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The story stuff, for being "story" stuff is pretty horrible anyway. The way it's paced totally kills it. Something dramatic happened!! Now go grind sidequests until your level is high enough so you can do the next one and find out who the traitor is. God, thinking back on it infuriates me. Fuck their me-too bullshit. Star Wars is 100x more interesting than that (failed) money grab is.

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I play free-to-play games quite a bit. City of Heroes had something of a very stupid rewards program, though I was a subscriber for a time before it went F2P so I had plenty of content unlocked already. And it was easy and cheap to unlock things permanently, relatively speaking.

That chart of what's available and what's not for TOR is demonstrating to me that EA is trying to milk every dime possible for every little thing, and it's wrong to do so and misses the point of the concept of free to play. The game wasn't designed to be F2P so they had to make shit up. But rather than develop new content or new kinds of content, they're just locking down everything in the game? Fuck, man. $15 better pay for a lot of those cartel coins, and those coins, in turn, better permanently unlock a lot of stuff, because that is ridiculous. Weekly passes for content is already a super bad move. And character creation choices are going to be limited too.

I assign the blame of this to EA rather than Bioware.

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I don't have a perfectly appropriate thread for this, but

.

What- I'm just hangin out here with this bag o' Doritos and my old friend Master Chief doin some games journalism.

Nothin' weird about this.

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I was waiting for him to interview the doritos and mountain dew or something.

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"Listen, can we move the Doritos packets closer to the middle of the shot?"

"Actually, change of plan: we're going to have the packets of Doritos give the interview. Please email us the questions you were going to ask."

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I know it's just the luck of the screen grab, but his so-very-dead expression, seemingly superglued in place to looked intrigued/intriguing, is what really sells this for me.

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It's pretty great. Though I'll hazard a guess that Keighley isn't too happy about this either, but it's part of his job description. That's the story in my head anyway, but I enjoy seeing hidden tragedies in things.

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I know it's just the luck of the screen grab, but his so-very-dead expression, seemingly superglued in place to looked intrigued/intriguing, is what really sells this for me.

"I am so excited for these products. Can't you tell."

God that is so awkward. Still pretty frustrating to see that you can buy ranks apparently. What the fuck. Anyway, this all remembered one of my favorite comics when this Mountain Dew + Halo crap first started:

217532795_wHBrN-L-2.jpg

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This kicked up a bit of a storm over in a thread on the forum there, and while I haven't fully invested myself in the conversation, here's what I picked up from it:

- There was no actual threat of libel lawsuit

- England's laws regarding libel / slander are sensitive compared to America

- The parts removed from the article weren't libelous at all; there was actual facts backing up anything noted

An associate of mine in England commented that he's been brought up on lawsuit 3 times for articles he's written, but all cases were dismissed because there was an actual trail of facts he sourced (rather than just writing a bunch of malarkey). He's kind of outraged at Eurogamer because instead of standing by their writing and editing staff, they bowed down to pressure that wasn't even necessary in the first place.

But again, I haven't fully involved myself in this story.

Edit - Let me quote him, just one particular note:

People need to understand this, there was never any threat of libel. He republished publicly available quotes verbatim. As long as they aren't altered, which they weren't, then libel is totally off the cards. The woman who contacted Eurogamer apparently did not threaten legal action, but even if she did, it wouldn't even make it to court.

If the article was edited to protect Eurogamer from libel, then Eurogamer are employing some very dumb people. Becoming a qualified journalist in the UK requires you pass exams showing you understand, among other things, what is and what is not libel, slander or defamation of character. Once more subtly reinforcing the notion that these people are not journalists, because if they were they would know that the idea of reposted twitter comments being libel is absurd, no matter what context or commentary you apply to them (all protected by free speech).

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Thing worth noting: the Keighley thing is hilarious and pretty terrible, but I respect his work. I'm not sure how well-known this is, but before he was a Video game CELEBRITY, he ran a series called "The Last Hours Of" on GameSpot, detailing the last hours of development on some high profile games. I believe the recent Portal 2 e-book was his too. He's a totally legit journalist, and one of the few doing at least semi-investigative work. I just wish he was doing more of that, and less of ... this ... thing.

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Yeah I pretty much agree with SiN. Keighley actually has genuine journalistic work out there that is worth reading... but he's also one of the most frustrating interviewers I've ever seen. Watching a Keighley interview never fails to annoy me. I'm not even sure exactly what it is about it, other than that the questions he asks seem to be even more inane and softball-y than most games journalists while also somehow seeming to miss the point of certain games. He will occasionally ask bizarre questions along the lines of "so you can't play a dragon?" in Skyrim (not an actual question he asked, as far as I know, just an example of the kind of left-field stuff I've noticed him asking) while completely failing to ask something fairly obvious while still being relevant like "will there be any differences between the textures between console and PC versions of the games, and how soon after release do you expect to support modding?"

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Fuck me, I read the original article and am going through the timeline of events (from the sources) and now I'm all worked up and ready to go on a warpath.

Keighley isn't the problem here. From what I can see, he's an unwilling participant in something that's been going on for way too long in the realm of video game journalism. Advertising and PR dictate the terms of the writing or commentary. It's a fair thing to look at. People like Lauren Wainwright writing it off isn't them providing their stance in the conversation to be had, it's them walking away from that conversation. Here's how it went:

Florance: "Is there a problem in video games journalism of conflict of interest between reviewing and PR fluffing reviewers or blocking them out when they don't get the results they want?"

Wainwright: "Ugh, whatever." And she walks away. She's not the only one by the way:

JaRFA.jpg

Back to Lauren, that doesn't prove her point. It doesn't even state her position. It only conflates the problem; she may realize she's has zero integrity. Not to mention she actually does have Square listed as an employer for promotion of Tomb Raider. So the claims of "no evidence" are full of shit.

But I'm also mad at Florance, the article writer, because he didn't stand up for himself nor call out his employer, Eurogamer, on bullshit. I want to know what the motives for Eurogamer and Florance were in their reactions. It couldn't have been lawsuit; again, there is an actual trail of information to base the article's writing on (Wainwright is, again, mad because she got caught with her hand in the cookie jar).

Part of this whole thing is that people think the internet can make them into superstars. They want that Twitter or YouTube fame. So when they face adversity or get caught in bad positions, they flail like children. I don't mean to pick exclusively on Wainwright, though she is important in this scenario - there are many, many people who get caught up in this fucking frenzy of providing positive feedback because 1) it'll reward them with goodies or 2) they get to have access to content to review. The latter is total horse shit, by the way, and it's been documented as having happened before.

For anyone interest, N'Gai Croal is trying to have this conversation via Twitter. Unfortunately, as you'll see below, people who should be a part of the conversation are writing it off with snark.

TQA4D.jpg

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Watching a Keighley interview never fails to annoy me. I'm not even sure exactly what it is about it, other than that the questions he asks seem to be even more inane and softball-y than most games journalists while also somehow seeming to miss the point of certain games.

For me personally, it's the pestering for shit that a developer guy/gal says 10 times over he/she can't talk about. It's funny when he does it to David Jaffe though, cause every time I've seen them together Jaffe tells him to knock it off.

Though to be fair, interviewing a dev about his/her new game and then being unable to talk about said new game must be equally annoying.

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That's Robert Florence of Consolevania in case someone didn't make the connection.

EDIT: And Videogaiden, Cardboard Children, Downtime Town and a bunch of TV comedy you would probably not believe a video game journalist was involved with.

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I disagree with him saying to investigate the "system" and not the people. The system isn't some arbitrary monster machine that doles out these activities. The people are the ones engaging in it with each other. That's a hell of a dodge he's making.

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Well I think he's upset with the way the internet *cough* reddit *cough* is vilifying and hurling abuse at Wainwright when it really is about more than her. So we should be focusing on the structures in place, like PR events, parties and media blackouts instead of sending hate mail at random journalists for making stupid mistakes.

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It may sound like Hollywood, but business is run by ego. Video game business isn't different. In the previous 24 hours JP tweeted this K link: http://kotaku.com/59...s-x men-destiny

The following picture speaks volumes:

xlarge.jpg

It may not be ovbious at first, but there's a single guy sitting in front, it's Denis Dyack, CEO of SK.

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