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Comment by ajvs | Hacker News Reader

No SS13 discussion is complete without linking to SsethTzeentach's infamous absurd-sounding review[1] or MandaloreGaming's slightly less infamous but more informational review[2].

[1] https://youtu.be/URJ_qSXruW0 [2] https://youtu.be/nLAHBexJxrE

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My opinion on SsethTzeentach changed when guy did two and half hours long presentation (and Q&A) on current state of and ongoing developments in oncology.

It was a joke, but apparently this is his real field of expertise and YouTube edgelord persona is what he does to wind down after work.

Here's recording of stream in question, potentially offensive and NSFW jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsRVQWfqjms

I always knew he was putting on half a persona for the videos but seeing him talk about advanced serious topics in that voice is genuinely surreal.

Some in the SS13 community hold a strongly negative opinion about Sseth's video, since it appears to give the wrong impression of the game as a sandbox where you can do anything. In contrast, the most popular servers have a strict set of rules for what kind of behavior is appropriate, and randomly killing people for non-roleplaying purposes is a bannable offense. Regardless, the increase in attention to the game caused a lot of new players with no intention of following the rules to flood the servers, lowering the quality of the playerbase. (Sseth himself acknowledges in the video that the veteran players will blame him for the ensuing problems.)

As someone who did play a lot of SS13 way back (must be around 7-10 years now, whack) he gave the entirely correct impression of the game in the form that gave it its fame and infamy. Serious roleplay SS13 servers are a bit like serious roleplay sessions of Paranoia - sure you can if you squint hard enough and apply a million rules about what can and can't be done (heavily biased towards the latter) but the product becomes crippled and stiffled.

There's basically 2 extreme sides of that coin, which make up the majority of players.

Neither realize that the game would not exist without the other. The game is fun because it exists in the bittersweet spot in the middle.

The illusion of order is just an illusion. Admins kill the fun just as much as trolls.

The game IS this secret dynamic. It's even in the lore, and every single story you've ever read. Most of the fun comes from people breaking rules a bit.

And Black Pants Legion [1] for some very fun playthroughs of the game. Hail Cargonia!

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHweuFtIS-M&list=PLR5zhFCFVb...

Hail Cargonia.

I literally opened the comments to post these two links, but clearly there are other people here who enjoy these two exact channels already :D

Rumor has it that SsethTzeentach and Mandalore are the same person, but we will never know for sure. The audience can only listen to the voice and make their own conclusions.

Voice aside, I think it's unlikely purely because Mandalore is an absolute upload machine, he makes very high quality content and uploads regularly. Sseth less so lately, but the games he plays require insane investment of time and effort. Like, yeah, there was 4 month gap between the Amazing Cultivation Simulator video and the one before it, but having watched it it's obvious why(in fact I'm impressed it only took him 4 months). Mandalore usually plays games to completion, but doesn't get so incredibly deep onto them as Sseth does.

Sseth leveled a warrior in WoW to 60, which probably took at least 8 days of in-game playtime. 5 months of full time work.

Not true in classic or Blizzard's modern "Classic."

It's a pretty easy speedrun, and the community's been doing it since literally 2004. Here's a really fast example from 2006:

https://www.joanasworld.com/azeroth.php

This was do-able in WoW 1.x (prior to 2.0 before TBC launch) in just 3 days, before TBC ever came out (not talking about WoW Classic).

A hunter in the guild I ran (we rolled onto a new server) did exactly that. 3 days. I felt bad for taking an entire week to hit 60, when fifteen members (incl warriors) hit 60 in the first five days.

Dr. Mandalore and Mr. Sseth

This is only a meme.

Sseth is based in EU (and makes little secret on that), Mandalore is in US.

This has to be the bomb.

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