I used to love MMOs. I was decently dedicated to WoW during WotLK and have played it on and off for good chunks of each expansion. I played FFXIV more consistently with a slew of other MMOs. I fell for the bait of a few korean MMOs, not gonna lie.
The thing that I feel most MMOs are missing now is raid-like endgame content geared at smaller party sizes. As I've gotten older, my core friend group that kind of follow each other through games <!--td {border: 1px solid #ccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}-->omegle discord xender has kind of dwindled. And I have a less than consistent schedule, which makes consistent raiding hard. I can't schedule a raid every wednesday/thursday/friday from 7-9pm. PUGs never really go well.
And the same goes with my core friend group.
So I feel like Mythic+ WoW dungeons were a step in the right direction. They gave somewhat viable endgame content geared towards a small party of 5 players. Obviously you won't get that sweet raid gear with whatever perks it comes with (I haven't paid attention to BFA raiding due to lack of time, but I believe set bonuses are gone), but you can get some very powerful gear. The problem with this setup is that it is kind of rote running the same dungeons with just more difficulty artificially tacked on.
FFXIV does this a bit better with 8 man parties for endgame raiding, but my friends mostly burn out on the oodles of story. Which is fine. I loved it, but I can't blame them. I would just love to see the number of required players to do endgame stuff drop down to 4-5.
I don't really see why most of the difficulty needs to be finding a large group of bodies who can follow instructions and play their class at specific times during the week. You don't even need to like these bodies as long as they can do their job. It kind of turns raiding into a second job. I'd rather a small group of likeminded friends who can just coordinate and get together and tackle tough content rather than wrangling cats.
I get that most of this "super hard endgame content" focuses on throwing multiple mechanics at multiple people so that everyone is juggling a million things throughout the fight... but surely we've advanced far enough to find other ways to make difficult content?
The thing that I feel most MMOs are missing now is raid-like endgame content geared at smaller party sizes. As I've gotten older, my core friend group that kind of follow each other through games <!--td {border: 1px solid #ccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}-->omegle discord xender has kind of dwindled. And I have a less than consistent schedule, which makes consistent raiding hard. I can't schedule a raid every wednesday/thursday/friday from 7-9pm. PUGs never really go well.
And the same goes with my core friend group.
So I feel like Mythic+ WoW dungeons were a step in the right direction. They gave somewhat viable endgame content geared towards a small party of 5 players. Obviously you won't get that sweet raid gear with whatever perks it comes with (I haven't paid attention to BFA raiding due to lack of time, but I believe set bonuses are gone), but you can get some very powerful gear. The problem with this setup is that it is kind of rote running the same dungeons with just more difficulty artificially tacked on.
FFXIV does this a bit better with 8 man parties for endgame raiding, but my friends mostly burn out on the oodles of story. Which is fine. I loved it, but I can't blame them. I would just love to see the number of required players to do endgame stuff drop down to 4-5.
I don't really see why most of the difficulty needs to be finding a large group of bodies who can follow instructions and play their class at specific times during the week. You don't even need to like these bodies as long as they can do their job. It kind of turns raiding into a second job. I'd rather a small group of likeminded friends who can just coordinate and get together and tackle tough content rather than wrangling cats.
I get that most of this "super hard endgame content" focuses on throwing multiple mechanics at multiple people so that everyone is juggling a million things throughout the fight... but surely we've advanced far enough to find other ways to make difficult content?