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Chris

Idle Weekend April 1, 2016: Now We're Let's Playing with Power

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While I appreciate the Trolling , I'm still amazed at those of you who think me saying review scores should be objective seem to think it means the whole review is full of facts and just the facts.

 

The point I'm making is that a SCORE is something that is supposed to be universal across game types. a 10/10 game should be just that, a really well made game with no major failings.

 

If you score on "criticism" and "personal preference" scores are at best meaningless, and at worst seriously damaging to gaming.

 

If a professional journalist scores say World of Warcraft, would it be fair to say 2/10 because they hate fantasy settings and MMO's?

 

Would it be fair to mark it down for having no twitch based shooting?

 

Would it be fair to say "If this was Lord of the Rings" it would get 10/10, but as it's not 5/10?

 

because that's what I'm talking about.

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If you score on "criticism" and "personal preference" scores are at best meaningless, and at worst seriously damaging to gaming.

 

Not speaking for anyone else but I agree with this. However my conclusion is that I think we shouldn't bother having scores rather than try to make scoring more rigorous.

 

I skim reviews to find out what people liked or didn't like about games to see if I care about the criticisms and get excited by the praise of it. I'd personally prefer that reviews didn't have scores, because I do think they're harmful when they're used as an objective marker and when publishers are making decisions based on review scores.

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The point I'm making is that a SCORE is something that is supposed to be universal across game types. a 10/10 game should be just that, a really well made game with no major failings.

Is there an objective list of major failings somewhere? Why can't "not enough orcs" or "too many orcs" or "racist as all hell" be a major failing? Who decides what is a major failing? How about minor failings - who decides whether a failing is large enough to take off 1 point or 2 points? Is there an objective scale somewhere?

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The point I'm making is that a SCORE is something that is supposed to be universal across game types.

 

Why? Since when? Look at five different game review sites, and you will find five different scoring rubrics. Some say a 5/10 is average, some put that at more like a 6/10 or 7/10. Some only score out of 5 stars. Some score out of 100 points. Some frequently give games "perfect" scores, some only do so once every few years. And every single reviewer surely implements their site's score system in a slightly different way. No one review can "break" this universality of score that you feel reviews ought to aspire to, because that has never existed in the first place.

 

And what is a "game type"? Is The Division a third-person shooter, or an RPG, or a loot game, or an MMO, or an online shooter? It sure seems to take its own story seriously, even if I don't, so should we grade it as a narrative game? It feels incredibly subjective of you to ask reviewers to ignore the game's terrible story when the developers themselves sure seemed to place a lot of importance on it. Why is what you value in this game objective, but evaluating it based on a part of the game the developers appear to have put a lot of effort into is being "subjective"? I don't see how you can justify thinking of your own values as objective and assume that anyone who cares about different aspects of the game is missing the point.

 

If you score on "criticism" and "personal preference" scores are at best meaningless, and at worst seriously damaging to gaming.

 

If a professional journalist scores say World of Warcraft, would it be fair to say 2/10 because they hate fantasy settings and MMO's?

 

Would it be fair to mark it down for having no twitch based shooting?

 

Would it be fair to say "If this was Lord of the Rings" it would get 10/10, but as it's not 5/10?

 

because that's what I'm talking about.

 

As long as a writer clearly expresses where they're coming from, what's wrong with a writer giving WoW a 2/10 and writing about how they don't like MMOs? I can see how that might not be a useful review for an MMO fan. But what happens if there are reviews out there that aren't useful? The internet is quite full of wrong opinions I don't care about, so I don't understand why adding a score to it matters. If you personally worked on The Division and you're upset that people have given it poor reviews, I can understand why you might feel hurt by that. I wouldn't think anyone should care about your feelings, but I can understand why you'd be upset. But if The Division is just a game that you like and some reviewers don't like it for reasons you don't care about, I do not understand why your reaction is anything other than to decide that you're not interested in those reviewers' thoughts.

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It's literally all made up. There's no objective truth to be found here. Video games are made up! Genres are made up! Reviews are made up things that are about things that are also made up!

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Why? Since when? Look at five different game review sites, and you will find five different scoring rubrics. Some say a 5/10 is average, some put that at more like a 6/10 or 7/10. Some only score out of 5 stars. Some score out of 100 points. Some frequently give games "perfect" scores, some only do so once every few years. And every single reviewer surely implements their site's score system in a slightly different way. No one review can "break" this universality of score that you feel reviews ought to aspire to, because that has never existed in the first place.

 

And what is a "game type"? Is The Division a third-person shooter, or an RPG, or a loot game, or an MMO, or an online shooter? It sure seems to take its own story seriously, even if I don't, so should we grade it as a narrative game? It feels incredibly subjective of you to ask reviewers to ignore the game's terrible story when the developers themselves sure seemed to place a lot of importance on it. Why is what you value in this game objective, but evaluating it based on a part of the game the developers appear to have put a lot of effort into is being "subjective"? I don't see how you can justify thinking of your own values as objective and assume that anyone who cares about different aspects of the game is missing the point.

 

 

As long as a writer clearly expresses where they're coming from, what's wrong with a writer giving WoW a 2/10 and writing about how they don't like MMOs? I can see how that might not be a useful review for an MMO fan. But what happens if there are reviews out there that aren't useful? The internet is quite full of wrong opinions I don't care about, so I don't understand why adding a score to it matters. If you personally worked on The Division and you're upset that people have given it poor reviews, I can understand why you might feel hurt by that. I wouldn't think anyone should care about your feelings, but I can understand why you'd be upset. But if The Division is just a game that you like and some reviewers don't like it for reasons you don't care about, I do not understand why your reaction is anything other than to decide that you're not interested in those reviewers' thoughts.

 

I'm talking about something specific, Review Scores from profesional Journalists - you're talking about "everyone on the internet".

 

When you look at this all sites have their scores to be compared to each other (of course other sites have different criteria), but on one site an MMO getting 8/10 and an FSP getting 8/10 gives you the idea that they are of a similar quality for their gametypes.

 

So scoring WOW 2/10 because you don't like it is something I would expect a child to do, but not someone who is supposed to "know their subject", and I find it frightening you cant tell the difference.

 

My point is there are two parts to a review:

1) The subjective - what the reviewer thinks of the game

2) The objective - How is the game technically

 

Now when reviewing I would expect someone to be professional enough to know when they are being subjective and when they are being objective.

 

Why scoring fairly is important

It's important because like it or not this is how publishers gague what things to include and what they can get away with

 

So when games like Rainbow 6 get high scores, wrapped in so much anti-gamer crap (No hosted servers, crap monitisation, no private games until you play for hours) - it hurts future games

When games like the Division get scored down for being a modern world RPG and no-one mentions that it's the first Ubisoft game for years to have no monitisation, no mass of bugs and it doesn't feel striped of content that will be sold as DLC - the message to Ubisoft is it's not worth it.

 

Most importantly this isn't about the division getting bad scores

The way review scores are going, we will end up with half finished games like StarWars Battlefront and games that force you to do what the company want like Rainbow 6. Neither of which feel worth the $60 price tag, especially as you are blackmailed into the season pass.

 

So in my book reviewers need to man/woman up and let companies know whats important and score fairly or stop scoring and become critics instead.

NB though if people only critique a game, then the only way a company will know how well they are doing is by what sells, so get ready for more CoD rehash and SW Battlefront.

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It's literally all made up. There's no objective truth to be found here. Video games are made up! Genres are made up! Reviews are made up things that are about things that are also made up!

Of course there is. A game is a sum of its parts, the same as a car is.

 

A game can have great mechanics or crap mechanics.

 

When reviewing a minecraft clone for instance, how good is the block creation and removal --> all but the very best games fail in this area.

 

unless you want to go to the very logical conclusion, and it's all atoms, but it's all silly at that point.

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A car is supposed to drive you places. What is a game supposed to do?

Are you trolling, or do you seriously not know?

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I find this accusation, that people are marking down The Division "because it doesn't have Orcs," a bit of a strawman, but perhaps I've simply missed something. Could you please provide a link or quotation from a review that does this? 

 

What I have seen from the major game reviews outlets falls perfectly in line with what you're requesting--i.e., a critique of The Division's execution of its modern setting, not of its choice of setting as such.

On the one hand, you're right that if I am served a perfectly executed chocolate tart, it makes little sense for me to say, this is delicious, but it ought to have been a strawberry cheesecake. On the other hand, if you throw in an ingredient that just doesn't make sense in a chocolate tart, it makes sense for me to ask whether that ingredient had any right to be there, or whether the baker would have been better off making a different pastry, if they really wanted to use that ingredient.

By that measure, you can observe, for example, that if a game treats certain human beings in a setting that is meant to resemble our modern world as if they were Orcs (monsters, cannon fodder), perhaps they either should have a. adjusted how their narrative handles enemy mobs or b. chosen a setting more palatable to the kind of mass murder MMOs and other action RPGs rely on. This is not a matter of "Oh I prefer fantasy settings." It's an observation that one doesn't simply swap one setting for another without there being moral and narrative implications, that human beings are not interchangeable with Orcs, and if you treat them that way, many players will not be able, for reasons of morality and believability, to enjoy your game.

I admit, this is an immensely challenging thing for a content creator. You have to earn your players' trust. It is not a given. You have to convince them early and quickly that you have done your homework and thought through the rules of your world, or they will not willingly suspend their disbelief. In a media of escapism, this is supremely important and should not be ignored in a review, even though it is something that fundamentally happens on the gut level. No matter how beautiful the game is, or how well-designed the loot system is, if it creates cognitive dissonance, a significant segment of people simply will not enjoy it. Those people deserve for their reviewers to warn them of this, just as the systems-design-nuts deserve to know about underwhelming loot systems and the PC-heads deserve to know if a port is slapdash.

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a perfectly executed chocolate tart

This is an interesting example, because it clearly shows how the review would is based both on the expectations of the reviewer and their experience of the piece. For instance, say they were served a chocolate-cayenne tart: They might say "wow, that wasn't what I expected!" which is an important thing to note in a review, but also say "the combination of spice and chocolate really worked for me". Or maybe it didn't, whatever. But you can see a clear split there, where there's a part that could be said to be objective (not what you expect from the name) but with a final experiential result that is entirely subjective. Of course, the surprise of an unexpectedly spicy tart factors into that final experiential result and informs it, but doesn't comprise it in its totality.

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rharwick, on 11th April 2016 -- 17:00, said:

"I find this accusation, that people are marking down The Division "because it doesn't have Orcs," a bit of a strawman, but perhaps I've simply missed something. Could you please provide a link or quotation from a review that does this? "

 

It's pretty much word for word the editor of PC Gamer defending his teams review:

http://crateandcrowbar.com/2016/03/25/episode-134-they-killed-aethelred/

(at the end in the questions section) - in response to my letter from their previous pod cast.

 

Again it's not about the Division, it's that reviews are getting far more "about the reviewer" and not about what they are reviewing (IMO obviously).

 

Great Metaphor BTW ;)

Edited by MisterG

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Are you trolling, or do you seriously not know?

 

Rather than being hilariously condescending for a new poster, why not answer the question? So far something like half of your posts have accused other forum members of 'trolling' for disagreeing with you. If you can't carry on an actual discussion, I suggest you go find a forum that welcomes that kind of behavior.

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The Division's mechanics and the way they combine with the setting and several artistic choices are dehumanising and cruel. This is the type of criticism that I want because it means I don't want to buy or play the game. A so-called "objective" review would be useless to me because that sort of thing would be left out.

Totally agree with this. These things aren't just "politics," they can do real harm to both people's view of the world and to people who have suffered through the things they are trivializing. I wouldn't touch The Division with a ten foot poll, and that has nothing to do with its actual gameplay, but that doesn't mean it's an invalid judgement of a video game.

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Rather than being hilariously condescending for a new poster, why not answer the question? So far something like half of your posts have accused other forum members of 'trolling' for disagreeing with you. If you can't carry on an actual discussion, I suggest you go find a forum that welcomes that kind of behavior.

 

The quote was:

A car is supposed to drive you places. What is a game supposed to do?

 

so either they are baiting because they know what a game is, and are trolling OR are honestly asking "what is a game supposed to do?"

 

I didn't want to insult anyone's intelligence thinking it was the latter, so assumed you were baiting and I'm not interested in biting.

 

Also if you actually want an answer, you should at least have listened to what was said - I'm talking about judging a game on what it is supposed to be, so my example it that I don't think you should score a game down for being a real world RPG game when that's what it's trying to be and there isn't a better way to do it.

 

I totally accept they might not like the idea, or think it it doesn't work, but that is very definitely an opinion and shouldn't be reflected in the score (again IMO).

 

Also, the passive aggressive response is pretty crappy, when you accuse me of not being able to "Carry on an actual discussion", and suggest I go elsewhere when you are the one being both dismissive and rude. Really impressive for an Admin

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First, you are mistaken that publishers care what reviews say. Publishers care what makes them money. It is not at all uncommon for games with good reviews to fail to make money, or for games with poor reviews to do quite well. The critical buzz around the first Assassins Creed was not great! 17 Assassins Creed games later, they are only now rethinking their approach because sales began to falter (even though AC Syndicate was probably the best received AC game in years). Metal Gear Solid 5 got pretty outstanding reviews and plenty of GOTY awards, but Konami decided that making games like that and employing Kojima wasn't worth the investment. So they're not doing that anymore. You point to positive review scores for Rainbow Six Siege as dooming future games to have anti-player features. Everything I've read suggests that Siege has been a sales disappointment. I wouldn't be too worried about them making a significantly similar sequel just because reviews didn't call out the things you disliked about it.

 

Second, you say it's okay if reviewers "become critics instead" and doesn't use a review score. Why does that make a difference? Because Metacritic doesn't count unscored reviews? What if Metacritic decided to start assigning a value to text reviews (similar to how Rotten Tomatoes does for movies, inferring a positive/negative)? Would it no longer be acceptable to be a critic? And do your criticisms not apply to reviewers whose sites aren't on Metacritic? Can I give WoW a 2/10 if Metacritic doesn't care what I think? And what if Metacritic changes the way it translates a site's scores, as they did with 1Up years ago--does that mean old reviews that used to be objective are no longer objective? Or what if Metacritic just goes away? This seems like an incredibly arbitrary metric to focus on.

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First, you are mistaken that publishers care what reviews say. Publishers care what makes them money. It is not at all uncommon for games with good reviews to fail to make money, or for games with poor reviews to do quite well. The critical buzz around the first Assassins Creed was not great! 17 Assassins Creed games later, they are only now rethinking their approach because sales began to falter (even though AC Syndicate was probably the best received AC game in years). Metal Gear Solid 5 got pretty outstanding reviews and plenty of GOTY awards, but Konami decided that making games like that and employing Kojima wasn't worth the investment. So they're not doing that anymore. You point to positive review scores for Rainbow Six Siege as dooming future games to have anti-player features. Everything I've read suggests that Siege has been a sales disappointment. I wouldn't be too worried about them making a significantly similar sequel just because reviews didn't call out the things you disliked about it.

 

Second, you say it's okay if reviewers "become critics instead" and doesn't use a review score. Why does that make a difference? Because Metacritic doesn't count unscored reviews? What if Metacritic decided to start assigning a value to text reviews (similar to how Rotten Tomatoes does for movies, inferring a positive/negative)? Would it no longer be acceptable to be a critic? And do your criticisms not apply to reviewers whose sites aren't on Metacritic? Can I give WoW a 2/10 if Metacritic doesn't care what I think? And what if Metacritic changes the way it translates a site's scores, as they did with 1Up years ago--does that mean old reviews that used to be objective are no longer objective? Or what if Metacritic just goes away? This seems like an incredibly arbitrary metric to focus on.

 

Firstly, of course they do. Some companies even give bonus' based on scores, and how else will they know WHY the game flopped. Most huge corporations say "look it did great critically, poor sales must be due to piracy". In the absence of true feedback, people are free to use ego defense.

 

Secondly my point is about what a score represents. For a major site/magazine a game score is a professional stake in the sand about how good a game is.

 

To use rhawick's food metaphor, if a Cheesecake is baked perfectly, but you don't like Lemon for you to score it as a 2/10 Cheesecake. Again as a professional Journalist - or food reviewer - you should know what makes a great Cheesecake so even if you personally don't like it, you can recognise a good one from a bad one as score it on how well it's made and how balanced the flavour is.

 

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The quote was:

A car is supposed to drive you places. What is a game supposed to do?

 

so either they are baiting because they know what a game is, and are trolling OR are honestly asking "what is a game supposed to do?"

 

The idea behind 'objective game reviews' has been pretty roundly dismissed in these parts for a while MisterG. TychoCelchuu from earlier in the thread used to run http://www.objectivegamereviews.com/ (mostly) as a joke -  You should take a look at it. It is probably more objective than most reviews you consider objective!

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Also, the passive aggressive response is pretty crappy, when you accuse me of not being able to "Carry on an actual discussion", and suggest I go elsewhere when you are the one being both dismissive and rude. Really impressive for an Admin

 

Dude, you've repeatedly accused people who question the basis for some of your assumptions of "trolling." Personally, I have also wondered if you are actually here to have a conversation or if you just want to air your opinion and then tar anyone who disagrees with it, in whole or in part. Your increasingly aggressive and condescending tone isn't helping you, in that regard.

 

If you're interested in actual feedback, I think that "what it's supposed to do" is really shaky ground upon which to plant your flag. The author is dead, genres are porous at best and arbitrary at worst, and it's fully possible to fail at one's intent but succeed at something else inadvertently. Confining what a reviewer should be allowed to discuss in a review to "how well did they follow this recipe" feels like a backwards attempt to limit what games can actually be about and, more worryingly, reduces the work of reviewing games to guessing at and then validating developer intent.

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It was a genuine question. If it's so obvious, tell me the answer please.

To expand, from my perspective it's an absurd question with no answer. Everyone plays games for different reasons -- hell, more than that, everyone plays each game that they play for different reasons. Even the reasons that they think they play a game may differ from the reasons why they actually play the game. There's no single purpose which a piece of art exists to solve: It exists to be itself, and people take from it what they can.

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Also, the passive aggressive response is pretty crappy, when you accuse me of not being able to "Carry on an actual discussion", and suggest I go elsewhere when you are the one being both dismissive and rude. Really impressive for an Admin

 

It wasn't passive-aggressive, it was just aggressive. FYI.

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Firstly, of course they do. Some companies even give bonus' based on scores, and how else will they know WHY the game flopped. Most huge corporations say "look it did great critically, poor sales must be due to piracy". In the absence of true feedback, people are free to use ego defense.

 

Some publishers award bonuses based on sales. Are we being bad game consumers if we don't buy games that you believe are objectively good, or if we buy games you believe are objectively bad, because we provide some fractional incentive in the wrong direction? If not, why do reviewers have any more responsibility for what publishers may or may not do as a result of their actions? And if you are capable of identifying "true feedback" versus irrelevant subjective commentary, why do you think companies who have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake on this are incapable of sorting between useful and unuseful feedback? Why is it reviewers responsibility to focus on helping huge corporations make better products, rather than writing about games however their readers are interested in reading them?

 

Secondly my point is about what a score represents. For a major site/magazine a game score is a professional stake in the sand about how good a game is.

 

I think most sites, at least the ones I read, are pretty clear that the review is the author's opinions and not representative of the site's "stake in the sand about how good a game is." If you tell anyone at Giant Bomb, Polygon, Kotaku, that you would score a game differently than they did, I don't think any of them would break over a sweat out of fear that they may have failed to accurately describe a game. I have heard reviewers from each of those sites clearly state that they're describing their personal experience and explicitly rejecting the notion that they're staking anything on "objectively" scoring a game in a "correct" way. If you're reading sites that believe they are giving a definitive statement of whether or not a game is good, and that they will have failed at their job if a player comes to a different conclusion then them, we are just interested in entirely different sites.

 

If you want to argue that you're only interested in reviews that talk about the issues you're interested in, more power to you. I get that. Hell, I really like The Division and wasn't expecting anything out of the story, so it just didn't bother me that the story was bad. A review that doesn't talk about some of the weird politics at play in The Division is more consistent with my experience and thinking on the game. So I get how seeing a review that knocks the game largely because of its story seems to miss the point to you. But, especially in a universe where this game seems to have sold well and gotten quite a lot of buzz, I do not understand why you care that other people are writing critically about parts of the game you weren't interested in. There will be more of The Division. It will probably not do much to address its politics in a meaningful way, because short of having aliens invade, it's hard to have a justification for shooting tons of civilians that isn't kind of messed up. I have no problem reading reviews I disagree with or reviews that are interested in talking about parts of games that don't matter to me. Sometimes, they convince me those things actually do matter. Other times, I roll my eyes and move on to some other article. I never question the right of the writer to have expressed their opinion. I'll leave it here, though, because I suspect we are not likely to convince each other.

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First, you are mistaken that publishers care what reviews say. Publishers care what makes them money. It is not at all uncommon for games with good reviews to fail to make money, or for games with poor reviews to do quite well. The critical buzz around the first Assassins Creed was not great! 17 Assassins Creed games later, they are only now rethinking their approach because sales began to falter (even though AC Syndicate was probably the best received AC game in years). Metal Gear Solid 5 got pretty outstanding reviews and plenty of GOTY awards, but Konami decided that making games like that and employing Kojima wasn't worth the investment. So they're not doing that anymore. You point to positive review scores for Rainbow Six Siege as dooming future games to have anti-player features. Everything I've read suggests that Siege has been a sales disappointment. I wouldn't be too worried about them making a significantly similar sequel just because reviews didn't call out the things you disliked about it.

 

Second, you say it's okay if reviewers "become critics instead" and doesn't use a review score. Why does that make a difference? Because Metacritic doesn't count unscored reviews? What if Metacritic decided to start assigning a value to text reviews (similar to how Rotten Tomatoes does for movies, inferring a positive/negative)? Would it no longer be acceptable to be a critic? And do your criticisms not apply to reviewers whose sites aren't on Metacritic? Can I give WoW a 2/10 if Metacritic doesn't care what I think? And what if Metacritic changes the way it translates a site's scores, as they did with 1Up years ago--does that mean old reviews that used to be objective are no longer objective? Or what if Metacritic just goes away? This seems like an incredibly arbitrary metric to focus on.

I was just talking with a friend about MGSV and Konami, since I only recently played through it, long after everything was current news. In the context of the game, I feel pretty confident that the game's strong anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist messages probably fell on the wrong side of some executives that couldn't afford to kill the game, because of how much had already been sunk into it, and couldn't get Kojima to censor it. 

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It wasn't passive-aggressive, it was just aggressive. FYI.

Actually it was passive agressive, and twice as cowardly posting this after you ban me from the site.

 

Don't worry though, I'm not going to bother, though I'm so disapointed you jumped to a conclusion without actually reading what I wrote (Which was always polite and never personal).

 

The people I accused of Trolling me was not because they disagreed, but because they were trolling me (in a nice way).. really read the comments below and tell me that wasn't people taking the mick:

 

  • So what you're saying is that Paint Drying game is a 10/10, because it perfectly does exactly what it means to?  
  • The Division was clearly trying to be a game about orcs, but it fails miserably at it. 3/10.
  • Objectively speaking, no one complemented the fancy new chinos I scored in the Division, the loot system clearly is not working as intended. I agree, 3/10.

And the final one, the one you accused me of "not answering" was:

  • A car is supposed to drive you places. What is a game supposed to do?

Which was either Trolling, or ignorance - and I asked because assuming the above was a serious question is garbage.

 

So as an admin you bring shame on those of us who take it seriously. Go read it all back and realise you jumped to the wrong conclusion.

 

After Rob and Danielle discussed this seriously on the episode, and I have been polite throughout I expected more, but enjoy the cowardly powertrip and next time remember the Spiderman clause.

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