Almost all multi-player gaming is competitive and involves dealing with occasional (or frequent, depending on the game) jerks. If I want stress and occasional jerks, I can just do things in the real world. Single-player gaming is more comfy.
I don’t feel comfortable doing that unless the chance of an interruption is extremely close to zero. Stresses me out.
If I'm going to commit time every week it might as well be a physical sport. I do like couch co-op or occasional online play with friends but that is off-the-cuff stuff. I'd be willing to do it more frequently if the time were capped.
...team pvp or even coop games need much more commitment.
SP? Hit the pause button and go.
One game I'm dominating against the other team, but then the ball hits the other side and get paired with people above my level for the next several. It kinda makes me feel like the agency on how well I can perform is taken away from me, and I just have to hope the matchmaking system takes pity.
At least when matches were more random, sometimes I'd get paired with people above my level, but it was rare that it felt completely rigged against me.
My wife uses video games to relax and de-stress after having dealt with customers all day. Having to deal with more people in the evening is the last thing she needs.
Competition in gaming is fine, but only if the participants think it's fair. It feels to me like it's increasingly unfair.
But in relation it jerks, there seem to be many more same-team jerks than in the past. Teammate blame seems to be at an all time high. It's always someone else fault that we lost, never my own. Oftentimes you read the stats afterwards and the performance was basically equal. I can't help but feel that this same perspective is spilling into real life too.
Can you share an example of this outside of mobile games?
2. mobile game
3. mobile game
4. not actually pay to win.
5. noncompetitive game
6. mobile game
You see where I'm going. You can't relate "has microtransactions" with "is pay to win". They're different.
Again, can you provide an example? Also
> Any multiplayer game is competitive to some degree
Is just blatantly incorrect, unless you just mean "One player is further in the game than the other", in which case literally all games are "competitive", including single player.
I can but I won't, because I'm done with this conversation based on the inauthentic responses.
Exactly as expected.
So you can essentially skip half your character's progression arc by entering a credit card number.
Now, you can argue that the best gear is BOP (Bind on Pickup) so this isn't a huge factor, but there's still definitely an aspect of "pay to win", since there are plenty of other things you need gold for that payment skips.
You can also argue that WoW isn't competitive, but all multiplayer games have a light competition of being ahead of others in progression, even if it's not direct competition. (I'm ignoring PvP because actual PvP is a tiny minority interest. )
That didn't stop players from figuring out how to pay to win though. They now pay "boosting" and "carry" services - other people who group up with you and then clear dungeons while you just follow along behind them and collect the loot as it drops.
There are advertisers spamming ads for these carry services all over the place inside the game even though they're against ToS. It does still have its charms but on balance WoW really has become a train wreck.
Do you have a recommendation for something better that's subscription based?
What did bother me was (1) games taking too long (I don’t want to tell my family I can’t help with anything for 45 minutes) and (2) jerks. In ranked there were the people who thought they could not get ahead because the players they played with (me) sucked, in unranked there were too many people who couldn’t queue successfully (learned how to play all positions, even jungle, so I wouldn’t be part of the problem of having three people who want to play top)
There, changed it to the proper format.
I've seen plenty of glitches in LAN games with friends that were completely unfair, but never were a problem.
I prefer MMOs, but playing solo.
I still (very) occasionally play WoW, and that's pretty much the only game I ever play.
I'd love to try a new MMO, but they're all "free-to-play" meaning "pay to win". I just want to pay a normal monthly subscription price and explore cool worlds. Maybe interact occasionally with some other people in a guild or pickup group or something.
It's what keeps my WoW subscription active, even though I rarely play it.
Sadly, it's gotten so bad that I spend most of my brain-dead time reading Lit RPG stuff, because at least with that I can recapture some of the sense of wonder and excitement that we had during the golden age of MMOs (UO, EQ, DAOC, AC, SWG, etc...).
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a shot.
a lot of the other things mentioned (like a solo guy getting matched with a "team") are to me similar to real-life counterparts. you can play ball in a court against a group of friends that play together regularly. just like you can have a better computer and internet, you can have better sports gear.
this does not take away from the "skill" aspect of the game for me. i am with you in terms of systematic issues with ranking or game mechanics, but it is still much better than annual sports titles and the like. but if chess can be enjoyed despite the player starting first having an advantage, so can these games.
there was a game called "Journey" where there where other players in the world, but you couldn't interact directly. They'd help you. I think elden ring did something similar.
1. You can sometimes see what other players are doing, they show up as a translucent white phantom looking thing. This is useful because you can sometimes see entrances to hidden locations, etc.
2. There are blood stains on the ground which represent where another player died. If you interact with the blood stain, you see a translucent red phantom in their final moments. This is useful if you want to see if jumping of a particular ledge is fatal or to see potential traps.
3. You can leave messages for other players to see and can read messages that other players have left. This mechanic goes both ways, as some people troll and others try to help. Interacting with the message rewards the player who left the message by refilling their health bar. Many boss fights have been won because someone happened to rate their message at a critical moment. On the trolling side, people leave messages like "Try jumping" by ledges where jumping off would be fatal. Others leave amusing messages, and the community is amazingly creative with the messages they compose, given that the pre-set vocabulary is quite limited.
4. You put your summon sign down on the ground for others to see. When they interact with it, you can enter their game and help them fight bosses / progress through the level. Bosses are rewarded with more health for each player present. Obviously, the opposite works as well and you can summon others into your game.
5. You can put your dueling sign down / interact with the dueling sign. This is for people who wish to participate in player vs player.
6. You can invade other people's worlds / be invaded. This only happens if you have summoned a helper or are using an item which allows this mechanic to be used solo. When you are invaded, other players can automatically be brought in as hunters to help vanquish the invader.
I'm not a fan of twitchy competitive games, but I get a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction with cooperative ones. Elden Ring and the rest of the "Souls" series very much scratch that itch.
We still get our fair share of season passes and day one DLCs, so it's not total immunity.
people will continue to get frustrated, thanks in part of the game's shortcomings. but it is no longer possible to let your team know how you feel about it. take it as you may, it was pretty nice while it lasted.
EDIT: typo meant non-competitive co-op
If winning is on the line, it doesn't matter who the opponent is.
They spent months and months and months nerfing equipment (that was being used because basic game mechanics like armor penetration and damage models were explicitly broken) and making changes that intentionally or otherwise made the game much harder, all while literal employees of the company bullied players asking for an enjoyable game in their public discord, telling players that the BUGS they were suffering from, including weapons not working the way they were supposed to, and including the spawning behavior being utterly broken and spawning many times more enemies than it should was A SKILL ISSUE
ArrowHead's culture itself was so "sweaty" and "tryhard" and destructive that it resulted in a change of the CEO and a restructuring of the department that interacted with players including banning at least one employee from the public discord for his hostile behavior. They had to completely change their development strategy and release cadence to address these issues, with significant public "mea culpa"s promising to make the game more fun for normal people. It even worked, with the game seeing an influx of new and returning players after a year of constant reduction in player count.
This is a game where playing on higher difficulty levels is REQUIRED to unlock most of the content you cannot buy with the "real money" in game currency.
So helldivers 2 is actually a great example of how god awful and toxic the "tryhards" in online gaming are. It was literally corroding one of the best and most refreshing new games to come out in a long time, from a company who has historically done a wonderful job making games that are all about chaotic fun and lighthearted cooperation, like Magika.
They are god awful at programming though. Also don't seem to have reliable and well managed change control, since they seem to have no clue what releases any time they update.
Another great example was the Dark Souls debacle about adding an easy mode. These games are known for being hard (imo often with fake and bullshit difficulty like a dragon's fire breath literally going through a wall to kill you), but the devs wanted the game to be more accesible and there was LOUD outcry about allowing people to play the game easier would "ruin!!!!" the game.... somehow. This was a single player game that was perfectly playable with near zero online interaction. They explicitly were upset that other people may have fun.
I don't think I've ever seen a game company ever manage to put 100% of their changes in a CHANGELOG.
FromSoftware games like to put in cheese border-line bullshit mechanics to make you feel good when you overcome them, even if you have to cheese them yourself. They knew everybody was going to cheese regardless of the difficulty they just made a round-about way of making you feel like it was okay.
Some people like competitiveness in games, and like difficult games, and thats okay if you do or don't. Games need to find a product-market fit just like anything else.
They can be as competitive or as casual as you like, are "soft-multiplayer", essentially single player inside a multiplayer economy, and the better ones are non-p2w.
I've mostly stopped playing online games besides more chill/sandboxy ones, like Lethal Company, and those I play exclusively with friends.