MMORPGs didn't go wrong, the playerbase did. Note how after the invention of the iPhone every game genre has diminished in quality. MMOs had to adapt to cater to those morons.
The playerbase usually. The focus and need for the "most efficient" methods like RS or for other mmo grinds are all people talk about. And because new content for stuff drips out slowly devs dont really do much for player retention in between content drops.
>uuuh just ignore it bro
The MMO experience is altered greatly by the attitude and culture of the players. Casual guilds and sweat guilds have effectively switched places in terms of commonality. When 90% of the server is completely optimised and knows everything (or has addons to tell them), being completely optimised and knowing everything is no longer exceptional. It turns the whole game into an exercise more akin to catching up with homework than existing in a virtual world.
>The focus and need for the "most efficient" methods like RS or for other mmo grinds are all people talk about
Pal, I work full time. I don't have fricking hours and hours to grind just to gain 1 level in fricking herblore like I was when I was 13. I'm not saying I support P2W mechanics, but defending moronicly long grinds is just stupid
This.
Even the arguments being put forth are based on systems designed around extended time syncs and driving people towards spending their money. Even as players find the most efficient ways to accomplish goals in the game, the devs will make changes to the game to steer players back into those market designed systems. People have been dealing with them for so long that they see them as a staple for the genre now.
MMO worlds used to be the vision of one guy (Brad McQuaid/Chris Metzen) that wanted people to "live" in their game world. To explore, grow, and socialize living in their fantasy world. This was extremely appealing to a subset of gamers and is why it became so popular.
Once it went beyond that niche market and started seeking out "regular shitheads" to populate the game world, all visions were set aside to appeal to the lowest common denominator frickwit and/or third world FTP gamer. Now they're more of a
Times changed but design philosophy didn't. The original MMOs grew out of MUDs which were themselves just digital D&D sessions. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but there's no reason to explore and experience a vast fantasy world when you have dailies, weeklies, raids, equipment grinds, etc to do. Exploration directly clashes with these things because it's inefficient. Looking up where to go and ignoring everything else is efficient. Having a playerbase that focuses on efficiency isn't bad in and of itself but it also means you really have to lean into habit-forming, skinner box design philosophies which turn away people who just want to chill out and explore a cool world with other players.
The level/exp caps in Runescape were arbitrary because the Gower brothers never imagined anyone would bother to get them. They were wrong. But every MMO since is designed from a hodge-podge of their initial assumptions and the psychological profiling that you'd do when you make a gacha game. It's contradictory design.
skinner box mobile-game with fancy dressing around it. Without the communities of enthusiastic MMO-fans, they're a single player experience where sometimes you need to click the group-button to speed run a dungeon in silence.
>thinks 989 studios was a giant team
I know how games get made, I was talking about the vision for what the game world would be like, its lore, its races, its geography, its fricking food. Shit that was the dream of a D&D playing Gen X'er that was bold enough to make it into a reality.
Raiding as the central focus
Having a varied world to explore is breasts and other people make it better. Instanced content is cancer. Websites that tell people how to do everything doesn't help.
Rather than farm paypigs, I'd like a game that had a really big, fleshed-out ecosystem with food chains alongside the usual faction stuff, kind of a morrowind-pikmin kind of thing.
>I want a game (an activity I participate in for fun) to act as a second job
the better question is why anyone thinks the MMO formula is good in the first place
Times changed but design philosophy didn't. The original MMOs grew out of MUDs which were themselves just digital D&D sessions. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but there's no reason to explore and experience a vast fantasy world when you have dailies, weeklies, raids, equipment grinds, etc to do. Exploration directly clashes with these things because it's inefficient. Looking up where to go and ignoring everything else is efficient. Having a playerbase that focuses on efficiency isn't bad in and of itself but it also means you really have to lean into habit-forming, skinner box design philosophies which turn away people who just want to chill out and explore a cool world with other players.
The level/exp caps in Runescape were arbitrary because the Gower brothers never imagined anyone would bother to get them. They were wrong. But every MMO since is designed from a hodge-podge of their initial assumptions and the psychological profiling that you'd do when you make a gacha game. It's contradictory design.
Abandoning the subscription model was a mistake. When people were paying for a game monthly they had high expectations, but now publishers are free to nickle and israelite you in their shit games and it okay because it's ""free""
Because they heavily depend on playing with other people.
All other people, but especially gamer, are terrible to interact with.
It's moreso because of the atomization of the communities. Back when mmo's were a fresh concept they had much smaller communities, had expensive paywalls and could enforce the usual social rules that are repeatedly violated today. Now a lot of them are accessible and even free to play so they are flooded with people, gold farmers and even robots to the point that rules are repeatedly broken and unenforced for years because it's like fighting the tide. It's not terribly different from the anonymity we share here, where people are more inclined to be dickheads due to lack of consequence.
There are other factors at play of course but I'd be posting all day. Humanity in general is in a rather fricked state and the plague on MMO's is a reflection of those problems.
The systems are designed in a fashion that promotes the exploitation of other players to achieve individualistic goals. As a result, players will treat other players as pawns to get what they want. There is no incentive to help other players except for personal satisfaction.
I stopped playing runescape once i realized that the actual gameplay is just a glorified idle game you have to click every few minutes, would rather play cookie clicker.
Or the idle game literally based on runescape.
Is was a work, merchant simulator. You spend real time to produce boring shit that you got better at producing then you went on a forum to find someone to trade with. There was no better preperation for menial adult life.
MMOs just couldn't survive with the rise of social media and streaming. It killed the magic of it when everyone else is just powergaming as hard as possible and worshipping e-celebs and arguing over which side of an opinion is correct. Granted the years of WoW copies didn't help but the genre was doomed either way.
day 1? the idea of not hosting your own server with your friends is intrinsecally garbage.
i will NEVER rely on somebody else's computer to host the game i'm playing
PvE MMORPGs are boring "singleplayer" games. That's 99% of them. Zero risk, no reward and way too soloplayer friendly. There's only one PvP MMORPG that isn't dead or decades old.
mmos are obsolete, wikis and the rise of meta gaming solved them, endgame skewed content encourages using said metas and wikis, multiplayer rpgs are no longer novel, anybody who played for skinner box progression has moved onto gacha and only turbo normalgays and trannies are left playing mmos in cliques
They're not social enough anymore and the people who are social on these games are freaks these days. Back in the day, everyone was playing runescape and you weren't even necessarily logging on to do skills but just to trade or chat shit. That's dead now
runescape is (was) good because you can do things solo and still be around other players in a persistent shared world. Spamming trade chat wasn't a reason to log in and hardly social either way. I don't know where this notion came from that MMOs are about holding hands with your buddies or small talking with strangers, that's fricking gay.
FFXIV is one of the most social MMOs in existence, just not among the people you'd want to socialize with. But that's the logical conclusion of wanting MMOs to be "more social".
dunno but if when companies decided that MMOs should be about trying to scam players instead of making an attractive perpetual game to have perpetual costumers
MMOs were only as big as they were because of the novelty aspect. Once that wore off you have a shitty game that's been dumbed down to support so many players.
I played runescape since 05 and turtle wow. I distinctly remember spamming the login button on the world select screen to get to w2 and talking to randoms during the superbowl at catherby back in 07
I've played oldschool maplestory and I did not care whatsoever about "muh community". I still did small talk with random people I found from time to time, and that was pretty nice. Discord didn't ruin anything in comparison and my experience was literally the exact same than it had been when I played the exact same oldschool version back in the day
except that's literally at the absolute core of the 2 most populars MMOs right now, so you're just a jackass. If it was good then MMOs now wouldn't be shit, but they are.
I think technology is always underrated in these discussions. When I was playing Runescape in the early 2000s, it was on a one monitor setup, browser tabs weren't a thing yet so I just sat there with the game taking up the entire screen and nothing else. All I had to focus on was the game: I played, I talked to people on there, everything was funneled through the game.
Now multi-monitor setups are common and it's easier than ever to get taken out of the game world. There's an in-game wiki link in OSRS. Everyone chats and talks over Discord and the game is just a fraction of what you're looking at now. Is it more convenient? Yes. Does it decrease your immersion? Yes.
This is a great point. Having M+ as your endgame might have been good 15 years ago, when you would have to stay online so you were there if a group formed. Now you just don't login until you get pinged on discord, and logoff as soon as you disband.
Player-environment interaction as the main primary focus as opposed to player-player interaction. Not necessarily combat. If your MMO is still a functional game with only 1 person online it isn't an MMO. It's a single player game with a chat box in the corner.
>forced grouping
You have WoW brain anon. The only possible scenario you can think of for player interaction is grouping to kill pve mobs. Sad. Also why the frick are you playing an MMO if you don't like the M part? Single player games tend to have far more fun gameplay systems...
>runescape isn't an MMO... because it isn't!
Runescape has minor elements that require cooperation, but yes it is mostly a single player game with a chat box and player avatars.
Mmos have a world that is always expanding and getting new content. They don’t get stale as long as they are supported. That’s the draw. Having to play with morons like you is the price, anything that reduces exposure to tards in the course of playing the game is good
I think technology is always underrated in these discussions. When I was playing Runescape in the early 2000s, it was on a one monitor setup, browser tabs weren't a thing yet so I just sat there with the game taking up the entire screen and nothing else. All I had to focus on was the game: I played, I talked to people on there, everything was funneled through the game.
Now multi-monitor setups are common and it's easier than ever to get taken out of the game world. There's an in-game wiki link in OSRS. Everyone chats and talks over Discord and the game is just a fraction of what you're looking at now. Is it more convenient? Yes. Does it decrease your immersion? Yes.
>RP Servers
Playing shit like Space Station 13 in autistic roleplay servers as well as actually playing tabletop rpgs with my friends has convinced me that MMOs aren't worth my time unless I can actually roleplay. Shit is like night and day.
All MMOs still use the same chat box that only online players can see and resets when you logout. >NOOO I won't join your discord. You have to repeat everything when I come back online. Why can't you type in chat during combat? I'm too shy to talk and I lost my mic.
>All MMOs still use the same chat box that only online players can see and resets when you logout.
how is this even a problem? you zoomers really need to be fighting in a war
>guild makes an announcement or tries to get some group content going >they have to repeat everything that has been said because some dude just came online
Zoomers don't like forums because paragraphs are scary, but they like the archived/preserved aspect of them. He's complaining that he misses out on chat content when not logged in, and would prefer chat messages be preserved, like a forum, but again without the likelihood of scary paragraphs
>every historically big MMO has been PvE-focused >every currently big MMO is PvE-focused >the official revivals of those older big MMOs are PvE-focused >the unofficial return to those official revivals is PvE-focused
>PvPgays still insist that a true MMO has never been tried after the 50th PvP-focused "sandbox" territory control MMO dies after a month
Don't strawman sandbox chads please. You have wow brain thinking that sandbox just means pvp griefer clanwar bullshit 24/7. Sandbox means fundamentally to replace npcs with PCs. Combat is just a small part of this.
In my opinion something like Space Station 13 is a good example of what an MMO should and could look like.
Mmos have a world that is always expanding and getting new content. They don’t get stale as long as they are supported. That’s the draw. Having to play with morons like you is the price, anything that reduces exposure to tards in the course of playing the game is good
Anon we live in an age of live-service single player games. Your argument holds no water.
Since it's inception.
RS is more forgivable because of the culture behind it but WoWBlack folk are tasteless mongoloids.
How anyone can possibly enjoy clicking on the map to send your character to an enemy and have him stand in place and spam the same attack over and over like an idle game is beyond me. I wanted to have a fun time exploring an open world and make new friends, not play a glorified turn-based RPG.
d.gg/PwHFND2ywn
>play runescape with a WoW friend >he gets noticeably frustrated when i tell him there is no "best" (min-max) path to follow, and the games about the freedom of doing things how you want
Im gonna have to guess the MMO world looking to WoW as their leader instead of (old) RS. Which cultivated a completely lost kind of player with a culled imagination.
classic wow is currently the best performing mmo and all people want to do is just level up, hit max level, then do it over and over again for literal decades
People don't want to do anything but level, and do it very slowly and classic proves that.
I'm slowly realizing the big "you think you don't but you do" is questing. It's the type of thing where you wouldn't say you're having fun while you're doing it, but it's what gives the player both that sense of immersion and of accomplishment.
>Dunkirk's wife >Hogger >HOOVES, I need HOOVES
Wow's quests suck compared to OSRS, but it's still the part of the game people enjoy the most, which is proven by this recent classic HC leveling fad, which is where I got that notion in the first place.
most of the iconic items are from quests whirlwind axe for example, but if you mean quests that are memorable because theyre really long or because of story quests there are only three or four of them(i havent played wow in a decade)
The most popular maplestory private servers are consistently low rate old school versions. People truly do want to level up slow as frick, enjoy the journey grinding with their pals, and then do it over again on a different class. You can really see how less dedicated people become when they're able to make every class and get them all to max level in like a few weeks. Back then the journey to leveling up is what mattered, most people didn't even give a shit if they got to endgame, they just wanted to get as high as they could to see higher level areas without dying in one hit. Like exploring risky higher level areas as a noob was a big part of the excitement, to know that you're gonna go back there later maybe and frick those mobs up one day. When you make it easy to blast through 95% of the areas in the game and immediately put people on the daily efficiency treadmill with nothing else to look forward to except the completion of that treadmill they get bored fast.
>When you make it easy to blast through 95% of the areas in the game and immediately put people on the daily efficiency treadmill with nothing else to look forward to except the completion of that treadmill they get bored fast.
I feel like Big Bang didn't do as much damage to Maple as people would usually say since there were still tons of zones in the game for you to explore and getting to 200 was still a bit of a challenge, but I feel like the hyperfixation in stats that was introduced in Unlimited and whatever it was in GMS and other versions was what made Maple into a meme.
The patches between big bang and ascension were some of the best patches in maple history, it fixed a lot of problems the game had and nobody really cared about the old overworld anyway. It turned the game from magestory 1 hit skele Genesis leech on perma p2w 2x coupon into a game that people actually grinded and bossed on their main classes with. They got rid of a lot of meme skills and added some really useful ones like ground smash for warriors, allowed ranged classes to fire skills up close, gave dits a 2nd job mobbing skill, sped up buccs and made them feel less clunky, the evan rework, required less skill points to do shit, got rid of secondary stat requirements, etc.
Personally I think the real damage was done before big bang when they introduced potential and cubes in the same patch as dual blader, the class that defined the next decade of class design philosophy which was to powercreep the ever living frick out of any class that came before.
Didn't really start feeling like a meme game until they released resistance classes since mech/mercedes/demon slayer literally broke the platforming and mobbing aspect of the game and had everything all in one class. Especially bad considering how much the game was heading in the direction of creating flat convenient maps like gallos, mp3, ghost ship maps, newts & skeles, etc then they just continued to do that over and over again until we're here. Now I look at videos of modern maple and it's literally only just flat maps with insane mobility and huge skills that hit the entire map 100 times with 2.1b damage lines. It's frickin ridiculous, it's like a flanderization of old maple.
>all people want to do is just level up, hit max level, then do it over and over again
They want to relive and/or be the king of video game land they were or missed out on being 18 years ago.
The hardcore challenge is just slapping an arbitrary difficulty on something that was never intended. Like beating Zelda with the starting sword and 3 hearts. Just something to do to say you did it.
MMOs are simply live service games designed to create an addictive loop to keep the crackheads paying subscriptions. A co-op open world rpg with lobbies for larger instances would do the exact same thing as 99% of MMOs without a need for subcriptions.
>a world where there's any sort of serious issues.
you have 4 empires with very different philosophies at war with each other, pirate factions, unknown empires and ancient aliens, yeah its not anything near 40k but its not a walk in the park
> space rags to riches
this depends on how you play the game, you can completely ignore anything about the lore just join a player corporation that has their own space and you just mine, build ships, go to war with other corporations and just take their shit
as people grow past childhood and adolescence, more and more neurons in the brain become connected and old, inefficient pathways become pruned
with these newly connected neurons, your brain tells you that by playing an MMO; you are essentially wasting your time. You are on an infinite treadmill. Your time could be better spent playing enumerate other worthy new games you have never played before instead
those whose brains do not undergo such development continue to play MMO's
I genuinely don't know what the core of gw2 is. I have concluded that the core of gw2 is grinding gold, to exchange for mtx gems, to buy cosmetics. I don't know what else gw2 is about.
Mmos are only interesting as a treadmill, because thats what life is. The original appeal is that it was a type of hardcore alternate reality that could replicate the emotional peaks and valleys of real life. When you remove that it just becomes a multiplayer game with substandard gameplay and a big lobby.
old mmo like maplestory packed everybody into the same towns cause they couldnt level to get anywhere so you ended up talking to eachother since it was the next best thing
I think technology is always underrated in these discussions. When I was playing Runescape in the early 2000s, it was on a one monitor setup, browser tabs weren't a thing yet so I just sat there with the game taking up the entire screen and nothing else. All I had to focus on was the game: I played, I talked to people on there, everything was funneled through the game.
Now multi-monitor setups are common and it's easier than ever to get taken out of the game world. There's an in-game wiki link in OSRS. Everyone chats and talks over Discord and the game is just a fraction of what you're looking at now. Is it more convenient? Yes. Does it decrease your immersion? Yes.
. Nowadays when people feel like they can't do shit in a game they're just gonna log off, play another game and talk in discord or something. You don't really get too many people sitting around in MMOs just chatting unless they're degen weirdos nowadays. Back then sitting around and shooting the shit was kinda worth it, you could often get a lot of free shit from the pros just by being cool or being able to access spots like the hacker shack in henesys with a gunslinger to loot dropped items no one else could reach, or those times some guy would come in and drop hundreds of 1k meso sacks and rare items with 30 players chasing them. Sometimes you'd find a noob who would sell you a 60% GFA for way lower than FM prices. One time I met a black chick who treated me like I was her son and she spoiled the shit out of me with scrolled gear, meso and pots. There were real and tangible benefits to socializing back then, the culture was just different idk. Can't really put a finger on it.
I wish there was a singleplayer Runescape.
I like the grinding and everything about the characters and world is extremely charming, I just don't want to sub to effectively play a singleplayer game. I know there is 2007scape but that's still missing 16 years of content, good and bad. I played Melvor but while it does have the general progression of Runescape, idling for 12 hours while asleep or at work to get a rare item isn't the same as actively playing the game to get the drop.
>oldschool is missing 16 years of content
It's missing 6. Oldschool was released in 2013 using an archive from 2007. Ever since then it's been updated so much that no one sane actually calls it "oldschool" unironically.
Fundamentally fake games with artificial grinds to stretch out mediocre content. MMO architecture compromises any chance of enjoyable gameplay. They were never meant to be fun, just addictive. Real games are always better value time and money than MMOs.
The internet stopped being that wonderland of novelty and unexplored potential. Everything now has a wiki and the means of communication are widely accessible. Players had to creatively deal with the limitations of that time, but now all optimal paths of gameplay are registered and became common knowledge
MMOs will be never be the same as they were in their golden age because of wikiculture and the pursuit of optimization. The only way for MMOs to be successful nowdays is if they go full Second Life and appeal to the roleplaying aspect since that's one of the few remaining aspects of the genre that is up to player's agency and creativity. Large scale PvP-focus (GW2, New World, OSRS) could be another possibility but developers keep fricking it up
I can remember when having a DPS-meter was considered "weird" or a "power-gamer" thing. Now, you're being rude to other four people who have fully optimized their characters according to two different websites and three Youtube guides if you haven't at least simmed your live dps for an hour on target dummy for maximum output.
Casting spells used to be fun. Now it's a rhythm game that you get heavily chastised for if you miss a beat. People are watching your dps numbers and comparing them against the group's. The whole experience has been reduced to a button-tapping sequence that has an elite community around it.
>"Bro, watch me tap 1,2,2,1,3 for 10 minutes in a row and occasionally I'll bust out my cooldown, 5, when my mod makes a ding sound telling me the optimal moment."
Stamp collectors are more interesting. At least their hobby can't be automated.
They were only successful because of a specific taste in players and time period they are from. Being unanimously a shitty amalgamation of various games almost universally done mediocrely. The ones that stand out only do because they do (or did) one specific aspect very well in a way that was memorable or timeless compared to other MMOs or games at the time.
WoW and Runescape are at fault for turning an entire generation into MMO-simps with unrealistic expectations that the dumpsterfire genre can be anything but passable. >t. Runescape player
I will say it every time there's a thread of this kind because thousands of you never reach this answer, maybe because you don't know the games.
IT'S BECAUSE THEY NEVER DID BETTER GAMEPLAY.
Dofus and Wakfu are the only turn-based MMORPGs I know, everybody else is 3d open worlds with the same feel.
It just has to be online and let you play with other people in a world, the gameplay of this genre could have been much more creative.
For example why didn't Gamefreak ever release an official pokémon mmorpg? That'd be novel.
Or Digimon (not that Korean shit), they're all about the digital world, being transported to a well made MMORPG and raising monsters could have worked.
Going back to Dofus and Wakfu, they're 2d. With an amazing combat system, over 20 spells per character (18 classes) with unique animations and effects. And it's turn based on cells kinda like fire emblem, up to 8 players in a group.
It's so good that despite being an mmorpg, it's a great game by itself worthy of releasing an offline mode.
The subscription model was its original sin. Any game that relies on it is doomed to eventually turn into a treadmill, dependent on appealing to the playerbase’s lowest desires.
Everybody wants to be the immortal hero. Nobody wants to cut trees. Everybody wants to be safe in their own little activities and not have to worry about anything from the outside. They want a single player game with a chat room. This leads to dead worlds with no true agency in them.
SWG is a case study in how this is isn't inherently true. They just need to lean into it and warm players up to the idea of smaller goals being important. They're terrified of doing this because "play as a burlap-clad literal who" is a hard sell to the ignorant general public and crucially, the east-Asian market.
the genre has been fundamentally flawed from inception primarily due to the public availability of information about the underlying game mechanics. As the spread of that information became more prevalant over the years, the broken nature of the MMO design became more and more obvious to players. Imagine an MMO without a wiki, without youtube, without streamers, and without discord. Where in-game secrets remained in game and optimal play was something genuinely obfusticated to the majority of players. That might actually make for a game worth playing, but it's one that can never exist again.
MMORPGs didn't go wrong, the playerbase did. Note how after the invention of the iPhone every game genre has diminished in quality. MMOs had to adapt to cater to those morons.
Sweety, I know know if you've noticed, but videogaming and the internet in general has changed to cater to "those morons".
world of warcraft is the reasons mmos went to shit, frick face
mobile took over
chinese paypigs make them way more money
The playerbase usually. The focus and need for the "most efficient" methods like RS or for other mmo grinds are all people talk about. And because new content for stuff drips out slowly devs dont really do much for player retention in between content drops.
When my classic guild started autistically prepping and planning out their TBC dungeon grinding schedule I knew it was well and truly over
Join a more casual guild.
>uuuh just ignore it bro
The MMO experience is altered greatly by the attitude and culture of the players. Casual guilds and sweat guilds have effectively switched places in terms of commonality. When 90% of the server is completely optimised and knows everything (or has addons to tell them), being completely optimised and knowing everything is no longer exceptional. It turns the whole game into an exercise more akin to catching up with homework than existing in a virtual world.
>The focus and need for the "most efficient" methods like RS or for other mmo grinds are all people talk about
Pal, I work full time. I don't have fricking hours and hours to grind just to gain 1 level in fricking herblore like I was when I was 13. I'm not saying I support P2W mechanics, but defending moronicly long grinds is just stupid
When they started using marketing analytics in their game design.
This.
Even the arguments being put forth are based on systems designed around extended time syncs and driving people towards spending their money. Even as players find the most efficient ways to accomplish goals in the game, the devs will make changes to the game to steer players back into those market designed systems. People have been dealing with them for so long that they see them as a staple for the genre now.
MMO worlds used to be the vision of one guy (Brad McQuaid/Chris Metzen) that wanted people to "live" in their game world. To explore, grow, and socialize living in their fantasy world. This was extremely appealing to a subset of gamers and is why it became so popular.
Once it went beyond that niche market and started seeking out "regular shitheads" to populate the game world, all visions were set aside to appeal to the lowest common denominator frickwit and/or third world FTP gamer. Now they're more of a
skinner box mobile-game with fancy dressing around it. Without the communities of enthusiastic MMO-fans, they're a single player experience where sometimes you need to click the group-button to speed run a dungeon in silence.
Your headcanon is fricking moronic bro. Mmos are made by a giant team, even back in the late 90s
In the late 90s, they had budgets of single digit millions, and released after 2 hard years.
>thinks 989 studios was a giant team
I know how games get made, I was talking about the vision for what the game world would be like, its lore, its races, its geography, its fricking food. Shit that was the dream of a D&D playing Gen X'er that was bold enough to make it into a reality.
Raiding as the central focus
Having a varied world to explore is breasts and other people make it better. Instanced content is cancer. Websites that tell people how to do everything doesn't help.
Rather than farm paypigs, I'd like a game that had a really big, fleshed-out ecosystem with food chains alongside the usual faction stuff, kind of a morrowind-pikmin kind of thing.
>I want a game (an activity I participate in for fun) to act as a second job
the better question is why anyone thinks the MMO formula is good in the first place
There's zero point to MMOs now. You can just talk on Discord and play some co-op game
Times changed but design philosophy didn't. The original MMOs grew out of MUDs which were themselves just digital D&D sessions. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but there's no reason to explore and experience a vast fantasy world when you have dailies, weeklies, raids, equipment grinds, etc to do. Exploration directly clashes with these things because it's inefficient. Looking up where to go and ignoring everything else is efficient. Having a playerbase that focuses on efficiency isn't bad in and of itself but it also means you really have to lean into habit-forming, skinner box design philosophies which turn away people who just want to chill out and explore a cool world with other players.
The level/exp caps in Runescape were arbitrary because the Gower brothers never imagined anyone would bother to get them. They were wrong. But every MMO since is designed from a hodge-podge of their initial assumptions and the psychological profiling that you'd do when you make a gacha game. It's contradictory design.
Abandoning the subscription model was a mistake. When people were paying for a game monthly they had high expectations, but now publishers are free to nickle and israelite you in their shit games and it okay because it's ""free""
it's funny how the model has switched from
>pay to play
to
>pay to not play
Because they heavily depend on playing with other people.
All other people, but especially gamer, are terrible to interact with.
Because the systems are designed in a way that promotes bad behavior.
It's moreso because of the atomization of the communities. Back when mmo's were a fresh concept they had much smaller communities, had expensive paywalls and could enforce the usual social rules that are repeatedly violated today. Now a lot of them are accessible and even free to play so they are flooded with people, gold farmers and even robots to the point that rules are repeatedly broken and unenforced for years because it's like fighting the tide. It's not terribly different from the anonymity we share here, where people are more inclined to be dickheads due to lack of consequence.
There are other factors at play of course but I'd be posting all day. Humanity in general is in a rather fricked state and the plague on MMO's is a reflection of those problems.
The systems are designed in a fashion that promotes the exploitation of other players to achieve individualistic goals. As a result, players will treat other players as pawns to get what they want. There is no incentive to help other players except for personal satisfaction.
I stopped playing runescape once i realized that the actual gameplay is just a glorified idle game you have to click every few minutes, would rather play cookie clicker.
Or the idle game literally based on runescape.
Is was a work, merchant simulator. You spend real time to produce boring shit that you got better at producing then you went on a forum to find someone to trade with. There was no better preperation for menial adult life.
MMOs just couldn't survive with the rise of social media and streaming. It killed the magic of it when everyone else is just powergaming as hard as possible and worshipping e-celebs and arguing over which side of an opinion is correct. Granted the years of WoW copies didn't help but the genre was doomed either way.
I wish the quests weren't trapped in runescape, i really do. Some of the best quests in any video game
Only rich people used to afford the internet. Now every Black person and their niglets have internet. That includes the white Black folk.
day 1? the idea of not hosting your own server with your friends is intrinsecally garbage.
i will NEVER rely on somebody else's computer to host the game i'm playing
PvE MMORPGs are boring "singleplayer" games. That's 99% of them. Zero risk, no reward and way too soloplayer friendly. There's only one PvP MMORPG that isn't dead or decades old.
>way too soloplayer friendly
true, MMOs should all require you be attached to a discord troony clique (they will quit in a month) to log in.
>he didn't get into the right guild
sounds like a you problem
>single player games
And that’s a good thing. Seethe and howl shitter who has to be carried
Evolution of combat
is it too late to play OSRS?
Absolutely not. Play ironman.
>that spot
It's cannon time
Mmos are fine, you went wrong. Sorry Black person maybe next life you are born white
mmos are obsolete, wikis and the rise of meta gaming solved them, endgame skewed content encourages using said metas and wikis, multiplayer rpgs are no longer novel, anybody who played for skinner box progression has moved onto gacha and only turbo normalgays and trannies are left playing mmos in cliques
They stopped evolving around EverQuest 2.
They're not social enough anymore and the people who are social on these games are freaks these days. Back in the day, everyone was playing runescape and you weren't even necessarily logging on to do skills but just to trade or chat shit. That's dead now
runescape is (was) good because you can do things solo and still be around other players in a persistent shared world. Spamming trade chat wasn't a reason to log in and hardly social either way. I don't know where this notion came from that MMOs are about holding hands with your buddies or small talking with strangers, that's fricking gay.
FFXIV is one of the most social MMOs in existence, just not among the people you'd want to socialize with.
But that's the logical conclusion of wanting MMOs to be "more social".
FFXIV is the epitome for everything that is wrong with mmorpgs.
dunno but if when companies decided that MMOs should be about trying to scam players instead of making an attractive perpetual game to have perpetual costumers
MMOs were only as big as they were because of the novelty aspect. Once that wore off you have a shitty game that's been dumbed down to support so many players.
>I dont know where this notion that Multiplayer online RPGs involved small talk with strangers
t. zoomer poser who has never actually seriously played MMOs
I played runescape since 05 and turtle wow. I distinctly remember spamming the login button on the world select screen to get to w2 and talking to randoms during the superbowl at catherby back in 07
>just trust me I played turtle wow
>n-no my projecting narrative
cope
>seething zoomer mad his private server full of exploits isn’t respected as a real mmo experience
>seething whale mad someone isnt paying daddy blizzard money to ruin the game
>turtle wow
so I was spot on lmfao
no? its literally the same thing, except Im not paying Blizzard money
It was all over after the first expansion pack for ultima online
I've played oldschool maplestory and I did not care whatsoever about "muh community". I still did small talk with random people I found from time to time, and that was pretty nice. Discord didn't ruin anything in comparison and my experience was literally the exact same than it had been when I played the exact same oldschool version back in the day
Ganker is delusional
Discord took a major feature out of MMOs. Most logged in everyday just to chat with friends
No we didn’t. Don’t speak for us newbie.
I did
Pay to win and forcing players to use multiplayer to progress
>forcing players to use multiplayer to progress
That's what made old MMOs good, you dumbfrick zoomer.
except that's literally at the absolute core of the 2 most populars MMOs right now, so you're just a jackass. If it was good then MMOs now wouldn't be shit, but they are.
This is a great point. Having M+ as your endgame might have been good 15 years ago, when you would have to stay online so you were there if a group formed. Now you just don't login until you get pinged on discord, and logoff as soon as you disband.
Is Ganker really this stupid or do they not know what the M in MMORPG stands for
>Is Ganker this stupid or is Ganker this stupid
Yes.
which M?
conception
>he doesn't play MMOSTCs, massively multiplayer online small talk chatrooms
Furcadia
bobba
Player-environment interaction as the main primary focus as opposed to player-player interaction. Not necessarily combat. If your MMO is still a functional game with only 1 person online it isn't an MMO. It's a single player game with a chat box in the corner.
That’s a good thing. Forced grouping is autism and waters down content to lowest denominator
>forced grouping
You have WoW brain anon. The only possible scenario you can think of for player interaction is grouping to kill pve mobs. Sad. Also why the frick are you playing an MMO if you don't like the M part? Single player games tend to have far more fun gameplay systems...
Runescape has minor elements that require cooperation, but yes it is mostly a single player game with a chat box and player avatars.
Mmos have a world that is always expanding and getting new content. They don’t get stale as long as they are supported. That’s the draw. Having to play with morons like you is the price, anything that reduces exposure to tards in the course of playing the game is good
>runescape isn't an MMO... because it isn't!
The player-environment interaction isn't shit either. Most of the world in an MMORPG is unclickable and uninteractable.
Gacha killed MMORPGs.
Why make a good game when some cheap shit with anime jpgs breasts make twice the money?
I think technology is always underrated in these discussions. When I was playing Runescape in the early 2000s, it was on a one monitor setup, browser tabs weren't a thing yet so I just sat there with the game taking up the entire screen and nothing else. All I had to focus on was the game: I played, I talked to people on there, everything was funneled through the game.
Now multi-monitor setups are common and it's easier than ever to get taken out of the game world. There's an in-game wiki link in OSRS. Everyone chats and talks over Discord and the game is just a fraction of what you're looking at now. Is it more convenient? Yes. Does it decrease your immersion? Yes.
RP servers in game are the last bastion of immersive worlds and you still have gays there that just want to hide away in Discord all day
>RP Servers
Playing shit like Space Station 13 in autistic roleplay servers as well as actually playing tabletop rpgs with my friends has convinced me that MMOs aren't worth my time unless I can actually roleplay. Shit is like night and day.
>wojak
Argument won
>MMORPG
>NOOOOOOOO WHY ARE YOU FORCING MULTIPLAYER INTO THIS???
Fishing next to someone is multiplayer. Maze+ and raiding is a wannabe esport, not to mention instanced, which automatically makes it dogshit.
All MMOs still use the same chat box that only online players can see and resets when you logout.
>NOOO I won't join your discord. You have to repeat everything when I come back online. Why can't you type in chat during combat? I'm too shy to talk and I lost my mic.
>All MMOs still use the same chat box that only online players can see and resets when you logout.
how is this even a problem? you zoomers really need to be fighting in a war
>guild makes an announcement or tries to get some group content going
>they have to repeat everything that has been said because some dude just came online
before discord everything was organized with the telepathic wizardry. stop talking, moron
Zoomers don't like forums because paragraphs are scary, but they like the archived/preserved aspect of them. He's complaining that he misses out on chat content when not logged in, and would prefer chat messages be preserved, like a forum, but again without the likelihood of scary paragraphs
Coomers and Anime JPGs.
>every historically big MMO has been PvE-focused
>every currently big MMO is PvE-focused
>the official revivals of those older big MMOs are PvE-focused
>the unofficial return to those official revivals is PvE-focused
>PvPgays still insist that a true MMO has never been tried after the 50th PvP-focused "sandbox" territory control MMO dies after a month
LiFMMO was fun in its later days until payment and legal shit took it down, and ultima outlands is a good time too
Don't strawman sandbox chads please. You have wow brain thinking that sandbox just means pvp griefer clanwar bullshit 24/7. Sandbox means fundamentally to replace npcs with PCs. Combat is just a small part of this.
In my opinion something like Space Station 13 is a good example of what an MMO should and could look like.
Anon we live in an age of live-service single player games. Your argument holds no water.
Albion has been out for over five years. 300k active user and very popular right now.
Listening to players.
When social media came into existence and did what MMOs promised to so but in real life
Since it's inception.
RS is more forgivable because of the culture behind it but WoWBlack folk are tasteless mongoloids.
How anyone can possibly enjoy clicking on the map to send your character to an enemy and have him stand in place and spam the same attack over and over like an idle game is beyond me. I wanted to have a fun time exploring an open world and make new friends, not play a glorified turn-based RPG.
d.gg/PwHFND2ywn
people flocked to the casualgay shit like WoW and Runescape instead of coming home
>EvE
Awesome
>FF 11
Sick
>Ragnarok
HAHAHAHAHHAHA *breathes* No.
>eve
Oh boy paypiggy shit that is even a more cancerous spreadsheet simulator. What fun
>play runescape with a WoW friend
>he gets noticeably frustrated when i tell him there is no "best" (min-max) path to follow, and the games about the freedom of doing things how you want
Im gonna have to guess the MMO world looking to WoW as their leader instead of (old) RS. Which cultivated a completely lost kind of player with a culled imagination.
classic wow is currently the best performing mmo and all people want to do is just level up, hit max level, then do it over and over again for literal decades
People don't want to do anything but level, and do it very slowly and classic proves that.
I'm slowly realizing the big "you think you don't but you do" is questing. It's the type of thing where you wouldn't say you're having fun while you're doing it, but it's what gives the player both that sense of immersion and of accomplishment.
maybe in WOW where quests didn't matter.
definitely not in other games though
What do you mean? That people already know how important the questing is to their experience in other games?
>in wow where quests didnt matter
?
How come i never see the same nostalgia for WOW's quests as i do RS's?
>Dunkirk's wife
>Hogger
>HOOVES, I need HOOVES
Wow's quests suck compared to OSRS, but it's still the part of the game people enjoy the most, which is proven by this recent classic HC leveling fad, which is where I got that notion in the first place.
most of the iconic items are from quests whirlwind axe for example, but if you mean quests that are memorable because theyre really long or because of story quests there are only three or four of them(i havent played wow in a decade)
The most popular maplestory private servers are consistently low rate old school versions. People truly do want to level up slow as frick, enjoy the journey grinding with their pals, and then do it over again on a different class. You can really see how less dedicated people become when they're able to make every class and get them all to max level in like a few weeks. Back then the journey to leveling up is what mattered, most people didn't even give a shit if they got to endgame, they just wanted to get as high as they could to see higher level areas without dying in one hit. Like exploring risky higher level areas as a noob was a big part of the excitement, to know that you're gonna go back there later maybe and frick those mobs up one day. When you make it easy to blast through 95% of the areas in the game and immediately put people on the daily efficiency treadmill with nothing else to look forward to except the completion of that treadmill they get bored fast.
>When you make it easy to blast through 95% of the areas in the game and immediately put people on the daily efficiency treadmill with nothing else to look forward to except the completion of that treadmill they get bored fast.
I feel like Big Bang didn't do as much damage to Maple as people would usually say since there were still tons of zones in the game for you to explore and getting to 200 was still a bit of a challenge, but I feel like the hyperfixation in stats that was introduced in Unlimited and whatever it was in GMS and other versions was what made Maple into a meme.
The patches between big bang and ascension were some of the best patches in maple history, it fixed a lot of problems the game had and nobody really cared about the old overworld anyway. It turned the game from magestory 1 hit skele Genesis leech on perma p2w 2x coupon into a game that people actually grinded and bossed on their main classes with. They got rid of a lot of meme skills and added some really useful ones like ground smash for warriors, allowed ranged classes to fire skills up close, gave dits a 2nd job mobbing skill, sped up buccs and made them feel less clunky, the evan rework, required less skill points to do shit, got rid of secondary stat requirements, etc.
Personally I think the real damage was done before big bang when they introduced potential and cubes in the same patch as dual blader, the class that defined the next decade of class design philosophy which was to powercreep the ever living frick out of any class that came before.
Didn't really start feeling like a meme game until they released resistance classes since mech/mercedes/demon slayer literally broke the platforming and mobbing aspect of the game and had everything all in one class. Especially bad considering how much the game was heading in the direction of creating flat convenient maps like gallos, mp3, ghost ship maps, newts & skeles, etc then they just continued to do that over and over again until we're here. Now I look at videos of modern maple and it's literally only just flat maps with insane mobility and huge skills that hit the entire map 100 times with 2.1b damage lines. It's frickin ridiculous, it's like a flanderization of old maple.
Post active user count.
>all people want to do is just level up, hit max level, then do it over and over again
They want to relive and/or be the king of video game land they were or missed out on being 18 years ago.
The hardcore challenge is just slapping an arbitrary difficulty on something that was never intended. Like beating Zelda with the starting sword and 3 hearts. Just something to do to say you did it.
Powercreeping entire parts of their games
lorencia... home...
I have love hate relationship with MU Online.
oe hermano esa foto es mia chupa pingas
MMOs are simply live service games designed to create an addictive loop to keep the crackheads paying subscriptions. A co-op open world rpg with lobbies for larger instances would do the exact same thing as 99% of MMOs without a need for subcriptions.
The only real MMO is EvE.
Does eve offer escapism? Its advertised to me as space rags to riches rather than a world where there's any sort of serious issues.
>a world where there's any sort of serious issues.
you have 4 empires with very different philosophies at war with each other, pirate factions, unknown empires and ancient aliens, yeah its not anything near 40k but its not a walk in the park
> space rags to riches
this depends on how you play the game, you can completely ignore anything about the lore just join a player corporation that has their own space and you just mine, build ships, go to war with other corporations and just take their shit
as people grow past childhood and adolescence, more and more neurons in the brain become connected and old, inefficient pathways become pruned
with these newly connected neurons, your brain tells you that by playing an MMO; you are essentially wasting your time. You are on an infinite treadmill. Your time could be better spent playing enumerate other worthy new games you have never played before instead
those whose brains do not undergo such development continue to play MMO's
sad part is, MMOs don't have to be treadmills, but i genuinely don't know if the playerbase could handle a non-treadmill one
people b***h and moan all day long if there is no carrot on a stick to grind for
see: Guild Wars 2
I genuinely don't know what the core of gw2 is. I have concluded that the core of gw2 is grinding gold, to exchange for mtx gems, to buy cosmetics. I don't know what else gw2 is about.
It literally has no idea what it wants to be itself so you are not wrong.
Mmos are only interesting as a treadmill, because thats what life is. The original appeal is that it was a type of hardcore alternate reality that could replicate the emotional peaks and valleys of real life. When you remove that it just becomes a multiplayer game with substandard gameplay and a big lobby.
I have more fun playing mmorpgs than doing my job. Money is meaningless and nothing more than another control tool like religions.
I already calculated my if I just could be a neet and drop my job. I would lose 3000€ per month... but. I don't need much money anyway.
After the golden age of the F2P Korean grind MMO
Old mmorpgs were worlds filled with adventure, tasks, quests, etc.
Now the world is designed around the quests and the main story.
I wish it was possible to take some mmos and rebuild them into offline versions. Just grind and do random fetch quests alone. Seems comfy.
the fact that dumb shit eaters in this thread are citing wow, rune scape and korean grinders as good mmos is why mmos are awful
there's only three good mmos:
ultima online
dark age of camelot
star wars galaxies
Got a time machine so I can play them?
the point is that modern mmos should be using those as inspiration. instead every mmo is a wow clone with a gimmick
never liked star wars galaxies
You're wrong.
old mmo like maplestory packed everybody into the same towns cause they couldnt level to get anywhere so you ended up talking to eachother since it was the next best thing
Brings me back to the other anon's point
. Nowadays when people feel like they can't do shit in a game they're just gonna log off, play another game and talk in discord or something. You don't really get too many people sitting around in MMOs just chatting unless they're degen weirdos nowadays. Back then sitting around and shooting the shit was kinda worth it, you could often get a lot of free shit from the pros just by being cool or being able to access spots like the hacker shack in henesys with a gunslinger to loot dropped items no one else could reach, or those times some guy would come in and drop hundreds of 1k meso sacks and rare items with 30 players chasing them. Sometimes you'd find a noob who would sell you a 60% GFA for way lower than FM prices. One time I met a black chick who treated me like I was her son and she spoiled the shit out of me with scrolled gear, meso and pots. There were real and tangible benefits to socializing back then, the culture was just different idk. Can't really put a finger on it.
yea true
I wish there was a singleplayer Runescape.
I like the grinding and everything about the characters and world is extremely charming, I just don't want to sub to effectively play a singleplayer game. I know there is 2007scape but that's still missing 16 years of content, good and bad. I played Melvor but while it does have the general progression of Runescape, idling for 12 hours while asleep or at work to get a rare item isn't the same as actively playing the game to get the drop.
You can host your own offline server with bots and jack up the xp rates
>oldschool is missing 16 years of content
It's missing 6. Oldschool was released in 2013 using an archive from 2007. Ever since then it's been updated so much that no one sane actually calls it "oldschool" unironically.
Good to know, only problem is I wasn't talking about OSRS so I don't know how you drew that conclusion.
oh sorry i'm not up on private servers
I am a nutjob and still enjoy Dungeons and Dragons Online myself
also still annoyed I can't just say DDO.
>Solo Reaper
>Get one-punched
yeah a first life character isn't really intended to solo reaper and god do past lives end up making huge differences at low levels.
Fundamentally fake games with artificial grinds to stretch out mediocre content. MMO architecture compromises any chance of enjoyable gameplay. They were never meant to be fun, just addictive. Real games are always better value time and money than MMOs.
The internet stopped being that wonderland of novelty and unexplored potential. Everything now has a wiki and the means of communication are widely accessible. Players had to creatively deal with the limitations of that time, but now all optimal paths of gameplay are registered and became common knowledge
MMOs will be never be the same as they were in their golden age because of wikiculture and the pursuit of optimization. The only way for MMOs to be successful nowdays is if they go full Second Life and appeal to the roleplaying aspect since that's one of the few remaining aspects of the genre that is up to player's agency and creativity. Large scale PvP-focus (GW2, New World, OSRS) could be another possibility but developers keep fricking it up
I can remember when having a DPS-meter was considered "weird" or a "power-gamer" thing. Now, you're being rude to other four people who have fully optimized their characters according to two different websites and three Youtube guides if you haven't at least simmed your live dps for an hour on target dummy for maximum output.
Casting spells used to be fun. Now it's a rhythm game that you get heavily chastised for if you miss a beat. People are watching your dps numbers and comparing them against the group's. The whole experience has been reduced to a button-tapping sequence that has an elite community around it.
>"Bro, watch me tap 1,2,2,1,3 for 10 minutes in a row and occasionally I'll bust out my cooldown, 5, when my mod makes a ding sound telling me the optimal moment."
Stamp collectors are more interesting. At least their hobby can't be automated.
appealing to everyone simply doesn't work for MMOs. a 'good' MMO should strive for an average online population of about 20k
They were only successful because of a specific taste in players and time period they are from. Being unanimously a shitty amalgamation of various games almost universally done mediocrely. The ones that stand out only do because they do (or did) one specific aspect very well in a way that was memorable or timeless compared to other MMOs or games at the time.
WoW and Runescape are at fault for turning an entire generation into MMO-simps with unrealistic expectations that the dumpsterfire genre can be anything but passable.
>t. Runescape player
I will say it every time there's a thread of this kind because thousands of you never reach this answer, maybe because you don't know the games.
IT'S BECAUSE THEY NEVER DID BETTER GAMEPLAY.
Dofus and Wakfu are the only turn-based MMORPGs I know, everybody else is 3d open worlds with the same feel.
It just has to be online and let you play with other people in a world, the gameplay of this genre could have been much more creative.
For example why didn't Gamefreak ever release an official pokémon mmorpg? That'd be novel.
Or Digimon (not that Korean shit), they're all about the digital world, being transported to a well made MMORPG and raising monsters could have worked.
Going back to Dofus and Wakfu, they're 2d. With an amazing combat system, over 20 spells per character (18 classes) with unique animations and effects. And it's turn based on cells kinda like fire emblem, up to 8 players in a group.
It's so good that despite being an mmorpg, it's a great game by itself worthy of releasing an offline mode.
The subscription model was its original sin. Any game that relies on it is doomed to eventually turn into a treadmill, dependent on appealing to the playerbase’s lowest desires.
Everybody wants to be the immortal hero. Nobody wants to cut trees. Everybody wants to be safe in their own little activities and not have to worry about anything from the outside. They want a single player game with a chat room. This leads to dead worlds with no true agency in them.
Frick, I want to be the guy with a cozy little job where players can come to me for shit
And back in the early days, you could. But that doesn't pay the bills for bandwidth unfortunately. They're just a flawed concept.
SWG is a case study in how this is isn't inherently true. They just need to lean into it and warm players up to the idea of smaller goals being important. They're terrified of doing this because "play as a burlap-clad literal who" is a hard sell to the ignorant general public and crucially, the east-Asian market.
When it stopped being about the second M and the RPG parts of MMO
the genre has been fundamentally flawed from inception primarily due to the public availability of information about the underlying game mechanics. As the spread of that information became more prevalant over the years, the broken nature of the MMO design became more and more obvious to players. Imagine an MMO without a wiki, without youtube, without streamers, and without discord. Where in-game secrets remained in game and optimal play was something genuinely obfusticated to the majority of players. That might actually make for a game worth playing, but it's one that can never exist again.
I genuinely hate MMO players. They will defend and shill their favorite MMO for free no matter how dead it is.
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