DuckWrangler9000

joined 2 months ago
 

Jagex, devs of RuneScape, are testing how far they can push monetization without losing players. However, many long-time players are realizing they don’t want their paid game of 10+ years to turn into an ad-filled, pay-to-win nightmare.

Things that Jagex, RuneScape developer, hopes to add to the game:

  • Advertisements - an ad supported plan like Hulu, so you have ads hitting you in the face while you play
  • Paid account recovery - Pay more money to recover your account!
  • Character Name reservations
  • "special worlds" just for you! So VIP servers, paying EXTRA... for VIP servers, on a game you already pay to play
  • Pay to win features - longer AFK timer to stay in the game for longer. If you pay more, you ge a longer in-game access time
  • More membership price hikes - It's likely the membership price will rise AGAIN. Keep in mind, Jagex profit AFTER ALL EXPENSES has surged over 35% over past 5 years. They are stealing from their players, robbing them blind

Example of their black-mirror inspired membership plans

The $32.49/month membership option for Old School RuneScape and RuneScape 3 includes:

  • Access to both games.
  • 2 member characters.
  • Additional member characters for $10.49 per month each.
  • Specialized Member Worlds.
  • Character Name Reservations.
  • Pre-Verified Account Recovery.
  • A complimentary bond.

You ready to be nickle and dimed like going to the carwash and getting that juicy tire shine for an extra $5?

Here's a wonderful discussion post if you enjoy diving in and seeing some great points, and information: Membership Survey /r/2007scape

TL;DR: Jagex survey asking if players are ok paying an absurd amount more money for having access to customer service, ad-free gaming experience. Players went ballistic, and are finally wiseing up to how awful the company really has become.

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There's OSRS still, for the moment "uncorrupted", but it's basically starting fresh even when your account existed when OSRS was Runescape

Unfortunately you're a little bit behind on the times. They basically gave up on fighting bots because they know that they pay a subscription and there's no point in getting rid of them if they are a recurring source of revenue, so they quietly stopped fighting back against them and claim that it's not possible to solve the problem when they know exactly what they can do to solve it. Endgame is basically non-existent, it's literally just grinding the same exact bosses infinitely to fill out collection log or get a specific pet. That's the entire end game. They have done nothing to actually make the game more enjoyable and that's kind of a problem for people because if you've already maxed wood cutting and fishing, what's the incentive of doing it again on another account?

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Us RuneScape vets who quit knew this was coming when they started playing hot potato with Jagex limited. They keep selling it to different companies, now it's owned by a shitty investment company that basically kills off the companies it buys so it owns the IP and doesn't have to keep the games alive. It can then flip the IP for huge amounts of money. But anyway... Both versions of the game are just cash grabs at this point designed to waste the maximum amount of players time

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

You don't have to pay for it. The billionaires do, and they will do it without hesitation

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world -4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

How's that working for everyone in the USA? How many "riots" or protests have we done that yield nothing?

 

Let's assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed.... What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world -4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

genAI is currently very stupid, and each new version is having diminishing returns on what the models can provide.

Objectively false statement. You can dislike it (which I do too), but you're totally wrong. AI passed the bar, AI can identify cancer images, AI can do things which very intelligent people can't. Each new version has surpassed the previous, and companies have started layoffs to replace workers with skeleton crews armed with AI models.

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago

The amount that something costs is negligible. When have you ever seen billionaires complain about costs? They can spend 1 million dollars for 1 thousand years straight and still not be broke. They are so spiteful and hateful they will do anything to hurt other people and make them jobless. That's the true meaning of business, too. Billionaires own the business, why do they want more money? It's meaningless. They don't want the money, they just hate people.

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world 28 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Funny, how much hand wringing is going on in the sweaty mainstream media about a guy who merely put down a vicious oligarchy-loving killer. You'd get the impression that media moguls are worried that they're next.

It's a sign of the time that we're living in. When people find joy in the death of others in a society, the quality of living is exceptionally bad. It's reminiscent of Rome too where the last years of their society were filled with chaos

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yo ho ho, There is no sailing on the high seas when we are talking about multiplayer games! Alive service game, it be!

 

Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy... and then it's only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can't it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It's so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic... which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.

[–] DuckWrangler9000@lemmy.world -5 points 1 month ago

I know how APIs on reddit work, but you can block people who misuse the API if they're doing something nefarious. Some of these AI are in my honest opinion very taxing on hardware. Having to retrieve millions of posts, comments, pictures, text, on demand... and send that to who knows where for AI scraping.... Sounds very costly.

 

I feel like every day I come across 15-20 "AI-powered tool"s that "analyze" something, and none of them clearly state how they use data. This one seems harmless enough, put a profile in, it will scrape everything about them, all their personal information, their location, every post they ever made... Nothing can possibly go wrong aggregating all that personal info, right? No idea where this data is sent, where it's stored, who it's sold to. Kinda alarming

 

Used to spend most of my days playing live service games that required a huge amount of time, or big AAA titles that are critically acclaimed. For example, Fallout 4/76, Battlefield 2042, rainbow six, World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Skyrim, Destiny 2, OverWatch.... Basically any really big game that you would find on the top 20 of steam or by player count, I would spend a huge amount of time playing that. But I got pretty bored of all these really big games having overplayed them so much, and now I have no idea what to play anymore...

So I'll spend a few hours playing something, and then jump to another game and then another game and none of them give me any Joy. For example, playing 3 hours of 7 Days to Die, 10 hours of No Man's Sky, 5 hours of stardew Valley, play fortnite with a friend for 2 hours, login to World of Warcraft and get bored Within a day or two. Tried going back to Battlefield 2042 because it saw a small uptick of players....

Honestly have no idea what to play anymore. So I just bounce around trying to look for something that'll bring me some joy and don't get much luck

 

It's beyond insane to me that a $70 "AAAA" game (kidding, it's AAA) dips down to the absurd price of $5. I've never seen anything like it. Wish the entire Sims 4 "collection" if you can call it that was $5 total, would be incredible, or Starfield.

 
 

Here in the USA, you have to be afraid for your job these days. Layoffs are rampant everywhere due to outsourcing, and now we have AI on the horizon promising to make things more efficient, but we really know what it is actually going to be used for. They want automate out everything. People packaging up goods for shipping, white collar jobs like analytics, business intelligence, customer service, chat support. Any sort of job that takes a low or moderate amount of effort or intellectual ability is threatened by AI. But once AI takes all these jobs away and shrinks the amount of labor required, what are all these people going to do for work? It's not like you can train someone who's a business intelligence engineer easily to go do something else like HVAC, or be a nurse. So you have the entire tech industry basically folding in on itself trying to win the rat race and get the few remaining jobs left over.....

But it should be pretty obvious that you can't run an entire society with no jobs. Because then people can't buy groceries, groceries don't sell so grocery stores start hurting and then they can't afford to employ cashiers and stockers, and the entire thing starts crumbling. This is the future of AI, basically. The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don't have jobs and no income, not able to survive...

Like, how long until we realize how detrimental AI is to society? 10 years? 15?

 

One thing I have struggled with lately is finding good games to play. I bounce around from game to game trying to enjoy it but it just doesn't scratch the itch like it used to. For example, one of my favorites was old school RuneScape, but it hasn't really been giving me the same enjoyment that it used to. So then I would open up World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, just playing a little bit of each game. Think maybe I need some new games to play but it's tough to find them these days.

So what are your favorite 1000+ hour games?

 

I have been really tempted to jump into VR for a little while now, I tried it when the quest first came out, the very first one but it was too blurry and made me dizzy. I've considered getting back into it again, but the thing that has made me really hesitant is I've heard that VR is not in the greatest place and that it's really tough to find good VR games to play. For example, there's Fallout and Skyrim VR but they're not really in good shape, and it takes a lot of modding and tweaking to get them to actually work properly. But I'm curious what other people think. Do you think VR is in a good enough place to be able to play it and enjoy it long-term? Or is it some sort of short-term hype thing?

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