There’s a definite sweet spot for a subreddit/social media instance/online community whatever your verbiage. Once you get over around 10- 15k people quality of community goes slowly downhill
I would argue against that. You can keep the quality up even with larger sizes but you need focused moderation and some level of distinction between sub-communities (e.g. large forums of old would have special rules/culture for certain sections).
In defense of the generally indefensible masses of reddit, Hansen is hardly a figure above criticism. Fetishizing vigilante justice, embracing of the far-right, his emphasis on spectacle without regard for the community, that time where they more or less killed a guy… Child molesters are horrible (tho why we keep electing them, I’ll never know), but we don’t need to hail and laud someone as our champion just because they agree.
Hansen’s documentary has an opportunity to shed light on online grooming as a pervasive problem endemic to all online spaces but instead appears to further his usual moral panic about how there’s people lurking behind the bushes, waiting to nab your children while they do the things they enjoy. His productions have never been better than any other schlock reality television, but with a veneer of legitimacy from his LARPing with law enforcement. Targeting a popular piece of pop culture, instead of an expose on say grooming rings on discord or the constant abuses of children from religious institutions as facets of the ever-increasing access children have to unmoderated online interaction seems to be just as morally vapid as his work has ever been.
Shitting on Hansen I can understand, but defending Roblox? It’s no grand conspiracy that it’s riddled with predators, it’s an actual fact, so that’s kinda disgusting.
A bigger problem is the predatory behavior of the company that owns Roblox. You can teach kids how to wall themselves off from the pedos on that site but you can’t really protect them from the company that runs it. Short of keeping them off it all together… Which is what I do.
What blows my mind is the child predation isn’t even half the problem with Roblox. Gambling with real cash, child labor, black market for digital content.
It’s an absolutely dumpster fire of problems, and yet balatro is the one the EU cracks down on.
Hansen is generally more of a grifter these days to be fair. And even back in the heyday of the show, it had a lot of issues both legal and just moral. I really feel weird about this kind of predator catching stuff being made as entertainment.
I think it brings awareness. Which is needed to change the culture. I do think it’s weird to gain financially but I don’t think it’s the only “benefit” of making a show.
Historically the kind of awareness it brings is less constructive information on the problems with these websites, and more on the line of unhelpful paranoia.
I don’t use reddit, but tbf roblox is what you make of it. My kids enjoy the heck out of it. There’s the same issues with most games - exploiting the users for profits with micro transactions or whatever and the dangers of lousy people in chat. The real issue is that Roblox has become a mecca for kids and that attracts more of the worst aspects I mentioned.
I hate to say it but parents gotta parent. Roblox offers decent parental controls. I employed them and relaxed them as my kids got older, and check in on what they’re playing. Problem is parents treat games like babysitters and then get upset when their sitter hiring policy is leaving the front door open and let anybody walk in.
Ignoring the chuddy lead and constant insistence on making the game a bit more hateful with every update… it just isn’t a good game.
Weapon balance is very much you either go meta or fight health sponges. At first I thought it was just me but then I checked a few of the mid tier streamers and they were having the same issue where it felt like an NG+ fight in terms of damage… on NG. That said, it also seems like LOTF classic where there are a few OP spells that can trivialize any fight.
Level design? The concept of the lantern is REALLY cool. The reality is that it just means you explore the whole light world. Then you switch to shadow. And then you explore the whole shadow world. And because of the focus on geometry changes, you never really have a sense of continuity. It is very rarely “I am going to shift to the shadow realm to get past this flaming wreckage” and more “I am going to shift to the shadow realm and end up outside the boss gate”.
And for general build theory? On paper, the idea of linking item descriptions to minimum stats is interesting. In reality? It just means you are either checking a wiki or building blind because you have no idea if the item that needs Radiance 20 to identify is good or not. I get that this all has links to the old PnP games but… even those have mostly done away with this and just hide extra stats behind a catch all dump stat for your high INT player.
Also, speaking of the updates. Yup, trans and enby erasure with every update. But even if you are totally tolerant but don’t approve of their lifestyle blah blah hateful motherfucking blah… it also fundamentally changes the game. They removed the boss fight that you were basically guaranteed to lose on a first run which, in turn, breaks what little story there is. And, last I checked, the only way to reenable those is to play with the launch balance of enemies which was… real bad. It is a parody of inclusive difficulty settings with basically “if you want to play the real game you have to play our bullshit where even Dark Souls 2 thinks it is a bit much”.
So yeah. Chuddy ass game from a bunch of chuds that isn’t even all that great. Like… I might actually prefer the original Lords of the Fallen since that at least tried interesting things and had some fun boss encounters… if you picked the right magic at the start of the game. And those devs moved on to make The Surge which (poor level design aside) are genuinely fun souls games with an eye to both transhumanism and workers rights. This? At BEST it is an incremental improvement to the laughing stock of 2014.
The Surge 1 & 2 are massively underrated. They’re not without their annoying issues but even despite them I can enthusiastically say I enjoyed my time with those games. 2 was a big improvement as well. I’ll get around to revisiting them sometime and doing a second playthrough.
I never even got terribly far in the first LotF, it just straight up did not feel good to play. Everything was just a bit too clunky and jank around the edges. I intended to check the second one out but never made it a priority, guess I never will.
I’d absolutely take a Surge 3 from the other guys though!
I remember playing the original because I got it with Games with Gold on Xbox. I couldn’t even get past the first (second?) boss in that cathedral it was such a bullshit.
But The Surge 1+2? Those are cool games with interesting lore that’s actually fed to you, so you don’t have to go searching for little scraps of lore from item descriptions or cryptic NPC dialog. And it’s fun to play, but can still be kinda bullshit sometimes. I still haven’t finished either one though.
If he’s a YouTuber and it’s a work expense I’d think the videos he made on it more than offset the cost, pretty sure that’s how it works with the gacha creators that spend $200K on genshin impact
Yup. I watch MtG Arena draft videos, and they throw hundreds with worth of resources sometimes in a single video, but they’re also making ad revenue and whatnot, so it works out. And viewer numbers are peanuts compared to more mainstream games.
It’s not even a good game. It’s not significantly improved from previous titles why people paying microtransactions for this let alone buying the game at all
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