Ninety-Three

I'd like to make a tangent from the current theme of the thread to discuss this a bit more. Everyone talks about how Hatred is a game built to generate controversy and convert that controversy into sales, as if that was what the creators set out to do. But where are we getting that idea? Hatred certainly did create controversy and convert that into sales, but why is everyone so certain that the devs sat down and said "We'll make the most offensive game in the world and the controversy will make us rich"? Why can't it be "I have this awesome idea for a shooting spree videogаme where you can murder all the people!" Is there anything specific that people are pointing at and saying "That was clearly engineered to be offensive to drum up controversy" or are people just assuming that the game was built ground-up as a controversy engine because they can't fathom anyone wanting to make Hatred?

When he talks about talking, multiple times, it's specifically the moral panic kind of talking. I'm assuming that he doesn't mind "This is a bad videogаme four of ten ten do not buy or rent" talking because he does it himself multiple times. You're right that he's not saying "Publish only serious criticism", but "Don't publish moral panic, mechanical reviews are fine" is functionally pretty similar. So what happened is he used a piece of rhetoric about inside connections which also gets used by Gamergate, so you assumed he was a big old anti-feminist who wants people to praise the nazi game, despite none of that being present in the text? Is alleged games media collusion like the Hitler mustache, so tainted by association that one cannot use it for any purpose without looking bad? That's not a rhetorical question or an attempt to trap you in an argument, I'm really asking. It seems like it might be happening, and it's not necessarily an invalid premise.

So basically, ignore the moral panic and review it with an impersonal "The game is garbage"? Isn't that Jerry's point? He's not decrying any and all attention given to Hatred, but specifically "press histrionics" and "breathless, plainly mercenary attempts to capitalize on the game's violence". Jerry's post sounds like he would love if there were nothing but John Walker reviews. I realize that I misstated things in saying the game should be ignored completely, I was taking it for granted that there would still be a John Walker to review the game and tell us that it's a videogаme which scores four out of ten. When I said Hatred should be ignored, I meant that the anti-Hatred articles shouldn't be written. Capitalism makes things complicated. Every news outlet which published an article about Hatred is (in part) responsible for that game's sales being higher than they otherwise would have. Writing about Hatred leads to the Hatred devs getting more money, decreasing the odds that they go back to doodling pentagrams. This isn't the case for everything, or even most things. For instance, I doubt that articles complaining the movie Boyhood was all-white resulted in an increase in its sales. And maybe when this is the case, whatever you get out of engaging is worth the price of the Hatred devs getting more money. But that's a cost-benefit analysis, and so it's easy to imagine the numbers such that the best way to deal with Hatred is to not engage. EDIT: Gormungus, people aren't saying that all offensive things should be ignored, they're saying that specifically this one should. We should ignore offensive things if they're just being offensive to generate controversy, because not ignoring them would be doing exactly what they want.

The overall tone of this thread seems to be that you're supposed to talk about Hatred, supposed to write a bunch of news articles about how it's a terrible evil game made by terrible evil people (which is true). But why? If you want Hatred to go away, do badly, or otherwise not exist, the only course of action seems to be what Jerry's proposing: give it no publicity. I haven't seen anyone disagree with his premise that media controversy boosted the game's sales substantially. What exactly is the point of the anti-Hatred article then?

I fail to see how that leads in any way to your earlier response. What does anything he said have to do with feminists or his perception of them as spooky? He called the game bad multiple times, how much further can he get from demanding people praise it?

What? What quote did you read? Because I read one where he called Hatred a bad game, and the only thing he said about the media was that their attention made this bad game sell better than it should have.

Other aritcles on the site: I'm pretty sure it's a joke.

I had a terribly disappointing experience with Endless Legend. I used the pointbuy thing to build a custom civilization optimized for a One City Challenge, science victory approach. The game makes public announcements when any player is nearing completion of one of the victory conditions, so I had been preparing a defensive army. The game announced "Ninety-Three has researched two of the five top-tier technologies required to win the game!", I nervously shuffled my armies, and nothing happened. More science rolled in and it announced I had four of five technologies with none of the other players having gotten even the first victory progress announcement. At this point I had been pouring all my industry into making more and more soldiers for the inevitable moment when the AI dropped everything and rushed to stop my scientific victory. It never happened, the AI just sat there being friendly, and I won my scientific victory without resistance. I was so convinced it was going to happen. Why wouldn't the AI drop everything to stop a winning player? It's the obviously correct decision, so I just assumed that of course they'd do that.

The US Supreme Court just overturned the conviction of a man who made death threats to his ex-wife on Facebook. Some of these graphic threats: The court ruled that the standard of "A reasonable person would interpret it as a threat" is not sufficient to convict someone, and that one must prove something about the threatener's intent (ruling here, they're distressingly vague about what exactly must be proven). The man's defense was that the threats were self-written rap lyrics. Given that the above threats apparently don't constitute clear intent, the ruling seems to err far enough on the side of "You can't prove what someone's thinking" that anyone could easily make legal death threats. I'm not sure I have any comments beyond the obvious "this sucks and is garbage", but that seems to be a bit of a recurring theme when it comes to Ethics in Games Journalism. Hopefully this is one of those rulings that fades away quietly, I can only imagine the amount of bile the internet would spew if they heard the headline "Death threats legalized". Edit: Clarified some stuff.

Jesus, Jack Thompson? He was The Enemy, Sauron, he was literally coming to take away our videogаmes. And now GG has a narrative about how the bad people are coming to take away our videogаmes, and they're siding with Jack Thompson. Nevermind the combination of hypocrisy and tone-deafness necessary for that, how are the kind of people who get GG-level angry able to stomach working with possibly the only person who was ever gaming's antagonist? With TB, it's a bit of a monopoly issue. He is (I'm not well informed and could be wrong here) the biggest Youtube reviewer by a large margin, and reviews are necessary to sell an indie game, so you work with TB because he's the only (big) game in town. There has to be an infectious disease joke in there somewhere. In general though, would you say the games industry has more of a problem with that than anywhere else? Rewind a year to before an internet argument had everyone in the industry eager to shout their opinion, did games not have the same level of letting-people-be-shitty that every other industry does?

"Now as part of this agreement, Mr. AsianMan, you will be forbidden from disclosing whether or not letters and numbers are in fact, symbols."

I've got no personal examples, but there are definitely situations where it comes up. Some people only wear seat belts because the law coerces them to (proof: some people still don't wear seat belts, so of those who do, they're surely not all doing it for safety). There are enough car accidents yearly that surely one such coerced person got into an accident, and while they may not think about it, I'm sure that if you pointed it out, they'd be quite glad they were coerced to wear a seat belt. To give a similar example, I'm sure there are plenty of drunk people who, once sober, were glad that their friends/bartenders/etc refused to let them drive.

But his platform is already legitimized. What does working with Johnson give him that he doesn't already have? How is Wardell going to do more damage now than in the hypothetical world where Johnson found someone else to work with?

What are the tricks? I admit that the AI pilot is a dirty rotten trick, but it can only get you once. The only other way the ship "gets you" is by just being hard: having a ton of shelds/engine, and a ton of firepower, which is hardly a trick. Sure it has a Zoltan shield, but shoot that down. Sure it has the AI pilot, but boarding and killing 90% of the crew is still sweet. Sure it has a defense drone, but it's not like you didn't know those existed, overwhelm it. As for the ships, I always sell off the firebomb and turn the Rock B into a battleship, built upon that sweet Heavy Pierce laser, and the Lanius B's anti-oxygen boarding crew is just as good at boarding the flagship as anything else. I don't know what to tell you because I also liked the boss when I was ten hours in, and I wasn't having a huge problem killing it. I didn't drop out where you are now because I was doing better than you are now.

I have seen people try to discuss it with Soren Johnson, and so far he has avoided the question. Obviously we can't know what he's thinking, but I suspect he's not a fan of Wardell's politics (or perhaps he is, but recognizes that expressing it publicly may be a bad idea), and working with Stardock is mostly a marriage of convenience. To answer the philosophical question, I think it is okay to do business with someone like that. It means Brad Wardell gets some more money, but I don't think that's damaging to games a whole. Brad Wardell already has $X, where X is not small, I can't imagine that him having $1.5X would result in him doing anything worse than he's already doing. Maybe one could argue that Wardell is a bad person and does not deserve to get more money, but you seem to be talking more about the big picture than individuals.

I agree that on the very first bossfight, you don't know what you're in for, and you can die because of that. I don't remember if I beat the boss on my first sighting, but I know I at least got to the second phase, and by that point I had seen everything I needed to know how to prepare. It's obvious that you need to put a lot of damage through their 4 shield/many engine configuration, teleporting in crew is strong against the weapons pods but good luck taking out the full crew (and the AI is a shitty surprise when you do manage it, but at least you only get surprised once), to survive the super mode you'll want cloaking, a ton of shields and engines, or just enough firepower to kill most of their guns by the time it comes online... it's not like you need to fight it five times to learn what to do. I'm prepared to entertain the argument that getting screwed by a permadeath boss once (or twice, counting the AI thing) is too many times, but if that's an acceptable number of times, I reject the notion that FTL's boss requires more than that. Steam tells me I have over two hundred hours logged on FTL, victories with most ships and configurations, and I have never reached the final boss without enough weapons (and weapons are the only thing you need, I've powered through the fight without any specialized gear like cloaking or hacking). I hate to use "git good, scrub" as an argument, but with that many playthroughs, it's unlikely that I'm running on pure luck. I assert that with the right strategy, you can avoid ending up simply unable to kill the boss. I don't know what to say to this, because I could never make suffocation work (you had to outclass them so badly to keep O2 down without just killing them entirely), and fire was a terrible version of damage beams where you didn't get the damage effect of partial shield or weapon disabling until the enemy's ship was thoroughly on fire. Do people really play arson builds? What do you do about drones, just run away from every one of them, and leave all that scrap unclaimed? That's just it though, the DE bosses were terrible. Not just as bosses of the stealth game Deus Ex, but as bosses in general. Even if you were playing the game as a pure FPS (and they were clearly built as pure FPS bosses), they were ultralethal bullet sponges who gave no indication of fight progress, had about two attack patterns each, fought in boring arenas and were trivially defeated with stupid boring tactics (mines, the wall-penetrating laser). To say that invalidating some builds is their problem, I think they'd have to be otherwise good bosses. I strongly disagree. I'm a proponent of the "final exam" school of boss design where the boss tests you on all the game's systems, and what you're describing is exactly that. Sure you could run away from any one fight, but if you ran away often, you were doing it wrong. I didn't take the unmanned drones as a sign for my boarding ship to run away, I took them as a sign to not rely purely on boarding. This is a roguelike-like with a clock, you need all the XP you can get for the final level.

It's not like there was a big discussion going when you changed the topic. That's an oddly philosophical way of going at the coercion/persuasion distinction, and I'm not sure it works well when applied to more material examples. "Fill out this government census form or we will fine you $100" is clearly coercive, but "Participate in this research study and we will pay you $100" is not (at the very least we can surely agree that it's less coercive). By your definition, it seems they would have to be the same though. I'm also not clear whether they'd both be coercive, or both persuasive, by your definition. I guess persuasive because "You want to have $100 more than you otherwise would" is more a reason than a conclusion? You also seem to be presupposing that coercion is inherently bad or to be avoided. Seat belt laws coerce people to wear seat belts, and that's clearly a net positive.

The AI thing is pretty cheaty, and it's gross that it makes the optimal play to kill all but one enemy then destroy the ship. I suppose given that they wanted the crew to carry over between fights, it was necessary because otherwise decrewing the ship in fight 1 would automatically win fights 2 and 3. That bothered me, but the rest of it doesn't really feel like rule-breaking (I suppose the superweapon not having a system is totally breaking a rule, but I never found myself wishing I could target the super instead of standard weapon system, so it's breaking a rule in a way that doesn't matter). The criticism that the flagship invalidates some builds is one I've heard a lot, and it never occurred to me as a problem. I always thought of FTL as a game where your goal was to build a ship that could beat the final boss, so I never had the problem of cruising through sector 7 only to realize my sweet ship was totally not set up to fight the boss. Most games with bossfights have bosses that don't play by the same ruleset as standard enemies, and there's lots of games with heavy customization (mostly RPGs) where you can build a character that's great at killing normal enemies and lousy against bosses, but I rarely see people complain about that, so why does FTL in particular get flak for it?

What rules does it break? Sure it switches the pursuing fleet for a ship traveling towards the base, but it's not like it's unclear what's happening or what you have to do. I feel like the randomness of the stores could be better, but I wouldn't call it broken. I've never gotten screwed by stores, but I have to go pretty much as far as you can to get maximum store selection (maximum exploration, visit every store, keep a full wallet in case you find a store). As for the Crystal Cruiser, sure it takes either unreasonable luck or unreasonable savescumming to get it, but why is it flawed to have a rare thing that not everyone gets? It's not like you need to get it.

Not only is the password eight characters, it has to include a letter, a number and a symbol!

Really? What's flawed about it? The stealth B is an evil trap designed by sadists, but other than that I can't think of much wrong with the game.

The savescum god will work too. I played a bunch, and as soon as I got the stasis pod in an early sector I saved (as in, bypassed the permadeath by backing up my save file). Then when I hit a Zoltan sector, I used savescumming to fully explore the sector so that I could find the research outpost to open the pod, and so on for the final step.

At the very end, I genuinely expected the mushroom cloud to turn into a skull, because I had apparently forgotten it was serious. And they're pretty clearly serious because the whole game is, well, serious. There's no winking at the camera, no self-mockery, no indication whatsoever that they're in on how dumb it is. I understand why people are saying it, but when you say "I wish this was censored", who exactly do you wish was doing the censoring? The Internet Police? Even if we accept that Hatred is so repugnant that it should be censored out of existence, by what mechanism do you propose we keep a thing off the internet?

Assuming there's no good cover, the solution to that is usually to lure guards out and KO them (use strategic door opening, or sprinting to attract attention). There's a slim chance that you just got an unbeatable room though, I've gotten armoured guards stationary on long coverless hallways, or null drones idling behind seven layers of unhackable security. Do you have a screenshot of the setup? What are you doing that it takes so long to figure out a gap in their patrol pattern though? Most patrols are on a two turn cycle, and the longer ones are only a four turn cycle, how did you end up staring at patrols until more guards spawned?

Everything about that trailer is great, but did anyone else have trouble making out the voices? I found that the game's background noise kept making me miss what they were saying. Watch the trailer, it says Sep 22.