Gormongous

It was still a very ugly system, even modded so that it wasn't a ridiculous "everyone vs. the player" scenario. The vanilla system was a creeping opinion modifier that eventually topped out at -200 (absolute hatred), but the best mod that tried to fix it just flipped it and made it a -100 modifier that slowly decreased over time, so that strong alliances would survive the opinion hit but not much else. My ideal system for "realm divide" would combine the basic concept with some kind of player-designated sphere of interest, which the AI could use to calculate whether or not it was threatened by the player, since actions outside of a player's sphere would be heavily punished with opinion penalties or unrest modifiers. It's weird that, of all the strategy games I've played, only Victoria 2 makes much of an effort to present a player-facing system of spheres, and even then it's just another system where the player invests points to "claim" a country in a different way. EU4 actually has a sphere system too, but it's entirely subsumed in AI calculations about whether or not they hate the player.

I honestly feel that it's the same impulse as the bad-faith cries for ethics in games journalism. They've been around a system their entire lives and think that they have an understanding of how it works, which is in a way that always benefits and pleases them, so when it does something that they don't expect or like, it's the fault of the system and not them, therefore the system should apologize and/or change and/or be destroyed. Maybe that's a stretch, I don't know.

Wow, I could have written that post, except that I only have three years of teaching experience as a TA, with my first year as an independent instructor coming up now. I know exactly what you mean and I see Gjoni's rage and self-righteousness in miniature all the time among my students. Both genders get upset about grades all the time, but it's almost always young men, who've always thought of themselves as A+ students naturally, that fly off the handle with exaggerated accusations and elaborate revenge schemes when they get their first C for ignoring my instructions and turning in a book summary rather than a book review. A lot of the time, there is literally no way to get them to understand that they did something wrong and that they're the ones who need to change. They literally don't have the framework to evaluate their own thoughts and actions as anything but entirely justified, just because they had them. I really don't know what there is to be done about it. And yeah, I think there's also a recognition among these defenders of Gjoni, whether conscious or unconscious, that they've been awful to women in many of the same ways that Gjoni is, and that they're guilty of being vindictive and abusive assholes if he is. I hate to say it, but like you, I've treated girlfriends poorly and then not been able to let go when things rightfully ended with them. It took a lot of growing and some admissions of weakness to get beyond that, and I was lucky to have friends who told me how it was and didn't just blindly support me when I was doing wrong to myself and to others. For a lot of the people in #GamerGate, either isolated by themselves or surrounded by like-minded angry young men, they may never get that opportunity to grow, and that's a bit sad and scary, so long as I don't focus on the world of harm that they're doing to good people.

I made the mistake of reading the entire follow-up conversation after Dorn laid down the truth, and while these people make me physically ill, I'll never get tired of the way that their complaints and protestations escalate. It's always "Did you hear about this awful thing that's ruining video games" to "We don't care about Zoe Quinn, of course, but someone should" to "#GamerGate has been correlated to several minor improvements in way that game developers and journalists operate" to "Fuck you then, who cares about your opinion anyway." I wonder if they ever get tired of calling their heroes frauds for not wanting to give their blessing to this sad little crusade.

Should I just look that up, then? Is there much satisfaction to be gained from stumbling upon a weapon or anything?

You misunderstand me. He won't play Dark Souls, so he's going to watch me play Demon's Souls.

I convinced my friend who owns a PS3 to buy that, because he's been dragging his feet on playing the copy of Dark Souls that I bought him, so I'm going to need some advice in our non-existent Demon's Souls thread on how to wow him with my Souls prowess very soon.

Oh, I know that no one has to charge for their mods, but if any mod deserves to have a price attached to it, it's the incredible work done in a complete and functional total-conversion mod, which makes it a bit unfortunate that they're often made by teams that tend to be large and fractious. If the questions I put out there have been answered in any capacity, I'd love to heard those answers, since it's been nearly a decade since I was active in any kind of mod development, so I guess I'll cut my post down and send it in.

I really enjoyed the Thumbs' discussion of mods in the first half of the podcast, but it also felt really clear to me that they were speaking as indie developers used to working in small and close-knit teams, close to the ideal of an auteur or a collective. I don't have that much experience with making mods, but what experience I do have, working in double-digit teams of complete strangers over the internet to release total-conversion mods similar to the Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings 2, wouldn't really work well with any kind of traditional payment scheme. For most of 2005, I drifted in and out of the forum-based team for Rome: Total Realism, maybe the biggest mod for Rome: Total War until Europa Barbarorum was released and the RTR team refocused on scale and modularity instead of sheer detail. During my stint, we had twenty or thirty coders, artists, and testers total, plus a dozen or so independent modders who gave permission for their own work to be included in our mod. I worked under Driddle, testing his unit code for balance, but I didn't know his real name. In fact, I didn't know anyone's real name, nor did most of the other members of the team with whom I spoke regularly. This proved a problem because, twice during my short time with the team, the team leader (GaiusJulius, who was eventually forced out in favor of Caius Britannicus) absconded with some or all of the mod's files and no one knew what to do besides start over from scratch. The first time, it was because of a stupid argument that he wanted to win, so he just took his toys and left until the rest of the team begged for him to come back, but the second time, he used the trust people had placed in him as team leader to take down the mod's official site, blackmail some members of the team into quitting, and put up a broken version of the mod under the name of other members to discredit them for criticizing his behavior. It soon came to light that GaiusJulius was a lot younger than he had let on that he was and, despite his immense wealth of programming talent and historical knowledge, was simply not up to the task of leading a large, diverse, and multilingual team. As I alluded to above, he was replaced (by blunt acclamation) with someone who was, but the mod had already lost hundreds of hours of work and a lot of people had drifted out of the orbit of the team during the drama, myself eventually included. I still think Rome: Total Realism 6.0 Gold is one of the greatest gaming experiences of my life, and I feel lucky to have played an extremely small part in bringing it into being, but I literally have no idea how such a mod could exist in a system of paid mod distribution that just deposited money into the account of whoever uploaded the mod. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that I have so many questions about it that my mind cannot get to the point where I could even suggest a theory of how it would work. How would I, a part-time tester and consultant, be paid? Would I be expected to work for free and is that fair? How about independent modders who let their work be included in the mod, should they be compensated? What if they changed their minds later, if the mod to which they contributed turned out to be very successful? Could they pull the content that was theirs, maybe issue a DMCA, if they wanted to do that? Is it just going to be up to the team leader to disburse funds among the major figures on the team and hope that they let it trickle down? What's keeping the team leader from keeping all the money or doing a runner? What if the mod team is divided on the issue of price or on whether to charge at all? What's keeping a disgruntled or greedy member of the team from uploading an internal beta to the store in the hopes of tricking fans into paying? What happens when the original creator of a mod quits the team? Do they still own the mod, in the eyes of Valve? Can they demand that it be taken down and work be halted by whoever succeeds them on the team? What if they're forced out involuntarily, does Valve keep paying them the money or change to whoever's now on top? How is any of that decided? Are large mod teams going to have to incorporate to make this work? In short, could this team even function in a marketplace for paid mods, or would the politics of capitalism and the internet simply prevent them from existing, putting content on the Steam Workshop, and charging money for it? All of the above are questions for which Valve at least will have hypothetical answers, I hope, before they try to implement optional pricing for mods again.

Holy shit, you're right. I take back my lukewarm feelings about the Old Iron King DLC. Once you get the Scorched Scepter in place and the place starts moving like a clockwork toy, it becomes a beautiful maze of challenging set pieces. The Fume Knight is also a good mid-tier boss, if only I could have done it co-op so I didn't have to play it so safe with his attacks. I'm forcing myself to leave Sir Alonne and the Smelter Demon for tomorrow or the day after.

I didn't see that he was actively updating his final post with edits as responses to following posts, and I can actually reconstruct something of an argument there, beyond hedging and barbs? Something about character judgments being subjective and therefore not the purview of an article in a publication, I don't know. I get the idea of "who can say what Eron Gjoni is really thinking" in the abstract, but we don't typically deal with the secret lives of people around us when we interact with them. If you're an asshole, even just on the surface, I'm kinda at the point in my life when I'm done with you. Especially with tech-industry assholes like Weev, I've been validated repeatedly in this mentality.

Yeah, I meant to say, it was really distracting recording a podcast with you, because you were wearing a muscle shirt, like you do, and wouldn't stop flashing those guns...

Can I ask, if I may, why you thought that Eron Gjoni was the right flag under which to take a stand here? I mean, whatever you think of his reasons, this is the man who has been documented as publishing a colossal manifesto on his ex and then continuing to leak information when said information is causing widely visible harm to said ex. Only through the most partial and selective interpretation of Gjoni's motives, such as when he occasionally states that his goal in setting off #GamerGate was to get Quinn to go to therapy rather than commit suicide or quit video games, are we able to construct a scenario where he is a good person for doing any of this. The fact that his friends (maybe the most "biased" observers of Gjoni) think he's a alright guy and that "The Zoe Post" has done no real harm is almost tangential to the aforesaid situation, so I don't see the problem with leaving such "context" out of the article. Also, I'm not so much appealing to the legal judgment of Gjoni inherent in the restraining order, but to his disregard of it. Surely, if it's baseless, he'd be able to get it thrown out, barring systemic collusion against him, but by ignoring and violating it instead, he's almost demonstrating that it was an insufficient response to his behavior in scale, not in type. Who shows that they're innocent of wrongdoing by doing more wrong? More pointedly, who brags about violating their gag order to a reporter?

It's not exactly a tough row to hoe, is it? Even if we just look at his basic actions, he's positioned himself like that already, without needing to "twist" the testimony of his friends. Obsessive: Still thinking and talking about his ex publicly almost a year after they've broken up? Yep. Wrote a 9,425-word exposé, the length of a substantial research paper at thirty pages, about someone he'd known for a few months? Yep. Stalking: Spent weeks harassing his ex, first to meet with him and then just to talk with him, and ultimately chose to document their conversations? Yep. Has a court-issued restraining order of which he seems fully aware but which he flagrantly ignores? Yep. Sociopath: This one's to taste, but it's hard not to see, both in "The Zoe Post" and in the article above, that Gjoni wants to hurt Quinn badly and doesn't care about the consequences, which is damn hard to distinguish from sociopathy. Specifically, bragging about hanging out with his new girlfriend and coding, while his ex lives in fear of her life thanks to his actions? Yep. Also, please don't dance around this by just saying that Gjoni has reasons. Of course he has reasons, ones that are at least superficially reasonable. This isn't special. Everyone, even the worst human beings, has reasons, as well as people that they can find to agree with those reasons. That doesn't mean the things they do are right or justified, or that they should be protected or excused from the consequences of those things. If you post a screed on the internet and midwife a hate group, people will think you're a monster, full stop.

Yeah, I have zero interest in whatever justifications Gjoni thinks that he has. Time and again, he has shown himself to have a frightening inability to react appropriately to any situation having to do with Quinn. If you're bummed that the girl you're dating broke up with you, feel sad for a bit and then move on. If you feel that she was dishonest with you, feel sad for a bit longer and then move on. If you feel that she should be punished for failing to live up to your ideals of her, maybe don't do that and reexamine your life instead. If you get a fucking restraining order put on you for trying to mastermind a hate mob against her, definitely stop doing that and reexamine your life instead. I don't even want to know the answer, but is Gjoni even aware that literally millions of other people have had messy breakups besides him and chosen not to turn it into an internet crusade to "save" their ex by ruining their life? I mean, I've dated a few people whom didn't treat me how I want to be treated. You know what I did? I told them so, before or during the breakup, and then stopped being a part of their life for good. Then again, I'm not sure "everyone has good things to say about me," which is apparently carte blanche to be a total asshole.

It definitely seems to be the kind of place where Swiss-style "neutrality," meaning never taking sides with regards to anything, reigns supreme.

Yeah, it's definitely odd how the Souls games teach you that poison and bleed are so powerful, but if you try to use that power for yourself, you find out it doesn't work as well. It's one of the few instances where a gameplay system is weighed against the player through flat asymmetry.

Yeah, it's really weird how From (or, let's be honest, Namco Bandai) timed the release so that Bloodborne and the Dark Souls 2 remaster are draining players from each other as well as from older entries in the series. I feel like the first Dark Souls is evergreen, although I wonder if the population remains as dense later in the game. Vanilla Dark Souls 2 is a ghost town outside of a few bosses broadly considered to be "fun" to beat. The days right after release, of throwing down a small summon sign and doing some brief co-op to go human (or grabbing some help for a random section because you're having a little trouble), couldn't be more distant.

Honestly, it's not terrible. The balancing of the patch is closer to release (the best state of the game, in my opinion) than ever before, with most of the over-corrections to aggressive expansion, coalitions, vassal-feeding, and tech groups having been smoothed out by time. It's still a game of surprisingly low agency in places -- for instance, the hammer comes down with blinding speed if you take too many provinces, about which the game still doesn't know quite how to warn you, and there's literally nothing you can do to stop a coalition from happening in the near future, besides buying a lot of mercenaries to win it -- but in general, the features added by the DLC have made it a better game overall. I mean, the steppes are still a mess, because someone high up in the development team firmly believes that all horde nomads should be exterminated three hundred years ahead of schedule, and "lucky" nations like France and Austria never falter without player intervention, but I'm enjoying a recent game as Savoy. Really, I wish I'd intervened sooner, because right now I'm blocked by France to the west, Austria to the east, and Spain to the south. I literally have nowhere I can expand and I'm afraid of upsetting the great powers, all of whom are as stable as a rock.

Tad Williams also wrote the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, which basically defined what I thought about post-Tolkien fantasy as a teenager. I reread it once at the end of college and still liked it quite a lot, but I've lived nearly the whole decade since then afraid of recommending it anyway, because who knows why fantasy holds together and fantasy falls apart. I'm glad to hear that his other life-destroying series of monster tomes holds up, even at a glance!

I love you, Twig, but if no answers are obvious now, they're not going to become obvious once everyone has a lot of money invested in the system.

Honestly, looking at him, I am sad I do not live in San Francisco and therefore will never be able to use him as a Halloween costume.

Bonus round: play the videos in the above three posts with a slight offset to each other, hear the soundtrack for losing your mind.

Wait, do you mean this one? Really, it's my fault for never reading the Wizard thread unless I personally have wizard-related content to post.