Are the days of fun online community gaming over? 

There's a certain type of online community, one epitomised by Call of Duty: Modern warfare 2 and Halo 3, which is fun and toxic in equal measure. I recently fired up Black Ops original on back compat mode, and to my surprise found a few games, complete with a glorious symphony of swearing, laughing and raging. 

The death of these communities, and this way of playing online, can't be attributed to a single cause. But amongst them were the one-two punch of Ghosts and Infinite Warfare, the Xbox One and PS4's inferior community infrastructure, and also the change in demographics. My favourite FPS games of last gen, Titanfall and Battlefield 1, I have played for hundreds of hours each, yet I cant remember ever encountering a single person using their mic. 

I've found a handful of communities which do carry the torch to some extent. Sea of Thieves' belated popularity, while being a decent game in itself, I put down to a really fun community of people and game design which actively encourages it. 

Not sure of online gaming has ever had "glory days" so much as a honeymoon period honestly.

Glory days have become more like a glory holes. There's this increasing number of ever younger kids that play online with mobile phones etc. As people are playing the games casually, the cross-game chat with IRL friends is more important than in-game chat.

The glory days were local split screen. Mates always came round for goldeneye/timesplitters/halo and many, many more.

Multiplayer glory days were playing street fighter II (the original) in the filthy and dangerous arcades in Brazil. Now that's some serious swearing, laughing and raging.

Seriously though, the change you see is most likely caused by change in demographics and the new behavior that follows it.

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Maybe a lot of the importance of online gaming grew out of splitscreen. Every school had a kid who was the best. That attitude and competition carried across.

I am playing Online Multiplayer more than ever, especially with MS's games. The gaming community that I play in is a lot more chill though.

I very much agree with this glory holes statement.

There's no way to prove why people talk less on their mics than they use to, but for me, it most certainly had to do with how mean-spirited the players are. When voice chat became a thing, I thought it was going to amazing. Then I tried it and within seconds, someone was calling me a homophobic slur and telling me to leave their room simply because I joined. After that, the mic died a quick death.

I play games to relax and have fun. And arguing with random strangers about something as frivolous as which imaginary gun I am using or how I'm shooting said gun is not my idea of relaxation or fun.