5 Comments
Jun 17, 2023Liked by Melos Han-Tani

good piece and generous, ha. it is sad when people feel threatened by games that don't fit whatever notion they have, and it surely comes from insecurity. <3

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author

thanks Llaura!

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Jun 19, 2023·edited Jun 19, 2023

This is immature.

'Let's judge people's comments at face value, then make an armchair psychologist distinction on why they behave/think that way instead of having a conversation with them or an AMA down the line.'

That's healthy...

What this shows to me is a lack of confidence in the game's exposure.

Whether those comments exist or not, it's clear the intention here's to generate a reaction for sensationalist hate buzz replies, then play victim for sympathy points and it's no more apparent than when this was advertised in a very "Hello, fellow humans." way on the said "Certain popular imageboard".

(Thanks for the shoutout btw. Occam's Razor says hello.)

To the advertisers:

There's a good portion of users, myself included, who'd prefer honesty over being ironic. It's not all full of screaming underaged kids and manchildren, if you can believe it.

Either be upfront and genuine when talking about the game -- can even pretend to be a play tester if identity's a concern -- while ignoring the more low quality ad homs that're the daily norm there -- good games or not -- or go to Reddit/Resetera/Twitter/Facebook/etc. instead.

Being intentionally, cheekily hostile reflects poorly on your character despite it, sadly, being the most profitable tactic these days.

I'm looking forward to playing AE because you guys make some bizarrely unique and interesting games that really grabbed me emotionally through the music -- your OST in Sephonie in particular -- but unfortunately, because of the behavior in this hit piece, I'll be sailing the high seas with this one.

TL;DR Got me to reply/10

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author

Hey thanks for replying! You're right that I'm overgeneralizing 4chan's users, actually, most of the comments I saw about AE there were positive (a few were negative but like you said felt a bit more like ignorable ad homs). Anyways I edited my post to reflect that, sorry about that.

That being said, if you're referring to this post of the blog - https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/641219420/#q641219420 I truly didn't make it! You'll just have to trust me on that one, though.

Regarding the rest of the comments though... they are all real. I understand it would be very easy to fake comments for this sort of thing, but if you search "Angeline Era" "future of play" on YouTube and watch the live chat replays you'll be able to find each comment (either spoken or written.) My reason for not directly citing people's comments was I didn't want to draw attention to them, over the comments themselves: I picked most of these comments because they feel like comments I've seen in many similar forms over time.

Actually, it's interesting you mention the armchair psychology aspect because earlier forms of this post did have that sort of feeling to it, which I didn't like. I wanted it to be less about feeling like overanalyzing a person, and more like thinking about certain 'categories' of comments.

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It's funny someone did post it on 4chan though.. when I was writing this I was like "I probably shouldn't keep this line about the Image Board!" but then I did, and lo and behold someone makes a post there! I'll try to be more respectful going forward (even if that topic did have some direct insults... to me they don't feel as offensive as the stuff that live streamers said about AE!)

Unrelated to anything else it is kind of funny that there was a suspicion it was me. Actually I've thought about posting about AE there before because I've noticed /vg/ has a Falcom thread and I thought there would be some Ys fans. But I figured it would be too suspicious!

Anyways... I hope I could convince you a little that I wasn't posting this article as a hit piece or anything. Am I venting? Sure, but really I've been seeing cycles of these comments for such a long time that I felt I had to say something!

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