This is so depressing I'm succumbing to the death by a thousand papercuts... type of oppressive feel. I'm considering hard quitting this game.
It's obvious they have this 'minority report' upbringing of removing could-be controversial content before they could 'possibly' (not guaranteed) 'become' controversial when they're out the gate... they're literally curating the game in any way, shape or form... walking on eggshells on turbo mode.
It's so obvious that they're afraid of the court of public opinion... such as in places like twitter... where controversy spreads like wildfire... as well as 'game-centered journalist sites' that love to write inflammatory articles for clicks. It's ridiculous!
Changing the word 'blacklist' to 'blocklist'... changing 'white lie' to 'harmless lie'... changing 'master' to 'handler'... 'slave' to 'raven'... cutscene changes or outright omissions... height slider... Hariette's basewear being changed... a bit of under+sideboob was covered (probably because she's featured in the Story mode, as opposed to just being an AC item that doesn't get worn by any 'established character', also because she's 17 I believe)
Pretty sure one of the reasons why it's so inconsistent for some outfits to be modified to be less 'exposed' and some more lewd to go completely unchanged... is because of the Story character is tied to... and they don't make a separate model outfit for the NPCs, to only make the modification only on the 'underage' character, while not affecting the official design of the outfit... so a lazy fix all in all.
Some of these changes are happening post-release in updates... it's so obvious what they're intending to do. Everything is obviously point towards having good PR & making themselves look 'acceptable' in the eyes of the West, not just their customers but on the eyes of society as a whole.
It's so ridiculous, and depressing.... they're going to keep retroactively changing the game, by that I mean changing the things that are already out. Welcome to curated PSO2, despite the M-Rating.
I find this very discouraging. Not making me all that enthused... and this isn't the only game in our current political climate that's being affected by outside influences. 13 Sentinels... sigh I'm just not going to keep going... I need to go take a break. I have little to no hope anything will change, rollback their decisions, and that things will only worsen with every update. -_-
This is why they won't listen to us... this is why they won't stop doing what they're doing... they just care about making money and looking good to the general public. -_-
Like I stated above before the derailing about posts on steam and someone's life/activity in the online world elsewhere... which I should add is completely irrelevant to this topic, and all it's going to come down to is turn into insulting each other with ad hominems. So please stop... but going back with referring to what I posted on page 48...
This isn't necessarily a SJW driven agenda to change the game to be more 'family friendly' or rather 'socially acceptable' in some aspects... but it uses SJW's prerogative to change specific things that may make it seem that they're 'curating' the game with a certain narrative. I don't know if the people behind are SJW themselves or are just simply trying to stay on the safe side by appeasing overtly sensitive people... such as SJWs... and other fringe groups of people... because as I said... they seem... like many other companies... trying to avoid controversy, so they do things a la minority report... knee jerk changes without feedback of what could be seen as 'problematic'. They seem to completely terrified of the public opinion... this all obviously PR driven & monetarily driven... not exactly anything to do with Social Justice. Most of these companies, they don't care about that stuff... they pretend to do so, and try to align with the 'current times' moral spectrum... that's why I a lot of times call them tone-deaf or out of touch when they go too far for an invisible/non-existent crowd rather than their core-audience... the appease everyone to a certain degree path... which in my opinion a fool's errand.
If everything was unchanged... these threads wouldn't be made and the overly sensitive people would have quieted down a long time ago, there wouldn't be squabbles... because it would have just boiled down to... it's 1:1 with the Japanese game as it stands... but no, here we are... suffering from more knee-jerk changes on 'every' update post-EP3. They really underestimate how in this day and age people have so much access to information... they probably really thought that the changes being made could be pushed under the rug, and that people wouldn't be aware of the regional differences... I swear this ALWAYS happens.
They don't respond to us about this certain topic, because they are between a rock and a hard place... they don't have a good answer that will please anyone and would probably only bring bad PR or more attention to the matter... they would rather keep going in silence as long as they can until this conversation goes away altogether on its own. They will never address this... either they restore everything back to 1:1 with the Japanese version without saying a word or continue with changes without saying that word, that's what I'm expecting and that's what I'll continue to expect. That's what I find it all so depressing.
It may or may not be SJWs making the decisions behind all of this or not... and that is irrelevant whether they are or not... what is relevant, based on the nature of all the things that have been specifically changed is that the editorial line of the changes are pro-SJW appeasers or are pro-All Audiences in terms of inclusiveness.
It's extremely obvious... when you notice the pattern of the nature of things that HAVE been changed as to what their intentions are. Just like Atlus-USA/WEST localization can have knee-jerk reactions towards content that 'could' be seen anti-LGBTQ+ but aren't at all really... it's all for good PR, not because they actually care.
Why is there more to talk about as someone pointed out in the last 2 pages? Because they keep changing things... they just changed more innocuous things for EP5 update. Blacklist to Blocklist... oh it's just a word? That's not the issue here... it's WHY the did it, if it's that innocuous of a change in the first place... I think we can all agree that it's pretty obvious they're afraid of any backlash... and if what I've been hearing is correct... that the localization is actually done by Sega of Japan's contractor... and they also happen to be Japanese, I can see why they work with such a deliberate yet strict manner of changing innocuous things while at the same time not understanding the nuance of some of these things... like they're working with presumed guilt over the original work... so they're really hard on the 'curation' process, no wonder we get botched up translations & horrendous typos as well as no flavor text in item descriptions if that's all they care about doing first... they seem to be so caught up with the idea of 'let's do all we can to avoid as many -isms & -phobic words as possible'.
It's a very pathetic & a sad state of affairs... also never mentioned the gendered baths in the alliance being changed to remove the signs... which is yet another change that points towards the same line of thinking that goes into these changes. It's not necessarily SJW... but it's pro-SJWish as in appeasing those overly sensitive crowds with changes that are presumed to be controversial or that they could become controversial so they modify it pre-release to avoid it altogether and hope no one notices... it's like the movie Minority Report, where instead of stopping the crime before it happens, it's stop the controversy & articles being written about you by making said changes before the controversy happens.
I'll tell you right now, I bet if social media like places such as Twitter didn't exist... I bet most of these changes that we are suffering right now... they wouldn't exist. People really underestimate the power of 'loud minorities' have over these company decisions with -ism & -phobic buzzwords, especially nowadays.
Apologies for the essay in advance... barely write in here, but come back every so often, especially during updates.
Anyways, I hope you all have a great day... I'll check back later to see where this thread goes... and hope that everyone drops the ad hominems & stop derailing the topic about outside activities (Steam Community, Lover's Lab, or whatever! Who cares!) that are irrelevant to this conversation or topic. Hopefully I didn't miss anything I want to say out here.... between my two posts.
EDIT: I see these changes just the same as changes for other games & other forms of media that are Pro-China because how big their market is... it's all in the money.
