Reputation Assassination

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christian
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Reputation Assassination

Post by christian »

http://victorygamecenter.com/reputation-assassination/

Just in case anyone thought I made that final sentence up.

http://kotaku.com/five-things-i-didn-t- ... 1687510871
Anthony Burch wrote: Before I joined Gearbox Software, I worked at Destructoid as a features editor. I worked there from 2006 to 2010 and specialized in highlighting indie games and spewing vitriol at big-budget games I didn't like.
Anthony Burch wrote: Ultimately, I now realize I knew next-to-nothing about the actual process of making games. When I blogged for Destructoid, I was full of legitimate complaints that were, unfortunately, couched in mean-spirited vitriol and uninformed logical leaps. I still hate a lot of games, but being in the trenches of actual game development—watching as features or scenes I loved changed or died thanks to the realities of production; seeing characters and enemies transform from unfun wastes of memory into wonderful additions to the game; hearing how good voice actors can save less-than-stellar dialog—has made me a lot less likely to get angry at the developers themselves.
So he'll spare the big-budget developers from his continued "hate", but their children are still fair game. Heart of gold, ladies and gentleman.
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christian
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Re: Reputation Assassination

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And yet, his article was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. As if we should be surprised that the newfound game developer should suddenly change his position on personally attacking other game devs. As if he even said he'd stop. All he said was that it will be "a lot less likely".

But this is nothing new. Demonizing developers and publishers has been a common tactic of poor critics for some time now, who are incapable of searching out a matter. Anytime you see such nonsense from a critic, who paints creators as criminals in his text, be on your guard against him. For his real concerns lie elsewhere.

Now, a word of caution is in order here. As there are such things as criminal creators. But to throw the label around with reckless abandon, claiming the whole industry is a fraud, and that the hard work and dedication of thousands amounts to nothing more than a scam, that it's all a ploy to rob you of your hard-earned cash, is ridiculous. It betrays the guilty conscious of the individual bandying it about more than anything else.
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Re: Reputation Assassination

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The world was ready for this. Ready and waiting to jump down Dead or Alive's throat. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015- ... ted-debate

http://www.freestepdodge.com/threads/fs ... ost-248298
Xhominid The Demon Within wrote: at this rate, Arcana Heart is going to be more respected in the West before this game...
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christian
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Re: Reputation Assassination

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http://kotaku.com/a-chronicle-of-messed ... 1685685025
Kirk Hamilton wrote: For so long, there's been too sharp a disconnect between what we in the press say about Telltale games and what we hear from players. These games are well-liked by the media and by gamers, and for the most part, deservedly so. They're engrossing, well-written adventures that let us visit worlds we've previously only watched on TV or read about in books. My Kotaku colleagues and I have written many articles praising Telltale's games, and we love to join readers in talking about them. Yet each game is accompanied by an inevitable crowd of people calling foul, people with bugged and broken games who feel ripped off and ignored.

Part of the problem is that Telltale's games are released in piecemeal "seasons," and most players only have to spend around $5 to play the first episode. After that, many players will opt to buy the full season up front—usually for around $20 total—since that's a better deal than waiting and buying each episode separately. Thing is, it's usually in later episodes that the problems hit.

After years of reading various emails and forum posts reporting problems with various Telltale games—problems that I, usually, have not personally experienced—I decided to look into some of the most widespread issues their games have faced since 2012's The Walking Dead.

I headed over to the Telltale Support forums, expecting to find several lengthy threads centered on the most common problems for each game. Instead, I found something a lot messier. In every game's support hub, there are dozens of threads outlining problems with pretty much every version of all of the studio's games. I spent several days last week reading as many as I could.
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At first, I worried that listing user complaints in an article would feel unfair, like cherry-picking. After all, I was reading the support forum, so of course the majority of the posts would be about problems people were having with the games. Telltale's main forum is filled with happy users, contentedly chatting about the stories and characters in the games.

An hour or two of reading later, I had set that worry aside. Telltale's support forums paint a portrait of a publisher that is constantly releasing buggy and even outright broken games, and, unlike most of the other companies with which it competes, one that lacks the resources to meaningfully help or, sometimes, even acknowledge its frustrated users.

A few caveats, before we get into this:
  • All games have some technical problems. If I were to visit the support forums of a larger publisher like Ubisoft or EA, I would find plenty of people complaining of problems installing or operating games. The differences, as I see them, are threefold: A) Telltale's games have all had similar problems for years, and each new game brings the same issues, B) Telltale's major bugs tend to be of the catastrophic and game-halting variety, corrupting saves and erasing progress to an extent that would be noteworthy for any publisher, and C) Telltale's support apparatus appears to be limited to a support email address and a single person responding to forum posts as best he can, and as a result many of their players feel ignored or brushed aside.
  • Some of these threads have been successfully resolved, and, to Telltale's credit, even the unresolved ones tend to contain responses from a Telltale rep. With the majority of them, however, it's unclear whether the user in question actually got his or her game working.
  • I can't verify every claim listed here, or anything close to that. I'm taking each anonymous forum poster's word for it. Or rather, I'm allowing that between all of them, they paint a convincing picture, especially when combined with our staff's firsthand experience of Telltale's games.
  • I had intended to go back to 2012 and put together a timeline of complaints, but that proved unnecessary. Many of the forum posts I found, whether from 2012's The Walking Dead or 2015's Game of Thrones, were from sometime in the last few months. Go further back and you'll find many, many more.
  • This chronicle is incomplete. I tried to find problems that seemed clear-cut or had resulted in multiple posts or responses, but there are dozens I've left off. If you've had your own troubles, I hope you'll share them below.
Here now, an incomplete chronicle of messed up Telltale games:
He then goes on to list a series of rather serious bugs for each series. So how is it that Ubisoft is dragged through the mud for launching a game with bugs, but Telltale manages to preserve its revered status despite consistently doing the same thing for the past 3 years? Could it be that this has nothing to do with bugs at all?

From the comments:
treemasterx wrote: Lets see most of these are problems I have never run into(Including all my friends on multiple platforms). But let us not understand the smaller team that Telltale games have. They do not have the most amount of funding. So yes let us yell at the little guy compared to AC: Unity, Halo:MCC and many more smaller and larger games.
Nast3e wrote: They have 240 people on staff. I was shocked since it doesn't seem like it from the simple and buggy games they create, but they are far from a small indie developer. CD Project RED has 230 staff and creates 100 times more complex games in the Witcher series.
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christian
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Re: Reputation Assassination

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The concept of a criminal creator has its roots in anti-Christianity.

From The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
Albert Camus wrote: The metaphysical rebel is therefore not definitely an atheist, as one might think him, but he is inevitably a blasphemer. Quite simply, he blasphemes primarily in the name of order, denouncing God as the father of death and as the supreme outrage.
The rebel denies God's order and seeks to establish his own, and consequently paints Him as the Criminal Creator.
Albert Camus wrote: The idea of God which Sade conceives for himself is, therefore, of a criminal divinity who oppresses and denies mankind.
In fact, the whole indie rebellion cannot exist apart from Christianity.
Albert Camus wrote: The only thing that gives meaning to human protest is the idea of a personal god who has created, and is therefore responsible for, everything. And so we can say, without being paradoxical, that in the Western World the history of rebellion is inseparable from the history of Christianity.
Albert Camus wrote: It is the God of the Old Testament who is primarily responsible for mobilizing the forces of rebellion.
It is a defiant, and oftentimes violent, reaction to Christianity. Any trace of it is enough to provoke the most vile outbursts from these rebels. And if it so happens that AAA studios are attacked so savagely today, it's because they do in fact contain traces of it.

In the same way that the metaphysical rebel blasphemes against the name of God, the indie rebel slanders the names of the AAA studios.
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Re: Reputation Assassination

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In order to understand this better, reflect on what's required of the developers at a AAA studio, the kind of work they produce, and finally this quote from Peter Molyneux:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02 ... ckstarter/
Here’s the thing: this is what I truly believe. Making a computer game that’s entertaining and that’s incredible and that’s amazing is almost impossible, it’s almost impossible to do.
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Re: Reputation Assassination

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https://twitter.com/PS_TRay/status/576797086806470656
Tramell Ray Isaac wrote: Great games don't get made in a 40hr work week.
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christian
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Re: Reputation Assassination

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Leviticus 19:16
Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people: neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour: I am the LORD.
Ellicot's Commentary: http://biblehub.com/commentaries/leviticus/19-16.htm
C. D. Ginsburg wrote: This dangerous habit, which has ruined the character and destroyed the life of many an innocent person (1Samuel 22:9; 1Samuel 22:18; Ezekiel 22:9, &c.), was denounced by the spiritual authorities in the time of Christ as the greatest sin. Three things they declared remove a man from this world, and deprive him of happiness in the world to come—idolatry, incest, and murder, but slander surpasses them all. It kills three persons with one act, the person who slanders, the person who is slandered, and the person who listens to the slander. Hence the ancient Chaldee Version of Jonathan translates this clause: “Thou shalt not follow the thrice accursed tongue, for it is more fatal than the double-edged devouring sword.”
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christian
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Re: Reputation Assassination

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Sirach 28:13-26
Curse the whisperer and doubletongued: for such have destroyed many that were at peace. A backbiting tongue hath disquieted many, and driven them from nation to nation: strong cities hath it pulled down, and overthrown the houses of great men. A backbiting tongue hath cast out virtuous women, and deprived them of their labours. Whoso hearkeneth unto it shall never find rest, and never dwell quietly. The stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh: but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones. Many have fallen by the edge of the sword: but not so many as have fallen by the tongue. Well is he that is defended through the venom thereof; who hath not drawn the yoke thereof, nor hath been bound in her bands. For the yoke thereof is a yoke of iron, and the bands thereof are bands of brass. The death thereof is an evil death, the grave were better than it. It shall not have rule over them that fear God, neither shall they be burned with the flame thereof. Such as forsake the Lord shall fall into it; and it shall burn in them, and not be quenched; it shall be sent upon them as a lion, and devour them as a leopard. Look that thou hedge thy possession about with thorns, and bind up thy silver and gold, And weigh thy words in a balance, and make a door and bar for thy mouth. Beware thou slide not by it, lest thou fall before him that lieth in wait.
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Re: Reputation Assassination

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http://www.nodontdie.com/anonymous/
When we spoke before, you said the critics are jackals and the fans are idiots. I'd be curious to hear you elaborate on that, but also to put a more positive spin on it: Is it possible those two factions are that way because they're not getting the full picture or non-controlled information?

It seems to me that the 24-hour news cycle and the predominance of constantly updated websites have been kind of a disaster when it comes to creative work being consumed by this many people. When a game that, for whatever reason, gets a bad rap out there among game writers and bloggers, most of whom, as I say, are jackals, then the conversation around that game has already been framed. And game journalists do this to games all the time, working off almost no real evidence. They can do and do it in ways that can be really destructive to a team’s morale. Especially if they’re talking about something they haven’t played yet.

I remember Wolfenstein getting massive amounts of shit right up until the moment it came out. Game bloggers and game writers would just snark on it relentlessly. This snark filtered down into the comments. By the way, don’t read the comments.

I felt really bad for the men and women on that team, because I’d heard from friends at Bethesda that the game was really looking like it could be something special. Just seeing the constant shit a game like that takes in the long wind up to its release -- it pains me even for games I know I’ll never play. Just think about all the people working really hard on a game and how absolutely devastating it would be just to be working so hard on something, missing your husband, your wife, your kids, and some fuckhead comes along and takes a crap on it, just takes a massive crap on it, despite having never seen a single pixel in the game in motion. How angry that would make someone. Being away from their family. Working long nights. Trying to make this thing good. It's very hard, I think, for game developers to keep a super-positive attitude about the role of the press when a lot of them, even a lot of the good ones, do that shit.
After mentioning to a colleague how great the new Wolfenstein was, I was a little confused as to his response. He was under the impression that it was a bad game. I didn't know how that was possible, since I've never even seen a single word written against it. And when I mentioned the 9/10 review on the PS4's box cover, he laughed and dismissed it entirely. As if it couldn't be any good. As if the matter had already been settled long ago.

Maybe that's why the review score is prominently displayed on the front of the box. To combat the slander.
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