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[MOD POST] "Recent" Events, Reddit, and the Future
ALL RISE FOR YOUR DICTATOR-FOR-LIFE Greetings, my vastly subordinate G.R.O.S.S. members. You may remain standing. I've wanted to put out a post for awhile now covering the "recent" (tenuous definition at this point) drama on the sub, the current state of Reddit, and the future of r/okbuddyrosalyn. I kept putting it off; there was always more to add, edits to make, and second-guessing if any statement should be made at all. As a result, this will be a long read. I'll be covering all three topics and each one would be justified in having its own separate post. I think you'll see that they're all relatively interconnected and touching on only one without simultaneously addressing the others would be a disservice to each. 1. "RECENT" DRAMA Namely, the removal of one of our moderators. I'll do my best to answer some questions and add some context to everything that happened: Q: What happened? Last month, a post was removed citing our prohibition on sexual content featuring the underage characters. Subsequent posts questioning the removal where then also removed by the same moderator, before being restored by other members of the mod team. Once a response was received from all parties involved, the decision was made to remove them from the mod team the very next day. Q: Why were they removed as a moderator? Myself, the other mods, and the community at large were dissatisfied by their response to said post's controversial removal. My opinion on the matter is that the the original post's removal was secondary on the scale of deciding factors for removing them as moderator when compared to their decision to remove follow-up posts that were critical of the decision. Censoring discussion that is critical of moderator decisions, provided it doesn't cross the line into breaking rules itself, is an abuse of moderator authority and something that's been used countless times on other subs to enforce a moderator's biased/prejudicial/personal dogma. Q: Why did it take so long to remove them as a mod? It didn't: removing a long-standing moderator is not something that should be done faster than it was. I don't receive up-to-the-minute notifications from this sub or any other and I don't expect live-service moderation from any of my fellow mods. r/okbuddyrosalyn gets about six posts on a good day. When we discovered there was a potential issue, we started a conversation about it between the mod team members. That process involved waiting for responses from mods that are not continuously online, some of which live in different time zones. Mistakes do happen and it would be unfair to remove any moderator with a long record of mainly making uncontested moderation decisions without giving them a fair chance to explain what happened. We typically don't spend very long evaluating posts and our best judgement at the time isn't always the correct one. That's where hearing one another's responses and communicating back and forth about it afterwards comes in, and that takes time. Something that did not get announced publicly was that the moderator in question's moderation privileges were indefinitely disabled during our discussion until a resolution was reached. This wasn't shared because it was an on-the-fly decision and would have probably been seen by all of you, not unfairly, as an attempt to avoid an actual solution and let things die out rather than as part of a continuing process. Our mod team has decided this will be standard procedure for future inter-mod and community incidents. It's possible to check what permissions each moderator currently has on the mod list; u/Blockhog and I are the only mods that have permission to add or remove other mods below us in the list, as an example. Q: Okay...why are you bringing all of this up now? Well, there are a few reasons... 2. REDDIT & ITS CURRENT STATE In the time I've had an active account on Reddit, I've watched this platform continuously go downhill. It's gone through a villain's arc of enshittification from the "cool, not entirely brain-dead alternative to Facebook and Twitter" to "dystopian, data-farming propaganda outlet". It won't be groundbreaking news to any of you that have lingered around this site for awhile that things haven't been moving in a good direction. Artificial Intelligence: This is the big one that I felt had to be addressed. The number of bots in the last four years has exploded and our ability to identify them has all but dissipated. Numerous, obvious bot accounts were active on this sub during the aforementioned moderator drama and were continuously weighing in on the issue with opinionated comments relevant to the discussion. Some were caught by the automod, some almost certainly weren't. It was mortifying to see AI used to drive and manipulate discussion about a moderation issue in a small, niche Calvin and Hobbes shitposting sub, likely without any input from the creators of said bots. The amount of bot posts made on the main C&H sub both before and after it was shut down would probably stun most of you. It's an endless stream of by-the-hour robot posts doing everything from shilling Temu products and attempting to generate account karma all the way up to intentionally posting content that violates site-wide rules or copyright in the attempt to get the sub taken down alongside attempts to intentionally drive and manipulate discussion. My goal when signing up to Reddit close to a decade ago was to join communities like this one, not to facilitate the creation of data profiles of myself to train LLMs so that my opinions could in turn be influenced by server farms. There was a time when Reddit's maintenance was funded in part by the purchase of gold awards and most accounts here were obviously real people and that time has well and truly passed. It should go without saying that freely giving your data away to a company under the now-flimsy pretext of interacting with real humans online is a pretty poor decision. Censorship: Removing posts and comments that are critical of moderator decisions, provided they don't break any rules themselves is, in my opinion, a morally offensive decision for a moderator to make. It's also something that happens regularly in just about every other subreddit, whether they focus on shitposting or international news. It's far worse when it occurs on a subreddit that purports to represent the views of an entire real-life community versus when it happens on a sub with an abstract, lighthearted theme like this one. The subjectivity and pervasiveness of censorship I've seen enforced by moderators (and admins, occasionally) on many of these "official" subs would border on criminality in a real-life setting. This is all to say "you can't trust what you read on the internet" and that discussions on this site are not necessarily representative of reality, but also that the transparency and fairness of arbitration on Reddit is markedly poor. Visibility and Accountability: Subreddit members do not have public access to mod logs or ban lists, so it very difficult for any of you to see or prove a recurring pattern of bad moderation. If the other mods and myself had chosen to remove every critical post during this recent drama and continuously ban members that posted or commented about it, it's very likely that your ability to organize and demand changes would have been reasonably impacted. Regular members are also unable to see every correct decision that gets made by mods. If we visibly mess up, everyone sees it; do the job right, you'll likely never know we did anything. This is not a request for recognition or a justification for wrong decisions, just an acknowledgement that a regular sub member doesn't necessarily get to see the full picture. Public access to mod logs might sound like an easy solution, but it would also infringe on our ability to moderate out content that genuinely shouldn't be viewed by anyone and has also been made more difficult to do with the changes to Reddit's API. Administration: Reddit and its admins have more frequently chosen to make heavy-handed decisions with little to no justification or recourse. The subreddit blackout was followed by entire mod teams getting removed and replaced. One of our own active mods, u/HeIsNotGhandi (who I've recently discovered is now a moderator of the Lemmy community), was permanently banned by an automatic system for a post they made. The same goes for u/imGhostKitty, who made the ubiquitous "Menus and Parkour" version of u/Super-Contribution's turntable meme. Both of those bans were followed by every single post and comment they ever made being automatically removed (I was able to restore most of the ones on this sub). These decisions have become much more common and oppressive since Reddit's IPO. If a post gets individually removed by Reddit, we mods can't even view it for ourselves in most cases: there's no means to evaluate or appeal if the decision was fair. I've found my username and flair are very fitting in regards to my position as a head mod, since the successful function and moderation of this sub relies on me being a benevolent dictator. Short of intervention by the admins, myself and every other head mod on this platform have free reign to run these subs like our own little kingdoms. We can ban people at will, we can remove posts without any reason, we can remove any other mod, and we can independently silence just about any discussion on those matters that we don't like. All subreddits would be better named "[Head Mod's] Personal Domain of [Subreddit Name]". How awful... Not entirely. Every system is only as good as the people in charge. The best and worst thing about Reddit is that one person can start and run a sub. I don't think r/okbuddyrosalyn would be greatly improved with a system of unrestricted direct democracy, especially on a site with anonymity, alt accounts, and bot accounts. Ultimately, your continued presence here represents your support or discontent with our moderation and I don't have the means to change that even if I wanted to. After two months straight of very public moderator meltdowns across multiple subs, however, I don't think it needs to be said that this system is far from ideal. 3. THE FUTURE To draw together everything covered here: the continued use of Reddit as a social media platform, both by all of you and myself, is something that should be approached with caution. What might look like repeated community-level issues are also stemming from foundational (and occasionally intentional) flaws. I don't particularly like coming to this website anymore except to occasionally check in on this sub and make sure things are still functioning somewhat normally and that reason has been eroding over time. It feels somewhat unethical to be fostering any sort of social community on a forum I no longer consider adequate for that purpose. Would you nuke the sub and resign as head mod if you decide to leave? No. It shouldn't be my decision whether or not any of you stay here. I'm not important enough to unilaterally delete years of other people's creations and interactions. I'm certainly not willingly giving the best user flair on the sub or the privileges that allow me to keep it. With Reddit's new system of registering moderators as "inactive" after a period without taking moderation actions, the decision will be taken out of my hands at some point anyway if I stop actively moderating. I still come here regularly, so until that ends, things will keep going. What does the future look like? I can't say for certain how much of a better option it is, but we do have a parallel community on Lemmy that you're all welcome to look into. Heaven knows Discord isn't a safe option for your online activity anymore, but there is an unofficial discord server for the this sub that I'll be adding to the megathread soon. Speaking of, there was a time when we all migrated off of Skype to Discord: never say never when it comes to moving on to something new and better. There are structural limitations around making a subreddit more democratic and transparent (mod elections? in my dictator-for-life sub?!?), but I'd like to tentatively explore several different options in the future. Participating in r/okbuddyrosalyn has been the highlight of my time on Reddit and I'd like to see this community continue on in one shape or another, whether that be on or off Reddit and with or without me at the helm. Regards, Your Dictator-For-Life, u/The_PhilosopherKing P.S. Q: Several of us don't like the "Politics" flair. https://preview.redd.it/2w918de9k8qg1.png?width=743&format=png&auto=webp&s=117a55e6e55bceb1a3abba45b33b3438d0fd270d https://preview.redd.it/pii8pfe9k8qg1.png?width=668&format=png&auto=webp&s=9670ada3d1c0c7bcea3f39ed1446369c8d67aa01 Please refer to the comments above for why we've decided on keeping the Politics flair. It's been said before, but I'll say it again: the flair is not about a topic being inherently political, but about the likelihood that the comments will generate political discussion. A post could be about jogging; if there was a news incident that day that made discussing jogging likely to lead to political discussion, it should be marked as Political. submitted by /u/The_PhilosopherKing to r/okbuddyrosalyn [link] [comments]
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reddit.com |
The_PhilosopherKing |
Mar 20, 2026 |
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Updates from SaintMeghanMarkle mods and consultation about our future at Reddit - IMPORTANT
Date: 22nd July 2025 Many have raised questions around the quality of posts and low effort titles (which means that it will not show up in the search engines later), posts with tenuous links to the Harkles (yes the mods are guilty of doing this too). Then there are good faith comparisons between Meghan and Princess Charlotte wearing Givenchy, which some were uncomfortable with but that was debatable as it wasnt about the child but about the clothes. Going forward, mods will be moderating more strictly, including timeline cleanses (there should be no timeline cleanses posts). I cannot guarantee that we will get this right all the time but we will apply this as uniformly as possible. Some guidance for future posting: (i) Catherine wears X, Meghan wears similar - is relevant. (ii) Catherine / William is wonderful - is out, as no connection to Meghan / Harry. (ii) Catherine is wonderful; Meghan smashing plates - there’s a tenuous connection and its out especially if the main context is Royal. I would also like to take the time to remind users that there is a whole BRF sub run by the same mods and is a good antidote to SMM. Mentions of H&M in the comments is allowed too Now to more important things From 25th of July, Reddit will be required to verify the age of the users in the UK. This could be via a selfie or government ID. Edit: snappopcrackle says that this update applies to those accessing Reddit mature / NSFW content and that it likely doesn't apply to SMM. Likely fear mongering from TRG. Fair point. I read the BBC article (but not the by line), which was in line with what TRG said. See the pinned comment are Reddit restrictions could likely still apply. https://preview.redd.it/jpyvcbk0leef1.jpg?width=719&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bc11d5ef3d93a1817a3d4429646ce59e9ca9df73 Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4ep1znk4zo Archive link: https://archive.ph/B0toO I do not see many UK Sinners will be happy to stick around for this. I do not know what that means for the sub as most of the mods are British. Do you guys have any ideas? VPN? TRG has done a video https://youtu.be/JlDLwPOhOMM (Of course it is highly political. But the take is an important one) DeepSouthSinner has paraphrased the youtube video: Since 2023, the UK Parliament was quietly pushing through the Online Safety Act, as the Harkles were providing comedic relief, and TRG was floating around upon the old Information Highway with neon flashing warnings signs. ‘Twasn't just another piece of legislation, she claimed. ‘Twas the evil groundwork for yet another surveillance state, much like the former U.S.S.R. and others but cloaked in false compassion, and it impacts dear Reddit users near and far, including members of this subreddit. The mistress marrying king signed the nasty bill into law October 2023, and ‘twas his first major bill as monarch. That, alone, SHOULD have immediately garnered attention. Meanwhile, as-ever-not-so-bright Harry, the king's self-declared drug-addled son over here in America, Land of the Free, was doing his very best from within to completely destroy our invaluable First Amendment, while the UK and EU externally placed continual pressure for its collapse. I have a BIG problem with such, and I want the balding red head and his alleged children to be deported, the sooner the better, being how I personally view him as an enemy of the state. Within her video, TRG proceeds to recap how we arrived at this point, backtracking to December 2022 and beginning with when the Twitter files expanded into public consciousness: (there is quite a bit of meat in there, specifically pertaining to this subreddit). Reddit, one of the last bastions for anonymous expression, appears to have now officially succumbed to enemies of our First Amendment. “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” – Benjamin Franklin, 1755. Reddit users located within the UK are now being forced to verify their age, under the totally bogus pretense of child protection, via the Uk’s new censorship law veiled as, “The Online Safety Act”. This latest step compels websites like Reddit to install digital ID checks, in the name of child safety, at the potential expense of user privacy and the risk of stifling free speech, via removing anonymity. OfCom (UK Regulator, headquartered in London) dictates that sites hosting certain material must implement what it calls, “robust age assurances” (definitive matching of government issued identification with biometric data, for example), or incur heavy financial penalties. We expect other companies to follow suit or face enforcement, if they fail to act, implied the regulator. TRG states that Reddit claims it will log a user's verification status and date of birth, so as to allow easier access in the future, but that it won’t retain full ID documents nor images. “Persona, according to Reddit, promises not to retain the picture for longer than 7 days and will supposedly not touch any browsing data on the site. Despite these assurances, the fact remains the State now requires people to hand over personal identification, simply in order to access legal, online discussions. “ Full enforcement of the Online Safety Act begins July 25th. Ofcom is already posturing, bullying all via stating that non-compliance could result in fines of up to 24 million, or 10% of global revenue, whichever is greater. Moreover, the bully regulator over in CommieLondonville has been granted authority to entirely disrupt business operations, via pressuring advertisers and payment providers to cut ties with platforms deemed non-compliant, and/or potentially forcing ISPs to block sites. “The act is expected to be fully implemented in 2026.” (Source: The House of Commons Library). TRG claims that it isn’t Reddit's idea; it’s merely forced via Ofcom to adapt. She’s logically skeptical over the stated guardrails, and with valid reasoning. She asks whether anyone is gullible enough to believe that Reddit will only be verifying your age? She claims they will be logging your IP address (May be news to TRG that Reddit already does so…). She states that they'll be correlating usernames to government documented identities and retaining receipts on you. Why? Because they have no choice, she claims (I beg to differ). Offcom, the UK's new digital enforcer, has immense authority, just like Glavlit (Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs) did within the former U.S.S.R. “It can force platforms to scan your private messages, to deanonymize users, and to report what you say, even in encrypted apps”. She aptly puts it, “That's not regulation, guys. That's literally a hostage situation.” I concur. TRG continued, “To some, this news may still seem very foreign, but let's bring this down to earth and consider the St. Meghan Markle subreddit. Many of you know it's a community of Redditors, aka sinners, who …” and she goes on in great detail regarding the Harkles and this subreddit. It’s all worthy of listening to, in my humble opinion. While I have watched many of her videos and rather impressed at times, I have never chatted with TRG, but she claims to be a free speech absolutist, while I am a privacy advocate whom defends the U.S. Constitution, thereby in support of her stance here. She closes all with the following: “Again, let me repeat, in the UK, the citizens are now being required to upload their personal ID, whether it be license or passports, to read subreddits. How do you feel about that? Encrypted apps also are being forced to install scanning tools. Now your posts can get you doxed, fired, and dragged into court because someone in power found them harmful. And when we're talking about encrypted apps, we're looking at apps like WhatsApp. So, if you have liked a group where one person is from the UK, guess what? …” _____________________________________________________________________ What I can say as a reddit mod for this sub, I cannot see your private details, including your emails. Some of you share your names in modmail, this is not disclosed or discussed with fellow mods or sinners. This even applies to problematic accounts. I hope if goes without saying that if the decision came to disclose your private information, we wouldn't do it. I would rather nuke the sub. But we don't have access to such intel in the first place. PS, we are on twitter https://x.com/smm_mod I want to take this time to thank every Sinner that has shared something on here. You have literally taught me some awesome things and opened my mind to some crazy things, such is life. Meghan and Harry truly united all sides. That's something to be proud of Thoughts comments, feedback 👇 As ever & lot of love ❤️ Negative_Difference4 submitted by /u/Negative_Difference4 to r/SaintMeghanMarkle [link] [comments]
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reddit.com |
Negative_Difference4 |
Jul 22, 2025 |
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[Video Games and modding] Elden Ring’s Seamless Co-op mod – “It’s as if thousands of invaders suddenly cried out in terror and were very suddenly silenced.”
Elden Ring is a 2022 action role-playing game by FromSoftware, famous for their “Soulsborne” series of games that began with Demon’s Souls and continued through the Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne (hence the portmanteau), and Sekiro. Outside of a loose lore connection between the Dark Souls games, the games are all standalone experiences and, while Easter eggs are common, you really don’t need to have played any to play any other. Among the shared elements, there are probably three that highlight the range of Easter eggs. One is the “common element”, for instance, many of the games feature a “crestfallen” character right near the start of the game, who will give the player an item and express their own state of despair. Another is the reference character – many of the games feature a character named Patches, whose presence does not seem to indicate any shared continuity, but he simply shows up in a lot of games with a similar appearance and mannerisms. And lastly, the reference item – the most famous being the Moonlight Greatsword, which appears in every game, even as far back as King’s Field, the Demon’s Souls predecessor. I will assume a base level of knowledge about video games – leveling up, etc. – but there are a few specifics to the Soulsborne game that are story relevant. The grind is real. Soulsbornes use a type of currency that varies in name, but since Demon’s Souls popularized the term “souls”, many players keep the language through later games, even if the terminology changes. (Elden Ring uses “runes” in place of souls.) Souls are your currency for literally everything. To level up, you rest at a bonfire and spend the required amount of souls to move up to the next level in whatever attribute you choose. Want the sword being sold by a merchant? Souls. Want to upgrade it later? Souls. (And some materials too… which you can buy with souls.) Where do souls come from? You can find them around the world in chests and such, but mainly kills. The smaller and weaker foes naturally give few, bosses give the most, with maybe 120 from a basic undead soldier and as many as 10,000 from a boss. And as you level up, it progressively costs more to level each time, so each advancement means a higher cost to continue improving. I believe each game has been beaten as “soul level one”, i.e. a player can complete the game without leveling up their character at all. (Gear does not count.) The misnomer that you have to “get good” at Dark Souls is just a community meme; you can actually beat the game without getting good, you just have to get strong by climbing progressively higher steps to compensate for lack of ability with increased character attributes. There’s one area of the game where you can venture out, kill four unique enemies, then return to the bonfire, and each trip nets you about 10,000 souls – early on, enough for four or five levels. There are several quirks that complicate souls. One is that if you die, you leave all the souls you’ve collected at the place you died. In the case of a boss arena, yeah, that means you have to go back in there to get them, and you won’t usually be able to leave unless you’ve killed the boss. Secondly, when you die, you return to the last bonfire you rested at. This further complicates things as it also repopulates the area with any enemies that had died (which occurs any time you rest at the bonfire, hence why the above souls farming circuit is possible). To get your souls back, you may be risking an encounter with whatever killed you in the first place. Running is a viable strategy, but you are balancing the heightened risk of being killed on the way with the greater reward of avoiding fights. And lastly, if you die before you retrieve your souls, they are lost forever. This makes the time after defeating a boss, when your cup overfloweth with souls, potentially the riskiest, as you have to get somewhere safe to spend those souls. Though there’s variation in the games, this is the core premise of the currency system, and it’s true to Elden Ring. Help a brother out. An unusual aspect of Soulsborne titles, that would gradually be sanded down over time, was the lack of clarity about many things, but particularly multiplayer. Rather than being a menu item you select, multiplayer is actioned through the game world itself. The clearest example of what it’s like is in Dark Souls, so I’ll use that again to demonstrate. At a certain point in Dark Souls, a character will give you an item called the White Sign Soapstone. With this, you can enable yourself to be summoned by another player into their world (in the lore, it’s treated as kind of parallel universes, sort of) by using the soapstone to write a little sign on the ground. If another player finds your sign, they can click it to summon you, and you’ll appear as a white phantom – you can die, of course, so not a real apparition – to help them clear an area up until and including a boss. There are some quirks to this system: There are servers but you’ll be on a server without knowing which, and you’ll gradually cycle over time. What this means is, if you want to play with a friend, good luck – you need to put your sign down somewhere obscure so other players won’t summon you, and then you’ll need to wait until your friend cycles to the same server as you and your sign appears for them. Even if your friend does summon you, there is no in-game chat. A common solution was to use a phone or a messenger app to open a separate voice channel, but the game itself lacked one. Players could gesture in the game from a selection of motions, such as pointing, and could throw little blocks that would say a word, like “Thank you!” The developers were so strict about this, you could not use Xbox Live’s chat function at all. If you tried to use private chat, it would kick you back to the main menu – even if the person you were speaking to wasn’t even playing Dark Souls! Health was not shared, but only when the host consumed one of the limited health items could the phantom be healed. This was quickly lost in sequels, however, allowing both to heal independently. (There were other ways for the phantom to heal, such as spells, but the core healing dynamic was a flask that refilled at bonfires, and it was deactivated in multiplayer for the phantom.) The player and phantom could not leave a prescribed zone within which they were summoned until the boss was defeated. Once the boss was defeated, the player could not summon anyone in that zone. The player could, however, be summoned themselves as many times as necessary by as many different people as wanted them. As soon as the boss was dead, the phantom would return to their world. To give you a scenario to demonstrate this, I was playing with a friend back in the day. We were on Xbox, so we called each other on the phone and set it for speaker. I would place my sign around a corner where there was no reason for other players to wander, in a location called the Undead Parish. My friend would go there and wait until the sign appeared, sometimes use a bonfire (rest location) which would reset the area, repopulating any dead non-boss enemies, and potentially moving him to the same server as me. When my sign finally appeared, I was summoned, but I could not leave the Undead Parish, nor could he. If we were successful, we would have fought our way through the building to the boss battle on the roof, vanquished them, and then I would immediately disappear and return to my own world with the rewards of the battle. If we chose to play through the game together, I would then have to summon him so that the boss that was still on that roof in my world could be fought. Then we would together move on to the next area, lay our summon signs, and continue. This obtuse system, which has had variations over the course of the series, was a deliberate design decision. Basically everything from point 1 to point 5 was intended to steer people away from just playing the game with their friends, and towards working with complete strangers with whom communication was limited. The series lead designer Hidetaka Miyazaki told this anecdote about why he wanted the game to play like this: "The origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on a hillside after some heavy snow and started to slip. The car following me also got stuck, and then the one behind it spontaneously bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill... That's it! That's how everyone can get home! Then it was my turn and everyone started pushing my car up the hill, and I managed to get home safely." "But I couldn't stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove. I'd have just got stuck again if I'd stopped. On the way back home I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home, and thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we'd met in another place we'd become friends, or maybe we'd just fight..." "You could probably call it a connection of mutual assistance between transient people. Oddly, that incident will probably linger in my heart for a long time. Simply because it's fleeting, I think it stays with you a lot longer... like the cherry blossoms we Japanese love so much." To push this “mutual assistance between transient people”, disconnecting the phantom and making the whole process difficult for people who are seeking each other out gave it an impermanence. Someone chooses to be helpful (though they are also rewarded) and stays in an area, constantly putting their sign down to be summoned. And some, merely needing the help like Miyazaki did to get up that hill, accept the assistance and then move on to the next area of the world. As the series progressed, however, some of this complexity was worn down, due in no small part to the success of the games coming into conflicted with a more general audience. Of the original five points, many were amended: You could set a shared password with friends, which would enable you to more easily summon each other – at the expense of summoning randoms who did not assign the same password. Voice chat became widespread and accepted. Health consumables were brought in by the phantom to use for themselves. The player and phantom were still restricted to the same prescribed zone within which they were summoned until the boss was defeated. Once the boss was defeated, the phantom was still booted. Each time some element changed to be a little less hardcore or obtuse, a small vocal part of the community would make noise. And each time, it got a little bit louder. The “other” guys. There’s a whole lot more to Soulsborne multiplayer, with different covenants (ideologies with followers that are rewarded for doing things in support of that belief system) and other things, but the main crux of this story is the counterpart to co-operative summoning, which is invasions. To be able to summon another player in Dark Souls, you must be “human”. Another penalty to death besides the potential loss of souls was to revert to a state of being undead – physically disfigured, but other than a small hit to your maximum health, not so bad. But if you wished to summon, you needed to spend a finite item called a “humanity” to restore your maximum health to full, reset your appearance, and enable the summoning signs to appear. But this left you vulnerable to invasion. An invader is another player who uses an item to seek out players in other worlds who are in the human state and in the same general area of the game world. When invaded, a player is limited to the area they are in (much like with summoning) and are given notification of the invasion. The invader will appear as a red phantom, distinct from the white phantoms of co-op, and their goal will be to kill the player. If the player has summoned a white phantom, they can help – and the penalty for dying as a white phantom is nil, so they will do their best Kevin Costner impression as they try to save the host. To counterbalance that, the regular enemies in the world will not attack the invader (unless a finite item is expended), so the host and white phantom must contend with the usual dangers of the world while still fighting this invader. The invader, if successful, is given a proportion of the host’s soul pool. The host also loses their human state, as usual for dying, and sent back to the bonfire. Had the host been trying to retrieve lost souls, well, that’s still a death and it still counts. They now must also retrieve the souls from their invasion death, and a particularly vile invader can make sure the duel is in a difficult spot so that the return trip is extra perilous. In Elden Ring, there’s an encounter timer, designed to at least minimize grief – however, the timer starts at the beginning of an invasion, not the end, so a prolonged fight with an invader might not leave you much free time afterwards to continue playing the rest of the game before another invader pops in to say hi. In areas that favoured the invader (due to their positioning or threats to the host), or just locations that invader community liked to congregate, you could find yourself at the receiving almost as soon as the timer runs out. Now, the particulars vary from game to game, and the details change. For example, there is an element of mutual combat, where you can summon an invader specifically to fight each other. There’s also a group you can join whose job is to be summoned to help a host ward off an invader. The series has evolved over time but the main reason I’m leaning so heavily on Dark Souls as the example is twofold: It’s when the series got really, really big in the mainstream. It’s when a lot of people learned to hate invaders. So when we come to Elden Ring, many of the same multiplayer elements remain in a familiar form. You can summon help, but doing so invites the risk of invasion (the human/undead state is gone; you only invite invasion when you summon for co-op). You can engage in a mutual fight. You can have summons specifically to help fend off invaders. There’s even an item that allows you to provoke an invasion, which limits your co-op summons to one but allows for a second invader, turning the normal 2v1 or 3v1 into possibly a 2v2 fight. And the downsides remain too. You still lose your souls upon death (runes). Your progress is set back, and with Elden Ring’s ridiculously enormous world, that can actually be a big time investment to get back to where you were. Your summon buddy is kicked out too. So if you wanted to play this game with your friend, the game’s mechanics are gearing you towards disliking invaders. They’re wasting your time. They’re interfering. They can be annoying. And while there are restrictions on the invader’s level relative to your own, the earlier point about people beating these games without leveling up should indicate that it’s possible to become very powerful from gear alone – especially if an invader creates a build aimed at killing other players, not bosses. So someone decided to get rid of them. The Elden Ring Seamless Co-op mod was released only a few months after the game’s release and has been steadily improving for a while, though I believe it may be on hiatus for now. It was received with two wildly different responses: “Oh, this is pretty cool” and “You are literally killing this game.” You can probably sort the two camps yourselves, but if not, it was invaders who were the latter. So what does the mod do? Among many wonderful features (my bias is clear), it smoothed out some of the rougher edges of co-op to almost create a whole other game within Elden Ring. For one, at the most basic level, summoned players are not phantom, but appear as they would in their own world. This removes that weird effect of one host having ghost buds, and instead gives it more of a Fellowship vibe, with adventurers adventuring. There’s a horse you can summon in single player to more quickly traverse the wide world, with the added dimension of fighting from horseback. Where it was once limited to solo, not only could you mount up in this mod, but your friends could too. Four knights charging a castle became a memorable event that never got boring. Some would even suggest the lack of mounts for co-op was a design issue the developer couldn’t tackle, because the world was very clearly designed with riding as a primary means of travel. (Yes, you will cross that land to the structure at the other end. To fast travel, you now all vote on where to go on the map. Previously, you’d be traveling alone to the next spot, and you would all re-summon together when you got there. Why would you need to fast travel? Oh, that’s right, because it no longer kicked out friendly phantoms. When you clear an area and when you defeat a boss, everyone stays in the game together. You then just keep moving through the story as a group rather than having to reset each time. Picked up a good sword somewhere? Point it out to a friend and they can pick it up too. The mod fixed so many complaints people had with the co-op of Elden Ring, features that were there for design reasons or as artifacts of the earlier games, but which could now be removed or fixed. And where previously a host could summon two others, and risk an invader, now the host could summon three others to play through the game together. With the barriers between areas removed and bosses no longer a bootable moment, you could get from the tutorial to the final boss without ever having to separate. And the downside, the crux of this drama, is that it prevented invasions. The PVP community was furious. In their words, this mod was killing the game. And there’s a twisted sense to the logic. If 50% of people moved to the mod, the pool for people they can invade is halved. Considering that invaders already needed to stay within a certain level range to target people, it was unlikely to be an even distribution and some players reported having simply nobody to invade. (That 50% of people who moved over might have been overwhelmingly people from a higher or lower pool, draining that pool of targets.) With more than 1.3m unique downloads on Nexus Mods, a lot of people were speaking. And while they weren’t necessarily saying “We don’t like invasions”, they were certainly saying “We’re prepared to sacrifice invasions for this mod.” Some liked that it made the game feel more of an epic adventure with friends, that it was easier to stay in each other’s game and not have to re-summon all the time. (Even on death, you now all just go to the bonfire together.) Discussions of the mod on Steam discussions or Reddit (the latter usually being amongst the bottom of the page, downvoted) typically devolved into three groups: Those who appreciated the mod for all that it did to improve co-op, those who hated the mod for “ruining” invasions, and those who really liked to rile up that second group. “Nah, invasions suck, couldn’t clear one fucking area for days because me and my buddy kept getting invaded and we were both using fresh accounts. Impossible to survive.” “Invasions on PC really just got murdered. Was fun while it lasted, boys.” “These people are just entitled children, they hate the invasion mechanic because dying to a real player instead of a mob must just be too big a hit to their ego.” “I’m not playing the game for YOUR enjoyment, mate.” “This creator of stuff like this and drones who blindly push it are genuinely selfish for doing so. I really hope this gets counted as cheating on your account and you lose access to Elden Ring multiplayer. You killed off an entire segment of the player base due to your selfishness.” “The people using this mod weren’t part of your invasion pool, bud… they played offline to avoid you in previous games. They didn’t play with friends so they didn’t have to deal with you… now there is a mod that allows them to play co-op instead of just solo. If invasions are dying, it’s because they’re trash.” To some extent, the conversation started to veer away from personal preference (co-op or invasion, solo or online) and more… slightly philosophical about the nature of intention in design. Miyazaki evidently wanted people in the earlier games to have a certain experience, and he crafted the game to facilitate that. However, is that the pure Dark Souls experience? Not really. In fact, some were saying early on that co-op was a crutch for weaker players to be able to get through the game, and that invasions were meant to add a risk-reward factor to using it. However, dying would revert you to a human state, and Elden Ring won’t allow invasions if you don’t summon, so there’s also a mechanic to curb the invaders. And at a time where games were starting to venture into always-online modes, none of these games required you to be online or vulnerable to invasion. (A cheeky way to get out of invasions early on, and still today, is simply disconnecting from the internet with a cable yank. You’d probably cop a nasty message from the invader, but the game would save immediately and boot you to the menu, so you could just come straight back in.) The fact that you could play any of these games offline would suggest that the multiplayer portion, and invasions, couldn’t really be considered to be an essential aspect of the design – unlike an MMO where online is essential. It's impossible to quantify the impact of the mod, beyond the general number of 1.3m downloads. Some invader-friendly subs report some activity in certain level ranges, but dead zones in others. Some say they’re still going fine and others suggest that they haven’t been able to invade at all. Many were crying out for the publisher to issue a cease-and-desist to the mod (don’t know if I’ve ever heard of that for a free mod before), or to issue bans to punish those who used it (which is a very “burn it all down” attitude, since banned players would not be able to rejoin the pool of victims anyway). In short, the attitude was that the publisher had to defend the PVP player base, and were failing to do so. Talking points raised against the mod: It’s removing an intentional aspect of the game. The designers put it in there, and the mod entirely disregards the “risk” side of the risk-reward equation. People who use the mod are wrong about what Elden Ring is, and they’re trying to change it into something it isn’t. People who bought it as part of a long lineage of games with invasions expected this feature, and now it was being circumvented en masse by a mod. If people don’t like being invaded, they have to accept it as part of the online part, or just go offline. People who use the mod are actively impacting invaders by depriving them of the entire multiplayer side that they like. Invaders are not depriving those players of anything, as invasions are temporary, but the mod’s impact is permanent. PVP keeps these games alive with an active player base for longer. By turning on the PVP side of players, this mod is hurting the game itself. And on the less savoury side, hosts who were switching to the mod (pro-invasion communities only ever refer to them as hosts, it seems) were all just butthurt cowards, weak babies who had to hide because dying in a video game hurt their feelings. (Not being able to invade in a video game also hurting other people’s feelings, but alas.) Mod defenders were at times just as vitriolic, as shown before, but many also tried to rationalize their enjoyment of the mod: People who want to do PVP can return to the unmodded game and do so. This only prevents people from being invaded, and by nature of picking the mod, would indicate the people leaving did not like being invaded. Modding to change a game’s nature is literally the point of modding, and it’s a strange moral crusade to suddenly care about the integrity of the original product when so many great mods deliberately set about changing the nature of a game (such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and PUBG), and those are all celebrated. The series was on a trajectory to be more multiplayer friendly anyway. The addition of voice chat and passwords to streamline co-op was also going against the heritage of the early games, so this was just the logical next evolution. The removal of the human state meant that invasions were already on the downslide. Previously, there were benefits to being in human state (you could improve bonfires, among other things) that meant a solo player in human state in the online mode was fair game. Now, you were only open to invasion if you summoned. That alone greatly diminishes the pool of players available. You can’t call it an integral part of the game when it was so easily avoided, particularly in Elden Ring. If invasions were integral to the experience, they would always be on; they are only an aspect of the risk-reward multiplayer and this mod is essentially no different from a difficulty mod. People who choose to use the mod to play in co-op with friends are no more “entitled” to that experience than people who want to invade others are “entitled” to having victims to invade. While those who use the mod are no longer fair game for invaders, frankly, that isn’t their issue and nobody should dictate how they play the game. Duelling remains in the game. That invasions are the main form of PVP content would indicate that there’s a certain unwillingness by one party to engage in PVP, and the invaders, with some self-reflection, must surely recognize that they’re doing something that host players aren’t really keen for. (Some of the most braindead takes steered the topic towards issues of consent. Yikes.) Finally, if people are so put-out by the invasions, their choices are playing alone or not playing at all. The latter are removing themselves from the game entirely, which doesn’t help invaders. The former may want to play with other people, which this mod will facilitate. But if they had chosen to play alone, they too would be out of the host pool for invaders. The mod is only adding a third choice to that list of how to avoid invasions, and it would seem that anyone doing this specifically to avoid invasions… really doesn’t want that feature. The strangest invaders are trying to have their cake and eat it. “Don’t like getting invaded? Don’t summon.” In a weird pretzelly way, they are lamenting that the mod will deprive them of people to invade, but also, actively discouraging people who would want to use the mod (preventing invasions) from summoning anyway, as a solution to invasions. Which… I mean, if your propose solution to invasions is a way to circumvent them from being a target, then this mod is just another way to circumvent them from being a target, right? As a fun thought experiment, try and figure out whether this guy’s comment is pro-mod or anti-mod: “Stop trying to dictate how people play a game they paid for.” I’ve found two people with similarly worded comments, and they were arguing completely opposite positions. The above quote, however, was some who was anti-mod; they were replying to someone who proposed using duelling more often to play PVP if invasions were becoming rare due to the mod. In one Steam discussion that reached several hundred pages long before being locked, at 15 comments per page, the opening salvo referred to the mod as “illegal” and “destroying the PVP community”, that people who used the mod were cowards. By page 200, some people are saying it’s unethical, others throwing accusations of paranoia or projecting. It seems that one anti-mod player had even endeared himself to the pro-mod crowd, with one user commenting: “Only one person still parrots the “It’s against the TOS” crap (Terms Of Service – i.e. the guy was saying it’s illegal). We all know who he is and we all love him, it’s not his fault that he is the way he is.” Another chimes in: “That one person has more time logged in this thread than in the game itself.” The guy shows up a few comments later, responding to someone else… and linking to Elden Ring’s TOS. “Because everyone is presenting those opinions like colossal jackasses.” “Including yourself?” “Pot, meet Kettle.” I’ll turn to page 206 of the same discussion as two pro-mod players put to bed one of the main arguments for the mod: “Also, since I know you'll hate numbers... Dark Souls 3 lost 42% of its playerbase, in just under 30 days. It lost 98% in 57 days. See, there's this myth, that PvP keeps the games alive. It never has, it never will. Most of the players are PvE for a reason.” “Agreed. A great deal of those players return, and new players buy the game once DLC is released, all of which is primarily PvE-oriented. It's a single player game with MP features, of which the focus is on team work, as opposed to strictly PvP. Miyazaki's story of being caught in the snow or whatever didn't involve someone randomly showing up to slash his tires. It was about strangers coming out of nowhere to aid him, and then disappearing into the night.” At the end of the day, both sides – or at least those who engage – are slinging the same accusation at each other: You’re ruining the experience. Unfortunately for those who think the experience is ruined by having fewer invasions, their enjoyment relies on all those other players being accessible to them. And for those who like the mod, their enjoyment relies on all the invaders not being around. That’s a one-sided equation. One last ditch plea was made by Scott Jund on Youtube. “When you look at the lesser of two evils, we either have co-op players that are annoyed that every 15 minutes or whatever they’re getting invaded by people. Or the other side is, ‘Fuck you, you don’t get to play the game, go away.’ And when you put it in a black-and-white way like that, it’s kind of obvious which one is the lesser of two evils.” Now, of course, you can still play Elden Ring as an invader. You might have fewer invasions available. You might not even have any. But you can, of course, still play the game. You might not get to play it how you like, but the people who left to the mod also didn’t get to play they liked. And that might be as close to a common ground as you can find. A Valve member locked the Steam discussion after 290 pages as it had “devolved into non-productive argument.” submitted by /u/RemnantEvil to r/HobbyDrama [link] [comments]
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reddit.com |
RemnantEvil |
Jan 31, 2024 |
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Mods of r/Blind reveal that removing 3rd party apps will effectively remove the blind from reddit. and advocates for a reddit wide protest blackout in response on June 12th
Post on /r/Blind Unfortunately, new Reddit, and the official Reddit apps, just don't provide us with the levels of accessibility we need in order to continue effectively running this community. As well, the Transcribers of Reddit, the many dedicated folks who volunteer to transcribe and describe thousands and thousands of images on Reddit, may also be unable to operate. One of our moderators, u/itsthejoker, has had multiple hour-long calls with various Reddit employees. However, as of the current time, our concerns have gone unheard, and Reddit remains firm. That's why the moderation team of r/blind now feels that we have no choice but to take further action. The protest: In solidarity with thousands of other subreddits who are impacted by this change, we will be shutting down the /r/blind subreddit for 48 hours from June 12th to June 14th. You will not be able to read or make posts during that time. r/ModCoord also has a post talking about this issue and advocating for a protest: In the rush to draft a response to reddit's decision to kill Third Party Apps, our team made an omission in calculating the impact this move by reddit will have on its users. For the visually impaired, iOS is a disaster. Here is how this was explained to me: On Android, the official Reddit mobile app is reasonably usable with the Android screen reader, but the experience on iOS is a completely different story. There are missing elements, broken navigation, nonsensical labels, and more problems that plague those who just want to interact with the site. If you decide to become a moderator the problems are compounded even more. Third party apps, like Dystopia for Reddit and Apollo, have addressed this niche left so underserved for so many years because Reddit won't. It took literal years of tickets and complaints to get New Reddit to be accessible, and now the door has been shut in our collective faces. As things currently stand, this change doesn't just take away our clients; it takes away our voice. It takes away our voice. And what is reddit's official response to this madness? (Make no mistake, this move by reddit is madness.) Figure it out yourself. Here is where we stand on June 3rd: Reddit has nothing but contempt for its users, mods, and developers. A r/blind moderator responded As one of the mods of r/blind I depend on third party apps. Once the apps are gone, I may be left with no choice but to step down and close my 17 year old account. I hope it wont’ come to that. There was also cross post on r/modsupport. So in response to these concerns and others, r/Save3rdPartyApps has been formed and is also supporting the protest. Edit 1: The list of subreddits officially participating. Subreddits include: /r/videos, /r/blind, /r/wow, /r/truegaming, /r/MurderedByWords, /r/im14andthisisdeep, /r/nasa, /r/agedlikemilk, /r/AbruptChaos, /r/ukraineMT, /r/freesoftware, /r/dndmemes and too many to list. Also the post is only three hours old, so I imagine there's many more to come. Edit 2: Other major subreddits to join since are r/iPhone (3.8 million users) and r/iOS (267K), /r/blursedimages (3.6M), r/Gamedev (1.1M), r/Samsung (287K), r/ShitpostCrusaders (1.1M) and a lot of NSFW subreddits. Edit 3: Its now clear that many of these subreddits will continue being private beyond the 14th June if Reddit does not change their mind. New subreddits that have joined include: r/aww, r/EarthPorn, r/LifeProTips (all over 20 million subs); r/creepy, r/Futurology (over 10 million subs); and over 50 subs with over a million subscribers including r/cats, r/Disney, r/hobbydrama, r/jobs, r/catswithjobs,, r/CleverComebacks, r/drawing, r/Frugal, r/illegallysmolcats, r/skyrim, r/somethingimade, r/suspiciouslyspecific, r/tihi, r/trees, r/childfree, r/niceguys, as well as many smaller subs. Edit 4: If you wish to join the boycott, comment here. Here's a list of geographic subreddits that have now joined: r/Slovakia, /r/Slovenia, /r/newzealand, r/NewOrleans, /r/Quebec, a bunch of of subreddits from Connecticut, US (r/WaterburyCT, r/EasternCT, r/newlondon, r/oldsaybrook, r/CheshireCT, r/WindsorCT), /r/Seattle, r/baltimore, r/Finland, r/thessaloniki/ and r/Wallonia. submitted by /u/And_be_one_traveler to r/SubredditDrama [link] [comments]
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reddit.com |
And_be_one_traveler |
Jun 4, 2023 |
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Reddit user /u/sadfutago posts video of them entering previously undiscovered NieR:Automata area
A month ago, reddit user /u/sadfutago posted on /r/NieRAutomataGame/, asking how to access the church. The community reaction was slight confusion because there is no known area that matched the description: A hidden door in the copied city at the back of the Adam fight. OP claimed that the door was accessible to them, but not to a friend (presumably on another console). After some prompting, OP posted another thread with these two images, indeed showing what looks like a church-like interior in the copied city. This room was definitely not known. They then posted a video of entering that door but with little other information, other than that it was supposedly recorded on a PS4. They didn't elaborate much at all. Community questions on the exact conditions of opening the door and what else is behind it remained unanswered. Today, they post a video of going through the door and moving a bit further - climbing down a ladder and entering a twisted hallway. Again, neither are areas that are known to exist in the game. And again, there are no real/helpful answers from OP. Notably, the original "church" area is not part of either video. The community currently has no idea whether this is real and if so, how to unlock the area. It's certainly not easily accessible on recent game versions and as of posting this, nobody has come out and managed to do so on a 1.0 PS4 version either. Additional info: Both video threads contain a lot of mentions of OP playing on version 1.0, though I can't find them actually claiming that themselves. OP comes across as either quite young or unfamiliar with reddit/social media, certainly unprepared for the amount of community interest in the matter. The wire frame "cheat" that the game offers doesn't show anything behind the wall in question on the latest game version. But even if that's also the case for 1.0, it could be that the area only loads in when a certain condition is met. If this is modded, then OP has access to modding knowledge/tools beyond anyone else in the community since nobody (else) knows how to edit map files. This would a) in itself be bigger news and a more prestiguous claim to fame and b) playing the long con given how the first posts on it are over a month old. People are speculating that this content was removed in a later patch for whatever reason which would explain why it wasn't found before. Though this raises further questions. Another option is a developer prank or guerilla marketing ploy. The Switch version of the game will release soon-ish. In the past, Yoko Taro had said that all of the game's secrets had been found. But then again, it's Yoko Taro. Whatever this turns out to be, it's pretty on brand for Nier at this point. Edit 1: 22-07-26, 7:40 UTC: This 3-year-old reddit thread turned up which contains a link to this imgur album presumably showing an early version of the Copied City whose model was left in the game files. There are plenty of minor differences, but most notably a large church-like structure behind the elusive hidden door. That structure (and the other minor differences) is not visible in the current game version nor the footage with the hidden door. But it also being a church in that exact spot is absolutely noteworthy. This church model has been reused from Bayonetta 2, another Platinum game, as this reddit thread points out. Edit 2: 22-07-26, 10:55 UTC: OP just returned with a longer video of them entering the door, going down the ladder, through the twisted hallway and all the way into the church. Once the door opens, a short cutscene plays (using dialogue from when A2 discovers a recovery unit) and showing a white, child-like figure lying on the altar with a Lunar Tear sprouting from it. Additionally, there's a glitched figure (made from black boxes, like the things in 9S' later sequences) in the church. These two seem like references to Yonah and the Shadowlord of the previous game, NieR Replicant/Gestalt. You can also make out two staves which look identical to the ones wielded by Devola and Popola at the end of NieR Replicant/Gestalt. There is also a locked chest in there but as OP isn't on 9S, they can't open it. Edit 3: 22-07-26, 20:13 UTC: Yoko Taro tweeted in response to questions regarding this find, but only pointed at his twitter profile which states that he does not answer questions about his products. It has also been pointed out numerous times that OP's username "sadfutago" may give away that this isn't just some kid. "futago" means "twins" in Japanese and NieR definitely has characters for whom that description would fit. However, they have indicated that they picked this name because of a clan with the same name in Naruto. Edit 4: 22-07-27 12:50 UTC: A (now deleted) mod titled "Church" turned up on NexusMods, uploaded by a user named sadfutago. It only contained a text file with some cryptic numbers in the title and the binary encoded song lyrics from a Drakengard song. Here's a reddit thread with more info and screenshots. Note that there is no confirmed link to the reddit user of the same name. There's nothing here that a random person trying to cash in on the hype couldn't have done with what's already available. Edit 5: 22-07-28 05:07 UTC: OP uploaded another video to reddit, returning to the church as 9S. It shows the bird fountain from NierR Replicant/Gestalt's ending in a corner which we previously didn't see. It can be interacted with but only has "..." dialogue. More importantly, 9S can open the chest which contains a lore text regarding Yonah which was already elsewhere in the game. After that, the black block creature becomes attackable/hostile. It appears to be the same fight as in 9S' memory deletion sequence in Automata's route C. The video shows him losing the fight as the enemy deals a lot of damage. sadfutago made other threads stating that they failed to beat the enemy multiple times, but just now made another claiming they did beat it and are uploading the video now. Edit 6: 22-07-28 05:39 UTC: OP posted another video, successfully beating the fight. The black figure collapses with no further interaction possible. OP is now able to interact with the bird fountain, though the text is in Japanese (the rest of their game is English). Like the original, it asks a question and giving the (supposedly) wrong answer sends you back to the start (of the twisted hallway). OP returns to the same dialgue prompt, but only ever chooses the first (wrong) answer, meaning they're sent back again and again. It appears the Japanese question and possible answers are the same as in the Nier Replicant/Gestalt. Edit 7: 22-07-29 04:07 UTC: /u/sadfutago has posted five screenshots (as separate threads) on /r/nier, titled "z", "e", "3", "4", and "zinnia" featureing a wholly new area with no further comments. The screenshots show several artistic angles of huge female statue-like figures upside down with one arm extended downards, at least one towards for a lunar tear on the ground. The two statues we see with some detail to them seem to be the characters Zero and Two from Drakengard 3, the other Yoko Taro game series which has some connection to NieR. The naming of the threads also points towards that game as it also prominently features the characters One, Three, Four, and Five. The base of the statues, where the legs should be, appear to be gigantic flower petals, another callback to the Drakengard series but something that also featured in the added ending in NieR Replicant's remake. "Zinnia", finally, is the name of the creator of the first YoRHa androids in the Nier world, including prototypes for Number 2 and Number 9. He is never even mentioned in the game, only in supplementary material so we don't know what he looks like. The image titled such, however, has strong similarities with Drakengard 3's Two. With this, it's quite clear that sadfutago is not just some kid. Edit 8: 22-07-29 04:35 UTC: Over on /r/nier, in a new thread, a user points toward the very ending of the Drakengard 3 Prelude Book which features the founding of a church and a hidden door which leads to a room "that no one was supposed to know about". Screenshots of the relevant book pages inside. Edit 9: 22-07-29 05:33 UTC: /u/sadfutago updated their reddit user profile with the text "www.twitch.tv/ze34_zinnia >三時間", the Japanese portion translating to "3 hours". The corresponding Twitch account was created today with the channel description "finale". They also just made a reddit thread with the same title. edit9.1 Minor change in the reddit profile (~20 minutes later): It now reads "www.twitch.tv/ze34_zinnia >三時間 ARGじゃない Officialじゃない". The characters "ゃない" mean a negation, so not and ARG and not Official. edit9.2 And another change in the profile, down to "> 2 hours". edit9.3 We're at ">20 minutes?" now. Edit 10: 22-07-29 07:43 UTC: Stream at https://www.twitch.tv/ze34_zinnia is live. Here is a youtube VOD of the whole thing if you just want to watch it for yourself. Stream contents: Brief piano music followed by 9S entering the secret door again, moving to the church, heacking the chest, and fighting the enemy. This is a more competent player than what we've seen and at level 99. They choose the "correct" options at the (still Japanese) bird fountain. After the last question, the screen fades to black and we enter the area with the upside-down statues. 9S moves towards the Lunar Tear and the screen fades to black again. We return to the location of the Adam boss fight, with three giant variants of the basic machine enemies which 9S dispatches. The screen fades to a text slide, confirming that this was the work of a modding team: DevolasRevenge, WoefulWolf, and RaiderB. They also announce that the modding tools used to create this will be made public, as will the mod we've been seeing this whole time. We then get a few discord conversations of them discussing putting this together as well as a meme compilation from stuff the community has created in the last few days as well as a short behind-the-scenes look. It appears this (the mod and the mystery) has been in the works for around half a year. And with that, the stream ends. Edit 11: Here is the church mod to play through yourself And here are links to the modding tools: https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/NierAutoRebuild https://github.com/WoefulWolf/NieR2Blender2NieR https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/MrubyDecompiler Thank you everyone, it's been a ride and a half. I hate that this needs to be said, but it does: Please don't be an ass. Don't harass the folks involved. This stunt had tons of people on edge, greatly enjoying the mystery. That alone made it worthwhile. Even if this isn't the outcome you wanted, the modding possibilities that this will enable are undoubtably a great thing. submitted by /u/Angzt to r/Games [link] [comments]
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reddit.com |
Angzt |
Jul 25, 2022 |
United States
