pugbutter

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@Ace of Hearts Semantics are important when people try to twist them around to conform to your personal definitions. For example, when "meritocracy" and "White Nationalism" somehow become synonymous. (An interesting accusation since you're the one implying that, yes, CD Projekt is more talented than BioWare because it's Whiter and more male.)

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@Ace of Hearts You're thinking of White Supremacy, sweetheart, not Nationalism. Not that it matters when your "argument" (lol) is fallacious and irrelevant either way.

Cyaиide Suиs

@pugbutter Hey scrub

@Xandrya

oh lawd



Since Templar doesn't seem eager to post, I guess it's my turn. This is going to be a chaotic week but I'll try to catch up shortly.

E:\cyberpunk\the_deadliest_question.exe

Whereas yesterday she was a beggar, queen only of the filthy alleys of corporate thought, today she felt power, power true and royal, pulsing in the air which followed her, and puddling in her footprints. The difference was like that between the counterfeit watch and the one with a price tag as long as her womanly hand. She felt the bitterness laying on the tongues of the other office women as they complimented her; jealousy, no doubt, whereas they possessed about themselves the security in their status to build another woman up ingenuously when she could not threaten their fragile hierarchy. The men, simpler creatures, stared from afar, or complimented her, or, if particularly daring, touched her bottom as she passed. (Today only one did that: Nick, from Management, who knew damn well why the women of the office exempted him from harassment charges. That same hand moved up to his face, to mischievously stroke his broad, rugged jaw as he retreated through a nearby doorway.)

When she arrived at the joint office it was empty and quiet, as was the control room to their interview panel. By all measures things had gone back to normal, at least externally. Jules arrived not too late thereafter, although his habit of scraping through the doors just before the eight-O'clock tick irritated more people than one. Today it was 7:56 when he clocked in, and slightly after eight when, clammy and panting from the labors of the staircase and the halls, he threw himself into the wheeled chair. In his ringless hand he gripped the same mocha concoction as yesterday, bitterer than the way most others liked their coffee. So everything had fallen into place after all, restoring itself to normalcy; Ona worked herself to death and Jules got by on his graceful mediocrity. His shirt was a pale lime-green today, and his tie purple.

"Morning," he said, nodding. "Who's first?" Groggy. Dulled. Sleep deprivation sagged under his eyelids, and the blue-white tint of holoscreens haunted the shine in his eyeballs.

Cyaиide Suиs

>creates a CS gallery named "My Many Faces"
>only has one post in it

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Well......lets look at Mass Effect Andromeda and how the left wing cucks have changed it from the original trilogy which was more right wing and therefore better.

The first male Squaddie you meet is a black guy SHOEHORNED IN

Mass Effect 2 was the best in series, they would never do something like tha....

AND

They have a female with a BUTCH HAIRCUT, CANT JUST LET WOMEN BE WOMEN

Mass Effect 2 would never do something like that it was the best in the series and....

WELL THEYVE MADE EVERYTHING SUPER GAY! Since OVERWATCH now suddenly every game is gay! it wasnt like that before!

Ahh, well there it is, the only conspiracy here is the mysterious case of the short fucking memory.

@Dynamo Frokane

This is the excerpt which proves more or less that OP is missing the point; comically so. I would have thought this was bad satire if it had been linked from Reddit or an equally shitty site.

"Pandering" is when a character needs to be black, female, or demi-poly-quasi-cashewsexual because a minimum quota needs to be met in each of the respective demographics of race, sex, and gender. This is when the developers think they're widening their target audience by giving a larger number of people fair "representation" in the game; that is, characters with whom the audience can personally identify. It's stupid as hell that you'd need a character's race and sexuality to match yours in order for you to identify with his struggles, but whatever, that's the world we live in.

There is incontrovertible evidence that the Andromeda team pandered to certain demographics of people.

But it's not "pandering" if a character just happens to be Black or gay, and if he has more traits to define his personality than just being from a certain demographic. So even though ME1 still has bad writing and is a game for poopooheads overall, no one is being hypocritical for "forgetting" the Black and butch-lesbo characters in the first game, while lambasting Andromeda for seemingly doing the same thing. The fact that you can't see the difference, @Dynamo Frokane, proves that you're approaching this debate at a laughably superficial level.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@Fabricant451 Yeah, I get repetition, if it's being used properly. In Planescape you hear, "What can change the nature of a man?" probably fifteen times before you're given the opportunity to propose to Ravel an actual answer to that question. The difference is that the writing in that game is, like...good? And subtle? Whereas in Mass Effect the philosophy was clearly, "We need to say it again just in case someone in the audience doesn't get it yet. We don't want to alienate anyone, we need to be inclusive," blah blah blah. You water down your product by appealing to the lowest common denominator, which includes the polarized morality system (Paragon vs. Renegade, black vs. white, good vs. evil), and the dialogue wheel which results in simplified, cartoonish, downright childish "conversations."

I'm already biased against ME because it's basically pop-SciFi with the palette-swap alien design, the horrible art direction of the ships and tech, and of course, the illusion of grandiosity and significance to the story, where in reality the player is on rails throughout. But ME has no excuse because skilled developers can force you to conform to their design choices without you even realizing it. The evidence I would offer to corrobate this is from the Thief series: the difference between Thief II and THI4F. In the bad game, there are circumstantial pop-up prompts which allow you to shoot your rope arrow only at certain lampposts, ledges, etc. Whereas in the smartly designed game, you're also limited in where you can shoot rope arrows, but the developers did it by placing wood where they want you to be able to shoot, and metal or stone in areas they wish to be off-limits. (Since arrows can only embed themselves into softer materials, bouncing off otherwise.) There are natural and "organic" ways to incorporate your gameplay mechanics seamlessly into the story itself, and Mass Effect's people simply do not know how to do this.

skip to 14:07

Is this because BioWare hires purple-haired hippopotamuses who screech about not enough women in gaming instead of actually going to a tech school and becoming a skilled female developer? I personally think so. CD Projekt more or less tell women and brown people to go fuck themselves if they don't have the talent to make a good game, and their priorities show in the quality of their product. It's not racism or sexism or transdolphinkinmisogyny, it's employing the most talented people at hand to make the best product possible. Almost everything in Andromeda meanwhile is poorly designed and bafflingly incompetent, and staff choices will certainly contribute to that. The bad writing is a microcosm of the game's problems at large, and the developers' design philosophies certainly played a significant part in this failure whether OP likes it or not.

Hider

TL;DR Worrying about how many brown vaginas there are in your game fundamentally means you're spending less time worrying about things which will actually make the game good.

Describe your favourite game in a nutshell

You basically play as that edgy RP character you wrote when you first started up in this shitty hobby (or you're still writing right now, if you're bad at it). Because between stabbing guys in the back, shooting them with arrows, and luring them into strategically placed mine traps, you also steal their coinpurses and break into their homes to run off with their fine china. And while doing all this you shoot off snappy one-liners to prove how witty and snarky you are. And of course you're called upon to save the world from a technocult and its maddened leader, because expecting actual soldiers and heroes to do it would just make too much damn sense. Don't worry, you have a dark and tragic past, but that was already revealed in the first game so there's really no need to explain it here. Fuck this game.

it's actually one of the best games of all time lol

Thief II: The Metal Age

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

I'm more amazed by the fact that anyone thinks ME was ever good, and that 3 or Andromeda somehow defiled the series' glorious legacy or some shit.

Most of what @Fabricant451 says about the mechanics of horror is correct and all, but just because the Reapers are "unknowable" doesn't mean this was an artistic decision. Honestly BioWare's writers are so incompetent, it could just as easily be due to serendipity, not a conscious choice, that the antagonistic force of the story just happens to match up with some Lovecraftian tropes. Looking at how clumsy and awkward this passage is: ...

Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding. There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own you cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension. [...] My kind transcends your very understanding. We are each a nation - independent, free of all weakness. You cannot grasp the nature of our existence. We have no beginning. We have no end. We are infinite. Millions of years after your civilization has been eradicated and forgotten, we will endure.

How many times can one incompetent buffoon of a "writer" say the exact same fucking thing over and over, just in slightly different words? Well, five times per paragraph, apparently. Jesus Christ. This actually hurt to read. Never mind the fact that it's Telling instead of Showing us that the Reapers are "unknowable"; the prose is just fucking dreadful in so many ways.

Do you guys know any other good RPing sites?

I like RPoL.net although it's not very popular

Pros:

• I like how when you join a RP, you join under your character's name, not your username. So unless you're communicating with other players on the side, no one knows who you are except the GM. It's great for keeping personal grudges out of the RP.
• HTML is also much more versatile than BBCode.
• I also really like how each RP is basically its own subforum, with little sub-threads you can separate accordingly therein. One thread, locked and stickied, containing rules, another for worldbuilding stuff, another for a character roster......great organization on this site
• going one step further, you can toggle which players are able to see which threads. So you can have several stories going on simultaneously, and keep most your players out of the loop to avoid metagaming. Or if you have co-GMs then you can give them special moderation threads, for discussing penal actions against belligerent players. That sort of thing. You can probably create a thread which only you can see, and use it to take GMing notes for future subplots, etc.
• If you like tabletop, the site has a ton of built-in die roller RNGs, with built-in modifier features and such.
• Finding games you like is extremely fast and easy since you can narrow your search according to tags/keywords, game system (DD 3.5, GURPS, whatever), activity level...

Cons:

• Moderators are draconian as fuck and also sort of moronic. I was nineteen years old when I got banned for being "underaged" in an Adult-rated game, and when I asked them to provide the proof which made them believe this decision was correct, they basically said they don't need proof since they have a "better safe than sorry" policy when it comes to minors and statutory sexual harassment or whatever the fuck.
• Also their portrait system sucks and is useless.
• As aforementioned, it's a pretty small community.
• If you limit your game searches to "free-form" only (basically free-writing, like we do here), your options are severely limited, since most games are tabletop-based.