This succinctly covers my view on it as well. I think it’ll be more of a problem a few years down the road as statist admin culture begins to influence the mods of more communities there, but for now I treat it on an community-by-community, user-by-user basis. I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of community leaders and users in general that went to lemmy.ml simply did because it was one of the larger instances last year and didn’t think much more of it than that.
If I have a choice, though, I’ll still try to grow a community on one of the smaller instances simply because it’s still one of the largest ones, and that’s better for the health of the network.
I had to actually get my hands on it to find out what appeals. For me it was a combination of challenge, routine, and a clear sense of progression. Hunting materials for gear gave me clear milestones while I was also getting better at the combat at the same time in a more intangible way.
Monster Hunter World was the one I spent the most time in, and my favorite part was the multiplayer. Unfortunately, frustration with that is also what led me to eventually drop it. Co-op with a friend in that game was bizarrely restricted, with a really janky way of going through the story (I eventually figured out that it was just better to do the story independently). On top of that, the multiplayer had technical issues on PC at launch.
I hear that Wilds will have a similar setup for the main story co-op–outright bizarre for a AAA game releasing in freaking 2025–but here’s hoping it won’t have the other issues at least.