Cutting through the Treacle: AlzRAMmer's Disease

"So tell me, who are you dissing or maybe I'm missing

The reason that you're smiling or wilding

[...]

This time, this time I'm losing my mind"

 

Beastie Boys - So What'Cha Want

 

 

(working title: I Am My Own Grandpa, Redux)

 

Sometime in recent months, League of Legends began saving your role selection while queuing up for a match. Apparently after fourteen years of unjustifiably dominating the AoS market, they finally sussed out that players in class-based games tend to play their favorite classes repeatedly. You don't say. (ProTip: they also like leveling up, scoring kills and getting loot.) But, in Riot's defense, they're far from the only game designers forcing customers to repeatedly click-through pointless pre-flight checklists.

I've also been playing the squad management dungeon-crawler Iratus recently.

 

"Choose a battle squad" hmmm, let's see, well, tough choice, jinkies gang, I'm stumped! Maybe I should go with Squad 1, the same one I've been playing so far and the ONLY squad I will ever choose because in the absence of multi-squad fights you only ever shuffle units in and out of your ONE active squad. Your reserves should mostly be healing/training. Somehow, being forced to confirm the obvious for hundreds of fights in a row has never once altered my choice!

The same routine proved doubly unjustifiable among Wartile's many nuisances:

 

- for often making it literally impossible to alter your group composition (three recruitable party members and exactly three spots on the boat, etc.) yet still demanding you drag-drop the idiotic little digitized plastic toys onto the little diorama boat every. single. goddamn. time!

 

But I'm not bitter, dear game developers. I understand that in the five or fifty gigabytes of memory space your piece of shit of a product's taking up on my hard drive, complete with glossy high-resolution flashing buttons for your Twitter feed, Discord channel, forums, store pages, blooper reels, YouTube ads, holiday-themed costumes, DLC spam, director's commentary and podcast of your mother-in-law's appendectomy, there just weren't enough bits left over to dedicate to a few hundred lines of plain text preserving my own preferences in a .ini file or whatever they're calling it these days. I simply cannot express my gratitude at your open disdain for my choices. Especially when you're asking my money for the privilege of choosing.

Like all so-called "MMO"s Lord of the Rings Online gradually degraded to an outlet store for imaginary funny hats over the years, and having played on and off since its launch I've accumulated quite a few such hats. And spaulders. And boots made for walking. And capes for the crusadin'. And more cowbell. And a loaf of bread for some reason. Well, collect however many you want, but you still only get 8 outfit slots maximum to play dress-up. Any more might stress our servers and cause lag or something, and we need that server space to store three different versions of every consumable item reiterated every five character levels and ten different names and stats for every reused item visual and aaahh, by the way, please keep buying more character slots to feed your alt-itis everyone and please never look up the term "force multiplier" if you hear the fiberoptics creakin'.

I mean, The Secret World was even worse, as there the limited number of outfit slots applied not just to cosmetics but the the various gear you constantly needed to un/re-slot when swapping classes and damage types for different dungeons. The same applies to the aforementioned League of Legends' "rune" loadouts.

What are you selling?

 

Games, as media, bank on interactivity. Everything from new map settings to character and town names to group and gear loadouts to cosmetics express your customers' interests, personality and strategy. I don't care if you're motivated by microtransactions or interface timesinks to drag out those gameplay-hour totals or you're trying to build addictive anticipation of reward stimuli. This bullshit's been old for ages now. I'm not inclined to believe that the same program which records my last million mouse clicks suddenly hits a patch of senility when trying to remember my name, or whether I clicked "1" or "2" in the squad selection window last fight. I even less appreciate being nickel-and-dimed for the honor of permutating the content I already paid you for.

If you have enough memory to animate your company logo, you have enough memory to save my preferences.