6 ms·

Almost all multi-player gaming is competitive and involves dealing with occasional (or frequent, depending on the game) jerks. If I want stress and occasional j

Almost all multi-player gaming is competitive and involves dealing with occasional (or frequent, depending on the game) jerks. If I want stress and occasional jerks, I can just do things in the real world. Single-player gaming is more comfy.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jsheard 2y ago
Multiplayer has also been taken over by free2play skinner box design, so if you want games that aren't designed to waste your time with unfun but addictive gameplay loops and/or nickel-and-dime you to death then singleplayer is the last bastion.
- mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
  nickel-and-dime you to death then singleplayer is the last bastion. We still get our fair share of season passes and day one DLCs, so it's not total immunity.
huevosabio 2y ago
It also removes a lot of the immersion. For example, I love Civ but playing with people shatters a lot of the day-dreaming.
acomjean 2y ago
There are some which are more casual. My partner plays fornite. She's got a group she games with, and half the talking is about the game the other half is basically a catch up session with a game in the background. there was a game called "Journey" where there where other players in the world, but you couldn't interact directly. They'd help you. I think elden ring did something similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game)
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  fall guys has no voice chat and you are basically a jellybean playing in a japanese-inspired game show
- fullstop 2y ago
  Elden Ring has an interesting multiplayer mechanic, and it works quite well. 1. You can sometimes see what other players are doing, they show up as a translucent white phantom looking thing. This is useful because you can sometimes see entrances to hidden locations, etc. 2. There are blood stains on the ground which represent where another player died. If you interact with the blood stain, you see a translucent red phantom in their final moments. This is useful if you want to see if jumping of a particular ledge is fatal or to see potential traps. 3. You can leave messages for other players to see and can read messages that other players have left. This mechanic goes both ways, as some people troll and others try to help. Interacting with the message rewards the player who left the message by refilling their health bar. Many boss fights have been won because someone happened to rate their message at a critical moment. On the trolling side, people leave messages like "Try jumping" by ledges where jumping off would be fatal. Others leave amusing messages, and the community is amazingly creative with the messages they compose, given that the pre-set vocabulary is quite limited. 4. You put your summon sign down on the ground for others to see. When they interact with it, you can enter their game and help them fight bosses / progress through the level. Bosses are rewarded with more health for each player present. Obviously, the opposite works as well and you can summon others into your game. 5. You can put your dueling sign down / interact with the dueling sign. This is for people who wish to participate in player vs player. 6. You can invade other people's worlds / be invaded. This only happens if you have summoned a helper or are using an item which allows this mechanic to be used solo. When you are invaded, other players can automatically be brought in as hunters to help vanquish the invader. I'm not a fan of twitchy competitive games, but I get a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction with cooperative ones. Elden Ring and the rest of the "Souls" series very much scratch that itch.
  - stevenwoo 2y ago
    Super Mario Wonder has a subset of these for co-op play.
giantg2 2y ago
It's not just jerks. Seems like most multiplyer games have some sort of "pay to win" (or pay for an advantage) scheme in them. Then you have lag, solo team pitted against organized teams, ranking systems that arent accurate, etc. Competition in gaming is fine, but only if the participants think it's fair. It feels to me like it's increasingly unfair. But in relation it jerks, there seem to be many more same-team jerks than in the past. Teammate blame seems to be at an all time high. It's always someone else fault that we lost, never my own. Oftentimes you read the stats afterwards and the performance was basically equal. I can't help but feel that this same perspective is spilling into real life too.
- rldjbpin 2y ago
  there are established good competitive titles without pay2win. look at league, counter-strike for instance. a lot of the other things mentioned (like a solo guy getting matched with a "team") are to me similar to real-life counterparts. you can play ball in a court against a group of friends that play together regularly. just like you can have a better computer and internet, you can have better sports gear. this does not take away from the "skill" aspect of the game for me. i am with you in terms of systematic issues with ranking or game mechanics, but it is still much better than annual sports titles and the like. but if chess can be enjoyed despite the player starting first having an advantage, so can these games.
- alex_lav 2y ago
  > Seems like most multiplyer games have some sort of "pay to win" (or pay for an advantage) scheme in them Can you share an example of this outside of mobile games?
  - giantg2 2y ago
    Plenty on here. Also it's not as egregious as straight pay to win, but often it's stuff like buying a season pass to level up or unlock items faster. https://fictionhorizon.com/best-pay-to-win-games/ https://fictionhorizon.com/best-pay-to-win-games/
    - 2y ago
jerjerjer 2y ago
Agreed. Casual (non-competitive, non-p2w) multiplayer is a dying breed.
- cdchn 2y ago
  I wouldn't say its a dying breed. I think you see more non-competitive co-op games now than competitive multiplayer, especially with the huge success of games like Space Marines 2 and Helldivers 2 and the massive flops of Concord and XDefiant. EDIT: typo meant non-competitive co-op
  - falcolas 2y ago
    Heh. If we're using competitiveness as a measuring stick, Helldivers 2 is absolutely competitive. If you're not geared up with the current meta, you're frequently flamed and kicked. There's a lot of "win or die" mentality there. If winning is on the line, it doesn't matter who the opponent is.
    - cdchn 2y ago
      That's not really being competitive. You're not competing against the people in your squad.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Competitiveness and zero sum thinking is so bad in the world of video games, that Helldivers 2's entire run has been marred by over-balancing loadouts in an explicitly coop, PvE game, where balance shouldn't even be a priority. They spent months and months and months nerfing equipment (that was being used because basic game mechanics like armor penetration and damage models were explicitly broken) and making changes that intentionally or otherwise made the game much harder, all while literal employees of the company bullied players asking for an enjoyable game in their public discord, telling players that the BUGS they were suffering from, including weapons not working the way they were supposed to, and including the spawning behavior being utterly broken and spawning many times more enemies than it should was A SKILL ISSUE ArrowHead's culture itself was so "sweaty" and "tryhard" and destructive that it resulted in a change of the CEO and a restructuring of the department that interacted with players including banning at least one employee from the public discord for his hostile behavior. They had to completely change their development strategy and release cadence to address these issues, with significant public "mea culpa"s promising to make the game more fun for normal people. It even worked, with the game seeing an influx of new and returning players after a year of constant reduction in player count. This is a game where playing on higher difficulty levels is REQUIRED to unlock most of the content you cannot buy with the "real money" in game currency. So helldivers 2 is actually a great example of how god awful and toxic the "tryhards" in online gaming are. It was literally corroding one of the best and most refreshing new games to come out in a long time, from a company who has historically done a wonderful job making games that are all about chaotic fun and lighthearted cooperation, like Magika. They are god awful at programming though. Also don't seem to have reliable and well managed change control, since they seem to have no clue what releases any time they update. Another great example was the Dark Souls debacle about adding an easy mode. These games are known for being hard (imo often with fake and bullshit difficulty like a dragon's fire breath literally going through a wall to kill you), but the devs wanted the game to be more accesible and there was LOUD outcry about allowing people to play the game easier would "ruin!!!!" the game.... somehow. This was a single player game that was perfectly playable with near zero online interaction. They explicitly were upset that other people may have fun.
vundercind 2y ago
Multiplayer comes with social obligation. I’m messing up other people’s good time if I drop the controller and vanish for five minutes. I don’t feel comfortable doing that unless the chance of an interruption is extremely close to zero. Stresses me out.
- slothtrop 2y ago
  This is the big one to me, time commitment. People spend hours on these, and if you want to "hang" with an in-group, they expect you to put in the time. No thanks. I don't want a lifestyle revolving around maximizing time on a multiplayer game. If I'm going to commit time every week it might as well be a physical sport. I do like couch co-op or occasional online play with friends but that is off-the-cuff stuff. I'd be willing to do it more frequently if the time were capped.
  - valval 2y ago
    I imagine you’d find friends to play with who are able to dedicate the same amount of commitment as you are.
- jayd16 2y ago
  Yeah. FFA pvp is less stressful because you only have your own fate to worry about. If you need to go AFK it's you just sacrifice a match. ...team pvp or even coop games need much more commitment.
  - tharkun__ 2y ago
    Not my experience. You are right that it's less of an issue. But I very definitely stressed about individual matches and how it affects the ranking and stats. You hold it in until the match finishes and just don't join the next one right away but you still change your behavior. Or in something like WoW PvP servers you go somewhere safe before logging out etc. SP? Hit the pause button and go.
    - techjamie 2y ago
asdff 2y ago
I feel like multiplayer gaming was more fun/popular when there were more jerks, especially on the mics. It seemed like half the fun was the shit talking back in the halo 3/cod 4 era, and it really only stopped when they screwed up how lobbies worked in newer titles where you can't go on all talk between games let alone actually party up, or have proxy chat in game. At least on some PC games you can still get on the mics and PC gamers do actually still use their mics. I'm not sure if the new consoles even ship with mics anymore.
- rldjbpin 2y ago
  now you have people getting pissed off by "nice save!" messages used ironically in rocket league, or people getting riled up from a random goal celebration in the popular annual football game. people will continue to get frustrated, thanks in part of the game's shortcomings. but it is no longer possible to let your team know how you feel about it. take it as you may, it was pretty nice while it lasted.
- jayd16 2y ago
  Every PS5 controller has a built in mic/speaker. It's passable but it's no Xbox headset.
- charlie0 2y ago
  Shit talking or hearing others shit talk was half the fun. IMO, this should be resolved through the creation of moderated vs unmoderated channels. Different strokes for different folks. Instead, all channels are moderated.
- tdb7893 2y ago
  So I think there are two things here. First I agree somewhat though I think that there's a difference between good natured shit talking and being a jerk. I feel like as a kid people still could be mean but tonally it was more jovial, now I feel like I run into more miserable assholes (which I think is much worse). Secondly it still wasn't fun for everyone back in the day, especially if you were different people would try to bully you. I never had an issue but I know a lot of people who have never used public voice chat because they don't want to be harassed.
darth_avocado 2y ago
One factor not talked about enough is that multiplayer games are kind of limited in the "experience" you can create. Single player experiences are unbound. The fact that you can narrate "stories" is what allows gamers to "experience" new things.
TheBozzCL 2y ago
Yeah, almost every multiplayer-focused game nowadays seems to be trying to be the next big e-sport. There's always somebody who's fully focused on the meta and being competitive, and lashing out at people who don't. I have too much work , too much social life and too many hobbies, I'm not going to spend even more time gittin gud for internet strangers. I've mostly stopped playing online games besides more chill/sandboxy ones, like Lethal Company, and those I play exclusively with friends.
senkora 2y ago
Nintendo has the right idea with avoiding any kind of group or voice chat in Splatoon and Mario Kart. Those are always fun online multiplayer experiences for me.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jsheard 2y ago

Multiplayer has also been taken over by free2play skinner box design, so if you want games that aren't designed to waste your time with unfun but addictive gameplay loops and/or nickel-and-dime you to death then singleplayer is the last bastion.

mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
nickel-and-dime you to death then singleplayer is the last bastion. We still get our fair share of season passes and day one DLCs, so it's not total immunity.

huevosabio 2y ago

It also removes a lot of the immersion. For example, I love Civ but playing with people shatters a lot of the day-dreaming.

acomjean 2y ago

There are some which are more casual. My partner plays fornite. She's got a group she games with, and half the talking is about the game the other half is basically a catch up session with a game in the background. there was a game called "Journey" where there where other players in the world, but you couldn't interact directly. They'd help you. I think elden ring did something similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game)

bobthepanda 2y ago
fall guys has no voice chat and you are basically a jellybean playing in a japanese-inspired game show
fullstop 2y ago
Elden Ring has an interesting multiplayer mechanic, and it works quite well. 1. You can sometimes see what other players are doing, they show up as a translucent white phantom looking thing. This is useful because you can sometimes see entrances to hidden locations, etc. 2. There are blood stains on the ground which represent where another player died. If you interact with the blood stain, you see a translucent red phantom in their final moments. This is useful if you want to see if jumping of a particular ledge is fatal or to see potential traps. 3. You can leave messages for other players to see and can read messages that other players have left. This mechanic goes both ways, as some people troll and others try to help. Interacting with the message rewards the player who left the message by refilling their health bar. Many boss fights have been won because someone happened to rate their message at a critical moment. On the trolling side, people leave messages like "Try jumping" by ledges where jumping off would be fatal. Others leave amusing messages, and the community is amazingly creative with the messages they compose, given that the pre-set vocabulary is quite limited. 4. You put your summon sign down on the ground for others to see. When they interact with it, you can enter their game and help them fight bosses / progress through the level. Bosses are rewarded with more health for each player present. Obviously, the opposite works as well and you can summon others into your game. 5. You can put your dueling sign down / interact with the dueling sign. This is for people who wish to participate in player vs player. 6. You can invade other people's worlds / be invaded. This only happens if you have summoned a helper or are using an item which allows this mechanic to be used solo. When you are invaded, other players can automatically be brought in as hunters to help vanquish the invader. I'm not a fan of twitchy competitive games, but I get a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction with cooperative ones. Elden Ring and the rest of the "Souls" series very much scratch that itch.
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  Super Mario Wonder has a subset of these for co-op play.

giantg2 2y ago

It's not just jerks. Seems like most multiplyer games have some sort of "pay to win" (or pay for an advantage) scheme in them. Then you have lag, solo team pitted against organized teams, ranking systems that arent accurate, etc. Competition in gaming is fine, but only if the participants think it's fair. It feels to me like it's increasingly unfair. But in relation it jerks, there seem to be many more same-team jerks than in the past. Teammate blame seems to be at an all time high. It's always someone else fault that we lost, never my own. Oftentimes you read the stats afterwards and the performance was basically equal. I can't help but feel that this same perspective is spilling into real life too.

rldjbpin 2y ago
there are established good competitive titles without pay2win. look at league, counter-strike for instance. a lot of the other things mentioned (like a solo guy getting matched with a "team") are to me similar to real-life counterparts. you can play ball in a court against a group of friends that play together regularly. just like you can have a better computer and internet, you can have better sports gear. this does not take away from the "skill" aspect of the game for me. i am with you in terms of systematic issues with ranking or game mechanics, but it is still much better than annual sports titles and the like. but if chess can be enjoyed despite the player starting first having an advantage, so can these games.
alex_lav 2y ago
> Seems like most multiplyer games have some sort of "pay to win" (or pay for an advantage) scheme in them Can you share an example of this outside of mobile games?
- giantg2 2y ago
  Plenty on here. Also it's not as egregious as straight pay to win, but often it's stuff like buying a season pass to level up or unlock items faster. https://fictionhorizon.com/best-pay-to-win-games/ https://fictionhorizon.com/best-pay-to-win-games/
  - 2y ago

jerjerjer 2y ago

Agreed. Casual (non-competitive, non-p2w) multiplayer is a dying breed.

cdchn 2y ago
I wouldn't say its a dying breed. I think you see more non-competitive co-op games now than competitive multiplayer, especially with the huge success of games like Space Marines 2 and Helldivers 2 and the massive flops of Concord and XDefiant. EDIT: typo meant non-competitive co-op
- falcolas 2y ago
  Heh. If we're using competitiveness as a measuring stick, Helldivers 2 is absolutely competitive. If you're not geared up with the current meta, you're frequently flamed and kicked. There's a lot of "win or die" mentality there. If winning is on the line, it doesn't matter who the opponent is.
  - cdchn 2y ago
    That's not really being competitive. You're not competing against the people in your squad.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Competitiveness and zero sum thinking is so bad in the world of video games, that Helldivers 2's entire run has been marred by over-balancing loadouts in an explicitly coop, PvE game, where balance shouldn't even be a priority. They spent months and months and months nerfing equipment (that was being used because basic game mechanics like armor penetration and damage models were explicitly broken) and making changes that intentionally or otherwise made the game much harder, all while literal employees of the company bullied players asking for an enjoyable game in their public discord, telling players that the BUGS they were suffering from, including weapons not working the way they were supposed to, and including the spawning behavior being utterly broken and spawning many times more enemies than it should was A SKILL ISSUE ArrowHead's culture itself was so "sweaty" and "tryhard" and destructive that it resulted in a change of the CEO and a restructuring of the department that interacted with players including banning at least one employee from the public discord for his hostile behavior. They had to completely change their development strategy and release cadence to address these issues, with significant public "mea culpa"s promising to make the game more fun for normal people. It even worked, with the game seeing an influx of new and returning players after a year of constant reduction in player count. This is a game where playing on higher difficulty levels is REQUIRED to unlock most of the content you cannot buy with the "real money" in game currency. So helldivers 2 is actually a great example of how god awful and toxic the "tryhards" in online gaming are. It was literally corroding one of the best and most refreshing new games to come out in a long time, from a company who has historically done a wonderful job making games that are all about chaotic fun and lighthearted cooperation, like Magika. They are god awful at programming though. Also don't seem to have reliable and well managed change control, since they seem to have no clue what releases any time they update. Another great example was the Dark Souls debacle about adding an easy mode. These games are known for being hard (imo often with fake and bullshit difficulty like a dragon's fire breath literally going through a wall to kill you), but the devs wanted the game to be more accesible and there was LOUD outcry about allowing people to play the game easier would "ruin!!!!" the game.... somehow. This was a single player game that was perfectly playable with near zero online interaction. They explicitly were upset that other people may have fun.

vundercind 2y ago

Multiplayer comes with social obligation. I’m messing up other people’s good time if I drop the controller and vanish for five minutes. I don’t feel comfortable doing that unless the chance of an interruption is extremely close to zero. Stresses me out.

slothtrop 2y ago
This is the big one to me, time commitment. People spend hours on these, and if you want to "hang" with an in-group, they expect you to put in the time. No thanks. I don't want a lifestyle revolving around maximizing time on a multiplayer game. If I'm going to commit time every week it might as well be a physical sport. I do like couch co-op or occasional online play with friends but that is off-the-cuff stuff. I'd be willing to do it more frequently if the time were capped.
- valval 2y ago
  I imagine you’d find friends to play with who are able to dedicate the same amount of commitment as you are.
jayd16 2y ago
Yeah. FFA pvp is less stressful because you only have your own fate to worry about. If you need to go AFK it's you just sacrifice a match. ...team pvp or even coop games need much more commitment.
- tharkun__ 2y ago
  Not my experience. You are right that it's less of an issue. But I very definitely stressed about individual matches and how it affects the ranking and stats. You hold it in until the match finishes and just don't join the next one right away but you still change your behavior. Or in something like WoW PvP servers you go somewhere safe before logging out etc. SP? Hit the pause button and go.
  - techjamie 2y ago

asdff 2y ago

I feel like multiplayer gaming was more fun/popular when there were more jerks, especially on the mics. It seemed like half the fun was the shit talking back in the halo 3/cod 4 era, and it really only stopped when they screwed up how lobbies worked in newer titles where you can't go on all talk between games let alone actually party up, or have proxy chat in game. At least on some PC games you can still get on the mics and PC gamers do actually still use their mics. I'm not sure if the new consoles even ship with mics anymore.

rldjbpin 2y ago
now you have people getting pissed off by "nice save!" messages used ironically in rocket league, or people getting riled up from a random goal celebration in the popular annual football game. people will continue to get frustrated, thanks in part of the game's shortcomings. but it is no longer possible to let your team know how you feel about it. take it as you may, it was pretty nice while it lasted.
jayd16 2y ago
Every PS5 controller has a built in mic/speaker. It's passable but it's no Xbox headset.
charlie0 2y ago
Shit talking or hearing others shit talk was half the fun. IMO, this should be resolved through the creation of moderated vs unmoderated channels. Different strokes for different folks. Instead, all channels are moderated.
tdb7893 2y ago
So I think there are two things here. First I agree somewhat though I think that there's a difference between good natured shit talking and being a jerk. I feel like as a kid people still could be mean but tonally it was more jovial, now I feel like I run into more miserable assholes (which I think is much worse). Secondly it still wasn't fun for everyone back in the day, especially if you were different people would try to bully you. I never had an issue but I know a lot of people who have never used public voice chat because they don't want to be harassed.

darth_avocado 2y ago

One factor not talked about enough is that multiplayer games are kind of limited in the "experience" you can create. Single player experiences are unbound. The fact that you can narrate "stories" is what allows gamers to "experience" new things.

TheBozzCL 2y ago

Yeah, almost every multiplayer-focused game nowadays seems to be trying to be the next big e-sport. There's always somebody who's fully focused on the meta and being competitive, and lashing out at people who don't. I have too much work , too much social life and too many hobbies, I'm not going to spend even more time gittin gud for internet strangers. I've mostly stopped playing online games besides more chill/sandboxy ones, like Lethal Company, and those I play exclusively with friends.

senkora 2y ago

Nintendo has the right idea with avoiding any kind of group or voice chat in Splatoon and Mario Kart. Those are always fun online multiplayer experiences for me.