The genre of mmorpgs is terrible and one of the worst genres in gaming.
You have over 13k posts on a website named MMORPG....which you say is the worst genre in gaming? huh?
Yes. It is.
The genre is terrible because it has not made any attempts to further itself since I joined this site in 2006. Which is why the most popular games in the genre are ones released years and years ago. The genre itself is loaded with potential but buried under failures.
The genre is the worst in gaming because it has evolved into barely more than a mobile gaming, lootbox driven slot machine gatcha gotcha genre.
I agree with everything you said....right up until you call it the worst genre in gaming. Despite these things it is still my favorite. It could be so much better and that is disappointing, but still the best to me, not the worst.
I think both over-saturation and unmet expectations play a part in new player decline, but I think the worst thing is devs not picking an audience and making a game for that group. They want to pull in all players an try and throw everything in the game and in doing so make a game that isn't great for any group, just OK.
Other than that players themselves have changed. The players coming up now have had gaming their entire lives. It isn't like it was for my generation when gaming first hit the scene. It hooked people, even the parents most of the time when the first consoles hit the homes.
Lastly I would say monetization has become the biggest issue for most. Games are not released as a complete game now. Things get cut to be sold as addons or day one DLC. Then they use the free to play model where they nickel and dime people for ten times what people would have paid for the same game if it had a sub or just a box price.
The genre of mmorpgs is terrible and one of the worst genres in gaming.
You have over 13k posts on a website named MMORPG....which you say is the worst genre in gaming? huh?
Yes. It is.
The genre is terrible because it has not made any attempts to further itself since I joined this site in 2006. Which is why the most popular games in the genre are ones released years and years ago. The genre itself is loaded with potential but buried under failures.
The genre is the worst in gaming because it has evolved into barely more than a mobile gaming, lootbox driven slot machine gatcha gotcha genre.
I agree with everything you said....right up until you call it the worst genre in gaming. Despite these things it is still my favorite. It could be so much better and that is disappointing, but still the best to me, not the worst.
MMOs are the worst genre of video games, but the it's not their fault.
MMOs are bad video games because MMO players won't let them be better.
Whenever a new MMO wants to do something different MMO players complain because it's not what MMOs were like 20 years ago.
People really want to play new MMOs but they all suck.
So, the next MMO to be released that doesn't suck will be be huge.
No mater what mmo comes next, if bots run unchecked....then I lose interest. The biggest mistake any company that runs a mmo is making, is not investing enough into human resource to fight back against bots, gold sellers, etc..from day 1. I lost interest in NW, for example, after reporting a fishing bot daily for about 2 months and nothing was done.
People really want to play new MMOs but they all suck.
So, the next MMO to be released that doesn't suck will be be huge.
No mater what mmo comes next, if bots run unchecked....then I lose interest. The biggest mistake any company that runs a mmo is making, is not investing enough into human resource to fight back against bots, gold sellers, etc..from day 1. I lost interest in NW, for example, after reporting a fishing bot daily for about 2 months and nothing was done.
Americans won't accept the measures needed to truly snuff out the bot effect on their servers, not sure about other countries.
Maybe a new take? Most of the people who buy games today (whether it is a MMO game or not) are not MMO players (loosely, people who want to play MMOs, and want to stick with a game for more than several months).
The majority of these players are just excited about a new game to play, and with the marketing (Esp Wow) these players are OK with buying an MMO game, play it for several weeks like a single player game, chew through the content, and move on to the next.
The "good" MMOs already have the majority of the "real" MMO players. So you get this mass of singleplayer gamers, some amount of converted MMO players, and the game's population is decimated after several weeks or months (depending on how good the game is).
I play ESO from time to time, the financial model for it is my favorite. I don't mind spending money on games, I know the devs have to make money somehow. I just hate when the models are so bad that its hard to justify coming back and paying a subscription and buying the new DLC. ESO is great because I can play anytime I want, if there is a ton of content I wanna try for a bit, I can sub and get all of it. If there is content I wanna buy, the sub usually gives u enough currency to buy atleast one DLC. Its hard for me to ever justify renewing my WOW sub when I know I will stop playing for months just to realize I need to cancel it because I am not going to play again xD
MMO gamers place hope and desire over history and fact. All. The. Time.
As a result, they
-Hop in the new game
-play a few dozen levels
-realize it's the same game different skin
- go to the next one that promises to 'break the mold' or 'leave the [thing you dislike] behind'
MMORPGs have been almost the same exact game for almost 20 years now. I'm up for anyone that wants to challenge that. Pick a year, and post the MMOs that came out during that year. Is there much diversity to the list or are they almost all fantasy-themed, level-based, class-restricted MMOs with a raiding endgame?
Now the argument against that is often that the games of a genre are normally going to be similar. Agreed, but are they ever that monolithic in design? MMORPGs weren't always like that. My favorite year is 2003:
- Second Life
- Star Wars Galaxies (SWG)
- A Tale in the Desert (ATITD)
- There
- Puzzle Pirates
- EVE Online
- Project Entropia (now Entropia Universe)
- Shadowbane
- Horizons (now Istaria)
- ToonTown
Different themes, different progression systems, different advancement paths, and many don't require a stitch of combat.
So it's easy to see why pops drop so fast in today's MMOs, the audience is buying into the hope, but once there, they see it's just a new coat of paint on that same exact game they've played literally countless times before.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Other than that players themselves have changed. The players coming up now have had gaming their entire lives. It isn't like it was for my generation when gaming first hit the scene. It hooked people, even the parents most of the time when the first consoles hit the homes.
<snip>
I tend to say it a lot. Every adult alive today has had 20+ years to experience an MMORPG; children have always had MMORPGs. People have changed because their experiences have changed.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Are you kidding me? You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep... people are leaving these "new" games so fast b/c they are realizing its just an old turd with a different perfume... give us ONE single new idea or gameplay innovation and we'll stick around... we don't want to play WOW with shiny new graphics tyvm...
I'm the exact opposite of you. I want the tried and true things I found fun and exciting two decades ago done better. New ideas mean crap. Like the new idea of making games with no content besides crafting and pvp, or the new idea of instead of making an rpg, you'd tie abilities to equipment, or the new idea of instead of paying a $15 subscription a month and everyone on an even playing field, you'd go "f2p" and cater to people spending thousands per month, etc.
Wow, to me, got better and better up through WotLK. Then they started catering to people who liked the nue-new, and stripped talent trees, thinking, and complexity. No thank you. Every expansion up through WotLK added more complexity and systems, more options, more choices.
I'd love a new game that did what I loved from wow, AC, DDO, AO, etc., and tried to actually do it better, instead of doing something nue-different and just making a game that doesn't appeal to me in the least.
Until then, I'll occasionally try new things for a bit if it has something that appeals to me, but I'll go back to wow classic and DDO and play games that did things right and have years and years and decades of appeal to me.
Josh Strife Hayes brought up a really important point about this topic recently when discussing "Sideways Mobility" between other genres, and this one. And by that, I specifically mean the ability of otherwise "skilled" gamers to play with their more MMROPG-focused acquaintances.
TLDR: It boils down to the "Power curve". This genre is TRASH design because it crutches entirely on sunk cost fallacy where getting more muscle memory and familiarity with the playstyle itself is only a tiny portion of realizing your character's Power-Fantasy.
I like citing the now dead game "Firefall" in this instance because when it was in Beta, IE: when it was most popular and most like a sandbox Shooter instead of a ThemePark, the power curve only started at 1/4 of your final potential and the strongest you could ever get was 4x Tankier or "Blastier" than a brand new character. Planetside also has this dynamic even more muted where you can really only get about 2x as powerful as a brand new players after chasing every upgrade in the game. And when Firefall's studio went through a bunch of drama and declared a mutiny on its Founder, it changed that entire formula to a rote ThemePark with a 16x power curve and promises of expansions that would just keep raising the "Level Cap".
Why does this matter?? Because other players trying to join you, have no meaningful way of playing WITH you if you're already at the level cap or even halfway there. Nothing they do in combat matters until they spend months and months grinding up their Gear to the level that the rest of the Eternally-Online community is already at. It's FOMO on steroids where you had to be there day1 playing almost non stop.
ForkKnife doesn't have this problem. AMOGUS doesn't either. Even Deep Space Galactic and other consistently popular "progression" based Steam games keep their own power curves in check or use creative RogueLite & Matchmaking mechanics to make sure there isn't this massive chasm between Tryhards and weekend-warriors.
I think it is a combination of unrealistic expectations, sated curiosity, and a shortage of content for those games actually new rather than newly released in a region.
Underestimating audience intelligence only gets you so far.
Greed drives a lot of these subgenres into the ground, it happened in 1983, it happened with the MMORPG boom in 2008; it's been a ongoing calamity in the Mobile game sector; it's even hooked it's claws into the single-player console/PC gaming space (repeat of Atari game crash)
The big difference today is that amongst the rubble and war-torn bodies, those that actually care about their video game and it's audience are usually the one's still standing- bruised, but still standing.
And then theirs mega corporations' that just replace caring and passion with large stakes of money, so it doesn't matter how we got to where we are today; what matters now going forward is being able to tell the difference between the appearance of passion, and actual passion.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013 Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005 Fishing in RL since 1992 Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
I think WoW WOTLK probably nailed this the best as an example of it done well. You had your story mode where you leveled to max. You had your daily and weekly stuff to do. Then you got into normal dungeons, then heroic dungeons, and then you were ready to start raiding. Because this progression was so smooth and well done, as a casual player I had a number of alts who were either raid ready or actively participated in the lower level raids that you could join that were being organized in general chat on my server. It made me feel productive I guess. Like I was part of the game community and able to contribute. Even though the hardest raids were not something I personally was going to participate in, I could see clearly the path to get there. It was in reach and I had more than one alt brushing up against it.
not going to happen on classic woltk....sadly GDPK is here to stay
For me MMORPGs got worse after around 2011-2012. Before that I enjoyed a lot of older games, some of them were copies of WoW and I really liked that about them, but I don't like the new ones. I've bought ESO and few more, have tried pretty much every modern one I could get my hands on, but they just feel so different from what I'm looking for that I lose interest in an hour or two at best.
Now I just play MMORPGs, some on private severs and I'm kind of content. I'm not really looking forward to any of the new ones, not Pantheon, not Ashes of Creation or whatever, I'm done with hype, hope, excitement, expectations and so forth.
I think the healthiest thing any MMORPG player can do is come to terms that new MMORPGs just aren't good, to find one older one that they like and is somewhat solid so it doesn't get shut down or if it has private servers, there are lots to choose from and just play that.
I agree with everything you said....right up until you call it the worst genre in gaming. Despite these things it is still my favorite. It could be so much better and that is disappointing, but still the best to me, not the worst.
To me, this isn't about favorite or not. Liking it or not. I am speaking of the genre as it is and has been for a long long time. Not what I remember it to be. What it was and what it is are two very different things. The genre has fallen so far away from the original idea of what it means that it is barely recognizable. What other genre in gaming has fallen so far away from it's original vision? The worst one. mmorpgs.
Whilst I agree with you on your point of view, I am curious whether you think this is restricted to just MMORPGs, or whether u think it more generalised to the whole RPG genre?
The reason I ask is that it feels like many years since I've played a decent RPG. I feel like nearly all modern RPGs are hyper-focused on telling a story, to the point where they've become more like interactive films than games. Actual roleplaying mechanics are few and far between, so even if there is some decent gameplay, its more like an action / adventure game than a roleplaying game.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
I agree with everything you said....right up until you call it the worst genre in gaming. Despite these things it is still my favorite. It could be so much better and that is disappointing, but still the best to me, not the worst.
To me, this isn't about favorite or not. Liking it or not. I am speaking of the genre as it is and has been for a long long time. Not what I remember it to be. What it was and what it is are two very different things. The genre has fallen so far away from the original idea of what it means that it is barely recognizable. What other genre in gaming has fallen so far away from it's original vision? The worst one. mmorpgs.
Whilst I agree with you on your point of view, I am curious whether you think this is restricted to just MMORPGs, or whether u think it more generalised to the whole RPG genre?
The reason I ask is that it feels like many years since I've played a decent RPG. I feel like nearly all modern RPGs are hyper-focused on telling a story, to the point where they've become more like interactive films than games. Actual roleplaying mechanics are few and far between, so even if there is some decent gameplay, its more like an action / adventure game than a roleplaying game.
Erm, I think you may have missed quite a few releases, then. We've had no shortage of quality releases over the past few years, both from full studios and Indies.
The Pillars series, Pathfinder series, the Divinity series, Colony Ship, Wasteland 3, and Atom just to make a few. All include numerous narrative and gameplay pathways defined by your characters skills, history, and even appearance in some of those titles.
The cRPG genre has had a sort of renaissance recently, to be honest, in a way these MMORPG devs (specifically crowdfunded projects) can only dream of.
I agree with everything you said....right up until you call it the worst genre in gaming. Despite these things it is still my favorite. It could be so much better and that is disappointing, but still the best to me, not the worst.
To me, this isn't about favorite or not. Liking it or not. I am speaking of the genre as it is and has been for a long long time. Not what I remember it to be. What it was and what it is are two very different things. The genre has fallen so far away from the original idea of what it means that it is barely recognizable. What other genre in gaming has fallen so far away from it's original vision? The worst one. mmorpgs.
Whilst I agree with you on your point of view, I am curious whether you think this is restricted to just MMORPGs, or whether u think it more generalised to the whole RPG genre?
The reason I ask is that it feels like many years since I've played a decent RPG. I feel like nearly all modern RPGs are hyper-focused on telling a story, to the point where they've become more like interactive films than games. Actual roleplaying mechanics are few and far between, so even if there is some decent gameplay, its more like an action / adventure game than a roleplaying game.
Erm, I think you may have missed quite a few releases, then. We've had no shortage of quality releases over the past few years, both from full studios and Indies.
The Pillars series, Pathfinder series, the Divinity series, Colony Ship, Wasteland 3, and Atom just to make a few. All include numerous narrative and gameplay pathways defined by your characters skills, history, and even appearance in some of those titles.
The cRPG genre has had a sort of renaissance recently, to be honest, in a way these MMORPG devs (specifically crowdfunded projects) can only dream of.
Imo so speaking of lost ark specifically but also to other games in the same way, the game is too heavily monetised at the end game. Take upgrading gear. It fails so much you have to spend literal thousands to get your next bit. On top of that put customer service.
My account was caught up in the initial ban wave for nothing. It took 4 weeks to unban it and countless attempts at contacting anyone that would even look at it. By the time it was unbanned and combined with failure after failure I quit.
Games like lost ark should provide a subscription model as well without the f2p issues.
I would likely still be playing it as the bones are good. It was fun until the end.
TLDR.
Provide actual customer service
Provide sub model that is unlocked...
In my honest opinion... while the developers are maybe not what they used to be.. us players are not aswell.
Most of us are over our 30's or more, and we had our golden times between 16 and 24 years old, let it be World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, Runescape, Tibia..
Were those games the best thing ever created at the time? No they weren't, we like to think they were, because we had a great time playing it, but they weren't.
We were experiencing online gaming for the first time (so did our friends) and we were engaging each other, that was probably 90% of the fun. That was what it made us stick around.
It was exciting to log in and have the ability to meet people from other cities, or even other countries. We were not used to that kind of relationships, and we got to play some okayish game while completing content together, awesome!
Now we are overexposed to endless sources of entertainment, and we don't find anything enjoyable anymore. Smartphones and it's endless pit of games, all the streaming platforms, social media... and it's never enough. At the end of the day we are always bored.
We have nostalgia, understandable. But are the games nowadays that bad? No they aren't, they are pretty awesome in fact. It's just that the playerbase (us, the ones between 30 and 45) just hates everything new, because nothing is good enough.
The best thing is when people stop playing a game because "it's dead". A good friend of mine stopped playing a popular game the other day, when i asked him about it he said:
- "Bro the game is dead, is no use playing it! Won't spend my precious time in a dead game, the devs are trash, the game is horrible"
- "Is that so? I logged in recently and looked good to me, did a couple of dungeons and got myself new gear, it was awesome"
- "Man, you know nothing, that particular streamer just said that the game is dead, he even uninstalled it live, lol. So did I"
- "Oh, I see.. why did you started playing then?"
- "Well, that particular streamer was playing the alfa and it was super dope, and then at launch i got the premium package and it was super cool. I couldn't log in for the first week because bro it was so hype!! Ah those were the days, but now the game is trash"
This is a theatralization of the actual conversation but it was more or less like this.
"At the end of the day we are always bored" Exactly, at the end of the day we are always bored and feel empty Best Platform for MOD APKs & Premium Apps. All is free. Go to https://techzapk.com/ and enjoy.
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Other than that players themselves have changed. The players coming up now have had gaming their entire lives. It isn't like it was for my generation when gaming first hit the scene. It hooked people, even the parents most of the time when the first consoles hit the homes.
Lastly I would say monetization has become the biggest issue for most. Games are not released as a complete game now. Things get cut to be sold as addons or day one DLC. Then they use the free to play model where they nickel and dime people for ten times what people would have paid for the same game if it had a sub or just a box price.
No mater what mmo comes next, if bots run unchecked....then I lose interest. The biggest mistake any company that runs a mmo is making, is not investing enough into human resource to fight back against bots, gold sellers, etc..from day 1. I lost interest in NW, for example, after reporting a fishing bot daily for about 2 months and nothing was done.
The majority of these players are just excited about a new game to play, and with the marketing (Esp Wow) these players are OK with buying an MMO game, play it for several weeks like a single player game, chew through the content, and move on to the next.
The "good" MMOs already have the majority of the "real" MMO players. So you get this mass of singleplayer gamers, some amount of converted MMO players, and the game's population is decimated after several weeks or months (depending on how good the game is).
The amount of actual MMO players is very small.
As a result, they
-Hop in the new game
-play a few dozen levels
-realize it's the same game different skin
- go to the next one that promises to 'break the mold' or 'leave the [thing you dislike] behind'
MMORPGs have been almost the same exact game for almost 20 years now. I'm up for anyone that wants to challenge that. Pick a year, and post the MMOs that came out during that year. Is there much diversity to the list or are they almost all fantasy-themed, level-based, class-restricted MMOs with a raiding endgame?
Now the argument against that is often that the games of a genre are normally going to be similar. Agreed, but are they ever that monolithic in design? MMORPGs weren't always like that. My favorite year is 2003:
- Second Life
- Star Wars Galaxies (SWG)
- A Tale in the Desert (ATITD)
- There
- Puzzle Pirates
- EVE Online
- Project Entropia (now Entropia Universe)
- Shadowbane
- Horizons (now Istaria)
- ToonTown
Different themes, different progression systems, different advancement paths, and many don't require a stitch of combat.
So it's easy to see why pops drop so fast in today's MMOs, the audience is buying into the hope, but once there, they see it's just a new coat of paint on that same exact game they've played literally countless times before.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I'm the exact opposite of you. I want the tried and true things I found fun and exciting two decades ago done better. New ideas mean crap. Like the new idea of making games with no content besides crafting and pvp, or the new idea of instead of making an rpg, you'd tie abilities to equipment, or the new idea of instead of paying a $15 subscription a month and everyone on an even playing field, you'd go "f2p" and cater to people spending thousands per month, etc.
Wow, to me, got better and better up through WotLK. Then they started catering to people who liked the nue-new, and stripped talent trees, thinking, and complexity. No thank you. Every expansion up through WotLK added more complexity and systems, more options, more choices.
I'd love a new game that did what I loved from wow, AC, DDO, AO, etc., and tried to actually do it better, instead of doing something nue-different and just making a game that doesn't appeal to me in the least.
Until then, I'll occasionally try new things for a bit if it has something that appeals to me, but I'll go back to wow classic and DDO and play games that did things right and have years and years and decades of appeal to me.
TLDR: It boils down to the "Power curve". This genre is TRASH design because it crutches entirely on sunk cost fallacy where getting more muscle memory and familiarity with the playstyle itself is only a tiny portion of realizing your character's Power-Fantasy.
I like citing the now dead game "Firefall" in this instance because when it was in Beta, IE: when it was most popular and most like a sandbox Shooter instead of a ThemePark, the power curve only started at 1/4 of your final potential and the strongest you could ever get was 4x Tankier or "Blastier" than a brand new character. Planetside also has this dynamic even more muted where you can really only get about 2x as powerful as a brand new players after chasing every upgrade in the game. And when Firefall's studio went through a bunch of drama and declared a mutiny on its Founder, it changed that entire formula to a rote ThemePark with a 16x power curve and promises of expansions that would just keep raising the "Level Cap".
Why does this matter?? Because other players trying to join you, have no meaningful way of playing WITH you if you're already at the level cap or even halfway there. Nothing they do in combat matters until they spend months and months grinding up their Gear to the level that the rest of the Eternally-Online community is already at. It's FOMO on steroids where you had to be there day1 playing almost non stop.
ForkKnife doesn't have this problem. AMOGUS doesn't either. Even Deep Space Galactic and other consistently popular "progression" based Steam games keep their own power curves in check or use creative RogueLite & Matchmaking mechanics to make sure there isn't this massive chasm between Tryhards and weekend-warriors.
That and MMOs are massively multiplayer so once the decline starts, more people quit for lack of players to play with.
Like the article said, WoW Clone #647 died because why play a clone when the real thing is better populated and polished.
Greed drives a lot of these subgenres into the ground, it happened in 1983, it happened with the MMORPG boom in 2008; it's been a ongoing calamity in the Mobile game sector; it's even hooked it's claws into the single-player console/PC gaming space (repeat of Atari game crash)
The big difference today is that amongst the rubble and war-torn bodies, those that actually care about their video game and it's audience are usually the one's still standing- bruised, but still standing.
And then theirs mega corporations' that just replace caring and passion with large stakes of money, so it doesn't matter how we got to where we are today; what matters now going forward is being able to tell the difference between the appearance of passion, and actual passion.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
Fishing in RL since 1992
Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
not going to happen on classic woltk....sadly GDPK is here to stay
Now I just play MMORPGs, some on private severs and I'm kind of content. I'm not really looking forward to any of the new ones, not Pantheon, not Ashes of Creation or whatever, I'm done with hype, hope, excitement, expectations and so forth.
I think the healthiest thing any MMORPG player can do is come to terms that new MMORPGs just aren't good, to find one older one that they like and is somewhat solid so it doesn't get shut down or if it has private servers, there are lots to choose from and just play that.
For me it's:
- LOTRO
- Turtle WoW
- Perfect World Classic
- Loong Revolution
and maybe after I take a break from some of the ones above so I can divert more attention to something else, like:
- Eldevin
- Villagers & Heroes
- SWG
The Pillars series, Pathfinder series, the Divinity series, Colony Ship, Wasteland 3, and Atom just to make a few. All include numerous narrative and gameplay pathways defined by your characters skills, history, and even appearance in some of those titles.
The cRPG genre has had a sort of renaissance recently, to be honest, in a way these MMORPG devs (specifically crowdfunded projects) can only dream of.
My account was caught up in the initial ban wave for nothing. It took 4 weeks to unban it and countless attempts at contacting anyone that would even look at it. By the time it was unbanned and combined with failure after failure I quit.
Games like lost ark should provide a subscription model as well without the f2p issues.
I would likely still be playing it as the bones are good. It was fun until the end.
TLDR.
Provide actual customer service
Provide sub model that is unlocked...
Exactly, at the end of the day we are always bored and feel empty
Best Platform for MOD APKs & Premium Apps. All is free. Go to https://techzapk.com/ and enjoy.