No Community

[Seig345]

I havent played any of the old MMOs (being one of those filthy mid-20s people), so maybe I cant really understand what the OP is missing. [...]

As someone who began their addiction to MMOs with EverQuest (only 1 expansion was out at the time; Ruins of Kunark), I think the nostalgia salt is based on how those games were pioneering the genre, and lead to a niche-friendly design where making progress was a total slog and almost always required partying with others (in a time where forming parties required shouting within the zone you were in and no instanced content so if a zone was overpopulated with players, exp sources were scarce, sorta kills that fantasy immersion doesn't it?), and death was heavily punished by losing XP and even a risk of losing all gear and inventory on your character when you died. (Had to run back to your corpse, usually naked)

This hardship created more memorable events and forced players to interact with on another, but it was niche. You never saw the kind of player numbers you see in some MMOs today. People who couldnt cut it simply quit.

Then WoW comes out, no xp loss or gear loss, and boom, MMOs become mainstream, and objectively less challenging overall.

Thus, salt.

[Vidu]

"MMO was niche"

Oh, yeah, I knew that! But thanks for sharing your memories there
As someone who likes to inform themself about games and their history, I'm very well aware that MMOs - and games in general, actually! - were all niche and some point and playing them made you a memember of an exclusive little club - so I do get the frustration about "losing" that, I just cant "feel" it myself.

So I really dont share the opion that it was better back then, since we all know that we're benefitting from games becoming more mainstream and that not everything was better back in the golden days of old.

So yeah... you can still make friends, and probably more easy today even since the game is appealing to more people, giving you a larger pool to "pick" from - you just have to do that yourself now - if you want to create a community thats focussed on hardcore-content, you can do that. If you cant find the people for it, it might be because people are more interested in having fun today rather than having to "work" for something in a game.

(please note, that I'm not disagreeing with you here in anyways and not everything I said is a direct response to your statment, Seig I merely took it and added some of my thoughts to it)

Edit: I'd also like to add that back then it was the playerbase aswell that created the community - if enough people want to do that again, they can! Once in a while I get "nostalgic" myself, remebering shouts for "A BRD, full darklight minimum for T1!" in eastern LN, but having all those tools that are making it easier and more convient to find people to join you for content seems to be a step in the right direction for me...

[Dement]

As I was musing over this over lunch, I actually wonder if they could restore some of the nostalgia for older games without isolating others by making the overworld somewhat more challenging. I, personally, enjoy the lack of exp/gear loss, I like instancing duties and dungeons through PF, RF, DF which are all steps in the right direction in my mind. However, the overworld is an absolute joke. Nothing is even remotely threatening. I wouldn't even ask to make it ridiculously hard but a fresh level 50 being able to run into a beastmen stronghold and lay waste to the entire place by themselves is asinine, then we were told that Heavensward areas would be much more challenging... and they weren't. An ongoing joke in FFXI was no matter how overpowered you were, there was a bunny somewhere in the world that could kick your ass. I would like to see them go back to a challenging overworld with different areas of the same zone having wildly different levels of difficulty.

[aesteval]

We played Minesweeper and we liked it! Haha

Back in the day the console would crash if a charging cat ripped the controller out of the port! And we liked it! (Not really ^_^)

[LunaFaye]

Back in the day the console would crash if a charging cat ripped the controller out of the port! And we liked it! (Not really ^_^)

Back in the day there was C-64 & Atari, Lawn/Basement/Garage "lan" parties... AND we still loved it!

[Kosmos992k]

Back in the day there was C-64 & Atari, Lawn/Basement/Garage "lan" parties... AND we still loved it!

Pong in monochrome on a 12 inch screen, that's nostalgia.

[Parisstilton]

Pong in monochrome on a 12 inch screen, that's nostalgia.

This absolutely! And everyday I yearn for the adulation my peers had for me when I was the first person in our street to 'go round the clock' in space invaders

[Kosmos992k]

This absolutely! And everyday I yearn for the adulation my peers had for me when I was the first person in our street to 'go round the clock' in space invaders

Nice, my guilty pleasure was Atari VCS (predates the 2600) Missile Command.

[ChandraNoctis]

The thing about video game nostalgia is that it is rarely about the actual game you are remembering but more about where you were in life, how you related to those you played with and who you were at the time you were playing it.

Unfortunately that's something that no one can ever recreate. You need to move forward and find the benefits of where you are now.

Suggesting the recreation of old features you liked that have been discarded is fine if it is really the feature that would bring added benefit to the game now but don't expect the features to recreate the same feeling or the same social context because they won't.

[RukiaFae]

Snip

Yes that's how I met people back when I first started. A friend and his static helped me get my titan ex clear. I even tried coils with no raid experience because I was helping a friend out. I randomly made friends without trying. Most of the people I played with no longer play and it has been harder to meet people. I didn't understand why it was harder to find people to do content with since Heavensward. Your post hit the nail on the head. Now that hard content is not mandatory, you can just df or PF stuff with random people to get your clear and move on. If you can't find any one to help you, then you don't do the content because it's not needed for anything. The only content where you need friends is POTD and it's just for an achievement/mount.