The year is 1999, you show up at school and all the other kids are circled around your best friend. He's playing Pokemon Red, battling the Elite Four with a level-99 Charizard. You want to be cool; you want to be him. Even though you think Pokemon is a dumb grind, you finally cave in and buy a cartridge. You go with Pokemon Blue to differentiate yourself.

You get home and boot the game, but your experience is nothing like what you saw at school. Instead of crushing endgame content with an over-leveled Charizard, you awaken in the deep grass on Route 1 between Pallet Town and Viridian City.

You take a step forward and are pulled into a battle.

A wild MEV BOT appeared!

You try to run, but you can't escape. The MEV BOT attacks and buys one of your keys before you even knew what happened. You faint. You'll have to try again.

You awaken in the deep grass on Route 1 between Pallet Town and Viridian City. You take a step forward and are pulled into a battle.

A wild MEV BOT appeared!

You try to run, but you can't escape. The MEV BOT attacks and buys one of your keys before you even knew what happened. You faint. You'll have to try again.

>>> This repeats N(x) times depending on your follower count.

You don't learn anything from this, but you do make a few pennies off the fees. An insignificant amount of ether.

USER gained 0.000171875 ether!

The MEV scalping does only one thing exceptionally well: it efficiently prices out most people that you would actually want to have in your room, leaving your room vapid and void. Bots don't make for good conversation.

But you've finally escaped. What comes next is the grind.

For most people the grind is where they'll spend their entire FT life: the average account has 2.63 keys (not counting their own), most of which is bots.

You will get to see some cool shit while you hang out, but it’s activities that aren’t for you to participate in. This is the world of microtransactions, they show you the top rooms in menu to tease you and to get you to pay to play. Hundreds of other people have paid thousands of dollars to sit in unidirectional chats with awful UX, why shouldn’t you?

Even EA isn’t this cruel with their loot boxes.

People you talk with regularly on CT will be priced to ridiculous levels that you could never justify buying. And if you did buy them you get access to a public chat, so you’ll probably just keep DMing them on Twitter instead.

You’ll see trainers with Pokémon exclusive to Red that they didn't need to grind for and that you could never get (i.e., big accounts that join and just get arbed by bots to values you will never hit).

To top it off, every couple hours you have to stop what you're doing and change the batteries (i.e., the app is still broken and the servers need upgrades).

And that’s it. There is no culminating arc to the story, you will never get the Charizard that your friend got for free as a pre-order (early adoption) bonus. You just hang out in mostly empty and dead rooms until you finally give up and delete the app.

If you’ve made enough ether to bother bridging back to L1 then you’ve won.

The year is 1999, you show up at school and all the other kids are circled around your best friend. He's playing Pokemon Red, battling the Elite Four with a level-99 Charizard. You want to be cool; you want to be him. Even though you think Pokemon is a dumb grind, you finally cave in and buy a cartridge. You go with Pokemon Blue to differentiate yourself.

You get home and boot the game, but your experience is nothing like what you saw at school. Instead of crushing endgame content with an over-leveled Charizard, you awaken in the deep grass on Route 1 between Pallet Town and Viridian City.

You take a step forward and are pulled into a battle.

A wild MEV BOT appeared!

You try to run, but you can't escape. The MEV BOT attacks and buys one of your keys before you even knew what happened. You faint. You'll have to try again.

You awaken in the deep grass on Route 1 between Pallet Town and Viridian City. You take a step forward and are pulled into a battle.

A wild MEV BOT appeared!

You try to run, but you can't escape. The MEV BOT attacks and buys one of your keys before you even knew what happened. You faint. You'll have to try again.

>>> This repeats N(x) times depending on your follower count.

You don't learn anything from this, but you do make a few pennies off the fees. An insignificant amount of ether.

USER gained 0.000171875 ether!

The MEV scalping does only one thing exceptionally well: it efficiently prices out most people that you would actually want to have in your room, leaving your room vapid and void. Bots don't make for good conversation.

But you've finally escaped. What comes next is the grind.

For most people the grind is where they'll spend their entire FT life: the average account has 2.63 keys (not counting their own), most of which is bots.

You will get to see some cool shit while you hang out, but it’s activities that aren’t for you to participate in. This is the world of microtransactions, they show you the top rooms in menu to tease you and to get you to pay to play. Hundreds of other people have paid thousands of dollars to sit in unidirectional chats with awful UX, why shouldn’t you?

Even EA isn’t this cruel with their loot boxes.

People you talk with regularly on CT will be priced to ridiculous levels that you could never justify buying. And if you did buy them you get access to a public chat, so you’ll probably just keep DMing them on Twitter instead.

You’ll see trainers with Pokémon exclusive to Red that they didn't need to grind for and that you could never get (i.e., big accounts that join and just get arbed by bots to values you will never hit).

To top it off, every couple hours you have to stop what you're doing and change the batteries (i.e., the app is still broken and the servers need upgrades).

And that’s it. There is no culminating arc to the story, you will never get the Charizard that your friend got for free as a pre-order (early adoption) bonus. You just hang out in mostly empty and dead rooms until you finally give up and delete the app.

If you’ve made enough ether to bother bridging back to L1 then you’ve won.