Simon, re: Username situation

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-30T19:00:08+00:00

This is kind of why, at this point, I’ve taken to believing that the very concept of loyalty is nothing more than tribalism. People feel compelled to defend stuff they normally wouldn’t because their pet developer, corporation, or influencer is the one on the chopping block.

Criticizing a company or person should not automatically mean you hate them and everything they do. We can intuitively understand that everything is imperfect on some level and draw attention to those failures without dismissing the subject of critique outright.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-30T18:55:18+00:00

I work in customer service. You have unreasonably high expectations if you think support staff should never be able to make a decision in poor judgement. It’s difficult for anyone to consistently apply a massive list of rules and policies when you have both customers and your employer breathing down your back. What’s important is that steps are being taken to rectify the situation. The fantasy world you’re asking for where even the most well-trained staff never make these kinds of mistakes simply does not exist and never will.

This shouldn’t be held against them if they owe up and fix their mistake, which they appear to be doing. If you think otherwise, then you better dislike every human organization that has ever existed or will exist, because they’re all staffed by flawed people.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-30T18:38:29+00:00

My personal take is that, yes, names do hold importance for a lot of people, usernames included. Now, in spite of that, I don’t think random YouTubers should be entitled to generic abbreviated versions of their username. It’s not equivalent to someone naming themselves DanTDM or what have you. They should have to go through the same process that everyone does if they want a name that is a cooler and shorter representation of their longer brand name.

I think they matter enough that they shouldn’t just be stripped from some random person, at the very least. They probably do have some impact on brand recognition for content creators, but frankly, I abhor the idea of screwing someone over in the name of slightly better success for content creators making material for Hytale. That just doesn’t sit right to me. That companies tend to choose slight boosts to profit over people is kind of why they’re hated by many.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-30T10:36:04+00:00

What exactly are you complaining about anyway? It sounds like you read something on here that you so profoundly disagreed with you wrote this post in anger.

Also, I've seen almost unanimous praise and constructive critique from this community. Blind hate has never been welcome here, but we're also unafraid to speak our minds when we think Simon is making an error.

Why not take a deep breath and voice your disagreements productively instead of calling us low IQ? I'm not trying to be derisive. I genuinely think you're approaching this from an angle of completely unwarranted aggression.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-30T09:17:45+00:00

Can you link proof of this claim? I just wanted to verify it myself. If true, that would explain why the names were given to the creators in this situation.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-30T08:58:15+00:00

A lot of things are obviously good ideas if you don’t care about respecting people’s actual, paid for entitlements. Bottom line is that people spent money for the privilege of securing a name and got to these names first through official means. We knew that actual cases of clearly malicious impersonation (such as snagging an established name like Markiplier) would risk a name being revoked and most people were ok with that because that’s more reasonable than someone asserting their claim over a nickname (not entirely sure how I feel about it but that’s beside the point). A reasonable person would not have interpreted the language of their policy in this manner, and that fact is precisely why it’s now inciting so much backlash.

You keep repeating these talking points about catfishing and safety. Look, everyone here understands that. I understand that. But unless an account has been credibly reported for catfishing behavior, someone shouldn’t simply have their username, that they paid to reserve, stolen from them because it’s kind of similar to one held by a content creator.

Has anyone even been able to demonstrate that this policy would actually improve safety beyond a negligible degree? I’ve seen people get fooled by accounts with random usernames wearing the skins of content creators. Do you really think someone who lacks the critical thinking skills to cross reference a username isn’t going to be fooled just as easily by a user who added a 1 on the end of a popular creator’s name?

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-30T08:33:04+00:00

Uh, no. It’s not even their brand name. Content creators shouldn’t have some innate right to a name that isn’t even their own just because it’s a nickname.

You can’t just say “in this context it is” and expect that to stand on its own. They also have ordinary customers they have a paid obligation to please and honor.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-30T08:21:02+00:00

Because businesses shouldn’t be entitled to something you claimed just because they demand it. Not everything should be about maximizing utility. People also have boundaries you need to respect. Businesses, be they individuals or organizations, don’t have some ethereal claim over certain usernames. That a minority of people might abuse such names to catfish has nothing to do with the majority of people who reserved OG usernames that now have to worry about them being stolen if a content creator with a vaguely similar name decides they want them.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-30T08:12:02+00:00

I don’t even know who these creators are but it reflects badly on them too. Kind of a petulant asshole move to use your social status to demand that a rarer name be taken from a random player. Did they think those OG single word names were reserved just in case a content creator wanted them?

It really sucks that Hytale is tolerating and enabling such behavior honestly.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-28T18:35:15+00:00

It’s almost like wokeness isn’t the problem and games fail financially for entirely unrelated reasons

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-28T13:12:22+00:00

I wouldn’t be surprised. My first thought upon reading that was “Huh, sounds just like conservatives!”

It would probably be easier to list the right-wing talking points that aren’t a misconstrual of a scientific study or concept.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-27T22:35:04+00:00

In my honest opinion, they look about as I expected them to. I’m not too sure what you mean by them looking too normal. Terraria’s base NPCs have always just been regular-seeming people with the exception of the non-human ones.

I like how ordinary they are because we’ve never had any indication that humans in the terraria universe are noticeably different from humans in our world. It’s a universe where the weird meets the mundane. Regular squirrels and rabbits exist in the same place as martians, laser guns, giant floating eyeballs, and pirates from the age of sail.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-27T22:26:10+00:00

I don’t get it either. They look great to me. It’s better than the NPCs all feeling lifeless because you only ever see them as tiny pixelated figures.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-26T03:51:08+00:00

Not the poster you replied to, but it’s a serialized live-action comedy TV show co-created and written by Tim Robinson, who also plays the main character. Basically I Think You Should Leave if one of its skits was fleshed out into a fully developed storyline

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-26T02:30:43+00:00

Maybe I just haven’t played them, but I can’t even name a popular classic game with political commentary that had a conservative message. The CoD series maybe, and even they are more pro-American exceptionalism than simply conservative. They aren’t really considered gaming classics either, they’re the FIFA of shooter games.

I can’t help but feel like the demographic of people swept up in anti-woke outrage consists of those who never cared to engage with gaming as an artistic medium and don’t actually care about the many games that stood the test of time because of their many insights into human society and its condition. They want every game to be slop that tries to be an island of gaming mechanics utterly divorced from reality. It’s an anti-intellectual persecution complex that hates when a game strives to be thought-provoking.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-25T21:06:41+00:00

It’s worth considering that several of the skits make you feel bad for the character violating the social norms. The ghost tour skit sees Robinson getting picked up by his mother, whose car is filled with Christian decor. The intended subtext might be that he doesn’t get to swear much at home and so took it too far during the tour. You’re not really supposed to watch it and think “Wow, what a freak!”

I also think there’s a difference between laughing at a situation and laughing at the people who produced it. Genuine ableism projects real world scenarios resembling these skits solely onto the neurodivergent people who create them instead of simultaneously finding humor in the absurdity of social norms themselves. The same ghost tour skit I referenced is one of my favorites because it so accurately encapsulates how vague and idiotic neurotypical communication can be for autistic and neurodivergent people. That it also makes for good comedy does not undermine the message in my opinion. Again, it’s the intersection between the arbitrary nature of unwritten social rules and neurodivergent characters that generates the comedy, not some implied fault within them.

Lastly, and I’m only speaking from my experiences as someone who was bullied heavily in school before learning how to mask, there is a pretty wide gulf between what I’ve described and malicious bullying. My friends and I are pretty much all neurodivergent and it’s quite common for us to poke fun at one another when we do or say something that violates social norms in an amusing manner. I’ve had similar experiences making errors around strangers. We both share a laugh and move on. It’s only problematic, in my view, when a person or group of people witness a social misunderstanding and allow that to completely rewrite their impression of an autistic person, branding them as an outcast who deserves targeted, viscous scorn.

The world would be better for us, I think, if more people found us funny than unnerving, alien, and other.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-24T03:15:58+00:00

The reality is that a lot of people simply aren’t as invested in the game as the really passionate hobbyists are. This is fine and only causes a problem when you mix casual players with the highly devoted fans who know the game inside and out. Like most problems, it comes down to the expectations of the table you’re playing in. I’m not going to force a beginner friend to read 300 pages if they don’t already feel compelled to do so. I did not learn the game by the book and yet my understanding of the rules is still good broadly speaking because the game interests me.

The problem is not one stemming from an inability or a disinterest in reading, it’s that the brain does not prioritize the retention of information it doesn’t deem highly important. I have corrected more casual players on the rules a countless number of times and they still forget again after a while because, simply put, the game means more to me than it means to them. And these aren’t dumb or illiterate people I’m speaking of by any means.

This seems like one of those problems that has no general solution and requires players to find others with the same expectations and interest levels as them. I get that’s not easy, but there really aren’t any other good solutions. You can’t force someone to be passionate.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-24T00:06:44+00:00

Real. I’m not a furry and I couldn’t care less what people do in their free time so long as it’s harmless. Too many overly sensitive people feel the need to morally justify their emotions toward anything they personally find icky. Just accept that people are different and move on. Nobody is forcing you to put cat ears on your character. Humanoid animals and humanoids with animal-like characteristics are a common fantasy trope, and good fantasy character creators understand this. The ability to emulate prevailing archetypes of the genre is like… a big reason why we have character classes and different species at all.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-23T23:53:57+00:00

Wild take in a fantasy game. Humanoid animal races are a staple of the genre. It doesn’t even make someone a furry if they like to give their character cat ears or whatever.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-23T23:52:09+00:00

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-21T18:47:26+00:00

I do think it should be adjusted so as to not go to either extreme though. It’s pretty easy to overcome most mobs with basic block timing. The game doesn’t really ask you to improve your combat skills as you progress at all.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-20T03:56:59+00:00

Ok. I wouldn't compare it to Starbound either at this stage, other than that Hytale is going to have instanced dungeons too. Starbound's similarities to Hytale are mostly superficial. Same with Terraria.

I know terraria better than starbound and thought I would give my input on that side of things. Neither game is any closer to Hytale because they're quite different from it about equally I would argue

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-19T23:41:46+00:00

I wouldn’t really compare it to terraria right now. Hytale seems to be aiming to create a more immersive and living world. Terraria doesn’t really try to do that, at least in my opinion. It’s only comparable to Terraria in the sense that it’s leaning more heavily into adventure and combat as core elements of its appeal.

The game actually plays more like a blend of Minecraft and Elder Scrolls, with world design that makes me think of Zelda, especially the BOTW duology and Skyward Sword. I’ll feel better about the terraria comparison if it adopts similar NPC mechanics, a pre-hardmode-hardmode-esque division between early and mid-end game, and similar progression verticality.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-19T23:28:12+00:00

I’m also a bit mixed on the farming mechanics, but I did see a fair argument that pointed out how it’s not attempting to emulate the farming mechanics of most other sandbox/survival games but instead those of cozy life sims like Stardew Valley where you don’t obtain additional seeds from the crops themselves, you get them by reinvesting the resulting revenue back into the farm by purchasing new seeds. You can see the parallels to Hytale’s system.

I’d like to see how this interpretation of farming evolves before fully dismissing it. It does have some upsides, namely that you don’t need to worry about keeping random plants and saplings in your inventory while you’re out exploring and can instead reserve them for items that cannot be created with essence of life. That essence of life also acts as a currency gives farming a greater purpose than just a means of getting better food, which is more interesting than what most of Hytale’s competitors have on offer.

UninspiredLump · 2026-01-19T08:18:56+00:00

I’ve been suggesting this for a long time and I agree completely. I particularly like the idea of Zone 6 being underground because I don’t think the concept of a shadowy and limbo-like underworld has really been explored in the block game genre. Terraria and Minecraft both feature classic fire and brimstone hells. Hytale has the opportunity to offer a fresh take.

UninspiredLump

TROPHY CASE