I take it from your exasperation that you want a game to “just be good already”, from the very start. So I’ll exclude anything that takes too much thought or investment to start having a good time.
Deciding how to invest my resources, where to expand, when to attack, defend, or retreat, scouting and countering my opponent’s plans…
…but when it comes to the physical act of doing this stuff, it feels so horribly awkward that it’s like I’m fighting the UI more than my opponent.
Clicking and dragging selection boxes as if my troops are always in a rectangle formation? Right-clicking to attack but accidentally moving instead… And ugh, the endless series of tedious build queues.
The actual mechanics feel more like data entry — the kind with real bad RSI — than military leadership.
Job listing for back-end engineer at Arrowhead says:
Cloud Engineering: Utilize Azure services to build and optimize cloud-based backend components and make use of monitoring tools to track live performance.
Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution.
CEO said during the early day playercount woes:
It’s not a matter of money or buying more servers. It’s a matter of labour. We need to optimise the backend code. We are hitting some real limits.
They can’t just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that’s also baby bucks
A good back-end engineer is at least 100k. And a just-keep-the-lights-on crew is probably 3-4 of them.
FWIW: I also work in IT, on an IoT system that you might also assume has a “nonexistent” server cost. (I assure you, the cost exists.) I also used to work in game dev.
That said: Yeah, protesting by playing the game is a severely misguided notion.
Descenders. Just has a real nice flow state quality to it. Chill soundtrack. You can play as fast or slow as you want to. No pressure to do tricks or get high scores. Just making it to the finish line eventually is enough.
Copyright duration and rules are ripe for a complete overhaul, but it is worth noting that the so-called “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” really just put the US in line with the other countries in the Berne Convention, which the US had dragged its feet on signing onto for decades. Once the US agreed to respecting international rules for IP, offering a shorter copyright duration than Europe was an obvious disadvantage.