5 Conclusions - 14/12/18

A regular look at gaming-related stories from the past week or so whereby conclusions are drawn from anything and everything. These may be incredibly well reasoned based on events from the week. Alternatively, they may be highly speculative, drawn from very little evidence. More likely, they will be somewhere in between.

Conclusion One: The landscape of gaming continues to change and we must fight back

Street Fighter is a fantastic series and Street Fighter 5 a brilliant game. Capcom sell the game, plus DLC in the form of seasons, with new characters part of each new season. But now, now they are going to bring in-game advertising to the world of Street Fighter.

What a load of old bollocks. The advertising is in the form of additions to character costumes, adverts in loading screens and stage sponsors.

This is not the way we want games to go. People pay money for the game, play it for years, buy all the DLC and now they get ads telling them about the Capcom Pro Tour sponsors? If people are big fans of Street Fighter they’ll know about the Pro Tour; if they aren’t they won’t care. Either way, why are people getting adverts for content they’ve paid for? It’s like Capcom have seen the model which television uses and is largely being moved away from where possible (e.g. Netflix, HBO) and decided that’s a great thing to do with their most important game in 2018.

This is pure greed, just a new way of generating cash and it’s done in such a way that people will largely accept it. The game’s three years old now and established. It’s the premier eSports fighting title. People will want to continue playing. If they don’t, they could walk away or turn the in-game ads off...but then they lose out on the bonus fight money.

Way to go, Capcom. Let’s hope this experiment fails through people complaining and leaving the game. If not, Capcom will be encouraged and so will every other big publisher...then we head towards a future that echoes the frustrations of the past.

Conclusion Two: We cannot hear you over this ‘Street Justice’

Of course, here on Jump Dash Roll we do not advocate ‘street justice’ of any kind — but when Sydney-based Twitch streamer ‘MrDeadMoth’ was caught live on-stream (reader and viewer discretion heavily advised) allegedly slapping his pregnant wife and hurling objects with his child crying in the background, one cannot help but shout salutations to the gaming community for rinsing this horrible human being into the ground and getting the authorities involved in record time.

Twitter user RevvOCE originally posted the clip which caused immediate backlash and outrage with the gaming community as a whole. A select few ‘cyber-specialists’ (think the Matrix with less PVC) immediately hacked into his accounts and gathered information such as his wife’s phone number to ensure her and their children’s safety while simultaneously contacting local authorities to alert them of the situation.

Further investigation into MrDeadMoth’s previous streams also revealed him launching into a foul tirade against his daughter asking for attention with a slew of repugnant insults — while for journalistic integrity we have linked the offending video, we really don’t advise watching this one and you should take us at our word here. MrDeadMoth has since deleted all social media and streaming accounts and is currently remanded in custody pending charges.

The gaming community has rallied around MrDeadMoth’s wife and family and urged anyone who has witnessed such behaviour on stream to come forth and be heard and has applied the same pledge to any and all viewers of any live stream. We can only hope that this awful act sparks a sense of social responsibility within gaming to further stamp out violent behaviour that plagues gaming far too often.

Conclusion Three: South Korea takes cheating very seriously …

South Korea has just made ’boosting’ punishable by a two-year suspended prison sentence and a fine up to, and including, $18,000. This has been reported as an amendment to South Korea’s Game Industry Promotion Act, which deals in game-related crime such as piracy and hacking.

For those not in the know, ‘boosting’ is where someone pays a professional gamer to log-in on their account and win matches on their behalf. This is surprisingly lucrative business it seems, and whole companies are built on this service, as a quick Google can confirm. However, it absolutely ruins games using skill-based ranking and is generally frowned upon. These games rely on a certain honesty and skill equilibrium within their player base in order to achieve an enjoyable experience — if a high ranked player is disguised as a low ranked player during matchmaking, it becomes very much like letting a tiger loose within a cage full of sheep.

Blizzard, in particular, has been extremely public about its no-tolerance policy of ‘boosters’ within its games, and issued suspensions on players within the Overwatch League after being caught ‘boosting’ in their spare time. Now that South Korea is playing hardball with people exploiting the system for money, however, it is now on game developers to report and investigate allegations seriously before reporting players to the authorities - lest a life be ruined with a simple salty click of a button from an irate player who was simply outplayed.

Speaking as a Overwatch player regularly getting stomped on in the low golds, I’m going to pretend this is going to improve my overall standing within the game.

Conclusion Four: You can break a game with a single item.

Or so Epic discovered when they released the Infinity Blade as part of the Fortnite Winter Royale update. As it turns out, the weapon utterly unbalances the game since it gives you 200 health and shield and the ability to inflict 75 damage per swing. Oh, and you get 50 health for killing players and you can jump around the map like Jessica Jones on steroids.

If you want an example of how this late-game item can completely wreck any semblance of strategy in the popular online game, take a look at this video.

Unusually for the internet, fans have universally condemned the addition in the latest patch. We suspect that, given the backlash, it may either get nerfed or removed entirely.

Conclusion Five: The new look Sonic is just... wrong

There's a Sonic the Hedgehog movie coming out in November 2019. We know this, because Paramount are doing their absolute best to make us feel queasy with their promotional material for it. First, there's this video which shows an outline of a weirdly buff Sonic:

Then, there's this poster which has been doing the rounds in various places on Twitter, and which we currently believe is real. And it is all manner of wrong.

I mean, what.... what is that? Anthropomorphism is fine and dandy if it's a cartoon. but this CGI stuff is unsettlingly weird. The fur. My god, the fur.