I guess I just don’t see the appeal. If I wanted to interact with an AI, I can do it right now without launching a game to do it. And pointless NPCs are already one of the most annoying parts of games for me. I don’t want to waste my time reading meaningless dialogue from 100 characters trying to find the 1 person who will actually let me advance and continue playing the game. It will be even worse when they are all taking an unlimited stream of shit instead of 1 or 2 canned responses, because it will just be even harder to know who is wasting your time.

When a bunch of RPGs start doing that, they are all just going to start feeling the same.

My experience about a year ago. Try to hop into a game and find people complaining about bots and just vote kicking people constantly, then I got vote kicked. Join some more games that vary from people just standing around taunting, to more vote kicking, and everyone wearing stupid looking hats and shit. I used to love the game back in the day, but I gave up on it after a short time, it just felt unplayable.

I feel like the issue could be largely resolved if developers would just make a lot of the downloads optional. For as long as I remember, installers for PC applications have given the user options for which parts of the applications they want to install. Yet for games these days, they just take an all or nothing approach. Let me skip the ultra textures, and all the extra choices in languages I don’t need. It seems like it should be such an easy thing to implement!