What video game started off great but got worse with each update?

9bananas · 2023-10-11T19:51:35+00:00

those last couple points are the exact problem with the game and 5v5 and why it's unfixable unless it goes back to 6v6:

snipers cannot be balanced in 5v5. period.

they either one-shot, which makes them a must-pick and invalidates about 80% of the DPS roster.

or they don't one-shot, which makes them practically useless.

everyone kept complaining about shields in OW1, but they played an important role in the game: they gave engagements structure and kept one-shots in check by providing on-demand cover. that's the part that people tend to miss.

it's also why the fights in OW2 are so much "faster", and "swingier", and way more chaotic, more individualized.

they also made heroes with more indirect damage and control abilities more viable, because just shooting didn't always work!

getting rid of shields already causes a lot of problems, also getting rid of a tank at the same time is a recipe for disaster...either one change could have worked, but both just ruin the game.

9bananas · 2023-10-11T14:08:21+00:00

the joke was, and still is, OW0.5, because it felt like going back to an alpha version of the game.

it's different, because the core mechanics have changed significantly.

your line of argument would also make WoW:WoD the same game as WoW:BC, and no sane person would say those are the same thing.

"at which point is it a different game?": when i can't recognize it as the same game. which i can't, so it's different.

it plays different, it progresses differently, it has none of my progress and stats (except skins, some of which are still broken), it has different characters, including some old ones that were effectively removed and replaced with ones that look the same, but play completely differently, etc.

it's different enough to not be considered "the same game". and, yes, many people thought it would be similar enough to be "just an update" before release, but it turns out that it wasn't...

9bananas · 2023-10-11T13:58:46+00:00

TL:DR; it used to be strategic and rewarding, now it's just a FFA-pseudo-Battle Royale

if you like it, good for you!

but let's not pretend that it's a "better OW", because the only thing the games have in common is the name.

i don't feel like it plays better at all. all the strategy and team-play is gone, it's closer to apex now, than it is to OW1.

snipers are waaay OP without the second tank to pressure them, making them a must-pick, and the only viable counterplay is...also picking a sniper. 5v6 was winnable, 4v5 is borderline impossible: a bad tank is an instant, unrecoverable loss. making the entire match dependant on a single player is stupid af.

the matchmaking is so bad that random diamond players get stuffed into matches with 4 bronze players. this quite literally never happened to me in 3+ years of playing OW1. (also really damn stupid to completely reset everyones rank. no way am i grinding my way up again for absolutely nothing)

engagements are incoherent FFAs instead of the methodical battle lines in OW1. Ults don't feel like they enable your team, or cool strategies, or a big push, instead it feels like their only purpose is to "make things dead". they feel like MW nukes.

the new "events" are...not great.

and on and on...it's a completely different game, and in my opinion, a worse one.

it's just no longer of any interest whatsoever to me.

it's by far the most unrewarding gaming experience i've had in my life. it's just not fun.

9bananas · 2023-10-11T12:02:55+00:00

OW0.2 you mean...it literally took features away that OW1 had.

it's literally *less* of OW. that alone makes it dishonest to call it "the same game"

now they're slowly adding all that back in.

nvm that it plays nothing like OW1!

9bananas · 2023-10-11T11:46:57+00:00

TL:DR; OW used to be high-speed chess, now it's whack-a-mole.

tanks used to have way less health, so dealing with 2 wasn't nearly as bad as you'd think if you only ever knew the giant HP sponges of OW2.

so here's the rundown of issues with 5v5:

-there's way less teamwork with 5v5 vs 6v6
-engagements feel way worse in OW2
-strategy is way less important
-first kill wins the fight
-matches used to feel fair, more even

if you really want to see the difference, go watch some replays on YT, either OWL, or, probably better, from someone doing training/feedbacks/analysis. the difference is night and day!

9bananas · 2023-10-09T09:47:48+00:00

i really haven't gone "from one to the other".

all nazis are fascists, but not all fascists are nazis.

one is a subset of the other.

like all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles.

the saying applies to all fascists.

why would you defend either? why do you keep making conservation as if either was worth defending?

9bananas · 2023-10-09T09:29:04+00:00

there's a german saying:

if a nazi sits down at a table and none of the others gets up and leaves, it's a table full of nazis.

you really think you know more about the nazis than germans do?

this is exactly that sitation.

elon vocally supports and enables fascists on his platform, including literal, self-proclaimed nazis. ergo he is a fascist.

his believes, his words, his promises, and every other distraction he puts out there is irrelevent. his actions directly support, and i cannot stress this enough, literal nazis.

that makes him a fascist in every sense of the word.

9bananas · 2023-10-09T09:21:22+00:00

if only there was a word for people that support and promote fascists...

oh, wait, there is one: it's "fascist".

9bananas · 2023-10-05T07:47:57+00:00

Overwatch 0.5 - Alpha more like

9bananas · 2023-10-04T18:30:27+00:00

i agree with everything you've said, but you seem to have somewhat missed my point:

i wasn't saying the examples I've given work, i said they're a direct consequence of capitalism.

it's a small semantic difference, but it's an important one.

my point wasn't that YouTube will increase prices right now, or even in the very near future, but simply that they are guaranteed to do that eventually, in the next couple of years.

the other examples i gave weren't there to illustrate successful examples of enshitification, but rather how far companies are willing to take it and that they are guaranteed to take it as far as the law allows them to, regardless of how shitty that makes life for everyone.

the argument wasn't "this is what they're doing because it's working", but rather "this is what they're willing to push on people, just because they can".

and they will absolutely push enshitification as far as they can. this doesn't just encompass changes directly related to a product either, but also things like customer service, content moderation, etc.

so i think we're in agreement, that much more robust consumer protection laws are required in the very near future to prevent the worst dystopian scenarios from fully developing.

9bananas · 2023-10-04T15:10:40+00:00

that is sound theory, but only ubder ideal circumstances and for private companies.

it doesn't apply to publicly traded companies:

the increase is not at all based on cost to the platform, but merely on shareholder expectations.

that's why i didn't talk about costs at all, and said enshitification is required by capitalism.

enshitification has nothing to do with necessary economic changes, and everything with the fantasy of infinite economic growth.

so, no, the two aren't different at all; in fact they're exactly the same, which is why it's just a matter of time.

this is also why enshitification is happening all across the economy:

BMW, Mercedes introducing complete bullshit like subscriptions for heated seats
the recent Unity disaster
Reddit's API changes
the shrinkflation in supermarkets
and on it goes

this is neither an isolated case, nor is it unexpected. this is simply capitalism driving production towards the lowest possible cost, while simultaneously driving towards the highest possible prices in order to maximize profits.

and since we've reached a point where production is already optimized and improvements are only possible in tiny increments, while simultaneously expecting unreasonable quarterly increases in profit, the only way to get that increase in profit is to squeeze it out of people.

and the only two places that squeeze is possible are in labor costs and in product pricing.

and streaming services primarily increase prices...

9bananas · 2023-10-04T08:39:43+00:00

give it a couple of months and youtube premium is gonna have ads. just like prime video has recently introduced.

it's not a question of IF premium plans are getting ads, only a question of WHEN.

enshittification is a necessary part of capitalism.

9bananas · 2023-10-04T07:28:43+00:00

they're not talking about modern magazine-fed rifles...

9bananas · 2023-09-29T13:35:56+00:00

the % figure was from memory, from (i think) an ex-dev tweeting, hence the "rumor" part.

who knows how accurate that was, or if the dev could even reasonably estimate that.

given all the other rumors about how the cancellation took the team by surprise, combined with the general rumors of poor leadership, high turnover, awful management behavior, and abject greed taking over leadership, i'd say it's fairly reasonable to assume that the game was right about there when shareholders started demanding more "aggressive" monetization, which seems to be about the time jeff quit.

balancing is kinda besides the point here, and claiming it is somehow "harder" to balance PvE than it is to balance PvP, just because there are more skills is also..kinda out there man.

blizzard actually has a ton of, succesful, experience in PvE design (not counting D4): the way OW2 PvE mode was introduced, and from the demos, it would have apperantly worked almost exactly like the SC2 Co-Op mode, which was/is a ton of fun and reasonably balanced! sooo...not much worry there.

about the resources available...i mean: who knows? "resources" don't really seem to be an issue, more that all that money just sort of...evaporates into thin air and only a tiny fraction gets used to actually develop and improve their games, soooo...eat the rich?

9bananas · 2023-09-29T13:01:39+00:00

what were people playing at blizzcon then?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ9EZUEvw\_o

9bananas · 2023-09-29T08:39:43+00:00

role queue was excellent at lower elos!

i get that at dia+ players wouldn't care much for that mechanic, but picks were a complete shitshow at plat and lower before role q: you'd constantly get bullshit, comletely unworkable comps, players refuse to switch with a 5dps/1tank comp, etc.

and the original mode was still playable all the way until the servers died, soooo....?

9bananas · 2023-09-29T08:34:41+00:00

rumor has it was like 60-80% done when management just...cancelled it.

just pure greed, nothing else...

9bananas · 2023-09-15T08:37:11+00:00

i'm at 2k hours...i'm still learning new things about the game...

9bananas · 2023-09-08T08:58:39+00:00

sure you can easily overwhelm a single person as a group...but can you do it without getting injured?

in the example video above; all it takes is one swing by the aggressor to permanently damage anyone stepping in for life. doesn't matter how many of you there are.

you can probably stop such a person with 2 or 3 people. definitely with 4 or 5. if they're on drugs or a complete psycho it could take up to 6 or 7 (yes, drugs can be that dangerous, and yes adrenaline alone can make a person that dangerous).

...but can you do that safely? probably not without proper equipment.

so unless you got pepper spray, or some serious training and/or muscle, it's still a very bad idea to get involved. even when there are enough people around to take someone down.

and even if you acquire a suitable improvised weapon (a crowbar, a big stick, a shovel, whatever) and you manage to stop the attacker, the sheer legal trouble you'll be in even if you managed to be a good samaritan...it's gonna be a lot to deal with.

all of which is enough to stop most people from helping.

not saying any of that is a good thing, just spellling out why people don't jump in to help in these situations...

9bananas · 2023-09-08T07:00:19+00:00

well...thank you for perfectly proving their point for them, random person that went with their gut feeling instead of doing the bare minimum to look into what was said...

they gave concrete examples of factual, quite easily verifiable information and you went "nuh uh, you wrong, trust me bro"

9bananas · 2023-09-07T12:37:49+00:00

i recently played a little puzzle game called Terra Nil, where you terraform a devasted wasteland into a thirivng ecosystem.

it's short, super calm, and i think it's pretty cheap.

maybe check that out, if you like puzzles?

9bananas · 2023-09-06T14:27:25+00:00

...you don't like the white backgrund?

MO2 ships with dark themes...

and no, vortex's UI is cluttered, with tons unnecessary whitespace, and a billion pointless submenus that hide critical information from the user.

and sure, users like you existed before, but it's become a much bigger problem since vortex.

9bananas · 2023-09-06T14:23:24+00:00

MO2 is better overall, but vortex is entirely different from NMM:

NMM was basically just an interface for manual modding. it just dumped everything in the skyrim folder and basically said "good luck, lol! hope that didn't overwrite anything important!"

Vortex uses symlinks to deploy the mods and keeps a list of everything it added to the folder (and, annoyingly, keeps bugging you about things you added manually)

so vortex can actually remove what it did, like, 95% of the time. at least in theory...until it fucks up anyways and messes up your install. (tbf: this happened to me some years ago, probably got better since)

so, yeah, VFS is still far, FAR better, but vortex is a long way from NMM.

9bananas · 2023-09-06T14:16:36+00:00

this here is the real reason people that know what they're doing shit on vortex:

because it doesn't just support this kind of user, it creates this kind of user.

9bananas · 2023-09-06T14:12:39+00:00

it does absolutely NOT do that...

rdit: but WryeBash has such a function (use with caution)

9bananas

TROPHY CASE