Ogmios

It’s great to see sex workers getting legal protections.

Sword Art Online?

bosses are making “regular [people]” pay for their screw-ups

Welcome to human history.

Well, I certainly do appreciate seeing people like yourself making an active effort to bring some sanity back to the web. Keep it up!

Good luck with that. Volunteer moderation tends to attract some of the most toxic individuals on the planet.

I think your argument relates closely to something I’ve noticed happening over and over with more than just game developers. Far too often I see people expressing frustration that the Internet doesn’t give them more accurate information about the real world. Way too many people, apparently including many of the richest and most powerful people alive, have come to see the Internet as a magical machine that will do anything they want it to do… if only people would use it differently! Like, they legitimately seem to expect the entire population to post their entire lives online, unfiltered, so they can be used as automatons by people they’ve never even met.

I think of it like an oil slick on a pool of water. Very pretty, but absolutely zero depth. They indulge heavily in the aesthetic of a space sim, without actually having anything of substance tying it all together into something coherent.

You can get feedback from people you know, who’s opinions you actually trust. Why anyone ever thought taking advice from anonymous random strangers online was a good idea is beyond me.

I’m astonished it took this long for people to start realizing that injecting social media into every facet of their lives isn’t a great idea. Why people wanted anonymous comments on their art, which could be from psychopathic junkies for all anyone knows, is beyond me.

You assume too much. Those were problems brought on by the intrusion of big business after gaming became more profitable than movies, and precursors to the current blight. I’m talking about when gaming was almost entirely run by hobbyists doing it on their own time and dime.

Well that’s just completely the opposite of my experience. Blizzard Entertainment, for example, was reliably putting out hit after hit after hit for many years. AAA studios used to actually hire talented people, and allow them to make the games they wanted to make, which resulted in fantastic products.

The problem with indie gaming is that it’s nearly impossible to actually find the few good games within the massive crush of shovelware. Even besides that, this thread is specifically about a large publisher.

How about you get talented people to make the games they want to make, like they did before it became a big business, back when gaming was actually exciting?

You are never going to answer that question with math and statistics, and attempts to do so are exactly why the industry keeps tanking studio after studio.

Do you understand why people play games though?

Warcraft 3 multiplayer was peak “matchmaking” in my opinion, where people created lobbies with certain rule sets and anyone who was interested in that type of game could just join directly. It was a blast, playing lots of different game modes all the time and meeting a wide range of player types, instead of having to invest an insane amount of time (3-10 hours, vs less than a minute to find a game in WC3) into one single game mode even before you can actually start playing.

What you have described is exactly what I was talking about when I called it “playing the game like a job,” where you have to invest plenty of time before you can even hope to enjoy it.

You absolutely certain about that reasoning? Because from what I’ve seen, when automated matchmaking is used, you NEED to play the game like a job just to reach your “correct” ranking and actually enjoy the game. People who don’t play it like that are driven away because of it.

I’d like multiplayer a lot more if they still made games with user-driven match making, instead of opaque algorithms hellbent on ensuring that everyone maintains a perfect 50/50 win rate. That and the death of custom game modes/lobbies have really killed all the fun of online multiplayer.

Back in grade 9 I had trouble showing my work in math because I did it all in my head. My teacher, not believing that was possible, challenged me one day after class to do a tough problem in my head, in front of her. Upon writing a number down, before I could double check myself, she started yelling at me for being a cheat and a fraud… because I “forgot the negative sign.” That was the day that I stopped caring entirely whether or not others gave me validation, because it’s really more about whether or not they like you rather than whether or not you’re actually right about anything. It’s a decision that perhaps made my life harder for a while, but has resulted in the development of talents which I am quite grateful for, and eventually a near perfect score when I re-did grade 12 math later on to get into STEM.

Seeking validation from others can just as easily steer you wrong, as they are anything but an impartial indication of whether or not you’re doing things right. If the person doesn’t like you, there’s nothing at all in the world which will be good enough for them, and if they do like you, they’ll gloss over and sugar coat everything to the point you can’t even tell if they’re being honest with you.

Nope, divining the inner workings of the minds of others is beyond me. I can only tell you about the world that I see.

As someone who has never really cared about validation, from being an outcast since I was a child, the way much of social media is designed in an attempt to seek validation drives me nutts. I just want to see interesting things that people want to share, and engage in discussions with types of people that I wouldn’t normally meet in real life.