Current Events > Do any games still have good playerbases?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I keep thinking about this.
Earlier, I caught myself entertaining the idea of looking more into OSRS. Briefly wanting to buy into the idea that it was some nostalgia portal to a time when people playing online games seemed a lot less cynical.

I really miss games having good communities. Nowadays It's like the same few internet personalities copied across every game. Same comebacks, same references, nothing zany or memorable. It puts a huge damper on multiplayer knowing you have so little to look forward to in terms of interactions. Even single player games are much less fun to talk about.

Do you ever encounter any playerbases that still feel like they have their own identity?
It feels like the closest you can get is to play an old game with a small, dedicated community. To me, that's not the same.

Starcraft

Donkey Kong

FFXIV has a reputation for having a fairly laid back and positive community.

Atralis posted...

FFXIV has a reputation for having a fairly laid back and positive community.

have to be careful which server you pick but yeah

Atralis posted...

FFXIV has a reputation for having a fairly laid back and positive community.

I'm extremely hesitant to take the MMO plunge again.

But if that's true, how did they do it? How did they resist the twitch/twitter speak getting in and taking over?

Deep Rock Galactic. The randoms you play with in that game are impossibly nice. You have so many potential ways to fuck with someone in that game just in terms of killing or hurting them, nvm the ways you can fuck with objectives or their ammo/resources too. Yet no one does it. I can remember being killed by friendly fire once which was an accident and the guy was super apologetic about it. No one gives anyone shit if they suck or potentially bring down the mission.

It's like somehow populated by well adjusted adults looking to have fun playing vidya and no one else or something.

Don't know if microphones are popular on PC, but Fallout 76 is overall a pretty friendly and welcoming community. I played on PS4, but for every player that tried to initiate unwanted PvP, there were 20 that would just drop random free stuff they didn't want for others to take.

OSRS has a decent community compared to some other MMOs. It's definitely worth playing if you have enough free time for it.

I feel runescape is very cathartic and relaxing. It's like millennial mahjong. Just relax and fish/woodcut/firemake etc

no, no

Turbam posted...

Donkey Kong

well, yes

I don't really play online very much anymore but this topic made me think of an old game I used to play in highschool. It's called ogame and damn it was amazing. Just looked it up and it's still there... Don't know what it's like now but I used to play it all the time.

Guild Wars presumably still has the best community.

No, you would need to find specific online sub communities or depending on the type of game, find its local scene.

Most gacha games have really supportive and friendly communities because they're all desperate for more players

Tyranthraxus posted...

Most gacha games have really supportive and friendly communities because they're all desperate for more players

Most of the long term ones end up super toxic.

ellis123 posted...

Most of the long term ones end up super toxic.

The really popular ones like FGO or Genshin yeah. You gotta aim for mid tier stuff.

Tyranthraxus posted...

The really popular ones like FGO or Genshin yeah. You gotta aim for mid tier stuff.

Even mid tier ones get toxic. It's only the blue moon ones that end up not having something that fractures the community from the devs that end up not toxic.

warhammer. i've never played it, but talking to warhammer bros is like stepping into another reality.
there's so much fucking lore and so many references and shit and it's like the real world doesn't exist when they're talking warhammer. tikwhat? youwho? nah. blood for the blood god. skulls for the skull throne!

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Nope.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

I'm extremely hesitant to take the MMO plunge again.

But if that's true, how did they do it? How did they resist the twitch/twitter speak getting in and taking over?

With a fairly strict ToS designed to stop insults and also a game design that makes grouping up super easy and not strictly require verbal interaction for the general content. Also the way the dev team interacts with the community also most assuredly has an impact as well.

Also obligatory:

Have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward and Stormblood expansions up to level 70 for free with no restrictions on playtime. Xbox beta starting soon.

Pikmin

LinkDaLunatic posted...

warhammer. i've never played it, but talking to warhammer bros is like stepping into another reality.
there's so much fucking lore and so many references and shit and it's like the real world doesn't exist when they're talking warhammer. tikwhat? youwho? nah. blood for the blood god. skulls for the skull throne!

Some of them do seem very into what they're doing. Problem is I've had a few conversations with that kind of person but they've never made it sound interesting. It's always something about 4 big deities, chaos guys, eternal war and heavily spending on figurines and paint.

At times, it sort of looks like the old stereotype for DND/Star Trek/WoW but I do see enough casual discussion to know it's far more accepted than that.

Enclave posted...

With a fairly strict ToS designed to stop insults and also a game design that makes grouping up super easy and not strictly require verbal interaction for the general content. Also the way the dev team interacts with the community also most assuredly has an impact as well.

Also obligatory:

Have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward and Stormblood expansions up to level 70 for free with no restrictions on playtime. Xbox beta starting soon.

Does it have any personality though?
I'm not really complaining about vulgarity. I'm complaining about how I literally keep running into the same personalities.
I could start a bingo card. "His only joke is putting gaming on the end of names." "Has lmao as a verbal tick." "Automatically says skill issue or git gud in response to people innocuously discussing balance."

With online games, you're relying on the playerbase to make your time spent interesting, so I like a bit of dumb spontaneity. Stuff like Halo 3, old TF2 and Runescape felt different. You could have run ins with all kinds of characters. I always liked that thing where you'd be in a game with two people who became enemies in about a minute, but then over a few games gradually cooled off and became friends.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Most gacha games have really supportive and friendly communities because they're all desperate for more players

I have no interest in these games, but I always wonder what kind of person exactly gets stuck into them.
It's a cross between gambling and generic copy/paste waifu characters. It's hardly escapism, tedium followed by probably getting screwed over by luck. It sounds like a digital island of lost souls.
Doesn't seem likely that the following would be a wellspring of fun and creativity.

Carljank posted...

Starcraft

Hehe..

Trickfinger posted...

Nope.

Smash

Verdun - Tannenburg - Isonzo.

They are all WWI shooters.
The player base is relatively small.
But WWI games are so niche that it really only attracts a certain sort.
Apparently, dumbasses are not attracted to PTSD / Shell Shock Simulators.

It's basically like a gentleman FPS.

Dragons Dogma has the best community I've ever witnessed.

Halo 3 community is worse than it ever has been imo. Cheaters and trolls everywhere.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

I have no interest in these games, but I always wonder what kind of person exactly gets stuck into them.
It's a cross between gambling and generic copy/paste waifu characters. It's hardly escapism, tedium followed by probably getting screwed over by luck. It sounds like a digital island of lost souls.
Doesn't seem likely that the following would be a wellspring of fun and creativity.

The following is mostly people figuring out how to do things without spending money. You can go into nearly any gacha community and post your rolls and say stuff like "what's the best team I can make out of this" and you'll get tons of helpful input. Whales provide the empirical data and the rest of the community figures out how to make the best substitutions through theory crafting.

They're community driven games, even in pve games like arknights if you approach it from a perspective of an online only single player game with MTX you probably won't have any fun. If you like to engage with communities and discuss strategy or developing story/plot then it's got a much broader appeal.

And yeah most of these games are trash anyway even if you engage with a community because either the story sucks or the gameplay sucks or both. But if you ask around veterans based on what you're looking for you can get some good recommendations.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

With online games, you're relying on the playerbase to make your time spent interesting, so I like a bit of dumb spontaneity. Stuff like Halo 3, old TF2 and Runescape felt different. You could have run ins with all kinds of characters. I always liked that thing where you'd be in a game with two people who became enemies in about a minute, but then over a few games gradually cooled off and became friends.

Unlike most MMOs FFXIV actually has a fantastic story, there's literally people who treat it like a single player game and only interact with other humans when they have to.

Tyranthraxus posted...

The following is mostly people figuring out how to do things without spending money. You can go into nearly any gacha community and post your rolls and say stuff like "what's the best team I can make out of this" and you'll get tons of helpful input. Whales provide the empirical data and the rest of the community figures out how to make the best substitutions through theory crafting.

I've sort of been through this.
It was Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2. There's this figure battle minigame it wants you to grind through. Apparently on console it's a full on gacha, you can exchange real money for medals. I was on PC though so I was stuck repeatedly demolishing Supervillain Broly or collecting dragon balls for ages.
Once I got a serviceable strat up and running it was kind of cathartic but by the end I was really just glad it was all over.

Tyranthraxus posted...

They're community driven games, even in pve games like arknights if you approach it from a perspective of an online only single player game with MTX you probably won't have any fun. If you like to engage with communities and discuss strategy or developing story/plot then it's got a much broader appeal.

And yeah most of these games are trash anyway even if you engage with a community because either the story sucks or the gameplay sucks or both. But if you ask around veterans based on what you're looking for you can get some good recommendations.

What even is a gacha veteran though? Someone who's stuck with the watered down f2p version of a game, watching from afar as the whales get preferential treatment from the devs?
Something feels off about one of the big attractions being posting the results of your latest spree.
TF2 had to add strange weapons to make people okay with bad lootbox hauls, with these it sounds like people console themselves by posting about it and enjoying the attention briefly.

And there's no personality in that. "Here's my list. Here's the scraps the game gave me to goad me into spending. I am continuing to play and spread word of this kind of predatory game, but I'm not spending which means I'm ultimately getting one over on the devs."
Even if you get something good, you can only take so much credit for it. Sure you grinded for the materials but it came down to luck.
It's almost like speedrunners joylessly and repeatedly throwing themselves at the same game, only able to hope that this'll be the run where Drill Man just walks side to side instead of tunnelling underground three times in a row.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

What even is a gacha veteran though?

It's just someone who has played a lot of them and can generally tell when something is bullshit or not. For example if a game is constantly opening new servers that's a major red flag that people new to the genre wouldn't necessarily know about.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

And there's no personality in that. "Here's my list. Here's the scraps the game gave me to goad me into spending. I am continuing to play and spread word of this kind of predatory game, but I'm not spending which means I'm ultimately getting one over on the devs."
Even if you get something good, you can only take so much credit for it. Sure you grinded for the materials but it came down to luck.
It's almost like speedrunners joylessly and repeatedly throwing themselves at the same game, only able to hope that this'll be the run where Drill Man just walks side to side instead of tunnelling underground three times in a row.

That's definitely the philosophy of some of them (like Diablo) but not all of them. Most games I'd say let you do everything with crap units/gear. The big rewards come from the leaderboards which you were never going to place in if you weren't a whale or extreme no lifer anyway. And communities do like to show off doing challenges with horrible units/gear. Like beating some superboss using only 1 units.

The community is the game. Without it you're going to be left with a mediocre game that might have a good story at best. So the communities try to be as welcoming as possible. A healthy and happy community means a better game.

Tyranthraxus posted...

That's definitely the philosophy of some of them (like Diablo) but not all of them. Most games I'd say let you do everything with crap units/gear. The big rewards come from the leaderboards which you were never going to place in if you weren't a whale or extreme no lifer anyway. And communities do like to show off doing challenges with horrible units/gear. Like beating some superboss using only 1 units.

If I did that, I'd just feel like I'd created propaganda in defence of the worst aspects of the game. "Look, it IS possible! The long tedious grind isn't worth quitting over!"
The story I always hear is that these games start off heaping rewards and dopamine on to you, you play for a while and your progress begins to plateau. From there the onus is on you to resist spending and come up with zany new ways to keep the games interesting. I wouldn't want a game that's designed to get boring.

Tyranthraxus posted...

The community is the game. Without it you're going to be left with a mediocre game that might have a good story at best. So the communities try to be as welcoming as possible. A healthy and happy community means a better game.

You mean like people concede the games are meh but like to use them as a social hub to talk about... The very game they admit sucks?
Why use this as the foundation for a community in the first place? Something to do with addiction?

Deep Rock Galactic is probably the best gaming community I've ever encountered. Everybody playing is just having a good time. I don't think I've ever ran into too many players that ruined a session with grieving or too much of breaking the unspoken rules of the game. Everyone just memes around and even in the most challenging of situations people will stop what they're doing just to let everyone else know how rich they are.

you can probably find a guild in Elder Scrolls Online for what you want.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

If I did that, I'd just feel like I'd created propaganda in defence of the worst aspects of the game. "Look, it IS possible! The long tedious grind isn't worth quitting over!"
The story I always hear is that these games start off heaping rewards and dopamine on to you, you play for a while and your progress begins to plateau. From there the onus is on you to resist spending and come up with zany new ways to keep the games interesting. I wouldn't want a game that's designed to get boring.

No I'm saying basically the opposite. Find a way to do things with what you have now instead of grinding. Or alternatively play a game that doesn't even have grinding in the first place. There's lots of games where as soon as you get a new shiny thing it can be maxed out in just a few minutes because the focus is on composition and strategy and not time gates or pay walls.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

You mean like people concede the games are meh but like to use them as a social hub to talk about... The very game they admit sucks?
Why use this as the foundation for a community in the first place? Something to do with addiction?

Depends on the game / person.

Maybe someone really likes the story even if the game is mediocre. Maybe the game is fucking fantastic but they're poor and can't afford a console or mtx and all they have is a shitty phone but the game and discord community is free. Or maybe the game has some kind of appeal to nostalgia like Fire Emblem.

Tyranthraxus posted...

No I'm saying basically the opposite. Find a way to do things with what you have now instead of grinding. Or alternatively play a game that doesn't even have grinding in the first place. There's lots of games where as soon as you get a new shiny thing it can be maxed out in just a few minutes because the focus is on composition and strategy and not time gates or pay walls.

Is that fun?
I was pretty quick to hit reset on a Binding of Isaac run if the first two floors are no good. There were times you couldn't pay me to continue a run that tried to give me a bad active item early or curse of the maze/lost on a large floor.

This really sounds like making excuses on the game's behalf while turning a blind eye to the whales who're probably enjoying the game in their own warped way. Like getting a bad Isaac run almost every time and going "Haha I'm excited to do things the tedious way in this game that really just wishes I'd hurry up and capitulate to the microtransactions."
Except Isaac didn't have microtransactions so it felt more like it was just unforgiving rather than trying to exploit me.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Depends on the game / person.

Maybe someone really likes the story even if the game is mediocre. Maybe the game is f***ing fantastic but they're poor and can't afford a console or mtx and all they have is a s***ty phone but the game and discord community is free. Or maybe the game has some kind of appeal to nostalgia like Fire Emblem.

Story's an even weirder excuse to stick with a game like that. I sort of understand though, I really liked Xenoblade 1's story but had to accept that the game just wasn't replay-friendly after trying to come up with ways to rejuvenate it for over a year.

I feel like if the game was free and the playerbase was mostly discord users, that would be a very bad sign. Discord in my experience was mostly whatever's trendy getting reposted, people self-advertising and a big fascination with reaction repetitive images/gifs. That's the sort of thing I'd like to avoid.

As for nostalgia, I definitely get that. When I think of nostalgia I think more of the time period and circumstances that games I liked flourished in, something the game's name value can't offer me years after the fact. I don't really understand seeing a franchise you like and giddily following it down the path to microtransactions and addiction because you used to enjoy it.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Is that fun?
I was pretty quick to hit reset on a Binding of Isaac run if the first two floors are no good. There were times you couldn't pay me to continue a run that tried to give me a bad active item early or curse of the maze/lost on a large floor.

This really sounds like making excuses on the game's behalf while turning a blind eye to the whales who're probably enjoying the game in their own warped way. Like getting a bad Isaac run almost every time and going "Haha I'm excited to do things the tedious way in this game that really just wishes I'd hurry up and capitulate to the microtransactions."
Except Isaac didn't have microtransactions so it felt more like it was just unforgiving rather than trying to exploit me.

I mean maybe it's just me but when I play dead cells I always give it my best shot even if the stuff is shit. Dead cells doesn't have as much randomness as Isaac tbf. But I also don't play games that I have to make excuses for. If I download a gacha, the instant I run into something I don't like, I uninstall it. If I can't enjoy a game without spending money or the game requires time like a second job to stay current, I don't play it.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Story's an even weirder excuse to stick with a game like that. I sort of understand though, I really liked Xenoblade 1's story but had to accept that the game just wasn't replay-friendly after trying to come up with ways to rejuvenate it for over a year.

I feel like if the game was free and the playerbase was mostly discord users, that would be a very bad sign. Discord in my experience was mostly whatever's trendy getting reposted, people self-advertising and a big fascination with reaction repetitive images/gifs. That's the sort of thing I'd like to avoid.

As for nostalgia, I definitely get that. When I think of nostalgia I think more of the time period and circumstances that games I liked flourished in, something the game's name value can't offer me years after the fact. I don't really understand seeing a franchise you like and giddily following it down the path to microtransactions and addiction because you used to enjoy it.

Story is a bit different in these games. They're constantly getting new story. In Xenoblade eventually the story is just done and there's nothing more to do. In gachas, it's more like an intermission while waiting for the next story update. You can kind of gauge how good a specific game's story is without playing it by looking at the amount and quality of fan content. If a story is inspiring, it will be reflected in the fandom.

Discords vary wildly in quality for every game, regardless of monetization. Something I've found to easily identify a high quality discord is if the devs of the game are active on it.

Nostalgia by itself though usually can't carry a game. I love Saint Seiya and I've played every single gacha they made for it but they were all terrible and quit each one after a few months once the free shit all wore out. Most of them are offline now.

Tyranthraxus posted...

I mean maybe it's just me but when I play dead cells I always give it my best shot even if the stuff is s***. Dead cells doesn't have as much randomness as Isaac tbf. But I also don't play games that I have to make excuses for. If I download a gacha, the instant I run into something I don't like, I uninstall it. If I can't enjoy a game without spending money or the game requires time like a second job to stay current, I don't play it.

For me it's just boring if the game's not going to give me anything worth using, especially when there's no promise of things getting better as a reward for sticking with it. That's like gambling with time instead of money.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Story is a bit different in these games. They're constantly getting new story. In Xenoblade eventually the story is just done and there's nothing more to do. In gachas, it's more like an intermission while waiting for the next story update. You can kind of gauge how good a specific game's story is without playing it by looking at the amount and quality of fan content. If a story is inspiring, it will be reflected in the fandom.

Oh like an MMO getting expansions? That kind of being pulled into a never ending plot is off-putting to me. I get them doing it to give the playerbase a jumpstart though.
I couldn't rely on popularity and fan works to gauge quality. Whatever's popular gets views and that's what most people are going to flock to. Sometimes you can watch something grow in popularity and start to feel like something different entirely as its growing fanbase tears it to shreds.

It's hard to put what I'm looking for into words. I'm just tired of the monotony of hearing so many people on games talk with the same heavily curated vocabulary and speech patterns.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

It's hard to put what I'm looking for into words. I'm just tired of the monotony of hearing so many people on games talk with the same heavily curated vocabulary and speech patterns.

Try a niche genre then. Generally speaking, the harder a game is, the more engaging the community around it will be. Like Dwarf Fortress.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

I'm extremely hesitant to take the MMO plunge again.

But if that's true, how did they do it? How did they resist the twitch/twitter speak getting in and taking over?

Both the clickbaity streamers and their weird parasocial groupies cluster around a single server or two afaik. i'd have to dig around to find the name again but the ones that Aren't That One are mostly people that keep to themselves

flussence posted...

Both the clickbaity streamers and their weird parasocial groupies cluster around a single server or two afaik. i'd have to dig around to find the name again but the ones that Aren't That One are mostly people that keep to themselves

Oh okay that sounds kind of nice.
Not sure how I feel about an MMO being playable like it's a single player game. It's not like everyone's gonna be closed off like that though.

I'll give this and Deep Rock Galactic a look.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Oh okay that sounds kind of nice.
Not sure how I feel about an MMO being playable like it's a single player game. It's not like everyone's gonna be closed off like that though.

I'll give this and Deep Rock Galactic a look.

Oh, you can still find plenty of human interaction in FFXIV, it's just largely avoidable if you don't want it.

This Deep Rock Galactic game feels familiar and alien at the same time.

My brain keeps going for the Payday 2 comparison.
4 player co-op, run in and grab armfuls of loot and run. Getting swarmed by enemies. Random events changing the maps up each time. Start out terrible but grind until you can make an OP build.

But also they give you 4 dwarves instead of the PD2 characters and it has that thing where you're at the mercy of insane tyrannical hosts that PD2 had. Enemies seem to be a lot more about melee and projectiles while in PD2 it's all hitscan.
Teamkilling and freak accidents seem common too, whereas in Payday 2 you could see it coming from a mile off, you'd see someone join with the Scarface teamkill bazooka in that game.

Steam achievement statistics say 90% of people beat a mission and then the next achievement drops to 57%. Wonder what that means.
Game looks like you need a mic do to well. Maybe that's what's happening.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Game looks like you need a mic do to well. Maybe that's what's happening.

You absolutely do not. You just gotta type the 'r' key every once in a while into chat and that's about it for the communication you'd practically need for a majority of the game. If you can't solve it with the 'r' key in chat, then pointing at and highlighting what you want fills in the rest of the communication gaps. If you can't solve it with those two methods, then just hit the 'v' key until your fingers get tired.