Maybe a hot take but I hate what discord has done for MMOs. I don't want to join a discord server and VC with a small group over and over again. I want a vibrant in-game chat that makes the game feel like a living, social world. I want to chat and raid with randos. Sometimes I want to RP a little bit. Anyone else feel this way?
a vibrant chat like
asdf21: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\]
supaqt: "Anyone know where to find entrance to X?"
IH8N0GGR$: "In ur mum"
asdf24: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\]
asdf33: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\]
supaqt: "Anyone know where the entrance is or not?"
CyberRider: "Meet me at the crossroad in front of the town"
supaqt: "DO YOU KNOW OR NOT"
asdf45: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\]
asdf47: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\]
PogueRogue: "stfu rtrd, go kys"
Wow, your Valdrakken Trade Chat Simulator is looking great! All it needs is someone randomly talking about politics or religion followed by angry replies.
Maybe I'm just on a quiet server but if you leave 'Trade - Services' it helps. 'Trade - City' is generally pretty tame and is just players trying to find people to craft.
Also you can install an addon to automatically mute or block anyone who says certain phrases. Can't remember what it's called, but I had it set up to block gdkp and gold sellers on classic wrath.
I've seen a bunch of games over the past few years move everything over to Discord from matchmaking to wikis and any information about the game to literally tutorials and game tips, I fucking hate it.
And honestly it's getting harder to do that. I tried joining a mod server to report a bug and it wanted my phone number and me to input my password twice just to post.
Discord isn't the problem. Even back then I used to get in a guild or something and then we would use team speak or skype to make a group for ourselves. Then smaller and smaller groups of people would get better friends and so on.
For me is more than that, the game doesn't give us things to do together anymore. All the dailies are shitty tasks that you can do alone and waiting for friends sometimes is a burden. The weeklies are mostly the same except the raids or dungeons clears.
There's nothing to farm for, or to play for anymore, everything is in shop, and all you do is farm materials for upgrading your same shitty armor/weapon. This is my main problem, I want more and more content to be able to do with people. Not dailies, not shitty material farms.
Not to say how idiotic it is when a game makes quests not sharable with friends, and playing in a group feels worse again because of that.
Discord is the least of these games problems.
Was always forums back in the day for me. Every guild had an external forum that they required you to join and put all their info on. Really nothing has changed. We have all the same tools we always have, we just get older and change our selves.
Also, if you really become friends with your guildmates, aren't you going to want to be able to talk to hang out with them without launching the game? Having a dedicated program for voice/text chat for your guild makes everything so much easier.
Wasn't the only thing to do in MMOs back then just to material farm or level? Maybe it's cause I played mostly Eastern MMOs when they were still building their grindy reputation but most of it was 'get max gear, then wait for next patch with new gear' or 'run in circles aggroing mobs with your party as you attempt to hit max level'. Once you hit those milestones there's no reason to play the game anymore outside of meeting up with people you met through the game. The only difference between now and then that I've observed is that players have gotten insanely efficient at hitting endgame so the window of opportunity to meet people and form a social circle that'll keep you invested past endgame has gone from months to like a week at best.
EQ had raid encounters and an epic weapon class quest chain unique to each class, generally involving, sometimes a server effort. A friendly open raiding guild had a fairly popular cleric get her Ragefire kill KS'd by one of the top guilds claiming it and kiting it for two hours while their guild logged on. The entire server's open raiding community camped the boss until it respawned. Named mobs dropped highly desired tradeable loot, such as magic weight reduction bags that could fit large items. Generally leading to lots of sitting in one spot and killing a placeholder mob over and over.
This is definitely a huge part of the problem. Modern MMOs often feel more like mobile games than what we traditionally refer to as MMORPGs. The genre catered to the people who couldn't socialize, find a group, didn't want to travel, or complained that they needed more raid content to the point that the entire genre lost its way and became instance simulators where you press a button to port to instanced content that you run once a day/week to farm a special currency. It's less about the world and immersing yourself in it and more about repetitive, easy to develop, content that can be recycled ad nauseam.
Sadly the audience for these games doesn't want to build an in game community.
I'm not talking about this sub, this sub leans older. You guys always get it when the topic comes up.
But think of the typical r/FFXIV user. If you bring up this topic it's always the same response. They don't need a game to hang out with friends because to them it's just, well, a game.
So they want to play it like a game for a few months before moving on to the next flavor of the month. Gaming is intended to be rapid and disposible in their minds.
The fact that we want something different seems sad and depressing to them. They have discord for friends. No one should be a monogamer. Etc etc.
So even if games put in the systems of old that we wish we still had? They wouldn't play the game. It's not gamey enough for them.
It's a problem because MMOs should be designed as worlds first, and games second. The priority shouldn't be a bullet hell action combat system.
Unfortunately most people won't consider a game without the latter. The idea of a game designed as a second reality comes off as cringe. It wouldn't fly socially on TikTok or Twitter.
The genre cannibalized itself. The damage WoW inflicted is irreversible.
I don't know if I would say WoW caused the genre to cannibalize itself. It ballooned the genre into mainstream. The problem was it never really created enough space for healthy competition though. Every time wow released an expansion it was like Walt Disney corporation finding another loophole to push back their original Mickey copyright back another 5 or 10 years.
If WoW had stopped at Wrath or even stopped anywhere in between them and now, interest would have waned and new MMos would have arisen and taken their place. But because WoW is effectively Blizzards signature money printing machine/IP they can't let it die.
Competition breeds innovation. Without healthy competition between companies that product will become stagnant, a shell of its former self/glory. Yes other MMOs exist, but WoW is still the elephant in the room. It's presence will always warp the effectiveness of other games in the genre.
This is why I feel that chat bubbles are a must. In my opinion my char and the chat window are in two different dimensions. What happen in the chat stay in the chat, if I see a bubble it make me feel that the world is talking to me. When we read we *heard* with our eyes, if I see a bubble on top of someone head it makes me feel like I’m *hearing* them.
I hate that discord has become the new default for everything.
"Wanna join our guild? You gotta join our discord!" No I don't, just use guild chat like normal people
"Interested in our upcoming product? Join our discord for updates!" Wtf no just make a normal website and announce the release date and updates like normal people
"You're interested in this topic? Join our discord!" No bitch
Async chatroom style communication is the fucking worst for actually disseminating information. I have zero desire to hang out in a chat room during my free time, I'd like to actually be doing something. And when I have time to read I don't want to have to read 999+ messages searching through trying to find an ounce of meaning as dozens more come pouring in. It's terrible for actually trying to get any info unless you're a fucking loser who never gets off of it. Every time you come back it's the same 5-10 people having a multi 100 chat conversation and it's like don't you guys do literally anything else ever?
These days I refuse to join any discord server unless I have actual IRL friends on it. If I don't, it's a crock of shit.
yeah i hate that.
it feels like im joining discord community than specific game community. everything must be conducted there and people cant socialize without that thing. im loathe to think that community cant work without it.
looking back i probably prefer to play as solo due to i hate the need to use of discord.
me : "hey i want to join hardcore raid"
guild member : "hi! join discord first!"
me : WTF
This is what I was gonna say, it doesn't really matter what devs try to do in game to try to have people interact with each other, when everyone is just gonna hang out in discord to chat with the people they already know.
I feel exactly the same when it comes to RP, I like to RP on the fly in between combat etc, and right now Its just me talking in game to amuse people on discord, who respond positively but in voice chat.
It does matter though. Making every MMORPG into a solo experience where you sometimes do co-op for gear is the entire issue. Discord exists yet Turtle WoW and Vanilla Classic still feel like social games.
I'll be honest, I don't get the hate over Discord. In my FFXIV FC, everyone speaks in game. I have never alt tabbed to speak on Discord. I don't even speak on VC cause I just don't care. The only time I use Discord to speak to my FC is when I'm in work and obviously not logged into the game.
I think it is at least partly a FFXIV thing. That game has a rampant RP scene, partly thanks to the player/FC housing neighborhoods, and I feel like some elements of that culture, such as using in-game chat to communicate, bleed over into non-RPers as well. I've seen people chatting in game in FFXIV more than any other game.
In WoW, you're lucky if anyone in your dungeon say anything at all that isn't "wtf are you doing? Trash tank/DPS/healer".
ive experienced it in ff14 too. Our FC is active and has been thriving for four years now, but most of our socializing happens on discord. It makes sense, but I do miss the days where people would log into a game to talk to their friends
In-game chat has been replaced with out of game discord chat for some inexplicable reason. I’m secretly hoping discord will offer an API so MMO clients can bring the chat in game again.
> I’m secretly hoping discord will offer an API so MMO clients can bring the chat in game again.
An API so that games can link in-game chat with guild discords would be super fucking useful. Getting guild chat in discord so it can be checked without logging into the game would be amazing. Let people talk via both methods and receive messages in both too.
This doesn't actually need a discord API though. It could also be done via an API created by an mmo too. With an api that lets us get the guild chat we could make a bot that sends it to a discord channel and set up a two-way bridge using the bot. Discord's involvement isn't actually required to make it work.
Back when I played WoW we used a bot to cross post our guild and officer chat to corresponding discord channels and it worked great. It's not really inexplicable why discord took over. Even if you don't use the voice chat functionality, being able to talk to people on a message board that has persistent history is extremely useful. People can chat with each other anywhere even when they aren't logged on in game. Game chats simply don't provide that type of functionality. It's simply a free replacement over guild forums of old except its in real time. Most of our members didn't use the voice chat component outside of when we raid to listen to calls. One of our officers never spoke to us, and only listened and typed to communicate. Games know discord exist and that a lot of people use it, it doesn't make sense to include these features in game because it would still require people to log into the game (unless you have something like B.net that Blizzard uses), and even if they did the quality of the service simply won't be as good; discord can commit all their resources to their single service while games would only be able to dedicate a portion of their resources to try and replicate something that already exists and is free. The only thing I disagree with when it comes to games and discord is when companies try and replace their forums with discord, it's simply not well designed for it.
Also let's not forget the image sending capability so that you can send raid strat diagrams in invaluable. It's not surprising at all that the more hardcore groups jumped to discord. And then the casual groups just moved over because they were using it for everything else already anyway.
What about discord stops people from talking to random people in game? Nothing. People have always used 3rd party programs for guild communications. Talking to strangers online has lost the novelty it had in the late 90's and early 2000's. You know that girl isn't actually a girl in real life and you know getting engaged in political discourse at the game's trade hub is a waste of time. Why bother with all of that when you can can solo your way through the majority of the game anyway?
This.
It's a design issue, not Discord. If anything, Discord's made it easier for me to hang out with my friends in and out of game, and I've made better bonds over it. Chilling in a WoW PvP Discord rn talking to people about wPvP and organization stuff for the next expansion.
Meanwhile, WoW won't fucking implement player housing, so the casual social scene is nothing even remotely close nor ever will be to XIV's, which... I still log into that game sometimes just to go chill in somebody's random cafe while in voice on Discord.
Guess that's a bad thing though.
its not just MMOs its like... everything
guide for a new game? Discord
website for new tech product? Discord
new guild in an mmo? Discord
a FAQ where you are literally just reading and wouldnt and cant send or post anything? Discord.
Discord is literally ruining everything and it's depressing. Dare I say it... I miss Skype... at least Skype was just a bad program, and not a poison to the internet at large...
It does not matter where a community originates, once it gets moved to Discord, it always devolves into 7 or 8 regulars laughing at their inside jokes unrelated to the topic, while ignoring or dissing noobs with basic questions.
The big reason I dislike discord is your guild can reach out 24/7. It's like being on call. When I log off the game I don't want any messages or pings.
Yes, this is a great point. I get that you can mute it, but there's this separate chat that follows you everywhere with your phone. I actually like it when we can't reach each other much when we aren't in-game. Then I'm really happy to greet guild mates and say hi when they log on
Some things would have to be changed.
GW2 lets you access the auction house from anywhere. It's only to retrieve items or objects that you need to go to the NPC. Could just have that AND let people retrieve items or objects from almost anywhere (open world = ok, instance = no)
For immersion, I would like the auction house to be "split and filtered". Instead of a unique auction house, have multiple themed auction house as NPC-owned guild shops.
You want herbs, you go to the herbalist guild shop.
You want potions, the alchemy guild shop.
You want armor, the armorsmith guild shop.
You want a sword, the weaponsmith guild shop.
You want a spellbook, the enchanter guild shop.
You want a necklace, the goldsmith and jeweller guild shop.
You want a bow, the wood sculptor guild shop.
Need some food, there's the food court in the upper class part of the city.
There would be a bazaar for all the miscellaneous items.
It would spread players.
The thing is, games of all natures have don't want to add the code necessary to be a complete experience, so they delegate voice chat and video to external products such as discord. I've been looking through VTT software -- almost all wants to use voice and video but let discord handle it.
And the games that have tried to have in-game voice chat have found that many players simply don't want to use their in-game voice and prefer their third party solutions.
>I hate what discord has done for MMOs
It's not a Discord's fault **at all** that multiplayer game developers (regardless of game genre's specific abbreviation) became so utterly lazy to the point of completely unwilling to include proper communication tools into game themselves, Discord is merely a useful tool for players to compensate for such deficiencies.
>I want to chat and raid with randos. Sometimes I want to RP a little bit.
I do too. I also want to listen to public music/singing performances by other players, right in the game itself, but I can't do that in games such as, for example, FFXIV with its fucking **AWFUL** built-in "player music performance" system and complete lack of built-in voice chat of any kind. And again, it's definitely not a fault.
Yep, Reddit and Discord have killed any online community left over inside of the actual game. I think XIV is the only one with any kind of semblance of an in game community still.
Discord also killed off forums too, which was another community of said games.
(Maybe reddit helped.....)
Games like EQ, XI & GW are a dead breed. Love and hate reelationship with XI. It was the the 2nd best SE product ever (Behind 7 maybe), but also produced one of the most toxic instant oatmeal theme park mmo ever......XIV......
MMO currently are like a beautiful woman with zero substance beyond that.
I just wish the games would integrate social tols and build robust systems in the game.
Make it Immersive. A sci-fi MMORPG could easily include a voice chat system that fits right into the lore. I hate that it got downloaded to a 3rd party app that doesn't integrate into the game world or its systems in any way.
Agreed, but, surely there's a way to integrate discord with in game chat? Some kind of partnership so that messages you type in game are seen in discord and vice versa? I think if that hurdle gets solved, that'll work well.
I think some other people nailed it but specifically wanted to mention Return of Reckoning that I played recently. it was nothing but discord hopping but it was for the express purpose of working together in large scale. You want that type of coordination because the game allows for such large scale moment to moment tactics. Its one of the best experiences I've had with an MMO.
The chat/discord isn't the problem. Its the game needs to reward that in game behavior. The community will always use the best available tools to coordinate/communicate. Its on the game to make the coordination/communication opportunities and requirements fun.
I’ll take discord over the nonsense Bungie tried to pull with Destiny 2 or Nintendo. Why do I need to have an app on my phone to add friends, chat, or make a party? What a complete and utter load of shit.
I'm with you. I don't want to sit in voice chat all day and I don't want to be in voice chat for EVERY single event I do in a game. I just want to have some fun and I don't need to min/max and be super serious about everything all the time.
I have great memories of playing games and hanging out in vent, teamspeak, and mumble but that's because I wanted to, not because it was some requirement.
It would be 1 thing if discord actually worked to begin with xD I even have my private discord boosted but 5/10 times we can't even use it due to connection issues....I miss P2P.
Any reason to typing word instead of talking in voice, like in every modern game? In-game proximity/group voice chat is one of the best things in online games.
I feel the same way. Now that Pandora's Box has been opened, there's no going back to the good old days--and with the changes in social media and the way we interact with each other, maybe the change in MMOs would've happened regardless of Discord. But I definitely dislike the tribalism Discord encourages. I by no means have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to chatting in MMOs (well, okay, maybe a little) and am by no means claiming that all, or even most, conversations were intellectually stimulating, but I hate the silence Discord has created.
Everyone wants to group and chat from within their Discord communities, and when it comes to doing difficult content, prefer to pool from a smaller Discord dedicated to running that specific content within a particular MMO--in other words, a highly specialized community. Nobody wants to raid with their guild anymore or chat within small groups. Nobody has the patience to teach new players midcore content so they can become better players.
Instead, it's group with your Discord community and bitch about everyone outside of said community for not living up to the standards of said community. Because, you know, it's incredibly realistic to expect a group of randoms to coordinate as well as dedicated community with similar expectations and skill levels. Find a random group you don't like? Don't bother explaining things to them in clear sentences like a real human being; that requires effort. Just say nothing, drop from the group, or act passive aggressive the whole time and then complain about "trap parties" in your Discord.
Discord didn't cause this problem of tribalism. That is something affecting our society in general, and has much bigger implications than how people chat in MMOs. But hot damn does Discord not just allow but outright encourage such behavior within the MMO space.
I feel the same way. I remember back in the old days in MMOs, people would just be constantly chatting in guild chat even while doing our own thing. I made so many friends that way.
Now despite being in a very active guild in WoW, our guild chat is a ghost town 99% of the time. It's not like people moved the conversation to discord either. There is just no text conversation happening at all anymore. I mean, we still shoot the shit in voice chat when we are actually playing together, which is fun and nice. But it's super lonely the rest of the time.
Mortal Online 2 had that, but it's also probably the poorest managed MMO launched in recent years and there are literal white supremacists on there spewing hate speech so 🤷♂️
I loved how in guild wars 1 they had 'runners'... people who would sit in towns waiting to be hired for runs to distant cities. They made good gold in tips.
In FFXI, healers could teleport to various areas on the world map. Otherwise, normal jobs had to use a chocobo and that could take up to 10-30mins at a time. Those same healers could teleport party members. So basically, people would shout in a city zone saying
>Teleport-Altep. 5k gil. Can I have it?
Essentially saying they'll pay you 5,000 for you to invite them to your party and teleport them to Altepa Desert. This type of shout was so common your chat screen would be nothing but people asking for teleports.
As you can imagine, lots of healers made big money doing this. I used to spend weeks doing it at a time. Made millions of gil. A good day alone you could make 200-300k gil. The funniest part was that other healers would be doing it at the same time. So it was almost a race to see who could invite the person quickest. Sometimes another healer would get angry at you for doing it and /tell you nasty things lol
Good times. I probably wouldn't do that kinda shit today as an adult. Time = money for me now I work 45 hours a week. But yeah.
I found that during the day was the best time, tele the Japanese players. I worked nights at the time so I made bank. During the afk time I had a nice sushi shop in the main city. I had zero money issues in that game.
I miss those kind of utility actions being a big part of some classes. With modern MMOs it so often feels like your class choice doesn’t matter at all outside of combat. Older games really leaned into the class fantasy aspect of the games and the worlds felt more alive for having done so.
I really miss that too. Also miss stuff like Flyff's buffs. Ringmasters (healers) could turn new players into basically gods compared to what they normally are.
Unfortunately a new MMO could never do all these things. People would complain to much, and then complain when there's no social aspect.
Reminds me of lineage 2 when people needed to go to tower of insolence 13th floor for a quest. It was a 40 minutes run and very dangerous. Summoners sold their services for millions. Such a great emergent mechanic.
Selling warps to in ragnarok was the shit. More than once the person buying a teleport to glastheim invited me to the party, and often those ended up being the most fun ones. Even joined a guild that way.
In everquest 2 I joined a guild because the leader was a regular shopper. He'd come to my house sometimes to buy stuff and eventually we started talking about his guild. 😊
I don't think you can sell from your home anymore in everquest 2. I had a little counter set up and I'd sit behind it. It was funny as hell.
Taxi service wizards and druids in EQ — same thing, earn some extra money on the side and help players out by building a name for yourself. Yeah, the systems that players come up with were facilitated by the games. None of these would work without there being a reason to exist. Players needed to travel, EQ could be treacherous or time consuming, so out comes emergent gameplay.
I absolute loved the elite skills concept in that game. It was so fuckin fun to learn about a skill, go try and capture it like a fuckin Pokémon, and then use it to crush nuts in PVP. That was my favorite MMO by far.
Hit the nail on the head with new MMOs.
The convienence of one button to teleport to an instanced dungeon where you dont need to say a word to another player.
The MMO where people would rather multibox 5 characters at once instead of taking the time and the effort to make friends and make a real group.
I find myself solo playing most of the time compared to when I used to play EQ and WoW.
MMOs have lost their way- bring back the reward of group play, making friends, forming a community..the whole MMO experience.
Developers made things more convenient for the players because the players demanded it. Only a very small portion of players actually want to spend the time to travel to a dungeon, or look for groups just to complete one single quest, or spend hours upon hours grinding mobs and materials to get 1 item. Most people don’t want to do that shit, or simply can’t because they don’t have the time.
Yes and that's how the MMO genre has deteriorated and is dying.
Instead of designers and devs making the travel and the social interactions fun and interesting - they make a button for convenience to skip things.
This is right. MMOs haven't innovated on group play in literal decades. Even the director in the article is even for ye olden days of, hmmm, **1997.** As if copy-pasting a nearly 30-year-old game is even remotely acceptable something to aspire to.
Over the years, every other genre has grown immensely. Several of the components that made MMOs MMOs have even been spun off into their own, MASSIVELY better, sub-genres (management games, team PvE games, open world RPGs.) Why play an MMO when basically every part of the game is an aggressively mediocre version of other, really awesome and innovative games?
Just like Breath of the Wild did a remarkable job of making open-world traversal a fun and engaging experience out of what used to be a pure chore in older games, a new MMO needs to really re-imagine what it means to have a fun, engaging, and most importantly **accessible** massively-multiplayer and social experience in 2024.
Ultimate Online and EQ were really remarkable games for their time and a crucial piece of gaming history, but we really need to move on.
But then why are you blaming the developers for giving the players exactly what they asked for? There’s still thriving MMOs out there with big populations and content players. The largest MMOs are easily the most casual ones, the “hardcore” MMO’s are that the ones that are consistently struggling the most, so I’m failing to see what the point of having this discussion even is. If you’re upset that most people don’t share your sensibilities then that’s fine, but acting like it’s some sort of problem that needs to be solved doesn’t seem correct here.
its more like if they wont add fun content and traversal inbetween objectives might as well have fast travel to not repeat the same boring unchanging shit
> MMOs have lost their way
I don't think we'll ever get it back again. I always think that MMOs were just products of their time. That magic is just missing these days.
It wasn't just MMOs for me. There were lots of magical times for me when it came to the internet. A good example is Halo 2 on Xbox Live back in 2004. I shit you not I still remember vividly playing my first online game. It was Rumble Pit on Ivory Tower. I heard an American guy speaking, as a British person. I was fucking blown away by this. It's just such a vivid memory in my mind. I went from playing PS1/N64/Dreamcast/GameCube games alone to suddenly playing video games with other people from around the fucking world.
And then I started playing FFXI in 2005 and holy shit that was magical. Instead of just 8 players all shooting each other, I was now playing with hundreds if not thousands of players all at once in some magical land.
FFXI was my MMO as well, and I don't think we will ever get a game like that again.
First, the gaming demographic has just changed. Yoshi-P, the lead developer/director for FFXIV, has literally said that he thinks Ultima Online was the best MMO ever, but that he does not design FFXIV the same way because he does not believe a game like UO is economically viable today. He doesn't think players would dedicate themselves to a game like UO vs chasing instant gratification with other games. In other words, the guy running the currently most successful MMO in the business knowingly designs and balances the game in a suboptimal manner to be more profitable.
This means that there's not a lot of money to be made in old school MMOs. Now a MMO in the style of the 2000s could be profitable; it just won't be optimally profitable.
That leads us to the second problem: new forms of video game monetization. Capitalism as an overarching market force will prevent any studio from putting in the resources to develop such a game because micro-transaction based games have much better ROI.
The golden age of MMOs took place when MMOs ran purely on the purchase cost + a sub fee. When the only way for a game to turn a profit was to have the most players and to keep them all subscribed, therefore a game had to deliver the best experience to retain customers over competition. But the reality of the post-microtransaction gaming world is that you get better ROI by explicitly designing games to hook-then-monetize players rather than just designing a good game. When you can monetize players individually, decisions don't necessarily have to be good for the game (i.e. the majority of the players) to be good for the company's wallet. It's better to lose 900 customers whose ROI is only $5 each than to lose a whale who spends $5000.
There is no reason for studios to invest in making a good new game for a dwindling market when it is much cheaper and more reliable to save on resources and just build gacha games based around efficient monetization of whales. And, once you start allowing whales to use money to substitute for time/effort of any sort, it's an increasingly smaller leap for every subsequent "P2W" cash shop perk. This leads to a death spiral that eventually kills off every game. Without fail, games reach a place that most players can't or won't put the money in that is necessary to enjoy the game (i.e. to keep up with the whales) and the majority of players quit, leaving the game barren and dead. But when these games die, the money extracted from whales is worth the decreased lifespan and the studios shed no tears and move on to the next thing.
This goes back to that article a while back about how Blizzard's player base numbers were down, but the studio's profitability was still up. And as long as the company is profitable, that's all dissociated stakeholders care about and things will continue.
The closest thing we will get to old MMOs are Classic releases, because the player acquisition costs and the development costs are baked into those games already. But the issue with Classic games is that eventually they either a) will go down the same path as their retail counter-parts making them a time-limited nostalgia trip or b) require new divergent development at some point making them less-profitable.
Idk. Ive been playing GW2 since launch. I used to be extremely active and had guilds and communities were people knew each other. My life has changed significantly and now I no longer have the time for that. I still like playing and being part of a living environment even if i don’t interact with others much. I hate single player games. I like having strangers around
> instead of taking the time and the effort to make friends and make a real group
Maybe because way too many people are way too eager to act like shitheads thanks to the anonymity of the internet.
Placing the blame on people for being justifiably wary of toxicity is a weird angle.
The challenge of the MMO was being forced to work together to make a team that was more than just the sum of its parts. It makes the lows much more frequent (when you fail), but it makes the highs that much higher.
>The convienence of one button to teleport to an instanced dungeon where you dont need to say a word to another player.
Tbh I always disagreed with the "one button to teleport to an instanced dungeon" ever being the problem and if WoW Classic did anything it was confirm it to me. To me it's a literal time waste to find a group manually. Sometimes I even had to use a full evening just to get a group and to get a dungeon done (mind you sometimes not even getting the dungeon finished).
What ruined the dungeons in WoW (and in general) was more that they got piss easy and fast so that you didn't have to communicate at all. So that part I agree with but finding a group back in the day was such a misery if you didn't have a tank and healer beforehand.
I get that.
My experience was different and I'm not saying it was better or worse.
When I started playing WoW I had friends that started he same time and we all picked different characters.
We were all in the same guild so we put the time in to chat and get to know who the good tanks and healers and dps etc were and those that played in our TZ.
It paid off because when we needed a reliable tank we could call for one and vice versa... there was a community and we knew what each other needed in terms of weapons and gear and when there was a raid scheduled you would call on these people you knew well.
> where people would rather multibox 5 characters at once instead of taking the time and the effort to make friends
Sounds like an underlying desire by the customer, not a behavior forced on you by the MMO. In fact, I'd argue a person that goes to that much trouble to play a group game alone is a strong indicator of how much some people want to play alone.
Kyle Vallee, creative director for EverQuest 2, is a huge fan of MMOs and has played basically all of them—but he thinks the genre has lost its way in one respect. The sense of community early MMOs cultivated is being sidelined, he says.
*"They seem to have lost that [community focus] in other MMOs, the community has become not a big part of it,"* Vallee told me at Fippy Fest, an EverQuest anniversary celebration developer Daybreak Games recently brought me out to San Diego to attend. *"It seems like they don't give people the tools to build community anymore. The couple other MMOs that I play I'm almost like a solo player 100%, I don't group with anyone. The tools there for building communities just really seem lacking, even in the newer stuff."*
When I first started playing EverQuest, community and cooperation weren't exactly optional. Monsters were deadly, some classes couldn't solo at all, and if you wanted to get anything done you had to reach out to other players and get a group going. The challenge itself was a feature that brought players together organically.
Some MMOs do a better job of this than others. I played FF14 when it first came out, and like a lot of players, completely bounced off it. Years later after the overhaul of A Realm Reborn and a few well-received expansions, I decided to give it another go. I had a blast, and I played all the way through Stormblood before wandering off, but I spent the lion's share of my time alone. Sure, there were occasional Main Scenario dungeons or raids, but for the most part I was off by myself slogging through Main Scenario Quests.
Now, that's not a bad thing necessarily. FF14 is trying to tell a much more structured story than most other MMOs. I enjoyed the storytelling, and the duty finder was always there for a change of pace if my mind started to melt doing another fetch quest for moogles. But I was struck at times, in a world with thousands of players, at just how lonely it felt. Vallee found himself feeling the same with other MMOs.
*"Some MMOs have group finders for everything,"* he said. *"You get into a group finder, you go into the zone, you literally do not talk to the other players, you clear the zone as fast as you can, and you leave. There's no discussion. In our games you have to talk to other players if you want to find a group. We had a group finder at one time, but we felt like it was removing the sense of community from the game so we got rid of it."*
Now, I get the appeal of quality-of-life features like group finders, I really do. One of my biggest frustrations playing EverQuest back in the day was how hard it was to get a group sometimes. Too many shadowknights in Karnor's Castle when you wanted to play meant a long trek to another zone, a few hours of meager XP soloing, or giving up altogether and playing another character (because I mean let's be real, we weren't going to not play EQ). The ability to log on to WoW, or FF14, or TESO, grab your dailies, and launch into a dungeon group with the click of a button is inarguably convenient. But as I wrote last year, and as EQ visionary Brad McQuaid famously said, sometimes the magic is in the boring bits. Sometimes you meet a random monk in Highhold Keep who offers to tip your shaman for buffs and he becomes a lifelong friend. Sometimes you're waiting for the puller to finish changing his baby, realize the tank in your group is in the next town over, and decide to meet up for beers. Sometimes you meet the love of your life.
EverQuest 2 isn't much for the boring bits these days, and it seems to me that EQ2 has suffered a bit of the same fate that modern MMOs have. Lots of content focuses on the raid scene, characters are extremely powerful, and everyone does literally trillions of damage. With that said, their newest TLE (time locked expansion) server, Anashti Sul, is going all the way back to the start of the game. It's a true classic server, based on a build from 2006 and the brainchild of years of work in the studio poring through old databases and playtesting the original game.
*"When we first launched our first group of TLEs, a lot of players would say, 'This isn't what I wanted, this isn't what I expected, I wanted the original game,"* Vallee told me. So that's what they're giving them with Anashti Sul: You can't buy or sell Krono, there's almost nothing in the marketplace, and it's on its own design depot—changes to Live will not affect this Origins server, and vice versa. It's tough, exciting, and if the 50 instances of the newbie zone when I logged in were any indication, players are loving it. Everywhere I went people were getting together in global channels to group up and tackle stuff, even as low as level 1.
Seeing players grouping up to attack content, figuring out a plan based on their group composition, and being challenged right out of the gate feels like the very essence of MMO gaming to me. No shade to those who just wanna jam that dungeon finder, but for me the juice is only worth it if you have to give a little squeeze.
> The sense of community early MMOs cultivated is being sidelined, he says.
The sense of community IRL and everywhere is dying. This is just one example of it. Humanity has lost its way and the MMO space is just a subset of that.
Offline communities disappearing is a different issue and actually partially caused by the rise of online communities. The primary issue with "community" is that any new community that forms is actively taking people's time away from something else that they were previously putting that time into. With the rise of online community we have seen a collapse of offline community.
You can see this most clearly if you contrast western countries with global south countries that have not yet had the same thing occur due to much less access to internet and less convenience. The collapse of offline communities is most prevalent in richer countries whereas poorer countries continue to have strong offline communities.
"Gogogogo"
"LF BIG DICK DPS CHECKING LOGS"
"purple parse only"
"FULL BIS REQ"
People treat leveling dungeons like it is the race for world first when those that are actually relevant to that part of the gaming world are already farming their BIS gear. It would be a little sad if it wasn't also the lone playstyle shaping the majority of game design decisions in the MMO space.
This shit is ridiculous in retail and classic WoW. I got yelled at by a tank for not knowing a fight in a shadowlands dungeon literally like 7 hours after launch. I think we wiped once then got it. Guy was furious we didn't already read a guide to a fight that hadn't been in the game for a day yet.
I really don't understand how reading every bit of info before an expansion is fun for people. I enjoy discovering the world, not just following a checklist until I'm max.
Dungeon running in WoW seems horrendous. People complain that FF14's dungeons are too linear. But then you get WoW's dungeons. Honestly i like WoW's dungeon design more, the thing i hate is people expecting me, a new player tank, to know the optimal route to avoid the most amount of trash mobs. People don't want linear dungeons but in the end will make a linear dungeon themselves anyway.
Yep. I miss the old days when most people weren't speedrunning their way through the game, and they weren’t googling up every optimal way to get the fastest things in the shortest time.
People’s inability to just enjoy the game and learn it on their own, is what’s ruined MMO’s. Can't even blame the developers for that, because it's always the playerbase demanding for everything to be streamlined and skippable.
Also players are so anti-social these days.
The same people who \*say* they want an MMORPG, will be the same who refuse to do any socialising once there’s a new MMO out there. They don’t want to engage with other players, they'll avoid the co-op minigames, they'll skip all the lore and dialogue, they just spend their whole time grinding solo content. Then they complain that the game is boring and dead.
I find players have less patience these days as well. Like they wipe and then they start getting angry if a player causes the wipe. Like dude chill. Games are meant to be fun.
Nailed it.
The "good old days" could only really exist as a product of a combination of information asymmetry, limited competing entertainment options and lack of communication infrastructure.
Once:
* People could play just the "fun parts" of MMOs
* People could effectively find out "optimal strats" at the click of a Youtube link
* People didn't have to sub to a MMO to talk to other people online
Old MMOs as a "social community" thing were numbered. You can't force people to put up with other people when they have other options, and that's what a lot of the old "social communities" were founded on.
MMOs need to find a way to make socializing with random other people *compete* with other options, and right now they still don't know how to do that.
Which, to be fair, that's a *really* tall fuckin' order, so it's not just on them. That's hard to make appealing for anyone without some sort of ulterior motive or other outside pressure involved.
all very good points.
I would add that our perception of both gaming and online communities was much different than it is today. we went from a sense of pioneership into oversaturation and, frankly, overload, quite rapidly.
the sense of wonder that games were able to elicit not too many years ago has waned as we have gained a familiarity and routine when it comes to concepts, tropes and mechanics.
I disagree somewhat, some mmo's have hostile design at the leveling process for grouping up.
Honestly try to play FFXIV, with new characters and count how many times you have to leave the party and it disrupts grouping up. Now imagine trying to do this with randoms without VC.
It's not just FFXIV but it's a good example of bad mmo design in it, even if the end game is really social and everyone is great. The base game teaches newbies the opposite. But i've noticed a lot of in modern mmo's
1. A lot of quests become longer if you play as a group
2. A lot of quests want to play a cutscene/put me in a small fight with 0 difficulty 1 v 1 so I cant be in a party
Combine these two together and you have made the perfect storm of people now wanting to play together early on. Because if it's tedious with friends... most people wont give a random the same chance.
Yep this. People who are talking about TPing to dungeons being too easy are missing the forest for the trees. Its the majority of the population that gets everything spoonfed to them in guides, don't talk, raid logs, etc...
Plus the death of the servers in most mmos. When WoW came out server forums were alive with friends and enemies. You knew people on the server. Server firsts meant something. No one cares anymore. If you try to act like that now you get kicked. Applying to a guild isn't some questionnaire and running some dungeons after meeting someone. Its preparing your log resume or being poached.
There's more in game interaction in SSF path of exile if you sit in a chat channel than there is in WoW. And most mmos I try you can see the same trend already in place before the steam refund window is closed.
I'm an old fart, been playing MMO's since The Realm Online in the mid 90's. There are a lot of reasons why MMO's feel mostly feel like easy solo online games now.
1. Game Speed - Combat is much faster paced now. Back in the day of EverQuest and Dark age of Camelot you had to rest in between pulls which gave you plenty of time to chat with your group.
2. Simplicity and general catering to casuals - Old school MMO's were developed around requiring others to safely make it through content. Many times, I wiped to mobs my own level growing up because I screwed up my rotation. Now days I can roll my head on the keyboard and take out a mob of enemies.
3. The de-emphasis of crafting to get great, if not the best gear in the game. - A lot of older games would require extreme dedication to crafting and would often take master crafters from multiple trades to create one piece of masterwork armor. You then had to find a master enchanter to make the best armor in the game. It was a massive commitment on both sides (Gold for the player and time/effort for the crafting team)
4. The internet is too good. - There was sooooo much mystery in earlier MMO's and it was much easier to ask around in game to figure out a quest or where a certain mob was you needed than skimming through random GeoCities websites with their sweet midi music and minor animations that would absolutely tank my 28.8 kbs internet connection. (Yeah, they promised 56 kbs but you never actually got that speed)
5. QOL features that ruin immersion. - I'm talking to you fleshed out maps and question marks above NPC's heads. Nothing was better than finding a random quest of a random NPC and it feeling like a true quest instead of me just following where the map tells me to go.
6. Phasing and Mega-Servers - Convenient for handling crowds and server loads, but completely ruins the sense of community. You never run into the same person twice. It's like living in a small country town where everyone knows everyone and has each other's back vs. going to NYC and trying to find a person you met last week at the Yankees game.
There are more reasons but the more we innovate and make things easier, the more reasons there is not to join a group and this is a serious issue for MMO's. If we're going to have a resurgence of a true social MMO. We're at least going to have to make the combat extremely challenging and get rid of phasing. The problem with that is it doesn't cater to casuals and the money follows the casual masses these days. True old school MMO's aren't profitable and can't be anymore unless there is a major shift in the mindset of modern MMO players.
> Game Speed - Combat is much faster paced now. Back in the day of EverQuest and Dark age of Camelot you had to rest in between pulls which gave you plenty of time to chat with your group.
I really liked some games where sitting would speed up your mana or hp recovery. People would sit together and spontaneous social interactions would occur. Healers would have more value, buffs would have more value, and potions would have more value. Also things like plonking down a campfire might speed it up even more so other players would come over and sit at your fire.
I miss this so much. Some of my best online friends were made in between pulls. I know the newer generation must be thinking "why would you want your health and mana to take minutes to recharge?" and it's just one of those things where you had to be there to understand.
The important factor here is that downtime is where socialisation occurs.
If you have no downtime. You have no opportunity for socialisation.
The downtime should not just be part of post-dungeon moments. It should be weaved directly into the combat gameplay loop itself. Older devs that began the genre understood and intentionally did this. Everything about the games from the ground up was about creating ways that spontaneous social interaction could occur.
Now the devs do everything they can to prevent you from having any downtime at all and this creates the loneliest world imaginable. Thousands of people all doing their own thing with no interruptions and no possibility of them interacting with others around themselves, just rush rush rush. You can't even try to socially interact with people who are in the middle of something because you're rudely interrupting them.
0\.
There was no other kind of MMO so the people that didn't enjoy all of the following points didn't have a choice. When they first got a choice, it created the biggest MMO of all time and is still going.
There is just too much money in catering to the casual and offering incentives such as pay to win, cosmetics etc. There is no way to orchestrate a profitable model around old school MMO mechanics at the moment, it's become a niche product at this point.
I can see one day with AI assistance; a small indie team could create a niche product that would emulate an old school experience but without AI doing a lot of the heavy lifting with content creation and dialog. I don't see how you could make an old school model profitable because face it online games are expensive, servers are expensive, bandwidth is expensive, and these are ongoing costs and the masses don't want an old school experience. So, if you want a successful old school experience it's going to require a monthly subscription but that is a very-very hard sale these days when you can go play quality polished games for free.
>"Some MMOs have group finders for everything," he said. "You get into a group finder, you go into the zone, you literally do not talk to the other players, you clear the zone as fast as you can, and you leave. There's no discussion. In our games you have to talk to other players if you want to find a group. We had a group finder at one time, but we felt like it was removing the sense of community from the game so we got rid of it."
To be fair, classic WoW proved that you do not need a group finder for the community to act like that.
Blaming people not wanting to talk to each other purely on features like that is just weird. How about content that actually requires people to talk to each other instead? Like unique class or crafting features that you can't just sell on the market board. Or - I dare say it - difficult content that requires communication and that you can't just skip.
People managing to fight together through tough times are usually more inclined to talk to each other or even become friends.
nobody fights through tough times BECAUSE there's a group finder. If you spent 15-20 minutes putting a group together, you don't disband after 1 wipe, you talk it out and keep chugging. Its how new players often learned, and its how a lot of people found guilds with similar playstyles/values.
Now, whether you're talking about individual players, or the whole ass party, they're immediately replaceable. 1 wipe, people bounce and requeue.
> If you spent 15-20 minutes putting a group together, you don't disband after 1 wipe
Because if you do have to drop if life is calling, you don't get invited back and 90% of the group-only game is now unavailable to you.
He’s right. Community was traded away in favor of convenience.
Back in FFXI, some of my best social interactions was sitting around chatting while waiting to find a group. Then sitting around chatting while waiting for the puller to bring mobs back to camp. Leveling/playing was slow and clunky. But these moments led to real community interactions and friendships.
Even in the early days of WoW, putting together groups and doing harder content led to a lot of social interactions and relationship building. You wanted to build those relationships to make grouping faster in the future.
But people started demanding tools to streamline those things. We got dungeon finders, group finders, raid finders, teleports/portals to get around (which were often player-based abilities in earlier MMOs), and so forth. Soon, all major MMOs let you just stand around in town, queue up for a dungeon, run it, and never really have to interact. Then, as server populations fluctuated, they merged servers, added cross-realm zones, server hopping, etc. So now the people you linked up with might not even be on the same server as you, and you’ll likely never see them again once the dungeon is over. Or, in games like WoW, you’ll be running alongside someone down a path, and when you hit a zone boundary they will fade away, never to be seen again.
I will say, though, that some communities have found ways to flourish in spite of these design choices. FFXIV, for example, has all of the above convenience factors built in. They even let you run dungeons with NPCs if you want. Yet, servers still developed their own identities over time, with events that people create. It’s not uncommon to find out that someone’s house is being used as a night club, and you can hop servers over to go put on some fancy clothes and go dancing/hangout. There’s fashion shows, hunt groups, etc. that have all found their communities in the game.
He's right, for all the reasons we'd expect. MMOs simply don't force you to interact with other humans 99% of the time these days. You can certainly form great connections -- I've made a great groups of friends in both FFXIV and GW2 with whom I play all the time -- but you have to put a little effort into it, these days; it doesn't happen as organically as it used to.
That said, I can't act like I don't mind the current state of things. I used to spend half my time back in my LotRO days just standing around trying to find people to do stuff with. That was fine because I had what felt like an endless amount of free time. Nowadays? I log on at night after working, taking care of the dogs, cooking, doing chores, exercising, etc., and I just want to hop into something immediately and make a little progress before bed. GW2 lets me do that better than any other game. I can be in a Fractals group within thirty seconds of loading in.
Even if the tools were there, they'd be underutilized.
The behavior of online players in a general sense tend to reflect real life in the way that were still in the age of "me" and self-sufficiency being such an important mindset to modern people. Mindset being key word. It's why even in MMOs, solo-friendly content has become more prevalent.
A lot of people want to play in a world with others in an organic way without having to rely on (or sometimes even talk to) others, and this is — in many cases — playing out a power fantasy when in the newer that: in their real world they do very much have to rely on others to get by.
It's still escapism, it's just shifted in nature over time.
That's not to say they shouldn't be developing these tools, because they're evergreen so to speak and when the zeitgeist shifts again, the tools can be ready and there for when it does.
I like discord in the sense that you can check something or interact with certain people outside the game. It’s not as invasive as texting a stranger, yet you can holla at someone like “yo you wanna do a match or hey you wanna run this dungeon or hey can you help me real quick”. It’s also good for sharing a cool moment that maybe ur buddy was not there for.
Also a side note is the game status. I would see someone playing a new game and I would ask about it. Or discover that we play another same game, opening a whole other exciting convo about a mutual interest.
Finally, there are really generous people in the community that I would never have reached if not for discord. Groups that train shy or new players for end game content. Groups that does giveaways for skins that some may not be able to afford. They can organize wvw strategies and communicate better.
My only issue with discord is when people try and turn it into a forum. Sure there are built in features for it but it really doesn't work well. As a communication tool I think discord is great, its extremely versatile and it is what you make out of it.
Not sure anyone involved in EQ2 is in a place to make that assessment, they certainly aren't putting out a game that builds community. Maybe in 2004, but not in the last decade.
Players need to give themselves more agency over their experience to find/build communities, modern MMOs have added much more convenience to the experience so you aren't always forced to interact but that's no excuse for not taking shit into your own hands and doing it, it's still possible in every of the big/major MMOs to do this and placing all the blame on discord or other voice programs is retarded. You are in control despite what you think.
edit: MMOs should still offer ingame tools for this, I agree with that sentiment even if I think most people who complain about this sort of thing are just lazy.
I have to agree, as someone who has played everything as well hehe. I catch myself saying how anti-social games (& their communities) feel now compared to how they used to be quite often these days.
Every game should have built in tools to be successful in game, without requiring a bunch of 3rd party tools & sites to get anything done.
Me in gw2 like, wait you guys don't get to know your event coordinators (commanders)? Or add people to in game friends list and regularly bum their player home for its resources?
In all seriousness I forget out solo or singleplayer other mmos are. I hope AoC does well.
This is BS and another example of how far devs have fallen in the MMO market.
EQ didn't give you "tools" to do anything. They created a complex world that was unsurpassed for its era, with a complex lineup of different classes with which to enjoy the world. The rules were hard. The mobs were even harder. And players banded together in that environment to triumph over it together. It is that simple. There wasn't an auction house tool, I'd hit the tunnel to watch auctions. There wasn't summoning stones to help groups move to the dungeon quickly, I'd plan ahead and/or make new friends in order to explore that dungeon.
I play Eve Online right now because it is very similar in spirit to EQ. They made a hard and complex world for players. Players and environment make it a very unforgiving game, you need friends and when you find them you get that same camaraderie that is missing from all these other modern MMOs because they're too damn easy.
Devs really need to remove their heads from their asses if they want to make money in this genre. Quit catering to players on the things that do not work. Players will tell you they want it easy, make this easier, or that more convenient. But you gotta be judicious in doing those things. WoW started this nonsense and they got away with it by generating expansions on a regular schedule. But most companies are not like the old Blizzard, that was a singular time and place for devs I think.
Make a quality world of great complexity and beauty that is difficult to succeed alone in. Give the players tons of classes to make them feel unique in this world. And then back off and let the community build. Tools have nothing to do with it. Nothing.
A big issue is hostile design towards partying early game, it's not like putting a gun to the player and forcing them to party like FFXI or EQ1998 but got to the flip side where it feels like hostile design to partying.
FFXIV/Lost Ark are prob the two best examples of hostile mmo design towards community (pre-story completion)
IF you try to play either with a group of friends you might as well bind /party leave and /party invite \[name\] to auto hot key or a macro as the main story quest for which is 100's of hours will constantly want you out of a group. Forcing you to leave the party, then it might throw you in a different instance (only really happens on current story content) or just play a cutscene that you cant skip, some people enjoy, some people don't so they go off ahead past load screens and waiting longer.
Sure you get dungeons where if you're a pre-set team play dps/dps/dps/healer/tank, it's perfect but that's generally not the case all the time. Then if you do quests where you need to collect stuff on the over world further punishment of playing a group as you have to harvest different spots (which also might be limited to how many in one area is, slowing you guys down further then someone playing solo.)
THIS is what some mmo's do to people WANTING to play together, what do you think the chances some random is wanting to go through this with the constant interruptions (possible shard switches, etc). I think this is one of the boons of WoW Classic and why people enjoy the leveling experience over current mmo's. I could get 1-60 easily alone, but bringing more people never felt like I was putting a stick in my bike wheel and splashes group quests/dungeon quests that gave loot that sped up the leveling experience.
No one wants the solo player to deal with hostile design, but holy fuck do some mmo's make them seem like they want to make a single player game then suddenly expect you to know the community after 100's of hours of telling you to play mostly solo.
Sure, when you are selling experience potions and other cash shop 💩on both EQ and EQ2, these games are no longer about teaming up interact with each other to get fat loot and rare gears, it’s about swiping your credit card. They are literally polluting their own communities.
I think it's less about giving the tools to build a community and more about removing the *need* for building community. Group Finders, shared instanced areas populated from the entire player base rather than the actual server's population, widely available fast travel, etc. introduced for "convenience" have chipped away at the world like nature of MMO's for the worse.
I completely agree, but you are the creative director of one of the most iconic MMO franchises in history. Put your money where your mouth is.
I don’t mean the new origins server, that’s a start. But I mean a firm commitment to EQ3 that holds these core tenets and doesn’t stray from them.
I get this a lot. I am not joining discord just for the 8 percent chance I will vibe with someone and make a connection that matters. The emergent and spontaneous effect of finding someone in game and hitting it off in game is what can make or break the experience.
It can also be what ultimately will turn a mostly silent room into a lovely chaotic vibe when someone hits the note right then and there. Joining a bunch of discords for randoms is messy and annoying as well
after starting FFXI on both new private and old retail servers I am starting to think it's not just the games, but the players.
I sit there on FFXI shouting and whispering at people for hours, days even, and get a single digit number of people who even want to communicate in any capacity.
modern MMOs have less interesting job variety and unique class traits, but one thing I can't say is that people are more social in older games. Unfortunately I gotta say I see the most chatter in modern games.
Maybe there's something I'm not seeing since I wasn't playing MMOs in the 90s, but in older MMOs where people supposedly are set up the most for socializing I see the least conversation. Everyone is even MORE locked into their discords and linkshells than more modern mmos.
It's hard for me to blame the game when all the games that people boast as being the best social builders are dead silent with players running past you all day.
Even if the games give players the tools or force them to interact with each other, the gameplay would be significantly slower, which today's generations could have a hard time getting into.
Teleporting, group finder, mindless combat, etc. allow for a wider audience of players since the required time commitment is much lower, and games need to make money.
I love the old school experience, but trying to find a group can take hours, then traveling to the dungeon/raid, then running it and possibly dying multiple times. You're looking at 4+ hours needed to get anything done.
Everything else today is just super quick gogogo instant gratification, so I can get why that style of game has lost popularity.
It’s not the games fault. It’s streaming culture, discord, and the death of the open web. Gone are active guild websites and game specific message boards. They are all on Reddit, Facebook groups or discord now. Ventrilo was a great voice only add on for in game chat, but discord nuked that too. The result is a game with only gameplay but few social elements
plenty of community in wow at the raid level. raiding with the same group of people with voice chat is far more community building than finding a group in eq and killing mobs for an hour or two, and then probably not seeing them again, at least for some time.
He refuted his own point. He remembers trying to get in a good then spending hours getting poor xp. Yeah nobody has the time and patience for that. MMOs have to compete with way too many other forms of fast paced e Tetris meant. It’s not a lack of tools, we have changed.
They don't give them because the player base does not require for them to be in-game.
Time developing in-game tools for this would be time wasted. That's just in terms of people-finding.
In terms of forced grouping - people always tried to solo, even back in EQ1. It was a major feature of EQ's first real competitor and successor, WoW.
That ship has, unfortunately, sailed.
Instead, rather than forcing group content, incentivize it. People will still figure out ways to solo it (as they always did). It still may not draw the people (I suspect it won't people prefer to play alone for most of their time).
Well, yeah. As he stated, most MMOs focus on the solo play for accessibility. Which accessibility isn't a totally bad thing, but sometimes it's okay for someone not to play a game because it doesn't fit their criteria.
Add the fact that companies are run by money mongers and not gamers anymore, and the MM in MMO gets relegated to just O.
EQ2 just launched a new 2006 era server that has been a lot of fun so far. Such a fun game that I missed out on back in its day because I just wasn't gaming much or wasn't playing MMOs. But I definitely recommend giving it a shot if anyone sees this and hasn't tried EQ2 or hasn't played it for a long time. It's like a hybrid between EQ1 and Classic WoW. And there is no Krono so no p2w.
The dev is coping, many new mmos like NW and TL started as hardcore/social games by trying to force socialization down everyone's throat.
Then they realized the vast majority of their playerbase didnt touch content that required socialization and were forced to create automated group finders as well as other types of systems designed to remove socialization barriers.
He doesnt want to face the reality that people actually want to play games for fun, not socialize.
One of the biggest complaints I see in MMOs is if you have to depend on other people.
“What’s the soloability of this MMO?” And “I work all day and can’t be bothered to rely on others when I want to play on my terms with my free time.”
Normally I’d say that’s fine but really, if you want an open world game where you’re not interacting with other people - you should be looking at Skyrim, RDR2, cyberpunk and other single player open world games. The best part about the best MMOs like SWG, UO, and EQ was the social factors and that’s been neglected for decades now.
MMOs don’t give people the tools because players don’t really care for them. Pax Dei came out and one of the biggest complaints (outside of its alpha state) is the lack of soloability and having to depend on other people. The genre has changed for the worst but only due to popular demand.
My favorite MUD, Gemstone, had an experience absorb mechanic. You'd be "full" and have to go wait for it all to sink in, basically. You had to dwell on what you experienced before you started to level. It went faster at the center of each town at this tree. A social zone. Here is where you would talk, trade, ask for healing (game had a gnarly wound system too), and just dwell on your recent adventure with others. I always thought this would be a good thing to base an MMORPG around. A way to keep things social, and the gameplay loop was wound in tightly with that piece so the game never lost this social aspect.
That i can't sort my friends list by "people I know in person" versus "Someone I teamed up with once" and have no tools to help me team up with my friends... yeah it's like they don't want community.
Fallout 76, if it grouped my friends by what server they're on, I could easily find a server with a bunch of people to play with.
There's a pretty cool MMO I've been tracking that will allow players to develop their own governance structures in-game. I.e. corporation, dictatorship, democracy, etc.
It's an eve-like scifi mmorpg called the citadel.
The problem is that current developers are brain dead when it comes to mmorpgs. They have no clue how to make a proper mmorpg. And if they did, then they are most likely being forced by management or other incompetent people to go in directions to maximize profits, and not good gameplay.
The only person currently in the mmorpg market that I feel actually understands what makes mmorpgs good and special is Steven from AoC, as fellow (hardcore) mmorpg player enjoyer. We are lucky the dude is fucking rich and has that luxory of creating his own mmorpg with his own money. If I ever got into a position like that I would do the same. And I knew exactly what I would make.
nah.... 2004 had little competition ( other than the one MMO that absolutely crushed the EQ franchise) so anyone who provided an online chatroom was popular.
that's it.
Most I get in chat are now "hi" when the matchmaker drops us in a dungeon with people I never met outside them and said runs end up in 5min or so and have to queue up again and get new people again.
No, it's that dedicated community building tools will always beat whatever 'alright' tools that a game provides. If I actually make friends with someone, I'm going to want to hang out with them outside of the game - thus, why would we chat _only_ over game using in game tools? Why limit my scope to that of an mmo when community building?
Discord is has a TON of features that an in game clan setup just isn't going to have without a ton of dev time that should be put into actually making the game better.
Voice chat, along with mass chat spam, killed mmo communities.
People don’t chat in open world anymore, only in voice chat. So now you don’t have random people joining your conversation, or join other random people’s conversation. It’s all people you already know
Imo two things really contribute to it.
1. Cross server functionality/name change services: if you were an asshole back in the day eventually you'd run out of people who would play with you. Now, in WoW especially, you'll rarely meet up with anyone you grouped with previously. It means people can be absolutely horrible to each other without any consequences as long as they stay within the ToS.
2. Ease of levelling/content: you never need to so group content to get to max level and you can pug/random group for most higher end rewards. Sure, to do peak end game you need a real group but you can pug pretty high. Similarly to the first point, if you manage to piss off enough people or are on a small enough server group that your reputation catches up to you, you can just reroll, buy a boost, buy a name change etc.
I agree with what they said but, it’s just an advertisement for their new EQ classic thing. That explains why they didn’t mention something like Pax Dei which is in development that has goals all about community.
FYI you can play Pax Dei currently but it’s ALPHA status. Lots of missing features, combat is janky, PVP systems aren’t really in just one PVP zone as a tester, it’s really really rough but it gives me that old school community feel or potential to, some missing systems and unpolished crafting are issues. You would be paying to be an Alpha Tester. Now that said I’ve had a blast so far. Had to group up with 20 other people to work on clearing a “dungeon” zone no big finish just exploring a maze kind of found some loot piles and came out a secret entrance in another part of the Province.
I ended up stumping for Pax Dei in this response but yeah some games are trying community stuff still. Don’t feel obligated to jump in and pay to TEST we’ve all been burned to many times with EA games but it’s worth keeping an eye on Pax Dei at least if you like community stuff to see what it looks like down the road.
I always liked the shopping in Lineage 2. Found it exciting to find someone selling something others weren’t and the town felt alive.
The thing that changed for MMOs is the time investment for us growing older is less. Some want to get to the fun as fast possible. So the connections, energy and time invested in building relationships with people in game has changed completely.
Maybe a hot take but I hate what discord has done for MMOs. I don't want to join a discord server and VC with a small group over and over again. I want a vibrant in-game chat that makes the game feel like a living, social world. I want to chat and raid with randos. Sometimes I want to RP a little bit. Anyone else feel this way?
a vibrant chat like asdf21: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] supaqt: "Anyone know where to find entrance to X?" IH8N0GGR$: "In ur mum" asdf24: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] asdf33: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] supaqt: "Anyone know where the entrance is or not?" CyberRider: "Meet me at the crossroad in front of the town" supaqt: "DO YOU KNOW OR NOT" asdf45: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] asdf47: \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] First 1k G only 5.99!! : \[\[---W--W--W--F--R--E--E--G--O--L--D--C--O--M--\]\] PogueRogue: "stfu rtrd, go kys"
Beautiful, it's like I'm standing right at the grand exchange
💀
First thing that popped into my head, gambling bots at the GE, world 2.
Grand Exchange, Limsa Lominsa, Stormwind, Henesys + Henesys Free Market (back in the day), etc. Always has been this way.
Wow, your Valdrakken Trade Chat Simulator is looking great! All it needs is someone randomly talking about politics or religion followed by angry replies.
And a little sprinkle of chuck norris from the days of old.
Back to Barrens general with you!
There's not enough pining for KFC zinger meal deals
Maybe I'm just on a quiet server but if you leave 'Trade - Services' it helps. 'Trade - City' is generally pretty tame and is just players trying to find people to craft. Also you can install an addon to automatically mute or block anyone who says certain phrases. Can't remember what it's called, but I had it set up to block gdkp and gold sellers on classic wrath.
I feel like I'm in WoW right now
so immersive, much nostalgia
DID SOMEONE SAY [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]
Dirge
This is one “Baras is thicc” from being Drummond Kaas impside chat
Dromund Kaas made OG WoW barrens chat look tame.
You forgot the part where someone mentions trump or biden and it revolves into a shit flinging contest
It's all coming back https://preview.redd.it/c4zb27ehx29d1.jpeg?width=730&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=40b996e6918a21e055aa08dc5d17621770313488
WHERE MAKRIK WIEF????
"Alliance at the crossroads"
I've seen a bunch of games over the past few years move everything over to Discord from matchmaking to wikis and any information about the game to literally tutorials and game tips, I fucking hate it.
Yup it’s annoying af, this info is not even indexable on google and you have to join milion of servers to have all information you need those days…
And honestly it's getting harder to do that. I tried joining a mod server to report a bug and it wanted my phone number and me to input my password twice just to post.
And I’m already capped on servers I can join. So I have to scroll through discords awful ui until I find a server I don’t use and delete it.
Discord isn't the problem. Even back then I used to get in a guild or something and then we would use team speak or skype to make a group for ourselves. Then smaller and smaller groups of people would get better friends and so on. For me is more than that, the game doesn't give us things to do together anymore. All the dailies are shitty tasks that you can do alone and waiting for friends sometimes is a burden. The weeklies are mostly the same except the raids or dungeons clears. There's nothing to farm for, or to play for anymore, everything is in shop, and all you do is farm materials for upgrading your same shitty armor/weapon. This is my main problem, I want more and more content to be able to do with people. Not dailies, not shitty material farms. Not to say how idiotic it is when a game makes quests not sharable with friends, and playing in a group feels worse again because of that. Discord is the least of these games problems.
Was always forums back in the day for me. Every guild had an external forum that they required you to join and put all their info on. Really nothing has changed. We have all the same tools we always have, we just get older and change our selves.
Also, if you really become friends with your guildmates, aren't you going to want to be able to talk to hang out with them without launching the game? Having a dedicated program for voice/text chat for your guild makes everything so much easier.
Wasn't the only thing to do in MMOs back then just to material farm or level? Maybe it's cause I played mostly Eastern MMOs when they were still building their grindy reputation but most of it was 'get max gear, then wait for next patch with new gear' or 'run in circles aggroing mobs with your party as you attempt to hit max level'. Once you hit those milestones there's no reason to play the game anymore outside of meeting up with people you met through the game. The only difference between now and then that I've observed is that players have gotten insanely efficient at hitting endgame so the window of opportunity to meet people and form a social circle that'll keep you invested past endgame has gone from months to like a week at best.
EQ had raid encounters and an epic weapon class quest chain unique to each class, generally involving, sometimes a server effort. A friendly open raiding guild had a fairly popular cleric get her Ragefire kill KS'd by one of the top guilds claiming it and kiting it for two hours while their guild logged on. The entire server's open raiding community camped the boss until it respawned. Named mobs dropped highly desired tradeable loot, such as magic weight reduction bags that could fit large items. Generally leading to lots of sitting in one spot and killing a placeholder mob over and over.
This is definitely a huge part of the problem. Modern MMOs often feel more like mobile games than what we traditionally refer to as MMORPGs. The genre catered to the people who couldn't socialize, find a group, didn't want to travel, or complained that they needed more raid content to the point that the entire genre lost its way and became instance simulators where you press a button to port to instanced content that you run once a day/week to farm a special currency. It's less about the world and immersing yourself in it and more about repetitive, easy to develop, content that can be recycled ad nauseam.
Sadly the audience for these games doesn't want to build an in game community. I'm not talking about this sub, this sub leans older. You guys always get it when the topic comes up. But think of the typical r/FFXIV user. If you bring up this topic it's always the same response. They don't need a game to hang out with friends because to them it's just, well, a game. So they want to play it like a game for a few months before moving on to the next flavor of the month. Gaming is intended to be rapid and disposible in their minds. The fact that we want something different seems sad and depressing to them. They have discord for friends. No one should be a monogamer. Etc etc. So even if games put in the systems of old that we wish we still had? They wouldn't play the game. It's not gamey enough for them. It's a problem because MMOs should be designed as worlds first, and games second. The priority shouldn't be a bullet hell action combat system. Unfortunately most people won't consider a game without the latter. The idea of a game designed as a second reality comes off as cringe. It wouldn't fly socially on TikTok or Twitter. The genre cannibalized itself. The damage WoW inflicted is irreversible.
I don't know if I would say WoW caused the genre to cannibalize itself. It ballooned the genre into mainstream. The problem was it never really created enough space for healthy competition though. Every time wow released an expansion it was like Walt Disney corporation finding another loophole to push back their original Mickey copyright back another 5 or 10 years. If WoW had stopped at Wrath or even stopped anywhere in between them and now, interest would have waned and new MMos would have arisen and taken their place. But because WoW is effectively Blizzards signature money printing machine/IP they can't let it die. Competition breeds innovation. Without healthy competition between companies that product will become stagnant, a shell of its former self/glory. Yes other MMOs exist, but WoW is still the elephant in the room. It's presence will always warp the effectiveness of other games in the genre.
This is why I feel that chat bubbles are a must. In my opinion my char and the chat window are in two different dimensions. What happen in the chat stay in the chat, if I see a bubble it make me feel that the world is talking to me. When we read we *heard* with our eyes, if I see a bubble on top of someone head it makes me feel like I’m *hearing* them.
I hate that discord has become the new default for everything. "Wanna join our guild? You gotta join our discord!" No I don't, just use guild chat like normal people "Interested in our upcoming product? Join our discord for updates!" Wtf no just make a normal website and announce the release date and updates like normal people "You're interested in this topic? Join our discord!" No bitch Async chatroom style communication is the fucking worst for actually disseminating information. I have zero desire to hang out in a chat room during my free time, I'd like to actually be doing something. And when I have time to read I don't want to have to read 999+ messages searching through trying to find an ounce of meaning as dozens more come pouring in. It's terrible for actually trying to get any info unless you're a fucking loser who never gets off of it. Every time you come back it's the same 5-10 people having a multi 100 chat conversation and it's like don't you guys do literally anything else ever? These days I refuse to join any discord server unless I have actual IRL friends on it. If I don't, it's a crock of shit.
yeah i hate that. it feels like im joining discord community than specific game community. everything must be conducted there and people cant socialize without that thing. im loathe to think that community cant work without it. looking back i probably prefer to play as solo due to i hate the need to use of discord. me : "hey i want to join hardcore raid" guild member : "hi! join discord first!" me : WTF
This is what I was gonna say, it doesn't really matter what devs try to do in game to try to have people interact with each other, when everyone is just gonna hang out in discord to chat with the people they already know. I feel exactly the same when it comes to RP, I like to RP on the fly in between combat etc, and right now Its just me talking in game to amuse people on discord, who respond positively but in voice chat.
It does matter though. Making every MMORPG into a solo experience where you sometimes do co-op for gear is the entire issue. Discord exists yet Turtle WoW and Vanilla Classic still feel like social games.
I'll be honest, I don't get the hate over Discord. In my FFXIV FC, everyone speaks in game. I have never alt tabbed to speak on Discord. I don't even speak on VC cause I just don't care. The only time I use Discord to speak to my FC is when I'm in work and obviously not logged into the game.
You are lucky. Discord has ruined every guild I have been on in the last 5 years or so.
Maybe it's just an FFXIV thing? Most people seem to just chat in game. I don't play WoW so maybe it affects that game more?
I think it is at least partly a FFXIV thing. That game has a rampant RP scene, partly thanks to the player/FC housing neighborhoods, and I feel like some elements of that culture, such as using in-game chat to communicate, bleed over into non-RPers as well. I've seen people chatting in game in FFXIV more than any other game. In WoW, you're lucky if anyone in your dungeon say anything at all that isn't "wtf are you doing? Trash tank/DPS/healer".
ive experienced it in ff14 too. Our FC is active and has been thriving for four years now, but most of our socializing happens on discord. It makes sense, but I do miss the days where people would log into a game to talk to their friends
Are those people unsubbed? The only people who socialise via Disc in my FC are people who are unsubbed. The rest just log in and do stuff and chat.
My FC does both. When we're not ingame it's Discord all the way. When we're ingame, we all talk in Guild Chat.
could be an ffxiv thing - my FC have discord but no one is required to use it unless of course: it's for savage raiding.
I feel people forgot team speak was a thing during EQ1/WoW Classic
Discord fucking sucks. I really dislike it.
In-game chat has been replaced with out of game discord chat for some inexplicable reason. I’m secretly hoping discord will offer an API so MMO clients can bring the chat in game again.
> I’m secretly hoping discord will offer an API so MMO clients can bring the chat in game again. An API so that games can link in-game chat with guild discords would be super fucking useful. Getting guild chat in discord so it can be checked without logging into the game would be amazing. Let people talk via both methods and receive messages in both too. This doesn't actually need a discord API though. It could also be done via an API created by an mmo too. With an api that lets us get the guild chat we could make a bot that sends it to a discord channel and set up a two-way bridge using the bot. Discord's involvement isn't actually required to make it work.
Back when I played WoW we used a bot to cross post our guild and officer chat to corresponding discord channels and it worked great. It's not really inexplicable why discord took over. Even if you don't use the voice chat functionality, being able to talk to people on a message board that has persistent history is extremely useful. People can chat with each other anywhere even when they aren't logged on in game. Game chats simply don't provide that type of functionality. It's simply a free replacement over guild forums of old except its in real time. Most of our members didn't use the voice chat component outside of when we raid to listen to calls. One of our officers never spoke to us, and only listened and typed to communicate. Games know discord exist and that a lot of people use it, it doesn't make sense to include these features in game because it would still require people to log into the game (unless you have something like B.net that Blizzard uses), and even if they did the quality of the service simply won't be as good; discord can commit all their resources to their single service while games would only be able to dedicate a portion of their resources to try and replicate something that already exists and is free. The only thing I disagree with when it comes to games and discord is when companies try and replace their forums with discord, it's simply not well designed for it.
Also let's not forget the image sending capability so that you can send raid strat diagrams in invaluable. It's not surprising at all that the more hardcore groups jumped to discord. And then the casual groups just moved over because they were using it for everything else already anyway.
What about discord stops people from talking to random people in game? Nothing. People have always used 3rd party programs for guild communications. Talking to strangers online has lost the novelty it had in the late 90's and early 2000's. You know that girl isn't actually a girl in real life and you know getting engaged in political discourse at the game's trade hub is a waste of time. Why bother with all of that when you can can solo your way through the majority of the game anyway?
This. It's a design issue, not Discord. If anything, Discord's made it easier for me to hang out with my friends in and out of game, and I've made better bonds over it. Chilling in a WoW PvP Discord rn talking to people about wPvP and organization stuff for the next expansion. Meanwhile, WoW won't fucking implement player housing, so the casual social scene is nothing even remotely close nor ever will be to XIV's, which... I still log into that game sometimes just to go chill in somebody's random cafe while in voice on Discord. Guess that's a bad thing though.
Strongly agree. I joined a guild and immediately was asked to join a discord when I was talking in guild chat and introducing myself. Like wtf
Pso2 had some lobby rat chatting but the game basically died with ngs.
This 100% the last mmo that I feel was done well socially was maplestory 2, it was such a shame that's all it had going for it
Yeah. Sometimes I just want to enjoy the sound of the game
Definitely feel the same. Discord is poison to MMOs.
its not just MMOs its like... everything guide for a new game? Discord website for new tech product? Discord new guild in an mmo? Discord a FAQ where you are literally just reading and wouldnt and cant send or post anything? Discord. Discord is literally ruining everything and it's depressing. Dare I say it... I miss Skype... at least Skype was just a bad program, and not a poison to the internet at large...
the UI is terrible and that thing definitely not designed for guide database. i cant fathom how people can use that thing to learn things.
It does not matter where a community originates, once it gets moved to Discord, it always devolves into 7 or 8 regulars laughing at their inside jokes unrelated to the topic, while ignoring or dissing noobs with basic questions.
The big reason I dislike discord is your guild can reach out 24/7. It's like being on call. When I log off the game I don't want any messages or pings.
Yes, this is a great point. I get that you can mute it, but there's this separate chat that follows you everywhere with your phone. I actually like it when we can't reach each other much when we aren't in-game. Then I'm really happy to greet guild mates and say hi when they log on
Proximity voice chat directly in the game would be nice.
Imagine proximity chat around the auction houses in Undercity and Stormwind. It would be madness
Some things would have to be changed. GW2 lets you access the auction house from anywhere. It's only to retrieve items or objects that you need to go to the NPC. Could just have that AND let people retrieve items or objects from almost anywhere (open world = ok, instance = no) For immersion, I would like the auction house to be "split and filtered". Instead of a unique auction house, have multiple themed auction house as NPC-owned guild shops. You want herbs, you go to the herbalist guild shop. You want potions, the alchemy guild shop. You want armor, the armorsmith guild shop. You want a sword, the weaponsmith guild shop. You want a spellbook, the enchanter guild shop. You want a necklace, the goldsmith and jeweller guild shop. You want a bow, the wood sculptor guild shop. Need some food, there's the food court in the upper class part of the city. There would be a bazaar for all the miscellaneous items. It would spread players.
The thing is, games of all natures have don't want to add the code necessary to be a complete experience, so they delegate voice chat and video to external products such as discord. I've been looking through VTT software -- almost all wants to use voice and video but let discord handle it. And the games that have tried to have in-game voice chat have found that many players simply don't want to use their in-game voice and prefer their third party solutions.
>I hate what discord has done for MMOs It's not a Discord's fault **at all** that multiplayer game developers (regardless of game genre's specific abbreviation) became so utterly lazy to the point of completely unwilling to include proper communication tools into game themselves, Discord is merely a useful tool for players to compensate for such deficiencies. >I want to chat and raid with randos. Sometimes I want to RP a little bit. I do too. I also want to listen to public music/singing performances by other players, right in the game itself, but I can't do that in games such as, for example, FFXIV with its fucking **AWFUL** built-in "player music performance" system and complete lack of built-in voice chat of any kind. And again, it's definitely not a fault.
I agree with you
Yep, Reddit and Discord have killed any online community left over inside of the actual game. I think XIV is the only one with any kind of semblance of an in game community still.
Discord also killed off forums too, which was another community of said games. (Maybe reddit helped.....) Games like EQ, XI & GW are a dead breed. Love and hate reelationship with XI. It was the the 2nd best SE product ever (Behind 7 maybe), but also produced one of the most toxic instant oatmeal theme park mmo ever......XIV...... MMO currently are like a beautiful woman with zero substance beyond that.
I just wish the games would integrate social tols and build robust systems in the game. Make it Immersive. A sci-fi MMORPG could easily include a voice chat system that fits right into the lore. I hate that it got downloaded to a 3rd party app that doesn't integrate into the game world or its systems in any way.
Agreed, but, surely there's a way to integrate discord with in game chat? Some kind of partnership so that messages you type in game are seen in discord and vice versa? I think if that hurdle gets solved, that'll work well.
Yup. I don't feel welcome joining most chat rooms because I feel like they're established groups of friends and people that already know each other.
with the option of private channels in game, there's not going to be as much world chat like before
I think some other people nailed it but specifically wanted to mention Return of Reckoning that I played recently. it was nothing but discord hopping but it was for the express purpose of working together in large scale. You want that type of coordination because the game allows for such large scale moment to moment tactics. Its one of the best experiences I've had with an MMO. The chat/discord isn't the problem. Its the game needs to reward that in game behavior. The community will always use the best available tools to coordinate/communicate. Its on the game to make the coordination/communication opportunities and requirements fun.
They should just bridge Discord with in-game chat. MUDs have that, so I know MMORPGs can do the same.
Are you referring to like a in-game proxy voice chat?
This is why I went back to eso on playstation, you can free chat with the mic
Most MMOs before discord had their own guild chats so it's pretty much the same
I’ll take discord over the nonsense Bungie tried to pull with Destiny 2 or Nintendo. Why do I need to have an app on my phone to add friends, chat, or make a party? What a complete and utter load of shit.
I'm with you. I don't want to sit in voice chat all day and I don't want to be in voice chat for EVERY single event I do in a game. I just want to have some fun and I don't need to min/max and be super serious about everything all the time. I have great memories of playing games and hanging out in vent, teamspeak, and mumble but that's because I wanted to, not because it was some requirement.
Real, remember racial languages? God I miss insulting my friends in a language only the healer could understand.
It would be 1 thing if discord actually worked to begin with xD I even have my private discord boosted but 5/10 times we can't even use it due to connection issues....I miss P2P.
Any reason to typing word instead of talking in voice, like in every modern game? In-game proximity/group voice chat is one of the best things in online games.
I feel the same way. Now that Pandora's Box has been opened, there's no going back to the good old days--and with the changes in social media and the way we interact with each other, maybe the change in MMOs would've happened regardless of Discord. But I definitely dislike the tribalism Discord encourages. I by no means have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to chatting in MMOs (well, okay, maybe a little) and am by no means claiming that all, or even most, conversations were intellectually stimulating, but I hate the silence Discord has created. Everyone wants to group and chat from within their Discord communities, and when it comes to doing difficult content, prefer to pool from a smaller Discord dedicated to running that specific content within a particular MMO--in other words, a highly specialized community. Nobody wants to raid with their guild anymore or chat within small groups. Nobody has the patience to teach new players midcore content so they can become better players. Instead, it's group with your Discord community and bitch about everyone outside of said community for not living up to the standards of said community. Because, you know, it's incredibly realistic to expect a group of randoms to coordinate as well as dedicated community with similar expectations and skill levels. Find a random group you don't like? Don't bother explaining things to them in clear sentences like a real human being; that requires effort. Just say nothing, drop from the group, or act passive aggressive the whole time and then complain about "trap parties" in your Discord. Discord didn't cause this problem of tribalism. That is something affecting our society in general, and has much bigger implications than how people chat in MMOs. But hot damn does Discord not just allow but outright encourage such behavior within the MMO space.
I feel the same way. I remember back in the old days in MMOs, people would just be constantly chatting in guild chat even while doing our own thing. I made so many friends that way. Now despite being in a very active guild in WoW, our guild chat is a ghost town 99% of the time. It's not like people moved the conversation to discord either. There is just no text conversation happening at all anymore. I mean, we still shoot the shit in voice chat when we are actually playing together, which is fun and nice. But it's super lonely the rest of the time.
I too, am sick of discord
Mortal Online 2 had that, but it's also probably the poorest managed MMO launched in recent years and there are literal white supremacists on there spewing hate speech so 🤷♂️
I loved how in guild wars 1 they had 'runners'... people who would sit in towns waiting to be hired for runs to distant cities. They made good gold in tips.
In FFXI, healers could teleport to various areas on the world map. Otherwise, normal jobs had to use a chocobo and that could take up to 10-30mins at a time. Those same healers could teleport party members. So basically, people would shout in a city zone saying >Teleport-Altep. 5k gil. Can I have it? Essentially saying they'll pay you 5,000 for you to invite them to your party and teleport them to Altepa Desert. This type of shout was so common your chat screen would be nothing but people asking for teleports. As you can imagine, lots of healers made big money doing this. I used to spend weeks doing it at a time. Made millions of gil. A good day alone you could make 200-300k gil. The funniest part was that other healers would be doing it at the same time. So it was almost a race to see who could invite the person quickest. Sometimes another healer would get angry at you for doing it and /tell you nasty things lol Good times. I probably wouldn't do that kinda shit today as an adult. Time = money for me now I work 45 hours a week. But yeah.
I found that during the day was the best time, tele the Japanese players. I worked nights at the time so I made bank. During the afk time I had a nice sushi shop in the main city. I had zero money issues in that game.
> , tele the Japanese players They were usually quite gracious as well. 10k for a Vahzl had me so excited back then lol
Ragnarok Online had this too. The Acolyte could warp anyone to a map, as long as he had the map saved
I miss those kind of utility actions being a big part of some classes. With modern MMOs it so often feels like your class choice doesn’t matter at all outside of combat. Older games really leaned into the class fantasy aspect of the games and the worlds felt more alive for having done so.
I really miss that too. Also miss stuff like Flyff's buffs. Ringmasters (healers) could turn new players into basically gods compared to what they normally are. Unfortunately a new MMO could never do all these things. People would complain to much, and then complain when there's no social aspect.
Reminds me of lineage 2 when people needed to go to tower of insolence 13th floor for a quest. It was a 40 minutes run and very dangerous. Summoners sold their services for millions. Such a great emergent mechanic.
That sounds awesome. It adds an exciting layer to the game that doesn't need developers.
Selling warps to in ragnarok was the shit. More than once the person buying a teleport to glastheim invited me to the party, and often those ended up being the most fun ones. Even joined a guild that way.
In everquest 2 I joined a guild because the leader was a regular shopper. He'd come to my house sometimes to buy stuff and eventually we started talking about his guild. 😊 I don't think you can sell from your home anymore in everquest 2. I had a little counter set up and I'd sit behind it. It was funny as hell.
i had to hire them so many times because the GW1 devs' idea of fun was making every single enemy stack DoT damage on you in that one snowy area
Ohhh the shortcut down towards droknar's forge! I know that run!
I loved doing that. I ran lions arch to ToA haha havent thought about it in years
Taxi service wizards and druids in EQ — same thing, earn some extra money on the side and help players out by building a name for yourself. Yeah, the systems that players come up with were facilitated by the games. None of these would work without there being a reason to exist. Players needed to travel, EQ could be treacherous or time consuming, so out comes emergent gameplay.
Yep good memories from GW1, I really wish we could get a modern recreation of the game.
I absolute loved the elite skills concept in that game. It was so fuckin fun to learn about a skill, go try and capture it like a fuckin Pokémon, and then use it to crush nuts in PVP. That was my favorite MMO by far.
Hit the nail on the head with new MMOs. The convienence of one button to teleport to an instanced dungeon where you dont need to say a word to another player. The MMO where people would rather multibox 5 characters at once instead of taking the time and the effort to make friends and make a real group. I find myself solo playing most of the time compared to when I used to play EQ and WoW. MMOs have lost their way- bring back the reward of group play, making friends, forming a community..the whole MMO experience.
Developers made things more convenient for the players because the players demanded it. Only a very small portion of players actually want to spend the time to travel to a dungeon, or look for groups just to complete one single quest, or spend hours upon hours grinding mobs and materials to get 1 item. Most people don’t want to do that shit, or simply can’t because they don’t have the time.
Yes and that's how the MMO genre has deteriorated and is dying. Instead of designers and devs making the travel and the social interactions fun and interesting - they make a button for convenience to skip things.
This is right. MMOs haven't innovated on group play in literal decades. Even the director in the article is even for ye olden days of, hmmm, **1997.** As if copy-pasting a nearly 30-year-old game is even remotely acceptable something to aspire to. Over the years, every other genre has grown immensely. Several of the components that made MMOs MMOs have even been spun off into their own, MASSIVELY better, sub-genres (management games, team PvE games, open world RPGs.) Why play an MMO when basically every part of the game is an aggressively mediocre version of other, really awesome and innovative games? Just like Breath of the Wild did a remarkable job of making open-world traversal a fun and engaging experience out of what used to be a pure chore in older games, a new MMO needs to really re-imagine what it means to have a fun, engaging, and most importantly **accessible** massively-multiplayer and social experience in 2024. Ultimate Online and EQ were really remarkable games for their time and a crucial piece of gaming history, but we really need to move on.
But then why are you blaming the developers for giving the players exactly what they asked for? There’s still thriving MMOs out there with big populations and content players. The largest MMOs are easily the most casual ones, the “hardcore” MMO’s are that the ones that are consistently struggling the most, so I’m failing to see what the point of having this discussion even is. If you’re upset that most people don’t share your sensibilities then that’s fine, but acting like it’s some sort of problem that needs to be solved doesn’t seem correct here.
its more like if they wont add fun content and traversal inbetween objectives might as well have fast travel to not repeat the same boring unchanging shit
Huh? You mean like dynamic flying mounts such as WoW dragonflight and GW2?
> MMOs have lost their way I don't think we'll ever get it back again. I always think that MMOs were just products of their time. That magic is just missing these days. It wasn't just MMOs for me. There were lots of magical times for me when it came to the internet. A good example is Halo 2 on Xbox Live back in 2004. I shit you not I still remember vividly playing my first online game. It was Rumble Pit on Ivory Tower. I heard an American guy speaking, as a British person. I was fucking blown away by this. It's just such a vivid memory in my mind. I went from playing PS1/N64/Dreamcast/GameCube games alone to suddenly playing video games with other people from around the fucking world. And then I started playing FFXI in 2005 and holy shit that was magical. Instead of just 8 players all shooting each other, I was now playing with hundreds if not thousands of players all at once in some magical land.
FFXI was my MMO as well, and I don't think we will ever get a game like that again. First, the gaming demographic has just changed. Yoshi-P, the lead developer/director for FFXIV, has literally said that he thinks Ultima Online was the best MMO ever, but that he does not design FFXIV the same way because he does not believe a game like UO is economically viable today. He doesn't think players would dedicate themselves to a game like UO vs chasing instant gratification with other games. In other words, the guy running the currently most successful MMO in the business knowingly designs and balances the game in a suboptimal manner to be more profitable. This means that there's not a lot of money to be made in old school MMOs. Now a MMO in the style of the 2000s could be profitable; it just won't be optimally profitable. That leads us to the second problem: new forms of video game monetization. Capitalism as an overarching market force will prevent any studio from putting in the resources to develop such a game because micro-transaction based games have much better ROI. The golden age of MMOs took place when MMOs ran purely on the purchase cost + a sub fee. When the only way for a game to turn a profit was to have the most players and to keep them all subscribed, therefore a game had to deliver the best experience to retain customers over competition. But the reality of the post-microtransaction gaming world is that you get better ROI by explicitly designing games to hook-then-monetize players rather than just designing a good game. When you can monetize players individually, decisions don't necessarily have to be good for the game (i.e. the majority of the players) to be good for the company's wallet. It's better to lose 900 customers whose ROI is only $5 each than to lose a whale who spends $5000. There is no reason for studios to invest in making a good new game for a dwindling market when it is much cheaper and more reliable to save on resources and just build gacha games based around efficient monetization of whales. And, once you start allowing whales to use money to substitute for time/effort of any sort, it's an increasingly smaller leap for every subsequent "P2W" cash shop perk. This leads to a death spiral that eventually kills off every game. Without fail, games reach a place that most players can't or won't put the money in that is necessary to enjoy the game (i.e. to keep up with the whales) and the majority of players quit, leaving the game barren and dead. But when these games die, the money extracted from whales is worth the decreased lifespan and the studios shed no tears and move on to the next thing. This goes back to that article a while back about how Blizzard's player base numbers were down, but the studio's profitability was still up. And as long as the company is profitable, that's all dissociated stakeholders care about and things will continue. The closest thing we will get to old MMOs are Classic releases, because the player acquisition costs and the development costs are baked into those games already. But the issue with Classic games is that eventually they either a) will go down the same path as their retail counter-parts making them a time-limited nostalgia trip or b) require new divergent development at some point making them less-profitable.
Idk. Ive been playing GW2 since launch. I used to be extremely active and had guilds and communities were people knew each other. My life has changed significantly and now I no longer have the time for that. I still like playing and being part of a living environment even if i don’t interact with others much. I hate single player games. I like having strangers around
> instead of taking the time and the effort to make friends and make a real group Maybe because way too many people are way too eager to act like shitheads thanks to the anonymity of the internet. Placing the blame on people for being justifiably wary of toxicity is a weird angle.
The challenge of the MMO was being forced to work together to make a team that was more than just the sum of its parts. It makes the lows much more frequent (when you fail), but it makes the highs that much higher.
>The convienence of one button to teleport to an instanced dungeon where you dont need to say a word to another player. Tbh I always disagreed with the "one button to teleport to an instanced dungeon" ever being the problem and if WoW Classic did anything it was confirm it to me. To me it's a literal time waste to find a group manually. Sometimes I even had to use a full evening just to get a group and to get a dungeon done (mind you sometimes not even getting the dungeon finished). What ruined the dungeons in WoW (and in general) was more that they got piss easy and fast so that you didn't have to communicate at all. So that part I agree with but finding a group back in the day was such a misery if you didn't have a tank and healer beforehand.
I get that. My experience was different and I'm not saying it was better or worse. When I started playing WoW I had friends that started he same time and we all picked different characters. We were all in the same guild so we put the time in to chat and get to know who the good tanks and healers and dps etc were and those that played in our TZ. It paid off because when we needed a reliable tank we could call for one and vice versa... there was a community and we knew what each other needed in terms of weapons and gear and when there was a raid scheduled you would call on these people you knew well.
> where people would rather multibox 5 characters at once instead of taking the time and the effort to make friends Sounds like an underlying desire by the customer, not a behavior forced on you by the MMO. In fact, I'd argue a person that goes to that much trouble to play a group game alone is a strong indicator of how much some people want to play alone.
Kyle Vallee, creative director for EverQuest 2, is a huge fan of MMOs and has played basically all of them—but he thinks the genre has lost its way in one respect. The sense of community early MMOs cultivated is being sidelined, he says. *"They seem to have lost that [community focus] in other MMOs, the community has become not a big part of it,"* Vallee told me at Fippy Fest, an EverQuest anniversary celebration developer Daybreak Games recently brought me out to San Diego to attend. *"It seems like they don't give people the tools to build community anymore. The couple other MMOs that I play I'm almost like a solo player 100%, I don't group with anyone. The tools there for building communities just really seem lacking, even in the newer stuff."* When I first started playing EverQuest, community and cooperation weren't exactly optional. Monsters were deadly, some classes couldn't solo at all, and if you wanted to get anything done you had to reach out to other players and get a group going. The challenge itself was a feature that brought players together organically. Some MMOs do a better job of this than others. I played FF14 when it first came out, and like a lot of players, completely bounced off it. Years later after the overhaul of A Realm Reborn and a few well-received expansions, I decided to give it another go. I had a blast, and I played all the way through Stormblood before wandering off, but I spent the lion's share of my time alone. Sure, there were occasional Main Scenario dungeons or raids, but for the most part I was off by myself slogging through Main Scenario Quests. Now, that's not a bad thing necessarily. FF14 is trying to tell a much more structured story than most other MMOs. I enjoyed the storytelling, and the duty finder was always there for a change of pace if my mind started to melt doing another fetch quest for moogles. But I was struck at times, in a world with thousands of players, at just how lonely it felt. Vallee found himself feeling the same with other MMOs. *"Some MMOs have group finders for everything,"* he said. *"You get into a group finder, you go into the zone, you literally do not talk to the other players, you clear the zone as fast as you can, and you leave. There's no discussion. In our games you have to talk to other players if you want to find a group. We had a group finder at one time, but we felt like it was removing the sense of community from the game so we got rid of it."* Now, I get the appeal of quality-of-life features like group finders, I really do. One of my biggest frustrations playing EverQuest back in the day was how hard it was to get a group sometimes. Too many shadowknights in Karnor's Castle when you wanted to play meant a long trek to another zone, a few hours of meager XP soloing, or giving up altogether and playing another character (because I mean let's be real, we weren't going to not play EQ). The ability to log on to WoW, or FF14, or TESO, grab your dailies, and launch into a dungeon group with the click of a button is inarguably convenient. But as I wrote last year, and as EQ visionary Brad McQuaid famously said, sometimes the magic is in the boring bits. Sometimes you meet a random monk in Highhold Keep who offers to tip your shaman for buffs and he becomes a lifelong friend. Sometimes you're waiting for the puller to finish changing his baby, realize the tank in your group is in the next town over, and decide to meet up for beers. Sometimes you meet the love of your life. EverQuest 2 isn't much for the boring bits these days, and it seems to me that EQ2 has suffered a bit of the same fate that modern MMOs have. Lots of content focuses on the raid scene, characters are extremely powerful, and everyone does literally trillions of damage. With that said, their newest TLE (time locked expansion) server, Anashti Sul, is going all the way back to the start of the game. It's a true classic server, based on a build from 2006 and the brainchild of years of work in the studio poring through old databases and playtesting the original game. *"When we first launched our first group of TLEs, a lot of players would say, 'This isn't what I wanted, this isn't what I expected, I wanted the original game,"* Vallee told me. So that's what they're giving them with Anashti Sul: You can't buy or sell Krono, there's almost nothing in the marketplace, and it's on its own design depot—changes to Live will not affect this Origins server, and vice versa. It's tough, exciting, and if the 50 instances of the newbie zone when I logged in were any indication, players are loving it. Everywhere I went people were getting together in global channels to group up and tackle stuff, even as low as level 1. Seeing players grouping up to attack content, figuring out a plan based on their group composition, and being challenged right out of the gate feels like the very essence of MMO gaming to me. No shade to those who just wanna jam that dungeon finder, but for me the juice is only worth it if you have to give a little squeeze.
> The sense of community early MMOs cultivated is being sidelined, he says. The sense of community IRL and everywhere is dying. This is just one example of it. Humanity has lost its way and the MMO space is just a subset of that.
Offline communities disappearing is a different issue and actually partially caused by the rise of online communities. The primary issue with "community" is that any new community that forms is actively taking people's time away from something else that they were previously putting that time into. With the rise of online community we have seen a collapse of offline community. You can see this most clearly if you contrast western countries with global south countries that have not yet had the same thing occur due to much less access to internet and less convenience. The collapse of offline communities is most prevalent in richer countries whereas poorer countries continue to have strong offline communities.
the issue isnt MMO design, the issue is people.
"Gogogogo" "LF BIG DICK DPS CHECKING LOGS" "purple parse only" "FULL BIS REQ" People treat leveling dungeons like it is the race for world first when those that are actually relevant to that part of the gaming world are already farming their BIS gear. It would be a little sad if it wasn't also the lone playstyle shaping the majority of game design decisions in the MMO space.
This shit is ridiculous in retail and classic WoW. I got yelled at by a tank for not knowing a fight in a shadowlands dungeon literally like 7 hours after launch. I think we wiped once then got it. Guy was furious we didn't already read a guide to a fight that hadn't been in the game for a day yet. I really don't understand how reading every bit of info before an expansion is fun for people. I enjoy discovering the world, not just following a checklist until I'm max.
Dungeon running in WoW seems horrendous. People complain that FF14's dungeons are too linear. But then you get WoW's dungeons. Honestly i like WoW's dungeon design more, the thing i hate is people expecting me, a new player tank, to know the optimal route to avoid the most amount of trash mobs. People don't want linear dungeons but in the end will make a linear dungeon themselves anyway.
Yep. I miss the old days when most people weren't speedrunning their way through the game, and they weren’t googling up every optimal way to get the fastest things in the shortest time. People’s inability to just enjoy the game and learn it on their own, is what’s ruined MMO’s. Can't even blame the developers for that, because it's always the playerbase demanding for everything to be streamlined and skippable. Also players are so anti-social these days. The same people who \*say* they want an MMORPG, will be the same who refuse to do any socialising once there’s a new MMO out there. They don’t want to engage with other players, they'll avoid the co-op minigames, they'll skip all the lore and dialogue, they just spend their whole time grinding solo content. Then they complain that the game is boring and dead.
I find players have less patience these days as well. Like they wipe and then they start getting angry if a player causes the wipe. Like dude chill. Games are meant to be fun.
Nailed it. The "good old days" could only really exist as a product of a combination of information asymmetry, limited competing entertainment options and lack of communication infrastructure. Once: * People could play just the "fun parts" of MMOs * People could effectively find out "optimal strats" at the click of a Youtube link * People didn't have to sub to a MMO to talk to other people online Old MMOs as a "social community" thing were numbered. You can't force people to put up with other people when they have other options, and that's what a lot of the old "social communities" were founded on. MMOs need to find a way to make socializing with random other people *compete* with other options, and right now they still don't know how to do that. Which, to be fair, that's a *really* tall fuckin' order, so it's not just on them. That's hard to make appealing for anyone without some sort of ulterior motive or other outside pressure involved.
all very good points. I would add that our perception of both gaming and online communities was much different than it is today. we went from a sense of pioneership into oversaturation and, frankly, overload, quite rapidly. the sense of wonder that games were able to elicit not too many years ago has waned as we have gained a familiarity and routine when it comes to concepts, tropes and mechanics.
I disagree somewhat, some mmo's have hostile design at the leveling process for grouping up. Honestly try to play FFXIV, with new characters and count how many times you have to leave the party and it disrupts grouping up. Now imagine trying to do this with randoms without VC. It's not just FFXIV but it's a good example of bad mmo design in it, even if the end game is really social and everyone is great. The base game teaches newbies the opposite. But i've noticed a lot of in modern mmo's 1. A lot of quests become longer if you play as a group 2. A lot of quests want to play a cutscene/put me in a small fight with 0 difficulty 1 v 1 so I cant be in a party Combine these two together and you have made the perfect storm of people now wanting to play together early on. Because if it's tedious with friends... most people wont give a random the same chance.
Yep this. People who are talking about TPing to dungeons being too easy are missing the forest for the trees. Its the majority of the population that gets everything spoonfed to them in guides, don't talk, raid logs, etc... Plus the death of the servers in most mmos. When WoW came out server forums were alive with friends and enemies. You knew people on the server. Server firsts meant something. No one cares anymore. If you try to act like that now you get kicked. Applying to a guild isn't some questionnaire and running some dungeons after meeting someone. Its preparing your log resume or being poached. There's more in game interaction in SSF path of exile if you sit in a chat channel than there is in WoW. And most mmos I try you can see the same trend already in place before the steam refund window is closed.
I'm an old fart, been playing MMO's since The Realm Online in the mid 90's. There are a lot of reasons why MMO's feel mostly feel like easy solo online games now. 1. Game Speed - Combat is much faster paced now. Back in the day of EverQuest and Dark age of Camelot you had to rest in between pulls which gave you plenty of time to chat with your group. 2. Simplicity and general catering to casuals - Old school MMO's were developed around requiring others to safely make it through content. Many times, I wiped to mobs my own level growing up because I screwed up my rotation. Now days I can roll my head on the keyboard and take out a mob of enemies. 3. The de-emphasis of crafting to get great, if not the best gear in the game. - A lot of older games would require extreme dedication to crafting and would often take master crafters from multiple trades to create one piece of masterwork armor. You then had to find a master enchanter to make the best armor in the game. It was a massive commitment on both sides (Gold for the player and time/effort for the crafting team) 4. The internet is too good. - There was sooooo much mystery in earlier MMO's and it was much easier to ask around in game to figure out a quest or where a certain mob was you needed than skimming through random GeoCities websites with their sweet midi music and minor animations that would absolutely tank my 28.8 kbs internet connection. (Yeah, they promised 56 kbs but you never actually got that speed) 5. QOL features that ruin immersion. - I'm talking to you fleshed out maps and question marks above NPC's heads. Nothing was better than finding a random quest of a random NPC and it feeling like a true quest instead of me just following where the map tells me to go. 6. Phasing and Mega-Servers - Convenient for handling crowds and server loads, but completely ruins the sense of community. You never run into the same person twice. It's like living in a small country town where everyone knows everyone and has each other's back vs. going to NYC and trying to find a person you met last week at the Yankees game. There are more reasons but the more we innovate and make things easier, the more reasons there is not to join a group and this is a serious issue for MMO's. If we're going to have a resurgence of a true social MMO. We're at least going to have to make the combat extremely challenging and get rid of phasing. The problem with that is it doesn't cater to casuals and the money follows the casual masses these days. True old school MMO's aren't profitable and can't be anymore unless there is a major shift in the mindset of modern MMO players.
> Game Speed - Combat is much faster paced now. Back in the day of EverQuest and Dark age of Camelot you had to rest in between pulls which gave you plenty of time to chat with your group. I really liked some games where sitting would speed up your mana or hp recovery. People would sit together and spontaneous social interactions would occur. Healers would have more value, buffs would have more value, and potions would have more value. Also things like plonking down a campfire might speed it up even more so other players would come over and sit at your fire.
this remind me of original official Ragnarok Online. people would sit down to recover hp and sp after each time fighting mobs.
I miss this so much. Some of my best online friends were made in between pulls. I know the newer generation must be thinking "why would you want your health and mana to take minutes to recharge?" and it's just one of those things where you had to be there to understand.
The important factor here is that downtime is where socialisation occurs. If you have no downtime. You have no opportunity for socialisation. The downtime should not just be part of post-dungeon moments. It should be weaved directly into the combat gameplay loop itself. Older devs that began the genre understood and intentionally did this. Everything about the games from the ground up was about creating ways that spontaneous social interaction could occur. Now the devs do everything they can to prevent you from having any downtime at all and this creates the loneliest world imaginable. Thousands of people all doing their own thing with no interruptions and no possibility of them interacting with others around themselves, just rush rush rush. You can't even try to socially interact with people who are in the middle of something because you're rudely interrupting them.
0\. There was no other kind of MMO so the people that didn't enjoy all of the following points didn't have a choice. When they first got a choice, it created the biggest MMO of all time and is still going.
The main reason is easy = casuals = $$$. The goal was never to make a good MMO, the goal was to maximize it's income.
There is just too much money in catering to the casual and offering incentives such as pay to win, cosmetics etc. There is no way to orchestrate a profitable model around old school MMO mechanics at the moment, it's become a niche product at this point. I can see one day with AI assistance; a small indie team could create a niche product that would emulate an old school experience but without AI doing a lot of the heavy lifting with content creation and dialog. I don't see how you could make an old school model profitable because face it online games are expensive, servers are expensive, bandwidth is expensive, and these are ongoing costs and the masses don't want an old school experience. So, if you want a successful old school experience it's going to require a monthly subscription but that is a very-very hard sale these days when you can go play quality polished games for free.
>"Some MMOs have group finders for everything," he said. "You get into a group finder, you go into the zone, you literally do not talk to the other players, you clear the zone as fast as you can, and you leave. There's no discussion. In our games you have to talk to other players if you want to find a group. We had a group finder at one time, but we felt like it was removing the sense of community from the game so we got rid of it." To be fair, classic WoW proved that you do not need a group finder for the community to act like that. Blaming people not wanting to talk to each other purely on features like that is just weird. How about content that actually requires people to talk to each other instead? Like unique class or crafting features that you can't just sell on the market board. Or - I dare say it - difficult content that requires communication and that you can't just skip. People managing to fight together through tough times are usually more inclined to talk to each other or even become friends.
nobody fights through tough times BECAUSE there's a group finder. If you spent 15-20 minutes putting a group together, you don't disband after 1 wipe, you talk it out and keep chugging. Its how new players often learned, and its how a lot of people found guilds with similar playstyles/values. Now, whether you're talking about individual players, or the whole ass party, they're immediately replaceable. 1 wipe, people bounce and requeue.
> If you spent 15-20 minutes putting a group together, you don't disband after 1 wipe Because if you do have to drop if life is calling, you don't get invited back and 90% of the group-only game is now unavailable to you.
Classic WoW is full of current WoW players.
Funny how some people keep trying to find excuses instead of just accepting the simple truth.
He’s right. Community was traded away in favor of convenience. Back in FFXI, some of my best social interactions was sitting around chatting while waiting to find a group. Then sitting around chatting while waiting for the puller to bring mobs back to camp. Leveling/playing was slow and clunky. But these moments led to real community interactions and friendships. Even in the early days of WoW, putting together groups and doing harder content led to a lot of social interactions and relationship building. You wanted to build those relationships to make grouping faster in the future. But people started demanding tools to streamline those things. We got dungeon finders, group finders, raid finders, teleports/portals to get around (which were often player-based abilities in earlier MMOs), and so forth. Soon, all major MMOs let you just stand around in town, queue up for a dungeon, run it, and never really have to interact. Then, as server populations fluctuated, they merged servers, added cross-realm zones, server hopping, etc. So now the people you linked up with might not even be on the same server as you, and you’ll likely never see them again once the dungeon is over. Or, in games like WoW, you’ll be running alongside someone down a path, and when you hit a zone boundary they will fade away, never to be seen again. I will say, though, that some communities have found ways to flourish in spite of these design choices. FFXIV, for example, has all of the above convenience factors built in. They even let you run dungeons with NPCs if you want. Yet, servers still developed their own identities over time, with events that people create. It’s not uncommon to find out that someone’s house is being used as a night club, and you can hop servers over to go put on some fancy clothes and go dancing/hangout. There’s fashion shows, hunt groups, etc. that have all found their communities in the game.
He's right, for all the reasons we'd expect. MMOs simply don't force you to interact with other humans 99% of the time these days. You can certainly form great connections -- I've made a great groups of friends in both FFXIV and GW2 with whom I play all the time -- but you have to put a little effort into it, these days; it doesn't happen as organically as it used to. That said, I can't act like I don't mind the current state of things. I used to spend half my time back in my LotRO days just standing around trying to find people to do stuff with. That was fine because I had what felt like an endless amount of free time. Nowadays? I log on at night after working, taking care of the dogs, cooking, doing chores, exercising, etc., and I just want to hop into something immediately and make a little progress before bed. GW2 lets me do that better than any other game. I can be in a Fractals group within thirty seconds of loading in.
Even if the tools were there, they'd be underutilized. The behavior of online players in a general sense tend to reflect real life in the way that were still in the age of "me" and self-sufficiency being such an important mindset to modern people. Mindset being key word. It's why even in MMOs, solo-friendly content has become more prevalent. A lot of people want to play in a world with others in an organic way without having to rely on (or sometimes even talk to) others, and this is — in many cases — playing out a power fantasy when in the newer that: in their real world they do very much have to rely on others to get by. It's still escapism, it's just shifted in nature over time. That's not to say they shouldn't be developing these tools, because they're evergreen so to speak and when the zeitgeist shifts again, the tools can be ready and there for when it does.
Can we get a new updated Everquest please? The world and races intrigue me so much.
It's because they all pander to turning their MMORPG into a solo experience that happens to allow co-op.
I like discord in the sense that you can check something or interact with certain people outside the game. It’s not as invasive as texting a stranger, yet you can holla at someone like “yo you wanna do a match or hey you wanna run this dungeon or hey can you help me real quick”. It’s also good for sharing a cool moment that maybe ur buddy was not there for. Also a side note is the game status. I would see someone playing a new game and I would ask about it. Or discover that we play another same game, opening a whole other exciting convo about a mutual interest. Finally, there are really generous people in the community that I would never have reached if not for discord. Groups that train shy or new players for end game content. Groups that does giveaways for skins that some may not be able to afford. They can organize wvw strategies and communicate better.
My only issue with discord is when people try and turn it into a forum. Sure there are built in features for it but it really doesn't work well. As a communication tool I think discord is great, its extremely versatile and it is what you make out of it.
Not sure anyone involved in EQ2 is in a place to make that assessment, they certainly aren't putting out a game that builds community. Maybe in 2004, but not in the last decade.
They just released an "Origins" server that is EQ 2 circa 2006. (They are attempting to bring some of that community aspect back with this server.)
Players need to give themselves more agency over their experience to find/build communities, modern MMOs have added much more convenience to the experience so you aren't always forced to interact but that's no excuse for not taking shit into your own hands and doing it, it's still possible in every of the big/major MMOs to do this and placing all the blame on discord or other voice programs is retarded. You are in control despite what you think. edit: MMOs should still offer ingame tools for this, I agree with that sentiment even if I think most people who complain about this sort of thing are just lazy.
I have to agree, as someone who has played everything as well hehe. I catch myself saying how anti-social games (& their communities) feel now compared to how they used to be quite often these days. Every game should have built in tools to be successful in game, without requiring a bunch of 3rd party tools & sites to get anything done.
It’s weird because people both complain about it but also want everything instant gratification. Hopefully solo too
Me in gw2 like, wait you guys don't get to know your event coordinators (commanders)? Or add people to in game friends list and regularly bum their player home for its resources? In all seriousness I forget out solo or singleplayer other mmos are. I hope AoC does well.
Meanwhile GW2 just gave us beach chairs and bikinis and strangers are throwing summer parties in game
This is BS and another example of how far devs have fallen in the MMO market. EQ didn't give you "tools" to do anything. They created a complex world that was unsurpassed for its era, with a complex lineup of different classes with which to enjoy the world. The rules were hard. The mobs were even harder. And players banded together in that environment to triumph over it together. It is that simple. There wasn't an auction house tool, I'd hit the tunnel to watch auctions. There wasn't summoning stones to help groups move to the dungeon quickly, I'd plan ahead and/or make new friends in order to explore that dungeon. I play Eve Online right now because it is very similar in spirit to EQ. They made a hard and complex world for players. Players and environment make it a very unforgiving game, you need friends and when you find them you get that same camaraderie that is missing from all these other modern MMOs because they're too damn easy. Devs really need to remove their heads from their asses if they want to make money in this genre. Quit catering to players on the things that do not work. Players will tell you they want it easy, make this easier, or that more convenient. But you gotta be judicious in doing those things. WoW started this nonsense and they got away with it by generating expansions on a regular schedule. But most companies are not like the old Blizzard, that was a singular time and place for devs I think. Make a quality world of great complexity and beauty that is difficult to succeed alone in. Give the players tons of classes to make them feel unique in this world. And then back off and let the community build. Tools have nothing to do with it. Nothing.
A big issue is hostile design towards partying early game, it's not like putting a gun to the player and forcing them to party like FFXI or EQ1998 but got to the flip side where it feels like hostile design to partying. FFXIV/Lost Ark are prob the two best examples of hostile mmo design towards community (pre-story completion) IF you try to play either with a group of friends you might as well bind /party leave and /party invite \[name\] to auto hot key or a macro as the main story quest for which is 100's of hours will constantly want you out of a group. Forcing you to leave the party, then it might throw you in a different instance (only really happens on current story content) or just play a cutscene that you cant skip, some people enjoy, some people don't so they go off ahead past load screens and waiting longer. Sure you get dungeons where if you're a pre-set team play dps/dps/dps/healer/tank, it's perfect but that's generally not the case all the time. Then if you do quests where you need to collect stuff on the over world further punishment of playing a group as you have to harvest different spots (which also might be limited to how many in one area is, slowing you guys down further then someone playing solo.) THIS is what some mmo's do to people WANTING to play together, what do you think the chances some random is wanting to go through this with the constant interruptions (possible shard switches, etc). I think this is one of the boons of WoW Classic and why people enjoy the leveling experience over current mmo's. I could get 1-60 easily alone, but bringing more people never felt like I was putting a stick in my bike wheel and splashes group quests/dungeon quests that gave loot that sped up the leveling experience. No one wants the solo player to deal with hostile design, but holy fuck do some mmo's make them seem like they want to make a single player game then suddenly expect you to know the community after 100's of hours of telling you to play mostly solo.
Sure, when you are selling experience potions and other cash shop 💩on both EQ and EQ2, these games are no longer about teaming up interact with each other to get fat loot and rare gears, it’s about swiping your credit card. They are literally polluting their own communities.
I think it's less about giving the tools to build a community and more about removing the *need* for building community. Group Finders, shared instanced areas populated from the entire player base rather than the actual server's population, widely available fast travel, etc. introduced for "convenience" have chipped away at the world like nature of MMO's for the worse.
I completely agree, but you are the creative director of one of the most iconic MMO franchises in history. Put your money where your mouth is. I don’t mean the new origins server, that’s a start. But I mean a firm commitment to EQ3 that holds these core tenets and doesn’t stray from them.
I get this a lot. I am not joining discord just for the 8 percent chance I will vibe with someone and make a connection that matters. The emergent and spontaneous effect of finding someone in game and hitting it off in game is what can make or break the experience. It can also be what ultimately will turn a mostly silent room into a lovely chaotic vibe when someone hits the note right then and there. Joining a bunch of discords for randoms is messy and annoying as well
after starting FFXI on both new private and old retail servers I am starting to think it's not just the games, but the players. I sit there on FFXI shouting and whispering at people for hours, days even, and get a single digit number of people who even want to communicate in any capacity. modern MMOs have less interesting job variety and unique class traits, but one thing I can't say is that people are more social in older games. Unfortunately I gotta say I see the most chatter in modern games. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing since I wasn't playing MMOs in the 90s, but in older MMOs where people supposedly are set up the most for socializing I see the least conversation. Everyone is even MORE locked into their discords and linkshells than more modern mmos. It's hard for me to blame the game when all the games that people boast as being the best social builders are dead silent with players running past you all day.
Even if the games give players the tools or force them to interact with each other, the gameplay would be significantly slower, which today's generations could have a hard time getting into. Teleporting, group finder, mindless combat, etc. allow for a wider audience of players since the required time commitment is much lower, and games need to make money. I love the old school experience, but trying to find a group can take hours, then traveling to the dungeon/raid, then running it and possibly dying multiple times. You're looking at 4+ hours needed to get anything done. Everything else today is just super quick gogogo instant gratification, so I can get why that style of game has lost popularity.
It’s not the games fault. It’s streaming culture, discord, and the death of the open web. Gone are active guild websites and game specific message boards. They are all on Reddit, Facebook groups or discord now. Ventrilo was a great voice only add on for in game chat, but discord nuked that too. The result is a game with only gameplay but few social elements
plenty of community in wow at the raid level. raiding with the same group of people with voice chat is far more community building than finding a group in eq and killing mobs for an hour or two, and then probably not seeing them again, at least for some time.
He refuted his own point. He remembers trying to get in a good then spending hours getting poor xp. Yeah nobody has the time and patience for that. MMOs have to compete with way too many other forms of fast paced e Tetris meant. It’s not a lack of tools, we have changed.
They don't give them because the player base does not require for them to be in-game. Time developing in-game tools for this would be time wasted. That's just in terms of people-finding. In terms of forced grouping - people always tried to solo, even back in EQ1. It was a major feature of EQ's first real competitor and successor, WoW. That ship has, unfortunately, sailed. Instead, rather than forcing group content, incentivize it. People will still figure out ways to solo it (as they always did). It still may not draw the people (I suspect it won't people prefer to play alone for most of their time).
Well, yeah. As he stated, most MMOs focus on the solo play for accessibility. Which accessibility isn't a totally bad thing, but sometimes it's okay for someone not to play a game because it doesn't fit their criteria. Add the fact that companies are run by money mongers and not gamers anymore, and the MM in MMO gets relegated to just O.
EQ2 just launched a new 2006 era server that has been a lot of fun so far. Such a fun game that I missed out on back in its day because I just wasn't gaming much or wasn't playing MMOs. But I definitely recommend giving it a shot if anyone sees this and hasn't tried EQ2 or hasn't played it for a long time. It's like a hybrid between EQ1 and Classic WoW. And there is no Krono so no p2w.
Its mot the games. Its the people
The dev is coping, many new mmos like NW and TL started as hardcore/social games by trying to force socialization down everyone's throat. Then they realized the vast majority of their playerbase didnt touch content that required socialization and were forced to create automated group finders as well as other types of systems designed to remove socialization barriers. He doesnt want to face the reality that people actually want to play games for fun, not socialize.
One of the biggest complaints I see in MMOs is if you have to depend on other people. “What’s the soloability of this MMO?” And “I work all day and can’t be bothered to rely on others when I want to play on my terms with my free time.” Normally I’d say that’s fine but really, if you want an open world game where you’re not interacting with other people - you should be looking at Skyrim, RDR2, cyberpunk and other single player open world games. The best part about the best MMOs like SWG, UO, and EQ was the social factors and that’s been neglected for decades now. MMOs don’t give people the tools because players don’t really care for them. Pax Dei came out and one of the biggest complaints (outside of its alpha state) is the lack of soloability and having to depend on other people. The genre has changed for the worst but only due to popular demand.
My favorite MUD, Gemstone, had an experience absorb mechanic. You'd be "full" and have to go wait for it all to sink in, basically. You had to dwell on what you experienced before you started to level. It went faster at the center of each town at this tree. A social zone. Here is where you would talk, trade, ask for healing (game had a gnarly wound system too), and just dwell on your recent adventure with others. I always thought this would be a good thing to base an MMORPG around. A way to keep things social, and the gameplay loop was wound in tightly with that piece so the game never lost this social aspect.
That's about to change. [http://playableworlds.com](http://playableworlds.com)
That i can't sort my friends list by "people I know in person" versus "Someone I teamed up with once" and have no tools to help me team up with my friends... yeah it's like they don't want community. Fallout 76, if it grouped my friends by what server they're on, I could easily find a server with a bunch of people to play with.
There's a pretty cool MMO I've been tracking that will allow players to develop their own governance structures in-game. I.e. corporation, dictatorship, democracy, etc. It's an eve-like scifi mmorpg called the citadel.
The problem is that current developers are brain dead when it comes to mmorpgs. They have no clue how to make a proper mmorpg. And if they did, then they are most likely being forced by management or other incompetent people to go in directions to maximize profits, and not good gameplay. The only person currently in the mmorpg market that I feel actually understands what makes mmorpgs good and special is Steven from AoC, as fellow (hardcore) mmorpg player enjoyer. We are lucky the dude is fucking rich and has that luxory of creating his own mmorpg with his own money. If I ever got into a position like that I would do the same. And I knew exactly what I would make.
nah.... 2004 had little competition ( other than the one MMO that absolutely crushed the EQ franchise) so anyone who provided an online chatroom was popular. that's it.
Most I get in chat are now "hi" when the matchmaker drops us in a dungeon with people I never met outside them and said runs end up in 5min or so and have to queue up again and get new people again.
Ff14 would like a word with bad devs on how they cant make a social experience.
No, it's that dedicated community building tools will always beat whatever 'alright' tools that a game provides. If I actually make friends with someone, I'm going to want to hang out with them outside of the game - thus, why would we chat _only_ over game using in game tools? Why limit my scope to that of an mmo when community building? Discord is has a TON of features that an in game clan setup just isn't going to have without a ton of dev time that should be put into actually making the game better.
Voice chat, along with mass chat spam, killed mmo communities. People don’t chat in open world anymore, only in voice chat. So now you don’t have random people joining your conversation, or join other random people’s conversation. It’s all people you already know
Imo two things really contribute to it. 1. Cross server functionality/name change services: if you were an asshole back in the day eventually you'd run out of people who would play with you. Now, in WoW especially, you'll rarely meet up with anyone you grouped with previously. It means people can be absolutely horrible to each other without any consequences as long as they stay within the ToS. 2. Ease of levelling/content: you never need to so group content to get to max level and you can pug/random group for most higher end rewards. Sure, to do peak end game you need a real group but you can pug pretty high. Similarly to the first point, if you manage to piss off enough people or are on a small enough server group that your reputation catches up to you, you can just reroll, buy a boost, buy a name change etc.
I agree with what they said but, it’s just an advertisement for their new EQ classic thing. That explains why they didn’t mention something like Pax Dei which is in development that has goals all about community. FYI you can play Pax Dei currently but it’s ALPHA status. Lots of missing features, combat is janky, PVP systems aren’t really in just one PVP zone as a tester, it’s really really rough but it gives me that old school community feel or potential to, some missing systems and unpolished crafting are issues. You would be paying to be an Alpha Tester. Now that said I’ve had a blast so far. Had to group up with 20 other people to work on clearing a “dungeon” zone no big finish just exploring a maze kind of found some loot piles and came out a secret entrance in another part of the Province. I ended up stumping for Pax Dei in this response but yeah some games are trying community stuff still. Don’t feel obligated to jump in and pay to TEST we’ve all been burned to many times with EA games but it’s worth keeping an eye on Pax Dei at least if you like community stuff to see what it looks like down the road.
Most players use games as graphical interface for discord chat.
Maybe if the PC elitists wouldn’t be opposed to proximity chats and more immersive team work requirements versus the solo grind…
I always liked the shopping in Lineage 2. Found it exciting to find someone selling something others weren’t and the town felt alive. The thing that changed for MMOs is the time investment for us growing older is less. Some want to get to the fun as fast possible. So the connections, energy and time invested in building relationships with people in game has changed completely.