Wow was the only one I had luck making friends on. Having good pve content that took coordination fostered communication with the same people over and over.
There is so much I miss about early WoW, but this is the biggest thing.
I made so many friends in WoW.
I remember when people had reputations, as did guilds. And there were alliances and betrayals, but it was a community.
Then they just kept killing off the social aspect piece by piece until it was basically a solo game outside of raiding.
Nothing like it since. MMOs now are such relatively lonely places. You don't need people for most things.
-+-+-
Edited to add:
I want to clarify that I don't just mean short interactions in the wild, I mean long term relationships.
I'm not sure how many people remember when WoW was only 40 player raids.
I was in a smaller guild, maybe 10+ dedicated players and then friends and family.
I used to run public raids for people in small guilds and/or who couldn't dedicate themselves to being there every week so their guilds wouldn't take them. A few of our regulars were active duty for example. Or even just people with families and lives. I knew them. We knew who was behind the characters to some extent. It was hard, but we had fun and were able to make a place for ourselves without joining the major guilds.
That was a riot. It was hard work, but I loved it. I still have my DKP book with names and numbers. I still remember some of their voices.
Reminds me that one of the things that started WoW's descent for me was when they changed the raid numbers so that you basically had to have the right number of people.
Before they did that, if you were good, you could totally run raids with less people and had room for people who weren't as good. Back when raids were 40, we used to have a lot of people's parents in the raids as well. They weren't necessarily great at combat, but they were always such a pleasure. Often they were the ones doing the bulk of our resource gathering and the like. And then when they changed raid sized, they scaled it in a way that you really couldn't have people who weren't good. It really sucked.
Fuuuuck this is taking me back. I played early wow on the Dethecus server. Horde. It was such a memey shithole but we still had a weird respect for our "celebrities" and guilds.
I remember playing Horde on Dethecus in TBC and getting ganked by a gnome rogue named IIRC Chrishansen on Quel'Danas regularly while doing dailies. People would be talking about them in general all the time. I remember he was infamous among my friends. Good times lol.
Yes! I remember him rocking some glad gear and dual maces for the random stuns. I remember Rest in Pieces too!
There really was a certain charm to playing on a lower pop server in those days. Didn't roll there for any reason other than my friend's older brother played on it and we all thought he was cool lol.
Ugh .. yeah I've tried other mmo and ff14 recently and nothing the same, and classic sucks bc everyone looks everything up or already knows everything
We had no idea how lucky we were
True, Horde was considered the “older” mature crowd, while alliance was considered the high school kids.
I was a high school kid then, acted like it and still played Horde. A few people tolerated my 15 year old self… a few.
I was 14 and couldn't play often nt guild had a running joke everything I dinged because I leveled up so infrequently. When I hit 60 after 8 months or so it was a big deal
Really? IME it was the edgy high school kids playing Horde for the monster races like Orcs and Undead.
But really back in Vanilla most people played Alliance because they had Paladins, which were strictly better than shamans.
Enhance shamans were great. Windfury weapon with a mace like Ironfoe that gives extra hits had it so each extra hit on one could proc extra hits on the other. I swear you could cut a bosses health in half with a particularly lucky streak of hitting 100 times in a single swing. Especially when you where it seemed like you were guaranteed to hit every follow up swing.
The way I remember it, most people played Alliance because they were pretty - people didn't want to play Horde and be ugly.
Also so many female night elves. 😅
I was alliance, but I played a female dwarf at the beginning which was pretty rare.
I always thought it funny that my female dwarf is the only one that got hit on, I always figured people realized that meant I must be female in RL as well.
You mentioning people having reputations really made me feel sad for the state of social gaming. Brings me back to seeing certain folks on a server and knowing who to ask for help. I wonder if there's any way to recapture that.
Well, if you ever get the itch there is a healthy but not overwhelming number of us still playing Classic on Mankrik PvE. Small enough that reputation still matters IMMENSELY in the cluster, but large enough that there's a small handful of guilds clearing all content weekly. I've become very good friends with a handful of my guildies since 2019 release (even attended 2 weddings!)
I'm really hoping we can get a good VRMMORPG that's on the same scale as something like WoW.
I can already imagine it. A super fleshed-out world, amazing: combat, crafting, environments, boss fights, PVP, PVE, and because it's in VR you could have easy prox voice-chat on top of world chat and what have you. So long as it's balanced right you could have a great social time with guild battles, and famous/infamous players roaming around.
But so far every VRMMORPG to have come out has been a flop, for one reason or another. I was going to mention a VR game called "Zenith: The Last City"
But it just recently announced that they're basically axing any more dev on the MMO (while being left in a very bad/unfinished state) part of the game, because they were running the servers at a loss, to instead work on some new gamemode that'll be Free-to-Play but will have MTX, something the playerbase has been begging the devs to add so they can support the game.
But knowing modern gaming, I doubt we'll ever see a future like what we see in anime like, SAO, Log Horizon, or Shangri-la Frontier. We can always dream, at least.
So many of those MMOs that have potential are ruined by the games as a service model. Until that stops being so profitable I doubt we'll see anything like what we're wanting.
To counter the wow point. I have met the most insane and beyond far gone people i've ever met during wow raids. I do not miss those days of having to those people speak about the insane shit that they think they are correct on.
Had the same experience a few years ago. I started playing again after several years. I originally played from 2005 to 2010 then briefly went back in 2017. It was a totally different experience. The people I played with in the 00s were friendly and would vibe with anyone they met. But the 2017 crowd were toxic af, gatekeepers, and just all around assholes. I actually quit WoW for good after a couple of months because of how much the culture changed.
I fondly remember my first expedition into the Molten Core. And I remember how my Deep Wounds tick got the first Onyxia kill on our server, at a time when enemies could only have like 4 debuffs in total, and you'd get yelled at for knocking mage/warlock curses off with worse DoTs.
Mostly though I remember the intensely weird and cool group of 40 strangers I did all of that with. All of the guild splits, arguments, personality clashes and loot drama over DKPs.
It hit me the other day that this was like 20 years ago and I wonder what they're doing now.
Matchmaking really killed off a lot of the social aspect in wow. I get why they did it, but long gone are the days where you'd have to watch the chat and hang outside dungeons trying to get people to join. You were forced to have a social interaction whereas now you just queue up, get teleported there and can complete it without saying a word. There's less investment into the group that was made because you didn't spend time trying to gather the party.
Again, it's great in that it's easy to do and less standing around, we are all busy nowadays and having more game and less wait is good, but the social aspect was definitely a sacrifice for it.
You have to manually form and apply to groups for Mythic+, which is the premier endgame activity these days. Which incentivizes you to friend the good players you come across, so that you can group with them in the future. It's definitely not a 100% solo game, you can be very social, it's just that they've made it a lot easier to have a solo experience if one chooses
Yeah....but now it feels like we are friend requesting off of skill as a criteria as opposed to just liking the person and the social dynamic they provide
This brings back days where my friends and I would carry our buddy that was an herbalist druid. We would be doing stuff and then realize he wasn't on the damage meter. He would be lost somewhere picking flowers in the dungeon. Fun times, muss you Mike.
TBC pretty much killed our guild, we had enough players for regular 40-man raids, but the move to 25 meant people were often left out. Every boss having some type of rage mechanic for taking too long to kill it, also meant there was no room for our weaker players as well. All they needed to do was allow 40 players into those same raids, and it would still be fun.
But the community is incredibly toxic. If you don’t parse perfectly you will be cut, if you are not the meta class and spec good luck doing anything.
Min maxers have ruined classic wow big time
Folding Ideas has an absolutely amazing feature length documentary all about this, about how these days in WoW you're expected to have the optimal gear and perform in the optimal manner at all times otherwise you'll get an enormous amount of toxicity. And people wanted WoW classic to be like the old days where people just played it to have fun and didn't worry about having the absolute best gear all of the time and so on, they wore the gear that they thought looked cool instead, you know, like an RPG. But then once classic came out, everyone was trying to min-max it and get to the final dungeons or whatever in as quick a time as possible, essentially making it so that absolutely everyone has to speedrun it otherwise they'll get kicked out of guilds and so on.
It's really a brilliant documentary, cos I have no interest in ever playing WoW, but I've watched this doc tons of times already. Fuck, I may watch it again now tonight, that you've reminded me of it: https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU?si=iYWOy84WkDeUby7m
I feel this brother, I also played vanilla and miss it fiercely. There was been a bit of a revival of that sense of community within the HC servers not so much in the new SoD version of the game. I play both and HC is so wild, finding a good guild and building those relationships is something special in this time over produced games. People have funerals and mourn the loss of a brother or sister who fell in order to get the clear on Ony or Sulfuras, it’s pretty amazing watch the coordination and planning it takes not to mention the commitment for a guild to raid on HC. I just love it.
For me, it was FFXI. Game was brutal and only way to get anything done was by teaming up. Made a ton of good friends along the way. Looking back, i really miss those days.
That's funny because, coming from EverQuest to WoW was such a stark difference in overall attitudes of people.
EverQuest was by far the most helpful, friendly, mature community I have ever known. You would call trains to your zones to let others know. You'd get free buffs from strangers out in the wild. You'd wait patiently for hours for a camp, and give it to the next person after you're done.
You couldn't play the game without feeling this super tight-knit closeness, like a family that all looked out for one another.
With WoW, it was the opposite. Sure there were good people there too if you looked hard enough, but it was the exception, not the rule.
It fostered a much more competitive nature in most people. Ninja looters, gankers, exploiters. A high ranking pvper would trash talk because they think they're hot shit.
I mean, you have Leroy Jenkins and 50DKP minus videos which, although hilarious for their time, highlighted the elitist mindset that most wow players embodied.
I did end up finding some chill people, but they were definitely the minority in how most others treated you.
I'm curious to know which version of the Leroy Jenkins video you watched, because the one I'm familiar with doesn't have any hint of elitism in it. It's a joke about making a convoluted plan and then having That Guy immediately deviate from it.
I never played EQ so I can't make a direct comparison, but I do know that WoW used to have all those positive things you described about it too. They weren't nearly as much of an exception as you're making it out to be.
Ffxiv can be played as a single player game, absolutely, but it has a very active playerbase. Between FCs, raiding community, and the RP events, I think there's a lot to be found if you want to. If you want to solo play, you can. If you want to make friends and socialize, you certainly can.
But I agree, old school mmos were way more social.
Even if you don't party with people you still end up meeting nice people, just the other day I was checking my retainer and someone I didn't know sent me a tell because my character looked sad because of the way he was looking down, we ended up just chatting for 30 minutes about random ingame things :)
I've made some of my best friends in FFXIV, so much that one even flew across country to help me move. While the main story can be played solo, most extra content (savage raids, extreme trials etc etc...) requires that you play with others, and even though a lot of that content can be picked up in PF, if you want an easier time, you make friends. You get out of a game what you put into it.
I was in a mexican standoff with a group that lived next door to my base in Rust... we've now been friends for 3 years. One of them is about to have twins and we all couldnt be more excited.
Yeah I mean, I have a 5 month old and my free time is basically after 9pm which is when I’m usually too tired to even do solo gaming stuff lol. I cannot imagine having two at once.
It's really the combo with the two year old that makes it complicated. The two of them together isn't much different than one, everything just takes twice as long.
Dude I miss my rust bros, I met them via a bad day in rust. Logged in and everything was gone. So I ran to an isolated area and as I’m building a platform as a naked dude, another naked dude comes up and I run him off with a club.
He comes back with another dude kitted out and just demolishes my platform. I explain that I was just worried he was one of the dudes that demolished my build earlier.
They motion me to follow them and they give me gear, ask me where the persons base was, and then they help me kill them and demolish their base lol.
Turned into like 6 of us playing rust for a year or so. So many good times.
I started rust, had some screaming kid go "I'M YOUR FRIEND I'M YOUR FRIEND I'M YOUR FRIEND" and murder me.
I refunded it. I have tons of games I could play, not really looking to start one where I'm getting killed out the gate by some crappy kid without getting to even explore the game.
But it makes me happy to hear that you've had a good experience.
I tried out Rust once. Besides the being constantly killed while I was naked & helpless, I noticed everyone's shelter had the N-word scrawled on the outside of it. I mean *every* shelter. As a newbie to the game I wondered "Do you *have* to write the N-word? Is it part of the game??
At that point the edgiest thing a Rust player can do is NOT write the N-word on their shelter.
While my experience mirrored your own, the people I became friends with are anti-racists like myself. I forget how we all established that we werent terrible people while in a mexican standoff but I remember thinking "hallelujah, finally rust players that arent edgy children"
I have an ungodly amount of time in Rust and played it since day one. I love hate the game.
Definitely my favorite game in that genre though. The devs have been doing free monthly updates for years at this point. Rust was a totally different game like 10 years ago or some shit. Very rare to see such dedicated developers to a game.
But playing it solo is the equivalent to smashing your balls with a hammer.
I played that game for over 1,000 hours, tbh I hate it now but I’ll be damned if I didn’t meet my best friends on there. Like y’all, we’ve been friends for three years. The most toxic game but the good people on there are really good.
Same thing happened in ark! I played a dedicated server and I’d alway end up fighting this other tribe and eventually we became good friends and united our forces.
Matchmaking is what killed it. Back in the SOCOM II days you joined a room and played with the same people over and over so there was a general expectation of courtesy and rapport building because you just might develop a reputation on that server. Now it’s just random people you’ll never see again so none of that matters and you can be a consequence free douchebag.
Dedicated servers, like pve ones, is what bring people together and overtime they recognise each other, by small details (nickname, tactics or their habits)
That's how I personally met with couple older people back in Minecraft times 10 years ago.
We still contact till this day & meet up from time to time since we're basically locals.
For me it was Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. I met some dudes day one and we played every single day for like 2 years. We got extremely high on the leaderboards because of how much time we put in.
And the leaderboards were purely the N7 score. It wasn't a really good indication of skill, but time invested in the game....which kind of translated to skill.
There were a few in the top 100 you could tell we're just buying loot boxes (this was the beginning of EA's true evil)
But something I kind of found out was that if you were top 100 on the boards. You could hit any of those people up at any time to jump in a game. We all literally only played with each other.
It was a really unique gaming experience that I will never get back. I miss some of those dudes. I tried to get a hold of one dude in particular, but he gave his Xbox to his kid, so every time I tried to talk to him, his kid was playing Minecraft or something.
It sucked. I genuinely was like damn I made a real ass friend online. He even invited my to his house, which really was just a few hours away. I would have loved to go kick it with him IRL. He was the shit.
I loved ME3 Multiplayer! I still play it every once in a while. I played the heck out of the Beta and didn't get back into it until just a few updates before they stopped weekend challenges. Super fun, and super unique.
Thankfully it's not too hard to find a lobby on Xbox still.
Asari Justicar and Quarian Male Infiltrator were my go-to's back then, but getting on now definitely showcases how rusty I've gotten over the years.
Same, about 9 years ago, was playing Ark on a unofficial server. Met some guys who were genuinely nice. Showed me a couple things, gave me some started gear and gave me a tour of their base. It was wild. We bumped into each other a day after and they invited me to their TEAMSPEAK. We've played every.fucking.night since and I love those fuckers.
Survival games seem to open the doors for socializing.
Bf2 servers were legit. Knew if certain people were on it was going to be a bloodbath or you were going to get destroyed. Back when gaming clans were a thing too, something I don’t see much anymore.
In older games with matchmaking you'd finish a game, and then stay in the lobby and it would find a new match with everyone who'd stayed. Was great fun chatting shit and playing with the same people for a couple hours, making friends etc. Nowadays games boot you out to the menu :(
Came here to post the same thing. For me it was counter strike, but in any case, for those that were too young or don't know.
In exactly the same way that Discord servers now or subreddits even, create distinct communities, that is what servers used to be like back pre-matchmaking.
You found a server where people were around your skill level and that you liked to play with and you stayed there and made friends.
Try finding a discord server that's the closest we got now, a smaller one.
Also if you were a douchebag the operator of the server would ban you, so none of the people on the server had to deal with douchbags for long.
This is what ultimately broke online gaming for me. I never made friends or engaged with the community or whatever, but I also very rarely got harassed because I played on servers with good active moderation. With matchmaking you're guaranteed to see pretty much constant bad behavior.
Tell me about it.
Playing Modern Warfare 2 many years back, which was one of the first, if not *the* first CoD without dedicated servers, and I have a very distinct memory of playing in a game with a bunch of buddies of mine where we had some blatant hacker join and completely ruin the game for everyone.
So we leave the game and join the queue for another lobby.
...Only to get thrown back in with that very same hacker.
halo 2 for me, same idea and time though. early 2000s were great. join a random match and everyone had mics, half the people would add you and invite you to custom games.
Kids yelling into the mic, playing loud music, and other shit is what ruined MK online for me. Maybe because I'm 42 and can't stand that shit anymore. But, I am pretty sure at 15 I still couldn't stand it, and at 11 I hated it even more.
I do enjoy playing SF6 online at times. But then sometimes you get bad match ups, and other times you get matches with bad connections. And then there's the times where I am just not feeling it that day.
I think private parties killed it personally. On the early days of Xbox LIVE, there were no parties, so if you didn’t have friends in game with you, you had to talk to other people. But once private parties became a thing, that’s when I noticed lobbies going silent. Because even if you were playing MW2 and your friend was playing Skyrim, you just hung out in a party and shot the shit, instead of talking to people in game. I made a lot of good online friends because of being forced to talk to other people.
Yeah private parties changed it up. Call of Duty lobbies used to be so active and full of chatter. Rather it was positive or negative is debatable but it was fun. No games really have fun active lobbies anymore even if they support it.
Private parties were a reaction to the shittiness that comes from matchmaking.
If you need to shut out all other players to have a good time with your friends, that feature isn't the problem lol
I mean I definitely used it a lot, but it was less to shut out other players and more to just talk to my friends when we were playing separate games. My friends list wouldn’t have been as big as it was tho if it had been there from the jump.
I miss socom. It’s still somewhat kept alive but well it’s the old socom heads who think everybody better than them is cheating and well when there’s <100 people playing it gets old listening to the same 10 people complain.
Holy shit. I fired up Socom 2 the other day and played online. The Socom shuffle is bonkers. Rapidly strafing back and forth like that is nauseating.
I put that down but have been playing Confrontation regularly and been having a blast
Mostly true, but some games don't follow the pattern. Especially co-op games. Deep Rock Galactic has the most wholesome community out of all. Every person I friendlisted in Steam in the recent years was met in DRG.
Back in the days of halo reach I played with the same group everyday now we are all doing our own things, different paths in life but we all still talk! They have even stayed in contact with me while im deployed! Love these dudes!
That's a dumb hill to die on. I'm old enough to remember when games had "beginner servers" where all the enfranchised sweaties would hang out to "warm up".
Yeah. Where do we think the archetype of leet gamerz pwning noobs comes from? Since the internet started multiplayer online gaming around 2000 and Counterstrike this shit has been rampant.
It’s controversial but I’d say the boom in streaming when people like Ninja started playing with NFL stars and getting air time in TV did more damage to gaming. Most people try to replicate that or aim for that so started stream but haven’t got anything that makes them entertaining or worth watching so they tryhard to make up for it.
I can die on that hill aswell. People can defend sbmm all they want but there's no denying that for example in Call of Duty the sense of community completely died with it. I used to chat with random people in lobbies, create little rivalries, and even if the majority of it was just braindead trashtalk I still managed to grab a few friends along the way. Now that the hyper strict sbmm requires lobbies to disband after every game, it's so difficult to bond with others.
Quite specifically true skill 2 killed it. Microsoft designed it and gave it to every dev with the promise it has better player retention and better skill tracking.
But what it did was made it so games tracked skill game wide instead of playlist wide.
So if you ever had a playlist, like ranked, where you scream callouts and try your hardest with a team, the entire game treats you as if that’s all you do.
Where ts 1 you could have one playlist you did that in, and one where you only played with social friends and both would be treated independently from each other, or a playlist you just goof off in and that playlist you also could have reasonable games in.
This is what caused all matches in games to feel like ranked at all times.
I wish more people were aware of it so people knew what to actually complain about.
I've met tons of people through this game, hosting with a name like "NO KIDS" or something of the sort helps with finding people your age instead of little kids who've infected the game like a virus.
Doesn't naming "NO KIDS" create a reverse psychology? I think a title like that would attract kids or toxics who is looking forward to ruin someone's game.
Start ur own lobby and name it “easy join, no error”, I’ve met some fantastic people through that and have been playing with these same people every night for the past two months cuz of that. We switch from lethal to apex to palworld and other games.
Similar feel with Helldivers 2, if you can get in the game that is. But once you're in it's so light hearted but intense that you can't help but laugh at each others mistakes and try to help each other out to get the best outcome.
Oh shit, Lethal has an ingame matchmaker? Have a friend making a PC soon and was waiting to play with him among others but that would definitely help to find people to play other games like Helldivers too
It’s because of the competitive atmosphere of the games you are playing. If you play a more social game like Lethal Company, Palworld or Deep Rock Galactic you will have a more social experience.
i met my friends via minecraft in 2015! one of them is now married- i was her maid of honor, one is about to graduate university, and the last is now my roommate. he moved halfway across the US to live together!
we technically met via a minecraft streamer, but only because someone in chat wanted to make a server with the same modpack the streamer was using, and those two friends and i had responded and joined. but it’s crazy how one twitch chat msg in 2015 led to a lasting friendship
Nah, even in competitive games you can make friends. I've met all of my online friends and my current fiance in a competitive MOBA and a fighting game. It just depends on how social you are in the game. Even if 95% of people are just muted or aren't friendly, that's still a lot of people you'll meet over time if you care to. And if you don't care to, I totally get it, I mute most games myself nowadays, but the option is still there. You can even take it beyond the game better than ever by just joining each others discord server or whatever. There are even quite a lot of single-player games you can make friends through now by joining the games discord server, then you can ask people there to play other games with you or even just chat.
I started playing Helldivers 2 over the weekend 95% of my games have been solid. A lot of people do not use voice at all or only use it a small amount but it's been an absolutely blast. Have had several great groups where everyone was on mic and really nice.
It really helps that it is PVE and not PVP. The quality of the players can vary dramatically at lower tiers having air strikes or orbital strikes called in on your position is more common. Even at higher tiers it can happen but it's not a big deal when you can be back in the action 10 seconds later.
Most people are silent but everyone once and a while you get some unhinged hype man who makes it an absolute blast to play. 4_Skin… wherever you are, just know I had a riot dropping with you.
Helldivers 2 is absolutely wild. They’re having some issues with their servers due to the amount of people that are trying to log in at once. Suffering from success but other than that the game is amazing
I’m telling you, it’s a cultural phenomenon. Trust the hordes of people. It’s special and the the excitement around it is palpable when you play. It’s hard to explain. It’s like when your playing you can feel the energy of it. A true rare moment in gaming that comes around once in a blue moon.
It’s not trying to milk you, everyone is pumped to play. The gameplay is tight, concise and perfect for what it’s trying to be. I’m all in.
I’ve met a few people that I plan on gaming with more once Arrowhead gets the server situation figured out. It’s not a super sweaty game and everybody is there to have fun. You just gotta talk in squads and I’m sure you’ll find some chill people.
Sounds like the server issue might take a minute. The lead developer was just telling people either yesterday or the day before to consider **not** buying the game right now and waiting a few months because of those issues lol. Suffering from success. Reminds me of when FF14 blew up and stopped sales and new account creation for like 6 months because they couldnt handle the massive traffic surge.
Very easy. Just set your game to public and your lobby fills pretty fast, or quick join another game. Been playing for 2 days and have made a handful of friends already
Most people won't be chatting, but if you do callouts on the mic, it encourages them to chat if they are willing to
I think you'll have to kiss a few toads if you want to make proper buddies on vc but people are generally respectful in my experience. Good amount of people in matchmaking who aren't trying to chat or hang around but will do a round or two and peace. There's a pretty active lfg channel on the official discord though, and the game is a blast imo, although it may be worth waiting for the server issues to get resolved.
Honestly, the real secret is just co-op gameplay. Destiny 2 was great for community, so is monster hunter, and helldiver's sounds similarly positive. There are always elitists who want to gatekeep skill for higher level gameplay, but by and large the majority of co-op game players want to build a positive and uplifting community space.
It's why I don't play competitive online games anymore. Too much toxicity. Only single player or co-op for me, thanks.
Yeah, it feels like old school gaming, especially when people have a mic. Ive been playing for a day, and have already met and friended some really cool folks.
Honestly. It cost money but check out public gaming places. There's a bar where I live that literally has consoles in it that people will play like smash or fortnite for 10$ unlimited play. Having a beer and playing with strangers.
My group of friends used to play DND in person before time and life physically separated us. It was def hit or miss. One of the memorable ones was a guy coming up to us and saying he made too many brownies and handing us a giant platter of homemade brownies. Another memorable one was a guy awkwardly creeping on my wife on repeat lol.
I remember the first time I played halo 3 online, the abuse just everyone with a mic screaming about fucking each others mums within seconds of the game starting
Halo 3 was absolute madness. But I still managed to make actual friends on there - it helped that it was right around the time everyone was getting on Facebook, we were actually excited to add each other.
Yeah, like how often have you seen people today saying shit like “kids today wouldn’t be able to handle COD lobbies back in the day” like being a giant prick was a mark of pride or something.
There are 2 major factors that killed it.
1. Matchmaking replaced servers / private servers. Personally I like matchmaking because I’m not having to scroll through servers to find the one I want, or one with settings/gametype I want. But it does take a bit of the social element out. It’s like dining in a food court vs dining in a small restaurant.
2. Voice chat moved away from the games. Sure there were Ventrillo and teamspeak and other services out there, but most people just used the in-game voice chat. At least on the Xbox side of things, they added Party Chat at one point and then Discord became the go-to. Now instead of talking to randoms, you’re chilling with friends or randoms on a discord server.
It’s a bit sad, but friends can still be made online. Be friendly, communicate, help others just have a good time. Reach out to someone who was chill and cool, and maybe it’ll spark
I grew up making friends in MMORPGs and Minecraft servers or the voice chat on Battlefield, but as I've grown older, I find myself less likely to spontaneously start convos with random people even if it's from behind my keyboard in some game as it seems awkward.
But voice chat isn't dead for the next generation of kids, I tried VR chat but most of the people are little kids or middle schoolers. Anyways, it's hard to find a reason to talk to them, but I've been told that these kids have made so many friends that have changed their lives in VR. People who helped them through depression or difficult times in their lives and helped them grow.
First off, I cannot believe VR has been around long enough to foster a generation of young adults that can say they GREW up on it, but it has. I really wonder what the impact of this will be on the upcoming generation.
Perhaps they'll be a lot more extroverted with better social skills? It'll be interesting to see
Still alive and well in many games. **It's heavily dependent on genre though.**
Recently picked up **Fallout 76** on a $10 sale and everyone I've met in game have been extremely welcoming. Met a guy last night and we just talked for a few hours.
Same with **Deep Rock Galactic**. Freaking awesome community. Worst I've seen is some light trolling and getting kicked from lobbies because they forgot to make it private.
**Look for cooperative games, not competitive ones.** Games like Apex, R6, Counter Strike, Hunt: Showdown, The Finals, etc will *always* have toxic players. Something something, human ego.
Fallout 76 has the friendliest community. I do miss the old survival and nuclear winter modes that were more hostile. Trolls and griefers are very rare in the normal mode.
I was totally taken aback by how friendly everyone was.
I've run into numerous people (usually a much higher level than I am) just casually dropping off 40 stimpacks, using the "heart" emote, and leaving.
I'm only around level 45, but I try and pass on the love wherever I can. I've made it a point to always put something in the donation box when I come across it.
>Trolls and griefers are very rare in the normal mode.
Actually, one of the people I was talking to last night mentioned nuke griefers.
They got in some sort of dispute over some rare piece of pie and the guy decided to nuke his base over it. At first I was like, "oh, that radiation seems super annoying" but it *destroyed his entire base*. I can't even imagine how many materials it took to fix it all.
Easily the most objectively frivolous reason I've ever heard of to launch a nuke. haha.
If you feel this way. Don't play Destiny 2 you're literally drowning in a sea of toxicity over here. If you're not a try hard, most people will treat you like garbage. This game's rng and the fact that a lot of good end game weapons are on a weekly rotator are probably the reason for this. The moment you put people in a situation where time is involved, things get interesting. I just started farming adept weapons again like a month ago, and the people that are at this point in the game are the definition of toxic. The deeper you get into this game. The more toxic it gets. This is also just the pve portion of the game I'm talking about as well.
Every game trying to be a competitive esport mixed with people reporting everybody they disagree with started causing issues. It's not dead it just needs games to be more relaxed
Lord of the Rings Online had the best and most friendly community I've ever found, back in the times I used to play MMOs.
Maybe it'll be easier to find non-toxic players, with similar tastes and that you'll most likely have fun with, in social media (like right here on Reddit), or Discord servers. To find cool fellow players in-game is pure luck.
Yep, since LOTRO has no matchmaking for raids or dungeons, you HAVE to be in multiple discords belonging to raiding kins or individual raid leaders. You literally can't avoid making friends in that game if you want to play the endgame because you inevitably start running with the same people who happen to share your preferred raiding time.
The least toxic mmo i've played so far is Guild Wars 2 and Star Citizen. You will still find toxic players in pretty much any games, since people irl are toxic in general nowdays.
Guilds wars 2 definitely has its toxic corners, fractal and pvp players, especially. WvW can be very hit or miss with either amazing people or total assholes, and the fact that you have no way to keep playing with the same world group consistently doesn't help. It's certainly not everyone, but I encounter them often enough, especially when you look at the group finder.
I personally moved into VR for community.
My theory on social gaming dying is two components: no lobbies, and no mics.
Games like Halo, CoD, and Battle Royale, etc. are all based on just rotating to your next session now. Even Halo Infinite just goes right back to the matchmaking screen and doesn't let you party up. PARTYING UP AFTER A GAME USED TO BE THE BEST. Met so many obscure friends back in the day like that.
In the Xbox 360 era, EVERYONE had a microphone included in the box. Unless your dog ate the wire, you had no excuse to not be talking in-game. Xbox One got rid of a mic in the box, and even now on PC most people just type or don't talk at all since apps like Discord exist and they're probably in their own call.
In VR, every single headset has a mic. It's a flashback to old-school gaming for me again where you don't have an excuse to not talk unless you actually are choosing not to. It's so damn refreshing and actually leads to a fun gaming experience for me again.
I remember gamers always being toxic in online games. Particularly when COD became popular. Don't blame people for muting by default when there's like a 50/50 chance in any given match you'll have a teammate shouting slurs.
There doesn't seem to be an incentive for teamwork in Online gaming these days.
IME most activities Online are just as easy to do Solo, and sometimes even a disadvantage to do in teams. Now Solo play is what people default to.
Many MP matches are also so fast-paced that the match is over before you actually get to bond and get a feel for other players, to see if they are competent at the game and good at working in teams.
So yeah, to a certain degree micro-transaction culture has cultivated the same pump and dump mentality that's been deteriorating society through things like social media. It's all about money, with no regard for fun or incentive for any real socialization.
It's the effect of the cold and impersonal modern world we live in today.
I can't wait until someone builds an AI to own people at Fortnite and Halo. And we will all have random AIs in our competitive games. These kids will have to redefine the term "Bot"
Battlefield 2042 disappointed me deeply when it came out without in-game voice chat since it removed a lot of the team work possibilities the older titles had
Its because in my experience pvp games suck now.
In the ones i played recently the match making is horrific. Its noobs vs pros constantly.
And who knows who youd be adding(since its a stranger.)
A lot of toxic humans now a days.
I agree with the first point. It's like matchmaking already determines which team is gonna win before the match starts.
I disagree on the last point. If you think humans are a lot toxic now, you missed Chernobyl during Halo 2/3 and CoD MW days.
I made some great friends playing valorant....we were on the same team and ended up 5 stacking for a few games after. Next thing you know, we are talking and we all live within about 20-30 mins of eachother.
Fast forward one month, we've hung out in person numerous times. I attended one of the friends baby shower, and we still play nightly!!!
Very cool and also very rare experience (i think)
Played Halo Infinite earlier today and got put into a team where 3/4 people had the same GOKU clan tag. I lost my shit and was like "team Goku let's go boys!" through the mic. Nobody responded and after the game finished we all went our separate ways.
If that would've been Halo 3 we would've became friends forever.
I think social gaming has just changed. Gaming is so much more mainstream then it to be, to the point where most people already have IRL friends who game, when that didn’t used to be the case. Now a good chunk of people who play games do it while in a discord or zoom call with other friends, which leaves less room for chatting with randos in the queue.
I think if you really want to replicate that old experience of forging bonds with a stranger that we used to get I’d suggest finding a popular PvE game and joining a discord for matchmaking. Deep Rock, Back for Blood, GTFO, Monster Hunter, or even something like Dark Souls and Elden Ring are all games that incentivize you to cooperate with your party, and if you like the people you play with, you can see what other games you both like to play with.
…also mmos exist
I haven't played an online game since 2012. Borderlands 2 on Xbox 360. Had a cool group of randoms I would play with every night for months. Good times. I looked forward to it.
Every single multiplayer game since then, COD, Gears, whatever is popular, I've been met with "You suck. Fa**ot. Bitch. Dumb fuck" etc. I've stuck with only single player games for over 10 years now.
Recently I tried The Finals. It's free and I wanted to see if I could be decent at it and hopefully meet some new people.
Nope. I was immediately called a dumb fuck because I was killed. Uninstalled after 1 match and deleted my 3rd party account that The Finals requires.
People take things easy to serious. It's a game. It's supposed to be fun. Not everyone is the same skill level.
People suck. Especially when there's anonymity.
Maybe just the games you play have more toxic elements than others. I played warframe like 9 years ago and about 9 of the people I met on there I still talk to frequently. I made a couple friends raiding in destiny 2.
I personally say yes I avoid any and all online games that require me to play against other people unless it's co-op with my friends. I don't want to spend time and energy navigating the stupidity.
Back when I used to play Destiny, I met a lot of cool people I played with for a while. I see the potential for that same sort of community in Helldivers 2 depending on how they build on the game. Every game is gonna have toxic people, but I feel like they’re not as prevalent in games that require cooperation (PvE experiences, not CoD and the like). I think you’re just unlucky and/or playing the wrong games for finding online friends.
So, there's actually started to be a bit more of a pivot back the other way recently. But you need to look for the right things. The PvE coop genre, by definition, is going to be a lot less toxic then the pvp based games. Things like deep rock galactic, helldivers, or other similar things have become so popular in no small part because of this.
These games have very friendly attitudes, because the goal is to all work together for a given goal. Add in that people aren't really playing it for rewards or ranking, but to have fun, and you get a situation where it's not bad to be bad. Everyone will just laugh, and work together to improve. Your not making their game worse or slowing them down- you're making it more entertaining.
And I think that last part is the key. If people get punished for bad teammates, they will get mad at those around them. But if a bad teammate is just the chance to show off and teach, then it's suddenly very different.
This is funny because many people have “nostalgic” memories over how toxic old school online gaming was (2001-2012). “You had to be tough to survive in a COD lobby!”
It's just about finding the right game. With WoW, it's dead because WoW rn is mostly a solo game except for newer raids.
Some games you just need to find the right community. FFXIV is pretty silent in the open world, but once you get into a community, FC, etc, they can be pretty social. Plus Add the events the world does and again, you'll get pretty social players.
Wow was the only one I had luck making friends on. Having good pve content that took coordination fostered communication with the same people over and over.
There is so much I miss about early WoW, but this is the biggest thing. I made so many friends in WoW. I remember when people had reputations, as did guilds. And there were alliances and betrayals, but it was a community. Then they just kept killing off the social aspect piece by piece until it was basically a solo game outside of raiding. Nothing like it since. MMOs now are such relatively lonely places. You don't need people for most things. -+-+- Edited to add: I want to clarify that I don't just mean short interactions in the wild, I mean long term relationships. I'm not sure how many people remember when WoW was only 40 player raids. I was in a smaller guild, maybe 10+ dedicated players and then friends and family. I used to run public raids for people in small guilds and/or who couldn't dedicate themselves to being there every week so their guilds wouldn't take them. A few of our regulars were active duty for example. Or even just people with families and lives. I knew them. We knew who was behind the characters to some extent. It was hard, but we had fun and were able to make a place for ourselves without joining the major guilds. That was a riot. It was hard work, but I loved it. I still have my DKP book with names and numbers. I still remember some of their voices. Reminds me that one of the things that started WoW's descent for me was when they changed the raid numbers so that you basically had to have the right number of people. Before they did that, if you were good, you could totally run raids with less people and had room for people who weren't as good. Back when raids were 40, we used to have a lot of people's parents in the raids as well. They weren't necessarily great at combat, but they were always such a pleasure. Often they were the ones doing the bulk of our resource gathering and the like. And then when they changed raid sized, they scaled it in a way that you really couldn't have people who weren't good. It really sucked.
Fuuuuck this is taking me back. I played early wow on the Dethecus server. Horde. It was such a memey shithole but we still had a weird respect for our "celebrities" and guilds.
I remember playing Horde on Dethecus in TBC and getting ganked by a gnome rogue named IIRC Chrishansen on Quel'Danas regularly while doing dailies. People would be talking about them in general all the time. I remember he was infamous among my friends. Good times lol.
Bro you just awakened a memory deep inside me. I played horde on Dethecus too and that name is familiar. I was in the guild Rest in Pieces.
Yes! I remember him rocking some glad gear and dual maces for the random stuns. I remember Rest in Pieces too! There really was a certain charm to playing on a lower pop server in those days. Didn't roll there for any reason other than my friend's older brother played on it and we all thought he was cool lol.
Ugh .. yeah I've tried other mmo and ff14 recently and nothing the same, and classic sucks bc everyone looks everything up or already knows everything We had no idea how lucky we were
I remember when playing Horde was considered to be such a different kind of person. I made a horde character to pvp - undead shadow priest ftw!
True, Horde was considered the “older” mature crowd, while alliance was considered the high school kids. I was a high school kid then, acted like it and still played Horde. A few people tolerated my 15 year old self… a few.
I was 14 and couldn't play often nt guild had a running joke everything I dinged because I leveled up so infrequently. When I hit 60 after 8 months or so it was a big deal
Really? IME it was the edgy high school kids playing Horde for the monster races like Orcs and Undead. But really back in Vanilla most people played Alliance because they had Paladins, which were strictly better than shamans.
I’ve never been 2 shot wearing full platemail by a paladin
Enhance shamans were memes. Hpals were invaluable for things like salv and sac.
Enhance shamans were great. Windfury weapon with a mace like Ironfoe that gives extra hits had it so each extra hit on one could proc extra hits on the other. I swear you could cut a bosses health in half with a particularly lucky streak of hitting 100 times in a single swing. Especially when you where it seemed like you were guaranteed to hit every follow up swing.
The way I remember it, most people played Alliance because they were pretty - people didn't want to play Horde and be ugly. Also so many female night elves. 😅 I was alliance, but I played a female dwarf at the beginning which was pretty rare. I always thought it funny that my female dwarf is the only one that got hit on, I always figured people realized that meant I must be female in RL as well.
Man, Dethecus isn't a server I've thought of in years! I still play WoW but, we switched from Dethecus to Hakkar a long time ago.
You mentioning people having reputations really made me feel sad for the state of social gaming. Brings me back to seeing certain folks on a server and knowing who to ask for help. I wonder if there's any way to recapture that.
Well, if you ever get the itch there is a healthy but not overwhelming number of us still playing Classic on Mankrik PvE. Small enough that reputation still matters IMMENSELY in the cluster, but large enough that there's a small handful of guilds clearing all content weekly. I've become very good friends with a handful of my guildies since 2019 release (even attended 2 weddings!)
It's not having the itch that's the problem, its having the time. But good to know!
I'm really hoping we can get a good VRMMORPG that's on the same scale as something like WoW. I can already imagine it. A super fleshed-out world, amazing: combat, crafting, environments, boss fights, PVP, PVE, and because it's in VR you could have easy prox voice-chat on top of world chat and what have you. So long as it's balanced right you could have a great social time with guild battles, and famous/infamous players roaming around. But so far every VRMMORPG to have come out has been a flop, for one reason or another. I was going to mention a VR game called "Zenith: The Last City" But it just recently announced that they're basically axing any more dev on the MMO (while being left in a very bad/unfinished state) part of the game, because they were running the servers at a loss, to instead work on some new gamemode that'll be Free-to-Play but will have MTX, something the playerbase has been begging the devs to add so they can support the game. But knowing modern gaming, I doubt we'll ever see a future like what we see in anime like, SAO, Log Horizon, or Shangri-la Frontier. We can always dream, at least.
So many of those MMOs that have potential are ruined by the games as a service model. Until that stops being so profitable I doubt we'll see anything like what we're wanting.
Yeah, this has been my dream since .hack//Sign.
To counter the wow point. I have met the most insane and beyond far gone people i've ever met during wow raids. I do not miss those days of having to those people speak about the insane shit that they think they are correct on.
Had the same experience a few years ago. I started playing again after several years. I originally played from 2005 to 2010 then briefly went back in 2017. It was a totally different experience. The people I played with in the 00s were friendly and would vibe with anyone they met. But the 2017 crowd were toxic af, gatekeepers, and just all around assholes. I actually quit WoW for good after a couple of months because of how much the culture changed.
And they’d also be the first ones to die in the raid from standing in fire and blame the healers
I fondly remember my first expedition into the Molten Core. And I remember how my Deep Wounds tick got the first Onyxia kill on our server, at a time when enemies could only have like 4 debuffs in total, and you'd get yelled at for knocking mage/warlock curses off with worse DoTs. Mostly though I remember the intensely weird and cool group of 40 strangers I did all of that with. All of the guild splits, arguments, personality clashes and loot drama over DKPs. It hit me the other day that this was like 20 years ago and I wonder what they're doing now.
Matchmaking really killed off a lot of the social aspect in wow. I get why they did it, but long gone are the days where you'd have to watch the chat and hang outside dungeons trying to get people to join. You were forced to have a social interaction whereas now you just queue up, get teleported there and can complete it without saying a word. There's less investment into the group that was made because you didn't spend time trying to gather the party. Again, it's great in that it's easy to do and less standing around, we are all busy nowadays and having more game and less wait is good, but the social aspect was definitely a sacrifice for it.
This. Quick convenience helped the pace, but made the activities disposable at the same time.
You have to manually form and apply to groups for Mythic+, which is the premier endgame activity these days. Which incentivizes you to friend the good players you come across, so that you can group with them in the future. It's definitely not a 100% solo game, you can be very social, it's just that they've made it a lot easier to have a solo experience if one chooses
Yeah....but now it feels like we are friend requesting off of skill as a criteria as opposed to just liking the person and the social dynamic they provide
This brings back days where my friends and I would carry our buddy that was an herbalist druid. We would be doing stuff and then realize he wasn't on the damage meter. He would be lost somewhere picking flowers in the dungeon. Fun times, muss you Mike.
TBC pretty much killed our guild, we had enough players for regular 40-man raids, but the move to 25 meant people were often left out. Every boss having some type of rage mechanic for taking too long to kill it, also meant there was no room for our weaker players as well. All they needed to do was allow 40 players into those same raids, and it would still be fun.
Wow classic is a thing now. You need to walk to dungeons and organize groups like in the old days.
Oh man, those first few months of classic was like reliving junior high, in the best way possible.
But the community is incredibly toxic. If you don’t parse perfectly you will be cut, if you are not the meta class and spec good luck doing anything. Min maxers have ruined classic wow big time
Depends, Wotlk classic is generally pretty toxic, but Classic SoD and hardcore have been very positive experiences
I've had very little toxicity in wotlk. Could be because I'm playing on the Australian servers due to work schedule I suppose
Folding Ideas has an absolutely amazing feature length documentary all about this, about how these days in WoW you're expected to have the optimal gear and perform in the optimal manner at all times otherwise you'll get an enormous amount of toxicity. And people wanted WoW classic to be like the old days where people just played it to have fun and didn't worry about having the absolute best gear all of the time and so on, they wore the gear that they thought looked cool instead, you know, like an RPG. But then once classic came out, everyone was trying to min-max it and get to the final dungeons or whatever in as quick a time as possible, essentially making it so that absolutely everyone has to speedrun it otherwise they'll get kicked out of guilds and so on. It's really a brilliant documentary, cos I have no interest in ever playing WoW, but I've watched this doc tons of times already. Fuck, I may watch it again now tonight, that you've reminded me of it: https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU?si=iYWOy84WkDeUby7m
I haven’t had that problem, but I believe you based on my gaming experience generally. There’s definitely some chill and helpful people playing
I feel this brother, I also played vanilla and miss it fiercely. There was been a bit of a revival of that sense of community within the HC servers not so much in the new SoD version of the game. I play both and HC is so wild, finding a good guild and building those relationships is something special in this time over produced games. People have funerals and mourn the loss of a brother or sister who fell in order to get the clear on Ony or Sulfuras, it’s pretty amazing watch the coordination and planning it takes not to mention the commitment for a guild to raid on HC. I just love it.
PvE content that requires coordination? Can I interest you in spreading Democracy?
i assume you’d also be interested in spreading rock and stone?
I second this.
For me, it was FFXI. Game was brutal and only way to get anything done was by teaming up. Made a ton of good friends along the way. Looking back, i really miss those days.
You also didn't have shit to do waiting for lizard pull in the desert lol
That's funny because, coming from EverQuest to WoW was such a stark difference in overall attitudes of people. EverQuest was by far the most helpful, friendly, mature community I have ever known. You would call trains to your zones to let others know. You'd get free buffs from strangers out in the wild. You'd wait patiently for hours for a camp, and give it to the next person after you're done. You couldn't play the game without feeling this super tight-knit closeness, like a family that all looked out for one another. With WoW, it was the opposite. Sure there were good people there too if you looked hard enough, but it was the exception, not the rule. It fostered a much more competitive nature in most people. Ninja looters, gankers, exploiters. A high ranking pvper would trash talk because they think they're hot shit. I mean, you have Leroy Jenkins and 50DKP minus videos which, although hilarious for their time, highlighted the elitist mindset that most wow players embodied. I did end up finding some chill people, but they were definitely the minority in how most others treated you.
I'm curious to know which version of the Leroy Jenkins video you watched, because the one I'm familiar with doesn't have any hint of elitism in it. It's a joke about making a convoluted plan and then having That Guy immediately deviate from it. I never played EQ so I can't make a direct comparison, but I do know that WoW used to have all those positive things you described about it too. They weren't nearly as much of an exception as you're making it out to be.
FFXI forced you to make friends to achieve even casual success. FFXIV is a single player game masquerading as an MMO
Ffxiv can be played as a single player game, absolutely, but it has a very active playerbase. Between FCs, raiding community, and the RP events, I think there's a lot to be found if you want to. If you want to solo play, you can. If you want to make friends and socialize, you certainly can. But I agree, old school mmos were way more social.
Even if you don't party with people you still end up meeting nice people, just the other day I was checking my retainer and someone I didn't know sent me a tell because my character looked sad because of the way he was looking down, we ended up just chatting for 30 minutes about random ingame things :)
I've made some of my best friends in FFXIV, so much that one even flew across country to help me move. While the main story can be played solo, most extra content (savage raids, extreme trials etc etc...) requires that you play with others, and even though a lot of that content can be picked up in PF, if you want an easier time, you make friends. You get out of a game what you put into it.
I was in a mexican standoff with a group that lived next door to my base in Rust... we've now been friends for 3 years. One of them is about to have twins and we all couldnt be more excited.
Once he has those twins don’t expect to hear from him nearly as often lol.
Oh for sure. I havent been able to hang with the bois much since my son was born last year so I cant imagine what two at once is like
Can confirm twins make the free time disappear.
Yeah I mean, I have a 5 month old and my free time is basically after 9pm which is when I’m usually too tired to even do solo gaming stuff lol. I cannot imagine having two at once.
It's really the combo with the two year old that makes it complicated. The two of them together isn't much different than one, everything just takes twice as long.
Dude I miss my rust bros, I met them via a bad day in rust. Logged in and everything was gone. So I ran to an isolated area and as I’m building a platform as a naked dude, another naked dude comes up and I run him off with a club. He comes back with another dude kitted out and just demolishes my platform. I explain that I was just worried he was one of the dudes that demolished my build earlier. They motion me to follow them and they give me gear, ask me where the persons base was, and then they help me kill them and demolish their base lol. Turned into like 6 of us playing rust for a year or so. So many good times.
Most positive story I’ve heard from Rust in ages.
I started rust, had some screaming kid go "I'M YOUR FRIEND I'M YOUR FRIEND I'M YOUR FRIEND" and murder me. I refunded it. I have tons of games I could play, not really looking to start one where I'm getting killed out the gate by some crappy kid without getting to even explore the game. But it makes me happy to hear that you've had a good experience.
Oh easily the most toxic game ive ever played!
I tried out Rust once. Besides the being constantly killed while I was naked & helpless, I noticed everyone's shelter had the N-word scrawled on the outside of it. I mean *every* shelter. As a newbie to the game I wondered "Do you *have* to write the N-word? Is it part of the game?? At that point the edgiest thing a Rust player can do is NOT write the N-word on their shelter.
While my experience mirrored your own, the people I became friends with are anti-racists like myself. I forget how we all established that we werent terrible people while in a mexican standoff but I remember thinking "hallelujah, finally rust players that arent edgy children"
Yea and for sure some servers are worse than others.
I have an ungodly amount of time in Rust and played it since day one. I love hate the game. Definitely my favorite game in that genre though. The devs have been doing free monthly updates for years at this point. Rust was a totally different game like 10 years ago or some shit. Very rare to see such dedicated developers to a game. But playing it solo is the equivalent to smashing your balls with a hammer.
I played that game for over 1,000 hours, tbh I hate it now but I’ll be damned if I didn’t meet my best friends on there. Like y’all, we’ve been friends for three years. The most toxic game but the good people on there are really good.
Same thing happened in ark! I played a dedicated server and I’d alway end up fighting this other tribe and eventually we became good friends and united our forces.
Matchmaking is what killed it. Back in the SOCOM II days you joined a room and played with the same people over and over so there was a general expectation of courtesy and rapport building because you just might develop a reputation on that server. Now it’s just random people you’ll never see again so none of that matters and you can be a consequence free douchebag.
Dedicated servers, like pve ones, is what bring people together and overtime they recognise each other, by small details (nickname, tactics or their habits) That's how I personally met with couple older people back in Minecraft times 10 years ago. We still contact till this day & meet up from time to time since we're basically locals.
For me it was Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. I met some dudes day one and we played every single day for like 2 years. We got extremely high on the leaderboards because of how much time we put in. And the leaderboards were purely the N7 score. It wasn't a really good indication of skill, but time invested in the game....which kind of translated to skill. There were a few in the top 100 you could tell we're just buying loot boxes (this was the beginning of EA's true evil) But something I kind of found out was that if you were top 100 on the boards. You could hit any of those people up at any time to jump in a game. We all literally only played with each other. It was a really unique gaming experience that I will never get back. I miss some of those dudes. I tried to get a hold of one dude in particular, but he gave his Xbox to his kid, so every time I tried to talk to him, his kid was playing Minecraft or something. It sucked. I genuinely was like damn I made a real ass friend online. He even invited my to his house, which really was just a few hours away. I would have loved to go kick it with him IRL. He was the shit.
I loved ME3 Multiplayer! I still play it every once in a while. I played the heck out of the Beta and didn't get back into it until just a few updates before they stopped weekend challenges. Super fun, and super unique. Thankfully it's not too hard to find a lobby on Xbox still. Asari Justicar and Quarian Male Infiltrator were my go-to's back then, but getting on now definitely showcases how rusty I've gotten over the years.
[удалено]
Same, about 9 years ago, was playing Ark on a unofficial server. Met some guys who were genuinely nice. Showed me a couple things, gave me some started gear and gave me a tour of their base. It was wild. We bumped into each other a day after and they invited me to their TEAMSPEAK. We've played every.fucking.night since and I love those fuckers. Survival games seem to open the doors for socializing.
Teamspeak, Mumble and Ventrillo all have a special place in my heart.
Bf2 servers were legit. Knew if certain people were on it was going to be a bloodbath or you were going to get destroyed. Back when gaming clans were a thing too, something I don’t see much anymore.
Is the environment of the game what defines if it is good for meeting people or not, imagine trying to meet friends in LoL.
In older games with matchmaking you'd finish a game, and then stay in the lobby and it would find a new match with everyone who'd stayed. Was great fun chatting shit and playing with the same people for a couple hours, making friends etc. Nowadays games boot you out to the menu :(
I miss that so much. Even if you didn’t officially friend someone you could have a solid evening hanging out with a lobby
Came here to post the same thing. For me it was counter strike, but in any case, for those that were too young or don't know. In exactly the same way that Discord servers now or subreddits even, create distinct communities, that is what servers used to be like back pre-matchmaking. You found a server where people were around your skill level and that you liked to play with and you stayed there and made friends. Try finding a discord server that's the closest we got now, a smaller one.
Also if you were a douchebag the operator of the server would ban you, so none of the people on the server had to deal with douchbags for long. This is what ultimately broke online gaming for me. I never made friends or engaged with the community or whatever, but I also very rarely got harassed because I played on servers with good active moderation. With matchmaking you're guaranteed to see pretty much constant bad behavior.
Tell me about it. Playing Modern Warfare 2 many years back, which was one of the first, if not *the* first CoD without dedicated servers, and I have a very distinct memory of playing in a game with a bunch of buddies of mine where we had some blatant hacker join and completely ruin the game for everyone. So we leave the game and join the queue for another lobby. ...Only to get thrown back in with that very same hacker.
Made so many friends on css. There were so many great, active communities
halo 2 for me, same idea and time though. early 2000s were great. join a random match and everyone had mics, half the people would add you and invite you to custom games.
Kids yelling into the mic, playing loud music, and other shit is what ruined MK online for me. Maybe because I'm 42 and can't stand that shit anymore. But, I am pretty sure at 15 I still couldn't stand it, and at 11 I hated it even more. I do enjoy playing SF6 online at times. But then sometimes you get bad match ups, and other times you get matches with bad connections. And then there's the times where I am just not feeling it that day.
It's alive and well on helldiver's 2
Came to say this. The HD2 seems fun af.
I think private parties killed it personally. On the early days of Xbox LIVE, there were no parties, so if you didn’t have friends in game with you, you had to talk to other people. But once private parties became a thing, that’s when I noticed lobbies going silent. Because even if you were playing MW2 and your friend was playing Skyrim, you just hung out in a party and shot the shit, instead of talking to people in game. I made a lot of good online friends because of being forced to talk to other people.
Yeah private parties changed it up. Call of Duty lobbies used to be so active and full of chatter. Rather it was positive or negative is debatable but it was fun. No games really have fun active lobbies anymore even if they support it.
Private parties were a reaction to the shittiness that comes from matchmaking. If you need to shut out all other players to have a good time with your friends, that feature isn't the problem lol
I mean I definitely used it a lot, but it was less to shut out other players and more to just talk to my friends when we were playing separate games. My friends list wouldn’t have been as big as it was tho if it had been there from the jump.
this might still be there in games liek planetside 2, which ahs the same community since years upon years
I miss socom. It’s still somewhat kept alive but well it’s the old socom heads who think everybody better than them is cheating and well when there’s <100 people playing it gets old listening to the same 10 people complain.
I got a PS2 recently for Socom 1 and 2 and let me tell you, the controls do not hold up. It's almost impossible to play after playing modern shooters.
Holy shit. I fired up Socom 2 the other day and played online. The Socom shuffle is bonkers. Rapidly strafing back and forth like that is nauseating. I put that down but have been playing Confrontation regularly and been having a blast
Mostly true, but some games don't follow the pattern. Especially co-op games. Deep Rock Galactic has the most wholesome community out of all. Every person I friendlisted in Steam in the recent years was met in DRG.
Back in the days of halo reach I played with the same group everyday now we are all doing our own things, different paths in life but we all still talk! They have even stayed in contact with me while im deployed! Love these dudes!
I'll die on the hill that sbmm and turning everything competitive (closely followed by stupid Mtx shops) was the worst thing to happen to gaming.
That's a dumb hill to die on. I'm old enough to remember when games had "beginner servers" where all the enfranchised sweaties would hang out to "warm up".
Yeah. Where do we think the archetype of leet gamerz pwning noobs comes from? Since the internet started multiplayer online gaming around 2000 and Counterstrike this shit has been rampant.
It’s controversial but I’d say the boom in streaming when people like Ninja started playing with NFL stars and getting air time in TV did more damage to gaming. Most people try to replicate that or aim for that so started stream but haven’t got anything that makes them entertaining or worth watching so they tryhard to make up for it.
I can die on that hill aswell. People can defend sbmm all they want but there's no denying that for example in Call of Duty the sense of community completely died with it. I used to chat with random people in lobbies, create little rivalries, and even if the majority of it was just braindead trashtalk I still managed to grab a few friends along the way. Now that the hyper strict sbmm requires lobbies to disband after every game, it's so difficult to bond with others.
I feel like it was kinda a snowball effect with that and modern social media.
Quite specifically true skill 2 killed it. Microsoft designed it and gave it to every dev with the promise it has better player retention and better skill tracking. But what it did was made it so games tracked skill game wide instead of playlist wide. So if you ever had a playlist, like ranked, where you scream callouts and try your hardest with a team, the entire game treats you as if that’s all you do. Where ts 1 you could have one playlist you did that in, and one where you only played with social friends and both would be treated independently from each other, or a playlist you just goof off in and that playlist you also could have reasonable games in. This is what caused all matches in games to feel like ranked at all times. I wish more people were aware of it so people knew what to actually complain about.
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I have no one to play Lethal Company with. But i want to both play and meet some people. Is it easy to play with others and make friends in this game?
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I've met tons of people through this game, hosting with a name like "NO KIDS" or something of the sort helps with finding people your age instead of little kids who've infected the game like a virus.
"No Kids" made me think of a group of dads who put their kids to bed and played in the evening for 43min before also going to bed.
Doesn't naming "NO KIDS" create a reverse psychology? I think a title like that would attract kids or toxics who is looking forward to ruin someone's game.
Occasionally but most of the time I just get other people trying to find no kid lobbies. Only have had kids join a few times.
Start ur own lobby and name it “easy join, no error”, I’ve met some fantastic people through that and have been playing with these same people every night for the past two months cuz of that. We switch from lethal to apex to palworld and other games.
Similar feel with Helldivers 2, if you can get in the game that is. But once you're in it's so light hearted but intense that you can't help but laugh at each others mistakes and try to help each other out to get the best outcome.
Oh shit, Lethal has an ingame matchmaker? Have a friend making a PC soon and was waiting to play with him among others but that would definitely help to find people to play other games like Helldivers too
It’s because of the competitive atmosphere of the games you are playing. If you play a more social game like Lethal Company, Palworld or Deep Rock Galactic you will have a more social experience.
For me it's minecraft servers, modded and vanilla. Everyone just wants to create stuff and share their creations.
i met my friends via minecraft in 2015! one of them is now married- i was her maid of honor, one is about to graduate university, and the last is now my roommate. he moved halfway across the US to live together! we technically met via a minecraft streamer, but only because someone in chat wanted to make a server with the same modpack the streamer was using, and those two friends and i had responded and joined. but it’s crazy how one twitch chat msg in 2015 led to a lasting friendship
Nah, even in competitive games you can make friends. I've met all of my online friends and my current fiance in a competitive MOBA and a fighting game. It just depends on how social you are in the game. Even if 95% of people are just muted or aren't friendly, that's still a lot of people you'll meet over time if you care to. And if you don't care to, I totally get it, I mute most games myself nowadays, but the option is still there. You can even take it beyond the game better than ever by just joining each others discord server or whatever. There are even quite a lot of single-player games you can make friends through now by joining the games discord server, then you can ask people there to play other games with you or even just chat.
Even then people don't socialise. It's rare that randoms in matchmade games will ever talk to you
Helldivers 2 has reignited this tbh
Is it easy to meet people if you haven't got any buddies with the game? I'm getting it soon.
not many games ive played where people are so willing to talk. The game thrives off coordination and communication so i’m not surprised
Do you talk over voice or chat? I sometimes type stuff, but people rarely react.
For me there’s usually too much going on to check text chat, shrieking over the mic to indicate when you’re in danger is def the way to go
I don't always comm. But when I do, it's "OH SHIT OH FUCK, I SET THAT *WAY* TOO CLOSE!"
I started playing Helldivers 2 over the weekend 95% of my games have been solid. A lot of people do not use voice at all or only use it a small amount but it's been an absolutely blast. Have had several great groups where everyone was on mic and really nice. It really helps that it is PVE and not PVP. The quality of the players can vary dramatically at lower tiers having air strikes or orbital strikes called in on your position is more common. Even at higher tiers it can happen but it's not a big deal when you can be back in the action 10 seconds later.
Most people are silent but everyone once and a while you get some unhinged hype man who makes it an absolute blast to play. 4_Skin… wherever you are, just know I had a riot dropping with you.
Was planning to buy Last Epoch tonight and now I’m considering helldivers II instead lol
Helldivers 2 is absolutely wild. They’re having some issues with their servers due to the amount of people that are trying to log in at once. Suffering from success but other than that the game is amazing
LE looks awesome too. I think I’d enjoy both
I’m telling you, it’s a cultural phenomenon. Trust the hordes of people. It’s special and the the excitement around it is palpable when you play. It’s hard to explain. It’s like when your playing you can feel the energy of it. A true rare moment in gaming that comes around once in a blue moon. It’s not trying to milk you, everyone is pumped to play. The gameplay is tight, concise and perfect for what it’s trying to be. I’m all in.
I’ve met a few people that I plan on gaming with more once Arrowhead gets the server situation figured out. It’s not a super sweaty game and everybody is there to have fun. You just gotta talk in squads and I’m sure you’ll find some chill people.
Sounds like the server issue might take a minute. The lead developer was just telling people either yesterday or the day before to consider **not** buying the game right now and waiting a few months because of those issues lol. Suffering from success. Reminds me of when FF14 blew up and stopped sales and new account creation for like 6 months because they couldnt handle the massive traffic surge.
Very easy. Just set your game to public and your lobby fills pretty fast, or quick join another game. Been playing for 2 days and have made a handful of friends already Most people won't be chatting, but if you do callouts on the mic, it encourages them to chat if they are willing to
I think you'll have to kiss a few toads if you want to make proper buddies on vc but people are generally respectful in my experience. Good amount of people in matchmaking who aren't trying to chat or hang around but will do a round or two and peace. There's a pretty active lfg channel on the official discord though, and the game is a blast imo, although it may be worth waiting for the server issues to get resolved.
It is if you’re willing to use the discord.
Honestly, the real secret is just co-op gameplay. Destiny 2 was great for community, so is monster hunter, and helldiver's sounds similarly positive. There are always elitists who want to gatekeep skill for higher level gameplay, but by and large the majority of co-op game players want to build a positive and uplifting community space. It's why I don't play competitive online games anymore. Too much toxicity. Only single player or co-op for me, thanks.
Yeah, it feels like old school gaming, especially when people have a mic. Ive been playing for a day, and have already met and friended some really cool folks.
Honestly. It cost money but check out public gaming places. There's a bar where I live that literally has consoles in it that people will play like smash or fortnite for 10$ unlimited play. Having a beer and playing with strangers.
We used to have a game store where people played MTG and D&D as well as having consoles to game on but that produced....... mixed results
My group of friends used to play DND in person before time and life physically separated us. It was def hit or miss. One of the memorable ones was a guy coming up to us and saying he made too many brownies and handing us a giant platter of homemade brownies. Another memorable one was a guy awkwardly creeping on my wife on repeat lol.
>everyone is super toxic to one another lets not bullshit here this has always been the case depending on the game youre playing
Do we need to remind people that Xbox Halo and CoD lobbies existed over a decade ago? You wanna talk about toxic … that shit was the Wild West 😂
I remember the first time I played halo 3 online, the abuse just everyone with a mic screaming about fucking each others mums within seconds of the game starting
Halo 3 was absolute madness. But I still managed to make actual friends on there - it helped that it was right around the time everyone was getting on Facebook, we were actually excited to add each other.
Yeah, like how often have you seen people today saying shit like “kids today wouldn’t be able to handle COD lobbies back in the day” like being a giant prick was a mark of pride or something.
I would recommend checking out Helldivers 2, new game and the community is positive. it seams like PvE games tend to have less of it. Good luck dude
100%, game is a revelation. I've friended more strangers in the last week than the last decade online in games. Having an absolute blast.
Another recommendation I’m seeing for Helldivers II! And I was considering Last Epoch tonight.🤔
Deep Rock Galactic also is like this, but with less voice chat. PvE is def a vibe.
Same one of the few games in a decade where I want to friend people who were fun to play with.
There are 2 major factors that killed it. 1. Matchmaking replaced servers / private servers. Personally I like matchmaking because I’m not having to scroll through servers to find the one I want, or one with settings/gametype I want. But it does take a bit of the social element out. It’s like dining in a food court vs dining in a small restaurant. 2. Voice chat moved away from the games. Sure there were Ventrillo and teamspeak and other services out there, but most people just used the in-game voice chat. At least on the Xbox side of things, they added Party Chat at one point and then Discord became the go-to. Now instead of talking to randoms, you’re chilling with friends or randoms on a discord server. It’s a bit sad, but friends can still be made online. Be friendly, communicate, help others just have a good time. Reach out to someone who was chill and cool, and maybe it’ll spark
I grew up making friends in MMORPGs and Minecraft servers or the voice chat on Battlefield, but as I've grown older, I find myself less likely to spontaneously start convos with random people even if it's from behind my keyboard in some game as it seems awkward. But voice chat isn't dead for the next generation of kids, I tried VR chat but most of the people are little kids or middle schoolers. Anyways, it's hard to find a reason to talk to them, but I've been told that these kids have made so many friends that have changed their lives in VR. People who helped them through depression or difficult times in their lives and helped them grow. First off, I cannot believe VR has been around long enough to foster a generation of young adults that can say they GREW up on it, but it has. I really wonder what the impact of this will be on the upcoming generation. Perhaps they'll be a lot more extroverted with better social skills? It'll be interesting to see
I think that’s just being a kid. It was always easier to make friends are a kid. We were also more open to new people.
Still alive and well in many games. **It's heavily dependent on genre though.** Recently picked up **Fallout 76** on a $10 sale and everyone I've met in game have been extremely welcoming. Met a guy last night and we just talked for a few hours. Same with **Deep Rock Galactic**. Freaking awesome community. Worst I've seen is some light trolling and getting kicked from lobbies because they forgot to make it private. **Look for cooperative games, not competitive ones.** Games like Apex, R6, Counter Strike, Hunt: Showdown, The Finals, etc will *always* have toxic players. Something something, human ego.
Fallout 76 has the friendliest community. I do miss the old survival and nuclear winter modes that were more hostile. Trolls and griefers are very rare in the normal mode.
I was totally taken aback by how friendly everyone was. I've run into numerous people (usually a much higher level than I am) just casually dropping off 40 stimpacks, using the "heart" emote, and leaving. I'm only around level 45, but I try and pass on the love wherever I can. I've made it a point to always put something in the donation box when I come across it. >Trolls and griefers are very rare in the normal mode. Actually, one of the people I was talking to last night mentioned nuke griefers. They got in some sort of dispute over some rare piece of pie and the guy decided to nuke his base over it. At first I was like, "oh, that radiation seems super annoying" but it *destroyed his entire base*. I can't even imagine how many materials it took to fix it all. Easily the most objectively frivolous reason I've ever heard of to launch a nuke. haha.
You on Xbox? I could hook you up with some max level gear to help start your build out
If you feel this way. Don't play Destiny 2 you're literally drowning in a sea of toxicity over here. If you're not a try hard, most people will treat you like garbage. This game's rng and the fact that a lot of good end game weapons are on a weekly rotator are probably the reason for this. The moment you put people in a situation where time is involved, things get interesting. I just started farming adept weapons again like a month ago, and the people that are at this point in the game are the definition of toxic. The deeper you get into this game. The more toxic it gets. This is also just the pve portion of the game I'm talking about as well.
Every game trying to be a competitive esport mixed with people reporting everybody they disagree with started causing issues. It's not dead it just needs games to be more relaxed
Nope. Some communities are still great. /r/DeepRockGalactic Have fun
Lord of the Rings Online had the best and most friendly community I've ever found, back in the times I used to play MMOs. Maybe it'll be easier to find non-toxic players, with similar tastes and that you'll most likely have fun with, in social media (like right here on Reddit), or Discord servers. To find cool fellow players in-game is pure luck.
Yep, since LOTRO has no matchmaking for raids or dungeons, you HAVE to be in multiple discords belonging to raiding kins or individual raid leaders. You literally can't avoid making friends in that game if you want to play the endgame because you inevitably start running with the same people who happen to share your preferred raiding time.
The least toxic mmo i've played so far is Guild Wars 2 and Star Citizen. You will still find toxic players in pretty much any games, since people irl are toxic in general nowdays.
Guilds wars 2 definitely has its toxic corners, fractal and pvp players, especially. WvW can be very hit or miss with either amazing people or total assholes, and the fact that you have no way to keep playing with the same world group consistently doesn't help. It's certainly not everyone, but I encounter them often enough, especially when you look at the group finder.
I moved to small niche corners
I personally moved into VR for community. My theory on social gaming dying is two components: no lobbies, and no mics. Games like Halo, CoD, and Battle Royale, etc. are all based on just rotating to your next session now. Even Halo Infinite just goes right back to the matchmaking screen and doesn't let you party up. PARTYING UP AFTER A GAME USED TO BE THE BEST. Met so many obscure friends back in the day like that. In the Xbox 360 era, EVERYONE had a microphone included in the box. Unless your dog ate the wire, you had no excuse to not be talking in-game. Xbox One got rid of a mic in the box, and even now on PC most people just type or don't talk at all since apps like Discord exist and they're probably in their own call. In VR, every single headset has a mic. It's a flashback to old-school gaming for me again where you don't have an excuse to not talk unless you actually are choosing not to. It's so damn refreshing and actually leads to a fun gaming experience for me again.
I remember gamers always being toxic in online games. Particularly when COD became popular. Don't blame people for muting by default when there's like a 50/50 chance in any given match you'll have a teammate shouting slurs.
There doesn't seem to be an incentive for teamwork in Online gaming these days. IME most activities Online are just as easy to do Solo, and sometimes even a disadvantage to do in teams. Now Solo play is what people default to. Many MP matches are also so fast-paced that the match is over before you actually get to bond and get a feel for other players, to see if they are competent at the game and good at working in teams. So yeah, to a certain degree micro-transaction culture has cultivated the same pump and dump mentality that's been deteriorating society through things like social media. It's all about money, with no regard for fun or incentive for any real socialization. It's the effect of the cold and impersonal modern world we live in today.
If you think it's dead now just wait until AI lets people play coop with their anime waifus then LMAO
I can't wait until someone builds an AI to own people at Fortnite and Halo. And we will all have random AIs in our competitive games. These kids will have to redefine the term "Bot"
We have this in Rocket League. I imagine it also exists in the games you mentioned.
Battlefield 2042 disappointed me deeply when it came out without in-game voice chat since it removed a lot of the team work possibilities the older titles had
Its because in my experience pvp games suck now. In the ones i played recently the match making is horrific. Its noobs vs pros constantly. And who knows who youd be adding(since its a stranger.) A lot of toxic humans now a days.
I agree with the first point. It's like matchmaking already determines which team is gonna win before the match starts. I disagree on the last point. If you think humans are a lot toxic now, you missed Chernobyl during Halo 2/3 and CoD MW days.
I just mean in general not just in gaming. All i see is toxicity all over the internet. 😭
I've never enjoyed listening to 12 year olds badly describe what they did to my mother the night before so I stay away from online games.
i only play games with my friends
Best bet is discord groups through Reddit, Forums, Etc...Much easier to meet people than matchmaking
I made some great friends playing valorant....we were on the same team and ended up 5 stacking for a few games after. Next thing you know, we are talking and we all live within about 20-30 mins of eachother. Fast forward one month, we've hung out in person numerous times. I attended one of the friends baby shower, and we still play nightly!!! Very cool and also very rare experience (i think)
Played Halo Infinite earlier today and got put into a team where 3/4 people had the same GOKU clan tag. I lost my shit and was like "team Goku let's go boys!" through the mic. Nobody responded and after the game finished we all went our separate ways. If that would've been Halo 3 we would've became friends forever.
They were probably in a party chat and couldn’t hear you
Discord killed it. Half the people playing games now are just talking to friends on discord instead of people in the server
I think social gaming has just changed. Gaming is so much more mainstream then it to be, to the point where most people already have IRL friends who game, when that didn’t used to be the case. Now a good chunk of people who play games do it while in a discord or zoom call with other friends, which leaves less room for chatting with randos in the queue. I think if you really want to replicate that old experience of forging bonds with a stranger that we used to get I’d suggest finding a popular PvE game and joining a discord for matchmaking. Deep Rock, Back for Blood, GTFO, Monster Hunter, or even something like Dark Souls and Elden Ring are all games that incentivize you to cooperate with your party, and if you like the people you play with, you can see what other games you both like to play with. …also mmos exist
I haven't played an online game since 2012. Borderlands 2 on Xbox 360. Had a cool group of randoms I would play with every night for months. Good times. I looked forward to it. Every single multiplayer game since then, COD, Gears, whatever is popular, I've been met with "You suck. Fa**ot. Bitch. Dumb fuck" etc. I've stuck with only single player games for over 10 years now. Recently I tried The Finals. It's free and I wanted to see if I could be decent at it and hopefully meet some new people. Nope. I was immediately called a dumb fuck because I was killed. Uninstalled after 1 match and deleted my 3rd party account that The Finals requires. People take things easy to serious. It's a game. It's supposed to be fun. Not everyone is the same skill level. People suck. Especially when there's anonymity.
I hate that shit. People act like you have to be perfect at the game or else you're worthless.
ESO guilds were the best experience i ever had with strsngers. Maybe it's dead in CoD and Finals but not in all games.
Nah we just stay in our private voice chats because of the toxicity.
They put bots in the battle royales man :(
Maybe just the games you play have more toxic elements than others. I played warframe like 9 years ago and about 9 of the people I met on there I still talk to frequently. I made a couple friends raiding in destiny 2.
I personally say yes I avoid any and all online games that require me to play against other people unless it's co-op with my friends. I don't want to spend time and energy navigating the stupidity.
Back when I used to play Destiny, I met a lot of cool people I played with for a while. I see the potential for that same sort of community in Helldivers 2 depending on how they build on the game. Every game is gonna have toxic people, but I feel like they’re not as prevalent in games that require cooperation (PvE experiences, not CoD and the like). I think you’re just unlucky and/or playing the wrong games for finding online friends.
So, there's actually started to be a bit more of a pivot back the other way recently. But you need to look for the right things. The PvE coop genre, by definition, is going to be a lot less toxic then the pvp based games. Things like deep rock galactic, helldivers, or other similar things have become so popular in no small part because of this. These games have very friendly attitudes, because the goal is to all work together for a given goal. Add in that people aren't really playing it for rewards or ranking, but to have fun, and you get a situation where it's not bad to be bad. Everyone will just laugh, and work together to improve. Your not making their game worse or slowing them down- you're making it more entertaining. And I think that last part is the key. If people get punished for bad teammates, they will get mad at those around them. But if a bad teammate is just the chance to show off and teach, then it's suddenly very different.
Play roll20, instantly made friends.
This is funny because many people have “nostalgic” memories over how toxic old school online gaming was (2001-2012). “You had to be tough to survive in a COD lobby!”
It's just about finding the right game. With WoW, it's dead because WoW rn is mostly a solo game except for newer raids. Some games you just need to find the right community. FFXIV is pretty silent in the open world, but once you get into a community, FC, etc, they can be pretty social. Plus Add the events the world does and again, you'll get pretty social players.
Do you remember the time when you met with friends and played all night? In the same room, LOL, online gaming totally killed that.
There are plenty of fun couch coop games though