I recently joined a static in FF14 that wanted to "blind prog" the newest Savage-tier raids. Basically, we would force ourselves to never look at a single guide and try to figure out the mechanics on our own. While that's literally reinventing the wheel since an "optimal" strategy has existed for months now, it's probably the most enjoyable time I've had in an MMO as of late.
I love ffxiv but I can't bring myself to play any savage or ex fights because of the expectations. Even in dungeons you have people who spam sprint and face pull ahead of the tank because the only thing that matters is running wall to wall and finishing the game as fast as possible. It seems like what every MMO player hates more than anything is actually playing the game, and go out of their way to make sure they get it over with as quickly as possible.
@@MajorSquiggles As a healer, I find dungeons like that in FF14 one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. It's one of the few times where it truly feels like every single GCD and CD usage matters (at least last time I played around Shadowbringers release, doing the expert dungeons felt really good) during a wall-to-wall pull. I also enjoy the speedrun aspect of trying to do the dungeon as quickly as possible, trying to see if we can do it faster than we have before. That's when the game is at its most fun- it's not trying to get it over with, it's trying to push ourselves to go as fast as possible, weaving CDs and trying to maximize dps to make that happen.
@@MajorSquiggles Yeah that's precisely why I'm finding this "blind prog" type of gameplay way more fun than "clear parties". The "clear parties" just copy whatever strategy exists already, damned if they know why any of the movements work, just move in a very specific way and get your loot and get out. Honestly it's a huge chore playing the game like that, I used to do that back in the beginning of Shadowbringers and I burned out very rapidly. At least in this method of "blind prog", I understand *why* the optimal strats have certain movements, and I get to understand the boss designs more in-depth as well.
For me it's: >Try blind for a substantial amount of time to try to do it myself >Reach a point where I just wanna get it done with so i look up a guide
Love figuring things out for myself, but if it's hour 2 I need at least a tip. Figuring stuff out is fun, but I'm a mortal and there's more experiences to have.
Oh absolutely. And yet -- after doing this a few times, often it gives me the "basic idea" of how the game will want me to solve its puzzles in the future. So, a couple of "peeks" early on (after trying) can enable me to avoid constant dependence on the guides later.
I think most of us have that same mentality. Unless you're playing some kind of decision making game. Looking at you persona. Then you really need a guide.
If I join multiplayer game I prefer taking up the supporting role who isn't expected to leap into the fray and carry the team but still contributes. The farmer staying behind at the base harvesting resources, the healer hanging back slinging healing spells at the party, the crafter preparing supplies for the next foray. But most games have optimized guides for THOSE playstiles as well, which are made even worse by the fact that they make you superfluous. Why should they let you do the crafting when someone who grinded the optimal way for a week can craft better stuff? Why should they pick you as the healer when there's someone who knows exactly when he'll have to heal with every boss and can add to the DPS inbetween casts?
You are so correct about this, but it's just the little bit of romance that the multiplayer thing can offer that has me in love with it. I'm grinding something, I'm having a hard time, I'm getting low I almost die and someone swoops in, kills the extra mobs I tagged and heals me. They say 'this is a tough area, maybe you should go do 'x' instead, best of luck' and they maybe give me some food or gold or maybe a fucking enchanted shield that I had no way of accessing myself. I take the suggestion of the player and move on to the next challenge, to me that is beautiful.
Except for the week or two surrounding the release, where your active job is avoiding all the "How to Beat X Boss" and "Where to Find Y Item" videos every day.
Even solo games suffer from this, with achievements and FOMO everywhere with limited events or seasonal rewards creeping into them. Most people want to get all the achievements in a single playthrough or don´t miss any dialogues/events/items, and one feels games are being designed more and more with a very linear difficulty curve centered around an optimal way to play them rather than giving us free choice anymore.
I would argue it's worse in solo games. I hear more often from players doing single player RPGs that walkthroughs, meta builds, cheat videos and min/max ruined their experience than players in MMOs
@@Jrock420blam yeah, because many guides come with (sometimes neccesary) spoilers, specially in story based more linear JRPGs you can get heavily spoiled by reading a guide (say X ability unlocks when Y character dies or there's a timeskip). Story is the worst way to get spoiled, can even ruin the sense of achievement or will to keep on playing :(
I still remember joining my first guild in 'Elder Scrolls Online' and receiving a ton of "homework" on the select dungeons we would be running. When playing solo I put story and experience first ... when it's with other players ... I often have to abandon experiencing the story for the sake of being prepared from the first raid on ... it was the reason I stopped doing the group content.
When the other players expect you to skip the cutscene so the boss fight starts faster. I'm trying to experience the dungeon, not get out of it faster.
Yeah, I wish there was a way to collect together all the players like us. I had a lot of powerful toons in ESO, and made it my personal mission to help lower level players get to actually explore dungeons, not just "running" them.
@@gworfish It's the problem in making a game accesible for everyone. It stops being for the specialists. i just want a game to launch and say it's for a specific audience and then keep making the game fro them, instead of trying to pull in everyone with another generic game.
my experience of group content in FF14 was pretty good. Since everyone gets a pretty huge boost when there's a player who's first time playing the dungeon, people don't mind that you take your time with the cutscenes.
9:51 - 10:08 got me thinking about the time on Runescape (like '04) when I spent hours gathering wheat, grinding it into flour, and making pies at what I believe became the cooking guild unless I'm mistaken. It was to the west of Varrock. I'd just chill upstairs waiting for the pie dish and cooking apple to respawn so I could make apple pies, since they healed more than shrimp and cooked meat. It took a while waiting for everything to respawn but it was rewarding seeing that stockpile of pies in my bank grow. I made like 300 of them and got a few cooking levels too. Then when I got tired of cooking and wanted to go fight stuff, I had a buncha "good" food to use. Once I got more familiar with the game and started training things more efficiently, I remember thinking how dumb I was for doing all that and what a waste of time it was. But I never had as much fun efficiently grinding away as I did chilling in that building cooking apple pies. Noob me was onto something.
i feel like that with wow fishing + cooking specially in SL i felt that, i did it for fun and people thanked me for the group foods and i was more than happy to provide it to the right groups, thankfully it had value regardless of my speed at doing it because i did for love and people still liked it
Your are right but also remember Runescape is a very much outlier. People call RS3 easyscape, but even if you do dailies and you use your daily keys... you will stil spend dozens of hours on a single skill no matter how efficiently you are doing it. Game is grindy regardless. Honestly what i thought would be a little more fun if you had a team ( maybe team of 3 ) and while you dont play as Ironman you basically plays as one except you can trade with your team, but everyone would have a role, one of you would smith and mine, other could woodcut and fletch, 3rd one make food and this would aliviate some of the grind and create a challange too.
I fall into this trap with almost every game, especially my favorite genre, RPG's. I waste so many hours of time looking up guides so I can play the best I can, and it always ends up making the game less fun for me. I'm going to try real hard to stop doing that now. Great video. Here's a comment and a like for that algorithm.
Same here. Whenever I start playing a game I am asking questions like "what is the best class" or "where do I get the best weapons early on". What always eats at the back of my mind is the thought that if I looked up what the most optimal thing was I would get more enjoyment because I know I am playing in the most optimal way and will get the best outcomes. I definitely need to try just playing how I want to and stop caring so much about what is the most optimal.
Unpopular opinion but Mythic+ is such an awful system for an MMO imo. I ran some in Legion but had my fill. Refused to do them since, and I managed to keep up in DPS easily.
There are people who are grumpy everywhere. If you're still interested in learning, trying out mythic zero dungeons and stating at the start that you don't know things helps a lot. Usually in that setting people are ready to play with people who are learning, and you can often get tips from more experienced players in there. Mythic+ (the keystone part) is an endgame activity, so people wanting a group that is trying enough to know what they're doing isn't wrong. You're just going to want to say ahead of time you're learning and things will go better. If someone rejects you for not knowing, it's not a rejection of you personally, it's just them wanting people of a different playstyle for their dungeon run.
It depends what you didn't know. You didn't know the mechanics of the mythic+ mode or didn't know the mechanics of the dungeon mobs and bosses at all?. Because if it's the later, then I would also be angry, there's normal/heroic/mythic 0 for people who are fresh to dungeons.
@@gonzalovargas5961 probably dungeon mechanics ive encountered so many of those people because it is really easy to get to the m+ part as a new player which should not be the case
I love where you say "try playing less efficiently". I also feel some MMOs and games have such a gorgeous world and you don't get to experience it with constant use of fast travel. I get why it exists but if used too much I feel disconnected from the world. So I try not to use it. Unless it's WoW because the flight paths still take you over the world so you can see how big the world is. I'm thinking of vanilla and flying over Seering Gorge and knowing I can't go there yet.
My friend who showed me oblivion in highschool, lied and said fast travel was bugged and would corrupt save files (even the ones you aren't using at the moment), so he made me run everywhere my first character and I still refuse to use it now. I enjoy the time getting to a quest instead of wanting the reward.
@@kyleellis1825 I wouldn't be surprised if he actually heard that somewhere. Bethesda games have a well-deserved reputation for innocuous stuff totally destroying them. Skyrim, by default, never forgets the positions of physics objects, so you can bloat your save file and eventually corrupt it just by moving stuff around. The Unofficial Patch makes the game forget that information eventually, which helps a lot, but other information can still pile up, so there's another mod called Crash Fixes that totally reformats your save file when it reaches that dangerous threshold. It's unbelievable the state that Bethesda is willing to release a game in.
@@lued123 Oh he admitted it was just because I was normally a lot faster at beating games than he was. He'd fast travel when I was in the kitchen/bathroom.
happens to me every single damn time i ask a question in cc in runescape. and i always respond with 'i thought thats what a clan was for ." i really wish wikis wernt a thing . and everyone had to fend for themselves , and have to "know a guy " to get info , not just type in anything to google
@@youllneverguesswho4451 uh? whats the difference of asking a random stranger in chat about something and just googling it? your still basically searching up information you dont know but somehow asking strangers makes it better?
@@youllneverguesswho4451 there's a fine line between offering support as a clan/guild....or trying to get a player who NEVER researches ANYTHING on their own. Having a snarky response like "I thought thats what a clan was for" leads me to believe which player the person making the remark is.....in this case, you. What if no one genuinely knows the answer? What if your question was worded poorly? What if the ones who know are AFK? No one is really in a clan in a game to give YOU information at all. Can they, yes...but I wouldn't ever after seeing you say "I thought that's what a clan is for", that would be the end of your help in my opinion.
My best boss fight ever was in Age of Conan with three friends. We went in blind, a group consisting of two Herald of Xotli, one Necromancer, and one Priest of Mitra. For those who never played it, Heralds are 2-h-Sword wielding mages, so we were 3 cloth wearers and one in leather armor. We got a good groove going, but with no real tank and good, but ultimately insufficient healing, er starter dying. one of the Herolds went down first, after using his two 'oh shit' buttons (transforms into a demon, heals himself a lot and gets fairly tough,) and a self res ability. He then had to respawn outside the dungeon. Seeing the way the battle went, we started pulling the boss towards the entrance, focusing on not losing aggro to prevent him from resetting, and whoever was respawning rushed with all speed to get at least one hit in before all others were dead. More than once, the returning character landed a single strike before the remaining character died, and in AoC it was not enough to be nearby, you had to damage the enemy to actually aggro. The battle ended right next to the entrance with a glorious victory! I had respawned at least 5 times, and the healer and necro, who didn't have the self res or 'oh shit' buttons, at least 8. All gear was practically ruined and we were all ecstatic! Later I read up on the boss on forums. Apparently, he was listed as a major badass, requiring a 'perfect party' to take down and a bane of many adventurers. Had I read any of that before we entered, we wouldn't even have tried - the fun was in going in blind, and then see what happened!
@@TheSentry66 One of the nice things about AoC was (haven't played for years) that the bosses were still difficult even if you out-leveled them by quite a bit. In WoW you can start soloing instances quite early, (in classic it's harder, but even with TBC it was pretty easy to run non-raid content in classic,) but in AoC I could never really run any higher than mid-lvl solo. I remember some of the same from EQ2, though later expansions have changed some of that. I have always disliked the rush that some games seem to be in to make all old content completely useless, so having bosses still be a challenge feels good :) (Also - for those who remember - Giant Monsters in City of Heroes.)
One of the big problems in Mmorpg and Arpgs is that the developers have adjusted the difficulty and content to players who follow the meta and guides, which leave people who want to try by themselves incredibly far behind. And often there aren't enough in game tutorials and information to help someone who doesn't look up guides. Just look at OG wow vanilla and wow classic, with guides it has become trivial. And watch Wow vanilla fights Vs. current wow mythic bosses. If you dont follow guides and metas like a robot you dont even come close to beating mythic. In Arpgs its the same, the end game is so cranked up that you have to follow guides. And instead of giving you prestige and cosmetic rewards, all the good gear is hiding behind a huge meta wall.
:( bro i just wanted to play affliction warlock and go pew pew with multi corruption seed procs + shadow bolt but nah my dps is garbo compared to other 4 meta salves in m+ so i swapped talents and quit aff warlock 5 days later because i wasnt having fun
@@yankokassinof6710 I feel you. My guild wanted me to spec to disc priest "because it just works better with our raid" and I had a terrible time. Went back to playing holy only a few days later and told them to either take me with them or I would be leaving. But changing your playstyle to a point where you´re not having fun just for the sake of playing the meta is not my cup of tea.
This is 80% of my gripe with Warframe in a nutshell. The devs have created a system that, with enough time sunk into it, enables a staggering degree of power creep; and so each content update is gated behind a staggering amount of _grind,_ as if it were not, the highest-level, highest-powered players would be able to plow through it in a matter of hours. So now _everyone_ who wants to engage with the new content and get to try out the cool new mechanics have to bash their heads against that wall of grind for weeks if not _months_ before they can get there, but to an especially agonizing degree if you're playing _suboptimally._
Yes, I just don't get it. I played WoW on a pirate server when I was in school and my parents didn't give me money for online games. It was a wotlk and it took a lot of time to level up here. But this time has always been the most interesting for me. It was interesting to travel around the world of the game, pvp with random players, go to low-level dungeons with people who were just learning how to play. I remember how we tried to go through some dungeon with a hunter pet instead of a tank, because the original tank left the party. That's how we got to the final boss. It was fun. And years later, when I was studying at the university, I decided to try to play the "real World of Warcraft", spent a rather serious amount for a student on a new addon and game, and began to upgrade the character while waiting for the release of a new patch . And.. I don't know, it felt like I was playing on an x10 server. I was getting levels so fast that I couldn't finish the quest chains of the location. Going to low-level dungeons was generally useless. I literally leveled up on gray quests due to some random sources of experience at the same speed as I once did on the wotlk server. This is a terribly strange situation. And then a new addon came out, at the first week I went to a leveling dungeon and I was kicked in front of the final boss, because some crybaby whined all the way to my suboptimal rotation. Then a similar situation repeated itself in two more dungeons I just stopped playing. And I'm an old player. I don't know how to play the current version but i understand how it works in general. But game doesn't teach u anything now nether give u time to learn it through expirience until u hit an "endgame" Sorry for my english, translated my thoughts as best as I can
“We can do anything”. There is no MMO where you can do “anything”. You can do what the developer intended for you to do. In the order you choose. That’s all. Let’s take Warcraft. You can’t make an airplane and drop bombs. You do what the developer allows
@@toptiertech7291 On a video about regurgitating information, you regurgitate nearly word for word something Josh said from another video into the comments lmao
Have to agree here. In the late 80's when I started my gaming career we used to go to the library and read the game guides on a specific gaming magazine that released I believe 3-4 times a year. These were things like Secrets of Zelda etc. Later on when modems started to be a thing a few friends were able to reach BBS's and shared their findings to us who didn't have any internet access. Then came the early days of multiplayer games for me in the early 2000's. That was the golden days. Forums were filled with experimental guides and theorycrafting. Going forward some years the guides had been cemented and theorycrafting had reached its conclusion and the gaming mechanics were thoroughly known. Nowadays when people start a new game they're watching videos on the most effective classes and builds. I've fallen a victim of this myself a lot of times. Playing a cookie cutter build of any given character in the end becomes very boring. Also multiplayer raid content and such is people asking for "Berserker warrior with double axes wanted, has to have the axe of endurance of Kings with T7 armor and at least 253 Strength" instead of "Looking for DPS player". If you don't follow the meta you're not invited or allowed in a party. What I've realized over time is I rarely enjoy the endgame of MMO's where micromanaging is pretty much required. Instead I tend to nowadays play the game at my own pace and then when the meta issues start to hit I'll just quit and move on to another game. Kind of conflicts with the idea of "The game only starts in the endgame" but I prefer it this way. Also for this reason I'll rather start a brand new game even if it's less good than an established game with good player documentation. BUT there are games where the class changes happen periodically and change skills so much that the old guides become straight out obsolete. Even quest targets and places change sometimes. That's infuriating for people who try to use old online resources for quest guides but really nice thing for a player who likes going their own way.
I only use a guide after I have spent a considerable time trying to figure something out and not being able to get through it. Except for Runescape--which I might change how I play in response to this. I tend to avoid group play because I tend to like to take my time and explore--Neverwinter forces progression behind dungeons which many of the player-base have played over and over again. I think that is it--the fewer new players a game has, the more likely the player-base will be about efficiency rather than discovery.
Especially in puzzle games and sections, sometimes they are well done but sometimes they are so unfairly done that you dont stand a chance because you arent meant to figure them out on the spot but find a clue elsewhere which isnt obvious, what comes to mind is "Remnant from the ashes" a game i really like because it has a ton of secret items and almost every boss has an "alternative kill" way which lets you figure things out, especially since the game makes each campaign unique by giving you random maps and events for each campaign, But in there was an 8 bell puzzle where you had to ring it in a specific order, and despite having a book in the room talking about an old rhyme which would make sense to do the puzzle from, the actual solution required you to find another book in an entirely different part of the map (IF it spawned, remember random events) which gave the answer. I think puzzles generally reach a point where if you are already just trying to bruteforce it because the logic doesnt make sense then might as well look up a guide.
This whole video reminds me of the quote " given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" which is true (yes the follow up is the protect players from themselves, but players tend to rebel against that part too.)
This whole video is essentially why I am so hopeful for AOC to make it to launch with their current plans. They seem to understand what players want in the world of an RPG and the game on one node will be an entirely different game than another node, which will help to reduce guides.
FFXI was so pure, we learned everything by ourselves and matching cues didn't exist. FFXIV started out ok, but as it progressed all of the story missions and equipment upgrades became gated behind meta fights. Not to mention "gear level" entry requirements which further hampered progression.
this video is SO true, it hurts. i would go so far to say guides and meta have ruined online gaming to a certain degree, period. half of the game, the creative part, is taken away and we are left with only 50% of the fun because of it.
some games got plagued by that with time and popularity, i play terraria since 2012, a sandbox rpg singleplayer, and dude, the online community today is FULL of retarded ass wiki spammers meta slaves in a very stric game in terms of build diversity and power up, people are min maxing in motherfucking terraria, its sheer insanity
Nah, it just showed how lazy MMO development really is. These companies sell full-price games abusing the pioneer hype right after they release new content then hope enough people get stuck with their psychological traps. MMOs should have more interesting content, period, and guides won't break that the same way that they don't for single player games with multiplayer as an alternative. I still enjoy Age of Empires without having to go through the hell that is learning optimal play and no amount of guides will take away the enjoyment I take from the gameplay loop. You should be able to enjoy the content of an MMO and not want to skip it, not settle for less and blame the internet for the game's shortcomings.
@@ekki1993 It also shows people force themselves to use guides, we always knew we weren't playing efficiently before online guides, you can do the math yourself. You can choose not to use guides just like you chose not to do the math to min/max before online updated guides exist.
@@Jrock420blam I would only say peer pressure is guilty there. Individuals checking the guides often say they ruined the games to themselves, but they are mostly doing so because it's to be expected that pushing for endgame is the most fun way to play a game. That's a systemic issue and an entirely different problem.
@@ekki1993 when the same thing effects solo/offline games just as much I can't just put the blame on peer pressure. It's always easy to shift the blame to others but we put that pressure on ourselves even more than any peer could. Too many players forget you can join a casual guild/group/company etc instead of one trying to push the hardest content. When you join those guilds there will be pressure to push yourself
You just can't imagine how much more fun I've started to have in ESO when I stopped looking for guides. I just realized I'm not going hardcore PvE and discovered plenty of fun skill sets in ESO
@@JoshStrifeHayes not sure if you have ever heard or Remnant: From the Ashes, its like Dark Souls and Gears of War had a baby. It has neat partially randomly generated worlds that make not looking up guides really fun and even more rewarding since things spawing is just random so no play through ever feels the same
personal anecdote that links into that: I've been playing ESO for the past year now, very fun, I try to play as guideless as possible, at least for the parts that I want to enjoy the most. I was very successful at enjoying myself until I came to a meeting point of 2 issues, one which you talk of in this video. I was still lvling up my main tank, I had just gained access to all DLC dungeons and wanted to run each of them for their skill points. I then arrived at the notorious Moonhunter Keep. I knew nothing at the time but it is a notorious dungeon that even experienced players have a hard time with, and I had no idea what I in for. I arrive at the most difficult boss of the dungeon, Mylène the Moon-Caller and I get my ass handed to me time and time again, which results in the rest of the team wiping being that I was the tank. Normally, I would be fine with that and take my time to learn the fight but one other player in the group was not happy about that. Issue 1: One player of the group started hurling obscenities at me for "not doing what I was supposed to do" while simultaneously not explaining anything to me. That was distracting while I was trying to make sense of everything that was happening on screen (and A LOT was happening as a matter of fact) all while I have someone being an absolute dickhead that expected a low lvl player that had just unlocked the dungeon to somehow know everything about it. Issue 2: Up until that point I was managing every dungeon by using my core skills as a tank and learning the mechanics as they were organically introduced to me by the dungeons themselves with proper game design. It was enough to teach me what I needed to know until that very boss. Because nothing before the fight or within the fight from a design perspective did anything to help me understand the fight. There was poor work on the developper's side to intuitively teach a player not using a guide how to approach this fight at all. And that second issue is one of the defense points I may have for some guides, though not a proper defense. A guide can be a nice thing to have when tackling poorly designed content, which wouldn't be a problem if all content was well-designed but nothing is ever perfect or absolute. Also in regards to your solution, I thought you might have gone deeper into it and mention Runescape and their labeled servers. Though it divides the playerbase into smaller parts, it also greatly helps in finding like-minded players for your playstyle when you can join a server that is targetted at them. Want to play minigames? Use server X. Want to roleplay? Use server Y. Want a hardcore experience? Use server Z and so on and so on. I think that idea could help alleviate the stress of being grouped with players of completely different mindsets at the cost of shrinking the size of the playerbase per instance, but I see it more as focusing the playerbase into its most valuable partners for your playstyle.
Your solution has one major issue, what happens when a group of players joins a for example roleplaying servers and start owning everyone(assuming that the game we talk about has meaningful pvp)? Some people enjoy just rolf stomping weaker players instead of trying to compete with those who are "like minded".
I actually started playing ESO again myself after making myself roleplay my characters in Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Tried a new approach to learning the story and lore of each game. So taking on ESO as a single player game has actually been the most fun I've had playing. Luckily I made some friends to let me join their dungeons because they are making off the wall characters as well.
This. I love playing battle royale games but I stopped playing Fortnite a long time ago due to the shotgun meta and now Apex legends is going down that road. These games started out so much fun because everyone was goofing around and just using different guns that seemed fun but now its about rushing people as fast as possible and instakilling them which ruins what I first enjoyed about the game.
Thats why i quit warframe, parkeour 2.0 onward made all the game content simply skipable. Everyone simple run past the enemies to do the objective, so i lost the fun and quit the game despite being a founder.
To add to this, back in the day not that many people had home internet and social media was at its infancy, so sharing information was a lot more primitive as a result... For example, when I used to play yu-gi-oh/Magic the gathering competitively, the only ways to find and share new deck ideas or learn about the game was community made forums, youtube was starting take off, but not as huge as nowadays.
That jumping puzzle in gw2 was the first I'd encountered in an MMO. Watching you do it brought back a rush of anxiety because it killed me SO DANGED MUCH. Having come from NWN1 and Champions Online before that, it was a huge difference. Thanks for letting me relive that!
@@divinecomedian2 Should give it a shot. It's fun, free and the world is constantly expanding. They put in enough stuff to keep it interesting without having to get the expansion packs. ^_^ Also the later jumping puzzles that include mounts and different yearly event powers are even more anxiety inducing.
This made me remember Ragnarok Online, with it's beautiful no stat reset meaning my experiment for fighter priest hybrid, which ended unfit for combat and supporting in mid-high areas, required reseting 4 months of progress and going through the same old areas agains for 3 months with a new character until I caught up with level to the prior one. Or the time I made that Geffenia quest which at one point just fucking makes you wait an undetermined amount of IRL days until some item is ready (this was the point when I looked at a guide, since I thought the thing had bugged out and was about to call support), and failing to retreive it in time might actually fuck up the entire quest permanently, or how at some point it just throws you alone against a goddamn miniboss and it's minions and if you die there the quest is lost forever. Thinking back on that time makes me realize how much better my experience with the game had been if I had checked the build paths beforehand. It's really no fun when the cost of experimenting is to get royally fucked forever unless you restart the character or pay the devs for the privilege of stat resets to move on in the fucking game. That's a major flaw I see in this review as a whole, in that it assumes the time wasted corresponds to the victory being attained at a slower pace, instead of it being completely unnatainable if the experimentation results in failure and requires a full reset.
I think the problem with what you describe is actually poor game design. Failing a quest resulting in a permanent loss of that quest is not something that should happen in a video game. Ever since the dawn of this media, retries were there. If every failiure resulted in permenate progress loss and losing out on features of the game, I think a lot less people would play
@@HitMeWithABigFish In a strange sense poor or lazy game design made Ragnarok Online a great game. It was clear from the beginning that the developer didn't have a clue about their game (which also explains why they failed to ever remake their brilliant game). Most updates were complete random ideas that sometimes worked and rarely how it was intended. The classes were unbalanced and as a result as unique as in no other mmo. The only balance was that all classes had some skills or abilities that noone other had, which could be essential in certain content. No one designed a new dungeon so that most players could handle the new content, you were responsable to find skills or convoluted ways to handle new content, or maybe the new content was almost useless to everyone, did also happen. Leveling was secondary anyway, only a vanishing small fraction of the active playerbase were max level, even after years of playing. If you had a certain minimal level and some important skills you were essential for you guild in pvp wars and other activities anyway. Damagemeters made no sense in such a game, their was always class X which could do something no other class could do anyway in that specific situation. It was exciting to tinker around in the game, guides were rare(definitly part of the fun). Most MMO are streamlined to death today, copies of wow with all its flaws. Classes are balanced to be so similar that everyone can handle every content and every class can be replaced by another class. So in the end their are only 3 classes: tank, healer, damagedealer, you can only choose different esthetics and which buttons you have to press to fulfill your role. I don't want to suggest that game designer should design a game in such an aimless way. But MMOs should take notice that sometimes its better if you don't get obsessed that everyone can do everything and experience everything.
were*. JP's were good before you could use mounts in them and glide in them. You used to need like 20 attempts to reach the end in some of the harder ones, making the whole process so much fun with friends and so rewarding when u finally got it done. With the 1st expack, gliding became a thing in the majority of JPs and let you skip some of the hard bits. With the 2nd expack came mounts, which let you skip some JP's entirely.
Not all Jumping Puzzles allow the use of mounts and since the Jumping Puzzles aren't a competition, just tell to yourself that you won't use any mounts, commit to that. Yes, mounts can help you finish a jumping puzzle, if the one in question allow it. But you only use it if you want to, so don't blame the game, blame yourself. Jumping Puzzles can still be fun.
@@kimrasmussen7188 You can glide and use mounts from outside of the zones and move your way inwards in many of them. Simply put, the no-mount/glide zones are too small. But if they were bigger, they would limit the use of them in the zones themselves, which is dumb.
Im on the inefficient side of the spectrum, I love exploring and finding lore and reading ingame texts. I play eso and im wearing meta gear but im not rotating or studying guides unless I've been in the dungeon already and am the one leading a group. It's why i still like playing Fenyx, all the puzzles I've solved myself and im at least 70% done with the game. There's a sense of pride gained from solving something on your own even if guides are available.
YES. The best experience I ever had in a MMORPG was when I did my first Fractal in GW2. I had no idea what I was doing and so did nobody else. We together figured out how to beat this dungeon through trial and error. It was awesome and fun! The working together to overcome obstacles part combined with our own effort was so rewarding. Didnt have a similar experience ever since.
Something similar happened to me the first time I did the Silverwastes JP. Took me about 3 hours to finish it, had to do it in 2 sittings. JPs in general are a great thing to go in blind.
Love the breakdown! Recently a friend of mine has been obsessed learning content before ever even doing it out of sheer anxiety. I tried convincing them to stop doing that but after maybe one dungeon they fall back and spend more time trying to learn the content than actually doing it, subsequently doing it only once for the story bit of it and then never again since it “was so much to remember”...
I believe they've ruined it from a casual perspective since it's all about the endgame now. Getting there, getting to the grind, and generally being ahead of everyone else. Time waits for no man, it's a commodity people constantly like to value over anything else, and it is expected of you to know every little pixel. Going in to a game or dungeon blind is putting everyone else at a disadvantage and you'll more likely be called a troll. Guides are literally the Holy Book that nobody questions.
The People that are rushing to endgame are people that don't have the time to play an MMO, but are doing it anyways. Pre-endgame is better than ever and they don't like it, but then go and play classic wow and classic runescape and such, and praise the pre endgame, even though they are rushing through it either way to get to endgame as fast as possible.
@@rattlehead999 I feel like those are the exceptions to the rule as people enjoying the pre-endgame are more likely older players stuck in nostalgia or genuinely wanting a relaxing game to unwind. The community has gotten younger since then and are coming into an environment where your worth is based off your League Rank, how many pieces of M+ or Legendary Armor you have, and having Chicken Dinners every morning, noon, and night. As such, being in pre-endgame marks you as a noob that doesn't know the game which feedback loops on itself making endgame even more important.
@@Faarthemage I doubt it, it's people that are praising how good it was back in Vanilla, TBC and WotLK when they were playing and how now it's trash, even though it's better than ever. I doubt those are young. People that started in Legion and BFA aren't complaining in the slightest.
@Java Monsoon I played classic/vanilla on a private server when it was announced a year before its launch, it sucked. I started WoW in 2.1 of TBC and even then quite a few people were saying how amazing Vanilla was and how TBC ruined WoW and through the years I kept hearing how awesome Vanilla was, while it looked meh to me. After trying it and clearing everything except for Naxx(no way I'm investing so much time in grinding for just one run) and I didn't do some of the dungeons, I can say it's the worst version of WoW to date in every possible way. Though I hate how nowadays people complain how everything is a chore, because they don't have time to play WoW or any MMO and want to skip directly to raiding so that when they beat the raid and farm it for a few weeks they can complain how there is no content in the game... Even though the solo content is better than ever and dungeons are excellent. Happily, I got myself a nice, casual Normal/Heroic guild and I'm having a blast. I only wish WoW went back to linear raid progression and we got dungeon tiers as well like pre-MoP.
I come from playing cs and lol before i started playing wow at the end of wod. Me, my friends and the guild find fun in pushing each other and the content we are playing. If you want to play your way there are tons of old guilds that play like they want. There is no wrong way and min-maxing doesnt effect the games longevity so it does no harm to the people playing and it doesnt effect other people that dont want to min-max. I think it might hurt newer players through. Kinda lika information overload and it turns them off from the game
@@PHAPPSWE never mentioned min maxing or a right way to play. Fact is players play the game through someone else's experience and alot of the time end up like your last point. They rush a game that has years of content, and then get burnt out. Also it can impact your own play style if you don't play the meta as many groups won't accept you. Not everyone can find a guild that fits them or have friends of a similar ilk.
The worst part about it is friends that comment constantly after reading a guide. "oh that weapon sucks" "I heard this character is good" "omg I got this >insert item< this game sucks" I have 2 friends that follow guides/metas religiously
The day "the meta" came to be is when everything got ruined. Nobody had fun anymore. Everyone was just trying to be efficient at games and it just sucked the fun out of it....or as people experience it much faster now...it gets boring faster
Completely agree. I play healer in majority Mmo's. If I dont run certain buffs or debuffs in the meta, I would get kicked. But that is how I built my own character. Its frustrating.
14:22 "And you are placing the needs of the team above your own enjoyment" There's a caveat there. I'll use WoW classic as an example, because well, I struggle with this on a weekly basis. As I replay through wow classic, and the raids have a normal and hard mode version of boss encounters, many people are willing to bring along a new player and explain the fight to them, and/or let them see it for themselves, and a somewhat inexperienced person won't make or break any single encounter (highly anecdotal I know). However. When you attempt to engage in that same encounter in hard mode difficulty, which often bring different or new mechanics to that encounter, the need for you to "place the needs of the team above your own" is imperative. No one is required to do the group content. It is entirely voluntary. And, in my humble opinion, downright selfish and borderline rude to not read a guide. It is rude to be bad at MMOs. Because a mistake being made through no fault of my own results in consequences I have to deal with. As you stated in another video (sorry, I'm binging all your content right now, I think it was on ashes of creation), if I make a house, and I destroy it, I am suffering the consequences of my actions. But if I make a house, and someone else destroys it, then I am suffering the consequences of the actions of others. These are MMOs. It's generally accepted that you will play with other real life people, and those real life people will have varying degrees of freedom/time to engage with the game. And I would hate for the entirety of my engagement on any particular day be reduced to effectively nothing through no fault of my own. So for anyone who's reading this 2+ years later. Yes, you are rude for going in blind!
This covers so much of what I have been having issues with in mmos lately. I can't have fun because people want to take the most effective way possible, and if you don't follow their ideal of efficiency you're the villain.
Roleplaying as a fresh-off-the-boat n00b in a 15 year old game is way different than playing/discovering a new game. Many people play(ed) rets, moonkins, etc just to be contrarian with a rejoinder of "that's how it was in Vanilla" in their back pocket. It was well known back then, those toons were subpar. 99% of Vanilla players who didn't kill KT (or even chtun) wanted to "win". I did kill KT in the November before TBC when the meta of waiting till January when we knew trash boe greens from HP would replace most gear nearly killed my guild's motivation.
This is why my favorite times to play Final Fantasy XIV is just as a new patch hits. We get new content that no one has seen so we can experience them blind. It's then when you can see and hear people react with surprise and panic as they try to figure out what to do.
Eh, the savage content is boring as hell. It’s all about knowing your optimal rotation and memorizing the boss mechanics. Lame. Having come from old school FFXI, FFXIV just doesn’t provide any of the rewarding gameplay or interaction that made MMOs so popular in the first place.
@@MurakamiTenshi And alongside those there are just as many practice blind parties. Why are you so upset that other people progressed faster than you?
Bringing it up does actually make me look back on this aspect - even outside of MMOs I know I’ve leaned on guides for some games (usually a process of playing it my own way, and either relying on a guide when it gets hard, if there’s a second playthrough on a higher difficulty, or if it’s a gacha game cause those sometimes to rely on the meta units and team setups) but I really do feel it in some MMOs because it feels like if you get too far, it’ll be too late to change your builds and the hours you put into it, especially if it’s a game where you might need to pay to reset stats (looking at you, Perfect World). As you mentioned in the video as well - thus why I also tend to go solo in games to avoid said group process. Adventure Quest is one game I picked up again just a few days ago (original) and when I was younger my toon from there was ... oogh, a hot mess of everything, but listening to this I really should break away from guides outside of perhaps what stats to focus on raising and just ham on playing quests for fun instead of focusing on leveling. I really should try to close my eyes to that itch to look stuff up if I do pick up some new game again. I’m glad Genshin Impact still woke up that sense of wonder and exploration in me, only thing I ever looked up was more just team builds and it was the most fun I had in a long time before everything was discovered. Thank you again for the informative video! It’s nice to get something to make the brain think.
I had an absolute blast just playing 99% blind through GW2. Exploring at my own pace, finding cool shit, learning on my own. Can't recommend it enough.
That's what I am doing right now, exploring areas, looking at map and wondering what's over there. I'm F2P and I thought I was stuck in Black Citadel and Diessa Plateau because I couldn't use portal. But I ran around and explored and found pathway to new area
This has inspired me to play a little differently now, I felt it for a while and you pointed out and shone a light on things I knew but didn't know I knew. Thanks very much for reminding us that the things we do for fun are primarily only about us having fun.
First, amazing video. As for guides, yes for me. They take the main things out of MMO's that I love. Exploration, learning, adapting. I still play WoW but have skipped raiding and dungeons in the current xpac because everything needs to be known ahead of time, you need to have certain add ons, you need to sim all the gear you get (I've never simmed and really don't plan to), and if you don't the pug life and sometimes the guild life sucks. I still play for the story though and playing the auction house but the enjoyment I get today is a mere shell of what it used to be. Some days I just can't be bothered to log in.
I feel the core issue is that so many games focus on the numbers - stats, levels, etc. The best games in my library focus on the gameplay itself, not maths.
There's nothing wrong with games focusing on numbers like stats, levels, etc. The issue is with how gamers nowadays treat games. A lot of people seem to treat games like speedruns and not experiences to enjoy and figure out for yourself. I don't get why people are so afraid or against testing things out in games and "solving" the game for themselves. And so I'm not misunderstood, it's not a black or white thing, if you hit a brick wall in a game and spend a decent bit of time trying to figure it out and just can't, then yeah go ahead and look up what you're supposed to do for that part or w/e it is and get back to gaming. But the issue is a lot of people don't want to "solve" games anymore. They just want the fast-food version of games. Quick and easy, no thinking or effort involved in playing the game. Just copy and paste a build someone else came up with and don't work your way through the game and discover things yourself. Now as I said I'm not hardlining guides or outside help here, I'm just saying I think people should at least give every game they play the good ol' college try and play through the game without a guide at least once as long as the game doesn't seriously punish you for experimenting.
Sadly computer are only powerfull calculator. Every single game in the world is math. Maybe deception game like werewolf/among us or pure social game like Jack Party box are less stat intensive but still!
@@pierregravel-primeau702 There is a distinction to be made about 'games utilising a lot of maths within the engine' vs. 'games that make players do a lot of maths'.
I refuse to read any guides or let myself get spoiled the "learning" and exploration experience. Might piss some people off but I really don't care. Everyone has the right to this experience and to enjoy the game like it just released, no matter how old it is. As a community in an MMO we should strive to give newcomers this experience instead of robbing them of the enjoyment we had in the beginning.
This is why I don't play with some of my friends. They just look up everything before they play. No exploration, no surprises, no adventure. Just following instructions.
This is a great video. It speaks to me on an intrinsic level. Back in Vanilla WoW you could see players with all kinds of builds and gearsets. Running MC with T0, accepting “meme” specs because you didn’t know or care how bad they were. Thinking Runeblade of Baron Rivendare and Blackblade of Shahram was good. The list goes on. One of the core aspects of an MMO to me, is to have a Guild with lots of different players. You know that John over there is your Survival Hunter, and that Chris is the Deep Frost Mage and Mark is the Fire Mage. It creates a feeling of purpose because you have defined yourself in your community. I saw an old guide on Restoration Druid from 2006. The build was incredibly inefficient but it looked so damn fun. Back then, healing wasn’t the same. You’d spam healing on the Tank, so mana regeneration was key. This build had a focus on Spirit and Mp5 stats, which is laughable these days. Now we stack +Healing to the extreme and use a High-Rank Heal once to top it off, then wait for mana to return. The problem is that all these cool gear pieces are now obsolete. There is no reason to invest in them because the BiS list tells you so.
I think a lot of this comes down to nostalgia; when we get caught in an MMORPG's endgame (with the various sorts of grinding, raiding, pvp, etc...)and find ourselves focusing on optimization, we miss the time when we were newbies, learning the game, making silly mistakes, and just having plain fun playing with our pals.
... I RP on a Minecraft server, and about 2 months ago my super epic char died. My fat fingers combined with a bug and I lost a good chunk of that epic stuff. ... I quit for a month, then came back after... lots of cooling off. I had to start almost new, and while it was grating at first- all my friends have these super equipped dudes and I'm a puny weakass- but the new char grew on me. Now I'm torn on whether to go back to my old char once I finally re-grind the gear, or stick with the new one... there's something to be said for being weak and having to struggle up. Actually- I think it was for the best. I don't think I'd have grown as strongly attached to the new one if I didn't have to grind so much again.
A big issue I have with MMOs is the group content; back in WoW Legion, I decided to try out tanking. Legion had just launched, and I had people complaining I was going on the wrong way and didn't know the mechanics, for content that had only been out for 7 days to the public. It sucks that there isn't even a small time period for the masses to play MMO group content without being efficient -- all the paths and mechanics were sussed out on the PTR... Which sucks, as I learn muuuch better doing, than I do from reading it. I started reading / watching guides for the dungeons before I would queue for that sole dungeon, but since I suck at learning it that way, it just didn't stick. Since parties wouldn't be polite, let alone patient, I gave up tanking, and then the game shortly after.
@@mattlore9901 Oh hey mate! I did actually try that, I also tried queuing as DPS (though that only helped with route to take, and not tank-only mechanics). I did get better reactions when I said I was new, but ultimately decided the abuse wasn't worth it.
Yeah, I got yelled at for not knowing the “most efficient” way through a dungeon...I was playing in the beta, the expansion wasn’t even out yet and was being told I was a noob for not know where I was going
These videos have allowed me to return to my favorite games with a fresh view and find the fun in them again. I love what you're doing here. Keep up the good work!
Watching this Video after the current Lost Ark stuff in Global Server. The amount of People that want you to know the Mechanics of the Bosses beforehand, instead of explaining it themselves is overwhelming.
When I get into a game, I usually try to go through it on my own, without any guids and tips. When I have to look up guides on how to get by in a game, it feels like the game has defeated me. A source of shame for me. On the other hand, I also hate to fail at something a game throws at me. Because failing feels like I wasted my time and the work I put into beating the game.
@@inquisitorichijou883 oh, Solaire is just like an older brother. You should try the rest of the game, there are really interesting things in the game :3
Yes! This was my last weeks comment. This is EXACTLY why i can't enjoy an MMO as much as i did in the old days. Thank you for the vid and keep up the good work
On a similar note, I used to always go with normal difficulty in games, because obviously that's the way it was supposed to be played and hard is a thing you do if you feel like doing a second playthrough, or so I thought. But it turns out it's much more fun to play on hard straight out of the gate, because when not every build and tactic works, you actually get to do more of the figuring out that you crave so much. And those potions you would usually be hoarding? That's right, you finally get to use them.
I like how the alternate title is "The efficiency paradox", and at 2:59 you can see a Mesmer seemingly offering a teleport to the top of the jumping puzzle.
When "A Realm Reborn" released, the cutscenes in the last set of dungeons were extremely long but able to be skipped. 2 weeks after release of the game, people were often upset if a first timer didn't skip them all to clear it faster and just watch them after. On a side note, I enjoyed using the dungeon journal as the "guide" in WoW. Get a look at the skills of the bosses and try to think of a basic way to not die and then tailor your strategy to counter or deal with it and win. Was great fun.
Group content really is the issue when it comes to this paradox. My approach depends on how much of a commitment the group content is (size of group, premade or randoms, length of run, amount of repeated runs necessary). Usually I'll try it out for the first time with a random group first just for that first time experience, and if I can't and my first run is a premade, I'll watch a quick video showing the mechanics of the boss and figure out my own way for my first run or few runs. If the encounter has a low threshold for failure, I'm playing an essential role with not-obvious optimal play in the encounter, or the encounter is long and has to be replayed many times, I'll look up more in-depth information after doing a few runs with low information. Basically I sort of spitball how much of other people's time I may/will waste by not researching the encounters, and if it's not liable to ruin a 20+ minute run or slow a series of runs down by several minutes (or a few minutes for a large group), I'll generally just do my own thing until I decide I want to be more efficient. Maybe the big 5 MMOs have their encounters largely solved shortly after release, but for smaller games the information is often not-optimal or outdated: the mere fact that someone created a guide doesn't mean the information in it is good. You can usually learn more just from watching your teammates and trying to make sense of why they do what they do, which is one more reason to go in with low information when it's reasonable to do so.
I remember about 15 years ago when the WoW Guild I was a part of did its first Molten Core run. I think that we only made it to the third boss after a couple hours. It was great!
Truly this video encapsulates the entire story, these things have changed the landscape and honestly I think it removed the community aspects as far as asking people in-game or talking to them in-game, to get information through exchanges and possibly making a friend who was willing to show or teach you something. Now google is that friend and I dont need anyone. Which is one of the reasons I dont play mmorpgs anymore. I enjoyed the clans/families , you start with just like 2-3 people in about a month you have like 30 dedicated people in then more but now its not like that for me anymore. and I dont really get joy playing mmorpgs alone because I could just play other games where my progress will be definite to a goal I deem more valuable. good video.
The only times I look at guides or similar stuff are situations where I usually try for a week or so already and slowly drain out of ideas. Got trained early by my mother having both a lot of PS1 games and their respective official guides. Constantly having this treasure of information available but not wanting to spoil myself on the plots/skills/systems as a kid really is a skill I highly appreciate to have to date.
This is why D&D is so strong now. Also why we should go back to having roleplay servers in MMOs. No matter how much you know what to do in D&D, you have to play the game as if your character does not know. Therefore, no matter how many guides you read, the game content must still be discovered by your team.
D&D is also a game that is only as difficult as your DM will make it for. If you play some wacky party of off-the-wall characters with bad stats, no synergy, lacking certain utility, etc. then your DM can account for that (or not). You have no incentive to optimize because there isn't a static difficulty to overcome, there's no competitive drive.
@@ArborusVitae that's not necessarily true. Because the DM has that power like you said, they can create a static difficulty. I've played games where the DMs like listen. This is going be tough. High level monsters. No flubbed rolls. And your character can and likely will die. It really depends on the DM and the group. If you want to have a fun night with the boys. Get drunk and explore a bit. Your dm can make that happen. But if you want to have a difficult challenge and min max. Your dm can make that happen as well.
@@SevenWilly That's why it's true, though. As a group of players and DM you can discuss and set the expectations for the game. You can ask for a brutal game that requires min/maxed characters, optimal decisions, maximizing action economy, etc. or you ask for a silly game where the point is the roleplay and joking around. Because of that, you can know you have the freedom to do what you want without impeding the fun of those around you.
@@ArborusVitae I was mainly replying to the "you have no incentive to optimize" but you absolutely do if you are playing a brutal game and you arent pulling your weight. Your party will be annoyed.
That's not what makes D&D popular. It's popular because everyone is making their own stories and shaping how the stories unfold as a group. It doesn't matter if you do or do not know how certain monsters work or if you do or do not metagame that knowledge a bit. Unless it's a pre written module, you can't know everything the DM has planned and you can't know what your party members are going to do or how they react. it's a massive choose your own adventure book with combat on top of it. Video games don't currently have that and can't have that level of depth without MASSIVE amounts of investment into it. No one would take roleplay servers seriously in this context because after the first time doing something, you would always know the result of it in a video game. Even in choice games you typically only have a handful of routes you can take. People aren't playing the end games of MMOs to roleplay and for the story. We have single player RPGs for that. Promoting or forcing roleplay wouldn't make the gameplay any better for most players. As an MMO player myself I can't tell you a single piece of lore about anything. I don't give a single fuck about anything that is happening in the story and my character is simply a tool for the end game and the goals i'm trying to accomplish. If i want story i play a RPG, a visual novel, an actual novel, or i watch a tv series.
Hey, could you do a video about Perfect world on your worse mmo series? I'm new to your channel, but I really enjoy the effort that you put in the videos, it's a shame that you don't have millions of subs! I love your puns! (even when I don't really get them) (sorry if the text is confuse, english is not my main language)
I've been lucky in games like WoW and Final Fantasy 14 where I got to all the content when it was fresh and new and being forced to figure out all the content and lead the way in finding the best ways to finish that content, thus a guide was never needed except in the most extreme of situations(like achievement hunting or higher difficultly raids). It's a shame coming to it later and finding you need knowledge beforehand, it does take away the magic.
Holy crap. This is so true and explains so much. I honestly think that it's one of the primary reasons why I stopped playing MMOs. I mean, when I was a kid, it was fun figuring things out in one of the seemingly countless new MMOs with everyone else but nowadays? If you don't have everything min/maxed to absolute perfection or know which frame to hit which button (or just physically can't like I can't), some people will indeed get downright abusive and, even when they don't, when you're teaming and you *know* that you have to hit that window absolutely perfectly or else you're wasting everyone else's time... you just stop teaming. So, over time, I slowly stopped teaming more and more and it just got easier and easier and easier to solo more and more and more until, there just didn't seem any point in paying a sub for a purely 100% solo experience and it was off to solo games only after that as the far cheaper option. So. Thank. You. Thank you so much for finally pointing this out because, you're right. And it explains soooooo much to me about how that pattern developed and grew and slowly pushed me out of those games I used to love so much and why I still have absolutely zero urge to go back except for a quick solo and purely casual afternoon every few years.
You are becoming my favorite RUclipsr. For years I’ve been having less and less fun with mmos even though as a married man with kids and a career mmos are my favorite genre. It’s quite a pickle
I genuinely don't understand why people go out of their way to ruin their own fun by trying to be as efficient as possible. Maybe my brain just works differently. For example, I see people reach FFXIV endgame in less than a month while it took me way over half a year to get there. I would never consider the time I spent having fun as wasted.
Because if you don't have a group of people willing to cover for your inefficiency, you're forced to play efficiently in an MMO. Nobody wants to play with someone who holds them back.
I believe a part of people doesnt "ruin their fun" with guides, but rather wants to "skip" the things they find unfun, if somebody doesnt like leveling and just want to experience endgame then they might use a guide to skip "the boring parts", in a similar vein if you play a game like WoW and need money for raiding, you find a guide to make money since the act of making money is "unfun" but the act of raiding, which requires money is "fun"
@@zoulsgaming9455 I don't find that to be true. If someone uses a guide for one thing, chances are they're using guides for everything. It's not about skipping the "boring parts".
@@EntitySteel i strongly disagree with that, and again people play for various different reasons. Look to "bartles 4 player types" people play mmorpgs for vastly different reasons, and that is one of the main draws, not every aspect will appeal to the players. If you just want to collect transmog gear for yourself and dont care for leveling then people might power level to skip it, in wow it used to be dungeons, but guides or not that doesnt change that dungeons was the quickest way. If people need to beat a dungeon then it doesnt matter if they have guides on how to avoid the mechanics when there are giant red ground beams or not, or being told how to deal with it in person, both times you still need to "gitgud" Are you saying you believe all players who look up a build guide in ESO to have an idea of what to build also looks up all spawn locations of crystals + all story quest spoilers? i find that doubtful, guides can be a way to skip a part of a game that is tedious, especially in games that are as limited as WoW for builds, where "building wrong" either doesnt matter or is just detrimental without any real other sideeffect, even when experimenting you are basically not going to leave the little box blizzard has given you for what your class does, hence its kinda redundant.
@@EntitySteel The gaming community as a whole needs to be better with understanding that everyone is playing that game for various reasons, and its better that way. In FFXIV I HATE crafting, dailies, MSQ, no interest in housing, BUT I am so happy that other people really love that stuff, because I get to buy their crafts, visit their beautifully decorated homes ect. Personally, I only want to do savage/ultimate raids and collect glam. I'm sure non hardcore raider types like that I can help them learn extreme or savage fights and clear the hard content when they try to learn it. Has to be mutual respect. I hate seeing people get talked down to because they have sub optimal strategies or gear, just as much as when MSQ lovers talk down to people that skip the story. Play the way you want to play and acknowledge the game is better when the community is as diverse and big as possible.
@@katherineminor3402 true but early stages still have room for experimentation and discovery, and most of the players don’t know the Meta yet so it can still be fun
Saw this quote and it rings so true: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of anything". I started saying this decades ago: "Players are their own worst enemies. Making decisions for short-term gratification, with zero thought to the long-term repercussions... then blaming the devs/game when the results aren't fun". Once upon a time, not knowing what the heck was going on was part of the fun, and helped build community. I started FF11 on the launch of its PC launch in NA. No one in that community knew what was going on, and it led to a lot of discussion, grouping, and hilarious situations. Nowadays, people in a Beta will expect you to already know mechanics in a dungeon. It's ridiculous.
I lived in China for 15 years and it was very interesting to see the culture of online games there. In regards to MMOs there was a huge market for a service that would level-up your character in World of Warcraft. Then of course there was the introduction of an official way in which to purhcase a levelled-up character, so that market completely died; then WoW classic was released and the market was bigger than ever. You would come across a character that had a chain of other chracters on auto-follow all levelling-up by grinding in the same area. That was the day that MMOs truly died for me. (Im aware this is not just a Chinese phenomena; it was just the observation I made at the place I was living at that time)
This exactly! I was so burnt by playing Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts back then without a guide book not to be able to achieve the ultimate weapon BECAUSE I didn't follow a guide that I now am feeling uncomfortable playing any game without a guide. If I can't do it right from the start why play at all? But then again I'm also too lazy to read a zillion of guides for the best build/weapon/strategy. So I just play the way I think is right to me. Back then nearly a decade ago I tried to follow a build for Tera and Aion but after a while they got nullified because of patches. So in MMOs there is no point in following guides if the company debuffs or changes the class anyway at any time. Perfection is overrated.
Imagine if people treated movies this way. “Hey, I heard your gonna see this movie, Here’s a link to a breakdown of the plot and ending twist. Take a look at it beforehand to make sure you’re ready”
Except that's not a fair analogy. Watching a movie has no problem solving requirements. It would be more akin to watching a movie, then reading a critique of the movie and presenting said critique as your own opinion, even though you didn't go through the process of analyzing the movie.
I think guides are a good thing, some people do need the help and would never figure things out on their own. But at the same time it does take the mystery out of things sometimes
Not to mention the fact that said guides are rarely optional. But rather a requirement to be able to play with others without said people getting pissed off :)
I once spend half an hour failing a puzzle. Ended up reading a guide. Turned it I didnt understand the goal of the puzzle. Would not have figured it out myself.
@@HELLO7657 You're not wrong. And i'm not at all against content that requires optimal play. Since difficult content is more fun to finally master. Issue is that as a new player, unless the game itself is brand new, you aren't really allowed to actually learn the content through trial and error. Unless you play with some really nice people and/or friends. Most others in the group expect everyone else to already know the content. And if not, to at least have studied a guide. I've been on both sides myself. And even i get pissed off when i expect a run to be smooth, for only there to be a noob who knows nothing. And i've also been that noob that people are pissed off at. So i'm not really much better then the people i complain about :p But i also believe much of this attitude comes from the easily available guides and step-by-step walkthroughs of both class, skills, rotation and dungeon content. There just aren't really any excuses anymore to not study them. And that's sad.
@@kopicat2429 I mean I can understand why there's an expectation as well, at the end of the day MMOs are mostly a group activity and when you're in a group, you're expected to do things the way the majority want to do, and it's not just your own fun that is on the line but everyone else's.
@@insertname3977 True. But the issue is that the majority also have zero patience for anything besides THEIR fun :) And how many even have fun in dungeons and such in established MMOs anymore? It's usually something you only do because of daily stuff you just want to get over with. Hence run through as fast as possible. I remember back in vanilla wow, because you had invested so damn much time into gathering your party for a dungeon, you usually had a lot of fun inside. Sure, there were definitely times you absolutely hated certain party members, and had shit experience. But even so, nobody expected people to know the dungeon inside out. As long as you were willing to learn and listen, it was ok. At least mostly in my experience. Now, even new players are almost expected, required even, to know their class and dungeon inside out. I can respect this for raids. Especially if you want to get into a raiding guild. But dungeon finder, raid finder and shit like that? Have some compassion for new players.
When I was playing WoW my raiding group had a pretty good middle ground I feel. I was one of the raid leaders and we were never a super hardcore raiding team but we were also shooting for a head of the curve. The first time we fought a boss we didn't worry too much about whether people knew the fight and would often go into raids blind to try to figure it out. After the first time we had fought a boss we would expect people to know mechanics and all the raid leaders were required to watch a guide and know mechanics for their particular role so they could answer questions that any one else in the raid group had. We didn't require the whole raid group to watch a guide unless they were really not understanding the explanations of what they were supposed to be doing and even then we only asked them to watch the portions of the video that were relevant to what ever role they were playing. It was a nice balance between keeping thing relaxed and casual while also making sure we were efficient enough to make progress. That was also a group that my buddy and I basically built up from scratch and it took a LONG time to get everyone on the same page but it was definitely the most enjoyable Raiding group I've ever been a part of. Like you said I was willing to play the game in a less efficient way by building up a raid team from most people that had never raided before and doing full on couching session with most members of the raid group but it was definitely worth the extra time investment while it lasted.
I'm pretty immune to the "allure" of efficiency, so single player games go well. But MMOs really need to stop with the matchmaking for group content so I can just find people like me to do content with, instead of being forced to play with people who just want loot.
I think they can start cataloging guilds in styles "casual", "try hard", "mostly afk" y would love an afk guild, like, a place to talk stupid shit while I solo the game.
@@Puerco-Potter Pretty much the fix - have a "casual" or "efficient" tab in the lfg panel. The "efficient" players can write down their wished-for builds and whatever, casuals can write down what they're trying to do. Neither being casual nor "hardcore" is wrong in itself - it's a problem when they get mixed up with each other and the goals start clashing.
This is very true. This is why in MOBAs and RPGS I like finding my own builds and styles to play the most enjoyable thing to do. Doing something other people don't do and succeeded is what makes me the most excited the discovery.
Mobas arent that much better tbh. Tell me what happens when you play your favorite hero/champion in ranked mode during a certain patch where it has low win rate? Most of the time you ll get either flamed for not playing a meta pick or straight up dodged/avoided even if you have a good win rate on that hero/champion
@@ThunderingRoar I do that but in ranked games. I don't mind people and myself enjoying different champions even if they are weak but if they are in terrible state, you should not play it in ranked game, period.
This video sums up one of the major reasons Valheim is such an enjoyable game for me and a friend right now. The sense of exploration and danger is amazing. Even small issues that will be patched out caused a great adventure. My friend and I thought we had a portal back to our main base, but when we broke it down it did not give back all the materials. We had sailed VERY far away from the main base and were running out of supplies. This forced us to explore the island we were on which compromised of Tier 3 and higher biomes...holy crap it was BRUTAL, but so much fun when we were able to salvage the situation and recover. It was about a three hour detour to our mission we set out for, but was so much fun.
I came over to this video after watching "New World - Is There Any Adventure Left?" as you presented the heart of a very interesting dilemma for me as someone that has played MMOs for far too long, but also runs a large and growing guide resource website for one of the most burgeoning MMOs on the market with FFXIV. The early days of an expansion for me have always been the most enjoyable, in part because so much is uncertain, fresh and being discovered, but also because the time before we release updates to our DPS parser there's very much a kinder, fun and more light hearted tone to the community that irrevocably shifts once the updates go out. It has happened with every expansion in every MMO I have ever played since the days of Classic EQ and has only grown at a more rapid pace with the accessibility of sites like the one we provide. It definitely had me pause to think, are we really going about things right? There's a huge market for people wanting information and guides for an increase in efficiency for their time, but at how much cost to the wonder and adventure for prospective players? I'd never want to take that experience away from people, but is that's what has inevitably happened? Those of us working on these things do it out of love for the game, and we want people to also enjoy it just as much as we do. We do see more and more people trying to crack into the guide scene with further deviations from quality discussion and opinion pieces. Newer players are seeing these resources to accelerate to end-game to the point that they would rather just jump potion to current end-game and skip so much of the older content because it would otherwise take a lot of their time to catch up. All I can wonder is - what can we as [guide] creators do to better the situation?
I experienced another instance of this paradox while playing Genshin Impact. I pretty much started playing since launch, alongside a few of my friends. It quickly became apparent to us that having the optimal build for your characters was going to be a matter of patience, but more importantly, luck. For myself, this factor was no issue since I enjoy the game as is, and quickly made peace with not having the best character builds overall, sometimes overcoming shortcomings with different team builds and sharing equipment across different characters. For some of my friends however, even though they where having a great time with the game experience and mechanics, knowing the fact that they can't play as efficiently as possible, as quickly as possible made them stop playing all together. It's also very apparent from most viral videos of the game, being mainly focused on the big numbers and not so much on different teams and combinations outside what's considered META (Which there's nothing wrong about them, just noticing the type of trend the popular content for the game usually has). As for me, playing "less efficiently" has brought me great enjoyment of the game, even creating my own little challenges like not using the last level materials until I feel they're needed or switching to my less played characters and see what combinations I can come up with. At the end of the day, I think it's a matter of how one chooses to perceive the game, as well as how to deal with certain limitations that will determine your own level of personal enjoyment.
Wouldn't you agree that a big part of this is also the competitive "meta" that currently surrounds video games? Especially when succeeding becomes more and more lucrative due to the fact that you could one day make video games your career (either via content such as Twitch/RUclips or Esports)
100% that money drove players towards meta gaming. The explosion of twitch/youtube/social media are living proof that platforms that offer money incentives to attract an audience have entirely influenced the gaming sphere. Gaming is no longer just a hobby, its a full fledged job. If people didn't have an incentive to flood information about games to everyone else, we wouldn't be in the position we are today.
I was watching Log Horizon when K realized it (overall nota great show) but they went in a raid without knowing anything and died over and over again until they learnt the boss mechanics. Its set as a real world so you don't have that kind of access of info so they had to learn everything on a fly. Nowadays, when a new WoW xpac comes out and raid comes with it, you're expected to know every tactic before doing it. You're supposed to watch guides ans go in and you're basically not allowed to wipe or you're getting kicked. It's insane how much we destroy our own enjoyment
The funny thing was Log Horizon was also that the in that particular raid...the boss monsters started acting...like actual creatures which is what made the raid so much harder. One boss would hear the fighting going on in another boss room and wander in being like "oh, I'll help out my friend!" Also that arc annoyed the shit out of me because, being an MMO player I REALLY wanted to see more of the raid and not stuff going on in town but that's just me...
So I'm the type of player that likes figuring it out myself and theory craft my own builds. But I also enjoy helping new people. I hate being rushed in raids, dungeons or missions.
I remember back when I was still playing wow I was one of those people who always looked to be better at the game, looking up guides on how to be better at playing my class/maximize my damage, downloading addons, damage counters, etc. pressuring myself into being better because that was what the community was expecting from you. Doing mythic dungeons (not even mythic+, just the basic mythic dungeons) people were expecting you to have a perfect playstyle even if the way you used to play was more than enough to clear the content. At some point, it started to feel like I played the game more for others than for myself. It just wasn´t a fun experience anymore. I quit wow around bfa expansion and haven´t played it since. But I guess the community is still the same.
I rarely play an MMO past its first year for this exact reason. I'm so sick of being forced to read guides to work with guilds, or constantly having people who know what to do all around you, its like a never ending tutorial. I also was never super into gear grinding either so usually I would only run raids the first day and then never again, because it was fun doing it while everyone else was struggling to learn it too. Because of this I almost exclusively play solo despite missing cooperation.
Ruined? No. Made a lot less fun? Yes. I like learning through doing and nowadays you are expected to know the content and encounter before you've logged in to the game... It also doesn't help when the developers literally list all the content available with each of their patches and expansions. Let us figure it out, don't spoil.
@@cptcodpiece9207 Sadly I haven't played FFXIV, but that's why I no longer do Mythic Raids in WoW, that and lack of time. Normal/Heroic is chill and I enjoy it very much with my guild.
I totally quit mmos because of all the shit I got for wanting to run dungeons blind. The problem isn't the guids though, it's people expecting you to know the content before you've ever played it.
I only actively play GW2 now, so I can only speak for my experience on that game in particular. But I find even with the usage of guides I dont lose that sense of discovery or learning. There is a lot of content I've read guides for (I enjoy reading guides personally) yet still have not achieved, passed, etc. While I have the knowledge of certain things, I can't execute that knowledge without the experience. Which while that experience isn't totally blind as I have an idea of what to expect, I still feel blind when it comes to exactly what to do in those moments, and have to learn that through trial and error. For example with the story there are several achievements you can read on how to pass, but I can spend an hour or two attempting to pass them even with the knowledge and still failing time and time again. With things like raids, meta events, fractals. I can have expectations but thats where it ends. Joining practice raid groups for example too, most people do research before hand, but we still wipe a few times before getting more used to the mechanics. So while it isn't exactly the same as going into the game without guides, for me personally I still get that sense of discovery and learning through the fact that experience is the main way to learn. Having expectations from guides only takes you so far.
One of my most enjoyable runs in WoW was during those timetraveling events where you revisit dungeons from older expansions and play them. I played the tank. Blood DK. I told everybody that I would not look up the dungeonguide on any third party website. I would just use what the game gave me. That's when I found out that WoW actually has a place you can look up mechanics and little tips before the fight. But it's not a walkthrough. It's just something that explains mechanics in a few sentences and what each party member's role in the fight is. And I loved every second of it. We failed on one boss(the first, because I did not know that tool existed) and it took us about an hour. But I loved every second of it because I gave it a little read, told everybody what's up and we went into it. Nobody left the party and it seemed that everybody was actually having fun. Honestly, for me it was a blast. If I ever were to play WoW again, that's how I will do every encounter "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game"
This. I have a deeply rooted love of pushing myself to optimize my gameplay, setups and builds. It's quite frankly what I find the most fun doing in video games. But if I am to partake in the content that's even remotely difficult, I usually have to engage in group content. It means that I either ruin my own experience by looking up a guide and just being given all the answers I derive enjoyment from finding - or that I ruin someone else's experience by causing failure or slowing down the run. I never really got to experience MMOs in the days before guides and walkthroughs existed, and it's really disheartening to know that it's probably the environment I would have the most fun in - yet it physically cannot exist anymore. Single-Player RPGs are so much fun to me as a result, and they're definitely where I have the most fun with moment-to-moment gameplay as a result. I still spend more time playing MMORPGs than any other genre, because the social experience is also immensely important to me. In a lot of ways, I really wish there was an MMORPG out there that would shut down wikis and guide videos to ensure the experience of discovery would remain intact, but I'm well aware that doing so would be a terrible business decision and probably lead to a game that would crash and burn within days.
Lol I don’t care about anyone that I share dungeon missions with. I’ll waste their time all I want. And they’ll deal with it 😂 if the job of “troll” was an actual class in MMOs , it would be mine.
I always play a healer or support in any MMO and if my group decides to run ahead at unreasonable speeds and they are swarmed by enemies and out of healing range, then they will soon learn what it means to outrun the support.^^
I was saying guides haves ruined games to a certain degree just this weekend on my stream. It does ruin just a lot of the fun, kinda how I played games as a kid.
I remember back when all the guide we got was thotbot and we had to have a designated "timer" over ventrillo announcing incoming abilities. None of those mods that mark safe zones on the ground and on-screen timers and alerts. So a yes and no for me. Yes in a way that it removes the whole surprise that made exploration and learning fun. No in a way that it removed unnecessary stress.
So basically what you're saying is that you are part of the problem displayed in the video by being a casual, because god forbid people having to concentrate (what you are calling "stress") while running an hard dungeon or raid in an MMO in order to learn the tricks and tells of the bosses to get better over time like, you know, the natural progress you have as player that the game was designed for.
@@Slayton1978 The amount of hours you spend in a game doesnt determine whether you are a casual or not, it's the way you approach the game and your mindset while playing it that does so. Upper Echelon Gamers made a great video about this subject, check up his channel. Quick example tho. A player starts playing an mmorpg. Instead of leveling by playing he goes to the cash shop and buys the xp to get max level. Said player then proceeds to spend 8 hours a day online just chating with other people. Even tho he plays 8 hours a day and is max level, he's a filthy casual. Same applies to people who use third party programs that make the calls, show where it's safe and what mechanics come next etc, because those players have a poor mindset and approach to the game. They are not willing to go through a learning process and put in the effort in order to get the rewards. Can't get more casual than that.
@@Skarrgan89 If you spent 8 hours a day on RAIDING and getting wiped countless of times because some people don't get shit right, the frustration building up wherein people start arguing over vent, and a raid gets called off because some people don't wanna spend another minute for the shitshow, that's the stress I am referring to. Mods have somehow took away the unnecessary stress of having to find who is at fault. They know by themselves that they should not be standing where they are not supposed to and we all can see that. We no longer need a timekeeper. And we no longer need to bust out a piece of paper studying the Four Horsemen in vanilla Naxxramas.
@@Skarrgan89 That happens even with boss timers/callouts. Even with those, it takes people hundreds of attempts to kill the most difficult endgame bosses in WoW. It's not like they remove the progression of working to kill a boss as you get the strategy down- it's that bosses nowadays require you to spin about 12 different plates while riding a unicycle, single the national anthem, juggling flaming knives, and doing an obstacle course. The timers and addons simply help you to keep track of all of those things happening at once by letting you focus your attention on specific aspects at specific times. It would be impossible to manually keep track of all of that in your head accurately as a single player while also executing a dps rotation or healing a raid or moving things around as a tank. Especially when the margins are thin enough that a single player making a mistake can kill the entire group.
Fun story, my last MMO was lost ark, got invited by a friend's friend and got together with another friend, ended up playing by myself: I reached LVL 50 (not-so-soft lock here to lvl 60) and the Korean grindfest started to slowly creep in, even tho LVL 50 is the almost final level (as you unlock all your spells) you still have content locked based on ilvl, which are based on Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, you get your T1 items and enchant them to +15 and you'll get enough ilvl to start the T2 zone, etc. T1 and T2 are easy to go through as the % are usually among the 60+% (altho I've lost a couple of 90/95% one after the other), but I still decided to stick to T1 and enjoy their "open" (instanced) world, but a lot of places and even half of the map are unreachable, as the ilvl requirement doesn't even let you try like I have 899 ilvl and need 900 ilvl to enter, I know I can actually do that content at 600 ilvl as at 900 is a breeze, but the game is "Nah man you are too low ilvl, trust me you can't, so come back after you get better gear", so talking about the game not letting you do higher ilvl places to get some collectibles in the general chat I got someone saying "YOU ARE STILL IN T1??!?!?! WHAT A RETARD PFFFF", and the sad truth is that a lot of people are like that, so they make the game less enjoyable. So eventually after realizing I had no other choice than to get to T3 to get to actually enjoy "endgame content" (fuck I hate games giving you almost no content until you get to endgame), I rushed to T3 in 2 days, skipping everything in between, then did the dungeons and got completely insulted for 2 main reasons: 1) For not skipping the fucking cutscenes, and since you can still chat during the cutscene there was always some asshat yelling "NETFLIX!" as the 3/4 or 7/8 skip button was shown, then just saying "fuck whoever is not skipping" "skip plz" "JUST SKIP ALREADY!". 2) For not knowing how to beat the boss in my first playthrough, out of the 7 other people there was maybe only 1 guy trying to explain, 2 or 3 guys complaining, 1 or 2 just spamming the leave dungeon vote, and the rest just trying to rush as if they were robots, brought to this world to grind all dungeons. Oh and one time I got as response of "this is my first time in this dungeon" a great "go watch a youtube video of the boss and come back". Every dungeon I entered was just rush rush rush, no one talking, always someone getting mad and insulting, really unfun content. And guides are a huge problem as you have to follow them or be left behind, and while I do get that I probably would have had more fun playing with friends, the game should be fun playing with randoms too, and it's not, and most MMOs have this "follow this guide or lag behind" Now how do we stop this? besides the obvious stop filling the far empty world with stupid collectibles and retarded mechanics of 'enter and leave a dungeon 100s of times until you eventually get that 1% chance to spawn in a zone you can't ever reach otherwise to get that one collectible to get that stupid title everyone else has' (talking to you, maze island). I would love to hear ideas of how to better make games and solve these issues for future games, and I would love Josh to make a series out of it, a series of "how to make better MMORPGs"
I have a Hardcore Ironman in OSRS that I call "Hardcore Blindman." I've specifically banned myself from looking up guides for ANYTHING, simply going on the knowledge I have, and any input that others may have (although spoilers are banned when I'm streaming). I haven't played it in a while, but this video is making me want to log into that account again, because it was truly a lot of fun to discover things for myself and sometimes narrowly escape certain doom.
I feel this issue at least partly emerges from how System heavy many MMOs are. It's almost as if they don't believe they can create enough fun content to do, so instead, they come up with an elaborate and unintuitive way to artificially make things harder to grasp or just take longer to complete. However, Systems are not content. They are just the lens, through which we experience the actual game.
Good Guides: - Help you figure things out that you wouldn't of been able to find out on your own easily (example: Hidden mechanics in stats, or otherwise poorly explained by the game) - Give you tips or tricks without shaping the way you play to conform to any given style of play - Expect that you know at least something about the game as to not waste your time with needless information Bad Guides - Explain everything, even the stuff that could be solved easily and not just the stuff that is poorly explained or a little bit hard to understand - Guide you into a certain style of play, usually being extremely defensive and boring methods of play, or Meta methods depending on the game - Do not respect your ability to function on a cognitive level
I would say add on like Deadly Boss mode is 100 times worse then any guide. I can ignore a guide online but if there are boss mods i'm expected to use em no matter how I want to play and learn a game.
Dbm big wigs etc don’t make players better though they give them the information, the problem is today’s raids ie wow are far more complex with far more mechanics than the early days were a player needed to know 1 maybe two mechanics during a whole fight. Now the vast majority of players couldn’t do a fight without them because there are simply too many deadly cross overs. You can still choose to play without mods but you’re not wasting just your time if you mess up you’re wasting x amount of other players time. There is still plenty of learning to be done in those raids.
This is kind of a catch 22 because if you're raiding with other people and not using things like DBM for example and you cause one or more wipes because of mistakes you made that could've been avoided by having DBM, you're not just wasting your time, but the time of everyone else you're playing with which isn't fair to them.
Agreed 100% this is often why I just take it easy and enjoy the adventure along the way and for the most part avoid end game loops. I try to work out stuff for myself and will often run into things I had no idea about and get swept away for hours or days onto side adventures I did not expect, having a great time with the experience.
Another problem may be just how smug and unhelpful certain senior players are when you ask a question, completely forgetting there was a time when they didn't know how something worked or what the proper way to do something was
Depends on games, lets say runescape. I started playing it recently and doing some quests without guide gave me headache xD believe me, im patient person but i haven't seen so complicated quests in any mmorpg.
Imo runescape quest guides are the worse. Runey is so much grinding that the quests actually feel like a fun engaging part of the game. I feel like guides just make them more tasks to check off.
@@SevenWilly I understand both points, I've been in both shoes but ultimately, I found a balance where I only look when I simple am unable to figure it out on my own and I have a couple times. So guides aren't necessarily bad, just use them sparingly.
![Can you Judge an MMO in just 1 hour? [MMOPINION]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JpkGbVVLExw/mqdefault.jpg)
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I recently joined a static in FF14 that wanted to "blind prog" the newest Savage-tier raids. Basically, we would force ourselves to never look at a single guide and try to figure out the mechanics on our own. While that's literally reinventing the wheel since an "optimal" strategy has existed for months now, it's probably the most enjoyable time I've had in an MMO as of late.
I love ffxiv but I can't bring myself to play any savage or ex fights because of the expectations. Even in dungeons you have people who spam sprint and face pull ahead of the tank because the only thing that matters is running wall to wall and finishing the game as fast as possible. It seems like what every MMO player hates more than anything is actually playing the game, and go out of their way to make sure they get it over with as quickly as possible.
@@MajorSquiggles As a healer, I find dungeons like that in FF14 one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. It's one of the few times where it truly feels like every single GCD and CD usage matters (at least last time I played around Shadowbringers release, doing the expert dungeons felt really good) during a wall-to-wall pull. I also enjoy the speedrun aspect of trying to do the dungeon as quickly as possible, trying to see if we can do it faster than we have before. That's when the game is at its most fun- it's not trying to get it over with, it's trying to push ourselves to go as fast as possible, weaving CDs and trying to maximize dps to make that happen.
No chance you're on Diablos or on the Crystal data center is there? Lol
@@hobbitonman I'm on Aether rip.
@@MajorSquiggles Yeah that's precisely why I'm finding this "blind prog" type of gameplay way more fun than "clear parties". The "clear parties" just copy whatever strategy exists already, damned if they know why any of the movements work, just move in a very specific way and get your loot and get out. Honestly it's a huge chore playing the game like that, I used to do that back in the beginning of Shadowbringers and I burned out very rapidly. At least in this method of "blind prog", I understand *why* the optimal strats have certain movements, and I get to understand the boss designs more in-depth as well.
For me it's:
>Try blind for a substantial amount of time to try to do it myself
>Reach a point where I just wanna get it done with so i look up a guide
Lol yeah same that was my entire thought throughout the video
I do the same thing!
Love figuring things out for myself, but if it's hour 2 I need at least a tip.
Figuring stuff out is fun, but I'm a mortal and there's more experiences to have.
Oh absolutely. And yet -- after doing this a few times, often it gives me the "basic idea" of how the game will want me to solve its puzzles in the future. So, a couple of "peeks" early on (after trying) can enable me to avoid constant dependence on the guides later.
I think most of us have that same mentality. Unless you're playing some kind of decision making game. Looking at you persona. Then you really need a guide.
This is why I enjoy solo games more and more. There is just no peer pressure and it doesn't feel like a second job
If I join multiplayer game I prefer taking up the supporting role who isn't expected to leap into the fray and carry the team but still contributes. The farmer staying behind at the base harvesting resources, the healer hanging back slinging healing spells at the party, the crafter preparing supplies for the next foray.
But most games have optimized guides for THOSE playstiles as well, which are made even worse by the fact that they make you superfluous. Why should they let you do the crafting when someone who grinded the optimal way for a week can craft better stuff? Why should they pick you as the healer when there's someone who knows exactly when he'll have to heal with every boss and can add to the DPS inbetween casts?
You are so correct about this, but it's just the little bit of romance that the multiplayer thing can offer that has me in love with it. I'm grinding something, I'm having a hard time, I'm getting low I almost die and someone swoops in, kills the extra mobs I tagged and heals me. They say 'this is a tough area, maybe you should go do 'x' instead, best of luck' and they maybe give me some food or gold or maybe a fucking enchanted shield that I had no way of accessing myself. I take the suggestion of the player and move on to the next challenge, to me that is beautiful.
Except for the week or two surrounding the release, where your active job is avoiding all the "How to Beat X Boss" and "Where to Find Y Item" videos every day.
Death stranding is a second job
exactly
Even solo games suffer from this, with achievements and FOMO everywhere with limited events or seasonal rewards creeping into them. Most people want to get all the achievements in a single playthrough or don´t miss any dialogues/events/items, and one feels games are being designed more and more with a very linear difficulty curve centered around an optimal way to play them rather than giving us free choice anymore.
I would argue it's worse in solo games. I hear more often from players doing single player RPGs that walkthroughs, meta builds, cheat videos and min/max ruined their experience than players in MMOs
@@Jrock420blam yeah, because many guides come with (sometimes neccesary) spoilers, specially in story based more linear JRPGs you can get heavily spoiled by reading a guide (say X ability unlocks when Y character dies or there's a timeskip).
Story is the worst way to get spoiled, can even ruin the sense of achievement or will to keep on playing :(
I still remember joining my first guild in 'Elder Scrolls Online' and receiving a ton of "homework" on the select dungeons we would be running.
When playing solo I put story and experience first ... when it's with other players ... I often have to abandon experiencing the story for the sake of being prepared from the first raid on ... it was the reason I stopped doing the group content.
When the other players expect you to skip the cutscene so the boss fight starts faster. I'm trying to experience the dungeon, not get out of it faster.
Yeah, I wish there was a way to collect together all the players like us. I had a lot of powerful toons in ESO, and made it my personal mission to help lower level players get to actually explore dungeons, not just "running" them.
@@gworfish It's the problem in making a game accesible for everyone. It stops being for the specialists.
i just want a game to launch and say it's for a specific audience and then keep making the game fro them, instead of trying to pull in everyone with another generic game.
@@kyleellis1825 Yes, I'd agree with that. Trying to please everyone dilutes all of the experiences.
my experience of group content in FF14 was pretty good. Since everyone gets a pretty huge boost when there's a player who's first time playing the dungeon, people don't mind that you take your time with the cutscenes.
9:51 - 10:08 got me thinking about the time on Runescape (like '04) when I spent hours gathering wheat, grinding it into flour, and making pies at what I believe became the cooking guild unless I'm mistaken. It was to the west of Varrock. I'd just chill upstairs waiting for the pie dish and cooking apple to respawn so I could make apple pies, since they healed more than shrimp and cooked meat. It took a while waiting for everything to respawn but it was rewarding seeing that stockpile of pies in my bank grow. I made like 300 of them and got a few cooking levels too. Then when I got tired of cooking and wanted to go fight stuff, I had a buncha "good" food to use.
Once I got more familiar with the game and started training things more efficiently, I remember thinking how dumb I was for doing all that and what a waste of time it was. But I never had as much fun efficiently grinding away as I did chilling in that building cooking apple pies. Noob me was onto something.
i feel like that with wow fishing + cooking specially in SL i felt that, i did it for fun and people thanked me for the group foods and i was more than happy to provide it to the right groups, thankfully it had value regardless of my speed at doing it because i did for love and people still liked it
Your are right but also remember Runescape is a very much outlier. People call RS3 easyscape, but even if you do dailies and you use your daily keys... you will stil spend dozens of hours on a single skill no matter how efficiently you are doing it. Game is grindy regardless. Honestly what i thought would be a little more fun if you had a team ( maybe team of 3 ) and while you dont play as Ironman you basically plays as one except you can trade with your team, but everyone would have a role, one of you would smith and mine, other could woodcut and fletch, 3rd one make food and this would aliviate some of the grind and create a challange too.
I fall into this trap with almost every game, especially my favorite genre, RPG's. I waste so many hours of time looking up guides so I can play the best I can, and it always ends up making the game less fun for me. I'm going to try real hard to stop doing that now. Great video. Here's a comment and a like for that algorithm.
Same here. Whenever I start playing a game I am asking questions like "what is the best class" or "where do I get the best weapons early on". What always eats at the back of my mind is the thought that if I looked up what the most optimal thing was I would get more enjoyment because I know I am playing in the most optimal way and will get the best outcomes. I definitely need to try just playing how I want to and stop caring so much about what is the most optimal.
I try to use it sparingly and only for the difficult part.
Until you miss that one item or bonus that the game won't give you another chance to get, watch his review of Guild Wars 1,
@@Kuromario that sounds like a dick move....
@@voidling2632 On the part of the developers it is. Sadly a lot of games do this and that's why I read guides.
I don't wanna live in a world where I never found Mankirk's wife
Is that the Barrens quest?
@@pogolas yes, it was!
@@AEspiral that was a tragedy.
I understood that reference. :)
just ask. everyone else did
This hit so hard. I literally just joined a mythic+ dungeon in WoW where a dude yelled at me for not knowing all of the mechanics ahead of time
Unpopular opinion but Mythic+ is such an awful system for an MMO imo. I ran some in Legion but had my fill. Refused to do them since, and I managed to keep up in DPS easily.
There are people who are grumpy everywhere. If you're still interested in learning, trying out mythic zero dungeons and stating at the start that you don't know things helps a lot. Usually in that setting people are ready to play with people who are learning, and you can often get tips from more experienced players in there. Mythic+ (the keystone part) is an endgame activity, so people wanting a group that is trying enough to know what they're doing isn't wrong. You're just going to want to say ahead of time you're learning and things will go better. If someone rejects you for not knowing, it's not a rejection of you personally, it's just them wanting people of a different playstyle for their dungeon run.
It depends what you didn't know. You didn't know the mechanics of the mythic+ mode or didn't know the mechanics of the dungeon mobs and bosses at all?. Because if it's the later, then I would also be angry, there's normal/heroic/mythic 0 for people who are fresh to dungeons.
@@gonzalovargas5961 probably dungeon mechanics ive encountered so many of those people because it is really easy to get to the m+ part as a new player which should not be the case
When there is a clear progression system in a game and you try to skip ahead at level 3 hoping to get a carry you're gonna piss a lot of people off
I love where you say "try playing less efficiently". I also feel some MMOs and games have such a gorgeous world and you don't get to experience it with constant use of fast travel. I get why it exists but if used too much I feel disconnected from the world. So I try not to use it. Unless it's WoW because the flight paths still take you over the world so you can see how big the world is. I'm thinking of vanilla and flying over Seering Gorge and knowing I can't go there yet.
My friend who showed me oblivion in highschool, lied and said fast travel was bugged and would corrupt save files (even the ones you aren't using at the moment), so he made me run everywhere my first character and I still refuse to use it now. I enjoy the time getting to a quest instead of wanting the reward.
@@kyleellis1825 that friend did you a massive favor
@@kyleellis1825 I wouldn't be surprised if he actually heard that somewhere. Bethesda games have a well-deserved reputation for innocuous stuff totally destroying them. Skyrim, by default, never forgets the positions of physics objects, so you can bloat your save file and eventually corrupt it just by moving stuff around. The Unofficial Patch makes the game forget that information eventually, which helps a lot, but other information can still pile up, so there's another mod called Crash Fixes that totally reformats your save file when it reaches that dangerous threshold. It's unbelievable the state that Bethesda is willing to release a game in.
@@lued123 Oh he admitted it was just because I was normally a lot faster at beating games than he was. He'd fast travel when I was in the kitchen/bathroom.
The most soul crushing thing to see in guild chats is when someone replies to a game related question with the answer of "go check the wiki"
happens to me every single damn time i ask a question in cc in runescape. and i always respond with 'i thought thats what a clan was for ." i really wish wikis wernt a thing . and everyone had to fend for themselves , and have to "know a guy " to get info , not just type in anything to google
@@youllneverguesswho4451 uh? whats the difference of asking a random stranger in chat about something and just googling it? your still basically searching up information you dont know but somehow asking strangers makes it better?
@@ragingnep
Real time Human interaction
@@youllneverguesswho4451 there's a fine line between offering support as a clan/guild....or trying to get a player who NEVER researches ANYTHING on their own. Having a snarky response like "I thought thats what a clan was for" leads me to believe which player the person making the remark is.....in this case, you. What if no one genuinely knows the answer? What if your question was worded poorly? What if the ones who know are AFK? No one is really in a clan in a game to give YOU information at all. Can they, yes...but I wouldn't ever after seeing you say "I thought that's what a clan is for", that would be the end of your help in my opinion.
My best boss fight ever was in Age of Conan with three friends. We went in blind, a group consisting of two Herald of Xotli, one Necromancer, and one Priest of Mitra. For those who never played it, Heralds are 2-h-Sword wielding mages, so we were 3 cloth wearers and one in leather armor. We got a good groove going, but with no real tank and good, but ultimately insufficient healing, er starter dying. one of the Herolds went down first, after using his two 'oh shit' buttons (transforms into a demon, heals himself a lot and gets fairly tough,) and a self res ability. He then had to respawn outside the dungeon.
Seeing the way the battle went, we started pulling the boss towards the entrance, focusing on not losing aggro to prevent him from resetting, and whoever was respawning rushed with all speed to get at least one hit in before all others were dead. More than once, the returning character landed a single strike before the remaining character died, and in AoC it was not enough to be nearby, you had to damage the enemy to actually aggro.
The battle ended right next to the entrance with a glorious victory! I had respawned at least 5 times, and the healer and necro, who didn't have the self res or 'oh shit' buttons, at least 8. All gear was practically ruined and we were all ecstatic!
Later I read up on the boss on forums. Apparently, he was listed as a major badass, requiring a 'perfect party' to take down and a bane of many adventurers.
Had I read any of that before we entered, we wouldn't even have tried - the fun was in going in blind, and then see what happened!
I haven’t played AoC, but I’ve been in and out of Everquest long enough to understand what you guys pulled off - GREAT JOB!
@@TheSentry66 One of the nice things about AoC was (haven't played for years) that the bosses were still difficult even if you out-leveled them by quite a bit. In WoW you can start soloing instances quite early, (in classic it's harder, but even with TBC it was pretty easy to run non-raid content in classic,) but in AoC I could never really run any higher than mid-lvl solo. I remember some of the same from EQ2, though later expansions have changed some of that.
I have always disliked the rush that some games seem to be in to make all old content completely useless, so having bosses still be a challenge feels good :)
(Also - for those who remember - Giant Monsters in City of Heroes.)
One of the big problems in Mmorpg and Arpgs is that the developers have adjusted the difficulty and content to players who follow the meta and guides, which leave people who want to try by themselves incredibly far behind. And often there aren't enough in game tutorials and information to help someone who doesn't look up guides.
Just look at OG wow vanilla and wow classic, with guides it has become trivial. And watch Wow vanilla fights Vs. current wow mythic bosses. If you dont follow guides and metas like a robot you dont even come close to beating mythic.
In Arpgs its the same, the end game is so cranked up that you have to follow guides. And instead of giving you prestige and cosmetic rewards, all the good gear is hiding behind a huge meta wall.
:( bro i just wanted to play affliction warlock and go pew pew with multi corruption seed procs + shadow bolt but nah my dps is garbo compared to other 4 meta salves in m+ so i swapped talents and quit aff warlock 5 days later because i wasnt having fun
@@yankokassinof6710 I feel you. My guild wanted me to spec to disc priest "because it just works better with our raid" and I had a terrible time. Went back to playing holy only a few days later and told them to either take me with them or I would be leaving. But changing your playstyle to a point where you´re not having fun just for the sake of playing the meta is not my cup of tea.
This is 80% of my gripe with Warframe in a nutshell. The devs have created a system that, with enough time sunk into it, enables a staggering degree of power creep; and so each content update is gated behind a staggering amount of _grind,_ as if it were not, the highest-level, highest-powered players would be able to plow through it in a matter of hours. So now _everyone_ who wants to engage with the new content and get to try out the cool new mechanics have to bash their heads against that wall of grind for weeks if not _months_ before they can get there, but to an especially agonizing degree if you're playing _suboptimally._
Yeah, it's amazing we demand these huge open worlds where we can do anything .... and then craft guides to help us avoid having to do anything , lol.
Yes, I just don't get it.
I played WoW on a pirate server when I was in school and my parents didn't give me money for online games. It was a wotlk and it took a lot of time to level up here. But this time has always been the most interesting for me. It was interesting to travel around the world of the game, pvp with random players, go to low-level dungeons with people who were just learning how to play. I remember how we tried to go through some dungeon with a hunter pet instead of a tank, because the original tank left the party. That's how we got to the final boss. It was fun.
And years later, when I was studying at the university, I decided to try to play the "real World of Warcraft", spent a rather serious amount for a student on a new addon and game, and began to upgrade the character while waiting for the release of a new patch . And.. I don't know, it felt like I was playing on an x10 server. I was getting levels so fast that I couldn't finish the quest chains of the location. Going to low-level dungeons was generally useless. I literally leveled up on gray quests due to some random sources of experience at the same speed as I once did on the wotlk server. This is a terribly strange situation. And then a new addon came out, at the first week I went to a leveling dungeon and I was kicked in front of the final boss, because some crybaby whined all the way to my suboptimal rotation. Then a similar situation repeated itself in two more dungeons I just stopped playing.
And I'm an old player. I don't know how to play the current version but i understand how it works in general. But game doesn't teach u anything now nether give u time to learn it through expirience until u hit an "endgame"
Sorry for my english, translated my thoughts as best as I can
“We can do anything”. There is no MMO where you can do “anything”. You can do what the developer intended for you to do. In the order you choose. That’s all. Let’s take Warcraft. You can’t make an airplane and drop bombs. You do what the developer allows
@@toptiertech7291 On a video about regurgitating information, you regurgitate nearly word for word something Josh said from another video into the comments lmao
@@toptiertech7291you literally can make an aircraft and drop bombs. What do you think the Flying Machine unit is?
Have to agree here.
In the late 80's when I started my gaming career we used to go to the library and read the game guides on a specific gaming magazine that released I believe 3-4 times a year. These were things like Secrets of Zelda etc.
Later on when modems started to be a thing a few friends were able to reach BBS's and shared their findings to us who didn't have any internet access.
Then came the early days of multiplayer games for me in the early 2000's. That was the golden days. Forums were filled with experimental guides and theorycrafting.
Going forward some years the guides had been cemented and theorycrafting had reached its conclusion and the gaming mechanics were thoroughly known.
Nowadays when people start a new game they're watching videos on the most effective classes and builds. I've fallen a victim of this myself a lot of times.
Playing a cookie cutter build of any given character in the end becomes very boring. Also multiplayer raid content and such is people asking for "Berserker warrior with double axes wanted, has to have the axe of endurance of Kings with T7 armor and at least 253 Strength" instead of "Looking for DPS player". If you don't follow the meta you're not invited or allowed in a party.
What I've realized over time is I rarely enjoy the endgame of MMO's where micromanaging is pretty much required. Instead I tend to nowadays play the game at my own pace and then when the meta issues start to hit I'll just quit and move on to another game. Kind of conflicts with the idea of "The game only starts in the endgame" but I prefer it this way.
Also for this reason I'll rather start a brand new game even if it's less good than an established game with good player documentation.
BUT there are games where the class changes happen periodically and change skills so much that the old guides become straight out obsolete. Even quest targets and places change sometimes. That's infuriating for people who try to use old online resources for quest guides but really nice thing for a player who likes going their own way.
I only use a guide after I have spent a considerable time trying to figure something out and not being able to get through it. Except for Runescape--which I might change how I play in response to this. I tend to avoid group play because I tend to like to take my time and explore--Neverwinter forces progression behind dungeons which many of the player-base have played over and over again. I think that is it--the fewer new players a game has, the more likely the player-base will be about efficiency rather than discovery.
Especially in puzzle games and sections, sometimes they are well done but sometimes they are so unfairly done that you dont stand a chance because you arent meant to figure them out on the spot but find a clue elsewhere which isnt obvious, what comes to mind is "Remnant from the ashes" a game i really like because it has a ton of secret items and almost every boss has an "alternative kill" way which lets you figure things out, especially since the game makes each campaign unique by giving you random maps and events for each campaign, But in there was an 8 bell puzzle where you had to ring it in a specific order, and despite having a book in the room talking about an old rhyme which would make sense to do the puzzle from, the actual solution required you to find another book in an entirely different part of the map (IF it spawned, remember random events) which gave the answer.
I think puzzles generally reach a point where if you are already just trying to bruteforce it because the logic doesnt make sense then might as well look up a guide.
I love RS quests, but they're a lot harder than most modern quests. Maybe on my hcim ill aim to avoid guides
Tell that to elves quests which have 3floors of light puzzle connected together. I will never do that myself. Lol
@@calmkat9032 maybe you can avoid carbs too
Carbs are life.
This whole video reminds me of the quote " given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" which is true (yes the follow up is the protect players from themselves, but players tend to rebel against that part too.)
So let natural selection take its course then. Only the players can solve that.
You are be the only RUclipsr that summed up why I personally stop grouping in MMOs years ago. Thank you, this was quite revealing and gave me a smile.
This whole video is essentially why I am so hopeful for AOC to make it to launch with their current plans. They seem to understand what players want in the world of an RPG and the game on one node will be an entirely different game than another node, which will help to reduce guides.
FFXI was so pure, we learned everything by ourselves and matching cues didn't exist. FFXIV started out ok, but as it progressed all of the story missions and equipment upgrades became gated behind meta fights. Not to mention "gear level" entry requirements which further hampered progression.
I mean sometimes you have to for certain content.
this video is SO true, it hurts.
i would go so far to say guides and meta have ruined online gaming to a certain degree, period. half of the game, the creative part, is taken away and we are left with only 50% of the fun because of it.
some games got plagued by that with time and popularity, i play terraria since 2012, a sandbox rpg singleplayer, and dude, the online community today is FULL of retarded ass wiki spammers meta slaves in a very stric game in terms of build diversity and power up, people are min maxing in motherfucking terraria, its sheer insanity
Nah, it just showed how lazy MMO development really is. These companies sell full-price games abusing the pioneer hype right after they release new content then hope enough people get stuck with their psychological traps. MMOs should have more interesting content, period, and guides won't break that the same way that they don't for single player games with multiplayer as an alternative. I still enjoy Age of Empires without having to go through the hell that is learning optimal play and no amount of guides will take away the enjoyment I take from the gameplay loop. You should be able to enjoy the content of an MMO and not want to skip it, not settle for less and blame the internet for the game's shortcomings.
@@ekki1993 It also shows people force themselves to use guides, we always knew we weren't playing efficiently before online guides, you can do the math yourself. You can choose not to use guides just like you chose not to do the math to min/max before online updated guides exist.
@@Jrock420blam I would only say peer pressure is guilty there. Individuals checking the guides often say they ruined the games to themselves, but they are mostly doing so because it's to be expected that pushing for endgame is the most fun way to play a game. That's a systemic issue and an entirely different problem.
@@ekki1993 when the same thing effects solo/offline games just as much I can't just put the blame on peer pressure. It's always easy to shift the blame to others but we put that pressure on ourselves even more than any peer could. Too many players forget you can join a casual guild/group/company etc instead of one trying to push the hardest content. When you join those guilds there will be pressure to push yourself
You just can't imagine how much more fun I've started to have in ESO when I stopped looking for guides. I just realized I'm not going hardcore PvE and discovered plenty of fun skill sets in ESO
This is how I play Dark Souls games, it feels so good to discover the secrets in your own
Don't you dare go hollow.
@@JoshStrifeHayes not sure if you have ever heard or Remnant: From the Ashes, its like Dark Souls and Gears of War had a baby. It has neat partially randomly generated worlds that make not looking up guides really fun and even more rewarding since things spawing is just random so no play through ever feels the same
Try the Prepare to Die Again: of Ash and Dust mod for ds1, it's really good and makes it feel like a fresh experience.
Try Lost Castle without guides and a friend for CoOp if you liked castle cashers.
@@JoshStrifeHayes I'm already hollow
personal anecdote that links into that:
I've been playing ESO for the past year now, very fun, I try to play as guideless as possible, at least for the parts that I want to enjoy the most. I was very successful at enjoying myself until I came to a meeting point of 2 issues, one which you talk of in this video.
I was still lvling up my main tank, I had just gained access to all DLC dungeons and wanted to run each of them for their skill points. I then arrived at the notorious Moonhunter Keep. I knew nothing at the time but it is a notorious dungeon that even experienced players have a hard time with, and I had no idea what I in for. I arrive at the most difficult boss of the dungeon, Mylène the Moon-Caller and I get my ass handed to me time and time again, which results in the rest of the team wiping being that I was the tank. Normally, I would be fine with that and take my time to learn the fight but one other player in the group was not happy about that.
Issue 1: One player of the group started hurling obscenities at me for "not doing what I was supposed to do" while simultaneously not explaining anything to me. That was distracting while I was trying to make sense of everything that was happening on screen (and A LOT was happening as a matter of fact) all while I have someone being an absolute dickhead that expected a low lvl player that had just unlocked the dungeon to somehow know everything about it.
Issue 2: Up until that point I was managing every dungeon by using my core skills as a tank and learning the mechanics as they were organically introduced to me by the dungeons themselves with proper game design. It was enough to teach me what I needed to know until that very boss. Because nothing before the fight or within the fight from a design perspective did anything to help me understand the fight. There was poor work on the developper's side to intuitively teach a player not using a guide how to approach this fight at all.
And that second issue is one of the defense points I may have for some guides, though not a proper defense. A guide can be a nice thing to have when tackling poorly designed content, which wouldn't be a problem if all content was well-designed but nothing is ever perfect or absolute.
Also in regards to your solution, I thought you might have gone deeper into it and mention Runescape and their labeled servers. Though it divides the playerbase into smaller parts, it also greatly helps in finding like-minded players for your playstyle when you can join a server that is targetted at them. Want to play minigames? Use server X. Want to roleplay? Use server Y. Want a hardcore experience? Use server Z and so on and so on. I think that idea could help alleviate the stress of being grouped with players of completely different mindsets at the cost of shrinking the size of the playerbase per instance, but I see it more as focusing the playerbase into its most valuable partners for your playstyle.
Your solution has one major issue, what happens when a group of players joins a for example roleplaying servers and start owning everyone(assuming that the game we talk about has meaningful pvp)? Some people enjoy just rolf stomping weaker players instead of trying to compete with those who are "like minded".
I actually started playing ESO again myself after making myself roleplay my characters in Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Tried a new approach to learning the story and lore of each game. So taking on ESO as a single player game has actually been the most fun I've had playing. Luckily I made some friends to let me join their dungeons because they are making off the wall characters as well.
This "play the most effficient way" goes for every genre in gaming, not just MMOs tbh
This. I love playing battle royale games but I stopped playing Fortnite a long time ago due to the shotgun meta and now Apex legends is going down that road. These games started out so much fun because everyone was goofing around and just using different guns that seemed fun but now its about rushing people as fast as possible and instakilling them which ruins what I first enjoyed about the game.
But this is MMOPINION lol..
One of the downsides of speedrunning.
Thats why i quit warframe, parkeour 2.0 onward made all the game content simply skipable. Everyone simple run past the enemies to do the objective, so i lost the fun and quit the game despite being a founder.
To add to this, back in the day not that many people had home internet and social media was at its infancy, so sharing information was a lot more primitive as a result...
For example, when I used to play yu-gi-oh/Magic the gathering competitively, the only ways to find and share new deck ideas or learn about the game was community made forums, youtube was starting take off, but not as huge as nowadays.
That jumping puzzle in gw2 was the first I'd encountered in an MMO. Watching you do it brought back a rush of anxiety because it killed me SO DANGED MUCH. Having come from NWN1 and Champions Online before that, it was a huge difference. Thanks for letting me relive that!
Lol I never played GW2 but I got anxiety just watching
@@divinecomedian2 Should give it a shot. It's fun, free and the world is constantly expanding. They put in enough stuff to keep it interesting without having to get the expansion packs. ^_^
Also the later jumping puzzles that include mounts and different yearly event powers are even more anxiety inducing.
This made me remember Ragnarok Online, with it's beautiful no stat reset meaning my experiment for fighter priest hybrid, which ended unfit for combat and supporting in mid-high areas, required reseting 4 months of progress and going through the same old areas agains for 3 months with a new character until I caught up with level to the prior one. Or the time I made that Geffenia quest which at one point just fucking makes you wait an undetermined amount of IRL days until some item is ready (this was the point when I looked at a guide, since I thought the thing had bugged out and was about to call support), and failing to retreive it in time might actually fuck up the entire quest permanently, or how at some point it just throws you alone against a goddamn miniboss and it's minions and if you die there the quest is lost forever.
Thinking back on that time makes me realize how much better my experience with the game had been if I had checked the build paths beforehand. It's really no fun when the cost of experimenting is to get royally fucked forever unless you restart the character or pay the devs for the privilege of stat resets to move on in the fucking game.
That's a major flaw I see in this review as a whole, in that it assumes the time wasted corresponds to the victory being attained at a slower pace, instead of it being completely unnatainable if the experimentation results in failure and requires a full reset.
I think the problem with what you describe is actually poor game design. Failing a quest resulting in a permanent loss of that quest is not something that should happen in a video game. Ever since the dawn of this media, retries were there. If every failiure resulted in permenate progress loss and losing out on features of the game, I think a lot less people would play
@@HitMeWithABigFish In a strange sense poor or lazy game design made Ragnarok Online a great game. It was clear from the beginning that the developer didn't have a clue about their game (which also explains why they failed to ever remake their brilliant game). Most updates were complete random ideas that sometimes worked and rarely how it was intended. The classes were unbalanced and as a result as unique as in no other mmo. The only balance was that all classes had some skills or abilities that noone other had, which could be essential in certain content. No one designed a new dungeon so that most players could handle the new content, you were responsable to find skills or convoluted ways to handle new content, or maybe the new content was almost useless to everyone, did also happen. Leveling was secondary anyway, only a vanishing small fraction of the active playerbase were max level, even after years of playing. If you had a certain minimal level and some important skills you were essential for you guild in pvp wars and other activities anyway. Damagemeters made no sense in such a game, their was always class X which could do something no other class could do anyway in that specific situation. It was exciting to tinker around in the game, guides were rare(definitly part of the fun).
Most MMO are streamlined to death today, copies of wow with all its flaws. Classes are balanced to be so similar that everyone can handle every content and every class can be replaced by another class. So in the end their are only 3 classes: tank, healer, damagedealer, you can only choose different esthetics and which buttons you have to press to fulfill your role.
I don't want to suggest that game designer should design a game in such an aimless way. But MMOs should take notice that sometimes its better if you don't get obsessed that everyone can do everything and experience everything.
Yes I can confirm that watching the 100% guide ruined my experience with the best mmo ever
Club Penguin
Damn, that hurt T_T
says in russian accent: here you come join klub baby seal.
Rest in peace king...
Stopped playing Guild Wars 2 a few years back, watching this reminds me how fun the jumping puzzles are.
were*.
JP's were good before you could use mounts in them and glide in them. You used to need like 20 attempts to reach the end in some of the harder ones, making the whole process so much fun with friends and so rewarding when u finally got it done. With the 1st expack, gliding became a thing in the majority of JPs and let you skip some of the hard bits. With the 2nd expack came mounts, which let you skip some JP's entirely.
@@mgu-vx4ib Oh that is too bad, guess I Ieft at the right time. The challenge of them was what made them fun.
Not all Jumping Puzzles allow the use of mounts and since the Jumping Puzzles aren't a competition, just tell to yourself that you won't use any mounts, commit to that.
Yes, mounts can help you finish a jumping puzzle, if the one in question allow it. But you only use it if you want to, so don't blame the game, blame yourself.
Jumping Puzzles can still be fun.
@@mgu-vx4ib most JPs have a no fly/ no mount zone. unless they changed it in the last 6 months. not even gliding was allowed in most of them.
@@kimrasmussen7188 You can glide and use mounts from outside of the zones and move your way inwards in many of them. Simply put, the no-mount/glide zones are too small. But if they were bigger, they would limit the use of them in the zones themselves, which is dumb.
Im on the inefficient side of the spectrum, I love exploring and finding lore and reading ingame texts. I play eso and im wearing meta gear but im not rotating or studying guides unless I've been in the dungeon already and am the one leading a group. It's why i still like playing Fenyx, all the puzzles I've solved myself and im at least 70% done with the game. There's a sense of pride gained from solving something on your own even if guides are available.
YES. The best experience I ever had in a MMORPG was when I did my first Fractal in GW2. I had no idea what I was doing and so did nobody else. We together figured out how to beat this dungeon through trial and error. It was awesome and fun! The working together to overcome obstacles part combined with our own effort was so rewarding. Didnt have a similar experience ever since.
Something similar happened to me the first time I did the Silverwastes JP. Took me about 3 hours to finish it, had to do it in 2 sittings. JPs in general are a great thing to go in blind.
Love the breakdown! Recently a friend of mine has been obsessed learning content before ever even doing it out of sheer anxiety. I tried convincing them to stop doing that but after maybe one dungeon they fall back and spend more time trying to learn the content than actually doing it, subsequently doing it only once for the story bit of it and then never again since it “was so much to remember”...
I believe they've ruined it from a casual perspective since it's all about the endgame now. Getting there, getting to the grind, and generally being ahead of everyone else. Time waits for no man, it's a commodity people constantly like to value over anything else, and it is expected of you to know every little pixel. Going in to a game or dungeon blind is putting everyone else at a disadvantage and you'll more likely be called a troll.
Guides are literally the Holy Book that nobody questions.
The People that are rushing to endgame are people that don't have the time to play an MMO, but are doing it anyways. Pre-endgame is better than ever and they don't like it, but then go and play classic wow and classic runescape and such, and praise the pre endgame, even though they are rushing through it either way to get to endgame as fast as possible.
@@rattlehead999 I feel like those are the exceptions to the rule as people enjoying the pre-endgame are more likely older players stuck in nostalgia or genuinely wanting a relaxing game to unwind.
The community has gotten younger since then and are coming into an environment where your worth is based off your League Rank, how many pieces of M+ or Legendary Armor you have, and having Chicken Dinners every morning, noon, and night.
As such, being in pre-endgame marks you as a noob that doesn't know the game which feedback loops on itself making endgame even more important.
@@Faarthemage I doubt it, it's people that are praising how good it was back in Vanilla, TBC and WotLK when they were playing and how now it's trash, even though it's better than ever. I doubt those are young.
People that started in Legion and BFA aren't complaining in the slightest.
@Java Monsoon I played classic/vanilla on a private server when it was announced a year before its launch, it sucked.
I started WoW in 2.1 of TBC and even then quite a few people were saying how amazing Vanilla was and how TBC ruined WoW and through the years I kept hearing how awesome Vanilla was, while it looked meh to me. After trying it and clearing everything except for Naxx(no way I'm investing so much time in grinding for just one run) and I didn't do some of the dungeons, I can say it's the worst version of WoW to date in every possible way.
Though I hate how nowadays people complain how everything is a chore, because they don't have time to play WoW or any MMO and want to skip directly to raiding so that when they beat the raid and farm it for a few weeks they can complain how there is no content in the game... Even though the solo content is better than ever and dungeons are excellent.
Happily, I got myself a nice, casual Normal/Heroic guild and I'm having a blast.
I only wish WoW went back to linear raid progression and we got dungeon tiers as well like pre-MoP.
Not necessarily ruined, but so many players are essentially playing their games through another player.
I come from playing cs and lol before i started playing wow at the end of wod. Me, my friends and the guild find fun in pushing each other and the content we are playing. If you want to play your way there are tons of old guilds that play like they want. There is no wrong way and min-maxing doesnt effect the games longevity so it does no harm to the people playing and it doesnt effect other people that dont want to min-max. I think it might hurt newer players through. Kinda lika information overload and it turns them off from the game
@@PHAPPSWE never mentioned min maxing or a right way to play. Fact is players play the game through someone else's experience and alot of the time end up like your last point. They rush a game that has years of content, and then get burnt out. Also it can impact your own play style if you don't play the meta as many groups won't accept you. Not everyone can find a guild that fits them or have friends of a similar ilk.
because so many players such as josh, are casual players and would rather make up a problem then figure it out.
The worst part about it is friends that comment constantly after reading a guide.
"oh that weapon sucks"
"I heard this character is good"
"omg I got this >insert item< this game sucks"
I have 2 friends that follow guides/metas religiously
The day "the meta" came to be is when everything got ruined. Nobody had fun anymore. Everyone was just trying to be efficient at games and it just sucked the fun out of it....or as people experience it much faster now...it gets boring faster
Completely agree. I play healer in majority Mmo's. If I dont run certain buffs or debuffs in the meta, I would get kicked. But that is how I built my own character. Its frustrating.
14:22 "And you are placing the needs of the team above your own enjoyment"
There's a caveat there. I'll use WoW classic as an example, because well, I struggle with this on a weekly basis.
As I replay through wow classic, and the raids have a normal and hard mode version of boss encounters, many people are willing to bring along a new player and explain the fight to them, and/or let them see it for themselves, and a somewhat inexperienced person won't make or break any single encounter (highly anecdotal I know). However. When you attempt to engage in that same encounter in hard mode difficulty, which often bring different or new mechanics to that encounter, the need for you to "place the needs of the team above your own" is imperative. No one is required to do the group content. It is entirely voluntary. And, in my humble opinion, downright selfish and borderline rude to not read a guide.
It is rude to be bad at MMOs. Because a mistake being made through no fault of my own results in consequences I have to deal with. As you stated in another video (sorry, I'm binging all your content right now, I think it was on ashes of creation), if I make a house, and I destroy it, I am suffering the consequences of my actions. But if I make a house, and someone else destroys it, then I am suffering the consequences of the actions of others.
These are MMOs. It's generally accepted that you will play with other real life people, and those real life people will have varying degrees of freedom/time to engage with the game. And I would hate for the entirety of my engagement on any particular day be reduced to effectively nothing through no fault of my own.
So for anyone who's reading this 2+ years later. Yes, you are rude for going in blind!
God damn man. As an MMO lover I love these videos because it tells everything I thought and felt but couldn’t articulate. Loving your videos homie
This covers so much of what I have been having issues with in mmos lately. I can't have fun because people want to take the most effective way possible, and if you don't follow their ideal of efficiency you're the villain.
Classic WoW was ruined by this exact mindset in the community. The best part is leveling because it’s you vs. the world not you vs. the meta...
@@isaacfaith9369 I got painted a villain quite a bit by daring to main a retribution paladin.
Roleplaying as a fresh-off-the-boat n00b in a 15 year old game is way different than playing/discovering a new game. Many people play(ed) rets, moonkins, etc just to be contrarian with a rejoinder of "that's how it was in Vanilla" in their back pocket. It was well known back then, those toons were subpar.
99% of Vanilla players who didn't kill KT (or even chtun) wanted to "win". I did kill KT in the November before TBC when the meta of waiting till January when we knew trash boe greens from HP would replace most gear nearly killed my guild's motivation.
@@Arlyon9999 same dude I just wanted to be a Crusader :(
This is why my favorite times to play Final Fantasy XIV is just as a new patch hits. We get new content that no one has seen so we can experience them blind. It's then when you can see and hear people react with surprise and panic as they try to figure out what to do.
I should do that, lol.
And then you have the EX PFs that demand experience within a week of release xP
Eh, the savage content is boring as hell. It’s all about knowing your optimal rotation and memorizing the boss mechanics. Lame. Having come from old school FFXI, FFXIV just doesn’t provide any of the rewarding gameplay or interaction that made MMOs so popular in the first place.
@@MurakamiTenshi And alongside those there are just as many practice blind parties.
Why are you so upset that other people progressed faster than you?
Imagine thinking people in party finder don’t expect “guides” from watching livestreamed clear runs on the first day of the patch.
Bringing it up does actually make me look back on this aspect - even outside of MMOs I know I’ve leaned on guides for some games (usually a process of playing it my own way, and either relying on a guide when it gets hard, if there’s a second playthrough on a higher difficulty, or if it’s a gacha game cause those sometimes to rely on the meta units and team setups) but I really do feel it in some MMOs because it feels like if you get too far, it’ll be too late to change your builds and the hours you put into it, especially if it’s a game where you might need to pay to reset stats (looking at you, Perfect World). As you mentioned in the video as well - thus why I also tend to go solo in games to avoid said group process.
Adventure Quest is one game I picked up again just a few days ago (original) and when I was younger my toon from there was ... oogh, a hot mess of everything, but listening to this I really should break away from guides outside of perhaps what stats to focus on raising and just ham on playing quests for fun instead of focusing on leveling.
I really should try to close my eyes to that itch to look stuff up if I do pick up some new game again. I’m glad Genshin Impact still woke up that sense of wonder and exploration in me, only thing I ever looked up was more just team builds and it was the most fun I had in a long time before everything was discovered. Thank you again for the informative video! It’s nice to get something to make the brain think.
I had an absolute blast just playing 99% blind through GW2. Exploring at my own pace, finding cool shit, learning on my own. Can't recommend it enough.
That's what I am doing right now, exploring areas, looking at map and wondering what's over there. I'm F2P and I thought I was stuck in Black Citadel and Diessa Plateau because I couldn't use portal. But I ran around and explored and found pathway to new area
You know what? I might just try that.
Thanks.
This has inspired me to play a little differently now, I felt it for a while and you pointed out and shone a light on things I knew but didn't know I knew. Thanks very much for reminding us that the things we do for fun are primarily only about us having fun.
First, amazing video. As for guides, yes for me. They take the main things out of MMO's that I love. Exploration, learning, adapting. I still play WoW but have skipped raiding and dungeons in the current xpac because everything needs to be known ahead of time, you need to have certain add ons, you need to sim all the gear you get (I've never simmed and really don't plan to), and if you don't the pug life and sometimes the guild life sucks. I still play for the story though and playing the auction house but the enjoyment I get today is a mere shell of what it used to be. Some days I just can't be bothered to log in.
I feel the core issue is that so many games focus on the numbers - stats, levels, etc. The best games in my library focus on the gameplay itself, not maths.
Any recommendations?
There's nothing wrong with games focusing on numbers like stats, levels, etc. The issue is with how gamers nowadays treat games. A lot of people seem to treat games like speedruns and not experiences to enjoy and figure out for yourself. I don't get why people are so afraid or against testing things out in games and "solving" the game for themselves. And so I'm not misunderstood, it's not a black or white thing, if you hit a brick wall in a game and spend a decent bit of time trying to figure it out and just can't, then yeah go ahead and look up what you're supposed to do for that part or w/e it is and get back to gaming. But the issue is a lot of people don't want to "solve" games anymore. They just want the fast-food version of games. Quick and easy, no thinking or effort involved in playing the game. Just copy and paste a build someone else came up with and don't work your way through the game and discover things yourself.
Now as I said I'm not hardlining guides or outside help here, I'm just saying I think people should at least give every game they play the good ol' college try and play through the game without a guide at least once as long as the game doesn't seriously punish you for experimenting.
The society is focusing on numbers more and more nowadays, it's not just in video games.
Sadly computer are only powerfull calculator. Every single game in the world is math. Maybe deception game like werewolf/among us or pure social game like Jack Party box are less stat intensive but still!
@@pierregravel-primeau702 There is a distinction to be made about 'games utilising a lot of maths within the engine' vs. 'games that make players do a lot of maths'.
I refuse to read any guides or let myself get spoiled the "learning" and exploration experience. Might piss some people off but I really don't care. Everyone has the right to this experience and to enjoy the game like it just released, no matter how old it is. As a community in an MMO we should strive to give newcomers this experience instead of robbing them of the enjoyment we had in the beginning.
just dont use tools like groupfinder... there i would expect you know what you are doing ;)
otherwise i totally agree
i watched guide only when I was cornered and for the life of me I couldn't figure out something
This is why I don't play with some of my friends. They just look up everything before they play. No exploration, no surprises, no adventure. Just following instructions.
This is a great video.
It speaks to me on an intrinsic level. Back in Vanilla WoW you could see players with all kinds of builds and gearsets. Running MC with T0, accepting “meme” specs because you didn’t know or care how bad they were. Thinking Runeblade of Baron Rivendare and Blackblade of Shahram was good. The list goes on. One of the core aspects of an MMO to me, is to have a Guild with lots of different players. You know that John over there is your Survival Hunter, and that Chris is the Deep Frost Mage and Mark is the Fire Mage. It creates a feeling of purpose because you have defined yourself in your community.
I saw an old guide on Restoration Druid from 2006. The build was incredibly inefficient but it looked so damn fun. Back then, healing wasn’t the same. You’d spam healing on the Tank, so mana regeneration was key. This build had a focus on Spirit and Mp5 stats, which is laughable these days. Now we stack +Healing to the extreme and use a High-Rank Heal once to top it off, then wait for mana to return.
The problem is that all these cool gear pieces are now obsolete. There is no reason to invest in them because the BiS list tells you so.
I think a lot of this comes down to nostalgia; when we get caught in an MMORPG's endgame (with the various sorts of grinding, raiding, pvp, etc...)and find ourselves focusing on optimization, we miss the time when we were newbies, learning the game, making silly mistakes, and just having plain fun playing with our pals.
... I RP on a Minecraft server, and about 2 months ago my super epic char died. My fat fingers combined with a bug and I lost a good chunk of that epic stuff.
... I quit for a month, then came back after... lots of cooling off. I had to start almost new, and while it was grating at first- all my friends have these super equipped dudes and I'm a puny weakass- but the new char grew on me.
Now I'm torn on whether to go back to my old char once I finally re-grind the gear, or stick with the new one... there's something to be said for being weak and having to struggle up.
Actually- I think it was for the best. I don't think I'd have grown as strongly attached to the new one if I didn't have to grind so much again.
A big issue I have with MMOs is the group content; back in WoW Legion, I decided to try out tanking. Legion had just launched, and I had people complaining I was going on the wrong way and didn't know the mechanics, for content that had only been out for 7 days to the public. It sucks that there isn't even a small time period for the masses to play MMO group content without being efficient -- all the paths and mechanics were sussed out on the PTR...
Which sucks, as I learn muuuch better doing, than I do from reading it. I started reading / watching guides for the dungeons before I would queue for that sole dungeon, but since I suck at learning it that way, it just didn't stick. Since parties wouldn't be polite, let alone patient, I gave up tanking, and then the game shortly after.
@@mattlore9901 you created a macro instead of just typing that out?
@@mattlore9901 Oh hey mate! I did actually try that, I also tried queuing as DPS (though that only helped with route to take, and not tank-only mechanics). I did get better reactions when I said I was new, but ultimately decided the abuse wasn't worth it.
Yeah, I got yelled at for not knowing the “most efficient” way through a dungeon...I was playing in the beta, the expansion wasn’t even out yet and was being told I was a noob for not know where I was going
These videos have allowed me to return to my favorite games with a fresh view and find the fun in them again. I love what you're doing here. Keep up the good work!
Watching this Video after the current Lost Ark stuff in Global Server.
The amount of People that want you to know the Mechanics of the Bosses beforehand, instead of explaining it themselves is overwhelming.
When I get into a game, I usually try to go through it on my own, without any guids and tips.
When I have to look up guides on how to get by in a game, it feels like the game has defeated me. A source of shame for me.
On the other hand, I also hate to fail at something a game throws at me. Because failing feels like I wasted my time and the work I put into beating the game.
Have you played dark souls?
@@mohandasjung Up until you first meet Soliare
@@inquisitorichijou883 oh, Solaire is just like an older brother. You should try the rest of the game, there are really interesting things in the game :3
@@mohandasjung I may.
Tho at this point, I'm on hiatus. Indefinite hiatus
Couldn’t agree more. Finding a similar group of friends who play like you do sounds like a good idea.
Yes! This was my last weeks comment. This is EXACTLY why i can't enjoy an MMO as much as i did in the old days. Thank you for the vid and keep up the good work
On a similar note, I used to always go with normal difficulty in games, because obviously that's the way it was supposed to be played and hard is a thing you do if you feel like doing a second playthrough, or so I thought. But it turns out it's much more fun to play on hard straight out of the gate, because when not every build and tactic works, you actually get to do more of the figuring out that you crave so much. And those potions you would usually be hoarding? That's right, you finally get to use them.
I like how the alternate title is "The efficiency paradox", and at 2:59 you can see a Mesmer seemingly offering a teleport to the top of the jumping puzzle.
When "A Realm Reborn" released, the cutscenes in the last set of dungeons were extremely long but able to be skipped. 2 weeks after release of the game, people were often upset if a first timer didn't skip them all to clear it faster and just watch them after.
On a side note, I enjoyed using the dungeon journal as the "guide" in WoW. Get a look at the skills of the bosses and try to think of a basic way to not die and then tailor your strategy to counter or deal with it and win. Was great fun.
Group content really is the issue when it comes to this paradox. My approach depends on how much of a commitment the group content is (size of group, premade or randoms, length of run, amount of repeated runs necessary). Usually I'll try it out for the first time with a random group first just for that first time experience, and if I can't and my first run is a premade, I'll watch a quick video showing the mechanics of the boss and figure out my own way for my first run or few runs. If the encounter has a low threshold for failure, I'm playing an essential role with not-obvious optimal play in the encounter, or the encounter is long and has to be replayed many times, I'll look up more in-depth information after doing a few runs with low information. Basically I sort of spitball how much of other people's time I may/will waste by not researching the encounters, and if it's not liable to ruin a 20+ minute run or slow a series of runs down by several minutes (or a few minutes for a large group), I'll generally just do my own thing until I decide I want to be more efficient.
Maybe the big 5 MMOs have their encounters largely solved shortly after release, but for smaller games the information is often not-optimal or outdated: the mere fact that someone created a guide doesn't mean the information in it is good. You can usually learn more just from watching your teammates and trying to make sense of why they do what they do, which is one more reason to go in with low information when it's reasonable to do so.
I remember about 15 years ago when the WoW Guild I was a part of did its first Molten Core run. I think that we only made it to the third boss after a couple hours. It was great!
....This adds another reason why i prefer to solo and i never realized it. I never was into efficiency, but fun even back during my DND days.
Truly this video encapsulates the entire story, these things have changed the landscape and honestly I think it removed the community aspects as far as asking people in-game or talking to them in-game, to get information through exchanges and possibly making a friend who was willing to show or teach you something. Now google is that friend and I dont need anyone. Which is one of the reasons I dont play mmorpgs anymore. I enjoyed the clans/families , you start with just like 2-3 people in about a month you have like 30 dedicated people in then more but now its not like that for me anymore. and I dont really get joy playing mmorpgs alone because I could just play other games where my progress will be definite to a goal I deem more valuable. good video.
The only times I look at guides or similar stuff are situations where I usually try for a week or so already and slowly drain out of ideas.
Got trained early by my mother having both a lot of PS1 games and their respective official guides. Constantly having this treasure of information available but not wanting to spoil myself on the plots/skills/systems as a kid really is a skill I highly appreciate to have to date.
This is why D&D is so strong now. Also why we should go back to having roleplay servers in MMOs.
No matter how much you know what to do in D&D, you have to play the game as if your character does not know. Therefore, no matter how many guides you read, the game content must still be discovered by your team.
D&D is also a game that is only as difficult as your DM will make it for. If you play some wacky party of off-the-wall characters with bad stats, no synergy, lacking certain utility, etc. then your DM can account for that (or not). You have no incentive to optimize because there isn't a static difficulty to overcome, there's no competitive drive.
@@ArborusVitae that's not necessarily true. Because the DM has that power like you said, they can create a static difficulty. I've played games where the DMs like listen. This is going be tough. High level monsters. No flubbed rolls. And your character can and likely will die.
It really depends on the DM and the group. If you want to have a fun night with the boys. Get drunk and explore a bit. Your dm can make that happen.
But if you want to have a difficult challenge and min max. Your dm can make that happen as well.
@@SevenWilly That's why it's true, though. As a group of players and DM you can discuss and set the expectations for the game. You can ask for a brutal game that requires min/maxed characters, optimal decisions, maximizing action economy, etc. or you ask for a silly game where the point is the roleplay and joking around. Because of that, you can know you have the freedom to do what you want without impeding the fun of those around you.
@@ArborusVitae I was mainly replying to the "you have no incentive to optimize" but you absolutely do if you are playing a brutal game and you arent pulling your weight. Your party will be annoyed.
That's not what makes D&D popular. It's popular because everyone is making their own stories and shaping how the stories unfold as a group. It doesn't matter if you do or do not know how certain monsters work or if you do or do not metagame that knowledge a bit. Unless it's a pre written module, you can't know everything the DM has planned and you can't know what your party members are going to do or how they react. it's a massive choose your own adventure book with combat on top of it. Video games don't currently have that and can't have that level of depth without MASSIVE amounts of investment into it. No one would take roleplay servers seriously in this context because after the first time doing something, you would always know the result of it in a video game. Even in choice games you typically only have a handful of routes you can take. People aren't playing the end games of MMOs to roleplay and for the story. We have single player RPGs for that. Promoting or forcing roleplay wouldn't make the gameplay any better for most players. As an MMO player myself I can't tell you a single piece of lore about anything. I don't give a single fuck about anything that is happening in the story and my character is simply a tool for the end game and the goals i'm trying to accomplish. If i want story i play a RPG, a visual novel, an actual novel, or i watch a tv series.
Hey, could you do a video about Perfect world on your worse mmo series?
I'm new to your channel, but I really enjoy the effort that you put in the videos, it's a shame that you don't have millions of subs!
I love your puns! (even when I don't really get them)
(sorry if the text is confuse, english is not my main language)
I've been lucky in games like WoW and Final Fantasy 14 where I got to all the content when it was fresh and new and being forced to figure out all the content and lead the way in finding the best ways to finish that content, thus a guide was never needed except in the most extreme of situations(like achievement hunting or higher difficultly raids). It's a shame coming to it later and finding you need knowledge beforehand, it does take away the magic.
I'm glad that I stumbled across your channels. This shit is solid gold. I love everything I've watched
Holy crap. This is so true and explains so much.
I honestly think that it's one of the primary reasons why I stopped playing MMOs.
I mean, when I was a kid, it was fun figuring things out in one of the seemingly countless new MMOs with everyone else but nowadays? If you don't have everything min/maxed to absolute perfection or know which frame to hit which button (or just physically can't like I can't), some people will indeed get downright abusive and, even when they don't, when you're teaming and you *know* that you have to hit that window absolutely perfectly or else you're wasting everyone else's time... you just stop teaming.
So, over time, I slowly stopped teaming more and more and it just got easier and easier and easier to solo more and more and more until, there just didn't seem any point in paying a sub for a purely 100% solo experience and it was off to solo games only after that as the far cheaper option.
So. Thank. You.
Thank you so much for finally pointing this out because, you're right. And it explains soooooo much to me about how that pattern developed and grew and slowly pushed me out of those games I used to love so much and why I still have absolutely zero urge to go back except for a quick solo and purely casual afternoon every few years.
You are becoming my favorite RUclipsr. For years I’ve been having less and less fun with mmos even though as a married man with kids and a career mmos are my favorite genre.
It’s quite a pickle
I genuinely don't understand why people go out of their way to ruin their own fun by trying to be as efficient as possible. Maybe my brain just works differently.
For example, I see people reach FFXIV endgame in less than a month while it took me way over half a year to get there. I would never consider the time I spent having fun as wasted.
Because if you don't have a group of people willing to cover for your inefficiency, you're forced to play efficiently in an MMO. Nobody wants to play with someone who holds them back.
I believe a part of people doesnt "ruin their fun" with guides, but rather wants to "skip" the things they find unfun, if somebody doesnt like leveling and just want to experience endgame then they might use a guide to skip "the boring parts", in a similar vein if you play a game like WoW and need money for raiding, you find a guide to make money since the act of making money is "unfun" but the act of raiding, which requires money is "fun"
@@zoulsgaming9455 I don't find that to be true. If someone uses a guide for one thing, chances are they're using guides for everything. It's not about skipping the "boring parts".
@@EntitySteel i strongly disagree with that, and again people play for various different reasons. Look to "bartles 4 player types" people play mmorpgs for vastly different reasons, and that is one of the main draws, not every aspect will appeal to the players.
If you just want to collect transmog gear for yourself and dont care for leveling then people might power level to skip it, in wow it used to be dungeons, but guides or not that doesnt change that dungeons was the quickest way.
If people need to beat a dungeon then it doesnt matter if they have guides on how to avoid the mechanics when there are giant red ground beams or not, or being told how to deal with it in person, both times you still need to "gitgud"
Are you saying you believe all players who look up a build guide in ESO to have an idea of what to build also looks up all spawn locations of crystals + all story quest spoilers? i find that doubtful, guides can be a way to skip a part of a game that is tedious, especially in games that are as limited as WoW for builds, where "building wrong" either doesnt matter or is just detrimental without any real other sideeffect, even when experimenting you are basically not going to leave the little box blizzard has given you for what your class does, hence its kinda redundant.
@@EntitySteel The gaming community as a whole needs to be better with understanding that everyone is playing that game for various reasons, and its better that way. In FFXIV I HATE crafting, dailies, MSQ, no interest in housing, BUT I am so happy that other people really love that stuff, because I get to buy their crafts, visit their beautifully decorated homes ect. Personally, I only want to do savage/ultimate raids and collect glam. I'm sure non hardcore raider types like that I can help them learn extreme or savage fights and clear the hard content when they try to learn it. Has to be mutual respect. I hate seeing people get talked down to because they have sub optimal strategies or gear, just as much as when MSQ lovers talk down to people that skip the story. Play the way you want to play and acknowledge the game is better when the community is as diverse and big as possible.
Yes they have. That's why playing MMO's when they just came out is the best experience because there aren't guides at that point.
Haha that's cute. Guides get written like a week after release
@@katherineminor3402 that's cute, they're written weeks before by beta testers
played wow since actual vanilla, there have been guides since beta
@@jacovanlaere true true. But sometimes stuff changes in live.
Also, to give a comprehensive wiki it usually takes a week.
But you are correct
@@katherineminor3402 true but early stages still have room for experimentation and discovery, and most of the players don’t know the Meta yet so it can still be fun
Saw this quote and it rings so true: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of anything".
I started saying this decades ago: "Players are their own worst enemies. Making decisions for short-term gratification, with zero thought to the long-term repercussions... then blaming the devs/game when the results aren't fun".
Once upon a time, not knowing what the heck was going on was part of the fun, and helped build community.
I started FF11 on the launch of its PC launch in NA. No one in that community knew what was going on, and it led to a lot of discussion, grouping, and hilarious situations.
Nowadays, people in a Beta will expect you to already know mechanics in a dungeon. It's ridiculous.
I lived in China for 15 years and it was very interesting to see the culture of online games there. In regards to MMOs there was a huge market for a service that would level-up your character in World of Warcraft. Then of course there was the introduction of an official way in which to purhcase a levelled-up character, so that market completely died; then WoW classic was released and the market was bigger than ever.
You would come across a character that had a chain of other chracters on auto-follow all levelling-up by grinding in the same area. That was the day that MMOs truly died for me.
(Im aware this is not just a Chinese phenomena; it was just the observation I made at the place I was living at that time)
This exactly! I was so burnt by playing Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts back then without a guide book not to be able to achieve the ultimate weapon BECAUSE I didn't follow a guide that I now am feeling uncomfortable playing any game without a guide. If I can't do it right from the start why play at all? But then again I'm also too lazy to read a zillion of guides for the best build/weapon/strategy. So I just play the way I think is right to me. Back then nearly a decade ago I tried to follow a build for Tera and Aion but after a while they got nullified because of patches. So in MMOs there is no point in following guides if the company debuffs or changes the class anyway at any time. Perfection is overrated.
... I admit to reading a guide on how to get Cyberpunk's secret ending.
Other than that, I do try to play blind. It's hard, but definitely satisfying.
Imagine if people treated movies this way. “Hey, I heard your gonna see this movie, Here’s a link to a breakdown of the plot and ending twist. Take a look at it beforehand to make sure you’re ready”
Except that's not a fair analogy. Watching a movie has no problem solving requirements. It would be more akin to watching a movie, then reading a critique of the movie and presenting said critique as your own opinion, even though you didn't go through the process of analyzing the movie.
What about a thriller? That has a sense of breaking a puzzle or figuring something out. Seems like a perfect analogy.
@@AngelFluff723 you dont need to solve the puzzle to progress in the movie, lol.
I think guides are a good thing, some people do need the help and would never figure things out on their own. But at the same time it does take the mystery out of things sometimes
Not to mention the fact that said guides are rarely optional. But rather a requirement to be able to play with others without said people getting pissed off :)
I once spend half an hour failing a puzzle. Ended up reading a guide. Turned it I didnt understand the goal of the puzzle. Would not have figured it out myself.
@@HELLO7657 You're not wrong. And i'm not at all against content that requires optimal play. Since difficult content is more fun to finally master. Issue is that as a new player, unless the game itself is brand new, you aren't really allowed to actually learn the content through trial and error. Unless you play with some really nice people and/or friends. Most others in the group expect everyone else to already know the content. And if not, to at least have studied a guide. I've been on both sides myself. And even i get pissed off when i expect a run to be smooth, for only there to be a noob who knows nothing. And i've also been that noob that people are pissed off at. So i'm not really much better then the people i complain about :p But i also believe much of this attitude comes from the easily available guides and step-by-step walkthroughs of both class, skills, rotation and dungeon content. There just aren't really any excuses anymore to not study them. And that's sad.
@@kopicat2429 I mean I can understand why there's an expectation as well, at the end of the day MMOs are mostly a group activity and when you're in a group, you're expected to do things the way the majority want to do, and it's not just your own fun that is on the line but everyone else's.
@@insertname3977 True. But the issue is that the majority also have zero patience for anything besides THEIR fun :)
And how many even have fun in dungeons and such in established MMOs anymore? It's usually something you only do because of daily stuff you just want to get over with. Hence run through as fast as possible. I remember back in vanilla wow, because you had invested so damn much time into gathering your party for a dungeon, you usually had a lot of fun inside. Sure, there were definitely times you absolutely hated certain party members, and had shit experience. But even so, nobody expected people to know the dungeon inside out. As long as you were willing to learn and listen, it was ok. At least mostly in my experience. Now, even new players are almost expected, required even, to know their class and dungeon inside out. I can respect this for raids. Especially if you want to get into a raiding guild. But dungeon finder, raid finder and shit like that? Have some compassion for new players.
When I was playing WoW my raiding group had a pretty good middle ground I feel. I was one of the raid leaders and we were never a super hardcore raiding team but we were also shooting for a head of the curve. The first time we fought a boss we didn't worry too much about whether people knew the fight and would often go into raids blind to try to figure it out. After the first time we had fought a boss we would expect people to know mechanics and all the raid leaders were required to watch a guide and know mechanics for their particular role so they could answer questions that any one else in the raid group had. We didn't require the whole raid group to watch a guide unless they were really not understanding the explanations of what they were supposed to be doing and even then we only asked them to watch the portions of the video that were relevant to what ever role they were playing. It was a nice balance between keeping thing relaxed and casual while also making sure we were efficient enough to make progress. That was also a group that my buddy and I basically built up from scratch and it took a LONG time to get everyone on the same page but it was definitely the most enjoyable Raiding group I've ever been a part of. Like you said I was willing to play the game in a less efficient way by building up a raid team from most people that had never raided before and doing full on couching session with most members of the raid group but it was definitely worth the extra time investment while it lasted.
I'm pretty immune to the "allure" of efficiency, so single player games go well. But MMOs really need to stop with the matchmaking for group content so I can just find people like me to do content with, instead of being forced to play with people who just want loot.
I think they can start cataloging guilds in styles "casual", "try hard", "mostly afk" y would love an afk guild, like, a place to talk stupid shit while I solo the game.
@@Puerco-Potter Pretty much the fix - have a "casual" or "efficient" tab in the lfg panel. The "efficient" players can write down their wished-for builds and whatever, casuals can write down what they're trying to do.
Neither being casual nor "hardcore" is wrong in itself - it's a problem when they get mixed up with each other and the goals start clashing.
This is very true. This is why in MOBAs and RPGS I like finding my own builds and styles to play the most enjoyable thing to do. Doing something other people don't do and succeeded is what makes me the most excited the discovery.
Mobas arent that much better tbh. Tell me what happens when you play your favorite hero/champion in ranked mode during a certain patch where it has low win rate? Most of the time you ll get either flamed for not playing a meta pick or straight up dodged/avoided even if you have a good win rate on that hero/champion
@@ThunderingRoar I do that but in ranked games. I don't mind people and myself enjoying different champions even if they are weak but if they are in terrible state, you should not play it in ranked game, period.
This video sums up one of the major reasons Valheim is such an enjoyable game for me and a friend right now. The sense of exploration and danger is amazing. Even small issues that will be patched out caused a great adventure.
My friend and I thought we had a portal back to our main base, but when we broke it down it did not give back all the materials. We had sailed VERY far away from the main base and were running out of supplies. This forced us to explore the island we were on which compromised of Tier 3 and higher biomes...holy crap it was BRUTAL, but so much fun when we were able to salvage the situation and recover.
It was about a three hour detour to our mission we set out for, but was so much fun.
I came over to this video after watching "New World - Is There Any Adventure Left?" as you presented the heart of a very interesting dilemma for me as someone that has played MMOs for far too long, but also runs a large and growing guide resource website for one of the most burgeoning MMOs on the market with FFXIV.
The early days of an expansion for me have always been the most enjoyable, in part because so much is uncertain, fresh and being discovered, but also because the time before we release updates to our DPS parser there's very much a kinder, fun and more light hearted tone to the community that irrevocably shifts once the updates go out. It has happened with every expansion in every MMO I have ever played since the days of Classic EQ and has only grown at a more rapid pace with the accessibility of sites like the one we provide.
It definitely had me pause to think, are we really going about things right? There's a huge market for people wanting information and guides for an increase in efficiency for their time, but at how much cost to the wonder and adventure for prospective players? I'd never want to take that experience away from people, but is that's what has inevitably happened? Those of us working on these things do it out of love for the game, and we want people to also enjoy it just as much as we do. We do see more and more people trying to crack into the guide scene with further deviations from quality discussion and opinion pieces. Newer players are seeing these resources to accelerate to end-game to the point that they would rather just jump potion to current end-game and skip so much of the older content because it would otherwise take a lot of their time to catch up.
All I can wonder is - what can we as [guide] creators do to better the situation?
I experienced another instance of this paradox while playing Genshin Impact. I pretty much started playing since launch, alongside a few of my friends. It quickly became apparent to us that having the optimal build for your characters was going to be a matter of patience, but more importantly, luck. For myself, this factor was no issue since I enjoy the game as is, and quickly made peace with not having the best character builds overall, sometimes overcoming shortcomings with different team builds and sharing equipment across different characters. For some of my friends however, even though they where having a great time with the game experience and mechanics, knowing the fact that they can't play as efficiently as possible, as quickly as possible made them stop playing all together.
It's also very apparent from most viral videos of the game, being mainly focused on the big numbers and not so much on different teams and combinations outside what's considered META (Which there's nothing wrong about them, just noticing the type of trend the popular content for the game usually has). As for me, playing "less efficiently" has brought me great enjoyment of the game, even creating my own little challenges like not using the last level materials until I feel they're needed or switching to my less played characters and see what combinations I can come up with. At the end of the day, I think it's a matter of how one chooses to perceive the game, as well as how to deal with certain limitations that will determine your own level of personal enjoyment.
Wouldn't you agree that a big part of this is also the competitive "meta" that currently surrounds video games? Especially when succeeding becomes more and more lucrative due to the fact that you could one day make video games your career (either via content such as Twitch/RUclips or Esports)
Mindless drones don't realize the Meta is made by people not following a Meta and by following it you will never discover a new meta
100% that money drove players towards meta gaming. The explosion of twitch/youtube/social media are living proof that platforms that offer money incentives to attract an audience have entirely influenced the gaming sphere. Gaming is no longer just a hobby, its a full fledged job. If people didn't have an incentive to flood information about games to everyone else, we wouldn't be in the position we are today.
I was watching Log Horizon when K realized it (overall nota great show) but they went in a raid without knowing anything and died over and over again until they learnt the boss mechanics. Its set as a real world so you don't have that kind of access of info so they had to learn everything on a fly. Nowadays, when a new WoW xpac comes out and raid comes with it, you're expected to know every tactic before doing it. You're supposed to watch guides ans go in and you're basically not allowed to wipe or you're getting kicked. It's insane how much we destroy our own enjoyment
The funny thing was Log Horizon was also that the in that particular raid...the boss monsters started acting...like actual creatures which is what made the raid so much harder. One boss would hear the fighting going on in another boss room and wander in being like "oh, I'll help out my friend!"
Also that arc annoyed the shit out of me because, being an MMO player I REALLY wanted to see more of the raid and not stuff going on in town but that's just me...
So I'm the type of player that likes figuring it out myself and theory craft my own builds. But I also enjoy helping new people. I hate being rushed in raids, dungeons or missions.
I remember back when I was still playing wow I was one of those people who always looked to be better at the game, looking up guides on how to be better at playing my class/maximize my damage, downloading addons, damage counters, etc. pressuring myself into being better because that was what the community was expecting from you. Doing mythic dungeons (not even mythic+, just the basic mythic dungeons) people were expecting you to have a perfect playstyle even if the way you used to play was more than enough to clear the content. At some point, it started to feel like I played the game more for others than for myself. It just wasn´t a fun experience anymore. I quit wow around bfa expansion and haven´t played it since. But I guess the community is still the same.
I rarely play an MMO past its first year for this exact reason. I'm so sick of being forced to read guides to work with guilds, or constantly having people who know what to do all around you, its like a never ending tutorial. I also was never super into gear grinding either so usually I would only run raids the first day and then never again, because it was fun doing it while everyone else was struggling to learn it too. Because of this I almost exclusively play solo despite missing cooperation.
Ruined? No. Made a lot less fun? Yes.
I like learning through doing and nowadays you are expected to know the content and encounter before you've logged in to the game...
It also doesn't help when the developers literally list all the content available with each of their patches and expansions.
Let us figure it out, don't spoil.
@@cptcodpiece9207 Sadly I haven't played FFXIV, but that's why I no longer do Mythic Raids in WoW, that and lack of time. Normal/Heroic is chill and I enjoy it very much with my guild.
I totally quit mmos because of all the shit I got for wanting to run dungeons blind. The problem isn't the guids though, it's people expecting you to know the content before you've ever played it.
@@TheWeezul Well yes, and guides enable them to want and expect that.
I enjoy playing games optimally min-maxing and efficiency is what is fun for me at least in MMO-lite games like Warframe and Path of Exile
I only actively play GW2 now, so I can only speak for my experience on that game in particular. But I find even with the usage of guides I dont lose that sense of discovery or learning. There is a lot of content I've read guides for (I enjoy reading guides personally) yet still have not achieved, passed, etc. While I have the knowledge of certain things, I can't execute that knowledge without the experience. Which while that experience isn't totally blind as I have an idea of what to expect, I still feel blind when it comes to exactly what to do in those moments, and have to learn that through trial and error.
For example with the story there are several achievements you can read on how to pass, but I can spend an hour or two attempting to pass them even with the knowledge and still failing time and time again.
With things like raids, meta events, fractals. I can have expectations but thats where it ends. Joining practice raid groups for example too, most people do research before hand, but we still wipe a few times before getting more used to the mechanics.
So while it isn't exactly the same as going into the game without guides, for me personally I still get that sense of discovery and learning through the fact that experience is the main way to learn. Having expectations from guides only takes you so far.
One of my most enjoyable runs in WoW was during those timetraveling events where you revisit dungeons from older expansions and play them. I played the tank. Blood DK. I told everybody that I would not look up the dungeonguide on any third party website. I would just use what the game gave me. That's when I found out that WoW actually has a place you can look up mechanics and little tips before the fight. But it's not a walkthrough. It's just something that explains mechanics in a few sentences and what each party member's role in the fight is. And I loved every second of it. We failed on one boss(the first, because I did not know that tool existed) and it took us about an hour. But I loved every second of it because I gave it a little read, told everybody what's up and we went into it. Nobody left the party and it seemed that everybody was actually having fun.
Honestly, for me it was a blast. If I ever were to play WoW again, that's how I will do every encounter
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game"
This. I have a deeply rooted love of pushing myself to optimize my gameplay, setups and builds. It's quite frankly what I find the most fun doing in video games.
But if I am to partake in the content that's even remotely difficult, I usually have to engage in group content.
It means that I either ruin my own experience by looking up a guide and just being given all the answers I derive enjoyment from finding - or that I ruin someone else's experience by causing failure or slowing down the run.
I never really got to experience MMOs in the days before guides and walkthroughs existed, and it's really disheartening to know that it's probably the environment I would have the most fun in - yet it physically cannot exist anymore.
Single-Player RPGs are so much fun to me as a result, and they're definitely where I have the most fun with moment-to-moment gameplay as a result.
I still spend more time playing MMORPGs than any other genre, because the social experience is also immensely important to me.
In a lot of ways, I really wish there was an MMORPG out there that would shut down wikis and guide videos to ensure the experience of discovery would remain intact, but I'm well aware that doing so would be a terrible business decision and probably lead to a game that would crash and burn within days.
Lol I don’t care about anyone that I share dungeon missions with. I’ll waste their time all I want. And they’ll deal with it 😂 if the job of “troll” was an actual class in MMOs , it would be mine.
I always play a healer or support in any MMO and if my group decides to run ahead at unreasonable speeds and they are swarmed by enemies and out of healing range, then they will soon learn what it means to outrun the support.^^
I was saying guides haves ruined games to a certain degree just this weekend on my stream. It does ruin just a lot of the fun, kinda how I played games as a kid.
@Java Monsoon Man you are dead on, drives me insane the backseat gaming. I put "Please No Spoilers" now sometimes too.
I remember back when all the guide we got was thotbot and we had to have a designated "timer" over ventrillo announcing incoming abilities. None of those mods that mark safe zones on the ground and on-screen timers and alerts. So a yes and no for me. Yes in a way that it removes the whole surprise that made exploration and learning fun. No in a way that it removed unnecessary stress.
So basically what you're saying is that you are part of the problem displayed in the video by being a casual, because god forbid people having to concentrate (what you are calling "stress") while running an hard dungeon or raid in an MMO in order to learn the tricks and tells of the bosses to get better over time like, you know, the natural progress you have as player that the game was designed for.
@@Skarrgan89 Yup. 8 hours a day, hundreds of wipes. That's as casual as I can get.
@@Slayton1978 The amount of hours you spend in a game doesnt determine whether you are a casual or not, it's the way you approach the game and your mindset while playing it that does so. Upper Echelon Gamers made a great video about this subject, check up his channel.
Quick example tho. A player starts playing an mmorpg. Instead of leveling by playing he goes to the cash shop and buys the xp to get max level. Said player then proceeds to spend 8 hours a day online just chating with other people. Even tho he plays 8 hours a day and is max level, he's a filthy casual.
Same applies to people who use third party programs that make the calls, show where it's safe and what mechanics come next etc, because those players have a poor mindset and approach to the game.
They are not willing to go through a learning process and put in the effort in order to get the rewards. Can't get more casual than that.
@@Skarrgan89 If you spent 8 hours a day on RAIDING and getting wiped countless of times because some people don't get shit right, the frustration building up wherein people start arguing over vent, and a raid gets called off because some people don't wanna spend another minute for the shitshow, that's the stress I am referring to. Mods have somehow took away the unnecessary stress of having to find who is at fault. They know by themselves that they should not be standing where they are not supposed to and we all can see that. We no longer need a timekeeper. And we no longer need to bust out a piece of paper studying the Four Horsemen in vanilla Naxxramas.
@@Skarrgan89 That happens even with boss timers/callouts. Even with those, it takes people hundreds of attempts to kill the most difficult endgame bosses in WoW. It's not like they remove the progression of working to kill a boss as you get the strategy down- it's that bosses nowadays require you to spin about 12 different plates while riding a unicycle, single the national anthem, juggling flaming knives, and doing an obstacle course. The timers and addons simply help you to keep track of all of those things happening at once by letting you focus your attention on specific aspects at specific times. It would be impossible to manually keep track of all of that in your head accurately as a single player while also executing a dps rotation or healing a raid or moving things around as a tank. Especially when the margins are thin enough that a single player making a mistake can kill the entire group.
Fun story, my last MMO was lost ark, got invited by a friend's friend and got together with another friend, ended up playing by myself:
I reached LVL 50 (not-so-soft lock here to lvl 60) and the Korean grindfest started to slowly creep in, even tho LVL 50 is the almost final level (as you unlock all your spells) you still have content locked based on ilvl, which are based on Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, you get your T1 items and enchant them to +15 and you'll get enough ilvl to start the T2 zone, etc.
T1 and T2 are easy to go through as the % are usually among the 60+% (altho I've lost a couple of 90/95% one after the other), but I still decided to stick to T1 and enjoy their "open" (instanced) world, but a lot of places and even half of the map are unreachable, as the ilvl requirement doesn't even let you try like I have 899 ilvl and need 900 ilvl to enter, I know I can actually do that content at 600 ilvl as at 900 is a breeze, but the game is "Nah man you are too low ilvl, trust me you can't, so come back after you get better gear", so talking about the game not letting you do higher ilvl places to get some collectibles in the general chat I got someone saying "YOU ARE STILL IN T1??!?!?! WHAT A RETARD PFFFF", and the sad truth is that a lot of people are like that, so they make the game less enjoyable.
So eventually after realizing I had no other choice than to get to T3 to get to actually enjoy "endgame content" (fuck I hate games giving you almost no content until you get to endgame), I rushed to T3 in 2 days, skipping everything in between, then did the dungeons and got completely insulted for 2 main reasons:
1) For not skipping the fucking cutscenes, and since you can still chat during the cutscene there was always some asshat yelling "NETFLIX!" as the 3/4 or 7/8 skip button was shown, then just saying "fuck whoever is not skipping" "skip plz" "JUST SKIP ALREADY!".
2) For not knowing how to beat the boss in my first playthrough, out of the 7 other people there was maybe only 1 guy trying to explain, 2 or 3 guys complaining, 1 or 2 just spamming the leave dungeon vote, and the rest just trying to rush as if they were robots, brought to this world to grind all dungeons. Oh and one time I got as response of "this is my first time in this dungeon" a great "go watch a youtube video of the boss and come back".
Every dungeon I entered was just rush rush rush, no one talking, always someone getting mad and insulting, really unfun content. And guides are a huge problem as you have to follow them or be left behind, and while I do get that I probably would have had more fun playing with friends, the game should be fun playing with randoms too, and it's not, and most MMOs have this "follow this guide or lag behind"
Now how do we stop this? besides the obvious stop filling the far empty world with stupid collectibles and retarded mechanics of 'enter and leave a dungeon 100s of times until you eventually get that 1% chance to spawn in a zone you can't ever reach otherwise to get that one collectible to get that stupid title everyone else has' (talking to you, maze island).
I would love to hear ideas of how to better make games and solve these issues for future games, and I would love Josh to make a series out of it, a series of "how to make better MMORPGs"
I have a Hardcore Ironman in OSRS that I call "Hardcore Blindman." I've specifically banned myself from looking up guides for ANYTHING, simply going on the knowledge I have, and any input that others may have (although spoilers are banned when I'm streaming). I haven't played it in a while, but this video is making me want to log into that account again, because it was truly a lot of fun to discover things for myself and sometimes narrowly escape certain doom.
I feel this issue at least partly emerges from how System heavy many MMOs are. It's almost as if they don't believe they can create enough fun content to do, so instead, they come up with an elaborate and unintuitive way to artificially make things harder to grasp or just take longer to complete. However, Systems are not content. They are just the lens, through which we experience the actual game.
Good Guides:
- Help you figure things out that you wouldn't of been able to find out on your own easily (example: Hidden mechanics in stats, or otherwise poorly explained by the game)
- Give you tips or tricks without shaping the way you play to conform to any given style of play
- Expect that you know at least something about the game as to not waste your time with needless information
Bad Guides
- Explain everything, even the stuff that could be solved easily and not just the stuff that is poorly explained or a little bit hard to understand
- Guide you into a certain style of play, usually being extremely defensive and boring methods of play, or Meta methods depending on the game
- Do not respect your ability to function on a cognitive level
I would say add on like Deadly Boss mode is 100 times worse then any guide. I can ignore a guide online but if there are boss mods i'm expected to use em no matter how I want to play and learn a game.
Dbm big wigs etc don’t make players better though they give them the information, the problem is today’s raids ie wow are far more complex with far more mechanics than the early days were a player needed to know 1 maybe two mechanics during a whole fight. Now the vast majority of players couldn’t do a fight without them because there are simply too many deadly cross overs. You can still choose to play without mods but you’re not wasting just your time if you mess up you’re wasting x amount of other players time. There is still plenty of learning to be done in those raids.
This is kind of a catch 22 because if you're raiding with other people and not using things like DBM for example and you cause one or more wipes because of mistakes you made that could've been avoided by having DBM, you're not just wasting your time, but the time of everyone else you're playing with which isn't fair to them.
Agreed 100% this is often why I just take it easy and enjoy the adventure along the way and for the most part avoid end game loops.
I try to work out stuff for myself and will often run into things I had no idea about and get swept away for hours or days onto side adventures I did not expect, having a great time with the experience.
Another problem may be just how smug and unhelpful certain senior players are when you ask a question, completely forgetting there was a time when they didn't know how something worked or what the proper way to do something was
Depends on games, lets say runescape. I started playing it recently and doing some quests without guide gave me headache xD believe me, im patient person but i haven't seen so complicated quests in any mmorpg.
There are multiple quests in that game that have made people quit forever just because of how torturous they are.
Good point there. Guides can be good if you've already exhausted all the possibilities you can think of and are feeling some fierce frustration.
Imo runescape quest guides are the worse. Runey is so much grinding that the quests actually feel like a fun engaging part of the game. I feel like guides just make them more tasks to check off.
@@SevenWilly I understand both points, I've been in both shoes but ultimately, I found a balance where I only look when I simple am unable to figure it out on my own and I have a couple times. So guides aren't necessarily bad, just use them sparingly.
@@boredfangerrude Black Knight Fortress, and Ernest the Chicken had me really frustrated as a child.