Shhh you’ll upset the quantum mystics that need to believe magic is real!

Oh! And if it gets sold to Gamigo. That’s another massive red flag. Happens so gods damned much.

Extremely true, lol.

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.

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.

Yeah people consistently forget this, and will say things like ‘Valve isn’t even doing any marketing for me!’

No, they are.

Its just that its on their platform.

Via their categorization and recommendation snd review systems.

As opposed to… other pay to win ad platforms that shove ads in peoples faces depending on how much money you throw at them.

Also, while this is more of a minor point, Valve’s cut drops to 25% for games sales past $10 million, 20% for game sales past $50 million.

Been that way for 7 or 8 years.

I’ve now lost multiple entire weekends to trying to figure out how to just download assets from FAB, on linux.

Finally, they just made a direct option on the website to just download files, you know, like a normal download.

Prior to that, you basically had to install or compile and install UE5, to be able to download some asset.

… This doesn’t work well, because as you say, UE 5 is horrifically borked and improperly documented on linux, they can’t even figure out how to list all the dependencies you actually need, and thats on the linux versions they claim to support.

TIL that Tim Fortnite does not consider Sony or Nintendo to be ‘major stores’.

TIL that the video game industry has never had nor currently has titles that are priced exclusively on certain platforms.

(Where ‘its only available for purchase on one platform’ is an effective price of infinity on other platforms)

Just… from the article:

“Steam’s rules do explicitly prohibit games from steering players to competing purchase methods, forcing everyone to pay 30% to Valve,” he [Sweeney] recently tweeted. “Apple and Google did the same until the court explicitly found this practice to be unlawful. Now they don’t!”

It’s not clear exactly what rule Sweeney’s referring to here, but Steam’s own guidelines state that “it’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.” Though Valve would also prefer that developers “don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam key purchasers.”

It’s almost like this guy is malding, crashing out even, and has just… departed from the realm of even trying to make sense.

What is happening here is that Tim is losing his mind because Unreal Engine 5 only runs on GPUs (mostly from Nvidia) that cost as much as an entire PC did 2 or 3 years ago, and so many AAA studios that used UE 5 to make a pretty but hollow and buggy game are now collapsing or seeing a dramatic consumer pullback.

See how this is all connected, and these idiots did this to themselves?

Nvidia decides that Real Time Ray Tracing is the new paradigm for gaming graphics, and Unreal is the primary way people will experience this, by having all the lighting be done ‘auto-magically’ by UE 5, from the perspective of game devs.

Fastforward 5 or so years, half of everything computer hardware is too expensive now, hugely funded AAA games are routinely failing and causing financial disasters for publishers, Unreal Engine 5 is a hugely stigmatized joke because its not any kind of optimized for hardware people actually have, and outside of AAA games, is notorious for low quality UE asset store flips and actual scam games…

…this paradigm doesn’t work.

Compare that to Valve pretty close to singlehandedly developing its own VR hardware, and showcase AAA tier game for it… and well hey shucks, yeah, its too expensive for wide adoption, but that didn’t ruin their entire business’s financials.

They just actually properly accounted for the costs of trying that paradigm shift, and are today still iterating on and improving it, ala the upcoming SteamFrame and new software layer for translating ARM to x86 calls.

Wait wait wait.

So, analogously…

What would JIT compiler style code be?

… oh no.

I think it would basically be a co-dependent sycophant with no personality beyond pleasing you.

Make sure to try - catch the vomit in the event it potentially escapes your mouth.

Huzzah!

Oh I entirely believe you.

Hell hath no wrath like an annoyed high functioning autist.

I’ve … had my own 6 month black out periods where I came up with something extremely comprehensive and ‘neat’ before.

Seriously, bootstrapping all this is incredibly impressive.

I would… hope that you can find collaborators, to keep this thing alive in the event you get into a car accident (metaphorical or literal), or, you know, are completely burnt out after this.

… but yeah, it is… yet another immensely ironic aspect of being autistic that we’ve been treated and maligned as robots our whole lives, and then when the normies think they’ve actually built the AI from sci fi, no, turns out its basically extremely talented at making up bullshit and fudging the details and being a hypocrite, which… appalls the normies when they have to look into a hyperpowered mirror of themselves.

And then, of course, to actually fix this, its some random autist no one has ever heard of (apologies if you are famous and i am unaware of this), who is putting in an enormous of effort, that… most likely, will not be widely recognized.

… fucking normies man.

This seems astonishingly more useful than the current paradigm, this is genuinely incredible!

I mean, fellow Autist here, so I guess I am also… biased towards… facts…

But anyway, … I am currently uh, running on Bazzite.

I have been using Alpaca so far, and have been successfully running Qwen3 8B through it… your system would address a lot of problems I have had to figurr out my own workarounds for.

I am guessing this is not available as a flatpak, lol.

I would feel terrible to ask you to do anything more after all of this work, but if anyone does actually set up a podman installable container for this that actually properly grabs all required dependencies, please let me know!

“OP discovers quaternions.”

How do you solve gimbal lock?

3Vector Math / Matrix Algebra?

Nonsense rotational transforms?

You do nonsense harder.

Imaginary 4th Dimension, harder.

Shut up, don’t think about it, yes it will work if you don’t think about it.

… I guess that makes it like, the opposite of Orc Wauuugh or whatever?

Ok, so, Pluto is more spherical than Mercury, but the most important criteria is local gravitational dominance.

Which Mercury has, but Pluto does not.

I do not see how this is a difficult concept to grasp.

Yeah, sometimes you can make a hasty definition, and then refine it to a level of consistent clarity, after it is justly critiqued, though that refined definition may be multi tiered and somewhat complex.

Thats… thats how science works, thats like the entire fundamental concept of it, right there, improving the level of detail to which you understand reality, via empiricism, logic, participatory debate.

The primary purpose of the planet defition refinenment is to emphasize the importance of relative local gravitational dominance.

I’m trying to imagine you using this kind of logic with like, biological taxonomy.

At that point the only really ‘planety’ thing about is is basically that it is spherical.

Its not primarily orbiting the sun, so much as it is the barycenter of itself and charon.

And there are moons that are bigger, and more spherical, and more massive than Pluto.

And while it does have the vaguely heart shaped terrain feature, Mars has a smiley face crater, Saturn has an eternal hexagon on its north and south poles, despite being a gas giant, Jupiter has the spot, Mimas kinda looks like the Death Star, etc.

Its because its a colloquial phrase that more or less the media picked up and ran with.

Actual astronomers and astrophysicists use math to describe what they’re talking about, math that you can find and learn fairly easily on wikipedia.

Lay people tend to just evaluate a phrase for its extremely literal meaning, not realizing that it is at best just pop science jargon, short hand to refer to a pretty well defined and precise concept, that is difficult to summarize without losing specificity.

There are many, many other examples of this kind of thing happening with other phrases or terms used to refer to complex concepts.

What is going to be funny is if/when they discover planet 9, and all the apparent Pluto superfans just utterly lose their shit when they attempt to comprehend that there can be another actual planet, and no, pluto still doesn’t count.