The ease of access to the internet.
Now days its all plug and play, you plug the router in, your device pretty much sets its self up and your good to go.
I prefered the days when gaming and especialy online gaming was for thoese who were realy into it, passionate about it. The days of port forwarding, having to manualy download and install patches for pc games, if you wanted to set your PS2 up online you had to purchase a seperate network adapter. To connect your PS2 or Xbox to the internet you had a few options but for me I had to have my modem connected to my PC then a network cable from the PC to my consoles and the PC had to be on as it was network shareing, wires all over the gaff.
The community was generaly better as most who were online made the effort to get set up, there was less people but it was a more personal experiance.
Im all for moving forward and making tech easier to use but this has enabled any fucker online who many 15-20 yrs ago wouldnt of gone through the effort, now we got aload of wankers online and enabled devs to churn out shit as theres so many people that will just buy it and lap up those micro transactions. Back then all these GAAS and micro transaction games wouldnt of had a chance as there just wouldnt be enough dumb cunts to keep the junk sustainable.