Speedrun to endgame.
Endgame is running the same handful of dungeons over and over and over. Because it’s always the same shit, players learn to speedrun it. Because speed is the whole point, groups gets progressively tightened and optimized. It means they progressively create their own, community-driven, gatekeeping min-maxing.
It’s a perfect recipe for a toxic community. The players are always the same ensemble, it’s game design that funnels them into an acid pool, becoming toxic.
New players, for speedrunners, become obstacles and annoyances. They slow you down, so you kick them out of your groups. That means new players have nowhere to go, end up in party queues for longer and longer time. The more time passes, the more you’re left behind. The gap increases over time.
On the other hand, the speedrunners are having their worst time ever. Run over and over the same stale content, trying to keep up with the power curve, day after day, catching up to this impossible standard.
Until you realize you HATE all of it, and that you’ve turned enjoyment into some sort of fastidious compulsion. That this game only contributes to the ugly parts of your life, not the good ones.
Once again, all everyone talks about is the Pay 2 Win, which is, once again, completely irrelevant. (or rather: the design bait that forces a certain toxic gameplay loop)
(“Throne & Liberty” was so much better despite dying to very similar pitfalls. I don’t quite understand how the same studio, with more money, can go backwards while repeating the exact same mistakes. The engine runs so much worse despite not looking any better, especially with a large number of players. Art is fancier but significantly worse, from a technical standpoint. UI is worse in every area, much worse customization, less options, more lag. And so on. Combat is a lot more static, class design and choice is severely limited. Aion 2 is significantly worse, but wins out on its presentation on being mainly PvE, to T&L that was presented as mainly PvP. Yet this claim doesn’t produce any difference. Aion 2 is T&L with the whole PvP layer removed and without anything more added to compensate. The gap is in perception. You still run dungeons over and over, and you still try to keep up, daily. Until on one hand the game becomes inaccessible and toxic to new players, and on the other a negative compulsion that makes you hate yourself for wasting time on it. It should be obvious that all of this is EASY and QUICK to fix, because in both cases there’s a good game in there, with some minimal changes… But nope, NCSoft apparently loves repeating mistakes. The game’s population will, predictably, fall off a cliff and the game will die in record time. Just like capitalism in general, the goal is fast extraction of money, rather than growth of business, and the quick demise of the product is the point. The host is not expected to survive, therefore the squeeze for money is optimized for a limited amount of time. I guess they’ll go mobile next.)