Do you ever think about how people play games to escape yet...

[Midareyukki]

Would it have to be pork? I prefer chicken sausage, particularly with herbs and green onions.

Pretty sure it's ground-up behemoth. You'd have to ask the mod maker. Whatever it is, it's definitely not made with pork nor chicken.

And if you think anything green is in there, you'll be incredibly disappointed.

[MintnHoney]

Pretty sure it's ground-up behemoth. You'd have to ask the mod maker. Whatever it is, it's definitely not made with pork nor chicken.

And if you think anything green is in there, you'll be incredibly disappointed.

If I bring my own Behemoth, I'll bet I can have green bits.

[LianaThorne]

Or, hear me out, those people not doing the content elephant be doing the content even if it had a broader range and more content released.



These people are only here to mod the game and play second life. That's it.


Also, can I just say I don't understand why mods like these are so popular? They look awful. I'm not going to say the current models and textures we have are amazing HD masterpieces, but almost every gpose modder I see just has their character full of terrible looking flat textured models.

Only thing I'm gonna say here.

Stating that all people who use mods are just here to play Second Life is not true at all. While yes, there are some who enjoy the passive side of the game, there are many who also run Ultimates & Savage, achievement/title hunt, pvp, lead FCs...I get the club scene is huge but it's not really fair to blanket everyone under that assumptions when some don't even touch nightclubs with a ten foot pole and are just using mods to further their own character customization.

[AnnRam]

*Old man croaky voice* "Back in my day!!"

Escapism always existed. People just failed to learn how to deal with it. If it's not videogames, it was roleplaying, if not roleplaying, it was reading and writing crap. Even before the internet became a major thing, you had people utterly lost on television shows. Now, are we only going to blame the younger generations for it, or have the older generations do a trash job at teaching them better?

^^ just saying, older peeps: stop blaming youngsters' issues only on the internet and start looking into who failed to properly teach them the values you want them to exhibit~

You will never experience ever how things were before and why MMORPG games are dead with only two main games destroying themselves (ffxiv/wow).

Back in early 2000's MMO games were something so unique and every experience special. Now if you reach level 90 nobody cares because it's braindead easy.

Now we have an avalanche of people trying to emulate their "real lifes" while catfishing left and right with nothing but lewd content or sex humor 24/7.

[Raoabolic]

You will never experience ever how things were before and why MMORPG games are dead with only two main games destroying themselves (ffxiv/wow).

Back in early 2000's MMO games were something so unique and every experience special. Now if you reach level 90 nobody cares because it's braindead easy.

Now we have an avalanche of people trying to emulate their "real lifes" while catfishing left and right with nothing but lewd content or sex humor 24/7.

Dungeon Finder won't change anything, they said. Server communities will still be a thing, they said. Eh, not like it matters considering "catfishing" has been a thing since the 2000s except everyone called them a ____ and moved on looking for a healer in shout. Can't go back to 2000s era internet when everyone is ready to weaponize the ToS and dogpiling people based on the latest moral crusade, lmao.

[Amarande]

Dungeon Finder won't change anything, they said. Server communities will still be a thing, they said. Eh, not like it matters considering "catfishing" has been a thing since the 2000s except everyone called them a ____ and moved on looking for a healer in shout. Can't go back to 2000s era internet when everyone is ready to weaponize the ToS and dogpiling people based on the latest moral crusade, lmao.

Even weaponizing the ToS wasn't as big a problem in the olden days. The problem is that companies cheaped out (I think SE might be the only major one left at this point that really looks into every report by hand instead of just blindly going off - and sometimes, based on anecdotes regarding WoW players, apparently solely off - of how many people submitted a similar report against a particular account) and defaulted to automatically actioning everyone who gets a large number of reports against them in a short period, without regard for whether those reports are even founded, essentially handing over even ToS enforcement to a vote kick style process.

That actually goes beyond moral arguments (which, judging by the amount of toxic chat that persists in MMOs, have really not wielded much power) and even becomes a literal competitive tool.

A big example is WoW Classic, where the return of competition for world raid boss tags (Retail world bosses meanwhile are shared credit, like Hunts) resulted in a complete and sad joke on some worlds as instead of competing normally, guilds (armed with 40 people in attendance, more than enough to trigger a suspension) would simply mass report the competing guild's raid, forcing them to spend their time filing ban appeals with Blizzard while the report abusers got to kill the dragon unopposed (keeping in mind that world bosses in older WoW tend to respawn about as often as S ranks here, unlike retail where they respawn quickly but have a weekly gate on rewards).

It's a good thing SE does still review reports by hand, one can only imagine what Hunt culture would be like by now if they did things this same way.

Server communities eroding has been a very real problem on the other hand, though: every time SE has opened cross server barriers to an activity, it has turned out much the same as WoW, where multiple diverse communities were ultimately telescoped into a single hivemind, normally under the control of the most serious and hardcore players (to return to the original topic, the kind that often even attempt to bring even more onerous RL aspects into the game, such as being expected to have a work-like mindset to group events) thus leaving more laid back players with less and less power, their arguments dismissed as "Complaining To Complain" by the dominant group. And yet, we get steadily more cross-server XYZs anyway ...

[kevin_satron]

Maybe, but considering how most social media has harmful effects on peoples mental health, is that really something you want to emulate?

so you mean mmo never have harmful effects on people's mental health before?

[AnnRam]

Dungeon Finder won't change anything, they said. Server communities will still be a thing, they said. Eh, not like it matters considering "catfishing" has been a thing since the 2000s except everyone called them a ____ and moved on looking for a healer in shout. Can't go back to 2000s era internet when everyone is ready to weaponize the ToS and dogpiling people based on the latest moral crusade, lmao.

DF and any matchmaking ruined everything in MMORPGS.
The whole point of getting into an MMORPG was to explore and create communities, discover new ways to play , seek for help, be the best guild or make parties to go hunt a strong foe and not getting your hand hold without any risks to the point that you don't even need to interact with anyone in order to beat the game.

Most people here don't even know how it feels to wait or scout for a priest player to ask for some buffs in order to make the dungeon a bit easy.
Here 23 years later what we have now?

-Click on menu
-Click on Duty finder
-Click on the dungeon I want
-Wait between 5-15 minutes.
-Teleport in to the dungeon from any point.
- o/
-o7
-The only risk it's our healer/tank dc or felt to sleep.
-Mobs don't drop anything, not even money or experience
-Straight corridors, item level doesn't matter, party composition neither.
-Dungeon ends, nobody sees each other in their life's again.
-Repeat.

Then I suppose this is what "modern gamers" wants, instant gratification and rewards even for the minimum effort.

[Midareyukki]

You will never experience ever how things were before and why MMORPG games are dead with only two main games destroying themselves (ffxiv/wow).

Back in early 2000's MMO games were something so unique and every experience special. Now if you reach level 90 nobody cares because it's braindead easy.

Now we have an avalanche of people trying to emulate their "real lifes" while catfishing left and right with nothing but lewd content or sex humor 24/7.

First: I don't care to.

Second: I was young, WoW didn't exist so much less did FF14, and I remember people ERP'd in Second Life (notorious for its sims-like content) and yes even bleeding Runescape of all things.

It's really not anything new. Older people are just reacting so strongly because it's far more widespread now.

[Amarande]

Then I suppose this is what "modern gamers" wants, instant gratification and rewards even for the minimum effort.

I expect the problem is that usual bugaboo, real life.

Most decent people would probably LIKE to have a more vibrant community, especially when they realize how much matchmaking enables poor player behavior (because the likelihood of being seen again by the same people, or even actually being remembered when you are, is low; not to mention blacklisting is not honored by DF which ... yeah, but there are reasons, especially when groups as large as Alliance Raids and Frontlines need to be supported).

The problem is not so much minimum effort though - it is minimum time. People tend to have less free time as they get older, while the amount of time needed to learn an equally complex task soars, if one can even reach the same level at it as those starting younger at all (example: Chess). For many folks, and especially so among older school gamers, gaming is first and foremost a hobby: a lifelong passion, not some kind of sport-esque career to be expected to drop in favor of the younger and spryer as age and RL take their toll.

Heck, for that matter, even today's younger set struggle to find time for hobbies, what with all the stuff they are pressured to have-to-do, especially if they want to get into a decent college and not end up a freight jockey or customer servant for the rest of their life.

Then you have the people who are very privileged in terms of free time (such as WFH workers and people who were on the bonus unemployment during the pandemic) who seem to expect that others need to magically rearrange RL to have the same amount of free time, or bow out because of their "inexperience" or "not wanting to put in effort" "dragging down" the temporally advantaged player. Isn't that at least a little unreasonable?

Objectively: the main lament I have with DF is that it tends to necessitate that nearly all content be very mechanically bland and/or jobs be super samey, because you can't count on a group having a particular mix of jobs. Failure to concede this necessity leads to the donnybrook that dungeons at WoW Cataclysm launch were, and I expect this is the elephant-in-the-room that is why essentially no MMO publisher since has attempted to supply advanced matchmade content.