sclpls

The thing is, the bile that gets directed at Leigh is nothing new. She's had to deal with this sort of toxicity since forever. She is like the matador's red flag for shitty dudes.

Yeah, I mean just this year when Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree, and his manifesto was full of the exact same rhetoric you see on MRA forums, that didn't cause anyone to stop and rethink anything, so I strongly suspect the same thing would be true here.

Ahh man, Shinji Mikami, so great. I really want to play the Evil Within, but those VRAM requirements...

Thanks for pointing out the rewrite, I think it's a much better piece for it.

Yeah... there's a lot of that, a lot of "what about innocent until proven guilty?" (how does this change anything?), and a lot of "wait, if I have drunk sex I'm a rapist?"

I remember really fighting with the controls, which was the case for basically all 3D console games of that era.

I do think the criticism in that Verge article was poorly argued and bit of a mess, which is unfortunate since it is plainly obvious that DOTA has some fairly sexist content (personally it drives me nuts when Windranger dies and says "you hit a girl?"), but yeah that TB jab at Anita is so inappropriate. If he really wanted to be "above the fray" or whatever he could point out what's wrong with the Verge article, and then go on to say that nonetheless there are some problems with the representation of women in the game. But of course he doesn't do that, he's just telling his audience what they want to hear.

Not surprisingly, I've seen a bunch of of comments grossly misinterpreting the "yes means yes" standard of consent.

Yeah, if I'm understanding the changes to the formula correctly, it is going to reward good team fights more, and you can't cheese it by just ganking the hard carry a few times. There's also some cap to the gain.

Yeah, as far as comeback mechanics go, I would rather see a large XP bonus than gold bonus. Not being able to predict what your opponents will be buying because of huge gold swings makes the game waaaay too unpredictable.

But dudes, hoverboards.

Seeing the state of the game now, I've basically written the game off. It seems like no one working on this had any vision for how a game taking place across multiple planets should differ from a traditional RTS, and so you have what feels to me like a very generic TA/SupCom style gameplay wedded to a gimmick. There isn't any moment to moment experience playing this game that feels better than its predecessors in my opinion.

I'm not sure if I want to back this or not, but I'm definitely keeping my eye on this one.

According to the DOTA 2 subreddit, they can't even do that anymore, but people there are basically acting like a bunch of scrubs. ;-)

So everyone who listens to 3MA surely knows Tom Chick. He appeared frequently in the early days of the show, and still comes on from time to time, most recently in the excellent episode about Rise of Nations. Sometimes he's known as the guy that gave Halo 4 a one star review. I prefer to think of him as the one guy that was able to call out Master of Orion 3 as the emperor with no clothes. The great thing about Tom's writing is you know you're always going to get his unvarnished opinion about a game, and he's going to back up what he says with reasons for why he likes or dislikes something. Idle Thumbs discussed this in the episode where they talked about his negative review about Transistor, a game they really liked. But the flip side to these games that he savages, it really is the most joyous thing to listen to him discuss a game he loves. Just listen to that Rise of Nations episode, or the episode of his own quartertothree podcast where he had Steve Gaynor on to talk about how much he loved Gone Home. It's delightful. Anyway, I'm writing this because Tom recently disclosed that he has cancer. Which is obviously terrifying, and challenging. And of course expensive. A gofundme page was setup recently, so I'm asking the Idle Thumbs community to consider donating any money you might be able to spare to help out an individual who has had a tremendous positive impact on this medium we all care about. Thanks. http://www.gofundme.com/excvko

The conversation about tropes where some shitty guy becomes the chosen one made me think about how for all the noise Americans make about the desirability of a meritocracy, American audiences sure do seem drawn to narratives that are absolutely not that. Also, this was just a really, really funny episode. I love it when Idle Thumbs rips on these lazy conventions and random marketing garbage.

Your post reminded me of why I really dislike algorithms trying to guess what sort of things I like, but also why it seems like we're inevitably heading in that direction anyway. Because this is where we are with listening to music at this point. Things like Pandora are incredibly popular right now, and seem to have largely replaced things like word of mouth, music reviews, or a well curated record store. Those old systems of spreading information were less efficient in an economic sense, but they had the benefit of exposing people to things they wouldn't have been aware of otherwise, and allowed people to form social bonds. The new system with the algorithms is much more impersonal and because it is by definition a formula (even if it is a complicated one) it risks flattening the experience of the range of music that people listen to, and musicians are incentivized to create.

I was also concerned when I saw the "popular new releases" search which seemingly merged two separate search types into one. However now I see that there is a pure new game search at the bottom of the page, so I'm glad that's still there at least. In general I hate the layout of the new store page, I feel like I have to scroll down pretty far to find what I'm actually interested in.

Well sure, but that's happening anyway.

So with the changes that are happening to the fountain, it occurred to me that fountain camping is much more difficult now, which is an elegant way of gently addressing one of the problem of teams that are stomping but not really doing a whole lot to finish up the game by taking away one thing those teams like to do.

Yeah, it is kind of brutal, like, the first hero I have for my all hero challenge is Windranger. Cool, that should be no problem. But then I look at the next hero I have: techies. Ugh... do I really want to put in the time to learn techies (the answer is no).

My impression with the map changes is that the purpose is more to change the game's meta rather than address any perceived imbalance between the two sides (I agree that as the game currently exists it feels pretty balanced). I don't think the changes proposed are really gonna create some new imbalance, but time will tell I guess.

Yeah, this is a fairly mind melting update. I'm excited for the changes to Ogre Magi and Tusk. The two runes thing is going to cause there to be a lot more early team fights I think, and I think that will be a good thing.

I keep imagining what if people got this worked up over, like, David Brooks op-eds or whatever.

Good job internet