Just a thought, maybe the MMO player base is just aging out? I started with WoW back in 2005, I just don't have the bandwidth in life anymore for an MMO. I imagine that is a similar feeling for a lot of us millennials.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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I miss that feeling a little bit. My undiagnosed-ADHD highschool self with like 18 characters hovering around level 20, never maxing one out because the ~30-40 slog was real, just chatting up strangers for fun while hopping around various towns' mailboxes and occasionally actually doing game content. (Remember when Barrens chat was a meme for basically being like the /b/ of WoW? LOL)
... And it didn't feel like impending doom or that I was somehow wasting my life away. It's just what I did after school and that was alright.
It's how I met my wife though, so it all worked out. :)
I could go on for days but WoW's peak was a neat way to build social skills while being behind an avatar kept you from being too vulnerable.
I feel like online gaming now has gotten so anti-social and that the mere fear of potential toxicity just has everyone locked up and suspicious; Afraid to talk to anyone they don't already know. Thanks to, what, basically Discord? Game chats are completely dead.
I remember trying Guild Wars 2 and thinking every other player might as well just be a bot because nobody interacted. :(
I remember trying Guild Wars 2 and thinking every other player might as well just be a bot because nobody interacted. :(
I'm sorry that was your experience, but this is very much opposite of mine. Not only is the game still going strong (new expac came out like two weeks ago btw, and it's pretty good!), but in all my years playing (and that's been since Day 1), I've had so many fun interactions in the game.
And that's without even counting the ones with my guilds. I've even had some fun chats in ranked PvP, the saltiest place in the game. I'm playing in European servers, which probably doesn't change much versus NA, but yeah, there are often conversations going on in map chat, or locally, between total strangers. Also between teams in WvW, during events, during festivals, waiting at the Wall after the Chak Gerent...
It's a very friendly community and I encourage you to give it another try! And yeah, if you can find a guild suited to your tastes it's even better!
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FF14 has taken over most of the MMO hype, but plenty of others like Runescape and Path of Exile are also doing really well. It's just that if you don't have people you know actively playing them, you won't hear much about it.
A handful if my PoE friends have picked up Last Epoch which I've found to be more approachable. Little less MMO but a very similar game.
I've been meaning to pick it up but I heard it was buggy last I checked. I might wait more on it (patient gamer and all that).
Touche, forgot this was PatientGamers. Grim Dawn is basically the same sans MMO. It's the best ARPG I've played like, ever, and it's due for a huge DLC soon. Goes on sale for very cheap often.
Unlike Last Epoch, it's more item-focused. Unlike PoE, the items aren't a total nightmare to optimize...
It is fun, but buggy + doesn't have great performance in some areas. I've recently played it for a bit on 1.1 patch drop, and lasted for about 6 hours until I hit a brick wall of a progression blocking bug. There was a decently large thread about it on the forum, no dev response, no fix in the next 3 hotfixes, so I stopped playing. Might come back for 1.3 or something.
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The next war in foxhole starts today, it's a war MMO and I highly recommend it. No subscription (one time $30 purchase on steam), no microtransactions, no paid expansions, no cosmetic bs, grind is optional. New players are in the same spot as veterans, all resources are shared (regiments/people can have private stockpiles, but they decay after 48 hours of being inactive) and are all made by players. You don't get anything for making or transporting supplies except for the joy of supporting the war effort - which is good because if no one made supplies, no one could fight.
Want to chill? Mine scrap and make basic materials, throw in your nearest seaport for anyone to take (or put in your regiments stockpile if you're in one). Or transport supplies from far backline stockpiles to Frontline/closer via truck, train, or boat. Or drive supplies to the Frontline, just make sure you have a gas mask and radio! Or make bullets, medical supplies, or anything else in the game at factories. Or trucks, cars, boats, tanks, trains, etc.
Want to plan? Either start building up production centers at the start of the war, rebuild them as we take land, or build defenses in the backline or on the front.
Want to fight? Get on a ship crew in an artillery gun and listen to your captain to tell you when and where to fire. Get in a tank with a crew and go balls to the wall on the front line. Grab a gun and some supplies and charge into trench warfare. Mortars? Yep. RPG's? Yep. Want to be a doctor? Move with friendlies and fix them up when they get messed up, or carry them back to your hospital to get new supplies for people to spawn from.
Want to be sneaky? Sneak past the Frontline and sabotage their logistics people or buildings.
Want to be a gigachad? Join the wardens now.
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Dead? WoW, FFXIV, RuneScape, ESO, have millions of players. What world do you live in that these games are dead?
Do you see the latest WoW expansion discussed anywhere on Lemmy?
I only look at !wow@lemmy.ml, which has a 3 comments on a 4 days post, maybe I'm missing something?
You don't see anything except Linux discussed on Lemmy because Lemmy has a couple thousand active users. There are Facebook groups bigger than the entire fediverse.
I think you're missing that lemmy is a pretty tiny slice of the internet and niche(ish) communities either don't exist or are mostly inactive. Just because something doesn't seem to be making waves on lemmy, doesn't mean it isn't popular. The community for it just isn't really here (yet).
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Guild wars 2 just released a new expac and I've been really enjoying it. Lots of people online, so I'd say not dead at all.
Nice, I didn't know!
I was just about to say. My friends wanted something to just mess around in, and I had no idea it was still as popular as it is.
Gw2 is like the sleeper MMO that no one talks about but everyone still plays. I think the lack of subscription and never raising level cap does that to it. It's a very welcoming game to pick up and put down as time allows.
I was an og GW player. I hadnt played GW in like 15-20 years? I came into GW2 just 2 months ago and was overwhelmed at first with everything an old mmo adds over the years. I finally found the play groove and we are all enjoying it, even the ones still playing WoW. So much so I might grab the living story addons.
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Is it still approachable if you’re someone who hasn’t played since before there were expansions for gw2? Asking for a … friend.
I'm probably not the best judge cause I've been playing semi regularly since launch, but I'd guess it's a really good time actually.
Long story short they've recently changed to a yearly expansion model with smaller scale expansions that tell more contained stories. The first one was pretty rocky, not gonna lie, but this new one is really good so far.
If you're someone who wants to go through the entire story and catch up you've got a very long road ahead of you (up to you whether that sounds good or not), but if you wanted to get back in quickly the new expansion is a totally reasonable starting point I'd say. You won't get a lot of the references, but I think you'd still get plenty of enjoyment being dumped in. I'm guessing it would feel like picking up a long running book series on book 20--there are lots of references and characters you don't know, but it's also doing its best to catch you up as a new reader and not expecting you've read it all.
Aside from story stuff, the game has had a bit of a Renaissance lately and there are a lot of new players from what I can tell.
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Man, some of my buddies picked it back up and I just can't understand. How much fuckin money have they given that piece of shit company over the years? And now it's Microsoft? Sigh
I still play guild wars 2. It's the only MMO that doesn't piss me off. No subscription fee. Never raised the level cap. Only added a new tier of gear once close to launch and said that's it. Plays like a real video game.
Because the level cap and gear cap doesn't change, you can take a break and come back just fine. My characters I made years ago are just as mechanically viable as anyone else. (Knowing how to play them is a separate question. I'm pretty bad at thief, but some people are little immortal jerks with it)
It also feels more like a real video game than some MMOs. You can dodge attacks. Like there's a dodge button that moves you and gives you iframes. There's a lot less of the old timey "your character moved away on the screen so the monster did its attack animation way over there, but you still get hit".
They also solved a lot of the anti social problems of old MMOs. You don't need to form a formal group for most content. There's no kill stealing. You just go into the world and do stuff.
There's no mandatory quest chains. There's the main story you can follow, but there's very little MMO filler. There are "hearts" you can do that are kind of MMO busywork, but you can also just not do them.
I know the game is old but it's still very good. I haven't been able to get a lot of friends to play it. I think they think it's like a shitty MMO where you just grind for gear to grind for more gear, and level up so you can level up and grind for more gear. It's not.
Many might have also played Guild Wars 1 which had a lot of that content you could only access with a certain minimum party size from what I remember.
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WoW is still massive btw and the latest xpac seems to be a success so far.
Interesting, thanks!
I still play Old School RuneScape and Guild Wars 2, and they are both very active.
However, I've not tried a new MMORPG in ages. I don't even really know if any relatively new ones could be interesting to try out.
I just don't have time. RPGs are still my favorite genre, and I used to even work in the MMORPG space. I have a fulltime job, a house I just bought and have to upkeep (I was renting until now), and farming. On top of that, spending time with the wife and all of the regular shopping and chores still exist. Further still, I try to always be learning something for fun, but I haven't even really had time to do that. The most entertainment I have these days is listening to podcasts and youtube vids whilst working outside.
My understanding is that at least some WoW players switched to ffxiv, which does seem to be popular and well updated. If you're looking for a new game, might be worth a look?
I don't think they're dead. They were wildly popular in the earlier days of the internet when it was still a relatively small place. Now there's more people playing games than ever before. And a much lower proportion playing MMOs
I am playing turtle wow—a private server game.
It’s mostly like the vanilla wow, but has some optimized updates.
I’m attempting to host a private Ragnarok Online server for my small group of friends. Its a shame that game is all but forgotten, the music has not been topped… except by ffxiv maybe.
Ragnarok was so weirdly awesome. I loved how unique it was and somehow the jank was charming. The sprites and job tree were fantastic too, and I could listen to that music all day. :D
When the kids these days called the jupiteros music the roblox theme, i lost my shit. (BGM89 we have lee but you don’t have)
My GAWD the game was CHARMING. I loved the broken English, i loved all of the classes, I loved all the friends I made… RO legit probably saved my life. I had a bad time in school and it was my escape. I wasn’t sure if I loved Moonlight Flower or wanted to be her.
Never did get that GTB card. DID get Angeling for my GC ‘sader! And an ice pick for my SD SinX.
I miss that game so much. But it’s not the same.
It's not too terrible to set up a RO server. There's even a guide to running one on a Raspberry Pi.
I followed the guide a few years back and it worked out pretty well. Instead of setting up a site to create user accounts I just ended up manually adding users to the database.
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HMU if you do and want another player, it’s my favorite game of all time. SoundTEMP did SO GOOD with the music… I still listen to the soundtrack today. Bless them for just including the MP3s with the game.
Star wars the old republic is pretty great, not perfect but super solid story, essentially just Kotor 3. I played it reguarly for last few months and truly enjoyed it like how I used to enjoy WoW back in the day. I know certain fans are going come at me with knives for saying this, but imp, it has much better story content than FF14.
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I stopped playing MMORPGs around the Blitzchung incident. FF14 didn't hook me the same way WoW did, and Warframe isn't really an RPG, but it did end up filling the space.
MMORPGs may not be the butt of South Park jokes anymore, but that doesn't mean that they're dead. They're more diversified... Like others mentioned, other games are quietly stealing the thunder. Also, if you think about it, battle royale games are kinda MMOs with how many people are in the lobby, and games like Roblox and Minecraft can have players interact with large numbers of others
Old School RuneScape is alive and well, we got a new boss yesterday, and we've been getting drip-fed content all year this year.
I generally just don't play a lot of online games anymore. I have a job where I have to deal with people all day, so the last thing I want to do is go home and deal with angry people while I'm trying to relax!
I do play some Elder Scrolls Online and Star Trek Online, but I primarily do single player content. The normal extent of my interaction with human players is to help them if they need help, or to thank them if they help me.
I haven't seen a lot of chatter around live-service games in Patient Gamers communities in general over the years, but from what I can tell, very little of the Warcraft community made it over to Lemmy. I can think of a couple possible explanations for that.
First, because everyone uses Discord for voice chat over WoW anyway, with the Reddit exodus last year, Discord was always a more natural fit for discussion. Second, /r/wow has increasingly become a place for discussion around the game among former players, especially after Shadowlands. Seeking out a new space on Lemmy and actually participating in the necessary, proactive contributions to grow a community requires more enthusiasm than I think the jaded players have.
It certainly feels like there are fewer MMO players, but I'm not sure. I think we can be certain that younger players are being captured by different forms of live-service games though (shooters, various gacha) rather than traditional MMOs.
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I don't think most folks have cared about WoW for quite a while now. Those that do are mostly playing on private servers.
FFXIV has picked up all the old wow-heads and is highly active and fun to play.
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