Where I shop, if you go too fast it confuses the machine and calls an attendant over to clear it while a video of what I was doing plays. Which is bs.

I hear ya. I am getting real tired of the paywalls and the rent seeking in something I paid for. It used to be confined to free to play games but it has gradually started to creep into fully paid AAA stuff now and that’s just unacceptable to me.

lol, precisely!

Why do people gamble? Because that’s what this is.

The companies don’t even care about the average player. They are trying to hook rich people with more money then sense, aka whales.

A long time ago the industry realized an extremely small percent blows way more money than all the others combined.

If you ever played a game with any kind of monitization and asked yourself why everything is $40 and how the average player can afford it, this is why.

And honestly I think that’s what’s missing in “modern” mmos: the human element. Or rather the social one. Which is ironic.

They are now way too friendly towards solo play and systems like ff14s duty finder removed the social aspect by automating group comp with complete randos that you will probably never see again since it was cross server.

In evercrack and even ffxi you were required to shout for groups from a pool of players on your own server so you got to know people. Who was good and who was not so good. You built a reputation.

It was a lot harder for sure, but it felt more meaningful.

Oh and they were what weekly spawn on top of that too that were also open world spawns to boot, so quite often you had competition just laying claim to it.

Our server had some quite… colorful guilds that didn’t play nice and would train attempts, or bum rush it in an attempt to do more damage to steal the claim, among other nastiness. Imagine you spent hours getting 80 people together, prepping, and then getting ganked at the last minute. lol pure chaos.

The GMs were constantly involved sorting out the aftermath. Which was funny in its own right I suppose. Which is probably why they leaned hard into instances in later expansions.

Fun times. Dont think there will be another experience like it was its hayday.

This isn’t Reddit where there is a firehouse of content all day and at all times.

For doom scrollers such as myself, browsing all is a requirement.