>>960625
>any person spending hundred or thousands of hours is guilty of autistic addiction
I fail to agree with you completely. Investing no more than an hundred hours into a game and then "moving on", even though the game has a sizeable multiplayer base, is a sign of being gifted with ADHD or a worse brainrot. Also I lack to see an argument in "replayablility and progress like games that speedrunners practice on", all of us know these mentally deranged try to put their shtick in every available game on the market.
I believe this "autistic" grind implemented in every modern videogame is a psychological weapon aimed at younger minds to make them complacent with their place in the world. Look at it this way: predictive programming to forget about "a current thing" in mere months (if not the infamous 2 weeks). Thus you are obliged to accept whatever propaganda is shitting down your brain, because you have no recollection of the events that have happened prior. And researching said events leads you to the currated list of "found" sites that deem information that you are trying to seek a "dangerous conspiracy theory".
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ihDhZF7CgMM
Grind used to be different. Imagine previous generations masters, artisans. Their skills might not have increased at all during their daily "hundreds hours long" grind, yet they continued to hone their skill. Same way modern kids are taught that their "skills", basically reaction time, in a videogame could be used in a sports-like competition. Long story short: it's glowniggers. They prepare you for a war, creating an illusion of it being a cool fast paced action, where you shoot your former friends, labeled the bad guys today. Tomorrow we fight with Oceania, but we were sworn allies with them just yesterday.
>>960771
Thank you for your insight. Personally the last time I was "into it" was in ~2009, and again in 2019 for a month. You are absolutely on point about mindless level grind that everybody used to hate even back then. x10/50/100/1000/instant private servers were prevalent back then, focusing on the PVP aspect, because everything else was a bloody lackluster. Only hald of the mobs, dungeons, quests, professions, skills and talents would work during a red moon after a red heifer would perform a dance on its surface. But is the "endgame" any better? Running through the same dungeon to win a loterry is "fun"? Removing the main _social_ aspect from the Massive Multiplayer Game makes it a waste of time.
Let's drop this subject for a while and digress to the private servers unique game mods question. Assume you are given a private server ownership with somewhat dedicated team of game designers. What would be the things that you would have changed in the basegame to make it fun again?
Personally I would try as hard as I can to bring the social aspect back
OC DONUT STEEL, provided we are talking about Vanilla WoW:
-change many spells into AoE, rendering the "ball of death" problem obsolete (melee fighters would benefit from these spells damaging casters themselves)
-more spells are talent unlocks, rather than bought&taught
-remove the stupid miss/block/dodge chance on level difference, fixing a single high level raping newbies 15..20 levels below him
-instead of Hordie+Allie hand in hand, create an ability to become a renegade attacking players of your faction (was anything similar ever done?)
-try to spawn more mobs, forcing players to find a teammate to proceed (Diablo2 dealt with many mobs on the screen just fine, and unlike WoW its mobs actually had collisions and proper walk pathes)
-automatically add players to one of the nearby group when killing mobs, hopefully fixing the mob stealing issue
-create more unique randomly travelling world bosses, not just a single elite dino
-make generous rewards from competing in World PVP (certainly there was a server that dropped random leveled loot and gold on player's death)
-remove most of the useless loot like "+4STR/+4STAM LVL18", instead rely on unique skills and modifiers granted by this equipment (Diablo style)
-fill in empty areas on the map, add more leveled dungeons, make interesting loot as in an entry above
-make heroes be less dependent on the stats provided by the gear
-create unique contested dungeons, where enemy teams would participate in killing the boss faster than the other team, claiming its loot requires same time as changing a flag in BG
-finally, bring more factions: ork+troll+tauren+ogre vs blood elves+actual draenei+naga vs humie+dwarf+gnome vs night elf+goat space draenei vs scourge undead+nerubian (vs fel orc+demon?)
-make race choice matter (undead should take much more holy damage, and extra nature damage, while taking much less shadow damage, and being almost immune to poisons and diseases)
-make it possible to become a member of an another faction by abandoning(or significantly worsening relations with) yours
-nerf rogues (they deserve it)
>clearly has never played the game properly before
That's me.