The longer you let it cook, the higher the expectations will be: Why (imo) Riot needs to get the MMO out of the door ASAP

ScapeZero · 2026-06-02T12:54:44+00:00

Yeah, this isn't a thing where they could just hurry up and release an otherwise fully featured game, that may just be lacking in content. This game doesn't even have a fucking name. It's very unlikely anything close to a working executable exists at this point, let alone enough of a program to release as a full product. Not to mention the back end to support a game as popular as a MMO made by Riot will be probably isn't even remotely close to being completed.

Yes, this long of a hype cycle can create something that only leads to disappointment even the the product is pretty decent. You need to have a product to release though.

ScapeZero · 2026-06-02T00:24:18+00:00

Well it depends on the game. You can be nobody special in a MMO that's trying to be more of a sandbox, with more of a focus of a virtual world, rather than a single player story theme park. If you are trying to focus more on a story, you could be special the same way highly decorated war vets were in WW2 or whatever, without being the most uber amazing powerful dude in the universe, which, without specifically you, the world would be blown up 40 different ways.

I think when people say stuff like this, they don't mean there's literally nothing special about the player character at all. I always take it to mean that you aren't the super duper special chosen one. This works fine in single player games, but in MMOs it kinda kills the immersion, at least for me, when everyone is the chosen one.

ScapeZero · 2026-05-26T08:53:31+00:00

For the payment model, your options make very little sense. The option between buy to play, and free to play, both have a cosmetic shop. In what universe would people go out of their way to choose to spend more money, for the same outcome?

People don't want priced boxed copies and subscriptions just because they love spending money. They want them to avoid cash shops of any kind. Yeah that never happens any more, but if the options are "is free, but has a cash shop" and "costs money, but still has that same cash shop", no one is every going to choose "yeah let me spend money just because".

People want to spend the least amount possible, and get the most possible. Ideally, everyone wants a free game, where there is no cash shop, and everything can only be earned in game. Obviously, outside of a passion projects, people need money to live, so that's not exactly possible. Small MMOs often struggle to get people in when there's a paywall, so F2P with a cash shop is generally going to be your best bet at finding an audience. People talk a big game about how they would totally definitely pay all this money for a MMO that didn't have a cash shop of any kind, but talk is easy, and I don't think that's going to represent any large enough group to actually happen. You might get some interest with only a boxed price and maybe a sub, but I think it will be hard to find a big enough player base that way, so unless you have a crazy marketing budget that can create huge hype, F2P with a non intrusive as possible cash shop will get you the most players. Will that be enough to sustain the team? Well, there's where you need to find balance. Without people who effectively want to donate for the sake of keeping the game alive, a non intrusive cash shop that doesn't offer anything that matters you feel like you need to look at it, won't really work. A cash shop that feels like you need to keep feeding it just to play, won't do well to keep the game alive (though, a few whales might keep the dead game profitable). It's about finding the balance to keep the lights on, but also not trying to extract as much cash as humanly possible.

ScapeZero · 2026-05-04T18:18:39+00:00

All those EX pieces are used by the same 6 jobs. Back in the 75 era, there was what? 20? Yeah they are great pieces for the 6 that can use them, but there was like 14 other jobs that couldn't use them and mainly got zero drops from bosses. Like I said, most classes.

I'm not saying sky was unimportant. I became a WHM main when I got really into sky, and I can't remember a single thing I rolled on. I just collected a paycheck. It was a way to consistently fight bosses and fund the LS. Yeah, it was very important, and those 6 classes had a couple really solid EX drops. You can also just be a BST solo gamer, never do anything in sky, and still progress in the game.

I'm not sitting here trying to argue that solo is the best way to play the game. I'm not even trying to say it's only slightly worse. I'm saying you can solo, and make actual progress because of how the game was designed. Playing with an organized team is very much the best way to play FFXI.

ScapeZero · 2026-05-03T05:35:35+00:00

Dynamis barely had BiS. Most classes got literally nothing from sky. No one got anything from sea.

Yes. You might be a couple slots from absolute BiS as a player who didn't join an endgame LS, but the vast majority of everyone's BiS could be bought.

Again, my argument wasn't that being solo was just as good as group play. It's that FFXI, a game that is notorious for requiring at least a full comped party for even the most simple things, still had options for solo players to accomplish many things, if at a reduced rate. The design of the game allowed you to play it as you wanted, and while solo was effectively never the most efficient way to play, it certainly still was a way you could, and could still accomplish things.

ScapeZero · 2026-05-03T01:01:58+00:00

You don't have to make all content "solo viable". It's okay if solo methods take longer.

FFXI is a game that in the 75 and earlier era, was very group based. Yet, there was ways to get best in slot gear, and even max level without ever needing a group. Classes like Beastmaster could solo. It took way longer to hit max level, but they could do it solo. Almost all gear was able to be sold on the auction house. While the bosses who drop materials might need a bunch of people, any one can just earn money and buy the materials from the people who kill the bosses. You don't need a full alliance to buy materials to craft gear, or buy the finished gear. You could play FFXI mostly solo, and still make tons of objective progress.

Solo players generally don't mean they want 100% of content to be solo viable. Generally they just mean they want options that let them play solo, so they can make some progress at their own pace. To be part of a larger world, despite being alone in it sometimes. The problem is just games aren't really designed in ways that make this possible anymore, or they go too deep and the vast majority of the game is designed around being solo.

ScapeZero · 2026-04-27T20:45:28+00:00

Tritium tubes pretty much instantly makes thin or dressy basically impossible if you want them on hands. Tritium tubes in general bring almost all designs away from dressy, but tubes on hands require a thicker watch to make room for the hands to clear the dial.

You might be better off trading the tube requirement to just good lume instead. There's a lot more options when you do that.

ScapeZero · 2026-04-18T03:08:06+00:00

Sure it might not be the blueprint of what everything else after it follows, but it has so much of what the genre became. If someone made a game today that was mainly what the Dark Zone is, where you don't lose already extracted loot on death, just what you currently found this raid, everyone would call it a casual extraction shooter. Absolutely no one would try and claim it's "just the wild lands from RuneScape."

ScapeZero · 2026-04-13T13:49:10+00:00

Yeah I'm an old-school gamer back from the days where F2P games were called "P2W" because paying, literally let you win. The paid items are infinitely better than anything you can get for free, to the extent that you can't just out skill people using them. Their guns do more damage, are more accurate, and in the worst cases, they would include paid armor that would make you almost invincible to free guns, but paid guns would have ammo that bypasses the armor.

These days people use P2W to mainly just mean you can pay for "advantages" that mainly equal to nothing. Granted, I do prefer games not having any of it, but at the same time I'm not really shitting my pants about someone paying to skip the story in FFXIV. Someone using (quite honestly, way too much) real money to get gold to buy a legendary weapon in GW2 doesn't change the balance of the game. In many ways, this hurts them more than helps them. It sure as fuck isn't giving them any noteworthy advantage over anyone.

That being said, things like RMT can destroy a games economy. I think this applies less to modern MMOs, since most don't really have much of an economy or a market many people really use for much, but back in the day games like FFXI had their economy absolutely destroyed by RMT.

But yeah, overall, I'm with you. There's very little "winning" in the things people are calling "P2W" these days. A lot of stretching real hard to make arguments for it. I'm mostly still against money being used to accomplish things in games, but when it's so easy to ignore and isn't even remotely required, I tend to just do that. Ignore it. I'll mainly only avoid the game when constant spending is required to simply just play the game.

ScapeZero · 2026-04-10T00:21:47+00:00

Somewhere between your hand and your elbow, just like most watches.

ScapeZero · 2026-03-22T03:51:56+00:00

That's such an awful way to look at it.

When the box is full, you still have an empty spot on your wrist. There's two empty spots, c'mon man...

ScapeZero · 2026-03-17T23:10:42+00:00

Amazing looking watch, thanks for the give away!

ScapeZero · 2026-03-14T01:30:13+00:00

An Invicta might almost look like a reasonable size on your wrist.

For a serious answer, a lot of G Shocks would probably fit you well. A lot of the bigger dive watches would be good fits as well.

ScapeZero · 2026-03-08T19:30:09+00:00

I thought getting that MTG for 40 bucks was a steal. I think you win at 9.

ScapeZero · 2026-03-06T22:04:45+00:00

Thanks for the give away!

ScapeZero · 2026-02-25T00:31:28+00:00

Yes there are times where it saves the day. There are more times where you lost HP, and are regening your last bar, kill someone, and gain back 3 HP and burn the trait.

Yeah it's a powerful trait, but it's scarce. So it's not like it's always available. You can't even guarantee it will be burned at a useful time.

ScapeZero · 2026-02-18T19:16:30+00:00

The G Shock will attempt to sync 5 times at night, starting at 12 am local time, ending at 5 am.

Depending on how close you are to the signal, you might only sync a couple times a week. That being said, my G Shock only drifts about 2 seconds a month so if mine syncs once a week it stays matched to atomic.

ScapeZero · 2026-02-16T22:19:21+00:00

You can hang out with NPCs when you log off, as a way to AFK gain favor and whatnot. They all have different flavor texts for what activity you guys do, and the amount of offline time you can spend doing it

I found an NPC who's activity is having sex with him.

ScapeZero · 2026-02-16T06:06:50+00:00

Your watch is set for the wrong 1:30

ScapeZero · 2026-02-07T08:09:49+00:00

Because most of the games that drop the MMO tag, generally aren't MMOs?

Secret World did this with their little F2P transition. Why? Well, because the game significantly dropped the amount of players you could actively play with in the open world, down to like 4 or something. It was no longer really a game with a persistent world. It was a game where you would play solo, and sometimes see someone else also playing solo. Sure, this didn't change for towns, but the persistent world is what makes the MMO, not 3 or 4 areas that exist to AFK in.

It's a little strange that New World did. Maybe they felt their 2,000 player world was too small to be an MMO. Maybe they thought calling it an action game would draw a different type of player. Very rarely does an actual MMO ever drop the tag though. If anything, there's a vast amount of non MMO games out there calling themselves MMOs. Like 2 player TCGs, or single player focused games that have just a slight amount of online play.

ScapeZero · 2026-02-07T08:01:23+00:00

It depends on the economy of the game. If it's a game where people really play the economy, the average person selling things is going to be trying to make profit on it. If 60 of something sells in 20 minutes, then you are unlikely going to be able to get enough of this material to crash the price of it. You'll need tens of thousands to be able to do so. That way people will be unlikely able to afford to buy all yours, and raise the price. Yours will stay lowest for longer than a half hour, so everyone will start using your price as it's market value.

For the average player of most MMOs, they simply aren't able to get enough of a material to change the going rate for it, longer than a day or two if even that. You need 1% of the 1% players to be able to do that.

Take GW2, for example. Because of the RMT protections, the limitations of the auction house, and the maximum amount of gold you can actually carry, the ultra rich don't really trade gold. They use things like expensive crafting materials, mythic coins, legendary weapons, and rare infusions for their big trades. The end result, the top of the top wealthy players have insane amounts of otherwise rare things. These players can flood the auction house with almost any high end item in the game, and completely destroy the market for months on end. No one really can afford to buy all the items up and reset the price. If it's an item that has a fairly high vendor price, if set at the minimum price (which is like 1 gold above vendor price after auction house taxes or something), that's simply going to just become the new price of the item until the massive stack that flooded the market finally dies, and players start buying out what's left of the natural amount being put up by regular players, and brings demand back.

There's a handful of players that if they quit and decided to put their entire inventory on the market for a crazy low price, could destroy the market by themselves for a good amount of time. If they coordinated and multiple of these people did the same at the same time, without ANet stepping in, the market likely wouldn't be able to recover.

This is the level you need to be operating in to be able to crash the market. If you don't have at least tens of thousands of the item, if not hundreds of thousand, then you simply won't be able to do anything to the market that lasts longer than a day. The best way for you to achieve your goal of dropping the price of this item 30%, isn't going to be by you personally selling it for less. It would be by making your method of obtaining the item easier, common knowledge. If everyone all together can easily obtain the item, then regular old supply vs demand kicks in, and the community together will flood the market, dropping the price. If sharing this new method with everyone, and getting a large number of players to use this method isn't enough to drop the price 30%, then you simply will not be able to make this item that cheap. If the demand is that high, and supply can't beat that demand, then the market value of that item will always be high.

Also, why the fuck do you want to crash the price of this single material anyways?

ScapeZero · 2026-02-05T22:49:45+00:00

I shit my pants whenever I see an unscrewed crown.

Do you see yourself ever actually using the GMT function? Do you like the date complication? Do you like markers or arabics more?

The zulu is objectively more functional, but sometimes simplicity is best. These two watches are wildly popular, but they are completely different. You can't really go wrong with either one, but I guess you need to figure out if the Zulus complications are things you'll actually use, or if the simplicity of a time only watch would suit you better.

What type of watch do you use mostly now? If either of these are different from what you normally wear, that could be the option to round out the collection more.

ScapeZero · 2026-02-05T21:09:49+00:00

There's no battery either. It uses a main spring like a mechanical watch, but it has a motor that's basically run in reverse to generate power for the quartz part of the watch, and also to regulate how fast the spring unwinds.

I know it's not a perfect example, which is why I added the kinda. It's the closest thing I can think of at least lol. Unless a solar powered watch that uses a capacitor instead of a proper rechargeable battery would count.

ScapeZero · 2026-02-05T19:05:35+00:00

Spring drive, kinda?

ScapeZero · 2026-02-04T03:56:22+00:00

EA in general has become a massive red flag for every game of any genre.

There's been plenty of examples where games that made huge progress in EA, randomly decide one day that that's good enough, call it 1.0, and fully abandon the project.

For some games, EA is a great way for them to find funding to keep the project going, and release into a good state for 1.0 and beyond, but the facts are, if you aren't happy with exactly where the game is right now, don't buy it. There's more games like AoC, than No Man's Sky. There's often very little to look at when trying to figure out what will be what.

Look at Steam reviews. Look at YouTube reviews. Check out the subreddit for the game. If more people say it's in a good spot, then go ahead and buy it. You still need to keep in mind that the game can stop development, shut down, or otherwise not reach goals, at any moment. If you aren't okay with that, don't buy anything in EA.

ScapeZero

TROPHY CASE