it's just a pretty solid indicator that it's someone's burner
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MikeZ, lead designer of Skullgirls, makes an "I can't breathe" joke on stream
- Thread starter Professor Beef
- Start date
In what sense do they take it up with him? Quarantine has been super rough for everyone, and taking away what little respite everyone has as well as the games first EVO tournament after trying for so many years because of Mike would do more harm than good.
And it would be all on Mike. My stance isn't changing on this
^
To be clear, I have no issue with people's post counts at all, sorry if that's how I came across.
How is removing Skullgirls from EVO akin to removing everyone's respite during quarantine? That is some serious guilt-tripping.
Or maybe they prefer lurking over posting.
I mean that guy posting had a pretty terrible opinion, but attack the opinion and not the post count. That's so juvenile.
It almost getting a little disgusting to criticize Sonic, Sharpie, and others. Especially, people are already harassing them on social media for "being weak" when the incident happened outside their control.
The Skullgirls community is known for having a diverse community full of players from oppressed minority groups. Don't inadvertently make this into "their community gets punished due to a "supposed" ally creator's cruel, racist joke." Direct any anger or blame at the end of the day at MikeZ.
Also, people already know EVO is wack no matter what decision they do considering they never really apologized for inadvertently praising Domestic Abuser Inflitration's "triumphant return" from domestic abuse.
The Skullgirls community is known for having a diverse community full of players from oppressed minority groups. Don't inadvertently make this into "their community gets punished due to a "supposed" ally creator's cruel, racist joke." Direct any anger or blame at the end of the day at MikeZ.
Also, people already know EVO is wack no matter what decision they do considering they never really apologized for inadvertently praising Domestic Abuser Inflitration's "triumphant return" from domestic abuse.
Oh fuck off with that. Im saying that punishing everyone who has been grinding the game in preparation for this because of the lead developer fucking up is hurting the wrong people.
The community is already mad af at Mike and he's already feeling the backlash. I just don't get the point of fucking over the entire community when keeping Mike far away for however long is enough. Idk, maybe I'm missing something. Literally everyone agrees Mike massively fucked up and the community is made up of diverse and passionate people who have been longing for this EVO spot for years. Just doesn't make sense to me to punish the community when you can just punish Mike
Not having an avatar, defending a racist joke and low post count with a long time of registry are pretty obvious burner/alt account signs.
are there people who only play skullgirls exclusively competing?
I don't know about that, and its a free online tournament, but it still seems like the wrong move to remove the game last minute.
That's fair.
As the lead designer, Mike stands to financially benefit from the game's presence and promotion at EVO even he himself isn't allowed to participate.
Then say that next time instead of invoking the quarantine? Yes, it has been hard on everyone. Hell, the quarantine is the only reason that Skullgirls is even at EVO to begin with. That doesn't mean that they can't and won't pull the game if they think the reason is valid. Hell, they already dropped the entire scheduled slate of main stage titles from when it was an offline event. How do you think the people that signed up before the quarantine started, who had made travel arrangements, and who were prepared to travel to Vegas to compete felt when all of this shit happened, and their favored games were pushed aside because of netcode concerns?
So don't tell me to fuck off.
Then don't accuse me of guilt tripping when im just laying out the facts.
hell, why dont they pull mrwiz off evo until we see a public apology to pokchop or just cancel evo altogether
Anyone who accidentally drops their prefabricated dead nigger joke on stream, in the presence of a black person, does much worse off cam with only their white friends around them.
Stop it with the "bad joke" shit. There's levels and this mofo just ascended to supreme being.
His black "friends" just got a glimpse and will need time to process things, to put the pieces together for themselves. Godspeed to them.
When he calls the joke "too soon", he didn't mean to make publicly, he meant to make when there are no minorities around. He stumbled into the joke on stream (the other dude making the "suffocating" comment made it click into his mind) and couldn't stop himself, but he actually had that one in the pocket for his other dickhead friends to laugh at privately.
I'm sorry but good people don't make racist look at that dead nigger jokes. Again, the fact that it could slip out given the context of the situation should say a lot. The fact that he didn't even recognize wrongdoing immediately says a lot too.
He watched the video of George Floyd dying and found humor in the white man choking him to death. That's powerful stuff to digest.
Stop it with the "bad joke" shit. There's levels and this mofo just ascended to supreme being.
His black "friends" just got a glimpse and will need time to process things, to put the pieces together for themselves. Godspeed to them.
When he calls the joke "too soon", he didn't mean to make publicly, he meant to make when there are no minorities around. He stumbled into the joke on stream (the other dude making the "suffocating" comment made it click into his mind) and couldn't stop himself, but he actually had that one in the pocket for his other dickhead friends to laugh at privately.
I'm sorry but good people don't make racist look at that dead nigger jokes. Again, the fact that it could slip out given the context of the situation should say a lot. The fact that he didn't even recognize wrongdoing immediately says a lot too.
He watched the video of George Floyd dying and found humor in the white man choking him to death. That's powerful stuff to digest.
Well, it's spite. It's a knee-jerk reaction to spite a single person, and it upsets and hurts a lot of other people. While the game might MikeZ's child, it's not only his child; it's as much if not more Davidrath's child and the work of all the other developer's who worked on it. MikeZ basically did the combat. Meanwhile, the game stands on it's own and has fans who've poured hundred of hours into it and have been wanting to have it at EVO as a main event for years.
Now, at last second, some people want to pull the game and fuck with a lot of people for no other reason that to hurt MikeZ. That's all it is; MikeZ made a terribly offensive racist joke at the worst possible time, so people want to hurt him as much as possible and they don't care if it screw's anyone else over. It's just pure, blind, spite for spite's sake. And that's why it seems wrong.
MikeZ also worked on Killer Instinct and Them's Fighting Herds if people really want to go full scorched earth.
So we just remove an entire group of competitors who have been training hard who didn't do anything wrong? Sounds shit.
That's not the metaphor and you know it.
The person I quoted mentioned someone outed by the NBA because of their racism in response to my post and I simply mentioned a more recent case.
Also, that metaphor didn't really make sense because you're comparing Skullgirls at Evo to the NBA(which would remove anyone who did the exact same thing as MikeZ anyways)
And who was James Basketball supposed to be in that metaphor, anyway?
Truth.
What irritates me is that guys like this can pretend they are tolerant because they put some Furby in the game here, and a little pride flag there, and they fool everybody, but in reality the person is a piece of shit.
This is more important than playing a videogame. "he is racist but... I really need to play ma videogame :(" This would send a signal to the gaming community that this will not stand anymore. He should remove himself from the game if he is really sorry and really cares about his fans
User Banned (2 Weeks): Inflammatory Thread Derailment of a Sensitive Thread
The fucking pedantry of this thread.
Hey, can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Can't make insensitive remarks without there being consequences.
Cool, ban him from EVO and affiliated appearances, ask Lab Zero to make him really repent or fire him, drag his ass any time he shows up, dunk on his shitty apology, don't punish people who have nothing to do with him, except play a game he worked on. Hell, I bet if you translate some SFV dev tweets we can find something appalling, doesn't mean you ban SFV from EVO
They already dropped SFV from EVO because of extenuating circumstances. They can also drop Skullgirls due to extenuating circumstances. Them's the breaks.
Granted, these are ludicrously different categories in play. But this year has proven that from problems big and small, no fighitng game, no matter how established, gets a guaranteed EVO spot.
The "joke" is absolutely terrible. We had a politician here share an awful "joke" picture about George Floyd's murder. With his history and the accompanying text complaining about equality (and his political party ofc), it was easy to draw conclusion it being racially motivated. Is there more to MikeZ, to point out him making the "joke" was because George Floyd was a black man?
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You can hear him false start a couple of times, then half heartedly shrug the "joke" from his lips, already knowing that it's a terrible idea.
As I say, probably immediately regretted it and hoped it would just slide right past.
Not to get too OT but I don't think he directly 'worked' on KI..from what I remember he was part of a group who was shown an early build and gave feedback, IIRC he wasn't happy with some of DH's design choices early on.
Yeah. The events these past few weeks is a time to have some introspection for all of us even if they did not affect us directly. For him to think that it was time to cook up a knee slapping zinger and serve it up to the unsuspecting world tells you ALL you need to know about what he took away from seeing an innocent man get killed and the subsequent fallout from that.
Honestly all his excuses ring hollow to me for that mere alone. To then pull a Kramer and look for the nearest black person he could find to shield him from his own stupidity tells you he does not get it, yet. Hopefully he does after all this.
The only other scene that has as big, or bigger of a scene, with decent netcode that already hasn't been included is probably Power Rangers, and they are likely going through their own shit right now (likely licensing)
When you consider that LTG and Ceroblast got permabans from EVO for discriminatory comments said in public spaces online, it wouldn't be fair if Mike Z got to walk away without facing similar repercussions. That's why I think at least EVO needs to remove the game from their lineup this year and ban Mike Z from EVO-related events.
I'm sure that the Skullgirls community doesn't want to see this happen but they need to realize that this incident is bigger than them; it's about holding people in power accountable for their actions. Mike Z's comment was horribly distasteful and offensive to POC and victims of police brutality, as his joke made a mockery of their fears and actual suffering.
This is why I think Mike's action is serious enough for him to face some consequences. A simple apology will not suffice. In the video, you can see that Mike even paused slightly before telling the joke, which makes one question if the pause was because he was thinking about the possible fallout that he would get for telling the joke, which hints that he knew what he was doing.
It doesn't matter that Mike Z is a game developer or has clout in the FGC; he needs to understand that he can face a similar fate to those who have done similar offenses.
I'm sure that the Skullgirls community doesn't want to see this happen but they need to realize that this incident is bigger than them; it's about holding people in power accountable for their actions. Mike Z's comment was horribly distasteful and offensive to POC and victims of police brutality, as his joke made a mockery of their fears and actual suffering.
This is why I think Mike's action is serious enough for him to face some consequences. A simple apology will not suffice. In the video, you can see that Mike even paused slightly before telling the joke, which makes one question if the pause was because he was thinking about the possible fallout that he would get for telling the joke, which hints that he knew what he was doing.
It doesn't matter that Mike Z is a game developer or has clout in the FGC; he needs to understand that he can face a similar fate to those who have done similar offenses.
Worse, he didn't care. Cause how can you fix your mouth to say that shit if you have even a small amount of empathy
Mike Z deserves any bans coming his way, but banning Skullgirls itself from Evo is not really in line with the grassroots spirit of the tournament. It puts the dev as more important than the players. If Ed Boon, Harada, or Ono said something wild, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, or Street Fighter shouldn't be banned. Ban Boon/Harada/Ono.
It was a shit joke on a sensitive subject. I wish I could say I haven't been guilty of similar (unrelated to current events) but some of us need to learn the hard way that we're not funny or clever enough to use tragedy as a source of comedy regardless of our intentions.