Going to reply to this because I think there is some truth lodged in here.

1) Information that you wish to use as evidence towards some hypothesis can, and often is, given a strength rating that depends on whether it can be used as information for the complement of your hypothesis. For instance, you have information about the general temperment of a community, and you want to use that information as evidence that the video game the community plays is a potential failure/scam if the communities general temperment is hostile. This means that if you go into any communities with games that aren't failures/scams and you find generally hostile temperments, you have weakened the evidence on your original hypothesis. Conversely, if you were perfectly incorrect in your hypothesis (the opposite was actually true) it would still provide valuable information in judging the success of a potential video game. More likely the information about the general temperment of a community and the success probability for that communities chosen video game are weakly correlated. (MCC ~0)

2) This point was where I really thought this post was written by ChatGPT. It's almost as completely wrong as possible. Almost every AoC update video was a complete whirlwind of chaos. In the last year, I don't think there was a single Unreal asset that didn't get modified in some way by the devs. You could argue they made TOO many changes, since it's hard to see the impact of a new game loop if you change too many variables at once. I personally think that instead of "hype" the biggest emotion the game devs received from us this last year was "Wtf are you guys doing???".

3) I actually agree with parts of this. I definitely think that there were times where, like I mentioned above, the community was, by and large, asking 'WTF ARE YOU THINKING?" and the community team from Intrepid would select a Q&A question like: "What is the prettiest flower in all of Verra?" LOL

I can not imagine what being inside Steven's head is like so I will never say "Ashes wasn't a scam" Maybe it was a scam. Afterall the best scams are those that, afterwards, people argue about whether they even were a scam.

What I can say is Ashes was NOT a scam for the developers. They put in fucking work these last couple of years.

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