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?
I propose a Red Faction retro spinoff. Cash in on the underused franchise and the modern boom-shoot glut by doing a voxel-based game where everything, and I mean everything, is destructible. Like if Teardown was a setpiece-heavy FPS pretending to be from the Delta Force / Outcast era. Low fidelity keeps costs down, the genre is weirdly underused for all its indie-demo examples, and if the immersive sim curse kills any sequels then they’re only back to square one.
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.
We already had that - it’s called “early access.” But people gunked that up, so they have to roll along the euphemism treadmill, and make a fancier name for paying extra to get an incomplete game.
Aw. From the thumbnail, I was hoping for 3D shaders that somehow matched the cartoon. Transformers: Devastation pulled it off mumble-mumble years ago and looked friggin’ incredible. I know it’s mostly using environment maps for squiggly cell-shaded reflections, but just, god dang. The execution can be masterful.
And nothing’s changed in all those years. Yeah? P2P technology couldn’t get any better than 2004. The fact it was slow sometimes means we’re boned forever.
Corporations already have streaming. I don’t care if they come along. Their content might be there whether they like it or not.
Consider where we’re having this conversation: is big even desirable? Has the dominance of one video platform been good for the internet? I’d say plainly fucking not, if killing ad blockers is even a feasible outcome. When YouTube was its own company there were a dozen competitors of similar size and quality. Google pouring money into one, so it could swallow everything and censor everyone and shove people toward right-wing propaganda, is not exactly ideal.
As if video streaming will die with one site. One for-profit site, that’s not remotely turning a profit. A vestigial organ of an advertising giant, burning money to build dependency and exploit it for control.
BitTorrent used to share more video than Netflix - despite a lack of money, despite a lack of ads, and despite being illegal. Content creators will be fine without this corporate facade.
Same shit with Facebook claiming videos were the bestest content possible, using numbers sourced from the vicinity of their pelvis. Now every goddamn news site has autoplaying video for no damn reason.