I tried. Really, I tried. (Fan Creations)

by Claude Errera , Monday, October 23, 2017, 11:10 (2587 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

You say, in the last of these posts, that you rarely get any response, and you're not sure if that's because you haven't connected, or because nobody could get through your posts. Speaking only for myself, I'd have to say it's probably the latter. :(

I really tried, here. I opened all of them. I made an honest effort to read them. They're super-obtuse, though, and by the third one or so, I actually found myself getting annoyed by the obtuseness - as though you were doing it on purpose, to make it harder to understand what you wanted to say.

There are lots of references to things I've never seen before (or maybe things I just don't recognize) - with zero explanation. This means that I have no clue what you're getting at - because not only is the reference only relevant if you've seen the original, but you make ZERO EFFORT to explain it for people who might not understand it. (I get that you're doing this because explaining the reference sort of ruins it - but not having any clue what you're saying also ruins it.)

Even without the outside references, though, I was struggling. You write in a stream-of-consciousness style that almost requires that I be inside your head to be able to follow - except I'm not inside your head. You also link back to old (sometimes years-old) discussions with no summaries; if I choose not to follow a link, the point you're making is lost completely.

Couple this with the font changes, the style changes, the additions of fictional styles in what was ostensibly a non-fiction discussion... I'm sorry, i simply couldn't get through it.

Even the stuff I DID get through confused me. The Harmony of Fun starts off (I think) suggesting that you were underwhelmed by the offerings in the game. You then spent a while talking about how you were wrong, and that the weapons and armor you'd dismissed were actually quite good. Then you blamed Bungie for not making this clearer. Except... in every case, I've either EXPERIENCED the synergies you talk about, or read about them from others who have. They are NOT missed by the community - they're one of the reasons people are enjoying playing the game. So I'm not really sure what your overall point is. :(

(Also, that entire section bugged me: you said, early on (second post? I can't remember) that one of the big problems you saw was that everyone was treating D2 as D1, expanded, and that was a mistake. You spend this whole section talking about how you dismissed all of these weapons (and exotic armors) as weak analogs of their D1 counterparts - which is sort of silly, since you told us that we shouldn't be doing this. I understand that you were trying to point out that you made this mistake, multiple times, and you're showing us your thought process... BUT WE ALREADY KNOW YOU FIGURED IT OUT. You didn't present this as "here's what D2 does right" - you simply made the point (again) that it's easy to overlook things if you come into it with a mindset that D2 is D1 enhanced. Which would, I guess, even be okay, if you stuck to the OTHER stuff you said in the TLDR post. Specifically: what I got out of your Harmony of Fun post is that at this point, 6 weeks after release, you're finding that almost every item you'd dismissed at launch is a boatload of fun to play with. But one of your first points in the TLDR post was that Destiny was 'just good' - the dissonance hurt my head. The new gameplay, when looked at for itself (instead of as an extension of the old game) is deep and complex, with pieces working together to make super-cool new pieces... but the overall is... eh? Follow up. Explain WHY your trees post doesn't jibe with your forest post. What's missing? What would have made it better than 'just good'? )

I'm sorry. I make a serious effort here to critique on substance, rather than style; everyone has a different way of communicating. In this particular case, though, I just couldn't get all the way through the substance - the style got in the way too much.

Again: I'm speaking for me, alone. I have no clue how others view your content, and I know that there are some great ideas in here that could generate some really interesting discussion... but they're buried too deeply for me. I don't have an hour+ for each post (even if it's broken into a bunch of smaller posts).