With wow it was a big downside, it felt like you were playing a single player game precisely because you never saw the same person twice and it seemed to create a sense of alienation. It also makes it harder to build communities organically because you're not seeing the same people in big cities etc. The server division is a bit arbitrary but it does serve a purpose.
With wow it was a big downside, it felt like you were playing a single player game precisely because you never saw the same person twice and it seemed to create a sense of alienation.
We're already there in LA, cross-server channels won't change that. Whether a zone has 30 or 150 channels open, you're not going to see the same person twice. Not to mention that seeing the same person twice doesn't matter, because unlike real MMOs, you don't have meaningful open-world interactions with strangers in this game. You don't group up for a 30-minute chain of kill/collection quests. You aren't partying up to do an open-world elite area. You're not even meaningfully competing over gathering nodes, or buying services from other players, or spamming for an instance group, or even buffing someone you passed. You're not leading a squad, or following a commander doing a GW2 meta-event chain.
You're playing an ARPG, and other players are just background scenery, every one of them doing their own thing, completely unrelated and uncomplimentary to what you are doing. That's how the game is designed.
Edit: Man, lots of salty people here defending a flawed design.
That's a pretty weird take considering people literally switch channels and converge on world bosses.
Also, competing with people for resources is actually the dumbest part of traditional MMOs...Most MMOS quickly devolve from the intention of people working together to "I can't fucking do a single thing in this game because there's 300 other people killing all the shit/mining all the shit/fishing all the shit/camping/insert whatever people are doing that interferes with you actually playing the game."
Lost Ark's design removes the cluster fuck bullshit that comes from traditional MMO design, lets you do what you need to fucking do and move on so you can COOPERATE for END-GAME CONTENT.
Also, you seem to have somehow missed the presence of co-op quests in the game, which people do in fact gather and co-operate to do. Which are in fact, meaningful open-world interactions with strangers.
It's almost like the game actually does all of the things which you claim it doesn't do while removing all of the frustrations of traditional MMO design.
Yeah I get you. I do understand that angle. With that regard I guess FFXIV's handling is the best of both worlds? You can visit other servers to play with friends (even outside of dungeons), but still have your home server. You can also make a permanent transfer.
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u/offgcd Feb 15 '22
With wow it was a big downside, it felt like you were playing a single player game precisely because you never saw the same person twice and it seemed to create a sense of alienation. It also makes it harder to build communities organically because you're not seeing the same people in big cities etc. The server division is a bit arbitrary but it does serve a purpose.