Gaming
Let’s Talk About Discord and the Alt-Right
We’ll talk once again about everyone’s favorite Instant Messaging platform, Discord. This time we’ll address another big aspect that was tackled during the interview with Rolling Stone’s Glixel. Jason Citron has talked about how the development team plans to tackle groups belonging to the Alt-Right.
Discord as a platform offers a lot in regards to the features it has. From the ability to create private servers for audio and text chats to Screen Sharing and Video Calling which have been implemented recently. The service is at 87 million users with 14 million daily active users sending 9.5 billion messages a month.
“This year we saw tremendous growth, but it’s been a steady build since we launched,” Citron says. “The growth curve is such that it takes time to build to scale.” Jason believes that Discord’s growth is due to the grassroots powered by word of mouth.
However, there’s a problem with apps that allow secure form of communication to its users. This is one of the reasons why Telegram and WhatsApp have been generating some controversy as of late. While they ensure protection towards users, it also offers it to people with horrible intentions.
This all culminated in a video essay that currently sits at 52 Thousand Dislikes mainly because of how vague it is. However, the point that this is trying to convey is that Alt-Right users have been using this platform FOR GAMERS to push agendas and to perform “Anti-Rally” efforts like the one in Charlottesville.
Following the rally, Discord banned several of the largest alt-right servers and publicly condemned “white supremacy, neo-Nazism, or any other group, term, ideology that is based on these beliefs,” in a public statement.
The problem is, these groups are still showing up in Discord Server lists. However, Citron also talked about how much disdain they have towards the people who use their platform as it isn’t intended.
“The action we took very publicly this summer summarized how we think about this stuff,” he says, noting that Discord includes moderation tools and has a support team to help users out. “Essentially, if any issues are brought to our attention we take swift action.”
What I dislike about the way the NBC THINK article tackled this issue is how NBC pretty much pinned gamers and the Alt-Right together. Even if that wasn’t the intention of the article or the message, there was a pretty big misconception thrown around about how gamers ARE the Alt-Right. This is the reason why this essay is heavily disliked.
However, Citron also notes that Discord has never listened in on people’s conversations or read their messages and has no plans to start doing so. This puts the impetus on users to find and report bad actors.
There are a lot of non-gaming Discord groups too. Other non-gaming servers on Discord are built around the discussion of everything from crypto-currency to stock trading, music appreciation to language lessons and fantasy football, Citron said.
So, this is pretty much where the whole thing stands at the current time. Discord users are tasked with reporting any suspicious activity coming from users who might be committing atrocious activities in order to keep this service just for gamers.
“Our team is available to help respond to requests when people bring them up,” he says. “We have a full-time trust and safety team that is available 24 hours a day and the community is very proactive.
I still think that this “Alt-Right” term is bogus, as the people who commit attrocities are varied and will always find a platform to do so. And the problem is, attributing something to a political side often gives fuel to the other to think they have a free pass on doing the same thing.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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