The MMOs we grew up with are gone, and it's all our fault because we loved them to death

I have bad news—if you play MMOs, you're guilty of a crime. As are each and every one of us. We are the thousand knives plunged into the back of the "oldschool MMO". But who among us (don't say 'sus', it's not the time) is truly at fault?

You may now imagine me in a little deerstalker hat and a Sherlock-esque coat giving the final speech in a Whodunnit. Or maybe a nice shirt, like Benoit Blanc. Add a baw gawd at your own discretion.

The problem, dear Watson(s), is that so many are responsible that no-one can really be given the blame. The thousand cuts that bled old school MMOs dry weren't made with malice, but excitement—eagerness to push things forward, to share.

Since some of you might've grown up after this death, let me explain what I mean. In the (very good) video essay by Folding Ideas, Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft, Nathan Landel and Dan Olson collate a few anecdotes into the character of Wallace, who "walks between encounters and doesn't wear shoes".

The full video is worth a watch, and goes into the issue of instrumental play in far more detail than I will here—but I think about the Wallaces of MMORPGs a lot, and where they've gone. I'm not saying you won't meet strange characters in the present-day, but once you're locked into the endgame grind loop? Not a chance.

This murder is more than a tragedy—a simple dichotomy of 'old thing good, new thing bad'. What we've built up around MMORPGs has simply created an ecosystem where the Wallaces of the world aren't supported. Nigh-extinct, only located in the streams of popular YouTubers playing World of Warcraft Classic, and not a fact of existence.

The dead myths

Hardcore raiders used to be weird, man.

I mean that as neither an insult nor praise. In the time before raiders were professionally-sponsored digital athletes, they were frontierspeople—oddities who looked at the complex net of systems the MMO offered and said to themselves "that, I want to be good at that." They were regarded with a superstitious kind of derision, fear, and respect.

Propping up this mystique was a lack of transmog systems and the elusiveness of powerful loot. There was just something cool about wandering into Stormwind and seeing a warrior decked out in the Tier 2 raid set and going "wow. That person has a lot of free time."

Conversely, getting called a "noob/n00b" actually used to mean something. There used to be an actual gulf of knowledge you could have that would make you feel inferior, which meant the few who actually knew what they were doing were cooler by comparison.

But as time wore on, we've grown closer and closer to these personalities. They're streamers. They have essays and tier lists and (often very informative) WoWhead articles. If one of them causes some drama, there'll be ten videos online before we can even blink. I imagine if Zeus or Hera started vlogging, the people of ancient Greece might not be so awestruck, too.

Which leads into my next point: Our ambition had us learning too much. Supply rises where demand exists, and in our race to become just like these mythological figures, we all started getting way too invested in numbers and said: "Hey, being a God involves a ton of math, and I don't wanna do any of that."

And, crucially: "I wonder if there's a guide online for this."

Loved to death

Now, I certainly don't blame anybody, because I'd need to crucify myself to do so. I hate doing anything sub-optimally. I'll look up pre-written builds and BiS lists the moment I hit max level, because why would I spend my limited amount of time getting something worse than whatever's good? Why figure it out for myself if someone already did that for me?

This is especially relevant in games like Final Fantasy 14. This here's an MMO with a super-interesting crafting system, complete with its own minigame, and whenever I engage with it, I look up the best materia melds and use a website to auto-calculate the optimal rotation by entering my stats into it.

And as information became more readily available, chipping away at the mystique, the desire for it to be shared as efficiently as possible gnawed away at other areas, too.

While I'll never say in-game chats were good (Barrens Chat, my… whatever the opposite of 'beloved' is) they did lend themselves to a bigger sense of discovery. We don't share tips like we used to. Instead, we are expected to know how everything works, because it's really not that hard to find out.

We went from nattering in-game, to Teamspeak and Ventrilo, to dedicated forums, and then finally to subreddits and Discords. Each step more efficient at reaching a wide audience than the last. If you play FF14, you can drop into The Balance Discord and get your optimal rotation on lock in the span of a couple of hours without needing to talk to much of anybody. This is the new tradition.

Again, none of this was done in malice. None of these people wanted to kill the oldschool MMO—but the saying "to be loved is to be changed" applies here. We all collectively squeezed these games very hard, and in doing so robbed them of their mystery for our convenience.

I am about to take a hard left into talking about Twitch and I don't have a subtle way to do that.

So you get this subheader instead. Anyway, streamers:

The final culprit of this here murder? Streamers. How dare they entertain us for a living, keeping thousands company while they eat their meals at their desks. The rascals!

In all seriousness, as the games industry has grown to dwarf both film and music combined, so too has the environment around it shifted. You can actually play videogames for money, now. Take that, mum and dad!

This was not necessarily a cause unto itself, but an accelerant. Hardcore raiders were motivated to stream their world-first races, theorycrafters began analysing patch-notes, and entertainers rushed in to fill the void left by those tight-knit social bubbles. Where once we'd chew out Jeff, Who Was Just Trying His Best, we now turn our collective ire to certain streamers making big oopsies and then talk about it for fucking weeks.

In being able to craft these narratives and foster communities, these streamers might have you convinced that this sort of emergent socialising still exists for the majority of MMO players. Sitting down to watch Barny64's The Rogue Who Ran Out of Time has me day-dreaming about all the stupid nonsense I got up to way back when, but now?

It's still possible, but it's so much harder. Partially because I'm not a child anymore, and I have far less time, but also because… well, all of the above.

I'm glad these personalities are keeping the torch alive, they're basically heroes (okay, some of them are heroes, others need to clean their room) but we can't pretend that they don't exist in their own bubble.

This is not a hot take or an insult, or an insinuation that the communities they build are somehow ingenuine because they're tied to their livelihoods. It's literally their job to foster community, create stories, and act in ways that'd see the rest of us quietly punted out of a Mythic+ key. And most of the time, they do a good job!

But the way the MMO ecosystem is actually structured reveals our true priorities—the true MMO experience in the modern era is convenient, fast, entertaining, lets us choose our own friend groups, doesn't demand hours of our time just to compete at a moderate level, and… uh, what was I complaining about again?

Not bad, but different

The good news? I'm not sure a jury could convict us. Despite how much liquid nostalgia I've got tucked away for the MMO experience of yore, we got here because it's what we wanted. You know what MMO tried to capture that experience? Wildstar, and look where that decision got it.

Don't get me wrong, that game ruled. But we loved Wildstar like an unsupervised kid loves a goldfish: Completely and utterly devoted with absolutely none of the correct care methods to make it live for more than a couple months.

The problems rise when an MMO struggles to keep up, since the needle keeps getting pushed. Final Fantasy 14 hit this roadbump recently, but even our traditional understanding of MMO audiences—so long divided into casual and hardcore players—are starting to blur between the lines. A great example of this is the new and unwieldy term "midcore", someone who's generally pretty good at videogames but has, like, a kid and responsibilities.

We collectively beat the MMOs of the 2000s to death, but even the MMOs of the 2025s look different to those of the 2015s. They're more broadly-appealing, alt-friendly, less grinds, heavier emphases on transmogs and non-power-based rewards, and overall—dare I say it—easier. Shudder.

I get wanting to go back, but we simply can't. Not because we don't want to, but because everything's changed—the games, the ways we engage with them, and our own lives.

Even when we try, Ragnaros gets dunked on in a matter of days, not the five months it took originally, because we know everything and share everything so fast that anyone trying to make 'em like your grandma simply gets devoured. Only games with small, enthusiastic private server communities, like City of Heroes: Homecoming, even really get close.

But, hey, keep your chin up. The MMOs of 2035 will have so many more things to complain about, and we're MMO players. We love complaining. I can't wait. None of us can.

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