Kung fu!
If you are not currently nor ever have been heavily into the Legend of the Five Rings CCG, the below pathetic whine will make no sense to you. Choke it down at your own peril.
I really want to like playing the L5R card game again. I really, really do. And I don't mean in the sense where I make a deck and screw around with playing it some then let it collect dust for months. I mean being hyped to go to tournaments and run events and compete with good players and whatever. But right now, it just seems nigh fucking impossible. Losing in L5R right now is possibly the most frustrating experience of any hobby I have right now - including City of +3 Level Boss Random Spawn Killing You And Giving You 700+ Merry Christmas. Er, I mean City of Heroes. Unlike CoH and WoW, the payoff in L5R seems to have evaporated. I used to love making decks and trying to come up with something interesting and still effective. Though with any card game there's the reality that if you try shit too weird, you should be prepared to have it fail horribly, right now in L5R your choices seem to be "Make deck that does something very blatant, direct, and uninteresting" or "Lose". So there's that.
Fortunately, I realize I'm not, nor ever have been, one of the best deckbuilders in the world, which is why I bank some of the fun of the game on actually playing. Unfortunately that's up and fucking left since I can sit down with anyone and tell you when the game's about 3 or 4 turns away from someone winning. In a game that tends to last 5 to 7 turns, this leaves the only "fun" in the game play as "take advantage of retarded opponents." If I have to sit down and pray the guy across the table is an idiot in order to make the actual game interesting, I ... don't want to play.
Thirdly, the players themselves have evolved like Pokemon that are of the "Thundercunt" elemental type. They now have deeper "Thundercunt" powers, and are stronger in "Thundercunt" aura. They are, in fact, largely just thundercunts themselves. The sad reality is that alot of the people who see themselves as the "top players" are just noisy jackasses with a good grip of how the game works. Hell, they'll be the first ones to say "Well I don't see myself as a great player BUT OMG UR THE BIGGEST LOZAR LOL M I RITE!!1!!!!!!1!11eleven" which just hammers the point home even more. I think the last "great player" still regularly playing the game and keeping his presence online is Jared. You can tell because when the boy says something offhandedly, everyone talks about it the next day as if it were as blatant and constant as gravity, without question. Meanwhile, there's a horde of idiots who will just declare themselves the authority on something and shout down any opposition, because naturally if you don't agree with them you're really no good at this, right? And when these subhuman cubes of oozing assprotiens form into flocks, it gets even better. Not only are they going to laugh at you for questioning them, but they'll have their pals repeat the same tired lines and congratulate each other on how clever they are. It's like watching high school kids make friends just to have more people make snappy cutdowns for them so they never have to actually back up what they're saying. This is not to say every player is like this, but it seems that it's either a disturbing trend or just an epically noisy minority ruining it for alot of people.
If you are offended by the above paragraph, you're either part of the problem, or you want to be. If you laughed or thought "Wow Seth's trying to be funny again and failing, the poor jackass must be sober again", then you probably understand what I mean. There is your litmus test, children.
So why on earth would I want to play a game where the decks are vanilla, the games are boring, and the players are largely bad players with inflated egos (good job on your 10th place finish at your local pre-release! You are now the official authority on Raiding!), huh? I don't. If you made it this far through my post without rushing off to (what's left of) the Kobune Port to make a tirade about how "elitism doesn't exist in l5r it's just perceived by whiney bad players", this is where I clarify - these aren't problems driving hordes of people away from the game and destroying the world as we know it. I don't hate everyone who plays, and in fact there are a large group of people who play and I like and think are good players... they're just getting drowned out by people who want to be the American Idol of l5r for some reason. These are things I hate about l5r, and these are probably things others hate about l5r currently, as well. I mean, hell - I'm running a tournament in a couple of weeks. I don't want to see the game suffer, I don't hate l5r players, and I don't hate l5r. I'm just lamenting the fact my hobby has gone away from entertaining me and I don't feel like I have the time or patience right now to hunker down and try to be a good player again. I feel like there's alot of that going around. People I grew up playing this game with getting older, getting lives outside of thinking "wow what's the clever catchphrase being bandied about in the forums this week! how can I be an l5r superstar and make people love me!", and just moving away from it because the choice they have might be the same as mine. Maybe if I had a different job. Or just one job. Or if I had empathy for other human beings instead of a barely-checked need to see a great many of them turned into the meat that goes into meat nuggets.
So anyway, figured I'd get that off my e-chest. In other news, my feet are cold.
I really want to like playing the L5R card game again. I really, really do. And I don't mean in the sense where I make a deck and screw around with playing it some then let it collect dust for months. I mean being hyped to go to tournaments and run events and compete with good players and whatever. But right now, it just seems nigh fucking impossible. Losing in L5R right now is possibly the most frustrating experience of any hobby I have right now - including City of +3 Level Boss Random Spawn Killing You And Giving You 700+ Merry Christmas. Er, I mean City of Heroes. Unlike CoH and WoW, the payoff in L5R seems to have evaporated. I used to love making decks and trying to come up with something interesting and still effective. Though with any card game there's the reality that if you try shit too weird, you should be prepared to have it fail horribly, right now in L5R your choices seem to be "Make deck that does something very blatant, direct, and uninteresting" or "Lose". So there's that.
Fortunately, I realize I'm not, nor ever have been, one of the best deckbuilders in the world, which is why I bank some of the fun of the game on actually playing. Unfortunately that's up and fucking left since I can sit down with anyone and tell you when the game's about 3 or 4 turns away from someone winning. In a game that tends to last 5 to 7 turns, this leaves the only "fun" in the game play as "take advantage of retarded opponents." If I have to sit down and pray the guy across the table is an idiot in order to make the actual game interesting, I ... don't want to play.
Thirdly, the players themselves have evolved like Pokemon that are of the "Thundercunt" elemental type. They now have deeper "Thundercunt" powers, and are stronger in "Thundercunt" aura. They are, in fact, largely just thundercunts themselves. The sad reality is that alot of the people who see themselves as the "top players" are just noisy jackasses with a good grip of how the game works. Hell, they'll be the first ones to say "Well I don't see myself as a great player BUT OMG UR THE BIGGEST LOZAR LOL M I RITE!!1!!!!!!1!11eleven" which just hammers the point home even more. I think the last "great player" still regularly playing the game and keeping his presence online is Jared. You can tell because when the boy says something offhandedly, everyone talks about it the next day as if it were as blatant and constant as gravity, without question. Meanwhile, there's a horde of idiots who will just declare themselves the authority on something and shout down any opposition, because naturally if you don't agree with them you're really no good at this, right? And when these subhuman cubes of oozing assprotiens form into flocks, it gets even better. Not only are they going to laugh at you for questioning them, but they'll have their pals repeat the same tired lines and congratulate each other on how clever they are. It's like watching high school kids make friends just to have more people make snappy cutdowns for them so they never have to actually back up what they're saying. This is not to say every player is like this, but it seems that it's either a disturbing trend or just an epically noisy minority ruining it for alot of people.
If you are offended by the above paragraph, you're either part of the problem, or you want to be. If you laughed or thought "Wow Seth's trying to be funny again and failing, the poor jackass must be sober again", then you probably understand what I mean. There is your litmus test, children.
So why on earth would I want to play a game where the decks are vanilla, the games are boring, and the players are largely bad players with inflated egos (good job on your 10th place finish at your local pre-release! You are now the official authority on Raiding!), huh? I don't. If you made it this far through my post without rushing off to (what's left of) the Kobune Port to make a tirade about how "elitism doesn't exist in l5r it's just perceived by whiney bad players", this is where I clarify - these aren't problems driving hordes of people away from the game and destroying the world as we know it. I don't hate everyone who plays, and in fact there are a large group of people who play and I like and think are good players... they're just getting drowned out by people who want to be the American Idol of l5r for some reason. These are things I hate about l5r, and these are probably things others hate about l5r currently, as well. I mean, hell - I'm running a tournament in a couple of weeks. I don't want to see the game suffer, I don't hate l5r players, and I don't hate l5r. I'm just lamenting the fact my hobby has gone away from entertaining me and I don't feel like I have the time or patience right now to hunker down and try to be a good player again. I feel like there's alot of that going around. People I grew up playing this game with getting older, getting lives outside of thinking "wow what's the clever catchphrase being bandied about in the forums this week! how can I be an l5r superstar and make people love me!", and just moving away from it because the choice they have might be the same as mine. Maybe if I had a different job. Or just one job. Or if I had empathy for other human beings instead of a barely-checked need to see a great many of them turned into the meat that goes into meat nuggets.
So anyway, figured I'd get that off my e-chest. In other news, my feet are cold.