MMOs Are Cancer And More Importantly Decline

[Humbaba]

It's come to my attention that MMOs are getting ever more popular within HQ circles. I am here to say that MMOs are GARBAGE and should NEVER be played, talked about positively or recognized as legitimate forms of entertainment.

MMOs are predatory by design. By locking progression between increasing amounts of time, the "player" (henceforth referred to as "user") will be forced to fork over money every month in order to make ultimately meaningless progress, which only serves the end of making even more meaningless progress until the user gets bored or reaches max level, whereas many users will start over with a new character. MMOs are time sinks by nature and provide no real entertainment aside from "number go up".

The social aspect is largely secondary and the social circles they engender are about as non-toxic as hanging out with your weed smoking buddies. MMO homies are united by a common addiction and by the same lack of impulse control that led them to the MMO in the first place.

Do MMOs have gameplay? NO! All you do is click buttons and watch a bad animation play, after which you wait a designated amount of time until you're allowed to do it again. Whatever passes for combat in an MMO doesn't even stack up to playing Pokeyman cards.

Do MMOS have a story? Lmao no.

So what are we left with? A brain hacking program, designed to trick our gullible monkey minds into hanging on, spending money month after month for a cheap facsimile of success, progress and social interaction and friendship. Do NOT under any circumstances play MMOs!


Say NO! To the MMO!


-Humbaba

[Acrux]

The worst part of all of this is that you've all caused@Humbaba to post something I agree with.

[GhostCow]

Humbaba is mad that no one wants to play TF2 with him

[H-H-Holmes]

Humbaba is a zoomoid who is too young to know that there was a time when good MMOs existed.

[Decline]

It's come to my attention that MMOs are getting ever more popular within HQ circles. I am here to say that MMOs are GARBAGE and should NEVER be played, talked about positively or recognized as legitimate forms of entertainment.

I agree, I would exclude manly hardcore full loot PvP MMOs from the list.
These games do not currently exist though, therefore the number of excluded games is 0.

[rusty_shackleford]

Early MMOs were magical in a way that I've never seen recaptured since, you just missed out so of course you wouldn't get it

[Tweed]

Early MMOs were magical in a way that I've never seen recaptured since, you just missed out so of course you wouldn't get it

This is true though. Once UO hit the scene the market took off and everyone was trying something new. It was great keeping track of all the upcoming games to see what developers would come up with. Once WoW became a success it put an end to creativity and everything became about following the leader and endless whale hunts.

[Lich]

So what are we left with? A brain hacking program, designed to trick our gullible monkey minds into hanging on, spending money month after month for a cheap facsimile of success, progress and social interaction and friendship. Do NOT under any circumstances play MMOs!

This is true for most video games.

[rusty_shackleford]

Was any genre as badly destroyed by a single game overshadowing every other game in the genre like MMOs were?

[H-H-Holmes]

It doesn't apply exactly as this game is a masterpiece and WoW certainly isn't, but in terms of saturating a genre with clones of itself, I would say HL1. Even today first person shooters are still borrowing the same tired formula.

[Lich]

Starcraft may have had a similar effect

[Oyster Sauce]

Was any genre as badly destroyed by a single game overshadowing every other game in the genre like MMOs were?

League of Legends executed the RTS genre.

[Lich]

The RTS genre had been dying long before League of Legends became popular. I don't remember anything released after Warcraft 3 that was as popular as Starcraft or Warcraft 3.

[rusty_shackleford]

RTS died because it's not streamer friendly, it's too hard to figure out what's going on if you don't have intimate knowledge of the genre/game. MOBAs are easy to follow, hero not dying = good, hero dying = bad. Same deal with 'hero shooters' and such.

[SoLong]

Do MMOS have a story? Lmao no.

Some tried to have one. Guild Wars 2 had a half way compelling story untill they ****** it up.

Coincidentally the story went to **** when we went to the desert where all the brown people live. What a coincidence eh?

[rusty_shackleford]

Some of SWTOR's class stories are quite good, actually. Good enough to be considered commendable attempts at kotor 3 if it were standalone.

[GhostCow]

RTS died because it's not streamer friendly, it's too hard to figure out what's going on if you don't have intimate knowledge of the genre/game. MOBAs are easy to follow, hero not dying = good, hero dying = bad. Same deal with 'hero shooters' and such.

RTS died long before streamers were a thing. It died because it's a **** genre only loved by Korean autists.

[rusty_shackleford]

RTS died because it's not streamer friendly, it's too hard to figure out what's going on if you don't have intimate knowledge of the genre/game. MOBAs are easy to follow, hero not dying = good, hero dying = bad. Same deal with 'hero shooters' and such.

RTS died long before streamers were a thing. It died because it's a **** genre only loved by Korean autists.

SC2 was very popular for its pre-streaming time period, and it died right as the rise of streaming began. It's not a coincidence.

[Decline]

RTS died because it's not streamer friendly, it's too hard to figure out what's going on if you don't have intimate knowledge of the genre/game. MOBAs are easy to follow, hero not dying = good, hero dying = bad. Same deal with 'hero shooters' and such.

RTS died long before streamers were a thing. It died because it's a **** genre only loved by Korean autists.

SC2 was very popular for its pre-streaming time period, and it died right as the rise of streaming began. It's not a coincidence.

SC2 has always been streamed. Streaming really started to pick up during the golden years of SC2, so that is just correlation.

SC2 died because blizzturd was already flushing itself down the shitter in the early 10s and focusing too much on eSports!!!, thus failing to capture the essence of what made the first game great. The expansions were lackluster and unlike the 40,000keseque grim-dark story of the 1st game, SC2's story is LE EPIC capeshit.

SC2 is where you really started to notice that the people who had given the earlier blizzard titles their magic were gone. It's also the time when the first ideas of this thread edit: the other thread, unable to make vidya started to ferment in my mind.

[J1M]

Was any genre as badly destroyed by a single game overshadowing every other game in the genre like MMOs were?

StarCraft
Magic the Gathering
League of Legends

[Norfleet]

The RTS genre had been dying long before League of Legends became popular. I don't remember anything released after Warcraft 3 that was as popular as Starcraft or Warcraft 3.

RTS is a genre that isn't very accessible. Whether you win or lose the game is often decided well in advance of making contact with the enemy, sometimes before the game has even started. The player is generally presented with an opaque wall of options, with no clear understanding of what goes where. You've got 4 peasants and a town center. What happens now? What is your destination? What should you do from here? It's pretty much never clear and the understanding of what you need to do is only gained well after the Steam refund period. Even if you understand what it is you need to be doing to play the game, the interface for enacting your will in the game is often awful. You've got dozens or more units, with perhaps nearly a half-a-dozen clickie buttons, each of which has to be issued on a single-unit basis. Also, he's in your base, killin' ur doodz.

This is why RTS essentially got replaced by MOBAs. One unit, maybe a half a dozen clickies, and that's it. Easy to understand, easy to manage.

[Decline]

Please ignore the ****** in the pink shirt rambling inane ****.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Do MMOs have gameplay? NO! All you do is click buttons and watch a bad animation play, after which you wait a designated amount of time until you're allowed to do it again. Whatever passes for combat in an MMO doesn't even stack up to playing Pokeyman cards.

Oldschool MMO combat was fun. The act of pushing a button itself was not the focus of the gameplay; the gameplay was the socialization that happened during the combat. The APM was low enough that you could actually chat during an encounter and form friendships while fighting. That has gone away with modern retail WoW clones that require you to be pushing a button every second in order to beat the DPS check, but some games like Guild Wars 2 have enjoyable enough action combat.

Do MMOS have a story? Lmao no.

There are several WoW questlines that I thought were very engaging story wise. FFXIV is practically a visual novel and was very enjoyable up until Shadowbringers.

So what are we left with?

The most amount of character customization of any game, ever. Decades of races, transmogs, mounts, pets, and other attachments for your character.

If you want large scale faction warfare, you play MMOs. My first MMO was Space Cowboy Online (later rebooted as Air Rivals and ACE Online). The player elected nation leaders scheduled big wars to happen over the weekends and you would have hundreds to sometimes thousands of players turning out and it was very fun. In WoW you had huge RP-PvP wars happening in the Arathi Highlands during MoP, and GW2 has the WvW gamemode. No other genre of game provides this experience, that feeling you are participating in a massive war, except maybe certain Mount & Blade RP servers but they're usually not fantasy and ofcourse don't have the character customization of MMOs.


Aforementioned RP-PvP campaign I participated in a decade ago





MMOs like WoW, GW2, and FFXIV are the only games providing a story with a long continuity besides the Trails series of JRPGs. If you want a high production value fantasy RPG, your options ATM are extremely limited. In the West, a Witcher and Dragon Age game come out once every 7 years, and those games don't appeal to me very much. You're only real option is WoW or GW2 as they have a new release every 2 years. The JRPG industry is in dire straits with most devs having died off during the transition to 3D HD. Besides the annual Trails franchise, you only get a Xenoblade or a Monochrome Mobius once every 5 years now, while FFXIV has a new release every 2 years.

I also quite like the colorful, high fantasy aesthetics of MMOs. In WoW I got to visit the shattered alien world of Draenor, the shattered cityscape of Argus, a drowned city rising from the depths, a tentacle empire from 20,000 years ago, floating sky islands connected by hyperspace flightpaths, humongous underground zones, etc. In GW2 I got to visit zones such as an airship fleet that crashed into the canopy of a humongous jungle where the very trees are alive and trying to kill you. The inside of a volcano with its multiple biomes inside and a boiling sea. A desert scarred by purple crystals that you must take shelter under in order to avoid being struck by lightning. A zone set on the back of a humongous fallen dragon who was mistaken for a mountain range. Walking across a sea that was turned into jade. Etc. Those drab, photorealistic AAA RPGs that come out every now and then like Skyrim, Dragon Age, the Witcher, etc, don't capture my imagination like these games.



WoW



GW2

These are some of the coolest places I've ever been to in a video game.

I do agree about the predatory grinds built into MMOs, though with the current big three MMOs it depends. I haven't seriously played FFXIV for a few months and I'm only still subbed because I fell into the housing trap (you lose your house if you don't visit it once every 45 days) and I don't want to have to spend many hours glitching my decorations back into place, and with the housing shortage being as bad as it is it is unlikely I would be able to get a comparable good spot. GW2 doesn't have any mandatory grinds at all; you play through the storyline and get the mounts and your masteries and then you're pretty much out of stuff to do and can walk away until the next expansion comes out. WoW fortunately has gotten rid of most of their mandatory grinds with the latest expansion, but that has revealed that Blizzard barely created any content that players intrinsically wanted to do because it's fun. You do the Blue Dragonflight storyline (which was good) but it takes 2 hours and then you've done it. You have fun exploring the Zskera Vaults 1 or 2 times, and then you've done it. Next week the final raid of the current expansion releases. I will do that and I will unsub until the next expansion releases. Blizzard has promised that they will release expansions faster and without cutting content, but they've said that before so we'll see.

The social aspect is largely secondary and the social circles they engender are about as non-toxic as hanging out with your weed smoking buddies. MMO homies are united by a common addiction and by the same lack of impulse control that led them to the MMO in the first place.

Ten years later and I am still playing forum mafia with the guys I met on a MMO fan forum, even if most of them don't play WoW anymore.

Do MMOS have a story? Lmao no.

Some tried to have one. Guild Wars 2 had a half way compelling story untill they ****** it up.

Coincidentally the story went to **** when we went to the desert where all the brown people live. What a coincidence eh?

GW2's story was worthwhile IMO. The vanilla game starts out fine. I enjoyed most of the chapters, particularly the Charr story. The voice acting was good. Then you reach the first two seasons and things are pretty mediocre for a while. The good voice actors were too expensive for Anet to retain, so the vanilla cast gets replaced with new characters who just aren't as interesting as the old characters, and you're not getting to visit new maps. Then things pick back up again with the HoT expansion and the old cast are back, and the story gets better and better until season 4, which was written to be a soft ending for GW2 because the game hadn't been renewed for a third expansion or a fifth season yet and the devs didn't know if this was the end of GW2 development. S4 was a satisfying ending, a much better ending than most video game storylines that span multiple games like Suikoden, Utawarerumono, Trails, WoW, etc. Turns out that the game did get renewed for another season, and the first couple episodes of Icebrood Saga were very promising. Then the studio decided that they instead wanted to do an expansion, so IBS was axed halfway through and the story jumps the shark had a really unsatisfying ending. Then you get to the 3rd expansion, End of Dragons, which was rushed and was disappointing and lives in the shadow of S4's cathartic ending.

[WaterMage]

WoW brought DECLINE.

Ultima Online, Dark Sun Online : Shattered Lands and so on are as good a their single player counterparts.

[Shillitron]

The title of this thread made me wonder "Can we actually decline further in gaming?"

I think we hit rock bottom years ago and just kept digging. we are reaching the minimum value of a signed integer before it rolls over.. we are close to tunneling to the other side of the planet.

Essentially, Decline in {current_year} video games is reaching the threshold of just being incline.

[SoLong]

GW2's story was worthwhile IMO. The vanilla game starts out fine. I enjoyed most of the chapters, particularly the Charr story. The voice acting was good. Then you reach the first two seasons and things are pretty mediocre for a while. The good voice actors were too expensive for Anet to retain, so the vanilla cast gets replaced with new characters who just aren't as interesting as the old characters, and you're not getting to visit new maps. Then things pick back up again with the HoT expansion and the old cast are back, and the story gets better and better until season 4, which was written to be a soft ending for GW2 because the game hadn't been renewed for a third expansion or a fifth season yet and the devs didn't know if this was the end of GW2 development. S4 was a satisfying ending, a much better ending than most video game storylines that span multiple games like Suikoden, Utawarerumono, Trails, WoW, etc. Turns out that the game did get renewed for another season, and the first couple episodes of Icebrood Saga were very promising. Then the studio decided that they instead wanted to do an expansion, so IBS was axed halfway through and the story jumps the shark had a really unsatisfying ending. Then you get to the 3rd expansion, End of Dragons, which was rushed and was disappointing and lives in the shadow of S4's cathartic ending.

Heart of thorns was very, very good in my opinion.

The stuff afterwards... ugh. It gets worse if you played the original Guild Wars.

Two of the most memorable antagonists (Lazarus and Palawako Joko) were reduced to caricatures and yeeted out of existence to make way for their newer, blander protagonists.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was being forced to bow and scrape before Kormir (as a Charr no less!) and help rebuild her idiotic cult if I wanted the flying mount.

Of any of the gods to actually meet they pick the ******* black woman who ****** everything up in Guild Wars 1, released an evil god to kickstart the apocalypse, was UTTERLY useless in every single aspect of the game and then stole the power of said god once the players were done defeating it while she ate popcorn in the background. It's been forever and I still hate that ******* character. I swear she's based on one of the dev's crushes or girlfriends, this level of Mary Sueishness can't be explained otherwise.

[WaterMage]

One mmo which I loved is DDO. No endless gear farming, cooldown managing. And here is just one of the many places to quest in Ravenloft expansion :



3 Tarot cards are drawn and they show good indications of a friend, foe and treasure to help you from escaping the castle, making each run different.

You can't grind xp by endless killing. Characters has attributes not 100% determined by gear, racial trees, talent trees from specific quests, racial trees, class trees, feats, bonus from gear doesn't stack, has tomes, past lives from your character which can reincarnate, rare scrolls, all tier 8/9 spells can only be found in AH and in random loot, reagents for spells, including special reagents for create undead and stoneskin, has metamagic, save DC's and etc.

Now compare this game with Sword Coast Legends...

[Humbaba]

Let the record show that @rusty_shackleford, known MMO addict and degenerate gambler has relapsed and is with the junkies now. Also, MMOs killed our nice and comfy lounge.



-Humbaba

[Boontaker]

One mmo which I loved is DDO. No endless gear farming, cooldown managing. And here is just one of the many places to quest in Ravenloft expansion :



3 Tarot cards are drawn and they show good indications of a friend, foe and treasure to help you from escaping the castle, making each run different.

You can't grind xp by endless killing. Characters has attributes not 100% determined by gear, racial trees, talent trees from specific quests, racial trees, class trees, feats, bonus from gear doesn't stack, has tomes, past lives from your character which can reincarnate, rare scrolls, all tier 8/9 spells can only be found in AH and in random loot, reagents for spells, including special reagents for create undead and stoneskin, has metamagic, save DC's and etc.

Now compare this game with Sword Coast Legends...

What's it like to play DDO in current day? Is it pay to win? Do people group for the dungeons or do the red dragon or whatever other raids have come out?

[Decline]

One mmo which I loved is DDO. No endless gear farming, cooldown managing. And here is just one of the many places to quest in Ravenloft expansion :



3 Tarot cards are drawn and they show good indications of a friend, foe and treasure to help you from escaping the castle, making each run different.

You can't grind xp by endless killing. Characters has attributes not 100% determined by gear, racial trees, talent trees from specific quests, racial trees, class trees, feats, bonus from gear doesn't stack, has tomes, past lives from your character which can reincarnate, rare scrolls, all tier 8/9 spells can only be found in AH and in random loot, reagents for spells, including special reagents for create undead and stoneskin, has metamagic, save DC's and etc.

Now compare this game with Sword Coast Legends...

What's it like to play DDO in current day? Is it pay to win? Do people group for the dungeons or do the red dragon or whatever other raids have come out?

I think of the two Turdbine MMOs LOTRO is the stronger one.

Edit: For mindless questing I would rather play Elder Scrolls Online, it works on the Steam Deck at least.