Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Submissions have to be related to games
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No excessive self-promotion
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here and here.
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.
Its a depressing perspective sure, but it mirrors real life pretty closely. Nothing lasts forever, buildings change, towns die out. Still a good idea to take some pictures or videos in either case.
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.
Technically 100% do, games that require the Internet require the Internet, which means by design you're relying on someone else hosting servers which means it may not be available, 50, 100, or even more years into the future. That's not the case with single-player/offline-available games.
As the graph breaks down, some games are patched by companies to allow them to function offline or to enable self-hosted servers. Mostly its fan efforts to reverse engineer the server code, though.
The point of the stop killing games campaign is to legislate by law that going forward, developers/publishers would have to account for a way to allow the player to host a server or patch the game to run offline when they become unprofitable and are shut down.
My point was more that games that require the Internet itself, and not just LAN-capable servers, are games that are inevitably going to disappear.
It may seem like I'm splitting hairs but what I said is technically true.
I understand, but I'm not really sure why you're pointing out the exact problem that this campaign is actively trying to solve.
...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.
Why doesn't that graph show at risk games?
These are the total numbers and includes the at-risk games. Which may not be helpful to some, since the fate of those games is unknown.
Out of curiosity what are the 16 dev preserved ones?
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.
It shouldn't require a server that I can't control for multiplayer either.
Only exception to this is if I can run the server myself. Even multiplayer games I feel somewhat cautious about now.
Me building mega castles on my one man modded Rust server.
That's why the first thing I do when I buy a new game is to turn off the internet and boot the game. If it doesn't boot or work offline, I refund it. And I just don't buy games that have Denuvo.
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'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.
There ought to be a law...
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".
You know you bring up a really great point. We've finally hit post-scarcity in an industry (information) and look at what it has done to us. Are we really ready for this in other areas yet. Should we use this as a chance to figure out how to integrate such a creation into society such that the next time this happens it doesn't kill us all.
