But what I’m really upset about is that people aren’t communicating and cooperating and being respectful of each other and working together and being social and pushing back the alienation and playing and finding joy.
I’m so fucking isolated these days. This is the closest thing that I have to a social outlet. And so many people in multiplayer games just have no interest in communicating or working together, or have no interest in, like… playing in a way that supports the team and works towards a cooperative goal? Like they’re playing by themselves, in a multiplayer lobby, and I absolutely do not understand it and I hate it. I don’t understand why people play multiplayer games when they don’t wan to play with people.
One reason I love going back to warthunder, specifically air-sim for mid-tier warbirds, is the small community of prop plane sim players have several bits of unwritten code that goes across language barriers. Specifically, sim players use the “follow me” call out to signal position to team mates. Typically, you see a dot on the horizon, call out “follow me”, then one by one all 8 of your team mates ping back and you can check your map to see if you’re about to fire on a friend or foe.
There’s a ton of other toxic aspects to that game, but over all the narrow band of propeller sim players are pretty decent. The slow and expensive nature of the sim game type also rewards calculated moves over leeroy jenkins type play styles. If you go head first at low altitude to try to yoink a kill, you’re not going to have a good time, that 5 minutes of side climbing pays off when you can leverage the energy against an opponent who just burnt all theirs up in a turn fight.
I love that kind of thing. I recently found out that some AI in Tarkov will mimic the leaning side to side “Friendly dance” that people way back in DayZ would use to indicate friendly intent towards strangers, or identify themselves to other teammates when someone asked “Hey is that guy in the window one of us? Everyone do the friendly dance!”