In case you were wondering what has the spoiled man-babies up in arms lately, let me tell you. It’s not that the police have been murdering people, or that we aren’t doing anything about global warming, or that the Zika virus is becoming worrisome. Nope. It’s all about their entertainment.
Blizzard is cracking down on cheaters in their multiplayer game, Overwatch (which I haven’t played, although it looks fun). So people were loading up on mods that made the game easier for them, like adding code that auto-aimed their weapons for them. So Blizzard banned them for life from playing multiplayer.
The howls of outrage are amusing. They want to sue! They want to sic Anonymous on them! They paid good money for this game! They are being persecuted for their beliefs!
It reminds me so much of when I’ve caught cheaters on exams, especially the argument that they paid money for this class, so they deserve to pass it. No, you don’t. Bye.
One of their most anticipated movies, Suicide Squad, is getting bad reviews (I also have not seen this movie, but it’s opening in Morris this weekend). So they want a movie review site removed from the internet.
Here’s some news for you: everyone doesn’t have to like the same things you do to the same degree. I thought the new Ghostbusters was OK, the plot was nothing to rave about but the characters were good, and I got hate mail from people howling that we SJWs were unfairly propping up the movie and we should have been honest and hated it, like Milo did (curiously, the people who liked it better than I did are not damning me to eternal darkness).
I was disinclined to want to see Suicide Squad myself by the trailers — it looked like yet another excuse to showcase people in strange costumes demolishing a city with lots of explosions, and I’ve had enough of those already. Instead of complaining about bad reviews and trying to shut down reviewers, how about complaining about bad movies instead, and demanding some complex characters and relatable interactions in addition to the comic book destructive heroics?
You know, there’s nothing wrong with lobbying for entertainment you like. It’s just that these guys consistently lobby for the wrong things, things that would actually make their games and movies worse. I guess they just need their little hugbox where they can get cookies for being cheaters and for reveling in mindless violence.
I wasn’t happy about the Suicide Squad reviews either, but a) I’m more inclined to blame the producers, director, and writers, and b) isn’t taking down a review a violation of Freeze Peach? Also, c) I’m enough of a Harley Quinn fan (especially the Dini/Timm and Conner/Palmiotti incarnations) to go see the movie anyway, because reviewers aren’t the boss of me.
For Suicide Squad, the positive reviews I’ve read say that the plot’s an incoherent mess, but that the characters are good. I think that’s enough for me to see it, since I’ve liked movies like that before (I really enjoyed the film John Carter when it came out a few years ago, even though the film has massive structural issues).
“we should have been honest and hated it”
Wow, that’s a pretty arrogant and disturbing statement. Just because you hate something doesn’t mean everyone does. It’s like those christians who say Atheists know there is a God but don’t want to admit it.
For SS, I’ll see what moviebob says. He and I tend to agree when it comes to superhero movies. In any case, I won’t be part of opening weekend because of Musecon (www.musecon.org).
I’d fully expect that Blizzard has some stuff about banning cheaters and hackers for life in their terms of service, so… cry on.
What’s the point of cheating in a game? There’s nothing at stake in an online game except one’s ego – and I’d be absolutely soul-crushed if the only way I could succeed in a game was by cheating.
I’ve had my share of run-ins with griefers, gankers, and cheaters, and my experience is that they’re quick to whine that their experience is being ruined when they get caught. You know their gaming experience which consists of trying to ruin other peoples’ gaming experience? That one. It’s the old “you’re oppressing me by taking away my ability to oppress others” whine.
Weird. ACTUAL gamers would be pissed if a company didn’t take ENOUGH action against cheaters in multiplayer games.
Also, why Rotten Tomatoes? They don’t even give reviews, they just aggregate scores from other reviewers. As if their shouts for a shutdown of something they don’t like wasn’t bad enough, they have even chosen the wrong target. Baffling.
Saganite@#4:
Every online game has some kind of terms of service and I would be amazed if there is one that doesn’t say that cheating and harassing other players may be cause for banning. The main problem is actually getting the gaming companies to enforce the TOS – frequently you can grief and gank with impunity. Which is why people do it: they can get away with it. It’s very depressing. You’ll find occasions where groups of grown-up gamers join a game with the sole intent of messing up other players’ game-play.
There is some weird psychological transfer effect going on where some people conclude that “if being hated is the attention I get, it’s still emotional validation for me.” I think it’s the same effect we see in people like Thunderf00t: “you not liking me makes me feel more self-important.” As in: the bigger a loser I am, I win. Very odd.
Shutting down reviewing sites makes the movie better, how?
The best way is how the cheaters go onto talk about how EVIL Blizzard is, because them being blocked from the most amazing game in the world is TERRIBLE. Erm, who made that game, people? Sounds like they think Blizzard is simultaneously the worst and the best company in existence. And what about the other players, who are getting crappy experiences playing against cheaters? Let’s just pretend no one cares.
So, fuck the cheaters.
I have no interest in seeing Suicide Squad. Even though I actually like the squad in the comics, this just seals it for me.
Watch that 30 seconds. They thought that was good enough to be a promo clip. That doesn’t bode well for the hundred or so minutes they didn’t think were good enough for promos.
As Milhouse Van Houten once said: “Trouble is a form of attention!”
@#9:
being blocked from the most amazing game in the world is TERRIBLE,
An amazing game that their pleasure is to make less amazing. It seems to me that the best way to make the game more amazing would be to get rid of cheaters.
In Elite:Dangerous land the designers were talking about how they had planned to have an entire alternate universe, where, if you cheated or griefed you’d get shifted over into. So that universe would just be populated with your fellow cheaters and griefers. ENJOY!
Personally I don’t so much see this as outgrowth of privilege as an outgrowth of:
1) our culture perverse conflation of failure with moral failure.
2) the fetishistic devotion to so called objective analytics which are not in fact objective. You see the same thing with WAR in sabermatrics.
3) Hunan nature’s inability to tolerate differences of opinion.
Such is life we can only ever be self-interrsted.
I can corroborate PZ here: My lukewarm endorsement of Ghostbusters as “less bad than usual for Hollywood” wasn’t hardline enough and warranted blog posts from obscure cishet white bro philoso-bloggers pontificating on the evils of punching up. But I post about #SayHerName and get a tenth of the traffic on it.
Priorities.
Myers:
Yeah sorry about that, I’ve been busy with a tricky, statistics-heavy post. I’ll whip up some sort of virtue-signalling damnation after I verify the accuracy of my integrals.
I loved the new Ghostbusters, so damn you to eternal darkness, PZ
MyersMeyers?Exploiting human nature, you could probably make a killing by creating a subscription online game where the higher the tier that you paid to be a part of would give you greater powers over the lesser-tiered players. And the zero-fee players at the bottom would be the baby seals everyone else would enjoy clubbing.
These lowest-tier players could be bots, as long as their butt-hurt pleas were prominent over chat.
This would give the power-mad asshole players a clear path to greater power, a sense that they were infuriating other players with their ‘cheating,’ and the burning need for one-upsmanship would spell massive profits for the publisher.
And the rest of the game world would benefit from having all the assholes trapped in one place.
These asshats are constantly whining that, when we criticize a movie or a game for being racist/sexist, we want to censor it. They’re constantly whining that stopping them from hassing and threatening people is violating their free speech. And yet when anyone has a different opinion than they do on a game or a movie, the douchebros try to intimidate or silence them. Blocking some asshole on Twitter for sending death threats has nothing on trying to get an entire website shut down for not giving a movie a high enough score.
Also, when it comes to Ghostbusters, did it ever occur to them that they’re being unfairly negative to it? It sure seems like they were dead set on hating it because the principle characters were almost all women. One could argue that they should be honest and admit that the movie was average.
Also also, I was interested in seeing Suicide Squad because it seemed like it had interesting characters, a distinct style that separated it from other superhero movies, and a bit of humor and self-awareness. I’ll be disappointed if that’s not the case, but it’s also not the end of the world.
I don’t understand this weird phenomenon of review-rage either. Firstly, it is a movie; entertainment. While that is meaningful to many people, a degree of perspective is required – as PZ says, this isn’t something like issues surrounding inequality, oppression or our slow destruction of the natural world around us. This just isn’t the big stuff, so why get so bent out of shape about it?
Secondly, the opinion of movie reviewers is just that – their professional opinion. It is not an injunction clad in iron, and anyone is free to disagree and feel differently. If you think the movie might be your kind of thing, go and watch it and judge for yourself – what matters is surely whether or not you felt you got your money’s worth, not whether your taste happens to coincide with that of reviewers. Any number of critically panned films have gone on to be cult classics and even cultural icons to later generations, and equally many have become infamous turkeys held up as examples of how not to do things, but even the most egregious celluloid train wrecks will often find a perverse following, if only among people who mostly enjoy being contrary. Besides, if a film is popular with its intended audience within the general public, then critical approval is ultimately not the deciding factor in any case, and we won’t know how the public will receive this film until it is on general release, so panicking now is premature.
If you find you despise the movie, then the critics were right and its no big deal. If you like it, then you are pleasantly surprised and you are reminded that you are not actually the exact same person with the exact same taste as any given film critic – either way, nothing much is lost. It is also not as though the future of DC comic book movies, still less comic book movies more generally, is riding on this picture. Obviously Marvel is doing their own, very successful thing, and DC movies like Wonder Woman and Justice League are already under production, and will continue on even if Suicide Squad is a flop of truly seismic proportions.
There really is no good cause for all this furor and flailing about.
@17 Davingdale
Sounds like almost every “Free to play” game ever. Make a game that you don’t have to pay to get into, but unless you’re willing to spend literal days worth of time tediously grinding to get even the most basic of items, you have to pay to get anything, and the game basically becomes a matter of who pays more. I’s notorious among experienced MMO players.
A game that’s an exception to this is League of Legends. All you can buy with money are skins: visual changes to your character that add no advantage. Everything else that can give you an edge in the game must be earned with in-game money, which you only get by playing.
Also, LoL has a really good attitude towards harassers. After the game is over, you get to immediately report anyone in any of the teams, you get to tick off the boxes that apply to what they did to deserve your report (in general) and then explain the details on a form below. Players who are repeatedly reported go to the Tribunal for judgement, and can get temporary bans, get sent to a low priority queue (where you have to wait 10 minutes to play, instead of 2), and there’s some other possible punishments. They have a box to check for hate speech and one for harassment, since harassment can be something as simple as saying the game was “easy” just to spite the other team.
On the topic of “why people cheat”, like everything else, there’s a nuance to it. I’ve known people who cheat because they’ve been playing the same game for so long that they’re bored, so they resort to cheating to change things up. I’ve known people who cheat because they’re bad at the game, but they still want to win. I’ve known people who cheat because “it’s fun”. People who cheat because “fuck this game”. Because “everyone else is doing it”. Because “it’s just a game so who cares?”.
It really depends on the person and there’s often a switch, they don’t cheat all the time, or they start by really playing and then resort to cheating, there’s all sorts of cases. None justified, as far as I’m concerned.
Sorry for the wall of text.
As people have pointed out elsewhere, Rotten Tomatoes is partially owned by Warner Bros., the studio behind the DC movies, so if anything you would expect a bias in favor of movies like Suicide Squad and BvS if there was any significant bias to be found.
My favorite of my many exam/assignment cheaters will always be the one who sent a half-hearted email “Please do not report me for plagiarism as it may adversely affect my getting into medical school.” Most cheaters actually bother to show up at your office and make their plea in person, and most are more worried about getting kicked out of the school they’re currently attending.
It was three pages of short essay questions copied word for word from other students.
I’ve cheated because writing bots was more fun than playing the game.
I stopped doing it in MMOs when I had a bug and my horses went raiding the same poor neighboring village repeatedly over and over, until its owner complained to me I was griefing them.
@Marcus
>”In Elite:Dangerous land the designers were talking about how they had planned to have an entire alternate universe, where, if you cheated or griefed you’d get shifted over into. So that universe would just be populated with your fellow cheaters and griefers. ENJOY!”
I hope that will that be a thing. I’m going to be buying that soon. If it is a thing I also hope they collect data.
Actually now that I remember, it wasn’t my student, I had the one they copied from.
A special world for cheaters actually sounds fun. The best bot-writers win!
A colleague (who wrote market-prediction software for work, and in Kingdom of Loathing) was trying to come up with a good game mechanic where “cheating” with bots gave you only ancillary benefits. I don’t think he ever worked one out.
What are you, a commyist? Films that are utterly insipid and vapid are what makes America grate. They’re a right of passage, hence, the SyFy channel.
Yeah, I do prefer my films with characters who are memorable and don’t need a supporting class of high explosives to prop up a vacuous story line.
@20
Really? Granted, I don’t play LoL because MOBA games are about as appealing to me as an anal fistula, but when I’ve seen friends play it, it always looked like a scum pit. Granted, the friends I’ve watched playing were women, so it’s possible they were just targeted more.
@28
A lot of factors play into it of course, but from my observation Riot is doing a lot more than others to combat the problem. They seem very dedicated to making it a people-friendly game.
Generally though, you’ll want to build up a list of people who are not assholes, so you never have to go into random queue. That alone cuts the probability of abuse in about half and the other half you can mute with no adverse effects.
I’m confused by the association between “privilege” and gamers. The gamers I’ve known over time tend to be quite the diverse group.
Rotten Tomatoes isn’t even a review site – it’s an aggregator that looks at other reviews, interprets them as either positive or negative (based on established heuristics from different numerical scales that are from a bunch of movies), then reports what percentage are positive.
This petition isn’t even to shut down a reviewer that got a bad review, it’s to shut down a site that is reporting that lots of reporters gave bad reviews. It’s a textbook case of shooting the messenger, on top of everything else wrong with it.
> Here’s some news for you: everyone doesn’t have to like the same things you do to the same degree.
Absolutely.
> I was disinclined to want to see Suicide Squad myself by the trailers — it looked like yet another excuse to showcase people in strange costumes demolishing a city with lots of explosions, and I’ve had enough of those already. Instead of complaining about bad reviews and trying to shut down reviewers, how about complaining about bad movies instead
Perhaps they like people in strange costumes demolishing cities, and maybe complex character interactions just aren’t their bag.
> You know, there’s nothing wrong with lobbying for entertainment you like. It’s just that these guys consistently lobby for the wrong things, things that would actually make their games and movies worse.
.. for you?
I mean, I completely agree with your general point, but you do have an “us and them” mindset some times, and it doesn’t give you much room for humility.