The Hardcore Filter Problem

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Good Morning Folks. This weekend on the AggroChat podcast, Tam brought up a topic that sort of went in a bunch of different directions. The idea basically was a discussion around how he as a game designer, could build a communications system in an MMORPG that encouraged players to interact with each other. We know that forced voice chat does not work, and in the games that have open voice chat… the first thing I do is disable that option. We also know that pushing players of wildly different skill levels into the same content only leads to toxicity. We also know that across the board… MMORPGs are struggling. While Steam only represents a tiny slice of the FFXIV player base… it has seen a 78% drop in players since its all time peak in June of 2024. While again not representative of the totality of the player base… Steam does tend to allow for viewing trends and if it is happening there… it is usually also happening in the larger pool of stand alone client players.

I think one of the challenges of MMORPGs is that they are effectively being driven off a cliff by the most hardcore and as a result vocal player base. Here is a hard truth that we need to understand. If you use gaming forums, reddit, discord, or post about video games on social media… you are already among the most hardcore players in a given fandom. If you are regularly engaging in raid or other challenge content… you are further filtering your bias down to the needle point of the most serious of players, and they cannot survive with only your support. The challenge for developers is that as a whole, the feedback they have been getting is that the content needs to be harder in order to cater to the most dedicated players. However doing so… continues to push things out of bounds for the most casual players to a point where they feel like they can no longer justify that $15 per month in order to log in and do some busy work each day. When you lose casual players… you lose staff and money to make significant improvements to the game.

I think in part, Classic World of Warcraft has been so popular because it hearkens back to an earlier game design ethos. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair are masterpieces of zone design, and in both case… the fights were not actually that challenging. You needed 20%-30% of the raid that had a clue what was going on… and the rest could more or less be populated with warm bodies that were pushing buttons, and also getting to experience content they might not be able to otherwise. I started out as one of those warm bodies, and then eventually over the course of years of raiding developed the skills necessary to lead and function at a high enough level of get recruited into more hardcore groups. The thing is though… the golden age for me were those first raids. We had fun. It was a party atmosphere with comms filled with bad jokes and even worse stories… as we all fail-boated our way through the content to eventually get shiny loot. When these games got super serious focus time… they just stopped being all that enjoyable.

If a game exists in this mode, where it is being driven by the most dedicated players… eventually it starts to shrink in size and with it comes downsizing of the studios. You can look back at all of the games that I used to play fairly seriously… and eventually dipped out of because of cost cutting and lower frequency of content. I played the heck out of Destiny 1 and 2, and got frustrated when they started vaulting content… in part because they did not have the resources to keep updating it. I played the heck out of Rift but eventually bailed because it could not consistently keep a player base interested in the game in order to do much of anything. Wildstar was amazing… but its raid content was way the hell too complicated for most players and the casual content while great… just did not have enough meat on its bones to keep people engaged. Both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV were driven by decade long story arcs… and both began to flounder a bit when they lacked the story chops to keep people coming back for more.

In truth… I shifted my focus away from MMORPGs and began devoting the majority of my time to ARPGs where I could group up with friends if I wanted to… but the majority of my time was spent soloing. Other games have similarly become way more solo focused, like Elder Scrolls Online which churns through regularly story content updates… all of which can be completed in their entirety without the help of other players. We’ve lost this whole era where doing group content was a heck of a lot of fun, and I believe it is in large part because the players driving the narrative are the players craving challenge in their games. This also coincides with the birth of Streamer culture, and the focus on showing off how good you are at games in a public manner. If you are not doing something on the hardest of hardcore difficulty modes… then you are wasting your time… or at least that has become the prevailing public sentiment. However none of this takes into account the fun factor. Players who get their satisfaction by doing the sweatiest content ever… are a minority in the total player pie.

What you don’t hear publicly talked about is the number of players who bounce because they realize that none of the content is actually designed for them. The majority of folks don’t storm out the front door raging about how bad the game is. Instead they simply slip out a side door, cancel their subscription, uninstall the game… and then gravitate towards games that are giving them a better experience for their limited game time. There is a reason why Gacha games have seen this massive rise in popularity over the years, because they really hone in on the feeling of giving the players power… without actually increasing the difficulty terribly much. It is very easy to busily chase a bunch of objectives and feel like you are doing important things… regardless of whether or not the game is largely playing itself. They feel just connected enough so that you know you have friends who are also playing… but unfortunately there is no real meaningful multiplayer experiences.

I feel like for the most part Guild Wars 2 has done a pretty good job of catering content correctly, however there are still numerous cases where they drank the hardcore Kool-Aid and it shows. With the most recently expansion Janthir Wilds, they introduced a zone meta that is quite honestly… not capable of being completed without a large number of ringers in zone participating. As a result it is pretty rare that you actually find a group doing it, and succeeding at it. Similarly Dragon’s End to this day still fails more often than not. Contrast this with old classics like Tequatl, Octovine, or Chak Gerent that pretty much succeed damned near 100% of the time… and have full zones of players showing up every time they are run. The events that are being completed are just better designed, and it does not matter how much the “hardcores” turn their nose up at them… the participation proves it. People will come out of the woodwork for something that is chill, fun, and rewarding… and honestly does not ask that much of them.

Ultimately my theory is that MMORPGs have been struggling and shrinking… because they have been listening to the wrong voices. They lost sight of the inclusive content design that made their best zones great… and have leaned into chasing and ever shrinking piece of the player-base. World of Warcraft was a game changer. The number of people that I knew that had never really played another game seriously before that… was pretty freaking massive. However as the content kept getting more and more finely focused… the folks who did it for fun and did not have the time to devote to all of the prep work… quietly faded away. Essentially there are two paths to take… either you make it so that class design exists in a way that the difference between the most hardcore player and the most brain dead casual is about 10% efficiency… or you make the content designed in a way that you only need about 20% of the player base to be really paying attention to complete it. The best content tends to follow that second path. I am not saying do not put the double mythic extra plus hardcore content into your game… but make it for bragging rights only, and in no way connected to the flow of necessarily content.

Granted take everything I just said with a grain of salt. The fact that I have a gaming blog… already puts me on the narrow end of the “cares about games” spectrum. However I am very much a burnt out ex-raider who used to take this shit super seriously… until I realized that I would just be happier if I did not give a fuck about passing arbitrary skill checks in the games that I am playing. I mostly play ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch, where I only have to care about myself and my actions in order to complete them, and that reset on a regular enough basis that I can ignore a season/league if my devotion is elsewhere. That said… the whole conversation this weekend… did make me miss those glory days of raiding and a lot of the nonsense that used to happen on voice chat. To some extent I am getting some of this back with my small group shenanigans in Guild Wars 2, and I hope maybe we gather enough mass to be able to do some strikes at some point. I miss us progressing through Binding Coil in FFXIV and quite honestly… that was the last time when raiding with a large-ish group of people was super enjoyable for me. I had a blast learning the Arcadion with the release of Dawntrail, but that was pretty short lived.

Mostly I think we would be better of if games were designed to allow more casual players… to ride all the rides. I think the bar for entry for a lot of content has just gotten too high in order to keep the masses engaged anymore. That is the problem with the MMORPG design model… you need everyone bought in for them to succeed. We’ve spent the last decade filtering out who can reasonably play them… and they are going to keep shrinking unless that line of thinking changes. I say this as someone who has only one foot left in the genre… and could probably happily cancel the few subscriptions I have remaining without seriously impacting my enjoyment. If I am almost out the door… someone who is already well into the more serious end of the community… you’ve got problems.

AggroChat #531 – Commodore Is Back?

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We are down a Kodra this week but assembled a surprisingly long list of topics. First off Bel discusses the return of Commodore and the new product being released. Blaugust is coming up soon, and Bel is not running it this year. Tam shares the tribulations of trying to upgrade a PC right now, and the expense of hardware. Ash is finally back on the Final Fantasy XVI trai,n and it is really good.  Donkey Kong Bananza is pretty great…  but completely unintelligible. BPL or Badger Private League is a thing in Path of Exile and watching people participate is wild.  Guild Wars 2 announced the Visions of Eternity expansion and we talk a bit about the upcoming features.  Finally, Tam dives into a topic about how you get players to actually communicate with each other in games…  and we brainstorm ways to make those interactions happen.

Topics Discussed:

  • Commodore is Back
  • Blaugust is Coming
  • Upgrading a PC Sucks Right Now
  • Final Fantasy 16 Is Great
  • Donkey Kong Bananza
  • BPL in Path of Exile is Wild
  • Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity
  • Communicating With Other Players

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Relaxing Rifting

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Good Morning Folks. Last night was another return to normalcy. We had been on a stint of doing Thursday night Guild Wars 2 nonsense, and I had tagged out for a few weeks for obvious reasons. We did not do a ton of stuff, but ran the daily fractal which also doubled for the weekly, and then did a bunch of Rift hunts in Lowland Shore. Me talking about it in my blog yesterday apparently prompted the rest of the crew to do some of that since they had never really chained them. So we mostly just had this really chill night of going to the next rift and sitting on discord and chatting for a few hours. We normally stop earlier than we did last night, which I think is evidence of the relaxing vibes we had going on. I was yawning super freaking hard by the time we wrapped up and pretty much logged from voice and went straight to bed. I needed a night like that.

Over in Path of Exile I knocked out four more achievements for the league challenges and upgraded my sad little totem pole a bit. If you are not to this point yet in the league… I highly suggest you rathole corrupted, mirrored, influenced, and fractured items because you are going to need them for the Equipped Elites challenge. The other really easy one is to fully equip a mercenary in unique items. For Elated Exaltation I found that normal Exalt, Tainted, Eldritch, Shaper, Elder, Redeemer, and Warlord exalts were the cheapest options. In truth if you are planning ahead and don’t actually need to use these for crafting purposes… you can use this to complete any holes you have in influenced gear for the mercenary equipment achievement. Scarabs were pretty straight forward and swapping to my tanky single target bossing merc, was in fact what I needed to go ahead and finish up Pinnacles Paired keeping them alive when I downed Cortex. It also does not hurt that my damage output is way higher than it was when I took down the rest of the pinnacles with a merc.

As far as other things… I am still alternating between mapping and mining and have yet to find the damned hideout in Primordial Blocks. Every time I have seen it up for sale on TFT they have wanted 10 Divines to buy a portal… and I just cannot bring myself to spend that much on a stupid hideout. As the league runs on I might get more desperate. If I ever do find it on my own… I will absolutely shout out to the global I hang out in and give away portals to anyone who might want one because I am not hyper capitalist. I really want to swap things up a bit and run another map, because like I have said before… I don’t actually like the layout or boss for Primordial Blocks, I just want the hideout. I do however want to try and find a different Striker with a better setup. I love that I am getting Fortification stacks, but I really would like to have him generating some useful aura in addition to being a endurance charge bot.

I am thinking more and more seriously about the whole streaming thing, and might try a quick foray into that over the weekend. I spent a bit of time creating some necessary screens for like going AFK and swapping games, so that is at least some semblance of forward momentum. I need to spend some time updating my Twitch channel, because all of the info is very outdated at this point. Like my gear section still shows that I had a 980… which is 3 graphic cards ago because I went from that to a 1080 ti to eventually the 3080 that I have currently. At some point I want to burn down my setup upstairs and get consoles back up and running so that they can be streamed. In truth the only console that I have set up currently is my Switch 2 downstairs. At some point I want to get the loft setup with consoles again, but I have no clue how I am going to figure out how to record that. That is a problem for another day. Mostly just wanted to say that I am still moving forward potentially on starting streaming again, just so that I feel less alone while I am doing single player nonsense.

As far as everything else in my life… I had my first counseling session yesterday and it went pretty well. I get four more of these and for the most part this will be occurring every Thursday for awhile. It helped to have a professional validate some of the things I was going through as being perfectly normal. Even the soft hallucinations are normal. She described them as sort of a phantom limb pain thing, that my brain is just getting adjusted to my wife not being there and that it was not a sign of anything more concerning. I feel better just having someone echo back feedback that I had already heard from friends. I took the day off today because I am going up to move her stuff out of her classroom, so that is going to be rough. However her teacher friends are mostly going to be the ones packing up the room for me, and I will just be coming up to truck things back. In theory I am going to come back to the house and haul some stuff out of the garage that needs to be taken care of. I have a few dead tvs that I am going to try and find recycling for just to free up the space.

I’ve legitimately contemplated getting a storage unit so that I can box up and move her stuff into it… until I am ready to deal with it. There are a bunch of things I want to do in the garage, but I have always needed swap space to do any of it. Effectively I have to get rid of the piles of stuff from when she moved out of her last school district before I can do much of anything to improve the situation out there. I use the garage as sort of an extended pantry for the various stuff I order from Sams Club, and I would like to have proper shelving to put stuff on. I also potentially want to get rid of the collection of old door mats that I have out there, because they are so worn down the likelihood that I will use them again is minimal. Decorating our door wreath and the rug… are something that I will probably keep doing because while it was her thing… I do enjoy the whimsy of it.

Anyways… I am doing okayish still. I figure the best indicator of my mental health is that I am still getting up and making the bed. When I stop doing that… it is time to worry.

Visions of Flailing

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Good Morning Folks. I have no clue what I am doing anymore. I have my first counseling session this afternoon so we will see how that goes. I am still having the minor hallucinations that my wife is still here in this home, but like it is more a feeling than actually seeing or experiencing anything. Many folks have told me this is normal, and honestly it probably is. My brain is hardwired to expect her to be here and that does not go away in a few weeks time. I also have a meeting with a financial advisor in a few weeks to talk about how best to handle a bunch of stuff that I am dealing with. Most of which is in a holding pattern until we have a death certificate. Everything needs a death certificate and I am mostly just trying to function until that point. Tomorrow I have taken the day off because I have to move everything out of her classroom, so that they can prepare it for another teacher to move in. Thankfully her teacher pals have offered to pack everything up for me, and it will just be a matter of trucking things home and stacking the boxes up in the garage for now.

This morning I am probably going to be wildly flipping back and forth between my real world stuff… and gaming stuff because that is effectively how my brain works right now. I am latching onto distractions like a life raft, and we got some good distractions in abundance this week. Guild Wars 2 released a reveal trailer for their upcoming Visions of Eternity expansion and it looks awesome. Whoever is responsible for the motion graphics for their expansion logos… they need a fucking raise because this one is the best yet. SOTO and Janthir Wilds were both awesome, but the story being told by this logo is freaking phenomenal. I am really looking forward to the updates to the Skimmer mount because right now… it is the one that I use the least unless I have to be doing underwater stuff. I’m also looking forward to more shenanigans with the Inquest because they are one of my favorite bad guy groups. I am not sure how excited I am for more Elite specs, because quite honestly… I rarely change my builds and something is going to have to be really freaking cool to get me to change things up.

Depending upon how the counseling session goes, I might be ready to dip my toes back into Thursday night nonsense in Guild Wars 2. I have not mentioned any of this to Ammo, Sol, Ash, Thalen, or Sita… but I might do that throughout the day. I know there are a bunch of weeklies that we would even work on, like I could tag up and run bounties to knock out that one. I am also down with more Fractals or Dungeons because there are so many of those that I have not run. I’ve come to realize that my go to for knocking things out in Guild Wars 2 is running rifts in the Janthir area, because they are so much easier to get to than the Rifts in the SOTO area. They area great way to knock out general kills, defiance breaks, combos, and a few other general things because when you start one up… you almost always have a large group. Quite honestly Rifts in general are one of the best things that they have added to the game because they are so easy to get going.

Over in Path of Exile I am still slowly grinding up levels. I dinged level 99 yesterday over lunch and am starting to chip away at the large grind towards level 100. For now I am just pouring my last few points into 5% life nodes. They are generically useful, give me slightly more righteous fire damage… and quite a bit of just general survival. I might do something more clever but I can sort that out once I am actually level 100. I am trying to decide if I want to make a second character or not. I was running up an Elementalist to play with the Golems and was contemplating doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation power charge stacker to see how that goes. I would like to have some sort of a bossing focused character just to rip through invitations faster than righteous fire. There are a ton of challenges that I still need to work on to get my sad little totem pole a bit bigger before the end of the league.

There are a bunch of challenges that are pretty close to wrapping up. Some of them I just need some luck, like finding Infamous Mercs that I can steal gear from that I have not already stolen. Then there are things like the fact that I need to do a Cortex where my merc survives, and I think if I switch to my tanky bossing merc I should be good there. Sanctified Scarabs is in theory just me running a bunch of scarabs from various different league mechanics on a map with a minimum of 80% item quantity which should be reasonable enough to do. My Einhar tree makes a pretty decent base for generic usage of other scarabs so I might start working on those tonight. Remarkable Realms is worse this league because it is 40 maps instead of running one of a specific set of maps. I think previously it was 18 maps in total… so I just need to churn through the maps that I have banked up in order to finish that one out. Either that or pick a map that is not heinous and run that one over and over. Most of the unique maps are annoying in one way or another. I should grab Kodra at some point and force him to run them with me so he also gets credit.

The other thing that I have contemplated… is streaming again. Mostly just as a way of interacting with other human beings while I am playing mostly single player gaming experiences like my beloved ARPGs. I have a pretty beefy gaming desktop and it would not be a big deal to stream while playing most of the games that I play. I used to really enjoy doing this, but it always got really weird and made me feel like I was making myself unavailable to my wife while I was doing it. Now that it is just me… I have lots of time to kill before sleep claims me. I can’t say that I would ever be a good streamer, and there is no way in hell that I will ever turn on a camera. Just thinking it might be something fun to dabble in again on the side. Mostly it is just one of those intrusive thoughts that has started appearing in my head and I am not sure if I am going to allow it to take purchase there or not. If I did stream it would be over on my sad little Twitch channel which I believe is still an affiliate. I streamed consistently enough during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online to actually qualify for that. Apparently I have $71.31 in payouts that I am due… that I sort of wish I could just send to a charity somewhere. Accepting subs always seemed really fucking weird.

I legitimately have no clue what I am doing half the time these days. I think once some of the looming things finally are dealt with… I will maybe begin to allow myself to develop a new normal, but right now everything is too damned fresh. I should really spend my weekends working through some of the things that I need to work through. One of my good friends mentioned a pen and paper game, so I might be tagging in on that soon. I also need to sort out a good place to paint and assemble some miniatures for that purpose. I just do not know what I am going to do long term with my life and I am trying to figure out a lot of things. Thanks for sticking around and reading my nonsense as I flail.