I think I agree with everything you’ve said, only one note:

Generally with theme park MMOs (Final Fantasy, Runescape, GW2, etc) there comes a point where the player runs out of content, or burns out.

Beyond the things you say, which are accurate, there’s another phenomenon that often happens at this stage:

The actual endgame is a fashion show, rofl.

This consistently happens in MMOs with humanoid avatars.

Everyone whose ground up to and beat everything… yep, its fashion show time, we already beat every epic raid 10x… now its all about who can the flashiest while doing it, or just generally in ‘public’.

Thus anytime a game server hits a broad wave of this kind of behavior, you know the game basically is peaking, just peaked, or is just about to peak, and then its all downhill.

… This even happened in Destiny 2, and it probably happened in the OG Destiny as well.

Josh Strife Hayes recently did a video of basically ‘why do we keep getting indie MMOs that promise the moon and then basically rugpull everyone?’, and I also saw like an hour long video from another creator, a longtime WoW player, who more or less argued that WoW Classic objectively sucks and I can prove it.

To try and paraphrase/synthesize their points, there are basically a few reasons why MMOs so often seem to be full of chuds:

The MMORPG crowd is basically the same group of people that it has been for the last 25 years. There aren’t really too mant new, younger players … joining into an older school MMO style game, they play Fortnite or ARC Raiders or whatever Live Service Hero shooter.

This is an older crowd that really really likes very very simple and repetetive gameplay. You just have to understand a bit of an optimization strategy, but after that, actual gameplay is incredibly monotonous compared to many other kinds of games.

That is to say: the grind is the point. The very very simple gameplay loops are the point.

Also, what this crowd is doing is fundamentally trying to establish or join a social group where they get to feel important by virtue of usually just senoirity in terms of time spent, given that the actual skill ceiling is pretty low, the gameplay is essentially sophmoric.

They’re chasing a dream, an actual alternate reality, where they will be cool and awesome.

So… yeah, simple repetetive gameplay appeals to simpletons.

Fantasy worlds where you are important and respected for basically just being there… appeal to economically and socially disaffected people.

Simpletons who are economic and social outcasts.

… otherwise known as someone highly likely to find fascism to be an appealing ideology, and/or be easily brainwashed into supporting it.

These are the idiot suckers who can’t think very well and don’t think they should have to, the prime suckers who will constantly get got by so many kinds of scams and grifters that ultimately, sell them a sense of superiority and respect.

… By RPGMO, do you mean MMORPG?

I’ve not heard the term RPGMO before.

And … yeah while it absolutely is the case that MMOs are basically the most expensive kind of game to develop…

Well, no, they’re not actually.

That’d be basically AAA live service games.

Which… kinda just is sorta technically an MMO, in a way, in terms of the amount of content and required ongoing server infrastructure.

So the money for this exists.

And also… I remember the early 00s. We had a bunch of fairly big, and also actually fairly novel and distinct kinds of MMOs coming out, fairly regularly.

While yes, the idea of crowdfunding a modern MMO is… probably always going to be dubious… I think this is more a case that investors have a hardon for essentially variants of Overwatch, they’re allergic to MMOs, unless they make them insanely pay to win or gacha or something like that…

… and we just generally have a lack of people willing to try and re-envision what a new MMO could be, while also having the systemic integrity to actually make the underlying systems work together.

… and thence came the carmel mocha frappuccino.

I mean it sounds like we are in agreement then, that this works better for companies than it does for individual/retail investors.

…j-just… just gimme s-s-some gains bro, I need more GAINS!

I NEEED LINE GO UP!

I NEED IT BAD, MAN!

… you g-got any gains bro? P-please!

Try to apply that logic to any of Elon’s stocks.

Like, I generally agree with you, but… no one can possibly do any kind of analysis on TSLA, and Elon, and conclude anything other than:

Everything about this is completely insane and makes no sense.

Oh hi I’m Elon Musk, my car company only exists because of tax credits for EVs, and I just spent a squagillion dollars to elect a guy who will cancel those.

Oh, also, we build C3POs now, not cars.

Even though they’re decades behind already existing humanoid robots, being built by another car company (Hyundai), who acquired an actually ground breaking an revolutionary robotics firm (Boston Dynamics).

Also, please given Elon a squagillion dollars, to incentivize him to keep performing his super duper CEO magic.

… fucking what? He’s an actual madman, not a suave and calculating Bond villain, he’s a fucking lunatic!

… Does any of this not qualify as ‘management is going to do dumb shit?’

(also i am not sure if ‘manglement’ was an intentional joke or unintentional misspelling, but that will now be the word I am using in place of ‘mismanagement’, hahah!)

… Yeah… yeah.

Yeah that pretty much is the actual answer.

… That kinda sorta works for companies, not so much for people looking to make some kind of probably leveraged bet.

… I didn’t downvote you, but uh, no, I really don’t think they can.

I think you are confusing an semi-automable asset pipeline that adheres to various kinds of standards for… a whole lot more than that.

I’d really like to see any evidence that what you seem to be describing actually exists.

Because if it does, and is or has been in widespread use for any amount of time prior to now… well very broadly, it would seem to be hurting more than helping things.

… stool samples?

… kinda difficult to ship physically, but we could all just literally provide a daily shit post, just so you know how regular we all are, potentially screen for internal bleeding or a few conditions.

If you like holding an empty bag, this is a great strategy.

Any body else a fan of pinot grigio?

Roughly an average 10% drop in major gaming stocks, because a plagiarism machine can produce one minute of 720p, 24fps ‘gameplay’ at an absolutely astounding compute cost.

These people are all fucking idiots.

Therr is no universe where this even makes sense under a ‘a games are streamed’ paradigm.

This is like 100x to 100,000x the cost in hardware and energy, to produce a minute.

Do these fucking idiots think a game can just be wholly reinstantiated every single minute?

It actually would have made more sense to fine tune an LLM to interface with an API layer for Unity or something, to just… you know, produce an actual game?

Call that the uh, the processed training data/output condensed into a distilled an efficient piece of software, the ‘local’ model, if these clowns understand nothing but jargon.

I truly cannot comprehend the mind numbing level of stupidity on display here.

If that much investor money can be swayed by this utterly pitiful demonstration, then all these game stocks deserve to go to near 0, because clearly the people in charge (the investors) understand literally nothing about video games.

This is utterly asinine.

What happens if/when all of the plagiarised games start suing Google for IP infringement?

How is everyone involved at every step of this so utterly mentally impaired?

I mean, alternatively, you could hook yourself up to saline bag, a catheter, and then have some kind of extremely serious filtration system that recycles the same water.

I guess at least you would potentially have to change the filters less often than you’d have to empty the piss bottles and shove water in your face hole.

(Please for the love of god do not attempt this, there are so many potential infections and ways you could posion yourself)

People need to go watch or rewatch “The Second Renaissance” from the Animatrix.

(Uh, NSFW gore warning)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sU8RunvBRZ8

Well best of luck with a refund attempt, I guess?

I was once hopeful for it too, but I never actually played or spent money on it.

When they switched to the kind of ongoing, pay a stupid amount of money for the privilege of being an alpha tester thing, because you’ll get exclusive stuff that’ll be either impossible or very difficult to get in the early game… that kind of StarCitizen-like funding…

…at that point I wrote it off as “best case: development hell forever, worst case: eventual total implosion.”

It still is sad to see though, it really does seem like there will never be another major MMO that is any kind of compelling or novel, that isn’t monetized p2w … it apparently just costs too much money to develop one.

On that note: I wonder if the MxO emulator is still being developed…

EDIT: Apparently no, not really.

… major Cave Johnson vibes from this one.

Maybe you’ll get superpowers, maybe your blood will turn into gasoline. Not sure. Science!

It does very much annoy me that, yeah, its always been possible to do this.

I believe Claim A! Claim A deniers are bad, smell bad, and are probably also demons!

EDIT: Welp, looks like Claim A is dubious, thanks to user so and so for setting me straight, see their explanation below.

Yeah you have always been able to do that or something very close to it on basically every forum or social media type thing ever.

But… you are probably right that if you give people a mea culpa flag as a built in part of the UI/UX, that would almost certainly spur more people to do it.

… Its still terrifying to me that a large segment of people would need such a button to exist before they would be ok doing it.

I guess this isn’t a case where the sort of ‘desire path’ solution manifests and is then maybe formally adopted, seems like you’d have to basically social engineer humility into people.

I hate that this would probably work, in the sense that it isn’t just DUH obvious to everyone already that they don’t need a button specifically for this, but I also love that this would probably work.

I can imagine a ‘year end wrap up’ where you get to see all the stuff you said that you decided was stupid.

Then I guess just pair it with some kind of affirmative message of ‘hey, you’re trying to admit your mistakes, and that’s probably good’.

Its less deceptive than trying to delete shit dumb stuff, as… everyone can still see you did say it, but realized it was bad.