I'm afraid that's been around for a long long time :(
I don't like it either. But some people REALLY get off on streaming their game plays so that other people can see "how fast" they can play.

Or as I like to say how fast they can ruin a game and completely ignore its purpose.

At least now there are achievements that can more satisfy these people.
Heck I remember being excited to play Warcraft 2 onlnie and ran into nothing but asshole kids that did that exact thing...saw how quickly they could kill me through exploits of the game. No long sprawling epic battle...just make as many orcs even peons as possible and rush me. every time. what's the point. oh yeah rankings and ladders. things like that kill the magic of gaming

I'm familiar with the longevity of speed runs, and glitching in them to a lesser extent.
But the amount of time invested - particularly some of the bizarre glitch finding - in them seems to be up.

YMMV, but that's my take.

haha that's the second time this week i've seen someone say YMMV and i didn't know what it was but the first thing i thought of was "You Make Me Vomit"

it totally works here! :)

Your Mileage May Vary (ie: my take on it but you may have seen or experienced differently)


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As someone who loved Real Time Strategy games and was super ecstatic to get into the online multiplayer scene when I went to College (circa Warcraft III / StarCraft days), I was hugely disappointed that my online skill was not determined by tactics or strategy, but by how quickly I could click around the map, macro building queues, and spit out units. It was my first real experience with both min/maxing and the challenge / interpretation of game balance. There was simply no way to keep up unless I was moving as rapidly as possible, and the learning curve was steep. Combine that with the general (but as of then still relatively tame) toxicity of the online gaming world, and you had a barrier for entry that was maddening for a game style that I absolutely loved.

Though this is a bit of a tangent, this steep learning curve and toxic environment is fully-formed now in the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) world and is exactly why I do not play them (League of Legends particularly), despite likely enjoying them a lot if I could get through that learning curve.

Back to the topic at hand, I think something like this particular instance (RTS games) begs for a house rule type implementation, but how do you do that without neutering a legitimate strategy (the rush)? And if you are going to handicap against this, how do you compensate for factions that are designed around this type of play style (thinking of the Zerg in StarCraft particularly)? Obviously, it's up to me (and those I play with) to determine what is "legitimate" or "fair" - hence, house rule - but where do you draw the line? It seems awfully arbitrary.

This could even be expanded to game design in general - how much of the onus for customizability is on the game developer versus how much is on us, the player, to implement house rules to make the game play like we want it to? I mean, as much as we might not like it, there is nothing broken or "unfair" about the rush strategy in RTS games - we're just not very good at it, and it reduces our enjoyment of them. For something like a text-sim, this onus is easy: does the game mirror reality well? For an RTS set in a fantasy world of mythical races, it's far less simple to account for "realism."

As someone who is a long time (literally 15 years now) player of an MMO in World of Warcraft, I am constantly reading opinions about how the devs are "ruining the game" with their choices. It has been fascinating to watch the game evolve - especially trying to determine how design decisions are made. I play in the PvE environment, and am probably in the top 10% or so of players in the world there (/humblebrag); this means there are literally millions of players who play the game but never see the content I play. A lot of the discussion around these design decisions has to do with the "whales" - the far, far larger portion of the population who play the game, but not at this level, and are almost invariably silent about said design decisions. As designers, how do you level the fact that the majority of your player base (and therefore revenue stream) makes up this silent majority, yet this miniscule portion of your player base is insanely loud, vocal, and opinionated?

Meh, this rambled quite a ways away from the original thought, but you get the idea.

lovely post vince!

i played wow for a long while. like you i was only in it for the stories, the pve content and the exploration. however i did love playing that one mass player pvp whateverit was. i rarely played theothers. oh yeah and i was BIG on going after achievements with friends :)

i loved that game and my characters and the whole world
and most of the players were 100% about pvp
that's what most of the online world wants.

Mostly a side tangent, but many games have multiple speedrunning categories, I spent a little time messing around with speedrunning strategies in Ori and the Blind Forest, there isn't a "glitchless" category, but rather a "no out of bounds" category. So the primary speedrunning category for the game does incorporate some more minor glitches but you still actually play the game and go through many of the zones in the game, which to me feels like a much better experience both to play and to watch.

Its odd to me how much someone else's fun bothers you.

This actually reminds me of a situation that seems similar that I've been intimately familiar with for decades: radio stations & requests.

The talking point in the business (once upon a time at least) was usually stated as "90% of your requests come from 10% of your listeners" but the reality was likely even more skewed/extreme than that.

There were, I guess, three basic schools of thought:
1) accommodate it, at least those few care enough to request
2) fuggem, trust your instincts and play what you believe is best for most
3) tolerate it and pay lip service to it with a specialty hour/show for it

I'm not sure that doesn't do a pretty good job of describing the three basic game design approaches to the situation as well.

I ran into this same issue with Warcraft 2. We used to play Warcraft 2 versus other people a fair bit back in college, especially the summer after I graduated when I didn't have a job for a few months. We'd go to the computing center, install Warcraft 2 on machines (somehow, I forget how it all worked) and play against other people in the computing center.

For a while there, me and my friends were pretty decent. We wouldn't win always, but won a lot and it was competitive.

Fast forward a year or so later, and me and my buddy decided to go to a computer center one day to give it another try. We ended up playing against some guys who absolutely destroyed us using "only sappers". After that, we just accepted that the game had passed us by and it was time to move on.

Hello,

I'm trying to download fortnite games on my pc using 7downloads but when I download the launcher a notice pops up telling me it won't open. Does anyone know how to fix this? Please help...

I'm really looking forward to this game Ace Combat 7. Its been a while since I'm played a flight sim.


[linked deleted]

Just built my new gaming PC and bought Monster Hunter World for the PC. :D

Any of you guys playing MH:W on Steam?

Watching the ongoing comedy that is Bethesda's patch attempts on F76, something hit me ...

Y'know, we used to complain that Bethesda never fixed obvious bugs in any of their games. Given what we've seen, I think we were probably better off.

Edward, can you delete that link? The thread is broken in Firefox and even Brave is having issues.

It looks fun but I haven't bought it yet. Let me know how it is. I have so many games on my wishlist.

Sorry, done.

Thank you!

Played about 12 games of Tetris 99 last night. Once I realized how the whole thing works, it was a lot of fun.

Basically Battle Royale Tetris against 98 other people.

Nintendo with a lot of good announcements this week with the latest Direct.

Is origin access any good?

Also does anyone have that house flipper tycoon game on steam?

Origin everything is awful.

That being said, it's been years since I've given it a shot, so maybe they've improved it.

I paid $100 for origin premier on pc and I've gotten my money's worth and then some. Madden with early access was part of the subscription. As was battlefield, fifa, and Anthem. They also have a collection of non EA games you can play as well (they are billions is the only one I've been interested in).

Madden and fifa are annual buys for my son and those alone put me in the positive. Everything else has been gravy.

I can't say the service has blown me away, but it's been a good fit for my house.

I was looking at basic, I think I'm gonna throw 5 bucks in for a month. Wanna play madden anyways, and OOTP is on there to hold me over until the new version comes out. Seems like a reasonable collection of games for 30 bucks a year.

I pulled a 3rd place finish out of my ass the other night.

That game is way more addictive than "battle royale Tetris" has any right to be. :D

Best I have done is 6th.

My strategy is to keep my board clean, doing 1-2 lines at a time and when I get hit with trash, I use that to make tetrises. I have found I last much longer this way.

Next strat will be to learn how to target folks for kills. I think to be really good at this you need to be able to target those closest to dying to get the badges for powerups.

There's a couple ways to do it. You can use the left stick to target specific users, or you can use the right stick to target specific categories.

If you target folks with badges, you can try to kill them to steal their badges.

If you target people closest to getting knocked out, you can earn your own badges.

If you target your attackers, maybe you can make 'em back off.

Etc.

The thing is, some of it is keeping your head down to a certain extent, because if you get targeted by multiple badge-holders, it won't end well.

Thimbleweed Park is free on the Epic games thing.

Yes, I have a bad feeling I'm going to end up not thrilled with the console port of Stellaris (based on an 18 month old build instead of the recent improvements) ... but that didn't stop me from buying it anyway.

So, yeah, if I end up unhappy then its on me.

Turns out I'm reasonably happy with Stellaris port thus far (and so is the kid, so make that 2 votes out of 2 from our precinct)

I know there's room for improvement with the build version but I think they did a great job with the UI in the port. I was comfortable zipping around menus within the first 15-20 minutes and that really isn't something that happens for me.

Has anyone played Phantom Doctrine? If so, any good?

Phantom Doctrine on Steam

I know the early reviews were pretty mixed. There was a good game in there, but the bugs and some balance issues took away a lot from the experience. I have heard they have patched the game pretty significantly, but haven't heard how much it has changed.

Dola:

Posted yesterday from the lead developer:

Error | rpg codex >_< xedoc gpr

I have Phantom Doctrine, played it a bit and my early reviews are pretty mixed. It's got a XCom 2 vibe without being as good as XCom 2, build up a team and send them on missions. The mechanics are a little strange, shots generally dont miss so it forces very stealth play. You cant be spotted or you'll be shot and probably killed, and you cant shoot or all the other guards will rush over and kill you. So you need to be stealthy, generally you'll have a two-person team so you'll mainly be avoiding combat. There is a fairly good mix of missions though. Definitely not a game to play on Ironman Mode.

It's a James Bond-like international conspiracy with two campaigns: one playing as a rogue CIA guy trying to stop it and one playing as a rogue KGB guy trying to stop it. I didnt get very far but at the risk of sounding disloyal to the West, the KGB campaign is better. I believe if you finish a campaign, it opens up a third campaign. I didnt stick with it long enough to get anywhere near ending a campaign though.

So there's a good game in there, but it has some strange gameplay choices and it looks like it's not going to get any better. Worth buying on a good sale, but not at full or near-full price.

Anybody picking up or pre-ordered the Division 2? Played the first one for over 700 hours with a couple of buddies and was involved in a couple of the betas. Haven't been this excited for a game release in quite some time.

If there's people playing on PS4 and interested in joining up for raids, etc, let me know!

Early build video of the next game from the developer of Gunpoint.

Dragon Age 4 is sounding like it may be the final nail in the coffin for Bioware.

Before a 2017 reboot Dragon Age 4 was about wizard heists | Rock Paper Shotgun

The original concept for DA4 sounded interesting, but using Anthem assets and including an online service component pretty much kills the DA series.

Fuck.That.

I plan on getting Anno 1800 this weekend, anyone getting it today at release?

Been playing RDR2 from time to time lately. It is such a beautiful world. Makes me a bit sadder that we are so intent on trashing the real world.

I'll be playing today. Between this and Imperator Rome my gaming is set for a while.

Let me know what you think! I'm off Friday so I'll grab it from Uplay since Steam isn't selling it after today due to Ubisoft going exclusive to Epic games.

Maybe not release but I'll definitely be getting it!

Really enjoyable city builder. I started off my first playthrough and about 2 hours in I felt it was rather simplistic as they've cut out some common mechanics of city builders/management sims. I decided to start over and the 2nd time starting the campaign I picked up on things and understood the mechanics much better. It made the game a hell of a lot more enjoyable and helped me appreciate the game more.

Definitely the best Anno game IMO. I came directly from Tropico 6, which is a fantastic game in itself, and I really don't know which is better. Both have strengths. Anno much slower paced with a campaign. Tropico is lighthearted, moves quickly, and the missions add a lot of variety to the gameplay.

If you like Anno games. This is a no-brainer.

If someone is looking for a city builder with less convoluted mechanics and faster pace. Tropico 6 is at least on par with the best of the Tropico games.

I started the campaign last night.. didn't have much time but what I played, I enjoyed.

I rarely get console games outside of MLB The Show, but Days Gone looks really interesting to me, just curious if anyone has picked it up?

Cross posting a bit between this and the Steam thread, but still really interested in Imperator: Rome reviews if anyone has it. Seems to be a big delta between publications who have reviewed it (all well over 80%) and folks on Steam claiming to be Paradox fanboys who seem to hate it.

Picked it up and loving it. Getting mixed reviews, but the game world is beautiful and alot of fun. My kind of game where I can take my time and just grind through. Ammo is really scarce so far in the beginning, but melee weapons are aplenty. Story isn't anything new, but it does it's job. Has a Last of Us feel to it which is one of my favorite PS4 games. Happy with my purchase.

So I bought meself a SSD as a little present. I did not know that they looked more like a ram stick than an internal hard drive. I did not even know that my motherboard even had a slot for the drive (luckily it did). But it does work and work it does!

Slow down technology.

You got a micro SSD. They do make regular SSD drives that are about the size of a laptop HD.