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Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

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Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#141

Post by sokoloff »

debarshri wrote: post #76
kleinsch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I’ve found it interesting reading about YC companies from this batch that include: - A scam MMO - Terminal autocomplete as a service - A Splitwise clone - An app that puts your next meeting in your menu bar (for $10/month!) YC gets 5K+ applications/cycle, accepts 1-3%, so they rejected 4500+ companies for these?

We have been following YC's devops companies. It seems like they are basically investing in pretty much similar companies, which we found a little bit weird. I would assume as fund or incubator you would diversify your investments.

In an area that might be hot, VCS are wise to diversify by investing in multiple companies in the space rather than trying to pick the winner themselves way ahead of time.

VC is about funding the massive winner and much, much less about avoiding funding the runners-up.

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#142

Post by aaronetz »

coldcode wrote: post #58

I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10 years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today (small audience though). Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more tha…

There's a 5,000 human player experimental event happening tomorrow [1]. As a participant in a previous invite-only event, I can assure you that it works very well.

Disclaimer: I work under the same company as the developers of this tech (although I am not involved in this product). My opinions are entirely my own.

[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/scavengers-large-scale-m...

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#143

Post by jfrunyon »

setr wrote: post #130
gloriousternary wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Stadia et al. your computer sends keystrokes and mouse movements to Google's servers, and the server returns a video feed that's then displayed on your screen. Today's multiplayer games send and receive movement information and such, but the graphics rendering, which I believe is the main issue here, is still done client-side.

I don’t think graphics rendering is really the problem — worst comes to worst, you just reduce graphical fidelity — and regardless, rendering 300 AI characters roaming around is clearly doable, and it’d be the same with viewing real players. It’s a client-side problem, and doesn’t have to really scale much with player count (Stadia’s main pitch was that you didn’t need high end PCs to play AAA games — not that it wou…

The delays, interpolation, etc. are a big problem in games like FPS, but I fail to see why they'd be a large problem in an MMO.

Why can't you just send the new position of other visible players, and then client-side play those characters' walking animations to the new position from their current (client-side) position? Unless the accuracy of another player's targeting is relevant why is there a problem with their position always being delayed by, say, a second?

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#144

Post by monoideism »

runawaybottle wrote: post #132
monoideism wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insulting for many white men who don't come from privilege - some from poor backgrounds, or rural backgrounds, or non-college educated backgrounds, or health status, etc, etc - to pull out the hackneyed "white male privilege" stereotype here. Why not use the more accurate term for people like this, who went from a wealthy or upper-middle class home, to an Ivy, to a FAANG, to an easily funded startup? They're the…

I think you are 100% right. I didn’t have the words for it I guess, just the emotion, and picked something off the shelf. I’ll just add this though, I promise you 2 girls would never have gotten this funded lol. And I ain’t a girl either, or a white knight.

> I’ll just add this though, I promise you 2 girls would never have gotten this funded lol.

You mean "girls", like Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the infamous Theranos [1]?

Incidentally, she fits the mold I describe above: highly privileged childhood (Dad an Enron VP, highly politically connected), to Stanford, to a well-funded scam start-up with a board packed with our nation's elite (eg, former Sec of State George Shultz).

And she's just the best known - there are other examples of scammy or poorly-conceived companies founded by (actually) privileged women.

Yeah, most of these wealthy, privileged founders of scammy companies are white men, but some are women, and some are not white. Crucially, even if most of them are white men, they only represent a very small fraction of us.

And the 1% are doing a tremendous job of playing us off each other for reasons of gender, race, etc, while they consolidate their power and privilege.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#145

Post by gnopgnip »

angrais wrote: post #67
coldcode wrote: post #58

I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10 years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today (small audience though). Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more tha…

Could you explain how world of Warcraft works then? You can certainly have more than 200 in one place at once... Are they doing some tricks to make this appear as if it's working but in reality it is not? Would love to hear your opinion.

In Eve online the largest battle had ~6500 players concurrently. Eve has a system called time dilation to help handle large fights. During a normal battle, every player's actions are processed by the server, and the state is sent to all players at least once every second. When there are too many players and actions for this to happen, the servers overall tick rate slows down. So for this fight time dilation was down to 10s per tick, everything takes 10s as long, a normal weapon that fires every 15 seconds only fires once every 150s. Even with this 10x slowdown of actions, and a game like eve where relatively few actions are taken by each player there is a huge amount of lag, the server and clients don't always agree on the game state, weapons not activating, commands not being recognized.

The underling issue here is the information needed scales exponentially with the number of players interacting. Supporting 200 players means 400x as much information as 10 players instead of 20x as much. So specifically for WOW, there are problems with more than 80 or so players at once in PVP. If you do things like large scale open world PVP getting desyncs, disconnects, heavy lag is common. Also for major cities and other high density areas most servers have 4 or more "phases" where you can be in the same place in the game and not see other people not part of your phase. So you could have 50 people in a guild all together, 200 people in local, but most of the other 150 in another phase.

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#146

Post by hateful »

api wrote: post #131
angrais wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain how world of Warcraft works then? You can certainly have more than 200 in one place at once... Are they doing some tricks to make this appear as if it's working but in reality it is not? Would love to hear your opinion.

The WoW world is not very mutable unless something big has changed since I last played it. The amount of state to be managed is small. It’s basically location, inventory, some ephemeral projectiles, etc. Only a small number of players can see each other at the same time too, so it’s not like thousands of people in a virtual colloseum.

If you've ever played sitting next to someone else, you'll notice that not every animation is shared, just position and future position. If you hold the mouse button and spin in a circle, it won't show on the other person's screen. And the spells aren't governed by the animations position, but rather calculated and animated as a "hit" or "miss" completely independently on the other person's computer.

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#147

Post by api »

aidenn0 wrote: post #117
wearywanderer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Invest in the team" makes some sense when you're talking about bright people with a lame idea (RSS search engine, or whatever.) But in this case the idea isn't merely lame; it's a scam, and the team being invested in are a team of con-artists. What might they pivot to, if not another scam?

A key skill of con-artists is being able to make yourself resemble someone competent. If you go back to 5 years ago, YC probably wasn't on the radar for con artists yet, but starting about then, it was becoming clear that VCs had more money than there were good companies to fund. We are now seeing the results.

Unfortunately the con artists make funding harder for people who are not con artists. A con artist can spend 100% of their time and effort on polish and marketing, while someone trying to actually do something often has to make those things an afterthought. I’m sure the con artists have much better decks and web sites.

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#148

Post by reiichiroh »

650REDHAIR wrote: post #60
coldcode wrote: post #58

I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10 years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today (small audience though). Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more tha…

See star citizen for a recent example

Everything will work when /if server meshing works

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#149

Post by reiichiroh »

650REDHAIR wrote: post #60
coldcode wrote: post #58

I know what building an MMO is like, having worked on one 10 years ago that was already 10 years old and still exists today (small audience though). Building something like these people are talking about requires more $ than a Marvel superhero movie to get anywhere. We could manage about 100 simultaneous players visible to each other in a reasonable time but no more; the internet is not fast enough to manage more tha…

See star citizen for a recent example

Everything will work when or rather if server meshing works

Re: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

#150

Post by paxys »

If every overly optimistic founder with unrealistic goals was written off as a "blatant scam" then YC would invest in...exactly no one. The one serious charge in the article (that they got in to YC through nepotism) is more of a "I heard from someone who heard from someone", and has zero detail.
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