It might just be me, but does anyone else feel like MMOs lost their social aspect recently? Whenever I play an MMO released anytime after 2014 it feels like I'm playing a solo game with a chat box. There's no real need for cooperation since everything is designed for solo play. For the most part, at least. There's also no real need to interact with other players or any kind of player-driven politics. Only game I can think of that still has these aspects are either Mabinogi or games entirely focused on socializing like IMVU. What about you? Do you know any others?
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because everyone is a whiny b***h now and if you say something they dont like theyll try to get you banned for life. its not worth interacting with people in any game today
Idk anon.... I had that experience with some games but none of them got to the point of something like a Halo 2 lobby. People would just kick whoever was acting up
People don't talk anymore because game design changed to accommodate more people with less time and shorter attention spans as the genre/hobby/etc became more popular, not because of mods with a trigger finger banning morons with no grasp of social interaction for having gamer moments.
Funny because it's accurate
matchmaking is the devil
also, hosting dedicated games at home isnt as easy as it was because of the ipv4 shortage and stuff. Of course, paying a vps or a little more for an static ipv4 is not a big deal but most people are newbies that just want to port forward their router and give up if they cant
Ok there troony, now kys
Their first point isn't wrong though cause power hungry moderator culture was a thing as old as online games/forums themselves. Their second point is wrong because they refuse to address the effects this culture has had on games, especially when you consider the kind of new blood who are coming into these roles and how mindbroken they are by modern politics. Not even mentioning the kind of people who are getting into dev roles and catering to the new landscape of idiots. Make everything easier, stifle actual innovation and fresh ideas, silence differing opinions, milk the whales and masquerade it as a form of charity to some billionaire corporation muh "they need to keep the lights on somehow". It's all the same shit in MMORPGs.
It's the fundamental misunderstanding that nobody talks because games are no longer a safe space for shut in dipshits and 13 year olds trying to impress their friends, and not that they actually moderate chats now because they designed the games to attract more people who are outside of that demographic. The problem is that no matter what demographic it is they're trying to attract, more people means more stupid people, which means more designing a game around the expectation that most of the people playing it will be idiots.
>games are no longer a safe space for shut in dipshits and 13 year olds trying to impress their friends
This is exactly the opposite of what it was in the late 90s/early 2000s, what kind of historical revisionism is this? Complete misunderstanding of the current environment. The majority of internet users and MMO players were late teenagers and adults until the mid-late 2000s. There are more 13 year old shut in depressed suicidal perpetually online dipshits who only get dopamine rushes from impressing their friends than ever before. Things like gamergate and troonyism certainly didn't help that.
>The majority of internet users and MMO players were late teenagers and adults until the mid-late 2000s
Aside from ignoring the fact that "dipshits" covers a wide range of ages, and that I chose 13 arbitrarily to make fun of their immaturity no matter what their age, I don't think I'd believe that. The internet gained mainstream popularity in the mid 90s, and speaking as someone who was 13 in 2000, there were a lot of kids online. Unless you think Newgrounds somehow rose to popularity on the back of adults, and not kids entering their edgy teen phase. Though you're definitely right that something like EQ with its subscription fee wasn't selling to kids...But oh RuneScape was, fancy that. Obviously, you're right in that more people of every age are online now, and who's being marketed to changed completely as WoW consumed the MMO landscape and invited everyone and their grandmother into the genre, which was my point.
Yeah no, back in the 90s/00s it was fricking impossible for most kids to get access to the internet and a decent PC unless you were a true nerd or were privlaged enough to grow up in a techie household
You're right, newgrounds and runescape were popular with kids who had access to poorly managed school library computers, hell in high school we all kept hacking the computer lab computers to play halo and quake, one guy kept playing WOW by booting it off his fricking ipod, which made it run like shit due to the low bandwith using your ipod as an external hard drive was, but it was functional enough for him to update his auctionhouse flips.
But I guarantee you that online gaming wasn't as popular, especially with MMOs where trying to get your mom's credit card to play an online game was a tall order unlike now where you can just apple pay with your smart phone.
>it was fricking impossible for most kids to get access to the internet and a decent PC unless you were a true nerd or were privlaged enough to grow up in a techie household
I was thinking about this when I first responded, but this is probably part of my bias. I grew up middle class in a big city so it was rare for me to know anyone whose house didn't have a computer before the 90s were over, and adults slow to adopt as they are, let their kids run things. If they didn't have access to that, that's what the library and everyone's complete lack of understanding for computer safety were for.
>But I guarantee you that online gaming wasn't as popular, especially with MMOs where trying to get your mom's credit card to play an online game was a tall order
True, especially for MMOs, which is why I discounted EQ as being for kids. Diablo and the other battle.net games were huge though. RuneScape had its F2P trial as far as MMOs go and we all paid for it by mail with our lunch money. I think you're right in that the majority of people online were still those who had access to the internet before it was cool, but that the late 90s was when it really opened up more for kids and teens, and they had more of an online presence than you think.
I'm definitely not trying to say that mid to late 2000s isn't when the internet exploded and the flood gates were wide open. RS was popular here pretty much immediately, but things like EQ/RO/FFXI had a slower time catching on because of the P2P/subscription/console deal. It wasn't until MS and of course WoW that whole new generations really flooded in. Everyone knows the 2007 thing. But kids piled onto the internet in the late 90s to talk about this newfangled anime thing, play on shockwave.com, post on forums, etc. If anything that was the time when preteens made the internet their secret club before it became too mainstream.
Runescape and korean f2p MMOs which attracted the majority of kids onto the internet didn't really take off until the mid-late 2000s
This and instancing, sharding, and other content in it's own safe space.
>recently
Ever since WoW released almost 20 years ago, the genre took a sharp slide into casualization and stagnation. Not that they were perfect but games like EQ, or of the generation and before it, were designed in a way where playing by yourself wasn't just suboptimal, a single person didn't have all of the necessary features to survive on their own, mostly. WoW looked at that model and thought it would be better if the effects other people had on you were...Less. More of what made interacting with other peopke necessary could be smoothed out. Why should you NEED buffs from another player instead of them just being a benefit? Whya re there so many types of classes when they can be distilled into three colors? What if we structured the content a bit more? Why shouldn't more classes have access to healing, crowd control, etc. And you know what? It was a smash hit that lowered the floor of accessibility to a wider and less patient audience. It was at a level where people still needed each other at first, but once you start that design it's only a matter of time before people want more and more "convenience", without realizing what it does to the design of the games. CC is too important? Maybe we can make it less important. Mana issues slow things down? Maybe we can speed that up. Dungeon layouts too confusing? Well what if they were a bit more linear. Etc etc. And other games saw these things, and the direction it was going, and how it was making money hand over fist, and they went along with it. And the audience, new and old, spoiled by an age of non-interactivity, demand these kinds of features. The genre became so diluted with new titles that most which came out couldn't support a healthy population anymore...So things are just made even more casualized for the people who remain, so they can still play them by themselves.
ty anon i got so tired explaining this shit to geriatric boomers who can't process anything new and zoomers unable to process things from 3 months ago, this sums it up very neatly!
>games like EQ, or of the generation and before it, were designed in a way where playing by yourself wasn't just suboptimal, a single person didn't have all of the necessary features to survive on their own, mostly. WoW looked at that model and thought it would be better if the effects other people had on you were...Less
That brings up a very interesting point. Maybe WoW was never good, but the reason many people had good experience with it early on was because the playerbase that went into it came straight from the more multiplayer focused MMOs which compensated for the issues.
Vanilla WOW was good at launch, and why classic era is so compelling and why people enjoy playing classic over retail.
But it did start a trend that got worse with each expansion, that streamlining towards a more structured style of play robbed the MMO of its social and sandbox elements.
The greatest sin though happened in WOTLK, though it really started becoming a thing in TBC, it wasn't as bad, and thats AOE tanking.
Tanks became the only role that interacts with an encounter in modern MMOs, think about it, WOW, FF14, and others, the other 4 roles are only there to make it go smoother, but the tank is the one who pulls everything, CCs everything, has actual mechanics, everyone else is just there to either make it go faster by playing a DDR button mash they call a "damage rotation" or occasionally pressing a heal on you.
This robbed everyone who isn't a tank of their agency and shat all over class design. No longe was a mage desired for their crowd control, or a warlock for their banish and fear and occasional enslave demon, if you banish someone in a M+ dungeon in modern WOW you're legitimately trolling your group, where banishing one of the fire elementals in BRD on the bridge to MC could be the difference between an easy pull and a fricking 2 hour waste of fricking time, if we're speaking from a vanilla experience of getting MC attunement and not a classic/private server one where everyone just lava jumps to the end
But yeah, the lack of player agency and input into encounter design is fricking missing across the board in modern MMOs, and WOW set that gold standard in WOTLK.
But I wouldn't shit on vanilla WOW just because unlike EQ or UO or other MMOs that came before it the single player friendly aspects, which were still enough of a slog that doing it in a group was simply better, it still focused on group play, you couldn't finish half of your class quests without help, which meant you needed other people to go out of there way to help you
>because the playerbase that went into it came straight from the more multiplayer focused MMOs which compensated for the issues.
The thing about WoW is how most of the playerbase DIDN'T come into it from other MMOs. Before, those games were extremely niche, and part of it was how inaccessible or inscrutable they seemed to someone who didn't play them. But yes, there were plenty of EQ players who really wanted the more solo friendly appeal of WoW, and being able to adventure out into the world without needing a lot of support made it very appealing to well, a lot of people.
Threat is yet another bullet point on the list of things changed because it seemed like such a good idea at the time.
>tank wants to do more than spam moves that have no immediate, tangible benefit (taunts, etc)
>DPS don't want to have to wait for threat
>more AOE threat means that healers don't get aggro from doing their job (when the CC isn't doing theirs)
So threat to a lot of people just seems like an annoying mechanic again without considering what role it plays in the way content is consumed. Of course that's not to say it was alone in making that change, WOTLK also made mana a non-issue to most classes, including healers. So if tanks have no issues with threat, and healers have no issue spamming heals to keep the tanks alive through all their bullshit, what does that do to the dungeons? What does that do to DPS when suddenly every fight becomes a race to the top?
I want to add because it sounds like I'm getting way off topic, that the way this played out had an effect on more than just gameplay. As
said. Changing everything into an AOE-fest means classes are less important because you suddenly narrowed the situations that occur in a dungeon to 1 - pull everything and AoE it down. And if that's the only way the game is played, then every class has to be built with a similar toolkit to contribute to it. If everyone in the group is capable of approximately the same thing no matter what class they are, there's no need to communicate. If CC/threat/heals/mana/etc etc aren't important then that's yet another spot where players don't have to communicate anymore. You get where this is all going.
>smash hit
anon no one ever talks about wow unless it was Burning Crusade or WoTLK
No one gives a frick about TBC WOTLK in 2023 except wrathbabs
I don't know what half of this means but I'm sorry you are a wow babby and your parents abused you.
>anon no one ever talks about wow unless it was Burning Crusade or WoTLK
Vanilla WoW was a breakout success as far as MMOs go and what turned them from a niche genre to an enormous cash cow with hundreds of imitators. To put it in perspective, WoW had even in vanilla millions of subscribers when most MMOs had thousands to a few hundred thousand at most. Yes, the population only went up during TBC and Wrath...Which as you know introduced even more convenience features to the game for each iteration.
this 100%
ppl want to play mmos, but they can't handle real mmo mechanics without being whiny little b***hes and nerfing the game into a single player rpg
Yeah, this was my experience with WoW. People seemed to actively hate the idea of grouping up unless you were doing a dungeon or raid. In older MMOs I could just invite random people I encountered while questing and we'd play together for a few hours, inviting more people along for our adventure as we met them. Nobody ever wanted to do that in WoW, they'd decline my invites even when we were both doing the same quests. It made no fricking sense.
the social thing is something i miss from vanilla WoW...finding some random in your questing journey who invites you to a guild that shoots the shit constantly in guild chat and vent while getting together for mid-level dungeon runs and ends up doing AQ40
haven't found a single guild since vanilla that actually feels "social", just a lot of individual people doing their own things
i don't mind it that much because i enjoy playing solo, but i'm leveling a new main on a very active server and i'm hoping to find a good social guild
Mostly because the gameplay of WOW has been both sped up in terms of active gameplay, and then timegated.
in vanilla a majority of your time is spent traveling and resting between pulls, so having a social outlet was a massive bonus, and a huge draw to the game.
These days WOW is all about hurrying up and finishing your chores so you can log out, there is no active downtime where you still need to be at your keyboard and paying attention, such as resting or traveling, you're either spending your entire time trying to blitz through your daily/weekly chores, or you're AFKing in cities or just flat out logging out because you no longer have anything else to do for the day except maybe play an alt.
Its what happens when you start to turn your immersive open world MMORPG into a speedrunning esport, sure you can speedrun vanilla, but thats for dedicated grognards, retail is built to get people into the M+/raid scene asap so that the developers can spend all the development time there and not on immersive world content.
Discord, that's why
Because of game dev gurus who said that social interaction in games is potentially toxic and will drive away your whales.
Discord
>recently
LOLMAO, let me guess you've been playing MMOs for about a year total.
my first MMO was MapleStory so I'm not exactly a veteran lmao I didn't know this problem was much older than I thought
That anon is describing Counter-Strike essentially, shit killed Quake due to normalgays flocking to it for it not needing to actually aim properly
Counter Strike was a niche as Quake until valve started killing 1.6 by paying pros and clans to play CS:GOne Homo
The arena shooter in general has sucked because no one has tried to make a good one in 20 years and solo queue ranked ladder meme has killed casual PVP gaming all together, which is why only literal morons continue to play dogshit like COD
You still need to aim in CS. It's mostly still a hit scan game (well I don't know about CS:GO as I don't play it). It only differs from stuff like Quake and UT in that it isn't a twitch shooter...which sadly is a genre that is basically all but dead these days.
It baffles me that people call Warframe of all games an "MMO" because it has grind and clans.
Whale economics took over the AAA gaming sphere, and AAA game publishers are traditionally the only ones with the money and talent to pull off an MMO in a reasonable timeframe.
Whales HATE social aspects of MMOs, they simply just want to lord their special skins and store shit over others, and catering to this mentality makes you way more money than having a larger subscriber count.
In Social MMOs there is more risk of whales being shat on, look at fricking WOW where they banned /spit just because some balding streamer said it was the right thing to do to people riding store mounts, "Paying customers", aka whales QQing even a little bit got an entire emote removed from the game.
Trying to keep one paying customer satisfied by not adding in whale shit is a significant loss in revenue than trying to keep the whale satisfied, and anything that can cause the whale to regret buying MTX is poison to your MTX based cash revenue.
If you want social aspects to come back to gaming, not just MMOs, but across the board, you need to actively shit on anyone who plays that kind of dogshit entirely. Stop playing MMOs with cash shops, which yes that means all of them, stop playing Gacha trash, and call anyone who plays that shit out like the homosexuals they are, start promoting good buy 2 play games, or for MMOs, start playing on and promoting good private servers
If you want to really understand what im talking about, i'll highlight this video here, watch the clip and you'll understand, but if you want to see why AAA gaming across the board has taken a steep dive off a cliff in terms of quality and social aspects, its because of the success of whale games. https://youtu.be/xNjI03CGkb4?t=1073
The frick are you on about? Whales thrive in social mmos, especially pvp ones. From L2 and Archeage, to every korean and chinese grinder imaginable. It is themeparks that greatly diminished importance of whales as they can't really affect gameworld in any meaningful capacity.
>Antisocial fricks who sit there and show off how big their wallets are
>social
The moment someone calls them a homosexual devs step in, this isn't social MMO gameplay, these are whale games.
It happened to everything, not just mmos. I play Halo now and its just dead with nobody talking or laughing or working together, compared to 15 years ago where everyone would be talking and laughing and coming up with plans or making new gamemodes/maps to show off to friends.
Everything becoming corporate and hypercompetitive and sanitized killed communities, which is why multiplayer games suck now and companies are unable to bring the social atmosphere back because the people making games are corporate golems rather than based nerds that grew up on good fiction
External party chat systems were also the beginning of the end, when players could talk outside of the game rather than participate in in game voice chat games became silent ghost towns
>External Party chat systems also the beginning of the end
lol, lmao okay xbro
PC had external VOIP systems long before most games got VOIP it wasn't a problem.
The real problem is the death of dedicated servers across the industry.
If you played during the introduction of the party chat system you wouldve seen that it was like a lightswitch flipped, game lobbies went from being social gatherings to ghost towns in one update
>dedicated servers
no ranks and medals = no incentives to play
Play FOR FUN is not funny as raise status in the hierarchy, monki neuron acrivation.jpg
>Play FOR FUN is not funny as raise status in the hierarchy, monki neuron acrivation.jpg
how about we just stop doing that shit and the normalcattle can go back to watching god-awful daytime television and working themselves into an early grave for little obvious reward.
I'd say it's both. PC games have had built in voicechat for a long time yes, but for games that didn't have it, people would use stuff like Ventrilo and Teamspeak. Now you have stuff like Discord which allows people to have private voice chats with the ability to moderate them (the moderation part is a useful tool, because everyone knows how annoying in game voice chat can be with randos). That kind of pushed people away from chatting in game.
But yeah it wasn't the only nail in the coffin for sociability in video games. A lot of it comes down to other factors, like the loss of dedicated servers being a thing to AAA developers not caring about community and only caring about profit.
Creative oldschool games still exist. Just nobody wants to create maps and rent servers anymore. Players voluntarily decide to sterilize yourself for one more dopamine dose.
I was pretty impressed when i started playing neverwinter nights a few days ago and saw the boomers are still updating that game and running a server with 100 online plus an active oldschool forum, I still have hope that people will begin to form communities around dedicated servers again, and if yoy look at games like gta 5 with flourishing rp server communities its clear theres still a market for it
yep, pretty much every multiplayer game is suffering from this. look at league of communist for example, riot israelites kept listening to discord troony homosexuals and every redditor complaining about muh toxicity when all they had to do was leave their chat off, but no riot decided to go full 1984 and even saying the word "cancer" gets you banned
gaming media israelites have been ruining games for so long that even among us got killed overnight by blocking the free chat feature the game had from day 1, sure you can make an account and enable free chat again, but not everyone will do it or have the attention spam to actually create an account just to enable chat again. That killed the game for me.
In among us before they won "that award" you could interact with so much people, it was the best game during its prime, everyone talking freely and speaking their mind, but after they put the chat behind an account now nobody talks, its like playing with bots..... same as league of legends.... why call them MMO's or MOBA's at this point?
and also this
frick this younger crystal generations, bunch of homosexuals
Yep
are you the #1 halo player in missouri? Lemon
I vividly remember the day party chat was added to xbox live and ever since then, playing with a bunch of players who seem like bots of varying skill levels has been the norm. Pretty sure it was like late 2008 or 2009 they added it since I remember it was around the time people started learning advanced forge techniques in Foundry.
they're not wrong though and it's actually why I moved back to PC and ended up playing tf2/cs1.6 for the next few years. the banter there was still alive and well at the time and even after the brony invasion
us original gamers play(ed) mmorpegers because we were outcasts and had no friends irl. we got immersed in the gameworld. now the games are filled with normans. and getting immersed is heavily discouraged by stigmatizing by the normie social order. it can't be done without being seen as weirdos and posted all over the internet. see any wow rp servers.
I think the issue is with companies trying to cater to everyone ever rather than sticking to one audience. Why spend time making such an expensive project for only a niche community when you can blend in every fricking genre imaginable to bring more people in? Better yet, why keep old school gameplay aspects when you can """"modernize"""" it for accessibility? It's all about boosting profit. The only way you can really revive that kind of spirit is if indie developers start making their own but I doubt you can make a genuinely worthwhile MMO by yourself or with a team of less than 30 people
While that's probably mostly true, as a kid I got into MMOs because my friends played them. Adventuring in a world with people you know from real life was great since it was such a coop experience.
Over zealous moderation. Nobody wants to lose their account for saying a forbidden word or offending some mentally ill troon. Turns out limiting speech stops people from wanting to communicate.
Sounds like a you problem.
>Playing OW2
>Enemy team has a doomfist
>Make a joke saying the enemy team has a Winston
>Get an add after the game
>Talk with the guy for a bit
>We play every now
But I do agree OP, most people are so afraid now to get in trouble compared to before. Yes these corporations have made gaming more "inclusive" but at what cost the communication? The soul of a game? The fact that I could be interacting with a larping nazi one moment, the next moment I'm talking with a larping tankie.
Now everyone is too afraid to speak their mind and have all effectively put themselves in an echo chamber.
OP is talking about MMOs doe, learn to read moron or kys
Because they don't need to be anymore.
The games used to be hard and forced you to group up and work together and in ye olden days everyone was a frickin' nerd.
Now everyone is a complete normalgay and even as the games become solo friendly and easy it's preferable to interacting with the modern internet.
Fast travel. When you can just warp to the good spots, no one cares anymore.
Instant partying. If you had trouble getting a party, just raise your communication skills, then try again.
In PvE games you need it to be all about group content. Players should be able to solo, but they should be greatly benefited by grouping. There should be no disadvantage for your filling your party. There should only be incentive. A good economy works as well with the ability to pass down and loan gear to others. "NO DROP"/soulbound type shit is a really double edged sword. The EverQuest Mischief server nailed this. When I played there, people were almost too friendly. I just didn't have the time irl to be a part of a community as much as that server had.
That is PvE games. For PvP games, you need full communication (no global chat built in game though), full loot, and housing which provides semi-safe zones out in the wilderness in conjunction with actual safe zones of npc cities. Socialization should come in part through an incentive for players to work together to repel deviant players or for deviant players to band together with other skilled types. The best "online friends" I met and the most fun my actual friends and I had was on Ultima Online and for good reason.
PvP games are way harder to design correctly because your playerbase will constantly try to break it, but they're by no means impossible or difficult, it's just that PvE MMOs are easy to design and make social. That being said, making PvE or PvP games social is harder than making them anti-social almost by definition since making Massively Single Player RPGs is naturally going to capture a wider demographic since if you want to socialize you can, but otherwise you can just put yourself in a bubble and have the game continuously tell you that you're the chosen one.
How would you make a full-loot PVP game where autistic permanently-online guilds won't frick over everyone else and force them to either be a serf for a big guild or get steamrolled?
Its not that hard, it really isn't.
Stop assuming gear and resources have to be these giga rare uber legendary super items with a .005% drop rate and assuming only the top guilds are going to get it. And even then if you have some uber powerful items make sure they can't be stacked with limitations, EVE does this well enough, a blingy pirate frig still dies in 1 volley from a battlecruiser if you can catch them.
The other thing is to stop making tiny ass game worlds and calling it 'massively multiplayer', if your world is sufficiently large enough a lone wolf solo player can easily play through it with stealth options as long as they game can actually support that style of gameplay, which means you can't have a game world where everyone has 450% flying noclip speedhacks and addons that honk every time a player character is loaded into memory.
Numbers matter more than gear, a big clan will always have the highest advantage in numbers.
Making a big world isn't about the will to do it, it's about the resources to be able to develop one. EVE can have it because the world is mostly emptiness and 3 dimensional, which only works in a space game. It's also not a great example because most of the game world is ruled by some kind of guilds, and it's softened by the presence of "safe" areas. Stealth gameplay also makes the server architecture much more complicated which can be a big ask when you're already developing an MMO.
Also "massively multiplayer" doesn't mean that it's a massive game, it means it is massively multiplayable. The bigger you want the game to be the less likely the developers/investors are to be willing to try anything novel at all.
>massively multiplayer isn't massive multiplayer
lol, lmao
Holy frick can you ARPG gacha andies go frick off back to your genshin containment board already?
Yes we know that investors don't want to make shit, they just want money, its a fricking moot point if you don't believe MMOs shouldn't be made in the first place.
I think your post would go into my hall of fame for illiteracy if there was one.
cool story bro
>EVE does this well enough
No it doesn't lol. Null is entirely about who has the biggest capital blob to throw at people they don't like. Big alliances are nepotism and rmt central, directly affecting development in favorable to them way through CSM bullshit. You are absolutely clueless.
>I can't solo a titan fleet so game is bad
lol how is this post real just warp away lol
>EVE does this well enough
You must be joking. This game's "winners" are accounting nerds doing rmt. There is no real risk when whales throw cash to buy more ships and shit.
Reading comprehension.
EVE has a system in place that restricts how you can fit your ship so you can't fully officer/A-type fit a ship without going way over CPU
Of course you wouldn't know this because you've never flown anything outside of a guide, or quit in the first 3 days because there wasn't a linear quest progression telling you where to go and what to do.
And anyone can fricking bling out a Tech 3 cruiser
>b-but RMTers :~~*~~*
This is how I know you're fricking bad because you whine that you can't have a free titan for logging in and doing dailies for 6 months and that makes the game imbalanced, and why you deserve your gacha tier drop rates chink shit MMOs like WOW and whatever flavor of the month bullshit korea shat out recently
You are fricking moron. And anyone can get titan in 6 months doing what is basically amounts to dailies.
RMT in EVE is about milking idiots huffing your ally hypnotoad. As such null and wh are entirely a business ventures for corp/ally leadership to get mad dosh, gameplay is irrelevant and every war is orchestrated to keep useful slavedrones from getting too bored.
Damn, its almost like its an economic based MMO where anyone can do anything and not RMT koreaboo trash.
If by anything you mean 3 shitty minigames, randomly generated fetchquests and boring ass combat, sure.
>How would you make a full-loot PVP game where autistic permanently-online guilds won't frick over everyone else and force them to either be a serf for a big guild or get steamrolled?
you don't
the only people who want to play such games are gankers, people who want actual competitive experiences play actually balanced PvP games
When I think of full loot pvp I think of something like foxhole, where the loot is created by the logi players or the "pve lifeskiller" players which is then driven to barracks at the frontline for the pvpers to use wherever it's needed most. I think the idea of full loot in a game where you have to personally grind all of your loot yourself in the game where the weapons are just stat sticks kills desire to play it which is why many of them die. I haven't played foxhole in some time now, but I think it did a few things right which is why I use it as a reference.
The game is a good example of how if new players just want to go to the front line and plink at the enemy, they can. There is no mandatory skilling grind or some gay ass quest chain they have to do, pve mobs they have to farm for 30 hours before they can finally go shoot other players with guns without being at severe disadvantages. The name of the game is the war effort and nothing else matters, not personal progression or mounts and cheevos. Logi players aren't doing it for some kind of currency income which they can use to buy more gear, it's all about the war effort. There's logi and pvp, you can choose to do either or without ever having to interact with the other and they both rely on each other for the game to function.
Thats exactly how a full loot MMO is supposed to work.
Where resources is pretty much guaranteed to be gotten if you just gather them, the trick is getting them to a safe zone where you can then trade or craft with them.
Too many wowgays think that full loot PVP MMOs means that they have to grind like WOW for months to get full bis or thunderfury to be competitive like an arenagay only to lose it all in a single gank, or they're anti-social fricks who whine that the best way to play an MMO is, god forbid, with other players.
I genuinely hope you get locked in a room and forced to do logi 24/7 for a year in foxhole.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean others don't.
Have you considered call of duty or league of legends?
Nobody likes foxhole logi. If somebody said he like foxhole logi he either didn't do it seriously or straight up lying.
>no one likes doing X because I don't like it
Again, have you considered playing brainlet shit with no depth? Might be more your speed.
Seriously though, if you don't like MMOs why play them other than to shit on noobs because you won't last in any game with SBMM where you can't outgrind them, why b***h about people who are willing to outgrind you at your own game?
This is incredibly funny coming from someone who think foxhole logi of all things have depth and not a glorified cookie clicker simulator in the first place. You can also visit foxhole thread on this very board and ask their mind on logistics if you somehow think playerbase doesn't absolutely fricking despise its implementation in general.
Again, MOBAs exist for a reason.
I hated it when I tried but when I played foxhole there were ppl who genuinely enjoyed logi and doing bullshit like deliveries or dealing with partisans. Motherfrickers are autistic as frick about it so I assumed they loved it. You have a point about it being generic cookie clicker bullshit but then again MMORPGs are filled with players like that.
Again my point in bringing up foxhole is that players who want to pvp don't have to click the cookie to get the gear to start murdering the opposition. The cookie clickers can click cookies all day in foxhole if they want to and never have to pvp while contributing to the overall war effort. Last time I played foxhole there was a readily supply of cookie clickers and opposition murderers, almost like they were in perfect harmony. The murderers never had to click a cookie, and the cookie clickers never had to murder. My reasoning is why can't MMORPGs that propose pvp as a major feature be like this? I've considered playing Albion because apparently it's a pvp heavy game but I can't be arsed to click the cookie just to fight real people.
The thing about MMORPGs is they're multiple interconnected systems, which creates the social and community gameplay that makes MMORPGs interesting and popular in the first place.
If you're playing them to do 1 singular activity, step back, look around, and find the stand alone game that does that one activity better
Raiding? Fricking play monster hunter
Arena PVP? Fricking MOBAs
Grinding? You don't need an MMORPG, just play a regular RPG, especially ARPGs like POE and D2
What makes shit like EVE and Albion interesting to play as full loot PVP MMOs is that the loot has value to it because it took another player effort to make it, and it can be destroyed. If you don't like crafting and trading or participating in the MMO economy, then maybe just try playing something that isn't an MMO, again, MOBAs exist for a reason, and why LCS and TI has significantly more participants and viewers then something like the AWC or MDI.
they are
you're just playing the wrong ones
FFXI's kind of in a crappy place right now with retail being garbage and private servers being a choice of Horizon (horrible management, probably a sinking ship because of it) and ~400 player multiboxer servers where it's probably more like 200. I have a real itch to play it again but it just doesn't feel worth it in its current state. Also the new producer basically stating outright the game is going into maintenance mode for real now.
RO always interested me but I didn't get to play it back in the day, and it sounds like the private servers are like MS private servers, ie. a bunch of drama queen sociopath mentally unstable server owners. I'm really interested in trying the game itself but finding a stable server sounds like a crapshoot.
As it is the only MMO (and it's not really a proper MMO) private server I've found that felt reliable and sane is PSO's Ephinea.
What's wrong with Horizon management? I hadn't been following that closely, I played it around christmas but couldn't be assed to keep grinding this time.
RO is in the same place as XI in that it was only ever really good when it was live and you were 12, retail servers are hellholes and private servers are only for the people who played it growing up and can't let it go.
Things I've seen/heard:
>pride flag on the main site
>heavily discord focused, there have been people banned for violating rules that have been updated in the discord but not on the official site
>devs often taking server firsts for themselves and their friends
>supposedly a lot of the team is people responsible for shitting up Wings
>bizarre balancing changes a very large portion of the playerbase hates, ie nerfing ninja and making beastmaster stupid powerful
>devs that spend a bizarre amount of time defending themselves and their server on reddit, posts on ffxiprivateservers that criticize the server or staff are often deleted
>not sure if it does anymore, but at launch the installer connected to a bunch of known shady domains in china/russia
>RO is in the same place as XI in that it was only ever really good when it was live and you were 12, retail servers are hellholes and private servers are only for the people who played it growing up and can't let it go.
Yeah I've pretty much given up on the idea of being able to get that old MMO feel back any time soon. The internet landscape itself has changed too much into something not really conducive for hanging out with strangers in an MMO and I don't see anything changing until there's a big crash or people start getting more jaded with how things are.
>private servers being a choice of Horizon (horrible management, probably a sinking ship because of it) and ~400 player multiboxer servers where it's probably more like 200.
there are heaps of XI servers anon and like half of them are fricking great
stop going for shilled FotM servers set up by streamers.
Nasomi
Eden
Wings
Era
Nova
most of those have been up 10 years and have good, populated and dedicated playerbases, stable servers, no wipes and different stats/rates depending on how you want to play.
My personal recommendation is Era but Eden's pretty good too. Eden's about as close to 2009 retail as you'll get and has about the same server population as XI retail servers did back in the day
I want to believe any of those servers are good but I've heard a lot of shit that leads me to expect otherwise
>good, populated and dedicated playerbases
Aren't player counts generally seriously inflated on any server that allows dualboxing + a third for bazaar? Which is most servers, iirc. Sure Eden says 1500 active players daily, but it doesn't say if that's unique IPs or only 1/2 to 1/3 of that is actual players. I've also heard that Eden in particular is very cliquey the closer you get to endgame and the mods are asshats that delete/ban for criticism and favoritism and cheating run rampant. Mind you, I haven't heard of a private server for any MMO that doesn't have this problem, which is part of why I've never stuck with one (and part of why I stopped playing XI retail, too).
That said, of all the ones you mentioned and that I've heard of, Eden does seem like the most stable choice if I wanted to play on a current private server. Nasomi I thought was dead (wasn't it a single dev project and he quit?), Wings I've heard went to shit (though I also heard that the people that caused it to go to shit left it and are now working on Horizon so Wings might be picking back up). Haven't heard of Era or Nova at all.
I WANT a truly good, highly populated server run by reasonable, sane people but the more I look into private servers for any MMO, the less I can believe that'll ever happen. Even Ephinea, which seems close to me, has had drama over a couple of asshats on the team I will say I'm curious to see how Horizon crashes and burns however, because I'm certain that it will.
I feel like even if I find a decent private server it'll still be socially ruined by discords. I especially don't like this recent move of many private servers not even having forums, and being primarily discord-based for their community. My problems with discord as a platform itself aside, a fricking chat room is just not a smart or conducive way to host your entire community.
>Aren't player counts generally seriously inflated
few servers allow multiboxxing anymore
even Era, which used to famously allow people to run 6 characters at once and didnt mind if you used plugins to automate them stopped letting people do it.
t.i remember when zoning with 6 puppetmasters at exactly the same time would crash the server
>I want a high populated server
well you have like 2
Eden is my recommendation. 800-1000 pop depending what time of day, which is around how big most retail servers were in the game's peak.
even then, the best XI servers are the chill 100-man ones where everyone knows each other.
need help with something?
just ask
fricking half the server will drop what they're doing to get you Sky access and your Byakko's Haidate in the same afternoon
>havent heard of Era or Jova at all
cuz they dont feel the need to pay streamers like Ninja to shill their shit because they dont want crybaby newhomosexuals shitting up the place
>its prob ruined by discord
its FFXI
99% of the time people still just communicate through in-game chat
>wah wah server drama
thats why i suggested well-established well-coded and stable private servers that have been around over 10 years.
Era was already a fricking 8 year old server when I played on there back in 2015
honestly it just sounds like you're a salty noob who just makes excuses instead of having fun and enjoying a video game with friends
chill the frick out anon, MMOs like XI are supposed to be comfy
if you want to be sweaty and angry with 300k online go play WoW or Dota or something instead.
honestly just trying to help, maybe if you werent such an abrasive c**t you wouldnt have as many problems, iunno.
You sound about twice as salty as I am, anon, and about as emotionally mature and mentally stable as the average pserver owner/clique-r.
I may check out one of these small servers at one point if I get desperate, but at the moment pickings are so mediocre that I'm more interested in waiting and seeing what happens with the scene over the next few years in general, like whether there'll be a real boom/exodus or not now that Fujito has happened. Though the impression I get is that a lot of the players still on retail either are in denial or have some kind of hard stance against all private servers.
Sure, a small "tightly knit" community is nice but an important part of MMOs for me is having a lot of people around. Like at least 400 real active players (ie. not counting idlers and multiboxers). It won't carry a bad game for me, like XIV or WoW, but without it, I don't even want to play an MMO in the first place. That atmosphere and the atmosphere of old arena FPS servers fricking around with cool dudes every day are what I miss, without either of the two I just can't give a cat's ass about multiplayer games period.
If you want actual socialization play a co-op game like DRG
Drg is missing that rpg feeling for me that older mmorpgs fill that void.
then play a singleplayer RPG
or play tabletop games (online or IRL)
there really isn't a way to make a social experience out of games like MMORPGs, at least anymore.
Too many reasons to easily list out, but the biggest ones:
-MMOs take too much time to make too little progress. You can spend hundreds of hours in an MMO and still be far behind most of the playerbase in terms of gear and stats. Every quest needs to be done as quickly as possible just to reach the end, and most players want to complete dailies/weeklies/seasonals/etc. with haste because there's no reason to go slower to get to the exact same place. As a result, nobody wants to be creative and all players follow hyper-optimized guides online to be as tuned as possible, so there's literally no reason to talk about gameplay.
-Most people who play MMOs are in a group that's handpicked, because plenty of other randoms are completely insufferable homosexuals. Either you'll run into some roleplayer who misconstrues everything to be sexual, or you'll run into some minmaxing tryhard faux-pro cuck who won't let you have any fun for any reason. If you siphon those subhumans out, you'll have a good time with your personal group, and have an extremely hard time wanting to associate with anybody out of your own personal group.
-Nothing is mysterious or requires player interaction anymore. Every piece of content is laid out flatly on wikis and youtuber guides within an hour of its existence being discovered, and thus there's no reason to query or question from regular players when you can use Google to instantly get the answer.
There's literally no reason to socialize in an MMO unless it's a specific social zone that's been curated for a specific social purpose. There USED to be reasons, but the surrounding climate of the genre has obliterated any need or desire for it. People blame how "easy" things are or how soloable they are, but even in games that cannot have progress without a group setting, odds are extremely high you're also looking up guides and how-to's so you can clear things informed rather than learning blind anyways.
Linear progression is a problem, but many MMOs have fixed this already
Randoms are insufferable homosexuals because the multiplayer aspect of modern MMOs is binary, its either designed to be done solo (questing, solo challenges) or in a group (dungeons and raids) with no inbetween, and there are no natural drivers for group content such as conflict or co-operation. Its either artificial in the form of instanced PVP and dungeon queues, or its just non-existant
The lack of mystery is that every dev gave up on combating MMOchamp gays, even though they do have the tools to hide them from the playerbase. At this point we really should go back to old school design and remove numbers from combat logs and healthbars/levels from mobs, we can see with monster hunter that just adding damage numbers to your attacks greatly affects the mentality of players causing them to risk carting more just so they get bigger numbers, the only thing FFXIV does right compared to 99% of modern MMOs is they ban your ass for cheating with addons
Also i'd like to say the biggest reason for anti-social bullshit in MMOs is that there are too many drawbacks, punishments, for being social. Too many single player gays complained they couldn't do everything solo and got catered too, but in doing so they punished actaul social players, people who can run large guilds and communities should be rewarded for their effort, but instead the game is designed to make communities as toxic as possible because people who should be working together to slay the dragons and build their villages are instead bickering who gets the 2 items that dropped for a 40+ group of players, or worse, they start to restrict group sizes so people have to compete just for a fricking slot on a raid team and not get benched, when the game should just be like "Hey can my friend come for this dungeon?" "Oh its 5 man, but sure why not" and not "Sorry we're full"
>bickering who gets the 2 items that dropped for a 40+ group of players
Honestly why is this still a thing? I understand the notion of longevity, but if you and your party are raiding some boss's massive dungeon and killing a legion of enemies and an absolute monstrosity of a demigod, why is it that only four things drop? I still feel like killing these bosses should drop a treasure trove and maybe have the greatest items only drop in small numbers, but the idea that killing a king of dragons in his lair (sometimes literally in a room filled in all directions with treasure) and the only thing we can acquire from it is two scales, sometimes a wing, and a 0.9% drop of a sword is just insufferable.
Because then all people would ever do is kill dragons for all the loot they'd ever want.
Its actually a big issue in OSRS that skilling has become pointless unless you're an iron man because bossing drops all the supplies and money you'll ever need
Ideally slaying a dragon should give you something like a community wide buff, mount their head in the middle of town to give a zone wide buff, sacrafice their heart to a blacksmith forge to give it the temporary ability to forge improved dragonblood items, it should be its own reward but shouldn't be the best income in the game.
OSRS is fricked but I would say, ideally, part of the solution is that killing a dragon is an incredible ordeal, and not just something you can prepare a bank for to slam out 20 times in a day. Or however it works in OSRS, I haven't played it since 2007.
The problem in other games is with the themepark design, in that if there's a dragon, it should be a reasonable assumption that you can kill that dragon. Because of that, you do get to kill that dragon, and it's expected you kill that dragon, so the loot drops are throttled to match that expectation. In an ideal where killing a dragon affords you a whole horde of loot, then the effort would be commensurate to that reward. Even for the hardest raids in say, WoW, where guilds wipe hundreds of time, there's no "investment" to those wipes because the people just pick themselves up, slam out the consumables they used again, and go. If you want to design boss drops in a way where you only need to do them once, then the boss would be designed in a way where the expectation is that a group of players would only be able to kill them once.
Overall, in the world we live in, before things get better, things need to get a lot lot worse. People are overcoddled, spoiled and do not know worse than they have right now.
Hate to be with those incels but I must admit, billions must die before things start looking like the prime golden age.
Once this crystal homosexual generation goes through insane hardship, those that survive will be able to act like a real man while playing games knowing they have been through much worse.
As it is, they all deserve to be put through the challenge of their lives, most won’t make it but then again they don’t deserve it.
Monthly reminder that unless you're a gambling addict or you like having fun, you should be playing Diablo Immortal. It's repetitive and boring, the microtransactions have been discussed to death, endgame PvP is 100% pay to win, and so on and so on. But one thing the game does offer is constant interaction with other players.
You have to do everything with others for full rewards, and there are some things you must do with a semi-permanent 8-man crew to receive credit. PvP between clans is important, cooperation between allied clans is crucial to the PvP effort, and everyone in a clan is expected to chip in. Virtually any hour of the day you can log in and get a full group for any dungeon, raid boss, or most other activities. It's also incredibly non-toxic. Clans battle over resources and thank each other for a good fight. Alliances are toppled and congratulate the victors. Not sometimes, but always. All of this is made possible by the fact that we have small servers (a few thousand people) with none of the "connected realm" battlegroup shit that ruined WoW and is about to ruin Diablo 4. And nobody uses fricking Discord.
If I want to enjoy myself, I play some other Diablo game. If I'm lonely because I can't go out, I play Immortal.
Frick off blizzard
This is always the only reply, because no one can debunk the things I say about Immortal. And it's always someone who has spent $120 on PoE stash tabs.
Once you went immortal once, there is nothing more to see.
I am both socially awkward and hard on myself, if I do not perform perfect, I expect everyone is talking shit about me so I stop playing. This is partially because I had friends who were like this when it came to playing with people.
Servers are so fricking pozzed and filled with tyrant Black folk that will ban you with 0 recourse.
Have you tried not being racist or offensive?
Have they tried not initiating chat pvp then Getting ass blasted when they lose?
What does this have to do with what I said?
Nothing you said was relevant so I just continued on
Have you tried not playing MMOs?
I play and enjoy MMOs and I don't get banned because I am not an edgy 16 year old anymore.
So you play ffxiv with other trannies.
You start chat pvp with people with the intent of baiting out a report.
>nobody socializes in mmos anymore because everyone's too afraid to be racist anymore
nobody socializes in mmos anymore because the games don't require socialization, you fricking dipshits
I'm glad you morons feel too afraid to talk though, it's a nice bonus
Nobody is afraid to talk moron. You homosexuals are just such pussies you are afraid of having an opinion that 51+% of the population doesn't have.
I feel you dude, when I'll play old school RuneScape all I see is bots using macros to mine ores so that they can inflate the Grand Exchange because I guess they need the validation of having digital currency
some of those are venezuelans who can make more money that way than working an actual job
True
Game devs want money not players
swtor is still very social
you can always find people putting together groups for the weekly events and raids and things
small but tight knit and very active community
Lots of reasons.
Discordtrannies/Echo Chambers, ~~*political correctness*~~ streamers/jewtubers, wikis (Both good and bad), games being shit, polarization of society, third-worlders.
>Third Worlders
Why bother trying to talk to people if instead of people, it's just 12 year old subhuman shitskins going "sopa de macaco uma delicioso"
>Polarization of society/~~*Political Correctness*~~
You can say "politics shouldn't matter", but when two people have completely differing values, any long-term regular interaction isn't going to work out. It's not just whether you vote for a doubebag or a turd sandwich. It's the core values people have and their inherent philosophies.
Someone who expects the State to protect them (Despite the Supreme Court even ruling it has no obligation to) and wishes to strip others of the tools to defend themselves sure as hell isn't going to have the same sense of personal responsibility as someone in a rural area dozens of miles from the nearest sheriff, or even someone in the ghetto that knows they can't expect the police to help them.
Now imagine that the company blatantly sides with one of these groups and would happily ban the others.
>Streamers/Jewtubers
Promote FoTM gaming. morons pick up a game just because a streamer told them to, then swap when the next fotm game gets shilled. Even if you talk to them while they play, they're gone in a week along with all the other morons. You can easily end up with too many servers with low pop this way if the devs can't/won't merge servers.
>Wikis
Arguably good. Too bad real morons never look things up so the only questions that still get asked are moronic ones.
>Discordtrannies/Echochambers
Should be self-explanatory. They're all too busy jerking each other off in discord to talk in-game.
>Games being shit
How are you going to harbor a community if the community quits as a result of the godawful playing experience? Post is getting too long so; Scamazon's israelite World. 'nuff said.
All troony homosexuals get ignored as a default.
When MMOs first became a thing, social media didn't exist. MMOs, at the time of let's say Ultima Online and Everquest, they were basically the biggest social media platforms. Back then, the social aspect of online games were, for the most part, internal, not external. The people you played a MMO with were people you met in the game, and usually the only time you interacted and communicated with them was in-game.
Fast forward to today, social media became a thing, Discord is a thing, the social aspect of online games became external, etc. Now when people have friends they play an online game with, it's not people they met in that game, now it's let's say a furry who lives in the south, they joined a Discord community for southern furries, there's a group of people they met there and became friends with that also play said game, and now they play that game with them. This has an effect on MMOs, how the social aspects of MMOs are designed, etc.
>social media became a thing
forums were a thing too
>Discord is a thing
I'll admit discord is quite advanced but irc was already a thing, however it didn't foster communities like Discord did so I can kind of agree.
People put a little too much blame on the applications or websites instead of realizing that on top of that, people have changed. The people who frequent the internet aren't the same in 2023 as they were in 2013, or 2003 and they all used the internet for different reasons.
I think one thing worth mentioning is that the internet itself isn't based on peer to peer interactions, it's based on creator to audience interactions. I can't exactly describe the full implications of this but it's certainly had an effect on the way people socialize on the internet. You can certainly see this in the way that community events for modern MMORPGs are typically handled. Often times they involve some twitch streamer or eceleb, someone who's gained an audience, and relegates the average player to being nothing more than a member of the audience rather than an active participant of the community.
I don't think you can just place the blame on one thing, whether it be how games are developed now compared to back then, the people, or the applications. It's a whole slurry of things that got us to where we are today.
>"Why don't people socialize in MMOs?"
Why don't the same people socialize in reality? They come to the MMO as a friendship simulator. Find anybody who has been playing since the early 2000s and ask where the friends are they made back then. I still have some, and it's because I'm not terrified of using third party chat programs like MSN Messenger, AOL, Ventrilo, and more recently Discord. People in this thread want to act as though all of your interaction with people in a game should be limited to the game itself, but if you recognize that the social element is the most important part of the game, you should then recognize that the game itself is disposable as long as you keep your friends. The devs, at least, obviously seem to believe that the game is disposable and temporary.
Yeah, which is why the whole 'glorified chat room' arguement goes out the window.
Old MMOs just expected you to play it like D&D, but with hundreds-thousands of other players, and not alone, because they themselves were simply designed as graphical MUDs.
The problem is too many newbies want MMOs to be their single player second life job simulator, which you can get without a live service, the whole point of a server based RPG is that you're sharing a world with hundreds of other people and the dynamics other people bring to the equation makes the game fun and interesting, if you're just playing to kill monsters with your bros, fricking play monster hunter or an ARPG like diablo, if you want hardcore balanced PVP play a MOBA.
Its so sad that WOW hit everything perfectly with vanilla, mobs were easy to solo, but still dangerous enough that grouping up with others was a benefit, unlike now where the time it would take to /whisper someone "Hey you want to group up for this quest?" They have already AOE'ed the zone and completed their daily and flew away to complete the next in 3 globals or play private instanced bejeweled minigames, and thats the gold standard of how MMOs are designed now because every MMO tries to be the next big WOW clone, copying everything wrong with WOTLK and onward and trying to force the uber hardcore end game grind where modern WOWgays are perpetually stuck in, not realizing that group grew over the course of 6 years when the core game still had social building elements built into the leveling system like elite quests and having to find a group to run deadmines.
Literally a skill issue. You are not getting social experiences because you are not seeking them out, you are old and don't actually enjoy games anymore, you just miss the feeling of being a kid.
this covers basically 99.99% of the posts in this thread.
Doesn't help that the games just plain suck too.
And unlike most genres where indies can take up the mantle that AAA abandoned in favor of low effort live service gacha trash, MMOs take too much technical skills to code and upkeep without it becoming utter jank.
Like most modern MMOs are just WOW clones, yet somehow worse than vanilla WOW. The Mobs barely do anything outside of raid bosses and are just glorified punching bags, and the raid bosses themselves aren't mechanically interesting either since the only innovation in the past 20 years of MMO raid boss design is to highlight the groundfire with giant moron proof circles, which actually hurts the immersion greatly
I mean sure you might think the games suck but thats a different conversation from the ability to be social.
Like a lot of what you said might apply to a game like FFXIV, however it's quite easy to find social interaction in that game if you actually go looking for it.
Yeah but FFXIV and WOW ERP is done in spite of the gameplay, not because of it.
I feel like posts like these are missing the point. Yes you can find social interaction in an MMO if you "seek them out". But you didn't have to "seek out" social interactions in an MMO in ages past because they were suffused with both the necessity to communicate with other people and the downtime required to actually type something out. An example;
>grouping in Everquest
>have to go to a location with people, ask them to join, or ask people to group up and go somewhere else
>traveling itself might require the help of another person
>playing in a group requires some amount of coordination to function because every group combination is different, outside of some staples
>massive downtime on mana regen/etc leaves openings for people to chat
>some classes only hit a few buttons per mob if that so have even more time to say anything
>overpull/mez resists? people need to come up with a plan and communicate it ASAP, not just to themselves but to the zone in some cases
>grouping in WoW/XIV/SWTOR/etcetc
>push button on UI and get teleported to a dungeon with a prefab group of strangers
>every dungeon before level cap is completely toothless
>every encounter is a nonstop button spam with no downtime where you move from point A to B
>every class has functionally the same roles
>because of this, even hard content follows a very cookie cutter formula that you're expected to already know or be able to intuit
>you might be lucky if someone says hello and thanks in a run
Obviously, I'm giving very broad and cherry picked examples and not hitting everything. But my point is a demonstration of how the games are designed now around not communicating with anyone. You see this if you go back and play older games on private servers/etc.
Those communications were entirely superficial and most of those points came from tech not being quite there for the attempted scope. Also fricking everyone hated downtimes, conversations happened because it was stare at the wall tier boring and alt tabing wasn't really feasible to do for the most people.
In short web1.0 is long over, it won't work nowdays and we had a countless attempts that crashed and burned to prove it. Get with the times or don't and find a new hobby.
>Those communications were entirely superficial and most of those points came from tech not being quite there for the attempted scope.
A lot of conversations are superficial. I think a lot of people also have the wrong idea that socialization in MMOs was ALWAYS about making friends, when it was more about immersion, and playing in a space where there were other people around all the time just doing their own thing, but that they were still more than just a bot. Yes even if it was XXLegolas420XX telling you about their new bong while you were medding, it was something that kept you for the moment connected and conversing within that world. The exciting part of MMOs was playing in a virtual world with real people.
>Also fricking everyone hated downtimes, conversations happened because it was stare at the wall tier boring and alt tabing wasn't really feasible to do for the most people.
I know and I agree, it's not like we all had cellphones inches away from us either. I like pressing buttons. But their removal is part of a trend in the way MMOs have changed toward being antisocial. You would be surprised how many people still communicate on those old game servers despite having all the modern conveniences available too, but then again the people still playing them are the ones who like that kind of thing.
>Get with the times or don't and find a new hobby.
I still enjoy and play modern MMOs. But when the topic is "why are MMOs not social anymore" the answer isn't "because you aren't trying to be social". The kind of socializing that used to exist in those games doesn't exist anymore, as you said.
>Web 1.0 is long over
lmao, the only people playing MMOs then and now are people who could communicate via third party methods, this argument is so fricking bunk.
Just because you were a child when your first MMO came out and you didn't know that the internet actually existed doesn't mean shit didn't exist, stop spewing bullshit
The only valid argument is that fansites posting leaks became more lucrative thus a massive push for datamining content and spoilering it to everyone became a massive problem, and devs simply started to spoil shit themselves so that they can retain the ad traffic that fansites were taking.
When I played FFXI back in 2007, if you joined a "guild" you were in it for life for better or for worse. MMOs are a joke these days you just look up a wiki guide, build your cookie cutter build and get down your cookie cutter rotations. There were only 18 slots for a party at any given time, everyone had to know how to do their job at all times, everyone was competing with everyone with timed pops, farming pop items. It wasn't like wow where you could just be like oh, let's just let everyone wipe 30 times until everyone gets it down. If you wiped a party in FFXI, congrats you pretty much wasted hours or possible DAYS of farming pop items. Or "world bosses" that would spawn literally once a week with 30 different groups competing for a chance to kill it. If you quit a "guild" expect a lengthy job interview on trying to join the next one because reputation actually mattered and just like a small town word gets around quick. Nowadays people quit and join guilds harder than they quit their gf's. I used to be a dynamis thf death puller and trust me it was stress hell. There's a well known story of people playing this game for 6+ years and not getting a drop they wanted, I forget the thing but it was some warrior axe that was OP as frick at the time. Now compare that to some dumbfrick MMO where you just have to show up and be 75% competent at your role for a week or two to get your shit you want, I wouldn't give a frick either.
everyone is a fricking triggered fricking homosexual now
they cry
i play off meta i carry they cry
i play s tier and carry they cry
i play seriously and point out every single mistake after they frick up when they want to talk shit and go to that level they cry
you cant fix men now
theyre emasculated pussy homosexuals
i fricking hate them all
if you dont talk in chat they cry
if you do nothing wrong or anything in general they cry
and they team up and mass report you
any 3rd world monkey homosexual reports you en masse
then the game dev will ignore your ticket and leave you banned for months.
people just submit bans now for no reason just cause they can and they know an ai will ban you if you stack enough reports on someone
everyone is a mentally ill sociopath now
t.transwoman with a testosterone level of fricking
20
I was going to say something mean to you but then I realized that you are right. People who play online video games are not only way too sensitive nowadays, but there is also a layer of maliciousness behind everything. It was funny when homosexuals could just shit talk it out back in the day but nowadays people deliberately bait timeouts or bans and do anything they can to frick you over because they can't handle a little shit talk. Doesn't even have to involve racism or anything, now people just insist every argument is political instead of two motherfrickers simply having a verbal disagreement.
I bait gays like you and report because it is funny as frick, please continue to whine and seethe it is incredibly entertaining.
Smiley faces are enough to deal with you cause people like you just get angrier and angrier, then I report and boop. I do the same 🙂
__
(ಠ_ృ)
jokes on you i don't play asshomosexuals
its universal for all games. you just adjust.
nah i never bite.
I will bait you into getting mad and aggroing on me by shooting over your head or "accidentally" lining up the enemy behind you and going to shoot and I "miss" and hit you instead in case they are watching the playback or other things that arent trackable by the system and then clip it and submit it into the open ticket window for you being a homosexual. I'll gladly "accidentally" down you to delete a portion of your hp and heal you up with my stuff, so it looks good in the replay because I know me missing hp matters less than your ability to play with missing hp, which will massive increase your failure rate. I'll purposely fake backing up your plays and miss enemies on purpose so you die. Split your farm. Leave 4-5 seconds/steps early so when you do get attacked, I conveniently arent in LOS and cannot help you in time, nor am I there to die and I will escape. I won't warn you of impending ganks I know are coming.
Point is Im usually a masters level player in most games I play, so I can frick you over statistically in so many ways due to my off meta flexing playstyle and general game sense by adjusting tiny factors here and there. Then when youre 2-12 at the end of the game or triggered from me saying near the end when youre psychologically upset the most, that I was a nine year old trans kid going to meet my black 16 year old boyfriend after the match for some fun, I'll stack a report on you for feeding. If youre a huge piece of shit and rightwingoyim rage after that, Ill clip it and pewdiepie jamal you. I just want to play games and be left alone, but if you want to ruin my game and fun, I will gladly accept your challenge and play your game of sociopathy instead and I will drown you in my shit. That or join your side and pretend to befriend you and get involved in your life subtlety griefing, and then when I feel youre attached and im buried deep and know what hurts you, ill burn it all to the ground months from now abandoning you
because i don't want to talk to people
>nooooooooo you're ruining the genre!
it's always been this way for me ever since my 2004 assassin and wizard days in RO
Solo players aren't a problem, games had plenty of solo players. Some games like EQ and FFXI had classes like Necro/Beastmaster that were basically designed for solo players. Some people liked soloing just because they didn't have time for groups or they want a challenge. Or just liked the idea of playing in a large immersive world and grouping all the time made it feel more like a job. The problem is when games started catering to a majority solo players because that's where the money was instead of letting them be a necessary part of the fringe on an otherwise social experience.
As someone who was a solo player for most of my days you still socialized even if you didn't talk or interacted in group focused content
Grinding solo you still usually had to trade for what you wanted/needed, and it was just easier to trade with someone who specialized in a different niche or fed materials into a hardcore raid guild who couldn't be bothered to farm mats for gold or even a powerful tradable item.
Adventuring solo is great, but you should butt into other players regularly and interact with them, or else why the frick are you playing a worst version of a typical RPG
Also many things people call "QOL" or "Convinence" features pretty much delete the few aspects of MMOs that are appealing for a solo/lone wolf type of player. My friend used to be huge into trading in runescape until they added in the G.E. Before they added in the G.E. he was -the- guy in the australian timezone to get what you needed in bulk, wanted 10k iron ore or 1000 sharks but didn't want to sit in fally spamming, or offload a bunch of stuff for gold, or even just bulk trade iron for fish? in the australian timezone, he was your guy
When you add in too many convinience features that removes actual social aspects of an MMO you ruin the fun for some people who aren't playing to mash keybinds for 10 hours for a gacha tier droprate reward
>israelite got what he deserved
The horror
Calm down commie, your welfare tendies are on their way
The partyfinder is another one of those features that killed MMOs.
Repetitive Badge Runs, AOE tanking and Badge Farms ruined the dungeon running experience for WOW and its various clones.
When you turn the game into a chore to keep engagement high, people don't want to be engaged they just want to get their shitty chores out of the way
to put it as succinctly as possible, because players don't want them that way
They want solo experiences, they don't want to communicate, or learn, or make connections. They want to fill up a bar of meaningless garbage that does nothing at all for their character, they don't want character customization or progression. They don't even want teamwork; they just want someone to notice all the time they put into meaningless garbage without skill.
SharkCHADs rise up.
I miss how old MMOs used to be. Private servers are okay but they still just don't capture the same feeling. It's just a different time, I guess. Take me back.
Real answer: an average player has more social strength and more freedom to choose an activity for himself.
Basically it goes like this:
- 2007, I have just installed WoW, I am new to the game, I need a guild to tackle group content and just for fun or wpvp. When I search for a guild, I don't know how to pick one that suits me best, most guilds are laid back and chill, they will take me, and I will most likely enjoy their company. When I want to leave the guild - it's NOT easy to do - they are my friends and battle brothers, I need a good reason to do so, write a big farewell post on a forum, etc. I can leave a newbie guild for a better guild, but I really need to fit in and really outdo the members of my old guild (or else the switch is not justified).
- 2023, I have 15+ years of MMO experience, I can choose a guild depending on their RT, activities (parsing, speed clear, RF, semi-hardcore), I can look at their logs - it's all written on a website. Once I get good parses (I don't need a guild for that) I can leave right away, if I don't like when RL calls people "fricking morons" or when a guild suddenly shifts their RT, and find another guild right away. When not on RT if I don't like guild activity (let's pvp, let's do old raids), I can choose not to go. I can play in 2 guilds at the same time. But other people are like this too: if they don't like how I perform, they can kick me. A lot of people who have just started playing can't be my friends - they can't do the activities I can do, we don't have anything in common, we can't even talk about things or spead information: 99% of the info I would teach them is already written on wowhead or in class discords.
alright. i have been as of yet unable to get into this game, but today i will try again on Eden! started a catgirl warrior, gonna try to make into a corsair
anyone got the greentext of anon getting banned from an mmo and posting the chat log??
Social interactions are a consequence of modern MMOs major shift to being gacha games.
Its harder to sell a $200 skin to someone who will get /spit on by the majority of the playerbase if you don't ban emotes and mute offending players.
in general, anything to cater to whales is anti-MMO, skill based gameplay? Nope, uber content made for elite players? Nah, here's tourist mode for you and transmogs, PVP? only if whales can pay 2 win
You can see this in how major MMOs like WOW has developed more and more 'systems' that isn't based on completion and actually playing the game, but instead waiting around for shit to unlock so they can squeeze you for $15 a month while only giving you really only 3 days worth of content before it becomes repetitive and pointless.
MMO games still have a social aspect in them, but it has certainly changed. You can still chat with people, join guilds, make friends etc but it's not like it used to be. I think it's a result of MMO games becoming what they call theme park MMO games, in that they're all designed to be easymode, holding players hands from quest to quest and zone to zone without much need for cooperating with complete strangers.
Years ago, you'd have to chat and find people to help you out with things and then you'd maybe make a friend, but now it's all so streamlined. Aside from the fact MMO games are designed to be mostly solo'd now, the way they handle grouping sucks. Say you need to clear a dungeon, so you join a PUG, try to clear it and then at the end everyone says "gg" and goes on their way.
It sucks. I'm not the most social person but I liked socializing in some games. Something like Anarchy Online or Rift takes me back to a time when you'd be obliged to chat and build relations with people. Now when I play something like ESO, you see other people but never interact with them. There's zone chat but it's usually just the standard bullshit in there. Oh well.
Whole of gaming industry went to shit due to modern game design and logic.
In order to cater to the masses there are less and less gatekeepers, be it price tag (F2P), ease of in game mechanics, use of UI systems that fast forward any social interaction etc.
Nowadays game design aims at casual gamers where social prestige and FOMO is what brings in big bucks.
You can find social circles in MMOs just like you can do it with any other game. Reason you feel they are missing is because they have been side lined.
So now it takes proactive engagement to have social interactions through in game events, as opposed in the past where it took proactive engagement with in game events to have a social interaction.
If you wanted to raid before you needed a group, so you'd stand in the main city of your faction yelling LFG in chat.
For all of you to finish the raid you would have to talk about it because there were no instant 0day guides that you could read or videos to watch, nor where there advanced addons that would guide you through it all.
The challenge wasn't in games difficulty but in information sharing between the players.
Today, you find everything out before it is actually released. Everyone thinks they know the shit because they watched this or that video on how to do it so naturally they can pull it off in the first try.
Instant information, constant dailies, UI and UX mechanics which allow you to play MMOs as if they were single player have side lined the social aspect of it.