Quote Originally Posted by Carighan View Post
It's also important to keep in mind that the proliferation of "chat tools" (in general, even though as of right now Discord is of course by far the dominant one in gaming space) inherently reduces the amount of chat and banter in MMORPGs.

Back in the EverQuest days, in a lot of ways, EQ1 was a very, very elaborate minigame we all played together while socializing. But we needed EverQuest to socialize in the first place, IRC chatrooms existed but weren't the same form of getting to know strangers. It was our chatroom, and we happily engaged with it, that we all played together gave us a shared motivation but it wasn't the main one. This is also why older MMOs got away with being so tedious and requiring so much time and organization and communication, because we wanted to organize and communicate anyways.

Nowadays a combination of readily available chat tools, everyone being online 24/7 anyways and the sheer amount of players results in a lack of a need for this. Everyone can already talk to whoever they'd desire to, and can easily find new people to talk to if desired, too. The need for an MMORPG as a socialization tool is just no longer a thing.
I've said before that these days Discord is the actual main program and FF14 is the third-party app that people just happen to have opened in another window/monitor/alt-tabbed.

Ironically, Discord was allegedly made by an FF14 player WITH FF14 in mind to expand its communication options. And it more than succeeded, it practically eclipsed the very game it was designed around to the point that its own in-game chat functions are all but inert outside of shout spam for hunt trains and RP adverts (and there's Discords for those too).

Admittedly, an argument could be made that FF14's own in-game social tools are lacking in some form or another. Linkshells are finite in how many people can belong to one along with server restrictions, free companies often feel like you're just there to generate company credits for the leader/officers submarine farms, and how many people even know that fellowships exists much less belong to one? Even Novice Network is "invite only" and its easy to be kicked from it, despite some people's attempt to use it as a type of "world chat".