And then there’s rngfest Hearthstone in the Bahamas for the HCT (Hearthstone Championship Tour) happening right now with a nice studio/stage set and only a $250k prize pool being spread pretty damn thin.
But I think I’d rather play in a tent if it meant extra prize cash.
To be fair though, Blizzard did invite and pay for the rooms, travel, and meals of a ton of players and popular streamers.
Hahaha. Oops, I overlooked that aspect. I’ve been watching the Hearthstone tournament free on Twitch all weekend, so I took it for granted the viewer experience would be similar, and forgot about attendees (plus Hearthstone has a nice studio for the audience).
How are troops divided into multiple tiers an “insane” fact that I “will probably not believe”? Are these kinds of “articles” now just randomly generated by bots that scrape the web for whatever junk they think they can dump into a blog post to get extra clicks for their human overlords…?
It wouldn’t surprise me but I was disappointed to see Gamespot descending to that level.
I think SEO has created some pretty horrific self-sustaining bastardizations of the English language. Since my YouTube watching has trended toward anti-Trump stuff I’m seeing all sorts of video recommendations along the lines of “Jake Tapper DESTROYS KellyAnne Conway.”
[quote=“JoshoB, post:207, topic:127981, full:true”]
How are troops divided into multiple tiers an “insane” fact that I “will probably not believe”?[/quote]
Dude, don’t you get it? More than one tier! That could mean as many as two, or three, or – and I know this is hard to believe – four tiers of troops. No one has ever done that before, ever, in the history of troops, because it would be utterly insane! But guess what? Clash of Clans has five tiers of troops. Yep, five tiers of troops. Mind. Blown. Right?
/mic drop
-Tom
Do they have volume controls that let you set it to 11? Now that would be wild.
You’ve convinced me, Tom. :-P
The link you posted shows more clickthroughs than any other in this thread. Confirmed, sex still sells.
PC Gamer is running a multi part story on the history of RPGs. It’s an interesting romp down memory lane for us old farts. But it’s weird not seeing a byline that says “Desslock”.
The whole Youtuber vs “old media” thing is still going. If you check now, the narrative has turned from PewDiePie and JonTron’s antics to how The Wall Street Journal is on a witch hunt for the new edutainment reality. They’re, like, waging a total war against Youtubers, man!
So, what happens when Youtubers try to turn facts against WSJ and their ilk? They get schooled and learn what real journalism looks like.
Here’s the summary:
A couple weeks ago, WSJ posted a story about how Youtube was still showing ads from big companies like Coke, McDonalds, and Geico, etc in front of videos with explicitly racist messages. Those companies, in turn, asked Youtube to pull their ads from those videos. Google/Youtube vowed to get better at vetting racist content from ad lists.
That article contained images (NSFW for the N-word) from Youtube showing the questionable videos displaying those ads.
Ethan Klein of h3h3Productions (the same channel that blew the lid off the CS:GO betting scandal last year) accused the WSJ of using doctored images. In a video, that he’s since removed, he accused the article’s author of Photoshopping the ads into the screenshots because he contacted one of the video creators and that guy told him that he hadn’t made any money on the video since 2016. Clearly the 2017 screenshot must’ve been faked, and h3h3 had their smoking gun showing how desperately the WSJ wanted to sink this threat to their old school media.
But oops! The guy Klein had contacted about the racist footage conveniently left out that he hadn’t made any money from the video because the content was claimed by a copyright holder, not because there wasn’t any ads running on it! What do you know? The guy blasting the n-word around may not be completely trustworthy? Shocker!
Klein kinda sorta apologized. There’s a lot of goal-post moving and clumsy justification but he does admit that he goofed.
The WSJ published this statement:
[quote]
The Wall Street Journal stands by its March 24th report that major brand advertisements were running alongside objectionable videos on YouTube. Any claim that the related screenshots or any other reporting was in any way fabricated or doctored is outrageous and false. The screenshots related to the article – which represent only some of those that were found – were captured on March 23rd and March 24th.
Claims have been made about viewer counts on the WSJ screen shots of major brand ads on objectionable YouTube material. YouTube itself says viewer counts are unreliable and variable.
Claims have also been made about the revenue statements of the YouTube account that posted videos included in those screenshots. In some cases, a particular poster doesn’t necessarily earn revenue on ads running before their videos.
The Journal is proud of its reporting and the high standards it brings to its journalism. We go to considerable lengths to ensure its accuracy and fairness, and that is why we are among the most trusted sources of news in the world.[/quote]
Yeah, H3H3 has really rubbed me the wrong way with some of the stuff he has done lately. A lot of anti-media yammering with little tact or, clearly, well thought out investigative methodology.
Additionally, the CS:Go stuff that he did last year was him reporting on stuff that another youtuber had discovered. He didn’t do the brunt of the investigatory work there, he just put it all together in a killer video package laying out all the evidence found so far.
Ha, thanks! Yeah, I miss contributing to those features. Well, sometimes I do. These days I’m not as productive.
RPG Therapy or GTFO.
I still have all those columns. Not sure they’d make much sense these days without the magical context of usenet. I miss the wild west of usenet, which still somehow managed to police itself more sensibly than some moderated forums. Maybe the participants and the internet in general were more civil then though.
I think the fact that it was possible to ignore people helped Usenet quite a bit, since there wasn’t active moderation (you basically need one of these two things in place IMO for an online community to succeed). Also, excepting things like the time The Great Flamewar spilled over into csipg.rpg when some troll cross posted over there (I think that was after you moved on to just blogging, pre CGW; Todd Brakke took over the RPG Therapy column), or you know anything Cleve, people were respectful of the different groups. Somehow we got through all the “what is an RPG fights” without anyone dying. I don’t recall a lot of “blee [Genre x] is [better/worse] than [genre y] cross group flamewars”. People seemed to understand that everyone just wanted a tidy group where they could discuss the group’s subject in relative peace. csipg.rpg survived Queen Jeff pretty easily.
But the population levels also helped. Granted csipg.rpg was less populous than .strategic as I recall, but the groups then didn’t come close to well trafficked forums as I recall. At it’s peak Gone Gold had 3 forums - Games, Gaming in General, Everything But Gaming rolling over 1-2+ pages of posts a day; the volume was way higher than any usenet group I looked at. I don’t know if Qt3’s most populated era had that level of turnover but it was definitely over a page in some forums as I recall, and it certainly gets good traffic now I remember days when csipg.rpg got less than 20 posts. There’s just a lot more people online now. I think that’s the biggest factor. More people = more trolls, more chance for the usual types of miscommunication that can flare up as arguments. More people with divergent expectations. And more people who never had experience in the frontier era (Usenet or even BBSes before that).
Well, here’s something. Gearbox and G2a announced a partnership to sell an exclusive version of Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition through the key reseller site. A lot of people thought that was an odd choice for Gearbox.
John “TotalBiscuit” Bain called Gearbox out and pointed out G2A’s unsavory reputation among some gamers and developers.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spp1mm
[quote]
"Gearbox Publishing heard loud and clear the concerns voiced by John “TotalBiscuit” Bain. Gearbox was then provided with a lot of documentation on the subject, after which John was gracious enough to spend time across the last two days with our head of publishing Steve Gibson to put together a proposal and a deadline for G2A to act upon.
Before Bulletstorm Steam launch, G2A makes a public commitment to this: Within 30 days, G2A Shield (aka, customer fraud protection) is made free instead of a separate paid subscription service within terms offered by other major marketplaces. All customers who spend money deserve fraud protection from a storefront. To that end, all existing G2A Shield customers are notified by April 14th that fraud protection services are now free and they will no longer be charged for this.
Before Bulletstorm Steam launch, G2A makes a public commitment to this: Within 90 days, G2A will open up a web service or API to certified developers and publishers to search for and flag for immediate removal, keys that are fraudulent. This access will be free of charge and will not require payment by the content holders.
Before Bulletstorm Steam launch, G2A makes a public commitment to this: Within 60 days implement throttling for non-certified developers and publishers at the title, userid, and account payable levels for a fraud flagging process. This is to protect content providers from having large quantities of stolen goods flipped on G2A before they can be flagged.
Before Bulletstorm Steam launch, G2A makes a public commitment to this: Within 30 days, G2A restructures its payment system so that customers who wish to buy and sell legitimate keys are given a clear, simple fee-structure that is easy to understand and contains no hidden or obfuscated charges. Join the ranks of other major marketplaces.
Gearbox Publishing won’t support a marketplace that is unwilling to make these commitments and execute on them."[/quote]
Are these demands industry standards, or will this make G2A a lot more ‘secure’ than the competition, including Steam?
G2A doesn’t have a bad rep with this gamer. Used them once, worked, that was it. The spat they had with one company did that not turn out to be the company themselves having failed with some regards? Also, if developers/publishers have ‘free and easy’ access to ban keys, does that mean people who for example try to resell keys they have been gifted or gained through hardware purchases can risk them being banned, and now G2A will have to face the loss? Didn’t Oracle lose a court case with regards to re-selling of keys/licenses?
That said, I don’t see why G2A would want to be forced into meeting these public emands from the company that gave us Duke Nukem Forever, especially when it is related to a re-release of a 6 year old console title which will probably not sell very well.
The legal status of reselling commercial productivity software licenses in the EU is totally unrelated to the legal status of reselling personal-use entertainment software licenses in the rest of the world.
Remember, reselling of product keys is at best a legal grey-area in much of the world, and outright illegal in most cases. Remember, G2A has a well-established history of actively enabling fraudulent keys to be sold on its storefront that’s totally unrelated to the TinyBuild incident, hence the need for their paid “G2A Shield” service in the first place. Remember, when confronted about all of this during the TinyBuild incident itself, G2A rushed to blame payment processors for screwing over small publishers who were the victims of all these fraudulent purchases, even as they continued to fight about the keys they were reselling.
But hey, yeah, let’s shove all that under the rug because we don’t like Gearbox!
