Have Yourself A Jarry Little Christmas - 12/20/2013

Good to hear Jeff getting a little political. One of the better Jar jams.

Merry Christmas to all of you duders!!

Happy Holidays Jeff and everyone in the GB community! <3

These are always some of the most interesting content on the site, yay!

F2P purchases are funny. I think a lot of people go buy something after they get creamed. They think others are beating them because they have better gear, not because they are player than they are (because people have massive egos); so they go buy something to make them "play better". They get beat by someone with a specific gun, so they feel the gun must be better. This happens even on games that are balanced.

@noizy: Purely anecdotal of course, but in my small circle of game playing friends we usually buy stuff in F2P games as a show of support to the devs. But only if the game is good and Michael Transaction's not being a total dick about it.

@thejohn: I buy in F2P games as well as a show of support. I chipped into Tribes, Warframe, TF2, DOTA2 and possibly others. I don't bite into endless threadmill and carrot on a stick. If I feel the game is a pathetic threadmill, I normally get a sour taste and will stop playing it.

I always want to do that, but so many of the in-app purchases are just so terrible that I don't want to. Like, for as boring as it really is, for a brief day or so, I really did like Middle Manager of Justice and wanted to support Double Fine, but like, fuckthe structure of that game. So many F2P games are all designed to just make you sit around and wait for forever or just spend a bit of money. I'd rather they all either provide a way to just buy the game outright and skip all the bullshit or design the game appropriately and have a tip jar button. I would spend so much money if games had tip jars.

Jar time is the best time. Mixlr is good too.

<3 Jeff

Yea. I don't support those F2P game that are all about skinner box gambling, endless gear treadmill, play timers, and other BS schemes. Phone or browser based F2P games are mostly all shitty. I was mostly referring to PC F2P games that still try to be real games without compromising their game design too much. There are very few of these sadly.When the monetization starts to deeply affect the game design, I'm out. When you feel you're playing merely to unlock stuff, it's not fun in my book.

In most games I really wish giving devs 10-20$ would unlock more stuff than they give you. I can get full games, albeit a year old or so, for 5$ on Steam. So why would I want to spend way more on a F2P game that will keep releasing more and more monetized content as long as there's people to buy it, and will shut the game down a few years down the line when people left? F2P has a place, but I'm really more into games with a beginning and an end, and F2P aren't it.

"People Are People." ~ Depeche Mode & Jeffrey Michael Gerstmann

Funny, I always drink from a Mason Jar lol I like the stability

Yes. I feel like this is when Jeff truely gets real.

Count me as a vote for the "Ads are fine with me if they help support Giant Bomb and/or the Bombcast" camp.

I agree, I listen to a few other podcasts that are sponsored by many of the same companies (especially squarespace, I guess), but who just do dry or kinda dishonest ("we use this all the time, and it's a great product") infomercial style stuff, or put a pre-recorded ad in there, the way Giant Bomb has been doing it is great, and I love to listen to the non-premium edition just to hear them do the ads.

Where the hell did The RIcker get new hundo bills? He robbed a casino right?

The Jar has returned.

Funny ads are fantastic content.

Gotta have the jars! Commercials on the bombcast are funny. They're done right.

Merry Christmas!

Great video, Jeff! And merry Christmas to the Bombcrew, god knows you guys have deserved it!

The fundamental law of nature and economics is if you're not growing you're dying. So ads have to stay. Also after staring at his face I think this is what Jeff will look like in 10 years:

Senpai noticed me.

Jeff "its all about the Benjamins" Gerstmann

literally as he says battlefield 4 won't always be broken, I am watching a frozen battlefield 4 screen.

the guys reading ads during the bombcast is fine with me. keep that bombcast money flowing

(In relation to the end of this video.)

When i'm thinking how weird life can be, i always return to this video of good ol' Bill Hicks.

Bill died at the age of 32,looks like the good ones always die way too young.

Amen, Jar man!

@vuud said:

The fundamental law of nature and economics is if you're not growing you're dying. So ads have to stay. Also after staring at his face I think this is what Jeff will look like in 10 years:

you may be right?:

Turkey sandwich and the Jar.

That was an amazing video, Jeff.

Thanks for your insight and reflections.

"my roomate's been gone a year"

You know, is he REALLY a roomate if he don't pay his half or isnt actually rooming there! :P

The emulation thing is one thing, but the servers for console games just being arbitrarily shut down a year or two in is what's really bad. That's what's being lost that's hardest to recapture.

"Take someone who's played WoW for the first six months, then put them in front of 2013 WoW"

"Wow, the servers are so stable!!! But I'm so bored and no one talks to me..."

SF5 is going to suffer what Tekken has with TT2, there is SO many characters that they're going to be a let down if it's less than say, two dozen characters.

Shit gets real in these videos. God dammit he almost made cry! We love you Jeff, take that break you deserve!

Nice to hear they want to expand Giantbomb, more giantbomb is more of a good thing.

@pimblycharles said:

@vuud said:

The fundamental law of nature and economics is if you're not growing you're dying. So ads have to stay. Also after staring at his face I think this is what Jeff will look like in 10 years:

you may be right?:

A lot more of this though.

The line is when you say or do something that would reasonably make someone feel unsafe. The problem being that if you're too much of an idiot to recognize when you've crossed that line or always wanted to, it's not your problem anymore. Someone else has feel the consequences of your idiocy, regardless of whether it's because you're escalating to get a rise or are a genuine waste of resources that means the deplorable shit you say.

I dunno how to fix it, or if it's even a thing you fix. Some of the idiots you can get through to or change on their own, some people learn to glide over all the nonsense they get, some people stand up for others, and those all help. It sucks that someone could have this sort of ordeal forced onto them, but frankly that's how it tends to go with a lot of things, and then you learn to deal with it or not.

It's been crazy. I don't like thinking of the way things unfold as being off-track, or not how it should've been. It was, is, and will be how it happened. That's your life--that's the universe--not whatever you were expecting, because what the hell were you doing expecting anything anyways. It sucks that it's so easy to get tangled and stuck thinking about how bent out of shape things are, but it's not out of shape. It's just, well, the shape. Preconceptions needlessly complicate things when life inevitably happens.

Obviously you've got to make some plans at some point, but I don't like the idea of getting so tied to those plans, or even just the way things are, that if things deviate from it at all you lose your bearings. But we do anyways, and I suppose when that happens we also either learn from it or don't. Unfortunately, times like that are when the big "what's it all for" question rears its nasty head. That's probably where things get the lowest if you haven't already decided on an answer.

Water? I always thought that was moonshine. This feature is ruined for me now.

I'm pretty sure Jeff just turned me into a real adult.

I feel like these Jar Times always turn into some sort of homespun philosophy lesson, not only about video games but also about being a dick on the internet or being a responsible adult. It's pretty great.

I'm actually ok with the way you guys do ad's, even though I am for the most part staunchly against ad reads on podcasts. You guys go real dumb/friendly with them, where I've seen a lot of podcasts who do "professional" ad reads (Rooster Teeth being a good examples) that sound utterly pompous and stupid.

It's scary how often Jeff leads me to reflect on my own self through these videos. He always ends up being so poignant and refreshingly transparent. Besides that, I always love hearing into some of the inner workings of the site, and having Jeff lay out his opinions and thoughts on various subjects. Great Jar time jeff!

Fuck man, that was a helluva Jar Time. Respect.

Host 1080 60 video files on torrent Jeff. :) Let's share the bandwidth.

Thanks Jeff.

This was a great one.

Jeff with the extremely salient life advice. Good man, and merry Xmas/happy holidays/decent December to him and to all.

man i miss Ryan, what a fucking crazy year.

I really, really appreciate this jar. Keep doing everything you do, even as you make it look so easy.

Great work this year, Jeff. Even if some sad shit happened you pulled through and kept on trucking. The GB-train doesn't stop for nothing.

Just renewed my premium account for another year. Here's hoping for a great 2014 on Giant Bomb!

i cant never not have infinite respect for jeff. such an influence.

Patrick could absolutely learn a thing or two from how Jeff talked about the internet and the assholes on the internet, that was the best explanation of the whole thing and he said it without coming off as a fucking political activist.

maybe it was just me, but when he was talking about how he really missed rock band, i couldnt help but read between the lines. it really made me miss ryan.