I'm a masochist for still playing Guild Wars 2
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I dropped it after part 1 of the wizard's tower expansion. The first zone felt like a solid farewell to the game.
I looked at the Janthir wilds trailer and saw all the story characters were replaced with literal who women, and the spear animations had characters using them one handed. I had zero urge to return after that.
Story has been saturday-morning cartoon garbage since first game, and pioneered superwoke since at least 2nd expansion. I only play it for the almost-bloated gameplay.
Spears are fine gameplay, but everything from SOTO and Janthir points to them winding down the game. Recycled assets, 1 old mount revamped per expansion, spears being an existing underwater weapon, unfinished launches and seasonal releases. Don't forget bugs existing since at least first expansion, and powercreep contrasting with the game direction at launch. This leaves pvp, small-scale wvw, and newest CM content having any sort of challenge; open-world I just avoid because its piss-easy or the players are new-gen gamers running low-damage gear/builds; some of the most egregious anti-gatekeepers in all PC gaming since 2017.
For someone who hasn't really touched social gaming in a long time, can you explain what's up with that?
It's hard for me to put this in a short response. Gaming as a hobby is more mainstream than it was 3 decades ago, and our general culture has gotten softer. There's always been the Eternal September effect, where pioneers in an area of life have said thing experience rapid growth of newcomers. Overwhelmed by sheer numbers, they aren't able to acculturate the masses with healthy norms that ensured the success of said thing or community in the first place. With games in particular, monetization shifted towards post-purchase micro transactions, so devs put more resources into retaining a lowest common denominator playerbase, oftentimes with whales. This coincides with the general cultural shift of expecting competency (or in-group compatibility) towards unqualified inclusivity, even when said inclusivity weakens a hobby or makes it dangerous (ex: skiing and snowboarding at a popular resort). This effects singleplayer and multiplayer games, like Total Warhammer removing what little campaign logistical depth there was.
Multiplayer games in particular shifted away from the high-skill, always alert Quake/Unreal. Battle Royales (disclaimer: I've play them for 40 hours at most) are the prime competitive example, where one can relax and mess around. But a player struggling to win can blame their teamates or random item spawns instead of their own lack of skill and coordination. MMORPGs forever changed with the massive success of WoW which, despite being skillful game, was a casualification of earlier MMOs; this got much worse past the 2nd expansion. I'll explain further down.
Just looking at the Guild Wars franchise alone, the first and second game are stark contrasts. GW1 is basically a party RPG with shared lobbies, and GW2 a regular themepark MMO. The first punishes you if you try to level without any thought put into your skill selection and traits, and required you to find other players to progress missions, or rely on AI henchmen. The game did change with expansions introducing heroes to make other players unneeded (this had to be done as content grew and playerbase shrunk), while certain infamous missions like Thunderhead Keep got nerfed.
The second game targeted the wider MMO audience and changed industry trends. Starting off, they neutered any leveling or open-world that they were afraid scared off enough casual gamers from other new MMOs. IIRC during the beta, there was a trio of Ettins guarding a hero point (needed to make character stronger before reaching level cap) that stunned players (each would telegraph their attack sequentially) that didn't dodge or block, leaving piles of player corpses. Stuff like that had to go to maintain a soft leveling experience. There's actual skill and creativity in the game mechanics and buildcrafting, but most the time it wasn't needed, leaving a large gap between launch content and intro endgame, in addition to an equivalent gap and good players doing the rare slices of challenging content.
With the advent of political correctness, cultural Marxism, and similar coincides with the above to have a multiplayer and MMO scene to replace the declining past-time of watching network television. Whether it's Bob who instead of plopping down on the couch to watch Jerry Springer, picks up the latest game to not talk to anybody or learn mechanics, if the game has them. Or it's Jeff, who instead of watching the latest sportsball game with his buddies heads to a multiplayer game to bad unskilled while downing a few beers and having a grand ol' time with other online folk. This creates a giant vacuum to be filled activists, hall-monitors, or opportunistic devs can be 'anti-gatekeeping' gatekeepers, who then cultivate what I call a gaming underclass to steadily build-up and be exploited. The hidden costs of this dysfunctional social structure accumulate until playerbases of games result in swathes of shit, whether it's the mishandled toxic players, a lopsided skill distrubition, and an over-representation of what Javier Milei deems shit-leftists. It wasn't nearly this bad in 2005.
I guess the part which confused me the most was where you talked about people running low damage builds. I was picturing people deliberately building low damage specs for some reason, but you were just talking about people who don't know enough about the game to actually bother learning how things work?
It's funny to me, because I actually held the world record for top dps in WoW:TBC, but after that I spent years playing with many different types of players to try and understand why some people exceed while others struggle, because I didn't think my innate abilities were THAT much greater than others. My conclusion is that it's largely about priorities, which you seem to have also noticed. Some people had good priorities, such as family taking their time and attention, but many more seemed to simply not try, because they told themselves they weren't good enough for one reason or another. The one that sticks out in my head was a particularly talented girl who was convinced that her hands were too small to reach all the hotkeys.
All that aside though, there is another dynamic I've noticed which plays a significant role in how and why gaming has become what it is: People have been wasting entirely too much time with it. I believe quite strongly that much of our problems today stem from talented people spending their time playing games rather than engaging in the other roles important to the continuing function of society. Now, no small part of that can be attributed to how our society currently functions, in my mind, where the demands imposed upon people who seek to perform such important roles have become immensely more onerous at the same time as entertainment media has become much more engaging. Yet still, we do need those who are able to actually take on these challenges if we intend for our civilization to survive the turn of the age.
Frankly, for as many bad actors that take advantage of our state of affairs to push their own short sighted agendas, I can also see much reason for good people to feel disdain towards those who decline to participate in more important matters because they're occupied with games. So while I definitely can agree with how terrible this state of affairs is for gaming, and I do believe rather strongly that it has a greater negative impact upon society as a whole than what is reasonable, I think that people need to recognize that gaming should not be a way of life for those who are actually capable of serving society in a greater capacity. Recent generations have grown up with the mentality that technological automation will "free" us to spend our time however we choose, yet that is not how things have worked out in actual practice. Instead we have just seen a mass abdication of social responsibility leading to opening up doors for anyone with a motive to seek power in the vacuums which now exist, and wicked who can not rest lest they be set upon by good people who take exception to their depravity are gobbling up all the opportunity.