Go ahead, hate on me, but you can’t change the facts. This is my last post in a long time for reasons I will elaborate on shortly. I’m sure some wannabe officer is going to flag this as needing merging to the quoted thread and I really don’t care. I think my comments are different and analytical enough to warrant a separate post - if only so that people can read it in a brief respite from the frothing SEMC hate.
“But Magmaw”, you say. “SEMC is wasting their time with all this crap and they should be fixing Matchmaker and shit!”. To these people, I say:
A. Matchmaker is a constant problem for everyone. Suck it up buttercup
B. Matchmaker is better than you think, you just don’t like your teammates and cognitive bias takes care of the rest.
C. Do you seriously expect the whole of SEMC to work on whatever fills your personal bucket list of improvements, while putting everything else on hold?
The first thing I want to point out, is that somewhat hyped language is normal. Maybe a lot of you lack real life experience, or are just highly unobservant. But its normal for people to hype stuff up to keep their supporters motivated. If you read too far into this when they provide few details, its your own fault. Its their job.
Ranked leaderboards are not a bad idea - hopefully they lead to more API support ingame. Likewise, we’ve asked for ranked rewards for a long time. I used to be against them myself - viewing them as unnecessary. But someone (@Tamaticon?) had the argument that its worthwhile if it gets more people to actually take ranked seriously. And from that angle, ranked rewards are something we’ve been waiting for a good while.
Additionally, some of the high tier players I used to talk to went dark - in large part because hitting T10 felt like the endgame with no real reward or achievement for hitting it again. The game also felt too boring after a while. So I suspect they are trying to keep more of the upper end of players. It’s also another way to show who is higher tier ingame - hopefully helping teams coalesce around the better players more often.
Now, the elephant in the room. Joystick controls. Let me put this bluntly. Who the ■■■■ cares that we get joystick controls, and how on earth does this hamper your experience? I’m very, very tired of this elitist “ooh I play Vainglory so I’m better than all the noobs who play ML or AoV” attitude. The fact of the matter is that SEMC focusing on a quality game did NOT grow VG anywhere near as much as they would have liked. If they are going to compete seriously with the other mobile mobas, they need to make it easier for people to join and start playing. I stopped playing League myself despite it being a better game, because I found the controls too difficult to adjust to. Same will happen for other mobile players, and most of them will be a lot more casual than I am. To me, touch controls will always be superior to joystick controls, but that is no reason to exclude those players. If there is a reason to not include joystick controls other than “it makes us like them trash MOBAs!?!” I’d like to hear it. Given the low quality of discussion and high levels of salt and uninformed discussion however, I am not optimistic. I view this exactly like ranked rewards. If it helps make the game more enjoyable or more accessible to more players, then its a benefit whether it showed up on my personal biased wishlist or not.
Voice chat is in no way a bad addition here. With a few tweaks (such as a way to know if someone is muting you/is talking) it can be very workable in soloque. If they can make a voice chat that causes less lag than Discord I’m all for it. Its a royal pain to have Discord chat going without a second device to manage it - keeping it in-app is much better. And for those of you who haven’t paid any attention, the other main MOBAs on mobile were focused on integrating as many features as possible to make their games a one-stop shop and make socializing easier. It would be foolish to NOT let VG go down the same route if you want them to succeed.
I should also point out they are pushing out these features for testing sooner under a larger player base than their normal testing group. Put another way - its easier for them to find more bugs this way, and should help make their official launches smoother.
Now, why am I stopping posting? Let’s see:
- Salt Content masquerading as “discussion” (looking at you, hero balance threads)
- Constant biased whining about matchmaker
- Constant whining every time SEMC says something that isn’t exactly what you wanted
- Highly uninformed opinions being shunted as facts with no effort to research or present a less biased view
- (Intentional?) ignoring of important factors, and cherry picking data and anecdotes. We know who you are.
- You aren’t special because you play the “better” but less popular MOBA on mobile.
I get it. There are a lot of issues that SEMC has not fixed. I am not happy about it either. But if you have any real life experience at all, you should know that you still take what you can get. We all know SEMC is bad with communication (in part because certain people keep shredding them every time they open up to us). Don’t make them shut up and ignore us because you didn’t get what you wanted. Some of these issues I’ve seen come up time and time again are either spewing from uninformed people, or are perpetual issues that larger game companies also struggle with. Even if SEMC has a long time to work on this stuff, its not as simple as managing your homework. Perhaps some of you need a little experience organizing real projects.Some of the rest of you. You are adults, but you clearly aren’t showing it.
I could stick around to talk to some of you, but its abundantly clear that we are right back to where we were with the old forums (sorry Idmonfish!). SEMC is probably sad they can’t kill this place off either, and to a large extent I wouldn’t blame them. While Reddit is a hive mind, at least they know how to be happy. I don’t see a point in going through with other planned topics if its highly unlikely I get any decent discussion. Discussion I couldn’t get over discord if I really wanted to, that is.
Toodles. 
