Mediation

"The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity"

Yeats - The Second Coming

____________________________________________

 

"Coming to this cinema soon!

The tender, compassionate story of one man's love for another man in drag. Thrill to the excitement of a night emission over Germany, when the pilot, Jennifer, has to choose between his secret love for Louis, the hot-bloodedly bisexual navigator, and Andy, the rear gunner, who, though quite assertive with girls, tends to take the submissive role in his relationships with men, and sensational Mexican starlet Rosetta Nixon plays the head of bomber command, whose passion for seabirds ends in tragedy! With Ginger as the half-man, half-woman parrot whose unnatural instincts brought forbidden love to the aviary, and Roger as Pip, the half-parrot, half-man, half-woman, three-quarter badger, ex-bigamist negro preacher for whom banjo playing was very difficult, and he never mastered it though he took several courses and went to banjo college... uhhh... and everything...

Don't miss it! Coming to your cinema soon!"

Monty Python's Flying Circus - The Light Entertainment War (S4E3, 1974)

_____________________________________________

 

 

I resent the Pythons pre-empting my criticism of identity politics content generation with that hilarious movie trailer spoof, and for doing so more sweepingly and at once more thoroughly by mixing in overdone settings. That entire Light Entertainment War episode is more or less a drawn-out sigh of frustration at the endless tirade of war dramas churned out in the decades after WW2, most of which had nothing to say but all of which held themselves above criticism by the inviolable tragedy of national pride. The movie trailer segment in particular rings painfully true against contemporary media and their desperation to rehash every single idiotic cliche with special interest demographic twists, narrowing down to ever more obscure niches.

 

Reminds me of trying to sit through a bad movie called Summerland, which starts as a tale of wartime hardship during the Battle of Britain as a boy is sent to the country to live with a cantankerous female writer. Comedy... or something, should ensue, but we soon scrap the odd couple setup to segue awkwardly into a tedious lesbian romance having nothing to do with the intro besides one monstrously overblown contrivance. Seriously, they have to actively remind you there's a war on, or what year they're living in. One gets the distinct impression that Summerland's writer(s?) could find nothing either irksome or piquant in the 1940s besides closeted carpet-munching. Which likely stems from lack of research, as neither dialogue nor comportment support a period piece* and everyone's only mode of communication seems limited to copping attitude like sassy brit-com bit players. Why even bother? If you wanted to make yet another movie pitting glorified lesbians against the injustice of whatever, you could simply have made that movie, without resorting to a time period you can't accurately portray, or the informed existence of a war, or a child as prop, or confused gratuitous mysticism, or a man conveniently dying to clear the way for morally superior girl-girl love.

 

The story seems contrived backwards from homosexuality being SRS BSNS to the need for a dramatic backdrop and what the hell, WW2's only been milked for cheap drama for seventy years and counting, what's a few more? Blame it on inertia, I guess. Entertainment industries long ago grew so accustomed to copying and repackaging as to standardize even the packages. "Set piece" was not a slur to start, but earned its status as such, and it's hardly just special interest summer filler cinema getting bogged down in conventionality.

 

If you play any so-called "MOBAs" (LoL, DotA2, etc.) more properly remembered as Aeon of Strife games after their Starcraft beginnings, you might wonder why your inventory has six slots, exactly six slots, no more, no less. Six shall be the number thou shalt count and the number of the counting shall be six. Seven shall thou not count, neither count thou five, excepting that thou then proceed to six. Eight is right out. If you expect some convoluted justification based on class balance, match pacing or numerological progression, prepare to be disappointed: DotA, the one they all copy, was a custom map for Warcraft 3, not a single-character RPG but RTS with simplified skills/inventory for its hero units. In other words the 6slots were not a design choice but an incidental, arbitrary external restriction, slavishly copied by imitators for twenty years now like Corinthian columns on Howard Roark's house, for absolutely no reason besides looking more like a custom map for a game with early-2000s limitations. The same was true of the map size or shape (diagonal to fill more space, with lanes angled to fit Warcraft 3's square maps) or the 5-player teams (limited by War3's 12-player match maximum = 5+1 AI per team) though at least there five players coincide with a good multiplayer class mix.

Hardly an isolated example. If you step into The Lord of the Rings Online you might wonder at Bree's max-level NPC town guards, since monsters usually leash away from town's edge so there's nothing for them to actually fight. Well, World of Warcraft had town guards at launch partly to provide safety on PvP servers, and LotRO as WoW-clone with zero open-world PvP mindlessly copied over the superfluous guards into original launch content.

 

Don't get me started on random genres forcing you into platform jumping quests just because nothing says "video game" like Donkey Kong.

Don't even try to sell me on the artistic merits of pixelation. Pointillism's merit as clever novelty waned with the rest of the belle epoque.

On a completely unrelated topic, I don't like opera, or musical theater in general. Not to say opera doesn't occasionally offer some bangin' howl-alongs, but the few times I was dragged along or tried sitting through an entire performance I quickly grew aware of the genre's massive amounts of filler. Yes, yes, I can appreciate lavish mood/scene-setting, but generally speaking, I shouldn't have time to read the whole libretto while the plucky squire's still recitatatin' 'bout the sandwich he had for lunch. The covers are too far apart, to borrow Bierce's witticism. But the filler was originally part of the selling point, wasn't it? An evening at the theater is just that, isn't it? An evening, a social event, with the theater as pretext. When it took strapping on a corset, quadruple-tiered flowery hat and three layers of petticoats, plus a creaky carriage ride across town behind a horse's hind-hole to reach your entertainment, the least they could do was provide an entire evening's worth, complete with intermissions to intermingle. Also, singing troupes in full costume with orchestral accompaniment were the height of technological and choreographic achievement for about three centuries, the most impressive spectacle you might witness. Nowadays? Not so much. Pretty sure Industrial Light and Magic can out-glitz a dozen prancing ponces in puffy pantaloons. The strictures of form imposed by 18th-century avant-garde stagecraft no longer serve their function.

But if opera might be dead for most relevant cultural purposes, the simple observation that ILM was founded to illustrate a *space* opera speaks emphatically of its lasting influence, and the same is true of other dead forms whose functions outlived them. Romanticized drama persists.

 

Are silent films dead? Move your lips to say yes. Still, entertainment industries learned well the power of silent scenes. Peaceful vistas bloom onscreen a few seconds before the music score winds up, lovers wake alongside each other in wordless reverie, and rare is the thriller which doesn't include some nerve-jangling aural crater as the plucky squire hides... from... the... vill- BOOM, HEADSHOT! Talkies did not abolish silence, merely counterbalanced it.

 

Are radio dramas dead? Tell it to Morgan Freeman, The Narrator. Is letter writing dead? Then what the hell am I doing right now? Can you make a war movie? Sure, if the war's actually relevant. Are fairy tales dead? Not if superheroes have anything to say about it. Is ballet dead? Yes. Yes, that one is dead.**

 

A medium is not a goal. It's a means, a vehicle to be used to whatever extent it carries meaning. And that word, medium, reminded me to dig up my copy of Nicomachean Ethics:

"decision is either understanding combined with desire or desire combined with thought; and this is the sort of principle that a human being is."

Sapience is decision, the ego between id and superego. You are the process of processing. Somewhere between memories and impulses, between desire and thoughts, between desired effect and learned technique, there should be a choice, a chooser, a creator whose decisions shape those simpler elements into something worth creating.

That endangered species, the creators, have dwindled with every decade. All we have are industry standards cut and pasted, "babble babble, bitch bitch, rebel rebel, party party" as another brilliant philosopher once put it. Mercenary pandering renders bad art grotesque by its subhumanity, the degenerate, inbred, troglodytic effluent of caged animalism. The new media of the electronic age helped... for a bit... but as they outgrow their Betty Boop stage, they too have been choked with standardization and mass appeal, all features trimmed away which do not maximize short-term profit. Even the supposed alternatives do little but fetishize meaningless, outdated forms without function.

 

And the final nail in our cultural downfall is that the only members of our society now permitted to be heard are the ones saying nothing the loudest, the ones peddling moralistic prurience, desire without either thought or decision.

Activists.

 

 

__________________________________________________

 

 

* Compare character word choice, tone and mannerisms to The Dig, set almost exactly in the same time, place and social stratum, and representing it far more believably. By the way, The Dig also managed to make a point of sexual repression. Just a marginally more dignified one.

** Nope, wait, never mind, we do have strippers.

Foam on the Tsunami

"So how much easier would life be
If nineteen million motherfuckers grew to be just like me?"

 

Eminem - Who Knew

 

 

One of this blog's funnier moments came upon noticing a slight spike in hits a few years back and discovering I'd attracted the attention of some parental watchdog group called "children in peril" or somesuch, presumably for my habit of demanding your darling little submental degenerate walking shitstains be skinned alive for griefing in online games.

And they'd deserve it.

But there's an added dimension. While hardly limited to children, online games do skew toward younger demographics, and as I've tried conveying in the past, this makes players' observable behavior online a crucial indicator of where the culture is headed. Their capacity for fair-play, rising to difficult challenges, self-sacrifice in service to the team, all those sportsmanlike qualities which used to define our communal mammalian play (at least as ideals) have almost entirely died away.

 

What's left, the way online gamers act now, placed in our wider cultural context, leads me to predict:

GenZ will turn fascist on hitting thirty.

And no, for once I am not speaking figuratively, or even hyperbolically. Violence in movies or games has never been an issue... but the interactivity of the violence against other human players, the underhandedness, the demand to be able to cheat or grief or punch while never taking a punch, that reflects strongly on gamers' mentality.

 

Upon returning to League of Legends after years' absence (seriously, I used to play back when it still had a tribunal) I was surprised to see the once-coveted "carry" role is now shunned, and the once-mediocre middle lane caster role is eagerly sought. It seemed impossible for players to have shifted away from direct damage and stacking their K/D ratio. But the mystery was quickly resolved. Riot simply put in so many idiotically overpowered teleporting assassin heroes (e.g. Yasuo, Yone, Zed, Sylas not to mention the older Akali, Kat, etc.) capable of getting free kills on any squishy that everyone wants mid lane not to play a caster for cover fire and crowd control that would benefit the team more, but to farm said caster for free kills as an assassin... then be useless for team fights and force your fellows to fight outnumbered. Even when they play a bottom lane carry, quite a few insist on Yasuo.

Granted, from this blog's very start I was trying to call out the heavier and heavier shift toward designated griefer classes in every single online game. And note, it's never enough to reliably get kills on enemy players. They want it to be risk-free. They always insist on also getting to "vanish" or teleport out of combat afterwards. When World of Warcraft first launched, you could tell the idiots' mentality by one of rogues' most frequent complaints: paladin bubble-hearthing. Paladins, y'see, had an immunity spell lasting long enough to teleport back to town. Rogues, accustomed to getting free kills, kept demanding paladin bubbles be nerfed... not because rogues were losing fights, but because they considered it unfair for anyone to be able to escape their griefing. Despite rogues themselves having even more convenient escapes.

So sure, the mentality's anything but new, but it has gotten generalized across all genres. Yes, AWP whores were a problem in Counterstrike back around Y2K but at least most of us were willing to call the retarded little shits whores. Were you dismayed when the youth all idealized stalwart unbreakable '80s action movie heroes? Well, now they all want to be faceless assassins. Stannis Baratheon gets degraded to a redshirt, to be replaced with Arya... and in the final tally, you think that's a step up?

 

Magic: the Gathering was never a great game, and in fact lies at the root of much of the game industry's current idiocy like microtransactions, randomized loot boxes and over-reliance on luck-based gameplay. Its chief charm though was building up your board via chains of causality that could yield truly spectacular results:

I need a cigarette.

(addendum: in case you can't tell, I actually killed myself by overdrawing there... but damn if it wasn't worth it)

 

But at some point over the past years, its focus shifted toward proliferating "kill" cards which instantly remove an opponent's assets from the table regardless of their quality or defensive ability. A quick glance at MTG:Arena now reveals hundreds of redundant "destroy" or "exile" or "counterspell" or "discard" options, all bypassing card power/toughness values altogether. Sure, it's partly because arithmetic has gone out of style, and partly because the game includes way too many cards that can win a match singlehandedly if not immediately removed... but you have to account for the inescapable feel that if anything threatens me, I should simply get to make it go away, instantly and with utter impunity.

I doubt this is limited to MTG among card games either, having retried Gwent recently and uninstalled it in disgust when I found nothing matters except damage anymore, to the point it's impossible to win defensively.

 

Building is a thing of the past. Preventing others from building, one-shotting then running away, is the name of the game. Do you imagine this mentality will not translate to physical reality?

There's an old chauvinist mantra, a bit of plausible deniability that never really dies: "sure, I'd never call for those people of the wrong race/sex/religion/sexuality to be exterminated, I'd never promote holocausts, I'm a nice little girl... but still, wouldn't it be nice if they all suddenly just... went away?"

That's adolescents' newly burgeoning spirit: instead of pitting yourself against your designated enemy's strength, mano a mano, quality to quality, you should get to make the enemy simply disappear. Such attitudes in games are decidedly married to a politically correct education. An entire generation now has grown up walking on needles from the cradle onwards, because everything they do or say will somehow be construed as A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!!! - unless of course you align yourself with some self-appointed group of underdogs. Now you're "progressive" you're "woke" and entitled, nay, demanded to inflict as much attrition on the designated enemy as possible, while anyone speaking against you can simply be dismissed and blacklisted as an evil subversive. Life itself consists of making "problematic" people go away while hiding behind nominal oppression.

Anyone skimming through history can probably spot the problem on the horizon: a leader will arise, charismatic or simply positioned well enough politically to rescue them from uncertainty, promise these skittish executioners a complete takeover, complete cover, promise them they will never need fear being on the wrong side of history, ever ever ever again. When you have lived in fear your whole life, if not physical fear then the fear of ostracism, of existential negation, when you have spent a childhood, a youth and half a working life atoning for some ill-defined guilt in simply being born the WRONG sex/race/sexuality, anyone promising absolution is an angel inviting you to the rapture.

And all you have to do... is turn against your absolver's enemies.

That's not so hard, is it?

Just make the evil people go away. Be willing to murder for the glorious leader, and you need never fear again. Murder with impunity. You dashing Rogue, you.

(It's a lie of course. Nobody lives in fear more than citizens of a police state, the snitches and bootlicks, always feeling the noose of social acceptability tighten around their necks as the system purges more and more faithful infidels. But by the time they figure that out, it's too late.)

They're already embracing the ideal of killing with impunity in their virtual lives. Pretty soon someone will offer them that chance in real life. This is in fact what both the right and left wings have been practicing over the past decade here in the States, perfecting the formula be it white pride, black pride, gay pride, blue-collar coal miners, hashtag mobs, a grievance here, an entitlement there, rally this-and-that. The actual cause can be anything, "the flame of a blowlamp" in Orwell's prescient words. All that really matters is an entire population indoctrinated into both fear of being targeted and starving to inflict some harm in turn... so long as they get to "vanish" behind some noble cause's smokescreen afterwards.

 

Your children are not in peril.

Your children ARE the peril.

Because you've raised them as desperately, underhandedly, sociopathically, facetiously servile, backstabbing, self-hatingly narcissistic, sadistic little apprentice Nazis. An entire society shamed and feeling cheated of their righteous glory, and painfully aware how ripe for scapegoating their neighbours look. But enough about history repeating itself or 1920s Germany. You're worried about suicide bombers and school shooters now? Wait 'til the school shooters get their own political lobby under the moral umbrella of redressing the world's racial imbalance (however interpreted) as an oppressed underclass. They've toed the line so long they're about to fall in it. You've sowed, watered (and weeded of any clearheaded opposition) a generation's worth of faceless, spineless minions desperate for validation, begging to be reaped by the first charismatic powermonger to get a foot in the door. GenZ is a fascist time bomb.

Kahl me brother

____________________________________

Some spoilers for the "online" game Warframe's newer storylines follow.

____________________________________

 

I got back into League of Legends a couple months back, not that I'd recommend it. Still absolutely full of griefing little walking shitstains that the developers refuse to exterminate. But, sadly, the current multiplayer scene is so uninviting as to make a top choice of a game tailored to 12-year-olds fighting their own teammates more than the enemy. At least as a point of curiousity, it lets me see what gender roles the game industry's currently marketing to impressionable youngsters.

Unsurprisingly, the hero roster's now full of superpowered little girls, all spouting lines along some variation of "you got beat up by a girl" or extoling the superiority of girliness, or how the only person she respects in the whole world is <female name> or how she utterly disdains those losers <male name> and <male name> and <male name> etc. etc. etc. Nothing new there, just reiterating the entirety of contemporary culture. I was surprised at seeing some blurb about one of the male heroes "continuing his quest to find his father" or somesuch, which initially sounded like a nice counterpoint, not only two men interacting outside a woman's control but a father being presented as maybe worthy of being sought out. Well... you can probably guess how that eventually shook out:

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

 

You can pretty much call this shit before it even starts, can't you? My mother, knowing I used to like Star Trek, tried to tell my about Ted Danson's new series, which is sort of like it, except it's very cute and funny, see, he's a captain that screws everything up and -

- hold it. I interrupted her, gritting my teeth. Let me take a stab at this. Does he have a hypercompetent female second-in-command who counterbalances his incompetence? Oh... well, yeah, my mother admits.

Yeah. Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

Warframe is another of my guilty pleasures. For the most part, just an idiotic Diablo-style endless loot grind, but with some talented visual artists, decent music and enough customization options to keep me occasionally interested. Again, largely banking on the younger audience, to the point when they ran some storyline about a heroine going rogue a few years ago, I had to wearily explain to some naive youngsters they needn't worry about the outcome. Her redemption was a foregone conclusion, as any writer/director/developer would only dare tease you with a female doing anything wrong these days for the sole purpose of revealing she (having a heart of gold by virtue of her sex) was merely forced into evil by an evil, evil man. Aaaand, cue the inevitable denouement:

She was only being driven to evil by an abusive husband, y'see.

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

Warframe's past few years were filled with misconceived attempts at expanding gameplay beyond its basic routine of breathlessly bouncing off the walls effortlessly mowing down endlessly spawning enemies. Most failed, due to attempting to build up a hated alternate game mode or forcing you to trudge through found object minigames or other nonsense. Some time this past year they released a new patch in which they make you play as some mooks from your normally opposing factions. Notably Kahl-175.

Kahl's a basic grunt from a very grunty faction. He and his "brothers" are clones, tube-grown as cannon fodder. He doesn't glide effortlessly through the air or teleport or turn invisible for risk-free kills. Kahl shoots, and grunts, and talks in third person, mostly shouting "for the queens!" as his faction's standard battle cry, as his adventure becomes more and more of a suicide mission. With his final action, pulling the pin on a point-blank grenade he wryly changes that to "for my brothers!" - and I don't mind admitting my jaw dropped in surprise. You meet Kahl again later, having survived his kamikaze run, and though he's now given a new queen in the form of a condescending female as the brains of his operation, constantly bashing him as she grudgingly babysits you-as-him during fights, I'm nevertheless doubly surprised at his return as the focus of a whole new expansion, saving more and more "brothers" to join him. Apparently the audience liked Kahl.

But why shouldn't they? Even the slightest, hedged, most bashful and meekest break from absolute female supremacy now stands out as utter novelty, a shocking crack in an otherwise unassailable, government and corporate-backed propaganda system spanning all modern media.

 

Man 99% bad, woman 99% good? Avaunt ye, vile heresy!

 

____________________________________________________

 

 

P.S.:

As a bonus, I have to note storytelling creativity goes hand in hand with improved gameplay. See, Warframe may be a mindless twitch-fest now, but its oldest playable characters were based on a slower, more careful, stealth-based, puzzle-interspersed, action-and-reaction dueling gameplay. By focusing on a less inherently superpowered hero, Kahl's missions, while not too much of a throwback, seem a welcome reminiscence of Warframe's long-forgotten basics.

P.P.S.:

Kahl being helped by la blue girl has not escaped me.

Heroes of the Storm

I loathe Blizzard Entertainment.

Wait, that's not how this story starts. That comes later.
This story starts with Starcraft 1 back in the late '90s and the Aeon of Strife map. I never played it. I dimly remember taking a passing glance and deciding it bastardized the basic Real-Time Strategy routine too badly, plus I saw no point in playing one of the greatest PvP games of its time as PvE.

Half a decade later when "Aeon of Strife" became an entire category of player-modded PvP maps in Warcraft 3, the lack of "S" in RTS was already getting old and I'd grown more willing to branch out. A myriad lane-pushing maps filled the custom game list with experiments on hero advancement, ability cobbling, minion farming, item advancement, control points, etc. Good times were had. Horizons were expanded.

(Somewhere in between here, Demigod managed to both provide the most promising incarnation of the AoS concept and self-immolate by dragging its feet in the balance and infrastructure departments.)

When League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth finally became the first viable commercial models of AoS design, they did so by narrowing their focus down to one of the least creative WC3 AoS maps, Defense of the Ancients. Later games like Smite, Prime World, Paragon, Sins of a Dark Age, etc. slavishly copycatted most of DotA's "features" from item recipes to the exactly five (5) players per team and its one (1) map with its three (3) lanes and jungle camps. Never mind that everything in DotA from the four skill buttons to the item upgrading to the five player limit to jungle camps were all artifacts of Warcraft 3's game mechanics and had nothing to do with the lane-pushing concept.

Each of them failed in various glaring ways but usually added something. Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's own re-iteration of DotA, does what Blizzard has done best for three decades running. It adds absolutely nothing, removes most of its competitors' more interesting features and steals as many of the more marketable ideas as it can while putting its own glossy spin on it. Just as they copycatted Warhammer and dumbed it down to rebrand it as Warcraft, as they dumbed down cRPGs into "Action"RPGs for Diablo, as they dumbed down Elric of Melnibone into Arthas, dumbed down TF2 into Overwatch, as they dumbed down MMOs into World of Warcraft's endless "kill ten rats" grindfest, they've dumbed down the potential of WC3's old AoS gamut, pared off anything which might require customers to think and regurgitated something that sells.

I would much rather be playing Demigod or Gigantic. Both went bankrupt, in keeping with the rather striking attrition rate for so-called "MOBA"s. Luckily, Blizzard incorporated quite a bit of other titles' point control, timed objectives, frontline health/mana regen, alternate "ultimates" and so forth, cannibalizing its victims. It even took the unprecedented measure of eliminating individual player level-grinding, the most important step toward making such games truly team-oriented - a necessary plunge which not even Demigod dared take. Also, given their obscene wealth, they've afforded themselves quite a bit of development time for creating variations on the 2-3 lane pushing theme.

They've also refrained from pushing microtransactions as aggressively as some others. Like Valve's DotA2, Heroes is more of a cross-promotion platform than a product in its own right, an easily accessible form of interactive advertisement targeted to the penniless young dregs of various societies. Mousing over each playable character lets you know in which other Blizzard game that character originated, just in case you might want to... y'know... take a look? Take a hint? Hint-hint?

Sure, there's no base building, no manipulating minion waves, no character customization beyond transient skill choices each match, no terrain manipulation, nothing whatsoever which might require planning and scare off Blizzard's bulk clientele of retarded teen scum. But what is there works. It has smoother matchmaking, slightly fewer griefers and trolls, better balance, more maps and less grinding than other MOBAs.

As much as I hate Blizzard for their constant destruction of creativity in the ideas they copycat, their neverending race for the lowest common denominator, I hate them even more for making it work. The world would be a much better place if parasitic hacks like them wound up starving to death in the gutter.

Gigantic knives win gun fights

I spoke about the recent AoS derivative game Gigantic some time ago, so I won't go into much detail now. As it's being scuttled by its parent company by this July*, I might as well get a couple of posts about its more salient features in under the wire.

Those, my poor quality-deprived friends, are choices!

So-called MOBAs, being dumbed down from the original Starcraft / Warcraft custom RTStrategy maps to suit the fast-fingered, slow-brained tastes of whiny mass-market millennial trash, tend to lack tactically-relevant customization options. I don't care if it's DotA2, LoL or Smite. Even buying gear is almost always a straight climb up a blatantly obvious upgrade ladder. Some of the less known or newer titles like Prime World or Paragon offer much more pre-game customization through collectible card decks, but even they're pretty weak on letting players adapt after match start.

Gigantic, on the other hand, appended miniature two-deep skill trees to heroes' combat abilities, plus a choice of specializing in one of three abilities at level five. Some of these are mere damage or resistance upgrades while others can radically alter how an ability functions, adding force fields, teleportation, etc. More interestingly, they resisted the urge to make every choice valid for every match, thus qualifying as one of the few development teams to realize that "situational" is not a dirty word. The character above is a high-damage melee assassin / bruiser type, so for most matches the bonus damage option with the added stun is the obvious choice, hands down. Occasionally, you'll be fighting a tank-heavy team and the armor break will be more important. Rarely, very rarely, you'll be fighting a firing squad team.

Quite satisfying to stand in front of three idiot parasitic snipers -not killing them- cracking your whip above your head, tanking enough damage to kill you five times over while your teammates whittle them down. Suck my iconoclasm, bitches.




__________________________________________________
* I'm well aware this may just be a publicity stunt by the company, as developers rarely give such long warning. Still, the game was intriguing enough to warrant publicity.

Gigantic

"You say you wanted evolution
The ape was a great big hit
You say you want a revolution, man
And I say that you're full of shit"

Marilyn Manson - Disposable Teens
(No, I've never heard of these "Beatles" of which you speak)

Compelled by whatever mysterious force leads me to hold out hope for AoS games, the single-unit RTS concept which gradually decayed into so-called "Arenas", I'm currently checking out Gigantic. Before anything else, I have to say it's hard to find any video game these days that can't be made to look good in screenshots. While I've defended "cartoonish" graphics in the past, Gigantic's decor outright copycats the flat, blocky, frame-starved, anime-inspired children's cartoons which have become the norm since the '90s.

Higher-resolution textures will no doubt follow (at low-low DLC prices I'm guessing, as per industry standards) but still, they're obviously targeting a very young crowd here. Most of the voiceovers even sound like Disney characters (Mickey Mouse in the case of the alchemist above) and the basic gameplay follows suit, rushing you through frenzied, spastically twitchy battles with no pre-game strategic choices beyond team composition (and even that is sabotaged by being unable to see your enemies' choices to counter them.) Gigantic is not even a MOBA but a fighting game, Kombat with a K most Mortal, a genre by definition aimed at button-mashing, braindead little tween vermin with no attention span.

So why does it feel more cerebral than any of the DotA, LoL, Smite etc. variety of 5v5 slapfest? I've long said that AoS games took entirely the opposite turn from what they should have been. Instead of growing into their full RTS complexity, they aimed lower and lower toward the idiot-friendly nadir of FIGHT! Gigantic instead takes that moronic slap-happy premise, adds a few MOBA-themed map elements and manages thus to build on its original theme instead of denigrating it. You find yourself picking moves and countermoves to counter your enemy instead of just min-maxing the one obvious build everyone uses for your character, opting for defensive walls to alter the flow of combat around the map, using personal resources for the team's good, all features conspicuously absent from DotA-clones. It does away with the slavish adherence to DotA's three lanes and last-hitting AI soldiers, instead tying your character advancement intrinsically to your teammates.

Most interestingly, it sneaks a major change in mentality into its basic thematic elements. Like any MOBA, you're fighting to destroy the enemy team's chess-king. However, instead of a static, useless building, this is instead one of two "gigantic" creatures whose booming voices double as announcers, ostensibly ordering you about the map, invincible unless they directly attack each other. Towers can be rebuilt and receive a similar treatment, becoming slightly mobile summonable creatures which provide utility to players. Instead of blocking lanes, they count as player kills, can be bypassed or assaulted as deemed necessary, yet nonetheless provide, if anything, an even greater focus for combat than defensive towers in MOBAs.

All this along with other minutiae serve to shift the focus from individual character advancement to team objectives. There are no AI-controlled mooks for you to farm. You are the mooks. Stylistically, the two warring entities are not you and your enemies but the "gigantic" beasts about whose feet you scurry at breakneck rodential speeds to try to set up the big bosses' attacks on each other, the only opportunities to truly advance in a match.

This single change in perspective, in itself, is enough to make Gigantic noteworthy among its competitors, the necessary optic reversal for every multiplayer game and not just MOBAs, away from individual self-aggrandizement and toward group objectives. And hey, you know what? Maybe they're right marketing this to kids. The current crop of gamers is a waste. Grow a new one. Get 'em young. Maybe after such saccharine small-team cartoonish ultraviolence, the kids playing this now will be more ready in five years to involve themselves in truly "massively multiplayer" virtual worlds instead of simply looking for a place to farm up imaginary status symbols.

Maybe this is the only way to ever build anything: instead of trying to salvage a crumbling edifice, rebuild it from the ground up. Albeit too limited in scope to be truly interesting, logically building on Gigantic's precepts could yield great things down the road. And I'm not just saying that because I like the very apt title I received at the end of one match:

Arooo!

Mortal DicKslap

As I mentioned recently, I've been wasting a lot of time in Paragon. It's a blatant Smite copycat, and Smite's big gimmick was giving the AoS concept a close up third person look. Both of them owe much to the RTS / FPS hybrid Savage 2, but where Savage 2 was a true FPS / RTS hybrid which featured large 20 vs. 20 player teams, actual resource control, building placement, commanders giving players orders and other RTS staples in addition to its FPS gameplay, these are just ... eeeugh... "MOBAs" - the idiotically oversimplified version of the Aeon of Strife concept popularized by Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends. AoS maps started in Starcraft, and were based around controlling a single unit within a larger two-sided strategy conflict. They should never have devolved to moronic slapfests, but that's what DotA was and every commercially marketed AoS game since then has rebranded itself an "arena" instead of a warzone, copycatting DotA's simplicity.

Smite sinks a level lower, removing even much of DotA/LoL's remaining player choice, planning and tactical thinking in favor of degrading the genre to a 5v5 version of Mortal Kombat or other console fighting games. Paragon copycats Smite and is deliberately aimed at console gamers, but despite lacking entertaining mythical figures it improved a bit on some of Smite's combat basics. Now, that patch I linked is supposed to be their big December popularity push. Coming out on Dec. 6, I'm guessing it prefaces some kind of advertising blitz for the holiday season. Don't give a crap. It's what's inside that counts, and what's inside is... less.

5v5, 3 lanes, no control over strategic elements, no dependence on resource control, idiotic player advancement based on individual kill count dick-measurement instead of actual teamwork. That's the MOBA formula, a moronic shadow of the complete strategy games the AoS concept should have birthed. You'd think they couldn't dumb it down even more. So guess what the new patch advertises. Small map. Shorter cooldowns. Faster movement. Slappier slapfest. Like every game, Paragon will only get more dumbed down, more simplified as it goes along, but I would've though they'd at least wait until they officially declare themselves out of "beta" before shrinking their product, catering only to inbred rednecks mashing buttons on their eksbawkses. Investing time in moving to a particular lane and having to wait until you use your abilities were some of the last traces of actual frontal lobe activity in the whole "MOBA" denigration of team strategy games. Aaaaand now they're gone.

Don't even THINK about increasing team and map size. 7v7 complexity would break your drooling troglodytic customers' brains.

There were only two games I can remember which took the AoS concept in the correct direction.
The Warcraft 3 map Eve of the Apocalypse.
Demigod, a 2009 game developed by (of all companies) Gas Powered Games before their otherwise well-deserved bankruptcy.

I can't dig up my old Warcraft 3 copy (nor do I want to) but I really need to see if I can't snatch myself some screenshots of Demigod and start putting them up. Every time I've seen a new AoS degenerate come out I've bought into it in the hopes of something better. Every time I've told myself they couldn't possibly degrade the team RTS concept any further. Every time I've somehow been surprised that they have, and Paragon's only the latest in a long chain. With every company tripping over themselves to cater to drooling cretins, we really should remember that the genre could be (and was, for brief times) taken in the opposite direction, that of increasing complexity, planning and teamwork.

Fainting Couch Awareness Month

Been wasting a lot of time recently in Paragon, simply because I'm hopelessly addicted to AoS games (I refuse to call them MOBAs, blllech) so I tend to jump on each new one as if it's not just yet another oversimplified moronic sell-out of what the genre should be. Paragon's officially in "beta" - the kind of beta they take money for - so it's still a patchwork in some ways. It crashes some, it lacks some interface functionality, it's missing some sound effects. The UI is riddled with placeholder graphics. It does, however, have a swear filter. On by default of course.

A motherfucking swear filter. In beta. Well, good to know they took care of the important stuff first.

In other news, an organization whose ass I'm kissing in the real world spammed our e-mail inboxes recently with a dire warning about Cybercrime(tm) which is obviously different from real crime 'cuz y'know... cyber! OMGWTFBBQ teh cyberz iz comin' to getcha! Unsurprisingly this mountain of self-serving paranoia comes stamped "homeland security" like so much of the fearmongering of the past decade and a half, so if you live in the U.S. you likely got the same spam. It's their list of "crimes" which really takes the yellowcake though, listing in the same breath actual crimes like identity theft alongside idiotic media panics like "harassment and bullying" because as though this society weren't apocalyptically degenerating already, now it's a federal crime to call a retarded little shit a retarded little shit.

Yeah, there is such a thing as bullying, the kind with practical real-world repercussions, the kind that yields a collusion of the majority against isolated victims, makes people sit alone at lunch. Just having someone insult you, who's not even in the same room with you, whose presence will fade along with the text in your chat box? That is literally nothing. Grow a fucking backbone you gutless advertisement for abortion! We now live in a society tolerant of any kind of waste, parasitism, backstabbing and manipulation but rushing to its communal fainting couch every time someone might've hurt someone else's feelings. Retards!

I'm a thirty year old playing online games. I've seen your shiteating little ten year old brainless progeny in those games. They deserve a lot worse than anything I can say to them. Your precious little asslicking, 30-IQ dickmonkey subhuman waste of oxygen genetic filth don't need to get protected from insults. They need to get their faces slammed into the wall and be flayed alive for their stupidity. Every shitsucking little troglodyte I see playing a team game only to build up his own score should have rabid dogs set upon him. Their actions, their self-serving sabotage of their teammates have actual repercussions in the medium of those games, which is more than can be said by anything your chat filters block. I want them disemboweled and strung up from skyscrapers as warnings to others of their simian ilk, but in the absence of any actual punishment for their crimes at least admit that the utterly inconsequential verbal response to those crimes should not be punished while the crimes still exist.

In the 1890s it was Victorian morality. Sixty years ago it was Norman Rockwell's whitewashed picket fence wonderland. It seems to take only three generations for anglophone society to become incapable of distinguishing noumenon from phenomenon, to become so complacent as to hold facetious passive-aggressive politeness more valuable than practical competence or cooperation. This current batch started back in the 1990s when they were called feminazis and P.C. thugs and now they're called social justice warriors and regressives, but make no mistake: they're only new deputies of the same old thought police. Mrs. Grundy wears many hats.

And now she's got a government contract and tenure in every university.

Tipping the Scale of Id

Last month, Prime World introduced a new hero, Tu'rehu (and kudos on delving into mythology obscure enough that nerds like me aren't completely bored by it yet) as per the core business model of current, dumbed-down, DotA-knock-off "MOBAs" which relies entirely on microtransactions. Its all about pumping out endless streams of playable characters and skins, each for the low-low price of... whatever.

Trust me, you're gonna wanna pay that low-low price. You're guaranteed an endless string of wins against anyone who doesn't have that latest gimmick. This is also part of the business model: selling wins. Tu'Rehu, at release, out-damaged, out-healed and out-ran everything in the game... and I do mean everything and not just anything, as in, he could take out an enemy team 1v5. Despite this being blatantly obvious it took some conspicuous weeks for even a slight nerf to be patched in.

Of course, that's just an isolated accident. Ooopsie, the developers placate the masses on their forums, our bad. Hey, game design isn't a precise science, right? It's not like the previous hero, the Desperado was.... exactly the same story, or anything, for weeks on end beforehand, standing in the middle of your base, mowing you down while endlessly regenerating.
Prime World isn't even one of the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of stupidity, and though their constant updates make it more obvious, DotA knockoffs like League of Legends or Smite are only the tip of the iceberg. This sort of routine long ago became intrinsic to the idiotic pay-to-win microtransactions system shoehorned into every single game genre over the past decade. Even ignoring that, ample reasons to err on the side of "overpowered" upon releasing a new element predated our current crop of online cheatfests. If game design is such an imprecise science, I'm amazed at how precisely this pattern plays out, every time in every game. Somehow, by random chance, almost every balance error favors making the game easier for the group it most immediately affects, and not more difficult. It's like one of those old medieval images of Saint Peter or some archangel weighing souls for entry into Heaven or Hell... with a sneaky devil always tipping the "Hell" scale.

Quite a few devils hang off game developer's balances, dragging their judgment into the shadowy realm of legitimized cheating. As a very standard observation, if something is overplayed in a multiplayer game, it's probably overpowered. The corollary also holds true: if you make something more powerful, it will get played more. Hey, who wants to pay for in-house testing, amirite folks? Cuts into the bottom line. Easier to release every new feature as a candy-coated lure to every single min-maxing cretin looking to be handed undeserved wins, and the hordes of mouthbreathers will do your testing for you.

However, at an even more basic level, human beings simply do not want equality. With the eternal optimism of our monkey brains always swinging for the ripest fruit, the truism of power-lust upon which capitalism is built, each individual, no matter how unlikely to benefit from an unjust system, will wholeheartedly support injustice in the conviction of someday being at the top of the pyramid and pissing on everyone else around. Some of the most successful games reflect this.
Counterstrike always kept the idiotically overpowered AWP as a standby for anyone who got tired of actually playing the game and just wanted to grief others.
DotA was based on fighter heroes completely trouncing spellcasters.
Blizzard Entertainment, even before World of Warcraft, never even attempted true balance. Instead, it relied on sequential imbalance, giving each race or class from Starcraft to Warcraft 3 to WoW its fifteen minutes of fame, relying on selective memory to retain customers who keep hoping that next month it'll be their turn to get free wins over everyone else by abusing the latest gimmie. This is arguably how the blatantly game-breaking "zerg rush" came about.
Planetside 2 hands players more ways to one-shot each other at no personal risk than they even care to use. Sure, your bomber airfoil can fly upside-down and one-shot the fighter craft which should logically counter it, but who wants to go to the hassle of finding a gunner and flying around when you can just sit back, completely invisible, and snipe players from a mile away?
The rogue / assassin archetype has been ludicrously overpowered in every single PvP game to feature it, yet nonetheless it's constantly handed out as the "griefer special" contributing nothing to a team but sure to make some little snot feel big about himself for one-shotting players who can't even see him, keep the mindless petty sadists coming back for more of that endorphin boost.

Customers are more likely to remember a moment of glory, however undeserved, than a hundred complex, nail-biting, photo-finish pitched battles. Most human beings are morons, and we want most of the money now don't we? All we have to surrender are those outmoded old notions of challenge, personal choice or fairness. You know, what used to be called games, sports and contests. It's all about the cardboard medals now.

Sim Chore

This is not a screenshot of Prime World. It's a shot of the "castle" minigame which comes appended to Prime World. Crucial difference. Nival wanted more MMO-ish daily log-in rewards, so in addition to getting a bonus for your first win of the day you also have to collect resources accumulated by your various town buildings throughout the day, browser-game style. Aside from that, it's just where you can fiddle with your heroes' pre-game skill loadouts, chat with your clan and so forth. None of those buildings have a direct effect on gameplay within a 5v5 match aside from some minor bonuses to your own hero. Your castle qualifies as no more than a fancy main menu for your game client. Which, you know, seen that way is actually not so bad. You could see it as a quaint, minor addition to the AoS formula.

Viewed through a bitchier lens, Prime World's castle is a total cop-out! Nothing but a glitzy cosmetic timesink in place of true functionality. If each player's castle had an actual location on an over-arching game map and served as the site of battles, now that would be something. Whether you'd get to landscape the actual game map or your town buildings would just be placed in fixed positions in your team's base in-game, if by being "conquered" your town and your clan and maybe your whole faction gained or lost access to some resources, all building up to some grand finale, now that might integrate meaningfully into the central game concept. Instead of just some cutesy little pastel timesink, your pre-match experience could be a true virtual world.

No need to limit ourselves to castles of course. Each player's home could be a lumber mill, a farm, a mine, producing specific resources which could be fed into a faction-wide barter economy. Imagine the variety of game maps possible as each 5v5 match would take place at a water-mill or a tavern or a quarry, all tied into the main purpose of the game unlike the moronic alternate game modes companies insist on wasting development time with.

Ah, fuck it. Lemme just grab my daily food and ore and log out.

Kaleidoscopes Are Pretty but Meaningless

"Whatever makes you happy
Whatever you want
You're so fucking special
I wish I was special
But I'm a creep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?"

Radiohead - Creep


Prime World's conflated skill/item system (dubbed "talents") comes in the usual rainbow-sprinkle color scheme we've all memorized by rote a decade ago, in four categories.
Green talents are not as good as blue -
- which are not as good as purple -
- which are not as good as orange.
A little while ago they released the fifth category of red talents which, wonder of wonders, are even better than orange talents! Drooling fanboys and girls began tripping over each other to see all the wondrous new gameplay possibilities they could unlock by increasing their stats 5% - to fight other drooling cretins who have also just increased their stats 5%.

Apropos of nothing, some of my proudest moments involve getting kicked out of online game guilds as soon as I join them, like, say, the worthless morons in one LotRO guild who kicked me out because I wouldn't let them enjoy their latest item upgrade by pointing out that they were using an item with 10% more stats to fight monsters with 10% more stats, that nothing had in fact changed.


We really need to kick this idiocy upside its head. Stop tolerating the worthless, mindless little vermin who can't see that every increase is just part of the endless treadmill. Thanks to World of Warcraft and its ilk an entire generation has grown up creaming its pants at the color "purpoh" and the very concept of perspective has been almost eliminated from games. Here's Prime World's latest patch:
"all green (special) talents stop dropping in battle as well as in the castle: they are removed from battle rewards, from the Inn / Teahouse rewards; they can no longer be created at the Talent Garden / Forge or attained by other methods.
All present green (special) talents at the moment in players’ libraries or on heroes will become blue (rare). Their power contribution and attributes will increase accordingly to the level of blue (rare) talents."

I cite this game in particular because they managed to linguistically trip into the precise center of the nail's head, perfectly encapsulating the stupidity of the leveling / item farming treadmill we're forced to run to play any multiplayer game these days. Green ("special") items have been eliminated from the game. There are no longer any special items in Prime World. Nothing is special when everything's special. It's like every pack of knuckledraggers calling themselves game designers are imitating The Incredibles' cackling villain saying "when everyone's super, no-one will be." Rarity on the other hand is now redefined as commonalty. Literally, rare items in Prime World are now the lowest, most common kind.

You fucking retards.

Prime World

Prime World was recommended to me while I was playing some other dumbed down AoS game like League of Legends or such as having more serious and balanced gameplay mechanics. I took one look at their site's front page and closed the tab, retorting that any game which advertises itself with a panty-shot likely isn't worth bothering with.

Nonono, it's okay though!
They've switched to cleavage.

Granted, it's pretty hard to stand out as sexualized in a genre which advertises almost exclusively to boys in their early teens, but somehow Prime World managed to go one further and try attracting female gamers by giving them monetary discounts on pay-to-win features. Because, you know, all women are whores. I could not make this stuff up. They backtracked that idiocy before I ever took a serious look at their product but I'm guessing not before half their male playerbase declared themselves female. How the fuck did they even think they were going to verify and enforce that? Personally infiltrate every account holder's house and hike up their skirts?
I know Russia's fallen off the wagon so many times they don't even remember where they parked it but seriously, cut down on the vodka-induced marketing, fellas.

That's the other instantly noticeable feature. The game was developed by a Russian studio, which will become instantly obvious as you're hit with a solid wall of Cyrillic swears in every match. By the by, cyka (suka) means bitch. There, I've just translated half of Prime World's chat for you. You're welcome. Ah, yes, if nothing else this game proves that anglophone gamers certainly have no monopoly on unbridled stupidity. Have no fear. Despite the chat box being filled with funny blocky Russianisms and squiggly Turkisms and Latin scripts with all sorts of weird accents, you'll find all the same familiar multiplayer backstabbing classics as you would in Valve or Blizzard's games: intentional suicides, faking fight initiations, refusing to play, quitting, farming all game without actually helping the team, panicking and scattering as soon as the enemy appears, etc. Yessiree,  if you've any experience in online games you'll have no trouble at all adjusting to wishing a thousand deaths on a whole new multicultural crop of worthless mentally deficient wastes of air.

But hell, since nobody can read my ranting and cursing at least I haven't been banned from this one yet.

Nival seems to be making no effort whatsoever to clean out the griefers in their playerbase, which is a pity because it mostly ruins what is otherwise one of the better AoS incarnations on the market. Even visually, despite characters adhering to sexualized gender roles (female healers, male tanks, battle-bikinis, bulging muscles and square jaws and six-pack abs and so forth) I'm reminded again that Nival employs some of the most talented visual artists in the industry. The vampire is an instant reminder of the visual splendors of Heroes of Might and Magic 5 and despite very limited graphics capability, some inspired character, animation, terrain and effect designs salvage what would otherwise have been a sorely outdated engine.

More importantly, though, Prime World is a decent game. As in having good gameplay, you remember that thing that's supposed to set interactive media apart from movies? At first glance it seems even more simplified than Smite or LoL, having abandoned the old RPG tropes of skills and items. In Prime World, these are conflated into "talents" selected before and gradually activated during a match, some of which are specific to each class while most are drawn from a common pool inspired by collectible card games. Buy them in the cash shop or build them up from the ones you get at the end of each match, but selecting and building up your heroes' talents presents much more depth than any other AoS I've seen, even Demigod. There is no monetary resource and everything, even potions, are bought using experience, which is thankfully shared among the team much more than in other MOBAs. There are both benefits and detriments to this system.

Unfortunately it can blend heroes into each other. Scrapperization runs amok. Almost every character has a heal and a nuke and a disable and a teleport, invisibility spell or speed boost, and if they don't you can always get a common-pool talent which fits those roles. While it serves its current needs as a small-time AoS project, it's obvious this system lacks any room to expand.
Fortunately, as long as you abandon your expectations of this being a class-based game this has resulted in a good bit of entertaining flexibility as you can play the numbers in at least a couple of directions with every character. Bank more on healing or damage, mitigation or health, speed or staying power, it really is up to you and can work in a variety of ways. Talents are also arranged by tiers so it's up to you whether to save up for more expensive ones or level up quickly by choosing your cheapest ones first for the global level-based stat bonuses.

Sure, the old pigeonholing holds to some extent but largely because players refuse to abandon it. Tanks would not be able to steamroll you if you weren't stupid enough to actually hit the tank instead of his squishier teammates. Assassin classes are both idiotically overpowered and complete parasites and wouldn't be anywhere near so successful if players weren't stupid enough to get baited off alone. Supports are frustratingly dependent on teamwork but can turn an organized team unstoppable. Pets are handled very intuitively, following the player character's motions without letting the player have too much control over them. Common-pool active talents are often on shared cooldowns and scaled down enough that they again don't reward button-mashing too much. With thirty or so talents out of a pool of many more for you to slot at your discretion and a slow enough level system that you'll rarely get enough levels to use them all in one match, there's both balance and a lot of replay value in Prime World, plenty of novel combat situations to experience.

It's no Demigod. Nothing so far has been that good. It lacks Smite's more fluid first-person rush or SoaDA's intriguing team objectives but Prime World is a well thought out team game whose biggest drawback as in all such products is its playerbase. If Nival had the cojones (or Russian equivalent thereof) to actually ban griefers instead of rewarding them, it could easily capture a more mature, level-headed audience that's sick of AoS games being marketed exclusively to rabid ten-year-olds, an audience which doesn't care that the graphics are somewhat outdated so long as the teamwork-oriented gameplay stays strong.

Can't have good gameplay, though, when you refuse to ban some shiteating little waste of sperm constantly spamming the surrender button instead of playing. Gotta step up the draconian measures, sukas.

Legitimized Griefing

AAAEANNNAN | NNAANANANE | ANNANNNNNN
6

The above list ain't ET's genetic code or a new pop-song refrain (what's the wer-fox say?) It's a running tally of my last thirty matches in the AoS game Prime World according to the presence of griefers.

N
represents a normal 5vs5 game. Regardless of their crass stupidity, success or failure, players all stayed in the match to the end and more or less played it out. (Six of those were losses. I may be old and my reflexes hardly up to the standards of ten-year-olds' but I do alright for myself when I'm not getting sabotaged.)

A or E
represent matches in which players on my Allied or Enemy side have:
Failed to connect to the match.
Quit by leaving the game.
Quit by going afk.
Quit by sitting at spawn continually spamming surrender votes.
Quit by refusing to take part in team gameplay and only running around the jungle running out the clock until we lose.

Purposely suicided repeatedly into the opposing team to give them an advantage.

I have been banned from three AoS games so far for swearing at the imbecilic little shits polluting the internet with their stupidity. Swearing. All these games have actually had the standard easy two-click ignore option for chat, but that's beside the point. Even ignoring ignoring, no amount of slander will actually affect the "physical" outcome of a match. You can't talk the enemy's health bar down. You can't talk your allies' crit chance up. You can't talk your way faster across the map, talk the fog of war into lifting or talk a retreating enemy back into range. You certainly can't talk your allies' intelligence up. Talk is not just cheap, but utterly inconsequential, useless except for spewing vitriol at deserving targets. You can never ruin a match by talking, unless you're feeding the enemy information.

However, you can ensure a loss for yourself and four others every game by simply refusing to play. The list above isn't even counting the run-of-the-mill idiocy which can doom a team, about which I was kvetching in this post. I've only been counting instances in which one player decides he gets to "call it" and refuse to play altogether, ruining the match for his side intentionally. This is apparently fine. According to developers like Nival, Ironclad, Riot and HiRez, this is perfectly acceptable behavior.

Of course they'd contest that statement. Each one of these companies has put up some sort of "report" system so that you can recommend teammates for banishment by Game Masters. They like being able to say they're working on improving the game environment, engineering that society. You'd think that if you're trying to better the player-base, then the first criminals on the chopping block would be the ones whose very presence in a match guarantees a loss for their side, the griefers whose idea of gameplay consists of the most egregious violations. Both of those Es up above were easy wins for my side. All but one of the As was a loss for my side. If a red card in football (yielding a 10-11 handicap) is a grievous disadvantage, then a 4v5 is a death sentence. The game is after all a game and not a chat room. Actions which impact the game are the true issue and not empty talk. Look at the list I started with and tell me again whether these companies' idiotic pretense of oversight has anything to do with improving the game experience.

30 games
N = 17
A+E = 13
Close enough to half the matches being invalidated by a quitter that I get to call whoever set up this system for Nival a half-wit.
You. Overpaid knuckledragger who set up an automated matchmaking system which fails to eliminate quitters.
You're a half-wit.

Griefers don't get banned. It's a facetious smokescreen. On one side of things, it just gives players the impression that the injustice they've suffered will be avenged, which given by the sheer number of quitters still merrily ruining match after match in every AoS I've played, never actually happens. LoL, SoaDA, Smite, whatever. Griefers do not get banned. However, if you call one of these shiteating retarded little bitches a shiteating retarded little bitch, you get banned. See, that's in print. Devs get to say they have "evidence" and it's much easier to word-search a text file for swears than to actually watch a replay to see what happened. In other words, the verbal response to an injustice is always worse than the injustice itself. You know who talks about racism? Racists! Obviously. Duh. We don't tolerate righteous indignation here.

Which brings us to another point. Game developers hardly invented this sort of corrupt governance. GMs have a long history of being power-mad petty tyrants from before games were electronic and game companies are just playing out the reactionary complacency of every established power structure in human history. Keep in mind these companies are not so much game designers as game sellers, and griefers fill up slots in a 5v5 game. They're "customers." That they make everyone's life a living hell, meh, who cares, quality schmuality. Every player devs ban, every player that leaves, is money out of their pocket. So they pacify you with the delusion that they're policing griefers so you'll sit through it all, and instead ban any troublemakers who refuse to just shut up and swallow this shit.

Sabotage and treason are no crimes.
Rocking the boat? Calling attention to the company's refusal to police actual crime? That's a sin against the almighty dollar. Or, whatever, almighty ruble in Nival's case.

One more thing, though. I recorded those games in order. Notice a trend? If I'd marked down the games from beforehand as well, you'd see the farther back you went the games would begin to look a lot more like the end of my current list: more Ns, fewer As and Es. This sort of confirms the constant issue with randomized matchmaking of punishing competence. The better you do, the more you start getting placed on teams with idiots you're supposed to carry to an undeserved victory. That's bad enough in itself but it's also a necessary evil to set up evenly-matched games instead of the one-sided slaughterfests you find in any FPS which allows players to switch teams at will.

It becomes truly galling when you realize these are not just incompetents but utterly worthless little snots who throw games on purpose. AoS games have not simply legitimized griefing by punishing the response to it, but are actively rewarding griefers by putting them on teams with players who increase their chances of winning when they don't actively throw a match.

I get why the companies are doing it. To them, it's profit. You worthless cretins who pay them to punish you for playing honestly, what's your excuse you spineless, gutless, dickless mouthbreathers? Why am I the only one willing to say anything about this?

The Missing Middle Rung

Back in the day I used to play a lot of PvP games. FPS, RTS, whatever. I caught both Counterstrike and Starcraft during their golden ages. However the basic twitch-heavy routine got old fast and I moved on to MMOs, expecting a more grandiose form of PvP - which of course never materialized (world PvP in WoW lasted about six months, give or take a "working as intended") and other multiplayer games which could have delivered complex team mechanics (Savage, etc.) either vaporized or never materialized. So only in recent years, getting into the new fad for idiotically simplified AoS games like League of Legends or Smite, have I encountered multiplayer rankings again and noticed this recurring trend in every one of them.

Say you've got your rating based on win/loss accumulation weighted by match difficulties, pretty standard routine played out on some kind of Elo scale. Presumably the worst players would be at the bottom and they'd get continually better as you go up but that hasn't been my experience. See, the basic concept of the Elo scale was designed to work for one-on-one match-ups between involved, motivated participants, so it doesn't quite capture the poetry of team multiplayer in an anonymous medium devoid of repercussions.

Sure, some of the people at the bottom of the list are just utter mental deficients who have no business trying to puzzle out their left mouse button from their right, but many are simply stuck in "Elo hell", unable to move up for being stuck babysitting the others. Often, they simply have bad computers or connections and rack up losses for dropping out of the game. More interestingly, once you move out of the "novice and accident" category, players get increasingly worse. You heard me. Oh, sure, here we're getting into the realm of those who have learned the mechanics so a certain degree of competence smooths out the overall gameplay experience. However, you also have to deal with the fact that these idiots are invested in their own self-image and not the game itself.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. You've left the level of those who simply go afk in the middle of a match because they don't give a damn and entered the much more crowded realm of those who go afk in the middle of a match because they're more invested in their k/d ratio than an actual win, putting blame assignation over success.
This is where you get the cretins who refuse to do anything but grind up their stats the entire game because unless they can play the hero for the team, the game simply isn't worth playing to them.
This is where you'll see teammates sitting in one corner of the map leaving you outnumbered because as long as they don't actually take part in fights they can't be blamed for losing them, right?
This is where you'll never see anyone playing support roles or taking a hit for the team, where every match has the maximum number of parasitic assassin classes and they'll pout and deliberately sabotage an entire game because you accidentally "stole" a killing blow from them.
This is where you'll be retreating from a fight slowly getting worn down by enemies while your teammates run just a step ahead of you with full health while doing nothing to cover your retreat. So long as they stay one step ahead of you, they get to call you a "noob" for actually getting into combat.
Here's where as soon as your team has less than a 50% k/d ratio, players will immediately begin spamming the surrender button instead of trying to turn things around, playing the numbers, gaming the system, trying to get as many matches in to count on the law of averages to keep them afloat since they can't actually understand what wins team games.
This is the realm of both expertise and griefing, of those who have accumulated enough information about the game to out-play complete novices but lack the metal capacity to actually keep track of the flow of all the elements in a team game. Their only understanding is of simpleminded, algorithmic procedures. Diverge from those by thoughtfully analyzing and adapting to the situation at hand and they will throw the game rather than admit their inability to do the same.

At low levels, players lose team games because they react slowly. Above that, they lose because they do not react at all.
New players lose because they don't know how to use their abilities. Experienced players lose because they all wait to use their abilities for a killing blow.
Newbies lose because they don't know where to go. Experts lose by knowing exactly where the fight is and running in the opposite direction.

Elo hell is not the bottom rung, but actually the domain of those who think knowing the game means they know how to play and are willing to sabotage you to prove that you'll lose if you don't follow their one-track idiocy. In real-world sports or other team activities, such stupidity gets policed by various authorities. Coaches may be knuckledragging muscleheads but even they won't stand for that nonsense. Random match-ups cover it up by forcing intelligent team players to carry such morons.

 Of course above this level are the competitive players who have learned the hard way that in order to secure a win they may have to sacrifice their own personal glory, but unless you've got a full team in your pocket, good luck climbing there before going insane screaming at your monitor to get those little randomly-matched deadheads on your side to actually cooperate.

Smite

Whee, I'm banned from Smite so it's time to write a post about it.

Smite mostly reminds me of Savage 2 and not only because of the close third person perspective. Now, since after a decade of existence, AoS games finally became "a thing" a few years back with Demigod, Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends, the genre is gradually becoming standardized. Read: uncreative, entrenched and littered with carbon-copies trying to leech some customers off each other. Aside from its third-person close-locked camera gimmick, Smite is in many ways an even more dumbed-down version of the AoS concept than its competitors.

It's lent a very "savage" feel by a similar attempt to transfer the fast-paced reactive twitch-gaming of arcade fighting titles (Mortal Kombat, etc.) to online multiplayer. While the idealized AoS concept revolves around team strategy, it's suffered from a constant push to narrow the focus down to individual self-aggrandizement, to remove strategic elements (both in terms of map objectives like resource acquisition and individual choice in money spending) and pare everything down to an idiotic slapfest.

Despite its 3D perspective, Smite remains painfully two-dimensional. There is no z-axis. All your movement, abilities and all effects take place on the x-y plane. "Jump" abilities are a status effect and not actual motion.
There are no targeted abilities. Great marketing tool for leet-kiddies since you can tout "skill" in hitting line-of-fire attacks... which would be great as a basic assumption into which to also fit a bit of target lock, but except for a couple of "ultimate" auto-targeting skills, everything you do in Smite resolves to either a line attack or a ground attack. Granted this is largely a necessary evil of its FPS ambitions but it falls short of Savage 2, which though it used a true FPS basis for its gameplay managed to also address the necessity for smartcasting certain abilities thrugh crowds of players, like, say, healing for instance.
You cannot build a hybrid character in Smite. While most similar projects have wrestled with the issue of ability versus autoattack damage (most notably DotA with its "beat up the nerds" caster-stomping gameplay) Smite offers you no room to experiment. If you are a caster, you can only buy caster items. If you are a hitter you can only buy physical damage items.

Overall, Smite has clearly been designed for the idiotic fast-fingers, slow-brain e-sports crowd. Gameplay is petty, limited, devoid of any options which might confuse the leet-kiddies. Combining the worst of both RTS and FPS, your interaction is circumscribed by your choice in team role while your abilities follow the "shoot, shoot and shoot some more" FPS routine. You are not meant to think. You are meant to make yourself liked by following the "meta" and being in the know as to what "rocks" or "sux" in the current patch - and gods help you if you ever deviate from the accepted behavior pattern! Oh emm gee, u bought item xyz? OMG OMG it sux u sux OMG everybody surrender naow this guy sux!

Computer gamers have always had to absorb the constant accusation of childishness, and for the most part it's a bullshit slam by outsiders looking to score some "maturity" points. In this case, however, Smite has quite obviously gone out of its way to secure a mid-teens male audience. You run through the game's tutorial as probably the easiest-to-play character, Neith, who LaraCrofts her way around the map in a bikini and exaggerated swagger that would put most strippers to shame. This is her victory dance (apparently ignored by the religious crackpots who chose to complain about Kali being "sexualized") and let's not even get into Aphrodite...

Between this marketing scheme and the strategic limitations, Smite's community devolves to a high-school clique mentality. You do what the group wants you to do, regardless of whether it's helping all of you or not. If you step out of line, you become the scapegoat. Now, this is actually a step up from say, League of Legends, where the mentality tended to revolve around kindergarden-ish foot-stomping to make teammates give you what you wanted, but it's still a far cry from a fulfilling team experience.

So what about the goods? Smite is actually an expertly made product. The comparison to Savage 2 extends to the very fluid and engaging gameplay. Though lacking depth and scope, each match simply flows through intuitive movements, abilities and objectives, and in this Smite truly has recaptured the charm of fighting games. By abandoning most pretense of complexity, it's become a truer representation of a "MOBA" than many others which cling to a RTS facade while delivering nothing more strategic than Street Fighter. It's not what AoS should be, by any stretch, but it's quite expertly focused on its true goal and audience.

Which audience, might I add, I would gladly subtract from the human species. If you want to find some real teams, Smite ain't the place for that. If, however, you want to get called a "noob" by cliquish, degenerate, cowardly, parasitic excuses for pack hunters legitimizing their incompetence by adhering to the hero-worship of some mouthbreather they watch religiously on twitch-tv, there's no better place for it than Smite.

Dividing Primes in AoS

One of the first things anyone will notice about AoS games (or as they're now idiotically called MOBAs) is the limited number of players per team. The most popular one, DotA, used five-player teams with three main lanes of combat, and in the spirit of murdering creativity wherever it's found, almost every game since then has copycatted that exact setup. Pixel for goddamn pixel. Demigod broke that pattern as it did many others, to its credit, and other games offer "alternate game modes" but this has amounted to even smaller teams.

Now, DotA was not an independent project. It was a mod. It depended heavily on Warcraft 3's existing mechanics. The Strength/Agi/Intel split, the number of players in a match, the six-item inventory, the size of a game map, all reflected that dependence. Almost every custom map was made for five players on a team. This was not a design choice, but a limitation imposed by WC3's multiplayer mode. Five  plus one AI per team equals six vs. six, the maximum number of participants. There is absolutely no excuse for how every AoS since then has copycatted these limitations, especially the map layout and team size.

Three combat lanes plus room to roam made sense given the five player limitation. Stalemates are among the most reviled downfalls of any multiplayer game. People do not want to be waltzing back and forth taking potshots at the same other player over and over again. It's boring. So is jumping together pell-mell and letting the AoE numbers rack up. The game setup must ensure that players do not distribute themselves evenly across the map in stagnant trench warfare. Dividing five by three or four suits this purpose.

So would many other divisions. The 5/3 setup is only another idiotic self-imposed limitation of developers who despise their customers too much to try giving them anything unfamiliar. It's a symptom. The disease is the mentality of slavishly copycatting DotA in an effort to copy its supposed success. However, DotA's success, like that of any "first" which the public at large encounters, is that of mob mentality, success riding its own coat-tails, being the only game in town (that leet-kiddies in Brazil and Russia know of at any rate.) That, and free. Are you offering a completely free product? If not, if you expect people to actually pay you, you might actually need to offer something more, and you may as well start with the basics. How about more players per team or a more complex map? It would make the game more complicated... and regardless of what you've been told we customers want in some power-pointed board-room pitch, I the customer am here to tell you complexity is good.
Fewer buttons to mash: good. More things to keep track of: also good. Twitch: bad. Awareness: good. Fingers: bad. Brain: good. You see where I'm going with this? Larger games need not devolve into zergfests so long as you keep the central idea of dividing players unevenly across the game board. Yes, by all means keep the notion of lanes and tower pushing. Just divide by larger primes.

It doesn't have to be primes, of course, but hey, if you're looking for something which won't devolve to a lowest-common-denominator, you may as well admit you'll wind up using an indivisible number of players. Seven players in three lanes? Not good, that's just a damage/support split in three lanes, plus one roamer. The same goes for 9/4. Seven divided by four? Much better. How about eleven players per team? Not quite FPS size, still small enough to allow for personal influence to skew the odds but large enough to complicate matters. It would allow for the development of more interesting RPG hybrid classes to outgrow the tired old nuker/tank/healer holy trinity.

So. Eleven. 11/4 might actually work: 3+3+3+2 or 3+3+2+2+1. I envision roaming supports. I'm more fond of the vision of an 11/5 or 9/5 map, which would still slightly increase player density to rise above the 1.6 ratio which prompts too many 1v1 fights. Five lanes would also create ample enough interstices to allow for more than one roamer or "jungler" and with players being spread more thinly it might result in more empty lanes, which would encourage more strategic options in the way of manipulating AI soldier waves. 11/6 might be a bit of a stretch, though. Too much 1v1 dick-measuring, not enough teamwork.

And of course there are more ways to split players than simply horizontally. So far AoS games have limited themselves to flat maps in order to imitate their RTS roots but nothing's saying lanes full of AI soldiers couldn't be featured in other game mechanics. See the Half-Life 2 mod Iron Grip: The Oppression. Tunnels, overpasses, waterways, etc. become much more relevant with FPS mechanics. Barring that, even in Warcraft 3, better AoS maps like Eve of the Apocalypse weren't afraid to experiment with flying units and even a flying hero.

Seriously, though, allow yourselves to think a bit bigger than ohemmgee 1v1 me mid!!!1
There's no reason why AoS games should be marketed only to 1v1 epeen-measuring brainless twitch-gamers.