Chaz

KOTOR 2 beign as great as it is, the writing and story was not as awesome for all the fans, this are bits of a discussion I had abou Avellone and Kreia in the swtor Forums. "I did like KOTOR 2 a lot, I wouldn't be opposed to Avellone [writing for swtor] if he can manage to hide what character he's using as his mouth piece a bit better this time (Kreia is awesome but man, that was blatant." When I asked what they meant as mouth piece I got this response: "She's an awesome character, but like I said, she petty blatantly came across as Avellone's mouthpiece criticizing the whole black and white morality thing Star Wars often has. I don't actually really disagree with that criticism, but it was just a tad too noticeable for my taste" Then I pointed out that Alexander Freed also challenged the classic Dark/Light ideas of Star Wars when he wrote the Imperial Agent and I got this response: "Let's just say that Freed was far more subtle than Avellone was. With the IA story, I never felt that the writer was cramming his view in my face and calling me and idiot if I disagreed (Kreia did that a lot). All things being said though, I LOVE Kotor 2, probably more than the first one." So, yeah, I think for a lot of people KOTOR 2 is not the end all be all of the Old Republic era, there are tons of people that love KOTOR 1 and even SWTOR and wouldnt want them be wiped out so Obsidian could overwrite them.

In defense of SoR, I thought the story was going in a good direction when you find the ghost of Revan, my guess was that Revan actually did die on the Foundry and this new Revan was nothing more than an imposter, fooling the Order of Revan and everyone else, I thought it was a good twist, but it turned out it wasn't the case. The problem with using the MMO formula (specially the WoW formula) is that every great character eventually goes rogue/crazy and becomes a raid boss. It happened to Darth Malgus (another character with good potential) and they did it to Revan too. I still think that the personal class stories from level 1-50 were pretty good and people that played Kotor 1 and 2 should give them a shot.

Or people who don't know that in order to get money you need to actually put effort, as it comes from other people other than Mom and Dad. I really can't get past over MacIntosh calling me a "privileged ****lord" from the artificial Island he has made out of Boats... So much this But hey, you have a Legion of WK's trying to make them keep living the dream without doing anything resembling a job. Remember Brianna Wu getting about $16.000 in her patreaon per month or some **** like this for...twittering? I never saw his islands, got any screenshots?

What disturbed me the most about The Tropes vs Women videos is that when they started to come out, all the gaming press marched in lockstep to praise it, and two years later I think it's pretty obvious they are just shilling for it. It was also rare that even big gaming youtubers have been avoiding the topic until recently, they would rather not risk beign called misogynists. The only people that seemed to have no fear in beign critical of the series were people that were not part of the gaming scene like Amazing Atheist or Thunderf00t, or smaller channels like Kite Tails. For me Kotaku and Polygon are political sites as much as they are gaming sites, they will actively promote certain ideology and will never criticize their sacred cows while disregarding any kind of ethical standard and only respond when they are put up against the wall.

Oh no...another member of the GG army...plzzzzzzzzzz...no more In here I speak as an Obsidian Fan, a Pillars Backer and someone looking forward to SkyForge and New Vegas 2 That beign said GGArmy does sound good! Also, who keeps making all the cute Vivian James artowrk, so cute!

What do you know? It turns out that when you get away from twitter and go into gaming forums, the great majority Obsidian customers and backers are against corruption in games journalism, against censorship and against twitter lynch mobs. But no, no, clearly this is just a 4chan conspiracy, I backed Obsidian financially two years ago so I could harass women today, right?

I don't know why you think it's a fake outrage campaign. I obviously don't know the mind of other people who agree with me, but for my part, there's nothing fake here. Just a sincere request to try an d turn the public dialogue less hostile towards marginalized groups. And sure, complaining about the joke has definitely brought more attention to it. But really, staying quiet about it isn't going to change anything. Actually you have to consider that staying quiet in THIS particular case would have left that tombstone just as an obscure part of the game that only a handful were aware of, but no, the trend today is to make gigantic issues out of nothing and for people to ask removal of content that many many people that pledged for the game are not bothered by. While at the same time I see a lot of folk plugging their patreon account, and tweeting about #killallmen. this is ridiculous, this is not about justice this is about a handful of people that want to be relevant and profit from scandals. Yeah, I meant staying quiet won't change anything in the wider context of society. As PrimeJunta somewhat facetiously mentioned, at the very least this might result in Obsidian (and other developers who are paying attention) to be mindful of this kind of thing in the future. Having a Patreon account or tweeting a silly hashtag doesn't discount an argument, nor does it necessarily mean your opinions aren't sincerely held. Each developer will see it differently, many are coming to really resent this kind of nonsense but they dont speak for fear of losing their jobs, the only ones I see that speak about this kind of stuff without fear are the CEOs who are at no risk of beign fired, people like DAniel Vavra, Brad Wardell, David Scott Jaffe, etc. Make no mistake, I support equal rights for everyone, so you can see me as someone that is 95% on your side, but I dont support the removal of content from the game because a twitter lynch mob of genocide supporters asked for it. If Obsidian wants to develop a toggle that would make the text from the tombs dissapear It's up to them, I think that would be a mess to program and it would come in a patch later down the line. Also do you really want to erase a huge chunk of content from the game because 1% you didnt like? besides everybody already saw the joke, so disabling backer content just will delete a ton other content that was NOT offensive

And that's kind of a shame really. Something this relatively small shouldn't mean that LGBT content should never be included in games. It just means that maybe this isn't the game for that (doesnt fit designers' image maybe?), So its kind of a shame that some ridiculous extremists on twitter get to screw everything up for everybody else. But, I guess thats how the world works, so we should just accept it right? ~sigh~ Why can't people just be reasonable? Some people tried to be reasonable, Totalbiscuit tried to be start dialogue about on this Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/totalbiscuit/pillars-of-transphobia The result from the always offended crowd was as mature as you could expect, they started two hashtags one was #Shutthe****upTotalBiscuit and the other was #ShutUptotalBiscuit. Aslo Katherine Cross from Feminist frequency show called him a "transphone of the highest degree" and Leigh Alexander formerly from Gamasutra also attacked him. Now people like Alexander basically live off donations from her followers, she needs to stay relevant through scandals to keep getting money, so it's up to you to decide if they are really allies for justice or just people trying to turn any little thing into a big scandal to stay relevant themselves.

I don't know why you think it's a fake outrage campaign. I obviously don't know the mind of other people who agree with me, but for my part, there's nothing fake here. Just a sincere request to try an d turn the public dialogue less hostile towards marginalized groups. And sure, complaining about the joke has definitely brought more attention to it. But really, staying quiet about it isn't going to change anything. Actually you have to consider that staying quiet in THIS particular case would have left that tombstone just as an obscure part of the game that only a handful were aware of, but no, the trend today is to make gigantic issues out of nothing and for people to ask removal of content that many many people that pledged for the game are not bothered by. While at the same time I see a lot of folk plugging their patreon account, and tweeting about #killallmen. this is ridiculous, this is not about justice this is about a handful of people that want to be relevant and profit from scandals.

I'm gonna say as a general statement that Obsidian has probably already changed what some backers decided to write. I don't see how they're obligated to put exactly what the backers wrote into their product. Yes and the joke on that tombstone was aleady approved by obsidian, they decide what goes in the game, not some Twitter Lynch Mob of offended people that didn't even buy the game judging by many of their tweets

In this cultural context, the transphobic interpretation of the poem seems to me the more likely, and that's why I favour removing it from the game. Especially because I don't see it as in any way integral to the developer vision, so I don't see this stifling Obsidian's creativity in any way worth mentioning. Why remove it? why not just ignore the tombstone and play the game? if you think this joke is harmful in real life I'd like to see some evidence for this claim, but usually people just shy away when evidence is asked. Also if this joke was so harmful, this little fake outrage campaign just drew much much more attention to the joke and made it famous, so... good job? Yes and Im sorry but I will bring this up in every post, the person that asked removal of the joke on tiwtter wants to KILL ALL MEN. And the journalist that brought this to the attention of Sawyer was supportiv of the genocide of the jewish people. I have to bring this up every time because the censorship apologists seem to want to conveniently ignore it. The people that asked for censorhip of the game are very questionable people, horrible in my opinion, and they should be ignored.

In any case I don't see the censorship issue here, especially since trans awareness and sensitivity is still in its infancy meaning even if it wasn't noticed prerelease, doesn't mean Obsidian cannot take the feedback and say "Oh we didn't fully appreciate this." It's complicated because some transgender individuals won't care, while some do. Not really my place to say they should or should not be offended. Undoubtedly there's other contributions that were refused because Obsidian didn't feel they were appropriate. I've seen that some are and some aren't. I still see the joke as open to interpretation, was it really a trans person or was the man so drunk that he confused a man for a woman? You really have to be fishing for something to be offended if you find this so offensive. Not to mention that some of the people that spearhaeded this outrage campaign are pretty deplorable people, one actively promotes the genocide of men and the other used to promote the genocide of the jewish people, surprised that the developers even took them seriously. Anything that comes as a result of a twitter lynch mob pressuring developers I see it as censorship. Here we go. No need to write paragraphs when the heart of the matter are these 8 words you've written. This is deplorable in my opinion

I understand your view but calling people who want the poem removed "terrorists" just seems like that's stretching it a bit. Ooops hahaha, I thought it was a figure of speech . Yeah it's a bit over the top, but I do think they are bullies, and people like Katherine Cross, Jim Sterling and others thinking this joke leads to the deaths of trans or makes fun of the death of tans, you need to get back to reaily, folks.

The only one who can do that is the gold backer who submitted it, and he hasn't revealed himself yet. Oh God, I hope they do not. No one deserves the wolves at their heels that would cause. The joke it's open to inerpretation, which makes this whole fake outrage more ridiculous. People on twitter act like modern lynch mobs, and then they turn around and say "it's not censorship we were just trying to ruin their business if they dont comply"

I reiterate since people like to conveniently ignore that the person that started this fake outrage has advocated for genocide. And the "games journalist" that brought this to Josh Sawyer attention was a former neo-nazi that advocated for jewish genocode. "Im like a banana, yellow outside and white on the inside" is one of Ian Miles Cheong infamous quotes.

Is not... quite true. None of those people have anything to do with FemFreq, and while I know GG has seen this, they are not the ones starting it and this is kinda outside their usual 'territory'. As far as I know the FemFreq team consists of three people, not sure if there's more: Anita Sarkeesian Jonathan McIntosh (writer and producer) Katherine Cross (secretary) Here are my sources https://i.imgur.com/3krmDzG.png https://pdf.yt/d/QnYk8zz4nV8hfVfv

He, here's a good image showing how this nonsense fake outrage was orchestrated, as always, someone from feminist frequency had to be involved.

And believe me they will be offended by something pretty soon, this past week alone I've seem the very same crowd beign offended at Totalbiscuit, beign offended at a cover for a Batgirl comic, and they also had LiongsGate studios delete a few of their tweets because they were deemed offended. Everyone that disagrees is attacked, like I showed with Totalbiscuit and declared a misogynist or transphone and then put in one of those famous blockbots. You get put on the blocklist if you follow the certain individuals such as Roguestar or Sargon of Akkad. I don't care about the blocklist personally, I was just pointing out the madness of the people that are always offended, as for the blocklist, I think that beign on the same list with scientists like Richard Dawkins is badge of honor. What apologists of censorship fail to address is that the people wanting this harmless piece of content removed are people who have advocated genocide themselves, one of them has proudly promoted to Kill all Men and the other was a former Neo-Nazi who said that Jews=Garbage. Im sorry apologists, there is no way to reconcile that, if you think that all men should be killed of if you think that all jewish people should be killed you're a horrible human beign and no developer should be paying you attention, that's pretty much it.

And believe me they will be offended by something pretty soon, this past week alone I've seem the very same crowd beign offended at Totalbiscuit, beign offended at a cover for a Batgirl comic, and they also had LiongsGate studios delete a few of their tweets because they were deemed offended. Everyone that disagrees is attacked, like I showed with Totalbiscuit and declared a misogynist or transphone and then put in one of those famous blockbots.

Yes, the fact that someone that actively promotes genocide and someone that was a former neo-nazi got the ear of Obsidian so easily is pretty disturbing, the minimum background check should reveal this, the fact that veteran game developers with 20-30 years of experience in the industry bow down to the wishes of these people are clearly crazy (and yes promoting genocide is crazy) is pretty telling, these demands should have been dismissed immediately after people saw where they coming from. I'm looking forward to when this thread progresses to its natural conclusion and consists entirely of speculation over Zoe Quinn's sex life. Ok this is just derailment and if I may say so it's look like pretty obvious trolling. You dont seem to want to contribute anything to the discussion

Yes, the fact that someone that actively promotes genocide and someone that was a former neo-nazi got the ear of Obsidian so easily is pretty disturbing, the minimum background check should reveal this, the fact that veteran game developers with 20-30 years of experience in the industry bow down to the wishes of these people that are clearly crazy (and yes promoting genocide is crazy) is pretty troubling, these demands should have been dismissed immediately after people saw where they coming from.

Exactly, I see these type of twitter campaigns to shame game developers as pure bullyings and attempts of censorship. It's ridiculous to say that the only cases of censorship if it's Obama tries to silence you, it's nonsense, this is an excerpt from an interview with an artist that worked in Divinity Original Sin, they had similar issues. "When you own a pizza place and one day the mob enters your little shack, threatens you by saying if I don’t stop selling pepperoni pizza’s they’ll do anything in their power to make sure you go out of business, then what should we call this? Blackmail? Censorship? Harassment? Extortion? or simply a trade embargo?" You can find the full interview here http://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2015/03/divinity-original-sin-dev-talks-boob-plates-sexism-and-moral-outrage/

I would certainly be a huge disappointment to see Obsidian pay more attention to randoms on twitter than the people who believed in them and backed them financially. People like Ian Miles Cheong who said that nobody should care about Games Journalists beign ethical should not get the ear of Obsidian so easily in my opinion.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, TotalBiscuit is beign attacked on twitter for asking Obsidian to let that content stay in the game. These comments were made by Alexander, fomer EiC of Gamasutra and Cross of the Feminist Frequency Show

Ok, I'll just repost what I said in the other thread. It seems TotalBiscuit has recorded a SoundCloud about this issue as well, referring to this Twitter Outrage Campaign as an attempt of censorship similar to what we've seen recently with the Batgirl cover, the Censorship of Lionhead Studios and Months ago the censorship of Divinity Original Sin. https://soundcloud.com/totalbiscuit/pillars-of-transphobia There is the soundcloud that TB recorded, and now he's beign attacked on twitter by random people and members of the gaming press like former EiC of Gamasutra Leigh Alexander and Katherine Cross which works on the show Feminist Frequency