Be prepared for LARGE fines and HARD time if your with me

[Kavok]

This isn't going to be a 'we told you so' post, but I think it worth noting that legitimate fears were raised by a number of users on this forum, several of whom were subjected to varying degrees of pressure to change their minds.

We feared that making an arcade shooter out of WC would parody the franchise just a little too far, and in any case was not a fair test of the profitability of a new 'traditional' WC game. It would serve very well in failure, however, to make a mess of things.

I recall some members attempting to allay these fears by predicting, with verying degrees of certainty, that another game would follow. A large but mostly overuled group remained skeptical.

Then Arena crashed and burned - and we're worse off than we were before. THe insistence on FMV expressed by a number of forum users I think clouded the real issue - that a great new game could be made in the style of WC1-WC2, without spiralling costs.

If 'the community has missed out on something', perhaps the community should have resisted the Arena concept more strongly and made clear our desire for something more traditional.

Since we didn't, we may well have lost out on something great - maybe, just maybe, because the desire to get a game was set above getting the game.

Which is a great pity.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

You're gone.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Now that that extremly pleasant duty has been performed, let us be absolutely clear: everything he assumed was exactly wrong.

If Arena had been a spectacular success there would have been a new game immediately announced. I tried to make this absolutely clear to everyone months and months in advance. This was not some distant theory in my mind, as many of you seem to have self-justified, but was rather cold, hard truth. If you didn't listen to LOAF about Wing Commander, of all things, and refused to pick up an Xbox 360 then you deserved what you got (no fun XBLA game, no big followup.)

Arena did not 'crash and burn' - sales were good (not amazing, but similar to Boom Boom Rocket.) The thing that hurt things was the "mainstream" reaction, the one that non-fans like Kavok here apparently delighted in playing up. Furthermore, it remains an amazing, amazing, amazing (and entertaining) game. If you do not recognize this then I can't really think of a way to explain it to you -- but go somewhere else, we don't need you.

Is one particular setback that I can't really talk about 'the end'? Not at all - things are still moving (supposedly multiple things, even - but I can confirm only one)... we simply missed a great opportunity to have a big project immediately supproted on high. That's a shame, but we still had an amazing year and a wonderful game and a heck of a lot of fun... if you chose not to be a part of that then you're just stupid.

 

[Farlander]

Whoa, did you just ban that guy for his analysis of the situation and tell everyone who didn't like Arena to get out?

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Woah, I'd be happy to discuss bannings in private - but no, I didn't.

Also:

Woah, are you just some shark who showed up after a year of not posting because he smelled blood?

 

[Farlander]

Woah, I'd be happy to discuss bannings in private - but no, I didn't.

Also:

Woah, are you just some shark who showed up after a year of not posting because he smelled blood?

I read the forums every day, I just do not post much. I posted now, because I wanted to know what that was all about. And I did so publicly, because it would be useful for anyone who stumbled in here and saw it to have a little context. That would certainly scare me off if I had never been here before. It almost scared me off as it is, and I barely participate.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

If you 're scared to post, you're doing it wrong. Intelligent people have nothing to fear at the forums -- but my rake is lined with people who wanted to pick a fight for no reason or who wanted to be jerks for the sake of being jerks or who just show no respect for the setting.

Which is what happened here.

Let's analyze what just happened here, shall we? Take out your science rods and follow along in the text - when the record makes a sound like this [R2D2 Noise] it's time to turn the page.

Kavok came here with an unpopular opinion; maybe he was nursing it for months, maybe he's just a huge jerk. I don't know. In all likelyhood he's exactly what I said in the first response - just really, really stupid. He should probably get a medal for posting as long as he did with this anger bug eating up his brain. But I digress: I don't know the guy, beyond this awful post. Maybe he was having a bad day. Maybe he got part of his head bashed in in a truck accident. The point is, he was apparently waiting for some tiny, tiny, tiny worm to allow him to snap and rage about why he didn't want to have fun with a video game. Fine, whatever, it's the 21st century and everyone enjoys being a jerk more than having fun. We get it, we've heard it a thousand times over. Record status? Broken.

The problem is that he didn't pick a very good time to snap. Instead of having any facts or anything solid to base his wonderfully stupid opinion on, he decided to grab something vague and uncertain that he has no personal knowledge of that I briefly alluded to in one post and claim it gives him the right to his own pedestal. It's a fundamental lack of respect and he was banned for it.

Yeah, yeah, we're picking on the little guy with our big strong robots and all they get are those paper cups that have riddles on them. What do you call a horse with stripes? A zebra! Good one. Boo-hoo, my years of hard work and money spent and extra special brilliance get me a slightly higher social position in a setting I made up that has absolutely no effect on anything else in the universe. And to think I'd just go and kick someone out of my house for taking something I said and trying (failing! A thousand times failing!) to use it as a springboard for being a douchebag. Oh, the injustice of it all.

So don't ask yourself who will help stand up against the poor oppressed little guy who wanted nothing more out of life than to be a jerk at a message board and somehow be respected for it instead of banned -- that's the wrong question. Ask yourself, ask us where common decency went? Where did enjoying video games go? Where are the good old days and what can I do to help?

You must admit, your appearance is something of a cliche. Who will defend the little guy? Will it be one of the long time users whose opinions everyone respects? Will it be some eqloquent, soft spoken new player who has a reasonable new take on the situation? Will it be another mod or even an admin, with amazing magic powers equal to my own and brains that you all know function separately?

No! It's some random guy who hasn't posted in a year! What a surprise! We're going to need to put different letters on the cake! He's here to be offended by something that doesn't involve him! Hurray! Throw the ticker tape, this is so amazing.

And what happens now? The guy whose mission in life is to insist that it's wrong for me to take offense at Kavok's fundamental lack of respect is now going to insist that *my* fundamental lack of respect for *his* opinion is then somehow terrible! Do you see what happened here? In your post decrying the lack of a fair and just universe you became... me.

Now everybody go talk about Wing Commander, because this entire line of conversation deserves exactly as much respect as I've given it in this prose.

[R2D2 Noise]