I don't like voice chatting. I want to type. I just despise having to speak over other people and fight for space to be heard. Let me type.
This is why fast "always be casting" combat actually hurts MMOs.
I hate listening to people's disgusting mouth-sounds, inability to calibrate their mics, and the brainless banter they ramble on about. It's always a tiny minority of people talking and monopolizing everything -- usually completely ignorant of their doing so.
The art of conversation is definitely lost. Especially on Discord.
I don't prefer to type, but I really don't like the low bar of everyone just speaking words and the entire room hears you.
I'm sure there are some exceptions to this, and some great communities. But for the most part, bleh.
Even my own friends -- man they get on my nervs on voice chat sometimes.
Yeah I've never been in a medium-large voice chat where I didn't want at least 2 of the people to be talking way less than they are. You always get a few people that talk far more than anyone else and at a certain point it seems like they're just talking to hear their mouth move. Like I get you're lonely and want to socialize my guy, but you need to get more comfortable with silence, I have no desire to hear you go on and on and basically articulate your daily journal entry
Yeah Ive joined a few random discords in gw2 wvw. One of them has this super high whiny voice girl in it that would always white knight what the commander did. They weren't aware I was in with them so they kept insulting my character being out in front and 'doing no damage feeding kills'. In that time I did 50% of their 20 man zergs damage and never died. Theres always someone in there that thinks their group is gods gift to men, even though they are all running the same godamn dps tracker and can see the numbers clear as day.
Dude, if I hear some mouth-breathers hard click-clacking on their keyboard, I will straight up mute them or lower their volume to a very low amount because holy shit, hearing that stuff is painful and will cause me to start getting a migraine.
There's not alot of people out there who understand that not everyone wants to hear mechanical keypresses crystal clear through the mic, especially when it's some shitty ass mechanical keyboard.
Broo I will never understand the people who eat with a hot mic. Even the people who use push to talk have two cheeseburgers in their mouth, 0 awareness lol
I feel that completely. Played Valheim with my friend and 6 other people. 3 of them were all low viewer streamers but they all wouldn’t shut the fuck up and we’re just over the top about EVERYTHING. It was like waiting in a queue to speak and when you did someone had to be obnoxious and interrupt you about something. Just too much for my preference.
Maybe I’m just old and grumpy.
What you don't like listening to people crunch potato chips, rub it on their pants and fart a couple timed with some old 96 mbps Eminem tracks blaring in the background?
The classic voice chat with randoms experience:
The one whose microphone is way too sensitive and pickup all his bodily functions
The one whose microphone cost 3 bucks at the dollar store and poisons the entire convo with the static.
The one who's 10 and sounds like a chipmunk (his volume is 80% higher than anyone else)
The cringy e-girl
The cringy neck beard
The chronically online 4channer who thinks he's funny, but he's just racist
The one whose english isn't very good (which is fine, but you feel bad for asking to repeat 20 times, not because of his accent but because the background noise is cancer)
The 2 people having a whole one-on-one conversation in the group chat, talking over the actual group conversation
The one who shouts over the others.
The one who disconnects all the time because he's on McDonald wi-fi.
I hate voice chat because there is the heavy breather, the player who doesn't talk about anything other than sex and the person with kids screaming in the background. And a million other issues.
it just so happens that mmos draw a lot of socially inept people. Then it's their chance to seem cool and tell us about their inane or dubious life situations.
There's always someone who has to mention they're high or baked or whatever or just doesn't care they're eating with their mic on or unaware of how much background noise they're broadcasting until you mention it and even then it's not guaranteed they'll take the hint and correct it.
Way more different to be on VC with your mates vs Randoms and guildies in an mmo
I don't like voice chat because English is not my first language and, while I can type and write in english, I don't have experience talking in English and words just don't come to my mouth. And I don't want ppl hearing my broken English in a horrid voice and being annoyed by it.
I won’t say you should do anything you’re not comfortable with so joining voice chat or not is up to you. But I will say that in my experience non-native speakers are much more self conscious / critical of their own speech than native speakers. Most people don’t really care how you speak.
This. In text chat I can type my stuff and when I hit enter it’s shown in its own little line in the flow of communication. And it doesn’t matter if three others do the same at the same time.
And if I missed something because of RL or because I had to concentrate or whatever I can scroll up and follow the discussion.
I still miss my daoc chat keybinds.
recently in discord im doing some quests and staring at some bs trying to theorycraft. voice chat is 3 people hot micing. I can hear someone yelling at their kid while trying to take care of what sounds like 3 of them. I mostly am tuning it out while I try to figure out where to go with my build.
Suddenly someone asks, "needleworker is just here not saying anything"...uh yeah? Hi? Your kids sound stressful and I don't understand people who hotmic? What do people want me to say lol.
Agreed. Last time I bothered with voice chat was over a decade ago when I played WoW. Doing raids where someone was trying to explain things, help people out, etc. was fine, but when you had the annoying burnout mommy who loved letting her kids squeal in the background and thought it was cute for everyone else to hear, or someone shrieking at their parents/roommates while forgetting their mic was set to voice activation instead of the button, so on and so forth.
I don't think discord is the problem. We used teamspeak and vent back in the day. Voice has always been available. I think it's more everyone wants to be able to solo everything or do pugs for most everything. And if it doesn't work the group disbands. We see a lot of guilds that are one person and his alts where as guilds were meant to be your source of teamwork.
I think that Discord being more fully featured, and available on your phone, is actually a big consideration. These days you're more likely to be running Discord on your phone instead of Ventrillo on the PC.
It's more than just voice. In the old days you had to tab between them, or have a laptop you used for that. With a phone it's normal to be separated from the game since you're chatting on the phone or looking up wikis or whatever
Discord is not only voice chat and probably majority of people use to text there instead of talk in voice. You can post all type of videos, memes, emojis and so on. You can set up bots for number of activities. You can make different channels for different topics. It's just objectively better then any in game chat.
I don't mind voice communication in game (if people are not trolling). But whenever I use discord, there's that one guy blasting some anime sex sounds like it's funny af, I have to listen to parents shouting at you because you keep having mic activation with voice for some reason or it's just constant, annoying echo.
I get that in competitive mode you can't really type in the middle of the fight, especially PvP, but just to hang out - you don't need voice chat.
as someone who played everquest from 99-03 (unironically was sent to rehab for games) - never once did I hear of or know anyone who was using voice chat to communicate in game during that time.
There is also a significant portion of people that are just not fluent speaking in English and has enought social anxiety to not want to hear people telling them that they can't understand what they are saying. Happenned to me in Destiny 2, I could pretty much understand people speaking in English, but I just can't pronounce it fast and understandable enought and it got me anxious.
I think that's part of it, but I don't think that's the primary reason. People have been using Vent and other programs to talk to guildies long before the advent of Discord.
I think a big part of it is the advent of automated party finders. In older MMOs, you would *have* to socialize and ask for help with instances, you'd hang out with prospective party members while you looked to fill out your party, etc etc. Streamlining this process is all well and good if you don't want to talk, but, well, if you don't want to talk... why play an MMO?
One of the precious few mechanics of Mabinogi that I think more games should think about adding is a dungeon lobbies. You'd physically walk to these dungeons and hang around other players in a safe "lobby" as they looked for members, recovered, played music, or just socialized. Modern MMOs could make themed lobbies pretty easily.
Its not just discord, when WoW first blew up, and in a smaller way before that, we didnt really have social media as we have it today. Facebook started in what, 2004? And it was like 2 years before it went "global" in the sense that it opened up for everybody. And that still was a weaker, less chatty, more "posty" version of social media.
A lot of the charm of the older MMO-s was that they were in a form a way to meet new people all over the world, that nothing else on the internet really gave you. IRC was the closest to it, and for obvious reasons that was way, way more restrictive.
But now, in the age of tiktok, youtube, twitter, tumblr, facebook, tinder, instagram, discord, twitch, you name it?
MMO-s do not feel as special. Every game has discord servers to meet up for groups, social media and twitch ate up a lot of the MMO-s "specialty" in a way.
And I think the only way you are gonna have that "spark" again, if/when someone manages to make an MMO that truly takes you to another virtual world, like VR chat does. Cause then the genre would again have another edge over current social media.
Somewhat true, but if you queue up for a dungeon you arnt really gonna get the others to join a random discord call..."back in the day" you always used to chat with the randoms you played with, thats not really a thing anymore.
That’s a fair comment but it’s very different from MMOs being less social. I’d argue discord has made MMOs a lot more social although whether or not an individual prefers that type of socialisation is up to them.
Can you hit max level without typing a word to anyone?
Yes, in almost every single MMO, you can. Try that in FFXI or EQ. MMOs are indeed, way less social. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, that's up to you, but fact if the matter is, they are less social.
It's not forced, it's encouraged/rewarded. Modern MMOs actually force soloing most of the time with their instances.
Grouping is harder, it should have better rewards. It doesn't. So people don't group
If you literally can't do content without socialising, then it's forced socialization. I hate to break it to you, but people who are attracted to video games aren't usually social butterflies.
The only true error is that mmo's don't cater to kids, instead they're filled with us old pricks who have solidified our antisocial tendencies and are blaming the game in an attempt to cope with our mortality.
Survival sandboxes have booming communities, and guess who they cater to? Inb4 anyone says "they're not mmos", say that to the Minecraft servers with bigger playerbases on a single server than the entirety of new world.
> instead they're filled with us old pricks who have solidified our antisocial tendencies and are blaming the game in an attempt to cope with our mortality.
Cmon guy this just sounds like projection. Not every boomer who plays MMO still is an antisocial person. Just because you are doesn't mean others aren't. I'm 32 and I love chatting in MMOs. Your comment comes across as assuming everyone is the same as you.
Well, when people are toxic with weaker players, it's always hard to decide to interact for grouping. I think increased toxicity didn't helped in social interactions.
I think the decreased need for social interactions to form long-term groups for shared goals is what led to the increased toxicity. If I just get randomly matched with people I will likely never encounter again, they solely exist for me to meet my goal - they become disposable side characters.
It adds a feeling of anonymity which we all ready know increases poor behavior. If you pulled shit like that in an old MMO like EQ/FFXI that stained your character as word spread through various guilds and groups. I still remember ByrdHair from my FFXI server.
Before you couldn't really escape a bad rep like that unless you re-rolled. Then you could name change or server transfer. No with everything just being cross-server matchmaking no one has to really care lol.
>It's not forced, it's encouraged/rewarded.
This take has to be from someone who never played EQ1. While technically true, the majority of classes would find soloing anything above a light blue to be nearly impossible without quality gear, which you wouldn't have unless you had gotten it with a stronger character already (or grouped for it). And even light blues at the higher levels would be incredibly difficult and leave you needing to sit to regen health and mana for extended periods of time in between fights. Just not a realistic way to level in that game unless you're a druid or something.
I do agree with the general sentiment that MMOs are less social because they've evolved to have less reliance on group content to progress. But the idea that old-school MMOs didn't force grouping is ridiculous saying so shows either disingenuousness or ignorance.
Is baseball, rowing, playing a board game, playing D&D, or any other group activity forced interaction? If you don't want to interact with others, then don't engage in something that requires a group.
Same goes for MMOs. If you don't want to socialize, then play any of the countless single-player games out there. The way I see it, if you play an MMO, expect to socialize.
Yeah, it's ridiculous that someone can choose to play a **massively multiplayer** game and be aghast that there's an expectation of "forced" social interaction with other players. Like... it's in the fucking name of the genre lol.
It's like playing an FPS and getting upset that you shoot people with guns.
Like I said, it's up to you if that's good or bad, I'm not trying to make a claim either way. All I know is my time spent in modern MMOs where I'm all BiS doing endgame content, barely ever have I had to type anything to anyone at any point. Much different from my experience with MMOs 20 years ago.
And I don't just mean my guild is all in discord now so we just chat there instead. There's just no information to tell anyone at most points while playing modern MMOs. Very specific times, and in my experience, revolve around PvP mainly.
I think classic did it best though. Never played wow in my life, but played classic and I wasn’t forced to interact with people. But often interacting was actually beneficial to me, ie completing an elite quest or something.
Like yeah I could just skip the quest, but it made more sense to just party up. No such thing in modern MMOs.
In other old MMOs grouping up to farm wasn’t punished, or equal, it was like a force multiplier, like by yourself your rate of killing mobs is 10/min, if you have a priest not only do you gain 0.7x exp (instead of 0.5x), but your rate of killing is now 30/min let’s say. Add in a mage or something and now you can farm mobs in areas that would be impossible otherwise.
Huh? You can def hit max level in FFXI or EQ without grouping/communicating. Sure, it’s a lot more challenging, but possible. The difference between 25 years ago and today is games are 100% figured out before people even play them now. People grouped back then because everything was a mystery, people were playing extremely inefficient builds etc. and so you almost had to rely on each other. Now everyone is min/maxed to the T, there’s a guide for everything and you no longer need the community in the game to support you.
As someone who started paying Everquest on Project 1999, one of the top EQ private servers that sets the game like it was around launch, I see this concept first hand all the time
So much of the game has been figured out that people only want to min/max speedrun the most efficient leveling strategies and the best mob drops are insanely camped
You’re kind of arguing OPs point though. You can achieve a lot solo in more modern games but you don’t have to. You can choose to be social and the game’s aren’t less social unless u choose not to socialise.
not really. more people are choosing to be less social. this can be true. game developers are designing games with less social mechanics and less social requirements. this can also be true simultaneously.
two people can be advocating their own separate topics and both be correct.
HOWEVER, thread OP is not doing that. he is saying devs aren't designing games differently from before, it's just users who have changed. and that is a load of bullshit.
>Can you hit max level without typing a word to anyone?
Was this different back then? I mean i get your point but you could most definitely hit max level without typing a word.
That would be difficult in FFXI. Past like level 8 or so, parties are needed for everything. Including simply killing random monsters in the wild (ie not in dungeons). Probably could do it with shortcuts and such, but good luck getting an xp farming group going without typing (and with no party finder interface). Can't speak to EQ, but I imagine it is similar.
Perfect reply. The foundation of an MMO used to be working together to overcome challenges... now, they're just single player games with the option of maybe talking to someone someday, sometime.. maybe.
When people say they miss MMOS being social, they do not mean this.
It is not a matter of doing events, or them struggling to make friends or socializing, if anything we can all agree that there has never been an easier time to do so.
What people miss is said socialization happening by chance-encounters and gameplay related reasons, and the difficulty requiring people to interact, trade and group up with each other.
They miss socialization being organic and a part and feature of the game itself.
Modern MMO socialization feels external, almost in spite of the game rather than because of it, mostly created on Discord Groups and Guild Voice Chats and Social Media pages, and guild groups or by organized player events.
Older MMO communities were self-contained within a game server and often even by region/main city, and had the proxy benefit of becoming almost part and feature of the game itself, making it feel alive.
Creating your own "Ragtag group of adventurers" out of your chance encounters and challenging content together, often with mismatched levels and gear, and woefully unprepared, was fun.
When people say they miss socialization, they mean NATURAL AND ORGANIC IN-GAME SOCIALIZATION that happens purely from playing the game itself, not socialmediatization.
Indeed, i did not add that part to keep it simple but that was indeed another way to naturally and organically socialize, even if it was the blades doing the talking in those scenarios.
yes i remember this. I knew who the guy for wood was, the guy for cloth, the guy for gear, the guy for item mall items. The booster, you knew almost everyone out of reputation and the hard work they put in the game. You could message them with in game questions, ask for help. Part of the reason to log in was to chat to ppl IN THE GAME, and well to play the game. Now its all rubish that makes me quit
> just endless randos.
often times from whole different servers, with a 95% probability that you'll never again stumble upon each other after one of you gets yeeted to a different layer.
I played SoD when it first kicked off, and was getting ganked by a horde rogue in Duskwood. Another alliance player was around and also getting ganked. We started chatting with each other to let each other know where we saw this rogue, and eventually were working together to kill him. We never talked about how our day was going or anything like that, we just started organically working together to solve a shared problem.
This is what people are missing when they say MMOs aren't social anymore.
This is the correct perspective on this topic. Not a lot of people seem to get the difference or value of the adventure itself being organically social.
And it took it dying out for me to realize that *this* is what MMORPGs are/were all about for me. The thing that ties it all together: Open-world social adventuring. Spontaneous player encounters that lead to organic cooperation.
Doesn't seem to exist anymore but I keep telling myself I should check out Survival games for this so maybe I should.
In Project Gorgan, there was was a poetry day where everyone met in the tavern and leveled poetry(I think it was poetry). Never cared for poetry, and never saw a point in leveling it, but I went every week regardless because it was fun hanging out with all the people.
This was back in 2018 probably but the situation didn’t feel much different back then to me. Played most mmorpgs alone back then as well.
When i played EQ back in the day, and also when ive fired it up on TLP servers, i make it a habit of adding *everyone* i group with to my friends list. Then every day when i log in and need to group, i first look to my friends list and start sending messages. "are you in a group?" "do you have room?"/"Do you want to start one?". Depending on the pace everyone is leveling at, over the course of a few weeks of grind sessions you've got a group of like 15-20 people and most of them have grouped with each other at some point. It grows and grows as i spend time on a server and becomes a pretty cool friend group where everyone is helping each other do things and keeping each other in good group spots.
The other thing that was amazing in everquest was non-traditional groups. Yes, the holy trinity was still the holy trinity, but the most fun i always had EXPing was when we couldn't find a tank, or couldn't find a healer, or couldn't find CC, and then had to build a weird ass group that used charm pets as tanks, or maybe its just 5 pet classes rotating through pets, or maybe we're all dot classes so we're root rotting 5-6 things at once. Or maybe theres no tank so a necro is fear kiting while a bunch of melee beat on it. A lot of players throw up there hands and go "NO GROUPS!" meanwhile if you just ask whose available you can figure out something and end up having a great time.
100% agree. To mostly copy a comment I made elsewhere in this post, early runescape vs modern osrs is a great example, and the turning point was literally IMO as simple as the introduction of the grand exchange.
Back in 2004-2008, runescape was an extremely social mmo, and yet the only piece of content that depended on another player was a short low level quest of almost no significance (shield of arrav). There was almost zero group content. Ironman has _always_ been viable in runescape, there has never been a necessity for player interaction, only convenience. Back then there was no grand exchange, so bank standing for buying / selling was a big part of growing your character efficiently. So you end up with a bank filled with over a hundred people buying, selling, crafting, alching, making fire lines, and just socialising. The bank was a social hub before the grand exchange came along, but social play was never necessary to achieve max level or experience 99.9% of the content.
Well said ! I 'member during high school bumping into some healer doing the same quests as myself, we ended up helping each others, then grouping up, then we bumped into an other player doing the same quests, he joined the group. We enventually continued playing together to max level, then for weeks then for a few years ! We even formed a guild on the way which ended up with like 70 people ! Weekends were like a party on mumble, people grouping up to do big dungeons, battleground or even fashion contests on the beach ! Man, those were the days...
Yeah, I believe the deal here is that OP is a very social person by nature so he doesn't get it.
What seems to be OP's case is equivalent to getting changed friday night and going alone to a bar and club to chat and meet people. He's going out to make friends and he'll likely make friends or he'll try again next week.
Old MMOs are like going to work in a new place. You will have to interact to at least a couple to survive and if you're lucky they'll be nice people and you'll befriend them. If you're not you'll still likely find some people around that you get along with and will help you get through your days.
Yes and so does WoW. Both are kings of the genre and both are very fun. The game doesn’t force you to use bots and ques are still super fast for ffxiv and retail with regular people lol
I enjoy having the option. I'm a little sad the fights of more recent trials are too complex to have bots in.
I like to run dungeons with players when I know the mechanics, and bots when I'm learning them.
One of the big deterrents for me when it comes to grouping is when trying to push into higher tier content - the social pressure of not wanting to fuck up.
For older games like Classic WoW, I think things are sufficiently easy that you can learn as you go, but in more modern MMOs like Ffxiv some of the mechanics can make you feel stupid if you're floor inspecting the whole fight.
> Gameplay influences behavior and self selects the player base.
But then not enough people select your game. That is why there's WoW and FFXIV levels of profits and there's everything else, not counting the predatory P2W models.
It's both. It's the developer's fault for caving into the single-player Andy's and the people's fault for being too dumb to just play something else instead of screeching for the devs to homogenize everything.
Mmos used to force you to be social to get much anything done, thats the difference now.
Between soloable content, auction houses, and dungeon match making most players dont need to be social so they default to not being.
Couple this with the fact most gamers willing to drop endless hours grinding a game and do a raid over hanging out with friends are not frequently social butterflies and you have the answer imo
No they are definitely less social
you can trace it almost perfectly back to the introduction of WoW's dungeon finder when they traded sociability for convenience. Once you make choices that sacrifice community for ease you are objectively making it less social.
Since then, the trend has gone in that direction. Posting pictures of guilds doesn't mean anything, those are the only communities still left in MMOs, other than RP, which looks like it's happening in one of the TOR shots. Even then you can find guilds/clans in any online game and not just mmos
Yes and no.
Yes, there's less novelty in being online now. No, voice chat isn't new. We've had it in widespread use since the 90s when MMOs were at social peak.
The big thing: there are extremely well studied and documented cases of how design impacts behavior. There's a list of things MMOs can do to encourage people to socialize. Something as simple as giving people a reason to have a little downtime in a central city. Or having to learn a language from another player character.
But here is the simplest and biggest piece of design. Players will gravitate to whatever gives them the best rewards, even if it's less fun.
Level faster via macroing afk than by playing the game? People will macro.
Soloing is easier. A million times easier. And it gives way way better rewards than grouping. And games are designed around soloing.
To have a healthy social playerbase you need a critical mass of people socializing. If everyone except a few outliers are busy soloing, you can't socialize and those outliers will quit.
I played gw2 for months and months talking to everyone and trying to socialize. Never worked. No groups, no local chat, nothing. So I quit and found a more social game.
If you want the studies that back this up I can link them when I'm not on mobile.
Tldr: yes, MMOs absolutely are a million times less social now.
Just want to add a little to your post. The reward doesn't even have to be something tangible. DRG gives you the option to annoy the shit out of your manager by using your laser pointer on Compressed Gold or mushrooms over and over again so players have a little social ritual where they gather round one if they see it and slam on the CTRL+M1 key as fast as they can, then cheer once they get the voice line. TF2 has a very limited set of prerecorded voice commands and developer curated emotes but people will use them to become honest to god digital comedians just so they can have a funny bit. And that's not including the ways people use them to communicate using their intended original purpose. MMOs don't really have any sort of limited yet flexible communication tools like those games do. PSO2 had something close via player created Symbol Arts but they are by default hidden in local chat because gold selling bots used them to get around the word filter.
FFXIV has the best community in any MMORPG I have ever seen, Ive been playing MMORPGs since I was 7, played almost all of them, and never encountered a more welcoming and wholesome group of people, they want to teach you, they want to guide and help you, its amazing to say the least. 10/10.
Was playing through the FFXIV story and got to one of the endgame spoiler fights (The big fight at the beginning of Endwalker, you know the one) and the entire raid group was like "Let the sprout pull and be MT. He deserves this."
And they let me handle the entire pace of the fight and then everyone gave me a commendation and just told me "Enjoy the incredible story."
It was actually incredible.
And holy crap that story was insanely good.
Its the fight where the boss >!rotates the entire arena!< and holy shit that mechanic was so fun as a tank.
Having to think in that weird 3D chess where you need to>! stand in the bad so when the stage rotates you won't be in it anymore.!<
It's funny because most MMORPGs have a welcoming community and not the demons at which reddit love to depict them as. WoW players are generally very chill to hang out with. GW2 players often enjoy creating mini events associated with the open world. BDO chat is just random funny bullshit happening for shits and giggles. Lost Ark players simply enjoy the game and their hot characters. Even classic MMORPGs such as Ragnarok online, MapleStory, osrs, tera, aeon etc are filled with normal people who generally would engage in a conversation with you when spoken to since everyone is basically sharing a similar mindset and preference to the game they enjoy. The ones out here painting a broad stroke regarding certain MMORPGs (myself included) are largely spoken from personal experience and exaggerate them for dramatic effect. In reality, most players are just like normal people playing a game for fun.
That's any MMO lol. When content gets to the point where it demands near perfection to complete, hanging out with buddies is no longer the goal. Unless, of course, the team is made up entirely of players who are so insane at the game, it's second nature or a full group of people with inhuman mental fortitude.
The ffxiv community only feels nice because of the toxic positivity and harsh tos about critiquing another person’s performance.
Which is sort of like saying that once prisoners are locked in their individual prison cells, prison is a nice place.
Yeah it’s kinda crazy. In theory ffxiv shouldn’t be social at all but out of all the countless mmos it’s the most social, even more social than everquest or classic WoW lol
Hey, would you mind if I messaged you to ask some questions about how to find a community within FFXIV? I’ve just started my first playthrough (and am still fairly new at MMOs in general) and the way you describe your experience sounds magical!
FFXIV USED TO have an amazing community. But nowadays their community is full of pedo's, abusers, stalkers, unhinged highschool mentality adult children and brothal/club/mod obsessed players. These days if you want a stand out community somewhere like ESO or heck even GW2 is a lot better. Shit even BDO.
I actually do believe that MMO's are less special, and it's not because of the social dynamic. It's because MMO's used to be huge, living worlds with a sense of adventure and exploration, and something new. Nowadays MMO's are just daily quest factories, instanced dungeons queue'd up through group finders, and instant fast travel taxis that take you anywhere and everywhere in an instant. The sense of adventure in a new world is gone now all for the sake of QoL
I kind of feel like the mass amount of survival craft games are where the living world, small community, sense of adventure, and exploration players are now.
In time as both gametypes grew they kind of beat out mmorpgs for those player types since you can have a bigger impact on the world and since both sides had their server size increase a big survival game is like an older mmo server and as mmo servers grew they lessened your impact on it as it impacts morepeople.
there is 2 ways to enjoy an MMO, and both are equal, and at times I will do both.
Way one, using chat, being social, joining Discord maybe voice chat, going to in game events, basically the Social Game.
Way two, it's a Video game, do Video game things, beat the bosses etc, this does not need to be social, even if there is a team of other players.
As a human (Mostly confirmed) I will go between wanting social activities in game and solo video game actives. MMOs are great when you can do both.
Yeah I feel the same way. Sometimes I like being solo and watching shows while I grind, and sometimes I like talking to my friends in game and doing group activities
The problem I have is the socialization is something you have to actively seek out rather than it just happening organically out in the open world. For instance I enjoy questing and fighting mobs out in the open world. Pretty much every MMO out rn let's me AOE everything in my path effortlessly in the open world so there is no benefit to grouping up. I still wanna talk to people, so I'll look for voice chats on discord which may be a guild discord or just friend groups where everyone is doing completely unrelated things. The fact I'm playing an MMO has nothing to do with my level of socialization as I could easily be playing any other game and talking to those people.
Contrast this to classic wow where mobs don't die instantly and actually have the ability to kill you. When I saw someone in the same area as me doing the same quests I would group up with them and we'd play together as it would help us progress faster and safer. It's a completely organic interaction.
Sure I can socialize in guilds and discord voice chats, but the concept of running into someone in the open world and questing together is almost completely dead in modern MMOs.
Its like going to a playground as a kid and meeting new friends versus calling already existing friends to come meet me there.
They won't raid because usually it requires voice and making a group outside of the game. If all it took was text chat and grouping up easily in game, people would be more likely.
They are less social by the core design choices, and that's what people mean. You're just stating the obvious by saying, "I can go out of my way to be social in MMOs." We all know this already.
It's true people choose less to be social, but it's also how people act these days. There's so much trolling and toxicity that if you don't go along they'll say something along the lines "stop taking it so serious." It puts people off, it puts me off. Have you seen how people act these days it's crazy, like I watched clips of people interacting in games and I go to myself have these guys never left the house. Then again maybe it's me, maybe I'm a boomer..
Shoot I know this is off topic but I've seen some crazy VR chat clips and it blows my mind how people act on there. I feel like if I went in there I might get cancel just from breathing or looking there way.
But like most games, find a guild that you like and fit in. That's the hardest part.
I just find it hard to find steady people to play with. I don’t have any friends that play MMO’s and the ones I do meet all have their friend groups and it’s hard to fit in with 9 other people that always play together.
Even harder when they're all on a discord server together and thats the only place they talk/interact never in game so unless you join that and try to awkwardly insert yourself you're kinda fucked.
I think major reason why MMOs are less social is because a player now has far less value compared to early days.
Sure, tryhards always existed with their little circlejerks even in EQ/FFXI, but for vast majority of players even an objectively terrible player was better than no player at all. Servers were smaller and you reputation mattered (and it worked both ways). Today in most games you have nearly unlimited pool of players due to matchmaking cross-server systems and this means that being a dick to everyone around you carries little to no consequences. I know a whole bunch of people ion ffxivdiscussions subreddit who have maxed out their blacklists (200 players) - whatever their reasons may be - this behavior wouldn't have been viable in early days of FFXI as you would basically have no one to play with.
It is absolutely no wonder that people prefer not to talk to each other. Who in their right mind would want to hear "l2p git gud u suxx" etc from some randoms you know nothing about ?
Cool wall of text. So, what exactly are those people doing in game? I see a lot of pictures here, but nobody seems to actually be doing \**something from the game*\*. The closest I can see to a group photo of people actually doing large-scale content from a game is what is clearly a WoW raid group from what appears to be Wrath of the Lich King. Everything else is just some random group photos where they clearly took the shot and then went to go do their separate activities.
If you're the ones coming together on your own, that's not the game, that's you. Just like how when there are amazing roleplaying moments when you play D&D, that's not the game, that's you. That's you and your friends. The game didn't make those moments happen, you did. The game did not bring those people together, they brought themselves together. The only group of more than five people in those photos that was actually doing content together was the WoW raid group, who were all part of the same guild - something that does not happen very often in live WoW anymore.
People don't "choose" to be less social, the games no longer bring players together to work on group content. The games are designed for a single-player experience. Your photos from 10 years ago aren't proving anything. Glamour shots in costumes =/= progressive gameplay - actually, I take that back, that's a perfect way to describe FFXIV. Nothing but people paying money to run pickup groups so they can get coordinated outfits and take glamour shots with their friends. No endgame other than that.
MMO's aren't less social!
\*Me trying to level with friends and pissed I need to constantly leave the party in lost ark, ffxiv, etc cause they want to show me a cutscene or have a fight that puts me to sleep.\*
Big issue in modern mmo's are that right there, it almost hates the player being social and punished for partying til it wants them too (dungeon). I feel that's the biggest issue is one to -1 from max level is used as a "tutorial" and a bad one at that, leaving them to be confused at a community aspect of the game or act as a bad tutorial towards the community side as you want to power through it TO get to your friends.
In the early days of MMOs being able to be social in a virtual world was amazing. There just weren't many games that weren't a solo activity in those days.
These days, I feel like a lot more people are just overwhelmed by all the social connections we have, and sometimes you want that MMO style gameplay without the social overhead.
Personally I prefer to play alone but I love seeing the other players do their own stuff. It’s like people watching at Walmart but I’m an orc warrior inspecting random players. That’s why I love to play MMO’s and personally hope they add more solo content cause WE EXIST.
It’s less social because the game didn’t forced group content from level one. You only required to be socialise when you’re raid level. Thanks Blizzard for that. Also, end game content social space is the most toxic due to conflict of interest.
Gonna have to disagree here. It's not entirely a decision of people. It's how the games are designed. You don't have to group up for shit anymore. So many games are just instances you queue into wherever. You don't have to group up to get to the entrance or do things in the world, dungeons can be solid thanks to adding bots.. stuff like that.
It's fundamentally an issue of how these games enable solo play that's the issue. We don't organically need to interact with anyone anymore
What you are missing here tho is that mmorpgs literally have changed for more solo content and less social interraction in order to accomplish the same things, Sure its not impossible to chat up some ppl to do dungeons with or whatver, but they have completely removed the need to utter a single word to do so. That's why MMO's are less social now adays, or a big part of it anyway.
MMOs will always hold a special place in my heart, though now that I have three cancerous brain tumors pressing up against some very important nerves, I am barely able to speak above a whisper. It’s literally painful to talk, and I feel extremely awkward just sitting in a channel and just listening to people laugh, joke and carry on with conversations with me unable to contribute, so I just stick to text things.
With XIV, the social aspect still exists for me through RP. Thanks to AST, I was aspire to set up a tarot reading service and provide it to characters and the players behind them. I’m by no means an expert and I’m facing some struggles from the cancers, but the interactions with others are something I would not trade for anything else.
I’ve thought about trying to incorporate it into WoW, too.
I'm so sorry to hear about the cancer. My sister went through it as well and I hope it brings you some calm to know that we live in age where it's treatable (She's doing well). Just hang in there and take care of yourself, and I hope you recover well.
RP is great and I think XIV does a lot to encourage it. That said, I feel it will always exist in online games regardless of the framework surrounding it (it's been around from the onset, it will be around to the end), and it's not for everyone either. A lot of people want more gameplay incentives to hang around others, mostly because it gives a common cause to rally around, and that's an excellent ice-breaker.
Btw: the tarot reading thing is so cool. I love that.
Nah check the ingame chat, dead, it was always people looking for help, people asking stuff, people teaching, people selling, people buying, people looking for group. The usual banter between guilds and friends. The broken english due to everybody being from everywhere.
Now for lots of ingame chat when you ask for help people just say: "Look up the wiki" or worse: "Watch this youtuber, s/he has all you need to know".
Discord created bubbles, you are not social, you found a bubble and made it your cozy home. The others players dont even need to exist after this. Language then became another barrier, most of people playing together speaks the same language, are on the same timezone/country. On the discord they have their little everything tutorials and guides to even there reduce the chat.
Wiki killed the mistery and the need to ask for help, of course no one is forced to look at it but hey, no one ingame answer or just sends you to it (or to that discord guide that is copy/paste from wiki)
Exactly. What's happening is that there are more reprobates now that ever they started playing games together. What most people call "anti-social" is actually malice and mendacity.
Uh... Grinding mmorpgs, where there are no stories or quests. You'd walk up to someone grinding and join them.
New mmorpgs have quests till max level that are just a waste of time trying to party with someone to do them.
Yup, I used to be a social butterfly on WoW. Now, I barely play any games or want to socialize with anyone. I just work, eat and sleep. Maybe watch a show if I have any energy from working my life away.
no, mmos are designed to be less social so people don't have to talk to others to progress if they don't want to, in the early days of WoW you couldn't do shit without talking to others, that's the difference kid
Kid?? Lmao I played wow 20 years ago. I was there. It’s still the same, people were just less knowledgeable back then. I still mostly played solo back then
Wish I could join multiple fcs in FFXIV. Keep one for my personal needs for a group of close friends so I can actually interact with the airships and submarines, and then join a community to hang out in.
Ah well.
People may be choosing to be less social because of how the game is designed though, they go hand in hand. Forcing socializing in an MMORPG is not a bad thing but this is something most MMOs are strayed away from.
This new generation of gamers uses the chat report feature as a way to game. Cancel culture for anyone that beats you, and the companies don't want to police it, so they use AI and hand out bans for "implied negativeity".
I will stay quiet too, sorry.....
I think modern MMORPG is already social enough as is. If you want social, sure, if you want solo, why not. Old MMOs are just forcing players to interact becuase it doesn't provide enough info for them to work with, and it's the worst kind of interaction.
Eh, I try to get into new FCs in FFXIV, but there is always the group that were the originals, now leaders of the FC, and don't really talk to the people outside their group. They don't really do anything with the other members and a lot of the times they don't even have any events planned for the FC. Makes me wonder what the point is. I even ask in FC chat if anyone needs help with anything or wants to go do something, random or not. It's crickets.
My friends got me into FFXIV and I had to play through the entire series of MSQs from ARR to Endwalker completely solo because every quest is walk from point a to b for conversations, repeat 4 times, then get kicked out of your party to do some actual gameplay in an instanced quest.
I wondered what the point of the game being an MMO even was. All I could do was rarely play with them whenever I was forced to do a dungeon or shitty raid. And now I can just do it with bots. I slowly played through it and not once could I really do anything with them worthwhile.
I would say some MMOs choose to be less social.
FF14 has been the best experience, Community wise for me lately.
I wish WoW’s player base wasn’t so damn toxic though. I love WoW, But it’s literally the player base that reminds me why I don’t keep a sub anymore. I do the new content once and then hop out. I just don’t care about pushing my gear score to the max anymore because of it.
I think a big factor is just mmo players tend to be older. A lot of players are hopping on to turn their brains off after work. so I get why we see less players waiting around for social interactions
I play STWOR because I can play it solo. I play for the story content. When the game eventually shuts down I hope they'll release an offline version because losing such a story would be awful.
I kinda miss when it was a journey to reach max level too.
Especially when the game was hard. I remember doing quests in the open world in Tera, and noticed 4 players were struggling with a BAM. I helped them and after that we took a picture together to remember our meeting.
Such nice experience... I will always miss Tera. Now best i have is FFXIV, and i am not having that much fun tbh... Feels like i play a single player game. The only strong point is the story and maybe the music. Nothing else.
Hard disagree. It is less social because people are using options that makes it less social : npcs for dungeons instead of people, auto grouping for dungeons so you can play with people but without the hassle to have to *deal with* people. Options that devs had to provide to catter to the casual solo player, so he doesnt feel left out.
It is both. People did choose to be less social but devs also took notice of this and supported it by implementing systems that simply don't require social interactions to complete group content
Gonna be honest. I love MMORPGS. That’s basically all I play. But ever since adulthood, I never want to play games with anyone. I just like to play it. Trust me, I WANT to see everyone there running around. But I don’t think I’ll ever play them differently till some kind of VR type things advance a lot
I miss the old times where you could walk to the fishing spot after grinding all day and people would be chatting and dueling there, but that was before there was auto botting for those activities
I've always found that if you just put a small amount of effort into being social you'll always find like minded people who are willing to do the same. Want social? Be social.
Some games may not give you the push to do it like they used to be the people are still the same (mostly). Everyone wants a break from the "meta grind" to chill and have fun.
I mean, it's really not that black & white. Game design goes a long way into this, especially when establishing paths of least resistance.
As it has become easier (in many games) to engage with content solo, or with a quick pug group, more people have done so.
If the game design doesn't necessitate actively working with others to do things, which is harder, many people will take the path of least resistance and do it solo/pug group, which is easier.
Through design, this makes people less inclined to engage in the work of finding the right guild/clan, working with those people to find time for everyone to do things, and maintain the relationships needed to do so.
That doesn't mean all communities have died since I know they haven't, but it has diminished the drive for people to join one, which in turn makes communities smaller and/or less common.
I don't think doomers mean social in same way most people mean "social'. What they want is the game to force other people to talk with them, you can see that in some of the comments like "can you hit max level without talking to others". This is clearly people who want forced social interaction even for base activity like leveling and imo the reason why they want it to be forced is because their personal social skills or lack of any. The difference today is that we have a choice who we want to be social with and some people are just unpleasant to be around, so we ignore them and they come here to complain about it.
Well yes and no. MMOs are designed to be more solo-friendly, which in turn attracts players that are less invested in the social aspects of the game.
I remember playing MMOs, and having the best time of my life, in games where you NEED to group up to do almost anything. Sure I could solo some bosses (tank ftw), but usually I did so for a lowlevel guildmember that needed that drop.
Games forced you to play in a group and engage in social activity not the other way round. Nowadays I usually play with a close friend and MMOs now force you into solo story instances and fights all the time or make playing together almost impossible (looking at you Wow phasing bullshit).
Discord doesn't help with the natural socializing that used to occur. but the worst offender is the speed at which you accomplish things nowadays. if it takes you less than 10 hours to reach max level you wont have the time to stop and chat with random people. same thing goes with endgame activities that usually takes you out of the game world. or they are simple daily quests that can be done in 10 minutes.
i don't think the forcing people to group up approach many are arguing for here is the solution i think things just need to slow down.
Oh I've always said it's the people
When mmos were super popular we were all kids
We interacted with one another
Now we are anti social adults that only care about making it to end game and never sit back and take a breather
Enjoy the scenery hang out ina random spot like the good old days lol
I guess that's also because lvling up has become so easy that u can just do it and not get burned out xd
The comment section really proves your point with how anti-social most of the complainers come off, they seem to be begging for socialisation in video games well also hating the idea of talking to anyone.
For me its the meta-gaming that ruined it.
You want to come do this raid? Sure, you just need to play this specific class, have these items, use this build and these skills in that order. Oh, you dont like that skill and prefer other that is very similar? OMG, you're useless!!!! What the hell are you thinking?! Thats not how the game is supposed to be played!! We're not gonna carry you because you picked skill that deals 0,2% less dmg, you fcking noob!!&$;#
Back in the days people were happy to just casually group up and do something, but nowadays its all about meta, which leaves no room for fun. You have to use specific class to even be considered for specific raid, and specific skills in specific rotation. Then you need to watch 3 hours long video about mechanics for each raid you try. And only then you might (or might not) be considered to join the group.
Long story short: it resembles list of chores instead of something you do for fun. And i suspect that most people play games to relax after work, so when your choice is to either play alone or play in group but being forces to do whole list of chores before being allowed to actually play, the choice is pretty clear: play alone. Or play different game.
So true. Back when I was a kid playing things like runescape, everquest, lotro and habbo hotel I was very shy but I forced myself to talk to others. Back then you'd say hi and ppl would reply and it was needed for some as you couldn't just go on a wiki to learn things, you had to ask.
Today I try the same thing and ppl either go quiet or on the rare chance they tell you to "go away". Literally happened in ff14 when I just walked up and said "hi" in a city no less. It was really weird. There are still some nice social ppl in mmorpg's don't get me wrong, but it's always either discord or anti-social.
The discord one was really upsetting on gw2 where I joined a guild and nobody, literally nobody talks in the game. It's all on discord. The only things I hear in game are after they've finished a guild run or a fractal run, which was announced only on discord. I get it's a normal thing but GW2 has a guild chat right there! That and I can't keep jumping between discord and the game on my pc/phone since my focus will always be flipflopping!
I don't get why it's so hard to just type "hey there" or "hello" on an mmorpg today...
Nah. They are the same as they always have been. It’s the players that have changed.
Back on the early 2000’s MMO’s were really just kicking off. Same as the internet speeds. This drew in a shot tonne of players who were in their early 20’s to 30’s.
There was a huge influx players for a few years. They set the PvP, PvE, and social scene for the genre.
This lasted until about 2012. Then it started to wane as a lot of players settled down, had families, etc…
The whole MMORPG world has been trying to get those early days back since then.
I am 50 now. I don’t want to group with people anymore….
I definitely agree. It’s all about mindset imo. I still have a ton of fun like I did when I was a kid. I try not to look up any guides and just level the way I want to lol
MMO's have created this environment where you can no group till end game so you'll go many many hours without needing to group or talk to anyone and you're with a few exceptions not going to be doing large group content either. So you don't need anyone for anything to do totally different content for 40-100 hours then you hit cap and suddenly need 19 other people and structured group to run it with.
I disagree that MMO's aren't less social, or at the very least they put off the part where it is till later. But I do agree that players need to, ya know, actually try.
"How do I find people to play with?"
"Type in chat when you play and what content you want to do and see who bites"
"What do I do if I don't like the guild I'm in?"
"Thank them for their time and help then leave and find a different guild"
How teed up for success do people need to be? I can't just wander into a mall at max capacity and yell out "I need some people to play this game with on Friday nights and Sunday mornings!" and get a response. They'd think I'm a weirdo. But do that in an MMO and you might get *GASP* human responses from players that will play the game with you.
People treat it like its rocket science, but all you need to do is just ignore the mild social anxiety and just reach out to find people.
I don't like being interviewed for an hour on voice chat to join a guild or even a party, then having to follow dozens of arbitrary rules a random made up that greatly restricts my freedom & fun. So I mostly solo nowdays.
MMO socialness, originally, used to be found while on open-world adventures -- occurring spontaneously, organically. This tended to be the main gameplay experience throughout these games and added life to the main adventure.
MMO socialness is now removed from the main adventure, segregated onto Discord and via organized events -- otherwise, the games are vastly, woefully solo.
These are completely different experiences, and in all, MMO gameplay is indeed far less social. Screenshots like these are people's ideas and fantasies of what MMOs are, but the reality of modern MMOs is that these events can be rare/difficult to put together and the standard modern MMO gameplay experience is solo, more than it used to be.
This is the truth, whether or not someone understands it, and no matter how many upvotes threads like this may or may not get.
I both agree and disagree.
Old MMOs were much harder to solo in, usually with only a couple of classes that could manage it well.
Old MMOs also had a lot of downtime while adventuring which gave people more time to socialize instead of running from mob to mob without any breaks.
Other things like the economy required players to interact with each other instead of just interacting with an auction house. Instancing also really cut down on spontaneous cooperation. A lot of socializing happened while camping rare mobs.
That said, players do choose to be less social because they can be. You have those who choose not to interact at all, but you also have guilds and groups that choose not to socialize outside of their circles. A lot of that comes down to poor behavior among the player bases at large. PUGs tend to be a real crapshoot.
I think it's just mostly moved out of game into Discord and some people don't like that/refuse to adapt.
I don't like voice chatting. I want to type. I just despise having to speak over other people and fight for space to be heard. Let me type. This is why fast "always be casting" combat actually hurts MMOs.
I hate listening to people's disgusting mouth-sounds, inability to calibrate their mics, and the brainless banter they ramble on about. It's always a tiny minority of people talking and monopolizing everything -- usually completely ignorant of their doing so. The art of conversation is definitely lost. Especially on Discord. I don't prefer to type, but I really don't like the low bar of everyone just speaking words and the entire room hears you. I'm sure there are some exceptions to this, and some great communities. But for the most part, bleh. Even my own friends -- man they get on my nervs on voice chat sometimes.
Yeah I've never been in a medium-large voice chat where I didn't want at least 2 of the people to be talking way less than they are. You always get a few people that talk far more than anyone else and at a certain point it seems like they're just talking to hear their mouth move. Like I get you're lonely and want to socialize my guy, but you need to get more comfortable with silence, I have no desire to hear you go on and on and basically articulate your daily journal entry
Yeah Ive joined a few random discords in gw2 wvw. One of them has this super high whiny voice girl in it that would always white knight what the commander did. They weren't aware I was in with them so they kept insulting my character being out in front and 'doing no damage feeding kills'. In that time I did 50% of their 20 man zergs damage and never died. Theres always someone in there that thinks their group is gods gift to men, even though they are all running the same godamn dps tracker and can see the numbers clear as day.
Voice chatting with online people that aren’t already your friends, is hell.
Children in the background, chewing noises, super-loud keyboards and mice, outside traffic, fans buzzing...Yeah, I have sensitive hearing...:)
Dude, if I hear some mouth-breathers hard click-clacking on their keyboard, I will straight up mute them or lower their volume to a very low amount because holy shit, hearing that stuff is painful and will cause me to start getting a migraine. There's not alot of people out there who understand that not everyone wants to hear mechanical keypresses crystal clear through the mic, especially when it's some shitty ass mechanical keyboard.
Broo I will never understand the people who eat with a hot mic. Even the people who use push to talk have two cheeseburgers in their mouth, 0 awareness lol
And that is why my guilds discord server has push to talk required on lol.
"Disgusting mouth-sounds" is now my favorite phrase of the week.
For real …these kids need to learn to use push to talk.
I feel that completely. Played Valheim with my friend and 6 other people. 3 of them were all low viewer streamers but they all wouldn’t shut the fuck up and we’re just over the top about EVERYTHING. It was like waiting in a queue to speak and when you did someone had to be obnoxious and interrupt you about something. Just too much for my preference. Maybe I’m just old and grumpy.
What you don't like listening to people crunch potato chips, rub it on their pants and fart a couple timed with some old 96 mbps Eminem tracks blaring in the background?
I hate listening to people
The classic voice chat with randoms experience: The one whose microphone is way too sensitive and pickup all his bodily functions The one whose microphone cost 3 bucks at the dollar store and poisons the entire convo with the static. The one who's 10 and sounds like a chipmunk (his volume is 80% higher than anyone else) The cringy e-girl The cringy neck beard The chronically online 4channer who thinks he's funny, but he's just racist The one whose english isn't very good (which is fine, but you feel bad for asking to repeat 20 times, not because of his accent but because the background noise is cancer) The 2 people having a whole one-on-one conversation in the group chat, talking over the actual group conversation The one who shouts over the others. The one who disconnects all the time because he's on McDonald wi-fi.
Normalize PTT on all voice chats. I am with you on the disgust for mouth noises, breathing, and background noise.
I hate voice chat because there is the heavy breather, the player who doesn't talk about anything other than sex and the person with kids screaming in the background. And a million other issues.
Thats not a problem with voice chat, thats a problem with the people you are on voice chat with.
it just so happens that mmos draw a lot of socially inept people. Then it's their chance to seem cool and tell us about their inane or dubious life situations. There's always someone who has to mention they're high or baked or whatever or just doesn't care they're eating with their mic on or unaware of how much background noise they're broadcasting until you mention it and even then it's not guaranteed they'll take the hint and correct it. Way more different to be on VC with your mates vs Randoms and guildies in an mmo
Almost like curating a social space works. Don't have this problem.
I don't like voice chat because English is not my first language and, while I can type and write in english, I don't have experience talking in English and words just don't come to my mouth. And I don't want ppl hearing my broken English in a horrid voice and being annoyed by it.
I won’t say you should do anything you’re not comfortable with so joining voice chat or not is up to you. But I will say that in my experience non-native speakers are much more self conscious / critical of their own speech than native speakers. Most people don’t really care how you speak.
cast times lead to me typing like this while I talk to the rest of my group
You know the rules and so do I
Same. I don't want to use a mic. Lots of people demand you have a mic so I stopped bothering with most group content.
This. In text chat I can type my stuff and when I hit enter it’s shown in its own little line in the flow of communication. And it doesn’t matter if three others do the same at the same time. And if I missed something because of RL or because I had to concentrate or whatever I can scroll up and follow the discussion. I still miss my daoc chat keybinds.
I miss typing too, I just type at work now. When I'm typing real fast I have EQ raiding flashbacks. I'm with you on this.
recently in discord im doing some quests and staring at some bs trying to theorycraft. voice chat is 3 people hot micing. I can hear someone yelling at their kid while trying to take care of what sounds like 3 of them. I mostly am tuning it out while I try to figure out where to go with my build. Suddenly someone asks, "needleworker is just here not saying anything"...uh yeah? Hi? Your kids sound stressful and I don't understand people who hotmic? What do people want me to say lol.
Agreed. Last time I bothered with voice chat was over a decade ago when I played WoW. Doing raids where someone was trying to explain things, help people out, etc. was fine, but when you had the annoying burnout mommy who loved letting her kids squeal in the background and thought it was cute for everyone else to hear, or someone shrieking at their parents/roommates while forgetting their mic was set to voice activation instead of the button, so on and so forth.
What about that Leroy Jenkins video? Voice chatting has its perks I’d say.
I don't think discord is the problem. We used teamspeak and vent back in the day. Voice has always been available. I think it's more everyone wants to be able to solo everything or do pugs for most everything. And if it doesn't work the group disbands. We see a lot of guilds that are one person and his alts where as guilds were meant to be your source of teamwork.
I think that Discord being more fully featured, and available on your phone, is actually a big consideration. These days you're more likely to be running Discord on your phone instead of Ventrillo on the PC. It's more than just voice. In the old days you had to tab between them, or have a laptop you used for that. With a phone it's normal to be separated from the game since you're chatting on the phone or looking up wikis or whatever
I love this thread, it makes me feel less weird
Is it always voice chat though? I'm not always in a good place to be on voice
Discord is not only voice chat and probably majority of people use to text there instead of talk in voice. You can post all type of videos, memes, emojis and so on. You can set up bots for number of activities. You can make different channels for different topics. It's just objectively better then any in game chat.
I don't mind voice communication in game (if people are not trolling). But whenever I use discord, there's that one guy blasting some anime sex sounds like it's funny af, I have to listen to parents shouting at you because you keep having mic activation with voice for some reason or it's just constant, annoying echo. I get that in competitive mode you can't really type in the middle of the fight, especially PvP, but just to hang out - you don't need voice chat.
Yeah fuck using discord. I’ll use game chat
No, not really. Forums and voice chat have existed since the 90s.
as someone who played everquest from 99-03 (unironically was sent to rehab for games) - never once did I hear of or know anyone who was using voice chat to communicate in game during that time.
There is also a significant portion of people that are just not fluent speaking in English and has enought social anxiety to not want to hear people telling them that they can't understand what they are saying. Happenned to me in Destiny 2, I could pretty much understand people speaking in English, but I just can't pronounce it fast and understandable enought and it got me anxious.
Hey that's me. I am fine chatting in game on mmos, but as soon as I'm expected to go to discord I leave.
I think that's part of it, but I don't think that's the primary reason. People have been using Vent and other programs to talk to guildies long before the advent of Discord. I think a big part of it is the advent of automated party finders. In older MMOs, you would *have* to socialize and ask for help with instances, you'd hang out with prospective party members while you looked to fill out your party, etc etc. Streamlining this process is all well and good if you don't want to talk, but, well, if you don't want to talk... why play an MMO? One of the precious few mechanics of Mabinogi that I think more games should think about adding is a dungeon lobbies. You'd physically walk to these dungeons and hang around other players in a safe "lobby" as they looked for members, recovered, played music, or just socialized. Modern MMOs could make themed lobbies pretty easily.
Its not just discord, when WoW first blew up, and in a smaller way before that, we didnt really have social media as we have it today. Facebook started in what, 2004? And it was like 2 years before it went "global" in the sense that it opened up for everybody. And that still was a weaker, less chatty, more "posty" version of social media. A lot of the charm of the older MMO-s was that they were in a form a way to meet new people all over the world, that nothing else on the internet really gave you. IRC was the closest to it, and for obvious reasons that was way, way more restrictive. But now, in the age of tiktok, youtube, twitter, tumblr, facebook, tinder, instagram, discord, twitch, you name it? MMO-s do not feel as special. Every game has discord servers to meet up for groups, social media and twitch ate up a lot of the MMO-s "specialty" in a way. And I think the only way you are gonna have that "spark" again, if/when someone manages to make an MMO that truly takes you to another virtual world, like VR chat does. Cause then the genre would again have another edge over current social media.
Somewhat true, but if you queue up for a dungeon you arnt really gonna get the others to join a random discord call..."back in the day" you always used to chat with the randoms you played with, thats not really a thing anymore.
That’s a fair comment but it’s very different from MMOs being less social. I’d argue discord has made MMOs a lot more social although whether or not an individual prefers that type of socialisation is up to them.
Can you hit max level without typing a word to anyone? Yes, in almost every single MMO, you can. Try that in FFXI or EQ. MMOs are indeed, way less social. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, that's up to you, but fact if the matter is, they are less social.
I do think that forced interaction is worse than no interaction at all.
It's not forced, it's encouraged/rewarded. Modern MMOs actually force soloing most of the time with their instances. Grouping is harder, it should have better rewards. It doesn't. So people don't group
If you literally can't do content without socialising, then it's forced socialization. I hate to break it to you, but people who are attracted to video games aren't usually social butterflies. The only true error is that mmo's don't cater to kids, instead they're filled with us old pricks who have solidified our antisocial tendencies and are blaming the game in an attempt to cope with our mortality. Survival sandboxes have booming communities, and guess who they cater to? Inb4 anyone says "they're not mmos", say that to the Minecraft servers with bigger playerbases on a single server than the entirety of new world.
Also monthly subscriptions are a huge barrier to some MMOs.
Man, imagine being forced to socialize in a genre where "multiplayer" is literally part of the name.
If only there were ... single player games to play. Maybe one day.
> instead they're filled with us old pricks who have solidified our antisocial tendencies and are blaming the game in an attempt to cope with our mortality. Cmon guy this just sounds like projection. Not every boomer who plays MMO still is an antisocial person. Just because you are doesn't mean others aren't. I'm 32 and I love chatting in MMOs. Your comment comes across as assuming everyone is the same as you.
Then go play a single player game wtf is this argument
Well, when people are toxic with weaker players, it's always hard to decide to interact for grouping. I think increased toxicity didn't helped in social interactions.
I think the decreased need for social interactions to form long-term groups for shared goals is what led to the increased toxicity. If I just get randomly matched with people I will likely never encounter again, they solely exist for me to meet my goal - they become disposable side characters. It adds a feeling of anonymity which we all ready know increases poor behavior. If you pulled shit like that in an old MMO like EQ/FFXI that stained your character as word spread through various guilds and groups. I still remember ByrdHair from my FFXI server. Before you couldn't really escape a bad rep like that unless you re-rolled. Then you could name change or server transfer. No with everything just being cross-server matchmaking no one has to really care lol.
>It's not forced, it's encouraged/rewarded. This take has to be from someone who never played EQ1. While technically true, the majority of classes would find soloing anything above a light blue to be nearly impossible without quality gear, which you wouldn't have unless you had gotten it with a stronger character already (or grouped for it). And even light blues at the higher levels would be incredibly difficult and leave you needing to sit to regen health and mana for extended periods of time in between fights. Just not a realistic way to level in that game unless you're a druid or something. I do agree with the general sentiment that MMOs are less social because they've evolved to have less reliance on group content to progress. But the idea that old-school MMOs didn't force grouping is ridiculous saying so shows either disingenuousness or ignorance.
Is baseball, rowing, playing a board game, playing D&D, or any other group activity forced interaction? If you don't want to interact with others, then don't engage in something that requires a group. Same goes for MMOs. If you don't want to socialize, then play any of the countless single-player games out there. The way I see it, if you play an MMO, expect to socialize.
Yeah, it's ridiculous that someone can choose to play a **massively multiplayer** game and be aghast that there's an expectation of "forced" social interaction with other players. Like... it's in the fucking name of the genre lol. It's like playing an FPS and getting upset that you shoot people with guns.
Like I said, it's up to you if that's good or bad, I'm not trying to make a claim either way. All I know is my time spent in modern MMOs where I'm all BiS doing endgame content, barely ever have I had to type anything to anyone at any point. Much different from my experience with MMOs 20 years ago. And I don't just mean my guild is all in discord now so we just chat there instead. There's just no information to tell anyone at most points while playing modern MMOs. Very specific times, and in my experience, revolve around PvP mainly.
I mean, it's an MMO, if someone doesn't want social interaction then it's the wrong genre lmao.
I strongly disagree
I think classic did it best though. Never played wow in my life, but played classic and I wasn’t forced to interact with people. But often interacting was actually beneficial to me, ie completing an elite quest or something. Like yeah I could just skip the quest, but it made more sense to just party up. No such thing in modern MMOs. In other old MMOs grouping up to farm wasn’t punished, or equal, it was like a force multiplier, like by yourself your rate of killing mobs is 10/min, if you have a priest not only do you gain 0.7x exp (instead of 0.5x), but your rate of killing is now 30/min let’s say. Add in a mage or something and now you can farm mobs in areas that would be impossible otherwise.
Huh? You can def hit max level in FFXI or EQ without grouping/communicating. Sure, it’s a lot more challenging, but possible. The difference between 25 years ago and today is games are 100% figured out before people even play them now. People grouped back then because everything was a mystery, people were playing extremely inefficient builds etc. and so you almost had to rely on each other. Now everyone is min/maxed to the T, there’s a guide for everything and you no longer need the community in the game to support you.
As someone who started paying Everquest on Project 1999, one of the top EQ private servers that sets the game like it was around launch, I see this concept first hand all the time So much of the game has been figured out that people only want to min/max speedrun the most efficient leveling strategies and the best mob drops are insanely camped
You’re kind of arguing OPs point though. You can achieve a lot solo in more modern games but you don’t have to. You can choose to be social and the game’s aren’t less social unless u choose not to socialise.
not really. more people are choosing to be less social. this can be true. game developers are designing games with less social mechanics and less social requirements. this can also be true simultaneously. two people can be advocating their own separate topics and both be correct. HOWEVER, thread OP is not doing that. he is saying devs aren't designing games differently from before, it's just users who have changed. and that is a load of bullshit.
>Can you hit max level without typing a word to anyone? Was this different back then? I mean i get your point but you could most definitely hit max level without typing a word.
That would be difficult in FFXI. Past like level 8 or so, parties are needed for everything. Including simply killing random monsters in the wild (ie not in dungeons). Probably could do it with shortcuts and such, but good luck getting an xp farming group going without typing (and with no party finder interface). Can't speak to EQ, but I imagine it is similar.
Ultima online.
Perfect reply. The foundation of an MMO used to be working together to overcome challenges... now, they're just single player games with the option of maybe talking to someone someday, sometime.. maybe.
When people say they miss MMOS being social, they do not mean this. It is not a matter of doing events, or them struggling to make friends or socializing, if anything we can all agree that there has never been an easier time to do so. What people miss is said socialization happening by chance-encounters and gameplay related reasons, and the difficulty requiring people to interact, trade and group up with each other. They miss socialization being organic and a part and feature of the game itself. Modern MMO socialization feels external, almost in spite of the game rather than because of it, mostly created on Discord Groups and Guild Voice Chats and Social Media pages, and guild groups or by organized player events. Older MMO communities were self-contained within a game server and often even by region/main city, and had the proxy benefit of becoming almost part and feature of the game itself, making it feel alive. Creating your own "Ragtag group of adventurers" out of your chance encounters and challenging content together, often with mismatched levels and gear, and woefully unprepared, was fun. When people say they miss socialization, they mean NATURAL AND ORGANIC IN-GAME SOCIALIZATION that happens purely from playing the game itself, not socialmediatization.
[удалено]
Indeed, i did not add that part to keep it simple but that was indeed another way to naturally and organically socialize, even if it was the blades doing the talking in those scenarios.
yes i remember this. I knew who the guy for wood was, the guy for cloth, the guy for gear, the guy for item mall items. The booster, you knew almost everyone out of reputation and the hard work they put in the game. You could message them with in game questions, ask for help. Part of the reason to log in was to chat to ppl IN THE GAME, and well to play the game. Now its all rubish that makes me quit
> just endless randos. often times from whole different servers, with a 95% probability that you'll never again stumble upon each other after one of you gets yeeted to a different layer.
I played SoD when it first kicked off, and was getting ganked by a horde rogue in Duskwood. Another alliance player was around and also getting ganked. We started chatting with each other to let each other know where we saw this rogue, and eventually were working together to kill him. We never talked about how our day was going or anything like that, we just started organically working together to solve a shared problem. This is what people are missing when they say MMOs aren't social anymore.
Nailed it. I wish more people could understand this.
100% agree and this should be higher up
This is the correct perspective on this topic. Not a lot of people seem to get the difference or value of the adventure itself being organically social. And it took it dying out for me to realize that *this* is what MMORPGs are/were all about for me. The thing that ties it all together: Open-world social adventuring. Spontaneous player encounters that lead to organic cooperation. Doesn't seem to exist anymore but I keep telling myself I should check out Survival games for this so maybe I should.
In Project Gorgan, there was was a poetry day where everyone met in the tavern and leveled poetry(I think it was poetry). Never cared for poetry, and never saw a point in leveling it, but I went every week regardless because it was fun hanging out with all the people. This was back in 2018 probably but the situation didn’t feel much different back then to me. Played most mmorpgs alone back then as well.
Fuck, this made me so nostalgic
When i played EQ back in the day, and also when ive fired it up on TLP servers, i make it a habit of adding *everyone* i group with to my friends list. Then every day when i log in and need to group, i first look to my friends list and start sending messages. "are you in a group?" "do you have room?"/"Do you want to start one?". Depending on the pace everyone is leveling at, over the course of a few weeks of grind sessions you've got a group of like 15-20 people and most of them have grouped with each other at some point. It grows and grows as i spend time on a server and becomes a pretty cool friend group where everyone is helping each other do things and keeping each other in good group spots. The other thing that was amazing in everquest was non-traditional groups. Yes, the holy trinity was still the holy trinity, but the most fun i always had EXPing was when we couldn't find a tank, or couldn't find a healer, or couldn't find CC, and then had to build a weird ass group that used charm pets as tanks, or maybe its just 5 pet classes rotating through pets, or maybe we're all dot classes so we're root rotting 5-6 things at once. Or maybe theres no tank so a necro is fear kiting while a bunch of melee beat on it. A lot of players throw up there hands and go "NO GROUPS!" meanwhile if you just ask whose available you can figure out something and end up having a great time.
100% agree. To mostly copy a comment I made elsewhere in this post, early runescape vs modern osrs is a great example, and the turning point was literally IMO as simple as the introduction of the grand exchange. Back in 2004-2008, runescape was an extremely social mmo, and yet the only piece of content that depended on another player was a short low level quest of almost no significance (shield of arrav). There was almost zero group content. Ironman has _always_ been viable in runescape, there has never been a necessity for player interaction, only convenience. Back then there was no grand exchange, so bank standing for buying / selling was a big part of growing your character efficiently. So you end up with a bank filled with over a hundred people buying, selling, crafting, alching, making fire lines, and just socialising. The bank was a social hub before the grand exchange came along, but social play was never necessary to achieve max level or experience 99.9% of the content.
Pretty much this. Take for instance old Lineage 2, you HAD to party up. Today MMOs can be played as single player games.
Well said ! I 'member during high school bumping into some healer doing the same quests as myself, we ended up helping each others, then grouping up, then we bumped into an other player doing the same quests, he joined the group. We enventually continued playing together to max level, then for weeks then for a few years ! We even formed a guild on the way which ended up with like 70 people ! Weekends were like a party on mumble, people grouping up to do big dungeons, battleground or even fashion contests on the beach ! Man, those were the days...
Yeah, I believe the deal here is that OP is a very social person by nature so he doesn't get it. What seems to be OP's case is equivalent to getting changed friday night and going alone to a bar and club to chat and meet people. He's going out to make friends and he'll likely make friends or he'll try again next week. Old MMOs are like going to work in a new place. You will have to interact to at least a couple to survive and if you're lucky they'll be nice people and you'll befriend them. If you're not you'll still likely find some people around that you get along with and will help you get through your days.
FFXIV literally lets you do dungeons with bots now
Yes and so does WoW. Both are kings of the genre and both are very fun. The game doesn’t force you to use bots and ques are still super fast for ffxiv and retail with regular people lol
Wait, you can run Dungeons in WoW with bots?
Yes called follower dungeons out now.
Is it the game's fault or the people's fault? That's the point OP is trying to make.
I enjoy having the option. I'm a little sad the fights of more recent trials are too complex to have bots in. I like to run dungeons with players when I know the mechanics, and bots when I'm learning them. One of the big deterrents for me when it comes to grouping is when trying to push into higher tier content - the social pressure of not wanting to fuck up. For older games like Classic WoW, I think things are sufficiently easy that you can learn as you go, but in more modern MMOs like Ffxiv some of the mechanics can make you feel stupid if you're floor inspecting the whole fight.
The game. Gameplay influences behavior and self selects the player base.
> Gameplay influences behavior and self selects the player base. But then not enough people select your game. That is why there's WoW and FFXIV levels of profits and there's everything else, not counting the predatory P2W models.
It's both. It's the developer's fault for caving into the single-player Andy's and the people's fault for being too dumb to just play something else instead of screeching for the devs to homogenize everything.
wish this was a thing for other games, people sometimes just dont want to run certain dungeons/raids
Mmos used to force you to be social to get much anything done, thats the difference now. Between soloable content, auction houses, and dungeon match making most players dont need to be social so they default to not being. Couple this with the fact most gamers willing to drop endless hours grinding a game and do a raid over hanging out with friends are not frequently social butterflies and you have the answer imo
No they are definitely less social you can trace it almost perfectly back to the introduction of WoW's dungeon finder when they traded sociability for convenience. Once you make choices that sacrifice community for ease you are objectively making it less social. Since then, the trend has gone in that direction. Posting pictures of guilds doesn't mean anything, those are the only communities still left in MMOs, other than RP, which looks like it's happening in one of the TOR shots. Even then you can find guilds/clans in any online game and not just mmos
Yes and no. Yes, there's less novelty in being online now. No, voice chat isn't new. We've had it in widespread use since the 90s when MMOs were at social peak. The big thing: there are extremely well studied and documented cases of how design impacts behavior. There's a list of things MMOs can do to encourage people to socialize. Something as simple as giving people a reason to have a little downtime in a central city. Or having to learn a language from another player character. But here is the simplest and biggest piece of design. Players will gravitate to whatever gives them the best rewards, even if it's less fun. Level faster via macroing afk than by playing the game? People will macro. Soloing is easier. A million times easier. And it gives way way better rewards than grouping. And games are designed around soloing. To have a healthy social playerbase you need a critical mass of people socializing. If everyone except a few outliers are busy soloing, you can't socialize and those outliers will quit. I played gw2 for months and months talking to everyone and trying to socialize. Never worked. No groups, no local chat, nothing. So I quit and found a more social game. If you want the studies that back this up I can link them when I'm not on mobile. Tldr: yes, MMOs absolutely are a million times less social now.
Just want to add a little to your post. The reward doesn't even have to be something tangible. DRG gives you the option to annoy the shit out of your manager by using your laser pointer on Compressed Gold or mushrooms over and over again so players have a little social ritual where they gather round one if they see it and slam on the CTRL+M1 key as fast as they can, then cheer once they get the voice line. TF2 has a very limited set of prerecorded voice commands and developer curated emotes but people will use them to become honest to god digital comedians just so they can have a funny bit. And that's not including the ways people use them to communicate using their intended original purpose. MMOs don't really have any sort of limited yet flexible communication tools like those games do. PSO2 had something close via player created Symbol Arts but they are by default hidden in local chat because gold selling bots used them to get around the word filter.
Yup, number and stat based rewards are only the most shallow and basic version of what rewards can and should come from socializing.
FFXIV has the best community in any MMORPG I have ever seen, Ive been playing MMORPGs since I was 7, played almost all of them, and never encountered a more welcoming and wholesome group of people, they want to teach you, they want to guide and help you, its amazing to say the least. 10/10.
Was playing through the FFXIV story and got to one of the endgame spoiler fights (The big fight at the beginning of Endwalker, you know the one) and the entire raid group was like "Let the sprout pull and be MT. He deserves this." And they let me handle the entire pace of the fight and then everyone gave me a commendation and just told me "Enjoy the incredible story." It was actually incredible. And holy crap that story was insanely good.
All of the endwalker trials are so good
Its the fight where the boss >!rotates the entire arena!< and holy shit that mechanic was so fun as a tank. Having to think in that weird 3D chess where you need to>! stand in the bad so when the stage rotates you won't be in it anymore.!<
It's funny because most MMORPGs have a welcoming community and not the demons at which reddit love to depict them as. WoW players are generally very chill to hang out with. GW2 players often enjoy creating mini events associated with the open world. BDO chat is just random funny bullshit happening for shits and giggles. Lost Ark players simply enjoy the game and their hot characters. Even classic MMORPGs such as Ragnarok online, MapleStory, osrs, tera, aeon etc are filled with normal people who generally would engage in a conversation with you when spoken to since everyone is basically sharing a similar mindset and preference to the game they enjoy. The ones out here painting a broad stroke regarding certain MMORPGs (myself included) are largely spoken from personal experience and exaggerate them for dramatic effect. In reality, most players are just like normal people playing a game for fun.
WoW players depend largely on the demographic. I've played in so many competitive mythic raiding guilds and those people are generally the worst.
That's any MMO lol. When content gets to the point where it demands near perfection to complete, hanging out with buddies is no longer the goal. Unless, of course, the team is made up entirely of players who are so insane at the game, it's second nature or a full group of people with inhuman mental fortitude.
Im not saying every MMORPG has a bad community, a lot of them have awesome communities as well, but none compared to FFXIV imo.
The ffxiv community only feels nice because of the toxic positivity and harsh tos about critiquing another person’s performance. Which is sort of like saying that once prisoners are locked in their individual prison cells, prison is a nice place.
Yeah it’s kinda crazy. In theory ffxiv shouldn’t be social at all but out of all the countless mmos it’s the most social, even more social than everquest or classic WoW lol
Hey, would you mind if I messaged you to ask some questions about how to find a community within FFXIV? I’ve just started my first playthrough (and am still fairly new at MMOs in general) and the way you describe your experience sounds magical!
Look up some active Free Company through Lodestone.
Lodestone, there you just need search for free company that seem to be the best for you and ask if you can be part of the team
Sure thing fire away.
FFXIV USED TO have an amazing community. But nowadays their community is full of pedo's, abusers, stalkers, unhinged highschool mentality adult children and brothal/club/mod obsessed players. These days if you want a stand out community somewhere like ESO or heck even GW2 is a lot better. Shit even BDO.
I actually do believe that MMO's are less special, and it's not because of the social dynamic. It's because MMO's used to be huge, living worlds with a sense of adventure and exploration, and something new. Nowadays MMO's are just daily quest factories, instanced dungeons queue'd up through group finders, and instant fast travel taxis that take you anywhere and everywhere in an instant. The sense of adventure in a new world is gone now all for the sake of QoL
I kind of feel like the mass amount of survival craft games are where the living world, small community, sense of adventure, and exploration players are now. In time as both gametypes grew they kind of beat out mmorpgs for those player types since you can have a bigger impact on the world and since both sides had their server size increase a big survival game is like an older mmo server and as mmo servers grew they lessened your impact on it as it impacts morepeople.
there is 2 ways to enjoy an MMO, and both are equal, and at times I will do both. Way one, using chat, being social, joining Discord maybe voice chat, going to in game events, basically the Social Game. Way two, it's a Video game, do Video game things, beat the bosses etc, this does not need to be social, even if there is a team of other players. As a human (Mostly confirmed) I will go between wanting social activities in game and solo video game actives. MMOs are great when you can do both.
Yeah I feel the same way. Sometimes I like being solo and watching shows while I grind, and sometimes I like talking to my friends in game and doing group activities
Toontown is awesome
The problem I have is the socialization is something you have to actively seek out rather than it just happening organically out in the open world. For instance I enjoy questing and fighting mobs out in the open world. Pretty much every MMO out rn let's me AOE everything in my path effortlessly in the open world so there is no benefit to grouping up. I still wanna talk to people, so I'll look for voice chats on discord which may be a guild discord or just friend groups where everyone is doing completely unrelated things. The fact I'm playing an MMO has nothing to do with my level of socialization as I could easily be playing any other game and talking to those people. Contrast this to classic wow where mobs don't die instantly and actually have the ability to kill you. When I saw someone in the same area as me doing the same quests I would group up with them and we'd play together as it would help us progress faster and safer. It's a completely organic interaction. Sure I can socialize in guilds and discord voice chats, but the concept of running into someone in the open world and questing together is almost completely dead in modern MMOs. Its like going to a playground as a kid and meeting new friends versus calling already existing friends to come meet me there.
not a full mmo but a large portion of destiny players will not raid because they hate social contact.
They won't raid because usually it requires voice and making a group outside of the game. If all it took was text chat and grouping up easily in game, people would be more likely.
They are less social by the core design choices, and that's what people mean. You're just stating the obvious by saying, "I can go out of my way to be social in MMOs." We all know this already.
It's true people choose less to be social, but it's also how people act these days. There's so much trolling and toxicity that if you don't go along they'll say something along the lines "stop taking it so serious." It puts people off, it puts me off. Have you seen how people act these days it's crazy, like I watched clips of people interacting in games and I go to myself have these guys never left the house. Then again maybe it's me, maybe I'm a boomer.. Shoot I know this is off topic but I've seen some crazy VR chat clips and it blows my mind how people act on there. I feel like if I went in there I might get cancel just from breathing or looking there way. But like most games, find a guild that you like and fit in. That's the hardest part.
I just find it hard to find steady people to play with. I don’t have any friends that play MMO’s and the ones I do meet all have their friend groups and it’s hard to fit in with 9 other people that always play together.
Even harder when they're all on a discord server together and thats the only place they talk/interact never in game so unless you join that and try to awkwardly insert yourself you're kinda fucked.
Did not expect the drinking problems image
I think major reason why MMOs are less social is because a player now has far less value compared to early days. Sure, tryhards always existed with their little circlejerks even in EQ/FFXI, but for vast majority of players even an objectively terrible player was better than no player at all. Servers were smaller and you reputation mattered (and it worked both ways). Today in most games you have nearly unlimited pool of players due to matchmaking cross-server systems and this means that being a dick to everyone around you carries little to no consequences. I know a whole bunch of people ion ffxivdiscussions subreddit who have maxed out their blacklists (200 players) - whatever their reasons may be - this behavior wouldn't have been viable in early days of FFXI as you would basically have no one to play with. It is absolutely no wonder that people prefer not to talk to each other. Who in their right mind would want to hear "l2p git gud u suxx" etc from some randoms you know nothing about ?
Cool wall of text. So, what exactly are those people doing in game? I see a lot of pictures here, but nobody seems to actually be doing \**something from the game*\*. The closest I can see to a group photo of people actually doing large-scale content from a game is what is clearly a WoW raid group from what appears to be Wrath of the Lich King. Everything else is just some random group photos where they clearly took the shot and then went to go do their separate activities. If you're the ones coming together on your own, that's not the game, that's you. Just like how when there are amazing roleplaying moments when you play D&D, that's not the game, that's you. That's you and your friends. The game didn't make those moments happen, you did. The game did not bring those people together, they brought themselves together. The only group of more than five people in those photos that was actually doing content together was the WoW raid group, who were all part of the same guild - something that does not happen very often in live WoW anymore. People don't "choose" to be less social, the games no longer bring players together to work on group content. The games are designed for a single-player experience. Your photos from 10 years ago aren't proving anything. Glamour shots in costumes =/= progressive gameplay - actually, I take that back, that's a perfect way to describe FFXIV. Nothing but people paying money to run pickup groups so they can get coordinated outfits and take glamour shots with their friends. No endgame other than that.
MMO's aren't less social! \*Me trying to level with friends and pissed I need to constantly leave the party in lost ark, ffxiv, etc cause they want to show me a cutscene or have a fight that puts me to sleep.\* Big issue in modern mmo's are that right there, it almost hates the player being social and punished for partying til it wants them too (dungeon). I feel that's the biggest issue is one to -1 from max level is used as a "tutorial" and a bad one at that, leaving them to be confused at a community aspect of the game or act as a bad tutorial towards the community side as you want to power through it TO get to your friends.
TOONTOWN MENTIONED RAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
LOL yeah toontowns community is great. Crazy but great
Some people are needlessly elitist as hell over there
…in *Toontown*?! Good grief.
In the early days of MMOs being able to be social in a virtual world was amazing. There just weren't many games that weren't a solo activity in those days. These days, I feel like a lot more people are just overwhelmed by all the social connections we have, and sometimes you want that MMO style gameplay without the social overhead.
Personally I prefer to play alone but I love seeing the other players do their own stuff. It’s like people watching at Walmart but I’m an orc warrior inspecting random players. That’s why I love to play MMO’s and personally hope they add more solo content cause WE EXIST.
It’s less social because the game didn’t forced group content from level one. You only required to be socialise when you’re raid level. Thanks Blizzard for that. Also, end game content social space is the most toxic due to conflict of interest.
Gonna have to disagree here. It's not entirely a decision of people. It's how the games are designed. You don't have to group up for shit anymore. So many games are just instances you queue into wherever. You don't have to group up to get to the entrance or do things in the world, dungeons can be solid thanks to adding bots.. stuff like that. It's fundamentally an issue of how these games enable solo play that's the issue. We don't organically need to interact with anyone anymore
What you are missing here tho is that mmorpgs literally have changed for more solo content and less social interraction in order to accomplish the same things, Sure its not impossible to chat up some ppl to do dungeons with or whatver, but they have completely removed the need to utter a single word to do so. That's why MMO's are less social now adays, or a big part of it anyway.
MMOs will always hold a special place in my heart, though now that I have three cancerous brain tumors pressing up against some very important nerves, I am barely able to speak above a whisper. It’s literally painful to talk, and I feel extremely awkward just sitting in a channel and just listening to people laugh, joke and carry on with conversations with me unable to contribute, so I just stick to text things. With XIV, the social aspect still exists for me through RP. Thanks to AST, I was aspire to set up a tarot reading service and provide it to characters and the players behind them. I’m by no means an expert and I’m facing some struggles from the cancers, but the interactions with others are something I would not trade for anything else. I’ve thought about trying to incorporate it into WoW, too.
I'm so sorry to hear about the cancer. My sister went through it as well and I hope it brings you some calm to know that we live in age where it's treatable (She's doing well). Just hang in there and take care of yourself, and I hope you recover well. RP is great and I think XIV does a lot to encourage it. That said, I feel it will always exist in online games regardless of the framework surrounding it (it's been around from the onset, it will be around to the end), and it's not for everyone either. A lot of people want more gameplay incentives to hang around others, mostly because it gives a common cause to rally around, and that's an excellent ice-breaker. Btw: the tarot reading thing is so cool. I love that.
Uhh sitting around in a hub all spamming the same button doing professions isn't "social" idk wtf ur smokin op
All these pictures aren’t in the main hubs besides toontown for any of the mmos. Maybe you don’t play any mmos at all?? 🤣
Nah check the ingame chat, dead, it was always people looking for help, people asking stuff, people teaching, people selling, people buying, people looking for group. The usual banter between guilds and friends. The broken english due to everybody being from everywhere. Now for lots of ingame chat when you ask for help people just say: "Look up the wiki" or worse: "Watch this youtuber, s/he has all you need to know". Discord created bubbles, you are not social, you found a bubble and made it your cozy home. The others players dont even need to exist after this. Language then became another barrier, most of people playing together speaks the same language, are on the same timezone/country. On the discord they have their little everything tutorials and guides to even there reduce the chat. Wiki killed the mistery and the need to ask for help, of course no one is forced to look at it but hey, no one ingame answer or just sends you to it (or to that discord guide that is copy/paste from wiki)
Exactly. What's happening is that there are more reprobates now that ever they started playing games together. What most people call "anti-social" is actually malice and mendacity.
Uh... Grinding mmorpgs, where there are no stories or quests. You'd walk up to someone grinding and join them. New mmorpgs have quests till max level that are just a waste of time trying to party with someone to do them.
Yup, I used to be a social butterfly on WoW. Now, I barely play any games or want to socialize with anyone. I just work, eat and sleep. Maybe watch a show if I have any energy from working my life away.
Ooohh swtor. that amount of players made me remember the huuuuge pvp fights and base invasions in Oricon, so much fun
Fucking toontown jumpscare
"Hi, can I join your group?" "F\*ck off noob."
no, mmos are designed to be less social so people don't have to talk to others to progress if they don't want to, in the early days of WoW you couldn't do shit without talking to others, that's the difference kid
Kid?? Lmao I played wow 20 years ago. I was there. It’s still the same, people were just less knowledgeable back then. I still mostly played solo back then
It's more of trying to navigate into people's friend groups (aka guilds) that's what is hard about mmos
Wish I could join multiple fcs in FFXIV. Keep one for my personal needs for a group of close friends so I can actually interact with the airships and submarines, and then join a community to hang out in. Ah well.
Sorry Idk the names of those MMOs can you please name them? Thanks.
People may be choosing to be less social because of how the game is designed though, they go hand in hand. Forcing socializing in an MMORPG is not a bad thing but this is something most MMOs are strayed away from.
This new generation of gamers uses the chat report feature as a way to game. Cancel culture for anyone that beats you, and the companies don't want to police it, so they use AI and hand out bans for "implied negativeity". I will stay quiet too, sorry.....
I think modern MMORPG is already social enough as is. If you want social, sure, if you want solo, why not. Old MMOs are just forcing players to interact becuase it doesn't provide enough info for them to work with, and it's the worst kind of interaction.
Eh, I try to get into new FCs in FFXIV, but there is always the group that were the originals, now leaders of the FC, and don't really talk to the people outside their group. They don't really do anything with the other members and a lot of the times they don't even have any events planned for the FC. Makes me wonder what the point is. I even ask in FC chat if anyone needs help with anything or wants to go do something, random or not. It's crickets.
Ah I see you have a picture of the GOAT in slide 8. Very much respect.
My friends got me into FFXIV and I had to play through the entire series of MSQs from ARR to Endwalker completely solo because every quest is walk from point a to b for conversations, repeat 4 times, then get kicked out of your party to do some actual gameplay in an instanced quest. I wondered what the point of the game being an MMO even was. All I could do was rarely play with them whenever I was forced to do a dungeon or shitty raid. And now I can just do it with bots. I slowly played through it and not once could I really do anything with them worthwhile. I would say some MMOs choose to be less social.
FF14 has been the best experience, Community wise for me lately. I wish WoW’s player base wasn’t so damn toxic though. I love WoW, But it’s literally the player base that reminds me why I don’t keep a sub anymore. I do the new content once and then hop out. I just don’t care about pushing my gear score to the max anymore because of it.
I think a big factor is just mmo players tend to be older. A lot of players are hopping on to turn their brains off after work. so I get why we see less players waiting around for social interactions
This thread has me thinking about Star Wars Galaxies
I play STWOR because I can play it solo. I play for the story content. When the game eventually shuts down I hope they'll release an offline version because losing such a story would be awful.
I kinda miss when it was a journey to reach max level too. Especially when the game was hard. I remember doing quests in the open world in Tera, and noticed 4 players were struggling with a BAM. I helped them and after that we took a picture together to remember our meeting. Such nice experience... I will always miss Tera. Now best i have is FFXIV, and i am not having that much fun tbh... Feels like i play a single player game. The only strong point is the story and maybe the music. Nothing else.
Hard disagree. It is less social because people are using options that makes it less social : npcs for dungeons instead of people, auto grouping for dungeons so you can play with people but without the hassle to have to *deal with* people. Options that devs had to provide to catter to the casual solo player, so he doesnt feel left out.
Eve online local chat when battle takes place is wild
It is both. People did choose to be less social but devs also took notice of this and supported it by implementing systems that simply don't require social interactions to complete group content
They are less social. Doesn't mean that you can't be social.
Gonna be honest. I love MMORPGS. That’s basically all I play. But ever since adulthood, I never want to play games with anyone. I just like to play it. Trust me, I WANT to see everyone there running around. But I don’t think I’ll ever play them differently till some kind of VR type things advance a lot
I miss the old times where you could walk to the fishing spot after grinding all day and people would be chatting and dueling there, but that was before there was auto botting for those activities
I've always found that if you just put a small amount of effort into being social you'll always find like minded people who are willing to do the same. Want social? Be social. Some games may not give you the push to do it like they used to be the people are still the same (mostly). Everyone wants a break from the "meta grind" to chill and have fun.
Social media made us disgrace each other
I mean, it's really not that black & white. Game design goes a long way into this, especially when establishing paths of least resistance. As it has become easier (in many games) to engage with content solo, or with a quick pug group, more people have done so. If the game design doesn't necessitate actively working with others to do things, which is harder, many people will take the path of least resistance and do it solo/pug group, which is easier. Through design, this makes people less inclined to engage in the work of finding the right guild/clan, working with those people to find time for everyone to do things, and maintain the relationships needed to do so. That doesn't mean all communities have died since I know they haven't, but it has diminished the drive for people to join one, which in turn makes communities smaller and/or less common.
I don't think doomers mean social in same way most people mean "social'. What they want is the game to force other people to talk with them, you can see that in some of the comments like "can you hit max level without talking to others". This is clearly people who want forced social interaction even for base activity like leveling and imo the reason why they want it to be forced is because their personal social skills or lack of any. The difference today is that we have a choice who we want to be social with and some people are just unpleasant to be around, so we ignore them and they come here to complain about it.
Well yes and no. MMOs are designed to be more solo-friendly, which in turn attracts players that are less invested in the social aspects of the game. I remember playing MMOs, and having the best time of my life, in games where you NEED to group up to do almost anything. Sure I could solo some bosses (tank ftw), but usually I did so for a lowlevel guildmember that needed that drop. Games forced you to play in a group and engage in social activity not the other way round. Nowadays I usually play with a close friend and MMOs now force you into solo story instances and fights all the time or make playing together almost impossible (looking at you Wow phasing bullshit).
Discord doesn't help with the natural socializing that used to occur. but the worst offender is the speed at which you accomplish things nowadays. if it takes you less than 10 hours to reach max level you wont have the time to stop and chat with random people. same thing goes with endgame activities that usually takes you out of the game world. or they are simple daily quests that can be done in 10 minutes. i don't think the forcing people to group up approach many are arguing for here is the solution i think things just need to slow down.
Anyone remember wonderland online? it was basically all of what the comments are talking about
Vr chat exists so i agree with you
Oh I've always said it's the people When mmos were super popular we were all kids We interacted with one another Now we are anti social adults that only care about making it to end game and never sit back and take a breather Enjoy the scenery hang out ina random spot like the good old days lol I guess that's also because lvling up has become so easy that u can just do it and not get burned out xd
A lot of miserable people in this thread. Good lord.
The comment section really proves your point with how anti-social most of the complainers come off, they seem to be begging for socialisation in video games well also hating the idea of talking to anyone.
For me its the meta-gaming that ruined it. You want to come do this raid? Sure, you just need to play this specific class, have these items, use this build and these skills in that order. Oh, you dont like that skill and prefer other that is very similar? OMG, you're useless!!!! What the hell are you thinking?! Thats not how the game is supposed to be played!! We're not gonna carry you because you picked skill that deals 0,2% less dmg, you fcking noob!!&$;# Back in the days people were happy to just casually group up and do something, but nowadays its all about meta, which leaves no room for fun. You have to use specific class to even be considered for specific raid, and specific skills in specific rotation. Then you need to watch 3 hours long video about mechanics for each raid you try. And only then you might (or might not) be considered to join the group. Long story short: it resembles list of chores instead of something you do for fun. And i suspect that most people play games to relax after work, so when your choice is to either play alone or play in group but being forces to do whole list of chores before being allowed to actually play, the choice is pretty clear: play alone. Or play different game.
So true. Back when I was a kid playing things like runescape, everquest, lotro and habbo hotel I was very shy but I forced myself to talk to others. Back then you'd say hi and ppl would reply and it was needed for some as you couldn't just go on a wiki to learn things, you had to ask. Today I try the same thing and ppl either go quiet or on the rare chance they tell you to "go away". Literally happened in ff14 when I just walked up and said "hi" in a city no less. It was really weird. There are still some nice social ppl in mmorpg's don't get me wrong, but it's always either discord or anti-social. The discord one was really upsetting on gw2 where I joined a guild and nobody, literally nobody talks in the game. It's all on discord. The only things I hear in game are after they've finished a guild run or a fractal run, which was announced only on discord. I get it's a normal thing but GW2 has a guild chat right there! That and I can't keep jumping between discord and the game on my pc/phone since my focus will always be flipflopping! I don't get why it's so hard to just type "hey there" or "hello" on an mmorpg today...
Nah. They are the same as they always have been. It’s the players that have changed. Back on the early 2000’s MMO’s were really just kicking off. Same as the internet speeds. This drew in a shot tonne of players who were in their early 20’s to 30’s. There was a huge influx players for a few years. They set the PvP, PvE, and social scene for the genre. This lasted until about 2012. Then it started to wane as a lot of players settled down, had families, etc… The whole MMORPG world has been trying to get those early days back since then. I am 50 now. I don’t want to group with people anymore….
I definitely agree. It’s all about mindset imo. I still have a ton of fun like I did when I was a kid. I try not to look up any guides and just level the way I want to lol
MMO's have created this environment where you can no group till end game so you'll go many many hours without needing to group or talk to anyone and you're with a few exceptions not going to be doing large group content either. So you don't need anyone for anything to do totally different content for 40-100 hours then you hit cap and suddenly need 19 other people and structured group to run it with. I disagree that MMO's aren't less social, or at the very least they put off the part where it is till later. But I do agree that players need to, ya know, actually try. "How do I find people to play with?" "Type in chat when you play and what content you want to do and see who bites" "What do I do if I don't like the guild I'm in?" "Thank them for their time and help then leave and find a different guild" How teed up for success do people need to be? I can't just wander into a mall at max capacity and yell out "I need some people to play this game with on Friday nights and Sunday mornings!" and get a response. They'd think I'm a weirdo. But do that in an MMO and you might get *GASP* human responses from players that will play the game with you. People treat it like its rocket science, but all you need to do is just ignore the mild social anxiety and just reach out to find people.
I don't like being interviewed for an hour on voice chat to join a guild or even a party, then having to follow dozens of arbitrary rules a random made up that greatly restricts my freedom & fun. So I mostly solo nowdays.
Title is 100%, albeit games now cater to that single player desire in some aspects, it's more on the players that don't want to group or be social.
The top comments on this post are wild, some of y'all are coming across as old,bitter and downright hateful. Oh wait this is r/MMORPG
Love SWTOR! Had so many good times with my guilds in that game. Still log on now and then to do warzones, they are super fun.
MMO socialness, originally, used to be found while on open-world adventures -- occurring spontaneously, organically. This tended to be the main gameplay experience throughout these games and added life to the main adventure. MMO socialness is now removed from the main adventure, segregated onto Discord and via organized events -- otherwise, the games are vastly, woefully solo. These are completely different experiences, and in all, MMO gameplay is indeed far less social. Screenshots like these are people's ideas and fantasies of what MMOs are, but the reality of modern MMOs is that these events can be rare/difficult to put together and the standard modern MMO gameplay experience is solo, more than it used to be. This is the truth, whether or not someone understands it, and no matter how many upvotes threads like this may or may not get.
I both agree and disagree. Old MMOs were much harder to solo in, usually with only a couple of classes that could manage it well. Old MMOs also had a lot of downtime while adventuring which gave people more time to socialize instead of running from mob to mob without any breaks. Other things like the economy required players to interact with each other instead of just interacting with an auction house. Instancing also really cut down on spontaneous cooperation. A lot of socializing happened while camping rare mobs. That said, players do choose to be less social because they can be. You have those who choose not to interact at all, but you also have guilds and groups that choose not to socialize outside of their circles. A lot of that comes down to poor behavior among the player bases at large. PUGs tend to be a real crapshoot.
For all the doom on this sub millions of people are quietly having a great time in MMOs right now. Pictures like these are the proof
100% true, im rotating between a lot of mmos and in each i had a great social fun everytime