The reason why I lost interest in RuneScape is because the game was going from a sort of of socialist economy, where you work and get paid for your work, into a more capitalist one where you spend a bunch of up-front money to make passive income. Eventually the amount of passive income you get just dwarfs playing the actual game and it's like "why bother?" All you do is log in, collect your Kingdom, then collect your Ships, Load up your machines, harvest your animals, do your daily and that's it. No gameplay. The most fun I had playing the game was actually earning progress in the game rather than having it handed to me, not roleplaying as a fucking landlord. It's kind of insidious how the game slowly turned into a lord simulator. I'm thinking of all the features which basically boil down to "You're the boss, make these people do work for you and you'll get free money/xp while you're away." How long until the MC becomes a slave owner?
I guess I play a different game, I havent touching Miscellania or done much farming. I play Ironman, which decouples you from the global economy, forces you to smith everything yourself. Forget rumors about nazis, the game is straight up owned by Carlyle Group, guys who brought u 9/11. But what do I care, its the best cookie clicker to play at work
Getting paid off by the people who did 9/11 isnt any better lol
If I could meaningfully quit, I would, but individual action isn't going to change anything.
Sometimes, I just think of the alternate universe where Runescape just kept with Andrew Gower's original vision of the game, in which nearly everything is craftable, and the economy is decided entirely through small trades and the players...
One development that I couldn't stand was when they started putting resources on drop tables. It was designed to stop people from botting common resources by flooding the market through PVM, but they didn't stop there. It wasn't long before literally every resources was better obtained through combat than actually creating them. Unlike with botted resources, people still needed to get XP so these items' value plummeted into the dirt.
The most fun I had playing the game was actually earning progress in the game rather than having it handed to me,
Kind of random but ive met/seen techbros who think real life is basically Minecraft brah unironically apply this logic to the world and thus think that poor people are better off than people born rich since they can find the pride of earning their position as a CEO in the #grind which they will eventually do unless they are lazy etc. etc.
That would be a valid mindset if the work you did actually went to enriching yourself and not just most of it going to your boss, the rest going to the government to pay for forever wars, and the remainder ending up at your landlord.
no it wouldnt be because its a fetishization of doing work as the only means of securing both individual merit/survival and meaning to existence. Literally work insofar as to make a robot do it for you in the future, this is what socialism should be ffs. Robots doing shit is like immediate bountiful returns hunter gatherer society but in the future and better
The most fun I had playing the game was actually earning progress in the game rather than having it handed to me, not roleplaying as a fucking landlord.
There are 3 classes of people
- much paid for no work
- well paid for some work
- no pay for much work
capitalism is 2) solipsistically telling 3) that everyone has the chance to be a 2)
while the actual 1) just sits back and becomes more 1)Sounds a lot like the Warlords of Draenor expansion for WoW.
all these adventure capitalist style idle games are made so they can get you hooked on their game and you'll buy ingame items, even if you dont have much time to play the game.
I actually ran into an idle game on the app store like a week ago and it seemed neat because it actually had a story. Immediately you play the role of a white savior getting money from slave la- NOPE. Uninstall.
Bonus: Their chat filter didn't let me name my character any variation of "Cracker Musk" Like you tell me that I'm going to be owning a slave mine and then don't let me roleplay as Cracker Musk? Come the fuck on.
There's actually a cool idle game called Idle Civilization: World History where you plays through Marx's historiography, starting from primitive social group and collecting surplus value to unlock new technologies advancing through the stages of historical materialism all the way to achieving communist utopia. The original is more of a standard idle game, but the beta version is more complex and harder. For one I sucked with the beta version and never got past the stage of ancient slaveholding society lmao.
Reject monetized skinner boxes like Adventure Capitalist, embrace totally free skinner boxes like Trimps .
OSRS actually advertises directly to fash communities which is why there's so many of them playing it.
Oh man if you're in for a wild ride, check out the whole Mod Jed fiasco. Guy literally ran a runescape mafia and used his position of power to literally steal from people's accounts directly. Got away with it too. Despite being blatantly corrupt, nobody did anything to stop it. His updates are still in the game to this day, though a few of the worst ones were deleted due to issue with Venezuelan gold farmers.
Shit, that's a story in itself as well. One of the areas Jed made (the Revenant Caves) was designed to be a gang-controlled area. It was run by Nazis for years, but literally the instant the Venezuelans organized a union and took control, they deleted it. Basically, OSRS has deep ties to the alt-right and I would be surprised if they weren't funding literal neo-Nazis.
even building entire patch days around stopping tactics that were effective against the devs’ favorites.
Only tangentially related but this reminds me of the Dota TI '13 patch where they used a nerf bat to beat the heroes used by tournament winners Alliance into unplayability, team wouldn't win again after that.
A lot of the information about OSRS drama is easily available on youtube. My favorite is the Rock Climbing boots situation where they changed the stats and price of an overpowered PVP item but instead of the existing Climbing Boots keeping the item ID of the now statless variety, they instead converted them into the new Rock Climbing boots which had the same stats but a much, MUCH higher price. Obviously this meant that PVPers suddenly had the value of their banks septuple overnight, and there was lots of talks of the devs being in on it. (buying the item in advance) This wasn't helped by the fact the gold economy exploded overnight with insane runaway inflation. Yeah, nothing going on there. 👀 Oh yeah, for context PK clans tend to lean heavily fash with most of them either gambling it or selling their gold for real life money. They of course go soft on white people who RWT often looking the other way but when someone from China or the third world does it? Instant banhammer.
Unsurprising. PKing is basically built for fascism. It's why every game that has PVP has so many Nazis in it.
Your enjoyment of the game is directly proportional to how close you follow the ironman playstyle.
This seems like the core gameplay wasn't interesting and once the skinner box was decoupled from it you became free
Nah the core gameplay was fine, I knew what I was getting into. I was never in it for the luck-based rewards, I just like working slowly towards a grand goal.
It's rewarding to see something so seemingly impossible to obtain and then working hard to achieve it like a week later. Really helps you feel less impotent.
Of course all that gets taken away once you have other people doing the work for you. Now instead of being free to achieve the impossible, you're enslaved into a system of dailies and manageering.
Buddy that's a skinner box. You're not thinking about the activity; you're thinking about an increasingly distant reward. You just described in a first-person perspective the definition of a Skinner Box. I'm not judging. I've played MMOs too.
There's no reward in maxing skills except the journey itself. It's not like real life where you put work into something and have something at the end. When you complete a game's progression, that's it. The game's over. You can't play any more. The problem is with real life is that I can't pour myself 100% into anything. Capitalism just doesn't allow that to happen, but in games I can. I guess that's why I find them such an appealing fantasy.
But in the end, the same empty truth remains: Nothing I do in a game is meaningful. It's little more than appeasing a need which I simply can't fulfil in real life. I hate it. I desire for liberation.
Good idea. Shill your website to a left-leaning hacker. what could go wrong :che-smile:
