Off Topic Discussion Megathread

[ReynTime]

This isn't a "nowadays" thing at all. People who want grouping to be a requirement to get anything done were ever a niche.

Not at all. It's just the genre fails to attract a younger audience. People who today swear they don't have the time are adults who used to be kids or teens back then. MMORPGs have an aging audience compared to other genres. An aging audience that doesn't want to spend time grouping up.

Old school mmorpgs or mechanics are deemed tedious, and archaic. Something like that really would only fit with a niche audience, and in turn that means a triple A studio/publisher that actually has the resources to create and maintain something along these lines will most likely not bother investing in it. Heavy monetization won't save a game people don't want to play. Might put it on life support for awhile though.

I don't think you have any idea of what I'm talking about. Are you trying to tell me single player RPGs are archaic? Because they're doing well enough, some more than well enough even. I'm not talking about endless grind, which XIV itself has in spades.

But OK. You want to argue that MMORPGs with old-school mechanics/challenge are not viable. Well, guess what, FFXI is still around. And it's only no longer SE's most profitable product because XIV surpassed it after almost a decade trying with its vastly more populated playerbase. Does XI now has about a half a dozen populated servers only? Yes. But it's still very profitable, active, and getting more frequent updates than a lot of "not dead" MMOs. Now imagine if SE actually assigned more than two people to sustain it, if it's UI wasn't clunky and its registration/login process was updated...
Besides XI in its "dead" state as people in the XIV fanbase like to say in the most ridiculous hyperbolic sense is more active than every MMORPG not called WoW/XIV/ESO.

The audience exists.

And to elaborate a bit on old XIV. Grouping was nowhere near as bad as people who probably weren't there say it would have been. The copy-paste camps that people like to bash now were extremely important in the grouping process because you'd go to one and you KNEW there would probably be players forming or looking for parties for leve sharing or behests there. They designed these specific spots to act as mini hubs for adventurers leveling in specific tiers and Tanaka, who isn't the "idiot" youtube videos like to tell you he was, knew what his team doing when they created the camp locations. Grouping for the instances and NMs was more time consuming because you needed a larger party. But that's the beauty of having content of flexible party size like the old leves were (and FATEs are supposed to be now). Grouping for hamlet defences? Not that bad either. A lot of people wanted the relics and that feature was part of the process of getting it + it was on a timer so people didn't want to miss it.

There are always ways to design a game in a way that it naturally pushes players into grouping without making them sit around for an hour shouting in the chat without using a DF system. Specially in a day and age where party finder exists.