Quest guides like what Belgdore is talking about just tell you who to fight/talk to if you want to finish certain quests or get certain endings. It doesn’t tell you how to fight your battles and usually doesn’t even cover how to get there (unless its especially arcane – looking at you Millicent).

Further, the best part of these kinds of games (at least IMO) is the adventure itself. Working through a zone to a boss and then learning how to overcome the boss is the fun part. It’s the part of the game that makes you hone your skill as a player and “git gud”. Quest guides… stat build guides… pretty much anything short of a zone walkthrough or boss mechanic overview won’t help you with that.

The long story short is that you are being made to (by default) give up rights that you should have, particularly around class action lawsuits. It’s strictly bad for you and strictly good for the company. They probably shouldn’t be allowed to do this. Since they are, the only thing we can do to protest it is to opt-out.

Maybe you’ll never sue discord. But maybe someday there will be a lawsuit brought against discord by someone else. A few ideas for topics might include a security vulnerability that leaks personal information, the use of discord content for AI training data (e.g. copyright issues), or the safety of minors online. If you don’t opt-out, you can’t be a part of such lawsuits if they ever become relevant. This overall weakens these lawsuits and empowers companies like discord to do more shady things with less fear of repercussions.

And, since the vast majority of people will never opt-out (since you’re opted in by default) these kinds of lawsuits are weakened from the start. That’s why every company in the US is doing this forced arbitration thing. At this point, they would be crazy not to since it’s such a good thing for them and the average person doesn’t care enough about it.

Not necessarily. For a game like this that only functions online, you could presumably determine all the possible server calls and point them to a server you own. You could do this purely via clever network settings without modifying the game at all. If you could do that, the game would run fine and you could even use the original authentication server to ensure the user holds a valid license.

At that point, you “just” need to implement and run a server for the game. This also doesn’t involve modifying the game, but could run afoul of potential laws against reverse engineering if not done in a clean room manner (I’m not a lawyer so there could be other things too since unfortunately US law tends to not favor the end user).

Regardless of any of that, it always feels silly to me when companies fight tooth-and-nail against people not only performing free work and hosting for a dead game but ALSO trying to ensure people actually own the game before playing on their private server. Of course they could just use 🏴‍☠️ versions and black-hole the authentication server. All the company does by withdrawing licenses is ensure they have to skip authentication so the company loses out.

I’m almost starting to wonder if that’s the plan. Just keep saying “IPO IPO IPO” to get funding from over-eager VCs who want a piece of the IPO before it becomes widely available.

But then you just never IPO. Keep making minor to moderate mistakes along the way so you can be all “weeeeell we would have IPO’d but insert thing here so we want to wait another 6 months to let it die down”. Repeat until you’re ready to quit, then actually IPO and ride the initial IPO high all the way down via golden parachute.

Don’t worry, the devs have already won if the sales numbers are any indication.

As far as winning the larger gaming community’s opinion, I think that will depend on how they handle updates and bug fixes for the game going forwards. As an example, the dedicated servers have a massive glitch that causes you to lose all your progress and it’s hard to tell what causes it. Personally, how they respond to that bug (or bugs of similar magnitude) is my litmus test for whether this game will stand the test of time or not.

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