It’s good to hear a small bit of trouble has departed from the dev side of things, but part of my gripe is the irreparable damages of the past that shaped the player culture.
TLDR, the change in the player culture made the game stale for me, something that the devs can’t fix, only moderately influence.
I know that there are obviously enough people who enjoy the raid side of things, otherwise the game would really be dead. But I enjoyed interacting with players in a more casual manner… I wasn’t quite as worried about being able to solo content as much as experience it with other players in inefficient ways, if that makes any sense.
Everything is so powercrept, both from dev influence and player experience from age/raids, and I think most of all is this mind-numbing, unaltered traditional way of going about everything, to the point of hostility towards deviations on occasion. Silly little things like always taking the right path of blocks to get to Oryx’s stone statues. I know examples like this have been that way for years now even, but, yeah. It really feels like aimless wandering in a long conquered realm with dungeons feeling either too hard/long to solo reasonably, or lootbox speedruns. There hasn’t been an adventurous feeling with the game for me in a long time.
Hopefully taking a long break without paying much attention to updates may allow for some momentary neat experiences, but I don’t think the players will ever change. Long gone are the days where white bags were just shiny bonuses in a sea of tiered equipment, and you’d better believe many players are going to have the new content down to a science by the time I show up.
Here’s hoping to a better Realm, but it will take a lot to impress me (not that I’m some standard to hold by, mind you). I just wish the players were different.
(I realize reflecting a few minutes later that I was tired and grumpy for external reasons when I typed this, so I probably didn’t really say quite what I meant, lacking context and reasoning. Ah well)
