Ekkosangen

I’m not so much upset as I am curious why one might label friendslop as exclusively bad games. Peak was used for comparison simply because it’s a good game in the friendslop genre, in the same vein as CS2 being a good game in the competitive shooter genre. The comparison was being made to point out that direct comparison is futile; one game lacking something the other has doesn’t make either better or worse than the other because they’re in completely different contexts.

It’s part of why I’m growing to loathe friendslop as the name for the genre. As much as people try to insist it isn’t an insult, the connotation is that a friendslop game can’t be a good game. To which I say, why not?

Just want to drill into this real quick: a game like CS2 is a good game because it’s enjoyable to play with strangers, but a game like Peak is a bad game because it isn’t as enjoyable with strangers?

Alternatively, a game like CS2 is a good game because it’s mechanically well made, but what is it about the mechanics in Peak that make it a bad game?

Take care to not conflate a personal dislike of the genre with objective quality within a context. Liking action movies doesn’t mean rom coms are all terrible (no matter how much one might think they could be improved by a sudden firefight at the climax).

I have a friend that I did some EVE work for once. Nothing dangerous or weird, just making tactical warpgate bookmarks; two above, two below, and one just off-grid for every gate in every system in a region. Paid well for something that could be done in a cheap frigate, just tedious as hell. They would then copy the bookmarks and sell them in packs on a per-region basis.

They eventually had ALL of the tactical bookmarks for all of nullsec. As it turns out, that many individual items is problematic for the game to display in a single inventory. Not because of RAM or anything, but the game itself would refuse to show an inventory with too many items and lock you out of accessing anything. I forget the exact reason but it wouldn’t crash the game or anything. The number is also exceptionally high, to the point you have to be trying to hit it.

Because EVE Online players are bastards, they also found a way to weaponize it. Luckily, it was considered an unintended exploit so I was one of few (willing) victims to it. To this day, they have to warn people buying their complete bookmark packs that they can unintentionally brick their inventory unless they follow the directions they give to work around it.