Going through the absolute shit on offer currently it really is remarkable to me how backwards this industry has gotten. Micro-transactions were one thing but it looks like any kind of co-op game is just some god awful grind fest if it's free to play yet that's what the majority of the cons00mer types seem to be playing now.
At least Stardew Valley and Helldivers 2 can be called video games but honestly I tried PoE and it bored me to death not to mention the obvious trash FPS issues it seems to have right at the beginning. I'm going to just check out the Warframe gameplay rather than play it myself.
Even without the enemies having 500000 hitpoints it seems that matchmaking is often garbage in these games at the best of time which immediately gets me having flashbacks to GTA V and I go into a fetal position over that because rockstars matchmaking is truly awful. I don't think I could ever play co-op with people if they just quit halfway through and inevitably the instance ends right there so you're fucked and have to immediately jump to a queue only to have another twat abandon a game right after. So unless you can keep playing with people even after they leave or solo it that means the game is effectively unplayable.
Yep, offline or solo play only for me.
I have noticed that Korean mmos come out of the gate in a pretty decent state
Then some three or four years down the line the updates and new content have managed to fucking ruin everything
Take archeage for example at the start the life skills were super important and you could get a fair amount done just focusing on those because the product was sought after and the labour and land system somewhat restricted supply so the prices were not insane (it was possible to keep your sub up by making an alt in the other region, buying raw materials and then processing them because the processed product was worth more due to the labour system, in other games like runescape and wow buying the raw materials and selling the processed result is usually a loss)
Then with updates they added ways to get character power (gear usually) that did not require the life skills and instead just required endless daily quests and grinding