The Dead Game Tourist Is the Worst Kind of Player
It happens in pretty much every MMO community I’m in. Someone starts a real discussion about a balance patch or a new expansion, and a few replies down, here it comes. “Dead game.” Not mad. Not disappointed. They just want everyone to see them say it.
You know the type. They bounce from one MMO to the next, never stay long enough to learn anyone’s name, never join a guild for more than a week. The whole reason they’re posting is to walk in and tell everyone the roof is falling. If you push back, they’ll say they’re doing new players a favor. Saving folks from wasting their time. Looking out for the rookies. Sounds reasonable until you look at what they’re actually talking about.
Old School RuneScape has been “dying” for over ten years and the worlds are still packed. Guild Wars 2 is allegedly on life support, and Lion’s Arch looks like a parade every night. FFXIV gets buried between every patch, and then queues lock everyone out the second the next expansion drops. Whatever they think they’re seeing isn’t really there. They’re not warning anyone. They just like the way it sounds when they say it.
Funniest part? Most of them are still logged in. They’ll drop “dead game lmao” in chat and then go run a dungeon for four hours, or sit at the trading post flipping items until 2am. What they say and what they do don’t match, and the saying is the whole point. Somewhere along the way they decided that liking something out loud is embarrassing, and acting like you’re above it is the smart move.
And it actually matters. New players read forums before they roll a character. Devs read this stuff too. That constant background noise of “this game is finished” hangs over everything. Patch threads stop being about the patch and turn into a contest over who can quit the loudest. The annoying part is that most of these people clearly still love the genre. They just can’t say so without rolling their eyes first.
There’s no big fix here. It’s a slow shift in how people treat each other in these spaces. When someone shows up to do the dead game routine, don’t argue with them. Don’t pull up Steam charts. Don’t link concurrent player numbers. Let them yell at the wall. Spend your energy on the people actually doing things. The folks running guild events. The theorycrafters posting builds nobody asked for. The weirdos who decorate their player housing for fun. Devs should do the same and keep building for the people who are still showing up.
None of this means pretending everything is fine. MMOs have real problems and they deserve real complaints. But there’s a big difference between “this system is broken and here’s why” and “ded gaem.” One of those is a conversation. The other is some guy standing in the doorway of a party telling everyone to leave, while refusing to leave himself. The sad part is this “doomer” mentality exists in all aspects of gaming, not just MMOs.
