https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

Direct Link: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

It’s seriously important. Purchasing games needs to mean something and the decades of shitty tactics to take away the concept of owning anything needs to stop. The people convincing you that you should be happy with the way the system is set up now, are not your friends.

We support this petition 100%

Last Updated on July 2, 2025 by Standard of Entertainment

Image credits to: Mystqry
Image used with permission of original author.
Ig: @mxstqry
Twitter: @barebearzmc 
Tumblr: @mystqry

Last Updated on August 29, 2022 by Standard of Entertainment

I’ll make a write-up about that at some point in the future, but for now, make sure to check out the beautiful new site, that runs incredibly fast thanks to a lot of optimization and hard work learning from mistakes. If you really are interested, the short version is, stuffing a single WordPress install with 550+ pages and 5,000 images in a single month that then get made into 4-8 optimized thumbnails each is an amazing way to cause headaches you never realized could exist. I was still several thousand images and several hundred pages away from just finishing importing the rest of the old guide stuff.

Either way, to help promote the new site and the Solar 2 Guide, we are going to start doing CD-Key giveaways again. You can check this page for the current giveaway, which is a chance to win a copy of XCOM: Terror from the Deep.

This is a bit of a trial run, to see how everything goes and we will be looking to give away more free games in the future if this works without any major disasters. Make sure to reach out to us if you have any feedback!

Last Updated on October 23, 2020 by Standard of Entertainment

Site Performance Updates

The most recent change, but one of the most significant, and the focus of the next few days, I have done a lot of work making the site run faster and optimizing the suite of plugins we are using to keep the site running smoothly. Some highlights:

Removing Jetpack

Still in the process of doing this, but need to get rid of Jetpack for WordPress. Been looking into it and it definitely seems to be causing a lot of drag on server resources and page loading speed. Most importantly though, their significant price increase that happened suddenly, and their poor way of communicating that, was enough on it’s own to start this process. The performance issues just pushed up the need to strip it from the site.

Improved Caching & Compression

I upgraded our caching plugin to one that works a lot faster and has better features. Was previously using WP Super Cache but its a very simple plugin lacking in a lot of features. Plus it was deleting it’s own cache pre-loads right after making them even after turning the garbage collection off, and I honestly, didn’t feel like debugging that bullshit, when it was worth replacing anyways.

We also dropped Jetpack’s photon service and are serving images locally for now. This means that we needed to get a compression plugin to help optimize the massive amount of images used on this site. We currently host just under 4,200 images at the moment with a lot more otw. Prior to compression, after thumbnail generation, this was amounting to somewhere around 22 gigabytes of image data, especially because we try to use high quality PNG images for source material as often as possible.

I managed to find a good plugin that limits loss in visual quality, especially since that’s really important to us, which will reduce that to around 5 gigs or less. We are keeping backups of all the uncompressed source imagery of course, for any uses we might find later. This will take probably several days as image optimization isn’t the fastest process and there’s so many to go through. I’m also going to fine tune settings to make sure quality is preserved, especially with the more visually intense, 3D games like Skyrim, Homeworld, the RTS’ etc. Fun fact, each image needs somewhere between 8-16 copies to be generated, so that WordPress can more efficiently serve size-optimized images at every possible moment, as opposed to needing to downsize larger images on the fly at the cost of bandwidth.

All of this has increased overall site performance significantly, with most of the site already loading 60-80% faster than it was previously.

Most Guide Importing Finished

We’ll be making more posts about the individual guides in the next few weeks, once we wrap up the tasks we are currently working on, but the majority of guides previously hosted on Hubpages/Levelskip have been moved over. There’s still two more to do (Remnant and BFG:A2) and these are a top priority, but here is a quick list of all the guides now being hosted here, since the past few weeks:

We’ve been busy : )

There will most likely be ‘Feature’ posts about the specific guides, after the last few imports, when we have time to go through and beautify them and give them a true editing pass, since things are a bit messy in some places, to help prioritize just getting them hosted here first.

Last Updated on October 5, 2020 by Standard of Entertainment

Here are some before and after shots to demonstrate some of the changes I’ve been implementing:

Last Updated on October 5, 2020 by Standard of Entertainment

I know there are some tools that help with domain mapping, but my second primary experience with WordPress, besides the insane costs of plugins requiring a license for each Multisite sub domain or sub-site, is that the more they affect the site as a whole, the more likely they are to break something else, or the entire set at some point. Anything I use at this point, I’m trying to make sure will either have localized effects to site performance should it go without updates for too long or is established enough that the chances of them becoming abandoned is highly unlikely.

I can also actually afford to pay and use premium plugins now, which is definitely one of the best parts. No more stressing about whether or not I can actually afford the features or if I am about to be scammed out of $50-$100 because it’s only possible to learn after the fact, how restrictive the licenses are, with all the compounding problems it brings when also trying to make sure I get a set of compatible and affordable plugins.

Either way, I have the redirects working now, so most of the old links to the sub-domains should point to the proper pages now. I have a tool for monitoring that as well, so if stuff is still broken, I’ll be able to re-point said old links quickly after logging the report, so if you are getting 404’s on the site still, no worries, I’m already on top of it. Some of the pages are missing images or have old broken short-codes from plugins I disposed of in the merge and prior, those will be getting fixed in the next week as I also do a pass at beautifying everything. Current task after I’m done writing this is to get the sidebars and footers set up proper so navigation isn’t trash.

Saints Row & Homeworld

These two guides are still hosted on sub-domains because they are actually hosted on the Blogger platform and connected to the main site through urls only. No shared database there or anything. I am considering what I want to do with those guides for now. Trying to weigh the debate of making them look better here versus the reliability of being hosted entirely on Google’s servers and such. I kinda like the fact they will pretty much never break as long as they are on Blogger, whereas anything on the main site and WordPress requires a lot more maintenance in the long run.

Last Updated on September 3, 2020 by Standard of Entertainment

So I’m sure most people reading this have been to a few different game forums at this point in their lives, and if you have, you’ve probably familiarized yourself with 2 of the cardinal rules/sins of most game forums.

1. Search for your question (or subject matter) before posting a new thread about it.
2. Don’t necro bump (post in) old threads.

Now the time limit of what is considered a necro bump is a matter of opinion from site to site but it tends to be somewhere in the 1 month to 3 month range of when the last post was. Either way, anything beyond 3 always seems to be considered a necro worthy of disdain in almost any place I’ve seen.

Now here’s where we begin to run into issues with the above rules and mentality.

Issue 1: Most if not all, forum search engines are utter fucking garbage.

Got that? Good. Now to circumvent that we can use “site:” tags in real search engines like Google or Bing, to get a better result of what info is really there. This leads us to the second problem.

Issue 2: Older content ranks higher in search results.

Most forum admins who have complained about necros probably haven’t gotten this far in the process because they are seeing the content every day and probably have some level of a library in their mind about the chronicles of events on their forums, and how they lead to the present day, but anyone besides them and then 10 people who choose to play this one game and nothing else ever, have no fucking clue what events have transpired over the years.

They might be looking for an old mod they heard about or trying to fix a bug that was highlighted long ago, but the game is no longer at its peak, or the bug subsided but was never patched, or finally came back again but only in some more rare instances while affecting fewer people overall because the game isn’t as popular anymore. Maybe it’s not even the game that changed but some other part of their system that re-introduced an issue that was discussed 2 years ago but seemed to be resolved, only to again return.

Either way, thanks to the way search engines work and the time the old threads have been established, the time other’s have been spending sharing the links to it in the past, increasing it’s relative rankings, etc.. The older content will be what’s seen first by most people looking to familiarize themselves with an old issue.

If it’s a mod that has had several new versions, with large gaps of time between, the oldest or first threads might be seen far more easily than the new thread that was just started a week ago, but is still on the second or third page of the forum because there’s other busy threads to, keeping it from being readily seen without a search of some kind.

The Cascade of Problems

So now we have a quickly compounding problem, where:

• A single topic is being split across multiple threads because of necro rules and locks.
• Old topics that are locked can no longer be updated with new reference info or links to current threads. This could be fixed with moderator intervention, merging threads or using edits to add new links in the OP or last post but nobody actually does that.
• Outdated and inaccurate info persists and causes frustration if not addressed prior to a lock. Reasons for problems might change but that info isn’t reflected anymore. The top search result could offer a possible fix that once worked, but now breaks your game because a different “fix” is needed for the new version of the bug. Nobody who is already up to date will realize this and anyone who breaks their game cant post in the thread to warn others because its locked.
• Every diligent attempt to “search up” the info in good faith ends up turning into a drawn out Nancy fucking Drew mystery over the course of hours or days to fix what should be a 5 minute problem to solution turn over.
• By the time the diligent searcher actually loses all hope of finding the right info, most likely after screwing things up further with outdated info along the way, they are highly irritated, worn out, exhausted and frayed by the trash they had to wade through up to this point. They finally decide to make a new thread asking for help, or bumping the last old one they found, in the hopes for assistance.
• Even if they actually know how to find the problem, some of the regulars or mods who are there every day will now find time to berate said person for their bad form, because that person knew about it “for months now”. This is a great way to start a whole bunch of toxic BS for no good reason, as the OP never really had a chance.

This is all based on regular occurrences I go through personally, especially researching so many different games intimately to do guides on them, looking up detailed info from others on game forums on a regular basis. Because I don’t have time to keep up to date with most of them in the long term, I am always playing this game of catch up and it is fucking exhausting. I know others have to be dealing with this to, but there’s another big problem that keeps this from changing.

Issue 3: The Experiences of new players are often disregarded in favor of the regulars.

New player joins a forum to make a new post, complaining about this entire experience, the first reaction from the rest of the forum? Negative. “Nobody else here experiences this issue” kind of responses, even though there are almost always other new players with 1 or 2 posts littering most forums, mirroring these complaints.

They aren’t counted though because their experiences are never valid because of their “newness” but their being new isn’t the problem. The newness is an important factor as to understanding how they are encountering these problems and should be looked at as an opportunity to better understand how the new players experience the game and its community in its present form, not as a reason to dismiss their problems or blame the player themselves.

I’ve personally witnessed countless games that have been aggressively pushing away the acquisition of new players through the clogging of search results, overwhelming amount of outdated and frustrating information, complaints ignored or never seen by the regulars or moderators whom hold the only opinions that matter to the people who could do anything to address it, and policies and rules that accelerate this process.

Locking necro threads, penalizing necro bumps, and creating new topics for the same subject every few months, is destroying the ability for anyone who doesn’t understand the game currently to understand it in the future.

You are killing the growth of your community and toxifying anyone new who joins. People who are pleasant to interact with, don’t want to be forced through frustrating hoops to enjoy the thing they just paid for or expressed curiosity in. But toxic assholes with all the time in the world to hold onto their rage and frustrations just might make it through those hoops or decide to stick around anyways, right or wrong, just to take out their frustrations on those they see as being “part of it.”

Think of it like this.

Imagine you have a large building with a single floor and a single entrance, just a long rectangular warehouse, basic looking type of building. This building is a single game’s community, including its forums. A bunch of people enter when the building is brand new, and continue to hang out there, most of them coming and going over time, but a substantial portion will just stick around for the most part.

As these months go on, the group of people start making “stuff” (content/forum posts) that they just set down besides them as they move about the building, and this stuff starts piling up by the entrance where people were first gathered. As the entrance area is filled with this stuff, the people in the building move further away from the entrance, towards the back of the building. Nobody ever cleans the stuff they are now leaving behind, it just stays there taking up space.

The people in the building responsible for cleaning it don’t notice the mess because they’ve grown accustomed to it, plus it’s way “over there” now where they can’t really see it. If they have to go back out the building and return later, their familiarity with the stuff taking up all that space by the entrance, makes it much easier to navigate and get back to where the group is near the other side. Kinda like having a path through your own messy room. You can get through it no problem, but someone else tries to, they’ll probably break your stuff, stub their toes, or cause other forms of injury or destruction due to their lack of familiarity with your mess. And that should really be relatable to the majority of you reading this too, frfr.

This is what it’s like trying to get in on a game that’s been out for 4-10 years or more. The moment you need any additional help or info from the community, you have to wade through years of pilled up content that has been left to turn into garbage and trash before you can even begin to get to the useful stuff, and because it all looks the same to the unfamiliar eye, you have no fucking idea when you’ll be where the good info is.

So yes, seriously, enough with the Necro rules and berating newbs who couldn’t sift through your trash heaps to find the one paper hidden somewhere in that mess that had the info they needed. That shit needs to go. Locked threads are making search results as useless as the moderators who leave them lying around. Yeah, that’s shots fired, and you have no right to bitch about it because you are the cause.

Last Updated on September 3, 2020 by Standard of Entertainment

Last Updated on September 3, 2020 by Standard of Entertainment

Oh yeah, I also added the Cheats and Easter Eggs (Darwinian Santa Hats) because even though that info was freely available I hadn’t put that in until just recently, lol. Anyways, onto the next task.

Last Updated on September 3, 2020 by Standard of Entertainment

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Last Updated on September 3, 2020 by Standard of Entertainment