"Like for example, the fact that people call EVE a 'proper' or 'good' sandbox MMO. That depresses me. The fact that one of the best options available has no ability to modify the mechanics, combat, aesthetics, story, skill progression, abilities, or even build a house to call your own depresses me. Sure you can socket different things into a ship hull to tailor it a bit, that's not the same as in Fallout3"
yep. it's not the same as Fallout 3.
Also, all of the things you listed about a proper sandbox game are either already in EVE or on the list of features they are adding in one of the gurenteed 2 expansions per year. Yes, including housing and aesthetic modification.
Just didn't want you to get it twisted. Eve is definitely not perfect, but it is for damn sure a sandbox, and any bit of sandbox that it doesn't have now, it will get, because CCP dedicated themselves to an ever progressing, and ever improving ultimate sci-fi simulator. It's only a 'space ship sandbox" in it's current state.
Eh, you're stretching reality rather far there. That's a bit too much of a plug bit for EVE, not really a point on sandbox potential.
For one, they're developing a shooter game that ties in and influences/is influenced by EVE, but that's very different from being able to take a ship into orbit, land on the surface, and deploy an army on foot within the context of EVE. The engine just isn't built for it. There's a reason the shooter is a separate title. As such, EVE is fundamentally incapable of offering all the things I mentioned.
Does that make it not a sandbox? No, it's still a sandbox.
My point of comparing it to Fallout 3 was to specifically show that difference in fundamental capacity. Can you make a land rover or submarine in EVE? No. Can you flip to a first/third person mounted camera and fly your spaceship like a polit? No. Can you combine and redefine the context in which skills/abilities are used so as to allow new options not seen in the game before like, say, transforming our spacecraft into a robot? No.
And multiple of those I believe with certainty will never happen, because neither the engine is built for it, nor is CCP likely willing to deal with the Second Life like fallout of things produced if they let people do so.
Thats one of the reasons why we are developing our own game engine...as the release after our space game is planned planed landing and exploration the combined with worldbuilding. Therefore the engine even tho it specializesin space is targeted towards also planets in the long run. However when we launch we will have players walking around on space stations where they can visit a loung, the refinery or even their own hangar if they own one and will see there goods within the hangar etc. Both the space environment as well as the worldly environment were designed into the game engine as we needed users to be able to move about and interact in space stations. The same is planned on the parger ships where users will be able to walk around and operate various components if required. That makes it alot easier to add landings on planets at a latter stage where users can startt playing a totaly different game within the same game. The player skill sets were also designed from the start to enable us to form skill sets for the necessary environment over time.
However not all this features will be available at launch but will be available at a latter stage.
Remove WoW's persistent world and noone will see the difference. All that each WoW's realm needs is Dalaran for chat and existing matchmaking system for group finding. So I agree with OP. Such games can't be called "massively".
and i have been in battles with ~3000 player (about 1500 vs 1500) (it was unplayble but they are working on making it possible and playble )
It looks like EVE is the only truely massive online game. The problem is that EVE is "sandbox political simulator". Wich is not intresting to most players.
In Everquest you did not really interact with everybody in the game all 2000 of them on your server. They had zones and you had to go to a zone to get a group .Because without going there you would not know someone is looking for another person to form their group. Of course someone might send you a tell and that is a personal conversation which you can still have in every game even in Guildwars which is a CORPG.
The only time you might interact with everyone in a zone is in zone wide chat where jokes or general auctions went on and just talking in a mode that allowed everyone in the zone to read what you say. Of course the quality of Barren's chat may be not as refined (although oasis chat does remind me to some extent to Barrens) it is still large interaction. You might not want to admit it but that type of chatting is part of being in a MMORPG. What is objectionable these days is the quality of that chat but you cannot deny that such chat is still going on except most people turn off general chat in WoW....and there is that.
The other forms of interactions take place with a certain portion of the people in your server when you might quarrel over a spawn or a dragon which happened after patch day. Oh I used to love how our guild would get some ogres to block the entrance so other guilds' members could not get to Nagafen. Those forms of contention where Planes were concerned were settled with a Time Table. So a guild would be doing Fear this weekened and next weekend another and so on. People negotiated and talked guild leaders mostly except when trying for World Firsts then nasty fights would break out and GMs called who flipped a coin and decided which guild got to try to kill Trakanon this time. Does the open PvP that used to go in Hillsbrad Foothiils and Southshore remind you of these fights.
The general chat going on around you has devolved to begging for gold and powerlevelling or asking for runs. Yes it is horrible but it is chat and people turn it off. I do it too who in their sane mind wouldn't. This is how the game has devolved as a result of the community that plays the game. The tools are there it is just being used in a way that is distasteful and has lead to people turning off their chat and not reading what is on their screen unless it is a tell from someone they know or guildchat. Guild Chat has taken over the chat we normally have and even that chat can often devolve depending on the guild you might be unlucky to be in. Everything goes back to the type of people playing these games these days. It is not wholly the fault of the game it is the people playing it that is responsible for the state things are in today. Blame the player not the game.
These are the examples you miss I am guessing when you talk about massively multiplayer and why WoW does not qualify. I can see how you might consider all this part of being in a world and having experienced that I do miss it. I really do in fact right now I ache to go back to that but you are given tools and every game has tools to interact. People choose to use those tools and how they have chosen to use those tools is why WoW is the way it is today. You cannot just not give due to WoW and exclude it from the description of MMORPG because you do not agree how the game has evolved. Its evolution is partly our fault. We asked for the things you dislike in WoW when we complained and argued and fought and yelled at and appealed to GMs the developers were watching us and taking notes and their solution was instanced dungeons. I guess it was an inelegant way of solving a problem but WoW still has huge areas where people can interact they just do not do it like we used to in Everquest. People have just stopped talking to each other. May be the fault is the game or is the fault with us ?
It's true that you can interact with quite a lot of people outside of instanced dungeons in games like WoW.
But many people just don't. Back in the day when I was playing Neocron we used to group just for the sake of playing together. When I cried in the public chat in Champions Online that no one wanted to group with me the people explained to me that it's quicker and easier to go through the content solo. No problems waiting for everyone in the group etc..
Well that's also the fault of the damn quest-based MMOs. In Neocron you just got experience for every attack you made and not only for killing a mob or finishing a quest.
You didn't even have to be in a group to play together. You would just meet random people in the wastelands (no instances at all) and go hunt together. These were the days. I'm missing that.
Of course having no instances will become a problem if the number of players gets too large. There were fights about outposts in NC with 100+ people, but it did get a little laggy at some point.
Since EVE Online has point&click controls it naturally supports more concurrent players than games with WSAD movement, so I doubt other kinds of games will ever support as many players in the same zone.
Player housing/guild halls have been requested repeatedly by the WoW community. But Blizzard has not put them in the game because... you would essentially be pulling large chunks of the player population into these 'instances' for prolonged periods of time. The general population would appear to drop. And then the 'Chicken Little, the sky is falling' syndrome would kick in... and the rats would flee the sinking ship.
But... we need instances.
In order to incorporate complex fights, cinematic events, etc.,... you very nearly need to do this in a 'controlled' environment, away from the rest of the world.
Why? How else would you have 20-30 raid groups running the same raid at the same time? They all have their own 'instance'/virtual environment.
If your answer is... make them pvp/fight over who gets to kill the boss. What do you do on a pve server? 1st come, 1st serve? What keeps 40-50 other players from helping the raid group get their kill, then swapping the favor and assisting the others? OR... in this grand community we have of amazing and everkind consistently courteous people, what else helps keeps griefing to a minimum? I mean, I know that there are an enormous amount of arsehats out there that would do nothing but 1) be sure to get their kill (achievement/title/gear) and then 2) try to keep others from getting it by trying to wipe raid groups or resetting the boss or whatever.
As much as I hate instances... they are a necessary evil.
I would love to sit on the sidelines and watch an epic battle between "InsertUberAwesomeBossFromYourGameHere" and a raid-group... as if it were a cinematic taking place. But too many idiots would feel the need to ruin it and do something stupid to take away the heroic nature of the event by taining it with their idiocratic tendencies.
I agree with everything in this post, all i have to add is this: The games which have instanced dungeons/pvp/gameplay are NOT deserved to be called MMORPGs. And players are not deserved to be fooled by companies calling their games MMORPGs, because these games doesnt have the MMO gameplay experience. Thats why you are bored with them after a few months.
The reason for dungeon instances is so that you and your group can do a dungeon without fear of Kill Stealers. The first MMORPG I played was Asheron's Call. It was the first MMORPG that had seemless zones. you could litterally run from 1 town to another and not see a single load screen. they also have the dungeons you seem to like where everyone can enter and kill the mobs. Imagin if you will a game like WoW with this feature, now imagine trying to do the level 50 Paladin Helm Quest where you need certain items from kills and certain items from items that spawn on the ground through out the dungeon. Trust me you would not be able to complete the quest. WHenever Turbine released a new dungeon for Asheron's Call that armor drops in it, we were civilized and had a line formed up you step up get your kill loot your kill and then leave. I doubt the little kiddies in games like LOTRO, EQ2, GW, WoW, and Darkfall would be as civilized.
"Possibly we humans can exist without actually having to fight. But many of us have chosen to fight. For what reason? To protect something? Protect what? Ourselves? The future? If we kill people to protect ourselves and this future, then what sort of future is it, and what will we have become? There is no future for those who have died. And what of those who did the killing? Is happiness to be found in a future that is grasped with blood stained hands? Is that the truth?"
The games which have instanced dungeons/pvp/gameplay are NOT deserved to be called MMORPGs. And players are not deserved to be fooled by companies calling their games MMORPGs, because these games doesnt have the MMO gameplay experience. Thats why you are bored with them after a few months.
EDIT: Some replies tells me they missunderstood my intention with this post. I am not saying i hate these games. I love WoW, i love Neverwinter nights, i love Oblivion, Baldur's gate is even one of my favorites. All i say is stop calling WoW an MMORPG, because in its current state it is more Neverwinter nights, its more like a Multiplayer RPG with TONZ of content, then a MASSIVELY Multiplayer Role playing game.
Completely, utterly, wrong. On every single level, wrong. Wow is an mmo, as is AOC, CO, COX, STO, EQ, SWG, EQ2, L2, POTBS, Vanguard, all of them are mmo's. Whether or not the RPG moniker is deserved depends on the server and the people that make up said server. Just because you limit the way you play a game (log in and only queue) does not mean that the game deserves reclassification.
I agree with everything in this post, all i have to add is this: The games which have instanced dungeons/pvp/gameplay are NOT deserved to be called MMORPGs. And players are not deserved to be fooled by companies calling their games MMORPGs, because these games doesnt have the MMO gameplay experience. Thats why you are bored with them after a few months.
The reason for dungeon instances is so that you and your group can do a dungeon without fear of Kill Stealers. The first MMORPG I played was Asheron's Call. It was the first MMORPG that had seemless zones. you could litterally run from 1 town to another and not see a single load screen. they also have the dungeons you seem to like where everyone can enter and kill the mobs. Imagin if you will a game like WoW with this feature, now imagine trying to do the level 50 Paladin Helm Quest where you need certain items from kills and certain items from items that spawn on the ground through out the dungeon. Trust me you would not be able to complete the quest. WHenever Turbine released a new dungeon for Asheron's Call that armor drops in it, we were civilized and had a line formed up you step up get your kill loot your kill and then leave. I doubt the little kiddies in games like LOTRO, EQ2, GW, WoW, and Darkfall would be as civilized.
In Asheron's Call there was one big difference. There were hundreds of dungeons and a HUGE landmass. You would only run into people in the most talked about, trendy, or convenient dungeons. Most dungeons would have been no different had they been private instances. I really liked it that way, but the tradeoff was that the dungeons were fairly generic with lots of repeated content.
I remember getting Gertar's Dagger back when it was the most OP weapon in the game. It was surprisingly easy and I had more than 5 of them in one run. I don't think that situation was any different than the Paladin Helm quest you mentioned. There were enough other factors in AC's game design that made it work under those conditions. Maybe it was the community that helped make it work. Most of the hardcore achievers were playing EQ at the time. AC had more explorers and socializers which tended to be more curteous toward others.
The reason for dungeon instances is so that you and your group can do a dungeon without fear of Kill Stealers. The first MMORPG I played was Asheron's Call. It was the first MMORPG that had seemless zones. you could litterally run from 1 town to another and not see a single load screen. they also have the dungeons you seem to like where everyone can enter and kill the mobs. Imagin if you will a game like WoW with this feature, now imagine trying to do the level 50 Paladin Helm Quest where you need certain items from kills and certain items from items that spawn on the ground through out the dungeon. Trust me you would not be able to complete the quest. WHenever Turbine released a new dungeon for Asheron's Call that armor drops in it, we were civilized and had a line formed up you step up get your kill loot your kill and then leave. I doubt the little kiddies in games like LOTRO, EQ2, GW, WoW, and Darkfall would be as civilized.
I agree with Aganazer's post, but would also like to add that at least in WoW there are no repercussions for poor behavior in game. In the older MMOs where grouping and even scheduling of content/raids was a must being blackballed on a server for poor behavior was pretty much a death sentence for your character: guilds wouldn't want you, most everyone would know who you are and what you did. It pretty much dictated that you'd be re-rolling a new character and leveling actually took time.
WoW takes this stigma away with many factors- it is designed so that the majority of the game can be soloed so that you don't need other players until endgame, and even then only for raiding or arenas. Using the dungeon finder you can ninja loot to your heart's extent knowing that the great majority of people you will group with are on other servers and you'll never have to encounter them again by simply putting them on ignore. Finally, Blizzard gives you the option for name changes, race changes and server changes with extremely short cooldowns so that if you piss off too many people, you can just go elsewhere or change identities to piss more people off. WoW is a griefer's wet dream come true and Blizzard supports this asshattery through game mechanics and a lack of any consequence.
The reason for dungeon instances is so that you and your group can do a dungeon without fear of Kill Stealers. The first MMORPG I played was Asheron's Call. It was the first MMORPG that had seemless zones. you could litterally run from 1 town to another and not see a single load screen. they also have the dungeons you seem to like where everyone can enter and kill the mobs. Imagin if you will a game like WoW with this feature, now imagine trying to do the level 50 Paladin Helm Quest where you need certain items from kills and certain items from items that spawn on the ground through out the dungeon. Trust me you would not be able to complete the quest. WHenever Turbine released a new dungeon for Asheron's Call that armor drops in it, we were civilized and had a line formed up you step up get your kill loot your kill and then leave. I doubt the little kiddies in games like LOTRO, EQ2, GW, WoW, and Darkfall would be as civilized.
I agree with Aganazer's post, but would also like to add that at least in WoW there are no repercussions for poor behavior in game. In the older MMOs where grouping and even scheduling of content/raids was a must being blackballed on a server for poor behavior was pretty much a death sentence for your character: guilds wouldn't want you, most everyone would know who you are and what you did. It pretty much dictated that you'd be re-rolling a new character and leveling actually took time.
WoW takes this stigma away with many factors- it is designed so that the majority of the game can be soloed so that you don't need other players until endgame, and even then only for raiding or arenas. Using the dungeon finder you can ninja loot to your heart's extent knowing that the great majority of people you will group with are on other servers and you'll never have to encounter them again by simply putting them on ignore. Finally, Blizzard gives you the option for name changes, race changes and server changes with extremely short cooldowns so that if you piss off too many people, you can just go elsewhere or change identities to piss more people off. WoW is a griefer's wet dream come true and Blizzard supports this asshattery through game mechanics and a lack of any consequence.
That may not be such a bad thing. People want to play game and relax and it would be easier to blow off steam to rage quit without worrying whether i will have a group to play with tomorrow.
I agree with everything in this post, all i have to add is this: The games which have instanced dungeons/pvp/gameplay are NOT deserved to be called MMORPGs. And players are not deserved to be fooled by companies calling their games MMORPGs, because these games doesnt have the MMO gameplay experience. Thats why you are bored with them after a few months.
The reason for dungeon instances is so that you and your group can do a dungeon without fear of Kill Stealers. The first MMORPG I played was Asheron's Call. It was the first MMORPG that had seemless zones. you could litterally run from 1 town to another and not see a single load screen. they also have the dungeons you seem to like where everyone can enter and kill the mobs. Imagin if you will a game like WoW with this feature, now imagine trying to do the level 50 Paladin Helm Quest where you need certain items from kills and certain items from items that spawn on the ground through out the dungeon. Trust me you would not be able to complete the quest. WHenever Turbine released a new dungeon for Asheron's Call that armor drops in it, we were civilized and had a line formed up you step up get your kill loot your kill and then leave. I doubt the little kiddies in games like LOTRO, EQ2, GW, WoW, and Darkfall would be as civilized.
In Asheron's Call there was one big difference. There were hundreds of dungeons and a HUGE landmass. You would only run into people in the most talked about, trendy, or convenient dungeons. Most dungeons would have been no different had they been private instances. I really liked it that way, but the tradeoff was that the dungeons were fairly generic with lots of repeated content.
I remember getting Gertar's Dagger back when it was the most OP weapon in the game. It was surprisingly easy and I had more than 5 of them in one run. I don't think that situation was any different than the Paladin Helm quest you mentioned. There were enough other factors in AC's game design that made it work under those conditions. Maybe it was the community that helped make it work. Most of the hardcore achievers were playing EQ at the time. AC had more explorers and socializers which tended to be more curteous toward others.
I take it you didn't play on Darktide.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Ok so reading some of the comments, can i say that Diablo 2 is an MMORPG because it is able to handle massive amounts of players who play at the same time in different instances?
Comments
Thats one of the reasons why we are developing our own game engine...as the release after our space game is planned planed landing and exploration the combined with worldbuilding. Therefore the engine even tho it specializesin space is targeted towards also planets in the long run. However when we launch we will have players walking around on space stations where they can visit a loung, the refinery or even their own hangar if they own one and will see there goods within the hangar etc. Both the space environment as well as the worldly environment were designed into the game engine as we needed users to be able to move about and interact in space stations. The same is planned on the parger ships where users will be able to walk around and operate various components if required. That makes it alot easier to add landings on planets at a latter stage where users can startt playing a totaly different game within the same game. The player skill sets were also designed from the start to enable us to form skill sets for the necessary environment over time.
However not all this features will be available at launch but will be available at a latter stage.
http://unknown-universe.com
http://unknown-universe.com
The unknown awaits you
eve online have no instancing
and i have been in battles with ~3000 player (about 1500 vs 1500) (it was unplayble but they are working on making it possible and playble
)
Remove WoW's persistent world and noone will see the difference. All that each WoW's realm needs is Dalaran for chat and existing matchmaking system for group finding. So I agree with OP. Such games can't be called "massively".
It looks like EVE is the only truely massive online game. The problem is that EVE is "sandbox political simulator". Wich is not intresting to most players.
In Everquest you did not really interact with everybody in the game all 2000 of them on your server. They had zones and you had to go to a zone to get a group .Because without going there you would not know someone is looking for another person to form their group. Of course someone might send you a tell and that is a personal conversation which you can still have in every game even in Guildwars which is a CORPG.
The only time you might interact with everyone in a zone is in zone wide chat where jokes or general auctions went on and just talking in a mode that allowed everyone in the zone to read what you say. Of course the quality of Barren's chat may be not as refined (although oasis chat does remind me to some extent to Barrens) it is still large interaction. You might not want to admit it but that type of chatting is part of being in a MMORPG. What is objectionable these days is the quality of that chat but you cannot deny that such chat is still going on except most people turn off general chat in WoW....and there is that.
The other forms of interactions take place with a certain portion of the people in your server when you might quarrel over a spawn or a dragon which happened after patch day. Oh I used to love how our guild would get some ogres to block the entrance so other guilds' members could not get to Nagafen. Those forms of contention where Planes were concerned were settled with a Time Table. So a guild would be doing Fear this weekened and next weekend another and so on. People negotiated and talked guild leaders mostly except when trying for World Firsts then nasty fights would break out and GMs called who flipped a coin and decided which guild got to try to kill Trakanon this time. Does the open PvP that used to go in Hillsbrad Foothiils and Southshore remind you of these fights.
The general chat going on around you has devolved to begging for gold and powerlevelling or asking for runs. Yes it is horrible but it is chat and people turn it off. I do it too who in their sane mind wouldn't. This is how the game has devolved as a result of the community that plays the game. The tools are there it is just being used in a way that is distasteful and has lead to people turning off their chat and not reading what is on their screen unless it is a tell from someone they know or guildchat. Guild Chat has taken over the chat we normally have and even that chat can often devolve depending on the guild you might be unlucky to be in. Everything goes back to the type of people playing these games these days. It is not wholly the fault of the game it is the people playing it that is responsible for the state things are in today. Blame the player not the game.
These are the examples you miss I am guessing when you talk about massively multiplayer and why WoW does not qualify. I can see how you might consider all this part of being in a world and having experienced that I do miss it. I really do in fact right now I ache to go back to that but you are given tools and every game has tools to interact. People choose to use those tools and how they have chosen to use those tools is why WoW is the way it is today. You cannot just not give due to WoW and exclude it from the description of MMORPG because you do not agree how the game has evolved. Its evolution is partly our fault. We asked for the things you dislike in WoW when we complained and argued and fought and yelled at and appealed to GMs the developers were watching us and taking notes and their solution was instanced dungeons. I guess it was an inelegant way of solving a problem but WoW still has huge areas where people can interact they just do not do it like we used to in Everquest. People have just stopped talking to each other. May be the fault is the game or is the fault with us ?
It's true that you can interact with quite a lot of people outside of instanced dungeons in games like WoW.
But many people just don't. Back in the day when I was playing Neocron we used to group just for the sake of playing together. When I cried in the public chat in Champions Online that no one wanted to group with me the people explained to me that it's quicker and easier to go through the content solo. No problems waiting for everyone in the group etc..
Well that's also the fault of the damn quest-based MMOs. In Neocron you just got experience for every attack you made and not only for killing a mob or finishing a quest.
You didn't even have to be in a group to play together. You would just meet random people in the wastelands (no instances at all) and go hunt together. These were the days. I'm missing that.
Of course having no instances will become a problem if the number of players gets too large. There were fights about outposts in NC with 100+ people, but it did get a little laggy at some point.
Since EVE Online has point&click controls it naturally supports more concurrent players than games with WSAD movement, so I doubt other kinds of games will ever support as many players in the same zone.
Games seem barren because of instances.
Player housing/guild halls have been requested repeatedly by the WoW community. But Blizzard has not put them in the game because... you would essentially be pulling large chunks of the player population into these 'instances' for prolonged periods of time. The general population would appear to drop. And then the 'Chicken Little, the sky is falling' syndrome would kick in... and the rats would flee the sinking ship.
But... we need instances.
In order to incorporate complex fights, cinematic events, etc.,... you very nearly need to do this in a 'controlled' environment, away from the rest of the world.
Why? How else would you have 20-30 raid groups running the same raid at the same time? They all have their own 'instance'/virtual environment.
If your answer is... make them pvp/fight over who gets to kill the boss. What do you do on a pve server? 1st come, 1st serve? What keeps 40-50 other players from helping the raid group get their kill, then swapping the favor and assisting the others? OR... in this grand community we have of amazing and everkind consistently courteous people, what else helps keeps griefing to a minimum? I mean, I know that there are an enormous amount of arsehats out there that would do nothing but 1) be sure to get their kill (achievement/title/gear) and then 2) try to keep others from getting it by trying to wipe raid groups or resetting the boss or whatever.
As much as I hate instances... they are a necessary evil.
I would love to sit on the sidelines and watch an epic battle between "InsertUberAwesomeBossFromYourGameHere" and a raid-group... as if it were a cinematic taking place. But too many idiots would feel the need to ruin it and do something stupid to take away the heroic nature of the event by taining it with their idiocratic tendencies.
The reason for dungeon instances is so that you and your group can do a dungeon without fear of Kill Stealers. The first MMORPG I played was Asheron's Call. It was the first MMORPG that had seemless zones. you could litterally run from 1 town to another and not see a single load screen. they also have the dungeons you seem to like where everyone can enter and kill the mobs. Imagin if you will a game like WoW with this feature, now imagine trying to do the level 50 Paladin Helm Quest where you need certain items from kills and certain items from items that spawn on the ground through out the dungeon. Trust me you would not be able to complete the quest. WHenever Turbine released a new dungeon for Asheron's Call that armor drops in it, we were civilized and had a line formed up you step up get your kill loot your kill and then leave. I doubt the little kiddies in games like LOTRO, EQ2, GW, WoW, and Darkfall would be as civilized.
"Possibly we humans can exist without actually having to fight. But many of us have chosen to fight. For what reason? To protect something? Protect what? Ourselves? The future? If we kill people to protect ourselves and this future, then what sort of future is it, and what will we have become? There is no future for those who have died. And what of those who did the killing? Is happiness to be found in a future that is grasped with blood stained hands? Is that the truth?"
Completely, utterly, wrong. On every single level, wrong. Wow is an mmo, as is AOC, CO, COX, STO, EQ, SWG, EQ2, L2, POTBS, Vanguard, all of them are mmo's. Whether or not the RPG moniker is deserved depends on the server and the people that make up said server. Just because you limit the way you play a game (log in and only queue) does not mean that the game deserves reclassification.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
In Asheron's Call there was one big difference. There were hundreds of dungeons and a HUGE landmass. You would only run into people in the most talked about, trendy, or convenient dungeons. Most dungeons would have been no different had they been private instances. I really liked it that way, but the tradeoff was that the dungeons were fairly generic with lots of repeated content.
I remember getting Gertar's Dagger back when it was the most OP weapon in the game. It was surprisingly easy and I had more than 5 of them in one run. I don't think that situation was any different than the Paladin Helm quest you mentioned. There were enough other factors in AC's game design that made it work under those conditions. Maybe it was the community that helped make it work. Most of the hardcore achievers were playing EQ at the time. AC had more explorers and socializers which tended to be more curteous toward others.
I agree with Aganazer's post, but would also like to add that at least in WoW there are no repercussions for poor behavior in game. In the older MMOs where grouping and even scheduling of content/raids was a must being blackballed on a server for poor behavior was pretty much a death sentence for your character: guilds wouldn't want you, most everyone would know who you are and what you did. It pretty much dictated that you'd be re-rolling a new character and leveling actually took time.
WoW takes this stigma away with many factors- it is designed so that the majority of the game can be soloed so that you don't need other players until endgame, and even then only for raiding or arenas. Using the dungeon finder you can ninja loot to your heart's extent knowing that the great majority of people you will group with are on other servers and you'll never have to encounter them again by simply putting them on ignore. Finally, Blizzard gives you the option for name changes, race changes and server changes with extremely short cooldowns so that if you piss off too many people, you can just go elsewhere or change identities to piss more people off. WoW is a griefer's wet dream come true and Blizzard supports this asshattery through game mechanics and a lack of any consequence.
That may not be such a bad thing. People want to play game and relax and it would be easier to blow off steam to rage quit without worrying whether i will have a group to play with tomorrow.
The sword cut both ways.
I take it you didn't play on Darktide.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Ok so reading some of the comments, can i say that Diablo 2 is an MMORPG because it is able to handle massive amounts of players who play at the same time in different instances?
Well thats one of the things I loved about Vanguard: NO INSTANCES.