Oh I hear that my friend I promise. I remember getting soooo salty over people stealing my nodes. Though for every one of those incidents, I also remember someone apologizing if it happened (even had a few give me the mats), I remember others clearly walking up to the node seeing me fighting right next to it and walking away. It’s a very minor interaction, but in the end… it is AN interaction. As opposed to now, where all interactions are curated and filtrated.
Before the game felt more like a world where you interacted with your fellow player out in the world, and some times those interactions produced either negative or positive results. Now the game feels like it plays on rails. The rails are nice because we almost never collide, but at the same time… Since we never collide, my entire game experience is predictable down to the minute. Hard to have novel experiences to promote world engagement when the whole thing is laid out for you.
Heck, I remember the first time I played WoW. It was on a patched together private server my brother and myself put up and played. Alone… 2 people in the entire world. Guess how fun it was… We made it to level 20 then both walked away. Why? Because the entire game boils down to… Kill 10 X, Gather 10 Y, Escort Z. That’s like 99% of the quests. What makes the game is the people.
When I hopped on live servers, I had the same feeling until… I joined my first dungeon and had to interact with people. It. was. awesome… I’ve been here ever since.
At the end of the day… I think the dev’s have to remember what made this game great (in my opinion at least)… It was the people. The community. The player interactions. Not the gameplay.
