MMORPGs How they have changed for the better? or worse?

[Kirsten_Rev]

And yet you are here posting, at the forum of a ultra casual friendly game, this is pretty ironic.
Old mmorpgs, i do not miss them even a bit, they were punishing and stressful, and sorry to break your world but it was not good for young minds at all, the mmorpg i played in my young years were causing a ton of stress and kids were fighting in real life because of that game. There were several cases in my country of kids attacking their own parents because they interupted them in playing one of the "old style" mmorpg.
It was bad, often pay2win and was forcing youths to hardcore playing to keep competitve, often playing and ignoring school, not passing from class to class because of the game.
I was raised in those times, i experienced bad sides of online gaming, it made its terrible damage to our society, and you cannot denny this fact.
They were new, addicting and was hard to distiguish real life from online game for kids who played them, i knew in first person a boy who tried commit suicide because he has been hacked in Tibia.
These old games were like drugs given away for free, terribly designed and made to lure in you to spend all your time in them.

These bad sides apply to any form of online gaming, or really online interactions in general. It's the alter ego existing within a virtual space that creates problems for people, not whether a game features deep, time-consuming mechanics or pay-to-win loot boxes. There are stories of physical harm going back to the 70s and 80s, with studies showing that Pong could elicit negative physiological responses. A man died from a heart attack that arose from a compromised cardiovascular system exacerbated primarily by the Berzerk arcade game back in 1982. There have been suicides arising from old MMOs like EverQuest, and at least one infanticide resulting from a mother's addiction to FarmVille. It's all over the place.

That's not to say it isn't an issue. You're absolutely right to bring it up, and I offer my sympathies for what seems like a set of rough personal experiences. But it's a problem that has arisen with the internet and virtual online environments in general, not any specific title or type of online game.

[Zabuza]

I, for one, do *NOT* have Rose-Colored Glasses on.

Old MMOs sucked where you HAD to have 10, 20+ people to do anything "meaningful" in the game. People just don't have that kind of time and schedules anymore with how today's world works. I know people go "but mah massively multiplayer world" but they conveniently forget how they would spend 10, 15, 30+ minutes waiting for everybody to be ready to go, or then you had random disconnects, people having to AFK, etc.

I still don't know what this means when people say it. What do you mean by 'people just don't have that kind of time and schedules anymore in today's world?' Are you saying they did back then? What changed, exactly? Probably you just became an adult when back then you were still in your teens/young adulthood.

[Insertcoins]

This is like the same debate all gamers have, video games were greater back in the day and suck now cause it's all too easy and casual. There's some points to that but It's not all bad. I bet a good chunk of people would've NEVER picked up XIV if it was modeled after an old school system, Hell we have people NOW today in this YEAR saying XIV is too hard. NOW. MMOs and in general video games HAD to change, Look I like harder stuff too. Devil May Cry 3 BEFORE the crybabies made capcom changed it was great. But sadly a good chunk of gamers don't finish their games now, when games are stupid easy and everyone gets a trophy for turning it on. And people still don't finish them. So if mmos stayed as hard as they were back then.. they would be DEAD now. Gaming as a whole would be seeing as dead as the only people who gamed back in the day were arcade nuts and people like nerds and geeks. IT wasn't the kool thing to do and shut alot of people off from it to the point it's still kindof a meme today.

I took pride in finishing games in under a week where the -kool- kids didn't know how to hold a Sega controller or didn't know the different between the 6 button street fighter sega pad vs the default. Or when platformers punished you for being bad.. etc etc...

But those days are gone and just like gaming as a whole mmos are for those -kool- kids now who can't hold a controller, who can't understand what an aoe is, but they want to game now cause it's apparently kool now, now they want to jump in cause they want in cause pretty graphics and whatever is bringing them in. Pretty much we can't have hard stuff cause nongamers are the bigger draw to companies now.

[Insertcoins]

I still don't know what this means when people say it. What do you mean by 'people just don't have that kind of time and schedules anymore in today's world?' Are you saying they did back then? What changed, exactly? Probably you just became an adult when back then you were still in your teens/young adulthood.

Honestly NOTHING changed really.. people just think they are busier with their cell phones giving them instant updates all the time. Like thats the biggest change. Back in the day we didn't have the net in our pockets. If you had to make a call you had to either go home and dail the number, find a payphone, or use your phone at your job or whatever. Now we're walking around withthat in our pockets. And that's a things cause now netflix and the like are giving shows instantly. No longer do you have to wait a week to catch the next eps in - live life- Now you can watch all that in one night when it's brand new. Time hasn't changed. It's still 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. What changed was now people are doing so much on the go cause we have access to so much more on the go.

[Edax]

Is my most on hand example really. Yet the documentary touches on the pandemic that South Korea and several other nations face.
You might not want to look at it.

I work with videogame addicts daily.

Video games are not a disease either.

pan·dem·ic
/panˈdemik/

adjective

1.
(of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or the world.

noun
noun: pandemic; plural noun: pandemics
1.
an outbreak of a pandemic disease.

[Soge01]

Both sides have their good and bad, but I just personally wish there was a proper middle ground between them at least.

[Nims]

I still don't know what this means when people say it. What do you mean by 'people just don't have that kind of time and schedules anymore in today's world?' Are you saying they did back then? What changed, exactly? Probably you just became an adult when back then you were still in your teens/young adulthood.

I don't get this either, back then I had less time cause I had to go to school, do a lot of chores I didn't want, share the computer with someone else, and if my mom said get off at x hour, I had to get off.

Even if people don't have time now, it doesn't mean we should change an entire genre for those few people.

Oh and we still wait 30min+ for people with the duty finder. In mmos today where you make your own group, I get parties faster. Cause at that point it's about you and not just what class you are, people want to run content with that person cause they're funny, good at the game, etc.

That's not the fault of the game, that's the fault of the playerbase. XIV encourages you to take a longer path towards the end, to do things other than rush the latest endgame content

Huh? No it's the fault of the game, XIV has absolutely zero mid tier content, all the content and gear that "matters" are at level cap. When people talk about the journey and not rushing, back in the day MMOs had actual mid level content. Like mid level raids, mid lvl pvp arenas, rifts, etc. Not fluff content like gold sauce and sight seeing.

[Barraind]

You can blame players for ilvl actually.

No, I'm speaking of Ilvl.

Gearscore was a way to see what your Ilvl is.

Ilvl is (albeit 14's way of representing this) the driving mechanic behind the specific allocation of stats on gear. for the longest time in wow it was a set function of ilvl*statpoints allocated to a single stat, which was then decremented by a specific value to have a secondary stat added, so that at lower levels, the stat points of 2 stats added up to the same amount as one stat (level 39) to where it was spread across 3-4 different stats and added up to 1.5-1.75x the value of a single stat (I think 1.73% was Icecrown, but its been a long time and i cant find the old values for gear, but it was a simple exponential scaling of ilvl*base).


I lvl and resulting formulas are drag and drop "heres the ilvl, the stats will ALWAYS be: X or Y/Z or A/B/C or E/F/G/H" and you can determine exactly what the total stat value will be of any given piece of gear at that ilvl (and sometimes varying by rarity, but thats not even a thing in 14 anymore) if you know the formula, but there will NEVER be a difference across pieces of the same ilvl.


Comparatively, you have EQ which treats AC, HP and Mana, Base stats, secondary stats, tertiary stats, and resists as different values with different weights and has a range of allowable weights per zone.

People rush through the game to get that "beat it first!" pat on the back and then we get flooded with "Where all the endgame content?" complaints.

Thats a symptom of todays design.

I had world firsts in EQ in 2 different guilds for 8 or 9 expansions. We killed stuff and then we... killed days worth of other stuff. Beating the last boss of a raid zone in an expansion meant we still had 2-3 FULL RAID ZONES of relevant content to do (and then it started meaning we had 6 one-off dragons, a couple 36 man zones, a couple 24 man augment farms, a couple raid zones, epic 2.0 fights, and a raid zone for trash farming for augments) on our other raid nights. We had aa farms, or involved tradeskilling, or epic quests that took weeks or months of doing stuff. We could farm old content for fun toys to play with (clicky illusions, clicky shrinks, clicky levitate, clicky haste, clicky shoot a fireball pewpew)

We didnt kill 4 trial bosses in a day and have nothing meaningful to do until reset because you maxxed your tradeskills FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS in 100 leves, 2 weeks of custom deliveries and crystarium quests.

Back in the day, everyone knew everyone - If you screwed someone / a guild over, you bet your ass your name would be on a forum and everyone would know what happened and who to ignore. Now? Not so much

Now its harassing, bullying and naming and shaming.

Which are three things you SHOULD ABSOLUTELY DO to people who act in that way. The only people who benefit from the prevailing mindset of "now now, we cant shame them for instigating BS" are the people instigating the BS.

[Nedkel]

Wow, so this is a post.
What if people just wanted to escape? Why they have to be broken and depressed and have no purpose.
We all play these games for different reasons. Quit with the judgemental bs.

Several studies has confirmed what i just wrote in my post, mmorpgs does have a negative impact on psychological health and social life of minors.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3820076/
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6ca...84856f7adc.pdf
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/287...b030ecb5f7.pdf Page 19

The amount of people in denial to this negative mmorpgs effects is saddening.

Old mmorpgs were bad in particular, they were extra grindy and required a ton more time to do anything, it was bad design which was made on purpose because developers couldnt care less to create more content. Traveling to do X thing even took more time than running a dungeon in our current game, forming a group was even longer.

These bad sides apply to any form of online gaming, or really online interactions in general. It's the alter ego existing within a virtual space that creates problems for people, not whether a game features deep, time-consuming mechanics or pay-to-win loot boxes. There are stories of physical harm going back to the 70s and 80s, with studies showing that Pong could elicit negative physiological responses. A man died from a heart attack that arose from a compromised cardiovascular system exacerbated primarily by the Berzerk arcade game back in 1982. There have been suicides arising from old MMOs like EverQuest, and at least one infanticide resulting from a mother's addiction to FarmVille. It's all over the place.
That's not to say it isn't an issue. You're absolutely right to bring it up, and I offer my sympathies for what seems like a set of rough personal experiences. But it's a problem that has arisen with the internet and virtual online environments in general, not any specific title or type of online game.

Of course gaming in general is a time taker, and there were people who abused it even if it was not needed.
However the game design does have a giant impact on time spent and investment felt by anyone who played particular game. I could guarantee you if you compare a average wow player in mid 2000 to the current one, the old type will have significantly more time spent per day than modern player.
The amount of time spent on a game has its negative effects on a person who is playing them, the longer he plays, the worse and it has been proven in studies.

[Mistyregions]

Overall I think they are a little easier because they are more streamlined and we as a player base have more knowledge. I think what changed the dynamic of old school to new school wasn't min/maxing but how you went about it. Back in the dizzay you could look it up and maybe find some vague information but it was far easier to just ask someone in game. That's the socialization that made an MMO. Joining a good guild ment direct access to good knowledge. Now FCs barely know jack and go to limsa and shout out if someone can explain main stat to substat ratios. Or that you need help with something, you will mostly likely be met with silence or told to use PF.