I learned something very important today! You actually have to click "post."
It's almost better if the strip day isn't on April Fools', because then we can utilize this space as a metacommentary where folk chronologies exist in tension with the material and the manifest. Is that anything? I didn't go to college.
I was mostly just talking about my experience with matchmaking in Marvel Rivals at the end of my last post, and I guess some of Gabe's, but then a bunch of people were like "it's not just you." They put it down to a smorgasbord of causes - pink beams of interstellar light, heavy-laden with mysterious data. Whimsical AI. Some even attempted to tie it in to the strange, underground pillars only recently discovered in Gizeh; the going theory is that it forms a kind of psychic vacuum, which enervates conscious beings ("thinkons") and sequesters their energoids.
As I have suggested many times, on some level winning or losing in videogames isn't a big deal to me. It's deeply frustrating for those who end up on my team, the vast majority of which are friends I'm going to have to see again. So I'll often see people talking about things like ELO and think that scrubs and nubs need to git gud. It never once crossed my mind that there could actually be any reason for my failure in these contexts other than my own sloth and decay.
We've done strips about the Bot Matches they rope you into if you're having a bad streak, which broadly we don't really mind because you still tick up all your quests bars and shit. Generally, we use these matches to try out new characters; that's kind of a soft retention thing. It wouldn't have occurred to me that the matchmaking itself was like the interior of a Vegas casino, a labyrinthine trap for money and people, but I see now that it was pretty dumb of me and it is only because of my weird blind spot and subterranean self-esteem that I hadn't considered it before. Man, I was dumb.
(CW)TB out.
