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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

#121

Post by dang »

There was a recent submission saying the same things:

DreamWorld (YC W21) MMO raises all red flags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266 - April 2021 (195 comments)

I'm not sure what's driving this, but I'm not inclined to moderate the current thread in any way, even though the title is breaking HN's rules egregiously, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321926.

The reason is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... It's important that when people accuse us of manipulating HN to serve YC—as internet users, you know, kind of do from time to time—we can answer in good conscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Taking lumps like this are the price we pay for that. This a low-quality drama story that normally wouldn't clear the bar for HN's front page even if it weren't a quasidupe of a thread from a month ago.

Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through. If and when the story comes up again, we'll probably start moderating it closer to the standard rules that we'd apply to any similar story: when it's an ongoing saga, we downweight follow-ups unless there is significant new information. Here are the relevant links about all that in case anyone wants to know:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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

#122

Post by deterministic »

A rule of thumb in the games industry is that it takes $100+ Million to get a competitive MMO launched. Followed by ongoing $ for maintenance, new extensions/assets etc. The claims made by the inexperienced founders are beyond laughable. People who haven’t worked on large scale game projects have no idea how hard it is compared with your average web/biz application.

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

#123

Post by randallsquared »

angrais wrote: post #91
ElectricalUnion wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 200 in one place 200 players in one map instance. But not 200 visible player with interactions refreshing on real time. Most likely you see diminishing level of details, if anything besides complete fabrication or no data at all after a certain visibility range threshold.

It's an open world game, but let's assume you mean local map. In that case, let's assume that each player waves (/wave). I've done this before with >50 players and took a screenshot and we were all in sync. It's also possible to have 50 players in the same area fighting in real time, e.g., in a battleground. This was back in 2010 when I played ... So I am not sure if it's any fabrication at all, otherwise everyone wo…

This is one of the reasons it's been so believable. Lots of people think they've already seen it, apparently. The gap between what MMO players already think they're seeing and what these founders are promising seems trivial, but actually implies a lot about network latency and bandwidth, software complexity, etc.

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

#124

Post by shkkmo »

Bjartr wrote: post #114
onli wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a quote in the article. He also said this: > "I think for me, the base intent matters very little when the end result is the same and you've lied to everyone throughout." If it's true that the game developers promised this: > The campaign promises, among other features, "multiplayer with the population density of real cities" and a fully dynamic environment with no fixed interaction points. Then it's clearly a…

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.

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

#128

Post by armchairhacker »

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…

Part of it is luck. Just like job interviews or college applications. Even though I'm sure the people vetting YC startups are smart, they have to pick a few companies from a huge number of applicants without really knowing much about any of them.

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

#129

Post by monoideism »

runawaybottle wrote: post #47
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…

If you have to ask, I’ll go ahead and take a wild guess. I looked at the founder’s bios. A couple of white guys, think one worked at a few FAANGs - textbook archetype for ‘certainly people of this type know what they are doing’. Yeah, we do live in that world. This shit might be the most valid textbook case of white male privilege ever. Edit: I usually have a very high bar for throwing around while male privilege thi…

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 elite, or the 1% of whatever similar term you want to use.

Because "white male privilege" sterotypes millions of white males incorrectly. But I know it's a very popular stereotype right now among part of the population, and so often hard to resist.

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

#130

Post by setr »

gloriousternary wrote: post #85
zolland wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that how multiplayer games work today? You receive a rendering of the server's source of truth, and send actions you'd like to perform. The current implementation just sends a lot less data to the client by sending deltas and positional data rather than full screen renderings right? It seems like that wouldn't fix any of the issues above, and might just introduce the complexity of streaming video to all the cli…

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 would enhance games’ ability to play online)

The hard part is dealing with 300 players communicating simultaneously with random delays and state changes, in an environment that doesn’t really handle delays very well (a text chat can be 10s late and no one cares. A character moving can only be a frames late before interpolation becomes obvious, and you start teleporting people around). And tracking the state changes across users and passing them around tends to add up, causing further delays.

Of course, you could always change the game model itself too. RuneScape & Maplestory trivially enabled large groups of players simultaneously (pretty sure you could easily find places with 200+ players visible and active). Runescape was basically turn-based and ran like 1 turn a second, so much larger room for delays. Maplestory capped actual active play to relatively few players, but enabled large quantities in towns acting as glorified visual chat rooms — which solved 90% of the feeling of being in a large community. The Maplestory strategy I think nearly every MMO implements.

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