No Community

[TaurielKyudo]

It seems like you're just overall angry about gaming nowadays? You've mentioned how content isn't hard enough, too vanilla, games nowadays don't keep you engaged. The topic title you chose seems a bit out of place now that you've shared your thoughts...why didn't you just comment on another thread about how you want harder content?

This started when you said XIV had no community, and many of us here shared our own stories and experiences on how this game has made us happy with the friendships we've found. OP has ignored the many people who discussed the various ways you can create a community within the game, and is now just complaining about how games aren't what they used to be. The point of this thread was that there was no community, but there clearly is one, just not the specific, very narrow community OP wants.

Also, why is it bad that teenagers and adults in their mid-20's play MMOs? OP, you were probably a young teenager when you first started MMOs, and obviously you've loved them for a long time. You were once in their shoes...would you have wanted people to give you a hard time and say that you were ruining their gaming because you were new to the scene? Everyone has to start out somewhere, it doesn't make a game or community bad to have a variety of people playing. If anything it makes it that much more beautiful being able to interact with many different people - again, which is possible, because XIV has a great community aspect to it if you use it.

[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...

[Pileus_Storm]

I think it's because of the competitive nature of mmo fanatics. Some of these players have played other mmo's and have this idea that completing content and leaving others behind is fun. I think they like seeing ppl look at the gear they aquired that the player doesn't have. #braggingrights
This game gives multiple options for players to connect with other players. The Lodestone has a feature called Event & Party Recruitment. Then there's this forum which I read more complaints and criticism about this game than ppl trying to connect. Ive been playing this game since 1.0 and most ppl are speed running content probably because they can't afford it but they encourage and inform ppl that certain aspects of this game is lacking, so it's best to play a certain way. So players follow the trend of grabbing the highest level gear and never get into crafting gear and making strategic attribute builds. IMO For me, I'm just gonna use the Lodestone and hope ppl join 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.

[Atoli]

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[Atoli]

@OP:
My real life friendships are not defined by hardships and sacrifices either, but actually the opposite, shared joys and enriching each others life, but okay..

The convenience of FFXIV has made me fat, happy and motivated, to put it in your words. Because I can actually do what is fun, and I can do it easily. Back in 1.0, before Duty Finder was a thing, I spent most of the time online trying to even get a full party going at all. In the end, no one was happy because we wasted tons of time and when we managed getting in, it was thanks to people who had to join because they felt obligated to, not because they actually wanted to do said content. Now we can do annoying things with the click of a button with some strangers, so we have more time to actually spend some quality time with the actual friends
Back in FFXI, the entire game was so anti "actually being playable" and completely inacessible in any way and just the worst experience I ever had in any game, that most people who gave it a try simply left right away except for a few lucky souls that got rescued by someone they then knew they'd have to be nice to no matter how much unbearable they were, because their help was needed to even get from A to B. That's not friendship, that's "I hate this person but am forced to put up with him". In FFXIV, I engage with people because I genuinely like them and enjoy their company, not because I have no other choice. And if someone is horrible, I just kick or blacklist them, because I do not have to put up with their behaviour since I don't NEED them to go on.

Overall, that seems way way better to me ^-^

[Stormbad]

Some of the prerequisites to a meaningful friendship are shared hardship, sacrifice, and trust...

I can think of at least 30 additional reasons to have meaningful friendships in the game. If you narrow down the requirement so much, you are going to struggle with finding and making friends.

Your post basically had tldr = Can't make friends because game is too easy.

[Kosmos992k]

I’ve been struggling to define what’s missing here to those who didn’t get PK’d and all their shit taken in UO. The most salient thought I’ve had here is I miss hating someone so bad that I wrote their name down in a book and stayed up till 3AM grinding so the next time I seen them I'd kill'm and dance on their body while they watched from the afterlife. I want to feel genuine gratitude to someone who escorted me thru Jugnar Forest for my first trip to Jeuno.

I see, and you are complaining about a lack of community? If you really think, feel and act as you described, then your exactly the wrong kind of person to be trying to talk about a lack of community.

[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.