Players as product? Needs quality control.

"If you need some conversation
Bring a magazine to read around
Our broke-down transportation"

 

Modest Mouse - Fire It Up

 

 

You know what I hate about League of Legends? Lots of things, and if any of the better AoS games like Paragon, Demigod, Gigantic or HotS were still active, I'd be getting my lane-pushing fix there instead. But for the moment, let's focus on this:

I've set the damn game to display hero names fifty times over and it's kept resetting itself to player names. I don't give a flying fuck what these little cretins call themselves! It's an auto-matchmaking class-based game with premade characters. Nobody gives a shit about you. You are <ROLE> therefore perform <ROLE> and be judged as <ROLE> then go fucking kill yourself for all anyone cares.

Boy I tells ya, nuthin' ruins a multiplayer game like the multiple players. (Which reminds me, if any tabletop groups are looking for a GM, I have zero experience and I'm very inflexible.)

But hopefully this isn't a sign of some larger trend to force contact between players again... is it? Please no.

 

 

My last Warframe clan (whatever it was called) kicked me out for inactivity some indeterminate number of months ago. Teammates are even less relevant in Diablo-inspired loot grinds than in AoS, except as space-fillers. Even the <ROLE> matters very little. Yet from the start, Warframe has forced players to join clans in order to access gear recipes, flight travel mode, even the entire spaceship game mode for a while. Having picked up most of that already, I'm set, and for the next few years can hopefully avoid associating with anyone else for more than twenty minutes at a time. If your new event requires clan membership, then fuck it, fuck you, fuck off. I'm not putting up with a hundred retards for one piece of loot or whatever you're offering.

 

I briefly enjoyed online guilds back in the early 2000s, when computer games were still a somewhat nerdy, maligned pursuit and the apes one met online were of above-average intelligence... or at least a distinguishable minority of them were... or if not, at least atypical enough to display some interesting quirks. That interaction hinged on online culture's superiority to human culture at large. Once the mainstream vermin poured in during the late 2000s, once the nerdiness was diluted out to homeopathic irrelevance, once online chatter lost any quality over offline, once the only conversation you could hope to strike up concerned what you had for lunch, any appeal guilds, clans or friend lists once held also died.

Regardless of the countless hordes cramming into Fortnite or LoL, multiplayer as a style is dead. It died last decade with the likes of City of Heroes and The Secret World and Team Fortress 2 and Planetside 2. Players are now worth only a slight, ever-dwindling edge in behavioral diversity over AI, and the faster we can obsolete them altogether, the faster AI can replace <ROLE> the better. Any RTS with a multiplayer mode like Northgard will have something like ten players online at any one time, all cursing each others' existence. It is absurd for Larian and other imitators to keep trying to cram multiplayer modes into cRPGs, meaninglessly sidelining the genre's main purpose of personal decisions/adventuring. Consider the monstrous waste of funding this presents compared with how few must actually be using such a feature. Baldur's Gate 3 is currently still enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame, applauded and awarded and talked about and selling like hotcakes - for an RPG at any rate. Let's peek at the hottest thing on the single-player market's multiplayer.

 

the entire robot mafia

This is what half a million concurrent players looks like.

9 p.m. EST (GMT -5) while the highschool and college shits are still on holiday no less.

27 lobbies, 22 of which have no business being online since there's nobody actually in there with you!

I also tried this eleven hours earlier. Predictably weaker results, with some lobbies (Eve/Steve) apparently being on around the clock. Unless you dragged half of Belgium online during west-European peak time when I blinked, this in no way justifies the developer work-hours you charged us to design the game for multiplayer.

What, this is supposed to justify wrecking the complexity and pacing of the single-player adventure? This is what's supposed to justify the clunky outdated chore of an individual character inventory system? Five fucking multiplayer matches for every million sales?

 

Companies love getting players to form attachments through their product because that way they'll keep paying into the activity by which their interaction was initially defined. They'll keep chasing that validation. Or so the Facebook theory runs, anyway. Except more might be noticing that even if you like the book, the faces are stupid. We're not hating the game. We're hating the players, and with good cause.

 

If multiple players are a sellable feature, then the feature is subject to quality control and quality assurance. What quality of players can you offer? Admit the vast majority of humans are sub-humans. You are trying to sell me on the golden opportunity of mind-melding with creatures which stopped reading after Harry Potter, which consider the Kardashians the pinnacle of cinema, which copy their character builds off online guides, run from every fight to pad their precious K/D ratios and cannot converse in anything but a random mish-mash of slang and re-posted memes. The vermin have nothing to say!

I bought your product precisely to avoid any more contact than strictly necessary with that disgusting eight-billion-headed, no-brained pile of degenerate subhuman filth!