Deadpan

Oh glob, was there always a bonfire in one of the ruined buildings in the Shrine of Amana, or is that new for the Scholar of the First Sin? I just went back there to farm some Twinkling Titanite and happened upon it, last time I went through the area, and last time I played the game, I went straight from the first bonfire to the one before the boss. And since this is apparently the run in which I do everything I've never done before, I'm also doing the abyss covenant stuff, and invading people a little bit. Curiously, I've actually won most duels so far, and without any tricks. Well, except having a really annoying build to fight against. Is it possible to tip over into NG+ summoning without actually going into NG+? The orange frames on the travel menu that indicate players of my level being in the area have been slowly disappearing from all but the DLC areas, but now they're starting to show up again in The Lost Bastille and Iron Keep.

Some ultra greatswords actually scale with DEX though. I know cause I'm using the Drakewing Ultra Greatsword at the moment, which has a really satisfying two-handed strong attack that fires a projectile, and if you're in melee range it actually hits for both the projectile and the swinging motion. Got another of these Forlorn invasions yesterday, and previously I had to play them kind of slow and methodical, this one I could just hammer into the ground with like three of those hits.

I don't think anybody here is taking issue with the idea that maybe we need new models to deal with this stuff, but more so that your stance on this first and foremost seems to be "fuck those guys for having money." Even as somebody who's not into how a lot of these people are using their platform and who's kind of competing with them through the entirely outmoded medium of writing, that's just super gross to me. First of all, like Problem Machine said, because there are a few people making a lot of money and a lot of people making almost nothing off of this, so those kinds of hostile generalizations really only end up hurting the masses of lowkey streamers. Similar to how people basing their notions of what the writing industry is like on its few, highly visible successes contributes to a negative environment for everybody who isn't that level, because people assume that it's either about to happen and they can therefore treat you like shit in advance, or that it's somehow your fault you aren't quite there yet, or any number of other twisted notions that routinely make me want to gouge my eyes out. Secondly, those are some incredibly dogmatic notions on the lines between Youtubers and real critics, and original and derivative work. Which, as a rule, don't tend to do complicated situations justice. Like, I know from personal experience how many of my peers are experimenting with one form of video content or another right now, a lot of which relies on game footage or even that "talking over a game as they play it" format you loathe so much. The stuff they do isn't as popular as the big Youtubers, sure, but have you looked at what kind of games writing is the most popular lately? There's good stuff and bad stuff in both of these, and it's ridiculous to make judgements about how qualified somebody is based on what medium they work in. Plus, the medium we are talking about here happens to be a collaborative one, in which developers act as authors by setting up the framework and players act as authors by creating a specific playthrough. I very much question the usefulness of any approach to this issue that disregards the second kind of creativity as worthless or parasitic. Besides, games are so widely disparate in how they weigh these two different parts that it don't see much sense in making general statement about Let's Plays and the like. I mean, I get how streaming something as linear as a Telltale adventure is kind of similar to sharing a movie online, but then there's stuff like Minecraft, incidentally one of the most popular games for this kind of stuff, and that's almost entirely about player creation. Notch didn't build that sweet castle, sky fort or lava dome after all. He may have provided the tool necessariy to create them, but last I checked musicians also didn't pay royalties to instrument manufacturers just because they provided the tool with which they create.

That's about as good as when players summoned for the Pursuer bossfight early in the game accidentally snipe their host with the ballistas. I think I'm closing in on 30 sunmedals myself. Not really interested in the rewards, I just picked the covenant to have a flashier summon sign and phantom. In some areas I never had much luck being summoned, in others far more so, and I tend to try to do that pretty much until I'm out of the memory range for an area. After the early areas, which are usually pretty crowded, I've had the most luck in Huntsman's Copse, Harvest Valley and the Iron Keep. Also the first Bonfire in the Ivory King DLC is pretty good, although sometimes people there take you to the bossfight without having collected the item that makes the boss visible, and sometimes they want help exploring, which is quite a trip from that point. Those are all probably a ways away in NG+ though. Probably rough finding people there. I'm really glad that the optional gauntlet in the Ivory King has a full three NPC summons available, else I'd never make it past the demon horses. That said, the boss is still kicking my butt. I'll probably stick with it though, since I've mostly run out of stuff to do otherwise. I'm pretty much right up to the final bossfight in the main game and defeated all the core bosses of the DLCs, which also comes with a neat blessing from the King, who is really chill about me having murdered his future self.

The most grating thing about the gross or absurd ways developers try to make that stuff thematically coherent with their game is how their audience picks it up, too. So anytime anybody criticizes that kind of sexualization, or similar things, there'll be an endless parade of randos going "Oh but it has to be that way because..." and then quoting lore as if it was actual history and not fiction that somebody wrote in order to justify dressing a character a certain way, giving them a certain role, a certain personality, etc. The amount of people, especially in the games community, who are unwilling to believe that their favorite media properties are shaped by authors (rather than these univeres following their own internal logic) is bizarre.

Looks like some robots are trying to force their way into my site, at any rate my security plugin has notified me of 200ish fraudulent login attempts since last night. I got a secure password and said plugin, which locks out anybody trying to get in with nonexistent usernames or by spamming attempts, do I need to do anything else or do these critters go away after a while? Fortunately the mild annoyance of being bombarded with security notifications is the worst that has happened so far.

Those sonic bunnies in the Ivory King with their spin attack can go right to hell.

Interesting that Origen pulled that off after the shaky series against Roccat. I'm not sure how UOL ended up as the final seed in the regional qualifiers, is this like a championship points situation?

You just have to take a different elevator, I think. The main boss of that DLC is way at the bottom of that huge tower.

Now that I've reached the Ivory King DLC I definitely see the complaint about these being a little repetitive in their combat, the main enemies of all three are very similar except for a different paint job. Also both Sunken Crown and Old Iron King feature a lot of vertical architecture to move around in, can't say if that holds equally true for the last one. I did get to see most of it just now, I think, since I was summoned right from the entry bridge by another player who had two other phantoms already there for clearing the way as a group. It was really nice, until the game froze and crashed my PC just after we reached the third bonfire. This happened once already recently, but this time it was while connected to another player, which is I think what caused my save file to be corrupted when I first played DS 2 way back when. It's apparently fine though this time, and I made a more recent backup. That does seem like a pretty rough gauntlet to go through on your own though. Hopefully people will still be around when I run it.

Ah, we're probably just talking about different parts of the right-wing catalog. There's definitely a big difference in economic philosophy between here and there, but for everything else it's much of the same nonsense, except people often don't see it that way. It's like in that blogpost where TotalBeesquick claims there's no racism in Britain because there are no black people there which is 1) a bizarre and wrong claim and 2) neglecting that racism can also be targetted at people whose skin is virtually the same color as your own. It was always about assigning value to arbitrary differences, no matter how . But yeah, the amount of outright nazism that's going on around here over the horrifying prospect of providing for the basic needs of refugees makes it really unsettling to continually see people go "Oh racism, that's an over there problem"

Eh, there's that general tendency in Europe to claim that we're soooo much more progressive than the US, but that belief doesn't really match up to reality, it's just repeated ad nauseam until it becomes conventional wisdom, at which point it actually serves to mask what issues we do have here. People scoff at the state of reproductive rights, marriage equality (etc. etc.) in the states, but we're far from fixing these issues ourselves, and it's actually pretty hard to address them when people want to keep up the fantasy that discrimination is something that only exists elsewhere in the world.

They do kind of discourage that by being incredibly obtuse about what the critical path even is, but I suppose the later in the life-cycle of such a game, the more people will either know it from their own experience or are playing entirely based on wiki knowledge. Anyway, back in the main world, and especially in Drangleic Castle, there's still plenty of traffic. I put my sign down at the first bonfire there figuring I could help explore the castle, but of course I was more in the memory range for helping defeat the end boss, or being a panic summon for somebody who got invaded, There were several rematches of 1 invader vs. 3 phantoms, one triggered by me after I became human from helping out on a succesful run. I did feel guilty enough about wasting everybody's time that I took them to the actual boss afterwards, which was still a completely trivial outing for a crew decked out for finishing the game. On the upside, I was also invaded by somebody called "Harmless Butterfly" (I think, the butt part was filtered) who hopped around me in a moonlight butterfly outfit for a bit. I said hello, he said hello, I said very good, he said thank you, dropped 10 human effigies and left.

Oh yeah, the not seeing anybody to summon is even more annoying than nobody summoning me. I've only seen other people's signs around like three or four times maybe, and once, on the very top of Brume Tower, the guy I summoned preferred to instantly jump to his doom instead of helping me make my way down. Guess he placed his sign from outside the DLC area. I can kind of understand why people want to put their signs down close to the nearest bossfight as possible, but it's a shame, too. I personally really like helping somebody explore as a phantom. They get to have backup and I maybe pick up on a few hidden things by watching them. Plus those areas really seem to be designed with more than one person in mind. There's a noticeable uptick in NPC summons to kind of account for that, but those tend to be more right in front of the boss gate and don't help much on the way. That part in the Sunken King with the spike floor and unkillable knight ghosts was absurd! I somehow got through there running and screaming on my first try and made it all the way to the bonfire with all the bumbling dinos, but going back and clearing the area was rough. And then during the descent to the boss I kept getting beat up by a single knight. That's one of these things that's just so much easier with another person, when you're basically just taking turns backstabbing. Eventually I just threw on fall control and ran past him, and I did manage to beat the Queen and the Dragon down there just now, and was even summoned to help with the queen a couple of times.

I did go back to the main game for a bit since I actually tend to beat the Old Iron King long before it's intended, so now I've unlocked the Sunken Crown DLC thing too, and have been kind of going back and forth between both. These are tough, and I'm not really being summoned as much as I would like.

The point about him being a businessman is interesting, but I think this actually extends way beyond people thinking he can apply that experience to running a country (because hoo boy, what could possibly go wrong when you treat a nation as a for-profit entity). It's basically the founding myth of libertarian thought that money comes to those who deserve it. You just gotta work hard, be smart and apply yourself and then... you probably still won't be able to find a job, earn less based on your gender, or be fired for your sexuality. But in their version of the story, you'll get to live the American Dream. By inverse, it means this philosophy has to assume that anybody who has money must have done something to deserve it, and they were able to do those things because they're a good person. This seems to me why (judging from way the hell away) none of his right-wing competitors are able to really give him trouble. They can't call him out as a despicable piece of shit who got rich through a combination of luck, very specific knowledge, and a complete lack of basic empathy, because it would mean going back on their own beliefs. Perhaps they don't really respect him, but their platform is built on respecting his enormous wealth and the qualities they assume were necessary to achieve it.

I finally upgraded to Scholar of the First Sin last weekend. Early impressions are that the Pursuer definitely does a lot more pursuing in this one, and that there's quite a few more enemies in the early game. They gave me a bit of trouble, if only because I'm running shieldless for the first time, experimenting with DEX weapons and powerstancing (a regular Katana plus optional Dark Weapon and enchanted Falchion at the moment). I beat the Old Iron King yesterday and now have access to the first DLC area, but I'm not sure if I should actually go there yet. What's the ideal order for these, and where do they slot into the regular game progress route?

Yeah, that was interesting to see. I guess they really don't care about their track record as much as everyone else.

So the matchup that everyone expected to provide a decisive 3-0 turned into a 3-2 nailbiter, and the matchup where nobody was quite sure how it would go turned into a decisive 3-0 for who most people consider the slightly weaker team. Interesting finals alright.

Somebody made this point on Twitter, and I kind of agree, that it's weird to see games people celebrate the Hugos mostly shutting down the shoehorned-in puppy nominees, because if anything that shows what impact big institutions can have in this regard and that's all the more a bad look for our scene then, where a lot of big players (heh) are either not talking about the ongoing garbage at all or issuing anemic "harassment is bad, mkay" statements.

EU playoff finals are about to begin. At this point it's probably considered a major upset if Origen takes a single game from Fnatic. Personally, I figure it's gonna be another 3-0 stomp. Update: I stand corrected.

Maybe that's just where my mind went, but I feel like the two overlapping arrows going in different directions kind of point that way too. It... doesn't make much sense either way.

I saw some of these games, but I didn't know Remilia has decided to move into the professional scene. Gamers were predictably terrible towards her, because of course those fucking pissbabies can't get over how much better she is at this game than them. She kicked endless butt in the matches I saw, so hopefully she gets to keep doing that without getting too much of this garbage. When the game's not live I skip straight to where the match starts, but when I am watching the stream I do show up early or stick around for a bit sometimes, although that's partly because I'm even more interested in the infrastructure Riot are building up to make this watchable than I am in the championship. It's a fascinating problem! There is a little bit of asking exhausted players how they're feeling after a match, but most of the surrounding coverage is pretty interesting. They pick up by looking at where both teams are at the moment and then move into previous matchups and comparing them a little bit, then there's the live team composition analysis during the draft and step by step analysis of major teamfights afterwards. None of it is that important if you just want to get the action, but if you feel like hearing a little bit more about what's going on hear it can be nice... until they start trading back and forth tiny differences in irrelevant statistics. Jatt-22 is definitely a weirdly high-brow reference in that context, especially considering that the only other pop-cultural reference I remember hearing in a match recently was them calling something "the Exodia of team compositions"

All that clicking would be appropriate in a LOMA thread.