Give me something like The Matrix Online again. I want missions/quests that are unique. Only one person/team can complete them. Failing is an acceptable outcome and has ramifications for the rest of the story. You would absolutely need writers and asset artists on staff as old things content gets completed. Let the players make content as well a la Eve Online where factions vying for control of territory IS content. This fills in the blanks between the written stuff.
I can't answer for them, but for me it's the cobbled together nature of the distros and the lack of a decent GUI for some things. Nothing is intuitive and many issues end with "go read random forum posts until someone else has your exact same issue and maybe you can follow along and fix it, but the post is also from 2007". I don't remember if I ever found a solution to the laggy Caps Lock issue I had a while back.
Whenever I give it another go, there's at least a week of fixing shit to make it work how I would expect it to before I can even vaguely get comfortable. It's unfortunate that I'm going to have to force it this time because I don't really feel like tackling any of the problems that will inevitably manifest.
There are probably a lot more that I'm forgetting at the moment, but these have been on my mind a lot lately. Everyone's gravitated toward D&D5e for the last ~10 years, so I haven't had a lot of chances to play in or run campaigns in many other systems.
You may want to link to the beta because they're directing people there instead and accounts made for the original site don't work for it. wts2.wt.social
Edit: Is this just a lemmy/kbin difference that I wasn't aware of? None of the /c/ links work for me while using kbin, but I can change them to /m/ and they work just fine. Does lemmy use /c/ by default?
Some of these games might be a bit heavy for newcomers, so I'd recommend checking their pages on BoardGameGeek to get an idea of how mechanically weighty they are and maybe also taking a look at the most common negatives in the reviews. If you don't like a lengthy set up and tear down process, for instance, the reviews might give you some advance warning. I had this exact problem with Gloomhaven and Eldritch Horror.
Yeah, the overall number of subreddits that go dark doesn't matter, just the number of affected users. If the majority of the largest subreddits go dark, everyone feels the difference.
Start with what you're comfortable with. 3rd person narration makes everything seem a lot less cringy and lots of people stick with that. (Speaking in your character's voice seems kind of rare, tbh) I would also recommend using a more tactical combat focused game to start so you've got something kind of gamey to cling to. D&D 5e, Pathfinder 2e, Lancer/ICON, Mythras... There are a lot of games out there to try.