#but I'm unbeatable at minions

[islib]

I've slept, I've eaten, I've touched grass. My thoughts are a little more ordered. Let's do this:

On Railroading, Roleplay, the Social Contract and the QSMP

aka I Need To Get This Off My Chest Even Though I Want All Of Us To Move On As Quickly As Possible

So. Let's establish the narrative events as a baseline.

Since the first Purgatory event, Quesadilla Island has been plagued by visits of "Eye Workers/Eye Soldiers" - at first investigative, more recently aggressive ones.

(Side note - it appears that most characters have forgotten about this, but this is an ongoing war. As seen in Philza's [20.12.2023 - Hardcore Boi & QSMP - Xmas Event & a New threat?]:

Idk about you, this looks like a declaration of war to me. They don't care about retrieving Luffy at this point, they're just being destructive.)

This has lead to character actions. We have seen the rise of new safe rooms, fight metas, inventory prep. There's been serious parent-child talks about what to do when a fight breaks out. The characters have reacted to the threat accordingly - as a threat.

The fights have been getting harder. From the start, the Eye's minions were framed as dangerous, and perceived as such, but as time went on, they began to return with outrageously strong weapons, potion effects and health amounts that were essentially unbeatable, and unreasonable fight stamina. Still, thanks to the characters' preparations and the characters' relationships, no one lost a permanent life.

Yesterday (morning crew streams of 11.1.2023), Empanada lost a life.

The fight broke out in the Favela. The Eye Soldiers were using enchanted sticks, enchanted axes, potions, explosives and lassos. (In contrast to previous fights, which were generally only conducted with melee weapons.)

As soon as the players notice the attackers, they shout at the Eggs to get out of there. At first, the Eggs seem to ignore the shouts, wanting to help their parents. Understandable, if frustrating - both Empanada and Ramon have been on a "I need to protect everyone" kick lately, so it makes some sense.

It stops making sense very soon, though. Both the Eggs get downed multiple times, while their parents scream and plead with them to leave. Empanada gets lassoed by the workers, making her escape next to impossible - but we have proof that she got away at some point: you can see her teleporting away at 0:29:43-45 of Fit's stream and later we see her signs in Ramon's room at the bunker:

(slightly meta, forgive, it's still narratively relevant to have the proof)

The fight moves from the Favela to Spawn, Em returns to it, and dies (when she does, btw, there's no time between her getting downed and her dying. a fraction of a second at most.). The fight dies down with some curious events irrelevant to this post, scene ends.

Now that we've established narrative context, here's for a touch of the meta-narrative stuff.

The attacks haven't been ramping up linearly - they started very strong, and then alternated in strength with repeated attacks on a single day wildly varying in power levels. This attack was clearly the strongest yet - Fit's VOD shows some attacks doing minimum of 3 hearts of damage through a decent slime/diamond+high prot armor set.

The use of lassos is new - potentially a narrative show of how the Eye Soldiers are learning Player tactics? It's the main reason for why Em's death was mechanically possible.

There's been narrative in the past arcs of the server where egg death was the point of a fight encounter. It has always been possible to prevent the death in those scenarios.

There have been narrative fights that were unwinnable in the server past.

Ramon wasn't supposed to be on - his admin is sick (or otherwise indisposed and using sickness as a narrative reason for not playing) and had left a message that he wouldn't be on, only to later join anyway, likely due to the event needing Eggs to be present.

As far as I'm aware, this is the first time a player has hard-pulled themselves out of RP. (more on this in a bit)

All on the same page? Let's get to my criticism.

In roleplay, players and game facilitators enter a social contract. Very often it's an implicit one, just "don't be an idiot" and stuff, but sometimes it's more hard coded: what are the rules, what are the expectations, what are the lines we don't cross.

Now, as an audience of the QSMP, we don't know what the details of this contract are - only the players and the admins do. We can implicitly understand that parts of it contain expectations of activity on both player and admin sides, expectations of medium (i.e. Minecraft), expectations of who's participating, etc.

We've rarely seen anyone employ any sort of safety tools, although I expect at least some of the creators have some amongst themselves (think safewords mostly). The extreme safety tool that all of the streamers have access to is logging off, but I don't think we've seen that mid-encounter, ever.

Fit employed a softer safety tool yesterday, when he decided to stick with Ramon in the bunker. At 0:33:30, Fit notices footsteps outside the reinforced door. We don't get to figure out who it is, but he says: "Oh I hear you! If you're an admin, I'm fucking done. [...] We are not fucking moving." Now, some of you will argue this is in character - I disagree. It's semi-in character, simply thanks to the word "admin". Fit keeps some semblance of his roleplay, for any number of reasons, but addresses the admin, taking himself out of roleplay in order to declare he didn't wish to continue in the encounter.

The fact that he partially stays in character makes it easier for both him and the audience to rejoin the character later.

What's really important here is that the admin - whoever it was (I think at that point it may have been Em - backs off. Fit declares he's not playing, and the admin hears that and leaves. Even if it was Em, and whatever was going to happen wasn't going to be in the same tome as the fight encounter, they backed off. That is very good.

Now to the more narrative points.

These Eye Soldier attacks have been clear in their motives: hurt everyone on Quesadilla. Narratively, the characters responded appropriately, by gearing up and protecting the fragile Eggs.

How did the server lore respond? Well, it didn't.

The attacks continue on some invisible timeline, getting superpowered out of nowhere when the players preparations pay off, and the Eggs, despite their general agreements and character motivations, keep running head first into danger.

The only reason I'm not trying to push into a riot over Em's death is the lassos, because those make it mechanically difficult for her to stay away.

In conclusion, the main issue I have with yesterday is the consequences. If the only way to protect your child is to literally pull yourself out of the encounter - because clearly the narrative implication of yesterday is not only will the Eye Soldiers keep going until an Egg is dead, but also that Eggs will be coming back to fight unless they're actually restrained - then who's going to be playing in this arc? Why would anyone, when temporary victory only means more Soldiers with more power, and Eggs that are less likely to leave the fight?

If there was a clear narrative indication that these attacks can be stopped - a clue towards Luffy, or a conversation with the Federation on defences, or a clear sense of what can protect someone against the Eyes - I would be fine with what happened yesterday.

But there isn't. Nothing that's been done has had ANY effect on the events.

I've seen people going "well we've seen this coming" and to them I say: how does that make anything better? That just means there's been time to notice that the narrative line ignored player agency!

I've seen people going "well the players don't take anything seriously until an Egg dies" and to them I say: Morning Crew went out to look for Luffy literally yesterday, trying to move the story along. People have been building safe rooms and preparing fight supplies and player metas so they could defend themselves and their families, they've been taking this very seriously.

I've seen people going "even interactive stories have scripted beats" and to them I say: not at the expense of player agency, not in something as freeform as QSMP. This is not a Telltale game.

I don't think my criticisms are unreasonable - all I want is for the narrative to be actually interactive. To even a little bit allow for players to play, rather than act out someone's unwritten script.

That's what movies are for.

#qsmp crit #qsmp neg #cw child death

[homesweetgoodneighbor]

Yeeeeeah, I couldn't play Dark Urge.

See, I can do evil. But, my evil has STANDARDS.

I don't do unnecessarily cruel evil to animals. Humanoids of many forms are assholes. They're easy to want to do evil to.

Kick a squirrel to death for nipping your foot? Why? What does that get you?

Recognize that squirrel's moxy, recruit that squirrel to be your minion, and later have it call upon its squirrel pals to help you? I mean, if you're evil and have speak with animals, you have an entire unbeatable army. Alfred Hitchcock had a whole ass fucking horror film about birds alone! (Canadians will tell you nothing short of nuclear holocaust will kill moose and no one is sure on that one.)

Not to mention this means you get to be nature friendly while committing other acts of horror. So, after a day of being evil, you can come home to some nice little plant-centric cottage with some animal pals to hang out with?

So, you get to be evil and a Disney princess. What's not to love?

Dark Urge is just not creative enough in my Not So Asked For Opinion.

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------------------------ Please note: I don't care if you love to play Dark Urge. I'm just being silly. I have no desire to go that route, but what you do in your game is cool. So, chill. If you send me anon hate over it, then I will sigh sadly and delete you. Don't be a dick and learn reading comprehension.

#baldur's gate 3 #bg3

[waheelawhisperer]

Would you be willing to expand more on what you didn't like about v8?

Not gonna go in-depth on each of these, but I'll give you the bullet point rundown. Basically, my issue with Volume 8 is that it threw away almost everything Volume 7 set up.

Salem takes center stage for the first time and ends up sidelined 2/3 of the way through so Cinder and Ironwood can be the main villains. Her first fight somehow manages to make her seem more beatable rather than unbeatable despite her trouncing arguably her strongest subordinate and 3 heroes with zero effort and needing a magic nuke just to slow her down. The writers lowered her threat level in a Volume that should've been dedicated to establishing just how fucked anyone who tried to take her on is, and what's worse is that they had all the pieces in place to do it properly and fumbled the execution.

Ironwood's decline made sense to me based on what they'd done to set up his character beforehand but I kind of wish it hadn't been so abrupt and dramatic and found it personally unsatisfying. Would've rather seen him grow gradually more desperate instead of snapping at once. Feel like he kind of got screwed by the show's runtime issues a bit

Emerald's redemption arc was rushed as hell and someone other than Yang should've been suspicious of the woman who helped murder a school and cripple a Kingdom and whose actions directly contributed to the deaths of at least 2 of their friends. Instead, she makes one heroic speech and they're all sitting there laughing with her.

They kind of abandoned the trolley problem they set up at the end of Volume 7 (is it better to save what you can or fight and risk losing everything to save everything) and I'm pretty sure it's because they saw too many people siding with Ironwood (whose plan was fucking stupid and entirely inspired by his own fear of Salem independent of any moral considerations) during the hiatus and then decided to course correct by removing any shred of nuance that might exist in the situation

3/4 of the heroes drank tea in a mansion while Ruby pouted about reinforcements not materializing an hour after she called for help (Ruby consistently fails to understand how much time things can be expected to take throughout the series) and the Atlesian military (a faction portrayed as antagonistic) actually fights to protect the Kingdom despite its individual members being visibly terrified and having less training and worse equipment than the protagonist group and the B-team + Yang fights Salem. All of this occurs in-universe hours after Weiss swears she's not giving up her home without a fight. Between that declaration and this stage of the Volume, the only people she fights are the ones actually trying to defend the Kingdom.

Jk Weiss waved a sword in her defenseless untrained brother's face and the writers called that a girlboss moment and claimed he was the final boss of her arc

We never got to properly see what Hazel could do because the only two fights this show let him have were the terribly-choreographed Battle of Haven and then a couple minutes of him getting his ass kicked by his boss. Waste of arguably Salem's most powerful minion..

The message Ruby sent to the world should logically have made things worse everywhere that heard it - the original plan involved telling the people of Atlas about Salem, securing the Kingdom by suppressing the resulting surge of local Grimm activity, and then spreading the news to the rest of the world when Atlesian forces were organized, prepared, and ready to assist in combatting the increase in Grimm activity that would result. Instead, Ruby dumped that knowledge on two crippled Kingdoms (Vale and Mistral) that can barely defend themselves even without a spike in negativity and a Kingdom where survival is perpetually in question without any time for any of those Kingdoms to prepare and then acted surprised when they didn't immediately drop everything to assist her (I think she was right to call for help, but needed to craft her message more effectively and consider its implications more carefully) - but this will never be relevant because that might mean the writers considered the implications of a scene beyond its immediate relevance or that Ruby made a mistake that can't be easily brushed off and the narrative consistently refuses to engage with this possibility.

The show failed to adequately establish the necessity of evacuating the Kingdom's population to Vacuo because we never see the state of the Atlesian forces after Oscar's cane bomb. The Monstra is dead and the enemy can't spawn reinforcements anymore. It was the perfect time to counterattack, and I was actually expecting Ruby to have a Protagonist moment and rally the troops and get through to Ironwood so that they could save Atlas, but instead the writers decided that they wanted to dump the protagonists into some stupid fairy tale world for some reason so now Mantle's infrastructure is in ruins and the ability to adequately defend the world from Salem and her forces is crippled.

Penny's suicide. Just... Penny's suicide. The show fails to establish its necessity and instead it just feels like they're being cruel to both her and the people who like her

It felt like the entire Volume was just trying to recreate the emotional impact of Volume 3 without understanding what made Volume 3 work.

All of these could be a post of their own (and I've actually made posts on some of them) but that's my basic rundown of why I think Volume 8 is dogshit

#rwby #analysis

[sup-honey]

Arcane take on being left on your own

When I think about a scene in which I was ready to throw rocks at Jayce, there is only one that comes to my mind and that is right after he killed the Chembaron's son by accident and denies Vi any further help. It was that certain "You won't make it alone." for me, but that got me thinking today.

For Jayce it is just natural that you are not able to achieve anything on your own, for him there's always been someone to hold his hand, if it was the mage in the snow storm, the Kinnamans as his patrons, Viktor, Mel... (man, I could go one with this list forever).

But for the audience it was pretty clear, that Vi could take a lot. We've seen her beat up all of Silco's Minions (that weren't on Shimmer) and knowing she has the Atlas Gauntels it was more of a comic relief that she beat up all the Shimmer Guards in front of the Last Drop before her final fight with Sevika.

We knew that Jayce was wrong but it's funny to think about how people in Piltover are just not used to fighting or being kept from it (thinking about how Caitlyn was always willing to take risks but Marcus and her parents tried to keep her away from anything that could bite back, in Marcus case not because he really cared about her, tbh) and Zaunites have no other choice but to fight there way through.

I'm not only talking about Vi and the kids here, playing Robin Hood to prevent starving but also about older Jinx, making violence her way to cope with stress, scaring the whole of the Topside and being able to fight grown men herself despite not being as buff as her sister.

About Viktor who worked his way up from a gifted child that had nothing but his dreams to the co-inventor of Piltover's biggest success Hextech, working so hard, his body literally had to stop him (which he wouldn't have had to do if Piltover didn't have a class system that only allowed those with privilege to work there and if you're from Zaun you have to earn it ten times as much).

And I'm talking about Ekko, who brings something new on the plate.

Ekko is seen fighting in a group most of the time but that has nothing to do with his lack of strength and willpower to get where he has to, he chooses it because he knows they are strong together as you see it a lot in Zaun. It's established early on in the show that people in the Underground stick together and that that's what makes them strong against the technological superiority of Piltover. We see that every individual is strong on their own, they learn that from a young age, but together they are unbeatable (or they could be, but events in the past showed that it was still difficult for them).

What we see in the show is, that even Vi and Powder/Jinx together can't take the firelights in a fight even tho we get to know them as the most skilled fighters of the show. It's the strength of the Undercity kids combined, who had to fight their way through, that makes them so strong.

So yes Jayce, they are stronger in a team, what they could achieve is a hell of a lot but every single one of them could also make it alone, my dear.

#arcane #it's just you jayce get a hold of yourself #i love him dearly but he has to do something on his own once #zaun kids are so strong love them #arcane meta #piltover and zaun #undercity #jayce talis #vi arcane #vi and powder #jinx #ekko arcane #viktor arcane #caitlyn kinnaman #marcus arcane #vander #home