Hey @ev77, I no longer have the bug in the screenshot. Thanks!
kcin's forum posts
Awesome! Thanks. Love the app so far.

Hey, I think I am having the same issue. I'm on the Apple TV HD (not 4K), latest gen, on tvOS 14.2, version 6.1 of the app. When I open the app, I can't scroll up to the row above Continue Watching. In the picture above, uou can also see that the very top nav row is faintly visible at the top of the screen, on top of the top-most elements (the Search icon on the top-right is most visible in this instance, as it's currently selected here.)
I noticed that there was a red Live Now notification for the Extra Life stream, but it went away very quickly. I didn't have this issue until today. I last used the app two days ago without issues.
Abby is fantastic, and I will miss her personality and contributions terribly. If she is still public-facing in her next position, I will follow her wherever she goes next.
It's impossible to overstate how dramatic the fires in northern California have been. Weeks, cumulative months of unbreathable air. Not like, 'smog'. Air that will permanently damage you. You can't see down the street. The sky is blood red. And within those weeks, days where it's coming from somewhere so close that you need to prepare for evacuation.
We've obviously had many fires before, increasing in intensity to this point, but this year was the first that I recall having to keep our windows shut for weeks in a row, during 100-degree weather. I can't stress how depressing that is. For me, I've been doing fairly well, mentally, during this nearly year-long pandemic (did we mention the pandemic in which every level of government failed us spectacularly yet?), but there is something uniquely horrible about the compounding that with the sticky, ripe, damp heat of a tightly-sealed housing unit explicitly built to rely on airflow during hot weather.
That's something most people don't seem to realize when they wonder, "well why don't you just have AC?" Housing in California accounts for the (normally beautiful) regional climate with high ceilings and lots of windows, in the same way housing in the midwest does by necessitating basements for hurricanes and tornadoes. Beside the fact that the fires and pandemic are awful crises, most of us aren't living in places designed to be converted into hermetically-sealed cubes.
This is to say nothing of what it must be like to go through one of the worst years in US history, in one of the most intensely-affected regions in the country, on the year of your child's birth. Can't fuckin imagine.
I understand Jeff's opinion that it's 'embarrassing' that games are launching out of the gate with graphics options. 'Performance' or 'Graphics' options are, objectively, concessions, not a feature. They made sense last gen because those 8-year-old consoles were getting pushed to their limits. But now we're on brand-new, cutting-edge hardware that they are touting as capable of 4K at 120FPS with ray-tracing, and they're 'offering' graphics options on the launch titles?
......
We are back to what I originally said then, because that doesn't sound like it's about graphics options, it IS about not being able to have it all. You have to make concessions when making a game and I support the idea of giving the customer the option. We aren't talking about a full graphics menu. As far as it should go is probably "look best or run best". That's it.
Whenever I play a console game I know for a fact I am getting one or the other. Any game running at 60 could have looked better at 30. Any 4K game could have run much better at 1080p. The introduction of options with the PS4 Pro was to compensate for aged hardware but introduces a feature that has benefits to certain consumers. I can't say what the mass audience thinks when presented with those options. Embarrassing isn't a word that comes to mind.
I don't want it all. I want whatever the dev thinks is best. I don't want to decide. I also don't want hardware manufacturers to manufacture expectations that can't be met. I don't care if the hardware can't do it, it's not embarrassing if the hardware can't do it. It's embarrassing to say it can, but then expose that it can't with performance 'options'. I think 'run best' is always the best decision, so maybe that's why I think it was foolish to start doing this. Now they've made the conversation 'well why not both?? Must be the hardware!' That's on them.
We just feel differently about what it means to expose options to people on a console. I think it was a bad move, you seem to not mind or like it. That's fine.
I understand the argument, but I'm not sure how characterising it as "embarrassing" relates to that argument and feels like a different argument is being made. Also it's not really a graphics menu if you choose between 2 modes. In my mind you're experiencing a compromised experience if they just went with just one of those mods and didn't offer you the other. Ignorance is bliss? I guess that works if you don't know how games are made that well and don't think about it.
Counter argument: Jeff talks about how cool it is that Battle Arena Toshinden 3 has un untextured performance mode. I think it is pretty cool.
Edit: It's unfair to be confused by Jeff's stance and argue the point with you, but I do agree and understand with what you're saying.
I understand Jeff's opinion that it's 'embarrassing' that games are launching out of the gate with graphics options. 'Performance' or 'Graphics' options are, objectively, concessions, not a feature. They made sense last gen because those 8-year-old consoles were getting pushed to their limits. But now we're on brand-new, cutting-edge hardware that they are touting as capable of 4K at 120FPS with ray-tracing, and they're 'offering' graphics options on the launch titles?
Yeah, every game has compromises that the developer chose to make on the player's behalf for an optimized gameplay experience. That's intrinsic to development. Exposing a layer of that optimization to the player is novel, but it's still reflective of a compromise being made. If some people want to flip that switch themselves, that's okay. While I don't, either way it doesn't change the fact that the selection being made between graphics and performance is necessary because the hardware is the bottleneck through which both configurations can't pass simultaneously.
Since these hardware companies are so loud about the possibilities of their hardware that television forums are literally dominated by "does it do 4K at 120hz?" questions because people want to "be prepared for the next-gen consoles", I too think it's embarrassing that they're making players decide between Graphics and Performance in order to meet a technical benchmark at a rather high cost to the player's experience.
Lastly, I also think graphics options and 64MB expansion packs and shit in older games are neat because they expose how developers worked around limitations in hardware. That's also explicitly why I don't want to see it on new consoles on launch day.
I can't speak to everything that you're saying but I will absolutely agree with you on Jeff's disdain for having multiple graphical modes in console games. It's a really annoying stance. Even on the latest PC hardware you still can't have both. Raytracing is a massive performance killer, as is 4K resolution.
The options sucked on the PS4 Pro because the hardware wasn't that much better. So choosing between 4K 30Hz and 1080p 45hz in something like God of War was bad. Since this is a thing from the inception of the new console, a raytracing at 30 mode and a 60fps 1440 mode (or whatever specs they come up with) is a great choice. Having the choice of 2 graphic presets is a lot simpler than a PC graphics menu and a change I can get behind for consoles. You can't have it all.
I have to believe Jeff isn't saying "just make it" 60fps and with raytracing and 4K, but it often sounds like that.
I, like Jeff, just don't think that a graphics menu belongs in a console experience. I don't think Jeff is demanding 60fps at 4K with ray-tracing. I think he's saying "set realistic expectations and meet them". If the console can't do 60fps while also doing ray-tracing, or if it can't do 30fps while doing 4K, find something in the middle that it can do and just do that.
The only people making 4K, 60fps, and ray-tracing the hot-topic expectations that developers in the upcoming generation are meant to meet, are the developers and hardware manufacturers themselves. Perhaps they should stop hyping up this tech if it isn't usable without weird configurable concessions yet. I think that's the core of the critique against graphics settings.
The least compelling part of my PC experience is setting graphics options, and the most compelling part of the console experience is that it "just works". His (and my) frustration doesn't come from a desire to have it all. We just want it to be optimized to whatever is appropriate already. If they didn't talk about performance OR graphics, I wouldn't have thought about it, and these concessions they are admitting to making would therefore not be an issue.
The Giant Bomb forum has followed the trajectory of every ten-year-old forum on the internet in 2020. Its activity should not be assumed to be a good metric of the business' success or failure. This finger-pointing at overactive moderation by the self-identified 'power users', lamentations for the loss of the personalities that once populated the forum, and concerns about the waning interest by ownership in the forum itself is the same narrative I've experienced on every forum I've ever been on since 1998. This is not a marker of the community's cultural evolution or decline, it's just intrinsic to forums themselves.
There isn't a BB-style forum in existence that is more active now than it was ten years ago, and the rate of a forum's activity decay will only increase as socialization on the internet continues to evolve.
@kcin: I don't think saying "Jeff has a family and has been doing this for a long time" is me concocting some wild theory.
I fundamentally disagree with the notion that it is appropriate to take what little we know about the personal lives of the people who work here and guess at what their inner lives are like.
Jeff didn't reveal that his family was expanding until his child's birth. I don't blame him for maintaining that level of privacy when people are incessantly projecting their hopes and fears onto an imagined version of him that they've based on the details they were able to scrape from thousands of hours of videos and podcasts.
Everyone trying to game out how this is going to go down less than 12 hours after it was announced - especially the ones who are scared - should log off for awhile, for their own sake.
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