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Thompson

Is Gabe Newell insane?

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Probably.

There are way too many problems with a system like that.

Who says that because you bring people to game servers that you're improving the gaming experience for everyone else?

If you're making assholes pay full price for games and giving popular people games for free what about the middle of the road people who neither attract nor repel other players? You can't give them 50% price because then you are always losing money.

How about skill level? What if i'm good enough at a game that I scare off worse players who don't want to be raped in half a million times? Should I be punished for being good at a game?

What if I only like singleplayer games? I could be the nicest person on earth but because I don't play online and bring people to servers Valve hates me.

Assholes make up a very large proportion of the market, however making them look on as nice players get rewards isn't going to make them stop being assholes, it's going to make them angry.

Sony made assholes angry.

No thanks.

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What is this, I don't even. . .

To stop at GabeN, press control.

What is wrong with him?

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This is probably just like that time Gabe said they're not doing any more single player games. Everyone will be like "Holy headcrab, Valve's gone insane!" and then in an interview on some student radio he'll be all cool like "calm down, that's not what I meant." and like totally defuse the whole situation and people will go back to loving Valve but also being angry at them for refusing to mention Half-Life for years and years.

But if they're going to give me free shit just because I'm so much fun to play with (remember that time I got everyone killed in Left 4 Dead?) that's also cool.

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It's just an example in a talk, he hasn't done a press release saying this is now what Valve is doing.

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Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice

That's pretty funny.

I'd like to see an attempt at designing it that doesn't just make it into another system that can be gamed. I suspect that would be impossible.

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Hold on... if someone wanted to be a complete bellend, that would be okay by Valve as long as they paid them a hundred dollars?

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It's a good idea, I don't know if I like the idea of money being involved. If a friendly player can get access to additional content, which is merely aesthetic, for said game it would be great. Though money might be something which stops tossers from behaving with such disregard for other players.

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It's just an example in a talk, he hasn't done a press release saying this is now what Valve is doing.

I'm going to ignore this good point so I can remain outraged!

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It's a good idea, I don't know if I like the idea of money being involved. If a friendly player can get access to additional content, which is merely aesthetic, for said game it would be great. Though money might be something which stops tossers from behaving with such disregard for other players.

I think money would give people too way much incentive to try to exploit the system. And they would almost certainly find a way to do that making online gaming even worse.

The real reason I don't like the idea is that would never get a discount because I'm a dick I don't play video games.

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I'm going to ignore this good point so I can remain outraged!

How dare they? :(

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I kinda like this idea in a far flung future where voice and behavior analysis software could actually accurately measure someone's asshole quotient. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to implement this that wouldn't produce an unacceptable number of false positives or be totally broken due to a human contribution element. In the case of the latter, take for example the online matchmaking of Mortal Kombat. At the end of matches each player votes for a reputation/respect rating for their opponent, which would theoretically be a great way to rooting out players with skill versus "cheap" tactics. Unfortunately, there's just going to be a boatload of dicks who dole out zeros to every single opponent regardless of a win, loss, exciting match, boring match, etc.

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Newell is the sort of person who, for mention of any concrete specific thing that Valve is doing, must counteract it with not quite fully thought out musings on another aspect of their business which will never ever come to pass in the form he's talking about.

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Yeah, exactly. All game developer superheroes have a weakness. Peter Molyneux has his penchant for overselling whatever he's working on, Gabe Newell scares everyone by saying they're doing the opposite of whatever everyone wants them to. The difference, of course, is that while Lionhead continues to produce mediocre stuff, Valve's games usually turn out pretty good.

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Yeah, exactly. All game developer superheroes have a weakness. Peter Molyneux has his penchant for overselling whatever he's working on, Gabe Newell scares everyone by saying they're doing the opposite of whatever everyone wants them to. The difference, of course, is that while Lionhead continues to produce mediocre stuff, Valve's games usually turn out pretty good.

It always feels with Newell like they are always experimenting and always talking about very radical ways for people to consume and experience their games (radical in terms of the scope of the games, the pricing of the games, the distribution of them, etc), and when he's interviewed he has no problem just spitting out whatever that week's lunchtime spitball session happened to contain... just, whatever he is literally thinking about at that moment. That doesn't mean its an actual corporate direction, its just something that is interesting to him personally.

Unlike Molyneux, he doesn't phrase it as an actual feature people will get to experience, at least not to my understanding of his words. It almost always comes across as "here's an interesting idea." When practically applied, that interesting idea might totally suck, but I love interviews with Newell because they contain a slice of his brain at that instant.

"Here's a crazy thing we've learned definitively through tons of focus testing and sales and user data. So... where could that concrete idea take us in the future? Well, yesterday we were discussing one of the thirty thousand possible directions it could go, so I'll share that one with you just because its whats on my mind today." Internet: "VALVE ISSUES DECLARATION, IN STONE."*

* At this point Valve is the least "set in stone" developer/publisher out there, I think. Even their retail games can magically mutate into something else over time. They're agile as fuck. That doesn't stop the Internet from treating everything they say as a harbinger of certain doom, though. Somehow it seems to fan the flames.

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I don't care. Every little thing key people from companies say should be analyzed to every detail and extrapolated beyond reason, and the whole company should be held accountable for that until infinity.

That's what we still do with things said by Mike Capps, John Romero, Derek Smart.

although Smart actually deserves it

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You're right, Newell's definitely less bombastic than Molyneux. It seems it's mostly paraphrasing too, at least in the case of the iPad last single player game ever gate. It's probably more that we're (I am) hanging on his every word in wait of any mention of Half-Life, and thus interpret everything in the worst, most pessimistic, way possible.

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