Have guides ruined MMO games? - [MMOPINION] 

I recently joined a static in FF14 that wanted to "blind prog" the newest Savage-tier raids. Basically, we would force ourselves to never look at a single guide and try to figure out the mechanics on our own. While that's literally reinventing the wheel since an "optimal" strategy has existed for months now, it's probably the most enjoyable time I've had in an MMO as of late.

For me it's: >Try blind for a substantial amount of time to try to do it myself >Reach a point where I just wanna get it done with so i look up a guide

This is why I enjoy solo games more and more. There is just no peer pressure and it doesn't feel like a second job

Even solo games suffer from this, with achievements and FOMO everywhere with limited events or seasonal rewards creeping into them. Most people want to get all the achievements in a single playthrough or don´t miss any dialogues/events/items, and one feels games are being designed more and more with a very linear difficulty curve centered around an optimal way to play them rather than giving us free choice anymore.

I fall into this trap with almost every game, especially my favorite genre, RPG's. I waste so many hours of time looking up guides so I can play the best I can, and it always ends up making the game less fun for me. I'm going to try real hard to stop doing that now. Great video. Here's a comment and a like for that algorithm.

9:51 - 10:08 got me thinking about the time on Runescape (like '04) when I spent hours gathering wheat, grinding it into flour, and making pies at what I believe became the cooking guild unless I'm mistaken. It was to the west of Varrock. I'd just chill upstairs waiting for the pie dish and cooking apple to respawn so I could make apple pies, since they healed more than shrimp and cooked meat. It took a while waiting for everything to respawn but it was rewarding seeing that stockpile of pies in my bank grow. I made like 300 of them and got a few cooking levels too. Then when I got tired of cooking and wanted to go fight stuff, I had a buncha "good" food to use. Once I got more familiar with the game and started training things more efficiently, I remember thinking how dumb I was for doing all that and what a waste of time it was. But I never had as much fun efficiently grinding away as I did chilling in that building cooking apple pies. Noob me was onto something.

Yeah, it's amazing we demand these huge open worlds where we can do anything .... and then craft guides to help us avoid having to do anything , lol.

This hit so hard. I literally just joined a mythic+ dungeon in WoW where a dude yelled at me for not knowing all of the mechanics ahead of time

The most soul crushing thing to see in guild chats is when someone replies to a game related question with the answer of "go check the wiki"

One of the big problems in Mmorpg and Arpgs is that the developers have adjusted the difficulty and content to players who follow the meta and guides, which leave people who want to try by themselves incredibly far behind. And often there aren't enough in game tutorials and information to help someone who doesn't look up guides. Just look at OG wow vanilla and wow classic, with guides it has become trivial. And watch Wow vanilla fights Vs. current wow mythic bosses. If you dont follow guides and metas like a robot you dont even come close to beating mythic. In Arpgs its the same, the end game is so cranked up that you have to follow guides. And instead of giving you prestige and cosmetic rewards, all the good gear is hiding behind a huge meta wall.

I still remember joining my first guild in 'Elder Scrolls Online' and receiving a ton of "homework" on the select dungeons we would be running. When playing solo I put story and experience first ... when it's with other players ... I often have to abandon experiencing the story for the sake of being prepared from the first raid on ... it was the reason I stopped doing the group content.

this video is SO true, it hurts. i would go so far to say guides and meta have ruined online gaming to a certain degree, period. half of the game, the creative part, is taken away and we are left with only 50% of the fun because of it.

My best boss fight ever was in Age of Conan with three friends. We went in blind, a group consisting of two Herald of Xotli, one Necromancer, and one Priest of Mitra. For those who never played it, Heralds are 2-h-Sword wielding mages, so we were 3 cloth wearers and one in leather armor. We got a good groove going, but with no real tank and good, but ultimately insufficient healing, er starter dying. one of the Herolds went down first, after using his two 'oh shit' buttons (transforms into a demon, heals himself a lot and gets fairly tough,) and a self res ability. He then had to respawn outside the dungeon. Seeing the way the battle went, we started pulling the boss towards the entrance, focusing on not losing aggro to prevent him from resetting, and whoever was respawning rushed with all speed to get at least one hit in before all others were dead. More than once, the returning character landed a single strike before the remaining character died, and in AoC it was not enough to be nearby, you had to damage the enemy to actually aggro. The battle ended right next to the entrance with a glorious victory! I had respawned at least 5 times, and the healer and necro, who didn't have the self res or 'oh shit' buttons, at least 8. All gear was practically ruined and we were all ecstatic! Later I read up on the boss on forums. Apparently, he was listed as a major badass, requiring a 'perfect party' to take down and a bane of many adventurers. Had I read any of that before we entered, we wouldn't even have tried - the fun was in going in blind, and then see what happened!

This whole video reminds me of the quote " given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" which is true (yes the follow up is the protect players from themselves, but players tend to rebel against that part too.)

I love where you say "try playing less efficiently". I also feel some MMOs and games have such a gorgeous world and you don't get to experience it with constant use of fast travel. I get why it exists but if used too much I feel disconnected from the world. So I try not to use it. Unless it's WoW because the flight paths still take you over the world so you can see how big the world is. I'm thinking of vanilla and flying over Seering Gorge and knowing I can't go there yet.

Have to agree here. In the late 80's when I started my gaming career we used to go to the library and read the game guides on a specific gaming magazine that released I believe 3-4 times a year. These were things like Secrets of Zelda etc. Later on when modems started to be a thing a few friends were able to reach BBS's and shared their findings to us who didn't have any internet access. Then came the early days of multiplayer games for me in the early 2000's. That was the golden days. Forums were filled with experimental guides and theorycrafting. Going forward some years the guides had been cemented and theorycrafting had reached its conclusion and the gaming mechanics were thoroughly known. Nowadays when people start a new game they're watching videos on the most effective classes and builds. I've fallen a victim of this myself a lot of times. Playing a cookie cutter build of any given character in the end becomes very boring. Also multiplayer raid content and such is people asking for "Berserker warrior with double axes wanted, has to have the axe of endurance of Kings with T7 armor and at least 253 Strength" instead of "Looking for DPS player". If you don't follow the meta you're not invited or allowed in a party. What I've realized over time is I rarely enjoy the endgame of MMO's where micromanaging is pretty much required. Instead I tend to nowadays play the game at my own pace and then when the meta issues start to hit I'll just quit and move on to another game. Kind of conflicts with the idea of "The game only starts in the endgame" but I prefer it this way. Also for this reason I'll rather start a brand new game even if it's less good than an established game with good player documentation. BUT there are games where the class changes happen periodically and change skills so much that the old guides become straight out obsolete. Even quest targets and places change sometimes. That's infuriating for people who try to use old online resources for quest guides but really nice thing for a player who likes going their own way.

I don't wanna live in a world where I never found Mankirk's wife

This "play the most effficient way" goes for every genre in gaming, not just MMOs tbh

I had an absolute blast just playing 99% blind through GW2. Exploring at my own pace, finding cool shit, learning on my own. Can't recommend it enough.

This made me remember Ragnarok Online, with it's beautiful no stat reset meaning my experiment for fighter priest hybrid, which ended unfit for combat and supporting in mid-high areas, required reseting 4 months of progress and going through the same old areas agains for 3 months with a new character until I caught up with level to the prior one. Or the time I made that Geffenia quest which at one point just fucking makes you wait an undetermined amount of IRL days until some item is ready (this was the point when I looked at a guide, since I thought the thing had bugged out and was about to call support), and failing to retreive it in time might actually fuck up the entire quest permanently, or how at some point it just throws you alone against a goddamn miniboss and it's minions and if you die there the quest is lost forever. Thinking back on that time makes me realize how much better my experience with the game had been if I had checked the build paths beforehand. It's really no fun when the cost of experimenting is to get royally fucked forever unless you restart the character or pay the devs for the privilege of stat resets to move on in the fucking game. That's a major flaw I see in this review as a whole, in that it assumes the time wasted corresponds to the victory being attained at a slower pace, instead of it being completely unnatainable if the experimentation results in failure and requires a full reset.

Yes I can confirm that watching the 100% guide ruined my experience with the best mmo ever Club Penguin

This is how I play Dark Souls games, it feels so good to discover the secrets in your own

You just can't imagine how much more fun I've started to have in ESO when I stopped looking for guides. I just realized I'm not going hardcore PvE and discovered plenty of fun skill sets in ESO

YES. The best experience I ever had in a MMORPG was when I did my first Fractal in GW2. I had no idea what I was doing and so did nobody else. We together figured out how to beat this dungeon through trial and error. It was awesome and fun! The working together to overcome obstacles part combined with our own effort was so rewarding. Didnt have a similar experience ever since.

I only use a guide after I have spent a considerable time trying to figure something out and not being able to get through it. Except for Runescape--which I might change how I play in response to this. I tend to avoid group play because I tend to like to take my time and explore--Neverwinter forces progression behind dungeons which many of the player-base have played over and over again. I think that is it--the fewer new players a game has, the more likely the player-base will be about efficiency rather than discovery.

You are be the only RU-vidr that summed up why I personally stop grouping in MMOs years ago. Thank you, this was quite revealing and gave me a smile.

I feel the core issue is that so many games focus on the numbers - stats, levels, etc. The best games in my library focus on the gameplay itself, not maths.

I refuse to read any guides or let myself get spoiled the "learning" and exploration experience. Might piss some people off but I really don't care. Everyone has the right to this experience and to enjoy the game like it just released, no matter how old it is. As a community in an MMO we should strive to give newcomers this experience instead of robbing them of the enjoyment we had in the beginning.

personal anecdote that links into that: I've been playing ESO for the past year now, very fun, I try to play as guideless as possible, at least for the parts that I want to enjoy the most. I was very successful at enjoying myself until I came to a meeting point of 2 issues, one which you talk of in this video. I was still lvling up my main tank, I had just gained access to all DLC dungeons and wanted to run each of them for their skill points. I then arrived at the notorious Moonhunter Keep. I knew nothing at the time but it is a notorious dungeon that even experienced players have a hard time with, and I had no idea what I in for. I arrive at the most difficult boss of the dungeon, Mylène the Moon-Caller and I get my ass handed to me time and time again, which results in the rest of the team wiping being that I was the tank. Normally, I would be fine with that and take my time to learn the fight but one other player in the group was not happy about that. Issue 1: One player of the group started hurling obscenities at me for "not doing what I was supposed to do" while simultaneously not explaining anything to me. That was distracting while I was trying to make sense of everything that was happening on screen (and A LOT was happening as a matter of fact) all while I have someone being an absolute dickhead that expected a low lvl player that had just unlocked the dungeon to somehow know everything about it. Issue 2: Up until that point I was managing every dungeon by using my core skills as a tank and learning the mechanics as they were organically introduced to me by the dungeons themselves with proper game design. It was enough to teach me what I needed to know until that very boss. Because nothing before the fight or within the fight from a design perspective did anything to help me understand the fight. There was poor work on the developper's side to intuitively teach a player not using a guide how to approach this fight at all. And that second issue is one of the defense points I may have for some guides, though not a proper defense. A guide can be a nice thing to have when tackling poorly designed content, which wouldn't be a problem if all content was well-designed but nothing is ever perfect or absolute. Also in regards to your solution, I thought you might have gone deeper into it and mention Runescape and their labeled servers. Though it divides the playerbase into smaller parts, it also greatly helps in finding like-minded players for your playstyle when you can join a server that is targetted at them. Want to play minigames? Use server X. Want to roleplay? Use server Y. Want a hardcore experience? Use server Z and so on and so on. I think that idea could help alleviate the stress of being grouped with players of completely different mindsets at the cost of shrinking the size of the playerbase per instance, but I see it more as focusing the playerbase into its most valuable partners for your playstyle.

Not necessarily ruined, but so many players are essentially playing their games through another player.

God damn man. As an MMO lover I love these videos because it tells everything I thought and felt but couldn’t articulate. Loving your videos homie

That jumping puzzle in gw2 was the first I'd encountered in an MMO. Watching you do it brought back a rush of anxiety because it killed me SO DANGED MUCH. Having come from NWN1 and Champions Online before that, it was a huge difference. Thanks for letting me relive that!

Completely agree. I play healer in majority Mmo's. If I dont run certain buffs or debuffs in the meta, I would get kicked. But that is how I built my own character. Its frustrating.

I believe they've ruined it from a casual perspective since it's all about the endgame now. Getting there, getting to the grind, and generally being ahead of everyone else. Time waits for no man, it's a commodity people constantly like to value over anything else, and it is expected of you to know every little pixel. Going in to a game or dungeon blind is putting everyone else at a disadvantage and you'll more likely be called a troll. Guides are literally the Holy Book that nobody questions.

Love the breakdown! Recently a friend of mine has been obsessed learning content before ever even doing it out of sheer anxiety. I tried convincing them to stop doing that but after maybe one dungeon they fall back and spend more time trying to learn the content than actually doing it, subsequently doing it only once for the story bit of it and then never again since it “was so much to remember”...

This has inspired me to play a little differently now, I felt it for a while and you pointed out and shone a light on things I knew but didn't know I knew. Thanks very much for reminding us that the things we do for fun are primarily only about us having fun.

Im on the inefficient side of the spectrum, I love exploring and finding lore and reading ingame texts. I play eso and im wearing meta gear but im not rotating or studying guides unless I've been in the dungeon already and am the one leading a group. It's why i still like playing Fenyx, all the puzzles I've solved myself and im at least 70% done with the game. There's a sense of pride gained from solving something on your own even if guides are available.

This covers so much of what I have been having issues with in mmos lately. I can't have fun because people want to take the most effective way possible, and if you don't follow their ideal of efficiency you're the villain.

I remember about 15 years ago when the WoW Guild I was a part of did its first Molten Core run. I think that we only made it to the third boss after a couple hours. It was great!

On a similar note, I used to always go with normal difficulty in games, because obviously that's the way it was supposed to be played and hard is a thing you do if you feel like doing a second playthrough, or so I thought. But it turns out it's much more fun to play on hard straight out of the gate, because when not every build and tactic works, you actually get to do more of the figuring out that you crave so much. And those potions you would usually be hoarding? That's right, you finally get to use them.

Stopped playing Guild Wars 2 a few years back, watching this reminds me how fun the jumping puzzles are.

This is why my favorite times to play Final Fantasy XIV is just as a new patch hits. We get new content that no one has seen so we can experience them blind. It's then when you can see and hear people react with surprise and panic as they try to figure out what to do.

When I get into a game, I usually try to go through it on my own, without any guids and tips. When I have to look up guides on how to get by in a game, it feels like the game has defeated me. A source of shame for me. On the other hand, I also hate to fail at something a game throws at me. Because failing feels like I wasted my time and the work I put into beating the game.

This is a great video. It speaks to me on an intrinsic level. Back in Vanilla WoW you could see players with all kinds of builds and gearsets. Running MC with T0, accepting “meme” specs because you didn’t know or care how bad they were. Thinking Runeblade of Baron Rivendare and Blackblade of Shahram was good. The list goes on. One of the core aspects of an MMO to me, is to have a Guild with lots of different players. You know that John over there is your Survival Hunter, and that Chris is the Deep Frost Mage and Mark is the Fire Mage. It creates a feeling of purpose because you have defined yourself in your community. I saw an old guide on Restoration Druid from 2006. The build was incredibly inefficient but it looked so damn fun. Back then, healing wasn’t the same. You’d spam healing on the Tank, so mana regeneration was key. This build had a focus on Spirit and Mp5 stats, which is laughable these days. Now we stack +Healing to the extreme and use a High-Rank Heal once to top it off, then wait for mana to return. The problem is that all these cool gear pieces are now obsolete. There is no reason to invest in them because the BiS list tells you so.

Bringing it up does actually make me look back on this aspect - even outside of MMOs I know I’ve leaned on guides for some games (usually a process of playing it my own way, and either relying on a guide when it gets hard, if there’s a second playthrough on a higher difficulty, or if it’s a gacha game cause those sometimes to rely on the meta units and team setups) but I really do feel it in some MMOs because it feels like if you get too far, it’ll be too late to change your builds and the hours you put into it, especially if it’s a game where you might need to pay to reset stats (looking at you, Perfect World). As you mentioned in the video as well - thus why I also tend to go solo in games to avoid said group process. Adventure Quest is one game I picked up again just a few days ago (original) and when I was younger my toon from there was ... oogh, a hot mess of everything, but listening to this I really should break away from guides outside of perhaps what stats to focus on raising and just ham on playing quests for fun instead of focusing on leveling. I really should try to close my eyes to that itch to look stuff up if I do pick up some new game again. I’m glad Genshin Impact still woke up that sense of wonder and exploration in me, only thing I ever looked up was more just team builds and it was the most fun I had in a long time before everything was discovered. Thank you again for the informative video! It’s nice to get something to make the brain think.

First, amazing video. As for guides, yes for me. They take the main things out of MMO's that I love. Exploration, learning, adapting. I still play WoW but have skipped raiding and dungeons in the current xpac because everything needs to be known ahead of time, you need to have certain add ons, you need to sim all the gear you get (I've never simmed and really don't plan to), and if you don't the pug life and sometimes the guild life sucks. I still play for the story though and playing the auction house but the enjoyment I get today is a mere shell of what it used to be. Some days I just can't be bothered to log in.

I lived in China for 15 years and it was very interesting to see the culture of online games there. In regards to MMOs there was a huge market for a service that would level-up your character in World of Warcraft. Then of course there was the introduction of an official way in which to purhcase a levelled-up character, so that market completely died; then WoW classic was released and the market was bigger than ever. You would come across a character that had a chain of other chracters on auto-follow all levelling-up by grinding in the same area. That was the day that MMOs truly died for me. (Im aware this is not just a Chinese phenomena; it was just the observation I made at the place I was living at that time)

Group content really is the issue when it comes to this paradox. My approach depends on how much of a commitment the group content is (size of group, premade or randoms, length of run, amount of repeated runs necessary). Usually I'll try it out for the first time with a random group first just for that first time experience, and if I can't and my first run is a premade, I'll watch a quick video showing the mechanics of the boss and figure out my own way for my first run or few runs. If the encounter has a low threshold for failure, I'm playing an essential role with not-obvious optimal play in the encounter, or the encounter is long and has to be replayed many times, I'll look up more in-depth information after doing a few runs with low information. Basically I sort of spitball how much of other people's time I may/will waste by not researching the encounters, and if it's not liable to ruin a 20+ minute run or slow a series of runs down by several minutes (or a few minutes for a large group), I'll generally just do my own thing until I decide I want to be more efficient. Maybe the big 5 MMOs have their encounters largely solved shortly after release, but for smaller games the information is often not-optimal or outdated: the mere fact that someone created a guide doesn't mean the information in it is good. You can usually learn more just from watching your teammates and trying to make sense of why they do what they do, which is one more reason to go in with low information when it's reasonable to do so.

I think a lot of this comes down to nostalgia; when we get caught in an MMORPG's endgame (with the various sorts of grinding, raiding, pvp, etc...)and find ourselves focusing on optimization, we miss the time when we were newbies, learning the game, making silly mistakes, and just having plain fun playing with our pals.

What a great video! I've always tried to play for fun rather than for efficiency. I don't use the "best" talents or build, but I play my characters the way that I find the most fun. While often they do match up with the optimal setup (after all, doing lots of damage is fun!),. it doesn't always. Then again I don't do high end things like rated pvp or mythic dungeons in WoW and I play solo most of the time. When I do dungeons for the first time though I review the in-game dungeon journal first for each boss just so I know beforehand what to do so I don't cause the group to wipe. My favorite time in WoW is right when a new expansion launches because everything is so new, nobody knows anything, and even though there are guides, there is still plenty to discover.

When "A Realm Reborn" released, the cutscenes in the last set of dungeons were extremely long but able to be skipped. 2 weeks after release of the game, people were often upset if a first timer didn't skip them all to clear it faster and just watch them after. On a side note, I enjoyed using the dungeon journal as the "guide" in WoW. Get a look at the skills of the bosses and try to think of a basic way to not die and then tailor your strategy to counter or deal with it and win. Was great fun.

I genuinely don't understand why people go out of their way to ruin their own fun by trying to be as efficient as possible. Maybe my brain just works differently. For example, I see people reach FFXIV endgame in less than a month while it took me way over half a year to get there. I would never consider the time I spent having fun as wasted.

This is why D&D is so strong now. Also why we should go back to having roleplay servers in MMOs. No matter how much you know what to do in D&D, you have to play the game as if your character does not know. Therefore, no matter how many guides you read, the game content must still be discovered by your team.

The only times I look at guides or similar stuff are situations where I usually try for a week or so already and slowly drain out of ideas. Got trained early by my mother having both a lot of PS1 games and their respective official guides. Constantly having this treasure of information available but not wanting to spoil myself on the plots/skills/systems as a kid really is a skill I highly appreciate to have to date.

This was a great video. I'm actually playing albion online right now and though it's considered a full loot pvp game, I focus my time as a solo player in the safe zones where I don't have to worry about this. Most people tell you to focus on one thing (whether its leveling equipment, gathering resources, etc.) but I've found a good balances on all the different skills to level. It may not be the most efficient way, but I think it's the most effeicnt way to play that I can still enjoy playing.

A big issue I have with MMOs is the group content; back in WoW Legion, I decided to try out tanking. Legion had just launched, and I had people complaining I was going on the wrong way and didn't know the mechanics, for content that had only been out for 7 days to the public. It sucks that there isn't even a small time period for the masses to play MMO group content without being efficient -- all the paths and mechanics were sussed out on the PTR... Which sucks, as I learn muuuch better doing, than I do from reading it. I started reading / watching guides for the dungeons before I would queue for that sole dungeon, but since I suck at learning it that way, it just didn't stick. Since parties wouldn't be polite, let alone patient, I gave up tanking, and then the game shortly after.

These videos have allowed me to return to my favorite games with a fresh view and find the fun in them again. I love what you're doing here. Keep up the good work!

Truly this video encapsulates the entire story, these things have changed the landscape and honestly I think it removed the community aspects as far as asking people in-game or talking to them in-game, to get information through exchanges and possibly making a friend who was willing to show or teach you something. Now google is that friend and I dont need anyone. Which is one of the reasons I dont play mmorpgs anymore. I enjoyed the clans/families , you start with just like 2-3 people in about a month you have like 30 dedicated people in then more but now its not like that for me anymore. and I dont really get joy playing mmorpgs alone because I could just play other games where my progress will be definite to a goal I deem more valuable. good video.

I experienced another instance of this paradox while playing Genshin Impact. I pretty much started playing since launch, alongside a few of my friends. It quickly became apparent to us that having the optimal build for your characters was going to be a matter of patience, but more importantly, luck. For myself, this factor was no issue since I enjoy the game as is, and quickly made peace with not having the best character builds overall, sometimes overcoming shortcomings with different team builds and sharing equipment across different characters. For some of my friends however, even though they where having a great time with the game experience and mechanics, knowing the fact that they can't play as efficiently as possible, as quickly as possible made them stop playing all together. It's also very apparent from most viral videos of the game, being mainly focused on the big numbers and not so much on different teams and combinations outside what's considered META (Which there's nothing wrong about them, just noticing the type of trend the popular content for the game usually has). As for me, playing "less efficiently" has brought me great enjoyment of the game, even creating my own little challenges like not using the last level materials until I feel they're needed or switching to my less played characters and see what combinations I can come up with. At the end of the day, I think it's a matter of how one chooses to perceive the game, as well as how to deal with certain limitations that will determine your own level of personal enjoyment.

....This adds another reason why i prefer to solo and i never realized it. I never was into efficiency, but fun even back during my DND days.

Hey, could you do a video about Perfect world on your worse mmo series? I'm new to your channel, but I really enjoy the effort that you put in the videos, it's a shame that you don't have millions of subs! I love your puns! (even when I don't really get them) (sorry if the text is confuse, english is not my main language)

Fun story, my last MMO was lost ark, got invited by a friend's friend and got together with another friend, ended up playing by myself: I reached LVL 50 (not-so-soft lock here to lvl 60) and the Korean grindfest started to slowly creep in, even tho LVL 50 is the almost final level (as you unlock all your spells) you still have content locked based on ilvl, which are based on Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, you get your T1 items and enchant them to +15 and you'll get enough ilvl to start the T2 zone, etc. T1 and T2 are easy to go through as the % are usually among the 60+% (altho I've lost a couple of 90/95% one after the other), but I still decided to stick to T1 and enjoy their "open" (instanced) world, but a lot of places and even half of the map are unreachable, as the ilvl requirement doesn't even let you try like I have 899 ilvl and need 900 ilvl to enter, I know I can actually do that content at 600 ilvl as at 900 is a breeze, but the game is "Nah man you are too low ilvl, trust me you can't, so come back after you get better gear", so talking about the game not letting you do higher ilvl places to get some collectibles in the general chat I got someone saying "YOU ARE STILL IN T1??!?!?! WHAT A RETARD PFFFF", and the sad truth is that a lot of people are like that, so they make the game less enjoyable. So eventually after realizing I had no other choice than to get to T3 to get to actually enjoy "endgame content" (fuck I hate games giving you almost no content until you get to endgame), I rushed to T3 in 2 days, skipping everything in between, then did the dungeons and got completely insulted for 2 main reasons: 1) For not skipping the fucking cutscenes, and since you can still chat during the cutscene there was always some asshat yelling "NETFLIX!" as the 3/4 or 7/8 skip button was shown, then just saying "fuck whoever is not skipping" "skip plz" "JUST SKIP ALREADY!". 2) For not knowing how to beat the boss in my first playthrough, out of the 7 other people there was maybe only 1 guy trying to explain, 2 or 3 guys complaining, 1 or 2 just spamming the leave dungeon vote, and the rest just trying to rush as if they were robots, brought to this world to grind all dungeons. Oh and one time I got as response of "this is my first time in this dungeon" a great "go watch a youtube video of the boss and come back". Every dungeon I entered was just rush rush rush, no one talking, always someone getting mad and insulting, really unfun content. And guides are a huge problem as you have to follow them or be left behind, and while I do get that I probably would have had more fun playing with friends, the game should be fun playing with randoms too, and it's not, and most MMOs have this "follow this guide or lag behind" Now how do we stop this? besides the obvious stop filling the far empty world with stupid collectibles and retarded mechanics of 'enter and leave a dungeon 100s of times until you eventually get that 1% chance to spawn in a zone you can't ever reach otherwise to get that one collectible to get that stupid title everyone else has' (talking to you, maze island). I would love to hear ideas of how to better make games and solve these issues for future games, and I would love Josh to make a series out of it, a series of "how to make better MMORPGs"

One of my most enjoyable runs in WoW was during those timetraveling events where you revisit dungeons from older expansions and play them. I played the tank. Blood DK. I told everybody that I would not look up the dungeonguide on any third party website. I would just use what the game gave me. That's when I found out that WoW actually has a place you can look up mechanics and little tips before the fight. But it's not a walkthrough. It's just something that explains mechanics in a few sentences and what each party member's role in the fight is. And I loved every second of it. We failed on one boss(the first, because I did not know that tool existed) and it took us about an hour. But I loved every second of it because I gave it a little read, told everybody what's up and we went into it. Nobody left the party and it seemed that everybody was actually having fun. Honestly, for me it was a blast. If I ever were to play WoW again, that's how I will do every encounter "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game"

I've been lucky in games like WoW and Final Fantasy 14 where I got to all the content when it was fresh and new and being forced to figure out all the content and lead the way in finding the best ways to finish that content, thus a guide was never needed except in the most extreme of situations(like achievement hunting or higher difficultly raids). It's a shame coming to it later and finding you need knowledge beforehand, it does take away the magic.

Couldn’t agree more. Finding a similar group of friends who play like you do sounds like a good idea.

I came over to this video after watching "New World - Is There Any Adventure Left?" as you presented the heart of a very interesting dilemma for me as someone that has played MMOs for far too long, but also runs a large and growing guide resource website for one of the most burgeoning MMOs on the market with FFXIV. The early days of an expansion for me have always been the most enjoyable, in part because so much is uncertain, fresh and being discovered, but also because the time before we release updates to our DPS parser there's very much a kinder, fun and more light hearted tone to the community that irrevocably shifts once the updates go out. It has happened with every expansion in every MMO I have ever played since the days of Classic EQ and has only grown at a more rapid pace with the accessibility of sites like the one we provide. It definitely had me pause to think, are we really going about things right? There's a huge market for people wanting information and guides for an increase in efficiency for their time, but at how much cost to the wonder and adventure for prospective players? I'd never want to take that experience away from people, but is that's what has inevitably happened? Those of us working on these things do it out of love for the game, and we want people to also enjoy it just as much as we do. We do see more and more people trying to crack into the guide scene with further deviations from quality discussion and opinion pieces. Newer players are seeing these resources to accelerate to end-game to the point that they would rather just jump potion to current end-game and skip so much of the older content because it would otherwise take a lot of their time to catch up. All I can wonder is - what can we as [guide] creators do to better the situation?

When I was playing WoW my raiding group had a pretty good middle ground I feel. I was one of the raid leaders and we were never a super hardcore raiding team but we were also shooting for a head of the curve. The first time we fought a boss we didn't worry too much about whether people knew the fight and would often go into raids blind to try to figure it out. After the first time we had fought a boss we would expect people to know mechanics and all the raid leaders were required to watch a guide and know mechanics for their particular role so they could answer questions that any one else in the raid group had. We didn't require the whole raid group to watch a guide unless they were really not understanding the explanations of what they were supposed to be doing and even then we only asked them to watch the portions of the video that were relevant to what ever role they were playing. It was a nice balance between keeping thing relaxed and casual while also making sure we were efficient enough to make progress. That was also a group that my buddy and I basically built up from scratch and it took a LONG time to get everyone on the same page but it was definitely the most enjoyable Raiding group I've ever been a part of. Like you said I was willing to play the game in a less efficient way by building up a raid team from most people that had never raided before and doing full on couching session with most members of the raid group but it was definitely worth the extra time investment while it lasted.

Yes they have. That's why playing MMO's when they just came out is the best experience because there aren't guides at that point.

I'm pretty immune to the "allure" of efficiency, so single player games go well. But MMOs really need to stop with the matchmaking for group content so I can just find people like me to do content with, instead of being forced to play with people who just want loot.

Awesome video. I fell hard to this and having it put into words helps a lot.

Holy crap. This is so true and explains so much. I honestly think that it's one of the primary reasons why I stopped playing MMOs. I mean, when I was a kid, it was fun figuring things out in one of the seemingly countless new MMOs with everyone else but nowadays? If you don't have everything min/maxed to absolute perfection or know which frame to hit which button (or just physically can't like I can't), some people will indeed get downright abusive and, even when they don't, when you're teaming and you *know* that you have to hit that window absolutely perfectly or else you're wasting everyone else's time... you just stop teaming. So, over time, I slowly stopped teaming more and more and it just got easier and easier and easier to solo more and more and more until, there just didn't seem any point in paying a sub for a purely 100% solo experience and it was off to solo games only after that as the far cheaper option. So. Thank. You. Thank you so much for finally pointing this out because, you're right. And it explains soooooo much to me about how that pattern developed and grew and slowly pushed me out of those games I used to love so much and why I still have absolutely zero urge to go back except for a quick solo and purely casual afternoon every few years.

This channel needs more visibility tbh :/ Once again, in the MMORPG I'm playing currently, DDO, there aren't that many quests/raids where a new player (who hasn't read the "guide") can actually cause a fail for everyone. So overall the community is welcoming. You can state "1st timer" when joining and I guess this is true for most games. Find out if the group is happy to have someone who doesn't know his way around. Overall, yes, exploring new content in MMOs is so much better. Usually when new content comes out I take my time to solo it avoiding spoilers, best way to actually learn the quests.

when i'm playing an MMO i'm already aware that i'm sacrificing my time in exchange for (what i'm hoping for) fun. If my goal in the game is to reduce the time I have to spend -> then that is a strong indication for me that the game is NOT FUN to play in the first place. When you do something that is really fun, you do not care about time at all. Basicly this is "play a game to experience it VS. play a game to clear it" It is also a sign that the game you are playing lacks challenge and exitement. When the game does not pose a challange, you want to get through the unchallenging content as quickly as possible.

It's nice to be able to tell the age of your videos by the font size of the Pateon page. Keep up the amazing work.

I only actively play GW2 now, so I can only speak for my experience on that game in particular. But I find even with the usage of guides I dont lose that sense of discovery or learning. There is a lot of content I've read guides for (I enjoy reading guides personally) yet still have not achieved, passed, etc. While I have the knowledge of certain things, I can't execute that knowledge without the experience. Which while that experience isn't totally blind as I have an idea of what to expect, I still feel blind when it comes to exactly what to do in those moments, and have to learn that through trial and error. For example with the story there are several achievements you can read on how to pass, but I can spend an hour or two attempting to pass them even with the knowledge and still failing time and time again. With things like raids, meta events, fractals. I can have expectations but thats where it ends. Joining practice raid groups for example too, most people do research before hand, but we still wipe a few times before getting more used to the mechanics. So while it isn't exactly the same as going into the game without guides, for me personally I still get that sense of discovery and learning through the fact that experience is the main way to learn. Having expectations from guides only takes you so far.

Hey josh, you mentioned Asheron’s Call in this video and I was wondering you plan/had talk about the game more in depth before. I think the subject of how turbine managed the game would be a good topic. (How they releases AC2 which competes with their existing player base)

Yes! This was my last weeks comment. This is EXACTLY why i can't enjoy an MMO as much as i did in the old days. Thank you for the vid and keep up the good work

Hey josh, love your videos. As a fellow MMO lover, I was curious if you could make a video describing what your perfect MMO would look like if you could make it

Excellent video. Especially for the team part. Remembering my latest MMO excess, finding a group to go to a dungeon / raid "Like it is the 1st time" ... impossible.

I do not look up things but the problem comes up when i try and do group things i am EXPECTED to have looked up things... which annoys me because I do not want to look up things I only want to figure out things over time. It annoys me so much.

This exactly! I was so burnt by playing Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts back then without a guide book not to be able to achieve the ultimate weapon BECAUSE I didn't follow a guide that I now am feeling uncomfortable playing any game without a guide. If I can't do it right from the start why play at all? But then again I'm also too lazy to read a zillion of guides for the best build/weapon/strategy. So I just play the way I think is right to me. Back then nearly a decade ago I tried to follow a build for Tera and Aion but after a while they got nullified because of patches. So in MMOs there is no point in following guides if the company debuffs or changes the class anyway at any time. Perfection is overrated.

This makes me want to look at upcoming MMOs where I could be amongst the firsts to play and discover. This is also partly why I quit D3, because the game is already very repetitive, but the only thing that can add variation, which is trying different builds, is where you don't have any space for creativiy if you want to play efficiently/in group.

Guides and wikis existing, doesn't automatically mean it removes all the fun from the game, it's HOW you use them that decides that. For example, the GW2 wiki has the World Boss schedule, which lets you easily know which boss is available when and where so you won't miss them, information that isn't in the actual game, allowing you to go from one boss to the next without having to guess which one is next, or it tells you what drops each monster has, which is really useful when needing something specific for crafting without having to memorize it or look through every enemy on a ridiculously massive map hoping you'll get lucky and find the one you want! You can, and should, use guides as simply reference to assist you by removing literal hours of time wasted through things like the examples I just mentioned, you don't HAVE to follow "meta" and whatnot on there, it's a game, you are supposed to have fun, so have fun however you like! Most importantly, if it's PVE, why even bother with meta? Just do whatever makes the game most fun for you, if you are in a group and the others don't like it, just find new friends, that's the joy of MMOs!

You are becoming my favorite RU-vidr. For years I’ve been having less and less fun with mmos even though as a married man with kids and a career mmos are my favorite genre. It’s quite a pickle

This brings up a horror story that I used to tell to a lot of people back when I used to play Elder Scrolls Online. When I used to play Elder Scrolls Online I was a mage class and I was pretty much doing my own thing and having fun. I was part of a few guilds most of them were merchants and I had fun pretty much on my own. Till one day I bumped into a group of individuals that made me join their group. And once I join their group my enjoyment for the game completely crashed down to never want to pick up this game ever again. I was enjoying the story or at least enjoying it they had some good points but apparently that's the wrong way to experience the game. You should not care about the store you should only focus on rotation these are the type of spells you need to have you need to have frame perfect rotation stop using a controller and use a mouse and keyboard why are you running around with shity gear there since the spot you need to go and get this gear and if you can't Smith your own gear then cough up a million coin then I can get you the gear. It turned to a job and I hated it in my experience for the game plummet down to why do I even bother anymore. So I left. I left the game that I did actually enjoy and refuse to pick it up because I do not want to deal with this anymore. I was playing the game for the story for the exploring and just to have fun. But then these groups of individuals that I bumped into tried to force me into what they believe should be the perfect class that knows the perfect rotations in has the most perfect gear that is up to date and will be recycle for a new piece of gear by a month's time which would have the force me to grind out a whole new gear set. But yeah that's my experience with Elder Scrolls online and how this video is completely right.

Another problem may be just how smug and unhelpful certain senior players are when you ask a question, completely forgetting there was a time when they didn't know how something worked or what the proper way to do something was

I remember back when I was still playing wow I was one of those people who always looked to be better at the game, looking up guides on how to be better at playing my class/maximize my damage, downloading addons, damage counters, etc. pressuring myself into being better because that was what the community was expecting from you. Doing mythic dungeons (not even mythic+, just the basic mythic dungeons) people were expecting you to have a perfect playstyle even if the way you used to play was more than enough to clear the content. At some point, it started to feel like I played the game more for others than for myself. It just wasn´t a fun experience anymore. I quit wow around bfa expansion and haven´t played it since. But I guess the community is still the same.

Ruined? No. Made a lot less fun? Yes. I like learning through doing and nowadays you are expected to know the content and encounter before you've logged in to the game... It also doesn't help when the developers literally list all the content available with each of their patches and expansions. Let us figure it out, don't spoil.

Wouldn't you agree that a big part of this is also the competitive "meta" that currently surrounds video games? Especially when succeeding becomes more and more lucrative due to the fact that you could one day make video games your career (either via content such as Twitch/RU-vid or Esports)

Thanks for the jumping puzzle walktrough there josh!

easy solution: Make an explorers mode, where some combat encounters are a bit toned down and then make a raider mode with max difficulty and loot. Now normal people can queue for the normal difficulty exploration focussed run and the latter guys can go optimize to the max and reap the rewards. It's not "cutting the already small playerbase in half", but "giving access to the content to a vastly bigger audience" instead. I also think keeping mechanics in a way, that a few good players (or a single one) could carry them, would be important for said explorer mode. This way a team leader can actually guide his group through the obstacles and explain the things and show them how to succeed without the fear of getting hard stuck somewhere. Alternatively have more options / paths to "win" eventually. A fast (meta-) way, with high difficulty and others with different obstacles. Maybe a puzzle or a platforming sequence or an epic (but time consuming) fight against hordes of enemies, ect. ect. Maybe the option to straight jump to the boss fight and have a huge monster to fight or go around and weaken him pre fight until the point he's easy to win. Groups could check their team and decide if they can do it at max difficulty or which of the mechanics they need to disable before they can do it. This way time consumed would balance out the reward gained and it would have the max amount of inclusion of player base.

This is very true. This is why in MOBAs and RPGS I like finding my own builds and styles to play the most enjoyable thing to do. Doing something other people don't do and succeeded is what makes me the most excited the discovery.

So I'm the type of player that likes figuring it out myself and theory craft my own builds. But I also enjoy helping new people. I hate being rushed in raids, dungeons or missions.

I am an old girl who used to hardcore raid both back in Everquest and in original Classic WoW. I remember learning by doing all together as a guild. Learning MC and BWL from scratch was hard work and lots of fun. We did it TOGETHER. I am now in a Classic guild i would call Casual raid guild. We got members (like me) who is only there for the social aspect and we got members who wants to raid newest content as fast as possible. Tonight in guild chat i was surprised to see the Raidleader telling a hopeful new member to be ready for raid in 30 min. A spot had opened up last minut. That's nice, but then. "I assume you know the Strategies of cause" WHAT! Wrath raids has just opened up a few days ago and the member had no way of knowing they would be called on to join tonight, nor what raid they would be joining, nor how fare into the raid the guild would have been going before they joined. I could not hold my tongue and had to comment "I remember a time where half the fun was for the guild to learn together" I had been considering to maybe start raiding again on a more casual leasure than the hardcore mandatory 5 days a week i used to do, but this took away that thought entirely. No thanks. PS: No the member did not know the strat and now had less than 30 min to find out

Agreed 100% this is often why I just take it easy and enjoy the adventure along the way and for the most part avoid end game loops. I try to work out stuff for myself and will often run into things I had no idea about and get swept away for hours or days onto side adventures I did not expect, having a great time with the experience.

Good Guides: - Help you figure things out that you wouldn't of been able to find out on your own easily (example: Hidden mechanics in stats, or otherwise poorly explained by the game) - Give you tips or tricks without shaping the way you play to conform to any given style of play - Expect that you know at least something about the game as to not waste your time with needless information Bad Guides - Explain everything, even the stuff that could be solved easily and not just the stuff that is poorly explained or a little bit hard to understand - Guide you into a certain style of play, usually being extremely defensive and boring methods of play, or Meta methods depending on the game - Do not respect your ability to function on a cognitive level

I was saying guides haves ruined games to a certain degree just this weekend on my stream. It does ruin just a lot of the fun, kinda how I played games as a kid.

I joined a top tier guild in WoW years back when I played because I found it was the only way to experience anything new that hadn't been written about. I started Day 1 so remember the wonder and awe of experiencing the world without guides and optimal setups. I'm very much an efficiency player BUT I do enjoy experiencing things for the first time and learning the encounters. I quit right before Cataclysm came out but was the 3rd person on my server to hit 80 when WotLK released so got to experience tons of content long before others.

This video rings true for me on so many levels. I hate the hyper efficiency that everyone needs to be in. That said, I don't think you touched on another important point when it comes to this issue and, in my opinion, this issue makes it even harder for someone to actually enjoy the less efficient way of playing. Developers now design their games around the fact that people are hyper efficient players. This can make it nearly impossible for you, as a player, to figure something out in the game without a guide if you're not in the top 1% of gamers who are stellar at this. Deadly Boss Mods in WoW was a terrible mod in that it enabled Blizzard to make the encounters harder to the point where it was almost a damn requirement you had that mod installed. If developers do not design their games around this, the games will be considered to be too easy, people will blow through content even faster, never feel any modicum of challenge, and then lament about how bad the game was. If there is anything out there that makes hyper efficient playing a requirement more than other people you have to play with, it's that developers now design around this knowledge. I enjoy to be challenged, but not to the point where the boss fight has 5 different complex phases and a few tiny mistakes kill you. Both of those things together make MMOs extremely hard to enjoy. If having a second monitor open for a wiki is a soft requirement to play the game, the developer has done something wrong.

I feel this issue at least partly emerges from how System heavy many MMOs are. It's almost as if they don't believe they can create enough fun content to do, so instead, they come up with an elaborate and unintuitive way to artificially make things harder to grasp or just take longer to complete. However, Systems are not content. They are just the lens, through which we experience the actual game.