Blog:Stupidity from the Planet Earth Ep. 07

Welcome to the seventh episode of Stupidity from the Planet Earth. This is where we take a look at various ridiculous events taking place in the video game industry and more.

First of all, apologies for the lack of updates, I’ve been caught up between work, home repairs and creating a Command & Conquer related wiki. But enough excuses, let’s get this rolling!

Cancel Culture Is Going Outta Control
I’m sure many of us here have heard of various works getting cancelled for “wrongthink” or “not having enough SocJus checkmarks”. But recently, we just got our worst case of cancel culture, a man literally cancelled OUT OF HIS PLANE OF EXISTENCE.

So, R.I.P Alec Holowka, may you find peace and prosperity, and meet better friends and families in your next life.

Seriously, I can’t help but feel bad for this guy, imagine being mentally unstable in the first place, then have some lowlife accuse you of all kinds of horrible things without even a single shred of solid evidence, then have the entire world turn on you and abandon you because they’re all too stupid and brainwashed by #BelieveWhaman to see through the lies of this serial… liar. For fuck’s sake, even his own sister ended up betraying him!

A particularly hideous rule of this vile world is that—it’s always easier to destroy things than create things. I mean, look at Zoë Quinn, has she ever done anything useful to human civilization? All she’d ever done is shoot some low quality porn, make something that barely even qualify as a game, a memoir that is more fiction that retelling a story, and a comic book that sucks even more than her “game”. And that’s when she’s not cheating on the boy she abused or ruining other people’s careers and game jams!

And of course, Zoë Quinn went on a rampage of denial on social media, trying everything she can to retail the easily seen through illusion that she’s always the victim. Calling those who are skeptical and ask questions “terrorists”. (Man, that’s something I hear a LOT from her clique.) Despite the fact that her credibility and reputation had been tarnished years ago when she cheated on her boyfriend, smeared anyone who dares to criticize her shoddy work as “sexist”, and ruined a perfectly nice game jam just for her own personal gain.

Quinn also tried desperately to rack up some victim points by claiming that she’s “suicidal” when she’s young. IMO, this might be true considering the fact that Zoë is most likely mental. But this doesn’t change the fact that most of the griefs in her life were brought down on her by herself, either by being an asshole to everyone else on the internet or on purposely being a Lolcow to attract attention out of desperation.

But do you know what’s worse? Even after deliberately causing the death of a likely innocent man, people are still trying to hire her! DC is now getting Quinn to write a Batman VS Superman spinoff titled Deathbringer (Oh, the juicy irony!).

“''In fact, there seems to be a perverse and tribal tendency here – the more toxic the person on the movement’s own side of the cause is, the harder they get defended, as a matter of principle. Despite countless accounts of Quinn’s dubious conduct and integrity – regardless of what happened in Winnipeg - each time she gets into a new pickle her supporters double down. Inconvenient facts are tossed away or aggressively countered.''”—Igor Ogorodnev

It’s somewhat depressing that we live in an era of “post-truth”, where facts matter less than feelings, where truth-seeking is considered heresy and blind, unquestioning faith is considered a virtue rather than a deadly, deadly sin.

Social Justice Hits Monopoly — by Grust
I know I was supposed to talk about the new scandal with Zoe Quinn's allegations that drove an innocent man to suicide as said in my top 9 ways I torture the administrators but I already ranted on the article itself but I saw a new thing for Stupidity on Planet Earth and that's the new Feminist Edition of Monopoly simply titled Ms. Monopoly.

While it's supposed to reflect on businesses started by great women in history, It's incredibly biased towards them while giving male characters a disadvantage. For instance while men collect $200 as they pass go, women characters get $240 and women characters get $1900 while male characters get only $1500, obviously a reflection of the pay gap myth. Also instead of buying hotels and real estate, you're just funding inventions and innovations made by women throughout history like Wi-Fi or Chocolate Chip Cookies.

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While I do respect these inventions and the women that invented them especially the chocolate chip cookies, this game will do nothing but shove feminist ideology down our throats and further proves that third wave feminism is not about equality with men and women but pushing men to the side. If anything, this is actually going to do more harm to women than any "misogynist" ever could but it's only going to get people pissed off. This is also proof that SJWs are pure anti-fun because they don't give a damn about being entertaining but rather shove their ideology down our throats at all times. Plus whenever I get back to board gaming I want me and my opponent to be even and equal in terms of gaming, I don't want one side to have an advantage over the other.

This game was probably made in response to Hasbro's Millenial Edition of Monopoly which was made with good humor but sent a huge backlash over social media, forcing Hasbro to do damage control. Unfortunately they'll likely realize too late that backlash on Twitter or Facebook shouldn't really mean anything.

I know there are a ton of Monopoly parodies like Star Wars or the Simpsons, but I honestly see this helping to damage this classic board game. If you're a huge fan of Monopoly and a collector of these parodies, I won't stop you from getting this game, but personally I hope for a nice spot on Awesome Games' "Get Woke, Go Broke" category. Plus I hope you'll understand that by buying this game, you'd be encouraging companies to make junk like this.

Back to you WENth100.

WENth100—''Oh mon dieu, this reminds me of old RTS games! But not in a good way.''

A Rooster Has No Teeth
Now, for anime fans who have been following the whole Vic Mignogna incident, it seems that Rooster Teeth has been going down hill ever since they sided with #KickVic and terminated his contract. It was as if RT is a leaky keg and Vic is the flex tape holding it together.

Overall, recent years have not been kind to RT, first is the alienation of many anime fans via the firing of Vic Mignogna, then the mass Glassdoor complaints filed by disgruntled employees who got sick of the crunch time, then there’s their new game Vicious Circle which literally became an uninhabitable ghost town within less than a week, and worst YET: a massive layoff that removed more than 13% of their staff.

A frequently overlooked fact is that Rooster Teeth is not an indie group which it appears to be. It’s actually owned by larger corporations, which in this case Rooster Teeth is a subsidiary of Otter Media, which is itself a subsidiary of WarnerMedia Entertainment, a division of AT&T's WarnerMedia.

Nowadays, going corporate in the entertainment industry is considered a bad thing by the fans. Not just because of the political nonsense, but also because of executive meddling and corporate shenanigans. If you’re not getting the revenue you promised share holders, or not doing as great as you were the previous year, expect to have investors breath down your necks and give you a hell of a time.

Now, the laying off of your employees is only the beginning of a vicious cycle. Former Nintendo global president Satoru Iwata will rather cut down his own salary than lay his men off, for he realized that the top of a tower is the lightest and will not cause the entire structure to fall over.

“If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”—Satoru Iwata, during the period when Nintendo is getting hit by poor sales of the Wii U.

What Rooster Teeth had done not only damaged company morale and, but also undermined their already smeared reputation the quality of their products even further. While some say that RT is making all these cut offs is because their structure is too bloated, however, I’m hearing rumors that even high level staff like the art director is getting laid off.

The studio that have brought us RWBY is defiantly is defiantly wandering astray, with the deviation from ol’ Monty’s vision of the show, the push for pro-SocJus propaganda, the firing of Vic and the insulting of their fans. While not all hopes for recovery is lost, but any hope remaining is looking dimmer than ever.

Blunderlands 3
So… Borderlands 3 is finally out, loaded with guns, political correctness, bugs and technical issues.

One of the reasons I avoided Borderlands 3 at launch is not because of the Epic Store shenanigans, nor Dandy Bitchford’s stream of idiocy, nor the gendering issues of a robot. It’s actually a general unpolished trend that has plagued the series since the very first game.

Many of you may not know this, but the ultra rare “Pearlescent” (actually colored cyan) rarity that has appeared in the first and second game is actually a bug turned feature. Before The Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC was released for Borderlands, some legendary weapons are glitched to be generated at a higher rarity level than was allowed, placing them above normal legendary (orange and dark orange) items. But since the game engine cannot generate a rarity color to assign to these weapons, they simply left them default white. Thus the name “pearlescent rarity”.

Borderlands 2 was also launched with numerous irritating bugs and glitches, such as the game randomly crashing, vehicle skins randomly disappearing from your collections etc. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel feels outright incomplete, with weapons that don’t drop, bosses than cannot be farmed and the inability to complete the story in True Vault Hunter Mode.

But even without the bugs and glitches, there are the balancing issues. With supposedly superior pearlescent weapons being lousier than purple rarity weapons, special effects that can be glitched and exploited like insane, and assault rifles being weaker than pistols. The Unofficial Community Patch exists for the reason that Gearbox spent more time nerfing the gear players loved than buffing the underpowered gear players loved to hate.

Now, about Borderlands 3, the launch is pretty rough. The co-op game mode is laggy and hard to stream thanks to the damn DRM clogging up the player’s network. The game also refuses to load for PC players with DirectX 12 and forcing players to tinker with the game files just to make it work (Hell, not being optimized for DX12 in 2016 is one thing but in 2019 that's unacceptable). There are also input delay problems and framerate issues with stuttering even on PS4 Pro’s Performance mode (which is locked to an awful 30 fps while the resolution mode at a dreadful sub 25 fps). Overall, the game has a very rushed/incomplete feel to it, with some gamers outright accusing it of being a beta test version.

Needless to say, people were disappointed with how the game performed and flocked to Borderlands 2’s Steam page to vent out their fury (I don’t think I need to remind you all what Epic Store should have but doesn’t have). By the time I checked, the metacritic score is at only 5.2, which is awfully low for a game like this. But what I find interesting, is the very high critic score of 85, with 21 positive reviews and just 1 mixed, and no negative review in sight. Also, according to YoungYea, he was denied of a review copy before launch due to “security reasons”, and according to VG24/7, only US reviewers got the codes to unlock the review copies.

Now I know what we’re all thinking…

Moral of this story—DON’T FXXXING PRE-ORDER GAMES!

Conclusion
Anyway, this concludes our 7th episode of Stupidity from Planet Earth. More insanity will be coming soon! I hope you've held on to yours! Leave your opinions in the comment section and tell me if any improvement is needed! If anyone of you wants to appear as a special guest, please feel free to PM me.

