Speak for yourself or they'll speak for you

"Our only hope is the minds of kids"

Billy Talent - Red Flag

Ready to quote the same song three days in a row?

Last year, my Corsair Demographic series of posts tried to get at the sort of audience who would inhabit a true persistent virtual world game, a true MMO, which ended with the depressing realization that we will never have such a game, because we lack the chivalrous corsairs to fill it. That whole series started, however, with citing Lord of the Rings Online's decrepit, brain-dead remaining audience as negative example, who ignore 95% of the game they bought in order to log in every day for perfunctory chat participation and maybe running the one single currently popular instance.

The year before that I compared the more mature audience of The Secret World with the much more kid-friendly Warframe, concluding with the depressing realization that the idiot brats were more alive, interested, engaged in their activity and: "I have a request for my generation: Please don't get old."

Last night I got to see the intersection of those posts.

 

I reinstalled LotRO last week (I'm not expecting it to have improved, but can't stay away from Middle-Earth, damnit) and a couple of days ago joined a guild, fully knowing that I'll be kicked out (and banned from the game again) in another few weeks for pointing out gamer stupidity. Last night I was privy to a lengthy conversation between several gamers supposedly in their forties and fifties.

They complained about LotRO's decline, about the death of fellowship maneuvers and the unsatisfying end-game timesink. They rightly pointed out that the rest of the playerbase unjustly restricts instance groups to only half the classes, and that some classes like the burglar or loremaster desperately need their old functionality back. They argued about the merits of PvP. They reminisced, for hours (I had time for my one-hour teleport to cool down) about other old MMOs, about the classes they played and the battles they fought in DAoC and the combat sytem in AoC, about the likelihood of Camelot Unchained becoming vaporware for over-reaching, about a myriad old WoW-clones and other MMOs, about D&DOnline, Final Fantasy and games I've never even heard of, minutely dissecting the pros and cons of their group content, including how they motivate players to run said content.

It was one of the most comprehensive discussions on MMOs I've ever seen crop up spontaneously. Even I was impressed.

There was, in fact, just one, exactly one pertinent topic which never arose, the whole time they sat in their rocking-chairs griping about how they don't make 'em like they used to.

None of them ever bothered suggesting they actually get a group together and DO SOMETHING!