Lurker > adjl

Archaea_Ottoia posted...

Ah yes, the age old internet argument that youre telling other people what theyre thinking and feeling. Classic.

Correction: What their actions and behaviours suggest about what they're thinking and feeling. I don't necessarily know what they're thinking/feeling, I'm just pointing out the impression it gives.

Jen0125 posted...

If pro-life mens opinion is less valid than pro-life women so is a pro choice man's. The validity doesn't change based on the correctness of your morals lol. Being on the "correct side" doesn't make you more valid.

Being on the side where personal experience is logically irrelevant, however, does. Which, you know, is exactly what I've been saying. It's nothing to do with morals and everything to do with logic.

Jen0125 posted...

I'd love to see men's reaction if a full panel of female politicians had hearings and decided to just propose a female only sponsored bill that restricts their rights to viagra and vasectomies. I'm sure it'd be totally fine for the majority because the women are in a position of power. Lol

adjl posted...

I'll say it again: Pro-life men do indeed have a less valid opinion than pro-life women.

You keep bringing up examples that aren't analogous at all. It's the same as Far's circumcision example: Restricting rights that don't affect you is bad. Protecting rights that don't affect you is fine.

Jen0125 posted...

It's crazy to me that adjl is so smart and can't perceive the male ignorance and bias when it comes to female healthcare simply because science?

I mean, my sister spent hours in the emergency room and was ultimately told to go home and take an advil by a male resident who thought a 5 cm cyst on her ovary wasn't cause for concern (who, thankfully, was subsequently torn a new one by his female supervisor), but sure, keep insisting that I can't care about female health care or the blatant sexist discrepancies therein because I'm not a woman.

Jen0125 posted...

Adjl I'm not reading it. I never pegged you as one of the self important but I'm glad you showed your true colors finally after all these years

My "true colours" of caring about the semantic content of an argument instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks? I don't think I've ever particularly kept those hidden.

I'll say it again: Pro-life men do indeed have a less valid opinion than pro-life women. Pro-choice men, however, are on pretty equal footing with pro-choice women because the primary basis for that position doesn't rely on personal experience. That's not an effort to diminish the value of women and their voices, it's the simple reality of the situation and the logic involved. If you disagree, feel free to answer the question I just asked about how not being able to get pregnant makes it any more difficult for somebody to arrive at the opinion that nobody should be forced to carry a pregnancy, because explaining that logic is the only possible basis for changing my understanding of the situation.

Far-Queue posted...

So we need to account for the biases inherent in our flawed system. We need to lift women and other marginalized groups up so that their voices can be heard. Loud, and crystal-f***ing-clear.

Accounting for those biases, however, means pointing them out specifically, not in such broad terms as "everyone in this group has a less valid opinion." Telling somebody that their biases prevent them from understanding the situation without telling them what those biases are or why they're interfering accomplishes nothing (if not less, by fostering resentment and animosity).

People with valid opinions should make those opinions heard whenever possible and relevant. That doesn't mean steamrolling conversations and not letting anyone else express themselves (which men do indeed do pretty often), but if somebody's doing that, call them out for being rude, not for having an invalid opinion (that being outright false). If somebody's expressing an invalid opinion, challenge it by pointing out specifically why it's invalid, not by trying to tell them they shouldn't have a platform for some seemingly-unrelated reason.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

Ive never understood why multiple posts in a row is seen as bad. Its just a posting style

It generally conveys the implication that you're in a rush to make each of the posts and hit the "post" button so quickly that you forgot to include something else. Editing is also generally just a tidier way to append afterthoughts to a post, since it makes sure the information is all in one place instead of potentially being interrupted.

Jen0125 posted...

Yes they do

How does being able to get pregnant affect your ability to say "women should be able to decide whether or not they want to carry a pregnancy to term"? Specifically, how does that make it more valid than somebody who can't get pregnant saying exactly the same thing?

Yellow posted...

It's like my opinion on my friend's stomach ache.

Yeah my opinion is kind of irrelevant.

Depends. If your friend says "I have a stomach ache, so I'm going to solve it by cutting out my stomach," your opinion that your friend's stomach ache probably isn't bad enough to justify the rather extreme side effects that "solution" will have is quite relevant. If your friend says "I have a stomach ache, I'm going to cancel our dinner plans," then you've got a subjective decision that you should just respect.

Jen0125 posted...

Do you think a woman's opinion that it should be mandatory should hold equivalent weight that it shouldn't?

Generally, no. To be properly supported, the opinion that circumcision should be mandatory needs to consider the potential harms and weigh them against the potential benefits. The potential harms, however, include things that can really only be assessed subjectively, like reduced sexual pleasure, and women can't collect that information first-hand. Unless the potential benefits were so extreme that no amount of subjective harm could be felt to negate them (say, if 70% of boys died in infancy if they weren't circumcised at birth), that means she can't support her opinion.

By contrast, the opinion that it shouldn't be mandatory just relies on the belief that people should be able to decide such things on their own after taking their subjective experience into account. That opinion is, in fact, admitting that she doesn't have the necessary information to make the decision for anyone else. That's a very easy opinion to support, so in general, it's going to be more valid.

I don't know why you struggle so much with this, but I'm not saying men should be able to make abortion illegal without input from women. Pro-life men, by and large, are a bunch of virture signalling cowards enjoying a self-righteous circle jerk over punishing women for having sex with somebody other than them, whose position can never be justified because they can't have the experience needed to justify it. Pro-choice men, on the other hand, are perfectly qualified to say "just let women do what they want with their bodies," and I don't know why you're so upset about being given exactly what you want.

Adam_Savage posted...

you guys are literally arguing that your opinion on abortion should be worth more than anyone elses.

More that it shouldn't be categorically dismissed based on something that has nothing to do with its validity.

Adam_Savage posted...

the argument is that men should not have a say in what a woman does with her body

No, it's not. It's that men's opinions on abortion are automatically less valid than women's. The opinion in question that is being called less valid is, very explicitly "nobody should have a say in what a woman does with her body." The only basis that is needed for that opinion is a belief in respecting bodily autonomy, and nothing about that belief is gendered in any way.

Nobody is saying that men should have a say in what a woman does with her body (beyond the obvious, non-gendered things like "don't stab people," which goes without saying). The argument is not about that in the slightest. Anyone that thinks it is has missed the point entirely.

Far-Queue posted...

Disagree. A person who is personally affected by something should have more say about said thing than someone who is not.

Depends entirely on what that say is. If I need a heart transplant, I'm significantly more affected by the approval of a new procedure that will reduce the risk of rejecting transplanted organs than any of the doctors, researchers, or regulatory officials involved in justifying and making the decision to approve it, but I'm not going to pretend that that makes my opinion more worth considering than those other people's for making that decision. They already understand everything that my personal experience and investment in the issue can contribute, namely that I don't want to die and would prefer to maximize the quality of life I can have after receiving the transplant. Beyond that baseline, the opinions that matter for making that decision are going to be those based on medical expertise and empirical data, none of which my need of a transplant have given me.

Conversely, if we're talking about bills to regulate insulin prices, the testimonies of diabetic people who struggle to afford insulin should be factored in because it's difficult to understand the extent of the problem without that personal input, and the opinion of somebody saying "I can't afford the medication I need to survive" should be given more weight than the opinion of somebody saying "that person doesn't actually have trouble affording their medication." To turn it around again, a medical expert saying "that person doesn't actually need that medication to survive" likely has a more valid opinion than a layperson who insists that they do, though going beyond the question of basic survival and into questions of quality of life flips again back to the layperson's subjective experience.

It's not something you can make a blanket statement about. Personal experience or investment do not universally make you a more credible authority on a subject. You need to assess that on a case by case basis.

Far-Queue posted...

Agree, but personal experience of those affected must be weighed when considering passing legislation which restricts rights experienced by some, but not all.

I agree with that. I don't agree, however, that first-hand accounts of that personal experience must be weighed when considering passing legislation that protects those rights. The bottom line is that pro-life men are trying to make life worse for women in ways those men can never appreciate because they'll never have the personal experience needed to understand the harm they're causing. That means their opinion is based on incomplete information and therefore invalid. Pro-choice men, however, are trying to make life better for women in ways that they can easily appreciate without personally experiencing them (mostly because the benefits are really obvious). That means their opinion is based on sufficiently complete information and therefore valid.

Far-Queue posted...

Cool that you're okay with a woman deciding that you should be circumcised, but I'd rather keep that decision for myself.

On the flip side, do you think that a woman can't understand the basic concept of respecting bodily autonomy well enough to decide that circumcision shouldn't be mandatory?

Far-Queue posted...

Stick to the core of the argument and you'll see where you're wrong.

Pretty much everything I've said to you here has been an effort to help you realize what the core of the argument actually is, since you're completely missing it. Again: An opinion's validity based on how well-substantiated it is. Nothing else. The context and content of that opinion will dictate the extent to which personal experience is needed to substantiate it, which means there are certainly opinions that are in-/less valid without personal experience, but there are also opinions where personal experience doesn't mean much of anything, nuance which blanket statements like "men's opinions on abortion are categorically less valid than women's" ignores.

Now, none of this - and I think this is the point you're really getting hung up on - means that men don't need to listen to women in forming opinions on abortion. Men can have meaningful opinions on the subject that are no less valid than those of women participating in the same discussion, but those opinions should be based on data that includes input from women on the subjective experience of pregnancy/childbirth. Mostly, that just boils down to "pregnancy/childbirth are really unpleasant" as all the justification that's needed to believe that forcing women to undergo that experience would be bad, and that's not exactly obscure knowledge, but it's still information that men need to get from women before they can form a complete opinion on the subject.

That sounds like you're voicing an opinion on something you haven't experienced, which in this case means you don't have a valid opinion. Whoopsie.

She says, after spending the entire thread needing a fairly basic logical concept spelled out to her by an overwhelmingly-male audience (and not exactly passing the exam).

Jen0125 posted...

Lmao so adjl feels comfortable with white people telling black people their opinion on black matters is just as valid

adjl posted...

As always, depends on the circumstances and the opinions at hand.

I don't know why you're trying to turn this into blanket statements. It's like I'm talking to Sunny or something.

Zareth posted...

That still makes you pro-choice. Lots of pro-choice people would personally never get an abortion, but they support a woman's right to choose. You're only pro-life if you belive nobody should have access to abortions.

This. Mostly, you're falling prey to the fact that these are really stupid names that exist mostly for the sake of painting the other side as "anti-choice" and "anti-life." You can, in fact, value both life and choice.

Jen0125 posted...

Seems to me you guys are just trying to virtue signal for a population that doesn't exist here

The only population that has anything to lose by driving fence sitters into becoming pro-lifers is women, and that demographic certainly exists here.

Jen0125 posted...

You're upset I said a male opinion on female healthcare is not as valid as a female opinion. Boo hoo lol

No, we're upset that you're acting like an asshole for no reason. You saying male opinions on female healthcare are automatically less valid is just false. Nothing about the response to that is "upset," just trying to educate you out of some thoroughly faulty logic.

Jen0125 posted...

Do you guys think white people who are allies of POC causes opinions are just as valid as the affected demographic?

As always, depends on the circumstances and the opinions at hand. A black person who insists that there are no statistically significant differences in SES between white and black people does indeed have a less valid opinion than a white person who says there are. Swap the races, and the white person would have the less valid opinion, not because of their race, but because the opinion is inherently less valid.

Again, what matters is how substantiated the opinion is. Some opinions can't be substantiated without being a part of the group in question, since the only way to substantiate them is with personal experience. In those cases, sex, race, or whatever defines the group does play a role in the opinion's validity. Others absolutely can, and in those cases, group membership doesn't matter.

Jen0125 posted...

Well my behavior is being posted on PotD. So whose opinion am I affecting negatively here? Who am I turning off from being pro choice here?

You don't believe any of this strongly enough for it to carry into your everyday life?

Are you actually suggesting that PotD is a meaningful sample size in any way?

Far-Queue posted...

Nah son saying Jen is "off the rails" for arguing a point that pertains to the very real possibility that Roe could be overturned in the not too distant future is exactly that - taking her to task for having a passionate opinion. Whether they agree with her is moot when you consider what is at stake. Saying she's "off the rails" is to dismiss the fact that she and women like her could potentially lose their rights

But she's not being criticized for being "off the rails" about abortion being under fire. Frankly, I'm also "off the rails" about that, and I might even go so far as to suggest that anyone that isn't is a bad person. She's being criticized for being "off the rails" about people expressing opinions that agree with her because she's arbitrarily decided they're not the right sort of people to have opinions that are worth listening to.

There are absolutely times when men's opinions on abortion can and should be shut down just because they're men. Those times, however, are limited exclusively to those where they're using those opinions to erode or restrict rights: If you will never suffer harm from having certain rights restricted, you shouldn't be taken seriously when you say that restricting those rights isn't a problem. Having a problem with rights being restricted, however, doesn't require that problem to be a personal one, so there's no reason to take gender into account in evaluating that position.

Far-Queue posted...

Trudeau says all adult men must be circumcised or risk being thrown in gaol. Would you say a man is "off the rails" for arguing that their opinion of what should be done with their foreskin is more important than some random woman's opinion on a message board?

Depends on the opinion. If the opinion is that that's a violation of the fundamental right to bodily autonomy (which circumcising infants is, as an aside), that's an equally valid opinion regardless of who's saying it, because the basis for that opinion does not rely on gender-exclusive experiences. If the opinion is that it's a good idea because it looks better and nothing of value is lost, not so much, because that opinion is formed without having the critical experience needed to conclude that nothing is lost by removing the foreskin.

The bottom line is that not all opinions on issues that exclusively or disproportionately affects a given subpopulation require experience that's exclusive to that subpopulation to be valid. An opinion's validity is based on how grounded it is in objective reality and logical consistency. Sometimes, the only way to get that objective basis is to personally experience it, and sometimes that experience is exclusive to certain subgroups. Saying "pregnancy isn't that bad" is an opinion where that is true: You cannot credibly make that statement without personally experiencing how bad pregnancy and childbirth can be. Saying "the US has a maternal mortality rate of 17 per 100,000," however, is not: Credibly making that statement only requires you to have read the statistic and critically evaluated its accuracy.

LeggomyEggos posted...

It's funny and all to poke fun at her, but I trust at least most of you are mature enough not to let it turn you against a womans right to choose.

I'm fairly certain everyone here is, but I still consider it to generally be a really bad idea. There are absolutely fence-sitters that would be swayed into leaning pro-life by encountering enough pro-choicers that are behaving like Jen.

Adam_Savage posted...

being pedantic specifically so you can somehow still tell the woman she's less important than a man

Where exactly are you finding that?

Far-Queue posted...

No one, but you're the one trying to take a woman to task for having a passionate opinion regarding her right to bodily autonomy

But she's not being taken to task for having a passionate opinion regarding her right to bodily autonomy. Everyone she's arguing with has that same passionate opinion regarding her right to bodily autonomy. She's being taken to task for categorically telling people they aren't allowed to have that same passionate opinion regarding her right to bodily autonomy because they have the wrong genitals, since that's just plain silly.

Adam_Savage posted...

nah, this place is filled with misogynistic dudes who haven't gone outside in months my duder

While true, Jen also does tend to throw around such terms whenever people disagree with her, regardless of how appropriate they are. This has been demonstrated on a couple occasions in this topic.

Adam_Savage posted...

it's when you try to make your opinion more valid than a womans, on something only a woman can do, that is the issue here

Provided we correctly identify "something only a woman can do," sure. Evaluating the subjective experience of being pregnant or having an abortion is indeed something that only a woman who has been pregnant or had an abortion can do, and trying to make any claims of having a more valid opinion without having experienced those things is a mistake. Evaluating the objective risks associated with pregnancy, however, anyone with a suitable background in math/stats can do, and the opinion of a man with such a background on such matters is absolutely more valid than the opinion of a woman without it (and the opinion of a knowledgeable woman would be more valid than that of an ignorant man; that's not a gendered issue).

Jen0125 posted...

There are no more real fence sitters if you're an adult.

There absolutely are. I'm not sure what you're trying to gain by denying that.

Jen0125 posted...

Doing these debates isn't about changing minds.

Debates are always about changing minds. If you're not trying to change minds, you're not debating, you're just shouting aimlessly.

Jen0125 posted...

But I'm going to call out the asinine nature of men clamoring to control female reproductive rights every time I see it.

Nobody in this topic is clamouring to control female reproductive rights. Entirely the opposite, in fact.

VampireCoyote posted...

I do not agree with you. If someone can get pregnant then their voice and opinion matters just as much as anyone else that can, because its their body, not anyone elses.

I covered that: Having a more valid opinion on a specific subject doesn't mean that every conclusion drawn from that opinion is more valid. She can speak credibly on how unpleasant the experience was for her (hypothetically, since I think we all agree this probably isn't actually what's happening here), but accepting that that doesn't justify taking away other women's right to choose whether or not they want to have the same experience. It only affects her ability to help other women make informed choices (though even then it's a very personal experience and only commenting on one of the two options doesn't actually do much to inform people).

Jen0125 posted...

Pregnancy is 1 million times worse than that.

And you know that entirely hypothetically (and even then, you're pulling a number out of your ass instead of actually being able to do a proper comparison). Having a baseline doesn't change that you're still just imagining how unpleasant pregnancy probably is based on what other people have told you.

Jen0125 posted...

And it doesn't detect from the fact that I can ACTUALLY GET PREGNANT and be forced to be pregnant and give birth or die and you can't.

I didn't say it did. Just that the personal experience angle doesn't really work if you haven't personally experienced it.

Jen0125 posted...

Why does your opinion have any weight??

The same reason yours does: Because I'm hoping to secure essential rights for people I care about.

Jen0125 posted...

You know understanding the scientific process behind pregnancy has nothing to do with actually experiencing being pregnant and the risks associated.

It has nothing to do with experiencing the risks. It has everything to do with understanding them. Personal experience is in fact absolutely terrible for understanding risks, given how impossible it is to make statistical generalizations from a sample size of 1 (see: everyone that got Covid and was largely asymptomatic and now insists that nobody needs to worry about getting Covid, to use a contemporary example). One of the biggest mistakes people make in analyzing risks is placing too much emphasis on personal experience, and that's exactly what you're doing right now. So stahp.

Jen0125 posted...

But yes, I'm the one who is doing damage to abortion rights

I've known quite a few people who align with pro-life philosophy to a certain extent, but have decided against committing to the position after seeing the sort of people they'd be associating with if they did. There's no reason that can't work the other way. If you turn a fence-sitter away from being pro-choice by being a sexist asshole, you are indeed doing damage to abortion rights.

Jen0125 posted...

Yeah and the fact that I know how serious and terrible pregnancy is and that I'm a woman who can go through it means I should be able to have options. You can't get accidentally pregnant. I can. Your argument fails because I have the ability to become pregnant and you can't.

The point of that comment is that your sex does not inherently give you any greater understanding of what pregnancy does or can be like than any man has. Heck, given that I have a background in biology and you don't, I probably understand it better than you.

In general, I agree with where you're coming from: Men should not demand that women make sacrifices those men will never even have to consider making themselves. I'm not going to diminish how serious pregnancy can be, and any attempts to do so can indeed be dismissed as "you will never have an experience that supersedes what women can tell you about how bad it is." But on the flip side, that doesn't mean I can't understand how serious it is. My penis doesn't prevent me from knowing that 17 American mothers die for every 100,000 births (triple that for black women), which is more than triple the rate in any other developed country and higher than the fatality rate for police officers (14/100k). Shutting down allies for a cause you believe in is generally a really bad idea.

VampireCoyote posted...

but I dont think having had an abortion should make your opinion matter any more than someone who has never had one, especially since some women face that choice and choose not to get the abortion

I think the logic is valid, but there's an important distinction between "I think you have a credible opinion" and "I think more people should agree with you because of how credible your opinion is." Somebody who's actually experienced an abortion is more qualified to speak on that experience than someone who hasn't. The opinion of "it was a horrible experience and I regret having it" should be respected. Respecting that opinion, however, does not mean accepting it as a valid justification for making abortion illegal. It's meaningful for the sake of helping other women make informed choices about their own abortions, but it doesn't justify taking that choice away (for reasons which can easily be provided as needed).

Also of note: If somebody is arguing from their personal experience, you're not going to change their mind unless you respect that experience, so regardless of its merit in the argument in question, you should try to respect it and sympathize with their reasoning in forming a counterargument.

Jen0125 posted...

It's patronizing for men to act like they have any idea what pregnancy does or can be like.

I'm pretty sure I've been pregnant as many times as you have.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Even then I'd argue you better be one of the best games ever made (and not just an addiction-fueled Skinner Box) and would have to run for at least 15 uninterrupted years of constant content updates before I'd accept the argument.

(And even then, the fact that games like Kingdom of Loathing - which has been running for 20 years for essentially "free" - exist kind of undercuts the idea that games "need" to operate that way. There are ways to create and maintain self-supporting games that don't involve reaping your audience for maximum profits - publishers just refuse to make games that way.)

Eh, I'm always hesitant to accept the "cheaper games exist so this shouldn't be so expensive" philosophy of value assessment. Hours of entertainment per dollar is the closest thing that exists to an objective metric of value for games (or any entertainment medium, really), but leaning too heavily on that leads to developers and (especially) publishers padding games to artificially increase their length and perceived value, often to the detriment of the overall experience. It also makes it very difficult for shorter experiences that can't be cheaper to gain a foothold, and that's just not a healthy environment for entertainment as a whole.

It's something that certainly can be considered and should be brought out whenever some greedy publisher insists that they have to keep charging a ton of money for further content in a game that really doesn't cost that much to keep running, but the reality of the matter is that there's a significant difference between periodically adding content to a solo developer's passion project browser game and periodically adding content to a game that takes 100+ full-time staff to maintain. The latter needs to cost more, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.

Hypothetically, if I'd kept up with WoW for ~4 months per expansion, to date, I would have spent somewhere in the realm of $880 ($60 base, $40*8 expansions, $15*4 months*(8+1)). That would have been over the course of 17 years, and that kind of time investment would be about what's involved in just working through each expansion's quest and story content, without getting deep into raiding or other stuff that's really gated by random chance and grinding to lengthen the game (so avoiding the "addiction-fuelled Skinner box" issue). On paper, I don't consider that unreasonable. In practice, I quit when I did because I got bored and I'm not tremendously interested in picking the game back up again, so it's not a purchase I'd seriously consider, but that kind of long-term content delivery (which arguably boils down to paying $100 for a new 2-300-hour game every two years, rather than paying $800 for a single game) can work and be quite reasonable.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Worse, these days most "game-as-service" games will never keep the servers running that long. Once they've exploited the initial cash-in period (when the majority of players will pay for microtransactions or new content), they'll shut down in favor of the inevitable sequel (and next batch of having to buy everything in-game all over again). At which point you can't even play the game you've sunk so much money into.

This, however, is indeed the reality of most of these things. Most publishers aren't looking for a long-term commitment to steady income, they're looking to cash in on early spending, then abandon the project to chase the next big payday. That's why, if I'm going to even consider spending $1000 on a single game, it's going to have to be a long, gradual process. Anyone that wants me to invest $1000 up-front with the promise of decades of content is going to be disappointed.

funkyfritter posted...

What concerns me about Diablo 4 is how easily they can adjust the mtx system over time. It would be all too easy for them to make the offers tame at launch, then once the general playbase has decided they like the game start monetizing more aggressively and introducing stuff that affects gameplay.

See: Fallout 76. "There will never be any pay-to-win microtransactions!" followed by the introduction of pay-to-win microtransactions a few months later. This is not an industry that can be trusted to keep their word when it comes to promises not to exploit players whenever possible, and ABK in particular has not earned that trust. We've seen what "you won't be able to buy gear" turned into; they're going to include every form of monetization they think they can get away with.

Yellow posted...

You can play a ftp game without paying. It's like watching a great movie and to see the last 1/3, you gotta pay about $3000.

If you're a posting on the internet you have no excuse. This shit is meant to trick the Facebookers. You traded your soul for a brain though, you know better.

Except for the part where these games are specifically designed to prey on neurodivergent people who have innate difficulty resisting the urge to spend. Autism and especially ADHD are characterized by poor impulse control, those that struggle with addictions basically have to cut themselves off completely (which is especially troubling for recovering gambling addicts who had turned to games as a healthier outlet for their addictive tendencies, only to have those same games infested with gambling mechanics to again threaten them with bankruptcy), actual children with their heightened sense of FOMO and diminished ability to recognize in-game currencies as proxies for real money (not neurodivergence per se, but still something these games prey on)...

It's easy to look at these as a (mostly) neurotypical person and say "I won't spend money on that" and solve the problem at a personal level, but the problem is much bigger than that. These practices are deeply predatory and should not be allowed exist any more than unregulated casinos should exist. The only reason they're not globally beholden to the same regulations that face casinos is that most governments are comprised primarily of people too old to name a video game newer than Pac-Man and therefore understand nothing about the situation beyond what corporate mouthpieces say in defending the practices.

keyblader1985 posted...

Zero chance her current opinion on abortion is motivated by regret. Ask anyone working in an abortion clinic and they'll tell you that they get a lot of pro-life clients who will tell them at length that what they're doing is heinous - before, during, and after their procedure. None of that stuff matters once it affects them personally.

I wouldn't say zero chance, but it is indeed extremely common for pro-lifers to be blatant hypocrites who will happily get an abortion for themselves or their daughters while actively calling every other abortion in history evil. Their case is special, after all, and their daughter was just a victim of bad luck, unlike every other unwanted pregnancy that was the result of irresponsible hedonism.

Like the TERF's that surprisepikachu'd when the politicians they'd aligned themselves with to push transphobic agendas started also pushing misogynist agendas, I fully expect that these people would throw some truly spectacular tantrums if the anti-abortion laws for which they're campaigning actually came into effect and those laws meant they also couldn't get abortions. The concept of cause and effect tends to elude these people.

Depends what you mean by "don't get along." If she just isn't their friend and doesn't enjoy hanging out with them? That's fine. Being my friends doesn't mean they need to be hers. If she actively dislikes them and tries to prevent me from interacting with them? That's a problem.

VampireCoyote posted...

I mean that does sounds like an incredible ability to have

It could be pretty nifty, but I can also understand the objection to promoting that, especially with how heavily the anti-trans crowd leans into the idea that the whole issue is about perversion and sexual deviance and not a genuine health issue and the immediate threat that crowd is placing to the trans community.

VampireCoyote posted...

How did cyberpunk fetishize trans people?

I didn't follow it closely, but my understanding is that there was quite a bit of promotional content and stuff in the game itself amounting to "you can change your genitals at will for whatever sexytimes you want isn't that cool?", painting being trans as a sex thing more so than a matter of personal identity. Again, though, I didn't follow it particularly closely and haven't played the game, so I don't know how much of that was a serious issue and how much of that was a small handful of people just feeling weird about something.

I especially like how it's always just "masculinity is under attack!" without defending any specific examples of "masculinity" being attacked because somehow "it's manly" is supposed to be all the defense it needs.

Muscles posted...

If you go around looking for every instance of man hating bitches across the internet I'm sure you'll find plenty of evidence but if you actually go out into the real world you'll find that's not the case

Are you telling me that incels' world views and personalities are made actively worse by retreating into echo chambers where they get increasingly angry over cherry-picked examples of man-hating instead of experiencing a broader range of real-world interactions?

Cruddy_horse posted...

it's so easy to regain favor with the general public and gamers especially, if blizzard can largely get away from all the sexual harrasment, abuse issues and supporting an authoritarian regime then a s***ty mobile game is nothing.

Not at all. Gamers are exceptionally quick to forget or ignore blatant abuses by their favourite game companies, often angrily trying to shut down even the initial reports because they don't want to hear about it. Producing a bad game, though, means companies have to work a lot harder to earn The Gamers' forgiveness.

See: Cyberpunk 2077. Pre-release reports suggesting workers were being unhealthily crunched? Aggressively ignored and dismissed by The Gamers. Pre-release concerns about the game fetishizing trans people? Aggressively ignored and dismissed by The Gamers. Pre-release reviews said anything more negative than "this game is perfect and the world is a purer place for being graced with its presence"? The Gamers send death threats to reviewers. An epileptic reviewer issues a seizure warning because the game is particularly bad for that and gave her a seizure, despite generally having and expressing a favourable impression of the game as a whole? The Gamers assault her by sending seizure trigger videos disguised as something innoncuous.

The game actually comes out and is a buggy mess that barely runs on most consoles currently in people's homes? That's when The Gamers start calling for blood, because the only thing they care about is the game that lands in front of them.

Similarly, Blizzard is revealed to have a long history of sexism and harassment that has infested its entire corporate culture, including driving one worker to kill herself? "Shut up and let me enjoy my games." Blizzard doesn't even have to try to get away from that because The Gamers will shut it down for them. But releasing an entry this terrible in a beloved franchise? The Gamers are not so quick to forgive such a sin, and Blizzard will need to distance D4 considerably from Immortal if they want to regain their favour.

As I said, though, I fully expect this is a form of anchoring: D4 will be monetized much more heavily than D3 was (even with the RMAH), and the fact that whatever they do will look tame by comparison to Immortal is going to let them get away with much, much more. The Gamers may not forgive a bad game easily, but they're also not a particularly perceptive bunch, so it'll be pretty easy to dupe them into accepting more predatory monetization.

Archgoat posted...

Is it really that much money though?

For anyone with a tight enough discretionary spending budget to have to choose, you're making the choice between 7 full-price games (formerly 8, but that changed) and buying that extra console. Potentially even more than that, if you wait for sales and/or buy cheaper titles on a regular basis. It's not an insurmountable cost, no, but it is a very steep ask if the person is only interested in a tiny handful of exclusive games. In essence, it means a single system-seller actually costs $570 instead of $70, and that's going to rub anyone the wrong way and generally result in people just not paying that much unless they genuinely don't care about money on that scale (or have such crippling FOMO that they're compelled to do it).

Archgoat posted...

but people routinely upgrade their very expensive phones every 2 to 3 years.

Pretty often, those upgrades are buried in contracts that mean they're paid for just by paying for phone service. Speaking personally, I replaced my 8-year-old flip phone with a $900 (CDN) smartphone that I didn't pay a cent for because it was covered in the same plan I already had (with a two-year period of being locked into that contract, of course). Now, I certainly won't be replacing this every two years (it's been three already and I don't plan to replace it until it stops working), but I'll be taking a similar approach to that replacement as well, rather than buying anything outright.

There are indeed people who do buy new phones every couple years, or don't realize just how much they're spending on those phones because they accept it as the service cost (also meaning they overpay for service once the contract period is up), but the former isn't really the norm, and the latter isn't so much a conscious decision as it is falling prey to a deceptive marketing scheme. To that end, balking at buying an extra console isn't necessarily inconsistent with frequent phone upgrades (especially where phone upgrades can be treated as a recurring expense, while extra consoles are reactionary one-time purchases).

Archgoat posted...

Sony fanboys say there is no reason to buy an Xbox because the games are on PC as well, but that is a much more expensive item to acquire (if you want it to play all the games).

It is, but it also offers much greater value for that higher up-front cost. In addition to playing current games, you get nigh-unlimited backwards compatibility (with a bit of fiddling for really old stuff), fewer concerns about being locked out by new generations, the most versatile media centre you can get, the definitive web browsing/social media experience (hence what we're doing now), professional/household utility... And that's even without considering that sales are more frequent, deeper, and more readily accessible on PC than other systems and there are far fewer concerns about the digital storefronts supplying your games being shut down.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the PC I built in 2011 has seen more overall use time than every console I've ever owned combined, just because of how much non-gaming utility it has. While that's not necessarily a vital metric for picking a game system to buy, in terms of the overall value calculation, it definitely needs to be factored in.

Archgoat posted...

If a console is something you can only afford to buy one of per generation, then maybe it is just best for that person to wait until they can make a more informed decisions after more games are released.

That is indeed probably a better idea than rushing out to buy one right away, especially where they tend to get cheaper and have fewer technical issues as the generation goes on. That does carry the risk of not being able to find physical copies of many games, since stores often stop stocking them (especially less mainstream titles), but between Amazon and digital markets, that risk is much less significant than it used to be.

aHappySacka posted...

Because the the SSE ended up being a big time and resource sink for the developers where most of the content (including cinematics) ended being cut from the final game.

That too. While the cascade of "They wasted their time on SSE instead of giving me *insert obscure character here*" wasn't particularly reasonable given that nobody cared about whatever niche character the person in question was fanboying, it did take a very, very significant amount of resources.

Or just having a gaming PC, since most Xbox "exclusives" also end up on PC and a lot of PS ones seem to be going the same route.

I expect it was a combination of SSE having a very mixed reception (a lot of people wanted an Adventure Mode more like Melee's, and as interesting as fleshing out the idea was, Smash just doesn't make a great action platformer given how many characters aren't all that good at jumping) and both games being a little rushed on account of developing it for two systems and trying to make them meaningfully unique (while not making one clearly superior to the other). Putting different, sizable adventure modes into each game would have been a ton of extra work, putting the same one into both would have discouraged double purchases, and based on SSE's lukewarm reception, there wasn't really enough demand to justify dealing with that decision and extra development time on top of the substantial existing workload.

At least, that's my guess.

Archgoat posted...

Xbox is killing it this gen. I don't really get the fanboy mentality, just save and buy the other system if it has games you want to play on it. I don't really get the idea that you can only own one system and you need to remain loyal to them.

To be fair, "just spend another $500 on a new system" isn't the most reasonable solution, nor is that readily accessible for many people (especially not for the sake of playing 2-3 games). While being upset that a former or presumed exclusive is getting ported is stupid, being upset that a game you want is unexpectedly exclusive to a system you don't have is pretty understandable, given the rather sizable barrier that presents. There was a time when having every system made a lot of sense because they all had a ton of worthwhile exclusives, but with almost everything being multiplat these days, it's a lot harder to justify spending so much money for such a small handful of exclusives.

Revelation34 posted...

Get rid of third party exclusives entirely.

I wouldn't go quite that far, since there are certainly cases (Bayonetta 2 being the first example to come to mind) where third-party games only see the light of day because a first-party publisher decided to fund them. Exclusivity makes sense in those cases, otherwise there's little incentive for the publisher to invest in them like that (similar to first- and second-party titles).

Exclusivity in the form of "you could make this for every platform but we're going to pay you not to" is terrible, though, and it baffles me that people not only applaud it but get angry when a title they thought would be exclusive ends up with a multiplat release or subsequent port.

I'm willing to entertain the possibility in the form of subscription fees, DLC/expansions, and/or reasonable microtransactions, so that total cost is paid over the course of many years of continuous service and new content additions and not designed to cost that much out of the gate, but that's still a pretty tall order and the vast majority of games don't stand a chance of keeping my attention for long enough to get there (especially if I have to keep making the decision to spend more money to keep playing).

Lokarin posted...

because that's what normal people do... play games for fun

Specifically, why play Immortal for fun when there are so many other games that offer the same or greater fun as the best Immortal has to offer and don't constantly hound you with reminders of how much better the game could be if you'd just pay them this little bit of extra money to solve that one problem you have (that they created solely for the sake of selling you the solution to)?

HornedLion posted...

$1,000 to achieve everything? Sure. That would be fair.

Holy fluctuating scrotums, no. Not unless "achieve everything" is a couple thousand hours of genuinely enjoyable content, and even then that's still not a great value given what else is out there. Over five years and two expansions, I spent roughly ($60 main game, 2*$40 expansions, ~36 months at $15/month) $680 on WoW, and for that I had somewhere in the realm of 250 days of /played time (6000 hours, though a non-trivial part of that would have been AFK and other non-gameplay time by the nature of the genre), and even that's really not the greatest value by modern standards with games like Minecraft offering comparable playtimes for a flat up-front price of less than $60. If I'm spending $1000 on a single game, that had better be one special game that keeps me playing (and enjoying myself) for years.

This is what I mean when I talk about "anchoring": A decade or two ago, the notion of spending $1000 in post-purchase monetization for a video game would have been unfathomable. Now, though, against the backdrop of an estimated $100,000 to max out a character, it seems downright reasonable, and it's been normalized by a predatory market where this sort of nonsense has become normal. It doesn't matter how normal it gets. This is - and always will be - bullshit.

Adam_Savage posted...

you need gear to keep playing

you don't get gear unless you pay

Now now, don't go spreading misinformation. Wyatt Cheng doesn't like when you do that. You can absolutely get gear without paying. In fact, you can't even pay for gear, just like they said pre-release!

Now, the gems that go into your gear and ultimately play a much larger role in overall character progression? Yeah, they're paywalled. But you don't have to buy gear!

It really is a staggering amount of greed, but it's also going to be immensely profitable for them. That's the nature of these schemes: They don't need to be popular, they just need to get a couple of whales addicted enough to buy them a new yacht.

Far-Queue posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/9/AAZslrAADVmx.jpg

At any point this decade, no less.

Imagine being such an utter turd that you would petition for other people to not be able to get a video game just because that game is coming out on a system you don't own.

Some people would consider "actually reading the basis for your entire point" to qualify as "nuanced." I'll avoid commenting on how sensible such people are, for the sake of being polite, but they nonetheless exist.

I find it's usually pretty safe to assume "Sunny's completely ignoring the concept of nuance as he tries way too hard to find fault with somebody he doesn't like" whenever he gets like this. The specifics rarely enhance that understanding.

Sunny believes he's unmasked a grand, hypocritical conspiracy in that you referred to yourself as a "gamer girl" in that one other topic but are objecting to using the term "girl" to refer to adult women in this one. Evidently he didn't read much of the other topic, given that that was explicitly brought up and joked about there.

Yes, but pretty much only because I use it whenever I go to PetSmart because we share her Treats account.

Biking outdoors is generally pretty light cardio, even on that scale. The cardio really only comes on significant uphill stretches, and those usually aren't going to be very long and will be punctuated by downhills that take very little effort. Level ground is very low-resistance unless you've got a massive headwind or are in a really low gear and just end up spinning your pedals unnecessarily.

JOExHIGASHI posted...

We need Warcraft 4

In the extremely unlikely event that there is a WC4 (a major reason Reforged was such a disaster is because ABK was largely unwilling to allocate resources to it because they don't see Warcraft as a worthwhile investment outside of WoW/Hearthstone), it almost certainly won't be the game you're hoping for. The Blizzard that made WC3 doesn't exist anymore; whatever they do churn out will likely be heavily monetized and deliberately designed to be less than enjoyable for free players.