#or voicing criticism to game design/studio direction being taken to mean i'm being lazy and want everything handed to me

[awkward-teabag]

There's a talk about how bad live service games are from a consumer standpoint between the predatory "micro" transactions and how it removes access to games consumers paid for (just check out the latest Ubisoft controversy where they'll straight up delete your account—including games you paid for—if you don't respond to an email in time) but something that gets talked about less is how it gives companies the ability to straight up change how characters/classes/weapons/etc function and how that can make it hard or impossible for people to keep playing.

There is an understood risk of playing, say, an MMO where your character(s) could be changed at any given balance patch but it's assumed that playability would stay in the same realm, or at least low-intensity builds (builds that have less buttons to push and more downtime) would be left alone since LI builds rarely are top-performers.

But with live service games being what they are, all it takes is a change of design lead or balance lead to decide that LI builds are bad actually and to change them with no warning. Then "git gud-ers" come out of the woodwork to defend the change that was never asked for, wasn't game-breaking, and never so much as hinted to be a problem until right that moment.

You can't "git gud" wrist issues.

You can't "git gud" slow reflexes.

You can't "git gud" missing fingers/limbs.

You can't "git gud" brain processing speed.

And so on.

But because of the nature of live service/always online games, there's no way to avoid it as you can't simply not update the game to avoid the changes, not unless you don't want to play at all.

Or you pirate it and have a private server to run said pirated version on.

Accessibility matters. A lot. But it's not taken seriously and there's still the pervasive idea that if anyone so much as mentions video game, accessibility they're just being lazy and need to "git gud". With the lack of physical ownership or being able to opt-out of drastic changes, all it takes is someone in a studio to ascribe to that idea who has the power to push changes and people who prefer/can only play with LI builds can find themself suddenly not being able to play whatsoever.