Is the genre destined to be shit? I refuse to believe it's a technological issue, BRs run fine and Planetside 2 nailed massive scale battles a decade ago.
How do we fix MMOs?
Is the genre destined to be shit? I refuse to believe it's a technological issue, BRs run fine and Planetside 2 nailed massive scale battles a decade ago.
Aren't they all kind of inherently shit because of corporate greed working in lootboxes and shit? Has there ever been an MMO that released for a fixed price and never added any bullshit? The first WOW maybe? idk
It can only be saved though international effort. Japs do the art, Koreans do the systems, Westerners do the programming, Chinese do the marketing.
There's no real good way to monetize an MMO. Servers cost money, updates cost money, getting jannies to deal with MMOtards all day costs money. However paying a sub to keep playing a game you own is dumb, paying multiple times for dlc is dumb, and paying just to dress up your character is dumb. Gambling is basically the only way to get the most people to pay money. The only other thing they could do is make GMs and community herders also be vtuber cambawds and rake in money from morons who like giving money to e-celebs.
Needs to go back to the fundemental basics of the genre.
At the core of the genre is about sharing a world with hundreds or thousands of other players at the same time. The same resources, the same spaces, the same quests and objectives.
This is where modern MMOs fail, they think WOW, specifically WOTLK WOW is the gold standard of the genre, but WOW jumped the shark long before that. Vanilla WOW is a core MMO experience, but as expansions were introduced instances became more and more standard while the world was left to rot with nothing to do but farm 'rare spawns' that aren't actually rare, just timegated, for pets/mounts/transmog
The second issue is end game mindrot, the idea that the 'end of the game is when the real game starts' is a cancer, an MMO has to be fun right out of the box. OSRS is fun just exploring around lumby for the first time, WOW is fun venturing past your starting zones and seeing skull mobs way higher level than you and wondering what is in the zones beyond. Even EVE has gotten better about getting newbros into corps with other players and PVPing out of the box, end game is stupid because it is 'the end of the game.' not the beginning, no game should require 20+ hours of investment just to get through the tutorial, worse is when you create these artificial gaps between newbros and vets, it becomes harder for newbros to get engaged and get to that end game state, and the mid game stagnates heavily.
And finally, the genre needs to evolve. WOW shouldn't be the standard of an MMO in 2023, tab targeting combat was obsolete in 2003, monster AI has evolved a frick ton since everquest so the "B-line to the highest threat and auto attack" tank and spank that is only shook up by the boss occasionally farting groundfire or spitting a debuff at someone doesn't fly in 2023, Monster Hunter 1 came out in 2004, if you can't implement monster AI and combat as basic as Monster Hunter 1, you shouldn't even try.
Also MMOs need to stop trying to israelite players with gacha shit.
Energy systems, timegates, intentially making your game shit so you'll boost past the worst parts. This is a fricking cancer. A sub fee is fine, a box price and subfee is pushing it, but charging MTX to 'boost' means that as a developer you're incentivized to ruin your own game experience. People who like that gacha trash aren't going to invest into an MMO to get it, they're going to play dogshit like Genshin Impact on their phones for free.
Also the trinity just flat out needs go to, you cannot create a class system build around tank-healer-DPS and not expect one or two classes to outright outclass the others without making every single class play exactly the same. Classes should have niches, and those niches need to be interactive and interesting, sure the fighter is really good at frontline fighting and taking hits, but the wizard should be better at fighting other wizards with counter magic and spell slinging, a ranged character should be ideal for delivering a critical blow on a monster's weak spot while its flying to cause it to fall out of the sky and let everyone get a burst of free damage on the boss, the genre needs to get away from an immortal tank that generates infinite threat so they can pull 50 mobs into one spot while the other 3 players AOE the mobs down, and he healer occasionally fixes someone's frickup with a heal.
>At the core of the genre is about sharing a world with hundreds or thousands of other players at the same time. The same resources, the same spaces, the same quests and objectives.
I unironically think that Minecraft makes the best MMO shell. I had lots of fun with some Pixelmon servers, because it mixes the world impact of Minecraft with a personal levelling thing that works better than the other MMO plugins.
Too bad that java is complete and utter ass at everything, and trying to throw Pokeballs physically hurt me.
No more Groupfinder. Give solo players actual content and make group content require teamwork again. Quit forcing solo players into groups.
PvP that isn't optional but restricted to certain areas and different group sizes from duo to zergs.
No isolated instanced content unless it's to keep PvP fair.
Give me slow combat that works on 200ms+ ping. Less servers = more players in one world.
Stylized graphics and low system requirements because MMO players are on toasters and even high-end gaming rigs lag if more than twenty players are on screen.
Dofus already nailed the MMO genre.
Literally Dofus?
>No more Groupfinder
you forget people have jobs and cannot spend an hour just to get into a dungeon
>PvP that isn't optional
why would you push people into PvP?
>No isolated instanced
I once saw a game that did that. It had dozens of people camping the same boss for several days to try to complete a quest
Anon, he wants to play cutthroat everquest, and he wants you to frick off and die, never to play mmos with him again.
He's the inverse of the greedy corpo executive, he's the guy theorycrafting how to poopsock the fun out of a game to get more casual tears out of his minutes played (though he wants to nolife this like it's everquest)
Group Finder is a bandaid to poor game design, its not a solution to 'people don't have time anymore', because the problem with 'people don't have time anymore' isn't to make a system designed around running dungeons daily for your welfare badge gear more accessable, its to address the problem that you're making people have to log in and grind daily for a badge.
This is why groupfinder is bad, back in vanilla/TBC when I was working afterschool and attending highshool/fulltime university I had less time than I do now, and somehow I was still able to find PUGs on the weekend and raid consistently with my guild, because I had 1-2 days off a week that I could just blow grinding for 12 hours. I had to quit during WOTLK because the fricking welfare badge farm became too shitty to upkeep because you had to do it every-single-day, and the solution to fixing a shitty progression system was to add in group finder, but group finder doesn't fix the problem, it only makes it more barrable for people who have the privilege to log in every single day and play 20 fricking alts
Even WOW figured out that groupfinder is a cancer to the game and turned it into a vestigial tourist mode that is so useless it has 60+ minute queue times now, though now it has M+ which is a whole other clusterfrick of shit design, but at least I can run my 10 dungeons on the weekend, frick the badge farm and frick group finder.
everyone wants to be the main character that kills the big bad guy with their super edgy and cool damage based character.
no one wants to be a background support role.
Get better friends/guildies
Easy, all you need to do is have children IRL and then have a nice day. Now the person who hates MMOs is replaced with a person who can (temporarily) enjoy MMOs.
You cannot "fix MMOs" because the people who want them to be fixed just want to play WoW, except they want to feel like they did when they were young. They don't understand what the problem they're trying to fix is.
Full loot PvP and remove any kind of player-bound progression or power.
Give players something to fight over like bosses or resources.
Punish players for zerging.
All MMOs are designed to fail and deliberately so. It isn't intended to fail but rather delay end game content as long as possible to milk subscriptions and whales as much as possible.
This wouldn't be an issue but so much attention is required on increasing the time it takes to acquire end game gear that it detracts from the point of the gear. The point being enjoyable end game be it PVP or pve.
Gear also gets in the way of enjoying the content, if there is any. Often you need to see big numbers for fake dopamine as in you get dopamine off of seeing a big number rather than doing something that's actually enjoyable. I know a lot of vets would hate it but being fully geared versus not should be a one to two percent difference in damage tops. Not the 10 to 1000% difference you see in some MMOs. My DPS should let me down because they actually suck not because they don't have enough time to farm gear.
Woah dude sheeple wake up ayy weed lmfao.
Fricking shut up Scruffels. Holding onto grind focused greed mechanics for no reason after the servers went private is the problem.
MMOs have their place, the problem is everyone assumes they need to be these gacha tier grindfests to be functional, when they absolutely fricking don't.
Modern MMOs are so focused on trying to develop perfect systems to maximize cash shop profits and minimize development costs that they completely abandoned the concept of an MMO all together, and have been struggling to make anything new because they fail to make an MMO and what they do end up making is an overpriced gacha game that no one wants to play.
unironically i am a top 1% programmer and can make an mmo but i refuse to do it without at least $1,000,000 crowdfunding but nobody will get on board with that, ive tried.
Top 1% programmers make a million in 1-2 years, you can't make an MMO worth a shit in that amount of time no matter how good you are. Top 1% programmers also don't capitalize words incorrectly so at best you could be hired to some <90 IQ gayMAN web shitter job where they overpay the hell out of every moron who can glue libraries together because they have infinite money.
Raise monthly sub to $50 to scare the poorgays away
>How do we fix MMOs?
by killing all Zoomers. Total Zoomgroid Death.