Personally I’m going to wait for more details when it comes out. I still want to keep playing games like Soul Calibur VI and other games.
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Long story short, players who should have been the game’s best ambassadors (top players, notable streamers) instead spent their time and platforms complaining about the game and how much they hated XYZ. As in play one match, complain for 45 minutes, play another match, complain for an hour (this is an actual example, not hyperbole). This mentality bled into other showcases of the game, manifesting in terrible Twitch chats wherein acolytes of said players would then spend entire tournaments ■■■■■■■■ to the devs (who regularly tuned in and participated in tourney chats) how “dumb” or “cheap” ABC was instead of just watching and enjoying the games. One memorable conspiracy theory that refused to die was that a well-heeled fan was literally paying the devs to not nerf a particular character.
I’m disinclined to go more into detail, but this post is a pretty decent summation of where I also was personally at with respect to much of the KI community:
And this post here is a good summary of a long-form article that was written about KI and its community. I recommend the whole thread actually if you’re genuinely interested in the topic.
And the article itself: Loose Screws – Communication, Killer Instinct, and the Struggle to Fight Negativity – Them's fighting words!!
It’s long, but Hippo actually talked to a lot of people still in the community when writing it (full disclosure: I was one of those people), and has lots of links to other examples of the kinds of stuff that were happening.
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Thanks for the response, and for sharing your own opinion/experience. Those posts (and Hippo’s article), were great reads.
So basically, the simplest and most brief way to say it is that it went beyond traditional community negativity and became actual harassment. That’s very sad. The amount of passion and dedication that Iron Galaxy was putting into the game is evident even to someone coming in years later, and it’s such a shame people chose to crap on that.
I don’t see any issue with people posting their grievances, but the fact that it’s rarely ever done constructively is such a large problem. I generally feel sorry for developers (any developer) simply because of the amount of hate and slander that gets tossed their way for a video game. That always blows my mind.
Hippo’s talk about the NetherRealm Community is pretty accurate, and how people who seem to speak the loudest oft don’t understand exactly what they’re ranting about (how they think Stephanie as Lead QA can actually veto lead designer decisions has always had me rolling my eyes).
I’m a middle-aged guy, but one thing that continually puzzles me is how much this generation of gamers seems to completely hate everything they play! If you truly hate something so much, then why are you still playing it? Why not move on to things you do enjoy?
Anyway, it’s a huge shame that communities tend to be their own worst enemies.
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Yes, we all loved this amazing and touching documentary, and I’m clapping and cheering from the balcony alongside everyone here… but I’m surprised that I’m the first one to ask this: (Click the video and listen for a second)
The doom & gloom answer to the future of KI is “no one is working on it,” but Ken noted that he had SIX development studios in consideration for our Killer Instinct from the get-go. We know of the rockstars at Double Helix and Iron Galaxy, but what about the other four?
Killer Instinct (2013) did such an incredible job of catching us all off guard like a well-timed Skeleport, ( the headlines of Microsoft renewing the KI trademark aside), but like Eyedol’s surprise appearance at the end of Season 3, who knows if the sneaky sneaks at Microsoft aren’t slyly teaming up with yet ANOTHER studio for us all to fight on? 
You never know what the future holds…
-Zenek
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In my experience with gaming communities, it seems to largely be people who’ve invested so much of themselves into a particular game that they can’t detach from it even after their frustration has well exceeded their enjoyment with it. Oftentimes they feel a personal stake in the state of the game, and resent the developers for not delivering up to their wishes or certain expectations.
Others are just purebred haters and trolls who will cling onto any agreeable target they come across, as long as they get to talk trash and get internet points.
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See, but I still don’t understand that.
I’m a big Mortal Kombat guy, I’ve loved the franchise since it first came to arcades and was completely swept up in it. I wasn’t as keen with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 I wanted a new game as opposed to a Street Fighter like “upgrade,” and I didn’t care for Mortal Kombat 4 at all. I took one look at that game, said nope, and moved on.
I didn’t freak, spread hate, or force myself to play something I no longer wanted to play, I simply moved on. When Mortal Kombat (2011) came out, I tried the franchise for the first time proper since those days, and loved it as it captured the spirit of the klassics. Now I’m a huge Mortal Kombat guy again.
Halo. Love the franchise; it’s Campaign Gameplay and lore are excellent. Until 343 Industries took over. I was not as keen with what 343 Industries was doing with the franchise and had mixed feelings about the EU and Halo 4, and simply decided to move on (the poor state of the Xbox One at launch helped in that direction).
Now that I have an Xbox One X, I’ve re-invigorated myself on the franchise, including the 343 Industries stuff, which is not as bad as younger me thought.
Again, games are meant to be fun and for enjoyment. If you’re not enjoying a game or a series, there’s plenty more out there to enjoy!
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Agreed. It should go without saying that the types I’m describing probably lack a good deal of IRL maturity to begin with. Frankly, I don’t think anyone who makes a personal hobby out of hating on entertainment or muckraking people online is completely right in the head. That’s just what I think the reasoning behind that kind of behavior is, as twisted as it is; they can’t detach or process their disappointment in healthy way, so instead they stay engaged and go on a bitter crusade in an attempt to “fix” what they believe went wrong and punish the parties responsible for it.
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Someone is going to write a sociology dissertation about this someday. It’s partly a function of social media and how that works to amplify negative messages and the way happy people tend to be satisfied after making one post while unhappy people are compelled to post over and over and try to convert everyone to their point of view. My favorite example is Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite. People will still tell you that game is trash, but it’s got arguably the best gameplay of the series. The “fans” trashed it because Chun-Li was too ugly, they didn’t like the visual style, and there were no X -men. As soon as it was clear that the game was done, they started clamoring for a new MvC game - as if that was in any way possible. Fans have zero understanding of the financial investment and risk that games represent as well as the hard work and effort. When a franchise tanks it doesn’t lead management to say “let’s do that again?”
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That’s a paper I’d be interested in reading.
And I think I mentioned before in another thread, I generally loathe social media and don’t partake in it simply because it’s nothing more than the propagation of ignorance where opinions seem to hold more weight than facts.
Even forums, I scaled back on heavily. There’s one Discord and three forums I regularly go to now. This being one of them, of course.
And people complaining about a game character being ugly constantly also boggles my mind. Mortal Kombat 11 is the first game of the reboot trilogy where people aren’t complaining about Kitana’s face! During Mortal Kombat X, players were actually asking on the stream of a major to NetherRealm to give Royal Storm Kitana her mask! NetherRealm Studios said no.
Another thing I’ve learned about gamers, especially for this generation, is that they have very little to absolutely no idea on how business works. Yet they like to go on and on like they do.
My best friend has been known to say that with this generation, critical thinking has died. I believe he may be right.
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I’m in my forties, but I have to stick up for millennials a bit. I have had really good experiences in my profession with millennials. I don’t think they are more mentally lazy, thoughtless or emotional than earlier generations. I think all age cohorts are being impacted by new forms of communication which amplify all voices, but the kind of simple, definitive (and generally wrong) statements that play well on social media and spread are really dumbing down discourse. I would avoid it altogether but you can’t get any news about fun stuff like games anywhere but Twitter and Facebook. I’ve spent too many late nights fact checking people only to be immediately accused of being a crazy extremist for not just agreeing. It sucks.
And this carries straight down to unimportant things like video games. People show up with completely uninformed opinions and then fight to the death over their position instead of trying to better understand reality. 
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I’m a little younger than you, and right at the end of GenX.
I’ve met some fantastic millennials and several are dear friends. In general, I’ve found there’s good folk, “bad” folk, hard workers, and freeloaders in all generations, it’s simply human nature.
My personal experience with the millennial generation though, especially in my profession where I’ve directly managed millennials for years, is that there is a host of truth to the stereotypes, so our own experiences there have been quite different.
I had to completely change my management style, because traditional management wasn’t working with millennials, and at least here, companies as a whole are catering to many bad habits that have, in my opinion, degraded professional culture.
A few years ago I ended up hiring someone who was a little older than me, and by god was it was such a relief. I’d actually task him with something, and didn’t need to spend 30 minutes explaining why he should go and do his job; he’d just do the tasks! Perhaps it’s the industry I work in (television production), where egos are problematic to begin with.
Having said that, my current team is all millenials and they are absolutely fantastic.
Seeing how senior people at my company are no longer capable of basic problem solving and management though, I do tend to agree more with my friend re: critical thinking every day.
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I think individual variance will always eclipse generational variance. It’s all anecdotal but I hired a 50 something who would sit on his hands for weeks producing nothing. And then come back after doing nothing for weeks and argue with me that we really shouldn’t be doing it. Meanwhile the 25-35 year olds I’ve worked with run off and give it 110%.
What is certainly true is that the value of real, knowledgeable discourse between people who have relevant knowledge and experience but may have different opinions has gone down in favor of appealing emotional statements from strangers that we happen to agree with. And this is making us both collectively less informed, as well as more polarized.
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Very well said.
That’s why I never got a Facebook or Twitter account.
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This. One of the more interesting things I learned in grad school (minored in Engineering Management) was that generation theory pretty much always falls apart when you try to test it with any kind of statistical or analytical rigor. People are just people, and when you word things precisely you tend to find that old folks react much as young folks would and vice versa. My professor emphasized that we learned generation theory in HR not necessarily because it exists, but because everyone else thinks it exists, and it is therefore a useful frame to couch hiring/training discussions in.
On the broader question of critical thinking, I’d (predictably, given what I wrote above) say it’s definitely not the case that critical thinking capability is any more or less prevalent in Millennials and Zoomers than the gens above, only that the medium and incentives around conversations have changed. The kind of off-hand “I think X should Y…” you see on social media is exactly the same nonsense armchair-quarterbacking that’s occurred at lunch tables, bars, and living rooms for hundreds of years. The difference is that Crazy Uncle Eddie couldn’t blast his terrible opinion across the ether to 1000 other crazy uncles, and because of the prevalence of information nowadays he’s probably a lot less self-aware of the fact that his sources are bunk. The issue isn’t that he’s done no research, it’s that his research is laden with pseudo-knowledge that would have been very hard to come by 30 or 40 years ago. Lots of younger people are actually better at sorting the information glut of the internet than their older counterparts, for the simple fact that they were reared in that environment as opposed to “if it’s in print it must be true”.
That said, social media (and forums for that matter, though less so) is a roundly terrible place to have any form of nuanced discussion. The incentive is for likes, not understanding or changed minds, and that necessarily colors any and all discussions that take place within them.
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I have a Facebook account from a decade ago, I only use it for fundraising for the charity that supports my health condition.
To clarify, my best friend isn’t suggesting that critical thinking is dying among the younger generations only, he means it’s dying overall, and I’ve come to agree with him.
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My problem with social media, especially sites like Twitter and Facebook, has always been the rampant tribalism and the attitude that having any sort of grievance gives you the right to be a slanderous and ridiculous d-bag. I am really, really tired of the drama that stems from it when I just want to enjoy and talk about my hobbies.
Back during early Season 3 I agreed that there were some serious balance problems that were hurting the game, but there were some folks who jumped to viciously demonizing Iron Galaxy as incompetent hacks with malicious motives, decided the game was total trash and everyone who talked back was a fanboy and an enemy of the game itself. I cannot be convinced that much, if any of that was necessary to solve the problem.
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Yeah, I’m the kind of person who has little tolerance for drama, online or in real life.
I also find that, on the internet, whenever I see someone post things like “SJW,” “Incel,” “Agenda,” “Shill,” or other labelling terms, it’s time to walk away from the thread since it’s about to become an ignorant ■■■■ show.
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I think critical thinking has always been remarkably rare in the human population. I think what’s changed recently is that we are both actively discounting critical thinking, and we are exposed constantly and repeatedly to examples of people failing at critical thinking through media - a source of information that we are preconditioned to think represents more than just “random idiot’s ill conceived inner monologue that somehow got 10k likes fro other random idiots.” There’s lots of room to criticize “traditional media” but outside of famously terrible “man on the street” segments there is no history for the bombardment of bad ideas we get through social media.
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That’s the thing though, I’ve actually seen critical thinking decline in people I know. In real world, non-online interactions. Including at the professional management level.