Merbutler_Gothique [he/him]

?? I wasn’t hating. I don’t care about being cool. As a fellow 80s kid, I was putting my two cents in on your comment. I have no idea what favorite creator, movie, or game you are talking about here.

And yeah, I am new here. What does that matter?

Something has certainly made the medium more toxic across the board. Communication on the internet is kind of hitting a low spot culturally speaking in my experience. I know some people attribute that to dead internet theory, but people are literally calling for people to just unplug now.

I’m open to it being something else, but I really do think there is a kind of cultural noncommunicative wave that we’re seeing roll out in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Some people are more open to communication, but most of that is in older things (like OSRS and Everquest) where people are more prone to chat via text.

I can’t speak to the experience in Arc Raiders, but I can speak to a similar experience in Fallout 76, where there is proximity voice chat. That game is like a ghost town despite its player count having gone up, that community has just opted out from using voice chat, unlike how it used to be in earlier days. I would assume that Arc Raiders will eventually go the same way.

I do agree that some games have made people be the barrier to progress, and your statement on players hating the interaction. Moderation being handed over to automation is one of the worst things I have ever seen happen in games and certainly hasn’t helped. But I do think that moderation itself can turn into something sinister, like what we have seen Reddit become.

I don’t really have any answers or hard data to back up my assertions, but it has become hard for me to ignore it at this point. I feel like we have crested the hill and are on the way down now.

Eh. We have been getting a ton of horror, but a pittance of it is actually good. Some of the best horror movies being released are not even advertised in the genre.

I can’t agree. I watched this genre evolve from the tabletop. I was there playing rogue in the earliest days, and I was there to marvel at the connection of one PC to another, and then the BBS, and eventually the internet as we know it. WoW was the biggest wave crashing on the shore, but it wasn’t the only one.

People connecting to play fantasy games together goes far beyond the MMORPG. RPGs are still very popular. Their translation to computing was inevitable.

They did make something magical for a time. The problem is, they didn’t see the magic themselves. They were programming something else. That singular point where there were millions of people obsessed with the same thing was a dragon they didn’t know how to handle.

The tragedies were also real.

But I don’t think there wouldn’t be MMORPGs without them. We had them before WoW, and there would have been many after. MUDs are still running. The hunger for a shared fantasy simulation online is still there.

Stars Reach is the next installment in that legacy I’m hoping is more than just capitalist chafe, but regardless of WoW, there are still minds trying to make it happen out there.

Healthy development is not a promise for a personality that anyone is going to like.

In the current climate, you’re not going to be able to maintain any kind of deep relationship with anyone that does share your values. People are absolutely isolating based on the slightest of differences.

WoW started off alot closer to EQ than what it is now.

I don’t think that killing the genre is explicitly Blizzards fault. It should be fairly evident at this point that we’re having a much larger movement where people are moving away from interacting or even talking to each other largely.

Blizzard, being a capitalist enterprise, was simply adjusting to try to keep their subscriber numbers up while stifling the competition.

I cannot stand what WoW became. It is like a parasite that lived on after devouring its host. But I can’t blame it for wanting to live.