I suppose it's more my age showing. I played some of those earlier versions of MMOs from around 2004-2010, and while I remember these dumb speds existing, it was easy enough to overlook them and have a good time. Hell, I even ran a whole outfit on a roleplaying server in WoW that was dedicated to some tasteful mockery of the self-obsessed, pathetic narcissists and coomers that abounded - and it was a fun, cozy bit of notoriety. I suppose a lot does change in a decade, though, particularly given an internet-raised ADD-addled generation coming to the fore.
I've never once thought voice chat and MMOs were a terribly good idea, but that again might be my experiences. I am so used to just... the weirdest, weirdest fucking people talking about the dumbest shit in the vents and later discords that surrounded this genre. Like, I've had to develop good public speaking over the years - I hardly expect that of everyone. But some of these fucking voices, they're just goddamn needles on chalkboard combined with deathfat farts in their bass. I don't really think you're missing much.
It's not even necessarily them, I feel. Actual metagame people, who are really in it for their parsies or their speed-clears or their world-firsts or whatever... tend to keep to themselves, and I've found tend to either be chill with people not on that level OR they just avoid coming into contact with people not on that level. It's this other kind - people who aren't actually good or dedicated or sporting, who are often incompetent shitters, who just latch onto this shit both for the orthodox order that it provides AND for the feeling of power over others. The kinds of people who will spend 10 minutes screaming that something took an extra 30 seconds, who fucking collapse in on themselves and try to block anyone that shows the barest bit of spine, who tend to sound like 14-year-old-eunuchs... those are this new breed that seem absolutely everywhere, fuck up every one of these games, try to insert themselves and center everything around themselves.
I used to think that dungeon/duty-finder was where the bad kind crawled out of -- people feeling that the anonymity of functions like that allowed them to be complete shitstains without any real recourse. Classic's re-launch shook me of that opinion, though; the meta in that game right now is that everyone spends 2-3 hours a week to get their world boofs, does a raid which saves 15-30 minutes from everyone getting those boofs, and then logs out on the character until next week when they go boof-hunting again. It goes without saying - classic's endgame is fucking boring, and perhaps the WORST part of the game.
Yet everything is centralized around it -- you've got to just boost your way through leveling ASAP, dungeons are for fags. Leveling is for fags. Fun is for fags - you've got to parse. But not parse on something difficult, like a FF14 or a retail WoW raid; parse where the 'challenge' is pushing one button and watching your threat. You've got to spend gold to get gear that gives you .01% better parsies or you're DEAD WEIGHT SLACKER, and the most efficient way to get gold is to buy it from chinamen who fly around on level 1 characters beneath the map to gather resources in the high-level zones 24/7 or who run massive botfarms which just repeat dungeons 24/7 for raw currency. A game which is intentionally slow, clunky as fuck because it's from an era where balance wasn't a concern, and which was supposed to either be a fun nostalgia trip or an interesting little distraction for people to relax in... has been, thanks to this modern breed of pathetic fucking faggot, turned into a save space for sweaty escapists and no-one else. Casual players and guilds got driven off quite a while ago because it's just so tedious to deal with these kind of fuckers, and now the redditors are freaking out that they can't get enough people who want to spend 4 hours a week pressing 2-button rotations.
I really wish reality would slap these people like a brick through stained glass, but that seems increasingly fanciful.
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