The Real Problem With MMOs

Spankster77

The community!

They hate questing because it's not like quests are a staple of RPGs or anything.  They despise raiding, gear progression, grinding and all things associated with theme parks.  Oh and don't even think about making a "MMO" that  you can't play solo from beginning to end, because that is just silly talk!  In addition, It better also be polished, balanced, free to play with no bugs and constant content releases.

My point is I think the real problem is that a lot of people that play MMOs don't really like MMOs anymore or have never really liked them. 

When developers created games like EQ, UO, Shadowbane, Vanilla WoW, etc they weren't trying to please everyone they were just trying to please a small percentage of people that were into fantasy and video games.  They basically started with a fantasy based environment, added some cool elements like crafting, building, etc, sold it in a box and charged a monthly fee to play it to support continued development and server costs, and we were all fine with it.  There were only a few to chose from so us gamers picked our poison, created our guilds, hopped in voice comms with our guildies, quested until we reached a level previously thought unreachable and neglected our families and friends for months and years. 

I feel that most of the original MMO players have either become jaded or have moved on and we are left with a bunch of people that discovered MMOs at a time when developers were chasing the WoW white rabbit and either doing everything the same but not as good as WoW or everything completely different than it, neither methodology has really progressed the genre. 

I say it's time for MMOs to get back to their roots!  Forget trying to be everything to everyone and just please the people that really love the genre.  Charge us to buy the game and to play, make things not so easily accessible, make grouping mandatory for at least 50% of the game, make it hard to really advance if you don't have tons of time to play!  This is what we fell in love with all those years ago and I honestly believe that returning to our roots is the only thing that will make it feel right again!

AAAMEOW

Problem is mmorpg is too small.

If game studio dont' make a game for everyone, it is really hard to get enough players.  Unless the game is "low budget"

And pretty much everyone asking for games like the old days are lying.  They are asking for games like the old days "except better".

immodium

The real problem is gamers expecting 1st gen MMOs not embracing kickstarter/crowd funding.

Stop expecting AAA developers to develop for such a small niche.

You're going to have to vote with your wallet. That doesn't mean not spending anything, it's giving money to an idea you want to see come to fruition.

If you're not willing to do that, spend money on a hobby you apparently adore, don't expect publishers too either.

Antiquated

The real problem is the real problem.

Hasty generalizations piled atop cynicism.

jesad

I think that it's too late to fix what has gone wrong with this genre.  There are too many industries out there now that are making money hand over fist by selling exactly what it does not need.  And there are too many players out there right now supporting those industries.  The MMORPG genre is gone from the fantasy world player.  It now belongs to the competitive players who will do pretty much anything and everything to win.

Here's where it all went wrong.

PVP + Progression = an exploitation opportunity

If there is a way to progress in the game, other than time investment (i.e. level and acquired skill) and build, the system will become too big for the developer to properly balance and the game will spin out of control.  Blizzard is learning this right now with "Overwatch", go check out the news.

Free to Play + Progression = an exploitation opportunity

If there is a way to progress in the game, other than via a single player on a single account, players will create multiple accounts in order to enhance that progression.  See Archeage for proof of this.  It is a well known exploit to make multiple "free to play" accounts in order to circumvent the labor system.

Progression without resistance = the skipping of content.

The moment that Everquest 2 removed the locks on those quests that required players to complete them before moving into other parts of the game (which they did out of pure impatience and the desire to appease those players who had reached those zones far before everyone else) the majority of the game skipped right over the lower portion of the game and those areas became a ghost town.

Other games, such as almost ALL of them now, allow players to hop right in and build up to endgame status via either pay to win tactics or simply by not putting any kind of restrictions into the game in order to keep the player from doing so.

Free to play + Pay 2 Win + an auction house = the skipping of content.

Right now, at this very moment, there are several games out there where a player with enough money to burn can buy whatever the name it is that they are calling the thing, lets say "Apex" since we were talking about Archeage, that allows a free player to have paid player benefits, sell that thing to a free player for "in-game" gold, and in turn use that in-game gold to purchase just about anything that is availble on the auction house up to the most expensive thing.

And you know they are promoting this stuff to because this tactic, more than anything, makes the company more money.  Google "fully slotted Archeage armor" sometime and ask yourself how someone managed to surpass that brutal random number generator of that game in order to have highly regraded, fully slotted armor only 4 months after its North American release?  Could it have been that the developers of the game were putting that stuff out there in order to promote apex sales?  Could have been....

In any case, although it may have seemed like a great game in the beginning, it only takes the player who has been playing it on a lower level for the year or so that it has been open to examine the gear of a player who has been playing it on this higher "cash" level for a year to cause that lower level player to stop playing that game, and that is why they can't hold on to their people.

And then there are the industries.....

The clickie mouse with all of the buttons.

The configurable keyboards with all of the buttons.

The websites dedicated to macros for the clickie mice and the keyboards with all of the buttons.

The websites dedicated to the FLOTM builds.

The websites dedicated to programs that hack the game in some fashion.

I mean it's way out of control dude.  And this is what we have left.

Wishing for a return to purity then is like wishing to live forever.  It just ain't gonna happen.  But what can happen is that you personally make a decision, within yourself, to play these games only as, and only with, the people who like to play them the way you do.  And only playing games that allow you to do that without the imposition of those players that do not.  That really is the only way you are going to find any happiness in what has become a very corrupted system.

But of course, all of that is just my opinion.

Alligat0rJack

Today MMOS are relic of Old School RPG games and thats main problem.They all have Story NPC Quest and all kind of repetative content that eventualy bored players and they at the end leave MMo.
I have some time idea to make mmorpg without story quests NPC,but not sandbox game,WOW like open world in fantasy enviroment rich of lore that need to be discovered.
On first glance that seems like terible idea,but i think thats the way to go  ,World with his own Laws that players need to discover and utilizite for themself.

ArChWind

Problem with MMO is expectations exceed budgets.

F0URTWENTY

The real problem with MMO's is they have all been essentially the same game. They are all clones, same tab targeting carrot on a stick gameplay with very few exceptions.

I really don't see how someone can play a game like WOW, and then be excited to play a game like RIFT when they are the exact same game with a different map/art style.

Kyleran

If online games are making money hand over fist, mobas, shooters, card games, whale funded knockoffs etc, from Dev's standpoint, is there really any problem?

As Narius would say, if MMORPGs aren't really where the money is, they won't have any incentive to create them.

Now I agree, I'd love to see new titles based around the "lost" designs, but it will require folks to support indie titles while they grow, much as was the pattern in the genre's earlier days.

Spiider

You are forgetting the fact that games are made by money hungry now. All you wrote is irrelevant, games are not made to be nice but are made to squeeze the last penny out of us.

An open source mmo would rock... providing we can find moderation team that is honest enough not to misuse admin rights.

Scalpless

The real problem with this topic is jumping to conclusions and putting words in others' mouths. For instance, when people criticize typical MMO questing, it doesn't mean they hate all questing in general. I, for one, love doing fun, well-written, varied quests. The problem is that MMO quests tend to be none of these.

nariusseldon

Spankster77 said:

My point is I think the real problem is that a lot of people that play MMOs don't really like MMOs anymore or have never really liked them. 

First, it is not a problem. Secondly, it is not that people who play MMOs don't really like MMOs .. but devs want to get people who don't really like MMOs .. so they change MMOs to adapt to their preferences. 

It is really not a problem unless you are the one who likes the classical MMOs ... but by this time, you probably will be in the minority anyway.

XImpalerX

If the old MMO's were so great, then why aren't you still playing them?

ste2000

The biggest problem with MMOs?

The game Publishers (Note, not Developers)

Kyleran

XImpalerX said:

If the old MMO's were so great, then why aren't you still playing them?

Those that remain open are pale shadows of what they were in their early days.

Unless someone puts up a good emulator based on older rule sets it just isn't at all the same.

iixviiiix

XImpalerX said:

If the old MMO's were so great, then why aren't you still playing them?

MMO aging unlike singleplayer game , it change though time .
Some MMO change too much like an married woman that make you don't want to come back home even though you had sweet time with her in the past .

When you get enough of the change , you divorce .

You know , it's hurt a man's heart , but you have to leave .

Axehilt

The community doesn't necessarily hate quests and raiding.  Keep in mind that the minority can be very vocal, and that criticizing something doesn't automatically mean you hate it.

Granted my own criticism of raiding is pretty brutal and I wouldn't mind seeing it replaced with more small-scale group content.  The reasons raiding sucks for me are mostly (a) scheduling game time and (b) failing mostly due to others' mistakes rather than my own.  But there's more to it than that since LFR (WOW) solved that by letting you queue into raid groups which is great, but didn't fully fix failing due to others' mistakes (you fail way less in LFR, but only because it's so easy that it's boring.)  

To me small-scale grouping is the best balance, where my own contribution matters a lot but I still get all the nuance of group play.  Although I'd be interested in seeing a game try out an unusual reward system where your reward is primarily determined by your own performance (damage/mitigation/healing, and reacting correctly to the boss' abilities).  If 80% of my reward comes from how well I do my own individual job, then it'd be way less stressful to be in a bad group (since their badness wouldn't completely prevent me from getting rewards.)  I do think you lose a social element by doing this though, which is why I think small-scale grouping remains the best content.

nariusseldon

iixviiiix said:

Some MMO change too much like an married woman that make you don't want to come back home even though you had sweet time with her in the past .

That sounds WAY too serious for playing some games.

My wife will throw a fit if she hear that from me. And many players play multiple MMOs .. so are we talking about polygamy here?

DJkarlkani

I am old look when I signed up for MMORPG, I am sure alot of you kids where not even walking or talking, when I was mmo'ing as a teen. Take it from a vet the problem is that, MMO were to hard for the average person. In UO it was impossible to get the gold to purchase a castle or even find a place to plant a castle. So ppl ended up purchasing this stuff on ebay for real money. 

This became a problem because the companies wasn't getting paid for such transactions, and the problem still exists today. So developers have created games which doesn't allow this to happen again. Rather there will be a item mall or some other solution. Further more they don't make anything hard to achieve.  A few hours grinding and you got it.

I have played almost every mmo out there and I have alway be chasing the feeling of  UO back in the 96,97,98 days. But for the most part I have given up, video games in generally have gotten alot easier and no longer require a person to develop skill in them to achive anything. 

nariusseldon

DJkarlkani said:

This became a problem because the companies wasn't getting paid for such transactions, and the problem still exists today. So developers have created games which doesn't allow this to happen again. Rather there will be a item mall or some other solution. Further more they don't make anything hard to achieve.  A few hours grinding and you got it.

spending time is not challenging.

For example, a D3 greater rift takes only 15 min to play, but few can go up to the top of the leaderboard.

And the target audience today (including me) is not willing to waste a lot of time in a single game. The specific gameplay needs to be fun from the start, and don't requires a lot of time just to move the progress a little. 

Games need to be like games (by the targeted audience's definition) and not like work. 

Sovrath

XImpalerX said:

If the old MMO's were so great, then why aren't you still playing them?

Because they were changed.

That's why, for me, this Lineage 2 classic server is so intriguing.

Though, I would also say that sometimes the controls/graphics don't hold up over the long term and probably require something of an update. I doubt that most old games will get this as it costs quite a bit of money.

But don't think that people aren't playing these old mmo's. I have the original everquest on my computer and in many ways it's a breath of fresh air even though it's a bit horrible on the eyes.

I know there are people playing Dark Age of Camelot as one can see over 1,000 people enjoying it night after night.

It's just that the lion's share of mmo players, especially if they came in the WoW era are expecting different things and that's where the money is going to go, to chase these people.

Mors-Subita

XImpalerX said:

If the old MMO's were so great, then why aren't you still playing them?

The problem is that they get dated and it breaks immersion.
A perfect example is DAOC. I tried to go back and the game mechanics and stuff are still fantastic, but the interface is poor, the game isn't very responsive, and the graphics seem overly dated. 

Give it an overhaul on graphics, improve the responsiveness, and either give it a new UI or make the UI customizable and I would play it starting today and onwards... No other changes needed at all.

The problem is that no matter how great anything is eventually you will either get tired of it, burn out, or it will become dated and won't be kept up to date.

In my case I quit at ToA because ToA was a PoS, and a lot of people felt the same way. ToA killed a lot of our community. If they had skipped ToA and went right from shrouded isles to catacombs (not counting foundations or NF since those were free) their community would have gotten a lot bigger... And if they had kept upgrading the graphics engine and the graphics(like they did with SI) every couple of years to keep it up to date that would have helped a lot as well... And they could easily improve the UI... *shrug

ArChWind

XImpalerX said:

If the old MMO's were so great, then why aren't you still playing them?

I am and will continue to until something comes out that is actually playable instead of a pipe dream of unrealistic hype.

Gaming.Rocks2

OP is listing the sum of all the complaints on these forums. It's like asking people what colors they don't like and list them altogether then you'd have a list of all possible colors, you can't make the conclusion as people hate all colors. 

Like any other form of entertainment money is in "mass appeal". The reason those old roots went dry and dead is because they weren't appealing to the masses. Hence no AAA developer would risk their budget on something they have already experienced that wouldn't profit them as it should. 

I think the future of MMORPGs lie in crowdfunding but replicating the past wouldn't save them. There's a reason those old titles that many of us love changed and died. Yes, maybe they made a wrong decision. But there was a reason that they needed to make a drastic decision. None of them were just flourishing and blossoming all over the industry and decided over a drunken state that they should change everything. 

So no, I don't think anyone should go back, ever. It is always about evolving. But sadly in this process many a good thing fade away. Just because not enough people were willing to pay for their existence not due to natural selection. 

nariusseldon

Vardahoth said:

The real problem with mmos is they stopped releasing them over 10 years ago, and all we have are games with instances and lobbies.

Change the definition. Problem solved.

Cecropia

nariusseldon said:

Vardahoth said:

The real problem with mmos is they stopped releasing them over 10 years ago, and all we have are games with instances and lobbies.

Change the definition. Problem solved.

Oranges have gone extinct and the closest available fruit are limes. I have no interest in limes and all I want is an orange. To fix this problem your proposal is to simply start calling "limes" "oranges". 

Congratulations, Narius. You're level of intelligence is exceptional.