Stopped playing multiplayer games when they stopped being about fun. I hate everything being a competition or a race to the finish line to get to the next grindy shitwaste of time. I'm here to have fun, not help you get epic loot as fast as possible.
I play MOBAs and there's a fun mode: ARAM (all random all mid). I'm not even doing that badly and I'll get flamed every now and again. Typically it's from people that don't understand their own role. Sometimes we'll wind up winning and I'll say gg and they'll tell me to kill myself. I'm like geez man, it's just a game
Competitive is fun for many of us, and being on a team with someone ignoring the objective isn't. Ranked/casual split sometimes helps but not often. I miss the old days of self-hosted servers when you could find a place that fit your vibe.
Competition can be fun. Though competition against a bunch of teens who do nothing but play after school is terrible. Having vs competition be the entire game sucks, because it's one note. It's gogogogogo why are you walking five feet away from my plan!?
Fuck that. Fuck off with your objective nannying. I want to have fun.
Lmao. Check the recent videos about that exact toxicity growing in the community there too.
When any multiplayer game gets sufficiently popular the absolute worst scumbags seem to come out of the woodwork to play. Helldivers 2 was much better when people had a hard time getting in and only the patient (or assholes that didn't log out) were playing.
I'm going to mention a curse word here, but I even watched that happen with star citizen. The community was really great for a long time, then it got more stable and more playable as a typical game and the toxicity started growing and growing. People suck. :(
Yeah true. Some communities are better about this than others, but even so they rush through things too much for my taste. In ESO for example, they're a lot more chill in the non-veteran dungeons, but still you're racing through it, not reading any of the texts or listening to the dialog, as if you've got a plane to catch.
There's enough racing around irl that I don't care to do that in games.
When multiplayer games want you to feel normal for winning in the game. Bad for not unlocking everything. Good only when you buy something from the store for more real money.
Incidentally, this is how I play Overwatch. There's something so satisfying about explicitly not being able to directly communicate and having to use the built in chat and ping system.
Plus, abusive assholes can't spew toxicity at you when you're losing.
On a tangent, how do so many people not understand that if you're playing in a lobby that's appropriate to your skill you're going to lose half of your games? There's always that one asshole who can't ever lose or he word vomits all over his team.
You can't blame someone else's incompetence for your failure in single player games.
Unless it's one of those "hold the flashlight while bronze tier NPC with gun misses 90% of shots" sequences, which is way too common in early 2010s games. Damn you, Alan Wake.
I stopped playing mutliplayer games as the ones I played were very reductive in the end.
I stopped playing solo games, mainly Minecraft and Factorio, because I cycle between happy and depressed and if depressed the solo games would enable me to wallow in depression to the point I am not eating or cleaning myself but I’ll walk 6 hours in MC to find carrot seeds.
I used to like multiplayer a lot more than I do now and there are two main reasons why I don't like it very much anymore:
The games themselves all use developer owned servers that are not moderated except by hard coded rules handled by the software. It's not good enough to get rid of actual problem players and can be exploited to make things even worse by those same problem players.
All I ever hear coming through the mic are sexist, racist and homophobic comments from children who's voices are like nails on a chalkboard.
These days my primary multiplayer game is Elden Ring. No chat system (except on PS5 for some reason) and all I do is invade people to act like a mini boss.
I saw dunky playing that the other day and I'm kinda interested. But I couldn't tell if it was like tarkov with pvp or if it is solely pve. If it's just PvE: I want it. It looks visually like if Star Wars and Terminator were in the same universe.
I understand the "lonely" feeling, it's why I love single player games that have NPC parties, or NPCs in some form living about. As minimal as it is, even the NPCs in enshrouded add just enough life to make it not totally lonely. I was never a fan of the games where you're the only living thing that isn't an enemy or animal.