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It's abuse - you, pulling an ailing old man - slowly nodding off to oblivion surrounded in his retirement home by friends and third party medical equipment, maintained by questionable but well meaning eastern Europeans - back into an uncaring reality without any real plan?
Sure, sometimes the old faded pictures of his parents and children still gave his heart a pain, after not having heard from them in more than a decade, but he was at peace. Playing the old maps, telling the new kids they didn’t understand the hardships of Baud modems and sometimes blubbering 1337$P34|< in between bouts of sleep apnoea.
Suddenly ripping this palliative case back into the cold hard streets of new operating systems, a world colourful and confusing, pulled out his catheter and IV and kicked him into a hot topic to get fitted for some skinny jeans and an outdated BTS T-Shirt.
He just wanted a new wheelchair, something with a motor so the anaemic Gen-X chain smoking nurse doesn’t have to get up from her stories to push him to the vending machine.
You took the wheelchair, told ‘em you were going to make it good and nice. Sat him down on a bench in front of the duckpond in the park until you were done.
Sadly, you got distracted by a slightly less dilapidated cougar at the local AA meeting who is into medieval role-play and her daughter is a little past her prime, but she used to be a 12 million subscriber franchise - who wouldn’t?
So the old man is stuck at the pond, now it's getting dark - and there are a lot of weird kids with blue hair showing up, mining all the benches to build inexplicable tree-houses. And he’s a kind old man, but if one of them asks about Progression or MTX again, someone’s getting punched in the damned mouth.
There is only one guy working on the chair, his name is Garry. Garry hasn’t been here too long, Garry doesn’t know too much either. I don’t think Garry actually works here, I think they put him here so the old folks would stop asking about their chairs. It’s working too.
Garry fixes things sometimes, mostly the shit he broke a few weeks ago. But it’s appreciated by some of the late stage dementia cases. I think his name was Bobby last week, or was it Bill?
No IV, No catheter, No chair. But they did give him a smartphone, so now he can see a live feed of all his friends dying, and can message the nurse to come lift him up before he shits himself in his wheel-less chair. There is a queue now too - so everyone gets a turn on the TV, which granted has reduced the amount of stabbings in the home but now only half the channels are available.
The reduced social interaction is a sign of the times, but the guise of toxic anonymity doesn’t work all that well when all the shitters you get matches with are all in the same room, breathing the same air scented of stale mashed potatoes and colostomy bag.
All of this is happening 20 feet away from a solid golden mansion, where hundreds of yuppies and middle managers drive up and down to pretend to give a shit - to laud themselves over the passion they feel and satisfaction of contributing to the legacy of these geriatric demented old fucks.
The time has come and gone. But this bastard is still clinging to life. And the fucker won’t die.
If you didn’t give a shit, why even start? To prove the concept and to get that last dime squeezed out before anyone who cares has painted their hair blue. Sure.
Doesn’t change the fact that it’s disgusting. And I don’t care if its petty or short sighted, sad or passionate. This entire charade has been an insult to what was and could still be the foundation of legitimacy in competitively viable gaming. But as the rest of the world descends into actual chaos, and the world is indeed burning. Forgive this 32 year old boomer for reaching for one of the few things I think to have control over.
Rage is all that remains. And with that, a lot of wasteful creativity. Even if it means screaming to an empty stage.
 
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32 years old is a boomer now? Seems like everyone is a boomer these days.
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On December 13 2019 07:47 NoS-Craig wrote:
32 years old is a boomer now? Seems like everyone is a boomer these days.
Liking anything older, or thinking its better. Hell, even referencing anything longer that 5 years ago makes you a bitter old fool by default. So the internet has ruled.
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I didn't understand the ramblings until I saw who the author was then It clicked perfectly.
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Northern Ireland25041 Posts
I enjoyed quite a lot of the writing here for sure, I think the last quarter didn’t really deliver on the setup but stylistically I thought it was a solid start.
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The premise was running a little thin, and I basically ranted it out in about 15 minutes. But don't worry, I'm sure the metaphor of 'old man Brood War' will resurface one day.
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I enjoyed this a lot as well, good stuff.
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TLADT24920 Posts
Nice writing and yep, indeed. RM was probably one of the worst things to happen to BW in recent years. Losing the ability to use all the apps that were developed through the work of so many people as well as having to contend with new bugs and worse SD graphics is just ... bad. MCA launcher provided so many amazing stats for every rep and worked like a charm. Canrep allowed you to follow your movements in a rep years later and did it fantastically. Shieldbattery was starting to form its own small community and with some features almost ready (put on hold until others implemented first), it could've ushered in a new era for the foreign scene, devoid of any gateways. A place where we were all in one place and you could start a BW game instantly too.
From my perspective, Blizzard saw the community progress. They realized they were on a timer and that if things like SB took hold, it would be gg so they released RM in a bad state, made several early patches and left it to rot now. Patches are far and few with many things breaking in each release. SD graphics while better than day 1 are still not comparable to 1.16.1. There are new bugs now that never existed before and god knows how things are with the latest patch. I heard about the ram issue and that sounds preposterous. This is a 20 year old game, not some new AAA game released in the last year. Why the hell does it use 1GB+ of memory even?????
The addition to their launcher made it worse too. Even to this day, I'm still lamenting the use of RM gfx+dynamic lighting in BW tournaments. RM gfx were ok, but not as cool as the original and now we get the addition of the worst gfx to date in dynamic lighting. This has become quite the obvious cash grab from blizzard's end. They could've invested a bit into the game and fixed things up so that it was running well enough then quit, but they have like 2 developers working on it and who knows what's going to happen next. We might as well give up on the 2v2/3v3 RM/ladder and hope they don't break more things that were NEVER broken in 1.16.1
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The response is a tired one at this point. We've been asked to 'move on' to 'understand the business' that they can't lose money on such an old product. That we should be happy they did anything at all.
But I don't truly believe that we have to live in the timeline of teenagers, that we truly have to discard anything that is older that 5 years. It's a toy industry right? New kids come into the scene every year - yet oddly enough, because of the dysfunctional state of our society (I guess) we 'kids' kept hanging around and now someone us even tried to make a career in the farcical world of 'competitive gaming'.
No, we need to call it what it is. Disgusting. And sure, there are worse companies out there, ruining the planet much more efficiently with factual loss of life.
But that doesn't mean we can't take the time to be angry here. To let the rage out of just a tiny minute and call out ActiBlizz on their bullshit.
Starcraft Brood War in many ways created esports, along with other franchises. SC2 was an ignorant attempt by a disinterested, already corporatised Blizzard to re-create a game that only exists because of the flaws of its construction.
Brood war now has been swallowed by 'games as a service' as Remastered only functions by the graceful benevolence of our tyrannical god.
There is still life in the old carcass, there are people actively trying to keep BW alive. But I feel that part of that energy needs to be used to spit in the face of those who have abandoned us.
To colour this community in light of protest, not just for political reasons, but also for common decency - and a return to respecting the playerbase, rather than seeing them all as silly old cranky bitter men who can only see nostalgia.
Nostalgia only works when people have forgotten for a time and come back to regard things as better.
The issue is - its not been that long - through the eyes of teenagers perhaps - but we never stopped playing. We're still here. And many of us are quite capable.
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screaming to an empty stage. Quite the gripping the metaphor
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Northern Ireland25041 Posts
It sounds the worst of both worlds. Remastered broke all the third party additions to the experience, Blizzard is the only gig in town but isn’t putting the dev time in.
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EPT
