I hadn’t really considered the sex of the authors in what I’ve read, but looking at my shelves and picking some feminine names in the genre:

• Jacqueline Carey’s Godslayer duology (Absolutely amazing. Plays with themes of morality, religion, and war with a deep lore to bring it to life) I’ve only read the first two of her Kushiel’s Legacy series but I’ve enjoyed those as well.
• Trudi Canavan’s Highlord’s Apprentice trilogy (not the hardest or heaviest read but quite fun)
• Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman’s Death Gate Cycle (7 books, massive story with woven storylines and a wild lore creating a world with its own redefined science)

Your username in YELLING CAPS combined with the mundane comment made me chuckle.

I didn’t even know about it until I read this comment, but now I’m one of the salty.

Agreed. Role queue was dumb. I liked having the ability to look at how things have been going and say ‘They’re doing X. I’ll swap to this character and screw up their plans.’ The thing I loved most about OW was that it wasn’t locked into the left click first competition. Their Widow is causing trouble? Lucio>wall climb>drop in>boop them out of their safety bubble and get them shredded. Distract them behind a shield to the left so someone on the right can sneak up on them. Or go Sombra and do an invis run/tele to magdump into their head at point blank. Or go monkey and pig meatwall to get close enough to ruin her day. Whatever. Just something with more intelligence than left-click and die repeatedly.

I miss Mayhem too. People complained that it took too long to die/kill but that was what was amazing about it. How many games can you say have ever felt like you were in an epic fight where every thrust, parry, twist, duck, and swing mattered? Where you don’t win by the luck of a single shot but have to tactically manipulate enemy attention so you can change the angle of attack so it favors your healer over their Junkrat? Battles won or lost by the timing and precision placement of a Zarya hole catching the targets thrown by a Lucio boop to hold them just off the payload just long enough to get to the next checkpoint?

Man, I miss that game.

Might sound odd to some, but Overwatch.

Early Overwatch was great. Then some updates made it better. The only things wrong with it were design choices that were made for financial reasons. Then they made it much worse. Then they made it worse. And worse. And then they made 2, which turned it into just another ‘left-click on the target’ game, because those make more money. It saddens me that it died.

A ways back, I saw an article about how the French were rioting because their retirement age was being increased from 62 to 64. I remarked that it was interesting to see the French rioting against a change that wouldn’t even quite bring them to parity with the US but Americans can’t be bothered to riot for almost anything. A Frenchman said they didn’t want to even be more like the US in any way.

This law is absolutely the now-classic American attitude that kids can watch violent movies all day, but if they’rEXC exposed to one female nipple, you gotta shut it all down. Is France turning into America now, following Britain down the red, white, and blue path?

This would make a great little lore item in some RPG to explain why there’s a spell list.

‘We have literal magic that can raise the dead and move us across the world in the blink of an eye. Why the fuck am I having to do dishes by hand?’

‘Because no one actually knows how the spells we have work. We just have these spells left over from when they did, and ‘clean dishes’ isn’t one of them.’

If the loot boxes affect your ability to win, don’t buy the game. If they are just cosmetic, meh.

But don’t stop there. If it has day one DLC, don’t touch it. If it has DLC to patch game functions that should be in the base game, don’t touch it. If it has any kind of pay to win function, don’t touch it. If it has a subscription, don’t touch it. If it’s a pre-order, don’t touch it. If it’s put out by a conglomerate publisher that eats real developers and shits out imitations of their IP, don’t touch it.

And most of all, teach these things to gamer kids and their parents. Kids are ignorant of the effect their purchases, and parents don’t have the time and energy to go learn for themselves. Spreading awareness helps everyone.

Already transitioning. Been half doing it for ages. This’ll just be the last bit.

Yep

I absolutely LOVED Mirror’s Edge. That feeling of hitting flow in game and out of game as you just move smoothly from point to point was just amazing. I played originally on PS2PS3 and almost got the plat trophy. I loved trying not only to find the fastest path but the smoothest, the weirdest, the pacifist, etc. It was great.

Then I tried 2 for like 5 seconds before I dropped it. It immediately felt like a betrayal of the first game. I hated the UI. I hated the color grade. I hated the style. I hated what seemed like a turn toward the violent.

A perennial favorite

Don’t forget the vocal minority problem. The subset of people who comment on things is much smaller than the set of people who consume them. And while the threshold of effort for making comment is low, it isn’t zero, so people who hold more extreme views are going to be more prevalent in the selection because the people with moderate views aren’t going to have the motivation to spend 20 minutes explaining the nuanced position they have, while the ‘love’ and ‘hate’ camps will gladly spend 10 seconds on posting their simplistic view.

Add on the way modern systems work, focusing on likes, upvotes, etc. and you get short form responses getting greater engagement purely because they don’t take as long to read. It’s always easier to get traction with a short, maybe amusing, rehash of a common opinion than with a long dissertation on niche, complex views.

That cycles back in at the top to create a visibility bias so the people making the next round of commentary/content see the wave of love/hate and try to ride it. The result is a feedback loop with a terrible signal to noise ratio.

This is absolutely the answer. If it isn’t funneling money away from actual value creation and into their pockets, it’s evil in the mind of the investors.

Honestly, I’m slightly surprised ‘tattoo printers’ haven’t become a thing for those little ‘formulaic’ tattoos. (Stars, hearts, bird silhouettes, etc.) People love getting inked up and I could see it making those sorts of tattoos absurdly fast, albeit probably much more intensely painful due to the speed.