It’s also easy to think nothing is happening because Valve takes their sweet time getting around to reports, and while they will eventually tell you “something was done” if something was done, they won’t give you any way to find out what was done or what report they’re even referring to. You just get that generic “something was done” message.
I used to get added by randoms everytime and they always had the clown award because that’s the easiest way for people to mark someone as a scammer
Profile clown awards say nothing more than some jerk spend points on being a jerk. Not at all a good reason to think people were flagged scammers, especially since you can just hide any profile awards with a checkbox.
But no, while clown awards are still there, you can’t give them anymore. Maybe “funny” will be the new clown, or maybe people will spend fewer points just to be jerks.
Steam provides the forums; not mods. The developers are supposed to moderate their forums.
No, all of Steam’s forums default to Valve moderation, unless a dev chooses to bring/do their own moderation. If the dev moderates, they have total control and can do anything they want, regardless of community rules. If Valve moderates, you basically get eventual, low effort checks for flagrant rule violations in reported posts (which many trolls even exploit, knowing Steam mods don’t read threads or history or anything).
and a very complex, DLC-driven, gacha-based method of unlocking other costumes for its roster
I don’t know about the volleyball games, but the fighting games are simply “buy outfit DLC” without any complexity or gacha mechanics, aside from the small pool of built-in costumes which come via standard things like “clear arcade with character”.
Not at all. I was pretty dismissive of DOA for much of the series, but while exploitation may be the main gimmick, the counter oriented fighting system is quite worthwhile and unusual.
DOA is actually a quite good fighting game series, in the style of Virtua Fighter, but with heavy emphasis on counterplay, using a system where strikes beat throws, counters beat strikes, and throws beat counters. Usually a big series feature is tag play, but the most recent one (6) oddly dropped tagging and went solo-only. 5 had a great tag team survival mode where it’d load the next opponent in the background while you fought their partner, so you could have a fairly seamless fight through the entire sequence. Another frequent feature is gimmicky arenas, with area changes and things that can trigger from hitting someone into the right place.
It’s also made by devs who prominently exploit their characters to downright absurd degrees, releasing and rereleasing waves of often obviously cheaply made fetish-wear DLC hoping people will collect outfits and whatnot. They always start a version of the game out talking about how this time it’s a serious fighting game and not just fetish trash, and then inevitably they start pushing the flood of outfits and swimsuits they have piled up, which gets annoying even if you don’t want it, because they’ll dress the AI stupidly in your fights whether you want it or not, instead of doing something sensible like letting you turn off or substitute outfits you don’t want to see. Yet, for all that, it really is a good fighting game under the hood, even if they did just ditch it wholesale for a while and make volleyball fetish resort games instead.
They also took a big vocal stand against selling DLC characters in fighting games when someone else started doing that, talking about how it was wrong to have to pay to train against opponents and they swore never to do such a vile thing. Of course, they were selling their own DLC characters before that edition of the game was even over. Shamelessness is definitely a series staple.
The last couple editions have changed to a F2P model, where you can play some characters for free (I think a few are fixed while others rotate periodically), and either buy only the ones you want to keep unlocked, or find the “real game” DLC and buy that (plus any missing “extra” characters). So, it’s at least a very easy series to try out nowadays.
Metaprogression was always pretty unrewarding, dripping in upgrades and unlocks so you buy a game, but you don’t get the game you bought until 10-100 hours of time invested playing a worse and/or more limited game. It’s always been weird how so many people say they need progression to enjoy a game. Fun was always a better reason to play a game than progression. Fun is why better games have ways to rebalance to match the things progression adds along the way. It’s just a shame people will basically scorn most games that don’t offer some kind of cross-run progression nowadays, so devs are stuck doing something. Not just roguelites, either. Look at what’s happened to Diablo-style ARPGs, where the addiction mechanics have pushed things to where people want seasonal resets so they can meaninglessly re-grind, because the fun has shifted to grinding loot (and trading), and the game doesn’t matter once you have enough that loot isn’t changing things for you. People don’t even want significant gameplay, as it just slows the grind. Then the inevitable endpoint of unlock/progression based play is horde survivors, where the games have openly admitted the actual play isn’t even the point anymore. It’s just builds, unlocks, and grinds, watch it go.
But I never really got people acting like you can’t tell how you’re doing in a game as things shift, or they can’t engage with systems because things get added, or a win doesn’t feel like a win. It’s not usually that hard to tell how you’re playing or how stuff works. These things are rarely that unusual, and if winning on easy isn’t good enough for you, look for the higher difficulty. If there’s no option to adjust difficulty and give a good play experience, that’s the problem, not the progression. Difficulty always needs options, and people should play at the level where the game feels good to them, not get stuck trying to prove something by defeating the game. Just like devs should not take a lazy, one-size-fits-all path, especially if that path means more experienced players only get a less interesting game.
Finally, contrasting “sideways” unlocks to power progression is often a deception. Many games with sideways unlocks gain a great deal of power/easing from adding options, synergies, and opportunities. Then people try to act like the experience is more pure than some other game where things get easier just from stats. Yeah, stat upgrades are obvious, but you didn’t start in the same place as before when you’ve altered the game and drop pool to your advantage.
Yeah, Steam Input could have been huge for the entire gaming industry, but instead it’s only for Steam and so only can get fixed by Valve, who just doesn’t really care about coming back to things and keeping them working after initially building something. Frustrating to see something almost so good just kinda limp along, accumulating bugs no one will fix because Valve doesn’t really care beyond the simple button mapping use.
Just like how dynamic collections could have been pretty great, but Valve got a rudimentary version working, patted themselves on the back, and left forever without even implementing the most basic tools anyone would need to actually use them (boolean combinations, actually using the tags you set on games, etc). It could even have been a slick new interface to Steam’s tagging (imagine if you set a collection specifically as a tag, and Steam took your manually adding and removing games there as tag votes) that might’ve helped ease some of the dumb problems tags have (there’d be a lot more info for Steam to draw on than just the people actually updating tags on the store page).
I’m kind of impressed no one makes a better gaming social-launch client than Steam, but then Steam’s own client has a massive lock in advantage so you basically can’t make something that wholly replaces it, and Valve doesn’t care to play nice when they want that obvious Steam-game vs non-Steam-game divide.
That’s such poppycock I don’t even know if you’re subtly trolling. Anyone could put a clown on a profile for anything, and they come far more from bad actors than anything remotely legitimate. Steam forums are full of bad actors. Actually supporting that kind of petty toxicity by insinuating clowns mean something is gross.
Thankfully, profile awards can be hidden, and I’d expect they often are, so it’s hard to really say how many are given out. I certainly hid profile awards when the system was new, because it’s weird Steam just helps people deface your profile. Even having awards hidden hasn’t stopped the occasional spiteful clown award getting added.