Its not a genre I know super well, but I remember there was a Power Rangers one on SNES way back in the original generation that was incredibly fun that I enjoyed. Was very much an old reliable at Blockbuster for a weekend fun time.
Most people who make "Catholic jokes" or even generalized "Christian jokes" probably couldn't even tell you that there are different denominations beyond "Mormons, the pro-gay one and Catholic." Maybe Baptist because of Westboro if they are old enough.
I am in fact in a guild that does not raid, its simply a place to park for the handful of guild perks that still exist, so that tracks.
But again, I still don't think I'm a massively niche category. Plenty of people don't raid, are in guilds that don't raid or more importantly, only pug their raids. If that is the only metric, then it will miss probably even more than I thought, simply because the type of players who play retail is heavily biased towards "log in, do dailies/collection things" type players which is a playstyle that doesn't really exist until around Legion when it has enough content to justify itself.
This doesn't really change anything about your point, as the relative difference is probably still about the same, its just pedanticism about the numbers themselves. Which I'd say is still sub 1million if not sub 500k, but not quite 200-250k.
Though more to your point, Retail is a game of alts now and Blizzard is pushing people towards that harder and harder by the patch. Its likely that you are getting a lot of duplicate players who simply play their alts way too fucking much enough to make it seem like it would be more than one. I know a guy who has two full time raiding careers across two characters, for example.
but you're not going to have a discussion with them
I literally do. I talk until they prove themselves to be completely retarded and then they usually meltdown and stop responding. It amuses me, and it has multiple times managed to be convincing to people watching.
In fact, I argued against them for so long I saw myself go from "all the downvotes for criticizing them" to multiple people saying the same things I was with all upvotes while they themselves became mostly downvoted for being obvious spergs. We literally were turning Telia from some sort of serious political activist to a partial jester people dunked on through sheer time and mockery.
You have power, and you have convinced yourself that using that power is morally just and good for dealing with things you dislike or simply don't want to do. Everything is flowing backwards from your own opinions to justify using the sword.
Yes they are some people who are dangerous to allow to speak, yes it might be a "good thing" to remove them entirely rather than deal with them. But that also applies to eugenics, there are people who should just be aborted rather than run the risk of dealing with them.
Heck, that even applies to groups. Plenty of people will argue that Jews or Niggers would fail this test and shouldn't be allowed to speak at all because their very existence and lying tongues are warfare. You've spoken the very logic by which someone might end up in a racewar mindset.
You'll certainly say "its different because <essay>" but that is in fact the exact same starting position.
In order for fast travel to stop being a common mechanic, we need to kill off "open world" games as they currently exist.
Because they value size and story over fun. Sure its cool to run my way to X town the first go around, getting lost exploring things I see along the path. But the 9th time I need to travel there to "talk to Y Guy" to progress a quest, they better let me just skip the walk that no longer has anything possibly interesting along it.
Razorfist is an edgy contrarian. So a lot of times he will just take positions that are the polar opposite of whatever would be considered the "mainstream, acceptable" one and then work backwards to justify it for his audience to argue with him about (thereby driving huge engagement).
This isn't unique to him, its something you should keep in mind with a lot of "how would one even think that" opinions you see from content makers.
Because it really doesn't lose as many sales we wish it did.
I'd wager the vast majority of people here played Elden Ring, so clearly even those of us primed to find it offputting will still accept it to some extent. Which means the normies absolutely won't care.
Its already quite fascinating, because we can glean things from it regardless.
But we need to always keep that limitation in mind before we make strong statements on things like God or Heaven, because, like you said, we need to keep humility.
Even assuming everything they say about the Nazis is true, the only thing unique about them is how they made an inefficient but more "civilized" method of doing what most empires in history did at some point.
So what makes them special is they didn't just shoot you in your bed and burn your house down, they put you on a train to a camp instead.
And given the amount of "Holocaust survivors" who keep talking, clearly they were pretty lax at killing people at those camps.
Vanilla is just an overall good time to just lose yourself in exploring, questing and dungeoning.
It was probably the only time in the game that it didn't revolve around "endgame only" play. So you can just have lowkey, no schedule fun with friends without trouble.
You are right, but I also think your numbers are making massive assumptions.
Like, I play pretty regularly (I always come back because its free) and I don't appear on any lists there unless you directly search my name. I went to multiple spots where I would show in the list and I don't show at all. Likely because I don't raid in any real capacity or M+.
But what that tells me is that if you are casual enough, then whatever metric the site uses likely just doesn't pull you. Probably appearing in warcraft logs or something for them to pull your progress for the site.
So based on this, I'd wager a considerable amount of the casual playerbase wasn't factored into your numbers. Even most casuals do more M+ than I do to have pullable numbers, so its not off by like an absurd number, but still.
So I'd wager its only off by a chunk, but the relative distance between the various Classic Realms vs Retail is still accurate. Most of my friends moved to Classic and are still there, including a handful who only play Hardcore.
Well half of that comes about because lazy writers keep trying to use zombies as metaphors for humans they don't like, like Americans or consumers. Something in which the problem is somewhat perpetually able to continue.
It happens a lot with "satire or social commentary" media, where the message is meant to handwave away any logic or even internal consistency.
but you're making that argument in a game where there was no logic, there was no sense, and as you pointed out, it's clear that the writers didn't know what they were talking about half the time.
Honestly the only reason this point even exists is because the second game tried to piss on our face and say it was raining. None of these questions or logic mattered that much until then, because it was left ambiguous to a point where you could simply pick your preferred explanation and it was open enough to be possible.
I think that's passable writing. It may come about from lack of ability or skill, but it at least functions at what it needs to.
The second game attempting to hard confirm certain facts means those facts need to check out with what is already established, and when it contradicts that, and basic sense, it unravels quickly. Its just another way to say "lol Part 2 bad" but without needing to get into the Woke elements, because sometimes that'll get you tuned out.
You don't ask because the writer didn't know either.
Most media runs on the suspension of disbelief to some amount. Without it you would have to bog down your story with a lot of time spent talking about worldbuilding that isn't usually very interesting and often isn't necessary. Its why hard sci-fi is a niche genre, because it does spend that time.
Its not an inherently bad thing, because its an agreement between audience and creator to allow the story to function.
But that contract needs to be respected from both ends. When the writer or whoever starts making hard claims about things, then they need to be able to fit in established framework and hold up to at least a base level scrutiny.
he deserves the full due process rights of a full citizen despite not being one
He got multiple chances regarding his crime, including a very lenient plea bargain equivalent that he violated entirely. He got better than most citizens get.
Those tattoos are a better form of ID
Its funny how we have a fucking encyclopedia of gang tattoos that the FBI and every documentary treat as unquestionable fact going back decades in regards to American gangs. It was the basis of most of their scouting tactics against the "Aryan Nation" and all similar white power groups. If they had the tattoo, or flag, they got noted.
But this guy from a place where a slightly wrong tattoo gets you straight killed might be in question.
I think a lot of the problem with researching that is that we are trusting the brain to explain something the brain did in a moment of complete panic and losing function.
Its a problem with all Psychology, is that we cannot read minds. So the person has to explain what they saw, filtered through dozens of hoops that is their own brain and its perspectives, beliefs, and limitations. Both as they experienced it and in the recounting.
Its all super interesting stuff, but I think the lot of it is a bird staring at a computer screen. Something we are nowhere near able to comprehend on a level that isn't limited to mostly guesswork by our own brain.
Well reading the other images they are literally renting a warehouse in China to "wait it out" right now hoping for it to drop. Which is smart, because its likely to drop eventually to a less grandiose number.
But instead of pressuring China to stop playing hardball or lose their business going forward, they are whining that Trump is trying to prevent them from doing exactly what they are doing, and shipping American manufacturing to China to avoid paying real money for it.
That's the problem when you become an "international business." You increase the whims you might be living under government and politics wise. And they are caught in a literal (trade) war between two nations and whining they might have to pick a side.
I can have an amount of sympathy for starting production on something and then the tariff hitting after that's already done. That's an unfortunate position to end up in.
But they make note that their entire company and all its employees are all US citizens in the US. That means that the only reason for their production to be in China is cheap labor outsourcing. A morally repugnant choice that would be evil if the Chinese were able to be considered human.
They were abusing a game exploit to get something at a fraction of the cost it should, and they can't be mad when the GMs finally wake up and fix it. A bug remaining unfixed for a long time doesn't mean it never will be, there is always that chance.
he has permanently burned any credibility he earned over calling out critical theory in academia
I think its a good lesson for most people on the Right to learn that just because someone says something you agree with one day, doesn't make them your champion or even an ally.
This is especially true when it came to "calling out the woke" because that was not only smart business for many years now, but it was only a "foot in the door" that didn't tell you much about them. Its like with TERFs. They hate trannies the same as us all, but they only do so and call them out because they just hate men and believe in all the other same liberal progressive nonsense that isn't at odds with that first part.
So is the case with many on the Right who are now "calling out the woke" when its super easy to do so and also massively benefits multiple competing ideologies.
All it will take is for someone to make the right emotional or financial appeal, and I worry Trump will reverse course
To be fair, its equally likely for him to reverse reverse course after a few bombs for the same reason.
He is quite unstable, and prone to grandiose gestures to force people to the negotiating table. Helpful at some times, but might come to bite us all in the ass when he looses a bomb that people won't be a bluff he is trying to call.
They keep arguing over these pedantic little details, when the truth is that literally everyone on Trump's train would support deporting him regardless of being in a gang or not.
Because let's ignore that a literal court of law (aka the due process they keep whining about) found him guilty of being part of that gang, tattoos or otherwise. But that same court also found him guilty of being here illegally regardless. Whatever his him nation wants to do with him is between their president and their citizen, but he isn't ours and not our problem to care about.
Also you can see them on him in a few of the frames when he met with that politician a few days ago. They tried to position to hide it, but it still gets seen a few times.
The writing was not good, and it is an insanely overrated game.
Overrated yes, but I think it was fine for what it was. The writing worked internally and the emotional beats could land without stipulation.
they'll become dictators and control people with the vaccine
While this might seem too far for you, the idea that they have no logistical capability to mass produce and distribute the vaxx is just basic logic about the world and their shoddy setup. Which makes it not entirely too far an idea that they'd use it to increase their power and control of things, much closer to something like the USSR starving entire nations to death than a simple dictator. They've already shown themselves a few times to be acting in self-interest instead of altruism, so its easy to guess they'd use it as bargaining.
Its all headcanon assumptions, but there is nothing that proves it otherwise to support the second game's assertion that they were 100% morally good guys who were gonna save the world. The details of assumption doesn't need to be fully accurate, only able to support the idea that you could reasonably believe they wouldn't be that.
So yeah the writing pushed the idea that they were incompetent and couldn't make a cure
Its been a long time, but I don't think it was ever actually said in the first game. Its only implied by the fact that they killed someone immune before without success and then looking around to say "this don't seem possible." The game wants to say its "possible" to make Joel look morally grey, so its all those prior assumptions that says "they couldn't possibly make a cure."
Plus the fact that you can't vaccinate against fungal infections as far as I know, meaning its literally impossible. But that seems to be a pure writing mistake on their part likely stemming from them changing it from likely zombies to cordyceps mid development.
I do agree entirely that the fact that everyone seems to be a Mad Max psycho does mean the world probably isn't worth saving. The first game implies there is stable civilization where you live at the very beginning but then you never revisit any form of it. Its a whole lot of "humans are the real monsters" wank, like all hack writers.
The people you are trying to defend
I am defending myself, because all the sweeping accusations you are throwing can be applied to me any day by someone who has a slightly difference perspective or simply does not know me as long as you have.
This is why I defend most things, because I know that tomorrow I can be in that category easily and people will happily slurp it up as "yeah he was a problem he deserved it." Its while I'll defend lolishit, its why despite constantly fucking arguing and shitting on someone like Telia or Jester, I never called for their banning.
I have and will always disagree with you and Antonio's assertion that "these people are incompatible with everything, we cannot even allow their topic to be discussed" on these things. I have come to appreciate why you think that more, but on principle I will never agree with you.
These people matter, not for their value, but because they will always exist. Their idea isn't unique and will always spring up one way or another. If people aren't exposed to it, it will seem novel, radical, and powerful to those weak to such allures. Because those people will always exist as well and will always be ripe for picking up. Or worse, open to being grifted and manipulated by people whose intents are more self-interested and malicious instead.
But I do raid finder, I even sometimes pug normal super casually, so clearly that isn't enough on its own to flag.