I hated them when I was kid so I missed the golden age (also didn't really have money for the good ones).
Now I'm very entrenched into FFXIV and GW2 but there isn't really a community here on lemmy for them.
They've become jobs in themselves and I'd much rather play a game solo than deal with trying to schedule or be reliably available to something else.
Having a schedule to play with friends seems like the only way to actually play together when you are an adult. It's not like people randomly show uo to play anymore.
I play FFXIV but I've been drifting away from it lately between patches
It's been rough indeed. I can barely find parties for the content that we do have, so another 6 months before Dawntrail will be difficult.
That's something I can relate to. When I was playing a lot of Elden Ring my wife enjoyed watching it a lot. Not so much any of these MMOs.
Tbh I feel like I spend way too much time on them, but I got swept in the need to get some milestones done before I'm satisfied dropping them.
I used to play world of warplanes, tanks, and warships a lot. I burned myself out really hard though, and I haven't played in like half a year.
No, but part of it is personal taste I think. I played Runescape when Old School was the only school, dipped into ESO, and burned myself out hard on Destiny. Since then, I just hate the business model. It feels like devs all collectively asked themselves why WoW made so much money and started emulating it to the extreme. Now, as others have said, it feels like I'm paying them to allow me to do work for them. It comes off as a predatory model. MMO's used to feel like a labor of love, both on the dev side and the player side. Now they just feel like casinos with chores.
Now, I'm clearly in some kind of minority because those games are making bank, so it may just be that they're not for me anymore. All I know is that I feel dirty after playing them now. Like I just got scammed with a big ol' shit-eating grin on my face the whole time. Like I looked directly into the gaping jaws of capitalism as it financially fucked me and said, "Yes, daddy, please more." I could resist sinking money into premium currency, but the seasons. Yearly expansions. Pay-walled "legacy" content. Each one another cool, exclusive, FOMO-inducing skin for the same greed.
I used to be into WoW in the early days after its release and during the Burning Crusade. I also played a bit of Guild Wars and some smaller MMOs over the years. These days I would rather play a dozen other games than spend all my time in an MMO
I liked GW and GW2 a lot back in the day, but never really got into anything less casual. Been nearly a decade since I messed with an MMO at this point though.
I played WoW pretty regularly from Burning Crusade through Cataclysm, then bits and pieces of future expansions, but tbh I'm pretty burned out from MMOs because every single time I start playing one I always quickly get the feeling that I'm wasting my life and my time would be better spent doing literally anything else. Plus with all the shitty psychological hooks that WoW (and other MMOs I'm sure) do to keep you coming back, like daily quests and time gated content, they've made it pretty clear we're paying customers first and players second, and I just don't want any part of that. I'll stick with my single player games that I can pick up and put down at my leisure without being pressured to play them because of an active monthly subscription.
I just started playing ESO again a month ago. Send help.
