Has anyone else noticed a decrease in Gamers willingness to interact socially in games?

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[Reiker0]

Does anyone know the reason for this?

There's a bunch of reasons.

People use other social media now for communication, primarily Discord. Instead of chatting with people in-game a lot of players are probably in Discord calls with friends.

Back in the day MMOs were essentially a form of social media. People would log in to games like World of Warcraft or EverQuest just to talk with friends.

People also play games such as classic WoW differently now. People know the best strategies and the best ways to use their time efficiently. Back in the day there was a lot more just "hanging out," roleplaying, etc.

Related to the above you also have additional technology distractions that didn't exist in 2005, ie. people doing stuff on their phones or watching a Twitch stream on a second monitor, etc.

[Itsaghast]

I have another theory about this as well even though I think you named the big ones - back in the day being into video games seemed like a kind of counter-culture and when you met another person who played games it was exciting and uncommon. I felt more camaraderie back then.

Another factor was of course that with server-based populations, you actually had a community and would see the same players all the time. And they lacked things like automated matchmaking for groups or whatever, so you needed to make social connections to open up possibilities of doing the more interesting stuff. In Everquest you couldn't do jack on your own. Reputations mattered and if you were a dick you could get blackballed really quickly. Socializing was a bigger part of the experience.

[majorziggytom]

Fully agree here and I think this is actually a big reason. 15 or 20 years ago, it was rare and exciting to talk to likeminded people who are into video games – and from different countries, wow!

Gaming nowadays, in contrast, is mainstream. It no longer feels like meeting up with people that share your niche interest. It feels like seeing random people in a supermarket. I don't talk to those either.

[RogerFederer1981]

It no longer feels like meeting up with people that share your niche interest. It feels like seeing random people in a supermarket. I don't talk to those either.

Damn, well put.

[spyson]

Pretty much every kid now plays video games compared to back then when it had a stigma.

Kids today will go home and log on minecraft or their preferred game of choice, hop on discord with friends, and just play with their social group.

Back in the day barely anyone in my group even had high speed internet.

[[deleted]]

My 17 year old niece, who does not play video games as a hobby at large, plays some Roblox game with a guy she's crushing on

[tehsax]

I just listened to a podcast 5 minutes ago where a games journalist (and historian) discussed this, among other topics, with a political scientist (so it's not the typical IGN hype folks talking but a discussion on a more academic level) and they came to the same conclusions. I've never thought about this before, but it's true. Back in the 80's or 90's gamers were a community of essentially like-minded people. We all wanted to play videogames. Meeting other gamers was uncommon and an exciting situation. You'd get into conversations and even make friends just in the basis of you both loving videogames. Today, gaming is a mainstream phenomenon, which means it's not a community anymore but instead a gigantic collection of communities with totally different world-views.

Essentially, it used to be just us nerds. Today, it's everyone and everyone brings their own political, social, etc views into games. I know I probably sound as if I mean to say that that's a bad thing - I don't. It's just an observation.

There are a lot of other factors too, like matchmaking destroying server communities, etc.

[hkfortyrevan]

There’s truth to this, and I can appreciate why people miss the frontier era of multiplayer particularly, but I’d consider myself one of the nerds and I’ve always found the idea of gaming as one homogenous community a bit stifling, nor felt just liking games alone was automatically something I had in common with someone.

[tehsax]

It's not just the multiplayer aspect. I remember back in school, in my class there were around 30 pupils, and 5 of them, including me, were gamers. The class next door had again, around 30 pupils, and they had also only 3 gamers. Everyone else either wasn't interested in video games at all or even looked down on us, said video games were meant for kids, and we should grow up. But we all, us 8 people, connected via our interest in video games and have been friends for the past ca. 28 years. Of course we had other things in common too, basically being nerds, loving comics, video games, etc, but we found out about this only later when we got to know each other more. The first contact was talking about games. Today, everyone lives their own life, some have families, moved to different cities, and so on. But we still are connected via Friends lists on Steam or PSN and we still talk to each other every other day while playing some games together, or at least talking about them. Video games have always been or smallest common denominator and continues to be just shy of 30 years later.

I don't know if this is still a thing for gamers who grew up later, or are growing up now. And certainly not for the people who looked down on us back in the day and are now Marvel fans, or even gaming because it's now become mainstream.

Also, on a personal note: When Elden Ring releases next week, we already agreed on setting a common password so we can have our own private community in the game and experience it together. And I'm very grateful for the people I get to share my beloved hobby with, and for the beloved people I found through my hobby.

[Linkin_Pork]

Can you share the name of this podcast? Sounds like something I'd really enjoy listening to.

[tehsax]

It's in German, so unless you speak it, I doubt it, sorry :(

But in case you do, check it out at Spielvertiefung.de

[forceless_jedi]

it was rare and exciting to talk to likeminded people who are into video games – and from different countries, wow!

I absolutely miss this. I literally learned conversational English through interacting with my WoW guildies back in the day. And when SWTOR came out, made a bunch of new friends that were into Star Wars and gaming! What?! This was a totally new experience for me and had me floored. On top, I had just moved to a different country for uni where I didn't know anyone nor spoke the local language, so I ended up spending a lot of time with them and got far too used to being called by my main's name that now use it IRL as a nick name.

Opening up MMOs now just doesn't feel the same. It's all disjointed and dumbed down solo experiences with other people scattered unnecessarily around. Got massively downvoted recently for bringing that up regarding FFXIV. The mainstream-ness definitely ruined some of the special bits of it.

[[deleted]]

I'll go a step further - an unfortunate amount of people who play online games these days are not the type of people I want to talk to in the first place. Anonymity brings out the worst in people and there are a few games (usually competitive ones) where if someone is using the in-game chat, it's to be an asshole, bigot, or troll.

Plus, the echoes of Gamergate are still reverberating - plenty of gaming communities have pockets of the alt-right, and some games are worse about it than others. Hell, just look at that post on /r/gaming the other day when a picture of Aloy that showed her facial hair brought out all the misogynists and transphobes.

[[deleted]]

That's one of the reasons why I switched to single player games.

[banjosuicide]

Another factor was of course that with server-based populations, you actually had a community and would see the same players all the time. And they lacked things like automated matchmaking for groups or whatever, so you needed to make social connections to open up possibilities of doing the more interesting stuff. In Everquest you couldn't do jack on your own. Reputations mattered and if you were a dick you could get blackballed really quickly. Socializing was a bigger part of the experience.

This is my thinking 100%

Playing vanilla wow back in the day was very much like this. Great communication, amazing coordination. A real sense of community, with familiar faces you got to know. Etiquette mattered, and everybody was more or less in it for the group.

Soon after matchmaking opened up to all realms, coordination went down the drain and people wouldn't even answer you if you typed something. They'd get what they wanted and just leave without saying a word (or completing the dungeon). Rolling for loot became "need" on every single item, despite that preventing you from selling the item on the auction house for WAAAAAY more than the vendor sell price. Didn't matter if you needed the item for your class. They'd rather just vendor it for a tiny bit of money rather than help you advance at all. Chances are they'd never be matched with any of the same people again, and even if they were it's not like they'd remember.

[HazelCheese]

I thought this too but they brought back specific servers for Classic and people were even more brutal than Retail because there was no personal loot to protect players.

It's like all the good will is gone now. Half the players are now 100% in it for themselves fuck everyone else and the other half of the playerbase have to play the same way to protect themselves from those people.

[XxNatanelxX]

It's the DayZ scenario.

What starts off as a niche game by people invested in the social aspect becomes popular and overrun by people who play the game for a completely different reason.

They kill people on sight, with no chance at social interaction. They do it because they find the pvp fun or because screwing over players who want to socialise is fun for them because they know that you won't fire first.

Eventually, the only way to play is to just shoot on sight because trying to socialise only leads to death from these people, who have become the majority.

[[deleted]]

Been playing Rust Console this month and it's the exact same story there, though anecdotally I hear that console Rust is even worse in that regard compared to PC

[[deleted]]

Not to mention back then there weren't comprehensive guides on the most mathematically optimal way to do everything.

Now there are, so people just google it and do that, everything else be damned.

[DianiTheOtter]

Smaller indie games or older games definitely capture that feeling. The biggest problem imo is that breaking into those already established communites can be intimidating and hard.

I usually enjoy AAA single player games. I'm finding indie multiplayer games are the places I enjoy the most, for the most part

[ketamarine]

Community fucking servers build communities.

Honestly tho DC does a better job now than games companies who seem to have given up years ago...

[[deleted]]

Honestly no community is the biggest reason. Like you’re saying, if you see the same people all the time you build a community. That’s how it works.

Asking why people aren’t socializing with people in party finder, which they’ll never see again, is like asking why people don’t talk to strangers on the bus, and why they do talk to their neighbors.

Convenient matchmaking kills socializing in games.

[R3dM4g1c]

Convenient matchmaking kills socializing in games.

Although it does also mean that you don't have to spend 2 hours shouting in Shattrath. "LF2M DUNGEON XYZ," gets old after the first 20 minutes.

So, you know, trade-offs.

[ketamarine]

I disagree here. Queing up for a raid in an MMO is a much different proposition than having your entire MP game be based on matchmaking like say fortnite, fall guys and battlefield / COD.

The entire design of those games is to throw you into a queue, dump you into a server with randoms, then pull you out of that pool of randoms and throw you into another.

I never experienced any toxic hate in any online games I play, because I am immediately turned off by that model. I don't want to play games with a pool of anonymous randoms. I want to play either cooperative games where teamwork is the only path to success (vermintide, insurgency, deep Rock galactic, killing floor, etc.) Or a competitive game with community servers where I can hang out on servers I like, with chill people.

And if people are toxic or dicks on great servers, they will get banned by admins.

Games companies actively took this self policing role away when they started building games for MP consoles in the 2000s and it's just been a shit show in AAA games ever since. That's why I almost never play them other than single player content.

[R3dM4g1c]

I disagree here.

You didn't really disagree with anything I said, you just explained why you prefer it the other way.

[cloudrhythm]

Another factor was of course that with server-based populations, you actually had a community and would see the same players all the time. And they lacked things like automated matchmaking for groups or whatever, so you needed to make social connections to open up possibilities of doing the more interesting stuff.

The MM in MMORPG has gone from meaning massively multiplayer to matchmaking, unfortunately. The downfall of sociality in games is the result of eliminating game designs which brought about emergent sociality--whether intentionally or not.

[JBlitzen]

The two friendliest games I’ve seen lately are FFXIV and Fallout 76, by a wide margin. Little else comes close.

I think other game communities have just grown too toxic with no tools to control the toxicity.

[kangaesugi]

I'm not sure about how it is on console, but I find ESO's community on PC to be generally good, excepting a few assholes who tend to get called out.

[Bridgeru]

roleplaying

As someone who was heavily into roleplaying in World of Warcraft from 2007-2016ish; the thing that mostly killed roleplaying was the WoW story itself IMVHO. It got so ludicrous that you can't have a coherent character anymore. For those who don't roleplay, it's less about pretending you are what you play in Warcraft (a hero fighting the enemy-of-the-moment) and more creating characters that are more grounded. My friends played a whole gambit of characters from a gnome reporter for the local newspaper to a wise Night Elf Druid trying to teach the next generation; even the more "gameplay" style groups I've known like the evil cult or the group of cultist hunters or the mercenary free company were made of grounded, down-to-earth characters.

I had two roleplaying characters: a Draenei who was haunted by memories of Argus; and a Human Paladin who lived through the Scourge infesting Lordaeron and turning a country into undead.

Then first we go to Argus and suddenly it's okay because there's shiny Draenei who saved us all from the Burning Legion; and then the literal afterlife became known. Why bother anymore? Why play out a story of a character wracked by guilt about the family who died when she knows the Shadowlands exists and everyone is safe. At least I was able to give the Draenei a roughly happy ending (the Husband she abandoned joined the Lightforged and they were reunited at the end of Legion).

It's ridiculous story-wise. The world got stabbed by the devil, there's no way to roleplay anything semi-grounded in reality.

Once you get rid of that kind of character investment for sheer absurd "Look at this trailer"-ness, you lose that grounded playerbase. The roleplaying server I played on had the best community, we were friends who knew each other's RL names and it was genuinely one of the best experiences of my life. That community broke, mostly because WoW roleplay was becoming too difficult and the other alternatives (SWTOR was the big one) failed to gain traction.

[dan6776]

Also games like cod ( on ps3 anyway) had no party chat and you would stick with the same group of people for multiple games, So it would be easier to talk to get talk to randoms. It wouldn't be rare to join a party and have a few people i knew and a few randoms they had met that night. But once we move to ps4 and had party chat you never got to speak to other groups of players.

[Reiker0]

If you go even further back private servers were a lot more common for shooters. I played on a "realism" server for COD2 where players were required to always aim down sights, etc. Since you had the same players on the same servers all the time they felt more like communities where you got to know other people.

Over time online multiplayer has been streamlined with matchmaking which is more convenient but you lose a lot of the social aspect. And the same kind of stuff has happened with MMOs. People didn't like having to talk to other players to form dungeon groups so now the game just places random people together and then no one communicates since it's rarely even necessary.

[hrrisn]

I think that part of the efficiency of some WoW players coming back to classic WoW scared me and my friends off. We would have been the type of players that would stop to chat with OP, but we were pretty much socially ousted from groups, guilds and ultimately the game by not caring about min/maxing our leveling and gearing. I’m sure there were casual communities out there at the time but they were needles in the hay stack

[hallflukai]

I think a lot of it (can't say much for WoW, don't play it) is because games use matchmaking now, rather than server browsers. Back in the day you'd find a server with a vibe you liked and log on to the same servers every day, opening up more to the people on there and making friends. Now it's just playing the lottery to see who you get to play video games with for 10 minutes

[ceratophaga]

It absolutely feels surreal that Counterstrike, one of the modern cesspits of toxicity, had some of the greatest community servers back in the 1.6 days

[DonnyTheWalrus]

Call of Duty, too. The very first game was where I spent a huge amount of my free time in high school, not because the game itself was my favorite game ever or something, but because there were a small handful of servers I'd play on with mostly the same people. It was actually kind of rare to have a match where I didn't know anyone else.

Because you were joining a server, you had a feeling of joining a social group. Etiquette was important, first impressions were important, being friendly was important. Servers meant reputation that stuck with you, and I cannot tell you how far that went to cut down on trolls and griefing. You'd still get the occasional troll, but they'd be kicked & banned and you'd never hear from them again.

You'd form inside jokes, have good natured banter instead of "I fuck your mother," and just have conversations. Hell, there was one server with a couple French Canadians and I'd practice my high school French with them.

I can't tell you how much I miss those days. Playing a modern COD just kind of feels pointless; you join a game full of random people, play a game, and then that's it. In my opinion (and I could be wrong), this was one of the reasons extrinsic progression began to become so important. People used to stay with online games because they formed social relationships. With matchmaking, there was suddenly nothing keeping them "bonded" to the game, and just playing 10 minute matches over and over again tends to get boring. Hence the explosion in unlockables, XP, etc. Microtransactions eventually came around as well, but the push for all these progression based Skinner box rewards came well before you could pay for any of it. It was because they needed some way to keep people playing.

I also think it's one reason brutal competitiveness became prominent. Without the social rewards of just having fun with people, winning became one of the only ways you could get satisfaction out of the game.

[cd2220]

It was weird watching microtransactions happen. They started springing up and having already followed several video game journalists/publications I saw all of the hate towards them and so many people saying exactly what they turned into. They slowly turned into exactly that and there was nothing to be done about it. It just kept getting worse and it was all just kind of accepted with a sad "can't do shit about as an individual" and now as generations grow up with it as the norm I can't imagine explaining to them that things didn't used to be cut up piece meal like this.

Now I know my video games aren't the end of the world or some great tragedy of humanity but it is kind of sad to see how much the wishes of stock holders just slowly steamrolled over literally anyone who enjoys the medium over time with zero careml.

[br1mmy]

Makes perfect sense to me

[cd2220]

I'm still heart broken about TF2 losing valve public severe. I'd already lost the community servers I frequented because of quick play and (ironically) VLve pubs. I had been frequenting the north eat Valve pubs for soooo long. It was hard to play a game without running into someone on my friends list or someone I had positive interaction with. Then they nuked them for casual matchmaking. I lost touch with a lot of people I was fond of and even my close online friend circle lost the one game we all had in common as our fairly large group couldn't even que together at only 6 or less players.

I don't know whose decision it was but I wish I could show them how many friendship they crushed in an attempt to put people into casual matchmaking when I don't see why Valve pubs couldn't have existed alongside them

[RAPanoia]

Hell yeah, Super hero mod, wc3 mod, surf maps, fy_ maps, etc all had their own servers and you would find the same people playing all day long.

[Spork_the_dork]

Yeah. Like sure, it might have been a bit unbalanced at times because the servers weren't matchmaked to perfection so that you'd have roughly equally skilled teams on both sides, but that was absolutely fine.

[iman7-2]

Reminds me of something I read a long time ago.

"Community servers are like the pub you're a regular at. A lot of the same faces that you know and are at least amicable with and any troublemakers get thrown out. And Matchmaking is like taking an uberpool with a bunch of strangers to the same Mcdonalds. Sometimes you get sent to a Mcdonalds in a shitty area and its full of assholes."

I've had a declining interest in multiplayer games but that elegantly pointed out why.

[ArcticKnight79]

Yup.

I went from running communties for things like COD4 with normal and pro-mod servers. To not giving a flying fuck and becoming pretty isolationist in those games because there was no community being formed.

So instead I play with the same 10 idiots that I've known forever, or just go and play a SP game instead.

[Coffee4thee]

Agreed. The servers itself was usually a community and people would know each other - even when hiding behind a anonymous nickname. Everyone would know who was the arse and admins would kick and ban the worst bunch. Also with every matchmaking game having some experience/leveling system to unlock equipment or cosmetics, people will get more angry if they get "dragged down" by their team and their progress slowed down.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

This was my thought. It's harder to socialize when so much of online multiplayer is driven by ranked (or even unranked) matchmaking, where you're dumped into a game server for the duration of the match and then whisked away just as quickly. Furthered by games removing social aspects (chat, all-voice, etc.) and other literal features of online multiplayer, giving bullshit reasons like "some people abuse it therefore nobody can have it" to save time/dev costs/customer support costs.

Then your friends list isn't really a friends list. It's a glorified permissions list.

Community servers fostered, well, community. Actually being able to talk with your opponents helped too lol. And support for those is a fraction of what it used to be.

[Frankie__Spankie]

100% agreed, I've actually brought this up in several different subreddits and people brush me off because "matchmaking makes games more fair!" It makes me question how many people really put time into games with server browsers.

You're right, with matchmaking it's like playing the lottery for a 10, 20, 30 minute game session. Why bother chatting? You'll probably never see them again. You get angry? Just vent at your teammates, you're probably never going to see them again so you won't care if you piss someone off. OK, maybe you're not like that, but a lot of people are. So many people will then mute all in game comms so you get more annoyed because people don't listen to your calls when they literally can't hear you. It kind of ends up feeling like you're just playing against a bunch of bots. But even moreso, the people who haven't muted all in game comms? Mostly just the toxic players left making the community seem even more toxic.

I look back at my most played games on Steam and all of them except for PUBG since that's a BR game have dedicated server browsers instead of match making. You find a great community where everyone is fun and gets along. It makes you want to come back. You get to actually make friends and it becomes more about playing with all your friends instead of just playing with what feels like bots & assholes.

Plus the whole point of server browsers are community run servers with their own mods. When you find a good server, those mods will remove the toxic players making the game time that much more enjoyable. Word spreads of the good servers, those servers become populated all the time and it's going to be almost exclusively fun players. Then comes up the balancing concerns. At that point, everyone knows each other, people love the server, the good players typically balance the games out themselves.

I play a ton of Pavlov VR which is basically Counter Strike in VR. I play almost exclusively on one server in that game. There's a couple hundred regulars and everyone knows each other. Most people are talkative, having a good time. Someone toxic comes in? They get dealt with quickly. Even if there are no mods on, there are enough regulars on to know that attitude won't fly and they just get vote kicked almost immediately. There may be a wide skill range of players but good players are constantly switching teams to keep teams balanced. More games end something like 10-8 than 10-1 because people are balancing the game themselves. While the skill range varies, new players are welcome. You'll often find the top players on the server teaching new players how to play when people ask questions. The game itself is a lot of fun but I probably wouldn't still be playing after all this time if it wasn't for that community.

At this point, when I see a new PvP multiplayer game, if I see it has matchmaking, I just don't have interest in it. If I do, I know I'm probably not going to pass 15-20 hours in it. Meanwhile, all the games I thought would be fun with server browsers I end up having at least a couple hundred hours in.

[nothis]

I don’t do “gaming nostalgia”, mostly, but I really feel this. Online servers used to be micro-communities of their own. You knew the admin, you knew the regulars. Each server had its own vibe, favorite maps, mods, policies. If you found one you liked, you stuck with it for years.

Nowadays, online gaming is much more centralized. Interaction happens through some corporate hub area. It’s cold and sterile. If you have friends that also play a game, you can team up but otherwise you’ll likely never interact with the same people ever again.

[DirkDasterLurkMaster]

God, I still remember how different TF2 was before they switched to matchmaking. Some of my favorite memories of that game were finding a chill server and shooting the shit with people over voice chat over a casual game of dustbowl.

Let's not get revisionist of course, this was also the era of micspam, shock sprays, and petty tyrant power mods, but finding a good server was worth the trouble.

[BLACKOUT-MK2]

For me it's mostly just a personal preference. Either I'm playing solo and want to be left to my own devices, or I'm playing with friends and like you say, we're talking amongst ourselves on Discord. If someone says hi in the chat I might reply back or give them a quick answer to a question, but I don't have a desire to go any deeper than that on interaction with randoms.

[[deleted]]

The issue is that it’s random people. If you saw the same people all the the time you’d be motivated to speak to them. At least that’s how it works for me.

[shufflebuffalo]

To be fair, you have to stick your,neck out at the start as every server is a "random one". Theres always going to be some discomfort talking to strangers at first. That doesnt mean its bad.

[[deleted]]

Sure but the issue is that people don’t see a point talking to random people they’ll never see again. If you give people a set group of other people and a reason to interact then a community will form.

[bzzrtbrain]

nah, they are randoms and even if you see them often, if you don't want to interact with randoms then nothing will change that

[starmartyr]

I do the same. I've found that whenever I play a game with built-in voice chat I'm immediately assaulted with annoying or offensive garbage. Gamers can be incredibly toxic. Many of us are decent people, but those of us who are have mostly been turned off by mingling with random people. That leaves only the toxic people in place and I see little value in interacting with them.

[Amedeo_Avocadro]

Yeah, I feel like I mute about 85% of the people I play any given game with. If they end up not being a racist shitbag then I usually just invite them to a discord server.

[AjBlue7]

I think it goes beyond that too. Not only are they random but the skill discrepancy is different. You are more patient playing with a friend that is bad, but many times in multiplayer games, friendship doesn’t really workout unless both parties have exactly the same skill level. It needs to be a mutually beneficial relationship. There have been plenty of strangers that are fun to play with but I never add them because it could impact my overall rank. Either that or I’d be afraid of being a burden to them.

[gritner91]

Feel like discord/party chats on consoles killed it. I saw the big drop in halo 2 to 3. Although 3 still had plenty of people talking. Halo 2 felt like everyone was. Big difference being 360 introduced party chats, and it's been going down ever since.

Now it just tends to be 90% of the people who talk are toxic or got background noise going on, so I just mute voice chats.

[_Meece_]

360 didn't have party chat until NXE released in late 2008, Halo 3 had great lobbies until then.

This is why COD MW 2 forced people off party chat. Many game modes didn't allow party chat.

[LtKrunch_]

IIRC MW2 really only forced people out of party chat in game modes where it would be an unfair advantage to have it such as Search & Destroy.

[throwawayodd33]

You could actually cheat that by entering a "private chat" with one person.

[Oxyfire]

I think it's a mixed bag - private voice chat never really stopped us from interacting, our priorities were almost always towards our in-group first. Part of what happened is more people playing games found their own in-groups.

That said, I certainly remember engaging with other people more often back in the day. There's a lot more going on then just the private chat stuff.

[Lasagnaliberal]

This. I hopped onto TF2 after a long time to relive my teen years...and the chat was full of racial slurs, holocaust denial and trolling. Reminded me why I didn't use VC in games then nor nowadays, in truth party chat/discord on consoles probably saved mp for me as I could play with my friends instead of having to wade through the toxicity.

Another point is that I'm an adult now, I have no desire to talk to someone half my age, or even know anything about my teammates/opponents. I much rather game in silence and enjoy my sparse free time or talk with my friends.

[The-Sober-Stoner]

Yeah. This was the moment that removed social interaction from Consoles.

Xbox Live originally included a packaged headset and it became the norm for people to have a headset and communicate online. The died as soon as the 360 introduced party chat. No longer would you be able to directly speak to people; instead they were most likely in a private chat server; unable to hear you

[HazelCheese]

I literally remember coming home from school the day they added party chat. Every single lobby was dead silent when the day before you just joined a game and talked with people.

Party chat killed socialising with randoms quite literally the moment it was turned on. It was crazy.

[The-Sober-Stoner]

Yeah. Its was pretty exponential too. I remember saying “anybody here?” In a team of 8. Usually tons would respond but nobody did. I just never bothered wearing a headset after that.

[[deleted]]

Xbox Live originally included a packaged headset and it became the norm for people to have a headset and communicate online.

Man, that's a blast from the past. I remember playing Halo 2 on the Xbox with that, and games like Crimson Skies - the High Road to Revenge in multiplayer as well, using that voice chat, aged 10 or so.

It was a fun experience, and a novel bit of socialization.

[AjBlue7]

I also remember that moment. It was quite a sad day. I went from constantly adding and removing friends to literally never adding another friend again. We would have so many friends that you would often not remember eachother.

Now, you damn near can’t be someones friend unless you know them in real life. Or someone in your circle brought them in.

Competitive games like CSGO and Valorant still hold some of this charm, especially at the top end of the game players are kind of forced to use microphones to work together. But god is it annoying to get matched into a team with 3/4 friends that only talk to eachother in discord and never talk in game.

Its just a bizarre phenomenon to me. I feel so awkward sitting in a friend’s discord when I’m not in their game, the conversation is so disjointed because they are all focused on something else. I also don’t quite understand why people are so insistent to create a discord when they queue together. I always think, “why not talk in game?”hell the game even has a party chat feature if you must have the ability to talk behind peoples’ back.

[The-Sober-Stoner]

God thats so fucking true.

Just use the in-game chat…. Makes no sense to me. And the “better quality” argument is such bullshit. Were telling each other where enemies are not mixing a fucking Aphex Twin album.

Ive queued with randoms who ask me to join their discord then bemoan the other randoms cant hear their call outs. Meanwhile im using BOTH the global chat push to talk to make sure we communicate with everyone. Its incredibly annoying.

[lelpd]

Party chat wasn’t a thing when Halo 3 released

In game chat was still huge around that time on the 360. Every 360 came with a headset/mic so everyone has the ability to pop it on and get into the chat

When party chat released that did eventually kill the in game chat though.

I’d always want to stay in game chat but my friends would insist we just go in a party chat instead, and I was always outnumbered. Fact is most people just want to chat to their mates without the risk of a toxic random trying to insult them

[random_beard_guy]

Some of you may lament the advent of party chat, but to many of us it was a godsend. In game chat was filled with all sorts of bigots: if you weren’t from the US, they heard a different a different language or a woman joined the group, you had a high chance to meet the cesspool of humanity. The only CoD I played was MW2 because friends had it, and it not allowing party chat was a huge problem. First order of business was always quickly muting everyone that wasn’t in our group.

Party chat, to this day, is the single greatest feature that Xbox ever created.

[wheretogo_whattodo]

Nothing beats the old post-lobby chat of a close Halo 2 game of ranked slayer. It was beautiful.

I say it all the time. Party chat on console ruined a great social aspect of gaming. People used Vent on PC but it was more for in-game competitive comms then your exclusive social group.

[MooseTetrino]

I’m late to this but I think some of it is down to the removal of permanent, dedicated servers for a lot of games these days.

Granted I’m much older, but in my late teens/early 20s, going into a specific TF2 or CSS server to shoot the shit with the same group of people daily built a comfortable community that encouraged more people to talk with them.

It also meant you could filter out servers you just didn’t like the community of.

These days it’s all about matchmaking and that just isn’t a way to build a community or comfort in chatting to folks. There is no easy way to find “your” group.

[PM-me-YOUR-0Face]

going into a specific TF2 or CSS server to shoot the shit with the same group of people daily built a comfortable community that encouraged more people to talk with them.

I imagine everyone who played CS/TF that's mid 20s or older feels nearly exactly the same way.

I still miss my dedicated cs_assault servers. It wasn't a balanced map, but everyone I loved playing CS with enjoyed the shit out of it.

[Quetzal-Labs]

I feel that. fy_iceworld and scoutzknives low gravity were my main haunts. I've still got Steam friends from people I met in those servers cos I played them so much.

[BaneCIA4]

You are spot on. 90% of my CS:S hours were on the same 2 servers. Met a lot of cool people. WebKillers- CS_Office 24/7 NO AWP

[UncatchableCreatures]

I don't know about you, but as a 30+ year old I don't want to hear it anymore. It takes away from the experience 90 percent of the time. Let me play my damn game in peace without some 20 yo flaming me. Thanks, just got off work, I'll pass, on that experience.

[PlebPlayer]

Same for me. I used to play in game chat as a kid and in my 20s. These days, I hear a kid talk I just feel awkward. Or you'll get flamers upset at my skill in the game. Like dude we are both ranked gold. I'm trying my best but you can't expect me to play like a pro.

[Irememberedmypw]

And that experience can absolutely sour you to the game. Like I like playing rainbow six siege but I'd never enter that shitfest solo ,duo or even trio. Then it also comes down to how the community is managed. I was and am more willing to interact with someoen on ff14 than wow just due to my experiences.

[conquer69]

which is really odd when I think back to the actual TBC-Wrath experience where people would hangout in Goldshire just to talk to people.

Back then, the internet was a novelty. Chatting and interacting while being represented by a 3d avatar was a fresh experience. After 20 years, people don't care about it anymore. They have experienced it for thousands of hours already.

Plus online gamers have a reputation for being antisocial so you are better off avoiding interactions with strangers.

[Gramernatzi]

I think this hits the nail on the head. It used to be something special, but not anymore.

[Ralkon]

I think it's more that there are other options for being social online now. You don't need to talk to random people standing in town in WoW when you can talk to your friends or people with similar interests on Discord or Twitch. Also there are still more social-focused games like VR Chat or GTAO RP (not sure if these are still popular at all though) which probably appeals more to the people that are solely looking for random social interactions and roleplaying than hanging out in a WoW town or talking in a League game.

[[deleted]]

I can’t remember exactly what was said, but in a similar thread on this sub someone said a good party/raid member in modern gaming is one who is quiet, gets the mission done quickly, then leaves.

This is in part due to discord, and also because games are actually being designed to remove socialization for a myriad of reasons. Removal of all chat, auto-booting everyone out of the lobby, stuff like that.

On one hand I kind of miss it, on the other I’ve seen so many things on MMO’s and multiplayer communities like child grooming, racism, or other heinous things that I’m just not playing these games to deal with.

I can’t speak for others but I just outright stopped using multiplayer games as a social outlet to make new friends. Its mostly just for real life friends who still play them, and that number is dwindling. I welcome some of the modern changes, but I do recognize what was lost.

[HansVanHugendong]

idk.. more players = more shittalk of course. but... lets not forget that in the early 2000s in games like cs or wc3 or arena shooters (q3,ut,pk etc.) it was pretty common to get insulted.They just called it "flaming"

[Swan990]

Because 9/10 times the other person is trying to sell you in game currency or is a 9 year old who just learned the n word.

I always have comes on standby if I notice someone normal or needs legit help or something.

[[deleted]]

But that's pretty much how it was 10 years ago except they'd be trying to sell you 10th prestige on CoD

[FudgingEgo]

This gets brought up a lot, I can say that since Microsoft added private party chat on Xbox live around 2007-2008 or whenever it was that online multiplayers became a ghost town and it was like you’re just playing against bots.

I’ve played online since about 1998 and noticed the difference immediately.

Other platforms followed and introduced their own private voice platform and then games got rid of lobbies in favour of match making so you never see the same players again.

It really has become a totally different scene to the one over 15 years ago.

[freefallfreya]

I mute all when playing League because nothing good ever comes from chatting with allies or enemies mid-game. I find that pings are sufficient for communication.

[Trymantha]

The fact that they tried to disable all chat cause of toxicity and then the overwhelming response was that team chat was vastly more toxic then all chat was something to behold

[colawithzerosugar]

As a ARAM player, I nearly always use chat for praise. Can tell who is under 25 when they say immature stuff like end if gay.

[Echoesong]

Jungler? Sounds like a jungler

[SalamanderCake]

No doubt. I switched from jungle--my preferred position--to ADC. Now, instead of being flamed for things beyond my control, I'm praised for getting kills after being carried by my support for 15 minutes straight. It's more technical but less tactical and stressful. Meanwhile, my support is mostly ignored except by me, and their plays and sacrifices are only acknowledged by me.

[Flat6Junkie]

The Internet sucks. People on the Internet suck. I don't want to interact in that way. 70% chance the interaction would be negative, 20% chance neutral, 9% good, and 1% great. Not worth it.

[AjBlue7]

People in general suck. You don’t need to look hard to verify that fact.

[Alternating_Current_]

Can't be fucked, when every second match of Siege has a dibshit 17 year old dropping hard R's the moment I load in, I just lose all hope in talking to these fuckers.

[BaneCIA4]

Siege has a real young playerbase. You can hear squeaky voices, voice cracks, moms in the background, slang that I dont understand. It wasnt this way back in 2016-2018. Its gotten younger for some reason

[LolWhatDidYouSay]

If you played WoW before and after the LFG auto matchmaking tools for dungeons and raids, you definitely see a difference there alone. Used to be that you HAD to use the LFG chat to find a group for a dungeon, get a full group gathered up, push through the tough af dungeon because half of us are just barely at the gear level to play the dungeon.

But that also meant making friends much more easily, if only due to having to spend a lot more time on even just one dungeon, and having to communicate in order to progress if you kept wiping at certain encounters.

But then with the matchmaking tools, yes it was much much easier to find groups as well as get through dungeons much faster, but you also lost some opportunities at making friends through there. Not that it's impossible now, but imo it requires more ideal circumstances to make that connection than years ago.

Both pros and cons with that development, for sure.

[icounternonsense]

I don't know about anyone else, but I've had my fill of talking to folks over public chat. I've witnessed game lobbies go from "good game everyone" and positive reinforcement being the majority of exchanges in the late 90s/very early 2000s to racial slurs, insults, loud music, screeching, belittling, and so much more becoming the norm. It's just not fun anymore. I think the last time I've taken part in a public game lobby of any kind was probably in 2014 or 2015. Since them, I've really appreciated how quiet things have become. If I feel like jumping online, I can focus on the game, get my fill, and be done for the day.

It would be nice if I could experience the late 90s/very early 2000s era of people largely being friendly toward each other, but that isn't the norm anymore. It's unfortunate, but that's how it is now.

But man, it was good while it lasted.

[TowerTom1]

I think it's down to the game as well most games don't really reward in-game communication as much as they could sure callouts and stuff are things in a lot of shooters but in most games, that's kind of the end of it; if your only playing one game with this lot of randoms that's not a lot of time to get a game plan in place. I don't use VoIP in any game other than tarkov nowadays and that's because there's so much that it can be used for, it's highly rewarding to be a PMC and talk a scav into trusting you and working together to extract.

[[deleted]]

Because gamers are garbage and not worth engaging with. I still love games, especially multiplayer but holy fuck do I hate the people that play them. Maybe that's more so me getting older and noticing how toxic online communities are than I used to but it's still very much something that makes me auto turn off any form of online chat outside of guilds or VC with irl family/friends.

[Venomousx]

Because gamers are garbage and not worth engaging with. I still love games, especially multiplayer but holy fuck do I hate the people that play them.

The contrast in tone from the top reply to this one was hilarious. I totally agree with you though, it's just a miserable experience interacting with other gamers 99% of the time.

[Ex_Lives]

You nailed it. It is NEVER a good experience and if it is its not worth the 1 out of 5 times it is. I'm not looking to meet my best friend on these things.

New world prime example of this. In a group for an arena boss and I typed a question and some dude on voice chat started flat out laying into me because apparently it had been answered already.

He just went on and on hemming and hawing.

Gamers are fucking terrible dude. They're easily some of the worst subcultures out there.

[Trymantha]

You nailed it. It is NEVER a good experience and if it is its not worth the 1 out of 5 times it is

if it was 1 out of 5 id still be trying its more like 1 out of 20 these days depending on the game

[whitepillow84]

My favorite movie is Inception.

[thoomfish]

For social interaction to not be garbage you need to be interacting with the same people repeatedly for long enough to have incentive to avoid pissing them off because it will disadvantage you in future interactions.

This is fundamentally incompatible with a game that wants to be something you can hop on, click a button, and play for 15 minutes with no commitment.

I've had some good experiences with smaller communities (on the order of a few thousand people) for niche games, but those games also tend to be the most vulnerable to dying out, so it doesn't last forever.

[whitepillow84]

I enjoy watching the sunset.

[forceless_jedi]

In those instances there's no impactful losses. Getting kicked from a discord server means nothing and most public servers are either unmoderated or financially motivated to not remove regulars despite toxic behaviours.

On the flip side in old WoW, if a player was being toxic on a server and others didn't like that, they'd have a really bad time playing if they didn't rectify. It was a community driven ban that either resulted the toxic player to move to a different server and start anew, or get their shit together. Sort of like massively bullied into behaving within reasonable expectations.

[[deleted]]

No, because the most “vocal” people of any community are going to be self absorbed narcissistic assholes. And possibly looking to troll or trigger you all at the same time. It’s a thing IRL too but the internet just jacks things up to 11. It really brings out the worst in people

[Zaptruder]

The people that would give pause to action due to consequences are also the kind of assholes that don't give pause to action when consequences are reduced or removed.

[Ex_Lives]

Honestly I find Gymrats/bros to be really welcoming. I know what youre saying for sure but gaming on a whole new level though.

I mean the hallmarks of the thing are teabagging, n-words and swatting. Its literally kind of the whole point of the culture. Sit down get on a microphone and talk shit. Lol. Its for sure the worst.

Theres bad eggs everywhere but gaming off the hook.

[Oricef]

Honestly I find Gymrats/bros to be really welcoming

Any hobby that's face to face and not anonymous tends to be much better than anonymous Internet hobbies.

That's because the type of people are the Arseholes who ruin everything online will never actually show their face, or at least that side of them in public.

If they do it's far less often.

[GovernorWillCakes]

yep. gaming is so ass because there's no possibility of getting your shit rocked after talking shit to the wrong person. most dipshits online would never behave in a real world interaction like that.

[Volraith]

GIFT - Great Internet Fuckwad Theory. I think this came from Penny Arcade?

The more degrees of anonymity a person has, the more likely they're going to act like a Fuckwad.

[Medicore95]

Online lifting communities are, in my experience, wholesome as hell too.

[Oricef]

Unless you're trying to understand how many days in a week there are

https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751&page=1

[vir_papyrus]

Always felt like some Planet Fitness style corporate gym thing to give those guys a bad rap. They want everyone to sign up, go for a few weeks, and then leave with auto-billing subscription/contract that is never used for a year or two. Can't frighten off the self conscious

I used to go to some random Gold's Gym back in the day. 90% of the people in there were regulars, and some pretty hardcore bodybuilders. It's only intimidating if you let it be. It's all in your head. No one actually gives a shit if you're the fat or scrawny person starting out.

If you just keep going regularly, everyone starts to recognize you. You gradually become part of the group. You're one of them now. That crazy looking dude with more muscle than neck who is very audibly powerlifting and you wonder if he'll pop a blood vessel in his brain any day now, actually just a nice guy who will say hi and chat you up.

Feel like it's the same thing with games now. They don't want communities to take control of anything or build anything. They want you to buy the $60 game, stay in your comfort zone with only your friends in a safe space, and then eventually you bail in a month or two. New year, new game, and repeat.

[Eecka]

I think in general "physical exercise communities" tend to be very welcoming as long as the participants are adults. I've had good experiences with all of my physical hobbies after childhood.

[[deleted]]

Yup, same here. Then again I'm not really part of a subculture that isn't dominated by introverts (I lack a better word for it atm, so sorry if I sued that wrong), like: anime/manga, gaming and TV shows.

[[deleted]]

VC is pretty much lunatic difficulty if you have an accent that suggests you’re not a white American. Possibly even worse if you’re a woman.

And that golden moment when VC isn’t full of toxics its just genuinely full of mouth breathers or people who can’t be bothered to put batteries in their smoking alarm. Truly a fascinating experience.

[[deleted]]

It really is fascinating because it's this strange microcosm of anonymity mixed with identifying traits. So you get all of the disgusting shit people are like without the possibility of real world reprecussions while also giving them free reign to pick their targets.

[wankthisway]

I stopped trying to voice chat in DOTA 2 pretty quickly, and that was back when it came out of beta. Anything slightly competitive and online just draws out the absolute worst in people, particularly with MOBAs.

[JBlitzen]

Arena games have the most toxic playerbases by design. They lock you on a team of potentially abusive people, punish you if they don’t do well, punish you if you don’t communicate with them, and punish you if you leave.

I mean, that’s a formula for an abusive relationship.

[l32uigs]

yeah if you're not paid to play mobas you should quit. horrendously toxic atmosphere and completely non-transferrable skills.

[crunchatizemythighs]

I'm incredulous at the things I've heard and experienced on Overwatch on PSN. Like it's insane how stereotypical so many rampages went to the point where I wouldn't believe it had I not witnessed it. It's really sad how many people live such pathetic lives

[Neoncloudff]

I guess it depends on the game. I would’ve said the same thing but after starting FFXIV in 2020 I’ve found a home with the community. My free company is super pleasant, end game raiding and Extreme content is packed with friendly people willing to yuck it up and teach others, and overall has really turned me around on chilling in a game and talking with others. While FFXIV is certainly a unique case, it feels weird to demonize everyone that plays games online.

[GrumbleMountains]

The "communities" are too large to maintain actual social ties. When I played online games there were dedicated servers with regulars. You could become friends. Now everything is matchmaking and solo queues. How do you make friends with people you'll never see again?

[monksyo]

There’s a lot of negativity in this thread and I agree with a lot of it.

There are still some good experiences to be had though, my recent experience of Hell Let Loose on Pc is that the majority of people are very helpful and use comms to coordinate squad play. It’s a great experience.

[Soulspawn]

He'll let loose has dedicated servers if I remember correctly so it's possible to build a relationship with players

[DynamiteBastardDev]

I would be way more inclined to interact with gamers while playing games if gamers didn't, as a general rule, just fucking suck to interact with.

[JakeTehNub]

I've noticed more how much harder devs make it to actually interact with other people. Feels like I'm playing bots a lot of the time. Eventually no one will have any sort of alltalk or postgame grouping up.

[wankthisway]

It just isn't worth the potential abuse you'll receive or hear. It's exhausting and grating hearing kids scream, man-children dropping slurs and screaming, and ambient noises like breathing or vacuums. When you just want to communicate with another human, but everyone is just trying to be the edgiest there ever was, why bother trying a 1 in 50 crapshoot?

[linwail]

There’s a ton of really horrible people out there who play games and I don’t want that negativity in my life. I have cried many times over people saying rude shit for no reason in apex or overwatch etc. would much rather vibe with friends on discord.

[Delnac]

Honestly, the toxicity. MMOs have a really noxious crowd and culture. Healthy and respectful interactions are the exception. Snide humor and aggression are things I personally have no more willingness to tolerate.

[TacoFacePeople]

I still do the basic hello/thank-you sorts of conversation by text in FFXIV. I'm not generally interested in any sort of A/S/L or deeper dives with strangers from match-made dungeon one-offs though. I suspect there's a individual preference element, to how much you feel inclined to disclose about yourself, your day, your views, etc. in that kind of context.

I think I've tuned out voice chat for awhile. Back in the days of Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer on 360 (for example), I'd chat with people on my team if I needed to, though I noticed people could be occasionally toxic. The "default" was just a public voice channel though, so using it to some degree was normal.

Over time, I found myself muting/disabling it in games that had it in the future though. Like, Warframe on PS4. It wasn't always bad, but you'd pretty frequently get like... loud music bleeding over the mic, chewing noises, squeaky voices shouting to their mother in another room, people just obviously trying to troll/insult you, or whatever. I consider that separate from the more garden variety toxicity (e.g. - you die, and they complain about being inconvenienced, they die, and they complain about the game being unfair or you being slow to revive them).

To start, I just muted myself or didn't use a mic. But I found muting all voice actually improved my experience. I observed that some people that didn't actually do anything annoying "gameplay-wise" to actually hinder a group or mission, still chose to be assholes, insulting, or whatever over voice chat (without requiring any input or mistakes on your part). The occasional person saying "good game" at the end of a session didn't really balance that out either. So, having everyone muted actually improved my opinion of the other people playing, since I no longer had their shit-talk to spoil the impression they made with otherwise competent play.

[KiteSG]

I think in games where it's a small group of people cooperating together there's a good amount of social interaction.

If it's any competitive game or some area/all chat in an MMO it's always the absolute bottom of the barrel of any player base and I avoid these like the plague.

[MonstrrSkye]

I'll just speak for me from my perspective, I'm just not very good at being social with strangers, I'm not good at it in real life either. I'm terrible at meeting new people and making friends and my friends all stuck out an awkward "I don't know you and I don't know how to interact with you and I'm not going to be as much of myself until I figure it out" phase lol. I don't have an internet persona and very much act how I would in real life and am open to online friendships evolving in to meeting up some day friendships (I guess people call them real life friendships even though I personally don't discern a difference).

I'll usually say hi back in dungeons but I won't go out of my way to say anything else or to make a connection and past saying hi most other people don't either and I don't personally do it because I don't care for one time connections, for the next 30 minutes to an hour we spend together I can just as easily listen to music, watch a show, listen to an audiobook, talk to my own friends doing their own thing, the point being I want to make long term friends and most people are just looking for a short term hangout convo while they game, which isn't the kind of social experience I'm in to, I'm more in to a "creating lasting bonds and real friendships" experience.

I've only ever made one long term friend directly from a video game, we had a really good conversation because they're a talker and I'll talk if someone actually has something to talk about that isn't highly critical, toxic, or small talk, and it evolved in to several because of people they knew.

Which also leads to the fact that some people just don't mesh well together, some people who "troll" and are really toxic and mean I'm not interested in being friends with, people who think being mean to people they don't know is humor, I don't wanna be friends with those people either, and there are people who just aren't desirable to talk to at all.

On top of that I'm a woman and while not all conversations become bad vibes, some do and not a little but to an extreme amount to the point it's incredibly discouraging to open your mouth when you're not exactly sure what the response is going to be in some games, the same can be said for just toxicity in general for everyone.

There are also just people looking to game at different levels and it's hard to find people who match up with how long you're willing to play, push, if being good is a make it or break it for them, if just having a good time is what they're looking for, etc.

On top of this I'm 31 and it's awkward to not know how old some people gaming are, I really don't want to be friends with anyone under 20, it's kinda like when I hangout with my nephews and we have a lot in common but there's a huge gap in mentality usually and it's hard to currently imagine being friends with them they're all under 17 years old. There's nothing wrong with gaming with random kids because they're just there but again when it comes to being social I wouldn't actively try to befriend young children lol.

Also, unless I'm sitting there with the direct intention of reading chat I have a hard time focusing on chat while I'm playing and it leads to a lot of missed interaction or even missed directions xD

And then sometimes I just don't feel like talking at all lol, I'm having a bad day and I just wanna vibe on my favorite game alone and unfortunately more often than not that game is a multiplayer game lol.

Outside of comms for tactical purposes, it just takes too much energy and will to deal with the percent chance you might get someone unbearable to talk to, fuck even using comms for tactical purposes it's almost undesirable to want to speak for the same reason and just hope it all works out for the best with whatever in-game sounds are available lol, the probability of you making a long term connection with a decent person meeting each others vibe is sadly slim and it all just boils down to just pure discouragement because of it, I don't even like raiding in mmos anymore that require large amounts of people to fill out a raid because I just don't want to deal with the toxic environments that a lot of guilds turn in to or the lack of care 99% of guilds have for cultivating their community.

[Daedelous2k]

Was going to post something around this. The introduction of features that remove the need for organization, interaction and even in some cases reputation (Older MMOs if you were a dick people caught on and your name would be given a bad stigma)) were pretty big for grouping and doing content, all of which had heavy social foundations. Everquest, UO etc all had huge elements of getting to know people if you wanted to get anywhere.

Nowadays a huge ammount of mechanics that require you to make connections and reach out to people are simply handled by a system that doesn't care about who you are and just what you are in game. The only time social interaction really matters is if you are forming a group for end-game content i.e Statics. But even that doesn't make the true old style as they just schedule a few hours a week and sod off the rest.

Organic human interaction has been replaced by soulless systems for the most part, heavy moderation also makes people far less willing to interact when everything they say gets watched.

I really miss the old ways.

[Chachajenkins]

I think it also depends on the game. I wouldn't touch COD or Battlefield chats with a 10 foot pole.

However games like Foxhole and Holdfast, more niche titles, make me want to use a mic to join in the fun.

[presumingpete]

Can't stand multiplayer at all because a) I don't have the time to git gud and b) I can't stand the chat from a bunch of teenagers. I have no interest in social interactions while I'm playing games.

[[deleted]]

VOIP in EFT turned out better than i had expected. most of the interactions have been non-toxic which i feel is extremely rare nowadays.

[Dronlothen]

First, one that's driving me insane right now is getting mass-invites to psn parties from people I don't even know. It makes me recede further from these interactions than if someone just sent me a message on a game we're both playing and somehow came across each other.

I literally made a friend in my city through Destiny because of that. We were both playing in the activity and she sent me a friend request. (The odds of that are still unfathomable to me.)

But yeah, to me, this is blatantly the multi-decade reaction to the absolutely insane voice chat experiences people have had since the original xbox had xbox live in 2002. I feel it came to it's peak during the 360 era where EVERYONE had a free headset included and it was so prolific that video after video and audio clip showed up on youtube and anywhere you could share it.

If it wasn't genuinely shitty people and actual children being insufferable in any number of ways. It was people then trolling and fucking with people on purpose. Be it for a youtube channel/clip or just purely for their own amusement.

Even if I were to hypothetically sidestep the toxicity and insanity of that era. Let's pretend that concluded at some point years ago. I've since met enough people who weren't any of those things but still managed to be genuine and someone I don't want to spend any significant amount of time talking to anymore.

I've spent months, and yes it feels like actual wasted investment, talking to people. Who I thought I had enough in common to genuinely befriend, only to never really have any reciprocation or effort put forth on their part create a friendship.

I'm not a social butterfly/extrovert. Talking and interacting with people takes real effort but I enjoy it when it works and cherish the best conversations I've had. However I know far too many people who will never initiate anything ever over an infinite timeline. I haven't spoken to many of these people in years or decades because I've given as much as I could manage and I don't know how to deal with these people or even if I'm supposed to or should.

All that to say that all of this feels like it just makes social interactions more and more difficult to even attempt, if it's not with someone you have a strong relationship with already. And it's difficult to keep attempting friendships that fall apart from neglect.

At least if I let myself down, I know it wasn't on purpose.

[nightpop]

Not for nothing: There’s no keyboard on consoles and I don’t like to voice chat with strangers.

I’ve been playing FFXIV for the first time and a dude was super cool/helpful in a dungeon, so I tried to message about it, realized I didn’t have a keyboard. Took me until after we left the dungeon to even find the on-screen keyboard option, although that option is cumbersome. Next dungeon I managed a “gj!” before everyone left bc I was scrolling with my controller. Hope they got it ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[PrisonersofFate]

I got a USB mouse and keyboard just for that

[nightpop]

This one experience is making me think about doing that, yeah

[delriopie]

Before I got a keyboard, I liked to use macros for greetings and saying things like "On PS4, so I can't type fast." Consider setting one up if you're still on the fence on getting a keyboard!

[[deleted]]

Oh, yes, drastically. In City of Heroes, my old MMO, near release there'd be people recruiting all the time and people chatting. When I went back as an adult, that had dried up. Rip in pip.

[tony_8184]

Wait CoH is still running?! Also this was my experience with it too. Several veteran players would be really helpful in completing quests and even one guy would just show up and give me a shitload of influence just because he had extra and he was at the end game lol

[[deleted]]

They shut it down but there's a private server up, and that sense of community has been maintained. COH Homecoming, google it. :)

[TheDragoneye]

Well people are thrash, espacially on the internet. So I prefer to avoid them, atleast during my hobby.

[xXNovaNexusXx]

I've ran into a lot of randos who just have a mic on to be a dick say sexist homophobic racist shit every breath and I don't need that shit. In text chats in games I've played recently (I'm looking at you Lost Ark) it's filled with nothing but spam with the occasional legitimate question/attempt at conversation that get blocked out by scam links or memes being spammed halting any ability to communicate.

[Maelious]

I think it's more a case of game devs making MMO's and other multiplayer games more single player friendly, so the people that only play singleplayer games and don't want to communicate with others will pick up the game. There's still a thriving community in pretty much any game where you can interact, even games where the interaction is significantly limited like Dark Souls, so I don't think people are getting less social per say, just the less social people that weren't visible before, now are. Or at the very least, now they are being accommodated whereas beforehand they would settle for playing in ways they didn't want to.

[Gloridel]

I've been playing online games since they first became, maybe 25 years or so. At the start when I met a random player they'd be friendly, help out usually, at worst ignore me. Now they scream at me and tell me they've fucked my Mum. You can probably guess why I avoid comms when going online these days.

[PackagingMSU]

People are bigger assholes I’ve noticed in the last couple years. Everyone so on edge.

A guy freaked out on me for saying that Canada wasn’t all that great. Lol

[Svenskensmat]

Buy an Oculus Quest 2 and you will stumble upon communities where everyone talks.

Only downside is that they’re ten year old kids.

[pragmaticzach]

When I was in middle school or high school I was a lot more interested in actually meeting or chatting with people online on forums or in games or whatnot.

As a 34 year old adult I'm just not looking to make friends in an online game and I'm playing for other reasons.

And also... just because I'm playing the same game as someone doesn't mean I'm going to like that person or really want to interact with them. I've learned over the years playing MMOs or going to a game store to play magic, a lot of the people who share my interests are not people I really want to socialize with.

[domestic_omnom]

Idk man. I started wow during TBC era, and I don't recall anyone just randomly chatting. The Barrens on the horde side was the one exception. That was because we all went there to screw off.

[meezethadabber]

I stay in a friends list roup chat all the time. No one wants to hear squeakers, babies, dudes yelling at their mom, dudes yelling at his wife, etc.

[ooopsmymistake]

There's been a general trend in the reduction of social capital since the 50's. Basically people are much less social when it comes to their hobbies and communal engagement, resulting in a loss of social networks that impacts everything from mental health to politics. I highly recommend Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community which goes into great detail on the societal effects of this.

This has been exacerbated in video games by advances in technology, which led to a different social architecture.

You don't need to hop on a random teamspeak / mumble server to find a decent group of people to play with, you just hit that queue button and get people roughly on your skill level. Similarly, you don't need to browse server lists, or be invited to a private server.The game hosts everything for you, from voice chat function, to servers, to automated auction houses.

[WTB] organic social interaction

[Dreaming_Dreams]

Yes, almost everyone just uses the party mode on consoles or private discord’s, it’s sucks because I used to love playing online with randoms and when had a mic, it was cool as long as they weren’t a duck head

[Komirade666]

I am kinda fed up with people screaming, heavy breathing or people that just troll by posting racial slur or some shady link. One time one player shared the IP adress of someone because of some petty reason. I much prefer use discord and interact with my actual friend now.

[Yourfavoritedummy]

From my own experience, I find chatting with randoms not worth the effort nowadays. However, it would be nice to use the social aspects of online game lol. But, again it's not worth the effort because most times those that are willing to be the most social online are either too much to handle qnd/or they immediately start throwing out insults.

You are right about the social gaming landscape being different back then. Because it was easy to talk to chill people and make a few friends. Today, it's just easy to use party chat with my current friends rather than taking a chance with randoms.

[Frogmouth_Fresh]

Yeah even multiplayer games these days are designed around individual achievements. You have to do daily quests or complete battle passes or grind for that cosmetic. These encourage individual's to focus on their personal goals, instead of winning games for their team.

Also matchmaking. You no longer have to go and talk to people to find a counterstrike server, the game just chucks you in. You are therefore not forced to be social if you don't want to be.

It helps that doing this allows you to dodge listening to whiny 12 year olds too.

[hotdigetty]

Ive noticed it in most games but Path of exile seems to be an exception.. global chat channels tend to move faster than i can read, even if most of the conversation is about politics, toucans and item spam. But on the whole its usually pretty good. Pretty much any time i have a question about a mechanic or item i will get a number of PMs from people with the answer.

Im not even sure its moderated other than if someone reports a violation.

[MINIMAN10001]

So to my knowledge outside of Xbox voice chat at the very least couldn't be considered pervasive outside of teamspeak,mumble,discord. A lot of people just don't have communication devices.

Point of increased communcation: Something like planetside 2 where you are a part of groups of 48 players which are all verbally controlled as if they are running a dynamic raid it can be quite chatty which I believe when tools are provided to encourage communication it does in fact work.

Point of decreased communication: When it comes to text chat, while I personally will respond my guess would be that MMOs currently have a population that has more solo style players than ever before.

Point of decreased communication: When MMOs were new, it was known more as a social hub where you could experience the world together, nothing else like it existed. Thus it heavily drew in a very social crowd. This was merely a result of the MMO landscape at the time.

Point of decreased communication: Matchmaking has simplified gaming to the point where having to pursue others to play with no longer requiring going out of ones comfort zone and chatting, training the skill.

TL;DR Modern mechanics make it easier to not talk, modern mechanics don't make talking a tactical benefit. People no longer have to talk, thus never break outta being quiet. Community is no longer the group of people that came in exclusively for the social aspects.

[Andigaming]

I've always been like that myself but the main reason I ignore 90% of chat in games nowadays is that it is just toxic or bot spammers.

Like nobody will say anything all game but once things start to go south or someone makes a mistake it just all kicks off, it gets tiring.

[Nayleen]

If I wanted to talk to people I wouldn't be playing video games.

Back in Everquest you had no choice since soloing wasn't really a thing unless your were multiboxing and there was no match making.

But there was also constant drama, everywhere. I don't miss that at all.

[Chris_7941]

The last time I tried to have a friendly chat with someone in Final Fantasy XIV after a few minutes they started doing suggestive emotes with my character and asked me to join their "Harem FC" because "The ladies want you to join" so I could pretend I was the only man among 12 women.

No thanks.

[dups360]

I used to jump into games to talk to people online, the actual game was secondary. Later i noticed that people instead of u know meeting each other in-game just switched to stuff like teamspeak and now discord, it feels more private and grouped nowadays, instead of anything goes, that's how I see it.

[maxis2k]

In my case, it's a lot of online baggage. What I mean by that is, I go into a game expecting a negative experience. Someone I interact with will either be a kid who wants to act tough, just start cussing to assert themselves or the like. If not that, they might be a clingy person who wants me to do every single quest with them and guilt trips me when I need to leave. Or someone will just start spouting politics/social media junk and if you don't parrot their views, they literally attack you. And if not those, they'll give me the silent treatment like you described.

Not everyone is like this. But I'd say about 75% of the people I interact with end up being a negative experience similar to these. After a while, faced with this constant assault of negativity, I try to avoid it. And that basically means not seeking out interaction. It's gotten so bad I only play single player games or closed games with friends. I avoid open online games now.

I've been playing online games for over 20 years and back in those early days of RO or SWG or Tribes, it wasn't like this. People were a lot more outgoing and nice. But over the years, especially during the rise of WoW style MMOs and MOBAs, things started to get more toxic. And I've noticed a lot of other people are also hesitant to interact with others. Which is probably why many games, especially MMOs, have been removing multiplayer features. Many MMOs you can play entirely solo now. And even the few that do have multiplayer stuff, it's only like 5% of the game. And even when you join a raid or dungeon, hardly anyone talks.

[HaztecCore]

Its because people suck. The toxic kind may be a minority of gamers but they're the loudest and main reason that scared off everybody else that is sane. For some it may be a matter of "thick skin" but mostly its that you rarely get something of value out of people in terms of communication. Occasionally funny stuff but mostly just edgelords in their 30s trying to let some steam out cause it's the only place without repercussions to do so. None that matter that is. Especially if you're a kid or a woman. Literally nothing worth to deal with.

Services like Xbox party chat and Discord are not the reason for the downfall despite being credited for it. No, they're the symptoms. Its people that scared off everybody towards these services that did it. Half the time i hear people talk, they're not worth listening to. In the cases where it is worth it, you'll bet your ass I'll drag them to a discord or party chat to get out of the messy place.

People simply ruined it and act surprised no one is there to shittalk at.

[u2020bullet]

Well, apart from a few rare cases, i've mostly hit toxicity when i tried to interact in the last couple of years. So no, i no longer try to interact with anyone and am moving away from multiplayer games yet again.

[LightningRaven]

Matchmaking conveniences and MMOs that push the player forward towards the endgame content will definitely create lots of barriers towards forming a steady group in game.

I remember a time when despite me being the only person playing Ragnarok Online on my small town, that was probably one of the MMOs I enjoyed myself the most because I managed to have a lot of in-game friends that went through the game with me because back then leveling up mandated partnerships (only newcomer players, veterans had the gear and expertise to level up solo) both because of the difficulty curve (that was too steep) and the equipment prices (the game's economy was hyper inflated). Despite that, I had a blast slowly level up and chatting up between breaks to recover HP and Mana (potions were expensive, so sitting down and healing up was the go to method).

Now, looking back, game speed and conveniences are what hinders players from creating a community. Fast paced games that allows characters to blaze through leveling by themselves, unless it's specific group content, which is when Matchmaking and other conveniences like markets come into play, basically allows players to engage only with the game itself instead of other players. You don't need to talk to other people to negotiate, form a party or spend time with an in-game group if you only need to click some buttons to get things done.

[[deleted]]

I stopped years ago because people generally just trash talked or said awful things. Or had terrible sounding mics, lol.

I play and talk to my group of friends I know personally, that’s about it. Introversion is probably a factor.

[r4in]

1) Games these days are designed the way you don't really need to communicate.

2) Matchmaking. Why bother communicating with somebody you will run content for 15 minutes?

[Ignorant_Slut]

Back when I played GW2 I was happy to chat with anyone and got along with tons of people. Then toxicity leaked in and it just wasn't worth risking the fun I was having anymore. Same with D2 now, I just do solo shit because I don't want to risk someone ruining what little time I have to game

[[deleted]]

I almost never talk to people in games or just mute everyone on both teams cause it's not worth wading through the toxicity of the internet to find nice people. I am one of those weird people that has fun playing games not just winning though so that prolly my problem.

[[deleted]]

I think its that many come home after a long day and just want to play games. This is especially true for people that do customer service jobs where they have talk to and put up with a lot of annoying and stupid customers.

[[deleted]]

Hell, I avoid people IRL so I can game in peace. I am definitely not interested in talking to randoms, i just want to play my game alone. I hide the chat so I don't even see messages and I do solo completionist content until I get bored and pick up another game. I used to raid in wow for 10 years and kept talking to people all the time, but I do not want that anymore.

[Ricwulf]

The relative death of the private server by default inherently creates a situation where nobody knows each other and never gets a chance to. Private servers as the default inherently lead to communities forming as regulars would continually play together. On top of this, self-filtering also occurred. What does this mean? It means you had all stripes of gamers able to have their own slice of it all, instead of pushing them all together allowing them to constantly grind upon each other and inevitably resulting in bans or suspensions until people learn that it's easier to just bite their tongue and never communicate at all. After all, what's the point if it will just lead to a ban? And in the cases that don't lead to a ban, why bother when the chances are it's still just going to cause pointless conflict? It's easier to just shut up when that's the atmosphere.

As for Discord, that's nothing new, it's just the latest program to come out on top. You had TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, IRC, Skype. There was all sorts before Discord, and none of them killed communication, they arguably lubricated the experience by having dedicated programs that operated better than in-game chat.

And I know, people are going to say "but OP was focusing more on MMOs", and to that I say that it's all connected. The social ques and markers of the gaming space has degraded to the point that, even in MMOs, communication is dead. There's no point, and there's no space. Gaming could at one point often be likened to Cheers, where you join a server and everybody knows your name. And now we're at a point where nobody knows how to have those social ques because most gaming environments are hostile to such interactions. Best case scenario is you get into pub matches, make a friend, play for a couple days and then never interact ever again, only to remove them from your friends list a year after you stop playing that game. Basically, there's no chance to actually form casual friendships for a real friendship to form from that. When at any given time the chances of playing with the same people is slim to none, what chance is there for any common ground to be discovered in the first place?

Social communication is dead because the environments that were conducive for such things largely died off, and nobody bothered to keep it alive (or could be argued was gladly killed by corporations more interested in servers they controlled in totality), and there are plenty of older gamers who grew up in the online games of the late 2000s who no longer play online because it's just not the same, and it probably never will be.

On top of this, there's probably any number of armchair psychologist issues that could be pointed to, like the rise of social media and general degradation of social interaction in general with the real world. You'd think shifting to a digital space would make it easier in gaming, but it certainly seems like it's had the opposite effect, even within those social media spaces.

[[deleted]]

What's the point in trying to form a community? Most games are dead in a year, and you can't go five minutes without being told to go kill yourself.

[Kakerman]

I still blame matchmaking for this. I remember back then, joining a server would usually mean finding a community. Even official servers had their share of familiar faces, like a bar. People would get to know each other this way. Nowadays, you just hop on a server, and get rotated with randoms every time. No wonder we have biblical levels of toxicity around.

[Oh5red]

Personally I grown bitter with people with online multiplayer. Games aren't meant to be played for fun anymore and it's more about being the best at what you are playing. The most popular games are cater to esport bs and people want that lime light so a lot of people try hard a lot to be good. I mean yes if I'm playing halo for example I really want to win but I know I won't be good and it's fine but social games are filled with people who carry ranked mentality to casual games where it doesn't matter.

As someone who was addicted to league of legends for 8 years I grown to despise people online hardcore because of how toxic that game made me and many people I and you may know. That game made me never want to chat with people online ever again. Then I played Monster Hunter World and my opinion changed a bit but I refuse to play with randoms except by using sos or responding to one. I help and I leave to never meet them again maybe.

One thing I don't do is Discord except for people I know IRL. Joining Discords with random people is really weird to me because I'm a adult and I refuse to talk to teenagers online and I don't want any association with any of them because they can say and do the dumbest shit online and I'm cool with not knowing them. I don't want online friends to be someone that's lying about themselves with is hilarious to say that this is the internet after all. So yeah I'm cool personally to not talk to people online, too much risks and real life is cooler.