as someone who seems to simultaneously be sensitive to sound & hard of hearing + sharp-eyed & near-sighted, i'd like to thank you for this response.

e : visual snow is a binch, also.

call the bondulance

Kemi, you've gone on record essentially saying that the UK is colourblind. you've also said that, in your experience, racial bias always comes from the left. in light of this, what would you say are the optics of your now turning around to say this?

"it's always midnight somewhere."

just wanted to say that today's been crappy & seeing this reference made me feel a lil better.

yeah, thoughts & prayers to the cops for turning another peaceful protest violent.

maybe approach the subject again once you're done slobbering on pig pp.

we literally had a high-ranking cop running a criminal empire on the side.

well, yes, but so would science, games, movies, dancing, immigrants...

i get where you're coming from, i believe, but i don't mean the, well, "treadmill," specifically. there were players testing D4 extensively & finding out that 1) some mechanics, while baffling, appeared to be working as intended (necro minion behaviour, for one) & 2) some mechanics were not working as intended (armor chief among them, IIRC). add to this the monetisation, lack of content, dungeon / map design & a whole bunch of other things people had legitimate problems with from the get-go... well. i mean. i know kind of a silly amount of people with a long history with Blizzard / Diablo, some of whom i wouldn't feel weird calling Blizzard fanboys. not a single one picked up the game at all. like, not that my peers are the alpha & omega; i just kinda hadn't thought about this much before, but it's bizarre how many friends & relatives i was sure would eat up anything by Blizzard just straight up ignored the game. again, it's not really about the treadmill as much as like, just old-fashioned word of mouth, i think. it didn't take long at all for Blizzard to post their "so, uh, things are gonna change" damage control video, which to me says they know they messed up (for what it's worth), when everyone & their dog were reporting on the game selling a buttillion copies only a little while before.

i believe i may have been coming on a bit strong. apologies. i don't at all mean to be saying that D4 was overwhelmingly criticised by everyone, just that the reception seemed to be mixed enough where two people could have an entirely different view of it, depending on the environment. you know? there were people who were primed to hate it no matter what, absolutely, but also a veritable mountain of legitimate critique that i don't want to be dismissed, because the game was not ready for launch. the "beta testing" showed as much, but of course, it was already too late to change anything. & you know, what boils my piss is, there were folks saying, "have fun with a year's worth of beta testing you paid for." because they were right. they shouldn't have been right about this. this shouldn't be happening.

yeah, okay. all i'm saying is, parts of the internet were practically incandescent with negativity towards the game, a not insignificant amount of which had to do with the base mechanics. like, there are content creators currently reporting on how season 4 is turning things around, which wouldn't be noteworthy if the game hadn't been hemorrhaging players almost immediately after launch.

D4 released to "wide acclaim" where the critics are concerned, yes, but a sizable portion of the audience clearly didn't agree. like, the game was practically a meme until recently.

people were literally criticising the game so much on all the Diablo-related r/'s that i had to unsub from each one. like, yeah, it got good ratings, but if anything, that only served to further incense the ones displeased.

there was a lot of stupid, toxic bs, for sure, but there were also players dipping out before the first season even began -- myself included. like, this is just me, obviously, but D4 at launch was straight up the most let down i've ever been by a game.

for brevity's sake, i gotta say that season 4 made me wanna give D4 another shot. & you know, it's fun now, but there are still elements to it that make me want to scream & that's not gonna change, because it's all a part of their vision for the core experience of the game.