Unprofessional Fridays: 02/21/2020

It is just me or is everyone being kinda disdainful of the game Jason is playing? I know there's talking going on normally on UPF but Rorie really tends to drag all the attention off the game.

Rorie: "Motherfucker! Fuck fuck fuck shit shit!"

It used to happen to Drew too. The louder personalities tend to dominate.

RE: Fortnite matchmaking

I don't play Fornite but I used to play CSGO all the time and matchmaking was a huge issue in that game. There is a concept of "smurfs" who are basically trolls who are among the highest ranked in the game that make new accounts to play at low ranks just to utterly destroy new players or people who aren't very skilled yet. And of course they often pair this with abusive behavior/chat.

Whenever a game goes skill based, this will always be an issue. There isn't really a way around it other than offering an unranked competitive mode -- problem with that is you split the player base. Maybe not enough people now play unranked to find a match.

I don't think there is an ideal solution but I'm sympathetic to the problem. I always took smurfs in stride and used it as an opportunity to observe how people play at a very high level. But not surprised when it turns people away from a game entirely. Granted, this was all when CSGO still cost money so I can only imagine how it is now that it's free (or Fornite).

Is this really where we are? People complaining about being matched with people of similar caliber? I feel no pity for the dude bro’s who are mad they don’t get matched with 8 year olds anymore.

Sure, but without skill-based matchmaking everyone is good is just kind of smurfing all the time, because they're getting matched with bad players by default.

@klynn: And that's totally okay. Big difference between randomly matched with different skills on both sides versus random newbies up against a squad of 5 amazing players out for blood. It's hard to explain if you haven't experienced it. There will always be amazing players in an unranked server but such a big difference between that and a team of smurfs out to ruin your day.

I really miss the days of dedicated servers.

Ecco the Dolphin is my religion

calling Senna Portuguese is like calling Tiger Wood Chinese XDDD

People consider Double Dragon 3 the best of the NES game? Who are these crazy madmen? Yes, it was best from a technical perspective, but the game is incredibly difficult. Enemies are vicious and you take damage like crazy. They didn't play long enough to see it, but each character has 1 life. That's it. And you get 1 continue if you manage to reach level 4. Even by NES standards it's brutal.

But yes, there are 2 other characters that join you along the way, one of which is a squat kung fu master.

Which makes the earlier poster's conspiracy-theory that GB staff were "forbidden to use curse words by their CBS overlords" even stranger. :b

While I understand anyone having difficulty with Sekiro, it seems much harder for Rorie given that he refuses to block/parry, which are really important to success.

it's astounding how little patience Rorie has for annoying sounds

"I think what I'm gonna do is use this when I'm really at a wall"

Dude Rorie, if you use it when you're at a wall then you aren't gonna learn shit and the walls are gonna start appearing more and more often.

@neocalypso: And he can also cheat those walls to continue progressing at his desired pace. Cheats are very useful for playing games on your own terms, as demonstrated in this UPF.

For anyone else who's curious, based on Steam Achievements only 30% of players beat the final boss in Sekiro. I didn't see the flaming bull achiemevent listed, but things fall off below 50% pretty quickly, starting with Lady Butterfly, and all the optional completionist items are in the 20% range.

@ducktales_moon: If you can't be bothered to learn the boss's tells and strategies then just turn on god mode and suck your way through. The "play it your way" language isn't fooling anyone who played through this game. Each enemy has a specific set of attack rhythms and the perilous attacks take 1+ seconds to execute. Unless the player is retirement age or older, their reaction times should be well within the functional window for a game like this. Lady Butterfly is an especially bad boss to use as an example of a reaction-speed-intensive boss, since her attacks are long and flowing and she can be stun locked with repeated dodge counters.

@relic: Cheating a single player game isn't deception, it's accessibility.

@ducktales_moon: Cheating a single player game and then representing yourself as having played or beaten the game is deception, and the disabled manage to beat this game just fine. I could probably find a video of men older than any at Giantbomb beating this. Cheating at a single player game, suggesting that you’d prefer to turn death off in a game with three+ mechanics tied to player death, and then suggesting that your doing it “to beat the fight like the designers intended” makes you look like an idiot and a massive tool. If somebody isn’t enjoying the gameplay of a video game, but they want to see the content, they can just watch a video. If all they want is the “I beat the game!” star to show off, just cheat to get the achievement directly. The gameplay is designed to kill the player as a way to teach them combat skills. At the end of the game, the player looks like a badass, because they know how to clear out enemies quickly and get away if they can’t. It looks and feels fantastic. This looks like shit, and Rorie clearly doesn’t appreciate the core loop the game puts its players through. He doesn’t want to learn the bosses or enemy tells. It’s not a game for him. That’s fine. What’s not fine is watching 40 year old men pat themselves on the back for cheating through a video game designed around challenge as though they’ve accomplished something while sneering at people who dare to think they’ve cheapened the experience while doing so. If I wanted to watch somebody suck at games I’d watch DSP.

@relic: It's not a competition, it's a single player game. No one's trying to fool you. Rorie is having fun in a game, full stop.

Man I'm the biggest Souls fan and I could not care less about Sekiro. Kinda makes me sad because I would love a new Demons or Dark Souls. I've put hundreds of hours into those games. I didn't love Bloodborne either.

Rorie, for the love of god, just stop moving, hold block, and actually look at what the enemy is doing.

I promise, when you're not splitting your attention trying to run around and dodge and mash attack constantly it's pretty easy to figure out what different attacks look like. You don't even really need to know the timing, you can mash block and figure it out that way. Worst case is you end up blocking the attack instead of parrying, which is a thousand times better than getting hit because you committed to a dodge or a jump, both of which leave you super, super vulnerable.

Just sit right in front of them and hold block for a while and figure out what they do, then, when you feel like you have a good idea of the timing of their attacks, start trying to guess when to parry. With that strategy, especially with the early game enemies, worst case is you have to back off for a bit and recover your posture. But even then, the fastest way to recover posture is by holding block. It's almost like they designed it that way for a reason!

By all means, of course, make it easier if that's more fun for you but holy hell, I just had to get this off my chest because no one was actually helping him. The slowmo stuff actually seems like a good way to learn an enemy's moves if you're having trouble... but it won't help if you still aren't actually watching what they're doing.

I enjoyed listening to the music in the Lady Butterfly bossfight, it's mesmerising.