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Dawgstar posted:I often think of the line Jim said on The Office "This is the smallest amount of power I've ever seen go to someone's head." There are stories that he has pulled "Do you know who I am" at GenCon to get games. Don't know if that's true, but I've heard it in more than one place, though I can't quite remember where I heard before this controversy broke. Comstar posted:Is 45k subscribers really big enough these days to extort game devs? Apparently not because they decided to go public with it. (fake edit: beaten to this joke, wakka wakka) I've been seeing the discussions on BGG. I know we're supposed to assume stupidity instead of malice, but man some of these people are waaaay too willing to imagine this as an innocent mistake. First off, I have trouble even imagining this as non-extortion. "We already filmed a negative review (which is a sunk cost for us) but if you pay us we can ditch that and refilm it." is the way I understand it. That sounds like, "We have the photos which will be put online in 72 hours unless..." etc. I cannot shed enough premises off that statement to make it make sense and make it non-extortion; saying you are going to release something that already exists unless xyz is gross, and simply not releasing it for cash is gross. The better way to do it would have been: let's say you film it and internally say, "Man, this is more negative than I want to be. Well, if we can get them to pay for sponcon, we then can cover the cost of the original videos and just never upload those." You don't tell them what you're going to do otherwise. That would be a more normal level of shady in sponcon, as opposed to this. But bringing the existing negative videos up is just a huge rubicon to cross. Even if by some confluence of misunderstandings they did not mean this as extortion and just as a way to show their kickstarter project videos, the fact that they were doing this stupid, stupid, stupid thing for their own personal profit does not make it much better. "We're really stupid, want money and don't think of the implications of what we say" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement for someone who wants them to do sponcon. Also, in a pure sociopathic machiavellian sense, doing it this way puts the ball in the publisher's court. You give them the leverage if they are willing to go public. Good on them for not taking it and publishing the receipts. Quack guy has literally nothing to hold over them now and even if everyone forgives and forgets the publisher isn't hurt at all.
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May 22, 2023 11:23
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Dawgstar posted:Anybody else following the Quackalope thing? TL;DR prominent YouTube board game person accused of trying to extort money in exchange for a positive review. He's been poo poo for a long time. Just the worst board game channel with a reasonable following out there. You'd think two grown men who played a game for 40-50 hours would bother to learn the rules, but that's apparently a bridge too far.
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May 22, 2023 13:06
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dwarf74 posted:There's a good amount of discussion over in the board game thread, yeah. Apparently a friend told me Quackalope's thing is wanting to be a game designer (but bad at it) and have a channel empire (but not enough people care) which has led to them resorting to... this.
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May 22, 2023 13:35
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Never been impressed with any of his coverage, no analysis or explanation of the game, just a stream of consciousness ramble and insincere hype. It’s fairly clearly clumsy extortion, Isaac Childres basically commented “Good to see this is finally out there” so he has form, a huge number of his videos are sponsored streams backing that up. He’ll have unhealthily parasocialised fans defending him, but thats the market today. I’m a cynic so I’m predicting a shame shave, and a solemn fireside apology, talking about the stress he was under with the upcoming marriage with his Rabbi sitting beside him nodding along and his fiancé/wife weeping in the background.
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May 22, 2023 14:05
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Jimbozig posted:I disagree. At least in games where they give you enough choices. The variety means you don't want to over-invest in any one tactic because eventually you'll run into something that counters it. So suppose you go for a damage-over-time focused build - you also want to have at least a couple of good powers that don't just do DOT. Then there's a flying enemy so you spend the whole combat hucking rocks at it for mark. You can have a lot of choices but still get guided into a gimmick. If this were a video game that would be... well, still bad design, but whatcha gonna do. But in RPGs this puts the GM in the position of either making sure to include someone the melee only fighter can effectively target, reinforcing the effectiveness of overspecialising, or to not, which is generally agreed to be a dick move.
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May 22, 2023 14:36
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Magnetic North posted:Also, in a pure sociopathic machiavellian sense, doing it this way puts the ball in the publisher's court. You give them the leverage if they are willing to go public. Good on them for not taking it and publishing the receipts. Quack guy has literally nothing to hold over them now and even if everyone forgives and forgets the publisher isn't hurt at all. I have to ask how that's sociopathic and not just, er, thinking a few steps ahead about consequences. Like "you definitely shouldn't put extortion attempts in writing when you have no clout to speak of" is hardly the writing of a diabolical mastermind. That does sound like advice Machiavelli would give though
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May 22, 2023 15:41
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I would be more tolerant of the "player takes special anti-X power; how often do you pit them against X?" dynamic if more games actually gave you rules for it instead of just leaving it as a judgment call. Fragged Empire has a mechanic where certain player-facing abilities come with a "the GM may add extra bodies to combat encounters" rider, and while FE still hedges with "may" and the dev is on record saying he doesn't always do it and usually only applies the rider in big climactic showdowns, it's still a decent start. Combine that with typing ("Undead hate Brok Undeadbane as much as he hates them, so in every Y encounters there should be Z points worth of undead enemies to reflect them coming after him any chance they get) and it'd be much easier to assign those abilities a coherent value instead of it being 0-100 based entirely on the GM's whim.
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May 22, 2023 15:47
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I was at the IV games booth at Origins a few years ago looking at a demo of Mythic Mischief and Quackalope was there being a dickhead any time someone had a question for one of the designers. He’s a jackass but he’s a great testament to how far a good thumbnail can take your channel.
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May 22, 2023 16:47
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Comstar posted:Is 45k subscribers really big enough these days to extort game devs? For the record, it was 48.3k before this whole thing went public (according to the BGG thread). Not that 48.3k is enough bigger for the purpose of extortion, but it's a good sign that people are seeing this for what it is and hitting the rear end in a top hat where it kind of hurts (his Patreon would be where it really hurts, and I don't have the numbers there).
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May 22, 2023 16:56
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Zurai posted:For the record, it was 48.3k before this whole thing went public (according to the BGG thread). Not that 48.3k is enough bigger for the purpose of extortion, but it's a good sign that people are seeing this for what it is and hitting the rear end in a top hat where it kind of hurts (his Patreon would be where it really hurts, and I don't have the numbers there). So you can actually check that through Graphtreon here. At the time of this posting, it looks like  So it's definitely started to hit, but I'm looking at the numbers since last June, and I'm starting to wonder if he started getting desperate to stop his financial decline at the time this all happened.
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May 22, 2023 17:16
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I’m interested in seeing what BoardGameCo says since they’re so tied in together and their wives are best friends. I think this is going to get a lot messier in the next couple weeks.
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May 22, 2023 17:22
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sportsgenius86 posted:I’m interested in seeing what BoardGameCo says since they’re so tied in together and their wives are best friends. I think this is going to get a lot messier in the next couple weeks. Already put out a video crying about losing  100 subscribers To his credit, he apparently quit working with Quackalope last year because of "different approaches to the industry". They're both entirely paid shills, but Boardgameco's gimmick seems to be the "I'm open about how much of a shill I am so that makes it better and my day job being directly tied to the financial success of the games i cover is not a conflict of interest". His online boardgame shop/trade in business also sucked rear end and he would scam people all the time Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 17:37 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 17:33
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Bottom Liner posted:Already put out a video crying about losing I mean he wasnt crying and he said it was fine if you unsubbed. He just came on to say that he wasnt working with him, hadnt in awhile, etc. It's a super reasonable video, its not like he defended Quackalope's actions. And uh, there are conflicts of interest all over the industry, that's basically standard practice and almost always way more egregious in other places. Like in the warhammer sphere, a huge chunk of the youtubers will just gargle Kevin Roundtree's testicle nectar for a box of toy soldiers. What do you want, him to slit his wrists on camera while wailing about how much of a monster he is? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 22, 2023 19:09
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:What do you want, him to slit his wrists on camera while wailing about how much of a monster he is? There's jumping to conclusions to defend a dumb nobody on YouTube then there's whatever the gently caress this weird poo poo is
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May 22, 2023 19:19
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Gao posted:So you can actually check that through Graphtreon here. At the time of this posting, it looks like Interesting. The big drop in the yellow line is just the monthly end-of-month drop, which literally every Patreon account that uses monthly billing gets (it's partially billing issues and partially an artifact of the way Patreon used to do monthly billing). The green line is pledge per Patron, which dropped pretty significantly from Friday, while at the same time his actual number of Patrons rose slightly. That implies that either A) people are reducing their pledges rather than dropping them entirely, or B) more people are signing up than dropping, but at lower pledge levels than the ones who left (Or some combination thereof, of course). Either way, it's good to see he's lost a good quarter of his Patreon income over the last month, largely as a result of this.
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May 22, 2023 19:22
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Bottom Liner posted:There's jumping to conclusions to defend a dumb nobody on YouTube then there's whatever the gently caress this weird poo poo is So answer the question; what exactly do you want from BoardGameCo? You wrote a paragraph whining about him, so you must care about the dumb nobody, so you must have an action plan for him to earn back your forgiveness right?
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May 22, 2023 19:25
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:So answer the question; what exactly do you want from BoardGameCo? You wrote a paragraph whining about him, so you must care about the dumb nobody, so you must have an action plan for him to earn back your forgiveness right? given that BL's criticism of him is that he's a paid shill he would probably want him to not be a paid shill. also, "a paragraph"? It was like 20 words -- you put more effort into whatever the gently caress this is. are you BoardGameCo? You have to tell us if you're BoardGameCo
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May 22, 2023 19:38
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:so you must have an action plan for him to earn back your forgiveness right? What? Being upset with someone in no way requires you to have an “action plan” for them in order to be forgiven. That’s crazy.
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May 22, 2023 19:46
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I am BoardGameCo
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May 22, 2023 19:47
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Critical Support for Comrade BoardGameCo
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May 22, 2023 20:05
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If we want weird support for something that sucks, we could just got to BGG where people are diligently picking over their words of the publisher to find any tiny amount of daylight to make this more acceptable on the part of Quack guy. I can honestly understand the desire to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but the issue is that you can fall right into a pre-set trap of plausible deniability. I'm really extremely uninterested in what he has to say at this point unless it is a real apology. FWIW, it doesn't seem to have hurt them since they have cleared 2 mil, so it was a great choice of project to try and squeeze a measly 7K out of.  Even if we are excessively charitable and assume complete innocence on his part, I try to imagine how I would react in situations like this. If I made an innocent business correspondence with another party who misunderstood it as extortion to the point that they were indignant enough to air it out in public, I would be falling all over myself to unreservedly apologize to anyone that would listen. You don't want to be "the blackmail guy." Unrelated but wtf: Aeon Trespass: Odyssey is ranked 4.75 weight on BGG?? That's as complicated as The Campaign for North Africa aka the "Italians Need Extra Water For Pasta" meme game.
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May 22, 2023 21:55
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Magnetic North posted:If we want weird support for something that sucks, we could just got to BGG where people are diligently picking over their words of the publisher to find any tiny amount of daylight to make this more acceptable on the part of Quack guy. I can honestly understand the desire to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but the issue is that you can fall right into a pre-set trap of plausible deniability. I'm really extremely uninterested in what he has to say at this point unless it is a real apology. FWIW, it doesn't seem to have hurt them since they have cleared 2 mil, so it was a great choice of project to try and squeeze a measly 7K out of. I've got a review in the Kickstarter thread but its one of the heaviest boardgames I've ever played. Not as much from tracking minutiae, as much as you need to carefully follow the steps for action resolution and keep in mind anything you need to trigger. For example a boss might move to your character and attack, after resolving the attack, there is a reaction window you can do stuff in, so you need to remember "Ok, after his attack, but before his Knockdown, I'm going to use this reaction to move one square to prevent him knocking me down" All the fights however escalate in complexity and lethality and you continually need to improve your gear and play to keep up. Get lazy or careless in a later fight and your titan will often just get straight up killed in one attack. The first boss is all about knockbacks, initially they are small irritations, then as he levels he starts knocking you back so far you can't get back to him with your movement the next turn, then he is knocking you across the board, then if he knocks you to a board edge, your titan dies. He's the entry level boss, every one after that is more complex in some way. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=1&threadid=3777631&pagenumber=552&perpage=40#post530082107
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May 22, 2023 23:17
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HidaO-Win posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=1&threadid=3777631&pagenumber=552&perpage=40#post530082107 Thank you for sharing that. It sounds like an appealing 'lifestyle' massive campaign game. The inclusion of tiles as opposed to some of the other generic battle mats plus terrain I've seen in these games is something I don't recall seeing in the other follow-ons from the popular entries from several years ago. I say all that but I will never ever play these games unless I find a way to retire tomorrow or something.
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May 23, 2023 10:26
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Tales of the Valiant kickstarter is up. Cue 4 pages of discussion about this being a heartbreaker. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/tales-of-the-valiant-rpg-launching-black-flag-roleplaying
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May 23, 2023 15:29
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The heartbreaker is live on KS. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/tales-of-the-valiant-rpg-launching-black-flag-roleplaying Edit: ninja'd Also, my description is tongue in cheek.
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May 23, 2023 15:30
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And already 150% funded.
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May 23, 2023 15:44
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CitizenKeen posted:And already 150% funded. 400%. Breaks your heart.
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May 23, 2023 22:30
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Lamuella posted:Tales of the Valiant kickstarter is up. Cue 4 pages of discussion about this being a heartbreaker.  This is what they're cheering on; paying money for someone's 5e houserules.
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May 23, 2023 22:56
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And here we go.
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May 23, 2023 22:59
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Level Up at least tried giving martials more to do and threw in a warlord. I don't know why I'm supposed to care about this aside from it having a different company than WotC behind it. Heck, in the playtests, they seemed to be leaning into nerfing martials, so unless they reworked that drastically, they're just offering me a worse 5e.
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May 23, 2023 23:11
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Gao posted:I don't know why I'm supposed to care about this aside from it having a different company than WotC behind it. You are absolutely welcome to not care about it at all, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
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May 23, 2023 23:17
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It is not actually necessary to post about each thing you don't care about, presumably in each thread in which things you don't care about are mentioned. That seems like it'd be a lot of work.
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May 23, 2023 23:19
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I hope Kobold Press finds success with their generic D&D system that is probably not as good as some other generic D&D systems but surely better than some others. I am also curious about the longevity of games like this and if the D&D space has room for more than one "Paizo"? In the sense of D&D derivatives that build enough of a following that they're able to spin into their own recognizable brand long-term. Paizo certainly had a leg up there, being a company with a lot of WotC and TSR alums, having the D&D bonfides with the rules they were adapting, and being able to work a distinctive setting out of their game that could be iterated on. There were a lot of hyper-specific circumstances that gave them sustainable momentum for a long time.
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May 23, 2023 23:29
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Nuns with Guns posted:I hope Kobold Press finds success with their generic D&D system that is probably not as good as some other generic D&D systems but surely better than some others.
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May 23, 2023 23:31
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I just want them to stop being coy about which license they’re using! Why won’t people satisfy my irrelevant niche obsession?
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May 23, 2023 23:38
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Nuns with Guns posted:I hope Kobold Press finds success with their generic D&D system that is probably not as good as some other generic D&D systems but surely better than some others. In fairness Kobold Press was founded by Wolfgang Bauer who had been working on TSR and WOTC projects since 1991. They also wrote the first two published modules for d&d fifth edition (hoard of the dragon queen and rise of Tiamat) so they aren't exactly without bonafides. But I do think you're right that they are unlikely to produce something that is ultimately more than Continuity 5e.
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May 23, 2023 23:42
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Thanlis posted:I just want them to stop being coy about which license they’re using! Why won’t people satisfy my irrelevant niche obsession? Unless I'm reading it wrong they've said they're using the Open Roleplaying Content license.
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May 23, 2023 23:45
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There are hundreds of OSR D&D heartbreakers and a lot of them do fine commercially. IMO, to succeed as a new system these days you need three things a) some kind of a cool hook or identity to grab a potential player's attention b) the actual system has to be not too poo poo and c) there has to be some enticing published material that is statted up for this system specifically, so that if someone hears about the cool new OSR module or long-form campaign, they decide to buy the rulebook to run it.
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May 23, 2023 23:46
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OK boys looks like your standard thematic timeloop. By my count it's a 15 year cycle and it looks like we hit reset sometime last year, so we've got 14 years to find the trigger factor before we lose all progress to the wipe. Now I've heard some scuttlebutt claiming the actual reset was 2014 but if you look at the next slide we... I'm terribly sorry I appear to have accidentally included a page from my own pet project, it's an innovative yet portable stress and madness system that... can... be... no oh god no
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May 24, 2023 00:00
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Lamuella posted:Unless I'm reading it wrong they've said they're using the Open Roleplaying Content license. All of the verbiage on Kickstarter just says Creative Commons, which is what the 5e SRD is under now.
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May 24, 2023 00:30
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