Games

I loved Rocket League, was top 1%, and quit it because of the casual game ban you eat when leaving poorly matched games. I already wasn‘t playing ranked anymore cause I reached my goal so I just liked to play casual games.

I didn‘t mind people leaving casual games or leaving myself cause the outcome of the match didn‘t matter, what mattered was whether it was a well-matched game that was fun to play or not. And if it wasn‘t, you left and went back into queue, and it took like five seconds to match a new game.

Which is also why I didn‘t mind if my team was leaving. I just shrugged, went into a new queue, five seconds later I was back in the game.

But nah, nowadays devs gotta have this weird obsession over forcing people to play matches out even if there‘s no stakes other than whether you‘re having fun or not even though there‘s no victims here with the outcome being irrelevant and the queue timers being super low. It also doesn‘t matter how much time into a match has passed, the game‘s the same at minute 1 as it is at minute 3 or 5, you‘re not losing progress as in a MOBA or RTS match.

It breeds toxicity too: Instead of leaving, people now feel forced to stay, so they‘re just in there, pissed off, and take it out on their teammates.

Just allaround a dumb change likely initiated by a vocal minority of the playerbase.

Like, fuck quitting ranked games, but casual? Unnecessary.

Rant end. This change annoyed me af too when it happened, so I can definitely relate to OP.

EDIT: I do think there‘s worse offenders with regards to the post’s topic though. Ubisoft, EA, anyone using Denuvo or patching in mtx after launch, Paradox and their crazy dlc policy, KOEI and their crazy dlc policy for DOA (and probably other stuff), etcetc

Blizzard. I've been recently thinking about how much of a "comfort food" the game is for me, and how no other game could ever get me the same feeling as returing back to a game I've spent literally months player over the last 15 years. It's my escapism, where I don't have to stress about anything and know so much about the game, that I don't have to learn anything new or unknown, which makes it even more comfortable. It's also a game where I have a lot of friends, and since they are in the similar boat, we usually just meet up for an expansion - but investing our whole group into another game usually just fails.

The problem is, that Blizzard knows this and has started to exploit it. Milking players of as much money as they can, while abandoning their "Players First" motto and absolutely shitting over the playerbase by gutting most of the development teams that had some passion left, hiring management who didn't care about the game in the slightest and only was there to increase revenue and reduce costs as much as possible.

It's more and more apparent, the game is in the worst and buggiest state as far as I remember, lot of content was cut, there's literally no customer support - people can be stuck for weeks with their character somewhere, while only response they get is an AI generated "FUCK YOU", and their only hope being that their post will blow up on reddit and someone will actually look at their case.

The new book about Blizzard is so depressing read, and makes me extremely angry. Fuck all those people who ruined the company, even though one of the founding owners was extremely against it and fought for years to keep at least some semblance of original vision. And he lost.

I hate that I always return to the game when I'm down and just need a serious dose of escapism from real life, that only this game can provide. I'm slowly trying to invest myself into other MMOs, and get rid of this toxic, gaslighting ex WoW has been for me. But what I hate the most is how obvious their change of priorities is in their recent games.

I wish nothing but the worst for people who ruined Blizzard. We could've had second Larian, if it was Morhaime instead of Kodick and his greed who won.

Thankfully, we have FFXIV and Path of Exile, that still respect players, and Blizz games can go fuck themselves. I hope I'll manage to finally transition from WoW for good this time.

I'll say Ubisoft. I don't think I need to explain why.

Cloud Emperium Games and Star Citizen.

They constantly lie about all sorts of matters (progress, release dates, financial matters, state of the company).

Many of their senior community managers are openly disrespectful to their backers.

The founder, Chris Roberts, put his unqualified wife as CMO (she openly admitted to not knowing how metrics worked or what is SEO), while coming up with a fake last name for her and warning employees to keep their mouths shut about the fact they were married.