No Community

[Vidu]

The difference in the older games was that you didn't have these tools, but the games themselves forced social connections through gameplay. Here, you have some tools, but you could theorectically do the game entirely solo apart from anonymous pickup groups and not miss a thing.

And the tools have gotten worse. One of the reasons I hate Discord is that it removes social interaction completely from the game onto other mediums. Yeah, they did have teamspeak in the old days, but it generally was limited to raid nights. But Discord is everything now; every FC has one where half the members chat in, and things like pvp no longer use linkshells or fcs, but discord instead. A lot of old MMO socialization was done in game in event hubs.

The games have changed a lot to be much more antisocial in gameplay, and tools tend to take people out of the game to socialize.

How - or why - is that so bad though? What do you gain from being forced to socialize like that? Whats wrong with using a more convient tool (like Discord) than the ingame-chat to stay in touch with your friends? I've got a few friends that I only talk to ingame and its extremly annoying to basically just be online and afk to wait for them to log in if all you really want to do is chat, not play the game.

I dont see the benefits of enforcing more socialising - after all this is a game we play in our freetime to do something we enjoy.
If you enjoy hanging out a lot with other people, you can do that.
But if you enjoy the game more for its gameplay, its great that you can absolulty do that too.

I have an active FC, a handful of good friends to play with, even a static - and I barely play content alone, but once in a while its quite enjoyable that I can.
We keep arguing that more options are always great when it comes to glamour and stuff - why does this not hold true for fundamental ways to play the game? Its not like the game is not giving you the means to form social bonds - its just not kicking everyone who doesnt want to do that out...