Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
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EVE Online creator CCP announces a new game with BLOCKCHAIN and it's not going well:
Apparently they got investment from A16Z:
I admit, in my haste, I read that link as Marc Andreessen openly announcing they're investing in the Chinese Communist Party, which is slightly funnier than the reality of yet another crypto game.
it's even funnier than that (albeit also super depressing, in some ways)
primer: hilmar (the head honcho at ccp) has been "crypto = bae" for going on 5~6y now (that I'm aware of, maybe longer), to the point that there are pictures of the guy at chain confs from around then, and mentions of people talking with him in The Private Backrooms at said chain confs. it's been his darling and he has wanted very, very hard to put it into tq (the main game server). see this for example (and fwiw, warning: eve reddit)
in-fill: there also appears to be quite a bit of cart before the horse element in how the company operates - they will frequently first work on something, then when it starts getting near release they'll send out some surveys that almost without fail have some extremely loaded questions in them. an example would be that instead of asking players what they generally think of xyz feature/intended mechanic/etc, the survey will instead garden path answers along, attempting to manufacture consent/compliance.
and, last little detail: keep in mind this is a game where people will min-max the everloving shit out of something, and where a fair number of people out there are willing to trade actual time to making in-game money with which to fund their gametime ("plexing"). people who would be willing to engage with some really ridiculous abstract/effortful shit for whatever gains they could, just because they could.
so with that said, during 2021/2022 (in the middle of the NFT tsunami of shit) the first big round of "we want to add NFTs to tq" came about. and there were a fair amount of indications that ccp had already sunk quite a bunch of devtime on it, and were getting ready to roll it out. the pitch was, uh, "not well received" would be putting it extremely lightly. it was panned so fucking extremely, they had to put out this newsblog which included the remarkably tortured phrase "Not For Tranquility"
which is the early strand of what leads us to this particular little "gem". it's hard to get specific details because they're fairly tight-lipped about internal processes and shit, so the following is definitely heavily conjecture. hilmar didn't want to break up with his bae, and kept pushing trying to keep this alive, somehow. whether the drive for this is also tied up with the Pearl Abyss acquisition some years prior is unclear (but Black Desert Online players all cried wolf when PA bought CCP, and said to expect increasing financial fuckery). what does appear to be the case is that a number of developers (possibly the pro-NFT among them) got sequestered off to the Special Project that became this thing, along with the a16z money a while back. the general feeling in the eve:o community is still largely "get fucked", and this project is likely to be double-stillborn (on account of dead kriptoes and an unwanted game/product)
I look forward in earnest to see just how dead it is on arrival
[0] - it took less than 2mo from the "would you like to play a fps in the eve universe? what would you want in it? what do you normally do in eve? what would you do in an eve-universe fps? why would you want your eve ...." survey going out to the announcement "hey surprise! we have an fps!"[1]
[1] - again. they've failed a few times, with multiples out. ccp product leadership real bad.
Man this company has had some really interesting ideas and then the execution always falters.
I was still subscribed when the first eve-fps crossover they attempted. it seemed great and then for whatever reason a console exclusive with a subscription fee ontop. They didnt get the numbers they were planning for and the whole thing just died on the vine.
They've had some neat tech here and there and the whole experience is great for building out your psychopathy but i lost interest after the Greed Is Good phase of CCCP games started.
was that the one that targeted the near-eol console?
In 3 years they will release their NFT game.