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(I work at a major publishing and developing company) The biggest change have to be us, the players. Almost every game let it be an indie or a triple-A blockbu

(I work at a major publishing and developing company) The biggest change have to be us, the players. Almost every game let it be an indie or a triple-A blockbuster have been researched and min-maxed by most players. Not just the "sweats" but the casuals too. Of course official guides and playthrough books have been a thing back in the 90s too, almost every PS1 game had one. But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play. I see this everywhere. It's not even about the game being hand-holdy or not it's the fact that players can datamine and simulate every aspect of the game. Elden Ring is a perfect example recently where builds are min maxed to edge as possible. And that's a mainly single player title, there is not even anything on the line. MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality, especially WoW everyone expected to have the best build doing the best possible dps or else. Even in very casual games like Animal Crossing you have this mentality of having the best villagers in the game, people asking insane amount of money to visit their islands ot get that best item you need etc. So yeah, I'd say this is the biggest change.

RektBoy 4y ago
Just an idea, let's add into EULA something like, you can't post guides and walkthroughs on the internet, or DMCA/lawsuit.
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  Game devs would never do this. Its all free marketing for their game and if major streamers play the game, even for a short time, it will boost sales/downloads, etc.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Japanese developers are happy to restrict streaming their game. Usually they won't allow showing the ending, or the last quarter of it, or you can't allow monetization without prior agreement, etc. Other regions don't seem to care.
- 0des 4y ago
  Let's not
- elliekelly 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s likely to happen but sometimes I think it would be fun (maybe not the right word) for a really story-driven exploratory game like RDR2 to come with an NDA for the first month or so. Not anything that the company would seriously enforce but just as a way to give players a bit of time to explore the game without any spoilers.
  - hhmc 4y ago
    It's pretty straightforward to avoid spoilers if you don't want to be spoiled. Although I guess this depends on your social circles behaving to some extent.
helen___keller 4y ago
Agreed. I realized if I go back and play an old PS1 game, I can’t allow myself to do any internet search about it or it fundamentally changes how I play the game. On the other side, this change in player behavior has reflected back in the game industry. I often see a “softening” in permanent build-based character gameplay, such as choosing your skills and stats in Diablo 2 has gone away in modern Diablo games - because why add this feature when you know your player base will all just google the best build?
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  So you get Path of Exile instead, where the mechanics keep changing each "league" and you need to run a new "build" each time. On the upside it can keep the game fresh trying out new things, but if you find one that's fun, it will likely be nerfed in the next league.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    <i> but if you find one that's fun, it will likely be nerfed in the next league. </i> That is what I find infuriating about the game. They are constantly messing with the skills tree and even if it doesn't destroy my characters I don't want to go back and rebuild them everytime I log in. So, when I initially played it, I gave them money and logged in pretty regularly for 6 months or so, then I didn't log in for a couple months and they literally destroyed my character by removing the linkage to opposite sides of the skills tree I was using (yah granted that character felt way overpowered). If they were smart, they would version the skills tree at the point of character creation, so people in the general global world don't get messed up every time they want to change the league play strategy.
    - jpadkins 4y ago
      the game is designed around the assumption you don't play a character for more than 3 months (< 5% of the playerbase plays in standard). I agree they could do a better job setting expectations with new players to not get attached to their characters.
dgb23 4y ago
Interestingly this is something heavily discussed in many game communities. People feel a tension between looking things up while possibly ruining their experience and experimenting, learning themselves but spending much more time. I think this has to do with a prevalence of frankly stupefying reward structure of many games. I call it spreadsheet progression. Instead of opening up new gameplay options, you often get a huge list of entirely arbitrary choices that only differ in the most superficial ways.
- amlib 4y ago
  This is why I love games like Zelda more than the usual RPGs because even tough the game only offers a few dozen items to find, most of them are unique and introduce new gameplay mechanics.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
> MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality, especially WoW everyone expected to have the best build doing the best possible dps or else. I can't speak for WoW, but I hope this is true for ESO. Despite watching many videos explaining the light-attack/power weaving technique, practicing for many hours, watching build videos, optimizing my build, farming/buying (mostly) BIS gear, and maxing it out, I can still only pull about half the DPS demanded by the hardest trials. Despite paying just as much as everyone else, there's a whole bunch of content I'm effectively gated from playing. So I don't, anymore. And I'm bitter about it.
- yetihehe 4y ago
  It became a competitive game and you are not willing to be in the top tier of players. It is a holy grail for game companies: "How to mix having uncompetitive fun in a game while allowing competition".
  - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    I thought that detailing my efforts was a clear illustration of my willingness, but ok.
    - yurishimo 4y ago
      As a more charitable take, I think they mean that the devs at ESO know that only an upper echelon of players are willing to maximize their builds and they're okay with some players falling off the edges. I agree that it's shitty.
      - yetihehe 4y ago
        Exactly this. Not everyone can be in upper echelons. I'm pretty bad at any competitive game I've tried, even one I've created myself 5 minutes ago (I've lost to a colleague on a tiktactoe game on a graph I've invented when I was learning about graphs in university). What I meant with my comment: some players play for fun. Some players play to win and make a competition out of any game. Being the best requires some degree of rule-breaking which makes a game less fun. Not every player actually wants to compete in ways that are not fun but required to win a game.
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
> MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality Maybe the old school ones but there are many examples of games now that have season passes that cost $10-20 for a few months, have cosmetic items you can earn/purchase. The "meta" in a game is what the min-maxed gear is. Or what I like to call the spreadsheet gear load-out. There are lots of discussions, play testing damage numbers, trying different modifiers/gear combos, etc. done to figure out the max damage-per-second (DPS) and then players gravitate to that gear, grinding for that gear, etc. Some people actually publish spreadsheets of data on the gear. Then the game devs change the "meta" by tweaking the stats on the gear to make XYZ weapon/armor better, or introduce a new weapon that has better DPS. This sometimes aligns with season passes or map changes. Its endless and probably hugely profitable for them. If you compare the money people spend on these types of games, I bet the average player on season passes spends more than a monthly subscription based MMO (for those that actually spend money). Its the same "keeping up with the jonses" concept IRL, or in business world, earnings have to always be better than the last time.
Semaphor 4y ago
And IMO this is great. My favorite games (Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous) have a very broad difficulty span, story mode essentially plays itself, unfair requires very tight minmaxing of builds. I only play on core (which already comes with a warning popup as it’s 2 above normal), because I don’t like minmaxing and instead want fun builds (but still have a challenge). But what I hate are puzzles. Parts of the game would have been completely inaccessible to me, because I’d have either avoided them, or stopped playing because of frustration. Instead, I can simply look up the solutions online, and the unfair player who doesn’t want to spend hours thinking about the perfect build can go to neoseeker and check their list of unfair viable builds. I’m soon finishing my 3rd time through WotR (with a total play time of over 1400 hours), and for my next run, part of my build was decided by datamined deity reactivity in the game. Especially in single player games, the options and additional enjoyment coming from datamining, minmaxing, and sharing of secrets are amazing.
bombcar 4y ago
One of the counters to this is to have various ways to play - Stellaris for example has well known "best builds" where you pick the proper civics, traits, government, and origin and follow a pretty basic tech rush, and win. But then after you've done that a huge amount of fun is trying to win with non-optimal builds, often "for the lols". In this way it's more of a roguelike (or similar to Dwarf Fortress, et al) where the goal isn't to "beat the game" but to beat it on your terms.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  And if you pull off non-meta strategies, you’re not good, you’re just “cheesing” or something. Funny enough, a recent turn based 4X that was supposed to be a Civ killer released and is now looking pretty rough review wise. The biggest complaint is that some of the civs are just straight up better inherently. Which is probably why I love Crusader Kings, it’s the only paradox game I’ve played where playing as minor nobody nations isn’t the most boring grind imaginable.
  - jlawson 4y ago
    What game was it?
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      Humankind.
the_only_law 4y ago
> But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play. meta gaming kills strategy for me. From back when I first started playing AoE3 I was absolutely infatuated with the game and genre, but found myself incapable of winning MP matches. Some guys from the old pre-DE competitive scene helped train me a bit, and I could win MP matches now, but the game is no fun, instead of being a fun 4X/RTS, it was “follow this foundation, time everything perfectly, micro perfectly, min/max everything and it lost most of the appeal. Even more recently CK3, which can be a pretty immersive game, often loses that immersion when the game becomes less about what I do as a king, and more about min/maxing mechanics. A lot of strategy games start to feel less “strategy” and more “who can exploit mechanics and follow predefined path”. Ironically one AoE3 legend rose from nowhere a couple years back with strategies different from the meta and winning. People called him toxic for it.
- maccard 4y ago
  I don't agree with your take - I've always loved RTS games (played age of empires 2, StarCraft, Warcraft 3, deviated into lol/dota and back to StarCraft 2 and now age of empires 4) - basic strategies in terms of build orders are table stakes for these games and have been since as long as I can remember. You need to be able to react to changing situations in these games. Nobody executes build orders perfectly, and there's RNG in map spawns and layouts that can give you a subtle edge over your opponent. The game is won and lost on being able to react to your opponents moves and follow through on counters to it, the same way chess plays.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > The game is won and lost on being able to react to your opponents moves and follow through on counters to it, the same way chess plays. Ok fair enough, though to me personally, I’m not very excited by or immersed in chess games either. I’ve trended more towards grand strategy in recent years, which on the surface seem to be closer to what I’m looking for, but in practice often end up being me just trying to min/max modifiers for RNG rolls.
Levitz 4y ago
Information goes from one player to other, it used to be that the circles for this were small (relatives, classmates etc) but now it's the whole world. Besides of what you are talking about, it also affects developers, it is not that strange for games today to be developed assuming you are going to google things out or that you are going to be assisted by a wiki site, I'm frankly worried about this. I recently played Subnautica, one of the features is that after making a vehicle you can craft upgrades for it, you also have to replace the energy cells they use, yet the game gives no indication on how to do either thing, a quick google search will point out that there are specific areas of the vehicle that can be interacted with, but it really feels like there is a missing prompt or tutorial somewhere. What will become of these experience in some 20-30 years I don't know.
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
>MMOs are kinda dying They should. MMO is an expired genre. It's a relic of the advent of broadband, when playing with tons of other players in a graphical game became possible for the first time. That was novel and amazing, even if it meant deep compromises in gameplay and graphics. Now, though, that's no longer novel, and those compromises don't make sense. And the incentives are awful to boot; a company has to run beefy servers, which means it's pressured to find ways to extract ever more money from the players, leading to stuff like pay-to-win. Although some people think they can be saved, particularly if they're sandboxes instead of theme parks: https://youtu.be/nvK8fua6O64 https://youtu.be/nvK8fua6O64
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > And the incentives are awful to boot; a company has to run beefy servers, which means it's pressured to find ways to extract ever more money from the players, leading to stuff like pay-to-win. They have to run servers that would have been beefy decades ago. These days I could go rent a server for $5/core/month, and as a lowball handle 100 concurrent users per core. And based on some searches, if 10% of players can log in simultaneously that's much more than enough. So that comes out to $60 a year per 1000 subscribers. I don't see how server costs could be a problem for a game that has any income. You could ask for $5 a year to play and server costs would completely disappear. No need to do any harsh money extraction at all for server costs.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Okay, why the silent downvotes? Do people really think my cost estimates are more than a hundredfold too low? Because you'd have to go more than 100x my estimate before the server costs themselves are significant amounts of money and pressure the company into anti-consumer extraction. Please, explain the reasoning. What kind of MMO needs that much server infrastructure?
kipchak 4y ago
I think this is something that might be starting to reverse a bit. Just going off of conversations I see online, I would imagine a decent number of players made a conscious effort not to consult guides in order to "spoil" the experience for themselves. Outer Wilds is an example of a fairly popular indie where people are very careful not to spoil or give away too much.
- zbtaylor1 4y ago
  I think you're right. Anecdotally I, as well as most of my friends that still game, have become increasingly conscious of avoiding "help" when playing a new game. I'd never played a FromSoft game and beating Elden Ring with zero spoilers or advice was just about the greatest gaming experience I've ever had. I suspect it's partially an age thing. Now that we're older and becoming nostalgic for the wonder that games held for us as children this is a great way to capture some of that magic again. As mentioned elsewhere, gaming guides aren't a new thing, but for a certain segment of the population they were pretty uncommon for a large chunk of our childhood. So, instead, knowledge was shared around the lunch table or at recess. It's maybe not quite as exciting in my 30's as it was back then, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to discover things with my friends than it is to watch a 20 minute video about optimal strategy.
joshstrange 4y ago
> people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play There is a very fine line between "providing resources" and ruining a game for me. WoW isn't a lot of fun for me anymore (I haven't played even many years now) because of exactly the reason you list. It felt like the only "right way" to play the game or the only way to be competitive was to find and learn a specific build/play style. That sucks all the fun out of the game for me. I've run into this with Factorio as well. When I first played it I didn't look up much info at all and I had a blast. On later play-throughs I got deep into online blueprints or "best practices" and in very little time the game lost it's appeal for me. I'm not talking about belt balancer books but malls, research factories, and the like. When I realized why I wasn't having fun I vowed to only use the most basic online blueprints and that has helped a lot. It's a hard path to walk between "This game is inscrutable and I need help!" and "Well now I'm just a glorified computer following a detailed walkthrough, not playing a game". I have to stop myself from meta-gaming too much or it ruins the game for me (though it's a useful tool to use to quit a game that I'm too deep into).
t0bia_s 4y ago
I remember playing World of Tanks during early beta. It was fun. Player was mostly mens in around 30s with interest in WW2 technology. Game has unbalanced matchmaking, different tanks that has really different stats and specific cons and pros... Then it become publicly more known with lot of ads everywhere. A lot of kids joined to the game. Developers tweaked and balanced everything. And it slowly became game without fun. Everything was so perfectly balanced, that it was almost irrelevant what tank you had. And with casualty of players regular games lacks any strategy. No cooperation, just insulting, grinding, no fun... I quit playing WoT after developers puts more and more imaginary/ridiculous tanks with every patch and balanced specific unique abilities of tanks.
barrysteve 4y ago
Ketroc in the Starcraft 2 AI Arena tournament mentions the same pattern. Starcraft 1 came out before the internet and web had crushed the meta. People would figure out how to play with their friends and then meet up at local tournaments to find out who knew how to play. It was an awesome period of discovery. The guys behind aiarena.net are having a blast running the AI bot tournament because they are making the meta up as they code better bots.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
What, exactly, were you going to min-max in Mario 64? Strategy guides have literally been a thing since the 1980s. The biggest change is not the players. The biggest change is the monetization of games that you have already played for and the sad hamster wheel that companies have put players on. While Elden Ring is mostly about exploration, most AAA games being developed nowadays consist of a set of mundane tasks that don't even make sense when putting them into a real world context. Kill 10 X. Collect 20 Y. Walk to Z and stand there while you "survey the area." It's all bullshit, but instead of just being able to enjoy the game by exploring to progress through the story, you have to do all this dumb crap.
- PetitPrince 4y ago
  > What, exactly, were you going to min-max in Mario 64? Time to finish the game, aka speedrun. Not necessarily a bad thing though (I love watching all the performance during AGDQ/SGDQ), but that's an example of "optimizing the fun out of the game".
musicale 4y ago
> But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play I'm kind of OK with the metagame of every player vs. the developers. I even like the idea of developers vs. players in an MMO. There's sort of a cooperative aspect to it. But I also usually enjoy figuring things out on my own rather than consulting an internet walkthrough, and an MMO doesn't seem as fun if it is reduced to an exercise in efficiency maximization or trying to increase the value of some number.

RektBoy 4y ago

Just an idea, let's add into EULA something like, you can't post guides and walkthroughs on the internet, or DMCA/lawsuit.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
Game devs would never do this. Its all free marketing for their game and if major streamers play the game, even for a short time, it will boost sales/downloads, etc.
- astrange 4y ago
  Japanese developers are happy to restrict streaming their game. Usually they won't allow showing the ending, or the last quarter of it, or you can't allow monetization without prior agreement, etc. Other regions don't seem to care.
0des 4y ago
Let's not
elliekelly 4y ago
I don’t think it’s likely to happen but sometimes I think it would be fun (maybe not the right word) for a really story-driven exploratory game like RDR2 to come with an NDA for the first month or so. Not anything that the company would seriously enforce but just as a way to give players a bit of time to explore the game without any spoilers.
- hhmc 4y ago
  It's pretty straightforward to avoid spoilers if you don't want to be spoiled. Although I guess this depends on your social circles behaving to some extent.

helen___keller 4y ago

Agreed. I realized if I go back and play an old PS1 game, I can’t allow myself to do any internet search about it or it fundamentally changes how I play the game. On the other side, this change in player behavior has reflected back in the game industry. I often see a “softening” in permanent build-based character gameplay, such as choosing your skills and stats in Diablo 2 has gone away in modern Diablo games - because why add this feature when you know your player base will all just google the best build?

slowmovintarget 4y ago
So you get Path of Exile instead, where the mechanics keep changing each "league" and you need to run a new "build" each time. On the upside it can keep the game fresh trying out new things, but if you find one that's fun, it will likely be nerfed in the next league.
- StillBored 4y ago
  <i> but if you find one that's fun, it will likely be nerfed in the next league. </i> That is what I find infuriating about the game. They are constantly messing with the skills tree and even if it doesn't destroy my characters I don't want to go back and rebuild them everytime I log in. So, when I initially played it, I gave them money and logged in pretty regularly for 6 months or so, then I didn't log in for a couple months and they literally destroyed my character by removing the linkage to opposite sides of the skills tree I was using (yah granted that character felt way overpowered). If they were smart, they would version the skills tree at the point of character creation, so people in the general global world don't get messed up every time they want to change the league play strategy.
  - jpadkins 4y ago
    the game is designed around the assumption you don't play a character for more than 3 months (< 5% of the playerbase plays in standard). I agree they could do a better job setting expectations with new players to not get attached to their characters.

dgb23 4y ago

Interestingly this is something heavily discussed in many game communities. People feel a tension between looking things up while possibly ruining their experience and experimenting, learning themselves but spending much more time. I think this has to do with a prevalence of frankly stupefying reward structure of many games. I call it spreadsheet progression. Instead of opening up new gameplay options, you often get a huge list of entirely arbitrary choices that only differ in the most superficial ways.

amlib 4y ago
This is why I love games like Zelda more than the usual RPGs because even tough the game only offers a few dozen items to find, most of them are unique and introduce new gameplay mechanics.

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

> MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality, especially WoW everyone expected to have the best build doing the best possible dps or else. I can't speak for WoW, but I hope this is true for ESO. Despite watching many videos explaining the light-attack/power weaving technique, practicing for many hours, watching build videos, optimizing my build, farming/buying (mostly) BIS gear, and maxing it out, I can still only pull about half the DPS demanded by the hardest trials. Despite paying just as much as everyone else, there's a whole bunch of content I'm effectively gated from playing. So I don't, anymore. And I'm bitter about it.

yetihehe 4y ago
It became a competitive game and you are not willing to be in the top tier of players. It is a holy grail for game companies: "How to mix having uncompetitive fun in a game while allowing competition".
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  I thought that detailing my efforts was a clear illustration of my willingness, but ok.
  - yurishimo 4y ago
    As a more charitable take, I think they mean that the devs at ESO know that only an upper echelon of players are willing to maximize their builds and they're okay with some players falling off the edges. I agree that it's shitty.
    - yetihehe 4y ago
      Exactly this. Not everyone can be in upper echelons. I'm pretty bad at any competitive game I've tried, even one I've created myself 5 minutes ago (I've lost to a colleague on a tiktactoe game on a graph I've invented when I was learning about graphs in university). What I meant with my comment: some players play for fun. Some players play to win and make a competition out of any game. Being the best requires some degree of rule-breaking which makes a game less fun. Not every player actually wants to compete in ways that are not fun but required to win a game.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

> MMOs are kinda dying because of this mentality Maybe the old school ones but there are many examples of games now that have season passes that cost $10-20 for a few months, have cosmetic items you can earn/purchase. The "meta" in a game is what the min-maxed gear is. Or what I like to call the spreadsheet gear load-out. There are lots of discussions, play testing damage numbers, trying different modifiers/gear combos, etc. done to figure out the max damage-per-second (DPS) and then players gravitate to that gear, grinding for that gear, etc. Some people actually publish spreadsheets of data on the gear. Then the game devs change the "meta" by tweaking the stats on the gear to make XYZ weapon/armor better, or introduce a new weapon that has better DPS. This sometimes aligns with season passes or map changes. Its endless and probably hugely profitable for them. If you compare the money people spend on these types of games, I bet the average player on season passes spends more than a monthly subscription based MMO (for those that actually spend money). Its the same "keeping up with the jonses" concept IRL, or in business world, earnings have to always be better than the last time.

Semaphor 4y ago

And IMO this is great. My favorite games (Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous) have a very broad difficulty span, story mode essentially plays itself, unfair requires very tight minmaxing of builds. I only play on core (which already comes with a warning popup as it’s 2 above normal), because I don’t like minmaxing and instead want fun builds (but still have a challenge). But what I hate are puzzles. Parts of the game would have been completely inaccessible to me, because I’d have either avoided them, or stopped playing because of frustration. Instead, I can simply look up the solutions online, and the unfair player who doesn’t want to spend hours thinking about the perfect build can go to neoseeker and check their list of unfair viable builds. I’m soon finishing my 3rd time through WotR (with a total play time of over 1400 hours), and for my next run, part of my build was decided by datamined deity reactivity in the game. Especially in single player games, the options and additional enjoyment coming from datamining, minmaxing, and sharing of secrets are amazing.

bombcar 4y ago

One of the counters to this is to have various ways to play - Stellaris for example has well known "best builds" where you pick the proper civics, traits, government, and origin and follow a pretty basic tech rush, and win. But then after you've done that a huge amount of fun is trying to win with non-optimal builds, often "for the lols". In this way it's more of a roguelike (or similar to Dwarf Fortress, et al) where the goal isn't to "beat the game" but to beat it on your terms.

the_only_law 4y ago
And if you pull off non-meta strategies, you’re not good, you’re just “cheesing” or something. Funny enough, a recent turn based 4X that was supposed to be a Civ killer released and is now looking pretty rough review wise. The biggest complaint is that some of the civs are just straight up better inherently. Which is probably why I love Crusader Kings, it’s the only paradox game I’ve played where playing as minor nobody nations isn’t the most boring grind imaginable.
- jlawson 4y ago
  What game was it?
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Humankind.

the_only_law 4y ago

> But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play. meta gaming kills strategy for me. From back when I first started playing AoE3 I was absolutely infatuated with the game and genre, but found myself incapable of winning MP matches. Some guys from the old pre-DE competitive scene helped train me a bit, and I could win MP matches now, but the game is no fun, instead of being a fun 4X/RTS, it was “follow this foundation, time everything perfectly, micro perfectly, min/max everything and it lost most of the appeal. Even more recently CK3, which can be a pretty immersive game, often loses that immersion when the game becomes less about what I do as a king, and more about min/maxing mechanics. A lot of strategy games start to feel less “strategy” and more “who can exploit mechanics and follow predefined path”. Ironically one AoE3 legend rose from nowhere a couple years back with strategies different from the meta and winning. People called him toxic for it.

maccard 4y ago
I don't agree with your take - I've always loved RTS games (played age of empires 2, StarCraft, Warcraft 3, deviated into lol/dota and back to StarCraft 2 and now age of empires 4) - basic strategies in terms of build orders are table stakes for these games and have been since as long as I can remember. You need to be able to react to changing situations in these games. Nobody executes build orders perfectly, and there's RNG in map spawns and layouts that can give you a subtle edge over your opponent. The game is won and lost on being able to react to your opponents moves and follow through on counters to it, the same way chess plays.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > The game is won and lost on being able to react to your opponents moves and follow through on counters to it, the same way chess plays. Ok fair enough, though to me personally, I’m not very excited by or immersed in chess games either. I’ve trended more towards grand strategy in recent years, which on the surface seem to be closer to what I’m looking for, but in practice often end up being me just trying to min/max modifiers for RNG rolls.

Levitz 4y ago

Information goes from one player to other, it used to be that the circles for this were small (relatives, classmates etc) but now it's the whole world. Besides of what you are talking about, it also affects developers, it is not that strange for games today to be developed assuming you are going to google things out or that you are going to be assisted by a wiki site, I'm frankly worried about this. I recently played Subnautica, one of the features is that after making a vehicle you can craft upgrades for it, you also have to replace the energy cells they use, yet the game gives no indication on how to do either thing, a quick google search will point out that there are specific areas of the vehicle that can be interacted with, but it really feels like there is a missing prompt or tutorial somewhere. What will become of these experience in some 20-30 years I don't know.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago

>MMOs are kinda dying They should. MMO is an expired genre. It's a relic of the advent of broadband, when playing with tons of other players in a graphical game became possible for the first time. That was novel and amazing, even if it meant deep compromises in gameplay and graphics. Now, though, that's no longer novel, and those compromises don't make sense. And the incentives are awful to boot; a company has to run beefy servers, which means it's pressured to find ways to extract ever more money from the players, leading to stuff like pay-to-win. Although some people think they can be saved, particularly if they're sandboxes instead of theme parks: https://youtu.be/nvK8fua6O64 https://youtu.be/nvK8fua6O64

Dylan16807 4y ago
> And the incentives are awful to boot; a company has to run beefy servers, which means it's pressured to find ways to extract ever more money from the players, leading to stuff like pay-to-win. They have to run servers that would have been beefy decades ago. These days I could go rent a server for $5/core/month, and as a lowball handle 100 concurrent users per core. And based on some searches, if 10% of players can log in simultaneously that's much more than enough. So that comes out to $60 a year per 1000 subscribers. I don't see how server costs could be a problem for a game that has any income. You could ask for $5 a year to play and server costs would completely disappear. No need to do any harsh money extraction at all for server costs.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Okay, why the silent downvotes? Do people really think my cost estimates are more than a hundredfold too low? Because you'd have to go more than 100x my estimate before the server costs themselves are significant amounts of money and pressure the company into anti-consumer extraction. Please, explain the reasoning. What kind of MMO needs that much server infrastructure?

kipchak 4y ago

I think this is something that might be starting to reverse a bit. Just going off of conversations I see online, I would imagine a decent number of players made a conscious effort not to consult guides in order to "spoil" the experience for themselves. Outer Wilds is an example of a fairly popular indie where people are very careful not to spoil or give away too much.

zbtaylor1 4y ago
I think you're right. Anecdotally I, as well as most of my friends that still game, have become increasingly conscious of avoiding "help" when playing a new game. I'd never played a FromSoft game and beating Elden Ring with zero spoilers or advice was just about the greatest gaming experience I've ever had. I suspect it's partially an age thing. Now that we're older and becoming nostalgic for the wonder that games held for us as children this is a great way to capture some of that magic again. As mentioned elsewhere, gaming guides aren't a new thing, but for a certain segment of the population they were pretty uncommon for a large chunk of our childhood. So, instead, knowledge was shared around the lunch table or at recess. It's maybe not quite as exciting in my 30's as it was back then, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to discover things with my friends than it is to watch a 20 minute video about optimal strategy.

joshstrange 4y ago

> people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play There is a very fine line between "providing resources" and ruining a game for me. WoW isn't a lot of fun for me anymore (I haven't played even many years now) because of exactly the reason you list. It felt like the only "right way" to play the game or the only way to be competitive was to find and learn a specific build/play style. That sucks all the fun out of the game for me. I've run into this with Factorio as well. When I first played it I didn't look up much info at all and I had a blast. On later play-throughs I got deep into online blueprints or "best practices" and in very little time the game lost it's appeal for me. I'm not talking about belt balancer books but malls, research factories, and the like. When I realized why I wasn't having fun I vowed to only use the most basic online blueprints and that has helped a lot. It's a hard path to walk between "This game is inscrutable and I need help!" and "Well now I'm just a glorified computer following a detailed walkthrough, not playing a game". I have to stop myself from meta-gaming too much or it ruins the game for me (though it's a useful tool to use to quit a game that I'm too deep into).

t0bia_s 4y ago

I remember playing World of Tanks during early beta. It was fun. Player was mostly mens in around 30s with interest in WW2 technology. Game has unbalanced matchmaking, different tanks that has really different stats and specific cons and pros... Then it become publicly more known with lot of ads everywhere. A lot of kids joined to the game. Developers tweaked and balanced everything. And it slowly became game without fun. Everything was so perfectly balanced, that it was almost irrelevant what tank you had. And with casualty of players regular games lacks any strategy. No cooperation, just insulting, grinding, no fun... I quit playing WoT after developers puts more and more imaginary/ridiculous tanks with every patch and balanced specific unique abilities of tanks.

barrysteve 4y ago

Ketroc in the Starcraft 2 AI Arena tournament mentions the same pattern. Starcraft 1 came out before the internet and web had crushed the meta. People would figure out how to play with their friends and then meet up at local tournaments to find out who knew how to play. It was an awesome period of discovery. The guys behind aiarena.net are having a blast running the AI bot tournament because they are making the meta up as they code better bots.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

What, exactly, were you going to min-max in Mario 64? Strategy guides have literally been a thing since the 1980s. The biggest change is not the players. The biggest change is the monetization of games that you have already played for and the sad hamster wheel that companies have put players on. While Elden Ring is mostly about exploration, most AAA games being developed nowadays consist of a set of mundane tasks that don't even make sense when putting them into a real world context. Kill 10 X. Collect 20 Y. Walk to Z and stand there while you "survey the area." It's all bullshit, but instead of just being able to enjoy the game by exploring to progress through the story, you have to do all this dumb crap.

PetitPrince 4y ago
> What, exactly, were you going to min-max in Mario 64? Time to finish the game, aka speedrun. Not necessarily a bad thing though (I love watching all the performance during AGDQ/SGDQ), but that's an example of "optimizing the fun out of the game".

musicale 4y ago

> But now with the internet, reddit, Discord etc. people can come together and basically "solve" the game they play I'm kind of OK with the metagame of every player vs. the developers. I even like the idea of developers vs. players in an MMO. There's sort of a cooperative aspect to it. But I also usually enjoy figuring things out on my own rather than consulting an internet walkthrough, and an MMO doesn't seem as fun if it is reduced to an exercise in efficiency maximization or trying to increase the value of some number.