Welcome back. This post will be a direct continuation of my Hegelian Dialectical analysis on efficiency points. I suggest you check it out before reading this post because I want More Clicks on it Thanks!! also it it may help you understand the EP problems that i will bring up
Even though we have established the contradiction in EP, we need to take it a step further and analyze what else lies in Arcane Odyssey. Surprisingly, we can fit a lot of things in AO to an actual Marxist framework. Come with me and explore the wonderful world of Arcane Odyssey Political Economy. The game ironically struggles with everything capitalism does
Historical Materialism and the Base
We can consider armor, stats, enchants, jewels, etc to be the means of production. I know comparing this stuff to things irl like factories and machinery might not make sense, but hear me out. We can pinpoint the means of production in AO by just finding the social relations and simply walking back to the origin. The social hierarchies that emerge in AO are an immediate result of gear and etc. Meta sweats, PvPers, PvErs.., all come from gear and the distribution of stats. Meaning that, in standard orthodox marxist theory, that Gear and stats are the base and the superstructure is the social cliques that form out of this and talk of tier lists, EP, etc
EP as Arcane Bourgeois Ideology
The balance team substitutes themselves in as the ruling class. They control balance changes, patch notes, stat weights⌠EP in itself. EP gets produced by the balance team and gets pushed downward until its rationalized as some objective truth. We can quote Marx directly here: âThe ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideasâ EP is not a neutral science but rather the worldview of PvPers enforced onto the PvErs and the larger community
Commodity Fetishism and the Optimized Build
Before the development of EP, a build only had use-value, it only expressed a playstyle, it did things in AO. It truly belonged to the player who made the build. Now, EP introduces exchange value, which makes builds comparable, rankable, and almost tradable in social currency. Builds became commodities. People eventually quit asking âwhat does this build do for meâ and now ask âwhat is the EP value of this build?â The human relationship to gameplay turns into something mystified into a relationship between just numbers. This is commodity fetishism in form of stat allocation
Build Alienation
Off the dome I can think of three layers of alienation in AO:
Players being alienated from their builds: the grind for a good build produces gear thats fine-tuned to the meta instead of individual expression
Players being alienated from the balance process: patches happen to us, not alongside us
Players alienated from each other: EP turns gearbuilding into supreme ball knowledge and in turn theres competitive gatekeeping when it comes to gearbuilding
The Proletariat and False Consciousness
PvErs are the true proletarians of AO, as they give the game the numbers, engagement, activity to keep it alive. Without this class the game is dead, yet they have zero ownership over the conditions they play. The surplus of engagement gets extracted by the balance team while they (the balance team) make changes that work against the interests of PvErs. And surprisingly most PvErs donât really recognize this, and weâre even seeing average joes internalize EP, optimizing their builds while using a framework which is basically designed for an entirely different âgamemodeâ, all while never questioning whose interests EP serves. This is practically false consciousness, the ideological work in AO is so well-done that the laborers actively participate in their own subordination.
Even if you own the profits and rewards of what you grind for, ultimately the say of patches and etc are in the hands of the balance team, youre operating in a system that still isolates you outside of the grind
perhaps Arcane Odyssey is a dig against Lassalle?
EP and Hegemony
The balance team doesnât actually need coercive power. Remember: nobody IS ACTUALLY FORCED to use EP. Nobody is banned and beaten to death with hammers for not using EP, yet the cultural dominance of EP does the work instead of brute force. Metamancing discourse, spreadsheets, the culture of the forums and subreddit (trash reddit ngl) do the heavy lifting instead, and create a âcommon senseâ where the EP-optimized builds are just understood as being correct, and everything else is just a deviation that requires justification. This is basically hegemony in the Gramsci sense, the ruling class maintains their dominance through manufacturing consent
The Falling Rate of Stat-Profit
As diminishing stat returns have been introduced, so have crises. Every point invested into a stat gives less return (exception of power-defense) this mirrors Marxâs falling rate of profit perfectly. Capitalists invest expecting linear returns, but the returns keep shrinking, and then crisis follows. Players stack stats expecting linear gains, but hit the diminishing returns, causing builds to be homogenized around certain breakpoints. The meta stagnates⌠bteam comes in to patch just for it to keep happening. The patch is the response to the crisis, but like capitalist responses to crises it doesnât fix the underlying contradiction, and instead it just resets the cycle. New patch: same thing, different stats.
The Paris Commune of AO: PvE Servers
PvE servers were the unexpected revolutionary moment. When you remove the competitiveness part entirely, EP dissolves as a framework⌠builds exist for use value, and nobody cares about your stat efficiency. The player relationship to gear becomes unalienated, as YOU built it, you use it, you express your playstyle through it, its actually meaningful. We have achieved true Arcane Odysocialism accidentally through just one decision Vetex made.. yet the tragedy still comes
Socialism In One Server (TROTSKY VINDICATED?!)
However, balance patches cross server boundaries. The PvE communes managed to achieve independence but not trve avthentic sovereignty, as the bteam nerfs for PvP reasons the same also gets nerfed on PvE servers. The external system manages to break through into the commune through legislation the commune had zero vote on. This is basically Trotskyâs permanent revolution, a revolution confined to just one territory canât survive because of the contradictions just around it in the first place. Socialism in one server is exactly the reason socialism in one country was impossible: the revolution must spread or itâll be strangled. Stalin was wrong in 1924 and 101 years later on December 2025 he was proven wrong yet again in Arcane Odyssey (among other things of course)
In Conclusion
âThe history of all hitherto balance patches is the history of class struggle.â
While the Hegelian post identified the contradiction within EP as a concept, this post goes on to locate contradictions in social relations that produce and reproduce EP as an ideology, alongside the AO class relations
Soon, I will drop another post, this time on what a potential proletarian revolution will look like in AO, the material resolution to all these contradictions, and why we should reject class collaborationism alongside Arcane-Bourgeois balance changes, and uphold abolition of Odysseyan class altogether, and what the Arcane International should look like
