Was going to recommend Starforge to a friend. Won't be.

[indrora]

A friend of mine recently asked for recommendations on a new PC build. I mentioned that I was just going through the LTT secret shopper series and I'd get them my thoughts. I was doubly impressed at the positive review from GamersNexus, who had one major complaint about some thermal pads. That's high praise. 

 

I have a few give-or-take things for smaller shops. HP and other Major OEMs are monoliths that have big corporate faces. Smaller boutiques though? I look a little into them. I look into their leadership, and Starforge, for all their dumb logo is forgivable, is very big on how they're sponsor-y-paired with OTK, who raised my eyebrows when I saw a clip from one of AsmonGold's streams that made me say "Man I don't want to be associated with him." In the clip, Asmongold starts badmouthing some VTubers:

Quote

Isn't this a furry? if I look at this picture... that looks like a furry to me I mean.. look at this this  [...] it's another these are furries! they're like... what are we doing? It's a fucking furry like what is this what are we talking about what we're going to listen to a fucking furry? [...] You wanna talk about someone's history? Let's talk about the history of you being a fucking furry! How about that? Huh? [...] Somebody needs to put this person in an institution!

Then I noticed the name. 

 

That's one of my friends he's talking about. That's a human being who he's badmouthing. That's a streamer who has worked her ass off to build a positive community of people, responding to another streamer who has worked hard to have a supportive community. Even if that wasn't someone I know personally, I'd absolutely consider this a black mark. On top of that, it's a shitty comment, completely ignoring the point that people are trying to make (it's not actually about Palworld, but about its leadership, who are hard into the NFT/Crypto/AI-art world, which a lot of people aren't okay with supporting) just to hate on furries. (It's worth saying: furries make the internet go)

 

Okay so... where there's smoke, there's fire. There's some really bad takes I don't agree with ("artists opinions don't matter" when it comes to things like copyright infringement, for one) but okay, let's do some background research. If I'm going to form an opinion on one group of people, I should probably consider their actions as a group/whole. What's Asmongold and the rest of OTK like?

Asmongold has some amazingly bad takes about artists and creatives...

 

Okay, so, Asmongold is a jerk, what about the others? It gets complicated. There's plenty of snapshots of various OTK members being vaguely sexist, laughing about poor people, being jerks on twitter, having some skeletons in their closet, getting banned from twitch for a few interesting reasons, saying racist and homophobic things. I'm only somewhat going to bring up straight up accusations of terrible behavior, like manipulation and gaslighting, as too heavy a weight, as I don't know how much context you need, but it sure adds to the fuel for the flame.

 

Then there's the... tasteless naming of the supplement flavors that many of the OTK crew bring up, one of which is named by an OTK member.

 

All this sums up to "The people who are in some level of power, culturally, aren't the kind of people I want to support." I guess the final straw was reading that OTK as a group are worried that being called out for shitty behavior is somehow going to ruin streaming. 

 

Hassan had it right. I was disappointed when LTT got their time in the spotlight of unpleasant drama, but LTT took ownership and righted the ship. I dunno what OTK does, but Starforge has them as their front line big names. Puts a real bad taste in my mouth.