this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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I guess it's a good thing you used such a common word as obfuscate when making a point about clarity then....
Fomo or fear of misaing out iant exclusive to items or skins etc that can only be gained via purchase.
I could go deep into this, but i want to try to be concise here to save on massive paragraphs
Fomo applies to any situation where someone could miss out on the player experience that other people get. So, being behind other people or everyone else in a game increases the likelihood that you will make a purchase to catch up.
A good example is the battle pass in overwatch 2, which gives you instant access to the newest character. If you dont owm the battle pass, you have to grind for weeks to get a character that everyone else seems to have, and you have to play against that character whilst you sit there feeling left out.
So if you want the character now, you have to buy the battle pass. This creates alot of pressure to make the purchase in people who are susceptible to fomo or peer pressure.
Did you know that in schools, kids thst play fortnite get bullied for being a "default" because they only have the basic default skin which adds pressure on.
It's not only kids who experience this. Adults do aswell and the evidence is quite clear when a game company can price a pack at 48k because of a precedent set by whales and krakens (players thst spend obscene amounts of money on in game purchases) that legitimises that price point.
I've never noticed "obfuscate" being an uncommon word, but English is my third language, so what do I know. At least you can find it in a dictionary, I suppose, which won't be the case with some obscure acronym. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
As for this fear of missing out you're obsessively trying to shoehorn onto Star Citizen... we're not talking about a race here, there's no getting behind, there's no winning other than having fun and achieving whatever objectives you set for yourself (talking about the Star Citizen MMO specifically here, not Squadron 42, but the ships they're selling now won't be playable on the single player game, so it's mostly irrelevant to this discussion, other than as yet another way to weaken the missing out argument, since it very evidently doesn't apply to that game).
This isn't some microtransaction ridden malware like Fortnite or Overwatch (and I'd say any comparison to that crap is ill informed or disingenuous), this is a fucking space sim... There's no microtransactions, there's no pay to win, there are no season passes, there's no such thing as a better ship... it's a rock paper scissors situation, some ships will be better for some things, some better for others, and no matter how many you own you won't be piloting more than one at once (and the larger ones you probably won't be able to pilot or defend alone, so they'll be worthless to you if you don't have a group of friends to help man them).
If all you care about is fighting other players (personally I have no interest in that, but to each their own), sure, maybe having a better combat ship (which you'll easily be able to obtain in-game anyway) will make a difference... but not as much as your piloting skill (same if you want to be a racer), and much less than being part of some player organisation.
But there's so much more to do... you might want to explore (in which case the main "missing out" factor will probably be how early you get into the game... which, since all beta progress will be reset before release, you can't buy into no matter how much you pay), you might want to be a trader or smuggler, or miner, or whatever.
Is CIG preying on people with too much money and too little sense..? Possibly (though if I'm not mistaken they asked for this particular everything package, and they seem to be enjoying their ship collecting, so if that's what they want to waste their money in, let them, I say)... but that won't give them any significant advantage over players who just bought the basic game, and they're well aware of that.
If there's any pressure here it's from the whales to CIG, asking for more new shiny ships for their collections, not the other way around.
Obfuscate is not a commonly used word. English is my 1st language. So im pretty confident about that. And the point isn't that the word isn't common. It's that you were trying to say i used an uncommon word and described it using an obscure word. Which is really ironic.
Fomo isn't obscure just because you haven't heard of it. It also isn't nonsense just because you aren't affected by it. I'm not affected either, i dont buy things with real money in games. But i can see that it's real.
The shortest way to counter you here is to simply say: it's clear from your reply that you accept fomo exists. Its also clear that you agree that CIG are employing predatory tactics to squeeze money out of gullible people. But mainly its clear that you missed the part where i mentioned that skins in fortnite are a massive money maker in the fomo market. They dont affect your gameplay (basically your entire countrr argument) but they are a huge money maker for epic games because its all about peer pressure.
You can pretend that people other than youself arent affected by fomo in star citizen but it won't make you right. Cosmetic items are one of the biggest factors in fomo and making it work. Most games dont offer advantages that you can pay for.
I am happy to accept that i dont know much at all about SC as i dont play it. But what im "shoehorning" is not fake just becauee you dont see it and it doesn't affect you.
Im not even trying to prove a point here. Fomo and game companies use of it is a fact. And it applies here.
Really? I'm a native speaker and I use it a lot. Maybe not in casual conversations with friends, but I use it a ton in a workplace setting and when discussing current events in a more than passing manner. Looks like it's gotten steadily more popular in texts since the 50s.
And yeah, fomo isn't obscure, but it is an acronym that's relatively recently become popular (Google trends says the last 10-ish years).
Regardless, arguing about whether words are uncommon is silly, English usage varies by region, and people who speak English as a second language can have a really odd set of vocabulary.
Doesn't the graph showing the use of the word obfuscate show that it's 0.20 per million people that use it today? Is that a percentage? So i would need 5 million people before i find 1 person that says it? And has it only risen in use since the 50s? That's fairly recent in the grand scheme of things, considering it's such a small rise in use.
Anyway, your use of the word is anecdotal, and after 35 years on this planet, i find it amazing that its maybe the first time I've ever seen the word used outside of a book. So if we compare your anecdotal evidence to mine, we arrive back at zero.
You even said you dont use it casually, only in a professional setting.
I happily accept that non native speakers do end up with an odd vocabulary. But that doesnt change that the word isn't very common.
It's 0.20 per million words in books on Google Scholar AFAIK. So it has been getting steadily more popular in books that they track, in terms of word frequency. It said nothing about colloquial English (not sure how that could be tracked).
And the 50s isn't recent as far as modern speakers is concerned. Someone who would've been a kid at the time would be in their 80s today.
FOMO as a term is much more recent (like 10-15 years), though as a concept it's much older (very similar to "keeping up with the Joneses", which is >100 years old).
Well yeah, if I'm talking about dinner plans or something, it's not an idea I need to convey. It comes up a lot at work though.
It's not a five dollar word where there's a handy, more common replacement. I guess conceal or obscure can work in some cases, but I'd only so that if the listener doesn't understand the initial word. I work with a lot of non-native speakers, so I'm used to providing short definitions if I use something they haven't come across (even for relatively common words).