Presence

Is everything ok? Haven't heard anything since the feed crashed.

Test drive

Why would you boast about that? Do you have a personal reason you hate that store and the customers? If you have that much general contempt for other humans, fine, but we're other humans too...

I'd like it if the videos mentioned dates concretely. For example: "If you're watching this after February 2016", "The 2016 Halloween video will be up soon!" If not that, I'd like dates that clearly indicate they're relative to the video release "If you're watching this three months after this video goes up." I'd prefer for them NOT to use the format "If you're watching this in March.", or "I'll follow this up in December." I dunno, maybe I'm being silly since they do have publish dates in youtube. I just feel like when my brain tries to parse ambiguous dates it disrupts the narrative. Maybe other people would be bothered more by hearing the year mentioned.

Seemed healthy to me. It looked like one dude who had a question and a consensus was formed in response. Happy to move on though. One thing I wondered is why Ross didn't make a supplementary video that just focused on the issue. Not that the Game Dungeon was hurt by including the EA material, it's just less....digestible. Or is that already in the pipes, and this got pushed out first due to the severe time sensitivity?

Avoiding some groups as a whole may or may not be fair, but it is probably a good political move. First off, EA is the major buyer of gaming "journalists". It might make them dig their heels in if this became a gate cause. Second, that groups involvement could also attract huge numbers of feminists, with similar bad results. I believe the "neckbeards go home" comment was in specific regards to harassers. That type is a big reason to emphasize that EA's employees be contacted in a business context only. Doxing and harassment are completely unacceptable. This is a sentiment I wholeheartedly support. Passionate gamers who understand moderation are welcome. Harassers are welcome to go drink bleach. This campaign is fundamentally a form of advertising. The impression needs to be one of offering good public image in exchange for EA and others improving publisher culture.

Naming things is hard. "Sunset Letters"...too gothy. "Project Chainmail" Too generic been done. "Accursed Sunset"...hmm. "Project Chainmale" probably already a porno.

You should have a letter writing contest to encourage diversity in the form letters. And by you I mean Danielsan. I know in retail at least that higher ups take a far greater interest in letters than in emails, so you're completely right about that. In my company if someone writes a letter, the general manager is expected to personally contact the customer and try to resolve the issue. You know one company that's made arrangements for player servers is Turbine with Asheron's Call. Pity the game's a bit too dated for that to matter much, but I appreciate the effort a lot. Man, I still need to make my Asheron's Call story.

There's absolutely no reason to be critical of someone's life situation here. Especially when you can be critical of their "I want it now." mentality instead. In the 90's, a three year old game would tend to be far worse technically and often gameplay wise. That isn't true anymore. It's not just smart to wait, you don't even have to be bored or play inferior games while doing it. I suspect some piracy apologists conflate piracy not causing a 1:1 sale loss for an entire industry with piracy not causing a 1:1 sale loss for individual developers. Sadly it's impossible to get trustworthy numbers on this. I'd love to know what the breakdown of "Robin hoods" who pirate AAA games and then spend the money on indie games is vs 13 year olds who pirate everything vs """legitimate""" "demo" pirates vs "Tea" pirates who only target games they think have unfair dlc/pricing/region locks.

I really liked the boppin' footage. Go right ahead and keep using footage from game dungeon videos.

Call ins are tough. I've listened to the old kingdom of loathing radio shows back when they'd have players call in. It was usually unpleasant to listen to. There'd be difficulties connecting, "Can you hear me" scenarios, people would call in to ask incredibly specific questions that took a minute to explain, people would have incredibly low quality equipment ie laptop mic in a noisy room. I think if you were to make it work you'd sort of need to treat them like "mini guests", using a prearranged discussion topic that has broad interest. I recommend you get a smartphone. You're in Europe so it's not like you're sticking it to Verizon or anything by not having one, and there's nothing wrong with a used galaxy note 3 or whatever. Beyond giving you a 'good enough' gps, camera, video camera, alarm clock, mp3 player, mini tablet, barcode scanner, accelerometer, wireless screencaster, stopwatch, programmable infrared remote, flashlight, calculator, ereader, notepad, and something to do in line, it can provide backup internet access via tethering/hotspot. Just park it in away mode if you don't like being on call all the time. When it comes to a physical dos box, there's actually two modern hardware advances that can take some of the pain out. First off, there's readily available ssds for them, which were made for industrial machines. I've tried one and I can confirm they work. Second, there's usb-floppy emulators that can turn a usb drive into multiple floppies and internally convert between fat16 for the computer and fat32 on the usb drive. Fat 32 will be supported for at least the foreseeable future since it's the standard on usb drives. That'd let you move data between the dos machine and a newer machine without having to work with true floppies. At least in theory, I have yet to try one out. What I HAVEN'T found a good solution for is getting a modern (comfortable) keyboard and mouse to work. Old 100mhz motherboards often didn't even have ps/2 ports. Din5 and serial aren't fun.

I think he made it. You can buy transfer paper for printers and make your own tshirts.

I'll accept that in the spirit you intended, but my dad was in fact a politician.

I was referring to people not corporations. Ross has never been hostile to an actual person. I'm not mentioning this in an attempt to be critical, but there was both that politician from the Arcade America dungeon and the guy who flubbed The Doom That Came To Atlantic City in his newer fundraiser. I like Ross and I think neither of those examples crossed any lines. It's also true that both figures received tons of money from the public and then failed that trust spectacularly, so again they're fair topics for discussion and made the videos more interesting. But it wouldn't be accurate to say he's never told the story of someone's train wreck for the entertainment value.

Just what exactly were you expecting from Ross? I honestly don't understand where you're coming from. Ross has never been hostile to anyone in his in any of his videos ever. Ross is one of the nicest people I can think of that I watch on a regular basis. I wasn't trying to be nasty or imply I expected him to be nasty. Maybe you feel like I had the tone of "Gee, I'm glad Ross didn't kick that kitten in that video." like I expect him to kick kittens, but it wasn't the intent. Reitz is a very...colorful history, and Ross has talked about public figures as entertainment in and of themselves. I had a mild concern, and it didn't come true, and I was glad. Again, I wasn't trying to be nasty or imply I expected him to be nasty.

Since I almost exclusively play bundled indie games and read self published works, I wouldn't care much if people stopped making standard commercial media. I support most artists directly and this doesn't involve me on any emotional level. If you DO claim to care about that kind of thing, torrenting something brand new is participating in theft. That's how bit torrent works. I'll take your word for it you'll give them your money, and further that you aren't going to wait for a sale that you wouldn't have otherwise waited for. But you've still passed plenty of data along to genuine thieves. If I had a horse in this race I'd consider you culpable on some level. I don't though, so I only disagree with you semantically. If I'm going to judge you over anything it's your impatience. Download "you have to win the game" or read Homestuck or something. It's freaking awesome.

Sometimes you talk about the content creators, so I was just saying I was glad you didn't say anything mean spirited is all. Whether you were being decent or disinterested I think you were totally fine. I would love to see Tom in other videos, but don't prefer guests in the "standard" dungeons. It was a great thing to try, but you already have the format for those just the way I like it. You have a consistency of tone and enthusiasm that I love listening to without disruption. He and/or other guests could bring a lot to Ross Rants/something new/the dungeon follow up videos though.

The Fine Brothers discussion was interesting, I figured it was just a moral panic till you got into the details. I like the "Piracy is ok after a few years" approach, particularly since publishers look upon old games as an annoyance they'd prefer to abandon and never support. There's enough good content out there now that no one anywhere should be desperate for a game in its first year anyway. If you're doing release month piracy I think it's more likely than not you're just plain stealing. Regional locks excepted.

Reitz is an eccentric person who's lived an unusual life. I could list any single fact about her and it would be something that people have used as an excuse to harass her. Transsexual. Lives in a group marriage. Writes My Little Pony fanfics. Helped found the biggest gaming website on the internet, sold it for millions, lost said millions. I could go on for quite a bit longer, but I'm not making a litany here. I got interested a while back because I'm always looking for unusual webcomics, preferably ones that aren't written by college students who'll drop everything the day they graduate. I'll never understand why people hate weird. I understand hate, but why hate weird?

The wikipedia page is fairly accurate. Beyond that, you are going to have a hard time finding a neutral opinion. One could write a long article about her treatment on the internet. People have in fact taken the time to write long articles that unironically claim she's an ungrateful race-traitor who makes death threats to all who don't like her work. If I wanted to explain why her claims of being constantly and severely harassed are all provable or credible, I'd have about twenty pages of work cut out for me between the explanations and the citations. If you're just interested in her creative works, her website is very 90's, but fairly complete.

Reitz is probably one of the most consistently bullied people on the internet. It's been going on for more than a decade, and that's just what I've seen. She's gotten the works with ddos attacks, death threats, hacked accounts, and the endless trolling. There's some trash out there who literally has a script he's been running for years to downvote every single post she makes on a particular forum. It's this perfect storm of being a semi-famous figure, an author, having extremely unconventional views, and publicly talking about her depression and bitterness over how people treat her. Which is doubly sad even beyond the human aspect of it since she's got some really interesting stories to tell about the gaming industry, having been involved with it since the beginnings. Ross, thank you for not being a dick.

Me, I'd love it even with Quake-level graphics, it's just a totally different experience, but that could be a personality thing. You're absolutely right about Carter, I'd forgotten there was a niche market of "walkabout" games. Them I'd like to get into more deeply. I almost said that my only interest in VR would be for when I'm on the treadmill, but I figured that'd come across as trolling. Shooters in VR sound like a shaky idea to me. I get you're coming from, game looks good, scenery looks good, wouldn't it be nice to look around naturally? Then I think how fundamentally ugly the gameplay tends to be. I'm not talking about violence, I'm talking about the pacing of games published by douchebags for twelve year olds. Something with the pacing of Unreal might be alright.

I don't think I've seen even one first person 3d gameworld that is beautiful enough that I'd pay extra for deeper immersion.

Ross, we know you have a healthy respect for older games, but are there any antiquated pieces of technology you really like or still use? I'm thinking of anything ranging from using an alarm clock instead of your phone to film cameras to stuff with vacuum tubes in it.

That may be technically correct, but there are probably very good reasons why "No comment" or some flavor of such is so universal a response in ugly situations. Commenting makes you interesting, which keeps the debate going. It reveals you as caring about the subject, which automatically labels you as a soft target. There's a video on youtube called "Dont Talk to Police" which has a good viewpoint on the matter of keeping your mouth shut, and you can easily substitute "Social Justice Warriors" for police and the advice will stay surprisingly consistent for extremely similar reasons. In short: there's some conversations you can get in where you're guilty until proven guilty, and yes, there's a very important difference between the two.