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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

#241

Post by rasz »

Aeolun wrote: post #204
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?

Didn’t Oculus sound just as crazy when it was conceived? As far as I know the founder had barely any experience with hardware. Just a glorified gamer.

First Oculus was pretty much linear continuation of where VR died in the nineties with VFX1 and Virtuality. Merely a hardware upgrade of LCD and IMU technology.

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

#242

Post by fulafel »

devit wrote: post #208
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…

A contemporary broadband connection can manage way more than 100 simultaneous characters. You only need to send an updated position and direction on every frame, which can fit in 10 bytes (16-bit screen space fixed point coordinates, 3 position coordinates + 1 orientation + one 16-bit animation/action ID). With a 100mbps connection you can send 160 KB per frame at 60fps and thus support 16K characters.

You can do a lot more compression and encoding. The data is very regular and you can use pretty low precisions, even lower if server tracks the accumulated error at the client. Most players aren't moving on every tick. Network tick rate is typically much slower than fps with interpolation used in presentation. Players typically move in very constrained ways (walking speed is constant). Etc.

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

#243

Post by jfrunyon »

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…

> A good MMO typically isn't just a large number of players walking around and not interacting with one another.

It is, though! In most games you're only actually interacting with one or a few people at a time - even if many more might be visible.

Part of it, of course, is that the existing MMOs are designed for small-group gameplay. But even outside MMOs - Minecraft, CoD, etc. - you're not ever going to interact with hundreds of players. A human can't manage that!

Eve runs into problems because it has large-scale PvP. That says almost nothing about PvE scenarios.

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

#244

Post by seattle_spring »

shkkmo wrote: post #124
Bjartr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is however the possibility they are merely incompetent and genuinely don't appreciate the difficulty implicit in the scope of what they've set out to do.

Then they've lied about how much technical and game development experience they have.

They did lie, 100%. Cofounder said he, "quit Google, Facebook, and Apple" to start Dreamworld. He fails to mention that both Google and Facebook were 3 month internships, and his role at Apple was an SDET and not an actual software engineer.

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

#246

Post by gota »

MauriceChavez wrote: post #240
gota wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Therasense == Theranos? A google search returns a lot of stuff on patent litigation but no "human readable" articles

check out the coldfusion video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CccfnRpPtM ). truly another Enron

Thanks- I knew about Theranos, just had no memory of the term "Therasense". And googling the term didn't make the connection clear at fisrt sight, so I asked

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

#247

Post by mercer »

tomhoward wrote: post #194
lvs wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my YC batch (I was in the same one as dang and Airbnb), the issue of revenue/profit was what the partners talked about the most. Growth too, but profitable growth. Like, it was talked about all the time in the batch. That was particularly important in our 2009 batch due to the financial crisis, but it remained important later in the good times - see PG’s post “Default Alive or Default Dead?”. Though it took us a w…

And yet here they are investing in something that is so obviously a scam that possibly even my grandmother would notice.

It reminds me of the "but you fuck ONE goat" story: one misstep like this surely can and should have more impact than all the good steps.

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

#248

Post by mercer »

austhrow743 wrote: post #171
KuiN wrote: post #7

If you're thinking "how bad can it really be?", please treat yourself to watching a couple minutes of "gameplay". It's incredible to me that this project got any VC backing. 2 man team with barely any background in game-dev are going to build an exceptionally ambitious MMO? The red flags ignored are just absurd.

Slack came out of a failed attempt to build an MMO. Tech cofounder apparently has some reasonable credentials and particularly if he's known to people within Ycombinator it doesn't seem absurd at all to me that they'd invest largely on the basis of "guy we know to be reasonably competent wants to try his hand at entrepreneurship". Like its a hundred grand. They throw that at all sorts of companies. This aint softbank…

I'd say the 'salience' of this topic is not even primarily the idea of YC funding what is clearly a scam, but rather the particulars of WHY this one got funding.

It's not that YC 'throws shit at the wall', but rather that it throws shit at very particular walls, and the reason it picks those walls are not obviously 'good'.

While that shouldn't surprise us, I do understand that it's disappointing to feel that YC is not quite the nerdy, rational, investing-in-good-ideas-no-matter-the-source outfit that it's thought to be.

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

#249

Post by mercer »

ska wrote: post #113
serf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. " Feels weird to nitpick scam versus fiasco, but whatever. I'd be upset either way as an investor, but just flag it if need be -- as per guidelines.

> nitpick scam versus fiasco I don't think that's a nit. Intent matters, and it's entirely possible to have a well intentioned fiasco.

The problem is that lots of scammers, gurus, faith healers, etc. tend to believe their own bullshit. While I do believe that acknowledging this is worthwhile, in practice it doesn't matter to those that were scammed, hoodwinked, brainwashed, etc.

Over time I've come to believe that our desire to understand and sympathize with the perpetrators of scams and the like is not a good thing in the end.

Sure, we 'understand' why Walter White became what he was in Breaking Bad, but in the end he was a despicable person that destroyed many lives. as much as the show /does/ try to make that clear, we still sorta empathize. We like Walter and hate his wife. Same thing for Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey (The Shield).

But that 'understanding' shouldn't preclude us from coming down hard on these people, however 'well intentioned' they might be. This project is obviously a scam, or alternatively delusional. In either case YC's involvement is not a good look.

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

#250

Post by tomhoward »

mercer wrote: post #247
tomhoward wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my YC batch (I was in the same one as dang and Airbnb), the issue of revenue/profit was what the partners talked about the most. Growth too, but profitable growth. Like, it was talked about all the time in the batch. That was particularly important in our 2009 batch due to the financial crisis, but it remained important later in the good times - see PG’s post “Default Alive or Default Dead?”. Though it took us a w…

And yet here they are investing in something that is so obviously a scam that possibly even my grandmother would notice. It reminds me of the "but you fuck ONE goat" story: one misstep like this surely can and should have more impact than all the good steps.

> "investing in something that is so obviously a scam"

None of us has any idea what was presented in the application form and interviews, but given YC prizes its reputation above anything else, we can reasonably presume it wasn't obviously a scam.

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