The term nerf in respect to video games was actually derived from Nerf guns. Because Nerf guns are basically just normal guns that have been heavily nerfed 😅

I’d just like to point out that most of the complaints referenced in this post are at least partially being addressed with the latest release of Lemmy, 0.19.4

As you can see, there were many improvements to the moderation tools and image hosting UX/storage requirements. There’s obviously still room for improvement, but everything else out there has glaring issues as well. Mbin/PieFed are even less polished than Lemmy at this stage, although they are progressing quickly.

Also worth noting that most of the replies to the first post express a strong user preference for Lemmy over Sharkey.

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.

Huh that is weird.

Thanks for the community though, don’t know how I’ve never seen that one yet. Lemmy is actually bigger than people think sometimes.

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

Nice one dude. High memories run deep 😤

This is your guy

They basically do the same thing but the interface is better on this one.

You need to take a step back. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Our strength is in our diversity.

Hexbear defederated from us as we were discussing whether to vote on defederating them, which was a foregone conclusion. Our users can’t walk into their communities, because they are scared that we might poke a hole in their bubble. Perhaps these boogeymen that you envision are less interested in taking over the world, and more interested in simply having their own space on the internet.

In short, if a user on that instance were to accidentally walk into chapotraphouse (hexbear.net is also not defederated on that instance) and say something that would anger the trolls and get you brigaded (from their discord server), then that’s not the problem of the instance admin of sh.itjust.works to protect their users from such a mistake.

It’s not nice to put words in someone else’s mouth. I will always protect my users against being brigaded. Hence why we were about to defederate hexbear before they beat us to the punch. But we aren’t being brigaded by lemmy.ml.

You actually believe Dessalines is taking money from the Chinese government? Come on dude, that’s absurd. Occam’s razor: he just doesn’t like when people say shit he doesn’t agree with, and petulantly bans them. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just an internet moderation saga that has played out a million times before.

Amazing! So many features that people have been requesting. Really impressive release 🫡

Like I said, it was a good healthy discussion, you have differing opinions on the topic and you expressed them clearly and respectfully. Nothing wrong with that. I’m also a stubborn mfer

Agreed. But to be fair, there’s never been a forum like the fediverse before. People are still learning how to navigate this complex, multifaceted space. It’s not just one audience, it’s many different ones.

You absolutely nailed it with that comment, 5/7, perfect score.

Honestly it probably would get downvoted if you made it as a separate post, but that’s just because kvetching about lemmy.ml is the flavor of the week and most people are sheep.

Don’t mean to be a dick, but that was genuinely a very satisfying little internet spat. It was like watching a tennis match with you two volleying back and forth, and even the insults were pretty classy.

I think you each made several solid points, and I was brought slightly closer to forming an opinion regarding the public upvote/downvote system. This is likely to become a significant point of contention in the future, when Lemmy competitors will potentially seek to differentiate themselves by obscuring the visibility of votes.

Anyway, just remember that there are other people reading the thread who got something out of your contribution, even if you couldn’t come to a personal understanding with each other.

Makes a lot of sense, I have to agree with you that creating multiple accounts is not acceptable. Most of the people already here don’t mind it obviously, but in terms of future growth that’s a big hurdle that we need to figure out.

I’m definitely interested in the concept and I would certainly advocate for SJW to give it a shot in the future and see how it is.

That’s a very interesting blog post you linked. Lots of interesting tangents which I’m not gonna go down. But I mainly agree about corporations monetizing identity in the modern age. But I don’t think it applies to the fediverse, because instances are non-profit. And quite frankly, I don’t see the harm in playing to people’s sense of community and identity in order to lure them in. It seems to me that your vision is technically efficient, but maybe lacks some of the charm that Lemmy currently has.

Haha thank you for the info, I have been quite confused about this. At first I thought it was because it was already tomorrow in Australia, but then I checked a world clock and it wasn’t even close 😅

I think that’s a really cool idea, but I am apprehensive about unforseen consequences. I have previously pointed out that the current structure of Lemmy creates a nice balance of power between admins, mods, and users. I think all three groups have enough agency and independence that they can follow their personal preference in the fediverse without infringing too much on the experiences of the others. In theory, as the network expands, stability will continue to increase.

I’m not sure about messing with that paradigm in order to implement something like what you’re describing.

The question is: who else would be interested in hosting these fediverser-enabled instances?

So just to clarify what you mean. The fediverser-enabled instances would be current instances like lemmy.world, except with additional functionality to subscribe to unaffiliated communities?

Or they would be a totally new kind of instance with only independent communities? Sort of like lemmy.myserv.one (they don’t host local content), except instead of subscribing to communities on other instances, you would be subscribing to standalone communities organized in some kind of lightly moderated community list.

I think decentralization is preferable for a wide variety of reasons, most of which boil down to stability and adaptability.

As for why communities need to be associated with an instance, I think that’s a much more interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is moderation and liability. Ultimately, someone needs to be held responsible if shit hits the fan and somebody hires a contract killing on Lemmy or something. Right now, those people are the instance admins. If you could have free floating communities, the moderators of the distributed community would need to take on that responsibility instead.

Also how would that work technically? Stuff would presumably still need to be hosted and mirrored on instances, even if technically “unaffiliated”.

I genuinely do believe that we are starting to see some organic growth.

I’ve been obsessed with Lemmy for the past year; I used to mostly lurk during my 10 year reddit career but everything changed over here, partially because I felt like my voice was really being heard.

And I have noticed an increase in activity in the past month, with posts and comments receiving more upvotes and engagement. It sounds like you’ve also been making the most of your Lemmy experience, which is great.

I sometimes try to spread the word about Lemmy on reddit and people are so toxic in the way that they deal with the smaller userbase and lesser activity. So many people that love to whine and complain, instead of realizing that Lemmy is an incredible opportunity/concept at an early/imperfect stage.