Are gamers becoming lazier?
Are gamers becoming lazier?
Recalls the era when RTS dominated as the top genre.
They were eventually surpassed by MMORPGs in the mid 2000s.
Then MMORPGs fell out of favor due to MOBAs.
Now card games and shooters are taking their place.
As time goes on, the number of buttons you press while gaming decreases.
Remember when the 12-button Razer Naga was essential for competitive WoW?
The game now has lost half its features.
What do you think?
Shooters have remained popular for years, similar to games like Doom, Quake and Unreal Tournament. The latter two are mainly battle arenas, making your point less relevant. Games have shifted toward a more casual style, whereas in the past you needed significant time investment to succeed. Achieving excellence has become harder now. What I’m trying to say is that the learning curve has changed—being good has gotten simpler, becoming the best has become more challenging overall.
The outcome follows from the cause. If the game becomes simpler, with fewer mechanics to grasp, then those who try hard have less ability to show their better abilities. It's challenging to be the best at Pong since there are just two moves available. The greater the variety, the higher the risk of choosing incorrectly. I frequently hear that having more buttons doesn't mean increased complexity, but that's incorrect.
there are significantly more intricate skills in retail wow compared to classic. (highlighting the complexity)
mages predominantly relied on frost bolt (especially during MC), while warriors frequently used whirlwind and blood thirst, switching to heroic strike when they hit their rage cap, and only executing execute at around 25%.
it's possible there were additional abilities beyond ranks, but you seldom used many of them—except in PvE, where diversity was more common.
compared to today, achieving optimal rotation is much easier; macros are less useful now since stance changes aren’t as prevalent.
yes, while moba emphasizes the five core abilities (like dota and loot), there’s a broader range of elements to focus on during gameplay, including active items.
but there are countless minor details to remember and adapt to quickly, understanding their impact and knowing the immediate consequences.
fewer buttons
≠
lazy
Shooters have probably always been the most favored category. Games like Counter Strike, Doom, Quake, and similar arena shooters were extremely popular in the 90s. Later, COD emerged, along with BF, among many other titles.
That's an ignorant way of looking at things; the number of gamers has gone up an enormous amount over the years, so you can't just look at the popularity of any single genre and make such a sweeping statement from that alone. You have no data on e.g. how many people play RTS-games; the fact that some other genre has gotten more popular doesn't mean the number of RTS-gamers has dropped.
The point is, there are now more genres, more games in any given genre and more gamers to spread around all the available genres than there were in the past, so you can't just look at the popularity of one specific genre and compare it to what it was, unless you take the number of total gamers at any given period of time into account and the spread of those gamers over the then-available genres.
Yes, it's accurate. There are now fewer items available in stores compared to before MoP. They began eliminating words one by one right after MoP, which coincided with the rise in popularity of MOBAs.