- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
No, see, the problem I have with the example isn't "stuff is hard", it's "look at all these stupid surprises".
If those conditions weren't surprises, that isn't how they would arrive and they might not arrive at all. It was really effectively presented as gotcha gamemastering.
cB557
voOOP
But like, that is what makes being an inner sphere mercenary so hard. It's very volatile work where your employers might just try to screw you, you might not be able to get the supplies you need, and things can go real bad real fast through no particular fault of your own. Having to figure out how best to prepare for and manage sudden confluences of bad luck is a form of "stuff is hard". Certainly I'd be worried about a game focused on these elements being bullshit, but it's not and an illegitimate form of difficulty and it can be done well.
Enforced incompetence I would hesitate to give even the faint praise of 'legitimate'.
The exact same events happening because you knowingly chose that path would not be phrased that way.
EDIT: Where I am coming from is, if you were actually doing the gribbly accounting, you would at a minimum know before you pulled the trigger that you might get a misfit ML and were committed to paying for it. And you would know that you were going to have the electrical overage at the time you authorized it unless it is enemy action!
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Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You can absolutely have parts of your merc game involve random chance, e.g. your ammo supply has run dry because of some fuckwit over in Sector 108, several star systems away, doing something that fucked the supply chain and so you have to fight the next mission hand-to-hand. You can have repair costs and ammo costs and wages and so on. You can even have an obstructive cheapskate boss for the merc company who chooses to force them to run at the blunted edge of minimal efficiency all in the name of making money by not paying for repairs.
You can't spring any of that on a player without letting them know it's a possibility/the core conceit of the game, because that's unfair bullshit and is going to ruin most people's fun.
Like, the above is basically Darkest Dungeon in many respects and a lot of people loved that! But you knew going in what you were getting into. Big chunks of that are part of the gameplay loop of Only War, a TTRPG where 'the quartermaster fucked up/you filed your requisition form wrong and now everyone has six cooking pots instead of the grenades they wanted' is actually a thing built-in to it.
You can't spring any of that on a player without letting them know it's a possibility/the core conceit of the game, because that's unfair bullshit and is going to ruin most people's fun.
Like, the above is basically Darkest Dungeon in many respects and a lot of people loved that! But you knew going in what you were getting into. Big chunks of that are part of the gameplay loop of Only War, a TTRPG where 'the quartermaster fucked up/you filed your requisition form wrong and now everyone has six cooking pots instead of the grenades they wanted' is actually a thing built-in to it.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
When ever the crappy actions of people like Rowling or Blizzard management and boycotting the games comes up people go "but the devs". Game developers are a notorious underpaid and mistreated field mostly because they are not unionized and people can prey on "passion" as a excuse for severe crutch.
Developers are also payed with a salary so how good or bad a game does isn't going to effect them.
A company doing well also doesn't meant they would treat their employees better. Or else Amazon would have brilliant working conditions.
It seems that Animation and Video Games are the only industry where people get to concern troll about the workers.
Like no one suggest that suing Exon mobile is bad because they would have to lay off the poor oil rig workers.
It seems workers rights is only brought out to concern troll people and not to say support unionization.
Developers are also payed with a salary so how good or bad a game does isn't going to effect them.
A company doing well also doesn't meant they would treat their employees better. Or else Amazon would have brilliant working conditions.
It seems that Animation and Video Games are the only industry where people get to concern troll about the workers.
Like no one suggest that suing Exon mobile is bad because they would have to lay off the poor oil rig workers.
It seems workers rights is only brought out to concern troll people and not to say support unionization.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This logic is obviously incorrect.
Do you think that a person's job isn't impacted by the success or failure of the business they work for? It should be self-evident that a successful company is going to lay-off fewer people then an unsuccessful one on average. That isn't to suggest that the former will never lay anyone off but I would be shocked if anyone here would want to work for a place that was constantly on the edge of failure. Not to mention that there are incentives like stock options that are also impacted by success or failure of a game.
TBH I think you're drastically overextending yourself here. A moral argument can be made that hurting the company's bottom line is of a higher priority then the wellbeing of their workers but trying to pretend that the latter cost doesn't exist will just hurt your position because it's obviously wrong.
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And it's not even like this is an unpopular or out there argument, either. Like, the current writers' strike is going to (already has?) result in a lot of non-writing staff getting cut, and it has substantial support from people who know that this is the case.
- Location
- Nunya, Arizona
Isn't it a known and persistent issue with game development where even wildly successful companies will regularly fire more or less entire dev crews after the game they're working on is published? Plus the whole thing where successful companies hire a lot more people to begin with, so even if they're firing fewer people in a relative sense, the raw number is still substantially higher.
That might be one of those cases where it is self-evident, but also, y'know... wrong. Or accurate, but barely so, with the difference not actually being that large. Whether or not a game's successful might not actually make much of a difference for the outcomes of individual employees in a lot of cases, especially the short term ones.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
My take on the BattleTech thing is that you do need to communicate to the players: "Caution, I'm going to run this like the lore says BattleTech really is like for mercenaries, which includes employers and third parties trying to chisel you and screw you over financially on the petty stuff..."
But that once this is made clear, or if there's precedent for it in prior gameplay, it's not at all bad GM'ing to bring it into play.
But that once this is made clear, or if there's precedent for it in prior gameplay, it's not at all bad GM'ing to bring it into play.
Great Greedy Guts
Ceterum censeo Vigilam esse delendam.
Game dev cycles are long enough and companies so focused on company credit over creator credit that unless you're a stand out dev in some way, you probably aren't making it further just based on what you worked on previously. Like, that's not to say it won't help, but... barring indie stuff, I really haven't seen many devs say that kind of thing, barring (sometimes) ones fairly high up.
It sucks if a boycott screws someone over, but that doesn't make boycotts inherently wrong. Otherwise corporations can just keep holding workers hostage forever and do whatever they want on the basis that if customers don't buy EVERY game, they are letting the devs down.
And I don't have "buy every AAA title just to support the devs' future careers in having almost (if not all) the profits siphoned off to execs and shareholders)" levels of loose change, myself.
Serious question. Say the boycott on Hogwarts Legacy works, like, absurdly well, Hogwarts Legacy ships 0 units on launch, let's say month, do you really think that changes anything for Rowling?
Just to clarify my own stance... the first I heard of Hogwarts Legacy was finding out about people getting attacked for reviewing it, playing it, or saying "I might play it". I haven't paid attention to anything officially Harry Potter since I read the Epilogue of the Deathly Hallows the year that book came out. I frankly, still don't actually know what exactly Rowling did that got people that upset, and the closest I've ever had to an explanation is "she's a TERF", which is sufficiently vague as to mean nothing to me.(I've seen it applied to everything from "people with male genitalia should not be in spaces for women" to "Gender Dysphoria isn't real" to "We don't help people who are dysphoric about their arms by lopping them off" to "Trans people should just die" and everything in between.)
As for Blizzard... let's be real here, there are two types of people involved, the people who've been sitting on the sidelines being sad about the decline in quality of Blizzard games, and the people who lack the capacity to uninvest themselves and keep playing Blizzard Games. And neither of those groups are going to usefully boycott, the first one, because they already aren't spending money, the seond one, because if they could stop spending money they would have.
For the former, yes actually. Because in this rather fantastical scenario there would be a crystal clear message that Rowlings actions have damaged the brand. That would have huge repercussions going foward, as that sort of action would cause buisness executives to go into serious damage control mode. Moreover, Rowling has said that she views the continued success of various Harry Potter media to be a signal that a lot of people do support her policies. So, again, this would be a rather large blow to her messaging on that front. Honestly, the fact that you think no one would care if a major AAA release sold 0 copies for a month is baffling. It's like someone saying that if no one bought tickets to a new marvel release for a month no body at Disney would care. Meanwhile in reality sales on the opening weekend are a huge component of seeing if a movie is going to do well, and games follow a similar pattern.
Though I'm not sure what your point is about Terf being unclear? All 4 of the positions you list are pretty shitty, so those would all make the point that the person holding them is bad. But, to give a bit more context, Rowling is a very high profile anti-trans activist and is effectively bankrolling major hate campaigns. She is very much on the 'Transwomen are evil and need to die' bandwagon, and does not see a reason to hide that.
The Last One
Here because reasons
EVE Online now literally has Excel built into it.
Mandemon
Gentlemen, I love brawl.
- Location
- Cookie Jar
This is true in cases where those successful companies do not have new games to work on. Because producing a game and maintaining a game take entirely different teams.
So if there is no new game to be worked on, all those devs will be mostly sitting around, and that costs company.
Wouldn't this same apply for... more or less all tabletop games? People need to know what they are getting into, rather than having Spreadsheet Simulator 3000 dropped on their lap out of nowhere?
Chlof
Her Ladyship
- Pronouns
- She/Her
All of these positions are equally shitty for varied reasons.
- Location
- Sydney
Wait what do you think the difference between these positions is?
The last one only comes from hate, two of them are differing(and differingly wrong) understandings of the medical research and/or a general mistrust of big pharma, and the first one does not require hate, indifference, or any other form of antipathy, just a desire to keep protecting a group in the same ways they have been protected in the past.
All four CAN come from/be a mask for hate, but only one of them requires hate when genuinely held.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes Hogwarts Legacy bombing would signal to people Rowling has poisoned that well and that Transphobic attitudes have consequences.
Yes she hates trans women and thinks trans men are confused lesbians who pretend to be men for male privilege. But that's what she does in her writing pretend to be male for male privilege
Chlof
Her Ladyship
- Pronouns
- She/Her
There is literally no interpretation of the desire to segregate AMAB transgender people from public facilities that isn't hateful.
Rule 2: Don’t Be Hateful
There is a reason that part said "male genitalia". You cannot seriously tell me that someone with a penis should generally be permitted in spaces intended for, for instance, female victims of rape by men. If someone has a penis, they probably shouldn't be near someone who's Androphobic. Etc. And no, telling someone who's Androphobic that the person with a penis is actually a woman is about as likely to help as telling someone Arachnophobic that actually that spider is a crab.
And this is, frankly, perfectly emblematic of why I normally don't bother talking about any of this. Because I have encountered two people on the internet who talk about this stuff without taking the other person's position into reducto ad absurdum. So I'm just going to go back to doing that now.
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
Why are you ckecking people's pants to see what's in there ?
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
No one is taking your position into absurdity. Your position starts awful and stays there.
Chlof
Her Ladyship
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Like, I could go through and point out all the ways this both deeply stupid and aggressively bigoted, but I can't even be bothered to engage with this utterly smooth-brained, hateful bullshit anymore. Consider shutting up before you post next time, instead of inflicting your dumb facile garbage on the rest of us.
Errr. Do you know what I mean by The Company Store Syndrome?
Its meant to do that. Sure, you can be like Draconis Combine and starve Wolf dragoons of supplies they are supposed to get.... Culminating in a commando attack and blowing up the Wolf mobile space station.
But most clients are more like Davion. You want to survive on the battlefield? Better be indebted to me, just like what they did to Eridani Light Horse, selling them lots of equipment and gear that they couldn't possibly hope to get and thus secure terms of service such as ELH being NAIS instructors
It all boils down to this. Making your unit poorer and poorer, more stuck to the company store while work equals debt. If you don't though, you die in battle as your mechs are not ready. Eventually giving you a choice of indentured servitude to the employer or banditry. Its in the manual itself, as mercs having to keep one eye on the enemy and the other eye on their employer.
Its even why my suggested run thru has the classic signs of giving the mercs too good terms to be true(full salvage, bonus combat pay and independent command is not normal. )
Thd difference between mine and the suggested treatment is that I say exposing the players to the sheer insanity that is Btech economics is more than ample enough to cause such a death spiral. Rules say not to go too deep into accounting and not the economics because it's not fun, but that's where I disagree. I think it can be extremely memorable, if done properly.... And only ONCE of course.
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- Pronouns
- She/Her
The issue is blaming men as a whole.
TERFDOM comes from a type of feminism where the only axis of oppression is gender and all men are oppressors who want to attack women.
Trans women are seen as "men in dresses" infiltrating female spaces and are thus hated.
It's an attitude that ignores Race, Class, and any other axis of oppression also known as "white feminism"