#Veteran Issues

[churchofsatannews]

Infernal Legion #045 — Memorial Day

The Memorial Day episode of the Infernal Legion podcast is available now, on Radio Free Satan! Satanist Raul Atondo and Magister Adam Campbell join us on this special Memorial Day episode of the podcast. We discuss our plans for the holiday, honoring those who did not fall in combat, modern observances, and the homogenization of Memorial Day. As is our tradition, we close the show with the names…

[lobsterxentaros]

Image ID:

A cringe emoji is in the center of the meme with yellow hands bursting from the white background on either side.

On top is black text in caps that reads:

Do not, under any circumstances, join the US military.

End image ID

Personal note, citations.

They will use you up, spit you out, and then wring anything they can from you.

If, for no other reason than self preservation;

Do not, under any circumstances, join the US military.

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

Don't let republicans fool you with their national populism cause they do not give a single care for veterans who died and suffered for America. They would hollow out the VA and fill it corporate and political stooges who would blindly follow the GOP's bidding. Our government doesn't care enough for veterans and here we have Republicans confirming it, remember it was Biden who passed the CARE act. So remember a future where our soldiers suffer more than they already do is what the Republicans want.

[chronurgy]

I think if we want to understand what happened during veilguard's development, it's worth looking at this article about anthem's. History may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme - right down to the last minute title change right before the big reveal trailer. The section on the way the use of performance capture for facial animations caused issues with the writing and story as things changed over the turbulent development also feels particularly relevant (basically, they didn't have the time and money to redo it when the story changed, so they just left in things that didn't make sense). It's also worth noting that Mark Darrah, Inqusition's executive director, was widely credited by the devs in the article as being the one to take anthem from nothing at all to something that could actually be shipped by the deadline EA required (he came onboard 17 months before the game shipped). Darrah left bioware in late 2020, before returning as a consultant on veilguard in March 2023 (19 months before release), which I think is particularly interesting and may offer some insight into the game's dev cycle.

I think it also answers the question of whether this is all ea or bioware's fault - and it's both. The answer is that it's both of them. It's ea's fault for forcing them to continue to use frostbite when the engine is clearly not suitable for this purpose, and then just leaving them to flounder. But the incredible mismanagement is absolutely bioware's fault. Upper management's inability to set a course and to make sure things were getting done is on them. Their reliance on "bioware magic" (aka crunch) to make everything come together, ignoring that it wasn't working, and dismissing employees' concerns about it is on them. One developer said that reading the reviews of anthem was "'like reading a laundry list of concerns that developers [had] brought up with senior leadership'" which is incredibly damning!

A lot has been said about the number of senior people that left during this time period, but based on this article, non-senior employees were quitting in droves as well. There was also a massive spike in people taking "stress leave" at the studio during both anthem and Andromeda's productions. One dev said they couldn't count how many people "'had such a mental breakdown from the stress they [were] just gone for one to three months. Some come back, some don’t.'" Upper management at bioware let this environment happen. EA may have encouraged it with their insistence on an unrealistic release date, but bioware still let it happen.

[hummingjay]

The tags on the most recent Eiche drawing made me imagine an scenario in which other replikas she's like your usual replika age (or maybe slightly on the younger side), meanwhile for the other KASUARS she's ✨💀a n c i e n t💀✨ and annoying her with questions like "Eiche were you there when the dinosaurs went extinct?" Or something like that 😅

It gets old quickly, apparently.

Funny thing is that young as she is, she truly is authentically ancient for a kasuar. Her own unit doesn't mess with her outside of when they actually talk about age and they start teasing her, since they gotta keep the mateiral fresh.

She does end up training or briefing recruits and those fellas are new and fresh and ready. "And that's it. We strike from the west. any questions?" "Did you use dinosaurs as cavalry when you deployed?" "Not a useful question. And no."

[kcrabb88]

I think we're very blessed as a society that the Wicked movie was made now and NOT in the early 2000s, where I'm sure it would have suffered what I call the "Gerard Butler Treatment" where one of the leads simply cannot hit the required notes! 2004 Phantom got teen me back into a childhood obsession, true, but it was precisely because of Christine and Raoul, not the very badly cast Phantom. If Wicked had been made then and been bad it would have been the Cutthroat Island of movie musicals where you don't get another movie in that genre for 20 years or something. So thank you, John Chu, for making a great adaptation (and hiring three leads who are, indeed, known for their singing!)

(Also, I'm SURE an early 2000s version of this movie would not have taken the authoritarian government plotline as seriously as this did)

[frameconfessions]

Analysis/opinions about the current state of Warframe from a 10+ year old veteran player.

Okay this isn’t a confession (or maybe it is I guess) but I’m about to give my 2 cents on an incorrect take being paraded around by salty noobs and people who barely touch the game. “No one plays steel path.”

You’ve never tuned into a Youtuber or twitch streamer’s content before, clearly. 🙄 No one you know plays steel path because you play with people at your current progression in the game who either don’t have it unlocked or refuse to get good and if truly no one played it, it wouldn’t be getting updates every time new nodes and content dropped. We also wouldn’t have at least 2 secret steel path boss fights in game with multiple trophies built into them.

The problem isn’t that “no one plays steel path,” the problem is this Valkyr rework is out of touch with the current state of the game as a whole. It amounts to the developers over exaggerating a problem that isn’t as much of a problem as they’re advertising it out to be to make an attempt at lessening justified community backlash and slapping a bandaid over the cyst that is the current state of health, armor, and survivability in this game.

Some backstory & needed context: The devs clearly saw people losing interest in the base star chart content between constant back-to-back open worlds and no higher end difficulty built into the game. Player retention was dropping, it was the late 2010s content drought & veterans were leaving the game in droves or just stopped playing. This resulted in less money being spent on the game and DE saw what an impact that had. Warframe felt too samey and was boring for dedicated and veteran players alike.

People like Mogamu suggested a battlepass with special challenges and rewards to keep players coming back to the game, to give the dedicated players something new to do. Around that same time was the constant criticism that Warframe is too easy past a certain point, there’s just no real difficulty once you become a dedicated player. DE was taking notes, they heard the community’s problems with the game and saw how it was indeed hurting the game.

Timeline is a bit blurry for me here but sometime in the late 2010s they made railjack (launching with enemies being way too tanky for a lot of people and outpouring way too high DPS), steel path, and Nightwave. These were all made to address the issues that members of the community rightfully pointed out. Then Steel Path kept getting updates to make it actually incentivizing to play!

Power creep happens over time but people are more satisfied with the state of steel path as a whole seemingly. DE cared about making higher end difficulty and we saw that also with Duviri’s circuit mode even in more recent years. They care about the game’s health but there’s been an underlying problem even before steel path existed, health and armor just don’t cut it the further you go in the game.

You can mod for strictly survivability but then your damage can go out the window. Enemies at a certain point just one shot you which leads to players picking up frames that have high energy costs & upkeep for more survivability. Shield gating is but a bandage on the larger injury of late game just not being feasible regarding survivability.

Invulnerability isn’t the fix-all to Warframe’s end game but it is with the current state of difficulty in the game. Taking it away to “test out” slapping shield gate on a frame and nerfing her is just silly and out of touch. I get they spent budget on reworking her & they’re making the excuse that they wanna see how she feels on launch, but dedicated players have already done the math and builds to test her in steel path and it’s just not looking good. Also, we already have frames like Nidus & Inaros if they’re actually going to do something about reworking health & armor.

Is Valkyr just going to have to stay nerfed until more updates are out? How long will that take? How long does she have to sit on the base star chart shelf gathering dust while you “track stats?” If the goal was to sell as many thirsty skins as possible (not getting into the discourse about how it doesn’t look like Valkyr or how it doesn’t suit her idc about that right now) and have as many people playing her as possible in turn, this just isn’t the way to do it. Once those people DE pays to try out Warframe can no longer run her juicy thick self on steel path, they’ll just play a different frame instead.

She won’t get recommendations to be played anymore beyond base star chart and maybe early steel path. People won’t buy an expensive skin for a frame they barely play. Fashion the frames you play most is just common sense and economically smart! That social media influencer you paid to get into Warframe is not gonna stay a casual base start chart player forever. You’ll get your temporary influx of thirsty skin buyers with Isleweaver & whoever DE gets to promote the game to some corner of the internet, but long term? It’s not financially wise because it’s not a solution. It’s putting a sparkly little bandaid over a gaping wound and I’m tired of people pretending it’s not.

Warframe didn’t get to be this good of a game because of reddit white knighting or blind defense of their every decision as developers, it got good and stayed live on servers this long because of the veteran and dedicated players who rightfully criticized the developers choices, gave feedback on why x thing isn’t good and/or how x thing could be improved. Warframe is only good & has only been good when they listen to their dedicated and veteran players.

Covering up a problem in a thirsty purple pink bow isn’t gonna make the wound go away, the blood of the core issues in the game is gonna leak through that fabric. Those new players won’t stay new forever and they’ll soon also see Warframe for what is is, the good and the bad.

I’m also gonna go on record and say that she was not an inactive play-style, managing the energy economy of her is a task and one you have to sink a lot of time into to build for. Her damage is fine as is too; she can hit damage cap, you just don't wanna learn how to build her. The spin melee problem wasn’t really addressed with this and neither was anything else Pablo brought up, but hey at least Warcry is recastable without an augment now; so, it must be good, right!? RIGHT!?

Not listening to dedicated players is how Digital Extremes loses money, dedicated players keep the game alive. I’ve said my piece.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS & OPINIONS

Also before any trolls try to say “who hurt you?” Digital Extremes did, by making the game boring as all Hell in the late 2010s for at least a good year or so à la content drought. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it even in the Warframe community.

The problem is power creep and that problem is far more expensive to fix than a warframe rework or two. If the devs want a warframe to be played a certain way, they’re gonna make the community play that frame that way (even if part of the game’s appeal is player choice and build variety, but I guess that’s not really being considered here). While yes I hear you bringing up my earlier point about energy econ as a counterpoint about player choice, at least current Valkyr is something more unique than a rework that doesn't really change her kit all that much and is essentially just a nerf with sheild gate being once again shoved down our throats. All frames for steel path must be built similarly, this is good game design, right?

I get they wanna make her whole kit useable & I can respect that part, but right now the Hysteria invulnerability nerf is only going to make the game slightly worse overall, not better. Also it hardly seems to set out to fix what it's trying to supposedly fix, but I'd have to get my hands on the first 3 tweaked abilities to really know for sure,

Also don’t even get me started on how disingenuous Pablo’s Hysteria talk felt. "It also had this whole section where at the end of it, you could die if you hadn't done like a certain process that was very confusing for most players. So a lot of people would just end up like once they were running out of energy, they would just hide in a closet and just wait it out, which was pretty bad." I would like to see the stats for how often this actually occurs because I've never seen a Valkyr player do that, even base star chart default colors ones. I felt like I was being PR spoken to and that just makes it feel so wrong.

In a world where health and armor are at a good spot in late game this rework is an acceptable trade off, but right now it shouldn’t be shipped.

Also another thing about you level cap buzzword haters out there... Warframe does care about endurance runs/late game or at least used to back when the Kuva fortress tileset was released. People were doing max cap survival endurance runs, going for world records, and playwarframe was present in the chat cheering them on as well as some of the devs personal twitch accounts at the time. I remember Smashley's stream in particular as an example though it may be lost to time because the internet is not forever, much in contrast to what our parents told us as kids. Also, like I stated previously, Steel Path is consistently getting updates.

Easier financially to try to make small changes and seemingly ignore the bigger issues than to tweak bigger core parts of the game, I'm sure any developer would much rather do the former than the latter. It's smart budgeting even if it hurts the game's longevity, but this Valkyr issue has truly pushed this larger problem into the lime light; hopefully so much so in that they actually do fix the bigger problem. Huge changes are needed for the game's health if the power scaling is going to keep increasing, but Valkyr getting nerfed shouldn't need to come first. Fix the core issues before you put a perfectly good frame in the shredder.

Or maybe I'm just a MR27 (going on 28) salty veteran player ranting and raving about nothing important whatsoever. 🤷‍♀️ - mod Rose

[carlyraejepsans]

i was thinking about that ask i received the other day and how uncharacteristically upset the topic had made me when i usually just think "mh. gross!" and move on, and after mulling it over a while i realized it wasn't about the topic at all, it was the ask itself that freaked me out. i've mentioned sporadically before (for obvious reasons lol) that i used to be involved in fandom discourse when i was younger and that!! fucked me up quite a lot. between exacerbating my ocd and straight up getting cyber stalked (i almost feel guilty using that word, like i don't deserve it but. yeah that is 100% what happened to me), the topic is something I have very complex and personal opinions on but that i hate talking about in public because it still sets off my fight or flight response.

i know some people in the fandom are like "let me know if i ever rb someone who wrote/drew gross stuff" and that's entirely their choice and i respect it. but for the record, i am not one of these people. please, for the love of god, i am asking this genuinely do NOT come into my DMs about this, I don't want to know. assume I'm either living in blissful ignorance or my blacklist already covers me quite nicely & i wanna keep it that way. i vastly prefer the discomfort of stumbling into something unprepared and deciding what to do about it on my own, to the utter pit of dread i get whenever i open a message that starts with "hey just so you know-". i have blocked multiple people in the past over it. i WILL block more. be warned.

[note. this doesn't apply to people who have either hurt or behaved inappropriately with other members of the fandom, or spread bigotry and discrimination like racists and transphobes. please do let me know in those cases]

does this make sense? idk I'm kinda feverish you guys figure it out. I'm going to sleep.

[churchofsatannews]

Infernal Legion Podcast #043

On this episode of the Infernal Legion podcast, we are joined by one of our newest #WickedWarriors, Citizen Kimberly Campos! Kim recounts her 14-year career in the U.S. Navy, battling Somali pirates, becoming a Golden Shellback, breaking away from herd conformity, and discovering Satanism in the digital age—after being fooled by pretenders to the throne. Stream Episode #043. Download Episode #043.

[aerithisms]

you ever read a book where the core story it's telling is totally killer and designed to appeal to you specifically but you wish a better writer had written it

[mcrtalstrike]

We could have learned more about Vol'jin in the heritage questline. Like the entire part about the rush'kah mask.

You know, like one Vol'jin wears thats on the banner and tabard to represent the Darkspear. Maybe Rokhan reminiscing when Vol'jin made his own to emphasize the meaning behind them.

[morethananhour]

severance season 2 so soon please be good please be good

[mwolf0epsilon]

Community Service

Rex, during the commute back to Coruscant: It's so quiet without the 105th troopers around... Jesse: You're saying that like it's a bad thing? Rex: Hm? Oh, no not at all. I just... Got used to expecting even more trouble than usual is all... Jesse: Well, once we get to Coruscant we'll know how they've been getting along with their 'community service' assignment. Rex: Yeah... Fox is keeping tabs on that while also keeping tabs on when we'll finally be able to pick up a massiff for them. I'm a little nervous to find out what the boys have been up to.

-Several Hours after Touch Down on Triple Zero-

Fox, via holocall: Still no word on the massiff pup, Rex. Rex: Oh, yeah I know. You'd leave a message if you had anything new on that front. I just uh, wanted to check on how the 105th veterans were dealing with their current assignment. Fox: ...Well they haven't set the Madam's brothel on fire, if that is what you're worried about. Rex: Fox: They're doing ok Rex. I have some of my boys keeping tabs on the 105th men, and they're excellent as security detail. Seem to be receptive to the Madam's crew, since they're the least threatening people on Coruscant. Rex: And they haven't been... Instigating fights? Fox: Negative. All is well... Although I do hope the 'breeder' comes through soon, because while they seem to be more comfortable with the Madam's crew, I've been informed that they still seem to have issues trusting each other. A pet project like training their own therapy animal should help them bond more readily. Rex: I hope so too... Vode that can't trust other vode are a risk to themselves and others. And after everything they've been through, they deserve to at least be able to trust that they have each other's backs. Fox, somewhat melancholic: Yeah...

[thatlittledandere]

Ok I now have all the parts for Eridan. Off to assemble. Mom innocently noted that April is next week. Con is in early May. I'm in danger

[bunabi]

I've been kind of out of the loop on DAV stuff, I stepped away from the official-side of the fandom when the stress casualty stuff came out about Inquisition. Has the studio gotten better about all that? I sincerely hope so (for so so so many reasons), but when I do general searches on the quality of life stuff at the studio, not much comes up (at least in part cause idk how to use "new" search algorithms properly).

That's a good question and I really don't know :'(

I think the most recent information on that was an article about Anthem's 90 hour workweeks: high audience expectations, short development period, lots of internal pressure, very little manpower for polish & fixes, challenges with the Frostbite engine, the usual stuff

With the layoffs last October (not sure if they were also affected by the 700 extra layoffs inside EA in February) I can only assume they're spread thin right now

But they've hired some folks since then, and the team seems genuinely happy from what they've been sharing over this year, so I take that as a hopeful sign development wasn't too rough

[churchofsatannews]

Infernal Legion Podcast #038

Warlock Chris Little joins us on this special #WickedWarrior episode of the Official Infernal Legion Podcast to discuss his time in the U.S. Navy, discovering Satanism and joining the Church of Satan, and his new YouTube video series: Satanism 101. Stream Infernal Legion Podcast #038. Download Infernal Legion Podcast #038. Satanism 101 YouTube Channel.