School night?
The high end of millennials have grey hair and mortgages now.
School nights are when all the kids that fuck my very old mother have to log off early, so I get to engage in venerable spray ‘n’ pray duels with formidable peers. For a couple hours, I am esteemed ‘average’.
I don’t have mortgage because I cannot afford it but I can afford grey hair.
A lot of people euphemistically use “school night” to mean work night.
Mostly paid off mortgages, in some cases
Not if you’re in the US with a 30 year fixed.
Haha most of us millennials in my circle are still struggling to own property.
I’m a low end millennial and I’ve got both
I miss multiplayer in PC games being done by joining a server and playing. No match making bullshit, it was fun to be in a server with a mixture of skill levels. As compared with a lot of game snow, when ever your skills improve, you just get thrown into a harder tier of match making until you reach your limit and burn out.
This is because tech bros only read pop-psy without any regard for context or nuance. So they read a bit about Flow state and ranking for gamification, and as usual they just botched it. Most ranking is typically calibrated for engagement, not fun. Mind you, they are two different characteristics. If you graphed difficulty and skill, flow is a band, not a point, of difficulty, in the middle. The idea is that when you are challenged slightly over your skill, there is something in you brain that stimulates you to keep going under the promise that overcoming the challenge will be rewarding. Too high and people rage quit, too low and people get bored. The problem is that they want maximum engagement and for that the difficulty has to be on the higher end of the band. A frustrated person will return, a bored one most likely won’t.
They also want to keep people engaged with random and variable reinforcement. The other psychological theory that drives game design, much how behavioral scientist cheat pigeons to keep them engaged pulling a lever or pushing a button. Mix both theories poorly together and you get the awful implementation we see on multiplayer. People are tricked into believing that just because their brain chemicals are screaming at them to keep doing something, it means they are having fun. But that is obviously not true, just nobody ever occurred that those pigeons might be having a awful time. Ask most people on ranked MP or grinding for builds on MMOs if they are having fun and they have no idea why you’re asking them. It has nothing to do with fun, they just want the carrot being dangled in front of their nose.
I just don’t do online MP anymore because of this. 99% of the time, I’m not having fun. Now if I want to play with my friends or other people, we play tabletop board games. Infinitely more fun and far more satisfying than any online game ever.
I just want games focused on good old fashioned deathmatches. Just roam around the map and shoot whatever you see. No pressure on team tactics.
Playing Half Life multiplayer was so fun during the 25 year anniversary.
There are still a lot of games that do this. Though you are right about the mainstream titles being burnout generators now.
That’s not my experience, and I’m an elder millennial. The only time tiering up has encouraged me to quit a game was when the higher ranked players were just more toxic. Being challenged can be part of the fun.
That’s not to say I think matchmaking is simply better than persistent servers. Having a group of regulars and developing a bit of a server culture is good fun. I guess I like both options depending on the mood.
You could be playing pirated GameCube titles right now, but you chose this
You guys are completing campaigns?
I don’t have children.
Helldivers 2 is the first time in over a decade I’ve had actual fun in a multiplayer game
that’s because co-op multiplayer >> competitive multiplayer
Yeah I pretty much stopped playing competitive games completely. I really like playing with friends so I play a lot of coop. A way out and it takes two were some excellent coop games. Escape simulator and escape academy as well, if you’re into puzzles.
About twenty years ago I played Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal in multiplayer for about an hour, and I’ve never played competitive multiplayer since.
I can’t beleive I’ve never noticed the subtitle pun before today
I feel ya. I played one of the CoD games online once back in the mid 00s and stopped gaming entirely for more than a decade. It seriously made me just lose all the love I had for games. I came back for Cyberpunk and it turns out that was a good time to get back into gaming.
