 this is game chat born episode 134 negativity travels game chat with Buona welcome to the show now here's your host Buona McCall with all the gaming news of this week uh by the way that's me please folks and welcome to episode 134 of game chat born we got a great show lined up for you guys some good stories about five or six stories to talk about today and uh hope you all enjoyed the last episode of tale of two rants that was a 50 minute it was like over an hour I think an hour of just me ranting about a whole bunch of stuff with anthem and some stuff with borderlands during the epic game store it was a pretty engaging episode even my wife got involved you know she was like she was listening to the podcast and she she said she was actually arguing with the podcast on some points I was like oh that must be a good podcast and a good episode of it's got you arguing with the podcast but if you guys got comments like that you can leave them in the comments below that you know I don't bite I don't bite uh but today's show is going to be pretty pretty standard we got about five or six things to talk about everything ranging from the BAFTA awards to a follow-up to Bioware story on anthem and some stuff with even online even two we're going to talk something some stuff about negativity on the internet and uh something that I saw recently that inspired me to to kind of investigate or not even investigate but to just talk more about that topic so let's get right into the show and for our first story we're going to talk about Bioware and the whole anthem fiasco that we talked about last week with the article from Kotaku this is a follow-up that was posted from Jason Schreier over on kotaku.com and I've already discussed Bioware's response to Jason's article last week if you haven't checked that out go check out episode 133 of Game Chat 1 and uh this is a follow-up and this is Bioware's head boss basically replying to what the allegations were and the allegations were that there was a lot of mental issues and a lot of depression and anxiety that caused a lot of employees to leave Bioware. Casey Hudson is the name of the boss that I'm referring to and the reason why this is so so perplexing is because the PR statement that came from Bioware generally stated that things were fine that their postmortems didn't show what the article was accusing Bioware of having in their in their environment so this is a note from from Casey Hudson this is uh an internal memo it's pretty long but uh some of the quotes that I want to he says I want to get a note out to you to share my thoughts about the Kotaku article and the online discussion it has raised the article mentions many of the problems and the development of Anthem and some of our previous projects and it draws a link between those issues and the quality of our workplace and the well-being of our staff these problems are real and it's our top priority to continue working to solve them and then he goes on about what they're going to do and you know his commitment to helping them says I'm committing to getting us to a place where we are delivering on the highest expectations for Bioware games through a work environment that's among the very best in the world with your help we will get there please let me know if we can talk in person I'll be happy to set up a time to hear your thoughts so wow um this is this is quite the turnaround from Bioware I wonder if the person who wrote that article or the response to the article is still with the company because this sounds like a direct contradiction to what they were saying uh a lot of that rebuttal that they had before was you know defending individuals because individuals were named and uh Jason Schreyer claims that he only named uh some of the high level of execs and no I guess you call them foot soldiers or normal employees were named uh there's only a couple people that were named and you know Bioware was against that they said that you know they don't want to single people out it's a team effort blah blah blah but then they go to say that um that I think in the beginning of their response that the post mortems of our project showed that none of this was a concern you know it wasn't even a big deal um so I guess that that may have brought up the problem too and it just just goes to highlight how quickly things can change uh once once the public's eye is brought to some internal issues uh because I think it may have been an environment that it was uh you know I've been into some of these environments where it's a harsh environment but it was established to bring it up so if you go to a post mortem meeting no one's going to bring it up because you may get in trouble you may get fired you may get a look you know your boss may tell you not to bring it up which is quite possible that you may go into a post mortem and you know don't bring up the stress leave don't bring up this don't bring up that just bring up issues that could have been prevented in the uh in the project no mental issues allowed that's quite possible although I won't I don't agree with it it's probably one of those things they could have done however some companies do like to separate project-based issues with HR issues because stress environment stress-based uh leave and um mental health issues can most times be taken up in HR post mortems or one-on-ones with HR uh personnel so while it's easy to for even me to do it to even compare what happened in this response with the other response it could be it could have been accurate because a lot of those things may have been covered in HR but the light of the response you know you got a minute it made it seem like it wasn't really a big deal and in actuality it probably was a big deal so we'll be uh we'll be following this one up to see if Casey Hudson's note to his employees will make a big difference um on their future projects or even on Anthem but right now the company seems to be seems to be in a in a in a back peddling state responding to all this public outcry about what happened with Anthem both from a game standpoint and both from an internal employee standpoint check it out guys over on cataqua cataqua.com Jason posts this uh follow-up article by our boss addresses studio issues vows to continue working to solve them and for our next story we're going to talk about BAFTA the BAFTA game award winners for 2019 if you don't know what this is this is the british academy game awards uh 2019 uh a bunch of different categories i'm just going to go down the list and name some of these and i'll give my thoughts artistic achievement return of the obra obraden uh audio achievement god of war best game god of war british game forza horizon four debut game yoku's island express evolving game fortnite family game nintendo labo game beyond entertainment my child leban's born game design goes to return of the obraden game innovation nintendo labo mobile game goes to florence multiplayer goes to a way out music god of war narrative god of war original property into the breach performer jeremy davis and uh e mobile game of the year voted for by the public is old school runescape now there's a bunch of uh there's a whole bunch of nominees with this like artistic achievement at detroit becoming human uh uh gris development team uh gris development teams are god of war uh marvel spider man and red dead redemption so artistic achievement had a and uh had a really big big some big names in there and the winner was return of the obraden uh audio achievement had battlefield five in there as well detroit become human marvel spider man red dead redemption and tetris effect but god of war won that best game this is like their game of the year i guess uh assassin's creed odyssey astral bot rescue mission celeste god of war red dead redemption to and return of return of the obraden and the one that went to god of war um british game was 1111 memories retold forza horizon four which was the winner red dead redemption to the room overcooked two point hospital uh and forza horizon took that debut game beat saber cultus simulator doughnut county florence gris and the winner was yoku's island express evolving game destiny to elite dangerous beyond fortnite overwatch sea of thieves tom clancy's rainbow six siege so these are like evolving games games that are constantly updated fortnite won that family game lego disney's pics are the incredibles overcooked to pokemon let's go super mario party yoku's island express and the winner was nintendo labo this is some of these i'm not going to read through all of these um but uh it was pretty heated but god of war obviously just swept the entire thing it's so many awards how many did they win let's see uh you know performer jeremy davis that counts as god of war one two three four five five awards god of war walked away with five awards and i have to really thank spider man my my thing is i thought spider man was one of the best games last year um out of everybody everywhere and uh i was really sad to see it not get a nod because i think i really think they they did a good job but that game now i was hoping that would win something um but man it was a great game to me i never played god of war though i'm not a god of war guy i do respect it i do believe all the people that that said they loved it i believe that it was genuine but for me this was all about spider man and spider man uh i guess i could speak on the evolving game because a lot of these i played did us destiny to elite dangerous beyond fortnight over what c of thieves and tom clancy's rainbow six each first off i don't know i see if these is even up here uh no first off the game i think is too new and then on top of that they really haven't done anything yet and it's been it's been very very shallow so far even the updates they've been added adding hasn't really added that much so i could agree with overwatch i can read fortnight elite dangerous the december update was really really good i guess if they're talking about that the beyond update oh they are okay they actually put beyond in there okay yeah then i can agree with that destiny to forsaken i can kind of agree with that and rainbow six siege yeah i can agree with all that but see if these i don't i don't understand that one that that seems a little bit you know we'll see um of these other ones yeah original property i guess when we talk about that dead cells florence moss return of the over then and subnautica was on here too that's cool uh into the breach won that i haven't played that yet i've been meaning to try that game into the breach uh it's kind of funny because uh david brevick because really used the same name on his game uh but he chose they chose not to because it would have been a direct conflict um of his new game that he's working on they were going to call it into the breach but they didn't but check it out guys over on BAFTA.org and they got the details of the BAFTA game awards you can check out the full list and nominees on the website what do you guys think you think god awards are the one out of those awards what game you think should be in some of these categories let me know in the show notes i mean let me know in the comments what am i talking about that and for our next door we're going to talk about octopath traveler octopath traveler is a j rpg uh on the nintendo switch which was one of the first games that i saw on nintendo switch that i said man i would actually play that game um around the release time is when i actually got the switch and played it on my uh playing on my live stream at twitch.tv slash one you can also find footage of it on my youtube channel youtube.com slash one i got a playlist of it up there uh it is a pretty pretty similar to final fantasy type games where you've got turn based combat and you've got a party of different classes that have different abilities and items that attack different monsters and random encounters and the thing that encapsulated and and just grabbed me was that it had a really really good art style now the story i'm going to talk about from gomatsu.com is that octopath traveler is has been rated for pc in korea so it may be coming to pc as a pc port and i gotta say i highly recommend this game if you haven't played it you're into old school turn based rpgs like the final fantasy series octopath traveler is a great great game even my alert sound on my live stream is from that game where where tressa goes thank you where she she does her steal ability on different mobs and she says thank you that is my alert sound on my live stream i really love this game um so yeah it'd be really really good if this came to pc i'm wondering if it's going to be published on the epic store now but the the listing says it's going to be uh it's going to be published by bandai namco which has been known to to publish uh square enix games so this seems legit so we're going to be watching this one very closely if you haven't checked out octopath traveler on the switch if you own the switch you need to see if you want to buy it need to check your funds check your wallet because it is a worthwhile game to check out over there check it out guys over on gomatsu.com they got the details about octopath traveler possibly coming to pc it's a good one it's definitely a good one and for our next story we're going to talk about eve online eve online the space game where people spend billions of dollars on ships and no i'm just joking usually when there's a headline in in the uh the news about eve online it's about oh three million dollars where the ships were destroyed in a giant battle or this player has stolen the equivalent of seven hundred thousand dollars and ships and modules and they always like to tie a real money value to assets and eve but this particular story is about a real life counterpart to a character in eve online a player by the name of brisk rubal he is an actual real life lobbyist who is now or was sitting on a council of stellar management which is like their it's like their player council which is like the player uh it's like the voice of the players to uh ccp so that you know issues and stuff that come up in the game can be can be properly communicated from players to the company and it's a election that takes place every every so often in eve online they elect players to be to seat to be seated on the counter stellar management so this guy was permanently banning eve online for corruption it's kind of funny because his role in real life almost mimics exactly what he's doing in game and he's been he's been banned from the game he hasn't nothing has happened in real life but um they have accused him this is a pretty it's a pretty high accusation they have accused him of let me get the the actual text of what they accused him of um let's see he was permanently blamed for sharing confidential information with the member of his alliance that was later used by another alliance member to conduct illicit in game transactions and this is this is the meat of it this is where the drama eve is good at drama let me tell you the miss this misconduct was brought to us by the csm themselves this is the other people that sit on the council of stellar management as an immediate threat to the integrity of the csm as an institution ccp stands on this is clear regardless of the type of information shared acts like this go against everything that the council of stellar management stands for and will not be tolerated under any circumstances now uh mister i think his real name is shuman shunaman shunaman brian shunaman he made a lengthy public statement denying any wrongdoing this is an update on the pcgamer.com article he says that ccp games is not responding to his request for information about what specifically he was banned for and asserts that he did not break any non-disclosure agreements or share confidential information here's his quote he says as a licensed attorney for nearly a decade i have never had a complaint filed against me i have served in positions of public trust in the united states government and have never had a complaint filed against me the claims that i would risk my reputation by providing proprietary or otherwise confidential information to members of my own alliance for personal gain are false there is no reason why i would jeopardize all of that by violating my word putting my reputation online and risking all of this to provide a fellow player with an unfair advantage in the game i will fight these these false allegations restore my reputation and seek all avenues for recourse available to me for these reckless actions i'll quote um this this this sounds like a scandal this is like this is like soap opera like level scandal stuff like somebody it was a one-hour man somebody set me up and i it is so it's even such a cutthroat game inside the game that it's so often and you've reached you read stories it's so often bleeds into real life like people can't separate the game from real life it's it's like that's people call eve a second job it's like you know you know spaceships is serious business there's a lot of sayings and memes about it but in all truth man people take this game way too seriously it is a video game that people spend thousands of dollars a year on number one and then number two it's just the links that people go to to ruin somebody else's reputation both in game and out of game there's been a lot of public doxing that's been happening in this game a lot of threats you know real life stuff over the past few years that ccp has been trying to to get under control but this right here i mean this could affect this guy's real life uh his real life profession if if it turns out to be you know accurate my first that my first my first impression and my first reaction to this is that this guy's been set up it's really easy to falsify information and just come up with logs and and just falsify logs and stuff and put people in certain situations or even compromise the guy's account and do stuff you know it's there's so many things that could have happened here i don't know why i'm siding with this guy i don't even know him i i don't you know there's no reason to trust him but my first good reaction is that man i don't i don't really think he did it it's just i mean his his response makes sense he's like why would i do that i i there there's no reason to do that but you know that hasn't stopped people in the past so that's that's not an excuse that can hold water in all cases you know some people do stupid stuff for stupid reasons and have no reason to do them but they do them anyway so check this story out man this guy brian or brisk rubol evil line a public servant if you will has been banned from evil line permanently and all of his assets i didn't even tell you about that uh they're going to um let's see i think they have it it says all of his stuff because he's got two other people that are going to be banned too um here it is uh effective immediately he removed that he was removed from his role and permanently banned from the game two other players named dark shines and pandora pandora lika also receive year-long bans and all the isk which is the end game currency and goods associated with the schemes which sounds a lot like evil line versions of insider trading has been confiscated so they took all of his money and ships along with this these other two guys or gals um interesting interesting you can't make this stuff up man when they talk about emergent gameplay i didn't know would really do this this is some serious emergence right here check it out guys over on pcgamer dot b pc gamer dot com they got the details a real life lobbyist was just permanently banned and evil line for corruption if i find the story we're going to do something a little bit different i'm going to talk about something that we i saw on the joe rogan podcast and it affects games it affects gamers uh this is how i came on my radar because uh it was quoted by ninja he said kevin hart was speaking to his soul and i was like oh i got to see this um essentially what happened and i said essentially and um and i'm probably going to say uh what's the point you know you know see you know you know uh kevin hart was on the joe rogan podcast and the topic of negativity came up and uh kevin hart says that negativity these days is popular and joe rogan him are going back and forth about why that is and kevin says something very very true he said being negative is cool these days it is it is the popular opinion to be negative to be the the negative opinion and we see it in games all the time if you if you follow any subreddit if you follow any game community it is very popular the the the negative viewpoint is always going to be the more popular viewpoint reasonable arguments and stuff like that you know sometimes rise to the top but the negative opinion gets the views gets the popularity you see it on youtube videos you see it on game reviews angry rants and stuff like that people who are negative get the attention because that's what people want to see and that's the words that those are the exact words he said that's what people want to see they want to see the negative nobody wants to see the positive and i've been noticing this for a long time i first noticed it and called it out i don't know if i called it out on the podcast i'm going to go hipster on you guys a little bit um i called it on the podcast when the term white night first was like introduced and i was like what in the deuce is white night and it's like this guy's white nighting he's white night no basically what it means is that this person comes into a negative discussion and defends who's ever been attacked or someone who's been attacked he's white nighting and this is how it started this is how it came out if you came into a negative situation where everybody's being negative and you come in and be positive oh this guy's white nighting it's since evolved to something different now where in white nighting is now being quated with fanboying where you blindly defend things now that that that definition of white nighting has evolved since then but when it first hit it was when you just came and said no man nobody's doing anything wrong you're just white nighting and it's just like well what about this this is the truth what am i supposed to say and people you were you were intentionally put down for being positive and people even joke about these days you're like somebody's ranting about something and complaining about something you come in with a reasonable you know like hey man that's not true this is that this is that there's no reason to be upset like why are you coming into our we're trying to have a perfectly reasonable negative discussion you're coming in with all that positivity you know people even joke like that now and it's a plague it really is a plague software developers are terrified of this plague they're terrified of this of this thing because one thing point out in the video that i'm going to link in the description that it's a timestamp link to when kevin heart starts talking about it one thing he points out is that when one person is negative somebody else jumps in and just wants to do it for no reason as well yeah man i hate that too i hate that you know they were talking he gave the example of of someone talking about liking a movie i like titanic and then you say yeah i like titan too and somebody just bops bustles in boom i hate titanic why'd you hate titanic i don't know i don't have to tell you i just hate it you know just hate hate hate hate and then somebody else comes along like i hate it too and then i hate it i hate that you know it's like all these people come in and say they hate it now it's one thing to to actually not like the movie but you know as well as i do that majority of majority of these cases people don't even they barely know what you're even talking about they just want to jump on the hate train and i even saw this on that i was reading an epic game thread and um it was about uh some guy came forth and debunked the idea that the epic game store was fireware which anybody with half a brain already knew and the one guy put in the comments he said at this point i'm just having a good time hating epic i was just like well there you go and i i i really believe he was being honest he's just like i just i'm just having i just like hating epic how can you like hating something unless you just have evil in your heart i don't i don't understand that and the internet and this is where the discussion on kevin hart and on the joe rogan show kind of kind of alluded to it's like the internet and anonymity people are just purposefully being negative and hateful and not even trying to be positive that's their first reaction is to be negative and it's become a complaint echo chamber if you go to twitter if you go to instagram if you go to a forum uh subreddit social media in general has become uh come uh complaining and hatred echo chamber uh and it's really bad now i mean you can really really see it in some cases where people don't need there's no rational thought it's just constant screaming and and and grinding of teeth i was just yeah i hate this i hate this too you know they're just going back and forth and they just they're feeding off of each other's negative energy and it just it just grows and grows and grows so you can't have a really rational thought like i was saying earlier developers they're they're terrified of this because these negative waves and these negative uh these negative movements essentially can be a pr nightmare from nothing let's take the epic game store as an example i'm not going to rant about it but the fact that people are calling it spyware is so laughable because of a seemingly bad i think it's bad programmatic practice how they did the steam import friends list it's bad it was a bad programmatic practice it was it was a hack pretty much which oh my gosh in my years and my my 10 to 20 years of software development i've seen these types of hacks all over the place all these little shortcuts and tricks that that developers do it's not spyware though and they just think it's kept throwing that spyware term out there to scare people it was fear mongering and yet and still people are still propagated and it was like the guy came forth and did a detailed explanation and a detailed analysis which everybody knew was the case because the guy who brought up the original point had no clue he even admitted he had no clue what he was talking about he just had screenshots of various things that made no sense and then it just started this hate wagon and this hate train and i say it all the time there's perfectly reasons to not there's perfectly good reasons to disagree with companies and disagree with how they do stuff but don't spread and propagate misinformation and lies based off of fear that's where i have to draw the line i can have a i can have a reasonable discussion about that stuff all day long with people but soon as that stuff starts happening that's that's where logic and reason go out the window and that's people's ammunition these days is negativity negativity breeds a lot of defensive reactions and then you get you get caught up in fear and then you get caught in the motion and the next thing you know you are getting mad on the internet at four o'clock in the morning won't go to bed because you're trying to prove somebody is wrong over a video game it's a big problem negativity in video games is a big problem and there is a such thing as providing constructive criticism without being negative and people a lot of kids don't understand that they're like oh you just want me to bend over and you know you just want me to take you know everything you just want me to just just bow down to these people and just say hey you know you you you you just do whatever you want might know you could have you can have constructive feedback and you can even actually be a little bit upset about something without being negative it is it's called it's just called manners and intact something you kind of have to learn these days but I think a lot of this social media generation they just they don't know what how to do that and it's a it's a crucial skill you got to learn how to express yourself without being mad because when you're angry nobody wants to listen to an angry angry person let alone an angry gamer this is why gamers have a reputation now especially with people outside of outside of the the entertainment industry or outside of just the whole gaming market they just think game gamers are complaining whining babies that stereotype has been formed rightfully so because a lot of the the the minority out there the vocal minority that's exactly what they're doing it's exactly what they're doing it's just a lot of crying and negativity and no constructive you know no constructive conversations that are rising to the top the negativity rises to the top and I know there's people out there that are passionate about gaming like myself you probably listen to this going born I don't do that you know I have conversations I write lengthy posts I give developers feedback but like Kevin Hart just said people want to see the negative they want to they want to they thrive on the negative they want to be negative and they want to join along with the negative and that herein is the biggest problem that we're seeing in gaming today nothing is done because people are just negative it's a very very good podcast on a lot of different topics if you haven't watched this Joe Rogan podcast it's a heavy big language warning I have a family friendly podcast so if you're going to go over there listen to this be prepared to have your ears melted by a lot of the curse words and a lot of language on the Joe it's a very raw podcast but it is it's got some topics that I think a lot of people should listen to and it was really good really really good not just on negativity but just on social media in general there's a lot of good discussions in that podcast and they're all so true so true so check it out guys Kevin Hart on negativity and it applies to the gaming community of why we like to be negative so much and like to propagate negativity I think it's something that needs to stop and I hope we can all come together and realize that we need to stop doing that and that concludes episode 134 of game chat when I I want to thank you all for listening to this show please follow follow my stream at twitch.tv slash one I stream almost every day over there play video games we hang out we've been playing a game called marbles on stream lately where we just we play this this chat-based marbles game and you just race we race each other you don't have to you don't have to control yourself it's pretty fun and chill and it's oddly addicting we've been playing a lot of that we've been playing Borderlands and Division 2 and Warframe just to name a few play those types of games over there so come check us out also on youtube youtube.com slash borna where I post this and I post tech talk with borna also post videos from tech technology and game topics updates reviews you can see it all over there also I have merchandise go to spread shirt I'm sorry but shop.spreadshirt.com slash borna tv we're still on spread shirt for now but we may be moving if we can't get our international stuff worked out so right now we're on spread shirt that's where the merchandise is and instagram.com instagram.com slash borna twitter.com slash borna all my social media stuff is there as well next week is going to be a little bit up in the air sunday through wednesday i will have off so i will not be recording tech talk with borna and game chat with borna next week that's my plan i'm not going to be recording those i'm going to take some well-deserved time off like two and a half three years of just no time off i'm taking some time off finally and i'm going to take a few days because it's going to take three or four days and just just decompress no podcast no nothing so um the next show will be two weeks from now so i hope you can come back and listen then that concludes the show episode 134 of game chat one i hope you all have a great day i'll see you all next time and bye bye