MMORPGs How they have changed for the better? or worse?

[Lunavi]

I feel like MMORPGs changed focus from being a community/"second life" feeling to just being a game like all other. Back in the days a lot of prepping was needed for everything, literally everything needed prep in one way or another as it was meant to replicate real life more in a sense in terms of dedication. However, this has fallen out of fashion as people want more and more time spent during the action rather than during the preparation and debs had to find other ways to gate people as they figured to for all but a very small group of people having to grind something for 10 hours to be able to progress to what you want to do isn't reasonable (looking at people who aren't NEETs), and ended up creating something that feels more like an arcade game, but with weekly timers.

I am not going to lie, some parts of modern design are great, while others are not so much. I am never a fan of weekly timeouts for example, as rather than making it so people don't sit for 10 hours per day it just makes it so that if someone has a life situation where they have periods when they can play 10-20 hours per day for a week or so, but then have weeks when they are happy if they can log in at all WILL fall extremely far behind. In this game for example, if you can't play for a week you are SOOL as you miss an entire week of tomes, all Savage drops, etc. even if you next week put in thrice as much work as everyone else. Games nowadays are, for better and worse, designed solely for people with nine to five works. While it works better for most people who have fluctuating schedules will get left behind, and I think a lot of older MMORPG players fell into these categories of people, at least from my personal experience, so of course those people feel betrayed by things like weekly caps. I feel like the more reasonable thing to do would be to make weekly caps culminate over weeks, so if you miss a week you get two weekly caps next week.

However, now to the good stuff, recently a lot of MMORPGs have started to try to find their way back to the second life feeling of a living community, and FFXIV is one of the ones that are actually doing really well in this department for those who wants it. There are very long term goals such as getting a house and forming a bond and community with people. Sadly, most of it is still "fluff", but it is better than it was before when WoW reigned supreme that took out all of those kinds of features big time. Unless you play on an RP server the entire overworld in WoW is 100% useless, even as far as fluff goes.

Overall, I feel like modern MMORPGs fear NEETs too much in their design to the point that they ruin the experience for everyone except for people with nine to five works, which is a shame as a lot of jobs are not nine to five, personally I have had life situations that demanded me to travel a lot and sometimes playing a game on a weekly basis wasn't a possibility, and if you are a student (a huge target demographic for MMORPGs, or at least, it used to be) there WILL be those finals weeks where you just know that even completing weekly tomes might be a stretch. And this is just touching upon weekly lockouts.

EDIT for reply to avoid double posting:

Games are to play, not to live in them.

MMORPGs may be romantic and all flowers when people used to hard work for anything to get in them, but on the other side of coin, these games were full of depressed, broken people who had no other purpose in life other than waste more time into their second world where they are able acheive something. It was really unhealthy and dangerous hobby, i am so glad we have gone into the casual direction.
Today sure you could spend a lot of time at the game, but it is no longer a "must", mmorpgs these days are at last the games like they supposed to be, like in good old days of 8-16 bit consoles.

A lot of prejudice in there. I knew a lot of people in these old style MMORPGs who weren't depressed messes, but still took pride in their accomplishments and even found love in these games and had functional lives outside of the game. How is this any different than any other hobby you do? There is a lot of stigma around "living" in virtual worlds, but for some that might be a very good thing that improves on their mental health, and in some cases even help them in other fields of life. Moderation is key though, and I do also know a lot of people who drowned themselves in MMORPGs to the point that everything else in life stopped working.

However, on the subject of "must" spend time, I find modern MMORPGs just as bad, if not WORSE on this department due to weekly lockouts that will put you behind for the entire cycle where the current content is relevant. So while you might have to spend in general less time in the game, you have to spend that time in the game in the way the developers wants you to. If you miss one week of tomes, you are SOOL for months until you can catch up.