It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Grats! You leveled up! Do you remember when you would log into the game and grind out that level, and as soon as your XP bar would *ding* you would get a wave of support from the community of fellow gamers around you? What happened to celebrating your achievements and the achievements of others?
Comments
Games become increasingly vertical as time goes by. Elder Scrolls and Path of Exile as good examples.
'Leveling up' replaces content too often.
The last great high for me was I managed to build a carrier in a C1 wormhole in EVE with a high sec exit and a C5 exit.
I built it. Stared at it for a few days. And quit the game. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Doing anything repeatedly again and again...and again just cheapens it. For the same reasons I question anything that makes a MMO easier for any activity, not that such moves are always wrong just that mostly they are not the right thing to do.
"To take part in a virtual world that sets itself apart from the, often tragic and polarized, real world that we all will live in until the machines inevitably create The Matrix."
Gotta watch those machines, keeping an eye on my rig as I type this. But isn't that what we want, a tragic and polarised real world? You can tell that from the way so many films, TV series and books that call themselves entertainment are set in such worlds. Be it in a real or fantasy, past present or future. So settle in to your couch, put on your tragic face and feel that entertaining polarisation.
Dat Dopamine Ding
How dare you? MMOs nowadays are single player games in which you see other players playing alone! :P
In DAOC leveling really slowed down as the cap neared so it wasn't uncommon to see players dinging zone chat and getting congratulated by everyone else, especially from levels 45 to 50.
Of course, if one was a Mid they would type /drums instead because only sissy Albs and Hibs "dinged" like a hotel front desk bell.
Lineage 1 was a real pita, getting to level 50 extremely time consuming (I never made it past level 48)
When someone announced in world chat they reached 50 everyone congratulated them regardless whether they were friend or enemy.
In more modern times, most recently in ESO I recall occasionally announcing to my guild some of the higher dings after 40 or so, definitely when I got to level 50, CP 160 (?) as that was the minimum level most would let join the higher level raid comten.
After that I recall announcing CP 300, 600, and 900.
Sort of similar to what cartoon villain Syndrome said, "if everyone is special, no one is special"
Rarely does one see impressive achievements in game that are not well within their reach own reach with little effort or time involved so there's little fan fare.
Instead the reaction is more like
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
That game still has the best system for gear/grouping/skills. You don't have to be max level to enjoy everything the game has to offer. And some people deliberately stop character before max level just for the extra challenge. I remember a certain 215 tank who was decked out, tanking all content.
It was also practical to shut down some stupid blaming game.
Everquest always holds a special place in my heart. There's still no way to ever complete everything even 20 years later. Well earlier this year, I set out with the goal of completing all 16 classes Epic weapon 1.0 quests. Was pretty tough, lots of waiting, grinding, raiding, and was a great time and it really was something I've wanted to do ever since I was a teen in the wee 2000's. Ive been working on 1.5 epics for the next step and then 2.0 epics eventually.
It happened in ESO when I pursued a very rare antiquities item that takes 17 separate leads and excavations to put together.
You first need to level up antiquities to the point where you can pursue and excavate high level leads you then need to pursue the leads for the location of the individual pieces. Some can drop from dungeon bosses, some are found in the world in rubbish heaps, but they all have a common theme : dwemer constructs.
The end result when you put it all together is a unique dwemer steampunk wolf mount that is animated with occasional steam coming out of some of its joints and has a unique metallic sound when you ride it.
It looks like this:
You don't see many of them in the ESO world. They're rare enough that when two or more happen to be in the same place the riders go out of their way to acknowledge each other's achievement in some casual way.
It felt really good to collect all the pieces and assemble them - that was an achievement that is both entirely personal and purely optional and only those who have achieved it recognize it.
That's the best kind of achievement.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Very neat! I don't think I've even seen one of those.
Only relevant achievements are ones that lock an item/mount/armor behind it and you want them for the reward.
Reading this bit and looking at your avatar, maybe you could ask Bethesda to adjust your mount so that the only joints releasing steam would be located in the mount's backside. With some very unique metallic sounds, of course.
Now that would be an achievement to celebrate!
- hitting 50 in DAOC, that took over a year at least
- taking our first enemy keep in DAOC
- hitting 250 forest digging in Ryzom, that took close to two years
- grinding for months to get my first mount in Vanguard. Only to see them implement a store where you could just buy it. Sigh.
- getting a Warshade to 50 in the old CoH (you had to get another toon to 50 to even start a WS)
------------
2024: 47 years on the Net.
In Runescape I personally getting some kind of achievement almost every day and if there is no broadcast for it I will let the clanmates know only if it is something really interesting.
There are even announcements for whole server or for all players online for some bigger achievements and it's very common that even total strangers congratulates the player in the public chat when they are somewhere around.
Perhaps, up to one's early teen years if male.
amen to that . new word I soloed to max level . as in most mmos now I just solo and get bored because i miss the eq dungeon crawl days . they were so much fun camping spots having a waiting list to join a goblin camp group in high hold pass and you would loot until a piece of bronze fell . the good ole days. now its shitty kids with adhd runnign around just a mess
These are the things that killed the genre, why say hello, why say grats when some one in your party get a level up, we did these things because at the time the people around were going to be around for years, you saw the same faces in towns, you got the same enchanters to enchant your stuff, your reparation mattered, what people thought of you mattered, your guild, mattered.
But in todays cluster fuck of gimmicks and social gaming all of that is gone, why care what some idiot in your group says you will probably never see them again, why congratulate some in your group for a ding when they come soo easily and soo frequently you would be saying gratz every five minutes.
At one extreme you have EvE Online where all that mmo stuff still counts but the game's mechanics suck a dick(its my main mmo shh fanboy), and at the other you have WoW, I would literally give my left testicle to any developer that can bring me an mmo that A) wont kill my gfx card (gameplay > visual fidelity) and has those mmo features we have lost over the years.
I think with the constant shove in the casual market direction, the mmo's most of us grew up with, and all the features they had are sadly a thing of the past, or relegated to niche games like EvE.
MMORPGs weren't lost. They changed, like everything else does over time. One either adapts to change or gets left behind. Such is the way of things.
The only other hope for those anchored in that past is that eventually change will come full circle such that MMORPGs are once again as they were decades ago.
Or, one can just play older MMORPGs of which many endure in varied forms.