PUBG Momentarily Tops CS:GO in Concurrent Players on Steam
PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS, the runaway Early Access hit, is nipping at the heels of some PC gaming juggernauts.
You sit in the distressed cargo plane waiting for the right moment. To your left, a copper-haired lady in a Where’s Waldo? shirt and steampunk glasses sits motionless. Across the aisle, you spot a twenty-something guy in nothing but his underwear and some blue high tops. It’s you and 99 other weirdos on this plane, all waiting to dive out onto a remote island and murder each other for a plate of chicken. You land on the island and feel helplessly alone against the swarms of folks waiting to take you out. There is no need to feel like you are alone, though, because 230,000 other people are taking the same plane ride as you in this exact moment.
For a brief moment tonight, @PUBATTLEGROUNDS had more players online than @csgo_dev! Thank you one and all <3 a="" href="https://t.co/BYN7qdSTgB" data-mce-href="https://t.co/BYN7qdSTgB">pic.twitter.com/BYN7qdSTgB
— PLAYERUNKNOWN (@BattleRoyaleMod) July 9, 2017
In a tweet from PlayerUnknown himself early Sunday morning, it has been revealed that 230,000+ concurrent players were on the island of death. For a short time, the concurrent player count of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) eclipsed that of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. In case you’ve been in a coma since seeing Armageddon in theaters, Counter-Strike (in its various incarnations) has been one of the most played PC games of all time. After Valve’s other gargantuan hit, Dota 2, CS:GO is typically the most played game on Steam. According to Steam Spy, CS:GO has sold around 30 million copies. It is also one of the biggest eSports in the world. For a game like PUBG to achieve a milestone of this magnitude so soon after launching onto Steam Early Access back in March is very impressive.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is unquestionably the runaway hit of early 2017 and is consistently one of the most watched games on Twitch. A simple premise, exciting gameplay, and a seemingly infinite number of amazing moments has made PUBG one of the most watchable PC games ever made. The rapid rise of PUBG has raised many eyes around the industry. At this year’s E3 show in June, Microsoft revealed that PUBG would be coming exclusively to the Xbox One consoles. As popular as it already is on PCs, expect the concurrent player count to continue rising once PUBG releases on Microsoft’s console.
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Shacknews
replyChris Jarrard posted a new article, PUBG Momentarily Tops CS:GO in Concurrent Players on Steam
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Three of the top 10 are survival genre. Meh.
What I worry about are how decent games seem to have trouble keeping sizeable enough populations lately...and don't seem to have a good solution for it.
Took me forever to find a Frontlines server in BF1 yesterday, that game is peaking around 24k and down to 9k after Europe goes to bed. The DLC is barely playable in the U.S. because of this. This from a game that Shack, among others, was raving about on release.
The lifespan of game populations seems to be getting shorter and shorter. I no more neither by PUBG's popularity than I was by Pokeman' GO's. It does make me wonder about the health of MP gaming on PC, but we have probably always been controlled by these popularity swings. It just didn't look so drastic because there were fewer gamers and fewer games.-
*no more impressed
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....what?
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Yeah lots of typos. Fundamental point, and I have been piled on this bringing it up for many games, is that the shifting popularity trends don't seem to be able to support PC multiplayer games adequately unless they are in the uppermost tier or F2P. I think this is a problem.
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People constantly shift what they play, because thats the nature of things. People get tired of playing the same shit so they try what is new and good. Then they might go back to the old shit if it's still good and has updates and doesn't fragment it's player base ..like CSGO.
Also didn't you make some kind of prediction a few months ago that PUBG would start dying out by now?-
No. I don't think so. I called it a fad and that pissed people off. But, BF1 was clearly a fad around here too.
People need to stop being insulted by that. Rocket League is a stronger fad that has only lost about 30k of its player base. CS:GO was a fad during 2016, I assume that was during the height of the gambling stuff that made it a streamer craze?
These things come and go. People need to stop seeing it as an assessment of a game's quality.
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Which Mario Brothers? Certainly it was.
Fad - a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fad
Even if it was quality, did it deserve a movie? Probably not. It was a temporary craze, like most cultural media things.-
Every game in the main Mario series has been absurdly successful. You have absolutely no clue what a fad is.
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http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Mario_games
Successful, but not on the same levels as their peers.-
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I said game, not franchise. It is like saying Star Wars was never a fad because it is a lasting IP.
We all know that's not true because it drove a temprorary craze. It has been revived several times, but it is a fad.
Stop obsessing over this word. It just means a temporary surge in popularity.-
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When every kid in school had a star wars lunchbox. That's the fad time. I don't dispute its staying power over 40 years and they way they have transformed it. That being said, it stayed strong despite a lack of quality in notable places.
The Christmas special, the Ewok adventures, etc. There were some attempts to cash in on the initial fad that misfired.-
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There are moments for all those things when they became cultural giants, then tapered off immensely.
WoW was so huge that there was a time you could basically assume any gamer you were talking to played. You cannot do that today even if it is still the biggest MMO population. It brought about the MMO fad.
I think you guys narrow fad too much. You seem to think that unless it completely fades to nothing a really popular cultural moment can't be a fad.-
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I posted two definitions without short lived.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fad
"for a time"
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fad
"temporary"
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fad
"usually does not stay popular for very long"
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fad
"An intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived; a craze."
You guys seem to think that last one that says "especially" is the only definition. It says especially, not exclusively.-
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You just shifted the context. Fad among comic con goers is not a mainstream fad, which is the context in which I used it.
Also, I will direct you here.
http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=36502474
I don't actually care about the word fad. It really triggers people here. Does it hurt everyone's street cred too much to admit they were ever part of a fad?
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Ask anyone here for a canonical example of a fad as a kid. You'll get things like Pogs and Tomagachi. Things that had a sudden rush of popularity and then disappeared almost entirely. No one uses fad to describe the apex of an otherwise immensely popular thing with long running success. This is one of your more ridiculous angles of attack on popular games.
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Or the macarena.
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We did that shit in Physical Education.
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The three games after the first were recent and came out way after the movie. A Nintendo theme park is currently being built. Again, you're making up some super specific definition of the word after being called out on whatever bullshit opinion you're trying to make, like you do in all of these threads.
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Okay, one dictionary was not good enough.
Maybe you'll like this one better.
a style or activity that suddenly becomes popular but which usually does not stay popular for very long.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fad-
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Disney is quite a non-sequitur there isn't it?
I said Star Wars was a fad. Not the IP, but it clearly had a couple huge moments when it became a cultural phenomena. Those subsided. Star Wars never went away, but the fad moments of explosive popularity did.
Then it did it again. And it had little to do with quality right? Or did the cultural takeover for the prequels exist because of the quality?-
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Fine. I'll agree with you there.
Is PUBG an evergreen property?-
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Eh. I don't know if DOTA 2 is here to stay. I guess it is because it is a valve property and even when TF2 isn't popular it still has crazy numbers.
I think MOBA is a bit of a craze that will fade like MMO, RTS, arena FPS, etc. All still exist obviously, but the player counts and titles in the genre are pretty declined.
For example, Starcraft would meet what you are describing as "evergreen property", but I don't think anyone expected it to hit it as big culturally and in market share with Starcraft 2 as it did with Starcraft. Starcraft and its sequels definitely had a huge moment in RTS gaming which is much less popular now.
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dota 2 was a fad when it left beta for a month in 2014
am i doing this right-
Not really because the numbers don't agree.
http://steamcharts.com/app/570
Not sure what was going on there. 2015 seems to have had a bubble for a couple months, then it was repeated.
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"Evergreen" refers to a game or series that maintains consistent sales and popularity for very long periods of time beyond the standard initial release spike. The same goes for things like classic Disney films, Star Wars, etc.
Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, and Pokemon are the most evergreen of the evergreen properties, 18-30+ years for them and sales that go for years per individual title (ie - Mario Kart 7 continued to sell millions of copies per year even after it had already been out for four years).
Modern evergreens are games like CSGO, Rocket League, Dota 2, Diablo 3, Witcher 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Skyrim (coming to a smartphone near you in 2023), etc.
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Depends when we are talking about. CS:GO is not a fad now, CS:GO was a fad in 2016 when it was peaking.
Is there anything about the quality of CS:GO that makes it not worthy of 850k players now compared to April 2016?-
http://steamcharts.com/app/730#All
Those stats don't suggest that CS:GO was a "fad". It slowly gained popularity over the course of 3 years until it reached it's peak before going on the decline. It's not like the player base shot up 200% over the period of a few weeks.
The DOTA2 player base is also on a bit of a decline. I would never say that game was a fad simply because there was a small peak in player base compared to other months/years.
Not every game is a fad simply because the population doesn't increase year over year until the end of time. Some players will keep playing the same game for years on end while the vast majority will get burnt out at some point and move on to another game.-
Emh. We're just arguing over the word fad here.
How about "experienced a brief surge in popularity not commensurate with any quality difference"?-
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Well, did CS:GO get worse in the last year? As in, did it get less "fun" the Jarrard standard from the article or have less quality content? Did it changes its game mechanics?
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THEN EDUCATE ME
I asked. You have no logical high ground here. It is a forum. Discuss things.
I know Shack's specialty is actually driving people away and reducing the number of posts so it can stew in its elitism and parenting threads, but if you want to discuss gaming then maybe you should start actually discussing it.-
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praise be
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Hey look. Captain civility himself.
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Who said it works? It isn't for you. It is for me. I got into trouble getting into shouting matches.
Now when you and others show up to troll me, I have something I say instead.
As long as Shack keeps tolerating people who only show up to insult in a thread like you just did, I will keep my civility response.-
http://replygif.net/i/101.gif
Yea. We're trolling you. You got it. Not a single person agrees with you, but we're trolling you. The mental gymnastics at work here is so good I can't help myself to respond because I want to see it in action. It's truly a work of art. Bravo sir. Bravo. -
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All evidence isn't to the contrary. And I admitted I was wrong about a couple things in the thread (namely Rocket League being a poor example and me misinterpreting those numbers). I conceded points to Serpico as well just for the sake of argument.
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Brink wasn't a fad because I don't think it ever did well enough to be popular.
You are putting games that failed because they didn't live up to their hype in the fad category. That doesn't line up with fads. As I argued, there has to be a critical mass of quality reached.
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I wasn't around Shack then much so yeah that sounds like a Shack fad. I didn’t see that much attention to it in the general gaming world.
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http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2011/06/la-noire-and-brink-top-may-video-game-sales/1#.WWPJn4jyvDc
But you are seriously reducing it to a month. It released outside the normal window too so I guess you got your 6 month fad because it 6 months before anything good launched?
Also, I think arguing that it had a larger gaming culture presence than Portal 2 may be a bit off.
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Where is the wrong part? You asked for information. I provided it without makinng a huge fuss like the people I asked to tell me about their CS:GO experience.
The information did not show it was a fad. At best it showed it was decently successful in sales during a relatively quite period in the game release cycle. Not really evidence of a fad.
Feel free to actually argue your point if you want me to concede more than I already have: that it was a fad on shacknews.-
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The stats I provided still had Wii titles.
But let's talk about that fad that was Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game.
People just wouldn't shut up about that game. That's all they would play.
And LA Noire? People were like, fine I'll stop playing this when BF3 comes out, but NO SOONER.
/s
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Then tell me. I asked. Did it get worse?
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It's had it's ups and downs over the years but I'm not going to bother doing an analysis on each patch and how they may or may not have affected the player base.
Either way you're incorrectly using the word 'fad' in an attempt to denigrate a game that you don't think deserves its success.
This is Overwatch all over again. For some reason you really get pissy when a game you don't think you'd like becomes wildly successful.-
Read how I used it. I called BF1 a fad as well.
http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=36502413
It is apparently a trigger word for some shackers.-
In either event, you're ignoring my comment about how you try to downplay a video game's success if it doesn't interest you. I have no interest in buying PUBG or Overwatch but you don't see me redefining words in an attempt to shit on them.
Not every game that becomes popular is going to interest you. Trying to come up with excuses for why these games shouldn't be as popular as they are is a giant waste of time.-
What is this thread then? Just a marketing fluff piece?
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The whole point of this discussion is its popularity. That is the OP.
I am not getting irritated with people enjoying something. I get irritated with them marketing it and buying the fallacy that it is so popular because it is so much better than everything.
Can you imagine how annoyed people would be with articles pointing out tht DOTA 2 has once again topped all the Steam charts and is clearly the best game out there?
It isn't. We all know that.-
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Right, but that is the crux of my position. DOTA 2 may be better than a lot of MP experiences. But, I have no played LoL or HotS. I never played HoN or DOTA 1. I have literally never played another MOBA.
I play this one because I liked watching Ti3 and some of my friends played it. That's it. That doesn't actually speak to quality, but a lot of things on the periphery.
Quality is part of it certainly, but I won't be making any arguments about DOTA being good or bad based on its position in the charts.
Starting to see why it doesn't matter if I played it?-
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I have over 1000 hours in DOTA over several years. I don't always play because it is fun. I played an extra two hours yesterday because my buddy wanted to even though I was pretty miserable from my games.
Not really a good example.
PUBG may eventually be that way. We shall see. I doubt it. I still think DOTA will be coming down in popularity soon enough too.-
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What matters is if it maintains the level of popularity it has now.
That can be deceptive too. Battlefield as a franchise may not be a fad, but the success it enjoyed from BC2-BF4 may be tied to a modern military FPS fad. Not tht those games were qualitatively better than the other MP shooters at the time or DICE's other games outside that theme.-
if a steam game stays near the top of charts more than 6 months and maintains it's numbers during that period with no signs of major slowdown, it's not a fad. That's my definition and the one the rest of the world agrees with. And looking at PUBG it has shown no signs of slowdown it's only increasing.
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since a game's object is to be played, by definition, a game that is played consistently more, and by more people, and over a longer period of time, is a better game.
BF2 and BF3 weren't fads, they were played for a long time. they were better than other games out there.
bf1 was played for a couple of months. it was not as good as it needed to be to compete. same with battleborn or Evolve. Quality is not measured in a vacuum, or based on some forum sperglord's weird bulletpoints. Quality is relative to the market, to other available games.
if 250k people consistently decide to play a game every day, the game's good. your opinion (and mine) are irrelevant.-
The DOTA 2 is the best game on Steam by your argument.
That seems silly.-
of all the games on steam who want to be played by everyone, daily, forever, yes.
it's dwarfed by LoL or Minecraft though.
everything is relative. every game has a different goal. some games are one and done. that's fine too.
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you gotta stop talking like game quality, production execution and everything is projected onto the game by some sort of collective desire for a game to have success.
Some games are better, or do something specifically right, or hit some nerve, and compel people to play hem over and over again. This is upon the game itself, nto some sort of mass hysteria voodoo.
If it were all only about HYPE, no one would still be playing ARK or PAYDAY 2, yet they are consistently in the steam top 10 most played games. Those games might not speak to you personally (or to me, that is) but you just gotta stop talking like no game has ever any merit, this shit's annoying.-
There are differences. But don't you see how it is insulting to insinuate those are the only differences?
http://steamcharts.com/app/361420
Go ahead. Apply the popularity meritocracy argument. I don't think that is fair at all to the game. Most developers would love to have their game reach fad status, but it can still be really high quality even if it doesn't.-
insulting?
astroneer's good. it probably would want to be played by 250k people daily. it doesn't tap in something popular enough to reach that massive audience. That's fine!
Good news, not every game NEEDS to hit that crazy milestone. Most game studios can survive on middling success, and that's good.-
But that detaches it from "quality."
As you just said "tap into something popular enough."
That's what I am arguing. Tapping into something popular enough isn't a quality thing, so stop arguing like it is. It is interesting what is popular enough. Games that do that should be examined.
But, stopping the analysis at because it is more fun than other games or because it is better than other games is misleading and just part of the marketing really.-
pubg is an online competitive military shooter. How more mainstream can you get? Easy to discover. But a new military shooter has to be even BETTER to stay significant.
And there’s no question that in this market of military shooter milieu it's standing out, and it's been standing out since early march, I think. Which is hard to do.
You're the one who's fighting literally everyone on some weird internet troll logic and definition of quality about some game you never played....
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http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=36278876#item_36278876
http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=36278759#item_36278759
you said you would check after summer and/or in 6 months to see how its numbers are doing. i can assure you its numbers will be fine.-
Okay. Not exactly predicting it would be failing, but down from its peak numbers.
I would say 20-30% drop off would be expected, just guessing. It seems unlikely to fall off as fast as Fallout 4 (shed 50% in a month around the holidays).-
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Could still happen.
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"The Earth blows up, killing all players of PUBG"
TraptNSuit: "See, people only played it for 6 billion years but they don't anymore. A flash in the pan."-
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here TraptNSuit: https://youtu.be/G2vcHyuJlPM?t=1m44s
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this flame sure went out quickly!
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but twitch streamers just stream this flame because twitch streamers stream this flame! there are no intrinsic qualities to this flame. quality is the projection of our desires for the flame to be streamed unto that same flame.
fad.
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classic traptnsuit smoke bomb
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woah weird a singleplayer game where the playerbase drops off after release. Almost like it by design has a limited set of content with limited replayability.
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It's the third top concurrent player stat on Steam.
So if you are going to make an argument about those numbers = quality you should probably be able to address it and why it is so much higher than so many others.
Otherwise, this OP story is pretty meaningless without context to what those numbers mean. It implies that the higher the number the higher the quality.-
no it quite literally doesn't doesn't imply anything, it states a straightforward fact that PUGB was the top played game on Steam for a period, dethroning the previous most popular game. This is an interesting data point about what people enjoy.
The only person attempting to derive the implied formula for quality from sales over time per person per pixel by server count modulo monthly drop off minus sales price plus post count is you.-
Hmmm. It did. Rereading it there seems to be a sentence missing that I had responded too about it being "fun."
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Obviously hundreds of thousands of people aren't playing a game for months on end because it's fun. Obviously it's a fad. Poor sheeple. Show them the light. If you just post enough eventually you'll get through to them and they'll realize how stupid they are for not being able to realize they're actually horrifically bored of these games and succumbing entirely to hype and PR in an endless campaign of advertising from influencers. Thankfully you have the intellect to rise above it and teach the plebians the errors of their ways and how to cut through the hype find the truly good games.
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Never said anything like that in this thread. What kicked off all of this was me noting how the hype had been around BF1 shortly before (I bought it due to the hype) and now it is troubling trying to find games of that.
People are deeply offended that I may have derided their precious game by suggesting it was something other that its pure fun inducing qualities that make them play it over the last game they raved about.
I am not even talking about a game I champion. Just one that I followed the previous herd mentality on and bought despite my reservations.-
What kicked the thread off was you starting your usual crusade about hype and quality vs popularity.
Yes people find it extremely condescending when you continually show up to tell them they're too stupid to realize they're actually just playing a game due to hype instead of their own ability to evaluate whether they're having more or less fun than something else they could be doing. I said these same words to you in the last PUBG thread you went on this crusade too.
That everyone keeps giving you the same feedback on this crusade should clue you into something. Either everyone is stupid and wrong or you are. Which is more likely?-
That's what the OP is about. Were people just supposed to gush in it about how amazing steam stats are and how PUBG is our gaming messiah?
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your logic skills are reading comprehension are as high as your mmr
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no that's not what the OP was about at all, which is why you're the only one making this dumb argument (again) and everyone else is telling you that this is some stupid shit (again)
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Right, the OP was reposting a developer's social media remark about how incredibly popular their game is.
So it is just marketing not worth discussing then?-
that you think the only possible point of discussion from this was 'look at all these stupid people who don't understand what's truly fun' says everything about why we're here
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Sorry. Back to, how do we pronounce PUBG then? No discussion of the steam numbers.
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We could have a discussion about what has made the game so popular. What elements of its design are so good that it's dethroned something like Counterstrike? But instead you wanted to have a discussion about how all its players are stupid (again). Turns out they weren't too interested in that discussion with you. The why should be obvious.
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rocket league seems an odd one to single out - the steam-centric stats i can google up mostly have it around 40-60k for the last two years straight.
it never really hit top of the charts, but it hasn't really fallen off either.-
I will admit a free weekend threw me off on that one. Rocket League is surprsingly steady, it has still dropped around 20%, but it would seem to be a good counter argument.
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Rocket League consistently opens itself up to more platforms, and right now there are almost 300,000 people on RL. The game continues to grow. Steam is far from the majority of its playerbase and it isn't a neutral measurement, so going from Steam data alone is going to really skew a measure of interest in it.
I'd bet RL's dip in February 2016, for instance, is largely due to people moving from Steam to Xbox to play with friends who just got the game rather than the game actually losing players.-
Fair enough. That was a poor pick. With its competitive scene actually taking hold it probably has legs too.
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No, your fundamental point is a game that you don't like, and have never played, is doing really really well.
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Seriously. Every time PUBG is mentioned, he shows up to shit on it despite it having both financial and critical success.
But for some reason he shows up anyway to complain about the game because Twitch is apparently the only reason it's successful and it doesn't actually deserve any of it. -
It really really isn't.
People need to stop getting upset because they think I am putting down their game.-
It really really is. Your post indicated you are not a fan of "survival" games. You responded with "meh"
You then started going on again about popularity swings in games... implicitly grouping PUBG in that discussion... which means you still think of it being a temporary fad... which has now been proven 100% false and wrong yet you won't admit how wrong you are.-
which has now been proven 100% false and wrong
Hold your hawses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi
Was a fad, sold more, lasted longer.-
I think we have to establish the period of time that we are referring to when calling something a fad
I think the example you just posted the Tamagotchi being called a fad ,whenever it's been popular for many years (5 or so?) ,which might seem like a small period but onlywhen looking back over several decades in the past...
but whenever were talking about present games.... over the span of maybe a year or two...which is what we typically assume the period of time is when discussing the performance of a game on this website ....then I think a fad would be something that is popular for probably around six months or less ...however battlegrounds is clearly on a trajectory to be popular for more than six months.-
six months or less ..
Which comes to my point of social media crazes compressing the time frames of popularity. You are agreeing with me there.
That being said, we don't have a threshold for what qualifies as being popular enough to have entered fad territory. Pogs existed in the 1920s, they were a fad in the 1990s.
If all we are doing is fighting over the definition of this word though, I think we need to move on. You and I coming up with arbitrary thresholds is pretty irrelevant.
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I posted two definitions in this thread. No one has provided another.
But please....go on. I love the civility.-
Sorry, you posted a definition that is not sourced, but uses a very strong qualifier.
http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=36502529
I have yet to see that in definitions.
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Unlike BF1, you can jump into PUBG and be sure that you won't be stuck having a miserable 45-minute match because you were unlucky enough to be stuck on a bad team.
You could play BF1 Deathmatch then. Same concept. Stop making an effort in team games because your team will suck. Of course none of that applies to DOTA which is smacking all of these games around with population.
Twitch is multimillion dollar marketing. It may not be centralized, but it is millions of dollars dedicated to getting gamers to see a game. PUBG may have found a way to get more streamers to play its game and make it go viral, but that doesn't mean it is beyond marketing. It just found a likely cheaper way to do it. That means we will see even more craven marketing practices trying to get streamers to play games so they don't die like Titanfall 2.
"It's more fun" isn't analysis. If anything this article is just another ad for PUBG. Shack has a reason to report on things, but you turned a tweet from a developer into a "article" that put quite a spin on numbers without contextualizing the comparison. Instead, you repeated a comparison from the developer on social media.
Why spend millions on marketing when the gaming media will do it for you?
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The overall idea here is that once you reach critical mass, social media (twitch), gaming media, word of mouth, etc. will perpetuate the popularity of the game by doing your marketing for you. The trick is reaching that critical mass in the first place. Games seem to be really struggling with that, fads are hard to pin down for why they were in the right place at the right time.
All that aside, even if this is a good mechanism and we have no trouble with it, the scope and effect of mass marketing due to social media appears to push population up in to such a small number of titles that high quality fun titles on pc have unsustainable populations.
Due to how fast this mechanism works, we should expect to see this repeat within a year probably.-
look at no mans sky. that had tons of media, word of mouth. and it definitely reached critical mass. but the core game wasnt good so it died out. that is a fad.
PUBG is a good game at its core, and that is the reason why it has not died out and why its not a fad.
i think you have been dodging the core argument which is whether this is a good game or not.
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Are you saying you think twitch streamers are more than 25% of the reason why PUBG is popular? Because it's not.. it's mostly word of mouth. Look at all the shackers here they play it because of people just talking about it. Also seeing people on your steam list playing it, and the fact that it has been top of the sales charts on steam.
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The upswing in popularity for PUBG is because it is simply more fun. It doesn't have the multi-million dollar advertising push and a huge launch to drum up hype among players. Word of mouth and visibility on Youtube and Twitch are attracting the new players. The quality of the experience is what is keeping players engaged.
Just because it is word of mouth doesn't make it more pure or something. I guess that means you are still a band that hasn't sold out or something, but this is the era of social media. Word of mouth can apply to a twitter post. Meh. It is self-perpetuating internet marketing after reaching critical mass.
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I was not suggesting corruption.
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The same way memes and narratives propagate across populations. It isn't nefarious. It is social species dynamics.
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Are you suggesting memes can't be propagated nefariously?
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a7/57/b8/a757b8c0569be3aef354923c717b1f99.jpg-
They certainly can be. Doesn't mean they have to be or that the mechanism is nefarious.
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I mean, I have kept a front page story at the top of chatty for a bit now. Clearly I am on the take. That just doesn't happen around here.
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True, but the logical inferene saying the article must exist for those reasons is lacking.
It is just as plausible that the author really likes this game, noticed tweet, wrote up an article on it, ran it by the editors who thought it was sufficiently gaming news, and now it is here. It is free marketing, but innocently enough if that is how it happened.
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The BF1 DLC is unplayable because EA insists on splitting the playerbase like they have since 1942. Battlefield is also bad and tired, has been for a very long time.
You insist on referring to evergreen games (or what are going to be evergreen games, as I believe PUBG will be) as flash in the pan fads. Its weird.-
The BF1 DLC is unplayable because EA insists on splitting the playerbase like they have since 1942.
It is unplayable, like every game in the series for a decade and a half.
What?-
whats your question
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Doesn't matter. Battlefield itself doesn't matter. People trying to find quality differences are making shit up because TF2 had all free DLC and that non-segmented base is smaller than just that on BF1 DLC right now.
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Titanfall is not a popular franchise. You are conflating completely different things. Like, Battleborn is never going to catch on even if all content is free for perpetuity. People need to get on board with the game first.
Battlefield is a popular franchise that segments its community and bleeds users over time due to how its DLC works. They start from a position of strength and popularity, something the Titanfall series never had.-
Okay. Assuming that's true. Why is BF1 struggling more than BF3 or BF4 in that regard on PC if it is simply a matter of how it is segmented?
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I agree. But, that goes to show that it is not just quality that determines popularity. This shouldn't be a contentious issue. It is rather self evident.
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Quality is one of the most important factors, but it has diminishing returns if it doesn't stay fresh.
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Agree. I think that's basically the Activision business model. DICE has been guilty of it too lately.
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Their handling of DLC in BF1 is atrocious considering the times. It is finally with Battlefront 2 that they seem to get a handle on what the community is willing to tolerate.
That said, I think the shooty gameplay in BF1 is really a class of its own, especially for DICE. It's just solid and there aren't that many shooters that have that level of quality, feedback and reliability to them. You can get a better, more unfiltered view on the gameplay by switching to TDM instead of the bigger 40-64 Conquest servers which favor randomness.
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would you be worried if 3/10 were competitive mp shooters?
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Maybe if they were all military shooters or something in the same theme. Like when zombie things were everything.
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The odds of there being 3/10 of any given genre at any given time in the top ten in popularity is extremely high. It doesn't mean that other genres are dead or can't compete or anything. It just means that a type of game is occupying the zeitgeist. In this case it's a new genre that is exciting people. I can't imagine why that would be worrying.
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People aren't playing the games he likes and it stresses him out for some reason. I don't think I've ever looked at or cared about population numbers for a game, and I've never noticed a difference.
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Don't you get tired of making up ways to try to convince people games aren't as good as everyone thinks?
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I remember being all concerned that Counterstrike was going to ruin PC gaming by taking all the players (literally all of them, it felt like in 1999). I enjoyed CS for a few months but then wanted to move onto other mods and games, but it was hard cuz everyone was playing Counterstrike all day.
And I was right, PC gaming was indeed ruined by Counterstrike almost 20 years ago.-
Can we blame you for not stopping it?
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Out of curiosity. Was it that no one was playing other games as in you had trouble finding populated servers for games (if so, what games?) Or that your friends were all playing CS instead?
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Populated servers for damn near anything else we're tough to find. You could still find a Team Fortress or Action Quake 2 game, but that was about it. In 1998 damn near any stupid game or mod would have players all day, and something featured on a major gaming website would be hopping, even if it was just for a week or two. Back then, gaming news was all about what's going on right now, like here's a link to the thing you're gonna do tonight. Not like now where it's always about some fame you won't get to play for months.
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I had a time during undergrad, I wanna say around 2006 when I was really into HL2 mods and would play any of them for a couple night and could always find one or two servers. Of course that was all on the back of the valve mp browser and being in the U.S., but I feel like 1 server for a lot of mods is asking a lot in today's very crowded market. Matchmaking and AI like what Verdun does seems like the only option for the small guys.
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People were always talking about what would be "the next counterstrike." I drank the kool-aid for a while. I thought it would be Dystopia Mod (I was hopelessly naïve then).
Many people think DayZ and I guess PUBG now are successors to the mod into industry dominating game. I think the market is too fickle for it to ever happen on that level again. DOTA 2 is the next CS. It was mod picked up by Valve and monetized by them the way no one else monetizes the game. That is what I think we see there. The Valve franchise effect, not anything about the games themselves. Blizzard does it too, they just stick to their own IP creation or reuse a lot.-
Indeed. Counterstrike moved PC gaming in the direction of a winner take all system of player attention. The indie game thing helped pull it back some. ounterstrike more or less led directly to online consoles, and they were born with a winner take all additude (fully realized with the dominance of Modern Warfare).
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Ironically, because of the size of the console player base, you have a better chance finding games of much forgotten titles if you are an Xbox or PS player.
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Very true. I guess the number of games climbed faster than the number of PC gamers though.
It is somewhat notable that PC gamers don't disperse into lots of little niche corners though, but crowd into the most popular games.-
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I guess, but you see things like Monday Night Combat die and that wasn't really competing with anything. (Although I guess people thought it was competing with TF2).
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clearly it was competing with something as its former players decided to play something else over time instead
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Then "something you can’t get anywhere else" doesn't have the necessary appeal right? Since you can be competing against something very dissimilar?
That's kind of my point. PC gaming has a couple huge blackholes at any moment.-
you extrapolate a lot of nonsense from standard consumer behavior. People get tired of things. No amount of uniqueness buys you infinite attention over time, especially as your uniqueness is copied.
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So this might be a temporary burst of popularity then that goes beyond a baseline consideration of quality? If only we had a word for that.
I am sure someone will think of something.-
indeed people have all sorts of words for this, like burst and surge. Fad is not one as you can see by literally everyone else in this thread telling you your assessment of the situation and use of English is wrong. There's not a single person on your side here. You can choose to insist you're right and continue to fail to communicate with other human beings or you can step back and realize what all this implies about you and your argument here.
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if you aren't able to recognize from this thread and the umpteen others where you went down this rabbit hole alone that for all intents and purposes no one agrees with you on this subject then I don't know what else to say
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A good, we went from "no one" to "for all intents and purposes." As kn1fe likes to point out, you never admitted you were wrong.
Supposedly a trait unique to me.-
no one is jumping to your defense in any of these threads because no one is aligned with your point of view here. And yet you persist in this belief that you have discovered a core truth that no one else can see rather than consider that maybe you're just completely wrong and off base.
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MODS were what kept games alive for a long lifespan. All of that is locked away now which is a shame. We would have never had Desert Combat for BF1 which really lead to BF2 if it wasn't for allowing mods. I blame EA for locking games down and preventing a mod community.
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Also important context to the story.
CS:GO peaked at 850k in April of 2016. It was hitting the kinds of numbers PUBG is right now back in 2014.
http://steamcharts.com/app/730#All -
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What PUBG does really well is get rid of the teammates as a problem. I can play a few rounds of solo PUBG and not get aggravated by teammates trolling or whatever. You don't have to listen to fuckboys whine about your loadout, and if the game ends fast you can get into another very quickly.
It's nice not having to hear anyone once I jump out of the fucking airplane. It's fun shooting everyone you see and not having to think about it. It's stressful but can be relaxing at the same time. Nice change of pace from games like Overwatch or Destiny that are constantly trying to get you to make new friends and play with them.-
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Fixed.
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I was all excited about article thread engagement, then I saw why there were over 100 posts...
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I can just ignore the front page now if that makes you happier.
https://shackstats.com/#dataset=totalPosts-
Nope, please engaging, Steve Gibso... I mean TraptNSuit! ;)
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I'm not sure if it's worse to be unaware of your own meme, or to be fully aware and persist anyway.
Either way what a colossal waste of time. -
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Civility.
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You didn't. Dognose sent me an sm threatening to ban me so using expletives in reply to people. I decided to say "civility" instead.
It isn't a shack meme, no matter how insecure they are about it.-
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No. It isn't popular in the least. If you guys feel like making it one, go for it. Maybe someday a CS:GO player will type it in chat and I can feel validated.
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"it isn't a shack meme"
ok meme boy -
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Was anyone offended? No. They just thought I was insane. So what effect did it have on anyone? Nothing. It prevented me from escalating threads. Seems I never should have explained it as it has just become yet another reason for a pile.
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I had a seriously slow day at work. And yeah, shack is a horrible habit and seems anxious for me to be gone. I should just take the hint.
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Yeah I know. It is the classic. Don't respond to the people attacking you rule of forums. I use civility when I am not doing well enough with that.
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No. I take attack as attack. You should learn how to disagree without talking about the person you are disagreeing with. Don't play innocent. The first thing you did in this thread was post about me.
http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=36502758
The fact that you manage to convince people that you are not the shitposter is beyond belief to me.-
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Lol. You seriously think interrupting a discussion to ask a person is they considered never talking to anyone there again isn't personal?
This place.
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I'm going for the non commenting thing after this. Finishing out this thread then considering asking for a ban a la pgharavi. Not really worth trying to talk to people on this site lately.
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Don't conflate everyone who replies with the whole site, bro! Nothing wrong with your ideas or posts. It's just really exhausting when you engage others in a ticky-tacky language game while simultaneously insisting that you're not doing it.
This whole thread is mostly just people just reading the word "fad" in different ways. That's a boring conversation. Sure, words often have different meanings at the point of delivery and at the point of reception, this isn't a revolutionary concept.
Somewhere in there, there are also some interesting points about how the popularity of games is often cyclical, how new players regularly come into gaming, etc. That's a potentially interesting conversation and one that is totally relevant to what Crabs wrote.
Now, the onus for dropping conversation A is on both you and the people replying to you, and for some reason something about your style of argument just makes it impossible for some others to drop it. You can do it, too! But it requires making some admissions sometimes or clarifying statements, and not clarifying about words/definitions etc. but a narrative statement about what you actually think is important in what you are saying. I'm not the post police, though! You do you, my man. -
Keep posting, bro. I'd rather deal with you in threads than not. Don't worry about all those others who keep putting you down.
Haters gonna hate. -
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^^^^^^^
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It was kind of weird how you shit on the game and said it was a fad. Then said that you didn't say those things. (or imply them) It was pretty clear. I don't own the game and it seemed obvious, even to me, that you had an opinion about the game.
Which is ok. The weird part is the back-tracking.
I don't think you should get so upset that you thanks.txt over it. You are a good poster and I appreciate your lawyerly contributions.
Everyone is giving you shit right now. That happens. You might actually look back on it with less defensiveness and realize: Yeah, I never said the game was a piece of shit. But my posts sounded like I thought that.
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Dude it is sooooo easy to avoid these piles. It's 100% your doing.
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A front page guest will click on the comments thinking, hey, neat they are discussing pubg, maybe I should sign up for this chatty.
2 minutes later:
http://i.imgur.com/666hiqM.gif-
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Sucked, stroked, it's all good.
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Well look at it this way. It is a TYPE of "discussion"
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I intentionally misread it as Pugb or Pug Battlegrounds
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Haha, me too.
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I say hot drops or battlebois
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As someone who has never actually played it, Plunkbat.
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I say Battlegrounds since the game is called Battlegrounds.
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pubgharavi
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Also Star Wars
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Why not both!?
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Well that and he thinks Star Wars and Mario Bros are fads and thinks literally no one else here understands what the word means.
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Really great traptnsuit sub-thread today guys. Looked eerily similar to them all.
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Oh hey, a news article with tons of comments. Let's take a look...
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/nvrmnd.gif-
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hahaha this is excellent
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I bet he was an arsonist and had poured a ton of gasoline everywhere, went in to light it not knowing half of it had already evaporated into the air, POOF! Just a guess.
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Yep. Saw who the brouhaha started with... and I'm out, because I know how this goes.
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This is quite the milestone.
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Patent troll.
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It's just like the "Phantom" comic. Xiang Jang client died so the next in line had to step up to replace him.
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Wow would you look at this thread.
Crabs has engagement tuned to over 9000 -
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But I think Crabs Jarrard is doing a great job with these articles.
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What happens when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object.
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Hey guys, what's going on in this thread?
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This thread was pregnant af.
