My experience has been the adoption of Discord for communication in game has been a negative factor in the social aspects of gaming. Before, games needed to implement their own comms, which would encourage players to communicate as part of the game experience. But now it’s expected that you’d talk on discord instead, so there’s less need for games to be a social experience.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
I think its a combination of that and games moving from community run servers (named things like “Gregz Hangout | Gungame 24/7 | No isms” ) to just clicking a matchmaking button and being dropped into a match with a bunch of people you’ve never seen before and will never see again after that game is over.
With the server model occasionally people join or leave, but you’ll likely see most of the same people over several matches and maps. And if you rejoin that server another day because you liked it you might see that some of those people came back for the same reasons that you did.