Mand'alor Dash

I really don't like Game Theory, or MatPat. Whether he's shamelessly jumping on every bandwagon that rolls under his nose, deliberately misleading viewers with clickbait titles and thumbnails, spewing SJW bullshit to an impressionable audience, nakedly selling lies to please his sponsors, or just wasting people's precious attention spans with verbal diarrhea, he's not exactly a model youtuber. But it's the way he conducts his research that I hate the most. Rather than going in any logical direction, he just spins a wheel and picks one completely at random. While I have neither the time nor the expertise to debunk his videos about physics or medicine, there's an especially low-hanging fruit in his library that should serve as the perfect example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln342caKBHs For someone who claims to know Fallout, I've never seen anybody get so much about the series wrong. Only a minute and 30 seconds into this video, he cocks up the most basic premise of series lore by claiming that "World War II never really ended." Of course, since he later identifies the point of divergence (incorrectly) as 1961, this leads me to question whether MatPat knows as much about real history as he does Fallout history. No, World War II ended right on time in the Fallout universe. 1945; Allies won. It's the Cold War that never ended, though the Soviet Union gradually declined and was replaced by Maoist China over the next century. America, meanwhile, grew into a much stronger stereotype of 1950s exceptionalism, and was dragged into war when the world's resources began to dwindle. For a better explanation, here's a good youtube channel. I'm not even going to get into how Mat refers to ghouls as "zombies" to appeal to his 13 year old fanbase, because by then I'd have exhausted my will to write and there's still so much bullshit to comb through. The premise of Mat's video is already stupid, since Pre-War Money is an item that exists in the newer games, and at the time the video was made, it was always valued at 10 caps. The wiki page even points out that the blue strap indicates that each stack is worth exactly $100; so 100 dollars divided by 10 caps means that each cap is worth 10 dollars. Wow, now wasn't that a much easier calculation than whatever MatPat cooked up? Now obviously, since the US government no longer exists in the year 2277, and the dollar is no longer legal tender, that's going to skew the equation a little, but that's still the most direct comparison you can make. So, how does Game Theory try to answer this question? In two incredibly stupid ways, the first of which is considerably stupider. Mat decides that the best barometer for value in this situation would be the price of gold, which would be great, if there was any way to determine the value of gold in the alternate, post-apocalyptic year of 2282. In lieu of that, here's some mental gymnastics. As previously discussed, Mat comes to the dumbfounding conclusion that Fallout's timeline diverged from our own in the year 1961. A conclusion he supports with one release date of one song in one radio station in one game. Once. The exact date of Fallout's divergence is left purposely vague in the lore, but there are several dead giveaways that point to a far earlier date. If you want to go really far back, you could say it diverged in the early 17th century when a samurai was abducted by aliens, but even if you stick to the events following World War II, there's still much more to consider. The most obvious example, and the one most commonly referenced as the reason why technology took such a drastically different turn in the Fallout timeline, is that the transistor was not invented until 2067; 120 years after its historical invention. If it's that easy to find a major divergence as far back as 1947, why did MatPat go through all the trouble just to find a song from 1961? I honestly have no idea, but it speaks volumes about how nonsensical the logic in his videos is. He'll go the longer path to find a less accurate conclusion rather than just sticking to the truth. Anywho, once Mat was sold on 1961, what was his next step? How exactly does the point of divergence help him calculate the price of gold in the alternate year 2282? He assumes, point blank, that the price of gold froze in place at the exact moment of divergence, and remained exactly the same for more than three centuries. Three centuries. Matpat actually believes that the price of gold stayed at exactly the same rate through not only time itself, but also resource crises, wars, societal collapse, nuclear Armageddon, and countless failed attempts to restore a functional society. Even if you buy into the misconception that American culture in Fallout froze in place following divergence (it didn't; some things advanced as normal, such as the civil rights movement), that still has next to no effect on the price of gold. That's dictated more by... y'no... economics. But fuck it, let's expand the misconception. Let's say that after 1961, not only did culture inexplicably freeze in place, but so did the economy, as well as the price of gold. Fine. That still leaves the issue of the atomic fucking holocaust that devastated the world in 2077. I have my doubts that the price of gold would remain comparable after an event like that. And that's how Mat arrives at his first figure of $1.67. It's ridiculous, obviously, but at least there he began in the right place. If there was a way to determine the dollar value of gold in the alternate year 2282, then he would have gotten a much better answer. He screwed the whole thing up royally, but at least he had a foundation. Another solid foundation that he had was much earlier in the video, when he mentioned that caps were backed by water. This is actually true (at least in Fallout 1), but for some reason, Mat just abandoned it and moved on to the gold method. Again, this all goes to show just how random and illogical this whole train of thought was. Why ignore or brush aside perfectly good avenues of inquiry to focus on utter bullshit? Anyway, his second method is much more forward and to the point. He wants to know what the raw materials themselves are worth, and then assumes that to be the price of a bottle cap. Because that's how currency works, right? Obviously not. In the US, for instance, our coins are never worth exactly what we paid to mint them. Pennies, infamously, are actually worth about 2/3rds the cost of the materials needed to mint them. Bottlecaps, should they become currency, would be no different. A currency's value in trade has next to nothing to do with its raw materials. Mat then goes through extra trouble to call the offices of a real life cap manufacturer to get an exact composition. I guess this is meant to impress me, but when he's still using the ridiculous 1961 year as his basis in all this, it still feels awful pathetic. Mat goes through all of this trouble just to come to a number even more ridiculous than his last one: about $0.0000175 per cap, or less than 2 cents for a minigun. Suffice to say, it's not that. And that's basically the end of this stupid video. After that, he goes right to whoring out his sponsor (which is a health food service, for some reason), and finishes with a few vaguely Fallout-related jokes and memes. Not something I can really debunk, but it did make it hard to take the shotgun out of my mouth. I know this is just one video, but this should be indicative of how bad Mat's research is. If he was too lazy or stubborn to actually learn the first thing about Fallout lore before making this video, then I don't even want to think about how many times he's potentially fucked up on more difficult, more sensitive topics. MatPat probably isn't going to read this. I understand that, and I don't care. I'm not the only one talking about how bad his videos are, and I don't expect him to read and respond to some nobody who posted mean things on a brony website. This is meant for the people who still take his crap seriously. Maybe they can look at Game Theory for what it truly is: the Nickelback of YouTube gaming channels.

I haven't been following it. Can anybody tell me what all the hubbub is about?

If you're worried, you should really see a doctor. Video games aren't the only thing that can cause seizures.

The art was already saved. This has already been explained. It sucks that we lose the experience of playing the game, but it really can't be helped in most cases. That's called abandonware, and it's basically just where you stop enforcing your copyright. If the fans care enough, they make something of it instead. Case in point "Negative emotion?" Talk about the pot and the kettle. And yeah, bombarding people with letters trying to make them do what you want (as Ross is trying to organize) is harassment. Ask anyone.

The art, story, and sound can be preserved in a let's play. Some games still have private servers running, if you're dead set on playing them. That's the best you're going to get. Does fucking Darkspore really warrant this? Those things cost money. You can't ask someone to sink a shit ton of money into "preserving" decaying MMOs. You care that much about Darkspore, then pony up. Start a private server project, like SWG has. Sink your own time and money into "preserving it" instead of expecting somebody else to. Now I'm the one talking to a wall. I didn't see anyone credited. Because it isn't their problem. How would you like to be chained to something you made for the rest of your life, forced to maintain it and keep it alive just because people don't understand inevitability? Depends. Let's Plays are widely accepted nowadays, but complete backups of the entire game run into iffy territory.

Oh, of course. All I mean is that the "game" still exists in some form, even though it can no longer be played. And again, most of these games just can't be saved in playable form.

29:40 "Honestly, this is all a longshot, but being a royal pain in the ass that makes EA executives dread coming into work... that, I think we might be able to do." Or let's players. Ross actually saved that planet he liked so much just by recording it. All that is ever lost is the gameplay.

Maybe you shouldn't have joined a harassment campaign, if you're so against condescension. My post had nothing to do with the benefits of snail mail in comparison to e-mail. You're yelling at a wall.

This is kind of a mountain/molehill situation. The majority of the games which have been terminated, or risk termination in the future, are MMOs which can not be run offline. Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes are two prime examples of dead MMOs, and SWG actually has private servers still running with questionable legality. These games can not remain online forever, nor can they feasibly be played offline without redoing the gameplay from square one. The Secret World, which Ross mentioned, fits squarely within this category. Saving it forever is practically impossible. Another significant chunk is games which were simply designed to be multiplayer only, and never included a single player component for some reason or another. the PS3 game M.A.G. is a great example of this. It was a console FPS that touted massive battles with up to 256 players on the same field. That was the game's entire selling point. Even if they had included a single player component, nobody would have given a toss. These games, again, can not stay online forever. Servers cost money, and there's a point where it no longer makes sense to keep them up. The last tiny handful is the few PC exclusives with always-online DRM: A practice that saw sporadic, occasional use earlier in the decade, but has largely died out ever since the SimCity catastrophe. This is the category that Darkspore fits into, and it doesn't have much company. As piracy is not considered a major concern on consoles, always-on DRM was only ever applied to PC games, most of which already had an unaffected console equivalent. Assassin's Creed II had an offline console release, and can not be destroyed in the future. Because of the policy's limited use, only a very small handful of games will ever be truly terminated thanks to always-on DRM. Telling devs to "stop killing games" is unbelievably naive. Many games are simply impossible to keep alive indefinitely, and the few that are unnecessarily killed are so small in number and impact that it's laughable to call this the "greatest problem in gaming." Fact is: There was a recent span of a few years, where a very small number of pc exclusives were shackled with terrible DRM that may eventually kill the playable form of the game. Even in these extreme cases, recorded footage will still exist, such as old Let's Plays, as will the music in most cases. In some cases, it is even possible to crack the game in order to run it offline, as was demonstrated with SimCity before EA officially added offline support. Some games can't be saved, and it's not worth acting like a bunch of jackasses just to try to.

Play the game for yourself if you're interested. It's not bad.

Shame, really. From what I've read, Singapore's an awesome country IRL.

feeling weird and bored so w/e. Just remember it's the last one you completed, not just the last one you played. Black Ops III, on my side. IDK. I'll definitely stay the fuck away from Zurich and Singapore. That much is a given.

A recent favorite of mine is the soundtrack to Wolfenstein: The New Order. Fantastic mix of 60s hard rock and modern electronica to fit its retro-futuristic dystopia.

When I first heard Fetty Wap, I thought we finally reached the point where even the defenders of modern music had to admit that something was horribly wrong. He couldn't hit a note with a shotgun, and the producers didn't even try to hide this fact. How any human ear could perceive anything but annoyance from his unbearable voice eludes me to this day.

I thought about this question for quite a while. I'm leaning toward Jolee Bindo from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. He will never save the galaxy, and he knows this. He isn't trying to. But he's seen a lot in his long life, and developed wisdom that the Jedi council will never grasp. His only wish is that whoever does save the galaxy be a wiser man. To this end, he's not afraid to stand toe to toe with a Jedi, the self-proclaimed heroes of the galaxy, and tell them that they are wrong. The world's greatest villains were all heroes in their own respective circles. It takes a wise, brave man to tell a hero that they are wrong.

The Republic from Star Wars. Weak, impotent, unobtrusive bordering on lawless, held together by an ancient order of Shaolin Spacemen, yet it still stood exponentially longer than the Roman Empire.