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Comment by larnon | Hacker News Reader

I started more than 15 years ago and recently got back into it. I would say that game has stagnated a lot more, character numbers may seem like it isn't that low but in reality most people who play it has around 5 accounts which they multibox with. So number of actual people who play it went really down. It is looking bleak for the future, and i can confidently say that it is all CCP's fault (called Fenris Creations now). They started aiming for short term gains and they probably realized themselves long ago it won't last so they started investing in other IP's but they were all mega failures so far.

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Keep an eye out for EVE vanguard, an Eve-related extraction FPS. It might scratch the itch for many who perhaps enjoyed the universe but don't want to (or can't) spend the enormous time to ramp up again.

EVE is on the list with Dwarf Fortress for me. I'm interested in it. I absolutely see the appeal of them, and wish I had played them instead of WoW back when I was 20.

But today? Ain't nobody got time for that.

Dwarf fortress is the “reading a book” of vidya for sure.

But sometimes I personally forget that it’s allowed and enjoyable to just read 20 mins here and there…

As someone who really no life fit and played WoW, Dwarf Fortress, and EVE in my 20s, you didn’t miss much. My most momentous EVE achievement was betraying my online “friends” who had mostly stopped playing, blowing up all their expensive ships for the insurance payout, then like a true space pirate losing all my ill gotten gains playing Space Poker.

EVE (and other MMOs) had their moment and the ideas of MMOs with a persistent lived in world were very cool but the moment for them seems to have sadly passed beyond the horizon for whatever reason. If you had asked me 20 years ago I would have told you MMOs were the future of gaming.

It's worth saying that whatever they call it, GTA: Online is basically an MMO and it's one of the top three most popular game on Earth iirc. In fact I think only Tetris and Minecraft beat it.

Looking at what GTA6 is shaping up to be, and wondering how R* is evolving the online side, I think we might simply have seen MMO's turn into something people our age don't recognize.

30-player lobbies isn't exactly "massively" multiplayer though.

I still can't figure out what the appeal of WoW was, but I'm guessing it was the insanely large community?

As someone who used to have a WoW problem and now and then relapses, it tickles me the same way Cookie Clicker does. It’s nice to see number go up.

Back when I was playing with my friends and the game was a little harder (BC & WotLK), there was a sense of shared accomplishment when overcoming difficult regions and raids.

There was a time when the community was the attraction, although I wouldn't say "the insanely large community", given that at the (for me anyway) best/peak WoW times, your specific community was the server, which was maybe a couple of thousand or so?

Around that sort of time you would encounter known groups/people, e.g. characters that had a reputation as extremely good in PvP etc.

Then along came the cross-realm stuff, and fairly quickly community ceased to matter, you just queue up, play, and move on.

Great for ease of play etc, terrible for community.

(Well, that was how I saw it anyway).

For many, it's an online third space. Cooperating to overcome shared challenges reinforces social ties. The game provides a weekly schedule of activities and new challenges quarterly.

My credentials: I played every expansion (but not every tier) since vanilla with the same group of people. I only stepped away in The War Within after family obligations and time zones got in the way.

Grind addiction aside, the gameplay was legitimately good. PvP was compelling, raiding was compelling, even the grind was pretty fun (especially compared to your usual free-to-play MMO).

It's not WoW, but the thing that kept me playing City of Heroes for longer than I should have was a weekly game night where a group of us would get together and run characters that we only ran on those nights.

When news about the server code leak broke containment and the open servers started I was initially intrigued, but I discovered that playing with randos just wasn't as much fun.

Planning 40 man raids was a part time job. Everyone worked together to grind out materials for potions and stuff and you really had to work together on dungeons to get through them, whether that was acquiring better gear or practicing strategies. The payoff of working on a dungeon for a month and finally clearing a boss was so satisfying. It created real comraderie.

It was a very forgiving and accessible MMO, one that really felt like playing diablo 2 on a persistent multiplayer world. That, and warcraft 3 was released not too long, and the Frozen Throne expansion the year before. So the setting and lore was fresh in people's minds.

I think it was similar to all the early MMO's. They were a platform to create a community in a time where that was hard to do in the real world. Back when I started playing Asheron's Call there were basically two "nerds" on my school of like 1000 students and the town computer club had 5 members. It wasn't like today where you can easily find someone to play DnD or board games with and you couldn't really play video games online. Hell, how many people under 35 knows what the internet chatrooms were?

MMO's let you go online and be social and build communities. WoW did that really well back then. Eventually as things went on, MMO's got more and more tools that let you avoid building those communities. Like the dungeon finder in WoW. I think a lot of MMO's and games in general turned to letting peope get their dopamine fix from increasing numbers through RNG rather than being social.

I know people who stuck around with WoW because of the social communities they build. One of the guilds I was in 20 years ago still meets up in the real world, I know because one of my old friends still plays. I also know people who stuck around because of what is essentially the idle gambling. I became a jock of sorts back around the burning crusade release because I had to put a lot of focus into water polo training. Which meant I didn't do a whole lot "nerdy" stuff for a decade. Once I started doing "nerdy" things again it was easy to find people near me because everyone is a "nerd" these days.

They were a social network before social networks and always available IM and the gameplay provided a reason to be in the game (and therefore available to socialise with) even if you were the first/only one there.

I mean, they also had their own gameplay appeal, but I think the current player pool of WoW+FFXIV+ESO+GW is probably a more accurate reflection of how widespread the appeal of them as pure games is, while the crazy numbers of 00s WoW were about the social network aspect.

There was no MMO like WoW before, that was a big appeal why I started after not doing homework for weeks while playing closed US beta and then later closed EU beta.

Only played casually and like a noob for a few years because I was like 12? and playing on the PC of my big brother.

Eve online holdem? Amazing. Was a banker there for a bit while I was working as a poker dealer IRL at night. Won a fully fitted mom in a game, lost it in another:D

I had a friend who was really into EVE online and showed me about 20 years ago. It felt too much like waiting and spreadsheets for me.

I got into Dwarf Fortress around 2015 and I was hooked. These days it's something I often play together with my son. I love how dynamic and deep it feels. It was such a privilege to get to buy a copy when it finally came to Steam.

I got bronchitis.

if you like the idea of dwarf fortress check out songs of syx. it really scratches that itch for me and is infinitely more accessible

Dwarf Fortress is awesome to come into today, give it a try. I started playing it a year ago and I love it.

My comment included EVE Vanguard. I tried it. As someone who played FPS all his life starting from Quake 1 and Wolfenstein 3D, and all the AA and AAA FPS that came afterwards, EVE Vanguard feels like a money laundering scheme at this point. Nowadays a single person with access to he SOTA AI models and engines like Unreal, can make a much better and polished game in less time. It's gonna be an absolute DoA. The only reasons CCP is still able to operate is the addicts (mostly old men with no other hobby) that has spent thousands upon thousands on their accounts can't let go.

Which console is this exclusive this time

I tried their new "survival" EVE Frontier game - oh boy was that disappointing.

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