How comes socialization is dead in MMOs? Nobody talks in game anymore...

How comes socialization is dead in MMOs? Nobody talks in game anymore. Did Discord really kill the need to be social inside games?

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people too focused on their goals rather than having fun reaching it

Why is this bad again? in the ancient times of the 90's people waiting for public transport didn't talk either, they would read or just wait silently, someone approaching you trying to strike up a conversation was the worst thing that could happen.

MMO used to force socialization.
You couldn't part up if you couldn't talk to someone, you also needed to plan things up with your party and stuff.

Not anymore sadly.

It only bothers me when people use their phone to avoid developing proper social skills.

You should look for PvE MMOs focused on missions that you can't do alone or it will be faster and increase the experience by having a party
Also look for recently formed guilds that welcome newcomers

Hurrr durr hurrrr, duurrrr hurrr dur? Hurrr durr duurrrr hurrrr hur dur.

Because fuck millennials

In the age of everyone being connected, everyone is further apart then ever.

You might be 40 and a loser at life but you speak like you have always been an asocial autist sperg with no friends.

...

Spend more time worrying about what you do than what others are doing with their lives, faggot

You are a millennial, unless you're 50 or 12

Back in the day, gear in WoW sucked. No matter how good someone was, they were still in blues and greens due to bizarre stats on epics, then BC happened, all of sudden someone needed to have the best in slot gear just in order to stand a chance. Suddenly, the game wasn't about exploring and meeting people.

This.

Over convenience killed the social aspect of MMOs

was gonna post this

What about raiding? You're forced to discuss strats or at least communicate who's handling what mechanic or else you fail.

>muh discord
teamspeak killed it long before discord even existed

This desu.
I don't know in which countries you just chat up strangers in public transportation but in central and northern Europe it's certainly not common.

Good filename but otherwise that picture doesn't activate my almonds.

Because 90% of modern MMO players are absolute retards no one wants to associate with. You can't take the risk of talking or partying up with randoms, because the chance of them being mouth breathing retards is too high.

It's mainly the fault of game design problems. There has been external game communication for as long as there have been MMO's.

What was different though about MMO's in the past is that their design required being social to succeed. Solo content was made impossible or just way too inconvenient. Nowadays MMO's still have a teamwork and social oriented endgame, but they've gutted the game up to that point of interaction, and even at endgame, added things that cut down on group building such as queues.

Most of this doesn't even touch on how the overall difficulty and design of the game just got easier and friendlier to accommodate normies. In making MMO's a genre normies could enjoy, they've fundamentally killed the MMO to do it.

This man speaks the truth. Nothing has really changed - only luddites and spergs hate modern technology.

really makes me think...

Socialization died long before discord was conceived. has the right idea.

nu-Sup Forums is too underage to afford it.

wasn't discord, it was dungeon finder, raid finder, auction houses. no need to talk to people, just sell your stuff, join your dungeons, join your raids with minimal human interaction.

I was making a joke

literally nothing wrong with that

As much as people are complaining about all this phone shit, I for one am happy that it's now actually socially acceptable to not be social in public settings. Ten years ago and people would look at you funny for doing something like this.

Why do you give a fuck what others do with their lives?
Believe me, if people around you would rather spend time on their phone than interact with you, then you're the problem
What point is there to interacting with people when everybody's a bunch of fucking assholes

this
I don't want to make small talk with strangers unless i'm trying to fuck them. I don't care about their day or what they're doing and I'd rather just think about my own problems.

The MMO demographic got older and socializing via internet back then was a novelty concept, now people just want to have their quick fix of fun and go to sleep.

>phone is shit and cant run good apps
>still pull it out when everybody is on there's so I blend in better

I would say, for me, it started with cross realm in Warcraft. I remember back during Classic and TBC you would get to know the people on your server. This helped build community as it was analogous to sharing a house with somebody. The server I played on, Scarlet Crusade US, had a group of Horde that was universally feared due to their ruthlessness. Guys like Suncobra, Nelfrox, the rest of their guild XDO (something like Xukuth du Oloth, though it's been so long that I can't remember the exact spelling). Then you had some Alliance guys, Maneens, Procyon, Jalem, etc., all of them former Grand Marshalls. Anyone play on that server? One of the first RP realms to open, maybe THE first. I've got so many memories of that time. You'd join a BG and you'd know the other team, how they thought, etc. I miss it a lot. Cross realm is what really killed community, and in turn, Warcraft. Obviously I can only speak for myself. I'm rambling.

MMO players are adults now

During the dial up days you couldn't just alt tab the game (client crashes) and look up a massive wiki full of everything on 56k internet. So you were forced to talk to others for information. Now we live the age where people can play the game and look up shit on a tablet or their phone. Why talk to random people when you could be chatting with your buddies on discord?

because mmos are a shit grind

You want to play end game? Enjoy the next 300 hours farming.

You want to get the best gear? Enjoy the next 1000 hours farming.

You want to play with strangers? Enjoy the time waste until you can play together. Also if you play in a group, you can't enjoy the story because normally not everyone wants to waste to much time with the story.

You want to play with others? KEK, mmos are build around a cash shop and not around player interaction and enjoyment.

No, the MMO design killed the need to be social in MMOs. You don't need to be social when you have a "convenient" tool to set up parties for whatever content you want and when you have a game-provided carrot you just follow around to do your quests. In older MMOs you actually had to talk to people to group up and you actually had to talk to people to find out how to do certain quests and to know where to find and how to get to certain points of interest.

Nowadays you just use the automatic shit or follow the carrot, even if there's no carrot there's probably some 'guide' online which tells you exactly the most efficient way to do something, which you then follow without needing others.

Autism.

THEY CALL EM SMART PHONES BECAUSE THEYRE SMARTER THAN YOU DUMMY

MAYBE IF YOU LOOKED UP YOUD SEE THE BEAUTIFUL WORLD IN FRONT OF YOU

cross realm is one of the many retarded choices and people understimate this shit.
People built a name of themselves, there was that one faggot, that super cool guy everyone liked, the ultra tryhards, the pvp beasts that spent all day on crossroads and hillsbrad foothills and you never killed someone that had that tag or you ended up being hunted by 50 niggers around the world.

Good times, but removing all need to be social ON TOP of dumbing down the game with lfr made the game boring and dead.

Non-forced socialisation, and third party voice programs.
desu third party voice programs ruined pc multiplayer

Iam the 1%. usually other players arent as dedicated as Iam so they onl drag me down.
nothing to gain out of people like that, I have real friends in the real world, I need fake ones online.

it was killed by autistic people who can't make friends, this problem was rampant long before discord even came along

hello, retards

Take out the dungeon/party finder tool, you still have no reason to be social because all strats and guides are available online. All you have to do is say lfg and send invite. No reason to talk when everyone is on the same page as to what to do by looking at a video guide or the approved Reddit strategy.

How's that projecting going for ya?

The novelty of online multiplayer hadn't worn off yet and there was an information drought. For the fags that hadn't played Runescape or some older MMORPG there was a genuine feeling of entering a massive world and realizing that holy shit, all those other characters jumping around and killing boars are PLAYERS? Running into people was a bigger deal because content was much harder - if you met someone in the area chances are they were also stuck on an elite quest or that they might even know where that quest you can find was located because you were too much of a retard to use Thottbot or an addon.

youtube.com/watch?v=VASywEuqFd8

Is it even possible to create videos like this without coming off so pretentious?

>Go out with people from my uni
>all they do is take selfies
>food pics are a 100% must
How is this not annoying as fuck? I just want to have fun when I go out.
Nothing wrong with using your phone once in a while outside but some people make going out super boring.

conversation naturally happens due to the amount of time spent.
Wailing caverns might have been easy as shit but I still made conversation and met people by just traveling there.

Good times indeed. World bosses were some of my favorite things about Classic. I had a level 1 alt named Kazzakcamper parked at the Blasted Lands to check the spawn. I loved organizing all the guys from the top guilds and hunting him, Azuregos, and the four green dragons. Sad it's all gone now.

>tfw i paid for months of iRO just to hang out in payon with my frends

absolutely 0 regrests transport me back

Tumblr made super nice people insufferable, troll culture becoming normalized makes people irritable and cautious in general, assholes being everywhere in general makes communicating with randoms a bad idea for your enjoyment of the game.

Find a guild with voice chat of some sort and you're fine usually. You don't need a super socialization heavy MMO, you simply need to join a guild.

>You're forced to discuss strats
LOL
>new? did you watch a video?
>No I-
>vote kick has been initiated

Again why would I talk to strangers when I could be talking to my buddies on discord, Ventrilo, Teamspeak, msn, yahoo messanger, aim, etc

MMOs are being designed in ways that require much less interaction with other players.

I have to interact with these people.

Dungeon finder and cross server matching killed socialization LONG before discord existed, people were still social even when we were using vent.

I ran up to a guy in Guild Wars 2 and said his character looked nice. I asked what his gloves were too, but he didn't respond to either. He just ran off instead. So I sent him a whisper hoping he'd respond later, but it said he was set to offline.

In other words: too fucking much grinding

Remember the 90s when being on the internet was still novel and you'd talk to a random person in town because "holy shit that's a dude in my video game"

Millennials are killing the MMORPG

MOBAs killed MMOs, prove me wrong.

The modern style of themepark questing makes forming parties more trouble than it's actually worth.

For example, players in the same are likely not on the same fetch/kill quest. It's simply easier to do it solo than form a party and wait for someone to catch up to where you are in the themepark ride.

All other party opportunity are queue instances that you do over and over and never really have to interact with anyone.

Older MMOs were mostly just grinding on a field. This created a climate where forming random parties was a good option and people would often get tired of the grind and afk for a bit, creating a time for conversation and socializing.

Themepark design killed MMOs. They are no longer open world.

>didn't have internet until 2003
>didn't get rid of dial up until 2007

Dark Souls is more of an MMO than most MMOs these days. The game forces you to suffer the consequences of another player's actions.

In actual MMOs other players are just background noise.

>t. sperg with no social skills

I didn't have Internet at all until autumn 2008.

>anymore
They never did. Maybe 2% of the entire MMO genre userbase since its advent has ever been genuinely interested in roleplaying and engaging socially with others beyond utilizing one another for virtual monetary gain.

That's what everyone keeps forgetting. It was just a different time. Being able to talk to and make friends with someone halfway across the world was just a bizarre and new experience, but now everyone and everything is so connected people just take it for granted that other people will just be there for them to reach out to.

>start meeting girls at uni
>they're all vapid as fuck and have 0 hobbies and interests except netflix, travelling and eating

What do I do

>Why talk to random people when you could be chatting with your buddies on teamspeak?


Fixed

I don't really have a solid answer but I feel that MMOs progressed into a state where you no longer have to have a vested interest in others, or even yourself for that matter. To experience most story and dungeons in a game you can easily solo on the easiest setting, and reputation is no longer required to be upheld or maintained as it's very easy these days to never see the people you play with a second time. That, along with the convenience of a name/race/server change most games now have. Discord is a factor, but no more than Teamspeak or Ventrilo would have.

Be glad you never got to see what used to be the web die an undeserved death.

Spend less time worrying about what user is worrying about and more time worrying about what you are worrying about, faggot.

I did though, the community center in town had computers. They wouldn't let me watch Foamy.

1) Design issue: the obsession of killing downtime to keep the player on the treadmill, associated with so called "quality of life" changes that made other players a non-necessity at best, a hindrance a worse.

Been playing FFXIV for a couple of months to be reunited with XI friends, and the results of the game design has been fascinating to look like, it's a game that is basically designed to kill social interactions at its core.
There's some really grim sociological implications to that game; when you design a world where people don't need one another, what you get, despite the social animal claims we like to drape ourselves in, is a world with little to no innate sociability whatsoever. It has to be created and fought for by people who want it for its own sake.

Which has to be tempered by:

2) A lot of the socialization happens out of the game.
Which to a point goes back to design, those games are NOT designed to be MMOs but single player games where AI cooperation duties are being outsourced to other humans. They're not designed to be worlds with their own set of defining constraints, but glorified UI.
Then, to be fair, designers had to make do with the realities of their audiences, which are connected to these parallel networks already, and don't want the inconvenience of having too many.

tl:dr: QoL killed MMOs

MMOs are the biggest fucking mindfuck to me. The themepark style MMO has pretty much been a labor intensive occupation simulator since the beginning. Why are they so popular then? Why the fuck are there people who want to spend 1000+ hours simulating a labor intensive occupation? And why do people see value in hoarding digital items? So you own a silly hat or pet that costs 1.5 billion gold willies and requires 650 hours of grinding a "press X to make glass" glassblowing skill to obtain, what an amazing accomplishment.

No it didn't, used teamspeak mostly just for Big event Like Woe or whatever guild event your MMO has.

>because spamming LFR, LFG, and price listings of items and mats you want to sell counts as human interaction.

Uni girls are the worst, they have 0 personality, try to go out with girls from small towns, if you happen to find someone kind on your uni, never let her go.

Most likely because the leveling and grind system is done so that it gets people addicted by pure habits instead of quality time

>grown men reading news is the same as me shitposting on reddit and playing candy crush xD

Pretty much this. I got into it so that I could play with my roommates, and it was fun at first, then "whoops, we're bored of leveling, so we're gonna play on our mains. Good luck on grinding for levelcap alone."

Try to play with strangers. "Why are you so bad? Kick."

Try to play alone. Gank, gank, gank.

Quit game. "Why did you stop playing?"

>netflix, travelling and eating

Just add social cancer and that's pretty much 95% of the female population

I unironically hate MOBAs. Actually, not the MOBAs just the fanbase.

why the fuck all girls play this "I'm a traveller xd" card these days?

I second this, unfortunately it's the truth
The 5% who are not retarded usually have BF already or are ugly. The best you can hope for is lower your standards or wait for the BF to fuck up

Because cultural enrichment and le funny twitter selfies and cool pictures about that famous monument that everyone else also has

Because normies believe that taking a shit behind a bush in Uganda is a life-changing experience that leaves them enlightened, unlike the plebs who stay at home like losers lmao. Travel is literally the #1 pleb hobby.

The point is obviously the lack of socializing

I know it's Sup Forums, but real talk: Women align themselves with whatever the men in power are doing or want. It's their biological imperative and makes sense given the world appears much more hostile when you're a woman than when you're a man. Right now, worldliness and travel experience is how men are competing with one another, so there's an expectation of that towards women, so women are aligning themselves towards meeting that expectation.

spend less time worrying and more time playing video games!

Gen Z is now 19 years old

increasingly autistic generations of humans are being born.

I want to help him

In my experience, people who travel a lot for leisure tend to have the delusion that by increasing the breadth of their experiences, they also increase their own depths.
Basically its a hedonistic way to keep the acknowledgment of their own shallowness at bay while gathering social status via luxury spending instead of self-improvement.

Thanks mr skeltal

>MMO thread
>Only people in it are FFXIV players
>90% of what they reference is FFXIV shit