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Tag game recommendations with [rec]. Tag your critique or commentary threads with [discussion]. Both table-top and video game content is welcome! Original content or indie/DRM free material is encouraged!
Not a place for gamer gate talk or other reactionary behavior. TERFs and incels get the wall.
lmao i never managed to get into these kinds of games. too anxiety-inducing and stressful.
i tried in the past because i was so fucking lonely and thought it would've been a good way to make friends. oh well.
i've always been a singleplayer/co-op girl and that's not going to change anytime soon.
This is like me. I would like to play them but they are way too stressful, especially if there's voice/text. I sometimes do coop stuff - Remant 2, World War Z, Destiny 2 but if I pick up that someone's getting annoyed with me I get stressed and start playing badly. I wish games were better at putting you with similarly ranked people but I think they just want short queues so they chuck everyone in together - newbs and the not-so-good get slaughtered and either get good quickly or leave (mostly leave I think). For me, at least, the best thing is to try to find a small, friendly Discord community and just play the games when you know you are going to be with friendly, supportive people. I'd love to play games like Rust, CoD, but toxic players keep me away. Then there's the homophobia and ageism... but that's a whole other post or two. 😅
Yes, they made me a bit too angry. While i still play some online now and then, never the competitive games.
I used to RAGE at Destiny when it first dropped like a decade ago almost. I was really good at the game for a short period but then everyone else got way better too and I eventually quit. Now I only play online games if I’m with a friend and that’s rare
For me they often provoke self-anger. I kept experiencing intrusive thoughts like "That's the third time I died that way and I KNEW it was coming so what the hell's wrong with me?" and "I can't believe I choked AGAIN. I dragged my whole team down and now I'm 100 MMR deeper in the hole to show for it..."
I wasn't having fun anymore and decided to hang up my hat for good -- these days I stick to TF2 when I want to scratch that multiplayer FPS itch. It's so much nicer to play on my own terms in a setting where whether you win or lose everyone has fun and wants to stick around for another round or three.
Yeah, I have stopped really caring for competitive games for 3 or 4 years, if not more, now. Playing with friends can be a blast tho, and that's what I do when it's a competitive game. Usually it's league of legends for me, but I play very little of it now, which is to be expected when you play the same game for a decade lol.
Gaming in general for the past years have been tough for me because despite genuinely loving it, my mental health have steadily declined to the point I have trouble even starting anything, let alone continuing to play something I have started, but right now I'm playing Breath of the Wild and Baldur's Gate 3, both for the first time and let me tell you, I'm having a blast and don't feel like stopping anytime soon. Single-player games are fucking great.
Now, I don't think the issue with competitive games is the fact that someone will get the short end of the stick and not have fun. If that was the case, fighting games would be dead by now. You can absolutely have fun while losing. The issue I have always seen, in league at least, is that you're alone, there's no collective sentiment when playing, no team mentality, most people are hostile and everyone is trying to win in a selfish way and because of that you get frustrated, which eventually turns to anger, and all of that most likely ties to the hyper-individualization of the self under capitalism. Every now and then you find a team that clicks, where everyone communicates and play for each other, instead of in spite of each other, and when it happens it's fucking great, even when you end up losing.
Now, I don’t think the issue with competitive games is the fact that someone will get the short end of the stick and not have fun.
Yeah I somewhat regret saying that aloud because it just makes me look like a sore loser, but hey, at least I'm avoiding situations where I'm a sore loser. 😅
Nah, it didn't came accross like you're a sore loser. What you said is not wrong, it can't always be fun, and for some people losing is always not fun.
Yes.
A long time ago, actually and it was very good for my mental health.
By the time video games got to where being destroyed over the internet was possible, I couldn't afford the time investment required to git gud.
This was my experience. Don't have time to play for more than a few hours a week so if it's between getting my ass kicked online the whole time or a few single player games the single players way more enjoyable.
Especially now that im a console behind and really can't justify spending hundreds of dollars to play marginally different versions of games I already own for 4 hours a week.
Yes, I avoid them. The only time I make exceptions are during LAN parties, when we all squad up together, to get demolished by sweat lords. But at that point, it's all about the hang session, really.
In my free time I prefer leisurely games, like thoughtful indy platformers and puzzle games, with the occasional RPG or survival game sprinkled in.
I'm travelling currently and taking a bit of a gaming sabbatical, but I look forward to replaying Sunless Sea when I get back. I also am looking forward to the STALKER 2 release sometime this Q1.
The only multiplayer games I've played in the past 10-ish years are Dark Souls and like Payday 2. This year I'm trying to get into fighting games, though, lol.
I like co-op games too. With friends at least. I haven't braved many random lobbies in Payday, but that is more just a matter of shyness.
Also, based username. Without the glorious LaGG-3 we would've never got my favorite WW2 fighter, the La-7.
Yeah, I only play with strangers when I don't have to talk to them lol.
Also, based username. Without the glorious LaGG-3 we would've never got my favorite WW2 fighter, the La-7.
Thanks! I like the La-7 and La-5 a lot, too, but there's something great about how the LaGG-3 was just "good enough" for it's time
For the past ten years… I don’t think I ever ended a session of a player vs player match - “happy.”
Yeah I had this same realization a while ago when I used to almost exclusively play competitive games. When I lost a match, at best I just felt bad, and at worst I was pissed because I got my ass kicked by some little shit taunting me over voice chat or something. When I won I just felt okay or maybe relieved, but not really good or happy. Either way when I stopped playing I was usually in a worse mood than when I started.
Now I mostly play single player games and have a lot more fun. After I close out of the game I feel satisfied and like I genuinely enjoyed the time I spent playing it. No more getting needlessly stressed out or having my day ruined because of a game. Also it helps that when I need to answer my phone, get a package at the door, etc. I can (usually) just pause the game and come back no problem.
One of my breaking points was having an incredible loss streak in War Thunder and when I finally won a match I noticed the only thing I felt was relief. Nothing else. Like goddamn that is not something I should have to work towards in a hobby.
I just stopped finding pvp fun at some point years ago and stopped playing competitive games.
I went back to some old school games and found that I can play them 20 times longer than anything new rn.
I've been enjoying OG Star Wars battlefront 2, and I can't stop. I never stopped loving that game apparently
Old Battlefront 2 is an amazing game. I tried getting my friends to play it recently at a LAN, and no one could appreciate it as much as I do.
Please join me comrade
I'm travelling until the end of the month. I'll DM you when I'm back home, so we can connect on Steam and Discord, or wherever. 👍
Absolutely I play with another close comrade of mine as well, please join us it's so much fun
I left ranked league of legends for single player pirated offline nintendo switch stuff, and old steam games in my library.
No regrets!
Once I enjoyed playing MMORPGs. But also this is kind of stressful to me. So I rather enjoy playing single-player games or Genshin Impact on my mobile phone, at least the interactions with other players are mostly friendly there and you can help someone
I have only played coop styled PVE multiplayer video games for years. Monster Hunter games are my favorite. Just dudes and dudettes slaying dragons. Most of the time vocal communication isn't necessary. Emojis and some signals at most. Most of the time when you are with people that know what they are doing you don't need anything. It makes playing with random online so much better. And there's not much animosity against other people. Like ok, sure, you can get a bad player here or there, and sometimes you might have to boot someone for being a little shit but generally speaking it's pretty smooth sailing.
When I play against people there's just so much extra stress. I just don't like that kind of fight. I like to work with people not fight against them. Even if it's team based pvp I don't like it. You are still fighting against other people and in the end that leave some people feeling shitty or angry at other people. I don't like that. Maybe it's part of why I took to communism so quickly and readily. It's not about competing against each other like shitty capitalism but working with each other to make things better. That just resonates with me in all things.
If you ever return - Play jazz in the background. Something chill that you would hear at a lounge. Your mood changes completely and you go from tense and raging to feeling at your most laid back mood. For me it turned multi player FPS games into a relaxing activity.
I wasted some good teenage years playing League of Legends. I quit it because of how not only it made me feel awful but also made me into a rager.
Nowadays I only do pve if playing multiplayer and honestly? I feel much better. MMOs kind of feel the niche of social interaction when I want to play with others.
And yes, the MiG-19 is the BEST plane in DCS (until we get the MiG-23).
I've always preferred co op for that very reason. Like I get it back in the day when you needed another person to have a good challenge, but bots are pretty good these days and I'd rather frag em alongside you.
I've been enjoying my time in Darktide because despite it being a fucking Warhammer game, the co-op only concept means that the most insufferable, toxic That Guys go elsewhere. I've had maybe one bad interaction, and it was so relatively minor I can't remember what it was about.
I quit League of Legends (checks notes) ten years ago and it was a great decision. Since then I've tried other competitive online games - Titanfall was my jam for a while, then Overwatch of course, tried to get back into Starcraft/SC2, really like Dragon Ball Fighter Z but I haven't been able to play for a while - but I always quit as soon as I cross the threshold of getting pissed more than I'm having fun.
My favorite online experiences now are all cooperative with relatively small player bases. I dug the hell out of Final Fantasy XI playing it through last year (though I still have a lot of content left if I ever go back to it again), on DCS I play on a "casual milsim" server that's mostly frequented by Australian dads where we play against a pretty hardcore computer opponent, and now that I think of it Dungeons and Dragons (and most other TTRPGs) totally has the same vibe of "coop gameplay with a small playerbase".
Getting back into EU4
just wait until you experience the adrenaline of being declared on in multiplayer. shit would get my heart racing so fast i thought i was going to pass out
i tried playing eu4 again recently but the feature bloat made it super inaccessible, victoria 2 with dlcs seems like the perfect level of features but i guess game dev doesn't work like that anymore
I used to play a lot of Street Fighter and found my fingers thanking me after I decided to stop playing it as competitively.
I'm currently on break from them, I can enjoy them (if they never made me really happy, I wouldn't play them), but they can also be bad for my mental health so for now I've been avoiding playing online, I still play some of the games but just against bots
I'd like to return to them eventually though, I really enjoy the process of learning and improving and adapting that doesn't exist the same way in singleplayer games
Feeling bad because of losing is certainly a big part of it, but I think another big problem often comes down to the mechanics these games have been putting in to cause addiction, like battle passes which are everywhere these days (even Splatoon, which is one of the biggest reasons I've grown to really dislike 3 even though I love this series)
Edit: Though, can't forget that another reason I fell off of Splatoon 3 in particular is because they ruined the rank system in this game, designing it to be grindy and require far more games to make actual progress regardless of skill, and distancing it so far from the skill ratings which are the actual good ranking system, there's a reason so many people switch to X Battles (the mode that directly uses those skill ratings) the moment they hit S+ instead of continuing to waste time grinding
Especially since they now have everyone rank down each season, forcing everyone to grind all over again for no good reason even if their skill hasn't actually changed
Splatoon 2's system was a lot more directly related to the SBMM than one might assume, and it was significantly better for it, you wouldn't be forced to stick around in a rank you couldn't handle and if you were truly too good for your current rank then you could move out of it pretty quickly, the whole "skipping ranks" thing happened if your matchmaking rating was higher than normal for that rank
I'm a big Dota2 addict and luckily I learnt to approach it more casually. I know not everyone has the material conditions required to do such impossible thing as to play a competitive game in a healthier way, but I'm here to say that it is eventually possible
I think dota has a lot of avenues for better understanding communism and dialectics.
As one example, the way the five roles fit together in the balancing of their power spikes and the harnessing of their skill sets towards a common goal, it makes me think of this Che quote:
One acquires in the face of work the old joy: the joy of fulfilling a duty; of feeling important within the social mechanism; of feeling oneself a cog that has its own unique characteristics, that is necessary — although not indispensable — to the production process. And, moreover, a conscious cog. A cog that has its own engine, driven further and further every time, in order to bring about to happy conclusion one of the key premises of socialist construction: the availability of a sufficient quantity of consumer goods for the entire population.
That's crazy because I actually thought a lot about how Dota2 was 'dialectical' compared to LoL's more 'ontological' approach. In League, the roles and lanes are written in stone, the items all serve the purpose of scaling the numbers on your fixed champion gameplay. On the contrary, there is fluidity in the Dota2 roles, ambiguity built in every hero, and items are here to mutate your gameplay more than simply scaling up your stats. Dota2 ends up with both more cooperation and actually more individual courses of action, to the cost of being harder to learn.
And coincidentally, Dota2 is very popular in Russia, China, and other periphery countries, when League is overwhelming in the West and its puppets
I still play Call of Duty: Mobile to this day. The problem I see now is SBMM, P2W bastards, and cash shops ruining the experience.
Hey if you’re looking for other single layer games to play I know a few hidden gems
Yes, though I think I made the same realisation like 5 years ago. Decent number of people tried to bully me back into comp games. Real nice community you (the sort of person that would do this) got there
I've never played "competitively" or as a "try hard" as people say now. Once things get too heated up or I start catching myself raging then I cut it off and stop. Games are just games, they're not life.
I think the most competitive I was was about a year or so before the TF2 scene actually had official competitive stuff.
I was done with competitive online gaming after ten minutes of Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal twenty years ago.
Pretty much, I occasionally play Halo but that's about it. Even then I can only stand it in short bursts before I have to stop. When I played on a console back in highschool it was really bad for my mental health but most of the time now I just end up realizing there's something better I want to spend my time on.
To go from competitive gaming to quitting cold turkey won’t work in my experience. Try playing a solo mode of whatever you play most often. Ex: I played lots of NBA2k online and it just made me pissed that people can buy better stats and attributes, so I just started playing MyCareer mode (single player) and never looked back. I might play one or 2 full length NBA games with my player, play a good game and then I quit before the game pisses me off. I play a whole hell of a lot less of it now, maybe once every day or 2, and I have more fun in the process.
I have never really been into online gaming and much prefer single-player experiences. I played COD for a time years ago, and I quickly got very, very annoyed by kids constantly telling me they were going to have intercourse with my mother.
Now I view gaming differently than I did then. It is escapism for me. I don't like my escapism tainted by the sheer competitiveness of it all. I have enough competitiveness in my daily life. If I want to slog slowly through a game -- sometimes just playing on easy because I find it more enjoyable -- then I do that.