Current Events > What's it like being an MMO player nowadays?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I have this image of someone playing an MMO they used to like a lot more than they presently do, joylessly min-maxing in the hope it'll end up being satisfying.

The wonderment of these games came from the spontaneity of meeting and interacting with all sorts of random people.
Nowadays personalities have blended together, so many people draw from the same shrinking pool of go-to internet phrases, jokes and comebacks. I see this negatively affecting other games so I assume MMOs get hit even harder by it.

I would like a game that lasts an extremely long time, but I don't like the sound of one with no ending and no closure. A point where the numbers just suddenly stop rising and you're left to decide what it was worth doesn't sit right with me.

Better than that? Even worse?

I log in and then I just stand in town and do emotes

It depends on the game, really. FFXIV has like... a full club nightlife scene with an emphasis on glamor. There are RP servers where you can go be in character if that's your thing.

s0nicfan posted...

It depends on the game, really. FFXIV has like... a full club nightlife scene with an emphasis on glamor. There are RP servers where you can go be in character if that's your thing.

Don't be like those people, it's fucking weird

Irony posted...

I log in and then I just stand in town and do emotes

You sound like a modern TF2 player.
Did you have to pay for these emotes like TF2 or was the subscription fee for the MMO enough?
s0nicfan posted...

It depends on the game, really. FFXIV has like... a full club nightlife scene with an emphasis on glamor. There are RP servers where you can go be in character if that's your thing.

This sounds like Second Life.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

This sounds like Second Life.

It's still a full MMO. That stuff is more for players who have put like a thousand hours into the game and just want to avoid the normal internet lingo like you are. But yea, it can get like that. Especially since player housing involves physical plots that rarely go on sale, so the REAL endgame is getting a mansion that you can decorate inside and out with like a thousand different items, each dyable in a number of ways, and even have NPC servants and stuff.

A few years ago I randomly started playing WoW WotLK private server for 2 months straight. It was an amazing experience (aside from some griefers in the shared zones). I've always been more of an OSRS guy but that made me realise WoW is also one of the best games of all time, especially with the worldbuilding, lore, environments. Though I can't imagine ever playing retail or RuneScape 3.

s0nicfan posted...

It's still a full MMO. That stuff is more for players who have put like a thousand hours into the game and just want to avoid the normal internet lingo like you are. But yea, it can get like that. Especially since player housing involves physical plots that rarely go on sale, so the REAL endgame is getting a mansion that you can decorate inside and out with like a thousand different items, each dyable in a number of ways, and even have NPC servants and stuff.

That endgame sounds kind of dour. You wait for a house to become available, turn it into a monument to your time spent and then what? Who do you show this to? How are they supposed to react?

It sounds like a lot of the pieces of mid-00s MMOs are there or have been replicated but it's like they've been separated and the novelty can no longer exceed the sum of its parts.

lets all play knight online and conquer da world

I feel like VR Chat is now the "game for people who wanna sit around and shoot the shit". PVP heads are all playing competitive games now.

Fully-fledged MMOs have turned into soulless loot treadmills and raid speedrunning as a result tbh

KhlavicLanguage posted...

I feel like VR Chat is now the "game for people who wanna sit around and shoot the shit". PVP heads are all playing competitive games now.

I really don't like VRChat.
It's like you take the cosmetics and dancing animations part of TF2 and turn it up to a million, toss the gameplay out too.
VRChat is Second Life pretending to be in on the joke that is its own existence by smearing itself in forced internet humor. If I wanted to quickly find a bunch of people who'd given up hope, I'd look here.

Who needs gameplay when you've got lingering? Lingering and hoping something interesting or entertaining will happen. I know, it sounds exactly like GameFAQs. Taking that and calling it a video game is still disappointing to me.

Joelypoely posted...

A few years ago I randomly started playing WoW WotLK private server for 2 months straight. It was an amazing experience (aside from some griefers in the shared zones). I've always been more of an OSRS guy but that made me realise WoW is also one of the best games of all time, especially with the worldbuilding, lore, environments. Though I can't imagine ever playing retail or RuneScape 3.

This makes it sound like you repurposed it to be a single player game.
Private server as in disabling the user-created chaos these games were known for.
Two months seems like a short time for an MMO too. Especially one that you go on to call one of the best games ever.
Is there more to this story?

That is a good point. I only really made one friend (a guy from Chile who played Hunter) who I played with somewhat regularly. I was jobless at the time so it was kind of 2 months playing 'fulltime'.

I also wasn't that interested in the endgame. I would get a character to 65ish then start again on the other faction, with possibly a different class. Mostly I enjoyed playing Paladin on Alliance this time (way back in the day I always played Horde).

But yes aside from instances, guilds and trading I really enjoy the 'single-player' experience of WoW. I think they've since improved the PvP aspect of the game, but it used to be really toxic how high level players could grief lower levels without consequences.

However I did enjoy PvP in the wild with players who were my approximate level. There was one good memory of a rogue about 55 who was trying a sneak attack on me (I was about 60). I do nothing, let him get me to low HP, then I LoH, turn around and completely destroy him. His friend was watching and just ran away.

Broken promises, shitty players who want everything handed to them on a silver platypus, and spam bots. Spam bots everywhere.

Joelypoely posted...

(way back in the day

As in you used to play a lot, dropped it for a while and came back - already initiated and aware of how things worked - like a short nostalgia tour?
That seems harmless enough, not giving the game the opportunity to become stale.

EdwardSnowedIn posted...

Broken promises, shitty players who want everything handed to them on a silver platypus, and spam bots. Spam bots everywhere.

I did see something about new bots being hooked up to ChatGPT, blending in and pretending to be human when prompted.
If you're already at the point where you've seen what the game has to offer and the onus is on you to keep it interesting, being surrounded by those has to be miserable.

I played semi hardcore in vanilla/bc wow and have been on/off again throughout the years. Currently in a casual raising guild with a friend from vanilla and I still like wow.

I want to hear from someone who hates what their game has become but continues to pay the subscription fee.

The only one I know hasn't answered yet.

when i revisted oldschool runescape years 2018- 2019:

was part of a few runescape discords centered around a small streamer and zezima's public cc.

i spent my time just grinding out skills and chatting with discord peeps and people in the zezima clan chat. was also online friends with the small streamer. he used to stake for me and other people. got up to 8.6 billion gp from him (and that was after i decided to give him like 30% of the earnings) till a series of unfortunate stakes bankrupt my character! i wanted to hit like 15 billion gp so i can buy 200m worth of xp for all the buyable skills! :'(

Then came back to osrs in 2021 to grind out fishing stat all the way to 200m (this was the goal i had in 2019 before i had to quit because of various reasons). then i quit again after reaching 200m fishing and a few hundred extra hours of grinding rune crafting because the communities i was a part of had pretty much died once the streamer stopped playing! that was fast af

ViewtifulJoe posted...

This makes it sound like you repurposed it to be a single player game.
Private server as in disabling the user-created chaos these games were known for.
Two months seems like a short time for an MMO too. Especially one that you go on to call one of the best games ever.
Is there more to this story?

Theres private servers with thousands of players online. One of them was so popular that it led to Blizzard launching WoW Classic

I no longer stick with a Hames end game, rather I enjoy more starting a totally new class and try different paths.