40 posts late and $1 short (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Friday, February 07, 2020, 08:18 (1547 days ago) @ Claude Errera
edited by narcogen, Friday, February 07, 2020, 08:22

I *AM* doing something about it. I am currently not playing Destiny 2. I have not purchased the current season pass, and I do not intend to. I have not claimed these "rewards" this system says I am entitled to, because I don't think they should exist. And I am here, on this forum and elsewhere, expressing the opinion that developers and publishers should not engage in anti-consumer practices, that media and consumers should call out developers and publishers, even ones they LIKE, for engaging in anti-consumer practices, and take into account these practices when making decisions about what games to buy, what services to subscribe to, and what games to play and support.

If you had come in here, when this thread was heating up with opinions about which side of whatever line in the sand Bungie was on today, and made some of these points in your inimitable way, I wouldn't have said a word.

Hell - if you had come in late (as you did), and made your points as you have in the last couple of posts, I wouldn't have said a word.

But you didn't.

You came in late, and you came in with drive-by snark, and you didn't follow it up with anything else germane to the state of the industry for 40 more posts (about a day).

If daily visits are too infrequent then I guess there's not much to be done about it. I apologize.

I mean... you posted between that drive-by and your discussion of the current problems with the industry... but it was mostly about how it was okay to take shots at Cheapley.

It is OK to refute CheapLEY's argument by pointing out arguments it is similar to. Unless we're saying there's a new Godwin's law that applies to FLOTUS, which would be an interesting statement, to say the least.

I'm not saying you have to stay on topic here. (I mean, if that were a rule, we'd have closed down years ago.) I'm saying you're being disingenuous if you're trying to claim that your involvement in this thread has been about a discussion on the industry.

... what the hell else is it about?

In response to what I viewed as some rather valid and on-topic discussion about whether Bungie's practices are anti-consumer (which they are, in my personal opinion) CheapLEY came in to contribute "who cares". This is designed to stop discussion. It is designed to accuse people of concern trolling. It is designed to bolster a status quo that I see as negative.

I haven't the foggiest idea why you'd think that the point of my doing this was "ooh, look, I get to take a dig at CheapLEY" as if that was my motivation. But I will absolutely take a dig at bad faith debate tactics like "who cares" in service of a negative status quo.

(Your last comment on this subject was "If this is the level of incivility that justifies a thread lock it's simply not going to be possible to discuss anything of any import regarding the industry." Dude - you weren't discussing the industry - you were adding to a general level of hostility here that makes ME tired... and I'm probably the most patient reader this forum has.)

Yes, I was discussing the industry. Saying I'm not seems to indicate your real issue is the political content, but there's no discussion of the industry at this time without discussion of regulation and regulation is politics.

Saying that bad actors in the industry, or in the discussion of an industry, are like other bad actors in other contexts does not change the topic of conversation to be that other context. I think you chose to fixate on that, and decided that everything else I wrote on the subject was just a disguise to get in a political remark. It was not. I don't know why you would think that, beyond the fact that it really bothered you that I did it, and you wanted to talk about that part and not the rest.

I was disappointed that this place has gotten so combative that even NARCOGEN feels comfortable coming in with a cheap shot, and not much else until I threaten to shut the thread off. That's all.

Why was that a cheap shot? Did you notice that you calling it a cheap shot led to CheapLEY also claiming it was a cheap shot, despite him claiming that 1) he didn't get it and 2) he wasn't bothered by it?

Pointing at nihilism and calling it nihilism is not a cheap shot. Pointing out defeatism and calling it defeatism is not a cheap shot. Pointing out that one person saying "I don't care, neither should anyone else" is like another person saying "I don't care, and neither should anyone else" is not a cheap shot. One might make the argument that comparing a small bad thing to a big bad thing degrades the level of discourse about the BIG bad thing, but I seem to notice nobody is even bothering to make that argument, and since the "big thing" in the context of this forum is videogames... well...

I quit Facebook because my country's politics are like this. I used to come here to escape from the constant fighting. But it's here now. And that sucks.

This forum isn't separate from the country or countries from which its readers hail, or from the world as a whole. It is part of it. The videogame industry isn't separate from the world. It is part of it. These things were always true, even when it was easier and more convenient for more people to pretend that it wasn't.

Movie quote time!

"We are the world in small. A nation is a human thing. It does what we do, for our reasons."

My reason for responding in this thread at all is that "who cares" is toxic. It says a lot to me that that slides, but the comparison to another sphere in which it is acknowledged that "who cares" is toxic was what really caused the objection.

If there's proof that this forum is now so combative that one should feel disappointed about it, it's not that I felt comfortable calling out "who cares" as being toxic. It's that the default position was to defend that statement because my criticism referenced a nearly identical statement, but in a political context, and calling that reference "cheap".