Ammokkx

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

MMOs exist as a venue for socialization. That is their literal selling point. Like taverns and conventions they exist to create a fandom and than maintain it for the members to facilitate socialization. In fact I would go so far as to say with some confidence that the vast majority of the hundreds of people I hung out with during that period of my life realistically couldn't have actually cared less about the game as such other than the fact that it was the thing we all used to hang out in and do stuff together.

@PPQ Purple

Sure.

But saying

Basically a good MMO is fundamentally not a game you are supposed to have fun with but something that's meant to facilitate social interaction.

@PPQ Purple

is asinine.

The best MMO's are both something you fundamentally have fun with and facilitate social interaction. They're not mutually exclusive concepts. Upping one doesn't reduce the other.

I would even argue that the more fun an MMO is on a fundamental level, the more people will be drawn to interact socially on it. Why? Because that MMO will be recommended to friends, who will in turn naturally fall into socializing, so having even more people actively running around and engaging with the game's content.

Fun, inherently, incentivizes social interaction, because if you're passionate about something, you're going to want to talk about it.

If I play an obscure videogame for its own merits, I don't need to talk to anyone about it. That doesn't make me any less happy when I find someone who also has played it, but the fact of the matter is I didn't need to have met them in order to have had fun. In the same way, if you fundamentally have fun in an MMO, then meet someone by chance who hits you up for a conversation and you become friends, the MMO has done its job.

Friends got me into XIV, friends that are far more social than I, but if XIV wasn't a good videogame then they couldn't have gotten me into it. Now I'm an active part of the Free Company they're in, and while I'm still easily the most distant person there, the mere fact of the matter is that if the game hadn't kept me playing on its own merits, I wouldn't be there at all.

If you want a chatroom, go to a forum. Like where we are now. MMO's are still videogames and need to use every trick in that book in order to be competent ones.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

If the game keeps you happy and engaged but does not push you into socializing than it has failed at its job as a MMO.

@PPQ Purple

No?

Not at all?

The only function of an MMO is to keep a lot of players playing it, through whatever means neccessary. This is true for literally every videogame.

You also say this as if I am the only person playing XIV and everyone shares my attitude to it. They don't.

Plenty of people socialize in XIV. The saying goes "Glamour is the true endgame" after all, because people are spending more time making their character look pretty at the end of the game rather than doing endgame content.

And you know what that says about XIV?

That it succeeds at both being a good game and a good social experience. It didn't need to sacrifice one for the other. It offers a satisfying experience on both ends of the spectrum.

Saying an MMO can't be "too good or else people wouldn't socialize" is an asinine standpoint to take in. People are upset with WoW because it isn't a very good or rewarding game. Actively making it the game a chore which forces you to engage with it rather than letting you do so on your own terms doesn't facilitate social interaction, it pushes you away from it.

Please stop making sweeping statements about genres you don't play, have no interest in, and don't know the target audience for.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

Conversely if a MMO is too good of a game in its own right than people will just focus on playing it and not socialize.

@PPQ Purple

XIV is actually good as a game too, though

I socialize in the MMO to the best of my abilities (I hang out with my FC and friends) but I'm not very good at that part. I do like playing XIV as a game, however, and have been for a good year now.

In fact, an MMO needs to be good as a game to be sustainable, unless you want to make it a pay2win KMMO nightmare. Games like Guild Wars 2 are good games.

The problem is that the "good part" of the game in XIV's case is constantly shifting back. You had many more skills to work with back when ARR was new compared to now, because it's the same number of skills at 50 compared to at 80. They purposefully keep the amount of buttons introduced low because they want to keep the game controller-friendly. Sure, there's a lot of grinding and busywork involved with any MMO, but if Runescape's enduring success is anything to go by, some people like that. Runescape isn't exactly the most social MMO, either. It's very focused on its repeating-task nature and seeing big number become bigger number.

I'm sorry to keep going off on you like this PPQ, but you have some hilariously misinformed or wrong opinions on genres and how they're structure. Games don't often survive by being actually bad, they're doing stuff right. XIV, especially, is lauded for its great storytelling and newbie-friendly Level Sync system. You can still do most old content as if it was new, and for the ones you can't, it's not impossible to find someone in party finder to help you out.

And for the record,

And once you've found the people you want to spend time with it has to be designed so that it continually gives you new and boring but challenging tasks to do so as to keep giving you an excuse to keep hanging out. Sort of like a drinking game. It's not the worlds most intelligent form of entertainment but it keeps the party going.

@PPQ Purple

I'd still be playing even if I didn't have people to hang out with in-game. In fact, I kind of don't want to be in an FC, but if I'm not, I'm hounded 24/7 by invites from all over.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

just one more thing, sleeping

But I just can't sit there and cook/fish. I'll go insane.

@SleepingSilence

I hesitate to say anyone can play videogames wrong, but this is dangerously close to having the wrong mindset going in.

Speaking as a guy who got fishing to 80, fishing sucks big time. But the thing is, it's also extremely optional. Not only are there two other gatherers you can use for Beast Tribe quests (which I don't think you even got to), but being an active gatherer requires a radically different mindset compared to being someone who's in it for the combat classes. You almost need to be thinking you're playing Runescape instead of FFXIV 'cause it takes a similar grind mindset for it.

Even then, you can level Fisher/Miner/Botanist and all the crafting classes ludicrously easy through Levequests. It would only take you a couple days to, at the very least, get most everything at 70 (if not maxed out purely on Leves, as I have done on a fair number of them). And this is only if you want to do it; plenty of people in my FC and a couple of my friends don't even bother with the crafter/gatherer aspect of the game.

There's only one thing the game 100% definitively asks of you to do: Get a class to 80 and do the story. The rest is all up to your discretion. You can pick and choose which elements of the MMO you want to engage with, and if you're not engaging with craft/gather, you'll do just fine. Either you buy what you need off the MB or you bother a crafter/gatherer friend to make something for you if you need it for whatever reason.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

*shrugs* I don't know how much "fun" I had playing FF14 exactly. Since the combat is fairly mindless for the class I played. (Summoner)

@SleepingSilence

Up to how far did you play? Because one of the problems I'll happily admit XIV has is that the skill pruning done each expansion has made earlier levels feel incomplete. Summoner actually becomes fairly intimate with having to keep track of various timers at level 80, but you need to get to level 80 and do level 80 content for that to matter. Summoner only gets something resembling its intended gameplan at 60, and doesn't even start to feel like itself until 70.

No real good solution to it either because of the linear progression FFXIV is built on and the fact they want to have a hard cap on how many buttons you press to keep it controller-friendly.

Greetings! Candy Cane Service!

Also, you need to remember the ratios. If you didn't send any out, I think two is pretty good.

@BrokenPromise

i sent four

Greetings! Candy Cane Service!

Ammokkx

@rebornfan320

Oh don't worry.

I knew.

EDIT: Also, the only other one I got was a signed one from Savo after I'd told him this existed. Clearly, I am very popular and beloved.

Secundi Lux

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Captain Wei getting back on her feet helped calm Chie's nerves ever-so-slightly, desperately clinging onto people as she was in the moment. The captain didn't have to tell Chie twice to stick close, the teenage girl tailing her like a puppy would tail the litter's mother. Her heart was beating so fast.

Wei was aiming for the stairwell and Chie figured that out pretty quickly, so a bit of hope was able to take root in her heart. Unfortunate for her, then, that it wouldn't last long before being weeded out again. She'd all but forgotten about the attackers for a minute, despite the fact Chie really should know better at this point, so she was unprepared for the creaking from above. At first she ignored it, but then a piece of rubble fell in front of her eyes. Chie let out a brief shriek of shock and surprise, her eyes darting up above. She saw the panels of the railstation coming loose. Not only that, but one of them seemed to be right above her. "Ah... aaah..." she muttered fearfully, reason briefly escaping her as she felt herself paralyzed. It fell and Chie tried to shield herself, closing her eyes. A loud crash rang out, but Chie felt herself unharmed. When she opened her eyes again, two parts seemed to have fallen; A set of displays blocking the party's path forward, and a piece of paneling that hit the soldier behind her.

At that point, Chie briefly forgot about her attackers and escape both. She rushed over to the soldier's side, crouching down next to him much like she had done for Wei. "I-It's okay... it's okay, I can get you out of this, so please get up...!" she desperately told the soldier. Chie didn't have a lot of time to save them, even if she didn't realise that herself. There was one thing she could do to help out, something only she could. Making a snap decision, she attempted to gather whatever traces of Nox that were in the area. It pooled at the edge of her hands, flowing into the ground beneath the soldier and Chie both. Something was changing. The weight of the paneling seemed to drain out of it, as if it were a sack gradually oozing sand. It felt like the floor was starting to push against the body of the soldier, rather than having it be something needed to push back against.

Unfortunately, Chie wasn't particularly versed in her magic, nor did she have the benefit of channeling like an Ars Magi would. She'd given the soldier some literal breathing room and, if they had enough strength, the ability to push themselves off the floor. More than this, however, was too much to ask of the girl. She couldn't make the floor beneath them feel weightless and floaty, even though she wanted to. Not only did Chie foolishly exhaust herself a fair bit by trying, but whatever Nox she was able to gather had all but been used up.

Chie had also stopped running for the exit to do this. She was too focused on saving the soldier, forgetting all about trying to escape.

Just a thought

I've barely got any interest in whether or not a PW actually comes onto the guild, but there's a conversation I had with someone not too long ago about this RP idea from @stone.

We both looked at it and came to the conclusion that, essentially, Stone is running with elements from a Persistent World and doing it on a smaller, more private scale. Each character is in the world and permanently a part of that world, and those characters can interact with each-other, but the players just don't know it. It's just one layer removed from having multiple threads that people happen to stumble into each-other on. The key is that you need enough characters to make it work, that's to say, there's enough of a brute force method to bringing them together. More people = inherently more chance that two of them cross roads, but that being said, it's also a massive amount of work for one person to undertake. My friend was of the opinion you'd need upwards of 10-12 characters merely to fill out the world to be breathing enough, an opinion I didn't quite share in its entirety. I'd argue that's an impossible amount of work for one person and that you'd need to throw in a second co-GM, but at that point there's even more communication that needs to be done and less chance of it working out. But the argument you'd need to bring in a co-GM(or, for comparisons sake, a mod) to make it work kind of shows the miniature-PW nature of Stone's RP.

Honestly, I think experiments like Stone's are the closest you can get to a living, permanent world with an ever-changing cast of characters that aren't confined to a singular (main) storyline. 'cor there's still the question of whether or not it will work out at all, but I'm not going to judge over that when I've not got a hand in it myself.

(also apologies to stone if I dragged them into a conversation they didn't want to be dragged into, I just think your RP is one of the more interesting ones to pop up in recent times and I really like the unique shit ;w;)

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

I don't generally enjoy games from that genre or any genre that don't require skill

@PPQ Purple

But that's wrong. They do require skills, they're just different skills.

An RPG tests your ability to strategize on the fly given limited resources and a ton of information you need to keep track of, as well as needing to not push your luck. And there is an elment of mechanical prowess involved in hack-and-slashes, that being the mere fact you need to dash around and kite enemies 'cause if you stand in one place, you're going to get overwhelmed and die.

Chess doesn't challenge the same skills as something like Magic the Gathering does. Both require intimate knowledge about the game you're playing, but one is static and never changing while the other is continually evolving and requires you to adapt on the fly based on what you're given.

In another example, you wouldn't say Poker is a lesser game to, say, Shogi. Shogi has no elements of luck, while you can get dealt straight pairs all night in Poker. Yet both games are still very skill intensive, but with Poker it's knowledge about what your opponents have Vs. you, as well as being able to read a room.

It's fine if you don't like the appeal of these games, but saying they require no skill is... odd. They challenge a different set of skills than what you'd like them to, sure, but they still challenge skills. When I'm playing FFXIV, I'm not going to be able to do a level 80 dungeon with level 50 gear. That being said, you can clear any content with any class that does have appropriate gear, and the community that forms around doing Savage content isn't any less skilled because their characters need to have the appropriate stats first.