Falling out of love with gaming

Makin modrods in the plane of fear. The epitome of gaming for Vazdeline

Speaking of, is Sloan going to get you a character for velious of what? I haven't heard much on that.

I think what I want out of an MMO is something that feels like a persistent world with a real community. It's something that just doesn't exist in stuff like wow for me, because cross servers and instances mean I never see the same people twice. What was so awesome about early MMOs to me was that the slow pace and tight-knit communities meant you saw the same faces day after day. You had cliques, you hated certain people, and everyone on the server knew who the shitlords were.

Thats why I think we play an MMO for 1-2 months and then quit, because it feels more like a string of content intended to be consumed, rather than a virtual world and community. I never got into EVE, but it sounds like the reason it's been successful is because of exactly that reason. I don't want to play an MMO where it's just a matter of hopping from questhub to questhub and beating the content, I want something cool and persistent.

Tol_sl said:

I think what I want out of an MMO is something that feels like a persistent world with a real community. It's something that just doesn't exist in stuff like wow for me, because cross servers and instances mean I never see the same people twice. What was so awesome about early MMOs to me was that the slow pace and tight-knit communities meant you saw the same faces day after day. You had cliques, you hated certain people, and everyone on the server knew who the shitlords were.

Thats why I think we play an MMO for 1-2 months and then quit, because it feels more like a string of content intended to be consumed, rather than a virtual world and community. I never got into EVE, but it sounds like the reason it's been successful is because of exactly that reason. I don't want to play an MMO where it's just a matter of hopping from questhub to questhub and beating the content, I want something cool and persistent.

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Completely agree with this. It's just tough, however, because in order to foster great community and virtual worlds that you can enjoy/appreciate, you have to vastly slow down gameplay, usually turning it boring. Fast-paced, engaging, frenetic combat, just isn't conducive to fostering community. GW2 was the last place where I felt like part of a community(it's no coincidence that it's pretty much the only reason I played as long as I did)and it was mostly due to the "slower" pace of running from keep to keep, the "slowish" process of scouting/guarding, etc.

EVE is a game Ireallytry hard to enjoy, usually going back every year or so, but the gameplay just inevitably wears too heavily on me. It's really just excel spreadsheets...IN SPAAAACE!

penalty_sl said:

That seems to be the mood of the thread (and the best many can hope for)

People get scared of their own feelings - analogy for life: you get knocked down, you avoid standing up again ... explains how some of us wind up reduced to zone 3 studio flats, playing simple games that don't excite us

Some people know the only way to get over such a love for gaming is to outgrow it - to get to the point where you're looking back at that intense era, catching its eye, remembering the good times, but seeing your once object-of-desire as little more than an old childhood toy (free to pick it up, spin it around, insert rods into its plastic orifices, but ultimately unable to respect how little it's grown, how much it's aged - you look back at your former self with a smirk)

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Damn in my mid 20's when life was still golden I went through the fall in love with Big Tittie Jane and once that exploded I became jaded towards a lot. I'm happy now with my fianc?e and all that nonsense, but the passion I once knew has gone, and now all I do is play league of legends until my eyes bleed. I knew there was a link, damn those tits damn them.

Kirun_sl said:

Completely agree with this. It's just tough, however, because in order to foster great community and virtual worlds that you can enjoy/appreciate, you have to vastly slow down gameplay, usually turning it boring. Fast-paced, engaging, frenetic combat, just isn't conducive to fostering community.

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I agree. The reason that old games like UO and EQ had great communities was not that they lacked dungeon/raid finders. The main reason was that they had plenty of downtime that where people had nothing to do but socialize. In WoW where you spend most of your time online spamming buttons it simply wont happen to the same degree.

Forced grouping, there's your community. The idea that you can't do jack shit without 5 other people helping you or a couple higher levels. That type of style, I think, caused "community". I didn't play EQ but I did play FFXI and in FFXI, people knew other players by name either due to their assholery or their awesomeness but they were known nonetheless. I think the idea of an EQ/FFXI community is gone and people always look for the "next best thing" so people are constantly cycling in and out of games moving on. Face it, those days are long gone.

Heallun_sl said:

Makin modrods in the plane of fear. The epitome of gaming for Vazdeline

Speaking of, is Sloan going to get you a character for velious of what? I haven't heard much on that.

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/who all vaz

Also, for Velious I am unsure what is happening. I think people are coming back, no news yet.

meko_sl said:

Forced grouping, there's your community. The idea that you can't do jack shit without 5 other people helping you or a couple higher levels. That type of style, I think, caused "community". I didn't play EQ but I did play FFXI and in FFXI, people knew other players by name either due to their assholery or their awesomeness but they were known nonetheless. I think the idea of an EQ/FFXI community is gone and people always look for the "next best thing" so people are constantly cycling in and out of games moving on. Face it, those days are long gone.

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Yep Go figure that in MMOs multi player dependency is gone... and long gone.. and i am willing to bet it is what killed the genre for most of us. i know it has for me why play a crappy single player experience disguised as an MMO ? it does not make sense.

meko_sl said:

Forced grouping, there's your community. The idea that you can't do jack shit without 5 other people helping you or a couple higher levels. That type of style, I think, caused "community". I didn't play EQ but I did play FFXI and in FFXI, people knew other players by name either due to their assholery or their awesomeness but they were known nonetheless. I think the idea of an EQ/FFXI community is gone and people always look for the "next best thing" so people are constantly cycling in and out of games moving on. Face it, those days are long gone.

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"Forcing" grouping is only going to foster enough community for groups/players to get together long enough to accomplish their daily quest, dungeon, etc. There's no real lasting bond that is forced out of shouting "LFG! 55 warrior!" or "Group needs tank! PST!". Community can't get built with how engaged you have to be in combat on a constant basis in games nowadays. There's no time to get to learn a person's life stories, roleplay, talk about the NFL, etc. When it's time to group/run a dungeon, it's pretty much non-stop combat, movement, staring at "ground effects", and everything else. Forcing grouping isn't the real issue that people think it is. People naturally want to group up and do shit together. Before WoW implemented LFD, people had to shout for groups all the time, yet the same "WTF!? No community!" echoes were being shouted. Why? Because combat is too "involved" to be able to do anything else. It's why VOIP has become so popular. Hell, most MMOs have it built-in now. That's the downside of adding difficulty/engaging gameplay. It slowly erodes away the community aspect of MMOs.

vazdeline_sl said:

/who all vaz

Also, for Velious I am unsure what is happening. I think people are coming back, no news yet.

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did sloan rebuy your shit? what happened to the red dream?!

Zuuljin_sl said:

Basically this. I *want* to want to play games, but just nothing keeps my attention or interests me. (God I feel old for saying this...) Also, a lot of times I feel I just can't be bothered to 'learn' how to play many newer games. They try to add so many features/abilities/whatever, that with my limited play time, I feel like the first 20 minutes of every play session is me re-learning how to play the game; what buttons do what, where in the story I am, what my goals are etc. And the problem only compounds itself as the further you get in a story, generally the harder it is, which makes it more difficult to relearn to play. Due to this, the only games that tend to keep my interest are simple games with the 'simple to learn, hard to master' mentality. Puzzle games etc on my phone. I think I've logged far more hours into my phone this year than all my playtime on consoles/PC combined.

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Games require, I think, some level of neoteny (wikipedia go if you need it).

I'm 40 now, and I find that I have to push myself to embrace new games, new mechanics, and even new books rather than embrace the familiar, reread a book, or rewatch something I know I like. It's like there's this internal mental resistance that has grown, making it harder to try new things or embrace new ideas. I don't always succeed, but I do think that it is worth that mental fight to try. Most of the time, after working through it, I find that the new game/show/book is well worth it.

Coral_sl said:

Games require, I think, some level of neoteny (wikipedia go if you need it).

I'm 40 now, and I find that I have to push myself to embrace new games, new mechanics, and even new books rather than embrace the familiar, reread a book, or rewatch something I know I like. It's like there's this internal mental resistance that has grown, making it harder to try new things or embrace new ideas. I don't always succeed, but I do think that it is worth that mental fight to try. Most of the time, after working through it, I find that the new game/show/book is well worth it.

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While I agree with you in theory, and I still play new and challenging games on the hardest settings, I don't think the gameplay has /ever/ been strong in an MMO. Socialization, multiplayer, and the things it offers that single player doesn't is the strength of the MMO. When you turn the game into DDR, you lose /all/ of that. Thats probably why I loved EQ, just chilling and chatting it up on raids, compared to games where I feel like I'm spamming a boring-ass rotation for 4 hours straight a night. If MMOs want to move towards "gameplay" then we basically need to kill off hotbar combat in the first place.

There are too many restrictions on the game-play of newer games. I remember a time when i could give a level 1 character max level buffs, high level equipment, and slay through low level places for loot that all wasn't all bind on pick up. A time where you could really help out your friends and others, that created bonds between players.

Someone said it before everything is about the bottom line now. How much money can be made comes before how much fun is the player having.

Nobody_sl said:

This is one of those things that you think to yourself, and then you think if anyone else thinks the things that you think. I mean obviously games are doing well. They get released all the time, they keep making new ones, and more upstart companies show up every day. Someone is keeping these companies in business, but it sure as hell isn't me.

I can recall bringing my computer over to my buddy's house every single weekend for like two years straight. A lot of the time, I would just leave it over there. We would play UT, EQ (Sullon Zek for life), BF2, Counter Strike, Diablo II, and when WoW launched we would do that for 48 hour stretches every weekend. I went and joined the army, and when I came back there was like no motivation to do that again. Nothing fundamentally changed. Our schedules and living situations were exactly the same, but I had no desire to bring my box over to his house and play a game. We did it once more when BF3 launched, and had fun with that for a weekend (trying to rekindle the BF2 magic), but it vanished in a few days. Anymore when I go over to his house, we flop on the couch and watch internet videos on the TV, or maybe a SC2 stream on twitch. I've spent a lot of time thinking about why this happened. What changed about the gaming landscape to remove any and all desire to play games.

I haven't reached any solid conclusions, but one of the big factors to consider is gaming evolution. We went from Doom2 to Half-Life 2 in ten years. That's fucking huge. Now we sit here, 10 years after Half-Life 2, and almost nothing has changed. I know graphics get better, and people tuck neat mechanics here and there, but we're seeing a lot of stagnation in the various genres. And this is an across the board thing. I mean shit, the only new innovation to come out of the RPG genre in years is the ability to fuck some of your NPC comrades. One of the few new concepts to emerge in the last decade of gaming has been the DIY games. Minecraft and Terraria are the big names for those, and yes those games provide an awesome platform for messing around, adventuring, playing with friends, and the like, but the problem there is that YOU as the player need to bring your own motivation and goals to the table to play them, because they are inherently directionless. That can make it hard to play one when you're looking for something "fun" because it puts the impetus on you to make your own fun. By no means am I saying that player-generated content is a bad thing. Hell no, it's one of the freshest things to hit games in a while. Rather, I'm saying that it takes a special drive or mood to want to undertake your own project in those games, and that's not always what people are looking for during their play time.

Bottom line, this "feeling" that a lot of us have probably has to do with a combination of different effects. There needs to be something different, because games these days are just spinning their wheels. This isn't some old faggot rant about how things were better "in my day" because we didn't need more than 8 bits to have a good time. Quite the contrary. I hate all those shitty ass indie projects that purposefully pick 8-Bit to either strike a nostalgia gold mine, or because they were too fucking cheap to hire an artist. Innovation is hard, and you can see that by looking at the gaming landscape. Nothing has really broken out in the last 5 years or so to change the way people look at games. There are peaks on the timeline: Mario, Final Fantasy, Mortal Kombat, Doom, Half-Life, Diablo, EQ, Baldur's Gate, WoW, Minecraft, GTA IV. Your list may vary, but the point is that there were games that made you say "Woah, I didn't know they could do that..."

I haven't said those words in years.

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Completely agree with you. It's like every new game I play is just a rehash of something I did 10 years ago. Getting into online trading card games now since I never played them when I was younger.

Coral_sl said:

Games require, I think, some level of neoteny (wikipedia go if you need it).

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LOL. The sound of the rest of your pointless post being flushed down the shit tubes where it belongs.

And probably any post you will ever make here, ever.

Little late to this thread, I skimmed it.. I'm glad I'm not the only one who is getting bored of gaming. I gave planetside2 a shot, played LoL for a while, D3... Bleh.., and now I'm on PoE which is actually still fun to me, but I only play a few hours a week. I tried gw2 and thought it would be my next mmo love, I quit after maybe two months, if that. Now eqn is approaching and I desperately want to get it and enjoy it for years like I did EQ, but I just don't see that happening.

My best friend who is also 30 is a hardcore console gamer, mostly single player titles, but he keeps up with current releases and is going to get xbox1 and ps4 day one like he did the wiiU. He even plays 3ds games and raves about them and I just can't get into it anymore. We are going to PAX this year in Seattle, as we both live in Tacoma, but I'm almost more interested in just going for the keynote speech and the make-a-strip panel. The games are like a bonus..

Since I've lost my romance with games I've moved on to a few other things. I'm restoring a vintage motorcycle, I practice traditional archery with a recurve bow, and my next purchase will probably be a mossberg 500 so I can shoot trap.. I have a wife and two girls and just want them to have some sort of real world knowledge other than how to fight a raid boss in an mmo. Get myself and the kids outdoors, see more of this beautiful state, pick up some real skills and build some character.

I think if EQNext fails me, I will likely close the gaming chapter of my life and move forward to something more rewarding.

Developers just need to stop over developing their games. Scripting every little thing.

The problem with games today is that every single action, from the first log in to the raids at end game everything is completely scripted. Every step, every action and any deviance from that is simply not rewarded what so ever. Perhaps punished in the case of raids and exploits. Games today are sterile because they are over designed and attempt to cater to everyone and end up pleasing very few.

There is no reason to be part of the "community" because the entire experience is hand crafted for you and only you. Fuck everyone else because you don't need them. Well except for that token quest or dungeon which you will only run once because for whatever reason developers enjoy spending months crafting these corridor style dungeons that people will do a single time and drop group to GTFO so they can follow the ! ?.

How about reasons to stick around in a group and do it a few more times? How about not making dungeons the linear corridor crawl they've become? How about giving players reasons to not follow the ! ?? Maybe reward exploration and leave the ! and the ? to the recycle bin where it fucking belongs. Quests are great, what we have gotten in recent games is busy work. Not quests.


Examples of community buildings I'd like to see:

Fast travel from major city to major city. Think WoW Zep. Fast travel from out anywhere to many more cool places think Wizard/druid ports or translocates. They can both exist and it gives people a reason to seek out others, charge fees, interact etc.

Binding. Same deal. Set shrines / areas to bind, caster can bind you anywhere.

Buffs. We don't need massive downtime without buffs but do you remember hearing that casting behind you and that feeling when you saw the icon pop up on your buffs? Yeah, bring that back.

What we need are buffs that are powerful enough to be desired, on classes that people will seek out and want to obtain or dole out. We don't need OP buffs but it would be nice if there were more things like Arcane intellect or Mark of the wild, fortitude. Maybe spice it up some, a heal at x% for an hour with a 1m CD. Soul shard type rez buff. SOW. Summon a portal stone. Shit people would seek out, maybe even tip for and encourage people to talk and interact. Heaven forbid people interact, sorry that isn't in the design plan.

Reasons to run dungeons more than once. Vanguard had some great dungeons and reasons to do them multiple times. Everquest as well. How about starting with significant bonuses for forming groups and sticking together through a few runs? Maybe bigger and better bosses with more loot. Not this +2 to STR shit we get now. Legit real loot people will actually want. Maybe even sell. Oh wait, can't sell most decent loot because that would be out of balance! Kiss my ass.


Pvp be damncan we get some cool classes that feel strong and do cool shit again? Split pulls, FD, mana burn, enchanter abilities, harm touch, loh etc etc. are not included anymore or watered down to almost uselessness because:

1. They fuck up the half assed PVP these retards put in their games. Do it right or use the dev time to expand PVE. Enough with this half ass PVP.
2. Developers can't seem to grasp that Powerful classes with awesome abilities are cool as fuck.
3. BUT MY ENCOUNTER, THEY MIGHT BE ABLE TO CHEESE MY ENCOUNTER. Heaven forbid it doesn't go exactly as you script it.

Oh and faction. Stop these fucking faction grinds. If you want to do factions take a look at Luclin and modernize something like that. I don't know about anyone else but I'd rather be killing giants and their leaders for faction and loot than grabbing 4 of the same quests and filling a bar_1 out of 4.


TLDR:
Give me back some community
Give me a character I feel attached to
Give me a world I want to roll alts in and see again
Give me back a reason to dungeon crawl and get loot
Stop this incremental, uninteresting loot upgrade cycles
Stop over designing your fucking game
Stop cock blocking people from playing (Dalies / lockouts)
Stop these retarded faction systems.