Ammokkx

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

I feel the whole "way too much backlog" issue

Between the garbage I like playing (Nekopara vol. 4) and the actual good, but long stuff I need to get around to (NieR automata, replaying Ever 17) and the fact I have a crippling XIV addiction, there's like no time to play all the shit I want to

I'll get around to muv luv myself, one day. a long day from now, even.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

@Ammokkx If I get back into it, they made it pretty easy to visit other people's worlds and quest together. The only thing you can't really do off server is join a FC or squat in someone's mansion.

@BrokenPromise

Only if you're on the same datacenter. I play on Primal/Exodus, but of the two people I know the server of on the guild, they're both on Aether so I'm shit out of luck playing with them.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

Also triple triad is amazing. Against people or bots.

@BrokenPromise

it's a shame you don't have a sub going 'cause I would've played you a game

...if you were on primal, that is

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

Ohey I just remembered another two things I can be confrontational about

I personally have tried more than 10 (I lost count) of the various free MMOs out there and I can't even remember their names. I remember Silkroad Online because it was my first game of the genre but that's about it. I don't even remember what the last one was.

@PPQ Purple

Ah, yes, you bounced between 10+ games... you remember only a single name of... and yet you're going to claim a lot of them do something right, despite you having no memorable experiences in them.

Do you know why Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, WoW, Runescape and so forth continue to find enduring success? Because they keep finding new ways to keep the individual player engaged. To keep them coming back, so the collective as a whole doesn't collapse.

The very fact you're playing none of the games you have done so in the past shows that they failed to keep your retention. You not being there anymore, by definition, also means you can't socialize in them anymore. You are not finding anything worth going back for. What kind of café doesn't hold its customers? Why would you think those MMOs did their job well when you can't even remember them?

At that point there literally is no more point talking to you as you will continue to demand your odd and unusual perspective is the correct one.

@PPQ Purple

Also this lovely gem.

Yes, I'm the one with the unpopular perspective, just because I'm the first to call you out on this incomprehensibly backwards logic you are utilizing. Despite the fact several others in this thread, while not sharing my exact viewpoint, have all pointed out in their own way that the MMOs they play are, in fact, fun as a single-player experience too. Despite that, you would claim you are the authority, the one who isn't playing MMOs? The one who can't stick with one? Despite the fact there are this many people in here telling you that you are wrong for expecting games to conform to one single-minded, narrow idea based on flawed past experience you laud over others as if it were the gospel of God himself?

PPQ, I hesitated to say Sleeping was playing games wrong, but you are definitely playing videogames wrong if you think your stances are the popular ones. I don't diss others for finding their own value in games as long as they find that value, but you seem to think there are objectively good and bad ways to handle game design, yet you continually fail to recognize what the core appeal of games is to so many people.

Everyone confronting you can name actual examples of games that do what you claim they're doing wrong, right. You can name a single MMO and a few dozen other unnamed ones, and the one named one you only remember because it's your first. Not because you had anything to do in it. Meanwhile, we're supposed to believe that this makes you know what you're talking about better than we do.

Please, firstly get with the times, and then come back when you know what you are talking about.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

The true enjoyment of playing an MMO is when you know there is a cool goal just beyond that boring quest that has you grinding up 300 tigers or some such. So you go into a field and stand for two hours grinding on tigers. And it's as boring as this conversation. Only you aren't alone. There are tens of other players in that same field grinding those same tigers all being bored and yet all looking for that shiny goal in the end.

@PPQ Purple

yeah you definitely haven't played an MMO past 2004

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

14 has implemented similar things as well.

@Fabricant451

Trusts are the coolest shit, they add so much to the main story. I never want to first time a story dungeon without them ever again.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

<Snipped quote by Ammokkx>
What"s asinine is you openly admitting that you are the odd one out and than proceeding to lecture on what the thing you are odd and unusual in is all about. You might as well be a non drinker lecturing about the true purpose of Octoberfest. At that point there literally is no more point talking to you as you will continue to demand your odd and unusual perspective is the correct one.

@PPQ Purple

You still haven't established how fun takes away from socializing, while I've made the point that the game keeping you engaged through fun will, naturally, lead into socializing.

Yeah I'll continue to call your side asinine until you explain to me why an MMO can't be fun to be good at its job.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

MMOs exist as a venue for socialization. That is their literal selling point. Like taverns and conventions they exist to create a fandom and than maintain it for the members to facilitate socialization. In fact I would go so far as to say with some confidence that the vast majority of the hundreds of people I hung out with during that period of my life realistically couldn't have actually cared less about the game as such other than the fact that it was the thing we all used to hang out in and do stuff together.

@PPQ Purple

Sure.

But saying

Basically a good MMO is fundamentally not a game you are supposed to have fun with but something that's meant to facilitate social interaction.

@PPQ Purple

is asinine.

The best MMO's are both something you fundamentally have fun with and facilitate social interaction. They're not mutually exclusive concepts. Upping one doesn't reduce the other.

I would even argue that the more fun an MMO is on a fundamental level, the more people will be drawn to interact socially on it. Why? Because that MMO will be recommended to friends, who will in turn naturally fall into socializing, so having even more people actively running around and engaging with the game's content.

Fun, inherently, incentivizes social interaction, because if you're passionate about something, you're going to want to talk about it.

If I play an obscure videogame for its own merits, I don't need to talk to anyone about it. That doesn't make me any less happy when I find someone who also has played it, but the fact of the matter is I didn't need to have met them in order to have had fun. In the same way, if you fundamentally have fun in an MMO, then meet someone by chance who hits you up for a conversation and you become friends, the MMO has done its job.

Friends got me into XIV, friends that are far more social than I, but if XIV wasn't a good videogame then they couldn't have gotten me into it. Now I'm an active part of the Free Company they're in, and while I'm still easily the most distant person there, the mere fact of the matter is that if the game hadn't kept me playing on its own merits, I wouldn't be there at all.

If you want a chatroom, go to a forum. Like where we are now. MMO's are still videogames and need to use every trick in that book in order to be competent ones.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

If the game keeps you happy and engaged but does not push you into socializing than it has failed at its job as a MMO.

@PPQ Purple

No?

Not at all?

The only function of an MMO is to keep a lot of players playing it, through whatever means neccessary. This is true for literally every videogame.

You also say this as if I am the only person playing XIV and everyone shares my attitude to it. They don't.

Plenty of people socialize in XIV. The saying goes "Glamour is the true endgame" after all, because people are spending more time making their character look pretty at the end of the game rather than doing endgame content.

And you know what that says about XIV?

That it succeeds at both being a good game and a good social experience. It didn't need to sacrifice one for the other. It offers a satisfying experience on both ends of the spectrum.

Saying an MMO can't be "too good or else people wouldn't socialize" is an asinine standpoint to take in. People are upset with WoW because it isn't a very good or rewarding game. Actively making it the game a chore which forces you to engage with it rather than letting you do so on your own terms doesn't facilitate social interaction, it pushes you away from it.

Please stop making sweeping statements about genres you don't play, have no interest in, and don't know the target audience for.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

Conversely if a MMO is too good of a game in its own right than people will just focus on playing it and not socialize.

@PPQ Purple

XIV is actually good as a game too, though

I socialize in the MMO to the best of my abilities (I hang out with my FC and friends) but I'm not very good at that part. I do like playing XIV as a game, however, and have been for a good year now.

In fact, an MMO needs to be good as a game to be sustainable, unless you want to make it a pay2win KMMO nightmare. Games like Guild Wars 2 are good games.

The problem is that the "good part" of the game in XIV's case is constantly shifting back. You had many more skills to work with back when ARR was new compared to now, because it's the same number of skills at 50 compared to at 80. They purposefully keep the amount of buttons introduced low because they want to keep the game controller-friendly. Sure, there's a lot of grinding and busywork involved with any MMO, but if Runescape's enduring success is anything to go by, some people like that. Runescape isn't exactly the most social MMO, either. It's very focused on its repeating-task nature and seeing big number become bigger number.

I'm sorry to keep going off on you like this PPQ, but you have some hilariously misinformed or wrong opinions on genres and how they're structure. Games don't often survive by being actually bad, they're doing stuff right. XIV, especially, is lauded for its great storytelling and newbie-friendly Level Sync system. You can still do most old content as if it was new, and for the ones you can't, it's not impossible to find someone in party finder to help you out.

And for the record,

And once you've found the people you want to spend time with it has to be designed so that it continually gives you new and boring but challenging tasks to do so as to keep giving you an excuse to keep hanging out. Sort of like a drinking game. It's not the worlds most intelligent form of entertainment but it keeps the party going.

@PPQ Purple

I'd still be playing even if I didn't have people to hang out with in-game. In fact, I kind of don't want to be in an FC, but if I'm not, I'm hounded 24/7 by invites from all over.