@matrix after you get to level 100 with every class and unlock levels 101-120, THAT'S when the real fun starts

@grips @matrix
the story, levels 1 thru max, and 99% of the world is just the tutorial for the REAL fun which is grinding eternally for marginally better equipment while replaying the same encounters where you die if any one of a crowd of people stands in the fire for too long.

But it's just the common wisdom that's like this. I don't know what WoW was like before or after Wrath of the Lich King, but I enjoyed the world. There was an event where one of the prizes was a set of goggles that showed everyone as a beautiful scantily-clad lady, with an unadvertised catch: the invention was to the inventor's taste, so you only saw naked orc women.

The brief Warhammer MMO was fun all the way through with group pvp areas and easy group pve. But MMOs in general suffered from the same problem that all industries still from: blind imitation of big successes, with big investments and requisite big returns, instead of trying for iterative success with moderate investments. It's never "I'll try to make enough money to keep going", but always "I'll borrow enough money to duplicate that 10th-generation idea, skipping all the prior work, and then I'll start making comparable amounts of money RIGHT AWAY oops I ran out of money bye"

The "good part" no longer exists in most of these games. They're ephemeral events built upon the people playing them, you had to have been there when they happened, and now they're gone forever.

@Alex @arc @matrix mmos will die but pso is eternal

@Alex @matrix True, in that vein a lot of the enjoyment is the experience with the community, and compared to 20, 15, even 10 years ago... yeah fuck.

I think there's still value to the story of FFXIV, it's pretty entertaining at a lot of points despite the lows hitting hard, but you can literally just play the game as if it's a single player game, or I dunno watch that shit on YouTube and save 400 hours. At this point the community is basically anime Second Life, existing beyond being a wallflower is engaging in hostile social PVP where you even risk getting your account banned for overstepping boundaries. But otherwise in general, it's very sad how these games made for hundreds of people to be in the world together end up being social deserts where, if they have to party up then it's very reluctantly. And yeah I get it, people are garbage now...