I didn't write this, u/Rumbleskim on Reddit did. Their account was suspended so I can't link their profile. Original post here.

[Digital Piracy] The rise of EMPRESS - How one woman turned the pirate underworld on its head, waged a solo war against the entire game industry (and won), went mad with power, started a messianic cult based on high school-level philosophy, and faked her own arrest to spite her rivals and haters

An Introduction to Piracy

Most of us have torrented something at some point, whether it’s a game, movie, book, song or TV show, but just for those who haven’t, I’ll explain the basics.

When you go to a site like The Pirate Bay or Kick Ass Torrents, and click ‘Download Torrent’, all you’re really getting is a link. Programmes like Bittorrent or Vuze are able to open those links, and will let you download almost any file, legal or not. But you’re not downloading it from a server somewhere, a website, or a single person, you’re downloading it from dozens, sometimes thousands of people at the same time, all around the world. Those are known as ‘seeders’. And while you do that, other people are downloading the file from you. They’re ‘leechers’. The original distributor of the file created that torrent, and submitted it to torrenting websites so that other people could find it, but once they’ve shared the full file once, they can break off their connection to the torrent.

This is known as ‘Peer to Peer’ file sharing, and it’s the primary means of distributing media illegally, because it’s basically impossible to stop. If a website is hosting episodes of Game of Thrones, you can shut the website down. If a person is sending out files, you can sue them. But no company or corporation, however powerful, can stop a torrent (though many have tried).

Sharing a movie or a song is easy – you just distribute the file. It will work no matter who downloads it. But games are different. Since a game is made up of loads of files working in tandem and tangled up in a confusing spider-web of code, the developer is able to ‘booby trap’ the game so that it doesn’t work when it’s copied.

For as long as developers have been doing this, savvy hackers and programmers have been working to undo it. When they do, the developers go back to the drawing board and come up with something smarter.

Cassettes were easily duplicated, so the industry invented consoles with more secure cartridges and built-in ROMs that could detect fakes. Pirates reverse-engineered the consoles to make their own duplicate consoles which could run both legitimate and fake copies. So the industry moved to CDs, because they had more storage space and could be fitted with new security features. Pirates cracked the CDs. Developers started requiring a game key, so pirates created key-generators to fool them. The developers came back with copy-detection software, so the pirates cracked the software. The companies started using DRM that forced players to remain connected and logged into the company’s servers at all times. Pirates cracked that too.

This game of cat-and-mouse has been going on for decades, steadily growing more complex and inscrutable. The stakes are high. By some estimates, piracy costs tens of billions a year. By other estimates, it costs almost nothing. To the game industry, every pirated game is a lost sale.

But who are these pirates, anyway?

The Warez Scene

Pirates tend to work in tightly-knit ‘Warez’ groups, and these groups are bound together in a secretive, world-wide, decentralised network called ‘The Scene’. While the Scene has no leader, it has come to adhere to strict rules and regulations. If a release breaks these rules, other groups will ‘nuke’ it – flagging it as bad content. From the outside, they may seem like the Robin Hoods of the industry, stealing video games from the rich and distributing them to the poor, but don’t let that fool you. Warez groups are motivated by competition, not generosity. They all want to be the best. The first group to release a cracked game wins – any cracks to release after that are considered worthless (and are subsequently nuked). There’s no prize, of course. But in the Scene, prestige is its own reward.

In one of their info files (often the only way a group communicates with pirates), the group SKIDROW said the following:

Keep in mind we do all this, because we can and because we like the thrilling excitement of winning over the other competing groups. We absolutely don't do all these releases, to please the general user that rather want to spend their cash on updating to the latest hardware, and sees the scene releases as a source to play all these games for free. Enjoy playing and remember if you like it, support the developer!

The group MYTH said the same thing:

We do this just for FUN. We are against any profit or commercialisation of piracy. We do not spread any release, others do that. In fact, we BUY all our own games with our own hard earned and worked for efforts. Which is from our own real life non-scene jobs. As we love game originals. Nothing beats a quality original. "If you like this game, BUY it. We did!"

The Scene comprises thousands of active groups, most flickering in and out of existence within the space of a few months. Some came and dominated for a while, but couldn’t adapt to the challenges companies placed before them, and inevitably faded into obscurity. Every era of piracy had its big names. PARADOX, RELOADED, SKIRDOW and RAZOR1911 are all good examples. The competition was fierce, so no single group held on to the spotlight for long.

But everything changed when the industry pulled out its trump card.

Denuvo Anti-Tamper

Denuvo is a piece of anti-tamper software, developed in Austria and first released in September 2014. At first, pirates saw it as yet another obstacle which would be overcome and set aside. But it gradually became clear that Denuvo was going to be more of a challenge.

I’m not remotely intelligent enough to go into exactly what Denuvo does in detail, though these people are. It’s difficult to understand because it was designed to be. But the simple version is that it scrambles the code inside the .exe (the file that boots the game) and decrypts it on the fly, using information from Denuvo’s servers, and from your computer. The first time you run the game, it will tailor itself to the nooks and crannies of hardware, which acts kind of like a fingerprint. This way, it can detect if it’s been copied to a different device, or if the .exe has been tampered with.

It’s hard to overstate how big a difference Denuvo made. At a time when games were being cracked less than a day after hitting shelves, this software could keep them out of pirates’ hands for literally years. Many people on the Scene thought Denuvo was truly impenetrable. That reputation got around, and soon almost every game came with it baked in.

There are claims that Denuvo has all sorts of negative effects on games, from slowing load times to taking a toll on hardware. It’s also possible that due to the way Denuvo works, once the company stops supporting older games, or new hardware becomes too different to old hardware, gamers may be totally unable to play. There’s a lot of debate about whether these effects are real but it's hard to know who to trust, because everyone has a narrative to push. Pirates go to great lengths to discredit Denuvo, and corporations work hard to defend it.

“The Denuvo anti-tamper technology is ultimately to protect the gaming industry and ensure game studios have an ability to continue to invest and build new games,” said a representative in a statement. “On PC, a large proportion of games (especially the AAA games) tend to be protected for a period of time to protect the monetization of the games being launched—say six months or 12 months for example.”

It took three months for the first breakthrough. 3DM, a warez group from China, successfully breached Denuvo on 1st December 2014. Thirty days after it came out, 3DM released Dragon Age Inquisition onto the Scene. But major video games made most of their sales within the first month, so that was still a victory for the developers.

Games came out in drips and drabs for a while. In all of 2015, only six games were cracked. 3DM gradually fell behind their biggest competitor, CPY. When CPYp cracked Metal Gear Solid V only nine days after it hit shelves, there were optimistic whispers that perhaps Denuvo could be defeated after all. But that was a folly.

In January 2016, Rise of the Tomb Raider came out, and with it was a new and improved version of Denuvo. Whatever had changed, it was enough to terrify 3DM. Within days of its release, they admitted defeat.

“The last stage is too difficult and Jun nearly gave up, but last Wednesday I encouraged him to continue,” the founder, known by her internet handle “Phoenix”, said.

“I still believe that this game can be compromised. But according to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years’ time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world,”

3DM all but disappeared from the Scene after that. CPY was the only group left with any prospects of taking down Denuvo. They toiled quietly in the background for days. The days became weeks. Weeks became months. And the video game piracy community fell into a long, deep hibernation, fuelled only by memes and indie games.

And then one morning, it awoke. Tomb Raider had been cracked. It had taken 193 days, but CPY had done it.

The day CPY gave us Hope again ...

After that, the games began to release more regularly – around a week or two apart. Since CPY was the only group capable of breaking Denuvo, they owned the Scene in a way no other group ever really had. From August 2016 through to May the next year, almost nothing got cracked without their input. It still took at least a month to crack a single game, but the number of days gradually got smaller and smaller. When Resident Evil Biohazard got cracked within five days, the call once again went out that Denuvo had truly been defeated, for sure this time.

And the scene and outsiders of the scene have completely dismantled and destroyed them. Far cry from the fear everyone originally had. Every new protection is scary at first but when it comes down to it...if there are people smart enough to create it...there are people smart enough to reverse engineer it! Cheers to all the groups and individuals who crushed them and will continue to do so as it evolves.

Over time, CPY started collaborating more with other groups, who themselves picked up the tricks for circumventing Denuvo. BALDMAN and STEAMPUNKS began to dominate between June and October 17. Between them, there were pirated games coming out almost every day. CODEX was there too, first working on collabs, and then on their own. From 2018 to 2020, they made up most of the releases, and CPY made up the rest.

And there was also a woman called EMPRESS.

Long Live the Queen

The rise of EMPRESS didn’t come as a shock; it was a gradual takeover. She first appeared under the name C000005, and had a history working with the popular cracker CODEX. Her first Denuvo cracks under the name EMPRESS came in mid-2017 as part of larger collaborations. One of these, ‘Total War Warhammer 2’, involved no less than six scene groups, plus EMPRESS on top.

She worked her way up from three collabs in 2017, to five in 2018, and a few the next year too, and it wasn’t until her solo debut with the cracked version of ‘Planet Zoo’ that she really made waves.

Between October 2020 and July 2021, EMPRESS would reign supreme. Of the fifteen major cracks during that period, she was behind eight.

But it wasn’t just her skill that drew attention. It was the fact that she bucked every trend in the Scene. She wasn’t part of some secretive group, she was one woman out to declare war against an industry worth tens of billions, and she won, with nothing more than her own intelligence. The normal Scene motivations of glory and prestige meant nothing to her (so she claimed), it was all about saving games. She made the cardinal sin of commenting on the CrackWatch subreddit, and did it freely. She posted polls asking what games the community wanted next, called out her competitors, interacted with fans, and shared her (often enigmatic) philosophical views. And unlike the other groups, she accepted donations.

In short, she was everything the Scene hated. But they couldn’t touch her – none of them could. She was one of the only people in the world capable of breaching Denuvo, so no-one could justify any measures against her. And even if the Scene tried to ‘nuke’ her releases, people would download them anyway – such was her fan following.

Groups targeted whichever games they pleased, insulating themselves from outside input, to say nothing of requests. And a lot of the time, they didn’t update their releases to account for bug fixes or software changes, fating their achievements to obsolescence. Empress doesn’t think they loved video games. They loved themselves, and winning. “Everything they did was just a way to ‘prove’ themselves and boost their fake meaningless Egos,’” says Empress.

EMPRESS became the closest thing the piracy community had to a celebrity. People loved her.

In a February interview with Wired, EMPRESS said she had been called to the purpose through dreams. A copy of Dark Souls 2 floated before her, wrapped up in chains made of numbers, and as she focused, she began to see what every number meant ‘universally’. Looking deeper still, she entered ‘The Zone’, which allowed her to ‘SEE MORE into everything’, and shatter the chains. When asked about her process, EMPRESS said, “By mixing philosophy with coding. It’s very complicated. I have a ‘Goal’ that no one else has. I have no need for Ego.” This is the kind of larger-than-life persona she adopted.

Of course, there were those who simply couldn’t believe Empress was a woman. She had to be a man – or even a group of men. To this, she said:

”to all the GENDER FREAKS out there who keep claiming out of their own ass that I am a male, I am so sorry to ruin your fantasy dreams of a trans cracker is false and yes I am actually a woman. Next time if you want to speak about your pathetic fetishes, you better look at yourself in the mirror.” She would later say, “i am 23 years old, and i am beautiful AS HELL. but i don't care 1 bit how i ‘look.’ i care of what i ‘Do.’”

The Wired interview is revealing and bizarre in equal measure.

“i think the main problem is that people ‘fail’ to see Video Games as the pinnacle and max potential of ‘art,’” Empress says that as a child she was a “very strange girl who did not like the ‘Real World’ as much as other people seem to.” More than the average gamer, she says, she has always taken games seriously not just as a way to pass the time, but as places to go and be. She loved Tetris on the NES, for when she wanted to “go ‘beyond’ the human limits in terms of ‘Response’ and ‘creativity.’” She loved Megaman 1, “for philosophical reasons that people do not understand.”

“i always keep in the ZONE till i crush their pathetic puzzle prisons,” she says. Cracking DRM has taught her that the only real way to view the games industry right now is through the lens of philosophy. Philosophy helps people discern what is valuable, she says. And to discern what is valuable, you must look for higher truths. The higher truth in gaming, she says, is that “wanting to preserve something you ‘Buy’ should NEVER be a ‘Crime.’”

Recently, she cracked Anno 1800, which layered three types of protection, Denuvo on top. “No one else does this because it requires insane amount of focus, dedication and endless passion. I was able to achieve this only in several months of research. it was HELL to say the least.”

The video game piracy community had long been a separate world to the Scene. Each understood the existence of the other, but didn’t care about their motivations, only their results. Gamers didn’t give a shit about the bizarre Warez industry or its search for clout; as long as cracks came out, that was all that mattered. And vice versa, as far as the Scene was concerned, gamers existed only to reinforce that clout. It was a confused but mutually beneficial relationship.

So when EMPRESS came along, espousing virtuous anti-corporate goals and beating the big publishers at their own game, the piracy community fell in love. In fact, her releases were sometimes even better than the official versions. Her fan-following rapidly grew into an almost cult-like obsession. She was half-jokingly called the messiah of video games. The community became full of her bizarre philosophical exercises, reviews, and even a few diss tracks.

“The reason why Ubisoft, EA and such companies never remove denuvo from their games is only because they LOVE feeling superior and ENJOY seeing you the customer as PIG under their control or worse.”

The corporations tried to use her fame against her. She announced her releases ahead of time with a lot of fanfare, and gave regular updates on her progress. So when news got out that EMPRESS was about to crack Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Ubisoft sabotaged the game so that players couldn’t fight two of the bosses. Then when the crack released, they removed the bug. EMPRESS’s version had to be fixed by other crackers.

But they couldn’t hold her off forever. The revolution had arrived, and it had found its Robbespierre. When the coveted Red Dead Redemption 2 release came out, she was on top of the world.

But we all know what happened to Robbespierre.

Are we Pirates or are we Dancer?

EMPRESS first began to lose followers through her ‘philosophy’. She had come to believe she had a totally unique view on the world that no one could even begin to understand. As far as Empress was concerned, she had the ‘perfect and totally correct’ answer to all philosophical questions. Whether this sense of grandeur had its origin in drugs, or the praise she was getting, or something else, it’s hard to say. In her first major philosophy post, she said, “I have always had lots of universal philosophy knowledge inside my soul and it always opposes the famous philosophers and thinkers' theories, and pretty much "Everyone else" on this planet.”

Aside from balking at the audacity of using a platform for piracy as her own personal blog, the community was quick to knock her down a peg.

So I guess you read them all? The great thinkers? To verify how you are above and beyond their thinking?

Do you understand how utterly arrogant this post makes you? I will tell you why. To put yourself above thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, John Locke, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Francisco de Vitoria, Friedrich Nietzsche and so many others. Human beings who have helped shape the foundation of the world we live in today. I am talking about the most basic of basic stuff we now take for granted like property, human rights, democratic governance and rule of law. Without these ideas and those who dedicated their lives to refine them, our world could not be like it is today.

This was a strong argument, but as someone else jokingly pointed out:

bitch shut up, they pirated rdr2

Which, to be fair, Hobbes and Kant never did.

The next philosophy post came with a ‘shitlist’ of all the people who had opposed her.

many people has put their heart and soul in their replies, and some of them were "very close" to the truth , while others tried their best to be DICKHEADS and speak with a brain of a cockroach. i list them below.

This didn’t earn her any friends. There were discussions of banning her completely. In order to find a compromise, EMPRESS went and created her own platform, with blackjack and hookers. It wasn’t too successful, but her most ardent disciples happily made the jump, and most of the piracy community was happy to see the end of her bizarre posts.

But the bliss wouldn’t last. Empress was shortly suspended, her followers scattered. No one seemed to care much about that.

Fuck You, Pay Me

You might remember the part when I said EMPRESS accepted donations. That would become a pretty big part of this. The most important thing to EMPRESS was cracking games, but a girl gotta eat. She had a real job. When fans donated money, she was able to take time away from that job to spend on cracking. “How much time I spend in it depends on the amount of donations I receive.” In other words, fans could pay her to get pirated games faster. Empress knew the value of her work, and expected to be compensated for it.

requiring money to keep working on this cancer is something that is a "must", and its not my choice or anyone else's.

The undeniable truth is-- this life requires this whether we like it or not... because otherwise there is no human capable of just magically producing cracks for the most annoying cancer drm in this world.

the most talented crackers in the SCENE left and worked for DENUVO for this same reason ... and to avoid my fate ending up in any negative way too, i am requesting all of your help to keep struggling and crushing this drm with every new version they make.

In September 2020, she approached the piracy community with a confession. After ending her solo career and joining a more traditional Scene group, she was back. The Scene was dead, she proclaimed, and they wouldn’t be coming to help. In fact, many of the recent Denuvo releases by other groups had been mainly done by EMPRESS. There were even questions of whether the Scene was deliberately delaying crack releases because they were being paid off by the industry. Conspiracies ran wild.

If you had high hopes for the scene to make some miracle comeback, I have bad news for you. Even before the busts, the scene's state was already very rotten and most of the people inside are nothing but leechers of fake fame based on on some old ass "glory". I made the Planet Zoo crack in 1 week, I made crack for Total War Three Kingdoms in 4 days and they were both ready to go in early August. But the lack of even tiny bit action from the people who should have moved things forward, made me completely blocked in what it seem to be infinite stagnation. Because I had to wait them, almost 2 months... I couldn't do any progress on Denuvo AT ALL. And as a result I became very tired. And you wait those people to save you? Especially after the busts, 95% of the scene is in dead silence. My mistake was leaving you and going with them in promises of fake support , so I am sorry for that.

This all lead up to the pitch: there was a new Denuvo variant out there, and if it could be broken, pirates could get their hands on games like Death Stranding and Resident Evil 3. But she would need to dedicate herself wholly to it, and that meant relying fully on donations.

The Scene didn’t take this lying down. In the info files of their own releases, they slated EMPRESS’s greed and unsavoury motivations. In their crack for ‘Iron Harvest’, the group DARKSiDERS had this to say:

As we do this without profit from own pockets, we supply them games, buy em... EMPRESS you are asking money for piracy!!

We think thats more rotten then CODEX themselfs!!

We also have our real-life jobs todo and we would not ever ask money!

SHAME ON YOU! For starters piracys basic princible is...: FREE!"

*ALSO THiNG iS

You are calling scene toxic just cuz were on one

biggest groups. We re really chilled and let ppl

do things on their own pace. Most of sceners are

Ä bit angry at the fact that codex used/uses

MONEY for crackers, scene dont do that usually.

But EMPRESS was always ready with a response.

They must understand I do not care about their shitty competition. We are not talking here about making profit from cracking itself, we are talking about saving the right to preserve your games and own them, because in current days no matter how much money you have, you simply cannot buy true ownership anymore. Instead you have to install 3 launchers and go through several sever authorizations in order to play your games. This missions requires extreme dedication and time put into it. So, yes, naturally requires financing as well, one way or another. Don't you think I don't hate asking for money, but it's how the things are.

They said it themselves, they chill and do nothing, because are lazy old bastards, who only speak but never do anything. Also I know about several german groups making money through giving early pre information to p2p sites, so don't give me that scene morality again.

DARKSiDERS, you are bottom of the scene with SKIDROW and you know exactly what I am talking about.

No one had ever seen anything like it on the Scene before. Empress thought she was better than everyone else, and she kind of was (at least, as far as cracking was concerned). However the piracy community started to sour on her over time, partly because of her requests for money, and partly because of her weirdly preachy and arrogant philosophical ramblings, which people often felt forced to slog through because they sometimes held hints about future cracks. Plus some of these philosophical opinions came across as a little transphobic. She was starting to get a reputation as a bit of a nut job who had let the whole thing go to her head.

This wasn’t helped when when EMPRESS released the crack for ‘Immortals: Fenyx Rising’. Pirates noticed that they had extremely low download speeds, and figured out that she was deliberately throttling her own torrent. Why? Because she didn’t want any other pirates repacking and re-uploading her cracks. To clarify, a repacker takes a torrent, strips away the fluff, compresses it down to a tiny size, and releases it again. Repacks are made for people who struggle downloading large files. EMPRESS wanted a monopoly over the spotlight, and tried to prevent repackers getting hold of the game. This led to new beef with the person re-packing most of her releases, ‘FitGirl’, promising never to work with EMPRESS’s cracks again.

In July, she went as far as to hold cracks hostage. Following one of her regular polls, she said “the highest vote choice will not win if i don't receive 500$ for it. the people who will vote for the highest demanded game need to cooperate and collect 500$ for me to crack the game. this way it doesn't have to just be "1" single indvidual suffering for the entire thing when everyone else gets the game for free later.”

No money, no crack. Those were the terms.

Pirates were stingy at the best of times – that’s why they were pirates. But there were no alternatives. It was EMPRESS or nothing. It was a lot cheaper to throw a dollar or two her way than to buy a game at full price. All that talk of ‘saving video games’ was starting to ring hollow. The push-back against her was enormous.

if id wanted to pay money id just buy the game, this is retarded and you should be ashamed of this. you shouldnt crack games for the money you should do it for the ideology or for the competition. this is a disgrace. shame on you

There was also the problem of preference – people wouldn’t donate towards cracking games they didn’t even like. One fan pointed out: “people might still support you so you don't starve to death but you are probably gonna lose respect if your choice of games don't align with that of most people who follow you.”

“Every fu*cking time these kids vote for a childish anime game instead of an open world game.”

But EMPRESS wouldn’t be cowed by abuse. Far from backing down, she continued calling out to potential contributors and sponsors, and promised that if anyone had a specific game they were desperate to get cracked, a simple payment of $500 dollars would make it happen.

This was open to a lot of manipulation – all a company had to do to protect their newest release was pay EMPRESS to focus on something else instead.

“the entire ‘Scene’ rules that accept ‘no money/donations’ is 1 of the biggest problems which always push the crackers back, instead of forward,” says Empress. “if you’re going to do such INSANE EFFORT, you wouldn't just do it for and from ‘nothing’

EMPRESS would try to let her fans decide how they wanted the process of donating to go, but that quickly devolved into chaos, fuelled by her detractors. But her supporters gave as good as they got, and the resulting firestorm grew steadily more toxic until it overflowed into every piracy-related space. All the while, she continued preaching her philosophy and attacking anyone who opposed it.

i suggest you all go for a self re-check, you people have stinking shallow mind and souls... my philosophy is the "UNIVERSAL" type, and the term "Subjective" means NOTHING in my world. [if you STILL not convinced and disagree of anything i said in this post, i congratulate you because it means you didn't understand a SINGLE WORD from what i said. please enjoy an empty pathetic life].

Wanted Woman

The was a great danger looming over EMPRESS’s rise to stardom. The law. After all, there was a reason why members of the Scene kept a low profile. Companies couldn’t touch the torrents, but with just enough information, they could take down the people making them. Other pirates (such as one named Voksi) had been apprehended before, and sometimes the plea deal even involved working for Denuvo. It could happen again. Fans urged EMPRESS to be careful. They thought she was sticking her neck out far too much.

I hope you get all the support you want but keep safe.

EMPRESS promised she would, but it wasn’t enough. Or so it seemed.

In February 2021, she announced that thanks to her haters and rivals, who had leaked her address to the authorities, she had been well and truly nicked.

some serious people ON REDDIT managed to report me to authority with my real address, i am not quiet sure how it happened, but even with putting my philosophical side aside, i think i pissed off the entire internet just by trying to control "MY" own crack for 24 hour is actually something i am still not able to believe. in less than an hour, i will be dragged out of my home here with my lawyer, but considering i was caught red handed while preparing version 2 fix for my immortals crack, i don't think there will be much of hope against it at all.

Her message to those who had insulted her was totally not at all bitter – she thought they were ‘all beautiful people’ who she definitely didn’t hate, because they had just made a mistake. This was all somewhat rich for a woman who was rapidly developing hints of megalomania and power-madness.

And then she made an Obi-wan-esque speech about ‘remembering me’ and ‘contuing on my path’.

Everyone was quick to point out the flaws here. The police generally don’t bust down your door, catching you ‘red-handed’ cracking Denuvo, then call you to tell you they’re going to arrest you in an hour, so you have time to write out a long and dramatic letter blaming others for your woes.

”I will be there in less than an hour to take you in. please don't delete any incriminating data. thanks."

Other crackers weighed in on the hilarity of the whole thing, especially Fitgirl, whom EMPRESS mentioned by name. Some users went straight to mockery.

This infinity crackhead has really gone of the deep end.

But to much of the community, it was just kind of sad.

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

So, to my knowledge, no one has done a write-up on the batshit insane history of the Beach Boys and the various inter-politics of band-members that extends to their fanbase, which is why I'm doing this now. I don't really use Reddit so excuse any formatting errors, I'm not entirely sure how to use italics on this thing, but I feel this story is worth sharing anyways.

Okay, let's start with the basics, the Beach Boys are a classic rock band most famous for being pioneers of surf-rock. They didn't invent the genre but they were one of the earliest commercially successful surf-rock bands to have vocals, basically cementing the vocal-jazz/doo-wop sound vocal style that's all over the genre. The band was formed by the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis), their cousin Mike Love and their childhood friend Al Jardine. Brian Wilson was the group's leader, writing all of their songs and eventually producing their records, with Mike Love functioning as the group's lyricist and arguably their lead vocalist (all of the members sung lead but Mike didn't play any instruments so he tended to sing lead a bit more often to give him shit to do on stage). This was how the group functioned from the early 60s until 1964.

Here's where the issue begins, for various reasons (largely due to having a panic attack on an airplane) Brian Wilson decides that touring and surf rock sucks complete ass, and that he'd rather innovate in the studio. A solution is agreed upon where Brian will write and record in Los Angeles for most of the year as the other Beach Boys tour, occasionally stopping back in Los Angeles to provide vocals on the instrumentals that Brian cooked up. Lyrics are to be provided by Brian, although he eventually elects to just hire other lyricists. To make up for his absence they recruit another musician named Bruce Johnston to tour with them, who eventually just joins the band.

So Brian gets more studio time, drifts away from surf-rock and eventually rock altogether, discovers psychedelics and records some of the greatest records of all time. "Pet Sounds", the Beach Boys fourth album to be recorded in these circumstances, is largely considered the band's masterpiece and consistently ranks near the top of most "Greatest Albums of All Time" charts (it's currently #2 on Rolling Stone's list, for example). It's really incredible psychedelic pop, genuinely a fantastic record and one absolutely worth listening to in full ("Wouldn't It Be Nice" was used in a Fallout advertisement a few years ago and got some attention because of it, "God Only Knows" was performed Bioshock Infinite by a barbershop quartet, I think Reddit likes these sort of things, they're also just very famous songs in general). There's some other material recorded around here that's also fantastic but is not necessary to understand this post.

These albums were weird, and they were critically acclaimed, but they weren't as successful as past Beach Boys albums (at least not in America, they sold fantastically in the UK). After one of them was cancelled near its completion ("SMiLE", an album with it's own insane fan history I may write-up later) the band became significantly less successful, Brian Wilson became reclusive and the power in the band generally shifted to the other members.

For the most part, this has been true since 1971. Brian has come back a few times, most notably in 1977 with "Love You" (a very weird but very good early synth-pop album), but a history of mental health issues prevented him from ever fully returning and the power in the band gradually shifted over to Mike Love. Here's the thing though, Mike Love is an asshole.

Mike Love's many faults are too long to list here, but to put it plainly he's a money-grubbing Reagan-Republican jackass who trampled Brian's creative vision to push the band back towards its surf-rock roots, in the process creating some of the worst records of all time. The Mike Love-helmed Beach Boys albums must be what the Beach Boys sound like to people who hate them, they're truly dreadful. In the mid-90s he somehow got the rights to tour under the Beach Boys' name, and has been doing so consistently since.

This is where the fans split. To those who consider themselves fans of the Beach Boys there are two general mindsets: one that considers Mike Love to be the antichrist and one that doesn't. Can you guess which side I'm on? To those who prefer the Beach Boys' experimental works, he's a greedy businessman ruining the band's legacy, but those who prefer their surf-rock tend to be more in favor of the guy. This split is largely across political lines too, Mike fans tend to be more right-wing and Brian fans tend to be more left-wing.

Many arguments are had over the merits of these two sides of the band. As Reddit leans younger, more tech-savvy and more left-wing, r/thebeachboys is mostly in favor of Brian, but on Facebook it seems way more violent. If you search for concert footage of Mike Love's "Beach Boys" and contrast it with Brian Wilson's solo touring it's apparent what types of crowds they're playing to.

Now, some Beach Boys fans are bipartisan and that shouldn't be left unstated, but this is certainly true for the majority of them. This is where our most recent issue comes to play.

So a few weeks ago on New Year's Eve, after Trump lost the election but before he was out of office, he held a party at his Mar-a-Lago resort and the Beach Boys performed at it alongside Vanilla Ice. "The Beach Boys" in question were Mike Love and a handful of touring musicians but no other members, not even Bruce Johnston who is a republican and has toured with Mike before. To say this caused a shitstorm would be an understatement.

Beach Boys fans are insecure about many things and I'll be the first to admit that, "Pet Sounds" pretty directly inspired the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's" and yet the Beatles and the Beach Boys are often considered to be in different leagues which Beach Boys fans don't really like. One thing that fans of Brian are particularly insecure about is "The Beach Boys" being used when referencing Mike Love's touring band. You can bet that when dozens of articles from major news publications come out about "The Beach Boys" performing at Trump's mask-less party in the middle of a pandemic that these fans would be fucking pissed. And they were.

This was easily the most active I've seen Beach Boys fans in awhile, especially on Twitter where just about every tweet about the matter had a dozen Beach Boys fans underneath it clarifying that Brian had absolutely no connection to the concert. In a rare move for him, Brian (or at least his social media team) came out to condemn Mike Love for playing a mask-less concert in the middle of a pandemic to support a man who was voted out of office and wouldn't admit it. Al Jardine, another Beach Boys’ member who regularly tours with Brian agreed, and former Beach Boys’ collaborators had some more colorful things to say (including Van Dyke Parks, the lyricist for Brian’s “SMiLE” project who has pretty regularly shit-talked Mike Love over the years).

While this wasn’t the first controversy surrounding where Mike Love’s touring band choose to play concerts, there was a similar controversy a few months ago when they performed at a party for Trump’s re-election in October and another one back in February when they performed at a Safari Club (Brian Wilson is very strongly in favor of animal rights), but this was truly the last straw. Bipartisanship is nearly impossible to maintain with the current politics of band members, and while a true reunion of the band has been discussed to occur sometime later this year (or whenever quarantine lifts) it seems considerably unlikely. The band, the real band with Brian participating, is probably just over forever now. You'll still be able to see Mike Love's bastardization of "the Beach Boys", and you'll still be able to see Brian tour (and Al too, probably) with his incredibly superior backing band, but the true Beach Boys are done.

I, and I assume many others, have found some hope though. The sheer amount of backlash seems to show that the Beach Boys’ legacy hasn’t been ruined, that Brian’s experimental music has been and will continue to be properly appreciated, and that attempts to destroy with this boomer surf-rock garbage have ultimately failed. It’s nice to know, but we can’t really be sure for now. Knowing Mike Love, he’ll pull some more shit.

I don’t really know how to end Reddit posts but if any of you want a real belly-laugh I suggest you check out Mike Love’s 2017 double-album “Unleash the Love”, specifically its second disc which consists of re-recordings of classic Beach Boys songs. I don’t want to spoil it but pay attention to the vocals, they’re uhhh kinda hard to miss.

And if you want some good music to listen to, listen to Pet Sounds! It’s seen as a masterpiece for a reason. If you’ve already listened to it, then listen to their other stuff like “Friends” and “Wild Honey”. That “SMiLE” album I’ve mentioned a few times in this post was eventually released in like 2011 as “The Smile Sessions” and it’s fucking mesmerising, really worth a listen. Get involved with the Beach Boys fan community too, speaking for the Brian-side of the group there’s a lot of really good and really talented people working hard to preserve the band’s legacy. Brian’s current touring band actually consists of a bunch of Beach Boys fans (namely Darian Sahanaja, the main organiser) who were able to perfectly replicate the very complex arrangements of Brian’s songs live.

So yeah, that’s all. Have a good one, listen to the Beach Boys, and don’t be like Mike Love.

Edit/Author's Note: Just to be safe, I added a couple sentences to show that all of this did have consequences as to follow Rule 10. Didn't really impact the pacing or the point, just emphasized what's at stake in a clearer way. Also, you've all been super cool in the comments, very nice to see people who've decided to check out Pet Sounds after this. I know "thx fer de updoots" is a fucking meme but it's nice how welcoming you all are, I'll probably do a write-up on the history of SMiLE and all of the bootlegs people did sometime in the next couple weeks. Okay, author's note over.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

Weekly Hobby Round Up

This is a weekly catch-all post for casual hobby talk for the community. This post is for breaking drama (the 14 day rule will not apply to this post), news, chat, drama that may not fit the rules or is too short for a post write-up, etc. Bring your own popcorn!

RULES

• Be civil
• Follow lemmy.world's posting rules
• Don't link directly to pirate or malware sites, use screenshots instead
• No vagueposting (changing names and not naming bands/fandoms/etc is fine, but if your post is so vague no one can understand the drama it will be deleted)
• Explain any acronyms and hobby terms (not everyone here is in your hobby!)
• Ctrl+F the post to check your topic wasn't already posted before posting
• For any issues use the report feature

Happy hobby drama-ing!

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

I am surprised there aren’t any posts about Chronicles of Elyria on HobbyDrama yet! The community was so rife with drama from start to finish that I don’t even know where to begin.

Throwaway because I will probably be doxxed if I post on my main.

What is Chronicles of Elyria?

Chronicles of Elyria was pitched as a Kickstarter in May 2016 as a dynamic MMORPG with procedurally-generated quests, a fully destructible environment, closed economy, finite resources, and survival elements. The goal was $900k, but they made about $1.3 million in the initial campaign, and through their subsequent crowdfunding efforts made close to $8 million total over the next few years.

What went wrong?

In terms of lofty ideas, Chronicles of Elyria was right up there with Star Citizen, but with a fraction of the funds. We’d be here all day if I went into detail about all of the game’s proposed features, because it’s like they were trying to be Crusader Kings meets medieval life simulator meets Harvest Moon meets survival game meets action RPG all at once. Browse through their Developer Journals; even without a background in game development, it’s clear that the scope of what they were trying to pull off would have been ambitious for a major studio, let alone a small crowdfunded team.

The game’s initial release date was a laughably unrealistic Q4 2017, so it was no surprise that this would get pushed back again and again over the course of development. However, on March 24, 2020, lead developer Caspian made an announcement that rocked the community: State of Elyria: Into the Abyss (autoplay warning). In his typical long-winded fashion, Caspian spent the bulk of the post outlining the milestones the team reached over the past year, but only in the last few paragraphs did he mention that due to financial stressors from COVID-19, they ran out of money and had to lay off the entire team, shuttering development of Chronicles of Elyria. Because of several factors I’ll cover in the next few sections, the community did not take this well. In less than two weeks, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office reported they had received over 150 official complaints against Soulbound Studios, the most they had ever received for a company in that amount of time. Community whales formed a 'CoE Lawsuit' discord and discussed plans for a class-action lawsuit, demanding accountability and refunds. Some of them even pledged over $20k on the game, and they weren’t going to let Caspian cut and run.

Amidst threats of legal action, on April 9 Caspian dropped another blog post, A Letter from Soulbound Studios to Our Community claiming that the March 24 post came from a “very emotional place.” He said that the community misinterpreted his intent, and that he was actually trying to communicate that he was still working on the game while looking for ways to secure additional funding. As you can expect, this was just as poorly-received as his last announcement.

​

Wait, why did people spend so much money on this game? And how did the drama get so spicy?

By its own design the game stirred up drama even before release. With social stratification based on medieval feudalism literally built into the system, there was no way around it; the developers cheekily called it the “Dance of Dynasties.” There were multiple tiers of "pledges" and if I’m remembering correctly, the prices after the kickstarter were $500 for a Mayor title, $1000 for Count, and $3000 for Duke. The most coveted were of course the King/Queen titles, which had people shelling out a whopping $10000 for the chance to be royalty in an unreleased game. Even with the limited supply (6 kingdom slots per server iirc), these kingdom packages sold out all but one server. A few monarchs even purchased TWO kingdom slots to guarantee their supremacy on their chosen server.

It’s very difficult to overstate the cult-like mentality of the community during the “peak” years of 2016-2018. There was an official CoE discord server where the developers frequently engaged with players, but most of the drama happened in what were called the Discords of Elyria. These were community-run discords for individual kingdoms, duchies, counties, towns, and baronies. Each had their own cliques of ‘advisors’ and elite roleplaying cabals.

No, ‘elite roleplaying cabals’ is not an exaggeration; these people were spending thousands of dollars for a title to justify RPing as nobility to lord over the peasant rabble. This attracted a lot of entitled narcissists; the game’s structure practically encouraged it! I’ll give you an anecdotal example: I was really active within a kingdom discord and was eventually appointed as an advisor (the equivalent of what a guild officer would be in a normal MMO). This title was almost useless until release, so it was mainly just a glorified clique with a secret discord channel where we would theorycraft and talk shit about people we didn’t like in the kingdom. But I was the only one on the advisory council that did not possess a noble title, and a Countess kicked up a big fuss about this. Just like the real-life aristocracy, she was scandalized! Wording it in an RP-appropriate way with paragraphs of purple prose, she claimed that the $60 I pledged to the funding of the game wasn’t enough to prove I was fully committed. She and her cronies were so bothered that they tried to get me off the council. They went around DMing a bunch of people, accusing me of being a spy because I used to RP with some guy that left for a rival kingdom, and dredged up screenshots of year-old discord posts as proof my conduct was “unbecoming” of a representative of the kingdom.

There’s a saga behind that story and many others; I can absolutely go into more detail in another post if enough people are interested in the byzantine “Dance of Dynasties” and the inter- and inner-kingdom drama that went down during the development of this beautiful disaster of a game… and developer involvement in said drama. If you want to waste several hours of your life, there is plenty of RP cringe archived on the read-only forums. For now, that’s just a small slice to help illustrate how detached from reality and cult-like this community was. Going back to the downfall...

​

Early Red Flags

As I alluded to, there were already red flags when the game was first pitched on Kickstarter. Despite hitting the initial $900k and going well into their stretch goals, the devs were still encouraging players to crowdfund long after the Kickstarter ended. There were several additional promotional events (somewhat outdated post that doesn't include everything) selling both cosmetic items and mechanically useful items, despite the developers going through hoops to justify over and over again why the game was not pay to win (it was). Eventually, the constant promotions and gamey tactics prompted community members to question why we were seeing more promotional events than development updates.

The devs then admitted that the original Kickstarter campaign was meant to raise enough to be able to create a demo to attract investors and secure a stream of income that didn’t rely on crowdfunding. Unfortunately, no investors took a gamble on a risky debut from an inexperienced team, and despite Caspian making a few weird statements on Discord and implying they had “other sources” of funding that they did not have to divulge to the community, he too later admitted that they were relying solely on crowdfunding to make this game work.

Well, this news was a departure from their previous claim that all they needed was 900k to develop the game for a Q4 2017 release, and that all funds would be used towards the development of Chronicles of Elyria. No one knew this was all just for a demo to attract investors, and people were justifiably upset.

​

The Community Begins to Turn

There was (and still is, last I checked!) a particularly loyal and obsessive subset of the community. At the slightest hint of criticism they’d quickly jump in to defend the game and devs. The community moderators were no better, and a lot of posts were censored or deleted from the forums. The developers had built up a sort of cult of personality with their over-involvement with the community. Despite a hilarious lack of transparency about the actual development of the game, they were… uncomfortably close to the playerbase.

Caspian complained about specific players on the official discord and publicly accused two kingdoms of cheating during a cheap browser event meant to (surprise) raise more money. A player made a post on the forums saying the community outreach manager should be replaced (he was known for being snarky and condescending). Said community outreach manager actually private messaged people that upvoted the post, basically saying “if you think I should be replaced, please don’t contact me if you ever need anything in the future.”

Yes, that came from the guy handling outreach.

The "Map Selection" event was rife with its own kingdom vs kingdom drama, but the devs weren't able to redeem themselves here. After months and months of delays for a map event, Caspian failed to deliver the high-resolution maps as promised on November 5, 2018, claiming they were taking too long to render.

"Remember, remember, the 5th of NoRender" became a meme and rallying cry across the community in reference to the constant delays and deception, to the point where people were banned just for saying it in the official discord.

Then there was the issue of Prelyria. Prelyria was the low-poly pre-alpha client of the game they were developing. Meant to be like a graybox, it became a lot more involved than that and seemed to eclipse the development of the “real” game. People felt they had been bamboozled when they looked back:

Pre-alpha video May 2016

Pre-alpha video September 2019

Some players with industry experience were pointing out that the amount of time the devs were spending on building the Prelyria assets and developing the low-poly client first (it was a lot more involved than a simple graybox) was actually going to be more cumbersome and definitely not save all the time the devs hoped it would. At this point, Caspian still looked like a well-intentioned idea guy with his head in the sky, and most people didn’t think he was intentionally scamming anyone. Personally, I believe Caspian definitely started out in earnest, but he spoiled his own vision with mismanagement and obfuscation.

Funding was always a touchy subject.

Despite first claiming they only needed $900k to finish the game, then saying no wait actually we need like $3 mil, Chronicles of Elyria raised almost $8 million in total and after 4 years in development had nothing close to a minimum viable product.

We later learned that $500k of that initial $900k came from Caspian himself. This of course was not disclosed until after the Kickstarter.

On March 20, 2020 (four days before the infamous Into the Abyss announcement), the devs released an exciting update claiming that Pre-Alpha Testing Has Officially Begun! Players that had pledged (iirc) $1000 or more now had access to test Alpha I! But excitement quickly faded as players realized this wasn’t really an alpha, but a 10-15 minute demo showing off movement and parkour mechanics and ONLY that. I didn’t have alpha access so I don’t know how bad the demo really was, and those who played it are still under NDA, but I heard it was terrible, and looked like something that could be slapped together in a couple weeks using Unity store assets.

Let’s look again at the timeline Caspian pulled out at the end of 2017 when he admitted the Q4 2017 release date wasn’t going to happen:

• V3 of the Website (Q3 2017)
• ElyriaMUD (Q4 2017)
• Alpha 1 (T1 2018)
• Server Selection (T1 2018)
• Settlement / Domain Selection (T2 2018)
• KoE (T2 2018)
• Design Experiences (T3 2018)
• Alpha 2 (T3 2018)
• Beta 1 (S1 2019)
• Prologue & CoE Adventure Toolkit (S1 2019)
• Exposition (S1 2019)
• Beta 2 (S1/S2 2019)
• Stress Test (Any paid account)(S2 2019)
• Launch (S2 2019)

By March 2020, the only milestones they hit were V3 of the Website, Server Selection in November 2018, and Settlement/Domain Selection (after a series of delays that included a period of radio silence lasting over 100 days, it began somewhere around Summer 2019 and never officially concluded).

​

The Downfall

Now for the big question I’m sure all of you have: why was it such a big deal when he announced they ran out of funding?

Indeed, projects are cancelled or become vaporware all of the time. While it's obvious Caspian and team were drowning in too many ideas and not enough tangible progress, why was this scummy enough to warrant hundreds of complaints to the AG and a class-action lawsuit?

About a week before the March 24 announcement, Caspian launched the “Settlers of Elyria” event. It’s hard to explain out of context, but basically all the unclaimed duchies, counties, and baronies were going on sale, and players could purchase them at reduced prices.

Yes, up to a day before he announced he laid off the entire team, he was allowing people to spend thousands of dollars on fake titles. Worse was the fact that this event was designed for new members of the community that didn’t have a chance to buy titles before or weren’t able to because of the prohibitive cost.

Illegal? Maybe not. Fucked up? Absolutely. This, combined with Caspian taking a PPP loan right afterwards painted a damning portrait of a man squeezing every last penny out of this failed endeavor before he ran.

Caspian kept the official discord open for a couple days after announcing the shuttering of the studio, but on March 29, he “fired” all of the community mods and deleted the discord, claiming that people were saying “horrible, unimaginable things” about him. There were rumors that he was cheating on his wife with a (much younger) community member. Apparently, a dev was corroborating these statements and providing receipts. Whether these awful rumors were true or not, Caspian’s reaction in the mod forum was nuclear.

The Future of CoE

After nearly six months of radio silence, a few days ago on December 17, 2020, Caspian gave interviews to MassivelyOP and MMORPG.com and released an “update” video that is a nothingburger rehash of old 'gameplay' footage and platitudes. He keeps saying that CoE is in development, but he has nothing to show. He keeps saying some of the staff have volunteered to work on it, yet based on their LinkedIn profiles it looks like most of the original team have found jobs elsewhere. He refuses to release the results of the studio’s audit. The new FAQ on the website is an obvious attempt to avoid lawsuits and in the two interviews he hilariously continues to extol his own transparency while being as transparent as a brick wall.

People are still able to find justifications for Caspian's actions and to this day are in the community-run discords and subreddit trying to keep the hype train going. Maybe it's a combination of Stockholm Syndrome and Sunk Cost fallacy, but a lot of people still maintain absolute trust in his vision. I personally did not invest a significant amount of money (but I did waste my time, RIP), but it's still as saddening as it is maddening. Yes, those "Dance of Dynasty" posts on the forum might be cringey now, but people put SO MUCH creative energy and passion into coming up with lore for their kingdoms and duchies and towns and such, and despite being a skeptic for most of my time with the community, it was an incredibly unique experience to be part of this group. I just wish they would move on; put that energy into something productive and not waste it on a failed game. Caspian used them and he will continue to use them if people keep giving him a platform.

​

EDIT: added more links

EDIT2: Obligatory "wow I didn't expect this to blow up!" but I really didn't! Thanks for the gold x2!

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

Weekly Hobby Round Up

This is a weekly catch-all post for casual hobby talk for the community. This post is for breaking drama (the 14 day rule will not apply to this post), news, chat, drama that may not fit the rules or is too short for a post write-up, etc. Bring your own popcorn!

RULES

• Be civil
• Follow lemmy.world's posting rules
• Don't link directly to pirate or malware sites, use screenshots instead
• No vagueposting (changing names and not naming bands/fandoms/etc is fine, but if your post is so vague no one can understand the drama it will be deleted)
• Explain any acronyms and hobby terms (not everyone here is in your hobby!)
• Ctrl+F the post to check your topic wasn't already posted before posting
• For any issues use the report feature

Happy hobby drama-ing!

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

G'day Curd Nerds! I'd like to tell you about a bit of hobby drama that is not so much a tempest in a teapot as it is a bit of a ripple in a teacup. It's drama that's so small, in such a peaceful little corner of the internet that I almost hesitate to bring it here- except, the resolution has such a unique blend of petty and wholesome that I thought perhaps others might find the story diverting.

The ingredients:

First, the Cheeseman: On youtube, there is a man whose entire channel revolves around cheese. His name is Gavin, and telling you this is not doxxing because that is literally his channel name. You can find his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/GavinWebber/featured However, in the spirit of not using real names (even ones so thoroughly public), I will be referring to him here as The Cheeseman.

I came across his channel in March and got hooked on his videos because literally all he uploads (aside from Q&A livestreams) is videos where he walks through cheesemaking recipes, explaining the process the whole time in a very mellow, soothing voice, and tasting videos for the cheeses he's made. His videos are very calming, and exactly what I needed because, y'know, pandemic. His channel has 251K subscribers, which is nothing to sneeze at, but also not enormous. It's also home to one of the most generally positive comments sections of any I've seen; I don't often read comments sections so it's very possible I've missed things, but generally all I see is positive comments and conversations among folks who have attempted to make the cheeses in the videos.

Next, the cheese: Grana Padano

Grana Padano is a type of Italian cheese similar to Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's a hard cow's milk cheese with a grainy, crumbly texture. It's also PDO, that is "Protected Designation of Origin", and has been since 1996. Essentially, just like champagne is only champagne if it comes from the Champagne wine region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling wine (and Destiel is only Destiel if it comes from Supernatural, otherwise it's just sparkling bury your gays), Grana Padano is only Grana Padano if it comes from the Po river valley in northern Italy, otherwise you cannot use that name to describe a cheese.

Which brings us to: The Consortium for the Protection of Grana Padano Cheese

This is a legally-recognized group whose purpose is "preserving Grana Padano and its Protected Designation of Origin (in Italian, Denominazione di Origine Protetta or DOP) status; in promoting it, supporting its development and taking care of its interests and in providing correct information to the public." You can view their website here:

https://www.granapadano.it/en-ww/the-consortium.aspx

They have all kinds of detailed explanations of exactly who they are and so forth, but the salient details for the purposes of this drama are that 1) these are the people who make the cheese, and have a vested interest in keeping tight control over the name, and 2) they do have the legal authority to do so. For the purposes of this writeup, I will be referring to them as The Consortium.

Step 1: Warming The Milk

So a while back, the Cheeseman had uploaded a video entitled "How to make Grana Padano Style Cheese". I don't have the exact date the original video was uploaded, nor can I link to it, because it has now been taken down, however I can deduce that it must have been uploaded about 15 moths ago, which would have been sometime in August 2019. Because most cheeses take time to age, the Cheeseman generally uploads an initial preparation method where he makes the cheese, and then after aging for the prescribed length of time, he uploads a second tasting video where he shares the results of aging the cheese. The tasting video for the Grana Padano Style cheese went up October 17, 2020, and is viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Qj2i3PMy4 The video description indicates a 14-month aging period.

In the original video, the Cheeseman makes it very clear multiple times that the cheese he is making is inspired by Grana Padano, and is intended to be as close as he can get to the style of this cheese, but no matter how close he gets, it can never be called Grana Padano because of the PDO status. However, that wasn't good enough for the Consortium.

Step 2: Curdling

Three days ago on November 26, the Cheeseman uploaded a video, viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_AzMLhPF1Q&t=2s

In it, he shares that he was sent a cease and desist letter from "an intellectual property company" on behalf of the Consortium, wherein they declare that the Cheeseman's video "is a clear infringement of the Consorzio’s intellectual property rights." They go on to say that "Indeed, your video seems to describe how to create counterfeited replicas of Grana Padano."

​

Let us all take a moment to contemplate the implications of counterfeit cheese.

​

Ok moment over.

​

They conclude by "kindly asking" for the removal of the video within 5 days of the receipt of the letter, and caution that if he fails to comply, they "will not hesitate to take the necessary steps to ensure the protection of its trademark rights."

The Cheeseman included in the description of the video a link to the PDF of the letter, which you can view there, if you're so inclined (there's not much more there than what I've included, though). I've chosen not to include it here directly because even though he posted it himself, it still includes some personal information and I'd prefer not to link to it directly.

After reading the letter out, he talks a bit about the letter and the original video, playing the snippets where he specifies that he is not and cannot make true Grana Padano cheese due to the PDO nature of the cheese; however he theorizes that he must have gotten pretty close with his recipe based on their concern over "counterfeit replica cheese". He concludes by encouraging his audience to go check out his original Grana Padano video soon if they're interested, because he does intend to comply with the takedown request and remove the original video exactly within the timeframe requested (and no sooner).

Step 3: Pressing and Draining

This is where things get interesting, because at this point, the Cheeseman shares that the Consortium has actually apologized to him.

The very next day on November 27, 2020, the Cheeseman uploaded a video (viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xy_KkZDiTE ) updating his audience on the Grana Padano situation. You see, he received a letter from the Director General of the Consortium in reference to the cease and desist letter, and the Cheeseman's video on the subject. As with the previous video, the Cheeseman linked to a PDF of the letter right in the video description, and although I will pull some quotes from it, I will refrain from linking it directly here. Basically the gist of it is that they were aware of his video and were going to let it slide (and indeed, it had been up for over a year unchallenged), however the video had been "reported to us [...] by our direct superiors at the Ministry and the EU Committee."

The Director General went on to say "We had not intervened before because your good faith is clear from your video and we are very sorry to see you and your community so angry towards us."

The Cheeseman responds: "Well personally I'm not angry, but the community has spoken I suppose, [Director General], that's just what they do on the internet" (This is, quite possibly, the most understated and true description of the internet that I have ever heard.)

The Director General adds a postscript:

"Ps. On a further note, you didn’t quite get the “real recipe” of Grana Padano...it is “slightly” different [smile emoji] So if ever you come to Italy, once this awful pandemic is over, we would like you to be our guest and we will take you to one of our dairies, where one of our master cheesemakers can teach you all the tricks of the trade."

The Cheeseman's response to this is gracious, but reaffirms that he doesn't believe he's in the wrong, and shares his intension to re-upload a "grainy Italian hard cheese" video.

Step 4: Aging the Cheese

As promised, yesterday (November 28, 2020), the Cheeseman reuploaded his Grana Padano cheesemaking video under the name "Chease & Desist Style Cheese with Taste Test. To Italy with Love 💛" viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqPP24IU1to

It is, as promised, exactly the same as the original video, except he's dubbed over every instance of "Grana Padano" within the video with "Chease and Desist". He's also combined the making video with the later tasting video, although the original taste test video was not specifically mentioned in the original cease and desist letter, nor was it ever requested to come down. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, that original tasting video (with the name of the cheese unaltered) is still up, and as a matter of fact, it shows up in the first page of google results for Grana Padano!

Tasting Notes:

If you've read all this, I hope it's brought some amusement. I know it's not as dramatic as most stuff in this sub, but a small-time home cheesemaker getting communication directly from an international cheese consortium was a level of absurd that I had to share. If there are any further developments and if people are interested, I will be happy to provide updates.

[edited to add the link to the apology video]

[edited again because I messed up numbering my steps and it was driving me nuts]

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Supernatural just ended its 15 year run. To catch up, you can read about the recent Destiel love confession; an actor who appeared in 4 episodes and harassed fans; a comprehensive writeup of the fandom in general, especially "tinhatting"; more general fandom drama; or a racist Haiti AU fic. Supernatural provided no shortage of drama.

But if you don't want to read all those previous writeups, the summary for this one is:

Over the course of the show's run, the fans were divided in to two groups. Group One were people who thought the show should be focused on the brothers, Dean and Sam (played by Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, respectively. Some shipped the brothers together. Group Two were people who thought Castiel (played by Misha Collins) should have a more prominent role and fuck Dean (ship name "Destiel"--you've heard of it). (Edit: There is, arguably, a third group of people who watched the show as a show, but I haven't actually met anyone who has).

It became abundantly clear that The Powers That Be (writers, producers, Jensen and Jared) were in the former group (minus the "Wincest" shipping). They shunted Misha/Cas off for episodes at a time with flimsy excuses, tried to write him completely off in one season and then haphazardly brought him back after fan uproar, and hazed/bullied Misha on set (ex: Misha talked about how Jared would tickle his balls out of the cameraman's view so that it looked like Misha was messing up his lines, among other things).

Misha said his final scene was his now-infamous love confession, which many fans lovingly described as "embarrassing." After fifteen years of pent-up tension, Castiel finally gets the courage to confess his love to Dean--and Dean responds with facial expressions that were memeified as "trying not to say a slur" to "trying not to commit a hate crime." Then, after confessing his love, Castiel gets sucked away to supermegahell, never to be seen again!

But fans knew that couldn't be his last scene...As one tumblr post said, "honestly it's quite impressive how supernatural, a show in which everybody dies & no one stays dead, has managed to convince a huge chunk of people that one of its leads is not coming back for the finale"

And it's true. Pretty much every character, major or minor, on SPN has died at least six times. Fans pulled out release photos, social media pics, and lines from interviews to prove without a shadow of a doubt that Castiel would be in the last episode--whether Destiel was made official or not.

What really gave fans hope, though, is that actor Jensen Ackles said he felt "uneasy" about the ending:

"And I just walked out of there kind of uneasy. I don’t know if it was just the fact that I just heard the ending of a show that had been going for 15 years and I’m just too close to it to really accept a finality to it."

And since he's historically uneasy about Destiel, fans connected the dots: Destiel would be canon in the finale!

So did we see Cas again? SPOILERS, obvs.

Here's what happened in the finale: Sam and Dean are bored. After everything was literally resolved in the penultimate episode, the world is pretty peaceful. Cut to commercial. Finally, they find a hunt. Cut to commercial. They follow some leads. Cut to commercial. They fight the monsters. Dean gets impaled on, like, a nail on a barn column or something and with his dying breath he tells Sam he's proud of him and asks for permission to die. This takes, like, a full 15 minutes. Cut to commercial. There's a montage of Sam being sad and petting a dog. Cut to commercial. Dean goes to heaven, reunites with a loved one (not Cas) and drives around. Cut to commercial. Montage of Sam raising a kid and Dean driving around. Cut to commercial. Sam dies a natural death of old age. Cut to commercial. The brothers reunite in Heaven.

Oh, and there was an emo version of Carry On, Wayward Son.

Basically the episode was three montages in a trenchcoat, with the lead characters meeting anticlimactic ends. Dean Winchester dies of tetanus. Sam wears a powdered wig from a Halloween discount store to show the passage of time.

Cas is mentioned twice throughout the episode, one line where Dean or Sam is like "I'm sad Cas is gone" and Sam or Dean is like "We have to move on and keep fighting" and one line that implies Cas escaped from supermegahell, somehow, but no more on that.

The response:

" Wow y’all got hate crimed harder than Sherlock fans did. I am very very sorry"

"GAY RIGHTS TOOK A STEP BACK THIS FINALE SINGLEHANDEDLY REPEALED SAME SEX MARRIAGE"

" that episode seemed like a love letter to Wincest shippers and a HUGE fuck you to destiel shippers ngl"

" they really hated cas and misha so much that they spent the finale pandering to the fans who wanted the brothers to fuck"

But even the Wincest shippers weren't happy, because the ending was boring and Dean's death was lame. But no one was more upset than Destiel shippers, who held out hope that Cas would return. So of course there's the angry hashtag:

" you're right dabb, it WAS bold to end 12 years of queerbaiting with a bury your gays and then never mention your queer lead again, very bold !! #cwspnisoverparty"

" The fact that Cas is trending because the whole fking world is raging about his pathetic excuse for an ending. He deserved so much better. #cwspnisoverparty"

" SPAM REPORT CW_SPN AND GET THAT SHIT SUSPENDED PLEASE THAT'S ALL I WANT and trend #cwspnisoverparty BUT MOSTLY REPORT THAT ACCOUNT THERE'S NO BIGGER FUCK YOU THAN THAT PLS"

And the angry tweets to the writer of the finale ep:

" ANDREW DABB IS THE WORST FCKING THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO THIS SHOW AND DEAN WINCHESTER"

" sweet boy..... god i am so sorry i will miss him so much i'm plotting my revenge on @andrewdabb right fucking now. cas deserved better. cas deserved BETTER. #Supernatural"

" The #Supernaturalfinale feels like an insult. Like @cw_spn and @andrewdabb actually just kicked me in the chest and walked away laughing. What the HELL was that? "

And of course it wouldn't be a disappointing queerbait finale if there weren't a Fake Episode conspiracy:

" All I want to say is that I hope @andrewdabb releases the original script, which I very much feel was more found family friendly, but that they couldn’t execute any longer due to COVID. The fandom deserves to see it. #Supernatural"

And it turns out the most likely reason Jensen struggled with the ending is because Dean dies like a punk.

---

EDIT:

OK, let me clarify a few things:

• "Homophobically gay" and "Jensen/Dean is about to commit a hate crime/say a slur" are popular memes describing the 15x18 confession and Destiel in general. Ill-phrased and insensitive phrasing perhaps, but pretty popular (and also accurate).
• The remark about hazing/bullying: Misha has said that the pranking has crossed a line a few times, but the cast seems mostly friendly regardless. On the writing/producing side, his treatment seems unpleasant compared to Jared and Jensen's, but he seems fine with it and gets paid nicely. I don't want to fall down a rabbit hole of conjecture and conspiracy theorizing. If I find the specific interviews, I will provide them, but they are from a long, long time ago and there is a lot of SPN content. Like, a lot. The show's been on for 15 years.
• A lot of people think the show is bad because it is bad, not just because Destiel didn't become canon. The plot, characters, and writing in general were messy as fuck from an objective standpoint, regardless of any personal stakes.
• I forgot to mention that the finale monster of the week were vampire clowns or as the fandom calls them vampire Juggalos.
• Link to one of the interviews where Misha talks about ball fondling: https://youtu.be/8bwzaP3l_28
• In my rush to post the writeup out I glossed over the non-shippy reasons why the episode was terrible and the fandom reactions, so here is an update: UPDATE It hasn’t even been 24 hours and Jim Beaver deactivated his tweet because of fans’ rage tweeting.

Jim Beaver played Bobby, the boys’ surrogate father. He’s generally a fan favorite, but some fans flipped out because he returned for the finale but Cas didn’t:

“y'all somehow managed to bring back jim beaver and mark pelegrino but misha was the one that couldn't make it bc of covid... the third fucking person on the call sheet. ofc he was the one y'all found to be expendable.”

“You literally brought Jim Beaver who’s a person of RISK be there amongst other 80 people on a bridge NONE OF THEM WEARING MASKS and you’re telling me that you couldn’t bring Misha Collins???? naa im calling this homophobia…”

“Like let’s not act as if Jim isn’t 70 years old that you placed there among the crew with no care and also the vamp chick from season 1 that NOBODY remembers... y’all just don’t like Misha Collins there, just say it”

“the show brought back mark pellegrino, jake able, jim beaver, vampire #207 and etc but misha and shoshannah two pivotal and essential characters to sam and deans story and the show were just too much”

He posted, “Thanks to all the kind people and thanks to all the unkind people. I’m deactivating my account. So long.”

Steering away from the Destiel drama, tetanus, juggalo vampires, and wigs were also big stars of the night:

“saw six people go "TETANUS?!" on the timeline and assumed bid*n caught it but its DEAN WINCHESTER????”

“I’ve never seen supernatural but the person who said that dean never got his tetanus shot because he thinks vaccines turn you gay is the funniest person alive”

“things Old Man Sam looks like: https://couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name.tumblr.com/post/635275319674372096/things-old-man-sam-looks-like-an-english

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Background

Supernatural is a CW show about two brothers, Dean and Sam, running around fighting monsters and having a lot of angst and drama with each other. It was goofy some episodes, serious in others, and tried to tackle complicated issues within the episodes. It also featured two conventionally attractive white guys. So you can see why it got popular pretty fast.

It got especially popular on Tumblr, which was the hotbed of all fandom discourse for the longest time on the internet. It was so popular on there, that it became one of the Big Three: Supernatural, Dr. Who, and Sherlock. It was one of the biggest shows on the entire internet, and it was very popular with teenage girls.

The Rise of Destiel

When it first came out, the shipping community of tumblr, a.k.a all of Tumblr, was kind of a mess, because there weren't many non-heterosexual ship options for them, as that's what Tumblr prefers over anything else. So the shippers made one of the first popular incest ships on the internet, Wincest, out of pure desperation. And if you weren't into Wincest, then you just didn't get a lot of room in that part of the fandom.

See Wincest in it's earliest forms on Fanfiction.net Wincest was in the many of the first fics in the Supernatural tag on Ao3

Wincest was so big it was even referenced in the show, when Dean and Sam visit a Supernatural(the in-universe book series about their lives written by a man with prophetic visions) Convention and meet two gay lovers who cosplayed as them.

Wincest was undethronable, until it was dethroned. When Season 4 premiered we were introduced to a new conventionally attractive white boy, Castiel. You see, Castiel was an angel who raised Dean from hell, making them basically soul-bonded forever. Even from the very beginning, he went on about how he and Dean has a special connection, and it really helped that Dean was way more popular than Sam on the show, despite Sam starting out as the main character.

You can see the progression, Wincest was dead, long live Destiel. The fics flooded Ao3, which was now the dominant fanfic site, and each new one spawned ten more based on it. The fandom blazed past everything else, with the most popular fic Twist and Shout reaching over 34,000 total kudos and 1,187,975 hits.

The popularity of the Ship boosted the show into the stratosphere on Tumblr, who finally had their gay ship to drool over. Destiel became fandom canon. One example of the many multi-gif posts made to glorify it

The show was peaking. Many girls I knew in middle school were obsessed, with the show and the pairing. Also me, I was also completely obsessed. I was very much in love.

The GayBaiting and The Fall

A lot of this section is directly ripped from this 2014 article, so please give it a read for more context.

The showrunners noticed, how could they not? They also noticed if they played upon the idea that Dean could be a lil' gay, let the show reference Castiel being so in love with him, and use a lot of romcom tropes, and maybe TELL THE ACTOR FOR CASTIEL (MISHA COLLINS) TO PLAY CAS LIKE A "JILTED LOVER" WITH DEAN, then they could drive the fandom into a frothing mess.

Queerbaiting was born on the back of this show. Queerbaiting refers to when a show teases a gay relationship for clout but never confirms it so they can have deniability. Supernatural proves that if you want a show to be popular, going to the gays never fails. Again, and Again, and AGAIN, the show teased the atmosphere between them. Just go back to the manips post and feel it.

But as time went on, and the show continued, and nothing changed or got confirmed, people on tumblr started losing interest. Newer shows to queerbait with came out, real homosexual relationships started to happen. Voltron. The shows fandom started to repress their Supernatural days and move on, especially as supernatural started entering it's 12th season. A new era had begun...

... .......

Season 15, episode 18

Season 15 was the last season of Supernatural ever, everyone looked upon this with relief, glad it was finally ending and the cast could move on. I actually started to pay attention to Supernatural in this season, out of pure interest for where it would go. The fandom made jokes about how funny it would be if they actually confirmed Destiel this season. Believe it or not, I actually thought it would happen because of Supernatural reaching the era of the Gays, 2020.

And then, episode 18 aired on the 5th of November. And then, Castiel started giving a speech about Dean, while looking directly into his eyes, and then he says, I Love You.

And then he gets dragged down to super mega ultra hell for experiencing a moment of true happiness.

What I want you to do is visit this link, https://www.tumblr.com/search/supernatural, or this one, https://www.tumblr.com/search/destiel, and scroll for a bit.

Because there's no way I can possibly condense for you the pure mixture of hilarity and fucking insanity the entire website devolved into. I'll try but I seriously don't think a single writer could capture the wild west of Tumblr at this point.

It started small, the Destiel tag was #9 on trending, every Supernatural blog in existence was reblogging and going crazy. And then people who had repressed their Supernatural memories noticed something was going on. And then popular blogs noticed what was going on. And then everyone on the entire website noticed something was going on. Tumblr refugees on Twitter noticed.

Tumblr became a supernova.

The Fallout

People were crying because it finally happened

People were making fun of them for immediately killing their gay character

A lot

People made fun of Jensen Ackles for looking extremely constipated during the confession

A lot

A lot

[A Lot](https://eyesandangels.tumblr.com/post/634075957607694336/deans-not-homophobic-hes-just-nevada-speed-at

LMAO

They make fun of the confession scene a lot

I mean come on it was pretty homophobic to kill off your fandom's beloved just after he confesses his love so that you don't have to explore a relationship

Yeah...

Blogs that hadn't posted in years reanimated.

And on top of all of this, other shit was completely going down. Georgia and Pennsylvania flipped colors. A fake Putin rumor spread. Hetalia was coming back. Season 5 of Sherlock was coming back(another queerbaiting show). MHA Spoilers

show spoiler

Dabi was confirmed to be Touya todoroki

Here's a really funny video recapping some of the insanity

Tumblr rose from the dead to and everyone is still going stir-fucking crazy. This is 2014 tumblr recaptured in it's purest essence so please enjoy the shitshow while you can.

Thanks Everyone

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

I quite enjoyed writing and receiving feedback on my Halsey post, so I thought I'd do another post about a different fandom. This time, we're delving into the extremely chaotic Adam Driver standom.

PLEASE NOTE: SEVERAL COMMENTS, USERNAMES, ETC. ARE LINKED AND SCREENSHOTTED HERE FOR EVIDENCE'S SAKE. DO NOT HARASS ANYONE INVOLVED. DO NOT DOXX ANYONE OR ATTEMPT TO CHASE THEM DOWN.

TL;DR: The Adam Driver fandom is split down the middle. Things came to a head when a fan from one side of the fandom gave Adam a wooden carving of his dog and he called them out in a New Yorker article months later. It turned out the person who made the wood carving is associated with fans who are convinced he is divorced from (or in the process of divorcing) his wife after Adam had an affair with Daisy Ridley. Wank ensued.

I'm going to start with the event and work backwards to the context. Let's start with the basics.

Basic Terminology: What is a Stan?

Eminem's song "Stan" describes a so-called "stalker fan," someone who is obsessed with an artist to the point of shaping their entire life around them. The term gained some prominence on Livejournal gossip blog "Oh No They Didn't" to describe superfans of artists, actors, and celebrities. Currently, a "stan" is anyone who posts exclusively or semi-exclusively about a famous person, group, or band, and a "standom" is a fandom made up of stans.

I've previously posted about Halsey stans; this post, however, is about Adam Driver stans.

Who is Adam Driver?

You most likely know 36-year-old Adam Driver from his work in the Star Wars franchise as the fearsome Kylo Ren, son of Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa. (WARNING: Article may contain spoilers.) What you may not know about Adam is his strange backstory, his marriage to his wife Joanne Tucker, and his rich filmography outside of Star Wars.

Born in California and raised in Indiana in a conservative family, Adam had dreams of leaving his small town of Mishawaka to become an actor. However, after 9/11, Adam, like many Americans, found himself swept up in the wave of patriotism that seized the USA, and he applied to become a Marine. He served for three years at Camp Pendelton, California as a mortarman and speaks fondly about his time in the Corps, as well as the friends he made. He was later honorably discharged for breaking his collarbone in a mountain biking accident and watched with guilt as his friends went on to fight in the ongoing War on Terror in the Middle East.

However, Adam was already reconsidering his career path during his service. A training exercise involving white phosphorous took a turn for the deadly, and he recalls:

I was like, ‘I’m going to smoke cigarettes and be an actor when I get out.’ Those were my two thoughts. I wanted to smoke cigarettes and be an actor.

After leaving the military, Adam, like many marines, had trouble adjusting to civilian life and puttered around the Midwest doing odd jobs. His second application to the acting school, Julliard, was accepted, and Adam dropped everything to move to New York City. During his education, he fell in love with acting and found its controlled release of emotions therapeutic. You can hear his TED talk about how acting helped him express himself and adjust to civilian life here.

He met his wife, Joanne, in his cohort. The two married in 2013 and went on to found Arts in the Armed Forces, or AITAF: a charity dedicated to bringing free, high-quality theater to military bases and to veterans's families.

Adam is famously shy and reclusive. He and his wife successfully hid the fact that they had a son for two years. While he isn't rude to fans, coworkers, or industry professionals, Adam is defensive of his personal space and reacts poorly to being candidly photographed in public.

He does not have social media, giving fans very little opportunity to speak or interact with him. If you want to say hi to him at all, you either have to wait for a charity auction, camp out for a red carpet, or attend an AITAF event and hope that he's there in-person. So when Adam announced a Broadway run in 2019, fans were thrilled at the opportunity to finally meet their idol.

March-July 2019: "Burn This"

Burn This is a somewhat obscure play by playwright Lanford Wilson. A Broadway revival was performed in 2019 with Keri Russel as the main character, Anna, and Adam as her love interest, Pale. The two begin a hasty love affair when Robbie, Pale's brother and Anna's roommate, dies suddenly in a boating accident and Pale comes by to collect Robbie's belongings. Robbie was gay, and the play takes place during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

The play isn't done often, partially because Pale is a challenging role: a fast-talking cokehead from New Jersey with violent mood swings. Pale is openly homophobic, yet spends the play trying to figure out how to mourn his brother. It takes skill to capture the subtlety in Wilson's writing and not downgrade Pale to a violent brute with no emotion. Adam originally played Pale during his tenure at Julliard and took on the role again for the Broadway revival. The play did so well that it was nominated for a Tony for Best Revival, and Adam was nominated for Best Actor in a Stage Play.

The "Burn This" Stage Door

It's common among theater fans to wait at the stage door to greet the actors, get their programs signed, and even (if they're lucky) chat with their idols for a bit. Occasionally, the crowd is sparse, but stage doors for famous actors are usually heavily crowded, even mobbed. Security is often needed for the safety of the crowd and the performers. Tom Hiddleston, for example, had a huge crowd 5-6 people deep at its thinnest when I met him after Betrayal in 2019.

Adam was no exception: the Burn This stage door usually had a moderate crowd after every show, and so the Hudson Theater was outfitted with several security guards and barricades, including a personal bodyguard for Adam himself. Early videos of the stage door show a small crowd, but as the play wore on, security measures became more intense.

In spite of the crowd, the Burn This stage door was usually pleasant and calm. Adam exited the theater promptly after the show ended each night, and he was incredibly sweet and patient with fans outside of the stage door. Throughout almost all of spring, Adam patiently stopped to sign every single person's Playbill, shake hands, and say hi. On one memorable occasion, he carried his dog, Moose, from the stage door to his car before coming back to sign programs. Plenty of videos exist on Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, and Reddit of peaceful interactions.

From my own experience at the door, I can personally say he will slow down for fans and happily greet them if they are calm and polite.

If.

June 2019: Someone Jumps The Stage

Stage door interactions slowed down around May. I was fortunate enough to meet Adam at the stage door, as were many friends who went around May 4th; others, however, waited for Adam, only to be told he was not coming. This sort of lag is normal, especially in the middle of a play run that's showing 8 performances a week: the actors are usually tired and want nothing more than to go home and get some sleep.

However, some fans were not satisfied. Some especially dedicated playgoers began staking out all entrance/exit points of the Hudson Theater. Sure enough, on days he didn't sign, Adam was leaving through the main entrance of the theater, accompanied by a small security detail. (Bear in mind that the main entrance =/= the stage door: the stage door was behind the theater and on an entirely separate street.)

A video was posted on Twitter in June 2019 of Adam leaving the main entrance of the Hudson Theater with his head down; in the background, you can hear a small crowd of people shouting after him. One woman gets right to the door of his car, but she is otherwise non-aggressive, and Adam gently turns her down before getting into the vehicle.

Reactions to this post were brief and basically amounted to, "Hey what the fuck OP," but this was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to weird, out-of-touch fan behavior.

Days later, a strange Twitter thread emerged, detailing a drunk woman who had to be kicked out of the Hudson and blocked from going near Adam at the stage door. Details of the thread were corroborated by others who were either at the same show or friends with OP. The story goes like this:

A woman got a little too tipsy on 17 dollar beers at the Hudson and sat through the entire show without incident. However, just after bows had ended and the actors had left, the woman stood up, made her way to the front of the stage, and climbed up. She then promptly made her way backstage, where she reportedly gave Keri Russel a huge fright before being escorted out by security. Once she was outside of the backstage area, the stage jumper persisted in trying to dodge security and get in front of Adam, insisting she was a "friend." Adam came out and signed as normal, not once paying attention to the screaming woman trying to dodge several security guards. Adam made his way home unscathed, and the stage jumper was never seen again.

But somehow, this was not the incident that made the news. At this point, you may be wondering why this was not the most memorable incident of the Burn This stage door. How could Adam or Keri not talk about the drunk woman who suddenly appeared backstage?

That's because the incident that did make the news has its roots deep in Adam Driver standom. Those roots dig into some very dark places.

We have arrived at the most famous incident at the Burn This stage door: the dog carving.

Summer 2019: The Dog Carving

In the summer, an Adam Driver stan by the username Missus-Misanthrope waited at the stage door with a special gift for Adam Driver: a wood carving of his beloved dog, Moose.

I have seen a picture of the (supposed) carving, but to maintain Missus-Misanthrope's privacy, I will not be posting a screenshot here. Essentially, it's a small, flat block of wood with Moose's smiling face woodburned into it. I am not a fan of Missus-Misanthrope (or her kin in our fandom) by any means, but it is extremely well-done.

When Adam made his way to her at the stage door, Missus-Misanthrope greeted him and handed him the carving. A GIF of this interaction is here.

At the beginning of the GIF, Adam is looking down, presumably at the wood carving. He nods at it and thanks Missus-Misanthrope with a smile. He turns hands it off to his security team. There is a long pause where he appears to be either waiting for his security team or examining the carving. Finally, he turns back to Missus-Misanthrope without making eye contact and continues signing Playbills. His expression is neutral.

Let me be abundantly clear: this exact GIF is impossible to find. This write-up took a while, partially because I was looking all over for the damn thing. It has been scrubbed from the Internet. The original Imgur post is set to "private." Accounts have been erased, posts have been either deleted or archived, and Twitters have been suspended, deactivated, or moved. It took over a week of me asking everyone I knew, combing individual Twitters by date, and abusing the Wayback Machine before someone eventually found it and sent it to me.

Missus-Misanthrope wanted this GIF gone from the Internet. This was the interaction Adam Driver remembered from his stage door. This interaction would become infamous months later, in October, when it came up during an interview.

October 2019: The New Yorker Article

During the Burn This run, author Michael Schumer interviewed Adam Driver for the New Yorker. The article was released in October 2019 and can be found here. I highly recommend it: it's a stunning interview, capturing a lot of the nuances of Adam's personality as he goes about his pre-show ritual.

However, this interview made waves because of Adam's off-hand comment about fan interactions at the stage door (emphasis mine):

On the couch was a piece of fan art he had received at the stage door. During “Girls,” strangers would often share details about their sex lives with him. (One guy stopped him in the subway and said, “I love that scene where you pee on her in the shower,” then turned to his girlfriend and said, fondly, “I pee on her all the time.”) But “Star Wars” has made him uncomfortably famous. “This one woman who has been harassing my wife came to the show and gave me a creepy wood carving that she made of my dog,” he said.

The stage jumper, the fans pursuing him at all doors into and out of the Hudson, seemed to fade away in comparison to this ten seconds of stage door history. Adam mentions the "creepy wood carving," and it is never touched upon again. But that one sentence sent stans into fits.

Some began gleefully sharing the original GIF of the interaction; others laughed at Missus-Misanthrope or showed her pity. Still more questioned whether or not it was appropriate to give Adam a portrait of his dog at all: even though Adam has featured Moose in photoshoots, stage door interactions, and even a news interview, opinions are mixed about how much fans are allowed to comment on his personal life. The wood carving of Moose seemed to toe that line in an uncomfortable way and ignited heated discussion on what behavior was "allowed" and "not allowed."

But there is a short passage just after Adam's comment about the wood carving that hints at the dark heart of this scandal:

He and Tucker have a young son, whose birth they kept hidden from the press for two years, in what Driver called “a military operation.” Last fall, after Tucker’s sister, who was launching a peacoat business, accidentally made her Instagram account public and someone noticed the back of his son’s head in one picture, the news wound up on Page Six.

Under what circumstances would Adam and Joanne have to hide a child for two years? Recall that Adam was not just scandalized by the wood carving (emphasis mine):

“This one woman who has been harassing my wife came to the show and gave me a creepy wood carving that she made of my dog."

No, something about Missus-Misanthrope herself had made him deeply uncomfortable. The wood carving wasn't the whole of the issue: it was something about how the fandom had treated his wife and the news of their child.

Here was where the real drama about this tiny wood carving lied.

Daiver Fandom and adamdriverfans

Missus-Misanthrope was part of a subreddit called "adamdriverfans." Not to be confused with the main Adam Driver subreddit, "adamdriver," adamdriverfans is incredibly small (only about 3000 subscribers) and, on the surface, appears to be a normal subreddit about Adam and his work. EDIT: It's 3,000 subcribers, not 300. Missed a zero!

However, probe deeper, and adamdriverfans reveals its true nature. The subreddit is, in part, a haven for discussion between Daivers, or people that "ship" Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley and want them to be in a relationship. ("Ship" is short for "relationship.")

Daivers are not to be confused with "Reylos," Star Wars fans who want Adam and Daisy's respective characters, Kylo Ren and Rey, to date. Daivers go one step further and want the actors to be together. Any Daivers found on adamdriverfans are the most extreme iteration of this kind of 'shipper: they believe that Adam and Daisy had an affair, followed by a falling-out somewhere around The Force Awakens, and that Lucasfilm (and their respective publicists) have been keeping them separate. This line of thinking also posits that Joanne is an ice queen keeping Adam on a short leash.

This is not to say that all posters on adamdriverfans are Daivers; many want what's best for Adam and see it as their right to comment on Adam's personal life. But it's challenging to separate posts from true-blue Daivers, posts from those who think Adam and Daisy had an affair, and posts from users who simply hate Joanne Tucker. In my opinion, it's impossible to go near the subreddit unless you believe, on some level, that Joanne and Adam should separate, and that Daisy is a factor in that separation.

Multiple posts exist trashing Joanne Tucker and questioning whether or not the baby is Adam's. Someone doxxed Adam and Joanne and discovered multiple residences, fueling speculation on whether or not they were "secretly" divorced or otherwise separated. There is "evidence" that their marriage is a sham or otherwise a marriage of convenience.

Supporters of Joanne and Adam's marriage and critiques of the subreddit are considered "blind" mean girls ignoring the truth and looking for someone to bully. In reality, the fans on adamdriverfans are hostile towards non-members: One poster even called other women "creepy" for asking to shake Adam's hand at the stage door. Still another post implies that fans who don't believe the rumors are waiting for their chance to sleep with Adam.

For its part, the mods of adamdriverfans posit the subreddit as a place for healthy discussion. Other stans treat adamdriverfans as a joke, leading the mods to be mostly hostile to those questioning the constant dunking on Adam and his wife. Dissenters have even been speculated to be PR people deflecting any discussion of Joanne and Adam's relationship in the hopes of saving *Burn This'*s ticket sales:

4Chan is full of PR people trying to shut down discussion by posting outrageous, disprovable claims in an effort to discredit all info about Joanne. You are a threat because you have a credible story.

This is why Burn This is selling slowly. There are tickets available for every single night and whole parts of the theatre are empty on some nights. Joanne is a PR disaster. They can’t even call on their friends and connections to help fill the seats

It's worthy of note that the Daiver and anti-Joanne communities extends into TikTok and other social media: for example, there is an entire Instagram account called "ihatejoannetucker" dedicated to posting personal photos and making fun of Joanne. Here, I focus on adamdriverfans because it was the main vehicle for Missus-Misanthrope to post her thoughts and feelings.

MissusMisanthrope's Backstory

Missus-Misanthrope had been recognized by Adam for a reason: she had already tried to pass a carving (speculated to be the very same dog carving given in 2019) to Adam via Joanne at an AITAF donor event in 2018.

Bear in mind that AITAF events are primarily for celebrating veterans and bringing accessible theater to them and their families. They are not fan events for Adam Driver. However, Missus-Misanthrope saw her opportunity to interact with Adam when she saw Joanne and a friend at the bar (bolding for emphasis by me):

I am an artist and had two gifts that I wanted to try to get to Adam. One was an anniversary plaque for AITAF, the other was a portrait of his dog. When I saw Joanne, I thought she would be the perfect person to help me accomplish this.

From the second I approached her, she made me feel like garbage. I was polite, I thanked her for her work with AITAF. When I said that I had gifts for Adam, she asked me if I was a veteran. When I said no, she narrowed her eyes at me and asked me "how did you get IN HERE?" as though she suspected that I had... snuck in?

"I donated money that was very hard to come by and purchased a ticket" I responded.

She chuckled smugly and said "oh... you're a DONOR. No. I can't help you."

I was taken aback... I was not sure that I heard her correctly. "You can't do anything? If I give them to you can you..."

"No"

Then she turned to the woman she was with and said "Lindsay, this... DONOR has PRESENTS for ADAM."

Then they both just... laughed? Like how could I EVER think that they would let me give my STUPID presents to ADAM.

Missus-Misanthrope continued describing feelings of hurt, dismissal, and betrayal.

I felt like they both viewed me like I was NOTHING.

I have never felt like such a freaking idiot in my life.

So... that was something. I almost cried. Went into the situation really admiring Joanne. Left the situation feeling really disillusioned and crappy and like I did something wrong. It sucked to look forward to that event so much and work hard to overcome anxiety to travel to NY alone and have some awful crap like that happen.

She implies that, had Adam not commented his gratitude towards donors later on in the event, she would not have felt appreciated or seen (emphasis mine):

Adam was very vocal about his appreciation of the donors to AITAF so at least I didn't feel like complete useless trash.

I hope she isn't treating a lot of donors like this. This could really make some people look at AITAF in a different light if she is the only person they interact with.

A later comment in the same thread underlines feelings of betrayal (emphasis mine):

I have played it over and over in my head and I literally didn't do anything wrong. I mean, even if I had, she is a grown woman... why was she laughing at me? I felt like I was in a freaking nightmare.

Her behavior was so ugly and childish. If she is doing this to people, they NEED to speak up. I don't know why anyone feels like they need to protect her if she is really treating people this way. This type of behavior coming from her can impact the reputation of Adam and AITAF.

I am going to be sending an official complaint to AITAF about my experience. It was just so, so not okay.

By the time Missus-Misanthrope attended the stage door in 2019, she had already publicly expressed dislike of Joanne and became a valued member of adamdriverfans. And Adam, whether through his wife or through other incidents at other AITAF events, knew full well who she was.

October 2019: Your Friendly Neighborhood Pariah

Fans elsewhere quickly identified the "creepy wood carving" girl as Missus-Misanthrope. EDIT: I've been informed that it was not fans, but Missus-Misanthrope's husband, who identified her. Her husband left an angry comment (now deleted) on the author's Twitter.

adamdriverfans, predictably, went absolutely apeshit.

The article was deemed to be "angry" and vengeful towards fans like Missus-Misanthrope for no reason. A poster deemed calling Missus-Misanthrope out in the article "classless." There was worry that Missus-Misanthrope was now in danger due to Adam's comment:

This fan has NOTHING. Who is going to protect her from the onslaught of Adam’s rabid fans and even the media who will likely try and track her down?

Other members of adamdriverfans said that Adam was well within his right to say something:

People are taking this way too personally. The fact is, there are a lot of Adam Driver "fans" out there who have been too creepy, taken things too far, and done gross stuff like deliberately scribble his wife out of photos they took together. Are those fans in the minority? Yeah, I'm positive of that.

But he has every right to his opinion and every right to express boundaries like any other person out there. I'm not even a huge fan of the dude and I get where he's coming from, regardless of how awkwardly he puts it.

He doesn't owe anybody anything. No one is entitled to him being 24/7 super nice and positive and not mentioning stuff like this.

Those who side with Missus-Misanthrope say that Adam was targeting Missus-Misanthrope on purpose:

My issue with the article was not that Adam expressed being creeped out by a fan/defending his wife. My issue is that he targeted someone specific. This fan had been having issues with AD and giving him this specific woodcarving for a YEAR now. I believe that this specific fan was mentioned on purpose. I don’t believe in coincidences.

But what about Missus-Misanthrope? Well...she didn't feel good, to put it lightly. In a statement to the subreddit entitled "Your Friendly Neighborhood Pariah," Missus-Misanthrope defended her behavior at the 2018 AITAF event:

I simply approached her in a common area of the theatre because I was advised by AITAF staff that I could talk to her about handing my gifts for AITAF and Adam off to someone who was able to help. Had I not been told that she was someone who could help me after the AITAF folks said that I should "definitely try to get the gifts to Adam" because "he will love them" I would not have even spoken to her.

All I was trying to do was give something to someone that I admire and to a foundation that I support. I wasn't trying to break up a marriage or be manipulative. I was following advice from people who work for AITAF and it ended up turning into a very unpleasant situation.

Regarding the stage door interaction, Missus-Misanthrope felt attacked and exhausted:

Less than 24 hours later, I was being attacked and insulted for basically just existing in the same place as Adam. I now just wish I had never gone.

This fandom makes me sad and a little bit sick. I am going to just continue existing as I have been in the past. I am just doing my best. If people hate me, I doubt that I can change that. I have no control over what anyone does but my own self. So I am just going to focus on being a decent person and treating others with kindness.

The mods on adamdriverfans followed up with a post on Missus-Misanthrope:

Here at this sub we have had the pleasure and privilege of knowing MissusMisanthrope and we have seen firsthand how brave she has been in the face of so much bullying and harassment – all because she had spoken about incident with Joanne Tucker and for daring to give Adam Driver a gift. What happened yesterday though is on an entirely different level altogether. What has happened to MissusMisanthrope feels like a horror story of the worst possible outcome of being a fan of a celebrity:

Bullied by the celebrity’s wife and staff.

Bullied and doxed by fans of the celebrity.

Finally, being bullied by the celebrity himself.

But curiously, according to adamdriverfans, Adam had pointed out the wrong fan:

The absolutely tragedy of this situation is (and I can not state this enough) is that he singled out the wrong person. Again, HE SINGLED OUT THE WRONG PERSON. There is another person who actively harassed JT and her family on social media (the infamous StalkerChan) but, let’s be absolutely clear about this, that wasn’t MissusMisanthrope.

This meant that there was a mysterious other fan behaving inappropriately, and that Adam had mistaken Missus-Misanthrope for the other fan.

Regardless of the error, the dice had been cast, and the votes were in: Adam Driver hated his fans, and Missus-Misanthrope was, indeed, a fandom pariah.

Aftermath: Exodus, Post Purging, and the Downward Spiral to Doucheville

I want to emphasize how challenging it was to dig up receipts for this post. That's because, shortly after the article broke, Missus-Misanthrope deleted all of her social media, and adamdriverfans began deleting older posts. When I began compiling evidence in September 2020, many old posts, tweets, etc. were completely gone. The GIF of the infamous stage door interaction had been almost completely wiped from the Internet: the original post on Imgur is private.

Shortly after the New Yorker article, Adam opened an Omaze charity campaign: By donating money to AITAF, you would be entered into a raffle to attend The Rise of Skywalker premiere with him.

However, Adam had previously voiced his distaste for peddling his autograph for money:

I don’t want to start getting into favors. It’s not about me and Star Wars. It’s about the people that we’re trying to serve and if you don’t get that then I’d rather not be associated with your money.

As a result, this Omaze campaign was met with negative reactions from those who sided with Missus-Misanthrope, with the general opinion that Adam was now a "sellout," a slave to his wife's desires to "save" AITAF from bad press. Many questioned if the Omaze campaign was an effort to repair relationships with fans after the Missus-Misanthrope scandal. Others questioned whether Adam was on a downward spiral in general, linking his "sellout" behavior to his weight loss and (supposed) fighting with Joanne.

Either way, one comment seemed to sum up the drama nicely:

It seems he is on a downward spiral to Doucheville.

Many announced that they were leaving the fandom after the Omaze campaign and after the New Yorker article. However, given the proximity to the mass exodus from the Star Wars fandom after The Rise of Skywalker hit theaters in December, it is unclear how much of the Adam standom exodus is Star Wars related and how much is Missus-Misanthrope related.

Regardless of the opinions of those on adamdriverfans, the Omaze campaign was a success. A veteran (coincidentally named Joanna) won and met Adam. A fan-run campaign started after The Rise of Skywalker raised a whopping 90,000 dollars for AITAF, funding their 2020 fiscal year and landing a personal thank-you from Adam himself. Needless to say, bad press from Missus-Misanthrope's interactions with Adam and Joanne did not stick.

It is unknown whether or not Adam will do another Broadway run in the future.

EDIT: I'm super overwhelmed and delighted by the positive reception to this post. Thank you so, so much for the great discussion and for reading this (and for giving it awards!). If you're spending money to give me awards, it would be stellar if you could give that money to BLM instead.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

This is a really old piece of drama, but I only discovered it recently after getting into Anna Rudolf’s Twitch channel (note: I don't think this breaks the rules because she wasn't a Twitch streamer at the time, and she's still primarily a chess analyst).

Warning: I don’t play a lot of chess, I’ve never followed chess competitively, and when this happened the only thing I really cared about in life was Webkinz. Even so, it’s pretty clear that this was screwed up.

Anna Rudolf is a Hungarian chess player. At the time this happened, in 2007, she was 20 years old. Since then she’s become an International Master, a Woman Grandmaster, and a member of the Hungarian Olympic Chess Team. She no longer plays competitively, but instead works as a commentator and analyst, and since the pandemic has been streaming through Twitch (her channel is here if you’re curious). If you were a Soothouse fan (RIP), you might recognise her from this video.

This took place at the Vandeouvre Open, whose current website calls them the “Biggest Chess Tournament in France”. At the tournament in 2007 there were 100 players, with the highest ranking being a chess grandmaster named Christian Bauer. Anna had a ranking of 2293 at the time, and was not yet ranked as a master.

Chess uses a ranking system where points are added or taken away based on games won while supervised. To achieve a higher ranking you need to have a point total within that range (for example, at the time Christian Bauer had a ranking of 2634, which made him a grandmaster since it is in the range of 2500-2700). So tournaments are an opportunity for chess players to move up and down the ranking, and have the opportunity to play those similarly ranked or higher ranked then they are.

Anna came into the tournament extremely strong. She was not expected to do particularly well, so there was a lot of surprise when she won her first four games in a row. Her second game, and the one that caused all the controversy, was against Christian Bauer. This caused a lot of talk about how she could have done so well, and some players began to suspect cheating.

It should be noted here that the normal way that people cheat in chess is through using a computer to calculate what the optimal next move will be. As supercomputers became more refined through time, and the Internet has made it easy to communicate their suggestions to chess players on site, concerns have arisen among high level players that any competitor could have a supercomputer.

Another important note is that Christian Bauer himself did not believe that Anna cheated. During the game and directly after the game it didn’t even occur to him. Afterwards he heard other players suggest it, and did briefly consider that it might be a “very unlikely” possibility. But then a friend of his used a supercomputer to prove that Anna’s moves did not line up with what a computer would have suggested, and that caused him to switch back to the “Anna did nothing wrong” side. He also said in later interviews that he made an error late in the game that Anna exploited perfectly, explaining how she won against someone with a much higher ranking. This is in line with what basically every other member of the chess community believes.

While several people gossiped about her cheating during the tournament, one competitor, a Latvian named Oleg Krivonosov, wanted to make actual allegations. He was dismissed by his fellow chess players because his claim had no evidence and no logical basis.

But he did not stop to listen to common sense. Krivonosov was hellbent on the idea of Anna cheating, so he rounded up fellow Latvians Oleg Lazarev and Ilmars Starostits to brainstorm with him. The next day, they went back to the competition and claimed that they knew exactly how she was cheating.

And what was their airtight hypothesis? Well, during her competitor’s moves Anna would get up and walk around, go to the bathroom, and apply her lip balm.

“Aha!” they must have crowed triumphantly, “Her lip balm is the supercomputer!”

Yeah, really.

To be fair, they did not literally think that she had disguised a 2007 supercomputer as a tube of lip balm. They thought that the tube was using the internet to receive signals from a nearby supercomputer, which she then used to make her next move. Which, considering the properties of both 2007 technology and of lip balm tubes, is basically just as preposterous.

Incredibly, they were not laughed out of the country. In fact, Anna went on to play two of them. The first, Lazarev, ended in a draw. Even with the accusation of cheating, Anna was doing pretty well.

The second Latvian she played, Starostits, went out of his way to make sure that she knew that he “knew” that she was cheating. He refused to shake hands, asked the arbiter to take away her bag (which the arbiter did, for some reason), and also got her banned from using her lip balm or from leaving the hall during the tournament.

A large part of chess playing is psychological. When you feel good and you’re doing good, you’re more likely to win or win again. Anna had been doing well all tournament, and presumably feeling on top of the world. This, alongside Bauer’s mistake, is the explanation most people give for her winning streak.

On the other hand, being publicly called a cheater, having your opponent refuse to shake hands, and then being treated like a criminal by the supposedly-objective arbiter, has about the opposite effect. Anna went on to lose that game, although it was a pretty even match to the end.

It also turns out that Starostits, aside from faulty logic and a strong sense of justice against twenty-year-olds who use lip balm, had a good motive to try and throw Anna off. If she had taken a draw in that game she could have finished in the top three. Starostits needed a win.

If that was his strategy, it worked. Starostits went on to take second. Thankfully, Anna also had somewhat of a happy ending in the rankings. She went on to take ninth place (she was expected to land around twenty-second), which allowed her to qualify for International Master and Woman Grandmaster.

In the aftermath, basically everyone sided with Anna. She left her last match crying, and many of her competitors went out of their way to comfort her. During the prize-giving ceremony, the president of the Vandeouvre club made a point to clear her name, telling everyone that she was just the victim of an amoral play. The crowd supposedly clapped for her for five minutes straight.

Krisonov, her original accuser, still could not let go of the belief that she was cheating. He promised to show up at the next tournament they both attended, Capelle-La-Grande, and accuse her again. If he did make these accusations they were dismissed out of hand, as no record of them shows up online.

The arbiters at Vandeouvre caught a fair amount of flack for their whole part in this. There was absolutely no evidence of her cheating at the time, and the arbiter either ignored internal protocols about how to deal with accusations of cheating (which are meant to prevent exactly what happened, a false accusation throwing a winning player off of their game), or the tournament simply didn’t have any.

False rumours swirled around online afterwards. Anna herself didn’t really comment on it, but her supporters found themselves having to clarify that most players she played were not ranked much higher than herself, and that her only incredibly high ranked competitor admitted to making a mistake that lost him the match.

For better or for worse, that weekend still influences her legacy. Anna continued playing for many more years, but that particular tournament is seen as one of the highlights of her competitive play. And the “scandal” is one of the first things to come up when you search for her online.

From what I could find, the incident is still occasionally brought up in general discussions of chess today, mostly in regards to two concepts: cheating with technology, and feminism.

Anna was a young, attractive woman in a field that is generally seen as male-dominated. Most of the rationale of her accusers was “he couldn’t lose to her”, and in an interview done by the Atlantic in 2019, she noted that a lot of the comments she received were very explicitly along the lines of “he couldn’t lose to a woman.”

The other chessplayer she was being interviewed with (Judit Polgar) noted that there were many times when male chessplayers did not believe her results because they did not believe that she could be that good, and that female chessplayers need to have a “strong character” to carry on. She called the experience a “teaching from life of how unfair [chess] can be”.

Even with the attempts in the last few years to promote women within male dominated fields, only two of the top one hundred chess players are women. In just 2015, one of the top English chess players, Nigel Short, claimed that men are just better at things like “chess” and “parking” than women, and later criticised his detractors as “shrill feminists”. Men tend to play chess more than women, and women tend to do worse playing competitively against men than they would playing against women.

As technology becomes smaller, the fear of chessplayers cheating becomes larger. In 2007, Christian Bauer said that he thought there was no worry of “cheating paranoia”. This actually seems to be mostly accurate.

In the thirteen years since, there have been a few large cheating scandals. None of them (from what I can see), however, have triggered any sort of witch hunt or disproportionate rule changes. While the situation with Anna stands out as what chess paranoia could lead to if unchecked, it does not seem to be any kind of herald of the future.

That’s pretty much the drama. If you’re a chess person and notice something I got wrong please let me know and I’ll edit it in.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

Weekly Hobby Round Up

This is a weekly catch-all post for casual hobby talk for the community. This post is for breaking drama (the 14 day rule will not apply to this post), news, chat, drama that may not fit the rules or is too short for a post write-up, etc. Bring your own popcorn!

RULES

• Be civil
• Follow lemmy.world's posting rules
• Don't link directly to pirate or malware sites, use screenshots instead
• No vagueposting (changing names and not naming bands/fandoms/etc is fine, but if your post is so vague no one can understand the drama it will be deleted)
• Explain any acronyms and hobby terms (not everyone here is in your hobby!)
• Ctrl+F the post to check your topic wasn't already posted before posting
• For any issues use the report feature

Happy hobby drama-ing!

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Introduction

Most people floating around the fandom areas of the Internet have probably heard of Warrior Cats. This past post about some of the franchise's drama does a fantastic job of explaining how the series and its fandom work, but I'll provide another summary for those of you who don't enjoy clicking links.

Warrior Cats (or simply "Warriors" depending on where you live) is a nearly two-decade old children's fantasy series about "Clans" of dozens of wild cats who live according to a code of honor. Originally just a single six-book plot, its success spawned countless sequels, prequels, and standalone stories. There are over 80 books in the series now, including six full main story arcs of six books each—and they're not slowing down any time soon, with five more books releasing just this year and the seventh arc currently underway. The series was created by author Victoria Holmes, while the books themselves are ghostwritten by two other authors, all collectively sold under the pen name "Erin Hunter." Plots in these books typically revolve around bloody battles between the different Clans, mystical prophecies received from the spirits of cats who have died (known as StarClan), and, of course, mountains upon mountains of romantic drama and love triangles.

To quote the other post: "Are the books any good? Well… no, but that’s irrelevant." Some of them are quite good, but most are mediocre at best—and in any case, it's not the books per se that draw in legions of twelve year-old fans. The world Warriors created has generated a massive online fandom of kids, teens, and young adults earnestly designing their own cats and entire fan-made Clans for the sake of fanfiction, roleplay, fanart, and more.

Ashfur: The Origin

In 2007, while writing the draft for Warriors's third main story arc, Vicky Holmes had one thing in mind: Ashfur. This third arc, titled "Power of Three," was about a trio of cats—siblings—who each possessed a superpower that they were destined to use to save the Clans. But that was only window dressing for Vicky's true goal. It was no secret that she had... a fondness, shall we say, for tragic scenes dripping with drama, and she'd had one of these in mind ever since beginning to brainstorm PoT's plot: A mother's children are threatened, and the only way she can save them is to reveal the shocking truth: They are not hers. From this one kernel of drama came everything else.

And so Power of Three, a story about young cats with superpowers, was entirely structured around a scene unrelated to that idea. At the end of book five, a fire breaks out in the forest, and our three heroes are trapped by the flames. Their mother, Squirrelflight, tries to clear a path for them to escape, but her way is blocked by Ashfur—a cat who was a rival for her romantic affections in the previous story arc, in which Squirrelflight was a main character, before she chose her fellow protagonist Brambleclaw as her mate. The scene that follows is widely considered the most recognizable and iconic moment in Warrior Cats, featured in countless pieces of fan art and animated videos: Surrounded by the fire, his eyes aglow with hatred and madness, Ashfur raves about how he's never forgiven Squirrelflight for being "faithless" to him. In a speech rivaling General Hux from The Force Awakens for its intensity and anger, he echoes incels worldwide and recounts just how badly he's been wronged because this woman wouldn't go on a date with him. He utters the infamous line: “Upset? I’m not upset. You have no idea how much pain I’m in. It’s like being cut open every day, bleeding onto the stones. I can’t understand how any of you failed to see the blood. . . .” He even reveals that he secretly helped the villain of the previous arc attempt to murder Squirrelflight's father, just as he's now going to let her children burn to death—all to get revenge for being turned down.

I've already spoiled what happens next: Squirrelflight, to save the protagonists' lives, reveals to Ashfur that they are not, in fact, her children. Her motherhood was a deception, and not even Brambleclaw knows that he is not their father. She does not tell Ashfur who their true parents are, but what she's already said is enough—Ashfur now has a new path for his revenge. He's going to publicly reveal to all the Clans that Squirrelflight lied, destroying her standing and humiliating her.

It is eventually revealed, in the sixth and final book of PoT, that the trio's true mother was Squirrelflight's sister Leafpool, who as a Clan "medicine cat" (essentially a faith doctor) was forbidden to bear children, hence the lie. Ashfur is killed by one of the protagonists, but the full details of the secret are still revealed to all the Clans, shaming both Squirrelflight and Leafpool.

We now skip ahead to book 4 of the following story arc. One of our protagonists visits StarClan (the cat heaven) in a vision, and notices Ashfur present among them. Shocked, they ask another StarClan cat—a wise mentor figure—why Ashfur was allowed into StarClan, instead of being sent to the Dark Forest, the cat hell, for his crimes and attempted murders. Serenely, speaking with Vicky Holmes's full intent, the mentor figure replies: "His only crime was to love too much."

Ashfur: The Fandom

It is impossible to overstate just how big of a deal Ashfur became in the Warriors fandom for years to come. Now, naturally, in a series with hundreds of named characters and plenty of other drama-filled stories to go around, the fandom had lots of things to talk about... but Ashfur was constantly near the top of the list.

It'll come as no surprise to anyone who's spent time in a fandom with lots of young teenagers that there was a large movement viewing Ashfur as... "Misunderstood." He became practically idolized by lots of young fans—particularly young female fans—as a symbol of romantic tragedy. Contrasting this were fans who, rightfully, wondered what the hell Vicky was thinking when she wrote that line about "loving too much" and pointed out that Ashfur was both a misogynist and a murderer... etc, etc, etc. The Ashfur wars raged for years across every fandom platform—Tumblr, Youtube, forum boards—spurred on in large part by two factors.

The first is easy: Kids don't really have a good perspective of what a healthy relationship looks like. Trying to murder a woman's children because you want her that badly... can seem beautiful, in a twisted way. And it helps when the books themselves end up confirming this interpretation for you.

The second factor is a phenomenon that affects nearly every aspect of the Warriors fandom: A lot of fans... don't really read the books. Remember, the books themselves aren't the draw! The world is the draw. Kids want to make their own unique cats with names like Darknesstalon and Furyscythe (those names definitely wouldn't fit into the world of the books, if it's unclear). They don't care what happened in some new book that released this year. For a lot of people, the world of Warriors is a purely creative one—and a lot of kids actually found their way into the fandom solely through fan content, without ever touching an actual book. So when your whole knowledge of Ashfur is based on fan animation videos that show off the tears in his eyes as he pleaded with Squirrelflight to love him back—

You get the picture.

Working Partners

Around 2013, following the conclusion of the fourth arc, Vicky Holmes passed on her torch. Though she still retains some involvement with the series, the books' plots are now created by a team of writers called Working Partners, while still being ghostwritten by the same two authors from before. WP's involvement with the fifth arc onwards has produced a number of changes in the writing and decisions made about how to handle characters, some negative, some positive.

This brings us to the seventh and current story arc, "The Broken Code," which began releasing in spring 2019. In writing this arc, the new team by all appearances took note of a number of common fan complaints about the series that had existed for years. This included a number of questions about the series's status quo that the books themselves typically ignore, such as "Why do the cats arbitrarily segregate themselves into different Clans when they all have the same culture and almost always have to unite to fend off outside threats?", "Why aren't medicine cats allowed to have children, that's a stupid and unnecessary rule?", or "Why do none of the characters seem to notice or care that their leaders always promote their relatives to positions of power?" (This last one is of course because characters in positions of power are almost always protagonists, and protagonists usually end up being relatives of other protagonists.) Every indication from TBC so far is that questions like these will be addressed in the series itself, possibly ending with lasting systemic change for the Clans.

Even more than any of those questions, the new team became aware of one particular fan complaint: Ashfur. By now the Warriors fandom had been around long enough to become somewhat more mature—though Ashfur stans still existed, the general consensus was totally aware that he was an outright villain who was in no way a dreamy misunderstood boyfriend. And so the time came that Working Partners, in planning out The Broken Code, had a brilliant idea: Make Ashfur the villain. Bring him back, as a sinister Big Bad for the seventh arc, and satisfy the fandom by showing once and for all that he's not some relatable lovestruck sadboi. More than that, retcon his placement in StarClan as a trick all along—Ashfur lied his way into heaven and has been plotting his revenge ever since.

"But, wait, isn't he... dead?" you ask, confused. Yes, but this is Warrior Cats, and death is kinda irrelevant. The entire plot of the fourth arc was about evil dead cats returning to fight a final battle and getting killed again, this time for good. If the new team could come up with a convincing way to make Ashfur insert himself back into the plot as a spirit, there would be nothing stopping them from reusing him.

This would have made shockwaves among the fandom no matter what, but the discourse was set into motion even before the release of TBC's first book. Kate Cary, one of the series's two ghostwriters, confirmed on her blog that a "controversial character" would be returning for arc 7. She gave no details beyond that, but most fans assumed this meant a villain, and speculation began. Could it be this character? Or this one? Or what about this other one...? And Ashfur's name, of course, came up a lot.

And then the rumor started. Ashfur. Leaked to the fandom from an unknown source came the whispers that it was Ashfur—it was Ashfur big time. Ashfur, the rumor said, was going to possess and take over the body of a living character and wreak havoc. Plenty of people believed it. Plenty of other people likewise dismissed it—the writers would never do something like that.

Heh.

The Broken Code

The first book of The Broken Code released in April 2019 and kicked things off with a bang. StarClan has gone totally silent for unknown reasons and isn't communicating prophecies and wisdom to the living cats like they normally do. Over the course of the book, one of our new young cat protagonists is spoken to by a mysterious unseen spirit. You see, Squirrelflight's mate Brambleclaw—now the leader of his Clan and named Bramblestar—is ill, and this spirit knows how to cure him. Acting on its instructions, the protagonist convinces all the cats to bury Bramblestar in snow to bring his fever down.

He dies.

Then he comes back to life! All the characters cheer. Bramblestar shakily gets up... looks around... and then walks over to Squirrelflight. "Greetings," he says in a deep voice. "It's good to be with you again."

Heh.

The book ends with another one of the protagonists on a walk through a totally different part of the forest, when he suddenly encounters... Bramblestar?? But it's a ghost. The ghost-Bramblestar runs towards him, yelling "Help! Please help!" The protagonist flees in terror. The atmosphere of the scene is excitingly horror-esque in a way that no Warriors book before has been.

Things only escalate in books 2 and 3, with each passing book amping up both the intense ominous feeling of the story and the chilling menace of the living "Bramblestar's" actions. In book 2, "Bramblestar" spends all his time with Squirrelflight, creepily fawning over her and insisting she approve all her actions with him. At the same time, he uses his position as the respected leader of a Clan to push for aggressive punishment for cats who commit minor infractions. He argues that he knows why StarClan has gone silent—it's because the Clans aren't obeying their Code strictly enough. In book 3 he pushes the other Clans to join him in a war against the cats that refuse to bow to his new regime, a war that ends near book 3's conclusion with him beaten and captured by the heroes and their allies.

As this goes on, the fandom starts to realize something. The impostor pretending to be Bramblestar... is an incredible villain. His writing hits notes of darkly intimidating behavior rarely seen in this mediocre kids' series, whether it's publicly threatening other cats for disobeying him, trying to murder a protagonist in the dark of night, or even—in one scene—privately gloating to one of the protagonists about how successful his plan to fool everyone has been. And all of this contrasts beautifully with the other side of his personality that emerges whenever Squirrelflight's name comes up: an obsessive, unhealthy, pathetic interest in her. He makes dumb mistakes and is easily tricked whenever another character leads him to believe he might get to spend more time with her. He drops everything and forgets all his other priorities if she's involved. He's a simp. And the two styles of behavior blend perfectly in the scenes where his true personality comes out—when Squirrelflight begins to push him away, knowing that something is wrong, he becomes violent and brutal, verbally abusing her and at one point bodily throwing her off a small ledge. It's a thorough, shockingly cold and real portrayal of a man obsessed with owning a woman. In a children's fantasy book about anthropomorphized cats.

Of course, most of the fandom knew it was Ashfur. The rumors and leaks helped, but even from the first book of the arc it was obvious. His main goal being "habe sex w/ Squireflit" is more than enough to prove that, but there were other hints too. In book 1, a protagonist has a vision of the cats' territory being suddenly set aflame—and of flakes of ash falling into his fur. (Yes, the book uses those words.) In book 2, the impostor references specific past events that Ashfur would be overly concerned with, and is clueless as to significant events that happened shortly after Ashfur's death. In book 3, in the scene where the "horror" vibe peaks, the impostor's spirit emerges temporarily from Bramblestar's body and menacingly threatens a protagonist—and though its appearance is smoky and indistinct, the protagonist can see its eyes are a bright blue, just like Ashfur's.

That book (which released earlier this year) ends with the impostor captured and Squirrelflight about to announce to all the cats that she believes she knows who he really is—but by that time the cover of book 5 had already been revealed. This is the cover, and this is official artwork of Ashfur.

Ashfur: The Fandom, Redux

I hope you were all anticipating this last part, because our story wouldn't be complete without it. Despite all the hints above and more I didn't mention... the fandom, as always, had diehard holdouts who refused to believe it was Ashfur at all costs. Thus did the last 1.5 years in the fan community become a strange rebirth of Ashfur wars, with many of the same elements of the original ones. Because, you see, one of the chief arguments the Ashfur deniers used was that Ashfur would never do these things. He would never try to murder other cats. He would never wreak havoc and turn the Clans against themselves. He would never hurt Squirrelflight like that!

I assume I don't need to provide counter-arguments.

Other arguments came from a variety of places. Some fans, as always, clearly had no idea what was actually going on in the current books, and were arguing from a place of ignorance. Some latched onto theories that the impostor was instead whoever their personal favorite villain was. Some argued that, while Ashfur was evil and murderous, he would never take the actions that the impostor had and try to manipulate all of the Clans, because he only cared about Squirrelflight. These people were essentially in denial, since anyone who follows the news knows that men can do absolutely horrific things to unrelated people when acting on anger about being rejected.

At one point I encountered a post suggesting that Mothwing—a still-living, female, non-blue-eyed atheist—was the impostor and that all the Ashfur theories were ignoring the obvious truth... though it was probably a troll.

Even when the book 5 cover was revealed, the holdouts for the most part insisted there was no proof that the cat on the cover was Ashfur and not another cat with a similar appearance. And when all else failed, they had one argument they could always fall back on: It doesn't matter whether it is Ashfur, it matters whether it should be Ashfur. Ashfur coming back as a villain, they argued, would be a stupid twist. It would ruin the story and there was no hope of the books being good if it really was him. Massive positive fan response to TBC and adoration for its new characters tended to disagree.

The Reveal

And now we come to the close. With book 3 having ended on a cliffhanger like that, most fans eagerly began the wait for the release of book 4 this November. While it seemed like Squirrelflight was seconds away from saying Ashfur's name, most fans were hesitant to assume that would happen. After all, this is Warriors, a series famous for its meandering plot and refusal to let characters actually figure out the mysteries before the last book of an arc. Everyone prepared to be disappointed when they opened book 4 and found Squirrelflight saying "I know who the impostor is... but I can't tell you yet!!"

Nope! A couple weeks ago, a small preview of the book was released online. In chapter 1, Squirrelflight says "It's Ashfur." In chapter 2, the characters trick Ashfur into saying "Yes, I am Ashfur" to Squirrelflight—complete with two fantastic villain monologues, one where he talks about his lust for her, and one where he rages at the other characters that he still has more plans and they haven't beaten him yet.

With any luck, the remaining three books of the arc are going to be fantastic, and all because teen girls in 2010 had the hots for an angsty murdering incel wHosE oNLy CriMe WaS tO LoVe ToO mUcH.

TLDR: Woman writes children's fantasy cat books where a man tries to burn a woman's children alive because she wouldn't go out with him. Online fandom argues for years over whether he was actually evil or just a sexy misunderstood bad boy. New writing team takes over cat books a decade later, sees online controversy, and decides to bring the character back as a villain again, leading to fantastic books with chilling villain scenes and transforming the incel into one of the best-written characters in the series.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

The story I am going to be telling you today involves a lot of jealousy, some drama and most importantly, lots of pettiness. I'm going to talk about the drama surrounding the infamous Vantablack, which, at the time, was the blackest substance in the world.

It was created in 2014 by a nanotechnology lab to be used in engineering projects, particularly regarding space (it can help telescopes and cameras by absorbing stray light, among other things). Here's some pictures of how stuff painted with this substance actually looks like-- I promise you, it's not photoshop. This thing is actually pretty amazing, as it absorbs 99.965% of visible light. As you can guess, this substance was quite the discovery and it became quite rare not only due to its copyright but also due to its relative toxicity, or at the very least heavy duty usage.

Naturally, the art world was gaga over it and wanted to be able to use it. However, it was not something available to the public, much less to the art world which I assume isn't the main interest of most scientists. That was, until a spray version of it called Vantablack S-VIS was licensed exclusively to Anish Kapoor in 2016. Who is that, you may add? He's a famous indian sculptor and artist. Did I also mention that he's one of the richest artists in the world? Well, his cash made it so that this spray paint was licensed for use exclusively for him and his studio. No one else could get it. And believe me, they tried, but they were quickly turned away by the company who made the product.

Of course, everyone was quite angry at this. Artist all over the world were expressing their disappointment at this licensing. Christian Furr, a british artist commissioned to paint the Queen, called black "the dynamite of the art world" (x) and that it was unfair for only one man to be able to use it.

However, no one was angrier than british artist Stuart Semple. So angry in fact, that he retaliated by creating a paint himself named the World's Pinkest Pink, in which you're required to basically pinky promise that you're not Anish Kapoor, have nothing to do with him, or are not planning on buying it for him. Here's a link to the store page where you can clearly see the disclaimer, and a video of him in his youtube channel explaining his reasoning. For those who don't want to click the link, it reads:

*Note: By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into that hands of Anish Kapoor. 

#ShareTheBlack

That in itself it's pretty ballsy, as basically Kapoor is not someone to fuck with. So much so, museums and people who have worked with him declined to say anything about him in regards to the Vantablack license.

Unfortunately, Semple's efforts were quite futile as Kapoor managed to get a hold of this paint and posted a picture on instagram giving it the middle finger.

Fear not, though! As Semple's pettiness was not yet defeated. He then came up with a very black acrylic paint, called Black 3.0 (here's a picture of a piece painted with it andthe youtuber I was watching that actually inspired this post). Not quite the blackest black in the world, but by Semple's own words:

IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE: this is not the blackest black in the world. It is however a better black than the blackest black in the world as it is actually usable by artists. 

....

*Except Anish Kapoor  

At this point, Semple has many versions of his blackest black. A Black 2.0, named "The world’s mattest, flattest, black art material", which is second to Black 3.0 in terms of blackness (absorbs 96% of visible light); Black 3.0 mentioned above (absorbs 99% of visible light); a Black 1.0 in pigment form, called "The OG" or the legacy, and a Raven black that's part of a rainbow collection called Potion. Funny enough, this last one does NOT have a disclaimer against Kapoor! Instead it reads:

After 15 years of making his own paints, Stuart Semple has been able to formulate and release a new breed of acrylic paint. For the first time his FULL RAINBOW palette is available to all artists* can share in these incredible colours.

*YES all artists! It's time the miserable ones had a bit more colour in their life - Stuart wants to share the rainbow with them, he thinks they need it.

I have yet to find any information about whether or not Kapoor himself cares about any of these other paints however. I don't know why he would when he holds the blackest paint already. I have also yet to find if he has commented anything else beyond that one instagram post.

At first I thought this was fun and amicable banter... But at this point I think it's truly just a general dislike for the guy, or at least contempt at his attitude. In an interview Semple says:

“He’s got like 40,000 Instagram followers, doesn’t follow anybody back, doesn’t write back to anybody,” Semple says. “It’s the equivalent of walking into a house party and just shouting about yourself and not having a conversation with anybody. You’d look like an idiot.”

So yeah, it's pretty much not an amicable think. Nevertheless, the drama ends quite in the standstill, as Kapoor hasn't pronounced himself about this issue anymore and Semple has also moved on it seems. I can't really say who's the winner in this, but what I can say is that I LIVE for Semple's pettiness that continues until now, and I like his attitude. But that's just a personal opinion.

E: u/HellaHotLancelot has graciously shared with us this post on tumblr that kind of has a follow up and TLDR of this issue, as well as some memes back when saying you were going to go to these weird events on facebook was The Thing to do. I did not know about the glitter thing which I am DYING for. It's the drama that keeps on giving despite being 4 years old.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Background: Cross stitching is a hobby that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, but if you're not, it's the art of making tiny little crosses in fabric to create a pretty picture. Cross stitching has many different styles, from the more traditional to the less traditional.

As with any crafting hobby, there tend to be multitudes of mini ongoing dramas (is DMC really the best thread maker around, it is rude to cross stitch swear words, is it cultural appropriation to stitch sugar skulls, is it disrespectful to stitch Jesus smoking a joint, why do metallic threads exist anyway), but this situation has blown up in the past few weeks and it's quite significant in terms of fallout, both monetarily and time-wise.

Heaven and Earth Designs (HAED)

One popular type of cross stitch is full coverage - that is, that you cannot see any of the fabric under the thread, there are no gaps. These can get pretty intense. In the cross-stitching world, HAED is the Ultimate Provider of Full Coverage Cross-Stitch designs. Here's an example of one being stitched up. They take years to create and are intense labours of love.

The reason HAED is so popular is that they purchase a license to produce cross stitch charts of copyrighted artwork. Again, like in many other crafts, copyright breaking pattern designers run rampant and stitchers tend not to want to give those people their money. Additionally, the owner of HAED has in the past claimed that she hand charts her patterns herself, spending anywhere between 4-40 hours per chart - that sort of quality is invaluable in a world full of people making a quick buck by scanning a picture they found on google through a pattern converter software and flogging it on etsy.

As they purchase a license for the art, HAED patterns get expensive. Kits cost around $200, and the cost inflates depending on what fabric you want to use and how many colours (and subsequently how many skeins of floss) you have to buy. Looking at one I was previously planning on purchasing, it would set me back about $400 total - plus the other tools that you'd use when stitching something this size. Not insignificant.

Floss, Chart Design and some Colour Theory

As I said above, DMC is widely considered to be the premier floss producer (maybe Anchor is you're European). Most kits come with DMC thread included, most independent charters will use DMC, they are by far the dominant force in embroidery circles. This is for good reason - their quality control is exceptional, they give a lovely finish, they feel nice to stitch with and they're available in all good craft stores.

When you're stitching up a large piece, you use lots of different colours to give the piece depth, texture, and importantly, gradient. This means that while you may not know why you need twelve different shades of blue for a small area, it turns out when you stitch it up the detail is fantastic. However, obviously DMC cannot create a colour for every conceivable colour in existence - currently, there are 500 options, which while a lot still means that when pattern makers create designs from existing art, there is some adjustment needed to be made.

Back in 2018, DMC launched 35 new colours to their range to fill in gaps where there currently isn't a good colour option, and to help with transition shades - this doesn't happen often, so it was a Big Deal. Crucially for this story, they introduced 08 and 09, Dark Driftwood and Very Dark Cocoa respectively. Browns are really useful in lots of designs, so these new colours were put to work immediately.

Chart Design is...complicated (and I don't do it myself so bear with me). As I said above, the gold standard way to create a pattern is to create it by hand yourself. A more common (and still very effective) way is to run a picture or design through some conversion software, and then adjust the result after (more common when it's a full picture as opposed to text + flowers).

Important to note that the software is quite sophisticated and will use the surrounding colours to determine the colour chosen, to ensure there is a nice consistent gradient between the colours.

Pattern Maker

When the 35 new colours were added, they were updated in the various common pattern making software. However, for one software there was an issue - the RGB values for 08 and 09 were updated wrong. So when you ran the picture through, it would think it had got it right but in fact it was not. This was quickly picked up by most pattern makers, who would manually change the RGB values in the software and merrily continue on. The pattern software producers also noticed the error and sent out an email explaining the error and instructing the users on how to fix it. However, as you can imagine (because this is a drama post) HAED did not, and continued to make patterns containing 08 and 09 for over two years when the result was a poor match.

The Drama

HAED has its own fans who are very quick to defend HAED and the owner. Some stitchers quickly noted the error with 08 and 09 (there's quite a popular app where you can mock up what the design will look like before stitching), and several people posted questions about why the mock-up was looking a bit dodgy - they were told that the issue was with the app.

Someone posted in 2019 this example of how 09 was fucking up their project. Initially, this was explained away as an issue with dye lots.

As things can take so long to stitch, sometimes if you replace a skein of floss after a few years there may be a subtle difference in the shade because it's a different dye lot. As I mentioned at the beginning, DMC is the premier choice of floss because they are incredibly consistent between dye lots, so this is very rarely an issue, and certainly not to the extent the above picture shows. Thread Bare did an excellent write up of why the dye lot argument is bullshit, with pictures, so if you're interested in more technical detail I would encourage you to look at that.

What makes this drama worse is that the only way you could really get any information from or to the owner is through their Facebook page, which was quick to delete or ridicule commenters who expressed concerns about their patterns.

Even as recently as June 2020, HAED sent an email out blaming the error on dye lots. Quoting from the email "we are seeing this more often" - at what point would it occur to them that perhaps this is an issue with them and not an issue with everyone else?

They sent customers pictures to try and prove there was a dye lot error, whereas it was really just a lighting difference.

Well - as of July 2nd they admitted it is an error with the charting.

[Despite admitting there was an error with the charting, they only closed their store down after 3 days following the backlash that they were still selling known faulty charts with no warning on the site]

But wait - surely this charting error wouldn't affect HAED, as she hand creates the patterns herself? Well, obviously that claim was total bullshit. Honestly - it wasn't super surprising, the rate that new, ultra-complex patterns were added to the shop meant that if you thought about it for at least a few moments you could infer that she didn't hand create these patterns herself.

What's worse is that she also doesn't appear to employ test stitchers. Test stitchers are common and will, as the name suggests, test stitch a piece before or even just after sale, just to make sure the final result is good enough. While you wouldn't expect someone to test stitch an entire 300,000 stitch pattern, most would consider it reasonable to test stitch a small area, particularly an area with the new colours used.

The owner claims that 14000 patterns are affected - even assuming this is a mistype, 1400 patterns is an overwhelming amount to fix.

Reminder - these kits cost $200+ each, and she's not doing anything more than running it through some software.

Now, some of you might think, "surely you can just sub in 08/09 with a similar colour and then it'll be fine"? This is the proposed solution by HAED themselves (see the suggestion in the email to sub out 09 with 3371). In the "re-charted" patterns she's sent out already, this is in essence what she has done, and there have already been push backs that it still looks awful.

To wheel back to colour theory - there is no floss that corresponds to the incorrect RGB values that were used. And - without getting too technical again, but by subbing around one colour for another, it creates a domino effect with surrounding colours. This may not be an issue in patterns that are meant to look blocky, but in HAED patterns they are meant to look as realistic as possible - one colour throwing off the surrounding colours ripple effects all the way through the pattern.

So now there are a bunch of stitchers that are several hundred dollars and potentially several hundred hours into these pieces, only to be told that they will be sent a 'recharted' pattern at some point over the next few months (which will probably not be a proper rechart, but a substitution of a colour one-to-one), and some stitchers are already several thousand stitches into their pieces.

Some additional examples of the errors/ 'fixes'/mockups

This stitcher (the error is the left-hand side of the birdhouse) was sent a replacement pattern that still looked awful when ran through a mock-up, so has changed it herself (it took her four days to frog the error out and start again)

This edited area looks abysmal and has been told by the owner that it is correct and fine

The top left next to the needle minder is very poorly coloured, and this poor person is about 150,000 stitches in.

The HAED 'mockup' vs the predicted result

This fireplace is light purple-brown vs the intended dark brown

The left is the 09 chart and the right is the fix - the right is still not great.

The Fallout

People are mad and upset. This is an expensive item that is faulty, there was a known error for two years that was not fixed, and people who did express concern were deleted/banned from the Facebook page. People may well be hours and hours into their chart only to be told it's going to look shit. HAED are rapidly losing their image as the premier full coverage producer, it is a major fall from grace.

There is no other way to get information than through the Facebook group, and not only are they banning anyone criticising HAED from their group, they're banning members who criticise HAED in other groups pre-emptively.

There is also the question about how this is going to work going forward - if 08 and 09 are removed from the pattern, there is going to be no way to tell if a pattern for sale was affected by this situation or not [Aside from the drama, the HAED website is absolutely awful to browse at the best of times]. You could end up paying for a chart that may never have been charted correctly in the first place.

A lot of people have been moving to different full coverage creators, who do employ test stitchers, run the software with edits made afterwards, and don't just whack in the picture, turn the number of colours to 250 and the biggest size and hope for the best.

A number of people are calling out the owner for lying about creating the charts herself in the first place when this is now very obviously not true.

There are also many stitchers submitting refunds through their credit cards for faulty goods.

There's also some rumblings that not only have 08 and 09 been affected but the other 32 new colours - if that's true it could very well sink HAED completely, if they haven't been sunk already.

Others are contacting the artists that licence their work to HAED explaining the issues and the terrible customer service, and already there are rumours they will retract their licence as a result (no screenshots of this as it's only rumoured at the moment). Some very kind artists are letting people who purchased faulty kits run the original, high def artwork through a better pattern creating software so they have an accurate pattern to use.

For me, personally, the fallout involved a very emotional throwing away of the kit I had invested over a few hundred hours in and picking up one of the other dozen non-HAED kits I have instead.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out a couple of months ago, and (as you are almost certainly aware) it was a massive hit. It's a life simulator where you live on an initially deserted island and slowly build a community of cartoon animals, with several hundred to choose from. It's designed to be a peaceful, calm experience where you do nothing but hang out, so of course people have built a greedy, brutally efficient underground economy.

Getting new villagers can be difficult, since your island can only have ten of them at any one time. There are only two ways to replace them once you've hit that limit: the first is to wait until a visitor arrives at your island, then invite them to stay, at which point you can replace one of your current villagers with the new one. The second way is to wait until one of your villagers randomly decides to leave on their own, then travel to other deserted islands to find a new inhabitant. Since the villager on each deserted island you visit is random, it costs 2,000 Nook Miles (more on that later) to travel to each one, and there are around 400 villagers, your chances of getting a specific villager either on an island or as a visitor is extremely low.

Now, there are obviously villagers that are more popular, and ones that are...not. Villagers such as Barold or Rodney tend to be hated, and the difficulty of getting them to leave your island means that there are multiple subreddits dedicated to complaining about them. Meanwhile, other villagers are in huge demand, none more so than Raymond. Raymond's popularity is partly due to his design, but mostly (I suspect) because the initial hype over his character has made him popular for being popular.

Now, it's possible to "give" someone a villager by having them visit your island while that villager is moving out, and since a villager's house is filled with cardboard boxes while they're in the process of moving out, this is referred to as being "in boxes". It didn't take long for people who had Raymond to start selling him to others who wanted him on their island, and having "Raymond in boxes" became a meme. While other villagers are sometimes sold, none of them can hold a candle to Raymond in terms of demand.

Pretty soon, the main currency, Bells, was abandoned in favor of Nook Miles Tickets, items which allow you to travel to a deserted island and which can only be bought with Nook Miles, which are harder to farm than Bells are. (The best way to farm Bells is to travel to other people's islands to take advantage of random fluctuations in the price of turnips. And yes, there are people charging Bells or Nook Miles Tickets in exchange for being able to sell turnips on their island.) Raymond was commonly sold for around 500 Nook Miles Tickets. For reference, each ticket costs 2,000 Nook Miles, and completing tasks such as "Catch 5 fish" or "Talk to your neighbors 3 times" will get you an average of around 150 miles each. 500 Nook Miles Tickets (or NMT) are equal to a million Nook Miles, so people were spending exorbitant amounts on Raymond. For a lot of people, this level of greed, especially in a game specifically designed to be relaxing and stress-free, tainted Raymond by association, so he's now both the most loved and the most hated character in the game.

This was bad enough, but eventually someone realized that this was a good chance to make some real money. When I was finding images for this post, the second result on Google Images was someone selling Raymond for $13 in real-life money. I've heard rumors of Raymond being sold for even more than that, or traded for nudes. On top of this, hacking the game allows you to get items that aren't normally obtainable, such as trees with stars growing on them. So there are now people selling items they've hacked into the game (and which may or may not corrupt your game file) in exchange for real money.

However, some people are fighting back. A hacker recently offered Raymond for free to anyone who wanted him, both in order to help people out and to kill the black market that has started up. I don't know what this is going to do to the underground villager market, but it's almost certain that it's going to take a big hit.

TL;DR People have hacked Animal Crossing to make money off of a furry slave trade.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

This is the seventh part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 7 – Classic and Legion

Classic was a separate game created to emulate early WoW. Legion was the sixth expansion for retail WoW, coming after Warlords of Draenor but preceding Battle for Azeroth. Since Legion was relatively uncontroversial, I didn't want to dedicate a whole post to discussing it, so I have added it to the end of this one.

“You don’t want to do that. You think you do, but you don’t.”

Those words, delivered by WoW executive producer J. Allen Brack, became immediately symbolic of the relationship Blizzard had with its community. The customer was not always right. In fact, the customer was a fucking idiot who needed to sit back, shut up, and keep paying. At least, that’s how it was seen. In the years since, Brack’s statement has only grown more infamous, more telling, and more painful for the company. It resurfaces whenever Blizzard shoots itself in the foot – an increasingly common occurrence these days.

It came in response to a question asked at the 2013 Blizzcon Q&A – had they ever considered creating legacy servers so that players could revisit old expansions? The answer wasn’t just ‘no’, it was a disgusted, emphatic, overwhelming ‘no’. It was a ‘no’ that said the developers were affronted that they had even been asked.

It wasn’t the first time, either. They had been refusing the idea for years. In February 2008 a community manager said, “We were at one time internally discussing the possibility fairly seriously, but the long term interest in continued play on them couldn't justify the extremely large amount of development and support resources it would take to implement and maintain them. We'd effectively be developing and supporting two different games."

Again in November 2009, they said no.

"We have answered these requests quite a few times now saying that we have no plans to open such realms, and this is still the case today. We have no plans to open classic realms or limited expansion content realms.”

And again in August 2010, Tom Chilton responded to requests with this,

"Currently, my answer would be probably not. The reason I say that is because any massively multiplayer game that has pretty much ever existed and has ever done any expansions has always gotten the nostalgia of, 'Oh God, wouldn't it be great if we could have classic servers!' and more than anything else that generally proves to be nostalgia. In most cases - in almost all cases - the way it ends up playing out is that the game wasn't as good back then as people remember it being and then when those servers become available, they go play there for a little bit and quickly remember that it wasn't quite as good as what they remembered in their minds and they don't play there anymore and you set up all these servers and you dedicated all this hardware to it and it really doesn't get much use. So, for me, the historical lesson is that it's not a very good idea to do"

Perhaps he was right. But the demand was clearly there. And since Blizzard failed to provide, players did the job themselves.

Enter the private server.

These were alternative copies of wow, hosted by a third party. Many private servers were simply replicas of the retail game, offering the same content for free. Others specialised, providing powers and mod commands, the ability to skip straight to max level, to gain items that might normally take weeks or months to get, or visit secret areas which were usually inaccessible.

Since private servers did not update along with the main game, they acted as a kind of time capsule. A private server created during Wrath of the Lich King would stay there long after new expansions had come and gone. Modern World of Warcraft bore almost no resemblance to its earliest form, not in its philosophy, its aesthetic, its gameplay, or most importantly, it’s community. As players became increasingly dissatisfied with WoW’s new direction, and began to hunger for return to the older instalments, these servers gained a new relevance. In some cases, private servers could be listed among the most popular MMORPGs in the world – quite the achievement for something technically illegal.

One of the most successful was Nostalrius, a server preserving Patch 1.12 – the sacred final patch before WoW’s first expansion. It was true to life in every possible way. Recreating the experience of vanilla WoW was easier said than done - not many servers had been able to crack it, but Nostalrius was one.

”Nostalrius is a living museum: a near-perfect record of a place, design choices and play styles that don’t exist anymore.”

What’s more, it was a totally non-profit endeavour. Its creators never asked for any kind of re-numeration, though they could have. They ran the server at a loss. Over its short lifetime (it was up for little more than a year) Nostalrius grew at a faster rate than Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, or Elder Scrolls Online.

"The heart behind all private servers, including Nostalrius, is to recreate a version of the game that many enjoyed and that Blizzard no longer provides," the team wrote in their AMA (LINKS TO REDDIT).

But it was not to last.

On the 10th of April 2016, Blizzard issued the Nostalrius administrators with a cease and desist letter. At that time, the server had 800,000 registered accounts, 150,000 of which were active. The creators had no choice. During its final days, users flooded onto the server. Those crowds, a seething mass of furious indignation and loss, reached a scale that hadn’t been seen in retail WoW for years. It was covered across gaming media.

Some players fired off /cry emotes, others mounted their most impressive horses, or spammed the chat with calls to protest, or made a last ditch attempt to advertise their guilds, and a few simply wished a fond farewell to the server they had come to call home. On the Horde side, hundreds of players marched the hour-long journey from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff, before leaping to their deaths from its highest peak. “ATTACK BLIZZARD SERVERS!! TAKE THEM DOWN!!”, one player screamed as he fell.

”THANK YOU NOSTALRIUS FOR THE GREAT MEMORIES THANK YOU AND GOODBYE! <3”

Time ran out, and the game reset to the login screen, where the black portal sat glittering in the background. ‘Disconnected from server’, said a popup message in yellow text. The buttons no longer worked. Nostalrius was dead.

And its community exploded.

All of Blizzard’s social media accounts were overwhelmed by angry messages, begging them to find some morsel of mercy and, in some cases, threatening them if they didn’t. Major gaming figures weighed in. The scandal broke into every forum, every subreddit, and every server. No private server had ever been the topic of such passionate discourse. But the Nostalrius scandal had come to represent more than a server, it was a martyr in the fight for the right of the consumer to preserve games. Vanilla WoW was not the first game to disappear because its owners no longer wanted to support it. Someday, all online games would face the same fate.

Across the video game industry, a conversation arose. Was modern World of Warcraft the same game it used to be, or something else completely? If Blizzard were not going to provide vanilla servers, did they have the ethical right to stop players from making them, just because they owned the IP? Was this new attempt to clamp down on private servers a desperate bid to reclaim players who had left the retail game? That last question provoked a backlash of its own.

”This is not stealing profits from your game”, declared Jontron. “These people weren’t even subbed. In fact, most of these people just don’t like your current game, so they’re trying to go back and play your old one.”

A petition was created on Change.org to resurrect Nostalrius following its closure. Ex-World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern pledged that if it gained more than 200,000 signatures, he would print all five thousand pages and deliver them to Blizzard President Mike Morhaime personally. It reached 279,000.

In June of that year, something remarkable happened. The team behind Nostalrius was invited to a meeting at Blizzard, where they met Morhaime and Brack, as well as Tom Chilton, Ion Hazzikostas, and Marco Koegler – all the men who held power over the future of Warcraft. For corporate executives to meet with people who had effectively stolen their game was unheard of. They didn’t even put them under a non-disclosure agreement – which Blizzard usually required for all visitors.

”People at key positions inside Blizzard attended the meeting. They were also all very interested, curious, attentive, and asked a lot of questions about all of the topics we mentioned.

We did everything we could to make this presentation & discussion as professional as possible, which was something that clearly was a pleasant unexpected surprise for the whole Blizzard team, Mike Morhaime included.”

It was planned to last two hours, but went on for five. It was summarised on the Nostalrius forum.

”One of the game developers said at a point that WoW belongs to gaming history and agreed that it should be playable again, at least for the sake of game preservation, and he would definitely enjoy playing again.”

The most important thing to come out of this meeting was a confirmation from Blizzard – they wanted legacy servers, but it would be a tremendous undertaking. At the end of the meeting, Blizzard promised to keep in touch.

But they didn’t. In fact, Brack wrote a letter prior to Blizzcon 2016 insisting that legacy servers would not be discussed at the event.

”We had invested our hearts and souls into this meeting, and we got some really good feedback while we were there. But after we left, we heard nothing from Blizzard for months - even after continuing to reach out. And so what were we supposed to do at that point? Were we supposed to just let the legacy server die? Is the dream dead? Well we took things into our own hands, and that’s when the Elysium project happened. We released the server code for the entire Nostalrius project to the Elysium team, Including the player databases for both of our servers.”

Elysium was a new project intended to take over from Nostalrius. A short while later, Nostalrius itself was re-created, but not for long. It shutdown and withdrew its code from Elysium under pressure from Blizzard. Elysium struggled on for a short while alone, until it was broken up from within by internal strife and embezzlement.

All seemed lost.

“I want to talk about ice cream.”

It was Blizzcon 2017. New adventures had been announced for Hearthstone, new maps for Overwatch, and StarCraft 2 was going free to play. The next World of Warcraft expansion was about to be revealed, and there was no doubt that ‘Battle for Azeroth’ would overshadow everything else at the convention. That was until J. Allen Brack stood on stage and started discussing food.

”Before we get to the big news, I want to take a minute. And I want to talk about ice cream. Ice cream is great. Ice cream is one of my favourite desserts. Personally, I love chocolate, and I love cookies and cream. Cookies and cream is actually my all-time favourite dessert. But I understand that for some of you, your favourite flavour… is vanilla.”

A trailer played, reversing through all of the expansions in order, before returning to the famous opening shot from when World of Warcraft first came out. The reaction was colossal.

”It brings tears to my eyes thinking of sitting down with my son and wife to show them WoW Classic.”

[…]

”Thank you blizzard for giving me the game i fell in love with back”

[...]

”THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN BLIZZARD ACTUALLY DID IT. STRAIGHT FROM THE GUY WHO GAVE US, "YOU THINK YOU DO BUT YOU DON'T".”

[…]

”No game has had me tear up before, that changed when I saw the announcement. And after rewatching this 40 times, I still get the same feeling.”

It wasn’t just a trailer, it was a landmark shift in Blizzard’s philosophy toward its games and its community.

With a quick two-minute trailer, Blizzard backpedaled on years of dismissal to finally offer fans an official, unblemished version of the world's most popular MMO as it existed in 2004. This is something they said they'd never do.

To this day, the trailer is the second most upvoted post on /r/wow (LINKS TO REDDIT).

”Amazing. I can now ruin my 30's in the exact same way as I ruined my teens.”

[…]

”This is not good for my career prospects”

[…]

”I'm legit crying right now. SO FUCKING PUMPED!”

[…]

”It took me a few seconds to get the ice cream bit, but when I got it my jaw fucking dropped.”

It’s really difficult for me to convey quite how shocked the community was. This wasn’t like any other announcement. It was spectacular to watch it all unfold.

There were a lot of questions asked in the following days.

Would this be covered by a normal WoW subscription, or separate service entirely? What version of Vanilla would be chosen? It had spanned two years and twelve patches, after all, each different in its own way. Which bugs, glitches and performance issues would be included for authenticity, and which would be left out?

No one at Blizzard knew the answers to most of these questions. The project was still in its early stages.

"We’re going to hire people specifically for this job, and we’re going to staff it with people who are interested in bringing back Classic WoW in the best, most authentic way," Brack says. "And that’s how we’ll be successful."

Even with the whole team focused on it, several years would pass before Classic went live. Blizzard has always loved deadlines – especially the whooshing noise they made as they went by. There were those who started asking why it was taking so long.

If you've been around the World of Warcraft ecosphere for a while, Blizzard's tentativeness might come as a surprise. There is no shortage of emulated vanilla servers on the internet. The official subreddit for the scene points to 15 of them, and there are dozens more holding crystallized copies of Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, or Cataclysm—wherever you happened to leave your happiness.

The reason was this: Blizzard didn’t want to just throw up an emulated Vanilla server. They wanted to fully integrate Classic into the modern game. Brack explained more in an interview with PCGamer,

"We think we have a way to run the Classic servers on the modern technical infrastructure. The infrastructure is how we spin up instances and continents, how the database works. It’s those core fundamental pieces, and running two MMOs of that size is a daunting problem. But now we think we have a way to have the old WoW version work on the modern infrastructure and feel really good."

Why did they bother? Well if they took the easy route, they faced a number of potential issues down the line. These servers were unstable, buggy and incredibly insecure to hacking. Anyone who had touched a private server could tell you so. The work required was immense.

”First, they DO have the source code for Vanilla WoW. Code version control systems are not something new, as it has been a standard in the industry for a long time. With these systems, they can retrieve the code at any given previous backup date.

However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the “WoW.exe” and “Server.exe” files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.

This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.

In addition to the technical aspects of releasing a legacy server Blizzard also needs to provide a very polished game that will be available to their millions of players, something existing unofficial legacy servers cannot provide.”

A lot was still up in the air. Blizzard were clear, however, that it would be as authentic as possible. They sneered down their noses at the quality-of-life changes which had, according to fans, ruined the game. Guns and bows would need ammo, pets needed to be fed, and they even laboured to recreate the annoyances caused by early 2000s dial-up internet, like spell batching, which processed user inputs in clusters rather than instantly. But some changes remained, like the in-game clock (which wasn’t originally added until Wrath).

Dungeon Finder? Of course not.

Cross-realm grouping? Never.

Flying? Come on.

Achievements? Nope.

Unified Auction Houses? No Way.

”ITS FUCKING HAPPENING!”

On Tuesday 14th March 2019, the fandom awoke. News. Fresh news. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, thousands of nerds stopped on the spot, and scampered back to their mothers’ basements like they’d just won a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. They finally knew (LINKS TO REDDIT) when Classic would go live.

”I just have to stay alive for 3 more months.”

Another user wrote, “THAT'S THE WEEK OF MY HONEYMOON - WEDDING'S CANCELLED”, and he was reassured that if his fiancé was ‘the one’, she would understand. She did not.

”This is what I imagine a former junkie feels like when they’re offered an Oxy.”

Rather than start at 1.12, Blizzard decided to resurrect Vanilla from its first moment. It would begin with Onyxia and Molten Core - the two first raids to be added originally. From there, the patches of Vanilla would be added over the course of a year and a half, so that players could relive Classic as authentically as possible – and so they wouldn’t get bored and unsubscribe.

The days ticked slowly by, and the hype grew to astronomical levels.

”Fuck it's so close, SO GOD DAMN CLOSE

I've dreamt of this since I first got into private servers and I never thought they'd do it but the mad lads did it

Honestly half the fun right now is being part of they hype wave, it's like sitting at a starting line revving your engine”

[…]

”Shit, it's like being back in 2004 all over again, waiting for release. But the hype is deeper, I have so many memories I can't wait to re-live.”

[…]

”Never in my life have I been this excited to play a game.

AZEROTH, I'M COMING HOME BABY! JUST 11 MORE DAYS, 10 HOURS, 12 MINUTES AND 30 SECONDS!!”

Then all of a sudden, the day had arrived. On 26th August 2019, the Classic servers opened, and immediately collapsed due to high demand. But once players got past the hours-long queues, they rushed into the Azeroth of their childhoods. To many, it was everything they had dreamed of. They dived in with youthful abandon. Over a million concurrent viewers tuned in just to watch it on Twitch.

”WoW was essentially struck with a nuclear blast of nostalgia that sent the franchise back into the stratosphere, appropriately enough, for the first time since 2004.

Sixteen years after the game’s original release, WoW permeates the many spheres of online culture once more. What’s most impressive, though, is how the game has stayed resurgent. While the nostalgia surrounding Classic WoW was a driving force for the resurrection of the franchise in August 2019, that nostalgia has morphed into a sustainable platform for WoW.”

During an earnings call a few months later, J Allen Brack revealed the extent of Classic’s success.

“Given the content updates for modern WoW, and the cadence that we have for Classic, we exited our year with a subscriber base that was double what it was at the end of Q2.”

Stories immediately flooded out of the game. Screenshots showed players queuing up in their hundreds to kill mobs in busy areas. One player sent another a box full of mangoes following a conversation in a random battleground. A famous Guild sponsored a race (LINKS TO REDDIT) to be the world’s first max level character, only for a completely separate unrelated player to beat them to the punch. In one bizarre case, hackers discovered a way to leap between copies of the world, in order to get a PvP advantage. I would write about the political intrigue and guild drama surrounding the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, but someone has already done a good job of it (LINKS TO REDDIT).

The long and short of it is this: Classic was a resounding success. It re-vitalised the game and even prompted people to look at retail wow in a more positive light. That was a return to player driven adventures, bizarre encounters, and collective action. For the first time in many years, Warcraft was a community defined by its optimism, not it’s nihilism. And all this did wonders for Blizzards reputation at a time when they desperately needed some good PR.

”People were loving this recreation of the great massively multiplayer game's early days and lamenting what WOW had become in the 14 years since. Someone celebrated freedom from the tyranny of item levels. Someone mentioned the hushed sound design, noting that they could hear every footstep and clink of their chainmail. Someone else remembered how the community was so much friendlier back then, in so much less of a rush.”

”git gud scrub”

For some, Classic was a rude awakening.

WoW had been slowly replaced over the years like the ship of Theseus, piece by piece, patch by patch, until nothing remained of its original form. Those who noticed the change were often unable to pinpoint what exactly was happening, or why. But Classic peeled back all the layers to reveal the bones of Warcraft, and it suddenly became clear.

It wasn’t just that the game was buggy or janky or tedious – though it was all of those things. It was a product of a its time, built in the days of Ultima and Everquest, and that showed in its philosophy. What should be rewarded? What should be punished? How should players overcome challenges? What makes a game fun? Is it more liberating to have a thousand things to do, or nothing at all?

Blizzard answered these questions differently in 2004. Nothing came easily. The time and effort required simply to hit max level were crushing. And for every player the game captured in a cruel cycle of addiction, another bounced right off it.

Perhaps more than anything, Vanilla WoW had been designed for new players. That might sound contradictory, but stick with me. Vanilla had been a new game. Most of its players had never seen anything like it, and it was made with that in mind. While every new expansion brought along more and more features to help newbies find their feet, they gradually abandoned them as the target demographic. Rather than inspiring wonder, they opted for spectacle. The point was not to capitalise on Vanilla, but to depart from it.

The best example is when Cataclysm remade the two continents from Vanilla. Each zone became a sequel to its previous (lost forever) self. A new player wouldn’t understand the references or story threads, but that was okay. New players weren’t who Blizzard wanted to impress.

Vanilla had been awkward, unintuitive, confusing, unforgiving, and full of bizarre experimental edges, but it was only after Blizzard ironed out those wrinkles that players realised how much they lent the game its character.

“It’s bad, but it’s also really good? I mean, it’s still a lot of fun, but it’s also pretty garbage. It’s garbage, but it’s still a classic.”

[…]

”There can be no argument at all that quest design and storytelling were better in early WoW. They could be quite poor. There's an awful lot of mechanical drudgery, with endless culling of wildlife and troublesome local populations, low drop rates and high kill counts padding out the levels with makework. You can find grace notes, of course, like an amusing spat between rival goblin factions, but these could often end up fighting the game systems or poor design.”

It has always been difficult to pin down what made Vanilla great. Topics like design philosophy and historical context are complicated and difficult to explain.

”I logged into current WoW, and just looked at the character screen, wondering: How it was possible to start with such a great game, and end up here like this?”

A lot of people in the Classic community boiled it down to difficulty. Its leaders encouraged an almost cult-like obsession with ‘the grind’, because things had been better back in the day, before the game went soft. They thought suffering and inconvenience were part of what made WoW great.

”If there's no sense of challenge, there's no sense of reward (LINKS TO REDDIT)

In retail, challenge is only an optional way to see content, so there's much less incentive to actually do the challenging content”

Not everyone was unreasonable, and plenty of Classic fans (LINKS TO REDDIT) mocked those who took it all too seriously. But some were, and unfortunately they clung to the spotlight. To them, you weren’t a ‘true fan’ until you accepted Vanilla into your heart. And if you weren’t a true fan, you were the enemy.

Yes, rose-coloured glasses were involved, but you couldn’t say that to people in these circles. To suggest their feelings were the product of nostalgia meant implying they weren’t ‘real’. It was tantamount to an insult, and had been used by the fans and developers of modern WoW for years to dismiss calls for legacy servers.

”Nostalgia is, of course, an important part of the overall picture. WoW landed at a really formative time for a lot of people, a time when they were in high school or in college, had a lot of free time, and all their friends had a lot of free time, and their lives meshed well with the pace of the game, and the game became their shared social space. That is a potent element.”

[…]

When asked about the differences (LINKS TO REDDIT) between modern WoW and Vanilla, one user responded, “Vanilla didn't have people crying about how much better Vanilla allegedly was.”

Discussions of difficulty in games have always evoked strong emotions, and WoW is no exception. This Puritan style of thinking was nothing new – fans of the Souls games had been treading these waters for years. But in the lead-up to Classic, it gained a toxic edge.

Vanilla became an almost mythological entity. Its strengths made it great, they said, but its weaknesses also made it great. Criticism wasn’t just wrong, it was seen by some as actively harmful, borderline blasphemous. But a lot of the people who bought into this idea had never actually been around during WoW’s early days, and so when the first servers came online, they saw behind the curtain.

”For many, this complete lack of direction was clearly overwhelming. The global chat was a chaotic mess of players asking where to find gnolls and bandits, with many picking a random direction from the quest hub and striking out to explore the region, hoping to get lucky and happen upon the right kind of enemy.”

For a lot of players, that was the moment they realised this promised land had never been that great to begin with. They found themselves apostates, cast out of a fandom which was far too busy touching heaven to even notice them leave.

”Wow Classic is god awful. (LINKS TO REDDIT) I played the game at various stages and i have no idea how Wow even survived when it launched in this state. People shit on retail when its magnitudes superior to classic no matter its faults. Classic doesnt even do the basic things well at all.”

[…]

”There is a strong and passionate fanbase of folks for whom this is the best thing ever, but I think a number of people don't realize how many quality-of-life and mechanical changes have been made in the years since.

Blizzard may have strayed too far in some areas, but it's hard not to see some of the tedium reintroduced to WoW with Classic.”

Some weren’t sure if they loved it or hated it.

”Blizzard could not have picked a better zone to stir nostalgia and then skewer it on the truth of how boring the game could be.”

But everyone acknowledged there was something here.

”World of Warcraft Classic is compelling in ways that modern WOW isn't.”

[…]

”I think it’s true that Classic offers something for everyone that retail WoW cannot. They say it’s about the journey not the destination, and I definitely feel that’s the case with WoW.”

And veterans weren’t the only ones who loved it.

”I figure this is mostly for older gamers who have a rose-colored, nostalgic view of the game, but I'm a little curious, so I test it out.

Oh boy was I wrong.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

It’s hard to have an impartial talk about Classic. The discourse has always been fraught. Classic actively fosters an in-group mentality, due to its emphasis on social dependency. You can't get by as a lone wolf. You can't dip a toe in the water and hope to remain competitive. Either you give everything to the game, or you get left behind.

”If you've only got a few hours a week to dedicate to an MMO, Classic may not be the game for you and you may be better off looking at modern Warcraft to fill that Azeroth-shaped hole.”

[…]

”You spent time together (LINKS TO REDDIT) and got to know each other. Maybe that still happens in small doses but it used to be the whole game.”

This aspect was so strong that for some players, Vanilla WoW was less a game and more a social network.

”WoW was so popular because it gave a sense of community (LINKS TO REDDIT) - something that wasn't really available elsewhere. Social media wasn't a thing, outside of MySpace(lol) and bare bones Facebook you needed a college email to sign up for. No Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, etc. So after a long hard day at work/school, you chilled with your guildmates, who were doing the same.”

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

This is the sixth part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 6 – Warlords of Draenor

This might seem like a bizarre topic to start with, but stay with me here. It all links together.

The Warcraft Movie

On 9th May 2006, a Blizzard press release announced the production of a live-action movie set in the Warcraft universe, in partnership with Legendary Pictures. Fans were euphoric. Blizzard’s cinematic trailers had some of the best CGI in the world. Even today, they have never released a bad one. Fans wanted something like that, only 90 minutes long.

"We searched for a very long time to find the right studio for developing a movie based on one of our game universes," said Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. "Many companies approached us in the past, but it wasn't until we met with Legendary Pictures that we felt we'd found the perfect partner. They clearly share our high standards for creative development, and because they understand the vision that we've always strived for with our Warcraft games, we feel there isn't a better studio out there for bringing the Warcraft story to film."

However good their intentions may have been, the film would linger in production hell for a decade before seeing the light of day. It was scheduled to hit theatres in 2009 under the direction of Sam Raimi (of Spiderman fame), but it was still only in its early stages when Blizzcon 2011 came around..

Uwe Boll, grim reaper of video game adaptations, tried to get his fingers on the film. Blizzard’s response was emphatic.

"We will not sell the movie rights, not to you… especially not to you. Because it's such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.”

Seven years into production, they settled on a director. Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) had directed three films and one of them had been somewhat successful – Moon. He immediately set about changing the story, which set the film back a bit, but they were finally able to make progress. A ‘sizzle reel’ was shown at San Diego Comic Con later that year, featuring a battle between a human and an orc. By the end of 2013, the film had been cast, and began shooting in mid-2014.

Warcraft finally premiered in Paris on 24th May 2016. It grossed $439 million, making it the most successful video game adaptation of all time, but the costs of production and promotion were so high that it still made a loss of up to $40 million for the studio.

The film was… divisive. The average Western viewer was alienated by the dense lore and confusing plot. In fact, it made most of its profit in China, where people flocked to see some CGI warriors smash into each other. Critics (most of whom knew nothing about the Warcraft franchise) absolutely hated it. Writing for Movie Freak, Sara Michelle Fetters said:

”Warcraft can't help but be a major disappointment, the game all but over as far as this particular fantasy franchise is alas concerned.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson had a similar opinion.

”Having sat through this baffling movie's grueling two hours, I can't in good conscience even recommend it to Warcraft devotees. There's nothing here for anyone --neither man nor orc”

The New York Post was very critical too.

”Jones ... is trying to deliver something like "The Lord of the Rings" minus the boring bits, but without the boring bits what you have is Itchy and Scratchy with maces.”

It’s true that the film was… a fixer upper. The CGI was impressive but often awkward, the accents were all over the place, the armour looked like bad cosplay, the tone was off, and the characters were hard to empathise with. Nonetheless, it found a following among Warcraft’s oldest fans. On Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, it has user scores of 76/100 and 8.1/10 respectively, which speaks to its cult classic status.

It was a thrill seeing the places and people they’d been playing alongside for years, rendered with such love and care on the silver screen. Stormwind City and Dalaran, the Dark Portal, Durotar and Thrall. It was a love letter to the fans.

The user ‘nerdlife’ had this to say:

”A truly work of love. As a diehard warcraft fan this movie was amazing. So many details, amazing art design and amazing sound design. It truly shows how disconnected the critics are to the everyone else. Me and everyone i know that went to watch the movie truly liked it.”

Here are some more responses.

”Simply a great movie, enjoyed every single bit of it as a Warcraft fan.”

[…]

”As a fan of Warcraft I went into this movie a little bit sceptical, but from ten minutes in I was already loving the film. The majority of critic reviews are pathetic and should just be ignored. The CGI is mostly fantastic, and the story while it is a little rushed at the start is also pretty good.”

In 2018, Duncan Jones would speak out about the issue he raced making Warcraft. It took place during a tumultuous time, both for his personal life and for the film. He said production was plague by ‘studio politics’, with Blizzard and Legendary picking the film apart and forcing multiple re-writes.

Despite all of its issues, rumours circulated in 2020 that a sequel was in the works. The rumours were picked up by Lore Daddy Chris Metzen, who helped create the story of Warcraft, though he has since left Blizzard.

"A new movie based on the huge video game series, World of Warcraft, is reportedly in the works at Legendary Pictures. According to relatively reliable scooper, Daniel Ritchman, Warcraft 2 is now in development, thanks largely to the game and first movie's popularity overseas."

Now, you might be wondering why I started a post about the next World of Warcraft expansion by talking about the film. You see, there was a problem. The movie focused on the ‘First War’, which played out in ‘Warcraft: Orcs and Humans’, the original Warcraft game from 1994. It was pretty light on plot, so most of its story was added retroactively in sequels and novelizations. Only the hardcore lore-nerds really knew much about it.

The most recent WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria, took place thirty years later, and those years were full of incredibly dense plot. Blizzard were setting their film so far in the past and basing it on a game so few people played, they worried it would alienate fans.

Their solution was ingenious. And by ingenious, I do of course mean mind-bogglingly stupid. The next expansion would take players to an alternate universe, set thirty years in the past.

The Big Announcement

Blizzcon 2013 was a good one. Siege of Orgrimmar had recently come out, and players were loving it. They had seen four patches in the last year, and two of the best raids ever. Diablo III’s expansion was revealed, and it looked great. Blizzard also showed off Heroes of the Storm, their first foray into the MOBA genre, the movie was making strides, and the trading-card game Hearthstone got a beta release. In terms of content, it was one of the busiest conventions Blizzard had ever held.

With so much going on, Chris Metzen didn’t have to generate any hype when he took to Stage D – the audience was already excited. But he took his time warming them up anyway. When he promised a return to Warcraft’s roots, they practically foamed at the mouth. The trailer was a hit. You can watch it here.

People weren’t quite sure what they were looking at, but they liked it.

I need to cover quite a lot of lore to give you a sense of what’s going on, but I’ve boiled it down to its absolute simplest form. Feel free to skip to the next section it if you don’t care.

There were two planets: Draenor and Azeroth. Draenor was the homeland of the Orcs, Ogres and Draenei. Azeroth had the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and so on.

The Draenei were being pursued by the Burning Legion, an infinite army of demons. The legion didn’t find the Draenei, but they found the Orcs and began corrupting them, starting with Gul’Dan.

Gul’Dan manipulated the Orcs into uniting to form the Horde, and waged a war on the Draenei. In an iconic scene, the Orcs drank the blood of the demon Mannoroth, turning their brown skin green and making them fully subservient to the Legion.

Empowered with demonic magic, they easily overcame the Draenei, who fled (and eventually found Azeroth). In response to all the evil energy, Draenor began to die, and the Orcs were forced to kill each other for what little food remained.

While all this had been going on, an extremely powerful wizard named Medivh was born on Azeroth, with his own demonic corruption. He made contact with Gul’Dan and together they hatched a plan. Two Dark Portals were built, one in Draenor and one in Azeroth, and Orcs flooded through. They fought the humans and succeeded destroying Stormwind, one of the Seven Kingdoms. That concludes ‘The First War’.

The Second War followed the Horde as they moved north, conquering most of the continent. The remaining Human kingdoms united with the Dwarves, Gnomes and High Elves to form the Alliance. The Horde was defeated and most of the Orcs were locked up in camps. One of them, a baby called Thrall, would go on to liberate the Orcs, cross the ocean to Kalimdor, and create a new ‘honorable’ Horde. Here’s a helpful map.

Ner’Zhul, an important dude who I’ve mostly left out of this summary, was chased back through the portal into Draenor by the Alliance. He cast an extremely powerful spell which ended up destroying the planet, turning it into Outland.

Anyway.

Thirty (in-game) years later at the end of Mists of Pandaria, Garrosh is put on trial for all those War Crimes he did. Through some confusing plot shenanigans, he’s spirited away to an alternate universe version of Draenor, right before Gul’Dan convinces everyone to drink demon blood. Garrosh sees this as the moment everything turned to shit for the Orcs, so he intervenes and stops it, as we see in the Warlords of Draenor cinematic. Rather than serving the Legion, the Orcish clans unite to form the Iron Horde. Wrathion (from the Mists write-up) engineered all this to happen because he wanted to conscript the Iron Horde to fight the Burning Legion.

They still build a portal and invade Azeroth (our Azeroth, not an alternative Azeroth), but this time they’re just doing it to be dicks I guess. The leaders of each clan make up the titular Warlords.

If you’re interested in learning more, RUN. It won’t end well for you. You don’t want to get into Wow Lore.

But if you do, here’s a concise history of the entire Warcraft universe told by a friendly Dutch fellow. Go to 13:13 for the story I told above.

The bizarre concept wasn’t as controversial as you’d expect. At least not at first. The community was eager to leave Pandaria behind and return to the themes and characters that had made Warcraft great. Draenor offered limitless possibilities for creative storytelling.

Blizzard marketed it as a dark, cut-throat, visceral expansion. The word ‘savage’ was used so much that it became a meme. When the cinematic came out, Chris Metzen tweeted, “the age of the whimsical panda is over”. To help players overcome to premise of Warlords, they showed off detailed plans for zones, patches, the new ‘garrison’ feature, and even the end boss.

This was a mistake.

Death By A Thousand Content Cuts

The beta for Warlords of Draenor began on 5th June 2014, and by all accounts it was kind of a mess.

A bug caused female Draenei characters to ‘fail to display their default undergarments’, which made it possible to be fully naked. The female draenei population skyrocketed on the affected servers. Another bug warped Night Elf facial textures, which one beta tester described as ‘similar to the aliens from They Live’. The dungeons were ‘violently unstable’, and ‘the loading bar boss was reported to have defeated 99% of players’. All characters were wiped – multiple times. At one point the servers were knocked offline due to a fire at a substation near Blizzard’s offices. One of the servers was labelled [EU] when they were all actually US servers, so that server became overpopulated because all the European players were using it.

And that was just July.

In the PvP zone ‘Ashran’, Paladins were given an overpowered item that let them stun enemies and teleport them to the Stormshield dungeon. A group of Alliance roleplayers began abducting members of the Horde, keeping them stunned while they held trials, sentenced them to death, and summarily executed them. A developer discovered this and described it as ‘awesome’, but the item was removed.

WoW betas are best compared to the Wild West. They’re a chaotic storm of bugs and half-finished assets. It can be difficult to figure out what exactly is going on. But it soon started to seem like almost as much was being taken away from Draenor as was being added.

On 26 June, Blizzard cancelled the cities. The beautiful temple complex of Karabor had been promised to the Alliance, and the Horde had been offered Bladespire Citadel, a colossal and intimidating fortress. The buildings remained as empty shells where a few story quests took place, but were otherwise abandoned. Instead, players would get Warspear and Stormshield, small villages made from generic assets, nested on either end of Ashran.

The reaction was immediate. Complaints filled every forum. The main MMOChampion thread stretched out to well over six-hundred pages. There wasn’t much debate – everyone was pissed off.

"Yes I was positive about other changes in warlords, but this one makes me one to not play the game."

[…]

"This is absolutely horrible, why would they do this?! I don't understand. I was looking forward to these cities a lot. Please change it back."

The community speculated on why this had happened. Was Blizzard cramming the Horde and Alliance together to encourage PvP? Was there a lore reason? Did they have more important plans for Bladespire and Karabor? Some players believed the faction capitals were being made deliberately shitty because Blizzard were going to introduce new, cooler ones later (LINKS TO REDDIT).

Blizzard tried to create some story-based reason, which was immediately torn apart in a storm of mockery (LINKS TO REDDIT) and sarcasm.

As more information came out, it became clear that the truth was much less exciting. Blizzard was struggling for time. Bashiok, one of the developers, said ‘We saw how much time it would take, said that’s not reasonable, and went for a reasonable solution’.

But if you read my previous post, you would know why that explanation fell on deaf ears. Mists of Pandaria had the longest content drought ever, specifically due to the development of warlords taking so long. So this expansion was taking longer to make, but delivering less? (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"This is a huge part of every expansion (LINKS TO REDDIT) because it's where we spend the most time in the expansions lifetime. And after our previous lackluster faction hubs in MoP to have an even more lackluster faction hub in warlords puts a MAJOR damper on my excitement. I REALLY hope blizzard finds a way to give us what we want."

[…]

"Ice Mountain Tower would have been better. That's something new for a city. Instead we got Orc Camp 37G."

[…]

"Fuck the shattered capital, beacon of light in a dark world. Fuck the mystical floating city. Fuck the golden pavilion hidden away in the ancient grove.

We've got wooden huts with red roofs! Maybe get some sharpened logs jutting out everywhere. Slap some spikey iron on a couple of the important buildings. And the floor can stay dirt."

There was a subset of players who tried to defend the decision, pointing out that things can change during the beta of a video game and it doesn’t always constitute broken promises, or that it simply didn’t matter.

"People are making this a bigger issue than it is. (LINKS TO REDDIT) Your just going to use it for portals and the bank anyway so what is the problem?

Honestly, I'm fine with the change. Apparently the sky is falling circle jerk revolving around this change is so strong that someone trying to stay positive is treated as a pariah, though."

The outrage which flared in response to this logic was almost worse than the fury aimed at Blizzard. The fans began to turn on one another. It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.

"Suddenly the thread is full of people who never commented on the issue before, for some reason trying to support Blizzard's bullshit. Smells pretty bad in here. Lots of people aren't just going to follow along with blizzard on this one, fucking deal with it."

At first Blizzard had given the impression that the cities had been cancelled during development. It later came to light that though the exteriors were complete, there was ‘never any actual work done to build them into faction hubs’. It seemed Blizzard had known for a while that the cities were never going to materialise – perhaps even before Blizzcon - but they had chosen to avoid mentioning it until as late as the beta. It was never going to go down well.

"So they were teased specifically to get people to preorder the expansion with no intention of actually making them?"

This realisation only added more fuel to the fire.

"Thats not even changing their minds during the developing process, which they said they did, they just fucking lied when they told us Karabor would be a city."

The discourse was getting rough, but the cuts had barely begun.

Things were disappearing from the map. This included a large island at the bottom-left of the main continent and Farahlon - one of the main zones revealed at Blizzcon. The loss of Farahlon was particularly controversial because it was meant to become Netherstorm in Outland.

"It's such a shame (LINKS TO REDDIT), because it was the zone I was looking the most forward to, and now that it doesn't even exist on Draenor, Netherstorm feels out of place…"

[…]

"Not having Farahlon leaves the experience of seeing Draenor pre-shattering incomplete, IMO."

[…]

"Fucking half assed expansion."

The explanation Blizzard gave for abandoning the zone was rooted in a lack of direction - no one could agree on how Netherstorm should have looked before it was destroyed. In a later Blizzcon, the developers revealed that the zone was originally planned as a starting area for boosted characters, but the idea was abandoned. Whether that is true, or Blizzard was simply struggling with time and resources, we may never know. We can only be sure that it was scrapped early on, at a time when almost nothing had been built yet.

Since Farahlon was promised as patch content, nobody could be quite sure whether it had been cancelled or simply delayed. There was no big bombshell moment. Blizzard certainly weren’t offering one.

"I don't necessarily think it's confirmed it's not coming so I'm holding out a tiny bit of hope but I'm not too optimistic about it."

Time passed and the map stayed empty and players were left to draw their own conclusions.

The third blow came on the 24th of July when Blizzard cut Tanaan Jungle from launch. Once again this major announcement came in the form of a tweet from a developer, but at least this time they were able to offer a little clarity. It would still arrive in the form of a patch. As Tanaan was the base of the Iron Horde, Blizzard explained, it wouldn’t be practical for players to go there straight away. And it surely had nothing to do with the fact that the zone was so incomplete on the current beta that it could barely be recognised.

The excuse would have gone down more smoothly if it hasn’t accompanied yet another lie. Once again, Blizzard said:

"As to Tanaan, the rest of the zone has always been planned as patch content."

Players were quick to pick holes in that.

"For having been in and following the beta there has been no evidence or hint Tanaan would be pushed into another patch. I don't mind personally but there has been absolutely 0 hints on Tanaan being "intended" to be a patch."

[…]

"I feel if that's the case then this should have been clarified earlier. Today is the first day that its been mentioned that the rest of Tanaan is a patch zone, it's been months since WoD was announced. People have been thinking Tanaan in its entirety would have been with WoD launch.

I have zero issue with the rest of Tanaan zone being patch content, personally. If that was always the plan, then it is what it is. But the lack of communication is disconcerting."

[…]

"Their PR is horrible nowadays (LINKS TO REDDIT). How do they advertise a zone at BlizzCon and then act like we misinterpreted when it was coming out? We understood Farahlon's status as a patch content area easily enough. Tanaan was never presented that way."

To those players closely involved in the beta, it was impossible not to notice that this was a recurring issue. It was starting to draw attention.

"It seems like every week something is getting cut, gated or completely changed from what was announced and hyped people up at Blizzcon."

[…]

"They are getting caught with their pants down, time and time again now."

[…]

"Something is definitely going on behind closed curtains over at Blizzard, the amount of cut content is ludicrous."

[…]

"We can only speculate as to what caused so many issues inside Blizzard."

Then there was the Zangar Sea, which was implied to be a zone – it had its own music, its own enemies, concept art, and someone had clearly started building it. In fact the seas all around the continent were surprisingly detailed. But the Zangar Sea simply never materialised.

There was never any official statement on Zangar. After everything else that had been cut, no one held out much hope.

"Most likely scrapped."

At Blizzcon, developers discussed the Gorian Empire, the homeland of the Ogres. They heavily implied it might be explored in a patch. But like so much else, it was cut.

While we’re on the topic of cut content, I need to mention the Chronal Spire. This appeared in very early maps as the gateway from Azeroth to Draenor. For whatever reason, Blizzard changed their plans to have players enter through the Dark Portal instead. The only problem was that they had already paid Christie Golden to write the book leading into the expansion. Garrosh travelled to Draenor with the help a rogue bronze dragon (the ones with power over timelines).

By changing this plot point, they undermined the book’s narrative, and caused a number of plot holes to appear. By connecting the dark portal in Azeroth to Draenor, they effectively cut off access to Outland. And since players broke that new connection immediately after visiting Draenor, the Dark Portal was rendered useless. Nowadays when players step through, they are teleported to Ashran – which makes no in-game sense whatsoever.

This Bronze Dragon stuff is actually kind of important and cutting it is a huge issue, but I digress.

The player Kikiteno summarised it this way: (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"Blizzard stated they didn't want this to come across as a "time travel expansion" so they really toned down any and all elements of chronal/bronze/infinite anything.

The problem is WoD became a time travel expansion the moment they decided to use fucking time travel as a plot device. Honestly, I would have preferred a time travel expansion, as dumb as it would have been, to a goddamn orc expansion."

But goddamn orcs is what they would get.

A Promising Start

Gamers can be fickle. After all the cuts, all the convoluted plot threads, the bad communication, the messy beta, and after much of the community had begun to notice serious problems behind the scenes at Blizzard, all it took to turn the tide was one really good cinematic. We’ve talked about the trailer before, but I really need to emphasise just how popular it was. To this day, it remains the most viewed video on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel. It had an extraordinary effect. The hype hadn’t been this intense since just before Cataclysm.

There were also the shorts. To promote Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard had released ‘The Burdens of Shaohao’, a set of animations explaining the themes of the expansion. Warlords of Draenor established this as a tradition. If you’re interested in seeing them all, the other sets are, ‘Harbingers’, ‘Warbringers’, and ‘Afterlives’.

Even at this point, perceptive players were beginning to voice serious doubts, but they were helpless in the face of the expansion’s unstoppable momentum. When Warlords released, ten million players flooded its servers. No one in their wildest dreams had predicted numbers like these. Clearly Blizzard hadn’t either, because in the days that followed, almost every realm was brought low by rolling crashes and waves of lag. Most players could barely stay logged on, let alone make progress. Garrisons were totally unusable. Even moving near the garrison area caused the game to break.

It was a problem, but to Blizzard, it was a good problem.

And what’s more, fans loved it. The zones were beautiful, the stories were well-told and ended with lavish in-game cinematics, the dungeons were fun (though there were angry murmurs about how few there were), the garrison system was incredibly popular, and while there was only one raid available at launch, it was extremely good. The Warcraft renaissance heralded by Siege of Orgrimmar was a bust, but this felt real. WoW was back.

While we’re here, let’s just look at what the final product contained.

There were six questing zones, but one was exclusive to each faction. The introductory sequence involved players beating back the Iron Horde at the Dark Portal, passing through, and shutting it down from the inside. Trapped in this new world, players fled on boats to their starting zones.

The Horde started in Frostfire Ridge, a snowy region littered with jagged volcanoes and full of Orcish architecture. Players followed Thrall as he got to know some of Warcraft’s big-name Orcs, such as Orgrim Doomhammer and Durotan – Thrall’s dad.

The Alliance got Shadowmoon Valley, widely considered to be the stand-out zone of the expansion. It was a blue-tinted land full of willows, glowing fae creatures, and crystalline Draenei temples. Its focal character was Yrel, a young paladin trying to find purpose.

After completing their starting zone, players were sent to Gorgrond, a beautiful and wild zone based on Yellowstone park. It typified the ‘savagery’ Blizzard had promised. Then came Talador, a Draenei zone full of fantasy forests. Spires of Arak followed, a totally original zone which explored the origins of Outland’s Arrakoa. Cities were built into its twisted rock formations, and made for an impressive sight. Finally came Nagrand, a remake of the most beloved Burning Crusade zone. It was very similar to the original, and players wouldn’t have wanted anything else.

Blizzard had clearly taken liberties when they designed Draenor, creating zones that had no business existing and ignoring zones which should have been there, but the ‘tourist sights’ had been preserved. The Dark Portal, Black Temple, Auchindoun, Shattrath, Oshu’gun. Blizzard had become masters at exploiting the draw of nostalgia, and they did it excellently here.

Pandaria’s treasures, lore tidbits, and rare enemies had been so popular, Blizzard took them to the next extreme. Draenor was packed full of things to find. Exploring was half of the fun. These zones also saw the advent of World Quests - rather than follow the tightly-choreographed story, they offered broad goals which could be completed in numerous ways, and gave the player huge EXP rewards. It was a welcome change that made levelling alts easier than it had ever been.

Every zone offered the option of two unique abilities which would only be available in that zone. It might be a mount you could use while in combat, or a tank, or a second hearthstone, or the option to call in an airstrike. Each one opened up new gameplay options, and made every zone feel distinct. Players loved it. The idea of ‘borrowed power’ would be much more prevalent in later expansions, and much more controversial, but in Warlords it was beloved.

After reaching max-level, it all became about the garrison. The much-maligned dailies of Mists were almost completely gone, and what little ones remained were kind of pointless. Choosing which buildings to place, upgrading them, collecting followers, and sending them out on missions was incredibly fun. You could have your own inn, your own bank and auction house and farm and mine. It was the player housing that the community had begged for since the game began. The system was popular.

"It’s an interesting iteration of the Panda farms, but the garrisons are good enough at this point to make it interesting to think about how future expansions will incorporate the tech. Farm to garrison to...what? Your own city? Your own airship? It’ll be fun to see how they top this."

At this point, you might be starting to wonder why anyone hated Warlords at all.

Writing for Polygon, Phillip Kollar said:

"At launch, this expansion was a brilliant addition to an already massive game, brimming with new ideas and dozens of potential directions to take things in the future. But following release, Blizzard dropped the ball in a way so spectacular that it’s still hard to believe."

The Problems With Garrisons

It didn’t take long for the first cracks to show.

After a month or two, everyone finished getting their garrisons how they liked them, and settled in for the long haul. The entire end-game was built up around garrisons, and every commodity players could possibly need was within arm’s reach. They were simply too convenient. No one had any reason to leave. Rather than purely acting as a nice place to hang out (like player housing in every other game), Blizzard had needed to make them ‘practical’, and this backfired immensely.

Writing for Massively Overpowered, Eliot Lefebvre suggested that the problem with garrisons was Blizzard’s aversion to customisation for the sake of customisation.

"…the design choices were pretty much universally made with a strictly functional viewpoint. The stated goal of having WoW‘s version of housing fell away based upon the designer assertion that no one wants to play The Sims in WoW, disregarding that the two aren’t mutually exclusive goals. There’s space to argue that these were bad choices, but I think that ties in nicely with examining the other major complaint about Garrisons being an unpleasant chore.

When you can get better rewards from Garrisons than from doing anything else short of Heroic raiding, so to speak, you are naturally going to do that, because why would you not?"

Since every aspect of the garrison had to carry a clear practical purpose, Blizzard found themselves increasingly limited in the customisation options. The features advertised at Blizzcon gradually fell away. Players couldn’t choose which zone to build their garrison in, as they had been promised. They couldn’t choose between multiple layouts - that was scrapped in development. They couldn’t name followers or display trophies taken from enemies. They were very limited in which buildings could go where.

"I think the biggest misstep here is that Blizzard stubbornly refused to acknowledge that players don’t just want an identical castle to everyone else in the game, but that they craved their own personal space to customize.

There is virtually no room in garrisons to express individual creativity. Sure, you can place buildings slightly different and choose music and I think pick a tapestry here or there, but my garrison is going to look pretty much the same as every other alliance character’s place.

Look at how rabid players are with transmog — it’s because that’s pretty much the only way that the game allows them to express creativity and visual personality. Proper player housing in WoW could have been that to the nth degree."

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

This is the fifth part of my write-up about World of Warcraft. You can read the first four by clicking the links below.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

It was mid-2011. The final patch of Cataclysm was on its way, and Blizzcon was just around the corner. The subject of World of Warcraft’s next expansion had begun to gain traction once again, and as was tradition, the internet became awash with leaks. Some promised Old Gods, some foresaw Kul’Tiras or Zandalar or Nazjatar, Tel’Abim or Suramar or Sargeras – in short, players made every possible prediction in the vain hope that one of them might be proven right.

But none of them were.

No one could have predicted Pandaria.

An Unexpected Trademark

It wasn’t until the user ‘Mynsc’ went wading through the US Patent and Trademark Office website in search of info about Titan – Blizzard’s ‘open-secret’ new game in development – that they stumbled upon a recently-filed trademark by the name of ‘Mists of Pandaria’. Among all the theory-crafting and scavenging for information, it had been there a week, out in the open where anyone could find it, and yet completely overlooked.

It was immediately dismissed by many users as a book, a figurine, an in-game microtransaction perhaps. They cast it aside and turned to the more realistic leaks. But upon further inspection, the trademark was for a game, distributed on CD-ROMs with instruction manuals and guides. It had to be WoW content.

Okay, the community said. It was a patch.

”they don't trademark patches. If they never did before, why now?”

Then it had to be some kind of trading-card game spin off. Definitely not an expansion.

”The international class used in the trademark is the same as they used for previous expansions. The timing and information for the Mists of Pandaria trademark matches that of The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm. If this is not going to be the expansion, they would really need to hurry to come up with a name and trademark it before they announce it at Blizzcon. Seems risky. Seems unlikely.”

It was a red herring, said the user ‘Johnnyarr’.

”Do you think blizz trademarked it to throw people off because they know we'll be searching pre-blizzcon?”

This sentiment echoed around the forums. Players simply refused to believe that Mists of Pandaria could be a real, genuine, true-to-life WoW expansion. What even were the ‘Mists of Pandaria’? A lot of them had never heard of Pandaren before.

But they did exist. Sort of.

One of Blizzard’s main artists, Samwise Didier, was known by the nickname ‘Panda’ to his friends, and had imagined and drawn Pandaren in the early 2000s. Blizzard had announced their addition to ‘Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos’ as an April Fools joke, and the response had been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, many fans were disappointed it had been a prank.

Pandaren became a favourite after that, an inside joke, and they began to worm their way into the game for real as easter eggs hidden away for perceptive players to find. When Blizzard released ‘Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne’, it was with a real Pandaren playable character, Chen Stormstout.

In World of Warcraft’s early development, questions arose about whether Pandaren would make a return. A community manager replied with the following:

pandaren will not be a playable race ... at this time. Will they make cameo appearances in the game as NPCs? Some things are best left unanswered I think :)

There were a couple of items that referred to the Pandaren, and one NPC child who would walk around telling unbelievable stories, one of which was ‘I swear, people have actually seen them. Pandaren really do exist!’

They re-emerged in 2005 as part of another April Fools joke. This time it was the Pandaren X-Press, a service that allowed players to order Chinese food deliveries within the game. A few years later in 2009, a cosmetic pet was added – The Pandaren Monk. I actually covered it in my Wrath of the Lich King write-up.

In fact, Blizzard had originally planned to make Pandaren a playable race in the Burning Crusade. They had created the models, designed the cities and the buildings, and written the lore. But when the Chinese government found out, they put a stop to it. Draenei were cobbled together to replace them at the last minute. That didn’t go public until after Mists was announced.

In a 2009 podcast, Sam Didier and Chris Metzen joked that Pandaren would be added as a playable race in ‘Patch 201732-and-a-half’. You can see why the trademark was dismissed as a red-herring at first. They had always been a joke, never a serious part of the lore. And that’s how Mists was seen.

”Decoy, I'm calling it right now,” said ‘Ryme’.

[...]

”Hehe, I know the news is slow at the moment, but I don't think this is the answer.”

[…]

’Vetali’ replied, ”I think they be trolling..... or they better be....”

[…]

”obviously a decoy before blizzcon, no way would they do a whole f'ing expansion on pandaria,” said another user.

Some players were receptive to the idea of a Pandaren expansion.

’Austilias’ replied, ”I was always under the impression that Blizzard avoided the Pandaren issue with respect to WoW, due to problems that it might cause in China which already has a pretty strict code on what aspects of WoW they permit (investigate Abominations in the Chinese version, for example, compared to the EU/US versions). Still, if the Pandaren are to be introduced as a race, I know that i'd be rather overjoyed where they a neutral race who perhaps in a questline would pledge themselves to the Alliance or the Horde.”

The expansion was divisive. There were those, like the user ‘Gunner_recall’, who said “If this is happening....SUPER STOKED!!!!”

‘Kathandira’ had the honour of being the expansion’s very first hater. Sixteen minutes after the trademark was posted, they responded:

“if this goes live, you will see my goodbye thread soon after, this game has been bordering TOO cartoony for me, this would be the last nail in the coffin.”

It caused quite the stir. I won’t post every reply, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Most people dismissed the entire concept, and those who didn’t were heavily divided. In an IGN interview a few weeks after the trademark, Game Director Tom Chilton further put players off the trail.

Chilton said the speculation was, "wildly overhyped." He added, "if you look at traditionally how we've handled that race it's been in those secondary products because we haven't realized it in the world. Most of the time when we do anything panda-related it's going to be a comic book or a figurine or something like that."

That put rest to the debate. For a while.

The Desolation of WoW

The stage had been set for one of the biggest dramas in World of Warcraft history.

Blizzcon 2011 had a different tone. The cosplay was still there like always, the esports were still going ahead, the merch shop still sold keyboards and hoodies. But there was an unspoken tension in the air – World of Warcraft had lost two million subscribers by that point, with no clear end in sight. Unlike every other announcement year, there hadn’t been any conclusive leaks. No one knew what to expect. It was with uneasy, desperate excitement that fans packed Stage Hall D. Chris Metzen (or as we real fans know him, Daddy) warmed up the crowd with his usual charm and some rather obscure promises of a new faction war. Daddy told us a war was coming, but this expansion would be the calm before the storm. He got everyone hyped up, and then the trailer began to play.

At Blizzcon, the guests went wild. But most of these players already knew about the trademark. They were prepared. And there’s something to be said for the effect of a good atmosphere. The announcement streamed out to Blizzcon pass holders, and then was uploaded to Youtube. Within minutes, it was on every forum, every server, and every gaming news site. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of pandas, which obey their own special laws.

It was official. Mists of Pandaria (hereafter abbreviated to MoP) was the next World of Warcraft expansion.

The community imploded. It was utter pandamonium.

From the frost-bitten slopes of Northrend to the sands of Uldum, the reactions came in thick and fast.

I though the Pandaren were a running joke? I stopped playing WoW just after Cataclysm but I still keep up with it since I do think it's a great game and I still love the art direction. But seriously. Pandas? What. The. Actual. Fuck?

The MMOChampion user ‘Quackie’ said, “Pandas? This is Blizz just trolling us right? […] Time for a new game.” To which others responded with, “Don't forget to close the door behind you, lock it and throw away your keys!!!”

My personal favourites were those who looked at it and said ‘Oh, how original,’ the way a kindergarten teacher might do when one of their students turns in a messy crayon drawing of their parents fighting.

Reporting on the scene of Blizzcon, Simon of the Yogscast said:

”I played a monk, a panda monk. It was strange. I sort of just waddled around, I hit things, I was doing [KUNG FU SOUNDS].”

”There’s no weapons, you don’t even punch things, you hug them. It’s going to be renamed World of Hugcraft,” he said, before reaching over and giving his colleague a big old squeeze.

There were reactions of confusion, bewilderment, incredulity, reactions of despair and anger, reactions of tentative anticipation. And some, like me, actually liked the look of MoP, if you can believe it.

Fans had a number of gripes.

The first, and perhaps the most knee-jerk response, was that it was just dumb. It had no solid foundation in the lore, it was too girly and cheery and bright (WoW’s worldbuilding was historically quite dark), and conflicted with the existing style of art, music and story-telling. It was a jarring Kung Fu Panda rip off..

Some thought the resemblance was so uncanny that there might be legal action

”Oh dear... I would not be surprised if this ended in a lawsuit, its too close, even if you can argue that the concept are not similar (martial art pandas vs... martial art pandas?)almost every environment they showed looks like a Kung Fu Panda set...”

Another responded.

My knee jerk reaction as well, the camera shots, building layouts and color pallets are uncanny. There's the building with the pool of water similar to the scroll room from the movie, and the squared courtyard very similar to where the festival takes place at the beggining of kung fu panda. The scene with the peach tree in particular with the bright pinks and dark purples are almost short for shot.

However not everyone felt that way.

Most likely because both pull from the same real world sources of ancient china and martial arts.

[…]

Yeah I just don't see it. It's like saying racing movie B copied racing movie A because they both have american cars in it....

Nathan Grayson, writing for VG247, had this to say.

Back in my day, Warcraft had orcs and humans. Squishy, weak-willed, whiny humans who wouldn't stop saying, “Moah work?” That was it. And now? Pandas. Warcraft has rotund kung-fu pa-- [CONTENT REMOVED, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DREAMWORKS ENTERTAINMENT].

During BlizzCon's opening ceremonies, Blizzard roundhouse kicked fans' perceptions of what Warcraft's all about with warm, soothing colors, furry fists of fury, and heaping dollops of d'aaaaaaw. Folks weaned on bloodshed, angst, and cold, calculating strategy were understandably (and audibly) upset.

Are things really as bad as they seem, though? Will Blizzard's behemoth be done in not by a giant apocalypse dragon, but by fluffy – and perhaps even wuffy – pandas?

Far from a departure, Senior Game Producer John Lagrave promised a return to form. Conflict between the Horde and Alliance had driven the story of the original Warcraft games, and it was WoW that constantly forced the two factions to work together against a common enemy.

“It really hearkens back to the original game where you landed in Hillsbrad because the Alliance were coming up and starting to fight. That spontaneous world PVP was happening. That's the old war that's coming back.”

But even then, there was no hook, no big bad, nothing to keep players engaged beyond ‘faction conflict’. There was a villain, but it was ‘the Sha’, which was explained as a kind of misty black manifestation of negative emotion. It had no personality, no goals, no motives, and was generally difficult to care about.

”So how do you even get players excited about that? You're billing it as ‘the calm.’ Generally, that connotates to “not very exciting.” The point between the epic clashes. Those pages everybody skipped in Lord of the Rings where people started singing.” Nathan said. “How do you make people say “Oh boy!” about that?

One classic mock-trailer kept the deep angry voice but changed a few words around.

“An adventure safer than any we’ve known thus far. Low textured clouds, retextured trees.A mystery shrouded in a mystery. Architecture that looks really, really close to Chinese. And a people that may well know… how to sprinkle water on their opium an easier way…”

Here’s another.

”A mystery shrouded by April Fools jokes, a land of forgotten power – mainly because we made it up over the last couple of months.”

One of the biggest accusations levelled at Blizzard was that they were trying to win over the girls, the gays, the kids, the Chinese, the causals – everyone except the ‘real fans’. Of course, those ‘real fans’ only made up a tiny percentage of the playerbase.

”glad I stopped playing this game. getting gayer every update,” said one user.

[..]

Over the past seven years since WoW’s launch it’s gotten increasingly more cartoonish and playful. Gone are the savage looking armor sets and the grotesque demons littering the various dungeons, to make way for foam weapons, motorcycles, helicopters, and now, a playable Panda race. The Pandaren are the hardest to defend, take a look at them, they’re a race composed of bipedal Panda Bears–there’s no getting around it.

Many people within the community voiced similar opinions.

"I gotta say I really, really dislike the addition of pandas. Yes, I am going to get a lot of stick from morons who have no concept "OPINION". I just think they are way too silly, even though this has never been the most serious game in the world. The worst part is that it seems they are trying to do it with a straight face, which makes it even more hilarious (not in a good way).Apart from that though? I think the expac looks really, really good."

Not everyone had a problem with all the players complaining, and promising to leave.

"I think it's better that the people who don't like the next expac leave anyway. They are probably the sticks in the mud."

There were, of course, plenty of players who really looked forward to Mists. Here are a few of those reactions.

”I'm very satisfied with what I saw at Blizzcon today. MoP looks fantastic.”

[…]

”I don't get the hate for this expansion. They're adding some fantastic features, and are taking a much better design direction with the game. If only people looked passed Pandas. People are so freaking dense.”

[…]

The moment I saw this I cried. I don't ever care if that's crazy. I CRIED.THANK YOU BLIZZARD!

The China Problem

There was a whole section of this debate relating to China. Some players saw it as a shallow appeal to the Chinese market.

“The only reason Blizzard created Mists of Pandaria was to save their sinking ship. Only about 20% of WoW subs come from North America. Half of the subs come from Asia, and the rest are from Europe and other countries. To put it simple, Blizzard isn't solely surviving off of North American subs ..so they created Mists of Pandaria to appeal to the people from Asian countries.”

One response said:

”I wouldn't be suprised when Deathwing will be changed into a Charizard...”

To which another player replied,

”charizard is jap mate.”

Others took issue with all this blatant racism.

”Rather arrogant statement your making about how WoW should be a game aimed only for Americans and not rest of the world.

Old Asian culture is interesting it has nice potential of creating interesting zones and the story of that area has almost zero lore behind it. This gives Blizzard as a company to explore new idea's and gives them freedom that they didn't have before when trying to create a story.”

Some not only rejected the idea that MoP was meant to satisfy the Chinese, they accused it of being a carefully coordinated insult. They claimed the whole expansion was a caricature, which not only combined stereotypes from all across East Asia without regard for their origin, it also made a total mockery of them.

“Mists of Pandaria,” Blizzard’s latest expansion for their legendary massively multi-player online role-playing game “World of Warcraft,” is a high-resolution mishmash of every Asian stereotype available, sans poor driving and high grades — however untrue any of those stereotypes may be. From the dragon kites to the koi in various ponds, everything is all so Asian.

Notice I don’t say Chinese — though the humanoid pandas are certainly based more closely on the the Middle Kingdom’s history than the Land of the Rising Sun’s.

But it’s all so shallow — and borderline racist. The Pandaren speak in near “Engrish,” the dialogue is ripped straight from a midnight kung-fu film and some Pandaren have Fu Manchu mustaches. I’m already encountering lazy yin-yang themes that draw heavily on spirit worship and ancestor references.

It’s hard to dismiss this take. The Pandaren were not ‘cool’, like in the Sam Didier art, nor did they try to be. They were fat, goofy, greedy, lazy, characters with silly accents.

”Although they are anthropomorphic pandas and always have been, early sketches of the race depicted them as more muscular than chubby, and their samurai armor gave off an air of ferocity and strength. Now that the race has been made playable in Mists, they’ve been significantly de-fanged.” Sophie Pell wrote for NBC News. “Every pandaren has a belly, and they remark constantly how they love to eat, very similar to Po from the Kung Fu Panda franchise. They have not one, but two racial bonuses that apply to food.”

An NPR article criticised their portrayal:

“To be completely honest, I don't know what Blizzard was thinking when they announced the new Pandaren race and having them be known for their "Art of Acupressure"? Laughable.”

Commenting on the ‘wow-ladies’ blog, the user ‘Baisuzhen’ was also unhappy:

I'll be honest here. Being Asian Chinese in South East Asia, personally I am not entirely very fond of the entire theme itself, since it's practically my heritage/culture. The translated names are just cheesy beyond belief, as Blizzard literally translated many Chinese words/names directly.

Maybe also having grown up and surrounded by Chinese temples, culture, history etc, having to see all these in a predominantly fantasy land is just jarring to me. This is different from other Chinese MMOs that takes place in Ancient China as those are still Earth while Azeroth is definitely not. To have so many familiar themes, words, history and social nuances translated in a rather cheesy manner across just irritates me.

Again I would like to reiterate that this is my personal views and I am not attacking anyone.

Indeed, according to Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, most of the player losses following the announcement of Mists came from Asia. Over a million of them dropped WoW and went to go… find something else for their whole lives to be about. And that was before MoP even came out. But if you’ve read my Cataclysm write-up, you’d know that 2012 was dominated by ‘Hour of Twilight’, an infamously hated patch which went on for over a year.

When confronted with the whole ‘racism’ issue in an interview with Wired, WoW Production Director J. Allen Brack dismissed concerns:

”We’ve always tried to make Warcraft very much its own thing. Certainly we have influences from all around the world. And certainly the panda is the symbol of China. Obviously, there’s a lot of influence, but it’s a very light touch of how much China it is or how much it is the rest of Asia. We just tried to take little bits here and there and incorporate it into our own thing.”

There were some who acknowledged the ‘problematic’ aspects of Mists, while also still wanting to play it.

I agree wholeheartedly that MoP is appropriating a wonderful culture and creating some kind of Disneyland trip.

So how do we respond? For those of us who DO want to play it, what kind of action should we take? Should I feel bad for even wanting to play it? What kinds of things would be critical to point out in a letter to Blizz? And would a letter do anything at this point in their creation of the new expansion? I've really been quarreling with myself about the expansion because I'm really excited to play it, while at the same time recognizing that it's culturally insensitive and there are several things I take issue with.

I’ve been all doomy and gloomy, but a lot of Chinese players responded positively to the expansion. One user from Beihang gushed about it in a Quora response:

”From my perspective, the MoP was really a shock to us. Blizzard does made it a fatastic game for us with lots of Chinese elements in the game, including the cute pandas, beautiful buildings in traditional Chinese style such as the WALL, the awesome BGMs made by some Chinese instruments, some of the famous characters in Chinese stroies...

What I really want to express is that, thank you Blizzard, thank you for working on such a wonderful masterpiece, thank you for carry out all these details, that really made us feel a special bond to see so many familar stuff in such a western background game.”

As if that wasn’t enough drama, there was a whole controversy in which Chinese players complained that there were non-Chinese elements in the expansion. Particularly here, in which a pillar has writing on it in gasp Japanese characters.

On Weibo – China’s Twitter equivalent – an angry user said:

“What’s the next chapter in World of Warcraft? The Mists of Pandaria! Everyone can fucking see you’re just trying to sweep up the mainland Chinese market again. So how is it that the fucking whole thing is full of Japanese culture, it makes me so disturbed!”

And another.

“[…] even though there are pandas [in the expansion], for the sake of the [game’s popularity] you mixed in Japanese culture. If you love Japanese culture so much, why didn’t you just make it Japanese monkeys [instead of pandas] and call it a day?”

Of course, WoW had always had Japanese influences.

”Have you seen how many tentacles Deathwing has? And that is just the beginning.”

In fact, the characters were not Japanese. They were ‘Pandaren’, a totally fictional script which Blizzard made up, and which Chinese players had just assumed was Japanese.

One Chinese commenter said it didn’t matter, because ‘Chinese people invented Japanese people and Korean people’, so it was all Chinese culture at the end of the day.

This reply sums everything up wonderfully in my opinion:

”To say that the Chinese have a bad past with Japan is like saying that a drinking a mixture of cyanide, rat poison, jet fuel and a bowl of lit matches is a bad idea. It's a HUMONGOUS understatement, so I would understand if blizzard didn't want to risk it.”

The Million-Man Beta

I usually wouldn’t discuss the betas in these threads. Every patch and expansion has a beta, so there’s not much to talk about. But MoP was different.

In a last-ditch effort to cling on to their subscribers, Blizzard made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. The Annual Pass. If players simply committed to remaining subscribed for a single year, they would get three very tantalising things.

• A free digital copy of the heavily anticipated Diablo III

• An extremely sexy Diablo-themed mount, Tyreal’s Charger

• Guaranteed access to the Mists of Pandaria beta.

A whopping 1.2 million players signed up. It was a colossal success – I certainly continued paying long after I got bored and wanted to stop.

But there was a problem. Everyone got to see the expansion months before they had to buy it. They got to play through all of its content while Cataclysm was still out. And not only that – they saw all of its content while it was being developed.

I recall seeing broken combat, half-finished zones, crippling lag, server crashes, buggy quests, buildings without any textures. Personally, I loved the experience of ‘seeing behind the curtain’, but not everyone did. First impressions matter, and these people (many of whom were already wary about the concept to begin with) were not seeing Pandaria at its best. For those who didn’t get the Annual Pass, the internet was littered with first impressions and gameplay videos which exposed the half-finished expansion. Sometimes these online personalities laid out disclaimers about the nature of a beta. Sometimes.

It’s kind of surprising how incomplete it is. A couple of my buddies were in the Burning Crusade beta, and from what I saw and played it felt like a complete game that we were just basically stress testing. While I can’t speak for the WotLK or Cata betas, the Pandaria beta definitely caught me off guard in that context. Zones are still inaccessible, many animations are still missing, and overall it feels more like an alpha than a beta. Many quests are buggy and include testing notes in the quest text to get around the bugs

To make matters worse, World of Warcraft and the Beta took place on totally separate servers with separate launchers and installers. This had the added downside of splitting the World of Warcraft player-base. In a year when subscribers were already dropping, over a million of the most dedicated players simply disappeared from the main game. And it was really noticeable. Online communities came apart at the seams because so many of the old faces were off traipsing through the Beta.

Until then, the weeks and days preceding an expansion were filled with excitement. Many players have memories of waiting outside shops until midnight so they could storm inside and buy their copies of Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King, staying up until the early hours of the morning. When Mists of Pandaria finally released, there was very little of the usual fanfare. Everyone who wanted to see the expansion had already done it. A lot of them would be levelling through its zones for the second, third, or fourth time now.

Blizzard had shot themselves in the foot.

The Game Comes Out

And so, it was with a whimper, not a bang, that the expansion began. On the 4th October, the mists finally lifted. Blizzard sold only 2.7 million copies within the first week. Cataclysm had sold considerably more, within a single day. There were a few hiccups, such as the hilariously broken gyrocopter quest, but those are core to every expansion.

We’ve spent all this time focusing on the outrage, without ever looking at what people were outraged about. So here’s the lowdown on Mists of Pandaria.

During Deathwing’s world-breaking shenanigans, he disrupted the titular ‘Mists’, a supernatural veil which had hidden the Southern continent of Pandaria from the rest of the world for ten thousand years. Both the Alliance and Horde, finally free of a big bad to unite against, sent teams to explore the continent and plunder its resources.

The two factions encountered one another and quickly came to blows. The story revolved around this growing conflict, which consumed all of Pandaria. All that negative energy reawakened the Sha, a force unique to Pandaria, which began to corrupt everyone there. Especially Garrosh Hellscream, the leader of the Horde. Before Mists began, he dropped the Warcraft equivalent of a nuke on the alliance city of Theramore, which is what kicked off this whole faction war. He had always had… anger management issues, but gradually became more and more paranoid, vicious, and dangerous, to the point where most of the Horde turned on him and, with the help of the Alliance, besieged him in the Horde capital of Orgrimmar. But we’ll get to that.

There’s not a huge amount to say about Pandaren or Monks. Despite the massive dramas prior to release, they sort of faded into the background. The Pandaren get a stunning starter zone, which is actually the back of a giant turtle. But that’s it, really. The big thing with Pandaren was that they started neutral, and could choose a faction to join at level 10.

The furry community welcomed them with open paws. Until then, they had satisfied themselves with Worgen and Tauren, but the Disney-like designs of the Pandaren made them a firm favourite. I played on a Roleplay server and let me tell you, exploring the many hidden nooks and crannies of Pandaria was often a lot less rewarding than the developers intended. This was not the last time Blizzard threw a bone to the furries, but they were still half a decade away at this point.

There was a fun story of a Pandaren player called ‘Doubleagent’ who refused to choose a side, and instead reached max level without ever leaving the turtle, by picking flowers. It took him 8000 hours.

As of 2020, Pandaren are the least popular race in each faction, but when we combine the Pandaren on Horde and Alliance, they sit on par with most other races. Of course, they’re nowhere near the Night Elf/Human/Blood Elf trio, which makes up a majority of all players. But they haven’t been a failure by any means. Monks on the other hand remain the least played class, just below Shaman.

From my research, the problem seems to be that players are unable to separate Pandaren from Monks. Pandaren mages seem wrong, as do undead monks. So a lot of players seem less willing to be creative with them than other races or classes. Also, while the aesthetic of the Pandaren fits fantastically in Pandaria, it kind of clashes in any other setting.

Five Hundred Dailies of Summer

Overall, the continent of Pandaria was a mixed bag.

All players started in the Jade Forest, one of the most visually spectacular zones Blizzard has ever produced. It had a tightly written story and an excellent plot. There were dozens of hidden locations all around the zone that only max players could find, once they had unlocked flying.

the Jade Forest zone is hands-down my favorite place in WoW (LINKS TO REDDIT). I love flying around, looking at the little solitary houses on the earth pillars, and pretending my panda owns one of them.

I’m so lame, no need to tell me.

After Jade Forest, players could go to either the swampy, atmospheric Krasarang Wilds, or the fertile farmlands of the Valley of the Four Winds. By all accounts, this wasn’t a difficult choice. Players overwhelmingly preferred the Valley. At this point, the story became less linear, and players got more options that branched out across the game-world.

Next was the imposing mountains and plains of Kun Lai Summit. While I loved it, I know some players didn’t.

After that came another choice, this time between the expansion’s less popular zones, Townlong Steppes and Dread Waste. The latter was particularly controversial. It was designed as the dangerous homeland of the ‘Klaxxi’, and as such it was full of enemies – to the point where it was hard to get around without attracting constant attention.

In a Reddit rant (LINKS TO REDDIT), the user /u/hMJem echoed the feelings of most players.

I just hate everything about it. You enter the zone and it's clustered and just looks boring/ugly.

However not everyone agreed.

It's the only zone in MoP I actually like, exactly for the reasons that other people seem to dislike it. I think it pulled the "dark desolated corrupted wasteland" off perfectly, having only a few bits that are actually safe.

There was also the max-level zone Vale of Eternal Blossoms, another visually spectacular zone with an interesting story.

Overall, the expansion is considered to be one of, if not the most beautiful. The music also deserves a shout-out. While there was a narrative that proceeded from zone to zone, they remained disconnected. Each one focused on a totally different enemy – from the Yaungol to the Virmen to the Saurok to the Mogu to the Mantid to the Klaxxi. It was a lot to handle. However, Pandaria was absolutely brimming with lore. Someone at Blizzard had clearly spent months coming up with the history and culture of its various races, and it showed.

”If, pre-launch, you had told people they’d be getting one of the darkest WoW expansions ever, they’d have laughed at you. Early on, they’d still be laughing at you – there was a basic tale of how raw emotion can get the best of you in Jade Forest, but it was pretty light-hearted for most of the zone. Around Krasarang Wilds, it starts to turn darker, getting darker in Kun Lai Summit, and then ultimately leading to the odd brutality of Dread Wastes. There is a military excursion happening, a tale of what happens when a native people are pushed to the brink by a war that they are barely involved in.”

The levelling experience was well-received in general. But after that, things became a little more divisive.

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Oh man, you guys, I can’t believe no one has written up the Sad Puppies yet! This is a tale of literary drama that went very nearly mainstream, tangentially involving a few people you’ve probably heard of, and it’s just packed with comically obvious villains and delicious schadenfreude. I sincerely hope that in a decade or two someone makes it into a heartwarmingly overwrought Oscar-bait docudrama. In the meantime, here’s what happened.

Tl;dr: science fiction had its own, somehow even dumber Gamergate.

This got so, so long, I’m sorry. You guys seemed to enjoy the extended Snapewives etc writeups so I kinda just went for it.

Diversity: The Final Frontier

Science fiction is, historically, a white guy-heavy club. There are notable exceptions, but for the most part when you say ‘sci fi’ people are going to think of classic 1950s-1970s genre giants like Heinlein and Asimov. Early editors and publishers deliberately cultivated a white male only scene. And, relevantly to the entire huge-ass essay I’m about to write, it’s stubbornly white and male. Although the field started opening up in the 80s with authors like Octavia Butler and Lois McMaster Bujold making inroads, and nominations for the Hugos (the genre’s highest awards, ie the Nerd Oscars) were actually about 50% given to female authors in 1992-93, backlash hit hard. From 1998-2009, no more than 25% of Hugo nominees were women, and some years as low as 5%. I can’t find hard numbers for racial diversity but it wasn’t any less bleak.

At a time when wider society was increasingly talking about maybe not gatekeeping literature quite so much, the science fiction fandom had spoken: stories of utopian societies and incomprehensibly advanced alien technology are relatable, but black people? This is not the way.

What changed in 2009 was Racefail. I’m not going to try and even summarize it, because it was an extremely complicated, contentious movement featuring about eight million people who won’t be relevant to the rest of this post. The extremely short version is that Racefail was an approximately year-long series of conversations, essays, responses, and counter-responses about racism and sexism in the speculative fiction community and the ways that non-white-guy people get shut out of the traditional publishing process. This was years before Gamergate, but it was an earlier example of the way online fan communities were starting to exert their authority.

In the wake of Racefail, a new generation of female and POC authors came out of the woodwork to participate more actively in the speculative fiction community, especially by finding easy-to-reach internet-based fans not locked behind magazines or publishers. Almost overnight the Hugo nominations looked a lot more balanced (40% female/60% male authors in 2010, 50/50 in 2011). A lot of really good contemporary talent blossomed, and we got some awesome novels that might never have seen the light of day. Problem solved!

The Hugos

That was just the exposition, sorry. The actual drama is going to center around the Hugo Awards. Like the Grammys and Golden Globes, the Hugos are the industry awards of the ‘Speculative Fiction’ (science fiction and fantasy) world, given out every year for accomplishments in a number of categories.

(It’s sci fi and fantasy, but this post is mostly going to be about the sci fi side, for reasons that mostly come down to science fiction being preferred literature of Logical and ~~Euphoric~~ Enlightened Gentlemen. Fantasy is for girls. Apparently.)

Unlike the Grammys etc, the format of Hugo nominations is somewhat unusual. Anyone who buys a ticket to the World Science Fiction Convention (aka Worldcon) can make nominations; the top five nominees are put through a ranked-choice vote by the same community. Every category also has a No Award option, intended to be used if voters think any or all of the nominees don’t deserve to be considered.

The decentralized nature of the award elections means the process can be fairly easily taken over by even a relatively small coordinated bloc. No one had ever really worried about this before, because no single author could ensure themselves an award and who else would bother gaming the Hugos?

Well, these guys would, as it turns out.

The Sad Puppies are born

History? In my spaceships?

The Sad Puppies movement was born in 2013, in the comment section of the blog of a science fiction author named Larry Correia. Correia lamented his lack of industry recognition, describing his work as ‘unabashedly pulp,’ and therefore discriminated against. In other words, modern fans cared more about books with literary and cultural merit than his good ol’ action stories about square-jawed spacemen punching bad guys and hooking up with sexy aliens. And that’s not fair. :c

Correia’s anger reflected a trend in reactionary science fiction blogging, which is a sentence that I did not expect to type when I woke up this morning. You see, the Puppies had their own explanation for the post-Racefail diversity burst: obviously it’s impossible that anyone actually likes books by or about women and/or nonwhite folks, so the increasing success of those authors was just pity awards and book sales, driven by liberal guilt and the desire to look Hashtag Woke. Conservative white male authors were convinced that they were, actually, the ones being discriminated against - some said the industry was anti-Christian, some yelled about the dreaded SJWs. Regardless of the cause, they weren’t winning everything anymore, which couldn’t possibly be the result of a fair process, so something had to change.

(The name ‘Sad Puppies’ is a reference to those emotionally manipulative Sarah McLachlin animal cruelty ads that had everyone crying themselves to sleep back in the day. Correia edited together a humorous video featuring himself as one of the pitiful little doggos who would die of Neglectitis without your ~~donation~~ vote!)

Let’s game the Hugos!

So Correia and friends dubbed themselves a movement and decided they’d raise support to get his latest book the Best Novel award at the 2013 Hugos…

...and failed. Completely. His book didn’t even make it to the election. Clearly Team Sad Puppies had to step up their game, so they advertised more and put together a whole slate of nominations in anticipation of the 2014 Hugos, intending to collectively win multiple categories.

...and failed, again. Of the seven Puppy nominees that reached the ballot in 2014, only one did better than ‘dead last’ and one actually lost to No Award, ie worse than last. “This was really a year that underscored that a younger generation of diverse writers are becoming central to the genre and helping to redefine and expand it,” noted nerd culture news repository Gizmodo, serenely unaware that there had even been a right-wing protest vote bloc.

Under Correia, the Sad Puppies had been pretty much entirely useless at achieving their actual goals. But interest in their club had spread through the rightwing geek internet, and a monster was waking…

Enter Players 1 and 2

deep breath

Time to introduce arguably the two central figures of Puppygate, ie the people I’m most focused on fantasy casting for my imaginary melodramatic reenactment film: NK Jemisin and Theodore Beale.

NK Jemisin is a sci fi/fantasy author and also black woman who incorporates themes of colonialism, oppression, and cultural conflict into her work; she was actually one of the pro-diversity voices of Racefail from way back at the top of this page. She’s also a really good writer. Her work burst onto the scene in 2010 to huge success and near universal critical acclaim and she’s since won approximately every fantasy literature award on the planet, refusing to back down from her political stances along the way.

Theodore Beale is better known as alt right culture war polemic Vox Day, who you might be familiar with if you were unfortunate enough to pay attention to Gamergate. He’s also an author, having created his own publishing house to distribute his Christian-themed fantasy books and “a guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks.” He has been described as a “graspingly untalented bigot” (by John Scalzi) and “holy shit, that guy is a straight up literal Nazi” and once attempted to create a conservative alternative to Wikipedia.

The two are not friends.

In 2013, Vox Day ran for president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). He lost, but NK Jemisin used her keynote speech as guest of honor at a large convention to publicly express her alarm that 10% of the SFWA membership had voted for a man who once referred to women’s suffrage as a “complete and unmitigated disaster” and had a lot of thoughts about something called ‘white tribalism’. In response, Vox Day used the official SFWA Twitter to link to a post on his blog in which he said that “genetic science presently suggests that we [ie white and black people] are not equally homo sapiens sapiens,” referred to Jemisin as a “half-savage,” and called her editor a “fat frog,” among a whole lot of other stuff. After a bunch of dumb waffling about civility and drama the SFWA kicked him out.

The incident apparently focused Vox Day on the dreadful oppression faced by rightwing white guys who write books about dragons. This all went down in 2013; now we’re jumping back to...

2015: Shit Gets Real

Puppies everywhere

In preparation for the 2015 Hugos, OG Sad Puppy Wrangler Larry Correia (remember him? No one else does) was succeeded by an author named Brad Torgerson, a guy who had been nominated for a couple industry awards but never found enough success to quit his day job.

About five minutes later, Vox Day popped up to announce his own splinter movement, the more extreme Rabid Puppies. While the Sads’ voting slate was officially a ‘suggestion,’ the Rabs were clear that they meant to be a unified bloc. Finally, someone was taking a stand against identity politics and affirmative action, by… only voting for books written by politically acceptable white guys.

Anyway.

War of the Puppies

2015 was inarguably the Year of the Puppies. Newly organized and energized and taking notes from the still-raging Gamergate movement, the Puppy candidates dominated the Hugo ballots - the Sad Puppies got 51 finalists, while the Rabid Puppies achieved 58. They swept several categories, meaning all five candidates were Puppy-approved. It escaped no one’s notice that Vox Day, Torgerson, Torgerson’s inner circle, and Vox Day’s publishing house were healthily represented, as well as a bunch of other authors who clearly were not on the ballot on the strength of their writing.

The whole thing took the rest of Worldcon by surprise - no one had ever tried to game the results at anything close to this scale before. The speculative fiction community was in an uproar. The Puppies were widely criticized for both their ideology (the Sad Puppies made a half-hearted attempt to pretend to disapprove of the Rabid Puppies and their openly white supremacist leader, convincing approximately nobody) and for their blatant abuse of the process. Much more successful and popular white guys like George R. R. Martin and sci fi writer Alastair Reynolds disowned them. Reasonably famous internet writer guy and former president of the SFWA John Scalzi started an all-out war against the movement, becoming their #2 nemesis - second only to Jemisin, who had become a symbol of everything the Puppies wanted banished from science fiction.

(Funnily enough, Scalzi won the 2013 Best Novel Hugo that Correia started the Sad Puppy movement to get.)

And the winner is…

When the panic died down, calls went out among the Worldcon community to No Award the Puppy candidates. The way this works is that in every category, No Award is essentially a sixth nominee. As the vote is ranked choice, a voter who feels that a given book or author is undeserving of the nomination can rank that book/person below No Award. Anyone who scores below No Award doesn’t place at all (so if NA gets third, the fourth, fifth, and sixth-place books get no recognition). If No Award wins the vote, no Hugo is awarded in that category at all. Prior to 2015 this was a rare occurrence.

The result: No Awards to every one of the categories with only Puppy candidates. No Award beat every Puppy-approved candidate in all of the other categories, with the sole exception of Guardian of the Galaxy winning Best Dramatic Presentation in the Long Form. No wins for Brad Torgerson or Vox Day.

Oops.

2016: Pounded In The Butt By My Reactionary Politics

Okay, So That Didn’t Work

By 2016 the Sad Puppies had completely lost control of Vox Day. They retreated to focus on gaming the votes at the brand new Dragon Awards of DragonCon, which at least kept them quiet. Newly crowned Supreme Puppy Emperor Vox Day vowed to DESTROY THE HUGOS AND LEAVE NOTHING BUT A SMOKING PIT and so forth.

The problem was that no one wanted to run on the Rabid Puppy ticket. Previous years had made it clear that associating yourself with the Puppies was a good way to win absolutely nothing at all, since even people who didn’t care about the ideological fight going on would vote against Puppy candidates in distaste for their gaming of the process. In fact, the only work or author to finish in anything other than last place after receiving a Puppy endorsement was Guardians of the Galaxy, which… probably didn’t need their help.

Guardian’s victory became the movement’s new strategy. Instead of nominating themselves, the Puppies would claim whichever independently successful authors weren’t entirely politically unacceptable. Then, when ‘their’ candidates won, so would the Puppies! It was foolproof.

The authors themselves (at least the ones who knew they’d been chosen by the Puppies; some had no idea) were… displeased. They demanded to be taken off the slate, to no avail. Neil Gaiman called the Puppies ‘sad losers.’ A few near-certain winners dropped out of the race to spite Vox Day. There was disagreement about whether authors who were essentially human shields should be No Awarded. In the end, the Puppies finally picked up a few ‘wins,’ but only with authors who weren’t associated with the movement.

And there was one victory they couldn’t celebrate at all: NK Jemisin became the first African American author to win the coveted Best Novel award for her book The Fifth Season.

THE BAD DOGS BLUES

There were a few Puppy-driven nominees on the ballot in 2016: joke nominees. The Puppies decided that if they couldn’t steal awards from minority authors, they’d delegitimize them. One of their most absurd picks was an obscure anonymous author who apparently wrote nothing but bizarre supernatural gay erotica.

That’s right: the Sad Puppies gave us Chuck Tingle.

Tingle accepted the nomination and used it to troll the hell out of his benefactors. Apparently no one had remembered to register RabidPuppies Dot Com, so Tingle bought it and redirected it to an LGBT charity and NK Jemisin’s marketing page. He arranged for feminist game developer and noted target of shrieking, incoherent Gamergate rage Zoë Quinn to give his acceptance speech. Lastly, he published the classic Slammed in the Butt by my Hugo Award Nomination, which I confess I have not read.

The End of the Puppies

Changes to the Hugo award process in 2017 reduced the effectiveness of bloc voting, but by that point it didn’t really matter. Gamergate had run out of momentum and the world had moved on. The Sad Puppies quietly disbanded; Vox Day and the Rabid Puppies struggled on for another year, but managed only 12 nominations and no wins. NK Jemisin took Best Novel again for the sequel to last year’s winning book.

Finally, in the scene that will almost certainly form the last triumphant shot of the melodramatic dramatization of this saga, in 2018 female authors won all the major Hugo categories, and NK Jemisin became the first person to win three consecutive Best Novel awards, one for every book in her Broken Earth trilogy.

In conclusion, I am going to go look at pictures of real, adorable, non-bigoted puppies. Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

If you don't know anything about lolita fashion, let me give you a quick primer. Lolita is a style of Japanese street fashion originating in 1970s Harajuku. While the name might squick Westerners, the fashion has nothing to do with that awful pedophilic book. The style actually originates from a feminist rebellion by young women against societal and parental expectations that they should dress and act a certain way in order to attract a husband. Instead, early lolitas created clothing which was heavily influenced by cutesy little girl's styles in order to dissuade men from approaching them. These days, lolita is worn around the world. Most people only wear it for special occasions like meetups with other lolitas and outings. They have lolita events at conventions, sponsored tea parties, and a bustling online buy/sell community.

The fashion itself focuses on a few key elements: poofy dresses or skirts, modest cuts with minimal skin showing, lace/ruffles/frills, and carefully coordinated looks where every element matches. There are plenty of sub-styles but the most popular are sweet, classic, and gothic. Sweet lolita is full of pastel colors, baby animal motifs, sweet foods, and fluffy stuff. Classic looks like a Victorian doll, using more subdued color palettes and simple or older-looking prints. Gothic focuses on black or very dark colors, crosses, bats, and spikes, while still maintaining the key elements of the overall style. There's other sub-styles too, like wa-lolita, pirate lolita, military lolita, and country lolita, but most follow one of the main three styles.

Before I begin this story, I should familiarize you with the idea of 'brand' or 'burando'. Brand is the term used when referring to items made by Japanese lolita companies like Angelic Pretty (AP), Baby the Stars Shine Bright (BtSSB), Alice and the Pirates (AatP), Metamorphose (Meta) and Innocent World (IW). Lolita isn't cheap to buy and brand items tend to be the most expensive. A new release dress from AP often runs around US$550. They also tend to have very small sizing, especially in the bust. Secondhand brand dresses can be just as expensive depending on how rare the style is. Prior to rerelease, the AP print Cat's Teaparty was going for upwards of 1k secondhand due to the rarity and desirability. People get insane about finding their dream dress and are willing to pay prices which seem ridiculous to those not involved in the fashion. There are cheaper options out there, especially Bodyline (which has some juicy drama I'll write about in a post soon) and Taobao, but some people pride themselves on being labeled 'brand whores' for only ever wearing brand items.

Kelly Eden and the $1,500 Dress

If you're not familiar with Kelly Eden, she's a cosplayer, model, YouTuber, massive weeaboo, and subject of much drama. She's claimed to be the most kawaii person in the United States, said that her video about Sailor Moon makeup made the price go up, sold all of her Hello Kitty merch after Sanrio refused to sponsor her, and claimed Disney was copying her look in one of their shows. Her house is adorable but all in all she has a history of entitlement and spoiled behaviour.

Back in 2017, Kelly went on a trip to Japan to do some work on a TV show. While she was there, she and her friends decided to hit up Akihabara, a very popular Japanese shopping district. This isn't your average western shopping center with a Banana Republic and Annie Anne's Pretzels. It's multiple buildings across many stories chock full of electronics, games, collectibles, toys, trading cards - basically the dream of every Japanese media collector and gadget geek. It also hosts department stores with some niche street fashion brands, including the main store of Angelic Pretty, the most widely known and popular lolita brand in the world.

Kelly and her entourage decided to visit the AP store for some shopping. Her group wanders the store until she hits upon The Dress. The Dress is gorgeous, an elaborate pink number dripping in ruffles and bows. It's every bit an over the top sweet lolita dress. After telling her friend she thinks it must be expensive, her friend converts the yen price on the fly, saying that it's $148. $148. When the average price of a brand new AP dress is around $550. In her later video, Kelly claims that she knows the average price of an AP dress and that she assumed it was on sale. AP is rarely, if ever, on sale. She asks to try it on and the shop staff decline. Note that this is common in lolita when an item is particularly expensive. They don't want to risk the dress being ruined by someone while they're trying it.

Kelly has a large chest, much larger than what is typically accommodated by brand dresses, and says she isn't sure if it would fit her. After debating the price and if it would fit, she decides to purchase the dress, figuring she could just return it if it wound up not fitting her. After all, it's just $148. She never takes out her phone to convert the price. She never asks shop staff for a conversion. She never considers that AP and other lolita brands have a no returns, no refunds policy. She never asks any questions while handing over her credit card, even after her debit card was declined. She looks directly at the price tag, agrees that it’s $148, and buys it.

That night she gets an email from her bank asking if she tried to make a $1,500 purchase on her debit card in Akihabara earlier in the day. Having never actually significantly considered why the dress she bought was so cheap, she freaks out, says it wasn't her, and cancels her card. The exact card she'd been holding earlier in the day. In Akihabara. At the time there was supposedly fraud. And which was still in her wallet.

Riiiight.

At long last she finally manages to figure out that the dress she thought she’d bought for a great bargain is actually anything but. It’s not $148. It’s roughly $1500. Ten times the price she thought she’d bought it for. Like any spoiled influencer who realizes they’ve made a grave, grave mistake, she freaks out and demands a refund. A refund from a store where giving refunds is Not A Thing They Do. Ever. Note The Emphasis Here.

Thing is, as I said in the intro to this post, there is a bustling secondhand lolita market. Brand new dresses can regularly go for nearly the same price online as in store simply because they’re easier to buy or because the release sold out. Kelly also has a sizable fanbase which is already known for buying her spare stuff and would likely have zero problems getting someone to buy this expensive dress from her. But either she doesn’t know this or she doesn’t consider it, because she marches down to the store after they say over the phone that they won’t return it.

The store obviously isn’t happy to see her. They know why she’s here. She has a translator go back and forth with the store manager, demanding to return it, telling them she’s not leaving until she has her money back. Dresses sold at these stores can’t have any flaws or damage at all, so the moment it leaves the store, while it could be sold second-hand, they can’t take it back and sell it again. The store staff have to thoroughly inspect the whole dress to be sure it isn’t damaged or worn. At long last, after having a fit in the store, they reluctantly agree to return it and she leaves.

After getting back from her trip, Kelly publishes a vlog detailing the whole fiasco. She makes herself out to be the hero who made a mistake and was horribly inconvenienced, but some viewers are quick to point out that she’s definitely not the victim here. Word gets out to the lolita community proper and shit hits the fan. Lolitas, outraged by her mistreating the store staff and talking bad about their favorite brand, bash her to hell and back across social media. A popular snarky lolita YouTuber, Tyler Willis of Last Week Lolita News, does a video ripping her a new one. This is soon followed by another popular YouTube lolita, Lovely Lor, doing a less snarky, more explanatory video also explaining exactly what she did wrong and why everyone is so upset.

Kelly doesn't take it well. She tweets up a storm, blocks a lot of popular lolita and kawaii influencers including Tyler and Lor, and ultimately, unable to take the criticism, deletes the video. It now only lives on in the clips in Tyler’s video. Lolitas continue to make jokes about her to this day and she has zero respect or credibility in the community.

I have other lolita drama I can write up if there's interest, like how one brand's CEO hosted model hunts to find a foreign wife.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

Hey there! This is obviously a community in the vein of the reddit Hobby Drama subreddit, but I wanted to check in to see where we want to draw a few rules as a community. So to that end:

REPOSTING FROM REDDIT

I did see a few people were interested in having a bot auto repost from the reddit sub and most of our posts are reposts. My question here is should we have an anything from another site (reddit or otherwise) is fair game to repost with proper credit (let's try to keep those links back to original write-ups, I feel this is only fair to the authors) rule or should permission be obtained from the author first for reposts (basically like r/bestofredditorupdates on reddit)?

DRAMA RESOLUTION WAITING PERIOD

The reddit sub has a 14 day waiting period for drama to conclude before a post can go up. As we're obviously a smaller community I don't see the need to be as stringent, but waiving the waiting period could lead to a lot of biased hot take posts. Would the community like to see the waiting period waived, lowered, remain?

ETA: this post is open for discussion until 7/24 so please do add your opinion even if you feel "late" to the discussion! It's my goal to have the community rules updated by Friday 7/28 to fit our community a little better and knowing how our community feels as migration from reddit continues to take place will be a big assist.

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

In 2015, Neelix was a well respected member of the Wikipedia community. He'd been on Wikipedia for nine years and made more than 180,000 edits. He'd written several featured articles, helped lead Wikipedia education programs, and served as an administrator for four years. So it came as a surprise when, on November 5th, an anonymous user reported Neelix to Wikipedia's noticeboard for "chronic, intractable behavioural problems", accusing him of vandalism on a mass scale.

First, a little background information. Most new pages on Wikipedia go through a process where an experienced user reviews the page and checks it for any issues. Pages that are inappropriate are tagged for deletion and the creator is warned; users who repeatedly create inappropriate pages are banned. Pages created by admins are automatically exempt from this process, because it's assumed that admins know better than to create junk pages. It is this assumption that allowed Neelix to escape notice for so long.

The anonymous user had stumbled across a handful of questionable redirect pages created by Neelix. Some were just silly and pointless, like "Anti-trousers" redirecting to "Pantslessness", or "Sixteen-headed" redirecting to "Polycephaly". But others were puerile, if not outright offensive, such as "Titty cancer" for breast cancer or "Boobie builder" for breast reconstruction. Many users were shocked to learn that these pages were created by an administrator. Another admin remarked that "if I saw this kind of crap from a new account I'd block it instantly as a vandal".

The rabbit hole went deeper. The reporting user originally complained about "dozens" of inappropriate redirects. As others looked into Neelix's page creations, that figure changed to thousands. You can get a sense of the scale of the problem from looking at this list of deleted pages. Tittypumps, tittypumping, tittypumpers, tittypumped, titpumps, titpumping, pumps titties, pumps tits, boobypumping, boobypumpers, boob pump... and that's just for one article. It soon became clear that Neelix had created redirects based on various permutations of the words "tits" and "boobs" for almost every single breast related article on Wikipedia.

Maybe Neelix meant well but got carried away. One could argue that it's reasonable to redirect "boob sex" and "tit fucking" to "mammary intercourse". But it's much harder to defend redirects like "Titty tumors", "Segmental removal of the titties", "Constructions of the booby", "Hypoplastic tits" and "Atrophy of the titties". And there were thousands more of these! Neelix had created over 80,000 redirects, and a substantial portion of them were about titties and boobies. A commentator quipped: "Thank God he apparently never heard the term "jugs" or "rack", or this would have been many times worse".

Some users speculated that Neelix's account had been hacked, but this was not the case. Several Wikipedia editors knew Neelix in real life and were able to confirm that he was in control of the account. Everyone was baffled. Why would an admin create so many terrible redirects? "It just seems so childish", one user said. "These are pages a high school vandal would make, not an experienced editor."

No explanation was forthcoming. Neelix said, "I apologize for creating unusual redirects. When creating them, I did not think the community in general would be against them. Again, I am very sorry." But he did not explain what he was thinking when he created thousands of pages like "Suckling of the boobies" and "Tumorous titties".

With dozens of users poring over Neelix's edit history, other issues came to the surface. In 2013, Neelix had created an article about Tara Teng, the 2011 winner of the Miss Canada beauty pageant. Teng's pageant win and her subsequent activism against human trafficking granted her enough notability for a Wikipedia article. But Neelix's article on Teng was perhaps a bit too detailed for her level of fame. By the time Neelix was done with it, Teng's biography was over 5,600 words long - longer than the article on the Dalai Lama! The article included five different photos of Tara and such important details as "In October 2012, Teng appeared unannounced at restaurant Szechuan Chongqing" and "In February 2013, Teng was asked to attend a sleepover called "Beautiful, You" at G.W. Graham Middle-Secondary School in Chilliwack".

This article was first noticed by users on the Hipinion.com forum, who mocked it in a thread titled "This is the story of a beauty queen as told by her stalker". The Wikipedia criticism forum Wikipediocracy took note of it as well. The article was soon edited down to a reasonable size, although not without complaints from Neelix - he and his friends accused everyone who trimmed the article of being sockpuppets. This incident was mostly forgotten until someone in the redirect thread pointed out a disturbing fact:

Neelix started making breast redirects immediately after Tara Teng posted a picture of herself breastfeeding on Instagram.

Anyway, the community now had to decide what to do with tens of thousands of titty pages. Some users suggested deleting all 80,000 of Neelix's redirects. But there were some good ones mixed in with the bad. And what to do with Neelix? This behavior would have gotten a normal user blocked within minutes, but Neelix was a respected admin. It didn't seem right to block him.

After several days of discussion, the noticeboard report ended with Neelix being banned from creating redirects but keeping his admin privileges. No longer able to make boob redirects, Neelix voluntarily gave up his adminship and retired from Wikipedia. A new deletion criterion was invented: any redirect created by Neelix could be instantly deleted without discussion.

It took until April 2018 to delete all the titty redirects.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

A bit of a long post that was inspired by a few conversations on r/headphones asking about what exactly happened (this one in particular recently). And I have the right brand of obsession with the industry to give you all the rundown.

The Main Players

• Campfire Audio or commonly abbreviated as CFA, the "antagonist" of this drama. They are a company based in the US that builds and sells high-end (>$200) earphones that the community refers to as "IEMs" (which means "In-Ear Monitors").
• Ken Ball, the CEO of Campfire Audio. Despite his position, he still participates relatively frequently on audiophile forums.
• "crinacle", an earphone reviewer. More about him later.

Why does r/headphones love Campfire so much?

To remove as much of the industry-specific knowledge as possible, what CFA essentially did was capture lightning in a bottle for what is their most popular product, the Andromeda. Released more than 2 years ago, it still receives massive praise by the audiophile community today and is probably the most recommended earphone for anyone with the budget at-and-under $1,000. In an industry where it is not uncommon for a product's popularity to completely die off after a month, this level of staying power is nearly unheard of.

It would only be obvious that CFA would try to re-capture this lightning in the bottle for future releases, but it seems that they've failed every time. The Lyra, Vega, Dorado, Polaris, Comet, Atlas... all names that you need not concern yourself with but just know that all of them weren't even close to reaching the level of popularity that the Andromeda has.

That is, until late 2018 when Ken Ball announces their new flagship model. Their masterpiece that promises to better that of their one-hit wonder, and the community loses their collective minds.

Campfire's Newest Flagship: The Solaris

The Campfire Solaris: Ken Ball's Mona Lisa. There are many reasons why it was so hyped up by the audio community but probably too technical for a mainstream post such as this. The first wave of reviews were almost unanimously positive as everyone touted the Solaris to be the greatest IEM ever, some going as far as to call it flawless. It really did seem that CFA had matched or even surpassed the hype that the Andromeda had during its release, and the Solaris' future looked bright both in terms of critical response and in terms of sales.

That is, until one person stepped in and "ruined" everything.

Who is "Crinacle"?

If Campfire Audio is (was) r/headphones' favorite earphone company, then u/crinacle is their favorite earphone reviewer. He is a figure with ridiculous influence over the IEM industry with his hypercritical reviewing style, often fighting against the hype but ultimately standing victorious whenever the hype eventually dies off and proves his numerous analyses correct. He is famous (or notorious, depending on your perspective) mainly for two resources that he manages:

• The "IEM ranking list", a list where he categorizes all the earphones he has heard into tiers on a subjective scale.
• His database of measurements, which shows how an earphone would sound like on a more objective scale.

The second part is more relevant to this story.

---

Extra context: What are "measurements" in audio?

To be specific, what Crinacle measures is the frequency response of an earphone, i.e. the relative volume between the bass, midrange and treble. That technical tidbit is not required for this story, but it's good to have it in your mind while reading.

---

The Tale of the Three Solarises

Most of the facts outlined be obtained from Crinacle's own subreddit r/inearfidelity. Some of the linked posts were also crossposted to r/headphones, where they were upvoted to the subreddit's front page almost every time.

On the 6th of December 2018, Crinacle posts his first impressions of the coveted Solaris alongside measurements. He wasn't outright negative towards it, but he clearly was not gushing over it and was even pointing out certain flaws that he thought were dealbreakers. At the beginning, this made the community somewhat riled up and doubtful towards what was essentially the first bit of critique of these earphones then.

With the mild backlash, Crinacle then sought out a second sample of the Solaris and posted about it on the 11th of December just in case the pair he had just heard was a dud. To his and everyone else's surprise, that unit sounded different. And better. Crinacle thus promises to find a third sample to confirm which one was the "authentic" Solaris.

Then for a good two weeks or so, it was basically radio silence from Crinacle regarding the Solaris. His initial impressions were a blow to the Solaris' reputation for sure, but it was only a tiny setback for massive freight train that was its hype. Reviews were still pouring in from e-magazines and other formal review sites pushing the Solaris as the next big thing, and for a while even r/headphones was being swept up by the hype.

On the 27th of December, Crinacle's post dropped. It was titled "Solaris unit variance and the dilemma of determining the representative", detailing how all three of the units he listened to sounded different, with the measurements as an objective backup.

Crinacle Versus Campfire

The post made waves across the niche community, being shared on almost every avenue and finally making its way to the Solaris Head-Fi product thread, Campfire Audio's ultimate stronghold and safe space.

The firing shot

Exactly how bad was the response? The entire shitstorm continued for another six pages (15 posts per page) before the most unusual thing happened: the thread got locked. For more than 24 hours.

People got suspicious. Hell, I got suspicious. Whenever threads on Head-Fi get locked for whatever reason, they are usually locked for at maximum a few hours at a time. Campfire is a well known sponsor of Head-Fi so it was not too far of a stretch to assume that they were behind this extended lockdown. As the day passed, the thread finally goes public once again, the venerable Ken Ball leading with his response to everything.

Key points for those who do not understand what he's saying:

• Their products are hand built, therefore variation is within the norm.
• They try to minimise QC issues by measuring the earphones for imbalances in each step of the manufacturing process.
• They claim that each Solaris had less than 1dB of channel imbalance. Channel imbalance in this case meaning that the left side and the right side should sound the same.
• "As for the measured units on Reddit, we primarily trust our measurements over others."

Immediately, people called for Ken Ball to release their own in-house measurements of the Solaris to address the drama, which was met with no response. Crinacle jumped in with his own response here which was basically a rehash of everything that had happened leading up to his final post on the matter.

During March of 2019 after talks of the unit variance drama was still ongoing three months after it happened, Ken Ball finally breaks his silence on publishing Campfire's in-house measurements to dispute Crinacle's claims. Spoiler Alert: he doesn't want to, nor plans to.

Why was Ken Ball's response so bad?

Many people were quick to point out how shallow KB's response was to the whole situation. This post here highlights the consistency of Crinacle's measurements so his criticisms and data shouldn't be brushed off simply because he wasn't a big audio company.

This post here (as well as many others after that, look it up if you're bored) points out how KB dodges the question of unit variance with channel imbalance. The whole point of the drama was not about how well the left and right channels of each individual Solaris was matched, but rather the fact that every individual Solaris that Crinacle heard sounded (and measured) different from each other.

Effectively, the entire point of the drama was missed by KB and the final question of "do these $1500 earphones sound different from each other?" was left unanswered.

Yeah, did I mention that the Solaris was ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS? If you were shelling out that amount of cash, you'd expect a lot more consistency for sure.

The other issue was KB's unwillingness to share in-house measurements of the Solaris to dispute Crinacle. This is fine as the sharing of measurements is not a norm within the high-end earphone industry so they had every right and reason not to.

Sorry, not every reason. One weird fact about KB (and by extension, Campfire) was that they actually used to share in-house measurements of their products. The Andromeda, the Lyra, the Nova, the Jupiter, the Orion, the Vega, just to name a few. I'll steal a quote from fellow redditor u/doomdonker since I think he summarized this situation pretty well:

there was a time that Ken Ball was very willing to supply officially measured measurements to not only end users but for reviewers. I've provided not one or two graphs but graphs for their entire starting lineup. But now he doesn't do so and is actually extremely frigid with regards to measurements to the point calling out people who look at measurements as measurebaiters.

This comment was from a month ago. Yes, people are still talking about this half-year-old drama on r/headphones.

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Side-note: some prime examples of the schadenfreude that manifested from this drama:

• They hated Crinacle because He told them the truth
• Stopping the hype train
• "Black hole mids"

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The "IO", a swing and a miss

Oh you thought the story ends there? Buckle up because it gets worse. Remember when I said that Campfire was constantly trying to re-capture the lightning in the bottle that was the Andromeda, and failing every time? Well here was what is arguably their biggest failure yet: the IO.

The IO's release mirrored that of the Solaris to a scary degree, with e-magazines and formal review sites chomping at the bit to get their (obviously positive) reviews out the door and jerking Campfire off about their next big thing.

And of course, everything came crashing down when our madlad u/crinacle dropped hot with some measurements once again, gathering 300+ upvotes and plastering itself at the front of r/headphones once again, subsequently killing another round of sales and Campfire's already controversial reputation in the Reddit community.

(For those unfamiliar, that is a very bad graph.)

Ken Ball Versus the Country of Singapore

Oh boy and it still doesn't end there. Back in the safe space that is the Campfire IO product thread on Head-Fi, fanboys desperately cling onto the last remnants of their sanity as negative non-formal impressions from potential customers start pouring in. And here is when it happened: Ken Ball decided to attack what is a fairly innocuous, rather legitimate set of (critical) impressions by referring to the poster's nationality as a point of suspect.

All hell breaks loose on r/headphones as it was quickly screenshot and posted, gathering 400+ upvotes by the day's end.

Why this matters

• The implication that Singaporeans were somehow a shady bunch was quickly picked up by the community, as demonstrated by this comment thread on Reddit. I personally don't think that KB was trying to imply this at all, but his phrasing was absolutely atrocious.
• Singapore is home to the world's largest English-speaking IEM community, so KB effectively alienated one of his biggest markets. Talk about horrible business decisions.
• The "location" tag on a Head-Fi user's profile is manual input, which means that the original user might not even be from Singapore at all. Now that people now that KB gets triggered by accounts from Singapore, they can just use this to their advantage without even being from the location itself.
• IMO the worst one: u/crinacle is Singaporean himself. It is very clear that KB meant this statement as a jab against the very person who dared criticize his original masterpiece and was quickly noted by Reddit users in the comments. Also note that this was half a year after the initial drama... talk about holding a grudge.

Ken Ball Isn't Racist

And to top this all off here is Mr. Ball's response to accusations that he's being racist, or at the very least, country-ist:

"Oh man, If your saying I am racist of course that is ridiculous and wildly false. I am part Asian and my wife is Asian and so is my daughter am I am a lot of things but racist is not one of them."

Now, I personally don't think that KB is racist, just heavily misunderstood and doesn't know how to phrase himself properly. But throwing out the "I can't be racist because I have an Asian wife" argument is, to put it nicely, absolutely goddamned moronic. Regardless of what you think his intentions are, the end result is still yet another blow to Campfire's reputation.

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So here we are today. Opinion of Campfire is now at an all-time low though there are still pockets of die-hard fans that primarily lurk around forums like SuperBestAudioFriends and the Head-Fi product threads. The Solaris doesn't seem to be doing as well as the Andromeda and the IO is pretty much DOA in terms of critical response. I heard Crinacle is about to give them a bad review too, so this little drama breakdown might be outdated soon.

Thank you all for your time, and I hope you enjoyed my TED talk.

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Bonus Content: reactions to this post by the totally-not-biased folks over at the Solaris Head-Fi product thread

• "Tin can ears"
• "Sad"
• "Someone on reddit with way too much free time on their hands decided to write-up a detailed account (of one side of the story at least) of all the drama that went down around the Solaris last fall. Nothing new, interesting or enlightening unfortunately." - Guy with a Solaris as a profile picture

UPDATE: Admins on Head-Fi removed all mention of this post on the Solaris thread as it was "off track".

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here