Always fun to see all those things happen. And I may as well comment on the individual points.

1. That is always the case, you have to know where to find what you want. It could be better though with more places having access even if all it does it point to steam.
2. Neat!
3. Hehe, suddenly that old wired connection and fast internet don’t seem so useless. So many people have been there.
4. Controllers go many ways, mouse and keyboard certainly have a specific learning curve while a controller may be a bit more intuitive. But the keyboard and mouse is always there if you need it.
5. Right… Difficulty is a personal choice and to add a bit of personal story about that. Back when I way a kid and you got to a stupid hard part that you couldn’t beat, you tried again until you did beat it. We didn’t quit because we didn’t really have other games to play so even if it was stupid hard and was bad you kinda had to stick with it. And games back then really got stupid hard. Elden ring looks easy in comparison.
6. Community interaction is nice when it’s positive like that. And finding the info that makes it more fun for you always helps. Even if it stops you from discovering some of the smarter things yourself and may even rob you of a surprise.
7. Load times… Nuff said.

Oh man… I remember that time I tried to fix an issue I had with my pre built dell that was out of warranty. Sharp edges to cut your fingers and hands open everywhere. Cramped and really hard to pull apart which meant that you found all the sharp edges in the process. Designed to be hard to repair or upgrade with one thing always leading to the next. So I stopped trying, put it all back together and then it would not boot anymore. Cause for some reason the hard drive was suddenly unusable.

That was the last time I bought a pc and have since built all of them myself.

Indeed that is the case, the way you build community is to make it not fucking optional.

Dungeon finder that gets you into a group and conveniently into that dungeon? Nope, do it yourself by chatting with people and finding a guild, clan, whatever that suits your needs.

Map markers that show you outright where to go and what to do? Nope, figure it out yourself or ask someone who may know.

Allowing crafting to have a good place In the sandbox by making it valuable and requiring several different professions to get to the good stuff? Yes please.

Don’t Introduce NPC’s that allow you to circumvent the need for other players.

Make it inconvenient to transfer items between your characters on the same account or multiple accounts of the same person. The original mail delay in WoW between characters did exactly that.

Ensure that direct trade is always better than using a big market place.

And that is just off the top of my head. Building good community happens when it’s needed and there are consequences for being an ass. Back then you couldn’t just find a new group of people on the server you were on. Of you were an ass to everyone you would end up on ignore lists and make your own life so much harder. At the end of the day community only works if there is a need for community.

That is what happens when the thing that matters to everyone is to get stuff done and fast. The general difficulty got adjusted to the point where people never have a reason to cooperate in the open world, crafting got relegated to the side lines and is usually not worthwhile enough and even then people would rather have alternative characters that do the few dependencies there are instead of relying on someone else. or there is an NPC that solves that issue outright. Then there are the tools that automate finding a group for the things where you absolutely need a group and you bet no one interacts in those groups… Oh no, it’s rush to the end cause everyone got different things to do including so many daily quests. No time for even banter.

You want community? Great, slow down the game and see if that helps. Sure you may loose players that way that liked the pure convenience but if players find that they have time they may just start interacting.

Me personally, well I stopped playing MMOs entirely simply because the magic that was community got killed off exactly like that. Why play in an otherwise boring and dead world when the big promise of the genre is to play in a shared world WITH other players.

Well. All I want is more of that thing the first game did. Not some bog standard Ubisoft formula that they have been too afraid to deviate from for so long now.

Sure apparently IIRC Michel ancel was not easy to work with. Not that I would know since I didn’t work with that guy. But who knows what is true when said dev left ubi stating that the company sucked now… I suppose the truth is somewhere in between, he didn’t want to conform that much to the safe Ubisoft formula and Ubisoft inausted that he did.

Man I remember when they took risks and put out actual good games instead of the same old safe and non risky rehashes that they do now.

Enduring commitment… To whom? Certainly not the franchise, otherwise it wouldn’t take that long, absolutely not the players since they keep ignoring what they actually want out of a prequel or sequel for that franchise. The shareholders? Doesn’t that kind of require to you know… Release a product? Which more or less only leaves one option. Enduring commitment to not knowing what the heck they are doing.

If you are only ashamed of your actions after you were caught, you are not ashamed of your actions. Grade A trashy behaviour that has no place in the world.

Basically… A lot! Just to have what effectively amounts to a painkiller. Now don’t get me wrong, those are great but you know what’s better? Solving the issue that causes you pain to begin with.

So… As someone who uses the all feed and that includes finding this post and subsequently interacting with it. There are reasons to use all. I use my subscriptions more as bookmarks to have an easy return path to a community should I feel the need to really check up on that particular community. I then use all to browse for interesting content to read and possibly interact with. I don’t use local because that feed gets stale with things I have already seen very fast and I don’t look at only subscribed feeds because I don’t want it to be an echo chamber of my own preferences.

I block communities that don’t interest me, can’t interact with reasonably anyways or that are simply annoying. As it is I don’t see a problem with using all since it still drives interaction via comments like this one. You can’t really restrict voting either since that creates more issues than it solves. Remember that voting on a post is interaction too even if there is no comment from someone. Perhaps that person is short of time or just doesn’t have anything to add.

At the end of the day it is personal choice how people choose to discover and interact with content.