Lurker > Lopen

Mog
Sabin
Ramza
Black Mage

Mariners

Not sure why

Uhhh

Like early in the show I thought they were alright but I don't know. I gotta go with...

No

But like a dispassionate no.

Flagg

Speculation but I think AM might not be as broad in its evil and limited by the drive for revenge. Like uh say there was an alien race, not human-- would AM care to try and imprison them or would it not have hostility towards them.

I dunno. It's definitely evil but Flagg feels more 'pure' evil in that he'd be malevolent towards whatever.

Toad
Erdick

RuneterranSnap posted...

What you're suggesting could easily lead to massive, free swings. It wouldn't be a small change, that would make him incredibly high tier.

Yeah. Swingy cards in snap tend to trend towards the higher end because if you don't get the upside you can just not play it.

Maniac64 posted...

What lesson? I dont think it works cause I see Quicksilver constantly as an early game player.

I actually get the Quicksilver lesson but the hypothetical angel lesson I don't get

Angel - 1/1
When destroyed or discarded put Archangel into play at a random location.
Archangel - 2/4
On Reveal: Discard the highest cost card from your hand.

How I'd fix. Better flavor imo. Current effect isn't really workable.

Auron - 7.5

I love stoic badasses but I think he's a little uh grounded for me? Like he's just no nonsense guy but doesn't really have "holy crap!!" moments. Also I mentioned this in Lulu's writeup but I think coexisting in the same cast with Lulu and Kimahri hurts him for me-- just a lot of gruff people killing enthusiasm for stuff. But he is absolutely the best of that trio by a lot.

Vincent - 5.5

He's fine. Awesome design. A little boring for me though I just don't really care about his backstory or anything and like Auron he's kinda grounded which for me I want my quiet badasses to be as over the top as possible. I'd probably like him more if I played Dirge of Cerberus. Maybe remake has some crazy moments too.

Steiner - 2

Probably a solid 3.5-4 if I wasn't bitter about him being rallied as a plucky underdog in SMFFFC by Sir Chris. Much like most FFIX characters he's got a strong personality but it's in the wrong ways, too strong really, and he just becomes an annoying caricature and not a real character.

Reserve whatever. Im bad with the names

The random 4/5 from a set of 4 reserves I meant (or him being a rigged one in a set I like I guess)

Yeah I would use Howard but 0 chance I burn 6k tokens for him. So he's gotta be lucked into with cache

Alucard
Mac

Delita
Cid
Wiegraf
Tristam

Sabin - 9.5
He has some great moments. The Vargas fight is great so is holding up the falling building. I love Blitz as a mechanic too. His personality is kinda unique for FF-- a little upbeat without being a perky girl or obnoxious. Big fan.

Yang - 7.5
I kinda love the pure absurdity of his sacrifice. He has a lot of good stuff really when he does stuff. I think with more time he could be a top character but he is just sorta hanging around spectating for most of the time he's in the party which hurts him.

Ass

Leonhart4 posted...

Kinda like how you ignored everything I said so you could just make a slam dunk joke about how we don't have contests anymore.

Uhh it wasn't dunking it was actually my main point.

To actually address what you said with more words since you think I was just dunking, I don't really think the contests needed experimentation, they just needed to be run fairly and actually run. That's literally it. Beyond that it was important to use the traffic the contests brought in to unveil new features and stuff which was literally never done.

Most of the changes he made was stuff that only people on GameFAQs cared about. Allen caring about "new winners" and stuff wasn't good business. That just showed his fanboyisms coming out. Three ways were the illusion of experimentation not actually a meaningful variation on 4 ways.

azuarc posted...

It's like showing up at a funeral

No it's not

Analogy better

azuarc posted...

If you read the room, you would have dropped the matter 100 posts ago instead of repeating your point 30 or 40 times when it's evident that mostly everyone else here isn't interested.

I responded to people rebutting me by misrepresenting my point with 28-38 of those repetitions. Not my fault b8 is full of people who intentionally misread arguments so they can think they won them. I was actually content to leave it at "this guy sucks, helped kill Gamefaqs, and good riddance though shame we won't get any more contests now"

Also I'm a completely nice person to people who are nice. The big thing I changed over the years is not giving a damn what anyone around here thought about me and calling out stupidity when I see it.

But there are plenty of people I get along with around here just fine. In fact I would say it's more of the board than not it's just the people who spend too much time on here and especially the discord generally dislike me. Wonder why that is.

AbsoluteUnit posted...

Aw, I'm sorry to hear that man.

That was genuinely one of the best parts of my life lol, not that things aren't good now, but yeah.

Ah nah it's good the trip was just poorly planned and got me on the borderline of depression thats why I didn't go to more of them. I had fun at the thing though and everyone was pretty nice.

But I'm doing a lot better now. The best time of my life is now. And I do think that ill planned trip helped me grow as a person so yeah all good

azuarc posted...

is stuck staring at 200 posts of Lopen failing to read the room

I read the room fine I just disagree with the room.

You guys are acting like he died or something. He's quitting a job that likely paid him well for many years that he was bad at. Boo hoo.

Oh

ChaosTony

Yeah I met you once. I went to a board game thing with you Shad Para and Kaylee. And maybe some other b8ers don't remember. I thought it was fine. That was not a great part of my life though.

Anyway like whatever. Keep thinking saying an admin did a bad job is a sign of being socially awkward if it makes you feel better.

I already said I dislike that people are heaping praise and well wishes on him for probably being the number one (of many to be fair) factor in sinking our site. I don't know why you guys are like "u mad" when I literally admitted I was mad like 200 posts ago.

And yes AbsoluteUnit we may have met even though I don't know that username.

down

Bowser
Sagat

Yeah I'm not sure why people are getting so mad at me either.

Evidence (what was implemented and the rate it was implemented, and difficulties met after implementation on literally everything even simple stuff) suggests he did very little.

Sorry that makes you unhappy.

redrocket posted...

none of us are to privy to the actual business side none of us actually know that.

Right. So naturally we just assume he did literally everything because you want to feel sympathy for the guy and ignore all the evidence that he didn't have drive or knowhow to implement things.

Leonhart4 posted...

Allen tried to change the contests pretty significantly though, much more than CJayC

You're right. Not having them is a pretty big change.

Delita - 8.5
I'm not sure I like the character a lot as a personality but his role in the story is super interesting so I have a lot of respect for his scheming and ambitions. Very good character though lacking a Lopen factor to make me really love him.

Seifer - 8
Zantetsuken Reverse probably gives him a point entirely on its own. He's pretty good as an angry rival type. One of the better characters in FF8 and I like that he never officially joins the party even though he totally could have.

General Leo - 5.5
The fight with Kefka is cool. I think replacing Cyan with him straight improves the game. As is he just doesn't do enough for me to like him much.

YoBlazer posted...

What even is the "food" in this example? The contests?

Contests and FAQs

Kenri posted...

it's much closer to your favorite restaurant shutting down and people wishing the owner the best instead of saying "if you'd done better my favorite restaurant would be flourishing right now. you fool. you absolute dunce."

except in this case the restaurant isn't even shutting down. the owner is just retiring.

It's more like my favorite restaurant got a new cook who sucked ass and did not ever try any new recipes when trying to replicate the recipes of the previous owner and no one new ever came to the restaurant and it went out of business.

Yeah I would be happy if they retired and would tell them that they ran a once great restaurant into the ground because they didn't change things that werent working. The restaurant I liked is just a building with regulars I know at this point-- I certainly don't come here for the food and no one else does here either. We just come to chat.

Yeah. The way I see it you want turn 4 for Samurai or Wong. Hard to play Dracula. Wong into Samurai tends to be super disruptive turn 5 too.

Also Drac screws up Silver Samurai. Then again so does Mystique. Again just play it out but try to remember when you chose to play Dracula and when you chose to let him sit there.

Ulti made far too much sense for endgame and was sure of indie so I figured he was scum with 1 scummate

Didn't follow enough to have any other guesses

IfGodCouldDie posted...

That's the thing there are many times when even if I can drop a bunch of my swarms I still have some in my hand for him to grab.

Yeah play it by ear

Basically with the way I play the deck I was hitting turn 6 that is either.

MODOK + Swarms
Apocalypse + Swarms

The former is often weaker if you dump every swarm. The latter you're dumping Apocalypse so Drac can't eat him. Option C is a bunch of random Loki/Helicarrier stuff which Dracula is also not useful usually

But if he's working he's a very good card. Just be aware you give up your turn 4 play for him so even though he works with Apoc he might not be worth burning turn 4 if he's not always working

Sheep007 posted...

Also a relevant comparison in that bars are rapidly dying out across much of the world.

Mostly they're being replaced with breweries imo

Kraid
Soda

Damn that sucks. Actually a name from the FGC I recognized and liked which isn't a super big list for me despite watching and attending many EVOs.

mnk posted...

Yeah, "GameFAQs becoming modern" and "GameFAQs keeping its boards as anything resembling what they are now" seem like statements that'd be at odds with each other. It's hard to imagine a whole bunch of stuff, like this small community board, wouldn't have been completely gutted as part of a total site redesign.

People don't come here for the social elements, they stay for them.

Redesign the Frontpage and how the FAQs work, and get us modern message board stuff when they're actually new and it's fine I think.

Discussion boards can be roughly what they are now, they aren't where the site failed at this moment though Id argue we get everything pretty late (aside from archiving all the game boards-- that actually removed a ton of charm to the board hunting culture and actively suppressed discussion). The guides and reviews and other stuff related to games are where the site failed and had a ton of room to be improved, and that's what brings people here.

I don't think getting sold to GameSpot was inherently a bad thing

It was the site never changing that made the site fall into irrelevance. At the time we were sold to gamespot gamespot was still a thing that mattered. I would say this site was able to be made relevant as late as even 2013. (That was the Draven contest right) That was probably our last gasp in terms of getting new eyeballs. Undertale wasn't even a blip in comparison.

Leonhart4 posted...
Other people want to express gratitude, so just let them. We all know your stance on it.

Would you let people just harmlessly express gratitude to someone you thought directly caused bad things?

Say a bunch of people are praising Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh or whoever else was a bad influence on whatever. When can we say "no gratitude is the wrong feeling here" and not be condemned for it.

No. Accountability matters. Sometimes "let people be positive" is not good policy and I don't think I should be silenced just because I'm making some people feel less positive. It's not something to be positive about unless you're happy with how the website has played out.

I mean Steiner, the dude who lives on Discord instead of posting here, clearly loves how it all played out so what do I know.

I don't think someone should be celebrated or consoled for leaving a job for 20 years that they did poorly.

Imagine going to a message board where people were wishing Donald Trump well in droves because the United States hasn't sunk yet and because people were claiming all the good things he wanted to do were overruled by congress or corporate interests or whatever. You'd feel a need to say "no he had some power and he was a terrible president"

Im not saying Allen was as bad as Trump, just referencing a leadership figure that did a poor job and that the board can understand and dislike. He's probably more like Hoover or something eddv would actually know the proper presidential analogy for a do nothing president that led the country into bad stuff by just sitting around when changes needed to be made.

Anyway I digress. This isn't "oh that Lopen he's such a contrarian"-- I'm actually mad here and dislike that people are thanking the guy for helping sink a part of my childhood. I loved this site back in the day. And when CJayC left that was the beginning of the long drawn out end. Is it fair or accurate to blame Allen for everything? No. But I damn sure don't like seeing everyone thank the guy because "aww he left a job after 20 years it's so sad." His paychecks for years of phoning it in are more thanks than he deserves. He isn't solely to blame, but he did not do a good job, and while you're saying I'm blaming him too much, I know you're not blaming him enough based just on things he has shared with us and being savvy enough on web design to know "no, putting a heart on the boards should not be that hard." I know he had a lot of control over the site direction and features added and stuff-- I am not blaming him for us getting sold to fandom or merging with gamespot or dumb ads or whatever. I am blaming him for our site being a relic of the mid 2000s (which indirectly caused our sale and such because the site has no value and is easily scooped up by predatory businesses like fandom). And I think that's a fair thing to blame him for. He clearly had some input on features and helped implement them, slowly and sloppily as they were. I do think I could have directly done a better job than him with my decent knowledge of web and database programming and drive to actually add function and flair to the site, and I think dozens of other users here could have done a better job than me still because while I am capable and have done web design in the past, I don't do that stuff for a living and I'm sure many people here actually do. But me asking "I wonder if it could be purchased" isn't just an entirely aimless hypothetical question. I would legitimately like to see someone do it, because I do think a LOT of people could do a better job than SBAllen.

I'm sad to see GameFAQs go but Allen getting his life vest and bailing after grinding this ship against an iceberg for 15 years? Yeah, no, fuck right off man. If he quit in 2008 we'd very possibly be in a better spot now. And that's a gamble I'd personally want to take over what we got.

Hook

HanOfTheNekos posted...

Well yeah, Lopen has yet to find a hill that he can be the sole standard bearer for.

I'm hardly the only one saying this site did a lot wrong and squandered opportunities I'm just the only one willing to ascribe any of the blame to Allen for it. Easier to just blame evil corporations for it despite Allen directly commenting on site features and presumably being responsible for something. Makes you feel better.

Yeah that's a variant on my deck. I definitely think Dracula is the guy to drop if you want to try absorbing man. At least the way I play it he's pretty likely to get a swarm.

MoogleKupo141 posted...

I dont think GameFAQs as an individual entity is a thing someone could buy, its too entangled with Gamespot at this point.

were a subdomain, we dont get priced individually

Well with the GameSpot baggage too I guess point remains

This is exactly the time and place

At best SBAllen was a corporate pawn that was overruled by his overlords.

At worst he was incompetent and unmotivated and let the site die.

I just don't see why we should celebrate him. GameFAQs is dying because it's become increasingly irrelevant then fandom was able to buy it for pennies, hooray!

BlueCrystalTear posted...

The only one that was the fault of the site's management in the slightest is the last one, and part of it was just the way this place was coded. Some of those were difficult to implement - particularly the space accounts, which messed up the code. I think Allen, Dev, Krystal (remember her?), Zoop, etc. all recognized that if they wanted to add those features, they would have to completely recode the site. That's a long, arduous, expensive project that would only serve to have a userbase revolt. Because people don't like change, even if the change makes major improvements. So Dev went to work to try to integrate them into what was already there, which caused a delay.

This is what people who aren't programmers actually think because people like SBAllen harp about how difficult these features are.

Like space accounts should be the easiest thing in the world if you know what you're doing. It is not some sort of "ya gotta overhaul all tha codez" gremlin.

The fact is none of the admins who took over after CJayC had any technical knowhow and it became painfully obvious when things were implemented and difficulties were explained. Which if that's not a skill they have fine but don't pretend like it's not something dozens maybe even hundreds of users from this site couldn't do, you know?

Mobilezoid posted...

It was interesting reading this reddit thread and seeing what outsiders think of the site.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/17alwk4/gamefaqs_owner_sballen_is_stepping_down_from_the/

I like how this thread has a ton of people saying how they actually like text guides

The "videos linking to text based guides linking to videos" thing has legs even today imo you just need to integrate everything. Throw in wikis and google sheets and stuff too-- just make all the information linked up. People still want easily searchable info.

I wonder what Gamefaqs actually costs and it's feasible for a wealthy person to buy or if the value is in corporation only zone at the moment.

Tifa - 7
She's cool. I like that she's an unarmed fighter and I actually liked the relationship between her and Cloud a bit (I guess some people dont like her keeping stuff from Cloud or something or maybe that was just to troll Vlado? I don't know)-- it may be my favorite canon ship in FF but that also kinda just speaks to how bad the canon pairings are. I would probably like her more if I played the remake.

Lulu - 5.5
Something about her really rubbed me the wrong way in my first playthrough. Replays had me realize "well, she's actually fine." If I were to guess I think just having her and Kimahri and Auron as half the crew sucked out too much energy from the room since they were all varying degrees of stoic badasses and Auron was the best at it by a lot. Lulu has some pretty funny moments chastising Tidus for being an obtuse buffoon but yeah I dunno. I really think Kimahri is what makes things excessive and Lulu is fine but that first impression is hard to get over.

Rosa - 1.5
Completely boring character who is a whole bunch of tell not show (like a lot of FFIV is, unfortunately). Yeah she and Cecil are involved I get that but I don't get why I should care about her or the relationship one bit. Whoo pixel smooching am I right.