Holy chrimbus! Nice activity bro. You’re like ThePicardManeuver of cats and anime

I’ve played chess, but I don’t, present tense, play chess, you know?

But if someone said hey, wanna play a game of chess?, you would be able to. Partially because the rules haven’t changed since you last played. So that counts for me.

You might wanna check the numbers on League, although they haven’t published anything official in years. Viewership is down massively compared to 5-10 years ago.

You may be right, but I have a hunch that there is fresh ground out there for the adventurous game developer willing to break it. Video games are still a very new type of media and I don’t think we’ve seen all the forms that they can take. It’s like being in the silent film era and having a discussion about the potential future of pornographic films. It’s hard to know what the future has in store; never say never, as they say.

Chess hasn’t had a rule change in over 100 years, to my knowledge, and despite being proven to stand up to the test of time competitively, it will never do League of Legends numbers either.

Are you sure about that? I would assume there are many more chess players worldwide.

Most video games that have existed have followed a similar trajectory, but that doesn’t make it inevitable by any means. Competitive games are typically the ones with the longest lifespans. Some people are still playing Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance online and possibly Battle for Middle Earth 2 as well.

But these models are not profitable, so game developers don’t try to follow them. Perhaps the reason why popularity seems to inevitably decline is because the gaming industry is practicing planned obsolescence. They deliberately put older games out to pasture once the profit streams have dried up, but if the developers weren’t so focused on profit, maybe that wouldn’t always happen.

Definitely. It was also massively exacerbated by the fact that there was no voice chat, surrender mechanics were extremely frustrating, there was essentially no punishment for inting, etc.

You’re not wrong that there is some baseline level of toxicity due to the genre, but I feel it was made infinitely worse by Riot’s failures in implementation.

For instance, the ability to forfeit a match immediately when one of your teammates had never connected. They literally wouldn’t even let you start a vote to forfeit until 15 minutes into the game, even if your whole team was afk. Even the other team was bored, but you all just had to go through the motions for 15-20+ minutes because of Riot’s infinite wisdom. And if you went AFK in that match, you got automatically flagged and put in leaver queue. Fuck sake I’m getting triggered all over again just explaining it.

Yeah I hear you, but they could have been far more judicious. LoL has lasted 15 years while being horribly mismanaged, so I don’t think 30 years is really that crazy. They have continued to add like 4-5 champions every single year, plus reworks and constant, incessant, unecessary rebalancing. I think you could easily slow all of that shit down by a factor of 5 and the game would still remain fresh enough for all but the most hard-core players. And those guys should probably spend less time playing anyway.

If you started with a roster of 70, added 5 per year for the first 5 years, 3/yr for the next 5, and 2/yr for the next 20, you’d end up at 150, which is totally manageable. LoL is currently at 167.

Riot would sooner wipe LoL off the face of the earth than allow it to be playable for a population the size of Third Strike’s right now.

I get that, but that’s why I made the comparison with Lemmy. What if LoL weren’t run by a company, but by the community itself, and the priority was simply to keep the game in a fair and balanced state and maybe gradually add a few new mechanics and heroes over time. That would be possible to keep going for a long time.

The game is inherently fun for the mechanical skill, strategic and tactical thinking, and teamwork/competition. You don’t need all that fancy new shit once a month to keep people playing imo. I enjoyed that stuff very early on, but it quickly became annoying because it was like you had to constantly relearn the game every year because of all the changes. And I think Riot just kept leaning harder into that because it was the most profitable in the short term, without realizing how many people eventually stopped playing due the fact that the game they once loved became unrecognizable.

Anybody watch LCK? I would kill to have a marginally active space for discussing professional LoL on Lemmy. But given how dead the mainstream sports communities are, it feels like an impossible goal.

Stopped playing many years ago but I’ve been a die hard fan of kt Rolster ever since the 2017 super team of Smeb/Score/Pawn/Deft/Mata. That was shortly after I revoked my fandom of North American LoL teams as a result of them being complete garbage.

But as someone with a lot of expertise when it comes to this particular game, I think this article and some of the takes in this thread are just slightly off the mark. This may get long-winded 😅

It’s absolutely true that the pace of patches, new champions, new items, etc is so fast that it becomes exhausting to catch up if you stop playing for any period. And of course, this plays right into the ballooning scale of the game, with the total burden of knowledge steadily increasing over time. But this is not an inevitability of the genre. As @fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works correctly observed, this development cycle is designed to extract the most money from a small number of whales.

It’s quite possible to massively reduce the rate and scale of patching, or indeed to streamline certain aspects of the game. Indeed, Riot has eliminated and streamlined numerous mechanics over the years such as old Runes/rune pages, various micromechanical techniques that have been automated, or the addition of automatic timers for buffs. However, they have typically replaced the removed mechanics with brand new, more complex mechanics.

Essentially, Riot has mismanaged their own game to extent that it’s nearly impossible for new players to get into, largely because they have been chasing quarterly profits and not considering the long term implications. Or I guess you could argue that they have managed it well, given that it’s probably the highest grossing video game of all time.

But I don’t think this is an inevitable outcome for MOBAs. I think with fighting games like Smash, thinning out the roster is much more important, because each character has exponentially more moves and matchups than LoL champions. The 5v5, semi-RTS nature of MOBAs means that having an intimate knowledge of matchups and ability ranges/timings is much less important for casuals. There is also effectively only one map that changes very rarely.

I believe that it’s possible to create a MOBA that would stand the test of time and be feasible and interesting for people to play casually or competitively for decades, and yet still be welcoming to new players. Imagine if something like that existed and fathers could teach their sons how to play the same esports game they played as kids 😂. That’d be awesome.

It’s more or less the same situation as Reddit/Lemmy. Reddit/Riot fucked up their golden geese, so there is an opportunity for someone else to iterate on their model and replace them. Unfortunately, the financial investment required to build a MOBA game like LoL is much higher than the cost of a link aggreggator like reddit. Nonetheless, I won’t stop dreaming of a community-built competitive MOBA that could attain some type of permanency. My best experiences on LoL were few and far between, but I really do believe that the MOBA formula is incredibly fun, entertaining, and can stand the test of time if done right. I ascribe nearly all of the frustrating aspects to Riot’s overriding profit incentive and incompetence. /rant over

That’s good to hear, I agree that Lemmy is wholesome. Ngl I braced myself for the worst when I read the post title though 😅

Master, forgive me, but I have to go all out just this once 🤺

Same. The spirit of the pre-corporate internet lives on here, and I find it very comforting and cozy.

When I was in Colorado I literally went to a Twin Peaks for dinner thinking it was a normal restaurant. We did realize pretty quickly why it was named that 😅. The food actually wasn’t bad either

Link’s Awakening is the 🐐

So this was the original endless runner game. TIL

Agreed, this is definitely an area that can be significantly improved. I like your suggestions

You should be proud, you got sage status. I’m just a lousy explorer lemming 😭

Absolute mad lad

Totally agree. It also happens when a comment is removed and the whole tree of replies gets cut off at that point and is no longer viewable. It’s definitely technically feasible because admins can still see removed posts/comments and all the replies, so I would imagine it’s just a matter of time until the developers can get around to implementing that functionality for normal users.

Thank you for the update, can’t wait for 0.19!

Yeah, I gotta sleep though. Nice to make your acquaintance

Lol all good. It’s hard for me to talk shit about dbzer0 so we can just call it a stalemate. I appreciate your loyalty to your server because I feel similarly about mine.

That image is so inaccurate, and not just because it’s based on a faulty paradigm (the political compass)