AkiraZXE

@Doomkid The mods have made it very clear that any specifics are not to be addressed, both now and during the instance in question. I think it's pretty clear you're not allowed to publicly mention specifics, period. So why are you giving me shit for not being specific?

Did you not see the mod outright saying not to bring up any specific instances, or are you baiting me?

Like I said, sophisticated stories for why they feel justified. If the story was true, and everyone was being honest, then the details of specific incidents wouldn't be forbidden. Not-harassment doesn't need to be hidden under euphemisms and enforced silence. It'll probably be this way for another 5-10 years, until there's some new story, and we can all have this conversation again, except about how witch-hunting and hazing were wrong and it's gotten so much better.

I wouldn't say it's gotten better. Somebody could leave because they were given a vindictive nickname stuck right to their profile. Today, it could be because you fought back in a public hazing session. Everyone then felt just as justified as they do now. The stories that justify it may have gotten more sophisticated, and people may use less crass language, but nothing has fundamentally changed.

I have to roll my eyes at this, honestly. None of this is new, or surprising, or even outrageous. How many furries found their fetish as teenagers when they stumbled across Sonic smut, some of it originally drawn by teenagers, when most of the Sonic cast are teenagers or prepubescent? Nobody's holding furries' feet over the fire for it. Some dude's art is hardly the biggest problem with the furry subculture, if it's a problem at all, and nobody with even the most remote understanding of the internet believed otherwise, especially after all this time. It may not even be the most objectionable thing anyone on that team has made. This dude was just a sacrifice to the recreationally outraged, by people who were more ashamed of their fetishes than he was, hanging him from morals they don't even believe in.

3 hours apart. Could probably save a bit of hosting money by moving the forums to Reddit, it's already there in spirit.

Well if you guys succumb to a social media-style moral panic and start purging people, at least there'll be good material for Community is Falling 4. I've seen it happen enough times that I can probably help out if it doesn't take off.

I just went and did the final fight for a good 25 minutes to try to get a better idea of what was throwing me off, without using the secret. To make a long story short, I could make everything except the last two Archviles very consistent. My route through the fight was pretty straightforward. Kill a Mastermind, try to kill two Pain Elementals as I cross the arena, kill the other Mastermind, try to cross again and kill two more Pain Elementals. At this point, I'd want to head back to the entrance and ambush the Archviles right as they spawn, but it's where I had the first hiccup. It usually wouldn't be a problem, but I found I had just enough time to get into trouble, but not enough time to really do anything productive before the Archviles spawned. After I'd kill the first two, it fell apart and I couldn't figure out a consistent way through the fight. If the last two Archviles got crowded, especially if they were next to each other when it happened, I think I only managed to salvage it once. Their aggro would jump around too much, and either I'd be whittled down by the mobs, or one of them would eventually snipe me while dodging everything else. I didn't actually notice much of a difference between HMP and UV. It really was just the last two Archviles. Personally, I think the main problem is that last Archvile spawn timer. If I had enough time to clear just a few more lesser enemies, the last two Archviles may not be the hard make or break of the fight. But I don't know that for sure. Oh and I found this probably-incorrect flat, on the other side of the door leading to the final encounter. Unrelated to Savage, on Under the Thulian Lights, this little floor decoration seems to be mistextured or misaligned. All the others have a cross.

Unfortunately I have to join the problems-with-Ravage club, pretty much exclusively due to the final fight. I don't even know what I was doing wrong. I get how all the enemies individually affect the fight, but it just seems like there was so much stuff going on that it only takes a few seconds of things going wrong to turn into a nightmare. Things were so tight that when I actually beat it, the health pickups were almost superfluous. They only needed to be there for the Masterminds. Otherwise, if you make enough mistakes to need them, you're not gonna win the fight anyways. The only specific things I can really point to are the secret, and the extra cell ammo. I would never have found the secret myself, and I can't imagine what would possess somebody to check that spot in the middle of a fight. It's just too deceptive for how much that changes the fight. The extra cell ammo is horribly dangerous to get, and if you don't have the secret, getting to it without already having a bunch of cell ammo is just rolling the dice.

I guess I'm in the minority opinion that the new layout is just...not very good? Ironically, despite it being a modern design, I feel like I've gone back in time to the days of 640x480. Everything takes up so much space, but accomplishes so little. I gotta zoom out just to feel like I don't have my face pressed against the monitor, and that ends up with literally half my screen being empty margins. The 15 subforum links on the front page of the forums don't even fit in 2 screens worth of space at 1600x900 with default zoom. Again, it's just so much space taken up, but most of it wasted.

Just to weigh in from a typical user's perspective... As far as Doom goes, 99% of what I play on GZDoom and QZDoom work despite my 8+ year old hardware. Only the absolute craziest maps and effects have problems, and I don't think a 5% performance increase is really going to solve those particular issues. Even on hardware older than that, I still didn't have problems too often. With ports like PrBoom and ChocoDoom, I can throw them on virtually any machine I will come across without worrying about performance at all. If a port's development slows to a crawl, or skilled people jump ship, that's really not doing me any favors. If there's a new feature that modders want, but nobody's willing to implement because they don't want to touch the code involved, that's something cool down the line that I'm gonna miss out on. If there's a bug I'm running into, having to wait weeks to months for even a possible fix would be beyond annoying. I don't think that's a good trade off for an extra 2 FPS when staring at a corner in a vanilla map that I'm going to cap at ~120 anyways.

I'm also one of those people who never uses a launcher. Most ports I use are ZDoom-derivative, so it's just easier to drag and drop from one window to another than to use another utility. I never create a batch unless I plan on playing quite a few sessions of that particular combination of wads, and even then, usually only if it's Chocolate Doom or PrBoom, which is rare enough in itself. The only launcher I've ever considered using was Doom Launcher. Having a proper library, but not bogging it down with features like user profiles, makes it ideal. Except that it wants to duplicate my entire wad library, which is a nuclear-level dealbreaker.

The thing that caught my interest a few years ago, when I was tinkering with composing, was that OGG Vorbis let you set your loop points. That always struck me as potentially useful in modding, but I've never actually seen it utilized and the tools I found were all pretty clunky. It definitely wasn't supported by any composition software, so you'd have to do it in a pretty roundabout way. I don't know why it didn't initially catch on, but I can see why it's no longer a real issue for most people. Since I personally do nothing that requires maneuvering around the licensing of the MP3 format, the looping is the only real benefit I could get out of it today. I think the worst MP3 has ever caused me was requiring one extra step to get Audacity to export to MP3. On the other hand, moving my library over to OGG Vorbis would require an insane amount of time and effort for very little real benefit.

The very first time I opened Doom Builder, I hadn't read any tutorial or had any experience with how maps worked on a technical level in Doom (or any game). I drew a few sectors, then proceeded to put the player start and a few decorative things outside the sectors I had just drawn, not knowing what sectors even were. I thought they would be solid objects in a big featureless plain. I do still have the map I actually learned how to use Doom Builder with. Like learning what "sector" meant in sidedefs, seeing what happens when you delete individual lines instead of sectors, having lines on top of lines, and using random textures I thought looked interesting so I could look back later if I forgot what they were called. The first time I actually tried to make a proper map, it was an awful big square deathmatch map, complete with crate areas, nonsensical ammo placement, seemingly random lighting, and a MIDI from Super Mario Sunshine. I then had the bright idea to release it on an unsuspecting community. Everyone involved probably would have agreed that it was a mistake. I don't have any of those early attempts anymore, though there's a couple really terrible maps floating around in an old megawad some friends and I put together on Doom Connector, but otherwise they're all lost to time.

I used to use ZDoom's fullscreen HUD and advanced HUD. After a couple years of that, I switched back to using the original status bar. Playing a few older WADs in Chocolate Doom convinced me to. It felt a lot more "Doomy" to have the bar rather than some floating icons and numbers, even if it took up a lot more screen space. Relatedly, I've never seriously played Doom with a reduced screen size. Sometimes I forget it's even an option.