NTC3'S PROFILE

author=bulmabriefs144
Maybe even serious problems. If you give a review and it is 0/5, it had better at least be completely ugly and horrible. Otherwise, maybe bump it to at least 1.5

As others have already told you, N/A means just that, "not rated". There is actually a reasonably well-known professional game website called RockPaperShotgun, which NEVER rates the games they play, even if they liked it a lot, and their "Wot I Think" pieces are included on Metacritic pages regardless. If I actually had to imagine this was the full game, then score would've been closer to 2.5 then anything else, if you're genuinely interested. I just didn't think writing that in the review, let alone using it as an official score, would've had helped anyone. I felt the text spoke for itself in that regard.

Perhaps the overall tone was harsher then that of a usual 2.5 star review here, but then, this is not an usual RMN game either. Now that steamspy.com has been active for nearly two years, I've had first-hand opportunity to see what happens to new games from (largely) unknown creators that get Metacritic score in the 50s, or even low 60s, right out of the gate. By and large, they tend not to get anywhere, and languish with ~5,000 sales or so. "Languish" is a key word; games that get good reviews can have very slow sales and be stuck to that level for a long time as well, but they can be reasonably confident people have seen it, and added to their wishlist, so that they eventually get all the "missing" sales back during the Steam-wide Summer/Christmas sales, even if they have to wait for more than a year. The games with more mediocre reviews are generally stuck in place, and don't receive much of a bump, even compared to games that lack any professional reviews whatsoever. (Here are some examples off the top of my head.)

So, honestly, the best I can predict from playing the game and years of closely following (any) reviews, is that if he goes ahead with the original release date (this March), it'll get on Metacritic soon after release (or at least the PS4 version will, since there are fewer games to compete for critics' attention there), and it'll likely get a score in the 60s: 62, 64, perhaps 58 or so, and sell accordingly. Perhaps something like this might be adequate for him, but I do believe that he desires better, and that the concept can be made much better, which is why I wrote the review in the first place.

Again, I could be in a minority here, and wrong about this. Perhaps it'll be a bone fide success and make him famous to the world at large. After all, I freely admit I seem to hold a minority opinion towards Middens. Kan Gao's first game, Quintessence: the Blighted Venom got a 1-star review here telling him not to make games again, which is all kinds of weird now that he's the only RM developer the average gamer can name. I suppose it's only the commercial release of The Tenth Line, be it in March, or much later, that'll ultimately settle the question.

author=unity
Hooray! :DDDDDD That's a relief!

author=eplipswich
Well, The Tenth Line gamepage is still down though.

Well, I can actually understand the logic behind this. After all, his other games have no relation to this matter, so depriving other people of them because of it is clearly unfair, so he reversed that decision (and that's a relief indeed.). By the time he took TTL's gamepage down, though, my review had nearly 400 views on it - that's about seven times more than the playthrough of it you did on YouTube, let alone the videos other people made. I can see that the gamepage itself might be considered a liability to the game's prospects in that regard, so taking it down, at least until he finally releases the game for sale, makes a certain kind of sense.

P.S. I've also looked for the game on YouTube when I first saw this happen, to try and get any information to figure this out, and found out he's disabled likes/comments on all his videos regarding the game, which is certainly his right, but not usually a wise thing to do. Perhaps I would've tried to be softer in the review if I knew this, but I had no reason to suspect such going in. Meanwhile, this video was apparently released on the same day my review was approved:


Perhaps, this has also contributed to the sudden takedown. I wouldn't know, but I guess it does show what the reaction of a more "average gamer" might be going into the game.

So...can anyone even estimate many games were lost along with those?

Damn, it always hits me when I realise how recent the net actually is, and how impermanent it is as well. Still, perhaps this is an easier way to think of it.

Just imagine the corollary. It's the year 2032, and rpgmaker.net still exists. It's just passed it's 50,000th game, in fact. Some new users occasionally log in and stare at the now-20-year-old reviews for games like Alter Aila Genesis, Star Stealing Prince and Legendary Legend. Pom has passed a million downloads a long time ago, while the newly submitted games are...

Honestly, even I can't keep this going for long. I think this is partly related to the relative popularity of the (post)-apocalyptic literature and settings: it's easier to imagine something, whether a world or a website, end outright, then to envision that it'll persist, but transformed by the passage of time in some way or another, even when it doesn't need you. Just the thought of some crazy person reading this very post in 2032 might be strangely unsettling - to the point that if the website does manage to have such legs, quite a few people can probably be expected to go all "it's not what it used to be back in 2010s!" and slowly hate on it from the sidelines, as that seems to happen with anything long-running.

And if the worst comes to pass, and it does get to the brink earlier, there's still The Wayback Machine, preserving what's important.

author=Liberty
It worked so well for them that girls are being kidnapped in order to become brides because the Chinese society went "Well, if we're only limited to one, might as well make sure it's a boy!" It's biting them in the arse something chronic now.

To be fair, I think India has had the same thing as well once it became possible to tell the sex of the unborn, so there might not be a direct relationship between this and the policy. Still, I remember a piece on the subject in "New Internationalist" a while ago, where they cautiously acknowledged the reasons behind China's policy, but then brought in Iran as a counterpoint, since it reduced birth rates to ~1.5 (below the replacement rate, and smaller than in Israel now) without such extreme measures.

author=Dyhalto

author=LockeZ
I have never heard of that fuckhead. I just know we're destroying everything else to make room for ourselves.

You may not have heard of him, but he's already done a number on you. The root cause of widespread pessimism in the western world comes from the idea that "Humans are the problem", which itself stems from his ideologies being carried forward to the present day.
Now when you say "destroying everything else to make room for ourselves", what exactly is the fate of everything else? That's easy. They're doomed. Sooner or later, the entire planet and everything on it will be eradicated by a meteor, a solar flare, or if it makes it that far, our own sun's supernova. The only species with a chance of prolonging it's existence is humanity.
That's not to say "fuck everything else, we're more important", but you have to accept that you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

This whole paragraph is notable for being practically meaningless (as in, it could mean just about anything) without any specific issues such logic might address.

@All the utopian (and not-so-utopian) replies about automation: I think that you're buying into the hype, and the whole automation thing most closely resembles the promises of "Nuclear Dawn" in the 1960's, before it turned out any plant safer than Three Mile Island and Chernobyl ones would cost magnitudes more than what these dreamers anticipated, and there isn't enough commercially viable uranium to run a lot of nuclear plants for a long time regardless. Here, you still have the same resource consideration: no-one seems willing to calculate just how much gold and rare earth metals (they're called that way for a reason) you would need to supply, to make this "robots replace all workers" come true. Even if you manage to find enough commercially available supplies to do so once (doubtful), the commercially available supplies of these minerals are likely to run dry in a decade or two later at most, and then you'll be back at square one.

I don't think things will ever get even close to that point, though, because there's still the societal factor, which in practice always kicks in before the material one: sufficiently strong perception of future scarcity of X leads to the same short-term outcome as actual scarcity of X. The X here, from society's perspective, is jobs. We've already seen how the Western societies react to globalisation-imposed job losses, even when they're concentrated in some regions and (theoretically) offset elsewhere. So, what makes you think that the same people who have voted for Trump and Brexit now will not in the future vote for a politician who promises to legally ban businesses in all, or many industries from using robots, or at least to impose punitive taxes on them?

The latter is already in motion, btw: the French ruling party, aware it won't win anyway because Hollande fucked up so badly, has now nominated Benoit Hamon, who promises to impose taxes on robots. He won't win this time, but he's still making what is now unthinkable (as evidenced by no-one bringing it up here, or on other places I've discussed this subject) into thinkable, which will turn into desirable once mass job losses become an incontrovertible fact. Before there was Trump, there was Ross Perot. I give it 20 years at most before a major European country elects a politician who'll make robot taxes or regulatory bans into reality.

author=Dyhalto

author=NTC3
Honestly, I think kentona is closer to the truth out of you two here. If there's no "desire for a strongman", then how do you explain the success of Philippines' Duterte

Duterte's election is an ad hoc reaction to a rampant problem of crime and corruption. We, in the West, went through a similar fight-crime-with-a-vengeance phase in the 70s, but it was only expressed through vigilante movies like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and the public discussion those controversial movies produced.
But in the Philippines' case, you said it yourself with your mention of differing collective morals. Responding to violence with a greater force of violence is one of the easiest principles to understand and, while the Philippines may not be the most uneducated place in the world, they're collectively not-savvy enough to disavow themselves of that demagogy and pursue the higher intellectual road.

Erm, aren't you forgetting the whole mass incarceration thing, which absolutely spiked at exactly that time? And of course, so did the gun ownership rate, and the change in NRA's rhetoric to reflect that (seriously, I've seen their 50's quotes when they haven't yet forgotten the "well-regulated" part in your 2nd Amendment.) And while Philipino police is obviously operating on a whole different scale entirely, I'm pretty sure many Europeans would question whether you've past "Dirty Harry" mentality at all based on both gun ownership/gun murder rate and the recently exposed police conduct. Hell, I think the fact police here in Russia are legally forbidden from opening fire without giving a warning (only the newly formed National Guard equivalent can do that) is already a good example. So, if I were you, I wouldn't be so self-confident about "higher intellectual roads."

author=Dyhalto
Personally, I think you're wrong about history judging him kindly. Even if his heart is in the right place, and he's picking his enemies carefully, his heavy-handed policy is not only doomed to fail, but likely to make the situation worse.
But again. I haven't been paying that much attention. There might be more to it than I see.

Well, you've missed that he's a fatalist, for one thing. He's 71, he serves a six-year term, and he does not believe he'll live that long. This is why he's been both so unorthodox in his policies, and so radical in executing them: he is literally in YOLO mode. Thus, he's already doing quite a lot of things that a regular "cultural populist" wouldn't do: taking on the massively popular Catholic Church for instance, both to hit back on their opposition to his criminal crackdowns, and to finally distribute mass birth control and thus deal with the country's shameful pregnancy/birth rates. Same goes with his turn to China, which is also not popular in the country, but unlike most people he realises a stand-off over worthless islands they cannot win is disastrous, when they can instead share the fishing grounds (the only thing in there that's actually valuable). There are other examples, but this is an important one.

author=Dyhalto
The real way for Duterte to fight crime would've been a massive jobs plan for the country. A New Deal or WPA for the Philippines. If people can get a job easily and provide comfortably for their family, they won't need to consider crime. You'll never get rid of crime altogether, but if you can make it impractical compared to the law-abiding alternative, it can be substantially diminished.

True, but I think it's clear that you need a strong centralised state to be able to execute that plan first, or else it becomes easier for local officials and such to be corrupt then work towards actually fulfilling the plan. (In fact, I think that's exactly what's been happening over there throughout the 2000's.) Sure, USA in the 30's wasn't that strong of a state with Klan and all, but I doubt it compares with Philippines and its two active insurgencies (Muslim, ISIS-inspired one and a Maoist one Duterte wanted to negotiate with) alongside the general drug crime. Duterte's plan might well make sense in that context.