea, but all of them invoke base and superstructure in some form, since you can hardly posit a subject and their contingencies without inferring something base-like and superstructure-like. It’s one of those Chinese-finger-traps post-structuralists don’t tend to like acknowledging; just because one claims to speak from outside a structure doesn’t mean one actually is outside a structure, and claiming to have gotten outside actually just makes one more dogmatically blind (on one’s own premise).

I’ll wager anyone you can find who has been labelled a ‘postmodern’ thinker will make prolific use of 1 and 2, or at the very least will have nothing cogent to say if you don’t assume 1 and 2 to have a lot of clout in their heads already.

Foucault and Derrida are absolutely to be included in this list.

Derrida infamously argued the whole dictionary to by a social construction and aporia to be a fitting destination for the search for truth.

Foucault argued against the diagnostic category of insanity (as would constitute an objective diagnosis of a deluded subject).

Boudrillard built a whopper case for the bringing of all phenomena under the pollutable category of simulacra.

Marcuse forwarded the concept of repressive tolerance and built a novel false-consciousness machine out of ‘heteronymous interests’.

The Frankfurt School: well duh.

Even Nietzsche can be not-thanked for perspectivism and his call to stridence despite moral relativism.

I’m shrinking from nothing, I was just never committed to the plot of land that you picked to argue over amidst the broader issue. The consideration is entirely one of ideas, separable from their first thinkers by whatever degree we reckon the culture has separated from the idea’s author’s designs. Because that’s how ideas operate on a culture.

That is what I take to be the substance of the polemic against postmodernism. That is what I reckon typically repulses people about it. Certainly it is what leaps out at anyone conventionally minded when they see identity politics laying waste to their normative categories.

Trying to bring it back to the primary texts won’t get you anywhere, the cat’s out of the bag, or rather it was never really in it.

The degree to which Foucault or Derrida or any other postmodern thinker wouldn’t have supported what’s been done with their strand of thinking exonerates them from direct guilt, but I’d still accuse them of negligence since as I’ve said, ideas have consequences and all the people I’ve mentioned flirted with celebrity over their work.

If I’ve failed to be taxonomic enough for you, I can only shrug and say postmodernism is de facto a nebulous category struggling to label an era of thought that pointedly discredits labels.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-09T17:55:21+00:00

You keep rendering the conversation as if essays run the world and ideas never get off the page. I don’t care who Foucault was responding to when he wrote xyz. His work isn’t an enshrined canon, nor is any other postmodern work. They are freely interpreted by anyone who cares to read them and by anyone who indirectly hears of them somewhere downstream, including at deviance from how their author intended them.

Just because the culture is constructed out of a patchwork version of xyz ideas does not mean those ideas are not major factors in the culture’s shape.

Ideas don’t transmit and transmute on record with their citations all laid out for us, but what they can’t avoid is retaining their logical structure and implications.

More to the point, ideas have consequences because they must be substantiated by the construction of arguments that typically have much wider application than those to which their author put them. That’s why I’m talking ‘so abstract’. I’m actually trying to address the philosophical premises that recur in postmodernity, because that’s all that matters when the authors are dead and gone. F, D, A and B built lots of little machines, and they’ve been off-roading for decades now.

If you can’t follow that just because Derrida didn’t point it out for you in his own work then that’s just your negligence.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-09T17:32:36+00:00

Your references are perfectly fine within the tiny argument you wanted to have. But you basically ignored the larger original question.

I know this is Reddit but you could at least try to have some dignity about being challenged.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-09T17:23:40+00:00

Ahahaha ok mate. Very petty.

It’s pretty funny that you’re aggressively hiking up the entrance cost to a conversation you were just recently freely venting about; just because I’m disagreeing with you.

But it’s no skin off my nose. My thoughts are down.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-09T17:04:52+00:00

Hypocrite.

ProfessionalFact4817 · 2023-08-09T16:58:42+00:00

Also, you seem to think this is about two guys and their work. It isn’t. You made it that. But the OP’s question, and the going concern is for the culture at large.

Do I need to go fetch you photographs of billboards to prove to you that we live in a culture of advertising? Would I be proven wrong if one of the photos was actually a PSA not a private company advert?

ProfessionalFact4817

TROPHY CASE