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fannyyann · 2 years ago

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matthew lore: childhood friends & teammates

AKA a vaguely chronological list of current NHL players Matthew knew before he ever played an NHL game

This is already a massive list, so in an effort to keep it as short and organized as possible, I have bolded the names of guys who appear in multiple categories and have only included those who have played at least a full season’s worth of games in the NHL.

For a comprehensive list of his teammates that have ever played an NHL game, this invaluable tool will provide you that information dating back to his first season in the NTDP (2013-2014).

CASEY FITZGERALD gets to go first and uncategorized, because he’s known Matthew longer than anyone else on this list, seems to be the cousin he’s closest to, and is one of the three childhood teammates that became one of Matthew’s NHL teammates. (And roommate!)

THE ST. LOUIS BOYS

LUKE KUNIN is THE guy. Their families are friends (Matthew’s whole fam was at Luke’s wedding, Luke’s whole fam was at Brady’s), and they were teammates for fourteen straight seasons before finally getting separated after their time at the NTDP, which is so long Luke's literally known Matthew longer than Taryn has.

Of the six St. Louis guys drafted in 2016, Luke and Matthew were the only ones born in 1997, so the following have all played with Matthew significantly less than Luke.

CCM Motown Classic 2005

TRENT FREDERIC From what I can find, Trent only played with Matthew during the 2005-2006 St. Louis Rockets season, but he played with Brady and was coached by Keith in the same Junior Blues hockey program, was one of the family friends that got to come around and play mini sticks with David Backes as a kid, and his time at the NTDP overlapped with Matthew’s in the 2014-2015 season (Trent U17, Matthew U18).

2010 Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament

CLAYTON KELLER played in the 2010 Quebec International Pee-Wee Tournament with Matthew and likely more but trying to find youth hockey rosters from before 2015 is a herculean task. But he was one of those U17 guys that got to play up with the U18s his first year in the NTDP and played with Matthew for 16 games and then went on to win gold together at the U18 Men's World Championship in 2015.

LOGAN BROWN Other than the 2010 tournament, Logan seems to have played more with Brady than he did with Matthew, and wasn’t in the NTDP like the other guys, but does train with them in the summer.

2011-2012 U15 AAA Junior Blues Team

2013 U16 National Tier One tournament champions

JOSEPH WOLL Unlike the other St. Louis boys, Joseph seems to have played exclusively with Brady, but his time at the NTDP overlapped with Matthew’s the same as Trent’s did. It’s unclear if he trains at the same place as the others during the offseason, but along with the rest of the 2016 St. Louis Draftees, his signed draft day photo is framed in Matthew’s bedroom at his parents' house because of course it is.

THE 1997 JUNIOR BRUINS

This Athletic article is about all the NHL players who played for the 1997 Junior Bruins tournament team over the years, but from what I can find, Matthew only played on the 2010 team with Casey Fitzgerald, NOAH HANIFIN, CHARLIE MCAVOY, COLIN WHITE, and the ever present, Luke Kunin.

Matthew is still close friends with all these guys, but Noah in particular is a Noted Best Friend and with him being from Boston and the Tkachuks having a house in Cape Cod, their summers overlap a lot even when they aren’t teammates.

With Casey, he and Colin White are the only childhood teammates to play with Matthew in the NHL.

THE NTDP BOYS

Okay, this section is where it gets a little chaotic so I split it between the guys who played with Matthew and those he went to school and was familiar with because their time at the NTDP overlapped.

2013-2014 NTDP Teammates Including the gold medal teams for the 2014 U17 World Hockey Challenge & the 2015 U18 World Championship

ZACH WERENSKI

Repeat: Noah Hanifin

2013-2015 NTDP Teammates Including the gold medal teams for the 2014 U17 World Hockey Challenge & the 2015 U18 World Championship

JORDAN GREENWAY

CALEB JONES

CHRISTIAN FISCHER spent his youth hockey years playing against Matthew, and when they both headed off to the NTDP, their parents split billet duties. He is one of Matthew’s best friends, attended Matthew’s draft, and even went with Matthew to Brady’s draft.

JACK ROSLOVIC was linemates with Matthew (and Auston) in the 2014-2015 season and when Matthew went to the 2015 Draft to support all his 1996 boys, Jack was the one he chose to sit with. The next summer, Jack returned the favor (see photo with Christian at Matthew's draft above).

AUSTON MATTHEWS is another family friend. He was Matthew’s center in 2014-2015 and when he broke his leg the previous year, Keith got a bunch of NHL guys to reach out to Auston , and he’s the one who gave us the best story about Matthew texting his own highlights to his friends.

Repeats: Luke Kunin, Casey Fitzgerald, Colin White, Charlie McAvoy

2014-2015 NTDP Teammates Including the 2015 U18 World Championship

TAGE THOMPSON

TROY TERRY

Repeat: Clayton Keller: played up 16 games as a U17

Teammates for a handful of games:

TOMMY NOVAK: 2 games for 2013-2014 U17 team

JAKE OETTINGER: 3 games for 2014-2015 U18 Team, and was part of the team but did not PLAY in the 2015 U18 World Championship

MAX JONES: 2 games for 2014-2015 U18 TeamRYAN DONATO played 4 games for 2014-2015 U18 Team and is now part of the extended Tkachuk family due to Emma, Brady’s wife, being his cousin.

NTDP Overlaps

2013-2014 U18s:

JACK EICHEL

ALEX TUCH

DYLAN LARKIN

2014-2015 U17s:

JOEY ANDERSON

ADAM FOX

RYAN LINDGREN

KAILER YAMAMOTO

repeats: Max Jones, Clayton Keller, Joseph Woll, Trent Frederic, Jake Oettinger

2015-2016 LONDON KNIGHTS

ROBERT THOMAS is practically a third Tkachuk brother at this point. But before Robbie lived with the Tkachuks, his own parents opened their home to Matthew while he trained at Gary Roberts’ the summer of his draft. Then when Robbie’s rookie season came along, it was Matthew who then suggested Robbie live with his parents too.

MITCH MARNER

EVAN BOUCHARD

VICTOR METE

Repeats: Max Jones, Christian Dvorak

2016 WORLD JUNIORS (bronze medal team)

NICK SCHMALTZ

BRANDON CARLO

BROCK BOESER

WILL BORGEN

ALEX DEBRINCAT

ANDERS BJORK

ALEX NEDELJKOVIC

SONNY MILANO

Repeats: Auston Matthews, Zach Werenski, Christian Dvorak, Colin White, Ryan Donato, Charlie McAvoy

HONORABLE MENTIONS

None of the Hughes brothers played with or overlapped with Matthew in the NTDP, but the two families are friends, and as far as I can tell, first met in 2010 when Quinn played on Brady’s Junior Bruins tournament team.

QUINN HUGHES is Brady’s best friend from billeting with him and Keith while in the NTDP and is on this list because Jack called Brady and Matthew QUINN’S BOYS, their families are friends and met at the latest, in 2010 when Quinn played on Brady's Junior Bruins tournament team. On top of that, Quinn he once included Matthew in his answer about watching Chris Tanev play after he got traded to the Flames for no reason at all other than to say he likes to watch him play too.

And last, but certainly not least, is CONNOR MCDAVID.

Matthew spent multiple summers, including the summer before his rookie season, training with Connor at Gary Roberts’ and the two of them are what I like to call STAR CROSSED TEAMMATES. Not only does Matthew swear the Oilers almost drafted him—and there’s certainly enough reports and predictions from before his draft to back up that being the plan—but Connor could’ve been a 1997 Junior Bruin if Brain McDavid wasn’t out to get me.

#matthew lore #matthew tkachuk #i am not tagging every guy in this it's just too many #rip to all the photos i curated for this post that could not fit

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dirt-piper · 1 year ago

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The TF2 problem

Don't take anything I say here as gospel - much of it is my own speculation and musings.

TF2 is my favorite game of all time. I started playing it wayyy back in 2012, and while I don't have that many hours racked up total (a meager ~1K), I can at least consider myself to be a few rungs above 'total n00b' in terms of familiarity with the game. I've experienced the best and worst eras of the game - from the Love & War update to the current botting crisis, and I have loved TF2 every step of the way.

But just because I love it, doesn't mean I think it's flawless!

Around 2015-2016 I noticed (alongside damn near everyone else playing TF2) that TF2 was changing, and not in a particularly good way. Love & War was in many ways a perfect update for TF2 - it gave attention and goodies to both the highly casual and the highly competitive ends of the playerbase, with a fancy new taunt system bundled with some pretty fun new weapons. At about this time, Blizzard announced the imminent release of their new game Overwatch, which was directly inspired by TF2 - and now presented itself as being a direct competitor to TF2 in its own niche. This, of course, turned out to be bogus - Overwatch is its own game with its own niche that has a playerbase nearly wholly separate from TF2's.

A common trend amongst the TF2 playerbase at the time was this sense of dread regarding Overwatch - either that it would suck up the entire TF2 playerbase, leaving the game to die, or that Blizzard would try their damnedest to manifest such a reality. Either way, a ton of die-hard TF2 fans began to absolutely loathe Blizzard's new game (before it even came out, I might add) for so much as daring to 'unthrone' TF2.

This entire premise is stupid. It's stupid now, and it was stupid then. But the fear became so pervasive throughout the community that, eventually, it seemed like VALVe was getting scared too. The tone and focus of TF2's updates began to shift far more heavily towards the competitive end of TF2's playerbase - which has never been the majority - as VALVe appeared to try to pivot TF2 into a stance where it could better "compete" with the upcoming Overwatch. Bits and pieces of this started showing with Gun Mettle and Tough Break, before Meet your Match completely revamped the game into a more competitive-focused format.

Why they would do this didn't really make sense - if VALVe wanted to compete against Blizzard's new AAA FPS with a competitive scene, then why would they try to remodel TF2 to position it as a "more valid competitor" to Overwatch when CS:GO was already a proven champion in that space? TF2 doesn't need to compete with Overwatch. It never did. So why would they expend so much effort to change TF2's course when, frankly, it was doing fine as-is?

Looking back now, with nearly a decade of hindsight and a bit more insight into VALVe actually works, I think the picture is a bit clearer, or at least the one I've formed in my head is. I don't think TF2's sudden drastic shift in focus was the result of VALVe scrambling to shore TF2 up against the onslaught of Overwatch - I think it was, rather, the TF2 team scrambling to shore TF2 up against VALVe.

VALVe is not a normal game studio. VALVe is not only lucky enough to be their own publisher (therefore making them a completely independent studio - yes, VALVe games are 'indie'), but also extremely lucky enough to be the de-facto publisher for nearly the entire PC game industry, thanks to Steam. VALVe makes money off of every single game sold through Steam whether they made it or not, essentially guaranteeing them a constant stream of exorbitant income regardless of their own output. They have a complete vertical monopoly of their own industry - they own themselves (VALVe has no shareholders whatsoever), they own their products, they own their publisher, they own their distributor - and now, with the Steam Deck, they own their hardware platforms too. VALVe answers to nobody but themselves, because they own everything that could possibly impact their business.

VALVe is, in a lot of ways, in a somewhat similar situation to AT&T (aka 'Ma Bell') back before the breakup of the phone company back in 1982. AT&T owned the entire phone network - from the switching equipment to the phone lines to the handsets plugged into them - and they charged every person in the country who leased phone service from them (you couldn't own a phone back then!) a subscription fee. AT&T, then, had basically infinite money to do whatever the hell they wanted with (though the government strictly regulated their commercial activities so they could not compete in any industry but telephony). As a result of this, Bell labs, the core Research & Development branch of AT&T, was in a very unique scenario - projects undertaken by Bell labs researchers weren't given budgets - they were given quotas.

AT&T didn't care how much money or time was spent on a project by a Bell labs researcher, so long as it ultimately resulted in something that benefited the company. And this model worked very, very well - Bell labs' researchers gave the world the transistor, the laser, the CCD, the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and received 10 Nobel peace prizes.

VALVe, through Steam, has a free, infinite revenue stream. VALVe's staff, then, effectively have infinite money and time at their disposal to make whatever they desire - so long as it ultimately results in something that benefits VALVe. Or, at least, so long as the people who hold the most seniority at VALVe think it would benefit VALVe.

It's no particular secret that the old guard at VALVe are, largely, unenthusiastic about TF2. Remember - Team Fortress is VALVe's oldest franchise. The original Team Fortress mod was released in August of 1996 - a mere one month after the Nintendo 64's initial release - a full 2 years before Half-life. Sure, VALVe didn't initially create Team Fortress, but they bought Team Fortress Software for a reason - Team Fortress was insanely popular. And it's not just TF2 that has absurd longevity, it's the entire Team Fortress franchise; here's a match from a Quake Team Fortress competitive tournament that is currently ongoing as I write this post:

youtube

VALVe acquired Team Fortress software with the premise that the sequel to Team Fortress would become an expansion to Half-life, thereby increasing Half-life's desirability by attaching it to the sequel of one of the most popular FPS games available at the time. TF2, of course, took a bit longer than expected - so Team Fortress Classic, a more-or-less direct port of Team Fortress to goldsrc, was released in 1999 to satiate people until the real TF2 came out.

That took another 8 years.

When TF2 finally released, it pioneered the concept of games as a service - that you could buy a game once and it would receive new content, features, fixes, etc. indefinitely - for free. These were not paid expansions or DLC, these were actual updates made directly to the game that anyone could get access to so long as they happened to own the game. And, once TF2 went free to play, the deal became even better. This model was utterly groundbreaking in 2007 - it's the standard for how most games operate today, sure, but only because TF2 proved how well it could work.

The issue, of course, is that VALVe was eternally working on TF2. By 2015, Team Fortress 2 had been in development in some form or another for 17 years. With this perspective, it seems understandable why some of the more senior members of VALVe would have grown sick of Team Fortress - they'd been doing or dealing with the same game for nearly 2 decades.

But, of course, newer hires at VALVe would have nowhere near the same level of fatigue - many of them were likely still very passionate about the game, and eager to continue its lifespan - but when the people who sign their paychecks and review their employee performances are sick and tired of hearing about Team Fortress, it becomes less and less attractive to pour effort into the game, no matter how much they may personally wish to.

Under these circumstances, the tonal shift TF2 experienced around the release of Overwatch appears more as an internal struggle - the remaining TF2 team trying desperately to prove to their seniors that TF2 was not yet ready to be phased out, that the game could modernize and remain relevant in the modern competitive gaming scene, that just because they were sick of TF2 didn't mean that everyone was.

So, they gambled. They bet TF2's future on a new revamp to adapt it to the then-modern world of competitive e-sports... and fumbled it pretty hard with Meet your Match.

The problem with the TF2 team's attempt to make TF2 more suited to the modern world of competitive gaming was that they seemed to overlook that, to the average non-competitive TF2 player, the game as it was was perfectly fine. Through Quickplay, any player could be automatically placed into a server matching their desired criteria and just... play. A server would stay on a given map for roughly 45 minutes (though players could vote to extend the map timer) regardless of how many rounds there were, meaning that everyone got the same amount of time to play the map regardless of how good or bad either team, as a whole, performed. This game players plenty of time to just... have fun playing TF2. There was no rush or hurry or incentive to play the game in any way other than how you wanted to.

This made TF2 very unique in the FPS world - the truest example of a "casual shooter". There were no ranks or rewards or incentives to play every day beyond random item drops and the enjoyment derived from simply playing the game itself.

The TF2 team's attempt to 'modernize' TF2 in Meet your Match effectively ruined this.

In addition to the introduction of a new, dedicated 6v6 competitive mode, Quickplay was replaced with 'Casual' - a matchmaking lite that tried to find a middle ground between the chaotic ad-hoc freedom of Quickplay and the more rigid, competitive structure of Competitive. It didn't work. Most TF2 players just wanted to play TF2 - casual forced them to stop and wait for the matchmaking system to find a server for them matching its desired criteria, stop and wait every other round for the server to change maps, stop and wait for matchmaking cooldowns to run out if they left a game in progress - so much time was spent stopping and waiting to play the game that hardly any was left to play the game itself. Yes, some of these problems have since been smoothed over, but Casual still forces the play to spend less time playing the game than Quickplay did. In my opinion, Casual, as it was released, could have been perfectly fine if Quickplay was kept alongside it. Instead, in one fell swoop, the way the vast majority of people played TF2 was effectively removed from the game.

In fairness to the TF2 team regarding this gamble, they were under enormous pressure - not just from a TF2 community growing increasingly paranoid about TF2's future due to the imagined threat of Overwatch - but also from the higher-ups at VALVe they were trying to convince.

However, the TF2 team snuck a back-up plan into Meet your Match - the Heavy vs. Pyro war. By outright promising a future major update (or perhaps two, even!), the TF2 team could at least insure that, no matter what their 'bosses' thought, they could justify their continued work on the game as fulfillment of a promise made to the community. And, if the new update was enough of a hit, it could perhaps inspire their 'bosses' to let TF2 continue to live on, at least for a little while.

So, the TF2 team pulled out all the stops for the next update. Jungle Inferno had an animated short, new maps, new weapons, entirely new features (ie. the contracker), it had a massive hype-spiraling 4-day-long update announcement, major weapon rebalances and overhauls - they clearly tried their damnedest to make the best TF2 update possible.

Whether or not the team managed to convince their superiors is unknowable. Jungle Inferno was followed by the fanfare-less Blue Moon update in early 2018, followed by radio silence. The TF2 team may very well have still been hard at work on the elusive Heavy update, but the double-whammy of the all-hands-on-deck push to get Half-life: Alyx finished and released immediately followed by the COVID pandemic likely reset whatever momentum or motivation the TF2 team had left.

This scenario, as described, is painful enough. From the outside, it appears as though VALVe had rebounded from Meet your Match, and was doing its best to improve the game in the wake of their own missteps, only to suddenly drop TF2 with zero explanation given. TF2 was left in a state of indefinite limbo with no clear outlook whatsoever on the future.

What made this infinitely worse is that VALVe had left the game in a state that wasn't just unfinished, it was broken.

TF2 has literally always had a botting problem. For the first span of the game's life, this generally manifested as idling/trading bots, but later on more and more bots began to appear that sought only to disrupt gameplay. Micspam, false votekicks, aimbotting, speedhacks, etc. - purely for the sake of irritating real players. Until Meet your Match, these cheating bots were relatively uncommon - real players could very easily either kick them from the game or simply join another server via Quickplay. Their impact on gameplay was no more than a minor, brief annoyance, and thus they were considered a non-issue.

Meet your Match's new Casual system, however, dramatically restricted the player's ability to hop to other servers when bots arose. Not only this, but the ability to switch teams at will was disabled on Casual servers, meaning it was now impossible to deal with bots on any team but your own (previously, if the other team was too slow to kick their own bots, it was possible to just wait for an opening on the other team, hop over, and call a votekick against the offending bot that would usually end up succeeding). Now, the disruption caused by a single bot was far more impactful than it had been before - because it was a far greater chore to either kick the bot or find a different server. Moreover, Casual outright incentivizes players to stick to the same server until the end - awarding them extra points the more they play, and nullifying any progress they've made towards a given contract that match if they leave before it ends. Players are thus, in effect, forced to play even when bots have made the game unenjoyable.

This resulted in a feedback loop - bots were now more irritating, so people complained about them more, so bot hosters hosted more bots, making them even more irritating - and that feedback loop has continued nearly unabated until modern day.

The TF2 community has been begging for an end to the botting problem for ages - and there have been genuine efforts from the TF2 team to try and fix the problem, but they have been too small and too infrequent to make much impact. And, to be frank, there is no way to effectively, permanently remove the bots. Attempting to keep any and all bots from the game would require enormous, constant effort from the TF2 team - something which is a very tall ask given VALVe's attitude towards the game for the past decade.

What can be done, however, is to simply make the bots less impactful. To let players more easily avoid them, to let players enjoy the game for longer so the bots are no longer such a nuisance, to let players have enough freedom in how they play that they are no longer forced to suffer through games with bots. It won't outright remove bots forever, but it will make them so much less of a nuisance that bot hosters will likely lose the incentive to bother with them. As soon as that happens, the feedback loop will be broken, and the botting issue will decline in severity as their potential impact on players' enjoyment of the game is neutered.

The simplest way to do this is to make Casual just as free as Quickplay was.

45 minute map timers, extensible by vote.

An Indefinite number of rounds per map.

Ad-hoc joining, leaving, and team switching.

Progress on contracts not erased by leaving mid-round.

These are not overwhelming changes. If anything, it's something of a return to form - not outright bringing back Quickplay, but making Casual into a suitable replacement for it - at long last.

And - most importantly - it's a one-time fix. It does not require an eternal arms race against bot hosters, nor a full return to frequent, massive content updates (though those would be nice).

One update to make TF2 more fun, to make the bots less impactful, and to give the game a better standing for the future.

One update to fix TF2.

-DirtPiper

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msx-pocky · 3 months ago

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For like, the past decade and a half I have found that any time I got a new games console I would try to work up the same kind of excitement I had when getting new consoles as a kid like the gamecube, ds and psp, and consistently what happened ever time was that I'd buy it, try to work up enthusiasm for it and actually keep up with new releases and get involved in modern gaming communities, but then inevitably every time I'd barely play any of the games I get for it since they just didn't grab me, and then inevitably I'd just sell the console to buy more retro games. this happened with 3ds, new 3ds, ps4, wii u and switch.

It took me ENTIRELY too long to realise that pc gaming was what I needed to get back into playing more modern games. I just assumed I wouldn't like pc gaming without trying it fully because I was specifically trying to recapture, again, excitement I got from consoles, and also pc gamers being pc gamers (the unironic "master race" fuckers) turning me off with their usual selling points of just "4k 180fps and no visible polygon edges", which makes it come off like you need overkill $2000+ gaming rigs capable of that kind of thing to actually experience the advantages of pc gaming

That isn't the case at all! you can build a computer for cheaper than next-gen consoles that is able to run lots of modern games at 60fps and 1080p. If you can settle for 30fps you can go even cheaper. You don't even need to buy a windows license anymore since Linux is free and its compatibility with windows software has gotten so good. If building a PC yourself is intimidating you could do what I did; buy a cheap OEM (pre-made) second hand desktop computer for cheap, like sub-$100 cheap, and use that to experiment with learning how to upgrade CPUs, gpus and ram. Using an old win7 HP desktop computer I bought for under $50, I managed to get it running doom 2016 at 30fps just by adding a new graphics card and CPU. doing it this way let me learn more about PC components so that when it was time for me to take the plunge and build my own PC from scratch I knew what I was doing. start cheap, and then if you discover that you need more powerful parts to run stuff you actually want to play, then you can start upgrading. There's no need to buy the highest end graphics card if a low-mid tier graphics card is already running everything smoothly after all. Just recently I built my girlfriend her own PC and managed to keep the price to around $500 (new zealand currency to be clear, which is like $300 USD). It was enough to run saga emerald beyond at 60fps which I was really happy with, but it did end up at around 30fps in other games like god eater 3, so we got a new graphics card once we could afford it.

And even with a cheap computer you can still experience a lot of what makes PC gaming so much fun. Indie games generally aren't demanding on hardware and there's far more of them on PC than there are on consoles. Indie games are genuinely some of the best modern games out there, frequently outdoing the AAA developers in lasting replay value and fun. plus, even the ones on consoles are better on PC thanks to extra features and content like mods, level editors and so on. there's also mouse and keyboard often being a more natural fit for game genres such as strategy and simulation games (I feel the same way about first person shooters as well but your mileage may vary there. Oh yeah also definitely play doom mods, they're awesome). Even if you're not into mouse and keyboard controls (I do really recommend practicing with it though! the speed and precision a mouse gives you is amazing), you'll still have a ton more controller options available on PC since basically anything that can be connected through USB or Bluetooth can be used. You also get access to fan made ports and remakes of classic games, all with their own mods and user made content, plus a ton of amazingly high quality standalone fan games (dr robotnik's ring racers is a recent fave of mine). You also have MUCH better access to older games on PC. You can be assured that stuff from the PS3 era will work superbly on modern PCs, and even a lot of 90s games work well out of the box on linux without needing to jump through hoops, in contrast to not even being able to play PS3 games on PS4. There's SO many cool aspects of modern gaming you can only experience on PC and it's not just playing microtransaction laden AAA games with marginally better graphics than on consoles.

This was meant to be about my disinterest in the switch 2 (not to say I think it'll be awful, I haven't looked enough into it, but I've already got my modern gaming covered by my computer unless some especially good exclusives win me over) but I got sidetracked and I just ended up gushing about how much i love computers oops

#linux #linuxposting #pc games #pc gaming #pc build

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rjschoicesstuff · 11 months ago

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i see your joy at art requests, and i see your attempts to go one day without drawing the ID gang -> soI'm gonna come on in here and complicate matters by offering you my beloved little disaster: my ID MC Luca 🖤

I'd love to see your take on them if you want to!

I hopeee I did them justice aaa

This prompted me to finally start reading SICSIG when I got the request, because I've been meaning to! And this was a good way to get to know more about Luca before drawing them, I thought. I'm an Extremely Slow Reader but I'm at chapter 14 now! More thoughts and stuff under the cut cause it's unrelated to the request lol

Ok bear with me cause I'm not a good with words and usually my feedback on things doesn't go further than 'yay I love this' because of that + shyness haha 😭

I've really been enjoying SICSIG aaa, I've read ID a lot of times to the point where it didn't Hit The Same Anymore I guess. And this was such a breath of fresh air cause I don't know what's gonna happen and stuff lol. I love that it's like a retelling of the og ID and it's been fun comparing it to my own headcanons and what's like similar and what's different and how Luca reacts to stuff vs how canon mc and Ripley do. And I love that a lot of the side characters also get more personality and backstory and that there's more explanation about how the hunting is done and stuff (and I also like your take on that) + also just new, different lore like the vampiric gifts and stuff, which is rly cool. I'm really excited to see the direction it'll all go!

I loveee ID sm and I love seeing people's versions of the story and mc and their relationship with Cas and Gabe and how everyone still really manages to do their own thing with it. I really like Luca, I like how he interacts with Cas and Gabe and he's funny! And how they can stand up for themselves. And I always have a bit of a soft spot for characters with ADHD cause same lol. And Ripley would like them too, probably haha.

Oh also a funny coincidence I noticed is that, taking Luca's birthday in account, SICSIG takes place in 2015-2016 (if im doing the math right idk) and I imagine my version of ID taking place in 2016-2017. And him and Ripley almost have the same birthday, january 5 1997 for Luca and january 9 1998 for Ripley, I hope me comparing stuff isn't annoying haha 😭

#art requests #immortal desires #my art

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escarietson · 5 months ago

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MultiVersus has died again...

Though it isn't as bad as Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League it was still plagued by a horrendous monetization system which is unfortunately common in free-to-play titles. Either pay through the nose to get the characters you want, or grind for it like it's your full time job.

Though the inclusion of Samurai Jack, The Powerpuff Girls, and Raven were great on their own it still wasn't enough to save this freemium game from its predictable fate at the hands of Warner Bros' AAA mismanagement and David Zaslav's malicious greed. Honestly they should've been left out of this entirely to spare them the trouble live-service games causes, though it was reassuring that the Girls along with the Rowdyruff Boys (as a skin) not only got their original voice actors back and also were characterfully improved from their horrible 2016 rebooted selves.

Given the massive commercial flop I can see Player First Games, the developers of MultiVersus to be marked for shut down given WB's greed.

I honestly never really gave MV a chance, it just didn't hit me as much while the controls and mechanics were clunky and nothing like Super Smash Bros at all. Plus I hated the microtransactions and the grinding aspects of it. Though it was a treat to play as the Powerpuff Girls and the Rowdyruff Boys it wasn't enough for me to keep playing.

#video games #powerpuff girls #rowdyruff boys #samurai jack #warner bros #live service games #david zaslav #multiversus

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transgamerthoughts · 1 year ago

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Abandon All Delusions Of Control

this is another cross-post. which is funny because I've paid for a domain name redirect to my tumblr since like 2016.. i never know what site is gonna explode these days. less people follow me here than anywhere but this write ups been passed around so...

I've been playing Dragon's Dogma 2 and while I'd love to talk about gameplay or interesting moments, the game's found itself something of a cultural lightning rod. It is a game with many friction points arising in a cultural moment where gamers are, perhaps more than ever, convinced that "consumers" are kings.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is not readily "solvable" and you can't min-max it. You will make mistakes. You will be scraped and bruised and scarred. Pain is sometimes the only bridge that can take us wher ewe need to go. And gaming culture, fed the lie of mastery and player importance, does not understand that scars can be beautiful. I love this game. I think it's a miracle it came out at all.

I also think in spite of the success it's found… that 2024 might be the worst possible year for it to have released.

Let's ramble about it..

It's easy to feel like Hideaki Itsuno and his team miscalculated the amount of friction that players are willing to endure and while I don't think that's true (he didn't miscalculate moreso stick to his particular vision) it certainly appears that we've reached a point in gaming where players, glutted on convenience, don't really know what to do when robbed of it. I've heard folks complain that they can't sprint everywhere or else balk learning that ferrystones required for fast travel cost 10,000 gold as if these shatter DD2 into pieces. I'm vaguely sympathetic to these concerns but at the same time they seem to spring entirely from a lack of understanding of the game's design goals. Much like how folks demanding a traditionally structured RPG narrative from an Octopath game misunderstand what that team is trying to do, players asking to sprint through the world or teleport with ease fundamentally misunderstand what Dragon's Dogma wants. The world is not a wrapper for a story. It is the story. Dragon's Dogma is a story factory whose various textures create unprecedented triumphs and memorable failure.

It is crucial to the experience to allow both of those to occur and live with whatever follows.

I'm always cautious of talking like this because it can come off as smug or superior but I think ultimately that's the truth of the matter here. This was not a well-played franchise before now and even if it's a AAA title, there's a way in which this game is meant to elide most AAA open world trends. You are expected to traverse. If you want relatively cheap and faster travel, you're meant to find an oxcart and pay the (quite modest) fee to move between trade hubs much like you would pay for a silt strider in Morrowind. Even if you do this, you could be ambushed on the road and in the worst case the ox pulling the cart can be killed. Something being "possible" in a game doesn't always mean it is intentional but Dragon's Dogma continually undercuts the player's ability to avoid long treks. Portcrystals, which act as fast travel destinations, are limited and ferry stones (while not prohibitively expensive compared to weapons and armor) are juuust expensive enough that you need to consider if the expense is worthwhile. Once is happenstance. Multiple times is a pattern. And the pattern in Dragon's Dogma is to disincentivize easy travel. It screams of intent.

Something I could not have imagined playing games growing up is the ways in which even a decade (or two) could lead to radically different attitudes on what games should provide. That's an audience issue to an extent but it's also something games have brought upon themselves. The "language" of an open world game has been solidified through years climbable towers, mini-map marked caves, and options to zip around worlds. When a game deviates from that language, the change is more noticeable than ever.

Hell, even Elden Ring (perhaps the closest modern relative to Dragon's Dogma) allows you to warp between bonfires and gives you a steed to ride. But that's also a much larger game! DD2 is not a large game and the story is not long. Yes, you can spend untold hours wandering about into nooks and crannies but a trek from one end of the world to another is still significantly shorter than bounding through most open worlds and a run through the critical path reveals a speedy game. Not as speedy as the first but brisk by genre standards.

exploration is the glue that binds the combat and progression system in place. Upgrading armor and weapons requires seeking out specific materials and fighting certain monsters. Gathering the funds for big purchases in shops mostly comes from selling your excess monster parts. The entire game hinges on the idea of long expeditions where you accrue materials and supplies on the road and then invest that horde one way or another once you return to town. It's not simply a matter of mood and tone for you to trek throughout the world without ease. The gameplay loop is built around it.

There's another complicating factor that I'm less interested in diving into and it's the presence of certain microtransactions at launch. Principally I'm against MTX in single players games, particularly conveniences of which most of DD2's microtransactions are. But I also think there's been a fundamental misunderstanding of what many of these are. Among the biggest things I've heard (repeatedly!) is that you can pay real life money for fast travel but that's not true. You can buy a single portcrystal offering you one more potential location to warp to. It's a one-time purchase and the only travel convenience offered. This has transformed, partly because of people's lack of familiarity with Dragon's Dogma's mechanics, into a claim that you can pay over and over to teleport around. I think that assumption reveals more about the general audience than anything else.

I think it is worth entertaining a question: does the existence of this extra port crystal signify a compromising of the game's goals regarding travel? That's not a discussion that folks seem to be interested in having—instead opting for more emotional and reactionary panicking—but it is the most interesting question. On face the answer is yes and that raises the follow up question of whether or not the developers had knowledge this convenience (though one-off) would be offered to players. If so, did that knowledge affect how they designed the game? Even slightly? It seems rather clear to me that these purchases are a publisher decision; there's nothing in the game's design that suggest the dev team wants players to have access to an extra portcrystal. As we've established it's quite the opposite!

They want you to haul your fucking ass around and get jumped by goblins, buddy.

Which is many words to say that as much as I care about microtransactions from a consumer standpoint, the way in which they undermine Dragon's Dogma 2's goals is a fair reminder of the ways in which they hurt developers. Ultimately, I do think that these purchases are ignorable and in that sense (combined with the misinformation surrounding them) I'm a little burned by the consumer-minded discussion. Doubly so because of the way it feels, at least in part, tied into a certain kind of rhetoric that's been on the rise lately. Instead, I find myself drawn to the question of the damage they do the devs and if more onerous plans actually would force their hands into undercutting portions of their own designs. The shift of many series into live-service chasing suggest so but even as I entertain these thoughts I don't get the sense that Itsuno and his team were forced to reshape their game world to encourage these microtransactions. The world is as they want.

If it wasn't, they wouldn't make it so failing to act quickly in a quest to find a missing kid stolen by wolves could end with you being too late. They wouldn't make it so buying goods from an Elven shop without an interpreter was a hassle. It's present in Every Damn Thing!

More interesting to consider is why this particular game became such a lightning rod of passion when I'm going to assume that most people caught up in the discussion have no particular fealty to the series. The answer is a combination of factors but there's something about the genre that ignites the panic we're seeing as much as the culture moment we're in. When people try to explain that these MTX purchases are not needed, it's confused for approval of their inclusion but that's not something we need to grant. I don't think anyone wants these things here and when they say "you don't need them" they are referring to the more complex thought that the game is better played without them. But this is not heard because the idea that you'd want to opt into friction and discomfort is not something that the general audience is likely to understand. They're wired against it. They crave ease.

not everyone, mind you. DD2's enjoyed a lot of excited reactions (there's tons of folks who like this game as it is and are happily playing it) but it has faced plenty of folks railing against "bad" design choices but the fact remains that those "bad" choices were intentional.

I'm writing about this stuff instead of, say, the wild journey I took solving one of the Sphinx's riddles because the immediately interesting thing about Dragon's Dogma 2 has been what it's become as a cultural object. It is a game suffering from success. Never designed for a general audience or modern standards but thrust into their hands due to Capcom's ongoing renaissance. Dragon's Dogma is a fine game whose cult status is well earned but the reason DD2 garnered this attention (and therefore becomes a hot-topic game) has as much to do with Capcom's ongoing success rate as anything else. In some ways, it actually IS a good time to release a game like Dragon's Dogma 2. There's certainly a curiousity in place. Partly borne of goodwill and also from folks' genuine desire to try something new.

and yet, we're in a odd moment in games. consumer rights lanaguge, having been fundamentally misunderstood and reconfigured by gamers as a rhetoric for justifying their purchase habits (I'm paying the money! why can't the game do exactly as I demand!?) has stifled many people's ability to have imaginative interpretations of gameplay mechanics. they don't ask "what is this thing doing as a storytelling device" (which mechanics are!) and rather default to "what is this thing doing to me and my FUN and my TIME". which are not bad questions but they also misunderstand the possibility space games have to offer. While we can attribute some of the objections that has arisen to players' thoughts about genre itself and the way in which Dragon's Dogma positions friction as a key gameplay pillar, the fact of the matter is that we would not be having such spirited discussion about these things in, say, 2017. not that things were great back then, but I think the audience is worse now in many, many ways. sarcastically? I blame Game Design YouTube.

Even if there were no microtransactions, we'd still be having a degree of Discourse thanks to a key game mechanic: Dragonplague. It is a disease that can afflict your Pawn companions which initially causes them to get mouthy and start to disobey orders. If you notice these signs (alongside ominous glowing eyes) then your Pawn has been infected and you're expected to dismiss them back to the Rift where that infection can spread to another player. The game gives a pop up to the player explaining this the first time they encounter the disease. However, some players have ignored that warning and found a dire consequence: an untreated Pawn can, when the player rests at an inn, go on an overnight rampage that kills the majority of NPCs in whatever settlement they are in. This includes plot-important characters. The reaction's been intense. Reddit always sucks but man… just look…

I understand some of the ire. It's a drastic shift from your pawn being a bit ornery to instantly killing an entire city. On the other hand, the game does warn of potentially dire consequences if a Pawn's sickness is ignored. Players have simply underestimated the scale of that consequence. Surely no major RPG would mass murder important characters and break questlines! We're in post Oblivion/Skyrim world. Important NPCs are essential and cannot be killed, right? Well, wrong and this is another way in which Dragon's Dogma chases after the legacy of a game like Morrowind more than than it adapts current open world trends. This is a world where things can break and the developers have decided that they are okay with it breaking in a very drastic way. It's hard to think of anything comparable in a contemporary game. We don't really do this kind of thing anymore.

The result has been panic and a spread of information both helpful and hopelessly speculative. Is your game ruined? Well, maybe. There is an item you can find which allows for mass resurrection but that's gonna require some questing. But some players also say that you can wait a while and the game will eventually reset back to the pre-murder status quo. What's true? Hard to know. Dragon's Dogma doesn't show all of its cards and won't always explain itself. We know entire cities can be killed. We know that individual characters can be revived in the city morgue or else the settlement restored (mostly) with a special item. Dragonplague is detectable and the worst case scenario is, to some extent or another, something that the player can ameliorate. Those are facts but they don't really matter.

That's because players issue (panick? hysteria?) with dragonplague is as much to do with what it represents as what it does. Players are used to the notion of game worlds being spaces where they get to determine every state of affair. They are, as I've suggested before, eager to play the tyrant. Eager to enact whatever violences or charities that might strike their fancy. They do this with the expectation that they will be rewarded for the latter but face no consequences for the former. Dragonplague argues otherwise. No, it says, this world is also one that belongs to the developers and they are more than fine with heaping dire consequences on players. Before the dragonplague's consequences were known, players were running around the world killing NPCs in cities because it would stabilize the framerate. They're fine with mass murder on their own terms. they love it!

This is made more clear when we look at how Dragon's Dogma handles saving the game. While there are autosaves between battles, players are expected to rest at inns to save their game. This costs some gold, which is a hassle, but the bigger "issue" is that they only have one save slot. Which means that save scumming is not entirely feasible though not impossible with a bit of planning. What it does mean, however, is that the game is saved when a dragonplague attack happens. you have to rest at an inn for this to trigger. which saves the game. They cannot roll back the clock. The tragedy becomes a fact. It's not the only time Dragon's Dogma does this. For instance, players can come into possession of a special arrow that can slay anything. When used, the game saves. Much like how players are given a warning about dragonplague, they're warned before using this arrow: don't miss.

If you do? that's a real shame. The depth of this consequence is uncommon in today's gaming landscape. Games are mostly frivolous and save data is the amber from which players suck crystallized potentialities. Don't like what happened? No worries. Slide into your files and find the frozen world which suits your proclivities. You are God. In Dragon's Dogma, you are not god. The threads of prophecy can be severed and you must persist in the doomed world that's been created. The mere suggestion is an affront. The fact that Dragon's Dogma has the stones to commit to the bit in 2024 is essentially a miracle.

It's easy to boil everything I'm saying down to "Dragon's Dogma is not afraid to be rude to the player" but that doesn't capture the spirit of the design. It invites players to go on a hike. It makes no attempt to hide that the hike is difficult. But that's the extent of it. It offers little guidance on the path, doesn't check if you're a skilled enough hiker. Your decision to go on the hike is taken as proof of your acceptance of the fact that you might fall down.

This is not unique to Dragon's Dogma. In fact, this is part of the appeal (philosophically) of a game like Elden Ring. The difference being that even FromSofts much-lauded gamer gauntlets (excepting perhaps Sekiro, conincidentally their best work) offer more ways to adjust and fix the world state to the player's liking. Even the darling of difficulty will offering you a hand when you fall. Dragon's Dogma is not so eager to do so. In a decade where convenience is king for video games, that represents both a keen understanding of its lineages and a shocking affront to accepted norms and expectations.

The core of Dragon's Dogma, the very defining characteristics that earned it cult status, are the same things that have caused these modern tensions. It is both a franchise utterly consistent in its design priorities and entirely out of touch with the modern audience. Dragon's Dogma 2 has come into prominence during a time where imaginative interpretation of mechanics is at an all time low and calls for "consumer" gratification are taken as truisms. It is a game entirely at odds with the YouTube ecosystem and the very things that give it allure are the tools that have turned it into a debated object.

This flashpoint of discussion is proof of Dragon Dogma 2's design potency. It's also a sign of the damage that modern design trends have done to games as whole and the ongoing fallout that's come from gamers learning design concepts without really understanding what designing a game entails. And, uh… I dunno respond to that or how to end this. That's both very cool but it also bums me out. Dragon's Dogma 2 is a remarkably confident game but games are long beyond the point of admiring a thing for being honest.

#dragon's dogma 2 #games criticism

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bir-devrin-tarihcisi · 2 months ago

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بِسْــــــــــــــــــمِ االلهِالرَّحْمَنِ اارَّحِيم

Günün anlam ve önemine binaen biraz karalayacağım..

Ahh rabbimiz öyle yüce ki yine bizi bize bırakmadı ummadığımız yerden rızıklandırıldıkk🤲🏻

İçimde burukluk vardı. Ailemden uzakta ikinci ad günümdü. Ve yalnız olacaktım arkadaşım olmayacaktı. Öncesinden yüreciğimi hazırlamaya çalışıyordum...Sonra cuma günü baktım öğrencilerden bir sürü gül geldi tebessüm ettirdi buu, öyle güzellerdiki.

Sonra bir öğrencim geldi gül verip 27 Nisan günü doğum günü olduğunu söyledi. Aaa dedim şaşkınlıkla benimde dua edip kutlayıverdim. Öğrencilerde öğrenip öncesinden bir kaç kelam ettiler....

Sonra bir abla arayıp oğlunun 26 sında yaş günü olduğunu havadan dolayı yarın oturacaklarını söyleyip davet etti ve yine şaşırdım. Nasıl denk getirmiş Rabbim.

Akşamında yalnızlığın etkisi ile bir burukluk olur ya hanii o moda girmemek için derslere yöneldim düşünceler zihnimi yormasın diye rabbimiz de bir iş bitince diğerine koyul der ya hani ilme sarılayım dedim derslerimi dinleyiverirken baktım bir arkadaşım aradı. Çok nahif aynı yöne baktığımız kitaplardan ilimden konuştuğumuz bir hanımefendi. Biraz oturalım mı? Ben yine şaşırıyorum bir kaç saat sonra doğum günüm olduğunu bilmiyordukii oturduk öyle hoş sohbet ettikki kitaplardan sohbet ettik derste dinlediğim bir konunun haline denk gelmesi vs derken geç saate kadar oturup ruhumuzu doyurduk. Kalkınca bir düşündüm hamdolsun rabbim hamdolsun yalnız kalmadım😥🥺yine beni bana bırakmadınn

Sonra mesajlar gelmeye başladı bir iki kişi mutlaka unutmazdı sonra bir baktım yine ummadığım yerden rızıklandırıldım Telegramdan görüp yazanlar aklına düşüp yazanlar. anonim olan, ben yine alemi seyre daldım mesajların güzelliği ile gözlerim dolu dolu oldu biraz ağlayıverdik ama bu duygu karmaşasından mutluluktan şükürden idii. Öyle kıymetli mesajlar geldiki burada bahsettiğim bir arkadaşım bile o saatte hemen yazdı. Normalde önem vermezdi özelliklerinden bahsetmiştim (Tık)

İyiki sevdin iyiki bırakmadık kimse yokken sen vardnn dedii ve 3. Kez seni çok seviyorumm dedi(bunu ağzından zor duyarım dediğim) duygulandım nasıl bu aşamaya geldik dedim. Sevgi sabır dua nasılda büyütmüş her şeye rağmen sabretmek..iliklerine kadar kırılsanda bir kaç kelam edip kırmamak ..., bunun meyvesidir adeta yaşananlar ve yine hamdettim 🥺🤲🏻

Pek kıymetli diğer arkadaşım. Zarif hanımefendi.. 2016 dan beri hiç unutmazz uzuun uzun mesajlar yazılar hediyeler.. Beni o kadar iyi tanır ki bazen göz göze gelmek yeterli olur yada birlikte susup kelimeleri düşüncelere bıraktığımız....Mesajını okuyunca tutamadık kendimizi, oda sağ olsun aradıı hemen toparladım. Rabbim hayatımız da öyle kıymetli insanlar var ki şükründen aciziz😢Hamdolsun kalpleri ısındırana.. Denk getirene (Tık)

Mutlu edince insan öyle mutlu oluyorki... Mutlu olmak istediğim zamanlarda hemen çevreme yöneldim. Arkadaşlarım yoldan gelecekti onlara kahvaltı hazırlayayım dedim mutlu olsunlar ve 27 Nisan sabahına erkenden kalktım vee İlk hamurumu yoğurdum. (bunlar insanlık için küçük benim için büyük şeyler😇)

Bizden ebeveynliğe dersinde hocamız" ben kendimi sevebildiğim zaman yetiştirdiğim çocuğa sevmeyi öğretebilirim arkadaşımı sevebilirim" dedi ve kendimiz için bir şeyler yapıp mutlu etmekten bahsetti bir kahve bir çay.. Kendinizi takdir tebrik edin demişti.. Çünkü bunlar değersizlik yetersizlik hissine iyi gelen şeyler (afferin sana kızz bak baya bir şey öğrendinn dedim hamur yoğurdun daha ne olsun dedim:))...Pasta yapayım o zaman kendime dedim ve pasta yayapıverdimm) Çünkü kendimizi sevdiğimiz zaman sevmeyi öğretebiliriz..

Akşamında da arkadaşlarla oturduk, geç saat olur birlikte oturamayız diye düşünmüştüm yoldan geldiler neticede, ona rağmen bir şeyler yapmışlar 🥺🤲🏻

Bunlar öyle mutlu ettiki hani mesele mum dikmek üflemek dilek tutmak değil bunlar uygun olmayan şeyler zaten ama o değerli hissettirilmek var ya" "Bunu sen seversin diye yaptım"" Cümlesi paha biçilmez. Her ne kadar çağımız yalnızlaştırmaya bireyselleştirmeye çalışsada insan sosyal bir varlık.. Kıymet verdiklerinden değer görmek değerli hissettirmek mutlu etmek için mesaj atmayı beklemek güzel şeylerr

Hamdolsun Rabbimize bizi ummadığımız yerden rızıklandıran, tevafuk ettiren insanlara sevdiren yalnızca oo. Kalp dersinde hocamız demişti Allah'ı razı etmeye bakın o razı olunca sevince istediği gönle sevdiği gönle sizi zaten yerleştirecek o kulların sevgisini nasip edecek.. O yeterki sevsinn.

Bunların hepsi ondannn insanlar sadece aracııı kulunun bakar muhabbete ihtiyacı var başka kulunun yüreğine düşürür. Yerden göğe kadar her işi düzenleyip duran oo😢 Biz yalnız sanırız kimse yok sanırız oysa o her yerdeee

Biliriz ki Güldüren de odur ağlatanda hamdolsun bizi unutmuyor bizi bırakmıyor...Rabbim halimizii en güzel hale çevir bizden razı ol. Biz çok aciziz😢

#müverrihin ruznamesinden #herkes uyurken anılar bırakmayı seviyorum...#2.00 #27 Nisan #yıllar geçince gelip okuyup büyüdüğümü geçtiğim yolları göreyim diye..#üşenip zaten okumazsınız diye azıcık içimizi döktük #duygu karmaşası yazıya sirayet etmiş dağınık yazı olmuş kusurumuza bakmayınız

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