The Corsair Demographic, Part 0: Not Thou, Luxurious Slave!

"Ours the wild life in tumult still to range
From toil to rest, and joy in every change.
Oh, who can tell? not thou, luxurious slave!
Whose soul would sicken o'er the heaving wave;
Not thou, vain lord of wantonness and ease!
Whom slumber soothes not—pleasure cannot please—"

Lord Byron - The Corsair



The Lord of the Rings Online is dead. Granted, this will come as news only to the troglodytic woses who still inhabit it and not to the noble Eldar who undertook their journey away from it in ages past. Well into its second decade now, LotRO has languished in MMOs' eventual and perpetual state of undeath for the last decade or so. The Rise of Isengard expansion revitalized it briefly in 2011 by some appropriately complex fights, but every patch after that slid farther downhill into meaningless reputation / gear farming via ever more oversimplified simplicity and ever lengthier timesinks. The litany of features removed or trivialized into irrelevance in order to make the game more "accessible" (to retards) makes one wonder what if anything at all could remain.

The answer of course is that despite having long since shed any value as a team RPG, LotRO's been largely kept afloat by its Tolkien license, profitable enough an intellectual property in its own right to justify the development team in striking out on its own after WB had had enough of milking the game as cross-promotional material for those vomitous Hobbit maladaptations.
I had hoped and cautiously predicted that the split would motivate the developers to better groom their now sole cash cow.
I also predicted that it would not matter, given that LotRO's long years of catering solely to cretins had hollowed it of the core of intelligent players who could actually have appreciated any improvements.
I was correct -- unfortunately on both counts.

The new instances feature more AoE attacks to make positioning matter, more adds which make crowd control at least marginally useful, shifting terrain, status effects dangerous enough to keep players from simply healing through everything. The writing, though terrible at times and wildly uneven, does a better job of not raping Tolkien's corpse than it used to. None of it matters; good or bad, you won't find any players above the intellect of a rodent with whom to give this ersatz multiplayer game an honest try. In the past seven or eight years the chat box of the four or five guilds I've tried has either been completely empty or followed a painfully predictable pattern.

"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"welcome to the kin!"
"hi"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"hi"
"i like pie"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"what's the best weapon?"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"hey, has anyone seen PlayerName lately?"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hey, has anyone seen OtherPlayerName lately?"
"welcome"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"i like pie"
"hey, has anyone seen all those other players lately?"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"

Other MMOs have established the same behavior pattern since the early 2000s: pablum and somnolence peppered with the occasional impulsive pro-social backstabbing. Not a single organized run or other purposeful action in sight. Once MMO gameplay was redefined as simplistic "kill ten rats" endless repetition, it turned out that marketing an entire genre to nothing but brain-dead filth gets you a customer base of exactly that. LotRO just makes a sadder example than most because its subject matter had, for the first few years, attracted a more intelligent nucleus of the right customers in addition to the usual subhuman chaff, attracted people who were in it for more than just the simplistic, repetitive nightly endorphin rush of giant flashing victory signs. Like EVE or City of Heroes, it was once a place where conversations about blue-shifting, bone tensile strength or the intersection of classic mythology and modern pop culture would simply spring up, casually, spontaneously.

And now?
The sole remaining activity of online game "communities" these days seems to be inviting each other and greeting each other, congratulating each other on existing and informing each other of what they had for lunch... and occasionally, awkwardly, visibly avoiding the question of why those other few, more interesting people have lost interest. You would never guess, looking at guild chat for several days on end, that there exists an actual game to be played somewhere beyond that chat box. Were it not for that bare glimmer of activity, you'd never guess the existence of players at all. They log in, chase their cake and log out again, pathetic addicts incapable of doing anything but mindlessly repeating the minimal actions they're prodded into by loot rewards. LotRO has scores of instances instantly available, but if you see more than three or four of them being played on a given week it's a miracle. The grim irony being that online games were originally where we went to escape human degeneracy; in a purposeful interplay of classes, gear and various maps we could find the antithesis of sitting in a cubicle stamping forms and replying to form-e-mails while listening to our coworker tell us about her cat and what she had for lunch and what her cat had for lunch.

For now, I'm just wondering: what would it take to rebuild the persistent virtual world mentality among a new crop of gamers? After all, it's 2020. Fifteen years have passed since graphic MMOs were strangled in their cradle by World of Warcraft, and a new generation is now growing into their high school and university mind-expanding period. They may wish to rebel against the previous generation's choice in "entertainment" - but where might they come by an alternate mindset?

I've talked at length here about the sort of world an MMO should be, but less about the necessary mentality of those who would inhabit it. To seek the antithesis of mindlessly repetitive instant gratification, bringing back the nineties just won't be enough. We have to go farther back, much farther, beyond the internet, beyond dungeons, dragons and Tolkien, to the era which defined our concept of escapist fantasies marketed to polite urbane audiences: to Romanticism. So, in order to wrap my head around what kind of audience would want to be plot devices instead of heroes I'm going to build the next three or four posts on this topic around lines from Byron's immortal Corsair... or mostly from the scene-setting first canto, and not from the bulk of Conrad's largely tedious personalized palpitations.