What are the greatest innovations in MMORPGs?

Little-Boot

Wait, I am not decrying the absence of it, I am here to discuss it. 

For some time there seems to have been a glut of rather generic and derivative MMOs, at least that is the way of most discussions on the subject, and those innovations that do arise are often considered small fry, more an evolution (or devolution depending upon your standpoint) of the genre.

So I thought I would ask the people here what they think the greatest innovations have been, when they happened, in which game, and how they affected the genre moving forward.  

And here is mine; for good or bad (bad), one of the greatest innovations for me was the DDO F2P/ cash shop transition. It sure changed the genre. 

DKLond

In no particular order:

UO's full loot PvP and emphasis on a player-driven economy
DAoC RvR
Vanguard player-skill-driven crafting system
WoW's quest-based progression instead of endless grinding
WoW's approach to instanced dungeons
Public quests starting from WAR -> GW2 -> Rift
Age of Conan story-focused quests - continued in games like SWtOR and TSW
Age of Conan "action combat" was fantastic back in 2008
GW2 dynamically scaled zones
DDO role-oriented cooperative dungeon exploration
LotRO zone/world design in terms of content-density and immersion
WoW zone/world design in terms of sheer variety and atmosphere
WoW's combat system was a revelation back in 2004

cameltosis

I wasn't around in the earliest days of MMOs so don't know which did it first / best / most innovatively, but the thing I am most grateful for (and can generally only be found in MMOs) is large-scale grouping. 

I love multiplayer. I love playing with other players. I love playing cooperatively with other players (as opposed to simply being on the same team like in FPSs). 

So, whichever MMO brought in large scale grouping, like raids, is one of the greatest innovations to me personally. My first introduction to this was in SWG where I pretty much exclusively leveled up in 20man raids on tattooine. Going from 2- or 4-man split screen on consoles to 20-man social raids was immense!

[Deleted User]

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ceratop001

First off great topic. I'm going in a completely different direction and I'm sure the Nerd Police will find fault with this.

In my honest opinion the greatest innovation has been the gathering together players from all over the world. It has obviously been done in sports for years. The ability to play a game from California and talk to someone from Ex:(Romania) is mind boggling to me from my generation. Younger generations might not appreciate this so much. 1995 I started to play games hardcore if you will, and met so many people. I now have friends from all over the world. Even today it still blows my mind.

I firmly believe mmorpgs helped to gather people all over the world and forced us to get along if we wanted to win. Like in full scale pvp or dungeons we learned to talk and get along with people from all over the world because of games. In the process I made a lot of friends. Even this forum is a result of it. We have commenters from all over the world and we share ideas and interact because of our love of games.

That's my 2 cents...

iixviiiix

The monetization system , P2P to F2P with P2W .