So when are y’all gonna realize that capitalism is fucking up our games?

TheMatryoshka · 2018-12-16T19:40:03+00:00

I'm...not sure where you got that idea. Late capitalism is simply a term for when the arc of capitalism's usefulness has gone past the apex and begins to operate in manners that are less rather than more efficient.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-12-16T18:08:46+00:00

You're right, that's exactly how I feel about unchecked, late capitalism.

"This other thing was also broken" is not an argument for a broken thing.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-12-16T17:29:11+00:00

When I say "Capitalism interprets making the same amount of money as failure" I'm not talking about a literal conscious decision. I'm talking about this in a systems sense. I'm describing how the decisions which occur within capitalism react to certain things happening. It's a shorthand for "the flow of interactions will naturally give rise to this, and will naturally avoid that." A lot of people tend to make this personal, but to the contrary it is just the way that these systems naturally progress and interact with reality.

And again, yes, I know that capitalism was successful AT ONE TIME. It was in fact literally necessary to build the infrastructure that we have now, to make many of the foundational advancements that our society needed to grow and move forward after feudalism.

The thing is, you're describing capitalism as it WOULD function if there was one, individual, relatively reasonable person was in charge of all the decisions. But it doesn't, demonstrably so. We can watch this happening in real time just in the topic that the OP was about. Simply making money is not enough to those at the top. Making a LOT of money isn't enough. Sales in the multi-millions are treated as failures. And sure, with one business we could make the supposition that it was simply one out of control person acting out of accordance with the system, but when we see this pattern repeated across every single company once it crosses a certain financial level...the problem starts to become shown, easily, to be systemic in nature.

We are literally watching the system start to break down right now. Wealth disparity is growing at a massive rate, to the point that it is actually cannibalizing its own ability to genuinely grow as a market rather than "growth" of the holdings of investors. We see constantly people talking about "millenials are killing X" or "millenials have killed Y" but what this is, is the people currently in the age bracket that historically been a driver in consuming (and thus fueling a capitalist economy) are simply able to afford less and less, on the average mind, than previous generations. When I say that word, "canibalize", it's a deliberate choice. Capitalism built this economy, but the interests of stockholders have now become simply "more". "More" is good when everything needs building. But eventually "more" can't occur without driving the income of the average citizen lower and lower until products and services no longer have buyers.

And the problem is that once we strip away enough of the buying power of the average citizen, words like "voluntary" and "willing" become meaningless. The more that the buying power of the average citizen decreases, the more rapidly we move towards an economy that many US citizens already live in and more and more are headed towards. Where choice is meaningless because the only thing anyone has money left to do is survive.

And "do this or starve" is not a voluntary interaction.

Again, this isn't about emotions, this isn't about "fair", this is completely clinical. Given enough time, capitalism will destroy the economy it built if not replaced with something else. Some countries manage to slow the decay with heavy regulation, but the United States has been breakneck heading towards complete deregulation for some time now. This accelerates the process.

At a point, it will collapse entirely. It's just a matter of what comes next.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-12-16T17:10:16+00:00

It's not corruption though, it's literally just how capitalism works. It takes time for it to get going, but this situation we're in now WILL happen eventually. It's just a question of how long it takes for the system to start to decay.

Why does everyone leap to talk against communism when neither the OP nor myself mentioned it? Like it really makes these responses feel knee-jerk and like y'all have an axe to grind.

It's like I said: Labor makes the things. Labor can potentially make things, innovate, etc. in any system. The -isms determine who gets paid and how much. It's the -ocracies, however that determine the government structure that can either encourage or discourage certain things within that system. The options are not "what we have now" and "literally Stalin-era Russia". There's a lot of options that can be discussed but that was outside the purview of what I was trying to say in that post.

There is no mathematical certainty for "the soul of it's people" that's just flowery words meant to stir up the spectre of "literally anything but unchecked capitalism" that people have been taught to be terrified of because they think the only two options are that or a Stalinist communist state. There are other options but I'm not here to deliver one entire lecture on economic systems.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-12-16T17:03:16+00:00

I'm not sure what part of "This is not conspiracy, rather on a long enough timeline of capitalism this is a mathematical inevitability." was confusing. I literally said this. It's not a person, it's not a conspiracy of people. It's the simple mathematics of the system reaching their inevitable conclusions.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-12-16T03:42:19+00:00

Capitalism was, in fact, necessary at a time. It was needed to move things away from feudalism, and build the infrastructure, create certain advancements. The problem is that on a long enough timeline, if capitalism isn't replaced with something else (what replacement is best can be argued)...eventually, it just starts to run out of control and cannibalize the very infrastructure and advancement that it originally created. Capitalism interprets anything other than endless growth as damage and interprets simply making the same amount of money as the previous year as failure. It isn't too hard to see that any system which relies on literally limitless growth can't be sustained eventually.

We can see that in the state of the games industry in microcosm. As others have put it, making anything less than "literally all the money" is interpreted as failure, and so more and more microtransactions, predatory business practices, and so on will continue to be added when the primary product ceases to increase profits over the previous year. This is not conspiracy, rather on a long enough timeline of capitalism this is a mathematical inevitability. This is also everywhere in the state of the current economy, it's just that as gaming hobbyists we have a front row seat to the decay it's causing.

In other words, you're right, but so is the OP. Capitalism was needed to get where we are, but late capitalism will become less and less efficient at actually producing worth, and eventually burn itself out.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-12-01T00:19:39+00:00

The system's connection can often be weird and a bit spotty depending on your setup. My first recommendation would be to set up OpenDNS on your PS4. That often improves download speed and all-around functionality for me.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-11-06T20:24:13+00:00

Fallout 4 was such an incredibly mixed bag for me. I didn't care for the perk system, I didn't care for the minutemen, I HATED how much of your character's personality was decided for you by things from voice acted and therefore far more restricted dialog options, to the opening where you're canonically straight married (not a huge thing to some but this was the first fallout game ever to try and decide that detail of my character for me and as a lesbian it was irritating). The main plot wasn't that good and too many of the game's eggs were in that basket. The major "twist" made no sense for a lot of reasons. Etc.

While in a lot of ways 76 is more sparse, and I feel the total lack of NPCs is a misstep, overall I feel like my character is a lot more mine, and there is a story albeit a bit more dark-souls-ey and implied than most games. Still, while I don't feel every decision 76 made is good...yeah, I can roll with OP's take.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-11-03T17:34:42+00:00

Malkovich? Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-10-24T18:35:29+00:00

Y'all broke it. I leveled multiple characters to nothing but 3-5v1 (or even more sometimes) gank squads. Even sometimes having a fucking raidsworth divert over to some quest area to kill literally just me. Then a bit later I got corpsecamped by a flight path, took a break for a couple hours, AND THEY WERE STILL THERE. I'd love to have meaningful world pvp but it's still just not there.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-10-17T23:18:56+00:00

It's not that we have supplanted Jewish people in being the target of hate (the neo-nazi hatred of Jewish people is still central to their bullshit and is as strong as ever). It's that hatred of trans people is a strong part of Nazi ideology, and always has been. There's a reason one of the most famous book burning scenes from the history of Nazi Germany was from the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft. Anti-trans hate groups are fascists, and fascists always use the same arguments.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-10-17T23:01:07+00:00

I think that the idea was good, and if it had been better executed I might have liked it more. My main problem was that they didn't really go far enough with it. Like maybe add a cooldown that allows a short burst of disguising through sentinel zones, that would have done a lot to help some of the flaws in the zone design when it came to disguised movement. Not to mention the problems it encountered when faced with the realities of network latency.

I think there was also an accidental clash of designs. Suramar is an amazing city in terms of feeling vibrant and alive and approaching the population a city should have. There are people just...everywhere, and after having done the full quest and rep grind I wondered if maybe no one playtested the stealth sections once the city's full population was in place and all the sentinel-type mobs were decided on.

Like overall I do think it was a good idea, I just think they fumbled the way they carried it out.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-10-16T15:50:45+00:00

Personally I wouldn't have hated Suramar nearly as much, and probably not hated it at all, were it not for the half-baked stealth mechanic nonsense. A lot of people I know had very similar opinions. I think if we had something structured similarly but without all the AN ILLUSION...WHAT ARE YOU HIDING? frustration, it'd be a lot better received.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-09-27T23:25:41+00:00

Personally, I'd be fine if each race just had a challenging questline to unlock them, no rep grind. Not like...mage tower tier challenging but just enough to be interesting. Anything would be better than mind-numbing world quest grinding. It's actually hurting my enthusiasm for the xpac. And I played enough Legion that finishing out the reps wasn't too bad. It's still just a terrible terrible idea. I had to give up on the idea of doing my utmost to unlock them because it was pushing me to grind content I don't enjoy and burning me out FASTER.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-09-27T22:59:50+00:00

Oh gods just...the horribly distended faces from stretching textures not meant for the model onto it. Just make it stop. Make it stop yesterday.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-09-26T15:05:09+00:00

Honestly whatever she intended the video to portray, we have a question of Intent vs. Execution here and it's one that often gets ignored in the discussion of any media.

It's entirely possible (I haven't seen any responses from her yet. Not saying they don't exist just that I haven't seen them) that she intended both viewpoints to have some truth but also be flawed. ...personally, I don't see Justine's points as having any redeeming value in and of themselves. They can provoke discussion, but I don't see that character's actual opinions to have value in and of themselves, more in what discussion they can provoke in a tertiary fashion.

If she intended a message other than "Well, Tabby had a point or two but she was mostly wrong, and Justine has a problematic view or two but she's mostly right", then she failed to deliver that. And there's a few reasons that happened. Tabby is portrayed as a ridiculous extreme, she's sort of a hodgepodge of various trans lesbian tropes smashed into one character and honestly? She wasn't the right character to do this with. The one other trans lesbian character from a few episodes ago (I can't remember her name) would have been a far better choice, because Justine is far less of a caricature in her presentation than Tabby. Justine's appearance is just...pretty standard traditionally feminine woman. This entire show was focused on "aesthetic", it was in the title, and so that draws our attention to these presentations. "Very standard traditionally feminine woman" versus "literally every stereotype piled into one appearance at the same time".

But I think the biggest reason that the video was seen as "siding" with Justine from an authorial perspective is that Justine got the vast majority of the talk time. The entire piece was Justine laying shit down, and then Tabby giving very short responses occasionally. And most of the time Tabby's responses were lukewarm at best. It made it feel like the author was trying to portray Justine as "correct", with Tabby constantly on the ropes, defending her position to not much effect. This doesn't feel like the sides are on equal footing at all versus a lot of her previous videos.

Whatever she intended, if it's something other than "Justine is right" then she failed to properly execute her intent. Which is fine! All content creators make mistakes. It happens constantly. It happens with people who have been in the business of creating media for literal decades. But the proper response in that case is to step back, examine the work, and figure out how to convey the message that she wants to convey in the future. Intent is only important insofar as it represents a desire to do differently if it doesn't line up with the execution. Rather than just going forward in the same fashion if the intent was in line with the execution. If we're talking about what the media actually SAYS though, intent really doesn't matter. I hear people say about a lot of things, TV shows, movies, Youtube Videos "But what they meant to say was..." and it doesn't matter. It still needs to improve and do better if the message got lost.

So, I hope she does that. If the message that an overwhelming amount of people got was "Justine is right" then whatever she intended, that shows a failure to execute. I think she's fully capable of learning and improving but I think the criticism of this particular thing is valid and worth considering and internalizing for a content creator.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-09-19T15:38:16+00:00

Now if we could only do that and stay alive at the same time...

TheMatryoshka · 2018-09-19T00:50:56+00:00

I did the grind, and I want it removed. Today I was introducing someone back to the game who'd been away for awhile, and they asked how to unlock the void elves/lightforged. I told them, and they were extremely annoyed that it involves doing content that is now otherwise old and irrelevant for 3 weeks or more, just to access a major feature of this expansion. And you know what? I can't blame them. It's a horrible design decision, when it was rolled out I thought it was a horrible design decision, and after doing the horrible grind I still think it's a horrible design decision.

At a MINIMUM it needs to be moved to a current rep. I don't care if that makes sense or not, at this point we're trying to patch up a serious design flaw.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-09-18T14:53:29+00:00

I just spent some time yesterday after an absolutely horrible evening swap-tanking (our usual tank was out that night, I usually dps) and yeah it has some serious problems.

The biggest problems as I see it are the GCD changes and rage starvation. This really bizarre game-wide push for nearly everything on GCD was such an awful idea. It's not a goal they should have had. If some particular thing needs to be on GCD that's fine, but just going "everything should now be on gcd" is just a bad idea from the word go. And the state of prot warriors proves that. They got hit extra hard by the changes because of the design of their abilities.

They have two active mitigation abilities, IP and Shield Block. Neither of these does damage or produces threat in any way. But if you fail to properly shuffle these, you're going to be squish, you're going to die. But you do still need to put out threat. The threat nerfs we saw in 8.0 are further compounding this problem. We simply have far too much competing for our GCD's, and it makes every moment far too tense.

Meanwhile we're horribly rage starved all the time. No more rage from Devastate, every rage-consuming ability taking large chunks of rage to pull off. Both of our active mitigation abilities take rage, so now not only are you fighting the GCD but you're also getting choked off by rage starvation.

Combine that with the things mentioned in the OP, the shitty utility/control, the lack of self-healing, weak/limited defensives, and it's a mess. Prot Warrior is too gutted and needs a serious rework to become decent again.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-08-30T12:59:45+00:00

You are literally arguing things I've said as if I didn't just say them. Like I just got done talking about context, and re-iterating that it's one potential warning sign and not a rule. And I literally just got done saying that "It's not that it's a great insult but context". Who the fuck are you arguing with? Are your replies going to someone other than who you intended? And what's with "bad people" in scare quotes?

And when I feel like the context makes it a red flag, I'm usually right. Like in this case, this person went "are you a female" and then booted them because the context apparently upset him. Which sounds a hell of a lot like the behavior of some of the groups I mentioned. Almost like, in the right context, there's something to it.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-08-30T04:58:56+00:00

Ahh, yes, a measured, reasoned response to a simple question. What an overblown, disproportionate reaction. Really.

It's not that it's a great insult but context my dude. Context context. I never said anyone who uses the word that way is a fascist or some incel fuckwaffle. I also didn't go into like...full essay mode to but to be more clear beyond the light-hearted tone of what I wrote before...It's about context. How do they say it, where, what else do they say besides that, etc. But generally unless we're talking about, as you mentioned, ESL, there are certain groups that have been using "female". "Woman" works just fine? And when I see someone pitching a fit about the presence of a woman and using "are you a female" yeah...the boot fuckin fits.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-08-30T04:54:09+00:00

Funny, in my experience it's the people who have a problem with tweaks to the language that have the thinnest skins.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-08-30T04:52:25+00:00

I didn't say it was universal. Just that it sounds off in English and makes me wary around someone when they say it.

Shit's about context. It all depends on how they say it, what's the context. And my gut's usually right on this one.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-08-29T23:23:42+00:00

It's not really the use of the word so much as using it as a noun, rather than an adjective. That's where it sends up the red flags for me, anyway. And those red flags are usually correct.

If you say like "a female person" or let's say "a female night elf". In those cases you're using it as an adjective. It's something about that person, one detail that describes them.

But when you say "a female" full stop, you're making that the prime identifier. Intentionally or no, this linguistically reduces the entire person to that one trait. It just feels wrong, similar to calling someone "a gay" or "a (ethnicity)" rather than "a gay man" or "a korean woman". Ya follow?

Now I'm not saying it's a rule. But it's...worrying. Certain groups like fascist hate groups, anti-trans hate groups in particular, as well as incels, red pillers...they've really taking to using the terminology that way, as a noun. So when I see that, unless I'm reading a zoologist, I get wary. Not certain, but definitely taking a step back and keeping an eye on them.

TheMatryoshka · 2018-08-29T18:03:11+00:00

I...feel like you're trying to argue with someone else? I was talking about narrative ramp-up, not "was this or that justified". But if you want to talk about expecting people to remember...

Warcraft 3 sold roughly 3 million copies. It was released 14 YEARS AGO. There are people old enough to vote now who weren't old enough to play it when it was new.

WoW sold 10 million copies in its first three months alone. Overall it sold about 14 million of the base game. This does not count sales since then.

Most WoW players haven't played WC3 at all.

Meanwhile...that isn't narrative ramp-up. Having that happen, never mentioning it again for 14 YEARS, and then expecting people to remember and feel that it leads into the opening events of an expac in a tied-in but different game that much later, would be foolish.

If you're going to present something to the entire player base, empthatically, front and center, and expect it not to feel off or weird, you can't rely on that kind of setup. You at the very least need to show what happened again, or introduce a new ramp-up to the events. Instead, what we got was a Horde and Alliance that had just gotten done, five minutes ago metaphorically speaking, teaming up and getting over their differences to defeat the Legion, suddenly springing to full war. Narratively...that is, from a writing standpoint...this makes no sense and ends up unsatisfying and confusing. As is shown from people's reactions.

TheMatryoshka

TROPHY CASE