The Giant Beastcast: Episode 46

@depecheload: As Jeff himself said last Tuesday, there is no way you can tell if Nintendo is lying, so don't act like your the man on the inside who knows how it REALLY went down.

@depecheload: What the fuck are you guys even talking about? One or two assholes makes the entire thread full of assholes? Anyone with an opinion or perspective that doesn't agree with or jive with yours is an asshole? Kinda seems to be your line of thinking at any rate bud...

I personally think this entire situation is shitty as well but, as @hurtfulmadmax reiterated Jeff's very salient point, we have no idea what really went down so acting like we do is an exercise in stupidity.

@newhuman said:

Haha, yeah, the part where anybody bought that "Micronics" is a real word is one of the best parts of the movie.

That movie stuck with me in a way that few movies do.

If you can I'd get that card plugged into a friends rig to test it out. This sucks whenever it's the first computer and you can't do much to exclude problems. But yeah I'd reseat and maybe see if it's a gen3 pci-e slot and not some older slot. Try disabling the intel gpu and revert drivers as best you can and just use the latest from nvidia's website.

Anyway good luck and keep us up to date, if nothing else we'll learn something out of this and I was thinking about building a rig similar to yours.

Check to make sure you plugged the HDMI cable into the right HDMI slot. I accidentally plugged my cable into the motherboard HDMI slot and got similar performance issues. I was so upset that my card didn't work. It's a silly mistake but an easy one to make.

Otherwise the issue of HDMI cable is one to look at. Also if you do have an onboard motherboard video chip then use that and see if the problem persists. If it does not then the card is the problem. If it does then something else is wrong. Your goal is to basically remove "unesessary" parts until you stop having the problem. If it's even being produced when all you have is your motherboard Ram and Power supply installed then you know can determine the problem.

@quickflint: oh yeah that's the other thing i was thinking when pheonix said how bad his performance was. felt like it was the intel gpu was doing the rendering.

@depecheload said:

@toxeia said: I rambled - I don't know. At this point it feels like a shame to just close notepad.

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I want to start by saying that on the subject of SJW/GamerGate, I totally come down on the side of GamerGate. I feel there's some shady shit that goes on - GameJournoPros, etc. - that shows there's some real growing that needs to happen within the realm of games journalism.

If you truly and honestly believe that your delicate little world is being destroyed by corruption and collusion then you'd be shocked to see how the rest of the world operates.

Did you know that oil companies pay writers to print lies about climate change? That this is a fact that they won't even argue? Did you realize that? Does THAT bother you? Does the fact that people are spreading lies to help kill people bother you? Does it bother you less than how people talk about games for children?

Maybe reorganize your priorities in life.

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This is entirely pedantic and I don't necessarily disagree with you, but that's a bit of an informal logical fallacy you're committing there. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

It sounds like the guy plugged his HDMI cable into the MOBO instead of the GPU

I had a somewhat similar experience where I sold my old PC to a friend and when he hooked it up he said no games met the minimum requirements and the rare ones that did ran like crap. So I went over to look and he plugged the HDMI cable from the motherboard to the monitor instead of from the GPU to the monitor. If you plug your cable into the motherboard instead of the GPU, the PC will use the CPU to render games which mean stuff will run terribly or not at all.

Download something like GPU Z and see if it can even register having a video card in there.

Most (all?) high end GPUs require two or more PCIE cables to power the GPU. Make sure you read the GPU's manual to see how many PCIE cables it needs.

@phoenix654: Personally, I've been avoiding Gigabyte after news broke that they'd been revising motherboards after they'd been reviewed to use cheaper components and remove features. And anecdotally, poor consumer experiences seem to be a recurring complaint on forums etc. in recent years.

I Just got to the discussion of the Baldur's Gate expansion and the firing of Alison Rapp, and I just wanted to say thanks for bring it up. I think a lot of sites would rather pretend this sort of thing wasn't happening and I'm really glad the people I like and respect on Giant bomb tackled it head on, and had a very good discussion about it.The part about having been a kinda shitty person as a teen or young adult rings true for me as well, I was pretty shitty when I was younger, and I like to think that I have learned and changed.

As a philosophy student, I feel bad for just accepting Austin's throw-away statement about there being a smallest-finite-distance that, I guess scientists (I don't remember the exact statement), have agreed upon, instead of being skeptical about it. But I also can't say I'm en expert in any kind of metaphysical science or school of thought.

Dammit Austin, I unconsciously made you a voice of authority at some point.

@bacon: So if assholes on the internet decide to search through everything you have ever posted on the internet and then emailed the worst parts to your employer you'd be ok with that? Rapp came under fire because people made her a target way before anything was widely known about her thesis or her second job.

She was probably fired due to a combination a confrontational attitude and her second job, but none of that would have been an issue if not for harassers and internet detectives. So let's not pretend this was some unforced error.

Just my quick opinion.

I was pretty pro gamergate when the shit first hit the fan and am still incensed that the whole discussion point has become toxic and basically untouchable by anyone and those that do touch it, it basically narrows down any criticism or critique they have to that lens.

The Baldur's Gate thing is super shitty. It's one character, get over it. There is no charitable view to look at, your being shitty to a dev for blatant political reasons. My one criticism about that is to maybe explore it more. In a world where sex-change magical items exist I wonder how that affects society and how they view trans people.

About Rapp, the harassment is shit but her views are beyond disgusting. Though I speak from a place where I dislike Leon:The Professional and don't watch Woody Allen movies so maybe I'm too sensitivity.

Though it sickens me that I fear getting banned for stating that I don't like Rapp's views and I think that is the biggest problem in gaming discussion on the net right now.

@phoenix654: I have a Gigabyte Windforce card and went through almost the exact same thing. The card is broken. RMA again and give them a detailed summary of your problem and the fact that this is a second RMA. Give them your contact info and see if you can get in contact with the person who is actually testing the card. After an email conversation with the tech I convinced him to run 2d benchmarks/stress tests and not just their standard 3d ones. They found faulty 2d ram on the card, he tested a new card and sent it and I have had no problems since.

This was about the 4th time I had to RMA the card, after being sent back a different card that was also broken and the same card with a "it's not broken" message. In the meantime I had replaced/upgraded every single component in the pc looking for the issue. Also make sure they send you a shipping label so they are paying to send it back to them. Welcome to PC gaming. :p

To the guy with the video card problem. There are 2 things you need to check in my opinion.

1) Make sure your Motherboard drivers are up to date (i'm assuming you have your videocard drivers are up to date.

2) Make sure your power supply is connected to your videocard. I suspect this is the problem. Some videocards require an extra connection to your powersupply. I'm pretty sure your card is one of them. Open the case up. Look for a connection which the power supply would connect to. Find the connection that looks like that coming from the power supply and plug it in. If your videocard doesn't have enough power it probably would have similar problems.

Well it looks like shit is about to hit the fan regarding the Rapp kerfuffle. Inglorious people have apparently found out what she was moonlighting as. Escort services fall into a grey area of the law. Anecdotally, a colleague of mine did performances on webcam and worked for a school. Once the school found out about her second profession, they dropped her in the blink of an eye. Nintendo might be just as crazy when it comes to optics like that.

Edit: @anonymous_jesse, you should never fear being banned for saying pedophilia is wrong. Silencing people over such a universal standard is morally reprehensible.

I'm sure Alex, Austin, and Vinny will eat crow about it all next week.

Actually, I'm sure they'll just act like none of it ever happened.

Jeff - It sounds like you either have a motherboard issue or your graphics card isn't getting good power from the power supply, but it's difficult to be sure. If you go to a good computer shop (the type where they fix stuff), they'll probably let you plug your graphics card into another computer for free or cheap just to be sure, but the first thing I would try is a different power supply just because that's an easy thing to try and it's consistent with your issues.

@hurtfulmadmax: The shit has definitely hit the fan in the past few hours. :(

@rorie, this might be a good time to stop the thread.

noncompete agreements are pretty common in most industries; the video game industry isn't an exception to the rule. While the timing is defidently questionable, Nintendo seems pretty strict on their agreements as they fired localizer Chris Pranger last year for speaking on a podcast. But the BS Alison Rapp faced was totally uncalled for, even if you were diametrically opposed to her ideologies. It was like people sending death treats to Jack Thomson. I guess people just haven't grown up.

@jadegl said:

I think the comparison to Quiet is illustrative. Both criticisms are based in skepticism of the legitimacy of the artistic choice. Simply put, Quiet is there to pander to horny boys and Mizhena blurts out how trans she to pander to the progressive gaming press. Both are valid criticism and both are hard to care about from the other side.

The principal difference as I see is the unrepresentative gaming press. The NSA is building another data center just to hold all the articles and comments from the gaming press about how "problematic" Quiet's boobs and clothes are. This despite the likelihood that a majority of Metal Gear Solid players approve of gratuitous sexiness. Meanwhile, the only people who care about the poorly-written, obviously shoe-horned character are the people who played the game. The gaming press dismisses any criticism as transphobia.

@bacon: I think that their stance still stands. But, why would you care? You're done with the site anyway, right?

I think Nintendo not defending Rapp (publicly) was a very tactical decision. Due to the nature of the stuff shitty people were digging up, all it would take is some twisted and terrible "journalists" (of which we have plenty of these days) to turn the conversation to "Nintendo defends pedophile against concerned parents" or some such BS, and then Nintendo is targeted by all kinds of groups who only have a partial story and then it's an even bigger mess.

Note that constructing this potential outlook is not a sign of endorsement for their decision, just an explanation I think makes sense. If that is the case, it seems as though no matter the outcome there was going to be endless awful mudslinging, lies and potentially good people looking bad and being harassed. I don't pretend to know the whole story, but goddamn do I pity the people at Nintendo trying to make a choice there and Rapp for being the target of so much unwarranted venom. (I think all people are fairly subject to criticism, especially those who make their opinions public, but this is very different from that and is just people being assholes. I can only hope it's a bunch of kids, because at least then they can still grow up into decent people.)

On the bright side...

Hate for hate's sake doesn't appear to be winning out! Now, this isn't an endorsement of the expansion or anything, hell if I know much about it, but a lot of the reviews I read were actually talking about the gameplay and such. Despite what Austin said, even when the reviews were mostly negative I rarely saw the trans character in question as anything more than a side comment on how the writing isn't great, but I hardly read them all. This is mostly just me being glad that people yelling to dump negative reviews doesn't necessarily mean that the game will be stuck with all negative reviews, which is good, targeted review bomb campaigns can't win!

Now hopefully the dev begging for good reviews resulted in people who thought the game was deserving of good reviews made them, rather than just retaliatory positive reviews.

This post has gotten too long. Unlike Jeff and Alex, I'm very optimistic about human nature. If there's one thing I've found in every person I've ever actually met and spent time with, it's empathy. Alex and Austin are perfect examples of that! People act like that a few assholes existing means the whole world has gone to shit, but I think there's less and less assholes every generation, and those that do exist are far less assholeish than those that came before. A targeted bad review campaign because a trans character scares you is pretty fucking lame, but 15 years that would've been a story about a trans person being beaten to death in a dark alley. (Not that that doesn't occasionally still happen, sadly.)

Now I'm just rambling.

Ew Gamergate.

Man, Vinny was right. Anyone who picked up the shovel is worse than garbage.

Right. Better shut down these comments before anyone finds out that Nintendo was 100% justified in firing this person.

@sethmode: no, their stance doesn't hold since she was fired for a legitimate reason. And yes, I will no longer subscribe to a site that tries to twist facts or says that lenient child porn laws are merely "less that mainstream ideas" or whatever crap Jason tried to spew because he worked with Rapp at GI. Absolutely disgusting.

No, sex work stigma/wh*rephobia is a form of employment discrimination and contributes to a significant volume of abuse and harassment. Just because a company is not being exceptional in their abusive policy does not justify that policy [assuming the speculation in this thread is accurate].

Stop trying to score cheap points in your trash ideological crusade against gaming being for everyone by reinforcing the notion that sex workers are less than human and so deserve less rights and protection.

@rorie: As with the OP quoted above: the thread probably needs locking down to prevent it going off the rails entirely. Sorry for this ruining your (and the other mod's) Sunday morning.

The vast majority of people weren't critical of the mere existance of a trans character. There were a whole array of reasons, most of which the devs have since addressed. The whole reason this thing blew up was because the developers tried to deflect the real criticism by spinning a narrative, claiming that the criticisms were illegitimate and trying to hide behind the "people are just trans-phobic" shield.

It's sad to see the Beastcast falling for the same trap by believing agenda driven narratives without looking into them.

It saddens me that I can't take anything either the Beastcast or the Bombcast crew says seriously anymore. They have diminished themselves to a mere site you go to for a few laughs. Which is fine too I guess.

@shivoa: Wait what? Nintendo is a public toy company. She was working PR for them while also doing this other job that would severely damage the public image of a family friendly company if it ever came out. I never said anything about her being less than human because of the job. I just said that Nintendo was 100% justified in firing said person because of this job and now you want the comments shut down because there is proof of her "moonlighting".

Please stop being a joke. Dozens of Steam reviews were there, plain as day, for anyone to read and actually look at the source of the issue rather than having to "pick a side to trust". There was no agenda-driven narrative - there was the fact that the many transphobic reactionaries who regularly harass us online turned their Sauron-like eye towards this and started spewing transphobia about how dare someone include trans characters in "their" [the reactionary's] game.

Hell, we got it even on here.

The crew talked about the facts of the matter, not the incoherent spin you're trying to play as reality. Please, grow up.

We're not going away. Claiming that this wasn't a transphobic pile-on combined with yet another misogynistic attack on a specific developer is disingenuous or ill-informed. I'm glad the people with a bigger mic, on the podcasts, are more informed than you are.

For all of the people in these comments claiming to have the smoking gun on Alison Rapp, you clearly didn't even listen to the Beastcast discussion if you think that's going to change the crew's opinions of the situation. They commented on the digging and the harassment, not whether Nintendo was justified in letting her go. They were talking about support and timing, not whether she should have been allowed to stay with the company despite whatever dirt her harassers found.

The problem wasn't with Nintendo's decision. It was with the timing of their decision and the lack of support they showed their employee during a months long harassment campaign.