For those who don’t want to read the article to know what this has to do with Smurfs:
Smurf accounts are alternate accounts used by players to avoid playing at the correct MMR, to abandon games, to cheat, to grief, or to otherwise be toxic without consequence.
As always: if leaving or sucking ruins a game for everyone else, your game is badly designed.
Only MOBAs have this level of toxicity. All MOBAs have this problem. Maybe lashing strangers together for forty-five minutes, in a zero-sum contest where half of them will lose, with so much inter-dependence and complexity that nobody feels responsible, is not great for the human psyche.
You can’t even kick someone. Losing them for any reason ruins the game. You have to tough it out, for most of an hour, after waiting however long just to start the game, and the inevitable loss will still count against you. No kidding people get wound-up.
I’d add the caveat “badly designed for solo matchmaking.” Dota with friends–especially a five stack you get along with and play well with–is sublime. Dota with four randos is a complete and total crapshoot, though if your behavior score is good and you’re not in the total shit tier ranks it’s usually pretty fun.
I absolutely agree. I think the time investment is the biggest reason. I can easily shrug off a loss if it only took 5 minutes. It’s much harder to swallow when you feel like you just wasted the last hour of your life. Honestly I don’t know how to fix it though - the farming and leveling is kind of baked into the formula. You can speed up the process like Heroes of the Storm did but it’s going to feel like a “lite” version of the original.
If you could leave, you’d never be trapped in a long game. You would enjoy every long game. The ones that suck wouldn’t last.
Root problem: the game requires a fixed number of human players, from start to finish. If bots worked then you could just take the L and quit. Or safely eject someone who’s being a total cock. Or possibly even split the game in two, so both the “fuck this” and “fuck you” groups see everyone else replaced with bots.
Bots don’t have to be good with every character. Bots don’t even have to play by the same rules as humans. They just need to be balanced. Which you’d figure these developers are really really good at, after fifteen years of pouring new characters into these games.
Individual scoring would be almost as powerful. A high-level player with a low-level team should ideally be scored on their skill - not a binary win / lose condition. Especially if half the players are guaranteed to lose. Long matches provide oodles of time to evaluate. And if bots work at all, the game can quietly run simulations from snapshots of the ongoing match - checking if players did better or worse than a player-like script would, and by how much.
Compare sports. You have a regulation basketball game. On one side is the 2023 Miami Heat, minus Jimmy Butler. On the other side you have the AZ Compass Prep Dragons, plus Jimmy Butler. The Dragons’ chances of winning are approximately diddly over fuck. But a talent scout watching those high-schoolers get smoked 132-15 can still recognize which of them are doing especially well under the circumstances. And Erik Spoelstra can still give Tyler Herro side-eye for ever missing a free throw. Despite a blowout loss, every individual can be judged for how they played, both in terms of independent actions and productive teamwork. (This new kid at Arizona, Jimmy somethingorther, is really good.)
Yet in a video game - where every moment can be scrutinized frame-by-frame, and statistical analysis is so easy you’d think this was baseball - there is only total victory and utter defeat, and only for whole teams. Everything from Smash Bros to Overwatch has little trophies to hand out for leading performance in a bunch of arbitrary details. So why doesn’t a loss caused by one feeding troll count as 90% of a win for the players who almost eked it out in spite of them?
More importantly: why doesn’t the game make it feel like they were doing good, when they were doing great?
Hit the nail on the head, I'd say. Some future competitive game that endeavors to weigh in an evaluation of personal contribution over just the binary win/loss condition and that implements ways to automatically mitigate the negatives enumerated for long duration matches is going to start off in a really good place.
Handling those issues honestly seems like Step 1 in tackling the kind of negativity that is notorious for cropping up in these sorts of games. If everyone's having a better time and doesn't feel punished for things outside of their control, it seems reasonable to assume that the baseline behavior will be a lot more chill.
If the smurf detection/etc is good, then that’s the first way to alleviate those toxic behavior. It’s a really bad feedback cycle when smurfs are involved. My main game is rocket league, you can have smurf that win the game single-handedly and then start to play 1v3 or 2v4 because he decides that he wants to lose these games to keep playing at lower rank, or something you did the smurf don’t like, and you might be some MMR away for your next promotion and it doesn’t matter. The MMR matchmaking this little shit to your matches because he decides to smurf instead of playing at his normal level.
I don’t know much about dota or moba games, but the idea is the same, smurf will pump more negativity into the game.
DOS2 combat allowed you to do goofy stuff and was fun casting spells. BG3 is more 1 turn 1 action and much slower and methodical, I mean makes sense, it is DnD afterall, it's designed for tabletop.
Yeah I mean I thought divinity combat was fun. I could make massive plays to freeze everyone, create all sorts of elemental clouds and surfaces, group enemies up with teleports, etc. Some combos were definitely OP but that’s what makes it fun + you could ramp up difficulty with mods and such. You could also cast spells for fun or teleport just to get around the map without having to long rest. Baldur’s gate is much slower paced and playing with the elements like that seems way less viable.
I really liked the combat of DOS2. All the interactions between spells were a lot of fun. The only Thing i disliked is, how ineffetive movement felt. Either you had an attack which included movement, or you didnt wanna move
What interaction? The constant everything blows up damaging everyone while healing sucks? Stunning yourself because your standing in blood that glitched under ground? Spells that don't work on the slightest change in the z-axis?
All the interactions between conditions. How wet is the condition to Support shock aswell as frost. How the Rangers First Aid is the only way to remove knockdown. How Charmed kann be removed by clear mind, but not by magic armor. How most geomancer spells create explosive surfaces to synergise with pyro. How you can usw dragons breath to clear Ice so your Charakter wont slip
I picked up DOS1 EE and DOS2. Playing 1 when I don’t have access to my desktop as my laptop isn’t capable of running BG3. Still in the first town, but so far I’m enjoying Divinity as well.
Really sad. GTA Online in principle sounds so cool, but it's such a shitty execution. I'm sure if modded servers were encouraged I'd find something to my liking but the way this rotten piece of shit company treats modders is just despicable, and always has been.
A lot of stuff is Iike that. Ultimate Team in Madden or FIFA, without the monetization, could potentially be one hell of a game mode (though also maybe hard to balance). The idea of being able to build out a team to your personal preferences and play style and match up against others head to head is awesome.
But "fuck you, we want users dropping $10k on their team", so we can't have nice things.
I believe my last time playing FIFA was on the PSX. I vaguely heard something about loot box style booster packs to get players I think? Imagine Nintendo would do that with Pokemon, and all the good & rare ones would be super rare, but you could of course buy packs for real money. 🎰
That's basically what ultimate team is in practice.
If it had no cash involved and was either tuned to a level where a normal person could build a team that was competitive at the high end in a month or so (since it is, ultimately, an annual game) or you just had a budget and could sign who you wanted (based on "market value" that was set based on overall rating and position or that fluctuated with how many people had a guy on their roster), it could be awesome.
But yeah, it's basically a card game (that I think also has cards expire, though I don't play it at all) that's designed to milk whales for cash. And they replaced a lot of the normal Madden tournaments you could win money playing to use this nonsense mode instead.
The only semi-saving grace is that it's mostly self contained. There are obnoxious ads for it, and other game modes haven't seen the development work they should because they spend most of the non-engine work on that nonsense, but you can still just play online head to head of a great football sim if you tune out the nonsense.
It's super scummy and I would love to see legal involvement shut it all down. Lootboxes are unregulated gambling and in sports games specifically they're very obviously targeting kids.
Yeah. I already don't do trading card games because of this. Having an expiration date on the cards sounds even dumber. Kinda sad how everything nowadays has to get milked into oblivion. Really kills the fun of many games, but unfortunately people still buy into it. Reminds me also how "micro" transactions ended up ruining the mmorpg genre. Everything is just so over-commercialized nowadays (same for the internet).
So I think it was "games played" "contracts" and there were ways to earn extensions through normal play when I briefly played the single player part a while back. I recognized the giant trap for what it was and bailed and am not sure the current state, but if it did exist and is scummy and makes them more money, I'd be surprised if they walked it back.
There are infinitely more accessibility settings and devices on the market now than there’s ever been. Ever. I get that not everyone is able to play, but the industry is leaps above what it was before.
Like, game reviewers have even started pointing out accessibility features specifically - a major release without them is kinda newsworthy.
Sure, indie games might not be complying, but the amount of indie games with no key rebinding or GFX settings is a problem too - those might not be catering to all able-bodied folks either.
I’m happy to give indies a pass because they generally don’t have the resources to know what accessibility settings people need, and they often don’t go through the major reviewers. I think people should absolutely point out those issues, but I really expect new releases to be fully accessible.
Don’t forget Nintendo titles being the most locked-down zero options games on the market. I played a Nintendo game for the first time in a decade recently and my god it felt so antequated. Couldn’t even change volume levels lol.
Yeah, I’m hearing impaired and need captions. I’ve never seen a major game without them for many years now, and recent games have gone above and beyond with things like captioning sounds (not just dialogue) and directional indicators.
I kinda hope someday they’ll remaster the original Assassin’s Creed. It’s the only non-spin off in the series that I haven’t played. I own a copy, but gave up on it because it has no captions and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying.
I also love how difficulty settings are much more common now. I’m never gonna buy a Dark Souls game. Fuck those. I tried the first game and learned my lesson. Thankfully, most games these days don’t take such an elitist stance with difficulty. It’s really common that games these days will let you change difficulty on the fly. Some games have split puzzle vs combat difficulty. I’ve seen some games have specific settings just for reaction timing. And also love those settings that highlight interactive objects so I don’t waste so much time looking for subtle hints that something is interactive.
It is baffling why Sony thinks studios who are known for their single player story driven games will all the sudden be rock stars at GAAS model games. No matter how it turns out, you’ve already got a dedicated fan base for these companies expecting a single player story driven game. These types of gamers have no interest whatsoever in micro transaction riddled online experiences. And by diverting developers away from single player content towards GAAS content, they’ll make worse single player games and half hearted multiplayer online games.
Coming from bg3, I had the opposite opinion. BG3 loading screens take a while but it doesnt load very much unless your loading saves a lot. With Starfield you get hit with a small loading screen constantly like when transitioning in/out of ships, buildings, planets, etc.
For me it’s not the speed, but the quantity. Docking? Loading screen. Launching off planet? Loading screen. Changing planet? Loading screen. Landing on the same planet? Loading screen. The only solution is to fast travel everywhere in an “immersive” space sim RPG. NMS and Elite:Dangerous have solved this issue. Bethesda needs to get with the times already.
Imagine still believing you’re going to get a functioning game.
I was an initial Kickstarter who pretty much knew this was going to happen but had $60 to gamble. Fucking lolol the development hell has far exceeded my wildest expectations for Roberts inability to deliver a finished project.
You know whats better? Not reporting shit, I just published my game. I don’t want to report a bunch of numbers to Unity each month. I want to push updates to fix issues my users are complaining about. How the fuck are the biggest chucklefucks in charge of every company? Give me the fucking reigns I can do better than this.
I feel like most digital stores already gives you all the statistics you need to make this trivial though. Steam even reports the difference after refunds/returns for you.
it’s the best way to do a rev share. pretty sure unreal engine lets you self report too. If you start a business you can’t complain about having to run a a business by tracking sales.
I can when I didn’t have to do it before and this policy is forced upon me by an established vendor. Thats like saying you can’t bitch about material vendors in the construction industry, you absolutely can because they make your business work and you’ve entrusted them not to fuck you.
With all intentions of respect, and in complete agreement that Unity’s new terms are alarming, If you dont have any intentions of tracking your sales unless you are forced to by the creators of your engine you are using, I’m questioning if you have the chops to be a successful dev in the first place. This is why the vast majority of devs don’t even make enough to even pay Unity the fee and should just stick with a publisher instead of trying to handle the business end of things on their own.
Its not the tracking of sales thats the issue. Its having to report it to someone so they can take even more of my money when we haven’t been doing that for years.
I saw a theory from another lemmy user a while back that made a lot of sense. Basically shareholders get to a point where the want cash now. So they make a deal with the current CEO to do something shitty for short term profits. The shareholders get paid in the short term and then once the share price takes a hit they buy more shares at a discount. They then fire the current CEO who takes a nice exit fee and install someone else to do damage control and grow the stock price again. This is the only thing that makes sense to me because the alternative is that the current CEO is just actually that dumb.
For me the problem is that the shareholders are putting enormous pressure on publicly traded companies requiring ever lasting exponential growth.
Back then I posted a thread about why I think publicly traded companies are bad for our society, as an unpopular opinion and I got severely downvoted, but hey isn’t this another example for the latter?
This SaaS model was born exactly out of this and it is the worst offender.
Back then we were able to own our own software/hardware, now everything is leasing and perpetual paying for things you need/use everyday. Thank God we have foss apps that in most cases are better alternatives.
I loathe seeing ads in any medium whatsoever, especially a medium I use for escaping this ad-filled apocalypse of a world we all live in. Why on Earth would I willingly force ads onto people who have generously supported me doing the thing I love most?
Disclaimer: I haven’t made any games yet, but someday “soon”…
It’ll be interesting to see how many games are made in unity. I suspect quite a lot will be actually because developers haven’t had time to learn anything new yet it’s been about 5 minutes. No doing that may screw them over long term so maybe they won’t.
But MONEY! Don’t you want to make loads of MONEY? Here, watch this Unity developer video about how to squeeze MONEY out of those generous chumps who supported you! It’s the Unity way!
Can Godot compare to unity in terms of features? I admit the last time I looked at it was probably over 2 years ago but it was very bare bones and could only do 2D graphics. Since the project I was developing at the time was a 3D game I kind of ignored it after that.
The 3D demos are impressive, and the most recent release added a lot of features for 3D development, such as a Vulkan renderer and a bunch of lighting effects.
I’m no 3D game dev, but from what I’ve seen, it’s ready for smallish 3D games. I don’t think the performance is anywhere near Unreal, but it seems to be capable enough for most indie 3D titles.
What the other folks said. To add, there are several games made with Godot that look like they match Unity in terms of graphical fidelity. And if you’re a boomer like me who doesn’t care about graphics, there are cool games like Ex Zodiac
Godot 4 drastically improved the capabilities of godot, especially in the 3d realm. It isn’t perfect, but I would say it is about on par with unity in terms of features. Note that some of the more advanced stuff are in modules that you need go download within the editor. This was done to keep the core light while not sacrificing features.
Last night I uninstalled Un*ty and replaced it with Godot, so I’m very excited to start learning. It’s a little disappointing that it’s not as “capable” as other engines, but my conscience (and future expectations) will be clear. And besides, to me game dev is about expressing oneself artistically and not chasing numbers and metrics.
If there is something you want to do and it isn’t simple and you think it should be, there is a good chance that there is a module that adds that functionality. Good luck!
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