Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatant scam

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 253 posts

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

#181

Post by deepnotderp »

rcxdude wrote: post #61
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…

Exactly, on the server side player interaction is an N² problem (where N is the number of players who are currently interacting). Each of N players need updates on the (N-1) other players they can see. And without strong in-game reasons not to, players will test the limits, no matter how efficient your code (see EVE where despite them making huge improvements to their servers and code as well as already using an extr…

Is this really true? I would imagine you get something more like Zipf’s law in practice, N log N.

Even if there were interactions between everyone, presumably you could still exploit locality, like: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/aaai10b.pdf

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

#182

Post by 0xy »

endisneigh wrote: post #96

Our of curiosity - to the game devs out there: The article suggests this game isn’t possible, as described, even with an infinite budget. Is this true? If the game were 2 dimensional (either top down or side scroller) would it be possible?

It's not true at all. It's impossible only if money and experience is limited. In this case, the scam has no money or experience.

$100k won't buy you a stripped down alpha vertical slice, even if you cut 90% of promised features.

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

#183

Post by rasz »

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…

Eve could go more granular than single threaded Server Blade per Solar System, go down to at lest server node per Grid, or even per 250km mini grid with BSP tree partition mechanism. They could also work on real dynamic scaling.

Instead last time I looked into it they migrated Solar systems around once a day during mandatory downtime relocating the ones where huge battles were pre-planned to happen in near future to the dedicated high MHz blade nodes, and everything was single threaded. Result was two small battles in different parts of one solar system loaded the node as much as one bigger battle.

Oh, and they ran a lot of Stackless Python code for that extra slowness.

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

#184

Post by sommohapatra »

dvt wrote: post #63
esturk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like brilliant people that gets rejected from prestigious universities and companies, there's bound to be undeserving people that gets in. Even if there's a vetting accuracy of 99.9% (for the sake of argument), there's still a chance that some lemon will fall through the cracks. So after 1000 seeds, there should be 1 lemon. Now does that make the program any less prestigious? No, but these things happen.

> Just like brilliant people that gets rejected from prestigious universities and companies, there's bound to be undeserving people that gets in. This isn't that great of an analogy because there are plenty of "hard" cutoffs at both elite companies and elite schools. For example, no matter who you are, you'll never get into Yale Law with an LSAT of 125.

I'd argue it's a fine analogy. You can get into Yale undergrad with an SAT of 1250, for example.

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

#185

Post by rasz »

patmcc wrote: post #170
jfrunyon wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pos…

A good MMO typically isn't just a large number of players walking around and not interacting with one another. Look at Eve Online; you have a spaceship, you travel around and shoot stuff (this is simplifying it, but that's a big part of it). Sometimes there are 100 or 1000 ships all involved in one battle; what do you have to deal with in that case? You need to send all ship data (model, loadout, customizations) to e…

Eve online has a lot of self inflicted problems, like relaying on Python for speed sensitive code, running single threaded servers, allocating one CPU per solar system (small region around a star) instead of per grid, expanding Grids to ridiculous sizes instead of partitioning them into small microgrids with delayed group updates.

You really dont need to be send accurate per server tick information about a rocket hitting a ship 5000km away from you.

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

#186

Post by rasz »

dvt wrote: post #8

I've been following the DreamWorld saga on YouTube for a hot minute now, mainly because I find it so interesting how they got through the YC vetting process when I myself have applied twice (maybe 3 times) and I also know plenty of people -- brilliant, motivated, entrepreneurial folks -- that applied many (many) times as well and were rejected (YC is mega-competitive after all). IMO, it's a bit insulting to the strug…

but do you have the kind of people skills that let you scam your girlfriend with a fake diamond ring, get caught, and be able to talk your way out of it to string her along for another 6 months? Do you have what it takes to recruit an army of free workforce (child labour) on empty promises alone? Those are some heavy duty CEO skills.

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

#187

Post by bombcar »

plorkyeran wrote: post #138
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.

WoW's servers fall down pretty hard if you have 200 players in one spot doing more than just running around. The Ashran battleground was lowered below 40v40 for a while because even just that many players fighting each other was enough to get multi-second lag on abilities.

Back when I was playing capital city raids would lag out pretty badly - you don’t get it when everyone is massively single-playering but when action is occurring you notice it.

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

#189

Post by lvs »

dang wrote: post #180
lvs wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ones? There are only two public companies that currently make a profit that I'm aware of: dropbox and coinbase. I don't really pay much attention, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

Well, here's one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/03/08/zapier-bo... . Sorry I don't have a list for you, but HN seems to have warped my memory in strange ways. I'm sure that YC has funded at least dozens, probably hundreds of profitable companies, including many that people wouldn't remember, because they found a lucrative niche for the founders and a small team (or maybe even just the one or two founde…

Seems like a deeply tedious topic, but it sounds like the argument is that the small number of (claimed) profitable companies have basically ignored whatever it is you tell them to do. That's a great pitch.

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

#190

Post by weird-eye-issue »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #136
p1necone wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't really matter though, after a certain point there isn't much difference to players between 50 people and 200 people within visible distance. You can just stop showing others past some cap, or throttle position updates to like 1 every 20 seconds or so and fill in the gaps with AI.

Actually it makes a huge difference. You haven't played WoW have you?

To the people downvoting me, I only said that because his response was directly about somebody mentioning World of Warcraft. In WoW, if they only limited you to seeing 50 people the game would feel completely different when you go into cities and do open world PVP and such. It would literally break the game.

In fact when they released WoW Classic they had a new technology they called layering where even if you were in the same realm as somebody you could be on a different layer and therefore not see them. People absolutely hated it and went crazy.

So that is why I asked him if he had played it since he said "at a certain point there isn't much difference to players between 50 people and 200 people within visible distance" which is just wrong.

Post reply on HN