As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
Enjoy your perpetual unavoidable and even undetectable bias and opinion influencing astroturfing.
Paid for by whoever doesn’t want the things that you want, to influence the people around you to bite at each other’s throats and work against their own interests.
Does anyone else find it suspicious there wasn’t any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures?
Nobody here disagrees with any point of the petition. I signed it. Even if gaming companies were rushing to send shills to raid discussions they would have done it months ago and last places they would go astroturff for is this Kazakhstani anti-whaling forum. Especially when their target now is the Eu bureaucracy and MEPs. Where I might say they have not a bad chance of succeeding.
I’m pretty sure it’s in the US. I’m in Utah (pretty far western US) and ping times are like 10-15ms, which is consistent w/ a west coast server. I have a VPS in Germany, and pings are more like 100-150ms.
I’m not exactly sure how pings work w/ cloudflare, so maybe it’s hosted somewhere else, but I would imagine they’d get a cloudflare host near their VPS to minimize latency.
Are people criticizing it? There is a certain critical mass that when something becomes popular enough a subset of the population will automatically oppose it.
I saw it posted on here much before it reached the threshold.
I think that before then it was really just a few people running with it, now that it has gotten momentum, more people are sharing and we run in similar circles so it can appear to be overwhelming.
Yes, this is a legit thing the EU cares about. However that’s also why I’ve always wondered why they’re soliciting signatures outside the EU…
Didn’t it come out that the people who pushed payroll processors to force studios to censor, have been found out to be a bunch of far right religious extremists who definitely aren’t going to stop here.
I mean I was critical of it well before it hit 1.4M signatures. As it ramps up in articles about it, I’d assume an increase in negative sentiment in addition to the positive side. Its not a perfect thing and has different viewpoints, so it makes sense.
And what is your argument against the petition? All it says is that developers need to leave their game in some playable state for those who laid for it, with several options offered as examples
Because as you already stated, that’s all it says. There is a lot of open interpretation to what that means and not all of it refers to big publishers/devs like EA.
For example, indie games like Objects in Space. It was Early Access and ran into technical issues which led to funding issues as they could only work so long on it. Its broken essentially. But it doesn’t matter if the project was beyond their scope of skill or they ran out of money, they would be forced to pay to fix it. This means (and for other indie devs) if not certain their project will succeed, having to block sales in EU. Its potentially the most damaging not to the Ubisoft’s and EA’s, but to the Flat Earth Games, Bugbytes, ColePowered Games, etc. Its asking new indie developers to take on optional risk by releasing in the EU. Remember no where in the petition does it mention live service games. Only just games.
Additionally, the points brought up in the petition needed to be bullet proof. The moment that petition started to get close to 1M, you know publishers started turning gears to block future legislation. The committee of petitions will verify the petition and then refer it for fact finding. The points needed to be concise for the purpose of the fact finding committee. And they needed to be geared towards the EU acting which around a dozen times now have stated that while concerns are valid, it is up to the member nations to propose legislation on this (which is who the major publishers are reported to have approached - not some EU committee).
I’m still salty about EA’s Darkspore (which I might add doesn’t mention on the case that internet access is required to play - which I did not have back in the day), but this petition just feels like minimal impact. I would just like to remind people that advocating SKG may feel good but that rarely equates to doing good.
NOTE: I’ll probably be downvoted to hell on it, but I imagine that is all that will happen. There really is no solid argument against what I’ve said.
For example, indie games like Objects in Space. It was Early Access and ran into technical issues which led to funding issues as they could only work so long on it. Its broken essentially. But it doesn’t matter if the project was beyond their scope of skill or they ran out of money, they would be forced to pay to fix it.
First off, that studio will not be forced to go back and fix their game. Western democratic governments, including the EU, works on the basis that ex post facto laws are invalid. The game is already dead and abandoned from your telling, so there would be no expectation to revive it.
The true solution for studios making new games in the future is to implement exit strategies for multiplayer implementation early on in development. And for single player games, much of that exit strategy is to not require login servers after the game is abandoned.
And to address your specific example, there is one option that is extremely cheap and easy to implement that will certainly pass requirements: release the sorce code. If a EA game is truly so bungled that it’s better off abandoned, studios and publishers will always have the option to fully abandon it.
The moment that petition started to get close to 1M, you know publishers started turning gears to block future legislation.
You’re forgetting this is the EU, it’s significantly less susceptible to industry lobbying than the US. If it wasn’t the GDPR wouldn’t exist and Apple would still be using their proprietary chargers on all new iPhones.
The points needed to be concise for the purpose of the fact finding committee.
Have you not read the petition? I doubt it could be anymore concise in its language while still being possible to pass. You can’t specify exact implementations for games post-abandonment because any single solution will not work for every game.
There really is no solid argument against what I’ve said.
That is a claim befitting an egotistical fool. But at least now you can’t complain that nobody has addressed your concerns, as you claimed in your first comment.
Have you not read the petition? I doubt it could be anymore concise in its language while still being possible to pass.
Require video games sold to remain in a working state when support ends.
Require no connections to the publisher after support ends.
Not interfere with any business practices while a game is still being supported.
That’s it… 3 sentences is not concise. You want to base multi-national law off of 3 sentences. Maybe you should think that through a bit more. If the time can’t be spent to actualy write out constructive goals or at least milestones (which is supposed to help dictate multi-national law) then maybe it should wait shouldn’t it until you can.
You’re forgetting this is the EU, it’s significantly less susceptible to industry lobbying than the US
The VGE (the lobbying group you’re talking about) helped to write the consumer protection, digital content licensing, and age ratings for the EU.
They already helped create your laws so that’s not really true is it.
There really is no solid argument against what I’ve said.
marked by brevity of expression or statement : free from all elaboration and superfluous detail
Aka, “short”.
The petition absolutely is ‘concise’. You just have no idea what that word means.
Using fancy words in an argument only works if you actually know what those words mean.
Not only that, a long petition containing lots of details has its own drawbacks. For one, fewer people will read it and/or understand it, which will make it easier for detractors to confuse the general public with misinformation.
Concise is synonymous with “to the point”. In other words, you don’t have to have lots of words, but they do have to be on target which your 3 sentences are not. So, no, it was correct word use on my part.
The fact that you can’t argue the VGE’s involvement or anything other than a word’s definition really doesn’t make you look like you have a strong case here lol.
Again, it seems like you have strong feelings, but that doesn’t win court cases. Sorry, not sorry.
The fact that you can’t argue the VGE’s involvement or anything other than a word’s definition really doesn’t make you look like you have a strong case here lol.
So you’re just ignoring all the other points I made earlier? On top of refusing to acknowledge that you don’t know what words you’re using?
Concise is synonymous with “to the point”.
No. The word you are looking for is “succinct”. You’re doubling down harder than PirateGames at this point, and with you including some egotistical snark at the end of every comment and claiming that you can’t possibly be wrong just further demonstrates that you’re a walking example of Dunning-Krüger syndrome with entitlement issues.
Get over yourself. Instead of petulantly whining about a petition on the internet, go and do something actually productive with your life.
I’ve made some comments critical of how relentlessly PirateSoftware is being harassed and how annoying it is and how distracting from the actual movement it is.
Nothing wrong with the petition itself, and I haven’t noticed any negative astroturfing about it.
Perhaps, but the most I’ve seen are some tenuous “evidence” about him being a little selfish in WoW, not finishing games, or using his dad’s influence to land a job at Blizzard. Neither of those are particularly bad, and certainly don’t warrant the negative attention he got. It really seems like people are looking for dirt just because they don’t like his position on SKG.
Then again, I didn’t hear about him until he came out against it, and I saw he defended Godot, which is pretty rad. That’s the extent of my knowledge about him, other than the handful of hit pieces against him people posted here once he got negative attention.
I support SKG and don’t think PirateSoftware is a bad dude. I say just let him be, and don’t watch his content if you don’t like it.
The WoW thing wasn’t about being selfish, it’s just one of a dozen or more incidents of him being a narcissistic bully who screws other people over and can’t take accountability for anything.
And nobody is giving him too much shit for simply being a nepo baby. The Blizzard thing is about him being a fraud who’s been caught repeatedly lying and misleading people about his credentials and work experience in order to appear like an expert. He uses his time at Blizzard like a magic wand to expel criticism, going so far as to misrepresent what he even did at Blizzard to appear like an authority when people criticize him.
The backlash against him has been well earned by bad behavior over a long period of time, most of which involves him treating other people poorly for his own benefit.
misrepresent what he even did at Blizzard to appear like an authority
Isn’t that par for the course for streamers/youtubers though? I’ve seen people claim to be “indie game devs” when they’ve never actually released a game, or if they did, it made so few sales as to be little more than a hobby.
After some very quick research about him, it seems his dad helped him get a job as a QA at Blizzard, and then he worked his way up to doing something cybersecurity related. That doesn’t scream “nepo baby” to me, that’s just a dad being awesome helping their kid get their foot in the door, and my dad would do the same for me if I expressed any interest in his career. If he was given a project lead role or something right out of school, then I’d agree w/ your assessment, but a QA a not a very glamorous job, he’s probably testing some boring component of their stack. Likewise, cybersecurity also isn’t very glamorous, he probably ran pen-tests or something on their servers (maybe not even game servers), it’s a decent job, but not something that would give him any authority since he’s not making important gaming-related decisions.
That said, having worked with important people probably gives him some valuable insight, and I’d like to see him expound on why he thinks things are problematic. All I saw in the videos I watched is some hand-waving and inaccurate statements (i.e. studios would need to release code or some nonsense), which tells me he didn’t actually read the petition. I didn’t watch the full thing, but apparently he read the FAQ where Ross explains what the petition is not about, and he probably just skimmed that. I think that’s unfortunate, since he actually has industry experience and might have something valuable to add to the conversation.
narcissistic bully
Again, I haven’t watched much of his content, but I did watch what I think was a relevant part of the original VOD. Here’s how I saw the WoW thing (I have never played WoW, so I’m probably missing something):
they’re all working their way to the boss together
they start getting wrecked, so some (all?) decide to bail
he casts some spell to help his team get out, using up the rest of his mana
his teammate is about to die and asks for help
he keeps running, as was the plan
he gets roasted for not helping out, and explains that we has out of mana and couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to
That sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe he could’ve said it better (seemed to be playing the “cool and collected streamer” role), but I think his actual actions were reasonable.
But maybe there’s something he could have done. I don’t know WoW well enough to know what options he would have had, but from my perspective, returning to help would’ve just meant he’d die too. And my understanding is that in this game mode, that represents a lot of investment, since the character would be deleted upon death, so it makes sense to be careful. I hear they worked it out after the stream, so his team apparently didn’t think his behavior was all that bad.
And then I look at the reaction. I see several articles slamming him for his behavior in that VOD, and a lot of the backlash citing that as justification for hating him. That seems way over the top, so I think the only rational takeaway is that other streamers are making a big deal out of very little, and people are latching onto it w/o actually looking at the facts and taking what they read for granted.
That’s why I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon. Maybe he’s as bad as everyone says, but I haven’t seen enough actual evidence of that. Each time someone has provided some evidence, I looked at it and didn’t see anything damning, just normal streamer behavior. I think people are making a big deal about it because they strongly disagree w/ his take on something else (say, SKG) and are digging for dirt.
Isn’t that par for the course for streamers/youtubers though?
No.
I’ve seen people claim to be “indie game devs” when they’ve never actually released a game, or if they did, it made so few sales as to be little more than a hobby.
That would in fact make those people indie game devs. Thats not a high bar to meet. Pirate likes to word it as if he was a game dev in the industry, and often leaves the context of him just working in QA out. As for the cybersecurity role, his role dealt mostly with the human aspect of the business. Compliance, awareness training, etc. the most active things he did were social engineering phone calls. Yet he has explicitly calls himself “a hacker”.
they’re all working their way to the boss together
they start getting wrecked, so some (all?) decide to bail
he casts some spell to help his team get out, using up the rest of his mana
his teammate is about to die and asks for help
he keeps running, as was the plan
he gets roasted for not helping out, and explains that we has out of mana and couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to
You’re missing a step here. 3.5. He chooses not to use the items he has that would have restored his mana. Which changes number 5 a bit as a consequence.
he gets roasted for not helping out, and explainslies that we has out of mana and couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to (Even though he could have. He just didn’t want to)
Maybe he’s as bad as everyone says, but I haven’t seen enough actual evidence of that.
Well you have done a pretty good job of focusing on just two of the things he’s been in hot water over, and avoiding all the other evidence that’s out there you haven’t seen. So yeah I wouldn’t want you to jump on a bandwagon without any evidence, but at the same time you’ve explained that you haven’t seen most of the evidence. So I’m not sure what the point of you weighing in here against the people who have seen all the evidence, from a perspective that hasn’t seen the evidence is.
There are hours and hours of video, photo, and written accounts of other events so I’m not just going to recap it all here for you, but it’s all out there for you to find. One of my favorites is when he’s playing another MMO on stream and a dungeon run his party does is ruined by someone accidentally pulling an extra mob. Pirate proceeds to be a huge dick about it. He doesn’t give the person who pulled it the benefit of the doubt like you have to Pirate. At the end of his rant it’s pointed out to him by his own chat that he himself was the one who pulled the mob lol. After which instead of apologizing, he then says he’s not sorry about what he did. He’s so unabashed about his view that only other people make mistakes.
You’re missing a step here. 3.5. He chooses not to use the items he has that would have restored his mana
That does change things a bit.
I’ve never played WoW and generally avoid MMOs, so I don’t know how everything works. I just assumed mana items are a time effect thing, so he would’ve needed to plan ahead. If they were already bailing, there’s no reason to use them on the way out.
and avoiding all the other evidence that’s out there you haven’t seen
Well yeah, I can’t know what I don’t know.
Those were the best examples provided to me, and they didn’t seem as bad as people made them out to be. I just have to assume the rest is more of the same.
I’m happy to look at more though. But honestly, I don’t know what you’d gain from that, I already don’t watch his content and support SKG. I guess I might repost some links for others to check out if they’re also confused by the backlash.
playing another MMO on stream
Someone else mentioned that here (today?), and that’s certainly enough for me to not want to watch his streams. I already avoid a lot of the popular streamers for being disrespectful to random opponents, and doing that to someone on your team is absolutely unacceptable.
I still don’t think that warrants the response he got, from calls for resignation to swatting.
I don’t think he’s been swatted. In fact, a lot of the “backlash” that Pirate has complained about has also been debunked.He said he had to step away from his role at a game publisher because people were “Reviewing bombing all of the company’s games”. Somehow he didn’t realize that game reviews are public and in the case of Steam reviews very detailed. People went right to the Steam reviews and found that literally none of the games had been review-bombed.
On the contrary, since the backlash started he’s been calling for his fans to brigade and mass report anyone who criticizes him, live on stream. He filed a lawsuit against a guy who made a game and put a cameo of Pirate in his game as a cockroach wearing Pirates signature wizards hat. (A cockroach is the wow term for people who do what Pirate did)
As for the resignation, generally companies don’t like to have people who are ongoing, unapologetic public menaces to be the faces of their company. Any consequences Pirate faces are all of his own doing. If you’re going to be a public figure, you have to understand that you’re going to be held accountable for your behavior by somebody.
Really? From the 5-10 min of his videos that I watched over the last 2 weeks when trying to figure out why people dislike him, I didn’t see any of that nonsense. That’s really too bad if true, because he seemed like a pretty level-headed guy who was a pretty laid-back gamer (no yelling or other form of aggression, which is unfortunately common among streamers). I watched some clips of:
take on Godot - defended Godot despite some missteps and (IMO) correctly pointed out that their PR person probably got overrun after a somewhat controversial comment that was apparently intended to be a joke (the “woke” post)
take on SKG - got a little unhinged in his follow-up video, but I hear there were swatting attempts after the first, so I understand the frustration
an “infamous” clip of WoW where he allegedly left his teammate to die (but he was clearly following other orders to run)
That’s about it. He didn’t seem like a toxic person who routinely trolls and screws people in games, just kind of your average, run-of-the-mill streamer who’s a little low-key but still out there to create content to get people to watch.
Then again, he could totally be the jerk you make him out to be. It’s really hard to tell what’s a legitimate explanation of things and what’s people looking for a reason to slander him because they don’t like his take on SKG. The couple of articles I read seemed to mostly be the latter, but they also didn’t mention most of what you did here. So idk, I guess I haven’t made up my mind about him, but honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth digging into because I’m not into his content anyway.
No, I explicitly said I don’t have a strong opinion on him. I’m not going to knee-jerk follow the hate train just because of a bad take on SKG and a couple of emotional videos where he said some moderately offensive things. Maybe he’s really a bad dude, idk, but I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon.
There’s the problem: you won’t get evidence of a murder if you ask the murderer for it.
He streams a lot, so the things he says or does are spread out, especially if you’re only looking for noticeably damning stuff like the rim job related rant against SKG.
His confidence and speechcraft makes him very good at steering conversations by lying or deflecting, as long as you trust what he says.
Good places to start looking may be his conversation with Dr. K or Ross’ “The end of Stop Killing Games” on Youtube, both are hosted by level headed people;
I can only assume you haven’t seen the latter, because at the very least it makes it very apparent why people dislike him.
This one? He sounds like an awesome dude according to his bio, but I’ve never seen anything by him, I’ll check him out.
And I haven’t seen any conversations between him and Ross. I did see snippets of his original reaction, where he seemed to completely misunderstand the petition, and his follow-up, unhinged rant, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the latter because he had apparently gotten a lot of negative attention (swatting attempts, calls for him to leave the publisher he was at, and random negative remarks on his own games), so I think it’s quite possible his attack on Ross was an emotional reaction to that negative attention, and not level-headed attack on Ross (I’ve seen nothing to suggest Ross is anything other than an awesome guy).
So my opinion on PirateSoftware is relatively neutral. He seems to be on the better end of the streamer range, which isn’t saying much (lots of popular streamers are pretty toxic). I don’t think he’s anyone to look up to, and I wish he’d either have Ross on to discuss the petition or thoroughly read and understand it so he can elucidate his opposition to it, both of which I think would be helpful for his audience to form an actual opinion instead of borrowing his. But maybe he’s on the worse end of that spectrum, I don’t know, since again, I’ve only watched a few minutes of his content and he seemed like your average streamer who exaggerates their credentials and leans into “content,” and I’m not surprised clowning on people is part of that.
I literally had not heard of him a month ago, so I’m missing a ton of context. However, nothing I’ve seen makes me want to watch more of his content (he’s definitely not my style), but nothing makes me think he should be “cancelled” or whatever. Aside from some offensive remarks, I don’t think he’s really hurting anyone.
The (alleged) swatting didn’t happen before “The End Of SKG”.
I also don’t think he deserves cancellation, but he has lied so many times, so confidently and so unrepentantly that he deservers very little credibility.
I understand that some people would feel sympathy for the somewhat excessive negative attention he got (not from me, he lost my sympathy the first time I saw him blatantly lying and lobbing insults) but with the way he ALWAYS behaved, he absolutely had some of it coming.
The SKG thing was just the latest L in the series he’s been collecting for a while now. Similar to his wow raid there was another MMO when his party wiped due to someone accidentally aggro’ing a mob. He did the usually “that was moronic, whoever did that is kicked from the raid, etc”. Then he reviews the footage showing it was him that aggro’d and completely 180s, saying the wipe wasn’t on him. As evidenced in his SKG video, guy is super happy saying nasty shit about people but cries toxicity when it’s reciprocated. Guy just can’t help himself. Has to be right on everything and when it’s proven he isn’t, either doubles down or just simply denies being wrong.
Even the wow roaching thing, it isn’t so much the raid but the demanding everyone listen to his side before talking over others when it’s their turn and then leaving before they can have there say and tripling down. I used to appreciate some of his content but given his pattern of behaviour, including bullying, the negative attention he’s gotten is pretty deserved.
Has to be right on everything and when it’s proven he isn’t, either doubles down or just simply denies being wrong.
That sounds like a lot of people here on Lemmy honestly, and I think that’s pretty common.
I used to appreciate some of his content but given his pattern of behaviour, including bullying, the negative attention he’s gotten is pretty deserved.
I think this is the issue. He had a lot of fans and they were let down. I think the real issue is people looking up to random streamers/influencers. It’s not unique to YT/Twitch, but politicians and celebrities aa well.
I don’t like it. If you don’t like someone’s content, don’t watch it, and don’t burn the place down on your way out.
The WoW things is the most well known, be he had a similar behavior in another game, Ashes of Creation i think. Doesn’t take accountability for anything. Cannot say sorry.
There’s also stuff coming out here cheated on his former wife. And then was a massive manipulative dick towards the person that he was cheating on with.
Or that all his previous credentials are fabricated. Like he doesn’t like giving details what he’s actually done in previous jobs. He’ll just state that he works somewhere and then let you fill in the blank. Or passing off what someone else did at the job as his own.
In his own channel he purposely misrepresent the recent things about him. And coding Jesus actually put out a video showing that, when he tries to reach out immediately gets filtered and banned. But meanwhile Thor is telling people that all he had to do was try to reach out…
Doesn’t take accountability for anything. Cannot say sorry.
Have you seen a popular streamer that does? If they do, it’s more like “sorry you feel that way.” To get a decent sized following, you need other people to see you as some kind of authority, and most authorities don’t apologize, they do some amount of damage control and move on.
That’s a big part of why I generally avoid popular streamers/youtubers. Most of my favorite YT channels have like 100-500k subs (and several well below 100k), and I only sub to a few w/ over 1M, and most of those are on the more humble end of the spectrum (e.g. Gamers Nexus). I don’t jive well with wannabe authority figures, so I’m not surprised PirateSoftware didn’t appeal to me. In fact, most of those talking head channels aren’t interesting, I want facts, not opinions, and I do validate the more important facts.
Or that all his previous credentials are fabricated
Why would he? From what I gather (from a random wiki), his dad helped him get a QA job at Blizzard, and then he moved up the ranks to cybersecurity. I don’t think anyone would lie about that, since those aren’t “glamorous” jobs, but they are solid jobs. So my level in trust in what he says takes that into account, whatever he learned about the AAA gaming industry he learned by being present, not by being in any impactful role.
coding Jesus
That guy rubs me the wrong way too (assuming you’re talking about Cr1TiKaL/penguinz0). I’ve gotten through maybe 2 min of one of his videos.
Yes. I think a lot of people would reference the MatPat apology.
Why would he? don’t think anyone would lie about that, since those aren’t “glamorous” jobs
That’s your personal bias. He lets people believe what they want. He used it for clout, and while you might not care about game development or cybersecurity, there are many who do. When he did security, he did social engineering. Which is just as valid, but if people are more impressed because they think he’s looking at source code and whatnot… he doesn’t correct them and leans into those stories. Since you kinda hipster-esque view of YouTubers… here’s a guy with less than 1000 subs talking about it, https://youtu.be/oKadi1zy8fQ and he didn’t really do that much at Blizzard either, not in game development either, but again, he doesn’t say what he actually did and has a lot of stories that don’t connect. That’s like if I said, “Yeah, I worked at the White House for 7 years” and just left it at that. But then it comes to light, I was the one mowing the grass, and that’s it. If I don’t specify what I did, nor correct people, and telling stories that I overhear that belong to someone else (and I don’t specify that) or talk about things that happen that I wasn’t involved with… then I’m lying by omission.
That guy rubs me the wrong way too (assuming you’re talking about Cr1TiKaL/penguinz0).
Not even close. https://www.youtube.com/@CodingJesus He’s a C++ developer who got his name because in some older photos of him people said he looked like Jesus. That’s the whole “lore”.
Hmm, never watched him. Looks like he has tens of millions of subs, which is probably why I’ve avoided him (I generally like smaller channels).
When he did security, he did social engineering.
Maybe I just have more industry insight, because when I think of cyber security, I think of people auditing computers (do you have the corporate spyware installed?), running automated pen test suites, etc. Most of it isn’t particularly technical, and most security audits I’ve been a part of (and we do them every year) are black box testing, meaning they don’t have the code. Even in the one or two audits we did that involved the code (needed a higher tier audit for government contracts), most of what they checked was just dependency versions, they didn’t look too closely at the actual code.
Outside of high profile security researchers, I see most cyber security jobs as the security guards of software dev, they make sure you keep the doors locked, but they don’t force you to use reinforced doors or whatever, they’re just there to tell you what the obvious weak points are.
then I’m lying by omission
Which pretty much everyone does. If someone doesn’t go into detail, it’s pretty safe to assume there’s nothing to brag about.
That said, even if you only mowed the grass at the White House, you’d pick up on a lot of stuff about politics. You’d notice who the regulars are, important peoples’ routines, etc, not to mention what you pick up on through random small talk with people there. There’s a reason spys target people like janitors and landscapers, they don’t realize how much they know so their guard is down. That’s social engineering 101.
The janitors at Blizzard know more about AAA software development than the average gamer. A QA would know even more since they have more direct access to the devs and designers.
Whether you’re telling the whole truth or not about your credentials is irrelevant if you can prove what you claim. That’s why I’d like to see PS and Ross talk, so it would be easier to tell what’s accurate from what’s BS.
C++ developer
Ah, ok. I assumed the other guy because was pretty public with his criticism of PS and has long hair.
I haven’t heard of that guy either, probably because I’m more into Rust than C++, and actually avoid C++ like the plague (I much prefer C).
Maybe he meant me? (Thank god karma doesn’t exist here)
I just wrote a comment on how it’s interesting from a philosophical angle that we’re willing to petition the preservation of our distractions but not the thing we need ever more distraction from.
Don’t bother with downvoting, your brothers and sisters already nailed me to the cross, covered me in tar and dragged me through 30km of molten lava.
I haven’t changed my mind.
Not a single person I know has significantly changed their behaviour due to the climate emergency. Imagine if we had this kind of rallying support to put an end to fossil fuels tomorrow.
It’s interesting, but it’s also completely unrelated aside from a larger discussion about what people can spend their time and energy on? The obvious answer is “people can care about more than one thing” and the secondary response is about how this initiative is easy to participate in compared to limiting climate change. If you could just sign an online petition to limit the effects of climate change I am quite certain it would get just as much or more support… so false equivalency/over exaggeration of what “this kind of rallying support” is. And yeah, limiting climate change directly benefits a lot of people. I would love it if the treasured forests near my home weren’t burning to ash more and more every year, disappearing all the places I loved to go.
The vast majority of people are not contributing significantly to climate change compared to the big players like the oil and gas industries and the big moving industries.
If you want to make for effective change, stop whining like a street corner crazy picketer and push against those actually doing most of the polluting.
See that sounds like a good counter argument on the surface but it is very flawed.
By just blaming big corporations and pointing the finger, your missing two important factors:
The big corporations do what they do because of consumers like you and me.
by shifting responsibility and effectively saying it’s okay to pass the buck, you’re telling people it’s okay to not have this front and center every day.
As much as I like blaming big corporations, we got here (and every point in human history before us) because of what the masses did or neglected to do.
So as inconvenient as it must be, until we pop out of this us vs them, the corporation expected lifespans can be centuries, human’s are finite, and if you keep that whataboutism alive, will get a lot shorter soon.
Tell me you do not understand how the economy works without telling me you do not understand how the economy works…
Personal consumers haven’t driven the oil industry for decades upon decades by now. Please learn how massive corporations function before you continue to embarass yourself.
The big corporations do what they do because of consumers like you and me
Which is why they run a non stop barrage of advertisemenr campaigns to brainwash the consumer into…
Oh. Wait. No.
That would mean the corporations basically tell the consumers what to do, and they basically listen.
Well, dang, thank god it’s not like they bankroll politicians to the point of individual citizen campaign donors being largely of no effectiveness whatsoever in the vast majority of…
I have posts being critical of it from over a year ago. I’d assume most people who have criticism don’t leave a comment because it’ll get you massively downvoted and your inbox will be flooded with angry replies.
What are the criticisms? Genuinely curious, have no idea what problems anyone might have with it, other than some quotes from the Ubisoft exec trying to act like implementing user run servers is borderline impossible
I don’t understand why there’s such a hyperfocus on petitions. The only thing being attempted is signing petitions in various countries. Every country has declined to do anything and the last hope is the EU parliament which is being treated like some all or nothing final bet. Why just petitions?
Why not directly put pressure on some of the worst offenders like Ubisoft? Lots of people are saying they’re not buying another Ubisoft game again. Cool! Start an official boycott. People who cant sign the EU petition can sign a boycott promise. It wouldn’t be binding or anything but it could create more solidarity around not purchasing their next big release. Companies care about their bottom line.
You know the hate campaign against piratesoftware? Why not do that to the official Ubisoft account instead? They’re the company that is actually causing the problem. You might not like piratesoftware but he’s not the enemy. He hasn’t killed any of his own games. He didn’t make the decision to shut down the Crew. The offical Ubisoft account shouldn’t get to post a single thing without pressure from the movement. Critical memes should be made about the company and shared on social media. The CEO shouldn’t get to speak to an audience without being booed. Companies cave to negative PR all the time.
These things can be done in addition to the petitions. Personally, I don’t think any petitions are going to bring about the change people are looking for. Governments rarely listen to them and the EU isn’t much better. There are just 10 citizens initiatives that have passed and all their responses have been pretty lack luster. Even if the EU enacts the exact laws people are hoping for, what about everywhere else? The idea seems to be that other countries will get trickle down consumer protections. Americans are pushing Europeans to petition the EU parliament to make law changes hoping it will cause American companies to change how they sell products to Americans. It’s just such an odd strategy to me. Again, it can be done, but there’s no reason more direct action can’t be taken in tandem with the petition.
I get lots of downvotes and angry replies for this take which I’m not sure why. I can only assume people don’t like hearing that petitions are largely useless.
Even if mostly useless, not doing anything is even more useless. At least that petition shows support for changes, which may influence some executive to rethink what they think is acceptable from their userbase.
I agree. I also think if you’re not European, you’ve not done anything. There wasn’t even a petition made in the US so Americans haven’t done a single thing, yet are the most vocal about it. That’s the part that confuses me.
Yes, that’s why I didn’t suggest Americans start a petition. A boycott and/or social media campaign is something Americans could do rather than just hope and wait for Europeans to fix everything.
A social media campaign by an American is exactly what SKG is…
The EU initiative was chosen specifically because it actually has a chance to get traction there, and the market is large enough that it can’t just be ignored by publishers.
Why would they? Most people didn’t know about the petition until a few weeks ago, and I think people are largely knee-jerk supporting their favorite streamer (in this case, PirateSoftware). I don’t think there’s a concerted effort here to kill it, just people coming out of the woodwork now that it got a lot of attention.
Perhaps, which I think is really unfortunate. I think he misread or misunderstood what the petition was about, and doubled down instead of taking a step back.
But he’s not going to be making a bunch of accounts on random message boards like Lemmy to try to kill it. The more reasonable argument is that some of his fans and other people who disagree w/ the petition are attacking it, not that he or the games industry cares enough to come here and spread FUD, I think regular people are dumb and emotional enough to do that for them.
I’m not concerned with it. I’ve looked into it a bit, and it seems like PirateSoftware ruined his own reputation. It just took his very visible cockup in that WoW raid for people to realize that he lies a lot and refuses to acknowledge when he’s wrong.
I think he misread or misunderstood what the petition was about
Possibly. I’m not going to speculate on that because it’s not really important.
But he’s not going to be making a bunch of accounts on random message boards like Lemmy to try to kill it.
I doubt it as well. I’m more suspicious of corporate astroturfing. And Lemmy isn’t too small of a target for it, since astroturfing is pretty cheap.
Yeah, I haven’t found a reason to care about PS beyond showing courtesy to people who went out of their way to provide receipts for their claims. I also haven’t seen enough to warrant ruining his life. That’s about as much effort as I care to spend here.
The bigger concern is what happens at the EU. Surely that’s where corporations are going to focus their energy, because it’s a lot easier to convince some bureaucrats than millions of gamers. Sure, some negative press helps, but the real impact is made by lobbyists.
Do you have specific examples of him making multiple accounts to amplify a message? If so, that would certainly change my opinion of him and would explain a lot of the unsubstantiated claims made here.
So TL; DW for anyone that made it down this far: PS’s mod made a Twitch alt presumably for the purpose of buying bits to keep a hype train going. Whether this is legal or consistent with the Twitch TOS is debatable.
I’m not concerned with it. I’ve looked into it a bit, and it seems like PirateSoftware ruined his own reputation. It just took his very visible cockup in that WoW raid for people to realize that he lies a lot and refuses to acknowledge when he’s wrong.
I think he misread or misunderstood what the petition was about
Possibly. I’m not going to speculate on that because it’s not really important.
But he’s not going to be making a bunch of accounts on random message boards like Lemmy to try to kill it.
I doubt it as well. I’m more suspicious of corporate astroturfing. And Lemmy isn’t too small of a target for it, since astroturfing is pretty cheap.
People have opinions. No everyone disagreeing with one opinion or other is a paid actor.
I’m all for SKG. I signed it. And I haven’t actually seen much criticism at all here. But if someone were to disagree I won’t automatically think it’s a paid actor, probably just a person with an opinion.
It’s so stupid to think that small message boards are spared; small boards are where they infest with the most enthusiasm; you infiltrate a hundred small boards, one grows into the mainstream and now you have a socmed in your control.
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Welcome to the age of bots.
Enjoy your perpetual unavoidable and even undetectable bias and opinion influencing astroturfing.
Paid for by whoever doesn’t want the things that you want, to influence the people around you to bite at each other’s throats and work against their own interests.
This is one of the biggest reasons Reddit has turned to shit.
Nobody here disagrees with any point of the petition. I signed it. Even if gaming companies were rushing to send shills to raid discussions they would have done it months ago and last places they would go astroturff for is this Kazakhstani anti-whaling forum. Especially when their target now is the Eu bureaucracy and MEPs. Where I might say they have not a bad chance of succeeding.
? Is lemmy.world hosted by Borat?
I brlieve it is hosted in Germany. Not sure though.
Domain and IP resolve to California, but it’s a cloudflare IP, so who knows where it actually is.
I think it is hosted in Europe. Nordic maybe?
I’m pretty sure it’s in the US. I’m in Utah (pretty far western US) and ping times are like 10-15ms, which is consistent w/ a west coast server. I have a VPS in Germany, and pings are more like 100-150ms.
I’m not exactly sure how pings work w/ cloudflare, so maybe it’s hosted somewhere else, but I would imagine they’d get a cloudflare host near their VPS to minimize latency.
Are people criticizing it? There is a certain critical mass that when something becomes popular enough a subset of the population will automatically oppose it.
There’s also a threshold where Industry Groups will start astroturfing. Especially when it comes to worker’s rights or consumer’s rights.
It seems like it’s a bit too late now to start astroturfing this though
It’s a fine line because if you do it too early you’ll just add more attention to it. They probably predicted it would stall out.
I saw it posted on here much before it reached the threshold. I think that before then it was really just a few people running with it, now that it has gotten momentum, more people are sharing and we run in similar circles so it can appear to be overwhelming.
This
So much internet space wasted for mundane thing,
Is This petition even automatic to get to the board of European Commission or European leaders?
If not, then it’s waste of time,
Also I have zero knowledge about European Legislation, to be honest so I maybe in wrong
Pretty sure:
Yes, this is a legit thing the EU cares about. However that’s also why I’ve always wondered why they’re soliciting signatures outside the EU…
Didn’t it come out that the people who pushed payroll processors to force studios to censor, have been found out to be a bunch of far right religious extremists who definitely aren’t going to stop here.
There is also a UK petition, which has itself cleared the required threshold. Are those the out-of-EU signatures you mean?
It’s possible there’s multiple out there
I just at one point also wondered what the point of a petition was because I’m a jaded American
2: Yes. https://youtu.be/DEflTJjtn5w
I made some critical posts about it several months ago. It was exhausting. So I stopped. Haven’t changed my position though.
I haven’t seen anyone here against it.
Ross got hit with some anonymous legal complaint so I wouldn’t be surprised with astroturfing.
I’m also an American so I can’t help.
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If he helps bump the gaming industry in a better/healthier direction, he deserves 6 figures imo
I mean I was critical of it well before it hit 1.4M signatures. As it ramps up in articles about it, I’d assume an increase in negative sentiment in addition to the positive side. Its not a perfect thing and has different viewpoints, so it makes sense.
And what is your argument against the petition? All it says is that developers need to leave their game in some playable state for those who laid for it, with several options offered as examples
Because as you already stated, that’s all it says. There is a lot of open interpretation to what that means and not all of it refers to big publishers/devs like EA.
For example, indie games like Objects in Space. It was Early Access and ran into technical issues which led to funding issues as they could only work so long on it. Its broken essentially. But it doesn’t matter if the project was beyond their scope of skill or they ran out of money, they would be forced to pay to fix it. This means (and for other indie devs) if not certain their project will succeed, having to block sales in EU. Its potentially the most damaging not to the Ubisoft’s and EA’s, but to the Flat Earth Games, Bugbytes, ColePowered Games, etc. Its asking new indie developers to take on optional risk by releasing in the EU. Remember no where in the petition does it mention live service games. Only just games.
Additionally, the points brought up in the petition needed to be bullet proof. The moment that petition started to get close to 1M, you know publishers started turning gears to block future legislation. The committee of petitions will verify the petition and then refer it for fact finding. The points needed to be concise for the purpose of the fact finding committee. And they needed to be geared towards the EU acting which around a dozen times now have stated that while concerns are valid, it is up to the member nations to propose legislation on this (which is who the major publishers are reported to have approached - not some EU committee).
I’m still salty about EA’s Darkspore (which I might add doesn’t mention on the case that internet access is required to play - which I did not have back in the day), but this petition just feels like minimal impact. I would just like to remind people that advocating SKG may feel good but that rarely equates to doing good.
NOTE: I’ll probably be downvoted to hell on it, but I imagine that is all that will happen. There really is no solid argument against what I’ve said.
First off, that studio will not be forced to go back and fix their game. Western democratic governments, including the EU, works on the basis that ex post facto laws are invalid. The game is already dead and abandoned from your telling, so there would be no expectation to revive it.
The true solution for studios making new games in the future is to implement exit strategies for multiplayer implementation early on in development. And for single player games, much of that exit strategy is to not require login servers after the game is abandoned.
And to address your specific example, there is one option that is extremely cheap and easy to implement that will certainly pass requirements: release the sorce code. If a EA game is truly so bungled that it’s better off abandoned, studios and publishers will always have the option to fully abandon it.
You’re forgetting this is the EU, it’s significantly less susceptible to industry lobbying than the US. If it wasn’t the GDPR wouldn’t exist and Apple would still be using their proprietary chargers on all new iPhones.
Have you not read the petition? I doubt it could be anymore concise in its language while still being possible to pass. You can’t specify exact implementations for games post-abandonment because any single solution will not work for every game.
That is a claim befitting an egotistical fool. But at least now you can’t complain that nobody has addressed your concerns, as you claimed in your first comment.
That’s it… 3 sentences is not concise. You want to base multi-national law off of 3 sentences. Maybe you should think that through a bit more. If the time can’t be spent to actualy write out constructive goals or at least milestones (which is supposed to help dictate multi-national law) then maybe it should wait shouldn’t it until you can.
The VGE (the lobbying group you’re talking about) helped to write the consumer protection, digital content licensing, and age ratings for the EU. They already helped create your laws so that’s not really true is it.
Sorry, it still stands.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/concise
Aka, “short”.
The petition absolutely is ‘concise’. You just have no idea what that word means.
Using fancy words in an argument only works if you actually know what those words mean.
Not only that, a long petition containing lots of details has its own drawbacks. For one, fewer people will read it and/or understand it, which will make it easier for detractors to confuse the general public with misinformation.
Concise is synonymous with “to the point”. In other words, you don’t have to have lots of words, but they do have to be on target which your 3 sentences are not. So, no, it was correct word use on my part. The fact that you can’t argue the VGE’s involvement or anything other than a word’s definition really doesn’t make you look like you have a strong case here lol. Again, it seems like you have strong feelings, but that doesn’t win court cases. Sorry, not sorry.
So you’re just ignoring all the other points I made earlier? On top of refusing to acknowledge that you don’t know what words you’re using?
No. The word you are looking for is “succinct”. You’re doubling down harder than PirateGames at this point, and with you including some egotistical snark at the end of every comment and claiming that you can’t possibly be wrong just further demonstrates that you’re a walking example of Dunning-Krüger syndrome with entitlement issues.
Get over yourself. Instead of petulantly whining about a petition on the internet, go and do something actually productive with your life.
I’ve made some comments critical of how relentlessly PirateSoftware is being harassed and how annoying it is and how distracting from the actual movement it is.
Nothing wrong with the petition itself, and I haven’t noticed any negative astroturfing about it.
PirateSoftware is being harassed for a whole lot more than just his SKG misinformation campaign.
Perhaps, but the most I’ve seen are some tenuous “evidence” about him being a little selfish in WoW, not finishing games, or using his dad’s influence to land a job at Blizzard. Neither of those are particularly bad, and certainly don’t warrant the negative attention he got. It really seems like people are looking for dirt just because they don’t like his position on SKG.
Then again, I didn’t hear about him until he came out against it, and I saw he defended Godot, which is pretty rad. That’s the extent of my knowledge about him, other than the handful of hit pieces against him people posted here once he got negative attention.
I support SKG and don’t think PirateSoftware is a bad dude. I say just let him be, and don’t watch his content if you don’t like it.
The WoW thing wasn’t about being selfish, it’s just one of a dozen or more incidents of him being a narcissistic bully who screws other people over and can’t take accountability for anything.
And nobody is giving him too much shit for simply being a nepo baby. The Blizzard thing is about him being a fraud who’s been caught repeatedly lying and misleading people about his credentials and work experience in order to appear like an expert. He uses his time at Blizzard like a magic wand to expel criticism, going so far as to misrepresent what he even did at Blizzard to appear like an authority when people criticize him.
The backlash against him has been well earned by bad behavior over a long period of time, most of which involves him treating other people poorly for his own benefit.
Isn’t that par for the course for streamers/youtubers though? I’ve seen people claim to be “indie game devs” when they’ve never actually released a game, or if they did, it made so few sales as to be little more than a hobby.
After some very quick research about him, it seems his dad helped him get a job as a QA at Blizzard, and then he worked his way up to doing something cybersecurity related. That doesn’t scream “nepo baby” to me, that’s just a dad being awesome helping their kid get their foot in the door, and my dad would do the same for me if I expressed any interest in his career. If he was given a project lead role or something right out of school, then I’d agree w/ your assessment, but a QA a not a very glamorous job, he’s probably testing some boring component of their stack. Likewise, cybersecurity also isn’t very glamorous, he probably ran pen-tests or something on their servers (maybe not even game servers), it’s a decent job, but not something that would give him any authority since he’s not making important gaming-related decisions.
That said, having worked with important people probably gives him some valuable insight, and I’d like to see him expound on why he thinks things are problematic. All I saw in the videos I watched is some hand-waving and inaccurate statements (i.e. studios would need to release code or some nonsense), which tells me he didn’t actually read the petition. I didn’t watch the full thing, but apparently he read the FAQ where Ross explains what the petition is not about, and he probably just skimmed that. I think that’s unfortunate, since he actually has industry experience and might have something valuable to add to the conversation.
Again, I haven’t watched much of his content, but I did watch what I think was a relevant part of the original VOD. Here’s how I saw the WoW thing (I have never played WoW, so I’m probably missing something):
That sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe he could’ve said it better (seemed to be playing the “cool and collected streamer” role), but I think his actual actions were reasonable.
But maybe there’s something he could have done. I don’t know WoW well enough to know what options he would have had, but from my perspective, returning to help would’ve just meant he’d die too. And my understanding is that in this game mode, that represents a lot of investment, since the character would be deleted upon death, so it makes sense to be careful. I hear they worked it out after the stream, so his team apparently didn’t think his behavior was all that bad.
And then I look at the reaction. I see several articles slamming him for his behavior in that VOD, and a lot of the backlash citing that as justification for hating him. That seems way over the top, so I think the only rational takeaway is that other streamers are making a big deal out of very little, and people are latching onto it w/o actually looking at the facts and taking what they read for granted.
That’s why I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon. Maybe he’s as bad as everyone says, but I haven’t seen enough actual evidence of that. Each time someone has provided some evidence, I looked at it and didn’t see anything damning, just normal streamer behavior. I think people are making a big deal about it because they strongly disagree w/ his take on something else (say, SKG) and are digging for dirt.
So yeah, that’s my take.
No.
That would in fact make those people indie game devs. Thats not a high bar to meet. Pirate likes to word it as if he was a game dev in the industry, and often leaves the context of him just working in QA out. As for the cybersecurity role, his role dealt mostly with the human aspect of the business. Compliance, awareness training, etc. the most active things he did were social engineering phone calls. Yet he has explicitly calls himself “a hacker”.
You’re missing a step here. 3.5. He chooses not to use the items he has that would have restored his mana. Which changes number 5 a bit as a consequence.
Well you have done a pretty good job of focusing on just two of the things he’s been in hot water over, and avoiding all the other evidence that’s out there you haven’t seen. So yeah I wouldn’t want you to jump on a bandwagon without any evidence, but at the same time you’ve explained that you haven’t seen most of the evidence. So I’m not sure what the point of you weighing in here against the people who have seen all the evidence, from a perspective that hasn’t seen the evidence is.
There are hours and hours of video, photo, and written accounts of other events so I’m not just going to recap it all here for you, but it’s all out there for you to find. One of my favorites is when he’s playing another MMO on stream and a dungeon run his party does is ruined by someone accidentally pulling an extra mob. Pirate proceeds to be a huge dick about it. He doesn’t give the person who pulled it the benefit of the doubt like you have to Pirate. At the end of his rant it’s pointed out to him by his own chat that he himself was the one who pulled the mob lol. After which instead of apologizing, he then says he’s not sorry about what he did. He’s so unabashed about his view that only other people make mistakes.
That does change things a bit.
I’ve never played WoW and generally avoid MMOs, so I don’t know how everything works. I just assumed mana items are a time effect thing, so he would’ve needed to plan ahead. If they were already bailing, there’s no reason to use them on the way out.
Well yeah, I can’t know what I don’t know.
Those were the best examples provided to me, and they didn’t seem as bad as people made them out to be. I just have to assume the rest is more of the same.
I’m happy to look at more though. But honestly, I don’t know what you’d gain from that, I already don’t watch his content and support SKG. I guess I might repost some links for others to check out if they’re also confused by the backlash.
Someone else mentioned that here (today?), and that’s certainly enough for me to not want to watch his streams. I already avoid a lot of the popular streamers for being disrespectful to random opponents, and doing that to someone on your team is absolutely unacceptable.
I still don’t think that warrants the response he got, from calls for resignation to swatting.
I don’t think he’s been swatted. In fact, a lot of the “backlash” that Pirate has complained about has also been debunked.He said he had to step away from his role at a game publisher because people were “Reviewing bombing all of the company’s games”. Somehow he didn’t realize that game reviews are public and in the case of Steam reviews very detailed. People went right to the Steam reviews and found that literally none of the games had been review-bombed.
On the contrary, since the backlash started he’s been calling for his fans to brigade and mass report anyone who criticizes him, live on stream. He filed a lawsuit against a guy who made a game and put a cameo of Pirate in his game as a cockroach wearing Pirates signature wizards hat. (A cockroach is the wow term for people who do what Pirate did)
As for the resignation, generally companies don’t like to have people who are ongoing, unapologetic public menaces to be the faces of their company. Any consequences Pirate faces are all of his own doing. If you’re going to be a public figure, you have to understand that you’re going to be held accountable for your behavior by somebody.
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Ok but… That’s the correct way to play EVE online.
Really? From the 5-10 min of his videos that I watched over the last 2 weeks when trying to figure out why people dislike him, I didn’t see any of that nonsense. That’s really too bad if true, because he seemed like a pretty level-headed guy who was a pretty laid-back gamer (no yelling or other form of aggression, which is unfortunately common among streamers). I watched some clips of:
That’s about it. He didn’t seem like a toxic person who routinely trolls and screws people in games, just kind of your average, run-of-the-mill streamer who’s a little low-key but still out there to create content to get people to watch.
Then again, he could totally be the jerk you make him out to be. It’s really hard to tell what’s a legitimate explanation of things and what’s people looking for a reason to slander him because they don’t like his take on SKG. The couple of articles I read seemed to mostly be the latter, but they also didn’t mention most of what you did here. So idk, I guess I haven’t made up my mind about him, but honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth digging into because I’m not into his content anyway.
You watched 5 minutes of his own verbal diarrhea and formed a full opinion on him?
No, I explicitly said I don’t have a strong opinion on him. I’m not going to knee-jerk follow the hate train just because of a bad take on SKG and a couple of emotional videos where he said some moderately offensive things. Maybe he’s really a bad dude, idk, but I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon.
Fair enough, by the way, valid point. But it does seem like you jumped on a bandwagon, my friend.
There’s the problem: you won’t get evidence of a murder if you ask the murderer for it.
He streams a lot, so the things he says or does are spread out, especially if you’re only looking for noticeably damning stuff like the rim job related rant against SKG.
His confidence and speechcraft makes him very good at steering conversations by lying or deflecting, as long as you trust what he says.
Good places to start looking may be his conversation with Dr. K or Ross’ “The end of Stop Killing Games” on Youtube, both are hosted by level headed people;
I can only assume you haven’t seen the latter, because at the very least it makes it very apparent why people dislike him.
This one? He sounds like an awesome dude according to his bio, but I’ve never seen anything by him, I’ll check him out.
And I haven’t seen any conversations between him and Ross. I did see snippets of his original reaction, where he seemed to completely misunderstand the petition, and his follow-up, unhinged rant, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the latter because he had apparently gotten a lot of negative attention (swatting attempts, calls for him to leave the publisher he was at, and random negative remarks on his own games), so I think it’s quite possible his attack on Ross was an emotional reaction to that negative attention, and not level-headed attack on Ross (I’ve seen nothing to suggest Ross is anything other than an awesome guy).
So my opinion on PirateSoftware is relatively neutral. He seems to be on the better end of the streamer range, which isn’t saying much (lots of popular streamers are pretty toxic). I don’t think he’s anyone to look up to, and I wish he’d either have Ross on to discuss the petition or thoroughly read and understand it so he can elucidate his opposition to it, both of which I think would be helpful for his audience to form an actual opinion instead of borrowing his. But maybe he’s on the worse end of that spectrum, I don’t know, since again, I’ve only watched a few minutes of his content and he seemed like your average streamer who exaggerates their credentials and leans into “content,” and I’m not surprised clowning on people is part of that.
I literally had not heard of him a month ago, so I’m missing a ton of context. However, nothing I’ve seen makes me want to watch more of his content (he’s definitely not my style), but nothing makes me think he should be “cancelled” or whatever. Aside from some offensive remarks, I don’t think he’s really hurting anyone.
The (alleged) swatting didn’t happen before “The End Of SKG”.
I also don’t think he deserves cancellation, but he has lied so many times, so confidently and so unrepentantly that he deservers very little credibility.
I understand that some people would feel sympathy for the somewhat excessive negative attention he got (not from me, he lost my sympathy the first time I saw him blatantly lying and lobbing insults) but with the way he ALWAYS behaved, he absolutely had some of it coming.
The SKG thing was just the latest L in the series he’s been collecting for a while now. Similar to his wow raid there was another MMO when his party wiped due to someone accidentally aggro’ing a mob. He did the usually “that was moronic, whoever did that is kicked from the raid, etc”. Then he reviews the footage showing it was him that aggro’d and completely 180s, saying the wipe wasn’t on him. As evidenced in his SKG video, guy is super happy saying nasty shit about people but cries toxicity when it’s reciprocated. Guy just can’t help himself. Has to be right on everything and when it’s proven he isn’t, either doubles down or just simply denies being wrong.
Even the wow roaching thing, it isn’t so much the raid but the demanding everyone listen to his side before talking over others when it’s their turn and then leaving before they can have there say and tripling down. I used to appreciate some of his content but given his pattern of behaviour, including bullying, the negative attention he’s gotten is pretty deserved.
That sounds like a lot of people here on Lemmy honestly, and I think that’s pretty common.
I think this is the issue. He had a lot of fans and they were let down. I think the real issue is people looking up to random streamers/influencers. It’s not unique to YT/Twitch, but politicians and celebrities aa well.
I don’t like it. If you don’t like someone’s content, don’t watch it, and don’t burn the place down on your way out.
The WoW things is the most well known, be he had a similar behavior in another game, Ashes of Creation i think. Doesn’t take accountability for anything. Cannot say sorry.
There’s also stuff coming out here cheated on his former wife. And then was a massive manipulative dick towards the person that he was cheating on with.
Or that all his previous credentials are fabricated. Like he doesn’t like giving details what he’s actually done in previous jobs. He’ll just state that he works somewhere and then let you fill in the blank. Or passing off what someone else did at the job as his own.
In his own channel he purposely misrepresent the recent things about him. And coding Jesus actually put out a video showing that, when he tries to reach out immediately gets filtered and banned. But meanwhile Thor is telling people that all he had to do was try to reach out…
Have you seen a popular streamer that does? If they do, it’s more like “sorry you feel that way.” To get a decent sized following, you need other people to see you as some kind of authority, and most authorities don’t apologize, they do some amount of damage control and move on.
That’s a big part of why I generally avoid popular streamers/youtubers. Most of my favorite YT channels have like 100-500k subs (and several well below 100k), and I only sub to a few w/ over 1M, and most of those are on the more humble end of the spectrum (e.g. Gamers Nexus). I don’t jive well with wannabe authority figures, so I’m not surprised PirateSoftware didn’t appeal to me. In fact, most of those talking head channels aren’t interesting, I want facts, not opinions, and I do validate the more important facts.
Why would he? From what I gather (from a random wiki), his dad helped him get a QA job at Blizzard, and then he moved up the ranks to cybersecurity. I don’t think anyone would lie about that, since those aren’t “glamorous” jobs, but they are solid jobs. So my level in trust in what he says takes that into account, whatever he learned about the AAA gaming industry he learned by being present, not by being in any impactful role.
That guy rubs me the wrong way too (assuming you’re talking about Cr1TiKaL/penguinz0). I’ve gotten through maybe 2 min of one of his videos.
Yes. I think a lot of people would reference the MatPat apology.
That’s your personal bias. He lets people believe what they want. He used it for clout, and while you might not care about game development or cybersecurity, there are many who do. When he did security, he did social engineering. Which is just as valid, but if people are more impressed because they think he’s looking at source code and whatnot… he doesn’t correct them and leans into those stories. Since you kinda hipster-esque view of YouTubers… here’s a guy with less than 1000 subs talking about it, https://youtu.be/oKadi1zy8fQ and he didn’t really do that much at Blizzard either, not in game development either, but again, he doesn’t say what he actually did and has a lot of stories that don’t connect. That’s like if I said, “Yeah, I worked at the White House for 7 years” and just left it at that. But then it comes to light, I was the one mowing the grass, and that’s it. If I don’t specify what I did, nor correct people, and telling stories that I overhear that belong to someone else (and I don’t specify that) or talk about things that happen that I wasn’t involved with… then I’m lying by omission.
Not even close. https://www.youtube.com/@CodingJesus He’s a C++ developer who got his name because in some older photos of him people said he looked like Jesus. That’s the whole “lore”.
Hmm, never watched him. Looks like he has tens of millions of subs, which is probably why I’ve avoided him (I generally like smaller channels).
Maybe I just have more industry insight, because when I think of cyber security, I think of people auditing computers (do you have the corporate spyware installed?), running automated pen test suites, etc. Most of it isn’t particularly technical, and most security audits I’ve been a part of (and we do them every year) are black box testing, meaning they don’t have the code. Even in the one or two audits we did that involved the code (needed a higher tier audit for government contracts), most of what they checked was just dependency versions, they didn’t look too closely at the actual code.
Outside of high profile security researchers, I see most cyber security jobs as the security guards of software dev, they make sure you keep the doors locked, but they don’t force you to use reinforced doors or whatever, they’re just there to tell you what the obvious weak points are.
Which pretty much everyone does. If someone doesn’t go into detail, it’s pretty safe to assume there’s nothing to brag about.
That said, even if you only mowed the grass at the White House, you’d pick up on a lot of stuff about politics. You’d notice who the regulars are, important peoples’ routines, etc, not to mention what you pick up on through random small talk with people there. There’s a reason spys target people like janitors and landscapers, they don’t realize how much they know so their guard is down. That’s social engineering 101.
The janitors at Blizzard know more about AAA software development than the average gamer. A QA would know even more since they have more direct access to the devs and designers.
Whether you’re telling the whole truth or not about your credentials is irrelevant if you can prove what you claim. That’s why I’d like to see PS and Ross talk, so it would be easier to tell what’s accurate from what’s BS.
Ah, ok. I assumed the other guy because was pretty public with his criticism of PS and has long hair.
I haven’t heard of that guy either, probably because I’m more into Rust than C++, and actually avoid C++ like the plague (I much prefer C).
Maybe he meant me? (Thank god karma doesn’t exist here)
I just wrote a comment on how it’s interesting from a philosophical angle that we’re willing to petition the preservation of our distractions but not the thing we need ever more distraction from.
Don’t bother with downvoting, your brothers and sisters already nailed me to the cross, covered me in tar and dragged me through 30km of molten lava.
I haven’t changed my mind.
Not a single person I know has significantly changed their behaviour due to the climate emergency. Imagine if we had this kind of rallying support to put an end to fossil fuels tomorrow.
But that doesn’t directly benefit anyone
It’s interesting, but it’s also completely unrelated aside from a larger discussion about what people can spend their time and energy on? The obvious answer is “people can care about more than one thing” and the secondary response is about how this initiative is easy to participate in compared to limiting climate change. If you could just sign an online petition to limit the effects of climate change I am quite certain it would get just as much or more support… so false equivalency/over exaggeration of what “this kind of rallying support” is. And yeah, limiting climate change directly benefits a lot of people. I would love it if the treasured forests near my home weren’t burning to ash more and more every year, disappearing all the places I loved to go.
The vast majority of people are not contributing significantly to climate change compared to the big players like the oil and gas industries and the big moving industries.
If you want to make for effective change, stop whining like a street corner crazy picketer and push against those actually doing most of the polluting.
See that sounds like a good counter argument on the surface but it is very flawed.
By just blaming big corporations and pointing the finger, your missing two important factors:
As much as I like blaming big corporations, we got here (and every point in human history before us) because of what the masses did or neglected to do.
So as inconvenient as it must be, until we pop out of this us vs them, the corporation expected lifespans can be centuries, human’s are finite, and if you keep that whataboutism alive, will get a lot shorter soon.
Tell me you do not understand how the economy works without telling me you do not understand how the economy works…
Personal consumers haven’t driven the oil industry for decades upon decades by now. Please learn how massive corporations function before you continue to embarass yourself.
Which is why they run a non stop barrage of advertisemenr campaigns to brainwash the consumer into…
Oh. Wait. No.
That would mean the corporations basically tell the consumers what to do, and they basically listen.
Well, dang, thank god it’s not like they bankroll politicians to the point of individual citizen campaign donors being largely of no effectiveness whatsoever in the vast majority of…
Wait, whats that Jamie?
That is how shit works…?
takes long toke
Fuck.
I have posts being critical of it from over a year ago. I’d assume most people who have criticism don’t leave a comment because it’ll get you massively downvoted and your inbox will be flooded with angry replies.
What are the criticisms? Genuinely curious, have no idea what problems anyone might have with it, other than some quotes from the Ubisoft exec trying to act like implementing user run servers is borderline impossible
I don’t understand why there’s such a hyperfocus on petitions. The only thing being attempted is signing petitions in various countries. Every country has declined to do anything and the last hope is the EU parliament which is being treated like some all or nothing final bet. Why just petitions?
Why not directly put pressure on some of the worst offenders like Ubisoft? Lots of people are saying they’re not buying another Ubisoft game again. Cool! Start an official boycott. People who cant sign the EU petition can sign a boycott promise. It wouldn’t be binding or anything but it could create more solidarity around not purchasing their next big release. Companies care about their bottom line.
You know the hate campaign against piratesoftware? Why not do that to the official Ubisoft account instead? They’re the company that is actually causing the problem. You might not like piratesoftware but he’s not the enemy. He hasn’t killed any of his own games. He didn’t make the decision to shut down the Crew. The offical Ubisoft account shouldn’t get to post a single thing without pressure from the movement. Critical memes should be made about the company and shared on social media. The CEO shouldn’t get to speak to an audience without being booed. Companies cave to negative PR all the time.
These things can be done in addition to the petitions. Personally, I don’t think any petitions are going to bring about the change people are looking for. Governments rarely listen to them and the EU isn’t much better. There are just 10 citizens initiatives that have passed and all their responses have been pretty lack luster. Even if the EU enacts the exact laws people are hoping for, what about everywhere else? The idea seems to be that other countries will get trickle down consumer protections. Americans are pushing Europeans to petition the EU parliament to make law changes hoping it will cause American companies to change how they sell products to Americans. It’s just such an odd strategy to me. Again, it can be done, but there’s no reason more direct action can’t be taken in tandem with the petition.
I get lots of downvotes and angry replies for this take which I’m not sure why. I can only assume people don’t like hearing that petitions are largely useless.
Even if mostly useless, not doing anything is even more useless. At least that petition shows support for changes, which may influence some executive to rethink what they think is acceptable from their userbase.
I agree. I also think if you’re not European, you’ve not done anything. There wasn’t even a petition made in the US so Americans haven’t done a single thing, yet are the most vocal about it. That’s the part that confuses me.
“Thoughts and prayers!” 😏
It wouldn’t work in the US because the movement doesn’t have lobbyists, and even if it did they would be massively outspent.
Yes, that’s why I didn’t suggest Americans start a petition. A boycott and/or social media campaign is something Americans could do rather than just hope and wait for Europeans to fix everything.
A social media campaign by an American is exactly what SKG is…
The EU initiative was chosen specifically because it actually has a chance to get traction there, and the market is large enough that it can’t just be ignored by publishers.
People don’t have problems with SKG. They have problems with reading and/or comprehending its goals.
In my experience about half the posts about it (since the start) have some dummy saying it’s unreasonable for devs to support games forever.
Not on this account…
Maybe an issue with federation? Heres the link https://lemmy.ca/comment/10932620
I can’t see comments there, but I can see there are 16 comments. So yeah, probably.
To be fair, I only checked your posts, not your comments
Because it’s about to affect big money so they sic their bots on it to shape public opinion and stomp it, like everything else.
Maybe because those of us saying it probably wouldn’t lead to much meaningful change got downvoted to shit.
Attention work both ways.
People who were not aware, now are. From all sides.
Why would they? Most people didn’t know about the petition until a few weeks ago, and I think people are largely knee-jerk supporting their favorite streamer (in this case, PirateSoftware). I don’t think there’s a concerted effort here to kill it, just people coming out of the woodwork now that it got a lot of attention.
This may have killed piratesoftwares career
Perhaps, which I think is really unfortunate. I think he misread or misunderstood what the petition was about, and doubled down instead of taking a step back.
But he’s not going to be making a bunch of accounts on random message boards like Lemmy to try to kill it. The more reasonable argument is that some of his fans and other people who disagree w/ the petition are attacking it, not that he or the games industry cares enough to come here and spread FUD, I think regular people are dumb and emotional enough to do that for them.
I’m not concerned with it. I’ve looked into it a bit, and it seems like PirateSoftware ruined his own reputation. It just took his very visible cockup in that WoW raid for people to realize that he lies a lot and refuses to acknowledge when he’s wrong.
Possibly. I’m not going to speculate on that because it’s not really important.
I doubt it as well. I’m more suspicious of corporate astroturfing. And Lemmy isn’t too small of a target for it, since astroturfing is pretty cheap.
Yeah, I haven’t found a reason to care about PS beyond showing courtesy to people who went out of their way to provide receipts for their claims. I also haven’t seen enough to warrant ruining his life. That’s about as much effort as I care to spend here.
The bigger concern is what happens at the EU. Surely that’s where corporations are going to focus their energy, because it’s a lot easier to convince some bureaucrats than millions of gamers. Sure, some negative press helps, but the real impact is made by lobbyists.
Why not? He’s done that in other plataforms
Do you have specific examples of him making multiple accounts to amplify a message? If so, that would certainly change my opinion of him and would explain a lot of the unsubstantiated claims made here.
I don’t consider this as evidence, but maybe you find it entertaining: https://youtu.be/1YYNAruSye4
Interesting.
So TL; DW for anyone that made it down this far: PS’s mod made a Twitch alt presumably for the purpose of buying bits to keep a hype train going. Whether this is legal or consistent with the Twitch TOS is debatable.
I’m not concerned with it. I’ve looked into it a bit, and it seems like PirateSoftware ruined his own reputation. It just took his very visible cockup in that WoW raid for people to realize that he lies a lot and refuses to acknowledge when he’s wrong.
Possibly. I’m not going to speculate on that because it’s not really important.
I doubt it as well. I’m more suspicious of corporate astroturfing. And Lemmy isn’t too small of a target for it, since astroturfing is pretty cheap.
Lemmy is way too small and insignificant for Industry Plants to be posting on here about SKG, if that is what you are implying.
Lol you are funny. Propaganda doesn’t come here!
Industry shills will show up on a obscure message board that only a handful of people have ever seen. They are everywhere, they are here.
People have opinions. No everyone disagreeing with one opinion or other is a paid actor.
I’m all for SKG. I signed it. And I haven’t actually seen much criticism at all here. But if someone were to disagree I won’t automatically think it’s a paid actor, probably just a person with an opinion.
It’s so stupid to think that small message boards are spared; small boards are where they infest with the most enthusiasm; you infiltrate a hundred small boards, one grows into the mainstream and now you have a socmed in your control.
Not only that, you then link to that enthousiastic small board on the big one, as “unbiased source”
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The smaller a community is, the more influence you have. Propaganda here is much more effective than on Reddit