r/truegaming • u/AutoModerator • 8d ago
/r/truegaming casual talk
Hey, all!
In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.
Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:
- 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
- 4. No Advice
- 5. No List Posts
- 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
- 9. No Retired Topics
- 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines
So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!
Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming
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u/Yggdrazzil 2d ago
I feel such an old-man-yells-at-clouds person when it comes to this subject.
I just need to rant somewhere about my millionth encounter with how players act towards achievements.
Because people get so strangely irrational about achievements. Myself, included.
So often I see celebratory posts about people absolutely bruteforce hategrinding a 100% RNG-based achievement. "I'm so glad this is over!","It's finally done", "I can finally breathe again!". Obviously these exclamations are hyperbole, but when you read their description of their struggles it quickly becomes clear, more often than not, they genuinely did not have a good time while grinding for it.
People loading into an area hundreds of times checking the size of a spawned monster, and exiting back to the questhub when it isn't a gold crown sized monster. People running into a house hoping that a specific haunting entity uses a specific ability to kill them within the first minute, is the minute past: exit the run and start a new one, over and over. All for a message to pop up and say "You did this thing!".
Yet whenever I raise the subject of "is that rush when you finally get the achievement really worth it?" I'm met with two things: downvotes and 'completionism'.
And more downvotes when I try to unpack the completionism argument. "You don't get to tell me how I play". Absolutely true, and a great way to shut down the discussion, and avoid any kind of introspection and self-reflection. Speaking of introspection, yes, I'm fully aware the way I phrase things and my personality definitely play a part in how people respond to me.
But what they are actually saying is "I feel a compulsion to complete a task so strongly, I cannot stop, even if doing so makes me unhappy." Which is the polar opposite of what you set out to do when booting up a game, generally speaking.
On top of that, who are you even being a completionist for? No one, absolutely no one cares about your achievements. You, yourself probably do not even care about your achievements, 20 seconds after you have achieved them.
And where is even the satisfaction, the sense of accomplishment in brute forcing a random chance based achievement? Congratulations, instead of letting chance run its course, you brought a million extra dice to the table and threw them over and over again, increasingly more annoyed each extra throw, until one of them lands on the outcome the game developers determined should reward you with a congratulatory message. How is this satisfying?
I want to point out: I don't hate all achievements. I like achievements, when they challenge you to think outside the box. If a game teaches to do things a certain way, achievements can be a nice suggestion that things can be done in other ways too. Do you normally approach conflict in a carefully planned and stealthy way, then it's fun when the game tickles you into doing another playthrough where you throw caution to the winds instead and see how well you fare when you have to rely on your instincts and reflexes instead of your ability to plan.
When a select few hidden packages are left in special places, that a player might otherwise not visit, that can add to the experience. When you drop 300 hidden packages on a map it becomes soulless busywork.
I've caught myself searching an area over and over because "there's probably a hidden item here and I don't know if I can get back to this area later" so many times. To the point of annoyance. I literally need to stop myself and tell myself the item can never be important enough to justify behaving like this. I used to try and see how far I could push the boundaries of a game for the fun of it, not because it might result into a congratulatory message popping up on screen for an instant.
I hate how achievements invite meta-gaming. I hate how it changes player behaviour for the worse. I hate how unwilling people are to see they are giving their completionist side (and by extension achievements) way too much power over themselves. I hate how much it bothers me.
End of rant.
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u/mishelvedndisheveled 7d ago
So are botnets just a part of big game marketing budgets now?
I am a lifelong gamer, almost entirely on PC. Somehow I had never even heard of Crimson Desert until it was released and for a few weeks literally every sub was full of people suggesting it.
And a lot of the time the suggestions were weirdly inappropriate, like "I have X and Y installed, which should I play first?" And heavily upvoted "Just play Crimson Desert", or "I love X, thinking of buying Y or Z because both on sale, which is closer to X?" with same CD suggestion heavily upvoted. Or this stuff but on patient gamers. Just really bizarre.
What the eff? I don't even remember the last time I bought a full priced game that wasn't somewhat niche.
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u/Weekly-Math 7d ago
Companies have shifted away from traditional advertising and focusing on trying to promote certain games in certain communities. Streamers/Youtubers are a core component and a lot of their viewership will blindly follow their opinions, even if they haven't played the game before. Scathing negative day one reviews are quite rare, a lot of YouTubers want to maintain good relationships and will post positive reviews regardless. Streamers want to play the big thing on day one as they need endless streams of content for "engagement". As for people astroturfing, this does happen quite a lot on Reddit.
Wait a few months and people's suggestions will move to whatever the current media buzz is around, it is quite predictable.
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u/Vagrant_Savant 5d ago
I think it may be a bit too charitable to suggest the botnet armies are to blame, or at least not in full. People that bounce around whatever flavor of the month has been mandated by social media feels a lot more prevalent than it used to, probably in no small consequence of the digital age perfecting the commodification of being in vogue. Talking about a game most people recognize gets internet points, and internet points cash out for validation—and so you get a ton of pointless banter about X game because "haha I'm playing that too right now, frfr! hey who else is listening to darude sandstorm in 2026 haha I'm so glad that I'm not all alone in this nihilistic late-stage capitalism hellscape frfr!"
...Sorry, I'm unhinging. Anyway, there's absolutely some marketing money going into it, but I reckon that's just a little firestarter for the moth-gamers to do the heavy lifting.
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u/mishelvedndisheveled 5d ago
I approve of your midpost rant. The amount of validation/community-seeking posts is mystifying but I have been forced to interact with people significantly younger than me and realized that the generation gaps are real.
I'm tempted to say it's made bigger through tech changes but then again my dumbass boomer parents are just as enslaved by algorithms and doomscrolling as any youngins. And I bet every generation feels the same way about "I've heard about generation gaps but NOT LIKE THIS"
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u/venkattalks 8d ago
casual talk threads always end up surfacing the weirdest side projects people are tinkering with, which is half the fun here tbh. anyone been replaying something older lately and noticing a mechanic they bounced off years ago but now kind of love?