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Older millennials and Gen X were the ones that organized a lot of the multiplayer groups on old MMOs and other multiplayer games. In a lot of communities they're the ones that seem to reel the most whenever games make changes that break up content to make it cooperation less encouraged.

As a younger millennial who hit 30 recently, I understand the feeling of wanting to step away from multiplayer games due to toxicity. I have played games where having someone cuss at you on voice was the least of your worries due to doxxing and irl harrassment including people having their families and work places called.

Younger Gen X here, sounds more like older Millennials to me, too. Multiplayer was fun when it was usually LAN parties of people you knew personally (or split screen), but once it became standard to play with strangers and/or people you've never met in real life I wasn't interested.

younger millennials grew up on multiplayer and online games, which were widespread and extremely normalized by the time we were old enough

I think that one part of that shift was VoIP. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, if you were playing, say, Quake or similar online, you communicated via text chat. Subsequent to that, a lot of games acquired VoIP support, which I think helped make communication in online games more accessible to a broader audience.

But another factor that I think affects playing multiplayer games for a number of people is having kids. Like, you're 18, you don't have that many immediate responsibilities, maybe. But if your kid's diaper needs to be changed or they produce some other emergency, getting an period where you can play realtime games with other people is maybe harder to get an uninterrupted time block for. Maybe slow turn-based games, like play-by-email type strategy games or something, stuff that doesn't have the same time constraints, would be more-viable.

Younger millennial (wish me happy 30th in a few months) coming in. I had my niche group of PC nerds who played CS:S, WoW and L4D basically on release. We all knew we were dumb ass kids coming into a scene. We got verbally destroyed in Vent and TS servers when doing ESEL CSS and dunked on while learning boss mechanics in MMOs.

I was always one to just want to have fun (shout out to surf_, aim_ag, and mg_ CSS maps). But I was in the trench as a plus one in a bunch of junk. I always felt like my other group of friends were out of the loop of gaming when they would just Autoaim headshot everything in sight on console COD4 and WAW, but I never got that group to try PC

After I graduated high school I just played dota 2 for two years until I was drained from comp play, then I just started queueing/playing games without caring about my rank. I'll check meta of what I'm playing and know a tad beforehand, but I can't be arsed to care about a winding down activity.

Tldr: Squeakers that played Source and/or 1.6 are adults now and are tired of comp play imo. One of my core group is still a Wow head and coaches raid clears, but we are just a bunch of tired adult stoners who dick around with FGs or rogue likes now.

The disrespect to SOCOM