General Video Game Thread

[Insomnia]

@arkandel Well part of my thing was I was doing a whole series - returning player who has been here since launch coming back after everything was changed and seeing what the new content was like, no mods, just like it was when it first came out. Commenting on things like shadows now, or how my blueberry has abs, or basically the entire undead zone make over - and lack of kobolds in the human starting area.

So like... do I rush, keep going, wait? I've always been able to solo, and it always takes a while to get used to new content. But yeah, don't really want to get all excited with all the changes to Brill if it's going to be erased and I have to start over.... Especially when the first 8 hours have my commentary, something I can't really do right now. That's a huge change on top of maybe having to start over and or missing what there is now.

[Templari]

@packrat The Trese Brothers game? This doesn't surprise me, they've been awesomely communicative devs for any of their games I've picked up. I'm still addicted to the original Star Traders.

[SG]

Late to the Battletech wagon, but is it weird that my Locust Pilot has the most kills out of my lance? That thing running behind people and shooting them in the back is just too much fun.

edit Nevermind. that last mission had the dodgiest of medium mechs and the most indestructable of Warboy cars.. My pilot is taking an 82 day nap now.

[Packrat]

@sg For a long time my Firestarter pilot was very much the MVP, especially after getting Ace Pilot. Jumping behind somebody then getting two turns of fire into their back with a full assortment of small lasers was just brutal.

[Arkandel]

Another interesting read.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/25/17593516/video-game-culture-toxic-men-explained

[Thenomain]

@arkandel

It’s too bad that they started with about half fluff opinion quotes. Only half of the people interviewed seemed to take the situation seriously, and even if they were opinions they were opinions pointing toward understanding and fixing, the other almost half about blame.

It’s really too bad that Anita is involved in this article but what can you do, she is relevant in third wave feminism. I feel bad for anyone who is the target of poisonous behavior, but I don’t see her as much more than propagating an Us Vs. Them behavior which I don’t see solving anything. God bless ‘er for bringing awareness, but I never feel like she wants to discuss, just talk.

[Ganymede]

@thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:

It’s too bad that they started with about half fluff opinion quotes. Only half of the people interviewed seemed to take the situation seriously, and even if they were opinions they were opinions pointing toward understanding and fixing, the other almost half about blame.

I felt the same way.

I understand the issue and I agree it is a problem, but there just seemed to be so little in the way of constructive discussion.

And the discussion is imbalanced towards women, as if men didn't have their own opinion on toxic men and toxic masculinity and haven't been, in some way, victimized by the same.

Well, it's not my article.

[Jaded]

@thenomain
I agree. I found the article interesting but adding Anita and Carolyn, her editor, really undercuts the argument of the whole article for me.

[Tyche]

@arkandel said in General Video Game Thread:

Another interesting read.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/25/17593516/video-game-culture-toxic-men-explained

Hilarious. I love the first illustration. White guys wielding tiki torches on game controller. I didn't know Richard Spencer and his merry band of neo-nazis were the ones behind toxic video game culture.

Anita Sarkeesian is a guest of honor at GenCon next week. She's going to provide her brilliant insights on toxic TTRPG culture. What next? Toxic male culture in model-railroading?

[Misadventure]

@tyche wasn't serious when he asked in General Video Game Thread:
What next? Toxic male culture in model-railroading?

I dunno, I looked at the HO scale model people, and there are no women engineers, rail workers, hobos, cops, etc. However, there is a grim reaper, so that's something.

I know ... I'm not helping.

[Thenomain]

@tyche said in General Video Game Thread:

Anita Sarkeesian is a guest of honor at GenCon next week. She's going to provide her brilliant insights on toxic TTRPG culture. What next? Toxic male culture in model-railroading?

Except the RPG culture has had some issues illustrated recently, probably ancillary to the same issues from the comics side of the nerd culture. Not just issues with women, but with POC.

It's just Anita is not the spokes-model I would want, unless GenCon wanted every (cis?) male to have a cat-o-nine-tails on entering the conference hall for their mandatory daily allotment of self-flagellation.

[deadculture]

@thenomain Without going too much into that, she's the only person in the world who gets paid 20K dollars to make a (free) Discord channel. That should pretty much tell you the intent there.

[faraday]

@deadculture said in General Video Game Thread:

@thenomain Without going too much into that, she's the only person in the world who gets paid 20K dollars to make a (free) Discord channel. That should pretty much tell you the intent there.

Look, I'm not defending everything she's said or done, but that's just not factually accurate. They had a fundraiser for a registered 501(c) non-profit charity organization. One of the fundraiser "reward tiers" was a promise to set up and for the leaders to be available on a discord server. Equating that to them asking 20k to make a discord server is like saying Idris Elba charged thousands of dollars for a dinner date. That's just not how fundraising works.

[Thenomain]

+1 @faraday .

I'm not saying she's not influential, I'm saying that I personally believe that we could do better. Much better. I believe that Anita is doing a good job at attracting attention, but that we need other people to continue the conversation after the conversation matures.

I personally know Phase 2 Feminists ("You've come a long way, Baby") and seriously believe that Anita is regressing the cause. Sure, sometimes we need to take a few steps back to take a new path forward, but we need to move forward as the second phase of that.

[Jaded]

@misadventure
Your comment created a rather interesting side quest. So I looked into the statistics for women in the railroad industry which includes locomotive engineers and operators, switch operators, conductors, and yard masters.

[Arkandel]

Any of you folks use a gamepad to play MMORPGs with?

A friend at work is talking me into using one (he lent me his old G13 for now), and I'm trying to figure out if it's a better experience or not.

Basically my left thumb is on a tiny joystick which was easier to do than I thought it would, but the action keys are what's taking a bit more time figuring out - I use the 1-5 keys usually for skills plus a bunch of modifiers with alt/ctrl for cooldowns and oh-shit buttons.

What is your experience with these devilish things if any?

[Jaded]

@arkandel
I swapped to one after my first year of raiding on WoW and I found that it helped tighten my actions/rotations for skill use. They are really great for doing that but it does take a bit to get used to but once you do it becomes second nature.

I think the hardest part about using my gamepad was remapping for how I would use it.

[Arkandel]

@jaded What worked for you in the remapping, as you remember? At first I thought it'd be easy (just bind my 2-4 healing spells) but then things kept creeping up; what about the jump key? Sprint? Tab targeting?

And then what about off-spec for quests? I'd need to make sure the same buttons work for both.

[Jaded]

@arkandel
By the time I got my gamepad I had my jump and targeting remapped to my gaming mouse. So I could not really tell you how to best deal with that. Which means my best suggestion is to move those essentials to your mouse if you have a multi-button mouse.

As for my off-spec, in WoW, I ran tank/dps split spec and I just remapped my primary functions to the top two rows with necessary secondaries to the bottom two rows - and since the buttons changed when you swapped specs all that needed to be keyed on a switch was top two rows.

In addition, as I mapped each skill row I moved those rows into the same formation as my gamepad on screen too and then shrunk them down. That helped me get used to my setups.

[BobGoblin]

I really didn't like gamepad for WoW, it's not 'designed' for it.

GW2 and FF14 were fine with it however. But that's just a simple man's opinion.