hi folks, hope all are well today. new’ish gamer and i have a question about etiquette in MMORPGs.
are there proper ways to engage people in game? it seems strange to me to randomly ask someone to be friends. i also don’t see many ways to strike up conversations (if that’s the proper way to refer to it).
for additional context, in a game like Throne & Liberty or FFXIV, there are tons of people running around doing their thing. do you just whisper to someone and say hi? do you comment on their character or if you saw them do something interesting / cool?
or, for something like The First Descendant you may run a mission with a bunch of random people and then everyone goes their separate ways. but, if that group was cool (and good) do you quickly try to friend everyone?
personal context (if it helps / matters), console gamer (PlayStation don’t judge please, haha), really introverted / anxious around strangers IRL, older play (mid 50s) and ultimately… afraid of looking like a weirdo 😀
apologies in advance if this topic was already discussed (happy to check another post if some can point me to it). also, apologies if i don’t directly respond to every message, although i will read them all.
I’ve played WoW basically since it ever came out like 19/20 years ago, just after Guild Wars 1 and among many other MMOs for shorter times. And communication in MMORPGs has definitely been a lot better back in the days, or at least felt more engaged than it does now. Now it’s often been difficult to get people to talk, even after like a good dungeon run people will often just leave without having said an entire word the entire dungeon. It’s not as chatty as it used to be back in the days, and a lot of people are the toxic type that only respond when something goes wrong.
I think your best bet would be to join guilds in these games. I used to be in great guilds as well, where everyone could talk to each other in guild chat, but it kinda devolved into an alternative looking-for-group chat over the years since most guilds just invite anyone to get the guild bonusses and have easier access to people wanting to do raids and dungeons and stuff.
Guilds often don’t feel like the band of friends they used to be, and more like a collection of people doing the same type of content. It’s like most players just treat MMO games like a second job, they log in, do their chores, and log off again. But you can get lucky and run into a great guild that’s more casual, it heavily depends on the game and servers though.
In the past years I found that local chat is mostly used by roleplayers, WoW has a few servers where a lot of roleplayers flock to, and it really helped make the world feel alive as well. As for everyday non-RP chat, it just feels like most MMO games turned into a singleplayer game where you run around doing your own thing, with a lot of other people that are also playing their own game.
I do think that free-to-play games are worse when it comes to communication though, since anyone can hop in, and it often attracts the most toxic entitled people. The paywall with games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy Online definitely help filter out the majority of them though.
On a side note, I often play shooters as well. And I really hated voice chat in basically all of them, since most of them were just kids screaming vile things about mothers and what not, so I just ended up turning it off. Eventually I started playing Squad, which is a more serious Battlefield type of game with voice chat that attracts a more mature audience. At first I was a bit hesitant to use voice chat at all, but now I absolutely love talking with random players and couldn’t imagine the game without voice chat, most fun I’ve had with complete strangers in any game.
Sometimes it’s just a step to get over, and it gets easier. It’s worth giving it a shot in the games you play, but I would say it’s more likely to have a better experience outside of free-to-play games since there’s a lower chance of running into toxic players ruining the vibe.
I think that’s kinda a generational problem. When you played WoW 20 years ago, all the chatter was in the game, because where else would someone be asking where Mankrik’s wife was?
Kids these days (and old people who are paying attention, too, I guess) just join the Guild discord because it’s persistent chat outside of the game with push notifications and streaming and you can listen to shared playlists while raiding and all sorts of shit you just can’t do in the game.
So sure, MMO people don’t chat in game as much anymore, but there’s still a vibrant meme-sharing-and-yelling-at-the-hunter community in Discord now.
It’s definitely a generational thing, aside from people being completely focused on achievements and run around with a go-go-go mentality that everything must be achieved as fast as possible.
I personally only use Discord for talking to friends in voice chat though. I absolutely hate how most communities it’s barely anything more than Twitch chats where the feeds go faster than you can read and it still feels like talking into a void. At least in most Discord channels I’ve been, you can’t really have discussions. Not unless you have smaller groups that aren’t a rotating door of people coming and going.