Might there be similar indicators for companies?
- Automatic chat restrictions/filters
- Microtransactions. Like in a tank game, creating “drones” that are a money grab.
- Pointless missions
- Too many random features and changes being added
These all have a similar cause: people trying to squeeze money and escape destruction because the engine of innovation has stalled.
Games
I’ll talk briefly on these leading indicators for Habbo Hotel, Tanki Online, Minecraft, and League of Legends.
Habbo Hotel got ruined slowly as they killed parts of the economy and gameplay experience.
- They made HC sofas worth less (my memory is fuzzy but I think they lost 4/5ths of their value from 20c due to increased supply of them)
- Muting everyone in the game for weeks due to a news article
- Banning cash (coins) and enforcing a tax on every trade that went through their new marketplace
- Cash didn’t actually exist until 2008. Before that, HC sofas were the unit of currency.
Tanki Online got ruined after they started adding drones along to tanks, which were just these expensive add-ons. It was a clear money grab. But they do it because some players buy it, but not the ones that are a core part of the community and drive it.
Minecraft got ruined after the 1.8 update where combat was completely overhauled.
League of Legends is getting worse and worse. You can feel the new champions don’t have the same art style as the past ones and are just kind of different, somehow. Like a giant ball of stats and dashes rather than their unique character. They are re-working old splash arts probably because they don’t have anything else to do. The automatic chat filter doesn’t help either. Too many mini-missions and quests.
I think video game developers don’t know how to make a classic. Would you add things onto chess? Tetris?
I think it’s really that once things get old and to a certain point, they lose the “spirit” of what the original game was. Yet at the same time many of these games are dynamic; without change the metagame gets figured out. Everything becomes boring. A brief moment in time dependent perhaps on the environment as much as the game. But it seems like developers actively try to destroy their game and accelerate this process.
Things to not do to a community
- Inflation
- Taxation
- Censorship
- Changing a core feature
- Thinking you know how people should play the game rather than seeing the emergent properties