If your game requires a server for single player content, I ain't buying it.
I'm not paying full price and getting a rental.
Only exception to this is if I can run the server myself. Even multiplayer games I feel somewhat cautious about now.
Piracy is essentially a form of archivism. The digital age literally ended scarcity in digital media and these people were like "well that won't do".
...Dead games, which means no one on Earth can currently play the game. It's not possible...
...At-risk games, which means these games are currently working, but they're designed in such a way that the second the publisher ends support, they will become dead games without some sort of intervention...
...Dev Preserved, which means the game would have died, but the publisher or developer implemented some sort of endof life plan, so now the game is safe...
...Fan Preserved, where the publisher did nothing or practically nothing to save the game, but fans managed to either hack it to remove dependencies or reverse engineer a server emulator so that the game was saved in spite of the publisher actions.
This is why it is so important to find exploits for current gen consoles. It is not about piracy, it is about preservation. You don't own a game that requires the internet, or a fucking download code Nintendo.
It is not about piracy, it is about preservation.
It's astonishing to me how even right here on Lemmy so many people still misunderstand what this is about with comments saying that piracy fixes it or that downloading the game installer solves the issue. The games where those things are options aren't what this effort is about, this is about games like Darkspore, Defiance, Tabula Rasa, and our prototypical example The Crew, where there is no one who can play them no matter where, how, or when, they acquired the game, it is impossible to play for anyone, the whole piece of art has been destroyed.
Honestly if we can't even communicate what the movement is about to those who aught to be our base it really does not bode well for gaining any kind of wider traction.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they'll never actually die, unless the server source code gets taken down and nobody archives a copy. I mean, WoW Classic only happened because a private server running vanilla got too big, despite Blizzard bullshit of "You think you want it, but you don't" and "We don't have the code to roll back".
Star Wars Galaxies, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes, Warhammer Age of Reckoning all still exist and can be played, despite being "dead", thanks to private/pirate servers.
That only works if the server code gets leaked or someone reverse engineers it. Both of those options shouldn't be relied on, especially for more complex or less popular games.
An MMO i played from 1999-2007 shut down in I think 2017. I still remember the landscapes and landmarks and it is really strange knowing the shared experiences in those places are just flat gone. Inscribed items with messages to other players: deleted.
I have emulated the game world but only fragments were saved by collective efforts in the community before shutdown. Regardless there's simply no people or things to interact with so it feels even more soullessly dead and empty.
I still love Lord of the Rings Online. It still has enough people to feel alive, to the point where they even upgraded their servers recently, and still keeps that old school feel. You can even earn LOTRO points through hunting monsters and quests, so if you put the work in you don't even need to buy anything.
Do I miss the days before MTX? Yeah, but I feel like they are fairly less greedy about it than other games. Fairly. There's still the VIP subscription while double-dipping into MTX that rubs me the wrong way a bit, but they still actively try to listen to the players. I'll be sad when its gone...
Its mostly much older generations that play, though, but that really cuts down on a lot of the toxicity. I've had so many polite conversations in world chat with programmers and sysadmins offering advice. One of the most helpful players I met was a 72 year old vietnam veteran. He helped me get started and gave me a ton of gear just for having a nice talk with him.
I love lotro. I played it for 10 years. From release, until mordor.
I was madly inlove with lotro. It was a beautiful game. the only MMO where you actually read lore and quest text and anything else, because of how immersive it was all.. and the game was perfect (before mordor). Casual, relaxing, but challenging in all the right places.
and the community was just absolutely amazing. Kind, considerate, helpful, generous. Like you said, i think the average age of lotro players was over 40.. Until there was there was some issue with WoW that caused a lot of WoW players to immigrate to lotro... Then chat got less friendly, and more obnoxious, and the community got less kind, and less helpful.. cause all the kind helpful people got burned by the jackholes being jackholes.. Still a pleasant community overall, but no where near what it was before that WoWpocalypse.
My love and faith in the game changed with Mordor, though... Mordor broke me, It was just so pointlessly difficulty spiked on even the landscape mobs were slaughtering raid-ready players, that most of my kin, myself included, ended up just quitting the game. A few people eventually got the gang back together again for southern mirkwood, but that mordor level of difficulty was still there. No one in the kin, except for the hunters and the champions, seemed able to even 1v1 the landscape mobs. that also reflected group content.. no one wanted anything but healers and hunters. was the same with mordor, but even worse with southern mirkwood. Mobs were so dumbly overpowered that only the lotro character equivalent of tactical nukes were wanted in groups.. I, sadly, was not a tactical nuke class.
It really breaks my heart. I loved that game. I made great real life friends in that game.. I met my Ex in that game (though in retrospect that probably shouldnt be viewed as part of the happy memories lol), Spent so many evenings bullshitting in voice chat while we did instances and group content, or just ground out old content for deeds. Was such a magical fucking experience, that I'll probably never experience again for the rest of my life. The pre-mordor game was absolute perfection. Especially with the revamps to some less ideal/polished game areas like Moria.
And killed, to me, because devs listened to a vocal minority that wanted moar harderer.
I'm sad now.
I absolutely love LOTRO, too. I understand what you mean. The endgame content is pretty advanced, but I had this conversation with someone on Reddit years ago.
It doesn't have to be hard. There is so much content in LOTRO to last you years of playing new classes and enjoying the world. Throw out all of your max level up items, they're going to ruin the game for you. Just go out adventuring. I've had a good time during anniversary helping people through old dungeons (I hate you, Saruman).
The endgame is hard, because half the community beats endgame and complains that there's no content, and half the community just plays casually. They don't really have the power to keep pushing out quantity in content, so they have to make ridiculously hard and rewarding content to make up for it. It's really a lose-lose either way, and they chose to keep the community that has been faithful for years over trying to pull in new players.
It sucks, I agree, but I think I would have made the same choice. I still love playing and wandering around; leveling new classes, and you can now get new titles for playing new difficulty modes they made. You can change the world difficulty starting at level 10, I believe.
Respectfully, I have to disagree with some of what you said.. I don't mind end game being a challenge, or even difficult.
Because the end game has always been in instances and raids. I don't mind raids being challenging. I dont mind 3/6mans being challenging. Cause they are content you can typically choose to do or not, you need a group to do them, and they have the tier system that lets you select how difficult you actually want it.
Thats a good, healthy system to introducing challenge to the system.
And that meshed very well with the otherwise relaxed/chill nature of lotro. Because before mordor, Turbine/SSG/Whatever they are now, did a fairly admirable job at balancing and spacing out the challenging aspects amongst the fun and relaxing stuff to keep playability and fun high, while keeping a sense of satisfaction by overcoming the challenging bits.
Landscape wasnt a cake walk, unless you were ridiculously overeveled, but it wasn't a torture session either. Any class could get through their landscape quests with an acceptable amount of challenge.
But then Mordor came in, and you couldn't solo landscape unless you were one of the chosen classes, with Hunter being the king of them, because their DPS was insane, and they were range, so they could power down anything without taking damage. A poorly equipped hunter was solo survivable, when a very well equipped not-hunter could barely survive, if survive at all.
Mordor landscape wasn't fun, it wasn't a challenge. it was just naked brutality for brutality sake. They listened to a vocal minority that hadn't played the game for long, comparatively, and wanted to turn lotro into a souls-like difficulty game, at the expense of all the people who had made lotro their evening stable for a decade+. and they lost players because of it. It really changed lotro from a fun way to spend an evening, to a way to ruin your evening because you just want to do these handful of landscape quests without having to deal with generic orc 37 that's as strong as a 3/6 man miniboss (slight hyperbole).
I dont know if they've re-balanced the areas since then, or introduced mechanics to take the edge off, or what. I hope they did. I hope they've brought the fun and play-ability back so new players don't hit the same wall that destroyed a generation of players, but no matter what changes they may or may not have made.. ultimately, I just cant see myself ever mustering desire to play lotro again.. and that saddens me as much as the state of the game that made me quit to begin with.
I don't want to even think of how many thousands of hours i poured into lotro over a decade of almost nightly play. Thats too terrifying a number to ever think about, lol.
Ohhhh, no no. The raids and dungeons are challenging and ridiculously hard. I get what you're saying now. It hasn't been like that since I started up again, which was right when Gundabad released. It's very easy to solo, and now there's an NPC that lets you change world difficulty if you want to opt for it, making it so that the hardcore players and the casual players both get what they want.
I hear you. I haven't touched it in a while because I will literally lose months of my life to it. Its harder for me because its one of my gf's favorite games and when she plays I can't help but play.
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