But decent guacamole is literally just mashed up avocados salt and lime!

Um, no, not really.

ya

Well, perhaps that qualifies as "decent".

yep deffo

i have guacamole dna

My problem with avocado (eating it straight, like on a salad or as a wedge on the side of some other dish) is the consistency, not the flavor. Once it's mashed it's a sauce and I'm ok with it. I then don't eat the stuff on its own, but rather, dip other, non-slimy stuff into it.

Do you eat bananas?



Guacamole = avocados, salt, garlic salt, onion powder, lime, water

Some people add sour cream or cilantro or tomatoes. Those people are going to hell.

Is it a trick question?

Yes. Everybody knows guacamole is supposed to have roma tomatoes in it.

According to a food science survey course I took, consistency is the most common reason people have for rejecting food. E.g., peanuts vs. peanut butter. You may like both, but it probably has less to do with your love of peanuts than a tolerance for slimy stuff.

i got i got i got
i got guacamole guacamole inside my DNA

any guacamole with anything other than avocado salt and lime in it is cultural appropriation gulag for all of you

For the longest time I was eating an avocado a day. The recipe I used for guacamole was something like avocado, onion, tomato, garlic, salt, pepper, lime juice. I usually don't have lime so it ends up being lemon juice. I usually use garlic salt instead of garlic and salt. I use a splash of my wife's homemade hot sauce instead of pepper. I mix it up in a bowl with one of those things for making mashed potatoes. So quick and easy to make and people love it.

I intend to die never having eaten an advocado

I intend to die never, having eaten an avocado.

I was trying to figure out why that sentence, before saberopus fixed it, sounded so wrong. I think having and never should be transposed. I've always pitied Tenshu but I didn't know why. It's so clear now.

Avocados are nice. We have a local hipster place that makes bowls of rice, beans, chicken, kale and other toppings. With avocado it is supremely good.

When did this happen?

would eat one of those rn

Please, let it remain unclear for me.

So Diablo Immortal was announced and many people don't like it. Which on some level I understand, since it's something nobody wanted or asked for. Now the debates are turning out exactly like it always does now.

My real question is: since when do companies not do market research on this kind of stuff? Did Blizzard really not think to get some opinions before licensing out the Diablo name to some mobile devs?

Here’s what I’m guessing happened: They have Diablo 4 in development and were going to announce both games at the same time, Diablo 4 as the main experience and Diablo Immortal as a way to get your game on at red lights. Something like a complementary good. An important announcement that would resonate with a particular audience, but not the main one. Then some Blizzard exec made a late call that they aren’t gonna announce Diablo 4 now, they’re gonna save it for some dumb stock manipulation reason, but go ahead with the mobile game announcement.

Immortal looks too much like the cheap cashgrab it seems to be. It wasn't denied that it's just a reskin of some other mobile ARPG.

I actually was looking for a decent mobile Diablo clone for when I'm on the move, so before I looked at Immortal I was actually a little bit excited for it. But what they've shown so far just looks like the same oversimplified boring **** everyone else is doing.
Now, old Blizzard is known for not being afraid of cancelling a game that's not up to their standards. But I don't think Activision/Blizzard will do that, especially when most of the development is in the hands of someone else.

Joncy's explanation sounds convincing to me. Prolly put the Diablo team up **** creek a bit when that was decided, assuming it's what happened.

My guess is Blizzard did their Chinese market research and realized they only want mobile games, and since the Diablo brand isn't all that successful there IIRC, they thought they could expand their playerbase. They probably thought western audiences would eat it up either way and just be happy to have anything Diablo.

They really miscalculated how people would take it either way. People are feeling cautious since Overwatch was such a hollow money grab, with thin gameplay and gamble packs galore, and we all know how mobile games are monetized. We're just tired of having our wallets bled.

The fact it's oversimplified is funny, too, given that Diablo has always been a ridiculously simple game at its core.

Reports out today say this is pretty much what happened.

uh. eh? did you play Overwatch?

Yeah, for a while.

I might be just projecting my own opinion of the game, but I felt it had a spike of activity in 2016 then petered out. At least everybody I know grew bored of it really fast.

The comments after the announcement.. lol

Who says they didn't? Surely they did. They'll put out a decent mobile game that will probably make a ton of money and PC fans will get the next game whenever Blizzard is damn good and ready to release one, which is what they always do. Throwing a temper tantrum because they didn't get an announcement yet is dumb. Besides, isn't it really early for them to be releasing another sequel? I mean, at the rate Blizzard releases sequels that is.

I feel like Diablo to Blizzard is what Cars is to Pixar. Some people love it, some don't care. But you gotta keep that IP fresh because people will throw money at it (especially if you can get in on those sweet sweet microtransactions.)
Watching the live comments on the other hand drove me crazy how impatient people are. "There is no gameplay footage!" within seconds of the announcement. Though watching someone hype up "Slay demons with your family!" was pretty hilarious especially when I think of Diablo I remember a 15 year old version of myself sequestering himself to a basement for a year and half of my life I'll never get back. Though, maybe mobile IS the perfect platform for that kind of isolation. . .

I agree throwing a temper tantrum is dumb, and people who go on twitter and yell at developers and otherwise overreact are silly. However it's true that Blizzard really misjudged the audience on this one. The reason I find some common ground with the complainers is only in the fact that none of the current Diablo fanbase really wanted this. It's a sign Blizzard wants to expand the Diablo brand. But, is that really a good choice? Personally I'm not sure it is. I have a hard time imagining the world of Diablo ever being as popular as Warcraft, since Diablo was always heavily steeped in European/Christian symbolism. More generally it's moodier, darker aesthetic will be more niche than the bright one of Warcraft.

By the way, given this is obviously targeted at Chinese audiences and is made by Chinese devs, we can expect: no skeletons, no excessive gore, no religious symbolism. Also "family friendly", lol.



There's speculation that another project was cancelled, as Diabloimmortal.com was only registered in October, Blizzard recently put out job listings for high level employees on the Diablo project, and the Immortal developers didn't have many responses for what the game would be like. It all seems to suggest that something was cancelled, either from Blizzcon or in general.

In any case, what's happening to video games is what's happened to big name movies. Have you noticed how boring and generally low level big budget movies are in the writing now? It's because they don't do things like write jokes which are hard to translate. They write jokes and everything to be understood by as general a human being as they can, so humor stays at a far more basic level.

We're seeing the exact same thing with video games, now. Diablo did have some appeal in how it boldly used religious symbolism. Pentagrams, magic circles, all sorts of occult imagery, plus the cathedral layout of Diablo's lair, it uses European religious iconography heavily. That was all cut from Diablo 3. Then with Chinese censors, games like Rainbow 6: Siege are removing skulls and skeletons, and we can expect the same moving forward from Blizzard games (previously, they would make two versions of the game with different assets, like in WoW, but that's becoming less common). As they move games to be as palatable to the largest audience possible, everything becomes so dull and boring it loses appeal.

Not to mention NetEase is apparently renown in China for having horribly P2W mechanics in their mobile games, so.

It may be helpful to note that Diablos 1 and 2 weren’t Blizzard games. They were developed by a separate studio that Blizzard’s investors bought and renamed to cash in on the Blizzard brand. Blizzard had nothing to do with either game, and only started work on the franchise after the important Diablo people all quit.

If it seems like Blizzard doesn’t really “get” Diablo, that’s because they don’t. They were just saddled with a beloved IP that someone else developed.

That makes sense. I remember it taking me awhile to get into Diablo but when I did I was hooked. I've [earnestly] started Diablo II twice I think. I do really like it but the furthest I've gotten is just into the second "world" and that was about nine years ago. I'll start again one of these days.

Well, at least this got me to try to find a good Diablo-like game for my phone again and I actually found one!
I just play the PS1-version of Diablo with an emulator and a nice gamepad.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-23-fifa-player-uses-gdpr-to-find-out-everything-ea-has-on-him-realises-hes-spent-over-usd10-000-in-two-years-on-ultimate-team

Thank god for European regulators. Lol at this industry. Burn it to the ground.

A fool and his money

Anyway RDR2 is pretty freaking great. There are a lot of random events (mostly scripted) but they're humorous and there are many of them. Also, I'm a sucker for westerns. The story is pretty good (so far) because it's a prequel so we already know "how it ends" but we want to know how it got there.

will soon be parted to a society which enables predatory behavior.

I don't know if the story is good or not, but if it is, this certainly isn't why.

Yeah, I wasn't clear on that. I should have said "the story is pretty good so far, but I find it more engaging because it's a prequel to a game I highly enjoyed so I'm very interested to see how we get from here to there. It adds to the intrigue."