MolochAlter

That was before the systematic casualization of nerd hobbies, people were still protective of the things they were fans of.

If you're in circles of hardcore fans, we hate this shit just as much as back then LMAO

Far as I know, not very.

Real combat with weapons is not all that entertaining.

You nick a guy in the right place and he'll die a slow agonising death in the locker room, far from the eyes of the crowd, then you're down an athlete and even the enslaved ones aren't cheap, and they need training, and housing, and feeding, etc.

Moreover this may happen at any point of the fight and that's not very satisfying to watch, think Mike Tyson one-hit KO vs a 20 minute banger with back nad forth.

So obviously you'd make it look good and take your time, send the crowd home happy. Even were it a real competition, which it was at times.

Gladiators that were intantionally killed in the arena were "bought" by the editor (the person paying for the games overall), and it was at a premium. Afterall the lanista got a major cut of their stable's wins, so you'd have to cover the sum of all the potential winnings of the rest of their careers, and then some, to make it worth it.

So it wasn't quite pro wrestling, but it was definitely close, the economics of it make more sense that way, and the (relative) longevity of certain documented gladiators also.

This isn’t an achievement. Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?

Because wrestling is a huge business and it has a lot of overlap with combat sports fans.

Like…of course he did. It’s the storyline. It’s quite literally “in the script”.

Yesn't.

An actor breaking the record for most best performer oscars won in a career would also be newsworthy, yet you can absolutely pay your way to an oscar.

John Cena is remarkable in that he's such a draw that a multi-billion dollar organization decided to set his career as the new ceiling to break for the next big star, by breaking a record untouched for decades, might I add. That's newsworthy.

That isn't scripted, that is a performer being skilled at what he does, as much as I personally don't enjoy his work.

But I thought at some point they steered into the whole “entertainment” aspect when most of us grew the hell up and clued into the absurdity of it all.

This is like, the most "I learned something so the rest of the world learned it with me" I've ever seen.

Wrestling has been known to be fake for over a century; newspapers stopped reporting on it as a factual sport in the early 1900s.

Hell, it was known to be fakery before it was ever televised.

Kids don't know until they do.

It's live action martial arts anime theater. No more, no less.

tl;dr: Should John Cena's record-breaking 17th title win be in the papers? absolutely. Sports section? Maybe, depends. It is a "sport" in the same way that figure skating or synchronised swimming is.

I see no mention of Starsector, there should be mention of Starsector.

Try Starsector.

The only thing possibly holding them off is that there's 2 or 3 factions all wanting to long knife™ eachother at the first chance, which means they have to be ready to go as soon as the power vacuum happens, and one of the factions controls the VP seat.

That might delay the chaos a bit, but not for long.

The impossible Is they're saying their reflection on the darkened screen.

Yep. I played an earlier version but it's the same game.

The key thing that made me notice was the scarecrow cards that allowed you to pick up your units, those make sense in Condottiere as it's divided in rounds where you fight multiple battles, so it made sense to pick up your units if you had excess power and were winning anyway, save your strength for the next battle in the round, whereas it made a lot less sense in Gwent given its 1v1 nature and fixed amount of rounds.

Mind you Gwent evolved a lot afterwards, I don't know much beyond the witcher 3 version, which I still enjoyed plenty.

Gwent is actually a slight hack of an existing board game called Condottiere, which is IMO the better game.

Cause that's not how salaries work?

Salaries grow because people negotiate for better salaries, either through collective action or by being indispensable and getting better offers, not by magic.

The game industry is full of wannabes chomping at the bit to get in, so maybe seniors can hope to haggle for a higher cut or become partners of a studio, everyone else is entirely replaceable, which means their salaries will grow extremely slowly already.

Add to that that the industry selects for financially stable/affluent croney kids by using unpaid internships to filter anyone who would be overly dependent on their salary and basically select for rich "starving" artist types and you have a recipe for a ridiculously strong buyer's market when it comes to salaries.

Yeah, sales have also gone way up.

They also conveniently forget that trans men exist when trying to argue their point.

1. Most people forget trans men exist. If they get surgery and hormones they almost always pass enough to go completely stealth in day to day interactions, which is sadly rarely true for trans women.
2. Trans men in sports overperform compared to cis women whom they wouldn't want to compete against in the first place, and underperform against cis men. There is no reason to worry about an unfair advantage by allowing trans men to compete in their preferred category, and men's categories are often open categories to begin with, so there may not even be a rule against it.

I don't know if you're just not a sports person so you don't follow enough to know, but it's not a gender issue, it's a sex issue, and it's not a debate unless you literally never look at data.

Here are some examples:

100 Metres dash: every one of the last 25 male world records is faster than the current female world record (and thus every previous one), every continental record is higher than its female counterpart.

100 Metres freestyle swimming same for both long course and short course.

The Williams sisters challenged "any male top tennis player outside the top 200" claiming they could beat any of them and number 203 beat both in the same afternoon, after playing golf in trhe morning and drinking alcohol at lunchtime.

This has nothing to do with transgender rights and what trans people choose to identify as or whether they should be allowed to get surgeries or hormones or anything of the sort, sports are segregated by sex, not by gender, and there is no surgery to reverse male puberty.

Male puberty is akin to a years long round of doping, it literally releases testosterone into the body and, while some markers regress upon taking estrogen long enough (bone density and muscle density most of all), some aspects will never regress, like lung capacity and limb length, both of which are massive advantages in most sports.

There are some sports where this division is unnecessary, famously sport shooting records are very close, with women's records outclassing men's records more than a few times, if you ask the federations why this separation persists the answer is almost invariably to encourage females to participate as an "open" league rarely sees female participants.

However, in any sport where physical prowess is a factor, the sex separation exists for a reason. It's not an -ism, it's an exclusion for the benefit of females to be able to participate in the sport alongside people who don't have an in-built biological advantage over them.