could be a taste thing or a question of what you're playing. i played Everquest on project1999 and had a blast. the really good ones are still engaging and enjoyable
I think that's actually OK. Then very end game has the worst kind of players. I quit WoW after 4 years or so to play CoH/CoV. Played that for 2 years and had a blast.
I think the longest I played was LOTRO. Played a little SWTOR with a couple of friends who wanted me to try. Oh and I think I tried Galaxies but that was a legacy thing so not when it was out originally.
>but can't get attached
MMOs aren't good by themselves, they need to be carried by the ambiance around it.
Back then the internet sucked at having every possible infos on a game, so something as big as an MMO had legit mysteries, players had an easier time shining since no one had an optimal build/gear/skill rotation, etc. It objectively sucked gameplay-wise, but it made it feel like a real world.
Also back then servers where small and gameplay *forced* you to interact with people. It objectively sucked gameplay-wise, but it made both PvE and PvP something that felt personal.
Basically MMO always sucked, but the novelty made it worth pushing through the suckiness and turned it into a pseudo-perk.
Then the novelty disappeared and devs optimized the pseudo-perks out of the game, leaving nothing but the suck that was always there.
"You had to be there" fully apply to MMOs, it's a fool errand to try to get into them long afterward.
Unironically, WoW was SO good when it came it out that every MMO after it got compared to it and none of them could make a game as fun and in-depth as WoW, so, the only option was to play a “lesser” MMO or play WoW.
>WoW was SO good when it came it out that every MMO after it got compared to it and none of them could make a game as fun and in-depth as WoW, so, the only option was to play a “lesser” MMO or play WoW.
WoW became a monopoly brand and ate up all the marketshare, then committed suicide, destroying the mmo space forever. The place is like irradiated earth, it will take decades to be livable again. The effects of a self imploding culture that's had so much influence all around the globe in the last 100 years are staggering.
Things are already growing around the edges. The rise of the open world survival game is proof MMOs as a genre would have still been successful today if not for WoW.
Or shit like GTA 5 roleplay servers, just gays going around larping as Joe the trash collector together with other like-minded players. Maybe that's actually another reason why these classic style MMOs are played out. There are so many different kinds of multiplayer experiences for any preferred play style, you can go be a zombie survivor in DayZ, you can pretend to be some mundane guy in an RP game, and all of them probably feel way more immersive. What's the reason to grind bigger numbers in something like WoW when Destiny 2 does the same thing but with better gameplay? Like even if you just want to grind loot, there are so many of those games now as well
MMOs were effectively dead long before those games. And really it's proof that publishers bet on the wrong horse. Give people the room to get together, explore, accomplish and RP and they will pay. WoW took all that away by making everything a themepark ride.
Oldgay here. If you remember old MMO's they were basically a chat room with a game tacked on. Interacting with other players in a virtual space is the heart of every MMO.
However the zoomers are so brainblasted with skinner box instant gratification that a lot of them are probably not able to socialize.
11 months ago
Anonymous
Socialization is not needed for them.
Society is fragmented and too hostile towards itself. Remember back in the days, if you meet another WoW player, the first question would be "are you Alliance or Horde?". Now it's "what server do you play", "are you a casual or hardcore?", "what are your parses?". You don't consider people valid if they don't have 99 logs.
I play in a guild and there is constant infighting for each piece of loot, for each heal cast - as if there was no camaraderie but constant penis measuring contest. My other guild didn't survive that and fell apart, and many other guilds did.
11 months ago
Anonymous
People are recoiling from this mindset and you can seek those who don't fit it with little effort.
>WoW was SO good when it came
No it wasn't, it had a negative effect on MMOs
Where other companies were doing everything they could to experiment with new mechanics that improved the social experience while keeping it engaging, WoW came along and proved people were just willing to be treated like monkeys and walk for 2 hours around mountains because other people were doing it, and now that the masses were introduced to the concept, the complexity of their systems had to be toned down. Basically blowing up the "time-wasting engagement" formula.
WoW is addictive for the wrong reasons and the only thing Korean MMOs have to envy from it is their profit. Literally a marketing scheme for dumb people.
OP is right. WoW killed MMOs. See where they are now? it's people who don't like RPGs joining the party thanks to Blizzard.
>Unironically, WoW was SO good
WoW was absolute, utter trash. Ultima, EQ, DAoC, those games were actual MMOs. Heavily inspired by MUDs--designed to be places for people to log in and hang, chat, etc. just as much as 'play'. WoW turned the whole genre into theme park, casual trash. You and all the other mouthbreathers that sucked down blizzard's cum ruined MMOs completely.
Your contrarian opinions means nothing to the generic consumer, and the generic consumer loves WoW to the point that it became the norm for MMO's to emulate WoW. WoW had a significant cultural impact, while stuff like EQ is remembered as a game only nerd losers played and this perspective is coming from the nerd losers who play WoW.
>majority of the human population supports lgbt including the literal owner of the website you are on and especially its creator >XD le gays get pandered too because they uhhhh bring in money O_O and uhh the israelites run games?
>WoW was SO good when it came
No it wasn't, it had a negative effect on MMOs
Where other companies were doing everything they could to experiment with new mechanics that improved the social experience while keeping it engaging, WoW came along and proved people were just willing to be treated like monkeys and walk for 2 hours around mountains because other people were doing it, and now that the masses were introduced to the concept, the complexity of their systems had to be toned down. Basically blowing up the "time-wasting engagement" formula.
WoW is addictive for the wrong reasons and the only thing Korean MMOs have to envy from it is their profit. Literally a marketing scheme for dumb people.
OP is right. WoW killed MMOs. See where they are now? it's people who don't like RPGs joining the party thanks to Blizzard.
>Unironically, WoW was SO good
WoW was absolute, utter trash. Ultima, EQ, DAoC, those games were actual MMOs. Heavily inspired by MUDs--designed to be places for people to log in and hang, chat, etc. just as much as 'play'. WoW turned the whole genre into theme park, casual trash. You and all the other mouthbreathers that sucked down blizzard's cum ruined MMOs completely.
You are moronic. >designed to be places for people to log in and hang, chat, etc. just as much as 'play'
The reason WoW failed is because this shit was taken away from it around the 2010s, when Smartphones became popular enough that social media exploded. MMOs got swamped by social media and their communities just treated MMOs as another game, not as a social space.
Concept of playing with hundreds of players simultaneously lost it's appeal when technology caught up, and MMO's can't really modernize without being an unplayable microtransaction-riddled mess.
They decided that instead of grinding out whatever you wanted everything would be gated between weeklies and dailies, an incredibly transparent attempt to make the game more addictive that actually just makes it feel annoying and arbitrary.
there's no point unless you have a group already lined up to play it with. everyone is a minmaxing metagay that thinks vanilla content is actually hard and every server is plagued with bots that use cheats to clip through the ground and teleport to resource nodes.
>he says as his mom pays for his 27th OF sub of the month while he listens to hyperpop on his paid SoundCloud account and watches the super based and redpilled stream he donates too along side of buying all of the testosterone powders they shill
Being able to interact with people used to be the whole appeal. It was very rare to be able to do this back then because no one knew how to code multiplayer.
Now? Every single game has online connectivity, it's nothing special anymore and if anything MMORPGs are now lacking in interactivity if compared to any other game you see out there.
WoW did. It turned MMOs into a singleplayer experience outside of the endgame raid grind. Made every MMO a themepark. And smothered every competitor in the crib. Never before has one game so utterly ruined a genre.
This. I play as Ganon in melee and just sit there and watch them spaz out under the platform and just turn off the game.
It was my one guilty pleasure. the one game I had time for outside of my busy life, it was supposed to just be a game I could get s round or two in and call it good..not sifting through legions of foxes and falcos and dealing with ledge guarding as to where you can't even fight.
Gaming's dead outside of troony spammers
Nah it's the opposite I actually win without having to wave dash or dash dance or ledgeguard
I just have to never make a single mistake
So it's not fun, I can't do daring shit as often as I like and it just feels like I'm pummeling a noob who is just so used to doing cheap shit he forgot how to actually play the game and didn't expect me to throw out a random smash move and trade so he fricking gets KOed
And I win with like 2-4 lives while it's always down to the last life with me and I end up making a comeback even after some silly ledge shit where I accidentally wizard kick off the ledge and simply just can't get back up.
It's not about "being good" it's about using cheap tricks to win an otherwise fair match ruining it.
WoW classic seems to be pretty popular though. And I admit, I still like the classic iteration of WoW. To me, it's like Super Mario 64. It seems to be timeless. The art style is cartoony enough that it will probably never become dated. The gameplay is simplistic bullshit dice-rolls... but it's kind of fun. Sometimes you yell at the game in furious anger and sometimes you mentally cum a little whenever you land that crit and obliterate that pesky frost mage.
0/10 frick this game, honestly. What a waste of time it was.
Agreed, Classic WoW was a 0/10 game and a 10/10 game at the same time.
Going back to Vanilla WoW, experience quality leveling and questlines again, getting your first mount, doing your class quests, clearing BWL with the bros, dueling outside of SW: All great things.
Every instance being a speedrun, cleave groups, people being powerleveled by mages, getting camped by 40 level 60's in STV, mage bots AoE farming and ruining the economy, clearing AQ40 for the millionith time, warriors being worse lootprostitutes than Vanilla hunters ever were, mage existing in general: All fricking awful things.
Reddit, unironically. The charm of MMOs has always been socializing and exploration. Shit like urban legends in videogames made them feel so lively.
Reddit functions as a centralized location of information on ANY subject, and that's why the magic of MMO is forever lost thanks to the modern internet.
Now that I think about it, Reddit is both a social media and an information hub. Two of the things that most peoples complains the most about when it comes to "why MMOs died".
MMOs were peaking when social media was in its nascent state and had better real-time communication capabilities than a lot of other platforms. For many people, MMOs were 3D chat rooms first and games second. As the years passed, the novelty of this wore off and other platforms became more capable and popular. Skype ate into MMO mindshare as much as others game did, and Discord was even more prominent in that regard. Why go in-game when you can do all your socializing from a universal app?
Many of the ones that stayed behind were the hardcore autists that hated talking to other people. They were there for the mindnumbing grind and considered it a waste of time to socialize. They dissected and ripped games apart into tiny pieces to find the absolute most optimal strategy and meta, and caused a domino effect that eventually rippled down to even casual players: follow the meta, have the whole game memorized before you even play it, or else you need to get out.
Developers are now caught between these two extremes and struggle to please both. The same tales echo across different games by different developers: classes are too homogenized, classes are too distinct, not enough mandatory content, too much mandatory content, etc.
On another note, even multi-monitor setups contributed to the decline of MMOs. When the game was the only thing in front of you, you were inclined to do everything in it and stay focused on it. Now you have endless distractions lined up next to it and the immersion is destroyed.
>Many of the ones that stayed behind were the hardcore autists that hated talking to other people. They were there for the mindnumbing grind and considered it a waste of time to socialize.
don't really think this is it, it's more that games are now run by women and rainbow hair homosexuals and so everyone is a little homosexual tattle tale, literally zero point trying to talk to normies in games now or you just get your money stolen
I swear most of the people in this thread never played a MMO before WoW. The idea that social media and too much information killed them is insane.
it's a cope that's gotten very popular and just gets regurgitated every thread. the reality is that new games are all trash and the old games are all solved. it's why "hardcore" got so popular, it presented some form of challenge for vanilla which is piss easy and solved. but permadeath in a MMO is gay and moronic, the real solution is to just make death meaningful. even Everquest classic's system and culling flight points would be enough.
Downtime is really verboten in all games now. The "go go go optimize every second of playtime" mentality is everywhere. I can't really blame it on players being older and becoming very self-conscious of their free time, even kids are doing it.
big reason i don't like most modern MMOs, no time to breathe and take in the sights, constant ADHD stimulation.
Wikis. Now everyone can access a wiki and minmax everything.
In classic wow where wiki did not exist and thottbot was trash, you get the feeling of being part of something bigger by talking with other people in game and finding out more.
But now you just Google minmax Meta build playthrough, and not only you will do it yourself but you will judge others as well. Aha he didn't spec this ability and isn't casting Renew every 3 ticks to get that one specific trinket mana proc? Not gonna play with him
It's honestly a multitude of issues and factors that most will rarely acknowledge. Really, it's far easier to blame something like discord or wikis when the problems have always run far deeper than that.
>The idea that social media and too much information killed them is insane.
FF XI would 100% be a different game if there was the amount of information that exists now back in the day.
You didn't have GUIDES back then you had fricking TESTIMONIALS which were just >Yeah, I did this quest with 3 friends and uhh we did ok I guess here were our levels and shit.
And then you had just blatant ritual tier misinformation from people who could only speculate on certain monster spawn rules or fight mechanics
I think it was the lack of interaction between players. Like in eq1 you'd typically find a camp in a dungeon and kill mobs as they spawn; but there was downtime while waiting on spawns. talking/interacting, you'd make friends etc etc.
newer games turned into a frenetic dungeon crawl with randoms. no downtime, no real interaction etc. you don't need an MMO for that style of gameplay.
Downtime is really verboten in all games now. The "go go go optimize every second of playtime" mentality is everywhere. I can't really blame it on players being older and becoming very self-conscious of their free time, even kids are doing it.
That's almost it. WoW from day 1 let every class solo to some degree, and every addition after only made it easier. City of Heroes was pretty frenetic but we still interacted and got to know each other because we NEEDED each other to get anywhere. That guys powers are suboptimal? Don't care, I still need him. Since leveling took so long we tended to encounter the same people a lot too.
Downtime is really verboten in all games now. The "go go go optimize every second of playtime" mentality is everywhere. I can't really blame it on players being older and becoming very self-conscious of their free time, even kids are doing it.
This is another product of WoW. MMOs traditionally forced everyone to team up from day 1. By endgame everyone knew what they were doing because you learned as you went. WoW was different, for a lot of people endgame was the first time they had to properly party. All those guides and sites came into existence because half the fricking players still didn't know how their class worked at level cap. 60+ levels of time wasting before the "real game" opened up.
That's where the meta mentality originated. Since it became expected reading and the frickwits at Blizzard centered the endgame on raiding.
I remember instanced dungeons in WoW back in the day at least had a little challenge. Remember when people would mark enemies for which CC to use on them and then you would execute the plan? Then one day they "re-balanced" the dungeons and suddenly it just turned into pure tank and spank, no planning with your party needed (at least until raids).
>it's so much fun
You know that if you stone face her she'll get more and more hysterical because you are denying what she thinks she's entitled to. Remember, women are twice as weak as men, there's nothing they can do.
This, that tactic he's trying to do is only possible if you're dealing with someone that's not too bright, if the "misogynistic" dude actually got a point and isn't dumb, he won't backup and actually would double down, turning the tides against him because these troons can't take a little confrontation.
Remember, they're all stronk warriors until you say Black person and they start chimping out like brainless monkeys.
They really aren't though, I hate MMOs and I hate modern MMOs.
If they want to appeal to me they gotta stop making shitty themeparks and treadmills. Start with a game that's fun to play and go from there.
We got older and didn't have the time. The zoomers that came next became obsessed with instant gratification of battle royales instead of building up towards something.
They got distilled into optimized poopsock Cookie Clicker grinding simulators. No more adventure, no more sense of community, just queue for the instance and get your +20 meta pauldrons as per the guide. Then go raid dungeons with other Excel guide gays and pay a monthly subscription for that, otherwise you get kicked out for not pulling your weight i.e. not playing like a line chart to get 1% better gear
I don't think MMOs are dead, they might be dead for people that want old school MMOs back exactly like they were 15-25 years ago, but they aren't dead for anyone else. They're simply changing, we're soon done with the era of WoW clones (finally) and new radically different types of MMO will rise from the ashes. Like proper action MMOs with highly interactive and realistic worlds, VR MMOs, MMOs utilizing new untested ways to handle instanced content and matchmaking.
It might seem grim right now because of how long it takes to get something new out on the market, we're stuck with the same ancient garbage that nobody really likes anymore. The new stuff is coming though, whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen.
the concept of an "endgame", instanced dungeons/raids. these two things killed MMOs entirely because level 1 to max level is no longer a journey or the point of the game, it's a menial slog meant to pad out sub timers and all of the actual effort goes into "endgame" treadmills that aren't designed to be fun, they're designed to keep you subscribed, instead of just having the game, the main part of the game you play, leveling, be fun
the novelty of online, real-time multiplayer fading away. the future of MMOs looks more like 'The Oasis' or .hack's 'The World' than any wow or final fantasy clone, but VR tech will have to advance to usher in the next generation
It must be your autism because none of that is actually true, it's an insanely grindy game where you click shit for hours and eventually lose your mind.
It's not esports, it's the consumeristic mindset. People don't have time to be inefficient when playing their video game, they're restless to move on to the next one.
yeah just put yourself at a significant disadvantage while not being able to even take advantage of the full mmo experience due to people playing it earnestly becoming a niche rather than the norm, i cant see how that could possibly result in a dissatisfying expirience.
I mained rogue in classic and skipped TBCC entirely after spent three fricking days trying to find party for ramps.
This "disadvantage" is just an illusion, you're not actually missing out on anything by not competing in the 1% poopsock bracket of players. The majority of players play the games like normal human beings with lives and as long as you don't wait weeks between play sessions you should still be able to find players to play with.
>The majority of players play the games like normal human beings
you have never played classic before
You only think that way because you're a part of them, if you take a break from the game you feel like you can't continue because you've fallen behind to much and now you are a casual noob. Well casual noobs are the majority of players and that's where you really want to be.
11 months ago
Anonymous
>if you take a break from the game you feel like you can't continue because you've fallen behind to much
homie you literally cant raid or even do dungeons if you're 'wrong' class/spec
11 months ago
Anonymous
I've raided a lot as a moonkin in classic, I know what I'm talking about. Sure you get some nasty people treating you like shit because of their dumb elitist metaslave mentality but that doesn't bother me.
anon thats just not fricking true, as much as i wish it were, trust me, i am the one stubbornly clinging to just blindly ambling my way through an mmo having fun and trying to find likeminded people along the way.
we are a niche, i would say a rapidly shrinking niche but theres nothing to rapidly shrink anymore, frick all people play the game in my way, at best you can make a small dedicated group of friends, but then you're playing a coop expirience, not an mmo.
>you're not actually missing out on anything by not competing in the 1% poopsock bracket of players
Anon, WoW is nothing but poopsockers and casuals who feel scared they have to poopsock not even easy content, but leveling content.
Every single MMO after WoW has been one of the following >Unfinished >Korean p2w >Development mess(look at New World and Wildstar) >Poorly mismanaged(money coming into the game but barely any of it going to improving the game)
And the companies that we know are developing ones currently are all silent even though all the active ones are walking corpses.
they died when they became competative and endgame focused.
themepark mmos and sandbox mmos could have existed in harmony as seperate entities but nooo mmo players have to treat their games like solvable equations and ruin both genres.
I'd say it's a mixture of changes in both culture and video game design. WoW's formula was too successful for everyone else not to try copying, so most MMORPGs became homogenized, which is boring. The rise of mobile games stole away a lot of the younger audience who would have picked up MMOs. A lot of the older generations who were already playing MMOs probably gave them up because they were timesinks and took too much time and energy away from work, raising their families, or handling their social life.
To sum it up, frick WoW. Also frick FFXIV because that game is just the same garbage but with plastic looking catgirls.
world of warcraft vanilla was essentially the perfect MMO and it killed the market because no-one can compete with it, over time WoW became shit, but then the people who like the old school style now have Classic
No one wants to compete because they never succeed when they try and they are expensive to make
morons going to WoW instead of playing FFXI. gays missed out on 8 years of perfect horizontal gear progression and shit tons of content with the best job system ever put in a game.
XIV hit the final nail on MMO coffin. It's barely online game anymore, you are forced to disband your party to proceed in the game. The typical holy class trio combined with dumbed down action gameplay with monthly vertical power creep progression is what defines nu-MMOs
The funny thing is that "modern mmos respect players time" is completely wrong. All the shit you did or gear you obtained will be obsolete in 2 months.
Most XIV fans would agree with you that conforming to what an "MMO is supposed to be" is XIV's biggest weakness. There's really no sense in it having MMO pacing and design. It should just be the same game with smaller zone maps, less filler and no sub fee. Just an online multiplayer RPG, no "massive" elements.
WoW did >before WoW
EQ, Tibia, FFXI, UO, RO >after WoW
FlyFF, PW, basically any asiaticshit you can imagine that you played for 20 mins and made you think all MMOs are shit, because all they did was try to copy WoW without knowing what made it good.
You used to play MMOs because they were the new thing, you didn't have a lot of disposable income and your parents were more that willing to give you 15 bucks a month if you did your chores and games weren't being churned out as often as they are now.
There's so many more games you could play now (if you have the time) that its not worth investing months (if not years) into a single (mmo) game
Terrible gameplay killed mmos. click on target, spam skills, win. Super casualized shit to cater to people who don't play games for the largest target audience possible.
Well for one thing, MMOs after WoW copied the WoW formula instead of trying to be their own games. At least modern MMOs seem to be straying away from the WoW formula. I think that has to do with the fact that WoW is dying and FFXIV is the only realistic competitor to WoW, so any modern MMO needs to find its own niche instead of trying to be "the WoW killer."
multiple things >well if you want to be decent, just spend 3-4k hours, if you want to be good, only 10k hours >no more feel of communties anymore, before you could make friends, even find love, interact with people, now is just farming alone like a loser >before you had to discover things alone, from maps to monsters, materials, etc, now you go to wiki or a youtube guide >now you can do everything with money, you have 5k-10k laying around? just put them into the game and you're going to frick shit up
and a lot of more reasons.
I had fun with them, i made friends and even found a girl (the distance was too big).
Systems and programs made to make players not be social ingame. (And the players who ask for these features.) >Auction houses remove the social element of trade >Wikis and YT tutorials remove the social element of learning, as well as the personal magic of discovery. >Matchmaking removes the social element of finding groups and bonding >Skype, social media, and eventually discord separated the social element of communication from the game, and greatly weakened any bonds you could form in the games themselves
The magic of the early mmos will never come back unless there exists some wall between the game itself and outside environments. A quality VR mmo could probably pull it off because people tend to want to get immersed in VR more, it has a higher barrier of entry to filter normies, and it isn't as easy to tab in and out to check discord. But VR is a pain in the ass both to play and develop for, so a truly magical experience probably won't happen.
>Wikis and YT tutorials remove the social element of learning, as well as the personal magic of discovery.
also snarky redditor "let me google that for you" culture where if someone asks a question you're expected to dunk on them instead of help or engage in a conversation. Nostalrius was great because this culture was discouraged.
>snarky redditor "let me google that for you" culture
It's called LURK MOAR and stop being a fricking moron who only ask to be spoonfeed without doing any work.
Don't forget that people are unbelievably toxic now in general. Who wants to interact with anyone when you never know what thoughtcrime you will invariably commit and thus meet the ire of some chronically online troony janny game moderator?
I don't agree with those points. >Auction houses remove the social element of trade
Social element of trade is removed because it's not needed. Path of Exile doesn't have AH, but people circumvent that by using 3rd party sites and trade bots. You invite a guy, msg him offer, he shows you the item, you trade, msg "t4t" to each other, leave party and never see each other again. Trading without AH in any other MMO would be streamlined as such. >Wikis and YT tutorials remove the social element of learning, as well as the personal magic of discovery.
People hate noobs and don't want to teach them. If guides didn't exist, you would be called a Black person and asked to have a nice day. >Matchmaking removes the social element of finding groups and bonding
This is partly true, but if content was easy, the bonding would not exist even without "matchmaking". I did many instances in TBC Classic (2022) without talking to anyone, and you had to assemble groups manually. There was an addon which fitlered the chat spam and helped to form groups: people created tools to help automate things, even though developers didn't use those features. >Skype, social media, and eventually discord separated the social element of communication from the game, and greatly weakened any bonds you could form in the games themselves
I don't think this is a big issue, messengers, VOIP and forums existed back then. For me it was exciting to talk to people all over the world, especially if they played the same game. Do zoomers not care about this at all?
Don't forget that people are unbelievably toxic now in general. Who wants to interact with anyone when you never know what thoughtcrime you will invariably commit and thus meet the ire of some chronically online troony janny game moderator?
They stopped being these huge worlds to explore and more like areas to do X quests, advance plot until you can do raids.
Same shit, different MMO.
Anything that tries to change the formula dies.
You can blame WoW for that and FFXIV to a lesser degree.
Blizzards eventual total and ONLY focus on current end game
Starting in wrath when they gave everyone catch up gear to the point players needed a fricking mod in gearscore to tell them who was good.
TBC showed cracks when they removed keys but the content was still sperated and had much more limted catch up gear.
After this all other games followed this pattern to focus on current stuff only.
That or they tried to niche themselves off with some thing like story or Powerful IPs
With all the boomers having kids and "zero time" to play games we are not going to get mmos for another 10-20 years when they start to retire and want something they can waste A LOT of time on.
That and they will have all the boomer and Xer money.
Devs catering to morons who only care about instant gratification, implementing systems that remove any need for social interaction in the process. Dungeon/Duty/whatever finders are opposite of what an MMO should be, yet here we are.
The idea that people would keep paying monthly subscription while having nothing to be done in the game.
I played "everything" in FF14. But I only play while there is content to do, I stop playing and if there is new content that looks good, I get back to it.
Desocialization, constant gear checks, and dailies have effectively transformed MMOs into single-player experiences with chatrooms built-in. The only part of these games that can really be said to be "massive" at all at this point is raids, and it just isn't impressive anymore that the devs can stuff 50 players into a single instance; hell, these devs aren't even writing their own infra code anymore. It's all AWS and Azure. The sole thing making these games more than just singleplayer games with chatrooms is practically done for them for free as part of their monthly PaaS subscription. Since the cutting edge of software has moved on, MMOs aren't interesting anymore, and nobody wants to sit through the 100+ hour grind to reach endgame if all they have waiting for them is sweaty balding men who sperg out if the raid comp doesn't fit the template they were told is the meta in whichever YouTuber is digesting their opinion for them. I'd rather quit playing games entirely than to chase the dragon with the shit MMOs on the market right now. FF14 is genuinely one of the best ones on the market right now, and that's fricking grim.
Their purpose, to be a method of online communication and co-operation, has become obsolete in the world of social media and discord. People can easily just play singleplayer RPGs with actual gameplay while chatting on discord, or straight up multiplayer games.
In WoW's case, greedy israelites at the top milking the game dry and disgusting homosexuals at the bottom covering it in shit. Anyone still playing is either the last remaining alive addicts or chink bots.
Convenience.
It's antithetical to what an MMO is, or at least was.
Dude wants his crocolisk hides taken from booty bay to China? Get running, it's an open world. Turning every zone into a self contained mario level where the only interactions between one and the other was a breadcrumb questline in and out is a tragedy.
one of the best things about runescape was how you really had to engage with the world, even when you had a bunch of transportation options unlocked you still had to think a fair amount about how to string them together. the Gowers' distaste for horses was smarter than we knew
After we took down Arthas most people checked out. Death Wing wasn't nearly as interesting of a character as the LK was. Wrath was peak WoW. It has been a steady decline since. The OG lore team headed by Chris Metzen (guy who developed Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft lore) retired. I heard he recently came back but it is too late imo.
A mix of available information out of the game, and tools in game. No LFG, no quest GPS, no phasing/instancing so you see people from your server and start to get to know them, etc. Then you add in the fact that Thotbot was fricking awful and usually outdated, your options to learn stuff was usually just asking players in a city. Nowadays its just a single player game, where you hit a button to queue, maybe say hi or o/ at the start, then thanks at the end. My friend list was full of players in Vanilla WoW, in recent MMOs I might have added one or two players who were pretty good in a dungeon or raid to group up later.
Played retail wow recently and iron forge was a ghost town. Granted, I imagine most people are in the new zone, but questing through the early areas is depressing. Going through WoTLK, I didn't see a single human in the entire zone througout the whole expac.
I spent two months playing wow at the tail end of bfa and it was fun. I played a hunter with a boar named Porkchop which made people mad because it didn’t have some special skill like Rage or whatever for group content but I wasn’t about to leave my pig bro. I liked the undead dinosaur dungeon and the bigass troll city. I also enjoyed legion zones, and surprisingly the panda ones, they were very comfy. I disliked cataclysm, the zones felt disjoined and elves are boring
I remember shooting some weird tentacles in panda monastery and the nearby dwarf player attacked me, I thought I was winning but then he healed to full instantly and it was all ogre
I never learned where the tentacles came from
MMOs can only be good when you have a large number of players to pull in that aren't familiar with them at all. They can sustain some poopsocking that grows with the game but once it gets firmly entrenched and starts from day one in following games there's no point.
Discord. Other group chats did their part but having an easy big group chat eliminated one of the big appeal of MMOs, socialization, people just got on to grind and any guild or socialization would be taken to Discord.
Things like Vent/TeamSpeak didn't cause the same problem because they were used for end game grinds and raids, which is another thing that killed MMOs going forward, games focused on endgame being the only game and so people would rush to the end, realize they had no real way to progress beyond better equipment, and drop it. That's a big reason MS2 died so fast in the Global release, they set the EXP to like 10X higher than it should have been and so doing the main quest got you to the end game in 5 hours and you skipped 95% of all the dungeons.
all longform games eventually get replaced by shortform games. mmos are a longform game where you >kill trash mobs for xp >grind gold for powerful armor/weapons >gank people
league of legends killed mmos by being a shortform game that lets you get the entire mmo experience in a 30 minute match
fortnite/pubg did the same thing to dayz/rust/ark
Every single one either becoming a slot machine which eats all your time, or a poorly developed 20 year old nightmare with wildly outdated ux, ui and gameplay. Somehow after 20 years it's only gotten harder for nerd indy devs to code a multiplayer persistent experience to the point where in 2001 a couple dorks with 5 bucks and a dream could make an MMO, but now for some reason it takes 15 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, so nobody even thinks of designing unique, hardcore and immersive games designed for huge scale social interaction. Again, people did that decades ago, those games existed, they were incredible. Somehow it's now impossible. Total nonsense
When the emphasis stopped being on the social aspects.
MMOs in their prime required teamwork, and had many non-combat activities that encouraged people to socialize.
Automated action houses, dungeon finders, balancing content for single player, etc, etc all killed MMOs because they were no longer social.
They are if you're in the right ones.
Can't play WoW private servers because the player base of current WoW ruin them. So thats written off.
But if you play something like Phantasy Star Online BB or Everquest Project 1999, people are very social on those.
I never played EQ back in the day and checked out P99 and was pleasantly surprised how much interaction I had with people. Got shown around to some dungeons, got gear gifted, bullshitted while sitting around the popular trading area. Honestly felt like an old MMO again.
People realized that the studios and publishers had no integrity, and so the worlds they created didn't either.
They saw MMOs shutting down left and right. They realized that the 100+ atleast hours of their life invested meant nothing to the publisher who would drop support the moment the game would lose numbers. The illusion of an online game world lost legitimacy the moment they were revealed to be transient services.
On the other hand, gamers didn't vocalize this because they didn't understand their own disillusionment. They told devs it was not enough content when really I believe it was that the service itself is destined to betray their own players.
People always complain about "muh guides" but really the fact is mmos are an old as shit genre. Once you know how to play an mmo, you know how to play them all. A poopsocking wow autist isnt going to act like a clueless noob when he picks up final fantasy. You know how the genre works
>wikis meant there's no sense of discovery anymore, and raiders expect even your first time in a raid to be pre-spoiled and pre-researched on youtube which is boring as frick >subscription fees are less justifiable these days >MMOs usually kill themselves like pyramid head impaling itself on a spike in Silent Hill 2 with bad updates that are just straight up awful to experience
Mediocre devs chasing WoW. You could make a game that's nothing but small lobbies with different stats tracked that would be better than basically every mmo. Dark & Darker a shitty ugly ripoff was more interesting than all these MMOs available. Devs are incompetent especially producers and leads, publishers are too greedy, audience too stupid. There's no excuse for why a supposed "MMO" should have worse combat or content than other games. That's just an excuse from devs with horrible taste in design because time and time again we see popular loved games that don't call themselves MMOs but basically are. And imagine if those notMMOs had a content stream that even attempted to release a significant annual update or hired contractors to make skins to rake in dosh off MTX in the meantime. Bro you could do nothing but have a shared economy like Tarkov and call it an MMO. It's just excuses and incompetence
Theme park environment. There's nothing to do once you've consumed all the latest content. It makes more sense for multiplayer oriented games to be open-ended
Trying to copy wow without realizing that it's formula was garbage and the only reason people played it was because of just how advertised it was / it was released by Blizzard who could sell stuff just on name alone at the time
my issues with current mmos >cross-server stuff >automatic party finding >after leveling it's always a list of chores to do every day or week >instances >no pvp or if there is pvp it's mostly locked behind instances with little reason to do it outside of those >greedy devs/publishers charging monthly fees to play and/or having cash shops in the game >games made excessively grindy to pad playtime (more money from cash shop or sub fees)
People realized they were trash.
They weren't at first. Ultima Online was amazing for two years or so. But they quickly degenerated into a money grab.
This. Specifically WoW style mmos which is most of them
Missed the MMO train and have tried a couple out but can't get attached.
could be a taste thing or a question of what you're playing. i played Everquest on project1999 and had a blast. the really good ones are still engaging and enjoyable
I remember people wanting me to play I think runescape but I couldn't get signed up and didn't try again lol.
I think that's actually OK. Then very end game has the worst kind of players. I quit WoW after 4 years or so to play CoH/CoV. Played that for 2 years and had a blast.
I think the longest I played was LOTRO. Played a little SWTOR with a couple of friends who wanted me to try. Oh and I think I tried Galaxies but that was a legacy thing so not when it was out originally.
>but can't get attached
MMOs aren't good by themselves, they need to be carried by the ambiance around it.
Back then the internet sucked at having every possible infos on a game, so something as big as an MMO had legit mysteries, players had an easier time shining since no one had an optimal build/gear/skill rotation, etc. It objectively sucked gameplay-wise, but it made it feel like a real world.
Also back then servers where small and gameplay *forced* you to interact with people. It objectively sucked gameplay-wise, but it made both PvE and PvP something that felt personal.
Basically MMO always sucked, but the novelty made it worth pushing through the suckiness and turned it into a pseudo-perk.
Then the novelty disappeared and devs optimized the pseudo-perks out of the game, leaving nothing but the suck that was always there.
"You had to be there" fully apply to MMOs, it's a fool errand to try to get into them long afterward.
it sucks but maybe we will get that feeling in another era
>WoW-Classic-Stress-Test
so this isnt even from a live server?
Chinks and asiatics.
actively punishing and adding systems keeping players from being social
incels with too much time on their hands
no one wants to touch a game full of weird people who dont take showers
Unironically, WoW was SO good when it came it out that every MMO after it got compared to it and none of them could make a game as fun and in-depth as WoW, so, the only option was to play a “lesser” MMO or play WoW.
>WoW was SO good when it came it out that every MMO after it got compared to it and none of them could make a game as fun and in-depth as WoW, so, the only option was to play a “lesser” MMO or play WoW.
WoW became a monopoly brand and ate up all the marketshare, then committed suicide, destroying the mmo space forever. The place is like irradiated earth, it will take decades to be livable again. The effects of a self imploding culture that's had so much influence all around the globe in the last 100 years are staggering.
Things are already growing around the edges. The rise of the open world survival game is proof MMOs as a genre would have still been successful today if not for WoW.
Or shit like GTA 5 roleplay servers, just gays going around larping as Joe the trash collector together with other like-minded players. Maybe that's actually another reason why these classic style MMOs are played out. There are so many different kinds of multiplayer experiences for any preferred play style, you can go be a zombie survivor in DayZ, you can pretend to be some mundane guy in an RP game, and all of them probably feel way more immersive. What's the reason to grind bigger numbers in something like WoW when Destiny 2 does the same thing but with better gameplay? Like even if you just want to grind loot, there are so many of those games now as well
MMOs were effectively dead long before those games. And really it's proof that publishers bet on the wrong horse. Give people the room to get together, explore, accomplish and RP and they will pay. WoW took all that away by making everything a themepark ride.
Oldgay here. If you remember old MMO's they were basically a chat room with a game tacked on. Interacting with other players in a virtual space is the heart of every MMO.
However the zoomers are so brainblasted with skinner box instant gratification that a lot of them are probably not able to socialize.
Socialization is not needed for them.
Society is fragmented and too hostile towards itself. Remember back in the days, if you meet another WoW player, the first question would be "are you Alliance or Horde?". Now it's "what server do you play", "are you a casual or hardcore?", "what are your parses?". You don't consider people valid if they don't have 99 logs.
I play in a guild and there is constant infighting for each piece of loot, for each heal cast - as if there was no camaraderie but constant penis measuring contest. My other guild didn't survive that and fell apart, and many other guilds did.
People are recoiling from this mindset and you can seek those who don't fit it with little effort.
Your contrarian opinions means nothing to the generic consumer, and the generic consumer loves WoW to the point that it became the norm for MMO's to emulate WoW. WoW had a significant cultural impact, while stuff like EQ is remembered as a game only nerd losers played and this perspective is coming from the nerd losers who play WoW.
>it's good because it's popular
just say you're moronic bro it's so much faster
OSRS would be an absolutely fine MMO without the gay pandering
>majority of the human population supports lgbt including the literal owner of the website you are on and especially its creator
>XD le gays get pandered too because they uhhhh bring in money O_O and uhh the israelites run games?
See, pandering to people like this is why the game will never reach its potential
They really don't. You have just been gaslit.
>WoW was SO good when it came
No it wasn't, it had a negative effect on MMOs
Where other companies were doing everything they could to experiment with new mechanics that improved the social experience while keeping it engaging, WoW came along and proved people were just willing to be treated like monkeys and walk for 2 hours around mountains because other people were doing it, and now that the masses were introduced to the concept, the complexity of their systems had to be toned down. Basically blowing up the "time-wasting engagement" formula.
WoW is addictive for the wrong reasons and the only thing Korean MMOs have to envy from it is their profit. Literally a marketing scheme for dumb people.
OP is right. WoW killed MMOs. See where they are now? it's people who don't like RPGs joining the party thanks to Blizzard.
>Unironically, WoW was SO good
WoW was absolute, utter trash. Ultima, EQ, DAoC, those games were actual MMOs. Heavily inspired by MUDs--designed to be places for people to log in and hang, chat, etc. just as much as 'play'. WoW turned the whole genre into theme park, casual trash. You and all the other mouthbreathers that sucked down blizzard's cum ruined MMOs completely.
You are moronic.
>designed to be places for people to log in and hang, chat, etc. just as much as 'play'
The reason WoW failed is because this shit was taken away from it around the 2010s, when Smartphones became popular enough that social media exploded. MMOs got swamped by social media and their communities just treated MMOs as another game, not as a social space.
Facebook
Concept of playing with hundreds of players simultaneously lost it's appeal when technology caught up, and MMO's can't really modernize without being an unplayable microtransaction-riddled mess.
They decided that instead of grinding out whatever you wanted everything would be gated between weeklies and dailies, an incredibly transparent attempt to make the game more addictive that actually just makes it feel annoying and arbitrary.
Is classic still playable bros? Getting that MMO itch again. I've never played Vanilla
there's no point unless you have a group already lined up to play it with. everyone is a minmaxing metagay that thinks vanilla content is actually hard and every server is plagued with bots that use cheats to clip through the ground and teleport to resource nodes.
Official classic hardcore went ptr and soon will go live. We're going home
kek, feed those trannies, home paypig
>he says as his mom pays for his 27th OF sub of the month while he listens to hyperpop on his paid SoundCloud account and watches the super based and redpilled stream he donates too along side of buying all of the testosterone powders they shill
Being able to interact with people used to be the whole appeal. It was very rare to be able to do this back then because no one knew how to code multiplayer.
Now? Every single game has online connectivity, it's nothing special anymore and if anything MMORPGs are now lacking in interactivity if compared to any other game you see out there.
WoW did. It turned MMOs into a singleplayer experience outside of the endgame raid grind. Made every MMO a themepark. And smothered every competitor in the crib. Never before has one game so utterly ruined a genre.
Dedicated info sites that post the best builds/talents/gear/ strats
This along with meta competitive culture really has destroyed gaming as a whole.
This. I play as Ganon in melee and just sit there and watch them spaz out under the platform and just turn off the game.
It was my one guilty pleasure. the one game I had time for outside of my busy life, it was supposed to just be a game I could get s round or two in and call it good..not sifting through legions of foxes and falcos and dealing with ledge guarding as to where you can't even fight.
Gaming's dead outside of troony spammers
>Waaah I’m garbage at the game so everyone else has to be
Holy frick what happened to this place.
Nah it's the opposite I actually win without having to wave dash or dash dance or ledgeguard
I just have to never make a single mistake
So it's not fun, I can't do daring shit as often as I like and it just feels like I'm pummeling a noob who is just so used to doing cheap shit he forgot how to actually play the game and didn't expect me to throw out a random smash move and trade so he fricking gets KOed
And I win with like 2-4 lives while it's always down to the last life with me and I end up making a comeback even after some silly ledge shit where I accidentally wizard kick off the ledge and simply just can't get back up.
It's not about "being good" it's about using cheap tricks to win an otherwise fair match ruining it.
WoW classic seems to be pretty popular though. And I admit, I still like the classic iteration of WoW. To me, it's like Super Mario 64. It seems to be timeless. The art style is cartoony enough that it will probably never become dated. The gameplay is simplistic bullshit dice-rolls... but it's kind of fun. Sometimes you yell at the game in furious anger and sometimes you mentally cum a little whenever you land that crit and obliterate that pesky frost mage.
0/10 frick this game, honestly. What a waste of time it was.
Agreed, Classic WoW was a 0/10 game and a 10/10 game at the same time.
Going back to Vanilla WoW, experience quality leveling and questlines again, getting your first mount, doing your class quests, clearing BWL with the bros, dueling outside of SW: All great things.
Every instance being a speedrun, cleave groups, people being powerleveled by mages, getting camped by 40 level 60's in STV, mage bots AoE farming and ruining the economy, clearing AQ40 for the millionith time, warriors being worse lootprostitutes than Vanilla hunters ever were, mage existing in general: All fricking awful things.
Reddit, unironically. The charm of MMOs has always been socializing and exploration. Shit like urban legends in videogames made them feel so lively.
Reddit functions as a centralized location of information on ANY subject, and that's why the magic of MMO is forever lost thanks to the modern internet.
Now that I think about it, Reddit is both a social media and an information hub. Two of the things that most peoples complains the most about when it comes to "why MMOs died".
WoW did everything it could to remove socialization. The game itself was the problem.
MMOs were peaking when social media was in its nascent state and had better real-time communication capabilities than a lot of other platforms. For many people, MMOs were 3D chat rooms first and games second. As the years passed, the novelty of this wore off and other platforms became more capable and popular. Skype ate into MMO mindshare as much as others game did, and Discord was even more prominent in that regard. Why go in-game when you can do all your socializing from a universal app?
Many of the ones that stayed behind were the hardcore autists that hated talking to other people. They were there for the mindnumbing grind and considered it a waste of time to socialize. They dissected and ripped games apart into tiny pieces to find the absolute most optimal strategy and meta, and caused a domino effect that eventually rippled down to even casual players: follow the meta, have the whole game memorized before you even play it, or else you need to get out.
Developers are now caught between these two extremes and struggle to please both. The same tales echo across different games by different developers: classes are too homogenized, classes are too distinct, not enough mandatory content, too much mandatory content, etc.
On another note, even multi-monitor setups contributed to the decline of MMOs. When the game was the only thing in front of you, you were inclined to do everything in it and stay focused on it. Now you have endless distractions lined up next to it and the immersion is destroyed.
>
>Many of the ones that stayed behind were the hardcore autists that hated talking to other people. They were there for the mindnumbing grind and considered it a waste of time to socialize.
don't really think this is it, it's more that games are now run by women and rainbow hair homosexuals and so everyone is a little homosexual tattle tale, literally zero point trying to talk to normies in games now or you just get your money stolen
it's a cope that's gotten very popular and just gets regurgitated every thread. the reality is that new games are all trash and the old games are all solved. it's why "hardcore" got so popular, it presented some form of challenge for vanilla which is piss easy and solved. but permadeath in a MMO is gay and moronic, the real solution is to just make death meaningful. even Everquest classic's system and culling flight points would be enough.
big reason i don't like most modern MMOs, no time to breathe and take in the sights, constant ADHD stimulation.
Wikis. Now everyone can access a wiki and minmax everything.
In classic wow where wiki did not exist and thottbot was trash, you get the feeling of being part of something bigger by talking with other people in game and finding out more.
But now you just Google minmax Meta build playthrough, and not only you will do it yourself but you will judge others as well. Aha he didn't spec this ability and isn't casting Renew every 3 ticks to get that one specific trinket mana proc? Not gonna play with him
I swear most of the people in this thread never played a MMO before WoW. The idea that social media and too much information killed them is insane.
Yeah it sounds like a zoomer opinion
I was playing MMOs before you were born, homosexual
It's honestly a multitude of issues and factors that most will rarely acknowledge. Really, it's far easier to blame something like discord or wikis when the problems have always run far deeper than that.
>The idea that social media and too much information killed them is insane.
FF XI would 100% be a different game if there was the amount of information that exists now back in the day.
You didn't have GUIDES back then you had fricking TESTIMONIALS which were just
>Yeah, I did this quest with 3 friends and uhh we did ok I guess here were our levels and shit.
And then you had just blatant ritual tier misinformation from people who could only speculate on certain monster spawn rules or fight mechanics
I will never believe the devs statement that the moon phase, day of the week, and the way a character is facing do not affect crafting results.
God frick for me it was all the Ashbringer and cut content theorizing during classic and burning crusade.
I think it was the lack of interaction between players. Like in eq1 you'd typically find a camp in a dungeon and kill mobs as they spawn; but there was downtime while waiting on spawns. talking/interacting, you'd make friends etc etc.
newer games turned into a frenetic dungeon crawl with randoms. no downtime, no real interaction etc. you don't need an MMO for that style of gameplay.
Downtime is really verboten in all games now. The "go go go optimize every second of playtime" mentality is everywhere. I can't really blame it on players being older and becoming very self-conscious of their free time, even kids are doing it.
That's almost it. WoW from day 1 let every class solo to some degree, and every addition after only made it easier. City of Heroes was pretty frenetic but we still interacted and got to know each other because we NEEDED each other to get anywhere. That guys powers are suboptimal? Don't care, I still need him. Since leveling took so long we tended to encounter the same people a lot too.
This is another product of WoW. MMOs traditionally forced everyone to team up from day 1. By endgame everyone knew what they were doing because you learned as you went. WoW was different, for a lot of people endgame was the first time they had to properly party. All those guides and sites came into existence because half the fricking players still didn't know how their class worked at level cap. 60+ levels of time wasting before the "real game" opened up.
That's where the meta mentality originated. Since it became expected reading and the frickwits at Blizzard centered the endgame on raiding.
I remember instanced dungeons in WoW back in the day at least had a little challenge. Remember when people would mark enemies for which CC to use on them and then you would execute the plan? Then one day they "re-balanced" the dungeons and suddenly it just turned into pure tank and spank, no planning with your party needed (at least until raids).
I too remember when the game suddenly shifted from "sap x, sheep moon, focus skull first" to "lmao just drop all your AoEs"
Every class started getting AoEs, HP regen, and charges. When everyone can just shit out tons of damage what's the point of debuffing/CC?
Debuffing and CC'ing is still important for high mythic+ keys and on some mythic raid bosses.
focus on and pandering to people who don't want to play mmos
I especially hate the ones that could have been really cool singleplayer games without the baggage. Like Secret Worlds, even TOR to a degree.
your image
misogynistic men
>rage provoking pic
>tangentially related comment
do i see an adams apple?
someone should tell her why "hysterical" is named the way it is
>it's so much fun
You know that if you stone face her she'll get more and more hysterical because you are denying what she thinks she's entitled to. Remember, women are twice as weak as men, there's nothing they can do.
This, that tactic he's trying to do is only possible if you're dealing with someone that's not too bright, if the "misogynistic" dude actually got a point and isn't dumb, he won't backup and actually would double down, turning the tides against him because these troons can't take a little confrontation.
Remember, they're all stronk warriors until you say Black person and they start chimping out like brainless monkeys.
>Or block them
Cop-out cope
Damn, what a sad image.
Anyway, WoW was based until Cata.
MMOs now designed for people that hate MMOs.
There's a reason most have devolved into mostly single player games.
They really aren't though, I hate MMOs and I hate modern MMOs.
If they want to appeal to me they gotta stop making shitty themeparks and treadmills. Start with a game that's fun to play and go from there.
We got older and didn't have the time. The zoomers that came next became obsessed with instant gratification of battle royales instead of building up towards something.
They got distilled into optimized poopsock Cookie Clicker grinding simulators. No more adventure, no more sense of community, just queue for the instance and get your +20 meta pauldrons as per the guide. Then go raid dungeons with other Excel guide gays and pay a monthly subscription for that, otherwise you get kicked out for not pulling your weight i.e. not playing like a line chart to get 1% better gear
ADD kids who want instant gratification, and the companies that want to cater to them. Same way RTS died out
Datamining
Queue based content
Discord
I don't think MMOs are dead, they might be dead for people that want old school MMOs back exactly like they were 15-25 years ago, but they aren't dead for anyone else. They're simply changing, we're soon done with the era of WoW clones (finally) and new radically different types of MMO will rise from the ashes. Like proper action MMOs with highly interactive and realistic worlds, VR MMOs, MMOs utilizing new untested ways to handle instanced content and matchmaking.
It might seem grim right now because of how long it takes to get something new out on the market, we're stuck with the same ancient garbage that nobody really likes anymore. The new stuff is coming though, whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen.
end game focus
the concept of an "endgame", instanced dungeons/raids. these two things killed MMOs entirely because level 1 to max level is no longer a journey or the point of the game, it's a menial slog meant to pad out sub timers and all of the actual effort goes into "endgame" treadmills that aren't designed to be fun, they're designed to keep you subscribed, instead of just having the game, the main part of the game you play, leveling, be fun
the novelty of online, real-time multiplayer fading away. the future of MMOs looks more like 'The Oasis' or .hack's 'The World' than any wow or final fantasy clone, but VR tech will have to advance to usher in the next generation
WoW and its core design
Every MMO should be 04 Runescape at a baseline
It's crazy how even through all the modernization OSRS still feels more like a real world you can inhabit than practically any other living MMO
>ill never own a home in ardy throwing rotten apples at the plagueBlack folk
why go on
It must be your autism because none of that is actually true, it's an insanely grindy game where you click shit for hours and eventually lose your mind.
>it must be your autism
>immediately shows he's too autistic to even understand the conversation
You think that was a conversation you were having just now? Man you've really lost your marbles. RS isn't healthy.
is that really the best you can do
My friend steve did
wtf steve
Your friend is a hero
Cash shops
competitiveness
instead of havnig fun people were forced to treat game as a race
esports and their consequences have been a disaster for video games
It's not esports, it's the consumeristic mindset. People don't have time to be inefficient when playing their video game, they're restless to move on to the next one.
You weren't forced to do anything, if you treated it as a race it's because you wanted to.
yeah just put yourself at a significant disadvantage while not being able to even take advantage of the full mmo experience due to people playing it earnestly becoming a niche rather than the norm, i cant see how that could possibly result in a dissatisfying expirience.
This "disadvantage" is just an illusion, you're not actually missing out on anything by not competing in the 1% poopsock bracket of players. The majority of players play the games like normal human beings with lives and as long as you don't wait weeks between play sessions you should still be able to find players to play with.
>The majority of players play the games like normal human beings
You only think that way because you're a part of them, if you take a break from the game you feel like you can't continue because you've fallen behind to much and now you are a casual noob. Well casual noobs are the majority of players and that's where you really want to be.
>if you take a break from the game you feel like you can't continue because you've fallen behind to much
homie you literally cant raid or even do dungeons if you're 'wrong' class/spec
I've raided a lot as a moonkin in classic, I know what I'm talking about. Sure you get some nasty people treating you like shit because of their dumb elitist metaslave mentality but that doesn't bother me.
wrong
>The majority of players play the games like normal human beings
you have never played classic before
anon thats just not fricking true, as much as i wish it were, trust me, i am the one stubbornly clinging to just blindly ambling my way through an mmo having fun and trying to find likeminded people along the way.
we are a niche, i would say a rapidly shrinking niche but theres nothing to rapidly shrink anymore, frick all people play the game in my way, at best you can make a small dedicated group of friends, but then you're playing a coop expirience, not an mmo.
>you're not actually missing out on anything by not competing in the 1% poopsock bracket of players
Anon, WoW is nothing but poopsockers and casuals who feel scared they have to poopsock not even easy content, but leveling content.
It's just a collective delusion, not real at all. Just try to play the game in a more relaxed fashion and you'll see.
I mained rogue in classic and skipped TBCC entirely after spent three fricking days trying to find party for ramps.
but you don't understaaaaand my favorite streamer said rogues SUCK, i HAVE to play the 20 year old solved game optimally!!!!!
Every single MMO after WoW has been one of the following
>Unfinished
>Korean p2w
>Development mess(look at New World and Wildstar)
>Poorly mismanaged(money coming into the game but barely any of it going to improving the game)
And the companies that we know are developing ones currently are all silent even though all the active ones are walking corpses.
ultimately, the players did
they died when they became competative and endgame focused.
themepark mmos and sandbox mmos could have existed in harmony as seperate entities but nooo mmo players have to treat their games like solvable equations and ruin both genres.
Gw2 being shit. Id still be playing them if i had a game with the skill/class mechanics of the first.
I'd say it's a mixture of changes in both culture and video game design. WoW's formula was too successful for everyone else not to try copying, so most MMORPGs became homogenized, which is boring. The rise of mobile games stole away a lot of the younger audience who would have picked up MMOs. A lot of the older generations who were already playing MMOs probably gave them up because they were timesinks and took too much time and energy away from work, raising their families, or handling their social life.
To sum it up, frick WoW. Also frick FFXIV because that game is just the same garbage but with plastic looking catgirls.
world of warcraft vanilla was essentially the perfect MMO and it killed the market because no-one can compete with it, over time WoW became shit, but then the people who like the old school style now have Classic
No one wants to compete because they never succeed when they try and they are expensive to make
morons going to WoW instead of playing FFXI. gays missed out on 8 years of perfect horizontal gear progression and shit tons of content with the best job system ever put in a game.
better MMOs
Really it is the abject destruction of the west by the comically liberal morons and der juden, but better non-zog'd MMO do exist.
Good devs leaving and being replaced with diversity hires.
I put in a decade playing Ragnarok Online, I have zero seconds in WoW. Ask me my favorite class line, its Knight.
World of Warcraft, FFXIV
XIV came too late to really have much of an impact on anything other than WoW
XIV hit the final nail on MMO coffin. It's barely online game anymore, you are forced to disband your party to proceed in the game. The typical holy class trio combined with dumbed down action gameplay with monthly vertical power creep progression is what defines nu-MMOs
I do not understand how someone can be so certain about something they clearly know nothing about
AND they demand a monthly subscription for it on top of buy-to-play. FRICK that.
The funny thing is that "modern mmos respect players time" is completely wrong. All the shit you did or gear you obtained will be obsolete in 2 months.
stop being attached to pixels
Most XIV fans would agree with you that conforming to what an "MMO is supposed to be" is XIV's biggest weakness. There's really no sense in it having MMO pacing and design. It should just be the same game with smaller zone maps, less filler and no sub fee. Just an online multiplayer RPG, no "massive" elements.
Meta slaves should be shot on sight.
Video
The novelty of going online wore off. Now any moron has access at their fingertips at all times.
Me
And I don't regret it
Soulsborne and Fortnite being much more engaging games than cookie clickers like MMO.
WoW did
>before WoW
EQ, Tibia, FFXI, UO, RO
>after WoW
FlyFF, PW, basically any asiaticshit you can imagine that you played for 20 mins and made you think all MMOs are shit, because all they did was try to copy WoW without knowing what made it good.
You used to play MMOs because they were the new thing, you didn't have a lot of disposable income and your parents were more that willing to give you 15 bucks a month if you did your chores and games weren't being churned out as often as they are now.
There's so many more games you could play now (if you have the time) that its not worth investing months (if not years) into a single (mmo) game
Wow killed itself, i can't speak for any other mmos since I never played them.
Terrible gameplay killed mmos. click on target, spam skills, win. Super casualized shit to cater to people who don't play games for the largest target audience possible.
Well for one thing, MMOs after WoW copied the WoW formula instead of trying to be their own games. At least modern MMOs seem to be straying away from the WoW formula. I think that has to do with the fact that WoW is dying and FFXIV is the only realistic competitor to WoW, so any modern MMO needs to find its own niche instead of trying to be "the WoW killer."
multiple things
>well if you want to be decent, just spend 3-4k hours, if you want to be good, only 10k hours
>no more feel of communties anymore, before you could make friends, even find love, interact with people, now is just farming alone like a loser
>before you had to discover things alone, from maps to monsters, materials, etc, now you go to wiki or a youtube guide
>now you can do everything with money, you have 5k-10k laying around? just put them into the game and you're going to frick shit up
and a lot of more reasons.
I had fun with them, i made friends and even found a girl (the distance was too big).
social media
Systems and programs made to make players not be social ingame. (And the players who ask for these features.)
>Auction houses remove the social element of trade
>Wikis and YT tutorials remove the social element of learning, as well as the personal magic of discovery.
>Matchmaking removes the social element of finding groups and bonding
>Skype, social media, and eventually discord separated the social element of communication from the game, and greatly weakened any bonds you could form in the games themselves
The magic of the early mmos will never come back unless there exists some wall between the game itself and outside environments. A quality VR mmo could probably pull it off because people tend to want to get immersed in VR more, it has a higher barrier of entry to filter normies, and it isn't as easy to tab in and out to check discord. But VR is a pain in the ass both to play and develop for, so a truly magical experience probably won't happen.
>Wikis and YT tutorials remove the social element of learning, as well as the personal magic of discovery.
also snarky redditor "let me google that for you" culture where if someone asks a question you're expected to dunk on them instead of help or engage in a conversation. Nostalrius was great because this culture was discouraged.
>snarky redditor "let me google that for you" culture
It's called LURK MOAR and stop being a fricking moron who only ask to be spoonfeed without doing any work.
give it 10 years. we'll be searching for the key of the twilight 25 years later
Don't forget that people are unbelievably toxic now in general. Who wants to interact with anyone when you never know what thoughtcrime you will invariably commit and thus meet the ire of some chronically online troony janny game moderator?
I don't agree with those points.
>Auction houses remove the social element of trade
Social element of trade is removed because it's not needed. Path of Exile doesn't have AH, but people circumvent that by using 3rd party sites and trade bots. You invite a guy, msg him offer, he shows you the item, you trade, msg "t4t" to each other, leave party and never see each other again. Trading without AH in any other MMO would be streamlined as such.
>Wikis and YT tutorials remove the social element of learning, as well as the personal magic of discovery.
People hate noobs and don't want to teach them. If guides didn't exist, you would be called a Black person and asked to have a nice day.
>Matchmaking removes the social element of finding groups and bonding
This is partly true, but if content was easy, the bonding would not exist even without "matchmaking". I did many instances in TBC Classic (2022) without talking to anyone, and you had to assemble groups manually. There was an addon which fitlered the chat spam and helped to form groups: people created tools to help automate things, even though developers didn't use those features.
>Skype, social media, and eventually discord separated the social element of communication from the game, and greatly weakened any bonds you could form in the games themselves
I don't think this is a big issue, messengers, VOIP and forums existed back then. For me it was exciting to talk to people all over the world, especially if they played the same game. Do zoomers not care about this at all?
This
Know what didn't kill MMOs? Attractive characters
They stopped being these huge worlds to explore and more like areas to do X quests, advance plot until you can do raids.
Same shit, different MMO.
Anything that tries to change the formula dies.
You can blame WoW for that and FFXIV to a lesser degree.
Blizzards eventual total and ONLY focus on current end game
Starting in wrath when they gave everyone catch up gear to the point players needed a fricking mod in gearscore to tell them who was good.
TBC showed cracks when they removed keys but the content was still sperated and had much more limted catch up gear.
After this all other games followed this pattern to focus on current stuff only.
That or they tried to niche themselves off with some thing like story or Powerful IPs
With all the boomers having kids and "zero time" to play games we are not going to get mmos for another 10-20 years when they start to retire and want something they can waste A LOT of time on.
That and they will have all the boomer and Xer money.
Devs catering to morons who only care about instant gratification, implementing systems that remove any need for social interaction in the process. Dungeon/Duty/whatever finders are opposite of what an MMO should be, yet here we are.
The idea that people would keep paying monthly subscription while having nothing to be done in the game.
I played "everything" in FF14. But I only play while there is content to do, I stop playing and if there is new content that looks good, I get back to it.
Desocialization, constant gear checks, and dailies have effectively transformed MMOs into single-player experiences with chatrooms built-in. The only part of these games that can really be said to be "massive" at all at this point is raids, and it just isn't impressive anymore that the devs can stuff 50 players into a single instance; hell, these devs aren't even writing their own infra code anymore. It's all AWS and Azure. The sole thing making these games more than just singleplayer games with chatrooms is practically done for them for free as part of their monthly PaaS subscription. Since the cutting edge of software has moved on, MMOs aren't interesting anymore, and nobody wants to sit through the 100+ hour grind to reach endgame if all they have waiting for them is sweaty balding men who sperg out if the raid comp doesn't fit the template they were told is the meta in whichever YouTuber is digesting their opinion for them. I'd rather quit playing games entirely than to chase the dragon with the shit MMOs on the market right now. FF14 is genuinely one of the best ones on the market right now, and that's fricking grim.
social media, discord and the rise of lobby based games, like mobas
Their purpose, to be a method of online communication and co-operation, has become obsolete in the world of social media and discord. People can easily just play singleplayer RPGs with actual gameplay while chatting on discord, or straight up multiplayer games.
In WoW's case, greedy israelites at the top milking the game dry and disgusting homosexuals at the bottom covering it in shit. Anyone still playing is either the last remaining alive addicts or chink bots.
metagaygin, guide sites,addons
Convenience.
It's antithetical to what an MMO is, or at least was.
Dude wants his crocolisk hides taken from booty bay to China? Get running, it's an open world. Turning every zone into a self contained mario level where the only interactions between one and the other was a breadcrumb questline in and out is a tragedy.
one of the best things about runescape was how you really had to engage with the world, even when you had a bunch of transportation options unlocked you still had to think a fair amount about how to string them together. the Gowers' distaste for horses was smarter than we knew
After we took down Arthas most people checked out. Death Wing wasn't nearly as interesting of a character as the LK was. Wrath was peak WoW. It has been a steady decline since. The OG lore team headed by Chris Metzen (guy who developed Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft lore) retired. I heard he recently came back but it is too late imo.
Metzen had nothing to do with the stuff that made Diablo good and his decisions not being questioned hurt WoW.
Wow was interesting for the war3 related content. After that no one cared about the lore
metzen made cata too dude. he does the voices for fricking thrall
A mix of available information out of the game, and tools in game. No LFG, no quest GPS, no phasing/instancing so you see people from your server and start to get to know them, etc. Then you add in the fact that Thotbot was fricking awful and usually outdated, your options to learn stuff was usually just asking players in a city. Nowadays its just a single player game, where you hit a button to queue, maybe say hi or o/ at the start, then thanks at the end. My friend list was full of players in Vanilla WoW, in recent MMOs I might have added one or two players who were pretty good in a dungeon or raid to group up later.
I did
Wakfu beta with the Ganker guild was one of the most fun gaming experiences I have ever had.
Played retail wow recently and iron forge was a ghost town. Granted, I imagine most people are in the new zone, but questing through the early areas is depressing. Going through WoTLK, I didn't see a single human in the entire zone througout the whole expac.
>Played retail wow
Diablo is more of an MMO than retail WoW
I spent two months playing wow at the tail end of bfa and it was fun. I played a hunter with a boar named Porkchop which made people mad because it didn’t have some special skill like Rage or whatever for group content but I wasn’t about to leave my pig bro. I liked the undead dinosaur dungeon and the bigass troll city. I also enjoyed legion zones, and surprisingly the panda ones, they were very comfy. I disliked cataclysm, the zones felt disjoined and elves are boring
I remember shooting some weird tentacles in panda monastery and the nearby dwarf player attacked me, I thought I was winning but then he healed to full instantly and it was all ogre
I never learned where the tentacles came from
>I never learned where the tentacles came from
old god's corruption
Gachashit
MMOs can only be good when you have a large number of players to pull in that aren't familiar with them at all. They can sustain some poopsocking that grows with the game but once it gets firmly entrenched and starts from day one in following games there's no point.
this board sucks, where'd all the normies come from
just make a good mmo yourself lmao, you'll learn what kills them
Discord. Other group chats did their part but having an easy big group chat eliminated one of the big appeal of MMOs, socialization, people just got on to grind and any guild or socialization would be taken to Discord.
Things like Vent/TeamSpeak didn't cause the same problem because they were used for end game grinds and raids, which is another thing that killed MMOs going forward, games focused on endgame being the only game and so people would rush to the end, realize they had no real way to progress beyond better equipment, and drop it. That's a big reason MS2 died so fast in the Global release, they set the EXP to like 10X higher than it should have been and so doing the main quest got you to the end game in 5 hours and you skipped 95% of all the dungeons.
Back then we had game forums, ICQ and MSN messenger. Idk if Discord contributed that much to death of MMOs.
Raiding.
MMOs that don't have raids are still going. It's only the ones that try to copy WoW that die off after each raid tier is done.
all longform games eventually get replaced by shortform games. mmos are a longform game where you
>kill trash mobs for xp
>grind gold for powerful armor/weapons
>gank people
league of legends killed mmos by being a shortform game that lets you get the entire mmo experience in a 30 minute match
fortnite/pubg did the same thing to dayz/rust/ark
Every single one either becoming a slot machine which eats all your time, or a poorly developed 20 year old nightmare with wildly outdated ux, ui and gameplay. Somehow after 20 years it's only gotten harder for nerd indy devs to code a multiplayer persistent experience to the point where in 2001 a couple dorks with 5 bucks and a dream could make an MMO, but now for some reason it takes 15 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, so nobody even thinks of designing unique, hardcore and immersive games designed for huge scale social interaction. Again, people did that decades ago, those games existed, they were incredible. Somehow it's now impossible. Total nonsense
i just have one thing to say, thank god for private servers, just look at that skybox
When the emphasis stopped being on the social aspects.
MMOs in their prime required teamwork, and had many non-combat activities that encouraged people to socialize.
Automated action houses, dungeon finders, balancing content for single player, etc, etc all killed MMOs because they were no longer social.
if that was true people would still be social when playing old mmos now. the sad reality is that people just arent social anymore
>the sad reality is that people just arent social anymore
Why aren't they social? You'll go mad without social contact for a couple of days.
people are in isolated discord bubbles. they are social, they just arent social with strangers
They are if you're in the right ones.
Can't play WoW private servers because the player base of current WoW ruin them. So thats written off.
But if you play something like Phantasy Star Online BB or Everquest Project 1999, people are very social on those.
I never played EQ back in the day and checked out P99 and was pleasantly surprised how much interaction I had with people. Got shown around to some dungeons, got gear gifted, bullshitted while sitting around the popular trading area. Honestly felt like an old MMO again.
People realized that the studios and publishers had no integrity, and so the worlds they created didn't either.
They saw MMOs shutting down left and right. They realized that the 100+ atleast hours of their life invested meant nothing to the publisher who would drop support the moment the game would lose numbers. The illusion of an online game world lost legitimacy the moment they were revealed to be transient services.
On the other hand, gamers didn't vocalize this because they didn't understand their own disillusionment. They told devs it was not enough content when really I believe it was that the service itself is destined to betray their own players.
Me. I did it.
People always complain about "muh guides" but really the fact is mmos are an old as shit genre. Once you know how to play an mmo, you know how to play them all. A poopsocking wow autist isnt going to act like a clueless noob when he picks up final fantasy. You know how the genre works
>poopsocking WoW raider plays EVE
>"I will now equip all BiS modules" sashko.jpg
>"OMG HELP ME WHY AM I GETTING KILLED IN THE SAFE ZONE??"
Leftism and israelites
Releasing them with story focused quests instead of letting the user being free to explore world and defeating the monster to level up
>wikis meant there's no sense of discovery anymore, and raiders expect even your first time in a raid to be pre-spoiled and pre-researched on youtube which is boring as frick
>subscription fees are less justifiable these days
>MMOs usually kill themselves like pyramid head impaling itself on a spike in Silent Hill 2 with bad updates that are just straight up awful to experience
Mediocre devs chasing WoW. You could make a game that's nothing but small lobbies with different stats tracked that would be better than basically every mmo. Dark & Darker a shitty ugly ripoff was more interesting than all these MMOs available. Devs are incompetent especially producers and leads, publishers are too greedy, audience too stupid. There's no excuse for why a supposed "MMO" should have worse combat or content than other games. That's just an excuse from devs with horrible taste in design because time and time again we see popular loved games that don't call themselves MMOs but basically are. And imagine if those notMMOs had a content stream that even attempted to release a significant annual update or hired contractors to make skins to rake in dosh off MTX in the meantime. Bro you could do nothing but have a shared economy like Tarkov and call it an MMO. It's just excuses and incompetence
Theme park environment. There's nothing to do once you've consumed all the latest content. It makes more sense for multiplayer oriented games to be open-ended
Trying to copy wow without realizing that it's formula was garbage and the only reason people played it was because of just how advertised it was / it was released by Blizzard who could sell stuff just on name alone at the time
WoW being the alpha and omega of MMOs killed it
my issues with current mmos
>cross-server stuff
>automatic party finding
>after leveling it's always a list of chores to do every day or week
>instances
>no pvp or if there is pvp it's mostly locked behind instances with little reason to do it outside of those
>greedy devs/publishers charging monthly fees to play and/or having cash shops in the game
>games made excessively grindy to pad playtime (more money from cash shop or sub fees)