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Well, the end of the comic was going to be finding a way to break the cycle of war on Erfworld. They've touched on it quite a few times, the Hippies' original prophecy for Parson, discussions about how the economy mechanics force sides into conflict, even that (for once) worthwhile aside where we saw the POV of some Archon and her experiments with getting eggs out of chickens. I'm interested in that story, but it's just gotten lost at this point.
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Oct 11, 2018 18:26
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:I think things had been kind of going off the rails for a while but the failure of the scroll to send him home was a huge red flag for me. It’s just bad storytelling: when you set up a bomb and spend so much time and effort explaining why it’s so dangerous and why it must be thwarted, then you detonate it and immediately go “lol nope didn’t matter,” it completely undermines your ability to tell a story with proper stakes. I generally agree with you, but I thought the scroll thing was perfectly fine. It was never set up as a bomb, it was set up as, well, a way to send Parson back to the real world. And I don't think anyone reading the comic thought that he'd ever really leave Erfworld til the end of the story, unless it was going to be a quick dip in the real world as an obstacle until he found a way to get back. I would have been perfectly satisfied even if it hadn't been a magic rear end-pull -- I originally thought it was because the scroll was sending Parson "home", and Parson had started to think of Gobwin Knob as his true home.
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Oct 13, 2018 21:16
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Oh, hey, look at that. All the stuff about heirs and sides disbanding gets invalidated by some magic that we've never heard about.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:17
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You know what would have been a better idea? Just not going into all this detail about how heirs were important and expensive and took forever to pop and how a side would disappear without one, and then you just give the rulership to Skye as Caesar dies without needing another unpredictable magical rear end-pull.
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Oct 20, 2018 05:14
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isndl posted:The majority of main characters end up in jail because even Rob realizes the magic spam is getting bullshit so he has to take magic off the table. Except then they can't do anything so they get some string magic and source-power and then we're right back in bullshit territory again. And string magic and source power ends up being even more ridiculous than what we've seen so far, and it's being done by a bunch of new side characters that we don't really care about that much. Main Paineframe posted:The thing is that heirs have been a big important plot point more than once. For example, it's the reason why Stanley is never allowed to go and help out in Parson's big battles. Aside from Charlie, just about every side that's gotten significant focus has had to deal with the limitations and requirements around heirs and ruler deaths...until now, at least! Yeah, I guess the new cheat for getting around the heir business is supposed to be a huge deal, but holy poo poo does it not even feel like it matters at this point. If it did, then there had to be a much, much less complicated and rule-breaking way to get to this point, if it was supposed to stand out. I'm with the OotS forums, gently caress this drat comic already. I think I'm already in the hate-watch category, which really sucks, because a couple years ago this was a really interesting and fun-to-read story. If he had gone from Portal Park to this standoff with TV and Charlie in a quarter of the time with a quarter of the rule-breaking, he could have had a reasonable climax here with the towers becoming sentient and Caesar's suicide and then a display of the towers' enormous powers. It just went way off the rails at some point.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:49
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Rand Brittain posted:If people are just going to hate-watch, I politely request that they make their own thread. Yeah, this seems unnecessarily hand-wringy. People can voice their dissatisfaction with a piece of media without making a whole new thread. Sorry if you'll have to scroll past negative posts once in a while.
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Oct 24, 2018 19:59
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Eh, all it really means to me is that I've been pissed off at where the comic has been going for a while but I refuse to stop reading because I thought it was really good once upon a time and I hope it gets back there again. It's funny to read back through the thread, because opinions started to take a steady downturn around the aftermath of the Portal Park battle, and hell, I defended it. I kept saying that yes, I thought it was dragging on a little bit, but it's just because it's a slow-update web comic, and once you're able to read it all straight through without waiting, it'll just be a quick interlude. And then the "interlude" just kept going and going.  I really hope Balder takes a step back and resets his focus with this upcoming break.
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Oct 25, 2018 14:27
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Cat Mattress posted:Homestuck is a good comparison because, there too, the author has spent a lot of time destroying the readers' investment in the characters by adding an exponential number of new side-characters that hog the spotlight while intentionally wrecking the plot repeatedly. I've never read Homestuck, but that seems like a pretty good description. And that's what I mean about focus. For the next book, he's gotta figure out which characters are most important to the plot and keep the perspective on them, even rewriting scenes to give them more agency if necessary. If the climax of this book was supposed to be the Towers becoming immensely powerful and rulebreaking, then he needs to define Erfworld's new "normal" and stop himself from breaking that normal every few comics. I mean, it's fine to have plot twists and clever ways of breaking rules, but he has to be able to moderate how many of them are thrown out there. If it's not an important inflection point for the plot, then it probably shouldn't happen. Otherwise it just ends up making the plot seem unstructured.
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Oct 25, 2018 15:31
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Hob_Gadling posted:I think breaking everything to the point that nothing can be trusted upon is an interesting development. Everything sort of leads to it, backing out now seems like a bad idea. If the original Erfworld was a hex-based strategy game with a ton of rules and restrictions, this new game starts to resemble Diplomacy quite a bit. Very few things to actually restrict you, it's all in how you deal with players. I'm down with that. It's an interesting development in theory, but as we've just seen, it doesn't actually play that well on the page the way he's been doing it. It's been Calvinball for the last year of updates. If "we broke everything and now nothing can be trusted" is the new normal, then he needs to narrow down his focus on the characters that need to react to it, and establish some logic in the way everything is broken that isn't thrown out five pages later. If the upshot is now that juice is free, then the things that happen next need to be essentially predictable (or at least logical) based on what would happen if these people had free juice. Not that juice is free and that was the only thing that was keeping Hat Magicians under control, and now there's a giant hat that sings people to sleep, but that doesn't matter because this Hat Magician we've never met is friends with Charlie and so he destroys the hat with Carnymancy spells we've never heard of but it rebounds on all the Hat Magicians everywhere because of a contract that he signed, and now all the hats are singing, and there's a secret message in the song that they're singing, and this is all just a tangent to what's happening with Gobwin Knob because it's on the other side of the game board.
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Oct 25, 2018 16:59
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Basically we need to start a petition to pull Balder off this comic and replace him with Brandon Sanderson.
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Nov 17, 2018 23:22
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Ugh, I feel bad but I kept thinking that half these pitfalls could have been avoided. Maybe look up how much health insurance costs in Maryland before you move there. Maybe check out the costs of shipping all your product before you settle on an out-of-the-way warehouse. Maybe you can just run ads from a reputable network that doesn't hijack your phone? I dunno. (I was gonna add "maybe don't count on paying a couple months of cancer treatment out of pocket till the health insurance kicks in", but that's maybe getting too personal. But honestly, that seems like an outrageously expensive decision.) I was also surprised to find out he was fifty, I always assumed he was in his thirties.
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Dec 1, 2018 01:07
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ninjewtsu posted:yeah is there actually a mythical ad provider who doesn't serve lovely ads? it seems pretty endemic to every site with ads that i've ever seen Is that true? I don't do a ton of actual Chrome browsing on my phone, but I don't usually have invasive ads unless I'm going to some weirdo site (or dailymotion, for some reason.) I guess my ad-blocker prevents me from noticing this stuff on PC?
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Dec 1, 2018 05:01
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The DM guide's portion on magic will be a single sentence that reads "Just let them do whatever as long as they talk about strings or some random gibberish"
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Dec 2, 2018 18:15
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ninjewtsu posted:yeah, theoretically there's no dying of old age, but realistically that's extremely rare, even for rulers. what's the actual life expectancy of your average erfworld denizen? Is that a worthwhile question when you're talking about a "species" that doesn't age? The average life expectancy basically means how long till you die in combat, which is entirely dependent on other factors. Is it useful to average up all the people who get thrown into the meatgrinder their first battle with all the people who pull guard duty for years and years?
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Dec 8, 2018 17:23
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Hah, I don't really watch anime, so I wasn't aware there was a whole genre of shows revolving around getting dropped into a videogame world. It still feels like a relatively novel idea to me. 
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Apr 6, 2019 19:16
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SardonicTyrant posted:I keep attempting to read book 2, but then I go "oh my gawd I don't want to read" I thought Book 2 was pretty solid too, honestly, and once I got over the idea of "I'm reading a webcomic!" I actually came to prefer the heavy text updates for all the worldbuilding and plot. If I remember correctly, it didn't start to fall apart until halfway through Book 3 when the plot stopped moving and Rob decided we needed to see things from every other character's point of view.
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Jul 15, 2019 14:15
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PMush Perfect posted:You know, normally you usually don't actually want a bad webcomic to end because then there's no more material left to hate-read. I don't really want it to die, I'd rather Rob somehow finds the thread again. I really, really liked Erfworld as of book 1 and 2, thought it was shaping up to be a really compelling, interesting story. I dunno, maybe he gets a therapist or a business consultant or something that can get him to scale back all this weirdness and just keep an artist around to knock out a few comic frames a week, focus on writing a good story from the viewpoints of the characters we already care about.
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Jul 19, 2019 03:06
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