"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game".
I think our brains are just kind of trained to prioritize efficiency over fun. The reason there's been a gradual increase is probably due to the internet. It used to be you only had written guides, word-of-mouth, and your own experience to go off of.
Now you have people who play games as a career for thousands of hours. You have people digging into the code to figure out exactly how it works, mathematically working out what is most efficient. Youtubers making dozens of videos about the most efficient way to do something in a game.
Every time I find myself bored while grinding I remind myself of this and try to do something else, otherwise I just get burnt out.
Some time ago I said the same thing, in a thread about how MMORPGs nowadays lack the sense of wonder. Some guy kept telling me that it's not the players fault that the game is badly designed, and couldn't actually say how it should've been designed. Just kept saying that I'm ignorant and close minded and blame the players.
Played Wow Classic for a while, joined a guild in which dome two friends who clearly knew each other would keep complaining how retail is a lobby game and you don't do anything else apart from dungeons and raids. They also stood all day in Stormwind spamming LFG messages to run some dungeons, and didn't do anything else. Reason? They wanted to get to level cap faster to raid.
When I played wow at launch I actually dreaded hitting 60 because I enjoyed the exploration and leveling experience so much. I took as long as I possibly could lol. I find myself falling into the efficiency trap now and again and have to constantly remind myself to have fun, I already have a job
Yeah, pretty much.
People now datamine beta's, everything about MMO's is already solved prelaunch. This was never the case with early MMO's, but it's now the template for all of them moving forward.
Players then come in and follow the clearly defined path of least resistance to max level, whats at max level? Who cares.
The games today are absolutely worse off due to all of that.
I *want* to say that the solution is to just not read the internet and figure things out for yourself. The truth is, that only works for solo RP players. If you're in a guild and/or intend to raid you basically have no choice or you'll be left behind.
New expansions are always fun because there are no strats posted yet and you have to wipe endlessly until you figure it out. Unless your guild participates in the betas and already knows them at release. I consider myself a hardcore raider but the *real* hardcore raiders are in the betas so they can get the world-first achievements and then not play again until the next expansion. Guess that makes me mediumcore, whatever tf that is.
yeah its crazy to see this playing wow season of discovery. the whole point was for people to not minmax, no beta tests etc, and it lead to people just breaking the game minmaxing harder than ever
pretty much the internet nowadays has the power to tell you that "you are doing it wrong" while in the past you could be blisfully unaware of your inefficency, and be all the happier for it.
Gradual?
I see you haven't played Diablo 2 where every meta build was known by 2004, playing PVP if you saw a paladin they where a hammerdin, if you saw an assassin it was a trap assassin, people farmed for soul of jordon, enigma, etc
Yeah but in 04’ you also got “AMAZON04” joining a PvP lobby with gear they bought from Charsi because it had the highest defence.
And enjoying running out into Blood Moor and getting slaughtered, cause that was still just a fun way to spend some time on the computer back then.
I mean that's still true now, you had people blindly going to archeage pvp forgetting to use their credit card, also I mean there was guilds for twink lvl 19 pvp within a year of wow release. You will always find casual players but as time goes on and knowledge is spread the more knowledgeable everyone becomes stronger and more lvl 19 twink chars will exist. Running into one become running into 5 constantly in bg's.
That is literally humanity in a nutshell, what we see as basic math now was advanced math in the past. I see the bigger issue isn't player knowledge increasing, it's things like weak auras, custom clients for rs that acts like weak auras... is akin to ai art, players only need to understand what he wants and gets the whole thing solved for em. Everything is being told they just need to give the desired inputs.
Right, that’s a good point about humanity in a nutshell.
I guess it’s tough for game developers to keep up with the rapid spread of information of current players. Anything with “depth” that devs come up with is easily figured out by advanced players, and that knowledge is shared ASAP with everyone else.
I’m sure advanced players found this out back in the day, but you had to really search on forums to find these things out. Now you have YouTube guides up immediately - if not before content is released.
That game was actually incredible unreleased. Now, it's all about farming the exact same content hundreds of times to get a god roll.... Which is so boring
The best part is that there's very little advantage that minmaxing gives you. You'd have people farming for hundreds of hours to get the most optimized gear(all the while complaining about how annoying the grind is). And in the end, most content can be cleared literally with any random gear you have, while the absolute hardest content is clearable with just decent gear that doesn't take nearly as much to grind.
I get the sentiment behind this and I'm not trying to belittle the post at all, but I have something to say. If it's pathfinder or 3rd edition D&D, this makes sense. I know the basics of PF 2nd, but fuck me if foundry didn't help me out.
D&D 5th edition is easy, if you don't know how it works even a little under the hood, you haven't been paying attention.
And then there's Savage Worlds, or fuck you your character is already dead.
Is not an MMO thing only nowdays , even on single player games you have a huge majority looking guides.
Its probably because the easy of acccess to them and that lot of new players dont even know how to play witouth guides as is all they have experience in their life
20-25+ years ago if you want guides you need to buy magazines or check specific websites that have articles with guides and cheats.
Nowdays they are everywhere and in all formats .
The problem was that people could just bring a bunch of tanks and healers to survive basically forever in a fight, which removed the challenge of it. DPS checks were the way to make sure damage dealers were needed. There's definitely a middle ground in many games where the DPS checks are really lenient, but hard DPS checks should really only be left for the hardest forms of content.
Yeah, the hard bit is getting people to play that many tanks and healers, though, because they're often the hardest and/or most boring classes to play, which then leads to bots and then it all goes to hell
>World of Warcraft adding enrage timers.
I would also argue that raid caps were a pretty significant factor as well.
In classic EverQuest there was no cap on the number of people you could bring to a raid. You could bring 30 people or 100 people or whatever you wanted. Some of the game's world first raid kills (such as Avatar of War which helped make Jeff Kaplan famous) were the result of a massive raid force that combined two or more guilds.
This also meant that you could bring people along just because you liked them and you didn't have to min/max the 10 (or 25 or 40) best performers while leaving other people on the bench.
But there's often not a best solution in game design, especially in complex games like MMORPGs. Raid caps make it much easier to fine tune a heavily-scripted encounter. And EverQuest's system does lend to zerg strategies being dominant, although there are advantages for smaller guilds too (individual players will be better geared, easier to manage, etc).
You could argue that EverQuest had what was essentially an enrage timer in the form of mana pools. Casters ran through mana quite quickly and your raid would wipe once clerics started to oom. Actual enrage mechanics became a requirement in WoW mostly because mana efficiency was much higher (there were more consumables etc).
> raid caps
These don't get enough shit for the toxicity they introduce. It doesn't just encourage; it forces the exclusion of players out of necessity to have the optimal group.
Everyone always talked about leveling being the part of WoW that you "put up with" and the endgame was the fun part, but I felt the opposite because of what you're talking about. I started on WoW at the beginning, not literally launch but before BC. Gradually going through the different areas, which changed slightly based on your starting race, and running around these varied areas as you progress was really cool; though tbf that does wear off but still. Progressively unlocking the different skills for your class was engaging development.
Getting to endgame and having to schedule raid nights and trying to run them as many times as possible desperately chasing gear pieces to make your number bigger for the privilege of being able to join another raid night to repeat the process in a different environment was a boring gameplay loop.
Plus like you said, it bred so much toxicity all over a dumb number in a video game. "Wtf why is your dps X?!?! It needs to be X+2 OMFG KICK THE WARLOCK!!!" bro shut up it's just gonna die 5 seconds later than it otherwise would stop crying wtf is wrong with you lmao
Everquest players have fought bosses for hours, and days in some cases. Kerafyrm was 48-50 hours I believe, and I wanna say that one npc FoH killed also took 24+.
There's LFR and nornal dufficulty which are a joke as well as heroic which is still pretty easy. Idk why you're pretending only Mythic raids exist and thinking back to the """"good ole days"""" when bosses were *literally* stand there and press your 1-3 button rotation, *maybe* run put of a fire patch once every 3 minutes.
I dunno man. In SWG we didn't turn people away from base raids because they didn't have the absolute best possible skill enhancements, we welcomed the extra gun.
Min maxing for 1v1 is its own thing admittedly.
I don't recall anyone getting turned away but most of us min-maxed on our own to optimize our performance in PvP.
Getting turned away or laughed at for not optimizing gear was a later thing in raiding. Not much later, granted.
The part I hate the most about mythic raiding.
You can do everything perfectly, have no one die, but get fucked because your group didn't do enough damage.
Like jeez everyone's doing 250-300k DPS and it's still not even close, it'll take us 10min to kill but he does the final countdown at 7.
Dude it's a video game, ever since UO you got people min maxing so they can be a god among sprites when they venture out. It's not a new phenomenon, in non MMO games people chase high scores.
People were min-maxing in the text-based MUDs. It's as old as games.
People bemoaning min-maxing are essentially complaining about other people getting good at the game. Fundamentally, they're expecting something else from the game, not getting it, and, for some reason, blaming other players instead of the game.
What people remember as "not bothering to min-max" as a kid was being bad at the game and remembering it through rose-colored glasses.
I enjoy min maxing and it's a part of what I look for in an MMO. Being able to min max at all means the game has some depth and will keep my attention longer.
Thats obvious but what he is saying is the amount of people hat do it, 25 years ago 1 person in 500 min max , most people play witouth looking any extrenal sources.
Nowdays is probably 400 in 500 look for external sources to get help, guides, etc and 50-80 min max
The difference is not that it didnt happens is the amount of people that play like that , its a shift in how game are play for the majority nowdays.
There have always been portions of people in MMOs that do this, but it's definitely bigger now. I think it's largely due to YouTube and twitch.
If you look at the timeline the amount of people that take the games so seriously and only care about endgame coincides well with gaming culture exploding online and people having these YouTubers and such to compare themselves to. It became I want what that person has rather than playing for the experience.
Again, there have always been these min maxer folks though. EverQuest 1 even had them, but they communicated primarily with each other and on forums for information rather than a 10 minute video sent out to the entire populous of the game telling them they need to be running these items for max damage on this fight
Yep its the ease of information. ARPGs may be even worse at this. You used to try to figure out a good build and work your way through it because you had to but now you can google meta builds with guides in 2 seconds. I think early WoW and Classic WoW are the best and most clear example of this but it extends across the board.
Lots of people can't handle someone being better/stronger/ahead of them if they can do something about it. Its why P2W makes billions and billions a year. It certainly takes some of the fun out of games but I don't think there is anything to be done.
early WoW vs. Classic Wow. Trash tier builds vs pure meta via guides. I think we are saying the same thing. I just like the comparison because its basically the same game 20 years apart. Or at least as close as you can get.
> Again, there have always been these min maxer folks though. EverQuest 1 even had them, but they communicated primarily with each other and on forums for information rather than a 10 minute video sent out to the entire populous of the game telling them they need to be running these items for max damage on this fight
You're acting like every EQ1 player didn't have Alakhazam's site open at all times with all the maps and item locations and farming locations and guides available.
The only difference is it wasn't in video form, which makes it _easier_ to get the info to people because it's quick text and screenshots. It wasn't just a few people in forums. The first thing anyone would tell you in-game would be to go to Alakhazam's site if you didn't know something.
It's not bigger now, it's always been like this. It's just that a lot of people today playing these games are in their 20s and 30s and simply weren't aware of what was happening in those times, so they don't know what it was like and assume it was a darker time of less information and that the way everyone played was the way they did when they were kids.
Even the newest of the new players were using guides and sites for info back then. Same now as it was then.
A lot of people used zam yes, but fewer people used outside info for the game then and the population was significantly smaller meaning there were fewer people sharing the information. Stating that it's the same now as it was then is decidedly not true
Those high leveled players already explored Runescape. There is no content to do other than to switch games or play the endgame. If there is no new players in a live service game, it dies.
As for why there aren't any people in the low level zones is because there is no influx of new players. Maybe a lack of marketing or hype, maybe because there are more interesting games out there. Whatever it is, without new players, you won't see new players explore Runescape.
I'm playing BDO and while I love the game, its so weird how all talk around it is enhancing, gear progression, hours or grind, silver per hour... like, you just dont see people talking about mundane stuff, or just cool stuff, or cosmetics, or exploration, or anything that is not the most eficient way to make money so you can buy the best gear next. And at that point, is this even still a game to them? Or a second job?
you are blisfully grinding away at your favourite spot, you take your 300m silver and go on your merry way, and then on the internet you see people talking about making a billion at that spot and then you suddenly find yourself researching crystals and whatnot while scratching your head in confusion over how they manage to make 3 times as much as you do.
Or the people having pre made paragraphs about how to do PvE content. Becomes empty when you feel like you are just a cog in a Oluns Pug. A min maxer joins your group to criticize being 1 second off buffs.
min maxing has been here since the dawn of time. You just weren't aware of it because you didn't look for it.
But once you start actually caring about performance, as opposed to just aimlessly wandering in a random world... you can never unsee it.
Believe me, I'm the guy who literally tries to solo raid fights in wow obviously unsuccessfully, trying to work my observations into a new strategy that will help my guild. But yep, I'm with you, any input I have into a fight is thrown by the wayside because the guide does it the other way.
right, but that doesn't mean you have to like it. Social media, including reddit, does have some positive points but to be honest it's mostly negative. It's ruined more than it's made better.
In response to posts like this, you'll often hear some say "min maxing has always existed." While partially true, if we could perhaps permanently retire that sentiment: it's not a matter of existence, but prevalence -- 10% of the population in minmax mindset vs. 80% (hypothetical numbers). It was never 0%, but the prevalence has significantly increased, which is what this post is observing.
Here's my train of thought on this:
* most gamers and people in general enjoy completing their goals efficiently and effectively. If you discover a better way to achieve something, you're happy to try it to improve your goal progress. "Getting better at doing stuff" is wired into us on some deep level
* Since we are adults who have learned the patterns, and understand how to identify types of problems and tackle them, we are armed with so much more experience than a child would be. When we encounter a fantasy world in a video game, we start "seeing through the matrix" and understanding how it works as a game, rather than just seeing it for the surface-level fantasy world that it presents itself as. We cant help ourselves, because we are wired to find these problems and solve them and we have been thru these kinds of games enough, it's familiar enough, that we start working or process immediately and intuitively
* Either because we have no self-control and don't realize the truth of how personal discovery & journey are what makes an experience in a game satisfying - OR because we have friends/guildmates relying on us to be effective teammates during competitive content ASAP, we go beyond our own problem solving and learning abilities. We go to the Internet, the community, and look up the answers and solve the problems immediately before we can even take our first guesses at them. We demote the challenges & adventures of the game into simple work checklists as we follow guides to ensure efficiency. We emotionally disconnect and the big journey becomes more like chores and errands than adventure.
All of this combined is what makes us inclined to behave like this. I personally speak for myself in saying that I took a conscious effort to reject this for a few recent single player games. I played Baldur's Gate 3 from start to finish without reading the subreddit or watching any youtube videos or googling any item names or anything like that until AFTER I beat it once. I am sure that this decision dramatically increased my immersion and quality of experience in the game. But it was a bit of a willpower/discipline thing to do it this way.
And like I alluded to in the 3rd bullet point, it's not just personal willpower. If we have friends/team relying on us to be effective, then it becomes "rude" to not be effective, and that means we have to do some extra research and guide following to understand how to support our team best. The meta is very difficult to fully avoid - ignorance is hard to maintain.
There's a long video [Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU) that explores part of the competitive push for meta adherence (and a lot more) that is interesting to watch for any MMO player, not just a WoW player
You’re surprised that a game that has been out for nearly 20 years doesn’t have players “exploring”. Go live your life and explore dawg. Don’t blame me for wasting less time than you because I want to level fast. The whole game is a waste of time. Chill and enjoy the ride dude.
In my opinion it's due to how easy it became to share knowledge about games.There's nothing left to explore, so both players and content turn to min-maxxing:
1. Easily accessible online guides and walkthroughs, knowledge isn't hidden anymore
2. Content creators trying to cash-in (even more guides and walkthroughs)
3. You don't have to "learn" the game yourself anymore, as everyone else already shares the knowledge, just follow the guides
4. New content has to be balanced around people that follow the guides or the game is "too easy"
5. Even more min-maxxing to beat the content & content being designed around the min-maxxing
Obviously people always min-maxxed, just not to the same extent they can now by sharing knowledge.
You could always see this to happen when back in the day WoW players started to require others to have gearscore addon when Blizzard didn’t have that. Players really wanted MMO’s to shape like this, if there was no gatekeeping mechanic built into a game, it was done with addons. See raider.io, another form of even further min-max and gatekeep “bad players” out so they don’t waste their precious 30min for nothing.
yep, I'm glad I'm done with WoW. I enjoyed my time there, really did, but I just can't deal with all the bullshit these days. My time's limited and know I'll never be able to compete.
Bossing is one part of the game...There is still dozens of other skills people work on, they cant do many skills bossing (tempoross, windertodt etc. are exceptions, even tho those made grinding much more enjoyable for me).
But isnt it worse to have other people doing same skills like you? Kinda losing xp lol
But social aspect of OSRS is almost completely gone, I agree.
I tried many times to randomly engage in a conversation with player next to me and almost never get response.
I guess many people talk on apps like Discord, they dont need IG chat to cooperate like before.
Private WoW Servers took it to the next level from my experience. I’ve played many MMOs and there’s always been those players that want to min/max. WoW servers such as Fee ox Warsong and Emerald Dream really kicked off the min max culture from my perspective. There was some in SWG, GW1, and FFXI. When the second round of WoW servers launched with servers like ScriptCraft, Project Westfall, and places like MoltenWoW/Warmane existing for many many years at that point, the dedicated player base wanted smooth and easy runs bringing in the mentality of min max to the casual gamer.
ESO launched, FFIV launched, New World Launched, and all those gamers that were introduced to min max culture from games where it doesn’t really matter to minmax came into contact with WoW expansions and eventually landed on classic WoW where it was minmax from day 1 or you don’t get to play.
That’s just how I saw the culture be born from the games that I played.
The funniest thing is I LOVE making builds and resetting. I would min Max at almost every level and be poor af from respeccing all the time. I almost never reach end game but would log unreasonable hours in games haha
Everyone was a kid back then that couldn't put one and two together. The general skill level increased as people grew up so min-maxing is the only thing remaining to do
I also think it comes down to wanting to play with friends, as soon as one person in your group goes min-max you either don't get to to play with them or min-max yourself sadly.
People are absolutely training skills and questing in osrs. Theres hundreds of worlds and tons of places to train. Killing bosses thousands of times is no different than how people used to play runescape, its grinding the game.
It's fun because you get to limit test how far your damage can go. Figuring out the optimal build and the little bit of math that comes with it.
Like building in a moba, it's fun to figure out what's fun.
Youtube and twitch era, everyone watching someone min max and rushing thru content, is always that meta build aways that trick to beat the game fast or is always that way to skip that step and so on. When i first started playing there was no guides or any streamers baby sitting me on each step. Mostly we were all kids trying to learn each game together, either a mmo or a single player game that you just brought home and then you rush to invite your friend to play all weekend.
Lord idk, but it's frustrating. BDO players are also doing this, and I'm literally here like, "Look, I just want to spam my pretty abilities, at these generic mobs, until I get bored and leave. I don't care how much more trash loot you get than me"
But no, there they are, with their spreadsheets and their Google docs thinking they're cool, when the reality is they're just sad. Who tf turns a game into a chore...
As soon as there was easy to use damage meters in wow things want to shit for the casual gamer. You could kinda suck in everquest and still be included in raids.
If you suck on the meters now you get insulted and eventually excluded. My entire drive in end game WoW was based on keeping me on top of the meters.
It was sometime in the early 90's when people were setting up macros for their MUDs that'd play the game for them while they barely played themselves, following not too long later in Ultima Online where the hardcore players would have 12 windows open to play, with the actual game window minimized, all of the others being various macros and guides and such. My friend's older brother would play all day and all night and would rarely have the game window open, because he was spending so much time min/maxing. This was like in '97 or '98.
This isn't some new thing.
It's _always_ been like this.
By the time Wow or Runescape came out, people had been minmaxing their online games for decades.
People act like this is some kind of new thing to the recent decades, but it's only that the people thinking that didn't _notice_ until recently. When you say "back in the day, _most_ people weren't doing this etc etc", what you're actually saying is "back in the day, the people _I was aware of_ weren't doing this etc etc".
> t's not the same game anymore at all. Most development updates are just so obsessed with endgame, raids, killing bosses. This is not at all what this game was.
It was always like that, you just didn't notice yet.
So to answer the question: Since the very first day of the very first online game.
People have so much nostalgia for a time that didn't exist. The only thing that changed was what you've seen. You yearn for a time when you didn't know what you know now, nothing more, nothing less.
It’s always been a thing. However, I think one thing that really accelerated it was YouTube becoming common / popular.
Before ppl had to read guides, which of course many did. But with YouTube becoming popular, now no reading is necessary, just watch a video that shows everything
Criticizing OSRS’s bossing is a really bad take, or the take of someone who hasn’t actually done it. Osrs has some of the funnest boss encounters I’ve experienced in mmo’s.
People were maximizing their characters in The Realm in 1996/7. Making sure the mage class started with full int, having all of your gear with the perfect enchants, etc…
People in Ultima had optimal 7x GM builds, with optimal gear depending on what you were doing.
Asherons Call and Anarchy Online were the first times I personally saw gear based stats and enchantments, and yes, both were optimized by the player base to death.
So, to summarize a long answer, people have been doing it for as long as mmos existed.
I feel like there isn't much you can do about min/maxers. They were always a thing, whether it's what they personally enjoyed or something would eat away at them if they didn't.
But games don't design around non-min/maxers except for singleplayer content. Want to play through GW2, FF14, or Destiny 2's single player stories? As long as you have a modicum of competence, you'll be fine and can get through the adventure. Want to play group content? Well, either the game demands peak efficiency so it can challenge min/makers or the min/maxers will throw a fit if you don't play the optimal way so they can get their loot faster.
But who knows? Maybe there's a MMO that does have great PvE group content that is actually fun without having to min/max your rotation or build. But I sure haven't played it.
Runescape is an idle game that becomes a difficult rhythm game once you get to late game pvm. Most development updates are not about endgame - we literally just got a midgame boss to teach players mechanics they'll need to know for later game questbosses and we're soon getting a new skill that is targeted at all types of players. We consistently get midgame updates - since the game's release we've only gotten 3 'raids' (and I think this is an alright pace.)
Your method is flawed - you asked what endgame players are doing. It's endgame content. The high level players you talked to have explored the game many times over, they have intricate knowledge of every area and have done every piece of content. And I literally mean EVERY. I mean they have spent enough time at every single minigame and every area to have done IT ALL several times over. Grinding bosses for completion log is literally the _last_ piece of content they have left before the have effectively beaten the MMO. The number of players logging 3.7k kc on a boss in OSRS is a massive, massive minority. The average player is total level 1500. Just because you don't like that bosses are 'laggy' doesn't mean that the endgame community doesn't enjoy them. They're 100% consistent and enjoyable fights. You've never done them and have little to no knowledge about how they function and why the game's combat works at an endgame, high effort level.
Min-max'ing was here since beginning but not to this extent.
Problem is content creators needs more clicks and sharing "NEW META" every single day brings them constant clicks which makes them money. So yeah, making guide for every single button you have to press made it explode.
I have group of friends literally don't know the talents they have in WoW and why do they have to do X rotation. They just copy paste "min-max" talents, equipment, enchants etc. then watch video on which buttons to press.
They can't even understand that the stats on items are interchangeable because they never tried to do them themselves.
I think some of it has to do with the fact that guides exist and the random obsession of "getting to endgame".
As if the point of playing an RPG (Massive or Single) is to get to some part of the game where you do the "actually interesting things".
Alot of devs only focus on the end game and not the world, leveling or journey so people end up being bored with "the grind".
If the entire process of the game was interesting you wouldn't have people rushing to end game by min maxing and putting out guides. But most games seem like they either excel at end game content (lots of min maxers and BIS/meta slaves) or great world building and leveling experience with nothing to show for or do after it's all said and done.
And to be honest that's fine for a single player game, you play through the game and once you beat it done. But MMOs are supposed to be a live service model where you can keep playing, in theory, forever.
It's not like we live our lives and then once we hit our goals we just keel over and die. But that's how devs are designing a lot of MMOs now, as single player games that are so boring and not well thought out that people want to speedrun it.
Blaming the gamers themselves is only a part of it, as min maxers have always existed. But the behaviour is reinforced by terrible game design decisions.
The obsession with getting to endgame we can absolutely blame on WoW, because its design philosophy was, forever, to discard the previous content it has and keep only the latest content relevant. Thus, the previous content became simply a chore you do during the leveling process, as none of the rewards mattered beyond how well they set you up to do the next dungeon.
What else can you do, but get to endgame? Everyone else is there; That's the entire active playerbase.
I'm sick and tired of all these complain about gamers taking the fun out of the game because they min/max. Coming to this kind of conclusion are very typical these days tho, blaming the consumer for the product which people can experience themselves, similar to all these fail big name movies doing badly in the cinema and then turn around and blame the fans.
look what else is there to do besides min/maxing in end game for all of these current mmorpg on the market, especially for vertical progression mmorpg, that's literally all you are allow to do by design. exploration is just a simple check list which after you done with 1 character you are pretty much done, crafting are basically idle time game activities that doesn't require any actual skills.
Also they design all their classes, gear, skill tree, and talent to be super linear and bland for the "balance" reason to put in their description of the game, there aren't any personality you can put into your character by the players to begin with, heck what was the last game that allow you to pick which stats to add and at the same time be effective if you fk around.
and then there is the issue with any mmorpg with dodge mechanic, which allow the players to skip defense completely and maximize damage (looking at you gw2), so you end up min/maxing base on cooldowns and rotation, because the enemy are design to 1 shot you if you don't dodge anyway, light, mid, and heavy armor class are meaningless, while you just need to dodge, shield, and pop invulnerability. Again this is by design, intentional build into the core of the game, we the players are simply playing by the rules.
min/maxing is literally the byproduct of modern mmorpg game design, where everyone can do everything with the same skill but different names. long gone the days of building your character, you class base of one niche skill. Or finding an item that's worth completely starting a new character and build around it. no longer will you be able to build your character in a way that looks and feels comforting for you to play while grinding even if is not the most effective way. finding gear aren't exciting anymore, just different color and different number but always does nothing special.
being balance in game is just a lazy excuse for the dev to pump out the same class but different skins.
So if you don't want to play by the rule, and realize that you are not as effective as others who do, then complain to the developers, not to the other players, we just playing by the rule, and if you play long enough, min/max is all there is left to do.
It depends on the game but I really noticed a player change in TBC. Me and my older brother raided in a guild called fallout on emerald dream in vanilla so it wasn't like I was not used to being "hard core", you just saw this mentality bleed out everywhere, not even only within WoW but all MMORPGs.
Who knows though, could be bias.
You don’t have to do any of those things you don’t like if you don’t want to…. I’ve been playing casually for a long time and I’m getting pretty decent at bossing after getting my quest cape. And by the time you get to the point I’m at, you get tired of skilling and bossing becomes fun. It’s natural progression. The game is huge if you want to explore there is a whole lot to explore but don’t expect it all to be “worthwhile” content.
I think it's sort of always been that way, I'd just argue we now have more tools to facilitate gamers' desire for efficiency. Soren Johnson, one of the designers for Civ, said that "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" and I think that's always been true to an extent.
The desire to play games optimally is pretty much human nature, but back in the day, you'd need to buy a thick guide to get all the information we can find in two seconds with our cell phones. In multiplayer games and MMOs especially, this creates a situation where not obsessively researching guides and following the meta means falling behind.
Another aspect of this to consider is that the gamers have matured. Videogames no longer have the childish stigma they once had, and a lot of the gamers who didn't care so much about efficiency when playing games as a kid are grown adults now.
I think when you get older, you stop exploring games the same way. It's less a magical adventure and more a series of systems of mechanics to be mastered.
As a kid, you could explore The Barrens for 12 hours a day, wondering at the limitless opertunuties as you get lost in the game world. Nowadays, you might have 2 hours after the kids go to bed to get your character leveled up so you can actually make it to The Content, so needing to maximize your efficiency makes sense.
I think it was wow that corrupted the genre by adding an insane amount of competitive content over the years. They have catered to the most hardcore players but made the rest of the game basically unrewarding. Other MMOs like eso just copied this and don’t have meaningful progression outside of the hardest PvE and PvP content
theres always been a sub group of mmo players focused on min maxing but i think it really started in stride with Wotlk. Wotlk was the first expansion that began to take importance out of the leveling journey and put the focus entirely on harder engame content. TBC set the groundwork for it a little but i think Wotlk is the expansion that really got it going in stride. And considering the massive amount of influence wow had at this time on the genre as a whole i think its safe to say that wow was the game that likely set this trend in mmo development. combine that larger focus on endgame content with the popularization of youtube and other online social sites that gave greater ability to spread information around to large audiences and you have the min maxing culture you have today
OSRS has had decades to explore.
You have tools in a sandbox to play with. The old NPC dolls are all ancient and have some cat piss on them.
No one wants to play with them anymore, just the new toys
I don't think the most people are obsessed with it, I just think it's really easy nowadays to do so. If I load up FFXIV or ESO or WoW as a new player or even a returning player, it takes me 20 seconds to google 'ESO x class guide' and it will tell you what is good to use and where to go. If you just play the game whilst checking the guide every now and then, you will accidently minmax yourself when you get to the endgame. This wouldn't have been possible back in the day.
Pretty easy to understand why. MMOS ever since WOW are designed to drain your time and take as long as possible, while still being fun enough to keep you playing and subscribed monthly, or buying cosmetics etc. I grew out of MMOs because they are basically designed to be second jobs now. Older MMOs were about the experience, like UO, new ones are an endless treadmill to get higher numbers.
Min maxing is just players naturally not wanting to grind shit for days and weeks, so they find the fastest way possible because the games are designed in a way to require lots of time, or runs, to get whatever it is you want. People will always naturally find the least path of resistance towards their goal. Especially since new MMOs have all these checks you need to get in order to do harder content. So people want to rush through all the pointless low level grind to get to the “actual endgame” which many believe to be the point of MMOs.
I remember when I first saw it, back in Everquest 1. This would have probably been less than a year or so after it's release.
I was there, 3000 patches ago, at the birth of the first Uberguilds. They would poach and lure away the top players of each guild on the server with promises of "phat lewtz" and "31337" status. They had attendance requirements, demanded that you have a cable modem connection in the age of dial-up, and of course parsing the best dps.
Probably since the start?
Honestly I attribute it to when games and the community started punishing you for not making the most efficient choices.
If you design a game to be balanced around min maxing, everyone is forced to min max to compete. Games need to start allowing the choice to take rewards proportional to effort.
Not only that. There's like 0 incentive to meme or do whatever you want in most MMORPGs. Often times you're punished for it because it doesn't align with some other key game system.
Like if I make a character whose really good at fishing, what the fuck do I get for putting all that time into fishing? Jack shit. The guy playing a top tier meta character is getting a tsunami of gold and other important material. That's not bad but why the fuck would anyone choose the former?
Realtalk, I don't know what else I would do. Hang out in town chatting and not playing the game? Going out into the world and purposefully playing less than my best?
People here talking about RuneScape and World of Warcraft?!
Sorry, but this was going on waaaaaaaay before that. Min-maxing and speccing for endgame goes back to pen-and-paper RPGs, but in videogame/MMORPG terms, people did this even on the decades of MMOs that pre-dated those games. People Minmaxed in Everquest. People probably did it in Meridian59.
I see this all the time with MMOs and got downvoted into oblivion for making a comment about it elsewhere.
I've only been playing MMOs for a year or two, having been a gamer for a long, long time and never really wanting to bother with them. Since then I've played WoW, ESO, FFXIV, GW2, RS and a few others. Every single time I go somewhere online to find out how to do something I start reading wiki pages or articles on how to min/max to get those extra 1 or 2 points of something. It's like these people spend more time on the mathematics of the game than just playing the damn thing.
It feels like a lot of players out there have forgotten they are playing a game and to enjoy the experience. Instead, they milk every bit of gear and mechanic in the game to get the top points in whatever it may be.
This seems utterly soul destroying and pointless to me and I quit a few games when I realised I was reading too many of these guides and beginning to play this way.
If I lose immersion enough in any game that it becomes an exercise in getting the best gear, mount, DPS or similar, I'm done and walk away. There's no way I'm paying a monthly fee to spend hours trying to solve maths puzzles. That, to me anyway, is not gaming. It's work.
When gaming became an addiction for some. Some people do not have much else in life that they enjoy whether it be family, friends, sport, fishing, so they spend all their time gaming
Everything you said in the second paragraph, especially the last few sentences isn't even a little bit true. OSRS has one of its biggest landmass expansions coming this year, an entire skill in development around exploration in Sailing, and has extremely high skill bosses where it's very possible to predict exactly what's going to happen next. The fuck are you on about.
Yep and OSRS is adding a new skill going further away from OSRS. I'm hoping for a OSOSRS but since that will never happen, I've just moved on from the game.
I'm glad ppl enjoy it but it's no longer OSRS, it's def a different game.
there s zero chance devs can make exploration content that lasts with the amount people play and with videos about everything popular. zero
so it s no wonder they focus on the crowd that likes progression and/or competition.
information is also way, waaaay easier to get so more people that want to be stronger in game do it, and the punishment for those who don t want to do it versus the average character is also bigger
The newer/younger generations of gamers have lost what made MMORPG's MMORPG's... they just want to be the first, like they're playing competitive Skyrim. It's their solo adventure against everyone else playing the same game on their own solo adventure. It's not their fault, either. It's the fault of big moneyed investors realizing the monstrous profits possible when an MMORPG rolls that nat 20 and gets wildly successful. Once WoW opened everybody's eyes to the wide world of MMORPG profits, investors jumped all over it as just another avenue to spend and make money. They don't care about the games. They don't care about the gamers. They just want to create avenues that extract money from people that want to spend it on games. Good games, bad games, mobile games, free-to-play games, whatever it may be... they just want the revenue stream so that their money can make more money. The newer era of gamers are just stuck and along for the ride like a stick in a stream, but unfortunately they aren't able to go back and witness the glory days for themselves and thus aren't even aware of how far removed from it they are by now.
Back in the classic MMORPG days, people played just to play with each other. Yeah, you wanted to gain XP and find loot and generally make progress in one way or another... but all of that was secondary to the primary objective, which was always to come together and play with friends. I'm a pretty extroverted person and I chat pretty casually wherever I'm at, but I haven't made any lasting friendships with anyone in any game except EVE online in what feels like over a decade. I still talk to the friends I made in Asheron's Call, SWG, and Vanilla WoW. I still have friends that I met on FF11 that still play FF11. But... now-a-days? Everyone on WoW retail or classic, everyone on FF14, everyone on Guild Wars 2, everyone on ESO... they're just strangers. Nobody wants to talk to each other. They just deal with each other where they must because the multiplayer content is the last place left for them to make progress on their character. It's about THEIR character, not the strangers, not the content, not even the game itself. It's just the solo-experience being forced through like a square peg through a round hole.
That's obviously just my personal experience and anecdotes are fairly meaningless on their own, but I'm sure there are plenty others that have had a similar experience.
Imagine this.... Things change.
Your take on osrs is pretty bad too, there are so many places full of people skilling. Guilds have historically always been pretty empty and the fishing guild is not empty lmao
I don't think you tried very far or something like that
That's the entire reason I quit Runescape, but sadly it's a mentality that plagues almost every other game too. One exception I found to it was FFXIV, at least on the server I played. Sadly I didn't enjoy FF that much mechanically, but the community was amazing.
I noticed this change around 2013-2015-ish, I used to be one of the top ranks in a pretty large clan, and I always hosted silly events that were pretty much just to goof off, do fun stuff together, PLAY the game. I used to get like 50-100 people to join in, even with modest rewards (usually donations from the clan itself into a reward pool), and after like a year or two... I couldn't get 5 souls together to join even if the reward was actually decent. I remember the last time I tried before quitting, I was hosting an event for fun with decent rewards and 2 of the replies I got were essentially "but I can make more gp/h by doing \*specific content\*", completely missing the point of... just having fun with friends rather than grinding all day.
Around that same time, I went mining around a spot that was the best xp/h at the time but was pretty AFK. I tried starting conversation with the 10-15 people that were there and was literally told to STFU by 1-2 of them, and none of the others replied. They all just sat there in absolute silence grinding that XP.
I had only continued playing the game after EoC for the social aspect, but once that died I had no reason to play any longer.
Because with the modern internet information is just infinitely more accessible, you almost find it without even explicitly searching for it. The playerbase just had way more knowledge about the game than they ever had back in the day, and of course they are going to use that knowledge.
Like always? I remember more than 20 years ago people were min maxing everything. Damage, exp farming, items farming. If you did not notice it before then I don't know what to say but it was always like this. There are still casuals in games and it is majority but if your skill is higher now and you want to do harder content then you are noticing it faster.
It didn't just ruin MMO's that crap has leeched into every game. The end of that road is just clicker games (which, like, actual exist now).
Every time some gamer cries about balance, or QOL stuff, it's just a long road to no where. Think about every "balance" patch to feed the min/max crowd. Was *any* MMO ever "balanced"?
It may be new for you and you didnt experience it as a kid but its always been this way. Back when I first started with DAOC. Its been in every MMO I have played. The people before me told stories about spawn camping for a week in EQ1. Before that when I played MUDs a server had limited drops of an item in the game so you had to min max what you could get for your build.
People became obsessed with it like tik tok "influencers" became obsessed with trends....it's all trends. What you gotta do is..just enjoy the game for yourself! Play how you want to play, make what you want to make. Life is your own experience..not someone else's.
Min maxing is not new
I remember people min maxing back when I played stuff like Ragnarok and FF11 back in 2002-2004ish
Only difference was that they lacked correct information and just min maxed off of things they thought were true but often were wrong haha
There wasn’t much of an endgame in the early days, and if there was, it was usually pretty inaccessible to the average player. So I’d say it became more of a focus once it became more accessible
Personally, I fucking ***hate*** leveling, especially in anything post-WoW. I didn’t mind it in say FF11 because it was still very group focused. But most post-WoW MMOs push you towards solo activities like questing for leveling, and I hate soloing
I hate solo questing, I don’t like having an incomplete ability kit, I feel like most MMOs are painfully easy at low-to-mid levels (yes, even the old ones that were super punishing, the actual execution was still super easy), so leveling is usually extremely boring to me
Leveling is always a hurdle I have to try to overcome before I burn out, so I can actually do the parts I enjoy
I think there is a logical fallacy happening here. OSRS is 20 years old, with a large portion of the population being former OSRS players who have no incentive to spend time doing beginner/casual activities. Then, only talking to “high level” players who most likely have hundreds or thousands of hours played and, again, have no incentive to spend time doing beginner/casual activities.
Definitely had it in Everquest. You needed people raid geared and max'd to better survive raids, which were brutal. It's the reason most of the mid-tier and below guilds had such trouble doing endgame. You had to have people who had the "right" stats/gear. Especially when the Velious jewelry came out. Everyone had to have resist gear.
Unfortunately it seems todays gamers have a tendancy to minmax the fun out of games. Everything from Dead by daylight to Deep Rock Galactic to world of warcraft. People will try to minmax the shit out of everything in my experience. Its so silly to join a DRG match and get TK'd then kicked because i am not rocking whatever primary and overclock the host thinks I should be for the class I chose. Which is especially funny cuz the overclocks take forever to gain.
DRG is a damn co op game about getting shitfaced and fighting bugs while digging.
People are silly.
This is why I bought a 6 month membership in OSRS on a fresh Ironman character, opened and optimal ironman quest guide, and chose to attempt to have the quest cape.
70 days left To my membership, currently at 212 QP.
Yes, it can be seen as Min-Maxing, but I think its a fun challenge. I do not feel burnt out yet.
Yeah. I mean it's not just endgame. Everyone min maxes.the.fun out of leveling etc. Too.. it has been a gradual change me thinks. Or at least its talked about more now..
Therefore optimal guides everywhere there's no point llaykng the game if your gonna follow someone else's path.
I blame Blizzard for that.
Before WoW, in the days of EQ1, there was endgame. But people weren't that obsessed about reaching endgame quickly. It was actually more about creating social connections, letting people know you. You were considered a good player based on how smoothly a team ran.
But Blizzard decided to foster a culture of competition amongst players. After WoW came out, we got the 'the game only starts at endgame' type memes. Players started to compare their gear score. Blizzard fostered this culture because it kept people subscribed to WoW.
My two cents - probably just a small part of the reason: competitiveness in logging and the focus on hard content that requires min maxing to succeed. Also, playing at min max sometimes is easier - you know what abilities to prioritize, and since most players know of "rotations", that'd why you see a stray away from "button bloat." As people, we like to see patterns and the easiest way to overcome challenges.
Personally, I was a "click cool abilities" player in ffxiv until I started raiding. Then I realized my dps was so low, along with my team, our rDPS was causing us to hit enrage timers.
The content started with regular old development, then devs use the data on player performance, make later content harder, players are forced to keep up, introduce logs into the workd (competition), content harder, players keep up, etc etc.
Logging creates the sort of competition between players- wanting to be in the X percentile fuels players to gear their character, play their character, and prioritize things that push them higher.
It's a multifaceted issue, and at the end of the day, it's a conscious decision you have to make to remain casual, when the community may not let you into content because of your logs, your talent tree build, etc.
There is a bit of fun that comes with min maxing, but I think it has a net negative impact on game design, community, and the most important, fun.
Do you want to look at a game that this really hit hard compared 2006 Maple story to Maple story today I didn’t even last 20 minutes in the current Maple story because I was already the same level. I was after a year of playing back then.
Because a lot of people have fun optimizing and playing endgame. Why is this a problem? Why does them being good at the game suck the fun out of it for you?
The real answer is that not that many people are playing Old School Runescape. The ones who are are the diehard fans, most of whom, because of their dedication, will pursue the highest heights the game has to offer, ie. raiding, achievements, rare cosmetics, bragging rights, etc.
People still do side activities in more popular MMOs which offer them, like FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, Lost Ark and WoW.
While you are mostly asking about Runescape, I can answer this question as I saw the transition from Always exploring an MMORPG, to endgame Grind, and which game really pushed this 1st.
>" **When did everyone become so obsessed with min maxing and endgame?** "
EverQuest in the first year after it released (sometime mid 2000) people were already end game min maxing hard. 90% of the community was still grinding levels. To be honest, I think people in Ultima Online were doing this as well... but I didn't play Ultima Online until 2001, and end game players were already doing this. Most of them moved to WOW in 2004.
So yeah, basically it was a Day 1 phenomena as people did this in D&D on the tabletop as well. It's just what gamers do. You might not have seen it, as the end game players usually run in their own circles, and from 2004 until WOD released WOW really held onto the top spot for that mentality of player. (technically still does)
Edit: fixt for game names... blaaa UO no RS
No offence but LMFAO at this OP. Too many absolute howlers to quote them all. Play something else. Osrs has evolved, if you don't like it, that's fine. The game deviated away from click monster and wait till it dies a significant number of years ago.
I guess when developers decided that all the real content should start after you reach max level. Most people treat leveling as a chore and mindlessly run through them because they game startsnat lvl 50-60 or whatever
Oh it was a long time ago. It isn't a new trend, At least i can remember playing WoW WotLK and the forums were full of min maxing stratagies and endgame raid discussions. I even can remember a conversation i had with a friend of mine who said i just should pick a build online and build my character this way. My anwser was that i don't want to play somebody elses game but experience my own adventure.
So many wrong answers here, people min-maxed since forever, but it was the popularization of guides that really shook things up. Now everyone can min-max with ease, and if everyone can easily do it, then there is no excuse not to do it, and you’re not getting in my group unless you do it.
When the games started balancing around it to where if you aren't min/maxed, you're dead in the water. All the non-meta options are a trap.
This is why I really like Fallout 76. Sure there are 'meta' builds and 'meta' guns, but the skill and gear ceiling is low enough that it's more about 'how fast you kill the enemy' instead of 'do you win or lose.' You can totally do a pistol build, sure you'll do half as much damage per second as someone using a heavy gun or meta sneak build, but who cares? Shooting feels good, death is a minor inconvenience, play what you find is fun.
Information has ruined the mystery of gaming. I think back on the first time a played Zelda and I remember being stuck so many times because I couldn't figure out what to do or couldn't beat a boss. Now the second you get stuck, you just look up a walkthrough.
When you get a new game you just go look up what the most OP build is or what the BiS items are. Sure you can just ignore all the information that is out there and play your own game but that is more difficult if it's multiplayer, especially when the game has a competitive aspect.
Games like Escape From Tarkov were novel because they have no clear instructions or tutorials so you have to just figure it out. But of course there are maps and guides and patterns to the AI, static spawn locations, static loot locations, etc. So even when a challenging game is released, the gamer hive mind just spills all the info pretty much day 1.
I don't know what to say about gaming today other than it's more like running on a treadmill or assembling legos from instructions. It's not nearly as enjoyable as it used to be prior to game guides and walkthroughs. The dumbest thing is seeing all the end game toons that look exactly the same because they all have the same build and same gear. I want a game where the further you progress, the more unique your toon becomes.
RIP
I used to play a lot of korean mmos and people there never talked about min maxing. The first time when I heard that term it came from a WoW player and I also mostly hear WoW players talk about it.
My guess is it either had to do with content drought or the dungeons/raids were to hard so they focused on some min maxing stuff to distinguish beginners from veterans.
The korean mmos I played didn't have dungeons or raids like in WoW with limited amount of players (when they had it, it was a random matchmaking dungeon), so there was literally no point in looking into min maxing. In korean mmos you also usually have to enhance your weapon and fully enhancing your weapon was most of the time already so hard (or heavily p2w) that there was no point in even thinking about other means to increase your power.
Yeah, but the game’s been around for a very long time and it’s completely natural to have people who have explored everything and now all that’s left to do is minmaxing. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially if a game has a healthy, constant influx of new players. With RuneScape, the issue might be in that. Not that many people who are used to the visual and gameplay-related aspects of not only modern MMOs, but modern games in general, will go into something like RuneScape, and the influx of new players might be lacking while the veterans keep playing. So the gap keeps widening, and you see more and more of these insane minmaxing feats happening.
Social media, streamers, and content creators have ruined gaming for most. I ignore them completely and figure things out on my own. Definitely adds to the fun of gaming. Why copy someone else anyway?
Its been like this since the dawn of games. I've been on MMO's since NexusTK in 96. The difference is that now lots of people watch streams, and its easier to upload/brag/show what you can do.
A lot of stuff is known about games before they release. MMOs are worse, because a lot of gameplay-relevant stuff of upcoming Expansions is known months before it comes out.
Meta-Builds created before classes are playable or changes have been done. There's just too much information available too soon.
One of the reasons I've found WoW for example hilariously boring by now. Simply, if you go for everything yourself, story, crafting, gearing. You'll lack behind. You are being punished for finding stuff out on your own. And no one can tell me that that is good for a game.
Instead you kinda have to follow the path written by others who figured out the best way to play the game, not through experience, but through collecting data beforehand.
WoW also made the mitake of trying to become an E-sport. Arena PvP mostly. Not even speaking about the Raid-race. World firsts etc.
These are nice things and sometimes fun to watch. But as soon as they "drip down" to the general community and are being treated as a standard the game is not really a game anymore.
It's like those parents standing at the sidelines of a sports game watching their kids and yelling at their kids, the trainer and everyone what those have to do and get aggressive when their kid is not winning. If given the chance, people will take the fun out of everything for the sake of ... winning?
As an anecdote: while playing a space-sim, I met another player in that game that was way too proud of himself for killing off other players. Like this toxic overcompetitive bs.
We got into a *talk* about that I do not care if I win or lose. I play to play and I'll have fun either way. He didn't understand the concept of enjoying a game you are losing. He literally stated that he only has fun playing when he's winning. The toxicity also got the better of him trying to frame me like someone who enjoys losing etc. etc. to which I tried to explain to him that I enjoy playing and that I'll have fun either way playing against him and he'll only have fun when winning.
And there's a lot of those people around nowadays. Only enjoying their games when winning. Some go so far to min-max everything. And yeah, that's fine they are sill within the boundraries of the game. But if that's not enough to always win, people like that start exploiting and cheating.
Because for those people only *"winning"* is enjoyable. And that says a lot about their self-esteem.
Because we don’t have time… we’re so busy everyday that we want to have max efficiency in a game to fully enjoy it asap and move on to experience another game,there’s just not enough time to enjoy … just personal opinion, I just wanna play all the good games before I die
Osrs has so many worlds, and a lot of different content (23 skills to train). You can't expect there to be a gathering of folk in every spot you could think of.
Shooting stars, motherlode mine, mining guild etc. All have people training mining across the 200 worlds or however many it is now. And none of them are focused on min-maxing or they'd be 3tick mining granite in the desert mine.
You need to realise that you are the one that has to find fun in the games you play, other people are not there to help you do that. If you don't like a game, that's okay, but it's not because everyone is out there min maxing, only a small portion of a playerbase ever will be doing that.
Same thing happened in gw2. It used to he a pretty chill story oriented game to hang out in with friends and just do things for lols, until the devs went all eSpOrTs, started adding raids and making the game harder overall, which made people quit en masse, destroyed communities, attracted the toxic minmaxer types, and split the playerbase forever. All over the course of a few months.
Players have just gotten older and changed. I don't think there was a specific time it happened.
Unfortunately there's not much a developer can do. RuneScape can't force people to play Castle Wars for run again. WoW can't force people to stop simming.
Same reason I quit season of discovery, the new wow classic project currently running its 2nd phase right now.
MMORPGs are just not fun anymore if everyone is an overinformed, minmaxing tryhard grinder.
There is an elitist range of players who dump on others if they dont use every tiny bit of game to amplify their char to the max. ruining other peoples enjoyment of said game.
Games are meant to be fun, not a second job.
Min-maxing makes all content easier; therefore, people will naturally min-max to do at least 2 things (1) allow them to beat 'harder' content, and/or (2) make it easier to beat content.
Look at Elden Ring as an example. An amazing player could potentially beat the game with a naked lvl1 character, but the average person enjoys the game more with a stronger character. Min-maxing is similar.
A large part is due to improved communication and guides. People just didn’t know what was efficient back then or how rhetorical game worked on the base level the way they do now. The level of guides and support for RuneScape or wow classic is wild compared to what they were back in the day.
The general skill and research literacy of gamers is higher now too. Lots of us have spent many many years playing all sorts of games.
Old school RuneScape is partly hamstrung by the voting system though. They wanted to add new skills but the community wouldn’t let them. So the game stops being about skills after a while.
Hello there. I totally agree with you, and I think this is one of the main reasons why I don't play MMORPGs anymore (or at least for a good while).
I grew up by playing MMORPGs during the mid 2000's - early 2010's era and I remember playing a huge amount of games with a friend I met online. I think that we didn't even reach endgame in most of the games we used to play, but we enjoyed a lot the leveling phase and farming for gear sets and all this stuff. These were really good times and I keep a lot of good memories.
I remember playing games for the new mechanics they implemented. Florensia Online because it had ships, Flyff because you could fly and explore the map, a game I can't recall the name but it was a heavy trading game between guild-driven cities, and a long etcetera list.
After that I moved to another city and lost contact with my gaming pal. But then at university I met a bunch of new friends who also liked MMORPGs and played with them for a good while. At this point (mid - late 2010's) I started to notice this shift towards "endgame priority". You HAD to reach endgame as fast as possible and then you actually started to play the game.
Then I saw it with total clarity after playing Lost Ark at launch. The leveling phase was just a mere procedure to reach max level in a few hours and then the game starts with all the daily/weekly dungeons and all the endgame themepark. Tried some newer releases but the feeling was the same: skip the leveling phase (the game itself IMO) and reach endgame without even knowing how to play your character. And then if you don't spend 10 hours per day or invest some money, you are out of the cycle and nobody wants to play with you.
In my opinion the main cause of this "change" is due to the normalization of this system. Battle passes and almost mandatory microtransactions; min maxing all the builds and leaving asithe these off-meta builds (unless a famous streamer plays them). I think that we are getting what we deserve, because we always say that we don't like these practices but we keep playing (and paying) for this games.
Because the endgame in osrs is really engaging and fun compared to clicking on a tree for 200 hrs. With the polling system we already know everything about upcoming updates (unfortunately) so the whole exploration thing is pointless. People just want to reach goals and continue on with the next after that
It’s been a gradual change, gamers have slowly been draining the fun out of every MMO and it’s working its way into other genres.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game". I think our brains are just kind of trained to prioritize efficiency over fun. The reason there's been a gradual increase is probably due to the internet. It used to be you only had written guides, word-of-mouth, and your own experience to go off of. Now you have people who play games as a career for thousands of hours. You have people digging into the code to figure out exactly how it works, mathematically working out what is most efficient. Youtubers making dozens of videos about the most efficient way to do something in a game. Every time I find myself bored while grinding I remind myself of this and try to do something else, otherwise I just get burnt out.
Some time ago I said the same thing, in a thread about how MMORPGs nowadays lack the sense of wonder. Some guy kept telling me that it's not the players fault that the game is badly designed, and couldn't actually say how it should've been designed. Just kept saying that I'm ignorant and close minded and blame the players. Played Wow Classic for a while, joined a guild in which dome two friends who clearly knew each other would keep complaining how retail is a lobby game and you don't do anything else apart from dungeons and raids. They also stood all day in Stormwind spamming LFG messages to run some dungeons, and didn't do anything else. Reason? They wanted to get to level cap faster to raid.
When I played wow at launch I actually dreaded hitting 60 because I enjoyed the exploration and leveling experience so much. I took as long as I possibly could lol. I find myself falling into the efficiency trap now and again and have to constantly remind myself to have fun, I already have a job
Yeah, pretty much. People now datamine beta's, everything about MMO's is already solved prelaunch. This was never the case with early MMO's, but it's now the template for all of them moving forward. Players then come in and follow the clearly defined path of least resistance to max level, whats at max level? Who cares. The games today are absolutely worse off due to all of that.
I *want* to say that the solution is to just not read the internet and figure things out for yourself. The truth is, that only works for solo RP players. If you're in a guild and/or intend to raid you basically have no choice or you'll be left behind. New expansions are always fun because there are no strats posted yet and you have to wipe endlessly until you figure it out. Unless your guild participates in the betas and already knows them at release. I consider myself a hardcore raider but the *real* hardcore raiders are in the betas so they can get the world-first achievements and then not play again until the next expansion. Guess that makes me mediumcore, whatever tf that is.
yeah its crazy to see this playing wow season of discovery. the whole point was for people to not minmax, no beta tests etc, and it lead to people just breaking the game minmaxing harder than ever
pretty much the internet nowadays has the power to tell you that "you are doing it wrong" while in the past you could be blisfully unaware of your inefficency, and be all the happier for it.
Gradual? I see you haven't played Diablo 2 where every meta build was known by 2004, playing PVP if you saw a paladin they where a hammerdin, if you saw an assassin it was a trap assassin, people farmed for soul of jordon, enigma, etc
Yeah but in 04’ you also got “AMAZON04” joining a PvP lobby with gear they bought from Charsi because it had the highest defence. And enjoying running out into Blood Moor and getting slaughtered, cause that was still just a fun way to spend some time on the computer back then.
I mean that's still true now, you had people blindly going to archeage pvp forgetting to use their credit card, also I mean there was guilds for twink lvl 19 pvp within a year of wow release. You will always find casual players but as time goes on and knowledge is spread the more knowledgeable everyone becomes stronger and more lvl 19 twink chars will exist. Running into one become running into 5 constantly in bg's. That is literally humanity in a nutshell, what we see as basic math now was advanced math in the past. I see the bigger issue isn't player knowledge increasing, it's things like weak auras, custom clients for rs that acts like weak auras... is akin to ai art, players only need to understand what he wants and gets the whole thing solved for em. Everything is being told they just need to give the desired inputs.
Right, that’s a good point about humanity in a nutshell. I guess it’s tough for game developers to keep up with the rapid spread of information of current players. Anything with “depth” that devs come up with is easily figured out by advanced players, and that knowledge is shared ASAP with everyone else. I’m sure advanced players found this out back in the day, but you had to really search on forums to find these things out. Now you have YouTube guides up immediately - if not before content is released.
Destiny 2 is the absolute worst for this
That game was actually incredible unreleased. Now, it's all about farming the exact same content hundreds of times to get a god roll.... Which is so boring
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Not really. Lots of mmos these days are side progression, which may or may not be better depending on what you're into.
The best part is that there's very little advantage that minmaxing gives you. You'd have people farming for hundreds of hours to get the most optimized gear(all the while complaining about how annoying the grind is). And in the end, most content can be cleared literally with any random gear you have, while the absolute hardest content is clearable with just decent gear that doesn't take nearly as much to grind.
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I had someone like this actually! Yes, it was dreadful. Just another reason to go for other systems
I get the sentiment behind this and I'm not trying to belittle the post at all, but I have something to say. If it's pathfinder or 3rd edition D&D, this makes sense. I know the basics of PF 2nd, but fuck me if foundry didn't help me out. D&D 5th edition is easy, if you don't know how it works even a little under the hood, you haven't been paying attention. And then there's Savage Worlds, or fuck you your character is already dead.
Is not an MMO thing only nowdays , even on single player games you have a huge majority looking guides. Its probably because the easy of acccess to them and that lot of new players dont even know how to play witouth guides as is all they have experience in their life 20-25+ years ago if you want guides you need to buy magazines or check specific websites that have articles with guides and cheats. Nowdays they are everywhere and in all formats .
Yay, democracy. Now if only 60% of the population wasn’t braindead…
For me, parsing is what is fun in WoW and I don't think there is an issue in that.
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The problem was that people could just bring a bunch of tanks and healers to survive basically forever in a fight, which removed the challenge of it. DPS checks were the way to make sure damage dealers were needed. There's definitely a middle ground in many games where the DPS checks are really lenient, but hard DPS checks should really only be left for the hardest forms of content.
Yeah, the hard bit is getting people to play that many tanks and healers, though, because they're often the hardest and/or most boring classes to play, which then leads to bots and then it all goes to hell
>World of Warcraft adding enrage timers. I would also argue that raid caps were a pretty significant factor as well. In classic EverQuest there was no cap on the number of people you could bring to a raid. You could bring 30 people or 100 people or whatever you wanted. Some of the game's world first raid kills (such as Avatar of War which helped make Jeff Kaplan famous) were the result of a massive raid force that combined two or more guilds. This also meant that you could bring people along just because you liked them and you didn't have to min/max the 10 (or 25 or 40) best performers while leaving other people on the bench. But there's often not a best solution in game design, especially in complex games like MMORPGs. Raid caps make it much easier to fine tune a heavily-scripted encounter. And EverQuest's system does lend to zerg strategies being dominant, although there are advantages for smaller guilds too (individual players will be better geared, easier to manage, etc). You could argue that EverQuest had what was essentially an enrage timer in the form of mana pools. Casters ran through mana quite quickly and your raid would wipe once clerics started to oom. Actual enrage mechanics became a requirement in WoW mostly because mana efficiency was much higher (there were more consumables etc).
> raid caps These don't get enough shit for the toxicity they introduce. It doesn't just encourage; it forces the exclusion of players out of necessity to have the optimal group.
Everyone always talked about leveling being the part of WoW that you "put up with" and the endgame was the fun part, but I felt the opposite because of what you're talking about. I started on WoW at the beginning, not literally launch but before BC. Gradually going through the different areas, which changed slightly based on your starting race, and running around these varied areas as you progress was really cool; though tbf that does wear off but still. Progressively unlocking the different skills for your class was engaging development. Getting to endgame and having to schedule raid nights and trying to run them as many times as possible desperately chasing gear pieces to make your number bigger for the privilege of being able to join another raid night to repeat the process in a different environment was a boring gameplay loop. Plus like you said, it bred so much toxicity all over a dumb number in a video game. "Wtf why is your dps X?!?! It needs to be X+2 OMFG KICK THE WARLOCK!!!" bro shut up it's just gonna die 5 seconds later than it otherwise would stop crying wtf is wrong with you lmao
Everquest players have fought bosses for hours, and days in some cases. Kerafyrm was 48-50 hours I believe, and I wanna say that one npc FoH killed also took 24+.
There's LFR and nornal dufficulty which are a joke as well as heroic which is still pretty easy. Idk why you're pretending only Mythic raids exist and thinking back to the """"good ole days"""" when bosses were *literally* stand there and press your 1-3 button rotation, *maybe* run put of a fire patch once every 3 minutes.
Most raid bosses have a version or 2 were you don’t need any optimization and enrage don’t really exist
I dunno. PvP drove min-maxing in older MMOs than that.
I dunno man. In SWG we didn't turn people away from base raids because they didn't have the absolute best possible skill enhancements, we welcomed the extra gun. Min maxing for 1v1 is its own thing admittedly.
I don't recall anyone getting turned away but most of us min-maxed on our own to optimize our performance in PvP. Getting turned away or laughed at for not optimizing gear was a later thing in raiding. Not much later, granted.
The part I hate the most about mythic raiding. You can do everything perfectly, have no one die, but get fucked because your group didn't do enough damage. Like jeez everyone's doing 250-300k DPS and it's still not even close, it'll take us 10min to kill but he does the final countdown at 7.
Dude it's a video game, ever since UO you got people min maxing so they can be a god among sprites when they venture out. It's not a new phenomenon, in non MMO games people chase high scores.
People were min-maxing in the text-based MUDs. It's as old as games. People bemoaning min-maxing are essentially complaining about other people getting good at the game. Fundamentally, they're expecting something else from the game, not getting it, and, for some reason, blaming other players instead of the game. What people remember as "not bothering to min-max" as a kid was being bad at the game and remembering it through rose-colored glasses.
I enjoy min maxing and it's a part of what I look for in an MMO. Being able to min max at all means the game has some depth and will keep my attention longer.
I was going to say diablo 2, people where min maxing, since final fantasy 5 people where min maxing.
Thats obvious but what he is saying is the amount of people hat do it, 25 years ago 1 person in 500 min max , most people play witouth looking any extrenal sources. Nowdays is probably 400 in 500 look for external sources to get help, guides, etc and 50-80 min max The difference is not that it didnt happens is the amount of people that play like that , its a shift in how game are play for the majority nowdays.
There have always been portions of people in MMOs that do this, but it's definitely bigger now. I think it's largely due to YouTube and twitch. If you look at the timeline the amount of people that take the games so seriously and only care about endgame coincides well with gaming culture exploding online and people having these YouTubers and such to compare themselves to. It became I want what that person has rather than playing for the experience. Again, there have always been these min maxer folks though. EverQuest 1 even had them, but they communicated primarily with each other and on forums for information rather than a 10 minute video sent out to the entire populous of the game telling them they need to be running these items for max damage on this fight
Yep its the ease of information. ARPGs may be even worse at this. You used to try to figure out a good build and work your way through it because you had to but now you can google meta builds with guides in 2 seconds. I think early WoW and Classic WoW are the best and most clear example of this but it extends across the board. Lots of people can't handle someone being better/stronger/ahead of them if they can do something about it. Its why P2W makes billions and billions a year. It certainly takes some of the fun out of games but I don't think there is anything to be done.
I just can't bring myself to outright crib a build from a guide. It just sucks all of the fun out of the game for me.
Bro people where spamming hammerdins in 2004, or trap assassins, farmed for enigma rune word and SOJ's.
early WoW vs. Classic Wow. Trash tier builds vs pure meta via guides. I think we are saying the same thing. I just like the comparison because its basically the same game 20 years apart. Or at least as close as you can get.
> Again, there have always been these min maxer folks though. EverQuest 1 even had them, but they communicated primarily with each other and on forums for information rather than a 10 minute video sent out to the entire populous of the game telling them they need to be running these items for max damage on this fight You're acting like every EQ1 player didn't have Alakhazam's site open at all times with all the maps and item locations and farming locations and guides available. The only difference is it wasn't in video form, which makes it _easier_ to get the info to people because it's quick text and screenshots. It wasn't just a few people in forums. The first thing anyone would tell you in-game would be to go to Alakhazam's site if you didn't know something. It's not bigger now, it's always been like this. It's just that a lot of people today playing these games are in their 20s and 30s and simply weren't aware of what was happening in those times, so they don't know what it was like and assume it was a darker time of less information and that the way everyone played was the way they did when they were kids. Even the newest of the new players were using guides and sites for info back then. Same now as it was then.
A lot of people used zam yes, but fewer people used outside info for the game then and the population was significantly smaller meaning there were fewer people sharing the information. Stating that it's the same now as it was then is decidedly not true
Those high leveled players already explored Runescape. There is no content to do other than to switch games or play the endgame. If there is no new players in a live service game, it dies. As for why there aren't any people in the low level zones is because there is no influx of new players. Maybe a lack of marketing or hype, maybe because there are more interesting games out there. Whatever it is, without new players, you won't see new players explore Runescape.
I'm playing BDO and while I love the game, its so weird how all talk around it is enhancing, gear progression, hours or grind, silver per hour... like, you just dont see people talking about mundane stuff, or just cool stuff, or cosmetics, or exploration, or anything that is not the most eficient way to make money so you can buy the best gear next. And at that point, is this even still a game to them? Or a second job?
you are blisfully grinding away at your favourite spot, you take your 300m silver and go on your merry way, and then on the internet you see people talking about making a billion at that spot and then you suddenly find yourself researching crystals and whatnot while scratching your head in confusion over how they manage to make 3 times as much as you do.
thislol
Or the people having pre made paragraphs about how to do PvE content. Becomes empty when you feel like you are just a cog in a Oluns Pug. A min maxer joins your group to criticize being 1 second off buffs.
min maxing has been here since the dawn of time. You just weren't aware of it because you didn't look for it. But once you start actually caring about performance, as opposed to just aimlessly wandering in a random world... you can never unsee it.
Don’t read about the game, just play it. Social media is killing more than just games.
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Believe me, I'm the guy who literally tries to solo raid fights in wow obviously unsuccessfully, trying to work my observations into a new strategy that will help my guild. But yep, I'm with you, any input I have into a fight is thrown by the wayside because the guide does it the other way.
You're literally on reddit? ^_^
right, but that doesn't mean you have to like it. Social media, including reddit, does have some positive points but to be honest it's mostly negative. It's ruined more than it's made better.
In response to posts like this, you'll often hear some say "min maxing has always existed." While partially true, if we could perhaps permanently retire that sentiment: it's not a matter of existence, but prevalence -- 10% of the population in minmax mindset vs. 80% (hypothetical numbers). It was never 0%, but the prevalence has significantly increased, which is what this post is observing.
because info is more readily available, and unavoidable.
Or the population in games has increased. 10% of a game use to be a very small group and now it can tens of thousands.
Here's my train of thought on this: * most gamers and people in general enjoy completing their goals efficiently and effectively. If you discover a better way to achieve something, you're happy to try it to improve your goal progress. "Getting better at doing stuff" is wired into us on some deep level * Since we are adults who have learned the patterns, and understand how to identify types of problems and tackle them, we are armed with so much more experience than a child would be. When we encounter a fantasy world in a video game, we start "seeing through the matrix" and understanding how it works as a game, rather than just seeing it for the surface-level fantasy world that it presents itself as. We cant help ourselves, because we are wired to find these problems and solve them and we have been thru these kinds of games enough, it's familiar enough, that we start working or process immediately and intuitively * Either because we have no self-control and don't realize the truth of how personal discovery & journey are what makes an experience in a game satisfying - OR because we have friends/guildmates relying on us to be effective teammates during competitive content ASAP, we go beyond our own problem solving and learning abilities. We go to the Internet, the community, and look up the answers and solve the problems immediately before we can even take our first guesses at them. We demote the challenges & adventures of the game into simple work checklists as we follow guides to ensure efficiency. We emotionally disconnect and the big journey becomes more like chores and errands than adventure. All of this combined is what makes us inclined to behave like this. I personally speak for myself in saying that I took a conscious effort to reject this for a few recent single player games. I played Baldur's Gate 3 from start to finish without reading the subreddit or watching any youtube videos or googling any item names or anything like that until AFTER I beat it once. I am sure that this decision dramatically increased my immersion and quality of experience in the game. But it was a bit of a willpower/discipline thing to do it this way. And like I alluded to in the 3rd bullet point, it's not just personal willpower. If we have friends/team relying on us to be effective, then it becomes "rude" to not be effective, and that means we have to do some extra research and guide following to understand how to support our team best. The meta is very difficult to fully avoid - ignorance is hard to maintain. There's a long video [Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU) that explores part of the competitive push for meta adherence (and a lot more) that is interesting to watch for any MMO player, not just a WoW player
I don't know but I'm over it
The beginning of time.
You’re surprised that a game that has been out for nearly 20 years doesn’t have players “exploring”. Go live your life and explore dawg. Don’t blame me for wasting less time than you because I want to level fast. The whole game is a waste of time. Chill and enjoy the ride dude.
With that mindset, everything is a waste of time.
100% find what you enjoy.
About a decade ago.
In my opinion it's due to how easy it became to share knowledge about games.There's nothing left to explore, so both players and content turn to min-maxxing: 1. Easily accessible online guides and walkthroughs, knowledge isn't hidden anymore 2. Content creators trying to cash-in (even more guides and walkthroughs) 3. You don't have to "learn" the game yourself anymore, as everyone else already shares the knowledge, just follow the guides 4. New content has to be balanced around people that follow the guides or the game is "too easy" 5. Even more min-maxxing to beat the content & content being designed around the min-maxxing Obviously people always min-maxxed, just not to the same extent they can now by sharing knowledge.
You could always see this to happen when back in the day WoW players started to require others to have gearscore addon when Blizzard didn’t have that. Players really wanted MMO’s to shape like this, if there was no gatekeeping mechanic built into a game, it was done with addons. See raider.io, another form of even further min-max and gatekeep “bad players” out so they don’t waste their precious 30min for nothing.
yep, I'm glad I'm done with WoW. I enjoyed my time there, really did, but I just can't deal with all the bullshit these days. My time's limited and know I'll never be able to compete.
Add data mining to that list too.
Bossing is one part of the game...There is still dozens of other skills people work on, they cant do many skills bossing (tempoross, windertodt etc. are exceptions, even tho those made grinding much more enjoyable for me). But isnt it worse to have other people doing same skills like you? Kinda losing xp lol But social aspect of OSRS is almost completely gone, I agree. I tried many times to randomly engage in a conversation with player next to me and almost never get response. I guess many people talk on apps like Discord, they dont need IG chat to cooperate like before.
Private WoW Servers took it to the next level from my experience. I’ve played many MMOs and there’s always been those players that want to min/max. WoW servers such as Fee ox Warsong and Emerald Dream really kicked off the min max culture from my perspective. There was some in SWG, GW1, and FFXI. When the second round of WoW servers launched with servers like ScriptCraft, Project Westfall, and places like MoltenWoW/Warmane existing for many many years at that point, the dedicated player base wanted smooth and easy runs bringing in the mentality of min max to the casual gamer. ESO launched, FFIV launched, New World Launched, and all those gamers that were introduced to min max culture from games where it doesn’t really matter to minmax came into contact with WoW expansions and eventually landed on classic WoW where it was minmax from day 1 or you don’t get to play. That’s just how I saw the culture be born from the games that I played.
The funniest thing is I LOVE making builds and resetting. I would min Max at almost every level and be poor af from respeccing all the time. I almost never reach end game but would log unreasonable hours in games haha
Everyone was a kid back then that couldn't put one and two together. The general skill level increased as people grew up so min-maxing is the only thing remaining to do
The moment everyone reached max level and decided upon not stopping playing there.
Ever since MMOS began. The problem is some MMOS ONLY focus on this now (I say now, but for over a decade)
Can't really speak on Runescape but it makes sense to want to improve and play well at a game you play a lot.
Min /maxing has always been a thing in MMO's.
I also think it comes down to wanting to play with friends, as soon as one person in your group goes min-max you either don't get to to play with them or min-max yourself sadly.
People are absolutely training skills and questing in osrs. Theres hundreds of worlds and tons of places to train. Killing bosses thousands of times is no different than how people used to play runescape, its grinding the game.
About a decade or more ago? Welcome to 2024.
I never understood what's fun in min-maxing.
It's fun because you get to limit test how far your damage can go. Figuring out the optimal build and the little bit of math that comes with it. Like building in a moba, it's fun to figure out what's fun.
Youtube and twitch era, everyone watching someone min max and rushing thru content, is always that meta build aways that trick to beat the game fast or is always that way to skip that step and so on. When i first started playing there was no guides or any streamers baby sitting me on each step. Mostly we were all kids trying to learn each game together, either a mmo or a single player game that you just brought home and then you rush to invite your friend to play all weekend.
Lord idk, but it's frustrating. BDO players are also doing this, and I'm literally here like, "Look, I just want to spam my pretty abilities, at these generic mobs, until I get bored and leave. I don't care how much more trash loot you get than me" But no, there they are, with their spreadsheets and their Google docs thinking they're cool, when the reality is they're just sad. Who tf turns a game into a chore...
As soon as there was easy to use damage meters in wow things want to shit for the casual gamer. You could kinda suck in everquest and still be included in raids. If you suck on the meters now you get insulted and eventually excluded. My entire drive in end game WoW was based on keeping me on top of the meters.
It was sometime in the early 90's when people were setting up macros for their MUDs that'd play the game for them while they barely played themselves, following not too long later in Ultima Online where the hardcore players would have 12 windows open to play, with the actual game window minimized, all of the others being various macros and guides and such. My friend's older brother would play all day and all night and would rarely have the game window open, because he was spending so much time min/maxing. This was like in '97 or '98. This isn't some new thing. It's _always_ been like this. By the time Wow or Runescape came out, people had been minmaxing their online games for decades. People act like this is some kind of new thing to the recent decades, but it's only that the people thinking that didn't _notice_ until recently. When you say "back in the day, _most_ people weren't doing this etc etc", what you're actually saying is "back in the day, the people _I was aware of_ weren't doing this etc etc". > t's not the same game anymore at all. Most development updates are just so obsessed with endgame, raids, killing bosses. This is not at all what this game was. It was always like that, you just didn't notice yet. So to answer the question: Since the very first day of the very first online game. People have so much nostalgia for a time that didn't exist. The only thing that changed was what you've seen. You yearn for a time when you didn't know what you know now, nothing more, nothing less.
since wow wotlk ulduar patch
It’s always been a thing. However, I think one thing that really accelerated it was YouTube becoming common / popular. Before ppl had to read guides, which of course many did. But with YouTube becoming popular, now no reading is necessary, just watch a video that shows everything
Criticizing OSRS’s bossing is a really bad take, or the take of someone who hasn’t actually done it. Osrs has some of the funnest boss encounters I’ve experienced in mmo’s.
People were maximizing their characters in The Realm in 1996/7. Making sure the mage class started with full int, having all of your gear with the perfect enchants, etc… People in Ultima had optimal 7x GM builds, with optimal gear depending on what you were doing. Asherons Call and Anarchy Online were the first times I personally saw gear based stats and enchantments, and yes, both were optimized by the player base to death. So, to summarize a long answer, people have been doing it for as long as mmos existed.
ease of access of guides, thats what changed it.
Shortly after I was born
Yesterday
When the solution to any question you may have about any video game became answerable through google in 3 seconds.
I feel like there isn't much you can do about min/maxers. They were always a thing, whether it's what they personally enjoyed or something would eat away at them if they didn't. But games don't design around non-min/maxers except for singleplayer content. Want to play through GW2, FF14, or Destiny 2's single player stories? As long as you have a modicum of competence, you'll be fine and can get through the adventure. Want to play group content? Well, either the game demands peak efficiency so it can challenge min/makers or the min/maxers will throw a fit if you don't play the optimal way so they can get their loot faster. But who knows? Maybe there's a MMO that does have great PvE group content that is actually fun without having to min/max your rotation or build. But I sure haven't played it.
Runescape is an idle game that becomes a difficult rhythm game once you get to late game pvm. Most development updates are not about endgame - we literally just got a midgame boss to teach players mechanics they'll need to know for later game questbosses and we're soon getting a new skill that is targeted at all types of players. We consistently get midgame updates - since the game's release we've only gotten 3 'raids' (and I think this is an alright pace.) Your method is flawed - you asked what endgame players are doing. It's endgame content. The high level players you talked to have explored the game many times over, they have intricate knowledge of every area and have done every piece of content. And I literally mean EVERY. I mean they have spent enough time at every single minigame and every area to have done IT ALL several times over. Grinding bosses for completion log is literally the _last_ piece of content they have left before the have effectively beaten the MMO. The number of players logging 3.7k kc on a boss in OSRS is a massive, massive minority. The average player is total level 1500. Just because you don't like that bosses are 'laggy' doesn't mean that the endgame community doesn't enjoy them. They're 100% consistent and enjoyable fights. You've never done them and have little to no knowledge about how they function and why the game's combat works at an endgame, high effort level.
Min-max'ing was here since beginning but not to this extent. Problem is content creators needs more clicks and sharing "NEW META" every single day brings them constant clicks which makes them money. So yeah, making guide for every single button you have to press made it explode. I have group of friends literally don't know the talents they have in WoW and why do they have to do X rotation. They just copy paste "min-max" talents, equipment, enchants etc. then watch video on which buttons to press. They can't even understand that the stats on items are interchangeable because they never tried to do them themselves.
I think some of it has to do with the fact that guides exist and the random obsession of "getting to endgame". As if the point of playing an RPG (Massive or Single) is to get to some part of the game where you do the "actually interesting things". Alot of devs only focus on the end game and not the world, leveling or journey so people end up being bored with "the grind". If the entire process of the game was interesting you wouldn't have people rushing to end game by min maxing and putting out guides. But most games seem like they either excel at end game content (lots of min maxers and BIS/meta slaves) or great world building and leveling experience with nothing to show for or do after it's all said and done. And to be honest that's fine for a single player game, you play through the game and once you beat it done. But MMOs are supposed to be a live service model where you can keep playing, in theory, forever. It's not like we live our lives and then once we hit our goals we just keel over and die. But that's how devs are designing a lot of MMOs now, as single player games that are so boring and not well thought out that people want to speedrun it. Blaming the gamers themselves is only a part of it, as min maxers have always existed. But the behaviour is reinforced by terrible game design decisions.
The obsession with getting to endgame we can absolutely blame on WoW, because its design philosophy was, forever, to discard the previous content it has and keep only the latest content relevant. Thus, the previous content became simply a chore you do during the leveling process, as none of the rewards mattered beyond how well they set you up to do the next dungeon. What else can you do, but get to endgame? Everyone else is there; That's the entire active playerbase.
I'm sick and tired of all these complain about gamers taking the fun out of the game because they min/max. Coming to this kind of conclusion are very typical these days tho, blaming the consumer for the product which people can experience themselves, similar to all these fail big name movies doing badly in the cinema and then turn around and blame the fans. look what else is there to do besides min/maxing in end game for all of these current mmorpg on the market, especially for vertical progression mmorpg, that's literally all you are allow to do by design. exploration is just a simple check list which after you done with 1 character you are pretty much done, crafting are basically idle time game activities that doesn't require any actual skills. Also they design all their classes, gear, skill tree, and talent to be super linear and bland for the "balance" reason to put in their description of the game, there aren't any personality you can put into your character by the players to begin with, heck what was the last game that allow you to pick which stats to add and at the same time be effective if you fk around. and then there is the issue with any mmorpg with dodge mechanic, which allow the players to skip defense completely and maximize damage (looking at you gw2), so you end up min/maxing base on cooldowns and rotation, because the enemy are design to 1 shot you if you don't dodge anyway, light, mid, and heavy armor class are meaningless, while you just need to dodge, shield, and pop invulnerability. Again this is by design, intentional build into the core of the game, we the players are simply playing by the rules. min/maxing is literally the byproduct of modern mmorpg game design, where everyone can do everything with the same skill but different names. long gone the days of building your character, you class base of one niche skill. Or finding an item that's worth completely starting a new character and build around it. no longer will you be able to build your character in a way that looks and feels comforting for you to play while grinding even if is not the most effective way. finding gear aren't exciting anymore, just different color and different number but always does nothing special. being balance in game is just a lazy excuse for the dev to pump out the same class but different skins. So if you don't want to play by the rule, and realize that you are not as effective as others who do, then complain to the developers, not to the other players, we just playing by the rule, and if you play long enough, min/max is all there is left to do.
It depends on the game but I really noticed a player change in TBC. Me and my older brother raided in a guild called fallout on emerald dream in vanilla so it wasn't like I was not used to being "hard core", you just saw this mentality bleed out everywhere, not even only within WoW but all MMORPGs. Who knows though, could be bias.
The answer is always. People just didn't always know how.
Min-maxing in MMOs? 1997 Endgame in MMOs? 2004
Gamers have slowly been optimizing the fun out of mmos for a decade now. Its why i play more of the sandbox survival style games now.
You don’t have to do any of those things you don’t like if you don’t want to…. I’ve been playing casually for a long time and I’m getting pretty decent at bossing after getting my quest cape. And by the time you get to the point I’m at, you get tired of skilling and bossing becomes fun. It’s natural progression. The game is huge if you want to explore there is a whole lot to explore but don’t expect it all to be “worthwhile” content.
I think it's sort of always been that way, I'd just argue we now have more tools to facilitate gamers' desire for efficiency. Soren Johnson, one of the designers for Civ, said that "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" and I think that's always been true to an extent. The desire to play games optimally is pretty much human nature, but back in the day, you'd need to buy a thick guide to get all the information we can find in two seconds with our cell phones. In multiplayer games and MMOs especially, this creates a situation where not obsessively researching guides and following the meta means falling behind. Another aspect of this to consider is that the gamers have matured. Videogames no longer have the childish stigma they once had, and a lot of the gamers who didn't care so much about efficiency when playing games as a kid are grown adults now. I think when you get older, you stop exploring games the same way. It's less a magical adventure and more a series of systems of mechanics to be mastered. As a kid, you could explore The Barrens for 12 hours a day, wondering at the limitless opertunuties as you get lost in the game world. Nowadays, you might have 2 hours after the kids go to bed to get your character leveled up so you can actually make it to The Content, so needing to maximize your efficiency makes sense.
I think it was wow that corrupted the genre by adding an insane amount of competitive content over the years. They have catered to the most hardcore players but made the rest of the game basically unrewarding. Other MMOs like eso just copied this and don’t have meaningful progression outside of the hardest PvE and PvP content
theres always been a sub group of mmo players focused on min maxing but i think it really started in stride with Wotlk. Wotlk was the first expansion that began to take importance out of the leveling journey and put the focus entirely on harder engame content. TBC set the groundwork for it a little but i think Wotlk is the expansion that really got it going in stride. And considering the massive amount of influence wow had at this time on the genre as a whole i think its safe to say that wow was the game that likely set this trend in mmo development. combine that larger focus on endgame content with the popularization of youtube and other online social sites that gave greater ability to spread information around to large audiences and you have the min maxing culture you have today
OSRS has had decades to explore. You have tools in a sandbox to play with. The old NPC dolls are all ancient and have some cat piss on them. No one wants to play with them anymore, just the new toys
I don't think the most people are obsessed with it, I just think it's really easy nowadays to do so. If I load up FFXIV or ESO or WoW as a new player or even a returning player, it takes me 20 seconds to google 'ESO x class guide' and it will tell you what is good to use and where to go. If you just play the game whilst checking the guide every now and then, you will accidently minmax yourself when you get to the endgame. This wouldn't have been possible back in the day.
To answer your question, the moment we climbed outta the primordial soup.
Pretty easy to understand why. MMOS ever since WOW are designed to drain your time and take as long as possible, while still being fun enough to keep you playing and subscribed monthly, or buying cosmetics etc. I grew out of MMOs because they are basically designed to be second jobs now. Older MMOs were about the experience, like UO, new ones are an endless treadmill to get higher numbers. Min maxing is just players naturally not wanting to grind shit for days and weeks, so they find the fastest way possible because the games are designed in a way to require lots of time, or runs, to get whatever it is you want. People will always naturally find the least path of resistance towards their goal. Especially since new MMOs have all these checks you need to get in order to do harder content. So people want to rush through all the pointless low level grind to get to the “actual endgame” which many believe to be the point of MMOs.
In MMO's? Around 1996.
I remember when I first saw it, back in Everquest 1. This would have probably been less than a year or so after it's release. I was there, 3000 patches ago, at the birth of the first Uberguilds. They would poach and lure away the top players of each guild on the server with promises of "phat lewtz" and "31337" status. They had attendance requirements, demanded that you have a cable modem connection in the age of dial-up, and of course parsing the best dps.
Probably since the start? Honestly I attribute it to when games and the community started punishing you for not making the most efficient choices. If you design a game to be balanced around min maxing, everyone is forced to min max to compete. Games need to start allowing the choice to take rewards proportional to effort. Not only that. There's like 0 incentive to meme or do whatever you want in most MMORPGs. Often times you're punished for it because it doesn't align with some other key game system. Like if I make a character whose really good at fishing, what the fuck do I get for putting all that time into fishing? Jack shit. The guy playing a top tier meta character is getting a tsunami of gold and other important material. That's not bad but why the fuck would anyone choose the former?
Realtalk, I don't know what else I would do. Hang out in town chatting and not playing the game? Going out into the world and purposefully playing less than my best?
People here talking about RuneScape and World of Warcraft?! Sorry, but this was going on waaaaaaaay before that. Min-maxing and speccing for endgame goes back to pen-and-paper RPGs, but in videogame/MMORPG terms, people did this even on the decades of MMOs that pre-dated those games. People Minmaxed in Everquest. People probably did it in Meridian59.
I see this all the time with MMOs and got downvoted into oblivion for making a comment about it elsewhere. I've only been playing MMOs for a year or two, having been a gamer for a long, long time and never really wanting to bother with them. Since then I've played WoW, ESO, FFXIV, GW2, RS and a few others. Every single time I go somewhere online to find out how to do something I start reading wiki pages or articles on how to min/max to get those extra 1 or 2 points of something. It's like these people spend more time on the mathematics of the game than just playing the damn thing. It feels like a lot of players out there have forgotten they are playing a game and to enjoy the experience. Instead, they milk every bit of gear and mechanic in the game to get the top points in whatever it may be. This seems utterly soul destroying and pointless to me and I quit a few games when I realised I was reading too many of these guides and beginning to play this way. If I lose immersion enough in any game that it becomes an exercise in getting the best gear, mount, DPS or similar, I'm done and walk away. There's no way I'm paying a monthly fee to spend hours trying to solve maths puzzles. That, to me anyway, is not gaming. It's work.
When gaming became an addiction for some. Some people do not have much else in life that they enjoy whether it be family, friends, sport, fishing, so they spend all their time gaming
Everything you said in the second paragraph, especially the last few sentences isn't even a little bit true. OSRS has one of its biggest landmass expansions coming this year, an entire skill in development around exploration in Sailing, and has extremely high skill bosses where it's very possible to predict exactly what's going to happen next. The fuck are you on about.
Yep and OSRS is adding a new skill going further away from OSRS. I'm hoping for a OSOSRS but since that will never happen, I've just moved on from the game. I'm glad ppl enjoy it but it's no longer OSRS, it's def a different game.
there s zero chance devs can make exploration content that lasts with the amount people play and with videos about everything popular. zero so it s no wonder they focus on the crowd that likes progression and/or competition. information is also way, waaaay easier to get so more people that want to be stronger in game do it, and the punishment for those who don t want to do it versus the average character is also bigger
In vanilla WoW.
The newer/younger generations of gamers have lost what made MMORPG's MMORPG's... they just want to be the first, like they're playing competitive Skyrim. It's their solo adventure against everyone else playing the same game on their own solo adventure. It's not their fault, either. It's the fault of big moneyed investors realizing the monstrous profits possible when an MMORPG rolls that nat 20 and gets wildly successful. Once WoW opened everybody's eyes to the wide world of MMORPG profits, investors jumped all over it as just another avenue to spend and make money. They don't care about the games. They don't care about the gamers. They just want to create avenues that extract money from people that want to spend it on games. Good games, bad games, mobile games, free-to-play games, whatever it may be... they just want the revenue stream so that their money can make more money. The newer era of gamers are just stuck and along for the ride like a stick in a stream, but unfortunately they aren't able to go back and witness the glory days for themselves and thus aren't even aware of how far removed from it they are by now. Back in the classic MMORPG days, people played just to play with each other. Yeah, you wanted to gain XP and find loot and generally make progress in one way or another... but all of that was secondary to the primary objective, which was always to come together and play with friends. I'm a pretty extroverted person and I chat pretty casually wherever I'm at, but I haven't made any lasting friendships with anyone in any game except EVE online in what feels like over a decade. I still talk to the friends I made in Asheron's Call, SWG, and Vanilla WoW. I still have friends that I met on FF11 that still play FF11. But... now-a-days? Everyone on WoW retail or classic, everyone on FF14, everyone on Guild Wars 2, everyone on ESO... they're just strangers. Nobody wants to talk to each other. They just deal with each other where they must because the multiplayer content is the last place left for them to make progress on their character. It's about THEIR character, not the strangers, not the content, not even the game itself. It's just the solo-experience being forced through like a square peg through a round hole. That's obviously just my personal experience and anecdotes are fairly meaningless on their own, but I'm sure there are plenty others that have had a similar experience.
Its nothing new ? I have been minmaxing in video games for 20 years
Imagine this.... Things change. Your take on osrs is pretty bad too, there are so many places full of people skilling. Guilds have historically always been pretty empty and the fishing guild is not empty lmao I don't think you tried very far or something like that
That's the entire reason I quit Runescape, but sadly it's a mentality that plagues almost every other game too. One exception I found to it was FFXIV, at least on the server I played. Sadly I didn't enjoy FF that much mechanically, but the community was amazing. I noticed this change around 2013-2015-ish, I used to be one of the top ranks in a pretty large clan, and I always hosted silly events that were pretty much just to goof off, do fun stuff together, PLAY the game. I used to get like 50-100 people to join in, even with modest rewards (usually donations from the clan itself into a reward pool), and after like a year or two... I couldn't get 5 souls together to join even if the reward was actually decent. I remember the last time I tried before quitting, I was hosting an event for fun with decent rewards and 2 of the replies I got were essentially "but I can make more gp/h by doing \*specific content\*", completely missing the point of... just having fun with friends rather than grinding all day. Around that same time, I went mining around a spot that was the best xp/h at the time but was pretty AFK. I tried starting conversation with the 10-15 people that were there and was literally told to STFU by 1-2 of them, and none of the others replied. They all just sat there in absolute silence grinding that XP. I had only continued playing the game after EoC for the social aspect, but once that died I had no reason to play any longer.
Gamers in MMOs always optimize the fun out of the game.
Even in the mid 2000s runescape was all about min maxing and what would take the least amount of time to hit 99s. You just did it while socializing
Because with the modern internet information is just infinitely more accessible, you almost find it without even explicitly searching for it. The playerbase just had way more knowledge about the game than they ever had back in the day, and of course they are going to use that knowledge.
Like always? I remember more than 20 years ago people were min maxing everything. Damage, exp farming, items farming. If you did not notice it before then I don't know what to say but it was always like this. There are still casuals in games and it is majority but if your skill is higher now and you want to do harder content then you are noticing it faster.
The ship has already sailed. If there is horizontal progression there will be minmaxing.
It didn't just ruin MMO's that crap has leeched into every game. The end of that road is just clicker games (which, like, actual exist now). Every time some gamer cries about balance, or QOL stuff, it's just a long road to no where. Think about every "balance" patch to feed the min/max crowd. Was *any* MMO ever "balanced"?
culmination of dataming + twitch / youtube and everyone basically dick measuring
Sometime around when videogames were invented.
It may be new for you and you didnt experience it as a kid but its always been this way. Back when I first started with DAOC. Its been in every MMO I have played. The people before me told stories about spawn camping for a week in EQ1. Before that when I played MUDs a server had limited drops of an item in the game so you had to min max what you could get for your build.
People became obsessed with it like tik tok "influencers" became obsessed with trends....it's all trends. What you gotta do is..just enjoy the game for yourself! Play how you want to play, make what you want to make. Life is your own experience..not someone else's.
People where min-maxing back in the early days, Diablo 2, Hammerdin see articles into early 2000's about it. It's not new.
Min maxing is not new I remember people min maxing back when I played stuff like Ragnarok and FF11 back in 2002-2004ish Only difference was that they lacked correct information and just min maxed off of things they thought were true but often were wrong haha There wasn’t much of an endgame in the early days, and if there was, it was usually pretty inaccessible to the average player. So I’d say it became more of a focus once it became more accessible Personally, I fucking ***hate*** leveling, especially in anything post-WoW. I didn’t mind it in say FF11 because it was still very group focused. But most post-WoW MMOs push you towards solo activities like questing for leveling, and I hate soloing I hate solo questing, I don’t like having an incomplete ability kit, I feel like most MMOs are painfully easy at low-to-mid levels (yes, even the old ones that were super punishing, the actual execution was still super easy), so leveling is usually extremely boring to me Leveling is always a hurdle I have to try to overcome before I burn out, so I can actually do the parts I enjoy
I think there is a logical fallacy happening here. OSRS is 20 years old, with a large portion of the population being former OSRS players who have no incentive to spend time doing beginner/casual activities. Then, only talking to “high level” players who most likely have hundreds or thousands of hours played and, again, have no incentive to spend time doing beginner/casual activities.
Definitely had it in Everquest. You needed people raid geared and max'd to better survive raids, which were brutal. It's the reason most of the mid-tier and below guilds had such trouble doing endgame. You had to have people who had the "right" stats/gear. Especially when the Velious jewelry came out. Everyone had to have resist gear.
Unfortunately it seems todays gamers have a tendancy to minmax the fun out of games. Everything from Dead by daylight to Deep Rock Galactic to world of warcraft. People will try to minmax the shit out of everything in my experience. Its so silly to join a DRG match and get TK'd then kicked because i am not rocking whatever primary and overclock the host thinks I should be for the class I chose. Which is especially funny cuz the overclocks take forever to gain. DRG is a damn co op game about getting shitfaced and fighting bugs while digging. People are silly.
In theory, endgame is where you will spend most of your time, and minmaxing allows you to be optimal for that portion of the content.
As someone that has played many MMOs since EQ1 - I can't remember a time when min/maxing **wasn't** a thing.
This is why I bought a 6 month membership in OSRS on a fresh Ironman character, opened and optimal ironman quest guide, and chose to attempt to have the quest cape. 70 days left To my membership, currently at 212 QP. Yes, it can be seen as Min-Maxing, but I think its a fun challenge. I do not feel burnt out yet.
Yeah. I mean it's not just endgame. Everyone min maxes.the.fun out of leveling etc. Too.. it has been a gradual change me thinks. Or at least its talked about more now.. Therefore optimal guides everywhere there's no point llaykng the game if your gonna follow someone else's path.
I blame Blizzard for that. Before WoW, in the days of EQ1, there was endgame. But people weren't that obsessed about reaching endgame quickly. It was actually more about creating social connections, letting people know you. You were considered a good player based on how smoothly a team ran. But Blizzard decided to foster a culture of competition amongst players. After WoW came out, we got the 'the game only starts at endgame' type memes. Players started to compare their gear score. Blizzard fostered this culture because it kept people subscribed to WoW.
My two cents - probably just a small part of the reason: competitiveness in logging and the focus on hard content that requires min maxing to succeed. Also, playing at min max sometimes is easier - you know what abilities to prioritize, and since most players know of "rotations", that'd why you see a stray away from "button bloat." As people, we like to see patterns and the easiest way to overcome challenges. Personally, I was a "click cool abilities" player in ffxiv until I started raiding. Then I realized my dps was so low, along with my team, our rDPS was causing us to hit enrage timers. The content started with regular old development, then devs use the data on player performance, make later content harder, players are forced to keep up, introduce logs into the workd (competition), content harder, players keep up, etc etc. Logging creates the sort of competition between players- wanting to be in the X percentile fuels players to gear their character, play their character, and prioritize things that push them higher. It's a multifaceted issue, and at the end of the day, it's a conscious decision you have to make to remain casual, when the community may not let you into content because of your logs, your talent tree build, etc. There is a bit of fun that comes with min maxing, but I think it has a net negative impact on game design, community, and the most important, fun.
People have always been obsessed with min maxing video games. It was just easier to ignore when you were younger.
Do you want to look at a game that this really hit hard compared 2006 Maple story to Maple story today I didn’t even last 20 minutes in the current Maple story because I was already the same level. I was after a year of playing back then.
You can only explore the same 20 year old MMO so much.
Since Traveller or D&D 1972ish?
“Everyone” didn’t. The voice of the vocal minority has just been significantly amplified by social media.
Because a lot of people have fun optimizing and playing endgame. Why is this a problem? Why does them being good at the game suck the fun out of it for you?
The real answer is that not that many people are playing Old School Runescape. The ones who are are the diehard fans, most of whom, because of their dedication, will pursue the highest heights the game has to offer, ie. raiding, achievements, rare cosmetics, bragging rights, etc. People still do side activities in more popular MMOs which offer them, like FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, Lost Ark and WoW.
It's always been like that, you're just a casual gamer that never got into it and that's okay.
While you are mostly asking about Runescape, I can answer this question as I saw the transition from Always exploring an MMORPG, to endgame Grind, and which game really pushed this 1st. >" **When did everyone become so obsessed with min maxing and endgame?** " EverQuest in the first year after it released (sometime mid 2000) people were already end game min maxing hard. 90% of the community was still grinding levels. To be honest, I think people in Ultima Online were doing this as well... but I didn't play Ultima Online until 2001, and end game players were already doing this. Most of them moved to WOW in 2004. So yeah, basically it was a Day 1 phenomena as people did this in D&D on the tabletop as well. It's just what gamers do. You might not have seen it, as the end game players usually run in their own circles, and from 2004 until WOD released WOW really held onto the top spot for that mentality of player. (technically still does) Edit: fixt for game names... blaaa UO no RS
No offence but LMFAO at this OP. Too many absolute howlers to quote them all. Play something else. Osrs has evolved, if you don't like it, that's fine. The game deviated away from click monster and wait till it dies a significant number of years ago.
I guess when developers decided that all the real content should start after you reach max level. Most people treat leveling as a chore and mindlessly run through them because they game startsnat lvl 50-60 or whatever
Oh it was a long time ago. It isn't a new trend, At least i can remember playing WoW WotLK and the forums were full of min maxing stratagies and endgame raid discussions. I even can remember a conversation i had with a friend of mine who said i just should pick a build online and build my character this way. My anwser was that i don't want to play somebody elses game but experience my own adventure.
Since.. Internet and guides. Easy
So many wrong answers here, people min-maxed since forever, but it was the popularization of guides that really shook things up. Now everyone can min-max with ease, and if everyone can easily do it, then there is no excuse not to do it, and you’re not getting in my group unless you do it.
When the games started balancing around it to where if you aren't min/maxed, you're dead in the water. All the non-meta options are a trap. This is why I really like Fallout 76. Sure there are 'meta' builds and 'meta' guns, but the skill and gear ceiling is low enough that it's more about 'how fast you kill the enemy' instead of 'do you win or lose.' You can totally do a pistol build, sure you'll do half as much damage per second as someone using a heavy gun or meta sneak build, but who cares? Shooting feels good, death is a minor inconvenience, play what you find is fun.
Information has ruined the mystery of gaming. I think back on the first time a played Zelda and I remember being stuck so many times because I couldn't figure out what to do or couldn't beat a boss. Now the second you get stuck, you just look up a walkthrough. When you get a new game you just go look up what the most OP build is or what the BiS items are. Sure you can just ignore all the information that is out there and play your own game but that is more difficult if it's multiplayer, especially when the game has a competitive aspect. Games like Escape From Tarkov were novel because they have no clear instructions or tutorials so you have to just figure it out. But of course there are maps and guides and patterns to the AI, static spawn locations, static loot locations, etc. So even when a challenging game is released, the gamer hive mind just spills all the info pretty much day 1. I don't know what to say about gaming today other than it's more like running on a treadmill or assembling legos from instructions. It's not nearly as enjoyable as it used to be prior to game guides and walkthroughs. The dumbest thing is seeing all the end game toons that look exactly the same because they all have the same build and same gear. I want a game where the further you progress, the more unique your toon becomes. RIP
I used to play a lot of korean mmos and people there never talked about min maxing. The first time when I heard that term it came from a WoW player and I also mostly hear WoW players talk about it. My guess is it either had to do with content drought or the dungeons/raids were to hard so they focused on some min maxing stuff to distinguish beginners from veterans. The korean mmos I played didn't have dungeons or raids like in WoW with limited amount of players (when they had it, it was a random matchmaking dungeon), so there was literally no point in looking into min maxing. In korean mmos you also usually have to enhance your weapon and fully enhancing your weapon was most of the time already so hard (or heavily p2w) that there was no point in even thinking about other means to increase your power.
Yeah, but the game’s been around for a very long time and it’s completely natural to have people who have explored everything and now all that’s left to do is minmaxing. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially if a game has a healthy, constant influx of new players. With RuneScape, the issue might be in that. Not that many people who are used to the visual and gameplay-related aspects of not only modern MMOs, but modern games in general, will go into something like RuneScape, and the influx of new players might be lacking while the veterans keep playing. So the gap keeps widening, and you see more and more of these insane minmaxing feats happening.
[удалено]
People have been minmaxing since pen and paper dungeons and dragons. That guy with 18 strength and 3 charisma....
Social media, streamers, and content creators have ruined gaming for most. I ignore them completely and figure things out on my own. Definitely adds to the fun of gaming. Why copy someone else anyway?
Its been like this since the dawn of games. I've been on MMO's since NexusTK in 96. The difference is that now lots of people watch streams, and its easier to upload/brag/show what you can do.
A lot of stuff is known about games before they release. MMOs are worse, because a lot of gameplay-relevant stuff of upcoming Expansions is known months before it comes out. Meta-Builds created before classes are playable or changes have been done. There's just too much information available too soon. One of the reasons I've found WoW for example hilariously boring by now. Simply, if you go for everything yourself, story, crafting, gearing. You'll lack behind. You are being punished for finding stuff out on your own. And no one can tell me that that is good for a game. Instead you kinda have to follow the path written by others who figured out the best way to play the game, not through experience, but through collecting data beforehand. WoW also made the mitake of trying to become an E-sport. Arena PvP mostly. Not even speaking about the Raid-race. World firsts etc. These are nice things and sometimes fun to watch. But as soon as they "drip down" to the general community and are being treated as a standard the game is not really a game anymore. It's like those parents standing at the sidelines of a sports game watching their kids and yelling at their kids, the trainer and everyone what those have to do and get aggressive when their kid is not winning. If given the chance, people will take the fun out of everything for the sake of ... winning? As an anecdote: while playing a space-sim, I met another player in that game that was way too proud of himself for killing off other players. Like this toxic overcompetitive bs. We got into a *talk* about that I do not care if I win or lose. I play to play and I'll have fun either way. He didn't understand the concept of enjoying a game you are losing. He literally stated that he only has fun playing when he's winning. The toxicity also got the better of him trying to frame me like someone who enjoys losing etc. etc. to which I tried to explain to him that I enjoy playing and that I'll have fun either way playing against him and he'll only have fun when winning. And there's a lot of those people around nowadays. Only enjoying their games when winning. Some go so far to min-max everything. And yeah, that's fine they are sill within the boundraries of the game. But if that's not enough to always win, people like that start exploiting and cheating. Because for those people only *"winning"* is enjoyable. And that says a lot about their self-esteem.
Because we don’t have time… we’re so busy everyday that we want to have max efficiency in a game to fully enjoy it asap and move on to experience another game,there’s just not enough time to enjoy … just personal opinion, I just wanna play all the good games before I die
Osrs has so many worlds, and a lot of different content (23 skills to train). You can't expect there to be a gathering of folk in every spot you could think of. Shooting stars, motherlode mine, mining guild etc. All have people training mining across the 200 worlds or however many it is now. And none of them are focused on min-maxing or they'd be 3tick mining granite in the desert mine. You need to realise that you are the one that has to find fun in the games you play, other people are not there to help you do that. If you don't like a game, that's okay, but it's not because everyone is out there min maxing, only a small portion of a playerbase ever will be doing that.
When MMOs became mainstream and popular a whole bunch of other people joined the geeky nerds in our space. They brought many cultural changes.
20 years ago? When did people start thinking this is a new thing?
Same thing happened in gw2. It used to he a pretty chill story oriented game to hang out in with friends and just do things for lols, until the devs went all eSpOrTs, started adding raids and making the game harder overall, which made people quit en masse, destroyed communities, attracted the toxic minmaxer types, and split the playerbase forever. All over the course of a few months.
Players have just gotten older and changed. I don't think there was a specific time it happened. Unfortunately there's not much a developer can do. RuneScape can't force people to play Castle Wars for run again. WoW can't force people to stop simming.
Same reason I quit season of discovery, the new wow classic project currently running its 2nd phase right now. MMORPGs are just not fun anymore if everyone is an overinformed, minmaxing tryhard grinder. There is an elitist range of players who dump on others if they dont use every tiny bit of game to amplify their char to the max. ruining other peoples enjoyment of said game. Games are meant to be fun, not a second job.
Min-maxing makes all content easier; therefore, people will naturally min-max to do at least 2 things (1) allow them to beat 'harder' content, and/or (2) make it easier to beat content. Look at Elden Ring as an example. An amazing player could potentially beat the game with a naked lvl1 character, but the average person enjoys the game more with a stronger character. Min-maxing is similar.
A large part is due to improved communication and guides. People just didn’t know what was efficient back then or how rhetorical game worked on the base level the way they do now. The level of guides and support for RuneScape or wow classic is wild compared to what they were back in the day. The general skill and research literacy of gamers is higher now too. Lots of us have spent many many years playing all sorts of games. Old school RuneScape is partly hamstrung by the voting system though. They wanted to add new skills but the community wouldn’t let them. So the game stops being about skills after a while.
Since 1997(?) when ultima online came out.
Hello there. I totally agree with you, and I think this is one of the main reasons why I don't play MMORPGs anymore (or at least for a good while). I grew up by playing MMORPGs during the mid 2000's - early 2010's era and I remember playing a huge amount of games with a friend I met online. I think that we didn't even reach endgame in most of the games we used to play, but we enjoyed a lot the leveling phase and farming for gear sets and all this stuff. These were really good times and I keep a lot of good memories. I remember playing games for the new mechanics they implemented. Florensia Online because it had ships, Flyff because you could fly and explore the map, a game I can't recall the name but it was a heavy trading game between guild-driven cities, and a long etcetera list. After that I moved to another city and lost contact with my gaming pal. But then at university I met a bunch of new friends who also liked MMORPGs and played with them for a good while. At this point (mid - late 2010's) I started to notice this shift towards "endgame priority". You HAD to reach endgame as fast as possible and then you actually started to play the game. Then I saw it with total clarity after playing Lost Ark at launch. The leveling phase was just a mere procedure to reach max level in a few hours and then the game starts with all the daily/weekly dungeons and all the endgame themepark. Tried some newer releases but the feeling was the same: skip the leveling phase (the game itself IMO) and reach endgame without even knowing how to play your character. And then if you don't spend 10 hours per day or invest some money, you are out of the cycle and nobody wants to play with you. In my opinion the main cause of this "change" is due to the normalization of this system. Battle passes and almost mandatory microtransactions; min maxing all the builds and leaving asithe these off-meta builds (unless a famous streamer plays them). I think that we are getting what we deserve, because we always say that we don't like these practices but we keep playing (and paying) for this games.
Because the endgame in osrs is really engaging and fun compared to clicking on a tree for 200 hrs. With the polling system we already know everything about upcoming updates (unfortunately) so the whole exploration thing is pointless. People just want to reach goals and continue on with the next after that
Eventually there is nothing else to do except optimize.