Best QT3 Thread of 2013 Award?

Get present shipped to work, say you won it in a contest.

My GF was able to handle the idea of a Qt3 Secret Santa way better than she did when I used to do the reddit ones. I imagine she’d be even less-equipped to handle the notion of something like a 4chan SS. To be fair, I don’t think I’d feel comfy with that ;)

The best thread this year was the one started because of the re-release of The Shiva. Not so much for the content, but for the title. That’s how you make a thread title, people!

Also, the giveaway thread is great, for giving a lot of good people the opportunity to play a lot of good games they might not have ended up playing. Technically not a thread from this year I guess, but one that has been updated throughout the year.

The Bargain Thread has been the most useful thread on this forum for me. I check it several times a day and it has saved me a lot of money.

I suppose that when certain threads about games I am looking forward to pop up all of a sudden; that always gives me a thrill (“Triumph Studio announcement due soon…” was the last one to make my heart go pitter, patter).

I found a new nominee today. Recently, one of my favorite games of the year (plants vs zombies 2) got a big update and I hate the game now, when I used to love it. But before the update Soren Johnson blogged about a couple of articles written about the game. One was on a site called Pocket Tactics which complained that the paywall ruined the experience for them. And the other was by one of the makers of Candy Crush Saga, who argued that the game was too easy and there was no reason to spend money on the game.

I agreed with the latter position before the big patch, which is one of the reasons I loved the game so much. The game was the best tower defense game I’d ever played, and there really was no reason to spend money on micro transactions, so the free to play model didn’t really affect the game design in any appreciable way. But I got curious about this Candy Crush game: what sort of game was hard enough and yet fun enough that you would be happy to keep playing and pay small amounts to make things easier or play more often?

After trying Candy Crush, I wondered if people on Qt3 had played it, and I found this Candy Crush thread which was a very interesting discussion on F2P mechanics, gambling, arcade cabinets, and addiction. Great thread. It even has an interesting twist on the last page where we learn that Gus’ wife didn’t actually stop playing the game back when he first reported that she had stopped.

What’s interesting is that even though I hate match 3 games, I still think that Candy Crush does a much better job of actually tying free to play boosts into the actual gameplay than this new revamped version of PvZ2. I hope we see more discussion about this great topic in that thread as F2P games continue to evolve and developers grapple with the ethics of certain practices.

Making a game (Candy Crush Saga, for example) so hard the user cannot progress feasibly without paying for power ups or “cheats” or whatever is the dumbest fucking thing of that type of Free2Play games, and the developer of Candy Crush Saga … I’ll bite my tongue because Holiday Fucking Cheer, but Fuck That Guy.

The game journalism thread is always fun.

I know it’s just my lizard-brain talking, but I always enjoy the I’m Only Going to Speak in Animated Gifs in This Thread) and I Hate This Guy threads.

<3 <3 <3 <3