This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.

Sure, team vs team games create the immediate game design consequence that if your teammates are terrible they can ruin your experience even if you are playing extremely well.

As a result good game design should limit the capacity of a single player to ruin the rest of their team’s experience. Obviously, this is a balance to find, limit this too much and the player no longer feels like they can impact the game for better or for worse. It goes beyond a balance though into the basic incentives and framing of the gameplay.

Take for example match length time, one of the ways a game can handle a player getting dealt a shitty hand with teammates is to have the match length be short enough that a player can just shrug their shoulders and discard the next 10 minutes or so from their competitive goals and just play the match out until it ends and they get matched with better teammates. Rocket League is a perfect example of this. Imagine if Rocket League had League Of Legends length matches. Imagine how much more toxic rocket league players would be to each other if getting matched with a shitty teammate meant having to play 40 minutes of frustrating, unfun gameplay with no coordination between teammates.

Another way team based competitive games can mitigate teammates being frustrating and not coordinating is by building the gameplay around it being easy and natural to coordinate with teammates. Take for example Apex Legends with it’s brilliant pinging system along with automated call outs, it makes coordination natural for players who might otherwise just fuck off and not coordinate (not that this doesn’t still happen). The equivalent system in a LOL type game would a simple way to non-verbally telegraph the rhythm of your next attacks to your teammates so that they could easily chain their moves with yours. Make it so the game is always displaying to your teammates what you are planning to do next so that it is maximally easy for your teammates to coordinate even if they don’t give a shit.

I have other examples but I think RTS games also struggle often with these things, in team games that go on for 20+ mins the losing team almost always starts to get angry and frustrated at each other even though… losing is literally 50% of the experience in playing a competitive RTS. That is bad game design in my opinion, losing isn’t going to be as fun as winning but there are ways to make players less likely to get genuinely upset with each other when they are losing. Take for example Titanfall 2’s end of the match blitz where the losing team has to try to get to escape drop ships, it gives individual players on the losing team something to fixate on pro-actively doing that can benefit them meaningfully instead of just letting the losing team check out from the gameplay and start blaming each other.

What I really don’t respect about the design of League Of Legends is it is one of those types of games that really puts teammates at odds with each other and it creates a lot of toxic conflict because of it. It is just bad design, people joke about the toxicity of games like LOL but it isn’t a joke.

Shopkeeper, increasingly exasperated: I’m trying to tell you that I’m evil and offering these wares with no regard for the harm they will do!

Me: You realize we are in the middle of a literal apocalypse and I am one of the only people who can stop it and save countless lives and you are still trying to nickel and dime me for a soda and some run of the mill agility potions? Like you have to understand that if I die and fail than you are also dead as well and if you have the magic ability to zoom ahead of me to deeper floors of this dungeons to repeatedly set up your shop without experiencing any harm from the creatures I am having to slaughter one by one by one… what the hell are you doing trying to make a quick buck selling crap to me?

Obviously your worldview is so warped that you don’t see the most evil thing you are doing is attempting to make a quick buck off of selling the hero tools that are essential to them saving the world, but honestly as exasperated as I am about this I work in the pharmaceutical industry and WOW by comparison selling me a pair of boots that is going to curse my strength is just amateur evil shit. Try getting a massive chunk of society addicted to opioids you wannabe evil schmuck and then get back to me about being evil.

Shopkeeper, taken aback and kind of concerned: ….are you ok? Damn what reality do you come from? This place is a literal hell dungeon full of creatures that want to dissect you slowly before feeding on your corpse but wow sounds like you have seen some shit

This is just textbook fascism.

It frustrates me that fascists like this can claim “this is the way of nature, the strong survive and the weak perish in competition” and no one challenges them. We are so primed to see everything through a fascist lens by neoliberalism because neoliberalism doesn’t provide any path forward but a broken, insufficient narrative.

Nature is full of cooperation, the interplay between fungi and trees for one is a dizzying network of relationships. In most ecosystems flourishing is a mutual process not a zero sum game, diversity begets stability, capacity to adapt and efficiency.

The ideology of fascists like Netanyahu will never lead a society to strength, because the point of adopting such a cruel and hateful ideology is a violent disinterest in understanding others, which is the precise opposite of an expression of strength.

The ultimate strength is realizing what others are capable of that you could never accomplish yourself and developing a mutual relationship to gain access to those things, the type of “warriors” Netanyahu are talking about here are just sad, isolated people with very little power to do anything meaningful in this world but needlessly kill and maim, they are incapable of even beginning to understand the rich, dizzying tapestry of different kinds of genius that a functional society requires to thrive and grow. They are incapable of doing actual work to retain status in their community so they clumsily fumble at violence and fear to try to fill that void of uselessness.

Seriously, Instagram and Facebook would also need to to delete the CIA’s account for this to make any sense (hating how extremist Iran is without acknowledging it was an explicit consequence of the CIA forcing regime change is just naive jingoism) but this is just about pissing on Iran to curry favor with other people.

I wonder if you took the comments of Iran’s evil leader and mixed them up with statements from conservative US politicians, removed obvious references to Christianity, Islam, and countries and then sat people down and tried to get them to guess who said what it would be pretty damn hard.

fuck harry potter, read terry pratchett