What could be done to improve MMOs?

[wabbitseason]

This post is the perfect example of why I believe MMOs need to become specialized for more focused groups of people, For the most part I disagree with almost everything you want changed, but I can see why you and others might want to play this game. I would have no interest in it however.

Now if you had this game, and 1 that was almost the exact polar opposite BOTH games would attract a very excited and loyal fanbase, but companies instead try to make everyone happy and wind up watering down the game for everyone.

Of your 10 points, I personally only agree with Sanbox and crafting(!), but disagree strongly with most everything else. That makes neither of us wrong though which again goes back to my main point.

You claim to like Sandbox games and then disagree with many points explicitly describing a quality Sandbox. What?

 

[Thuleman]

Why are we stuck grinding mostly solo content over and over to level up?

Because soloing is in almost all games the most efficient way to level up quickly and the gaming community as a whole no longer cares about the journey and only about the end-game.

When EQ2 launched and required you to group to level, like it was done in EQ1, players left and went to WoW where they could just solo.

Also, leveling that requires groups requires that you are able to dedicate time to the game at the same time as other people whom you may want to level with. As a general rule most other people are idiots, so finding people you can stand and play with on your schedule is very challenging for adults.

Why are raids and dungeons such a small part of the game and only facilitate small numbers?

Because the 120 man raids from EQ1 have shown that they are extremely difficult to coordinate. The 1000+ battles in EVE Online show that technology still is the bottleneck for such massive "raids" and coordinating them on the player side is still complicated. In addition the contribution of the individual in such large scale battles is diminished and people like to matter rather than just being one of thousands.

Why is there so little coop orientated game play that require groups of players to coordinate?

Because the market has shown that most people simply don't like to co-op for normal gameplay and only put up with it for extraordinary rewards that simply cannot be obtained solo.

Why is there any solo content at all in MMOs?!?!

See my previous answer.
WoW actually has a great story line for many of their quests but people don't bother with them and haven't even in the beginning because most don't feel it's worth their time to spend an extra 30 minutes completing some quest if they could gain a level instead and have essentially outleveled the quest reward.

The biggest problem imho is that MMOs are no longer epic.

In EQ1 it took hundreds of hours /played to get to the level cap (hell levels anyone?). Obtaining the original epic weapons before the quests became trivialized was also epic. You needed many other people to help you to obtain your weapon (i.e. Mage/Warrior epics).

Today the focus is on the end-game because that is where most players spend most of their time. It's a circular problem in that resources are focused on the end-game but the end-game is the focus for players because getting there is so fast, and it's fast because the devs focus on the end-game, yadda yadda yadda.

If I were in some MMO I couldn't care less if I were "stuck" at level 20 of 50 for a month as long as my time at 20 was entertaining every night I log on.

 

[Quartz-1]

I'd like to do away with the levelling system completely. I dip into Runes of Magic now and then and while that game does have levels, you can also boost your items (and thus yourself) with runes. Now if that boosting were internalised, you wouldn't need levels.

 

[Shalafi]

I doubt they can be improved, I really do.

MMO's have become a stale genre because of oversaturation and the fact that WoW has been so damn hard to topple and surpass.

Sure you may get the opinion here that X or Y MMO was better than WoW, but for the vast majority of us, WoW was the pinnacle of MMO's while it lasted, after that, we compared everything to WoW, and we're all poorer for that.

I don't know what else to say, except every time I try a MMO, I just simply don't feel like going through the grind again and lose interest in record amounts of time.

 

[EvilAngel]

long rant about community stuff, anti "multi-server," pro "keeping servers separate," pro promoting player interaction on every level:
...

While i understand where you are coming from and i miss the feeling of having a real community in a MMO a lot just imagine if that game existed right now.

How much time do you think you would spend coordinating groups/trades/events vs actually doing them? What about players in low population servers?

In vanilla WoW you had your community alright but waiting more than an hour just to get everyone to the same place, then someone would leave 10 minutes in and one of us had to go back to town to look for a replacement while we all waited another 20/30m, that i don't particularly miss.

There needs to be a certain balance between what you are saying and something practical, but i do agree we have way too much convenience to feel a sense of community because developers give us the players too much of what we want and too little of what we need.

 

[DarkStryke]

Again, they can easily be improved, but you won't be chasing a mass-market of mouth breathing xbox live style players. That's a game that no major publisher wants, all they care about is squeezing the most money possible out of a player.

This is why WoW has done a complete 180 since vanilla, it's why the industry is full of garbage wow-clones, and why the real turn around of the genre will only come through indy studios with no major publisher calling the shots.

 

[Spidey329]

Treadmill or stationary bike required to play. That would do tremendous for it.

 

[spugnor]

More player driven content.

Hell, i'd love to see a game where the "epic" gear isn't a drop, it has to be crafted. You can't just buy a healing pot, someone has to make it first.

And epic anything should be fucking HARD to get. Make the goal worth the effort to attain it, and not something just handed out.

One of the best examples i can think of was in vanilla WoW. A guild mate managed to get a thunderfury sword. This required two rare drops out of an end world raid, a LOT of mats, and a special quest raid to kill the boss required to forge the item. This is not a perfect example, but it was HARD to do, and required a lot of work and help to achieve. And thus when achieved, it meant something.

Like someone else posted, they had tons of fun being a crafter, and i can see this as being a good thing. Rather than run instance or dungeon X hundreds of times to get what you want, you work to get money or farm mats to get what you need to, to have another player (or yourself) craft the item.

 

[Tudz]

Treadmill or stationary bike required to play. That would do tremendous for it.

There's an interesting concept. Remove all fast travel and have the game wired to a treadmill and whenever you want to go somewhere you have to walk there on the treadmill, lol,

 

[Trimlock]

What would they do if they wanted to implement flying mounts? Have you sit there and flap your wings? Our would you hold your arms up running around the room making flying sounds?

 

[Tudz]

What would they do if they wanted to implement flying mounts? Have you sit there and flap your wings? Our would you hold your arms up running around the room making flying sounds?

You remember that Futurama episode with the flying bike? Oh yeeeeeah

 

[HardwareSearcher]

The best thing that can be done to improve MMOs:
You know those games that are the same 15-year-old-garbage that keeps being remade and sold in a different package? (aka, all the games being released in a completed-state now and in the near future)

Everyone stop purchasing them, stop subscribing to them, and stop making microtransactions in them.

When that happens, they will start innovating and making new, improved types of MMOs. But until people stop giving them their money for little in return, they are not going to go out of their way to decrease their profits and give you something actually valuable.

 

[wonderfield]

A lot of people have mentioned player-driven content, and clearly that's the right approach, but what I'd like to see is a genuine player-driven world. I see no reason, for instance, why players can't be building structures, like homes and businesses, and running business themselves, with all the scaffolding to make that feasible provided by the game. Why couldn't players have the ability to generate their own quests, based on some need of theirs, and hire other players to complete them?

A really good online RPG should provide a world for players to build upon and the scaffolding required to allow them to build, own and interact with the things they own. Given enough players, a society will arise with that, with all the problems real societies face and with all the benefits that come from a world where players can actually do the things they want to.

 

[Stiler]

Less linear design, less forcing players down a path. We need more open sandbox and freedom.

Combat needs to break away from the usual "special" spam and cd's and go toward more player focus imo.

When playing an mmo combat is a major thing, but the design of comba tin most is extremely repetitive and not fun at all. If your mmo can not be fun to simply play based on what you hae to do then ti's already got a point off it.

I mean imagine if they took mmo combat and then put it into a game that was extremely focused on it, say God of WAr or something, people would go apeshit becaues it's not fun.

As far as outside combat, to m e the main thing mmo's need is freedom. It still amazes me to this day that a game like UO, which was one of the first graphical mmo's did it sooooooo much better then almost any mmo since.

There were no classes, there were no "quests," you didn't login UO to go focus on finding gear and chasing that "Carrot on a stick" routine that almost all mmo's post-everquest focused on.

I had more fun in UO then any mmo since then, and sadly it seems that it was (and will be) the last major AAA produced mmo like it, since every big mmo is content with following a more WoW like focus.

It doesn't make sense though, look at the current singl eplayer rpgs, what dominates the market? TES, and what is it? A sandbox rpg, no linear design, no forcing the player to be "good" or "bad" no hand holding down a linear path.

That is what made UO so good, you could play it how you want, and it thrived on it's community. UO was the most social mmo out there because players could be just as in real life, good, bad, in between.

End game in UO wa sjust as fun as early, because it didn't focus on raids or anything of that crap but just simply letting you make of the game what you wanted. Exploring, combat, taming animals, crafting, building/decorating houses, whatever it was up to you.

Basically to me that's what mmo's need, fun combat and freedom, focused on simpyl allowing you to do what you wish within the world an dproviding you the most fun tools and thing sto do it with.

 

[zoobaby]

You remember that Futurama episode with the flying bike? Oh yeeeeeah

Oh, I can't wait until the tattoos on Amy's butt hear about this!

That's one of my favorite episodes.

 

[Inu]

Exploration and adventure...

No public betas that spoil the content, no behind the scenes developer interviews, no prelaunch sneak peaks, just a huge unknown world where you can adventure with friends and strangers.

All the corporate crap and balance discussion takes the magic out of it for me to some extent

This is partly what made EQ so AMAZING, back when the internet was still growing, information wasn't as easily available, the game required hard work and investigation to really understand it. I don't think they even had maps that i can recall.

 

[Stiler]

Yes EQ had maps in game, but it wasn't as detailed nor explained, there was no waypoint indicators, etc.

If you wanted someone to find you or were telling someone where to come you had to use loc feature and figure it out yourself.

 

[Harkamus]

Yes EQ had maps in game, but it wasn't as detailed nor explained, there was no waypoint indicators, etc.

If you wanted someone to find you or were telling someone where to come you had to use loc feature and figure it out yourself.

I missed that part of the older MMOs. My first ever MMO was Asheron's Call 2. I think the system was the same, where you had to find people with coordinates. Speaking of AC2, I loved their take on the traditional hero archetypes. Yea, you had stuff like rangers, but you also had classes that threw rocks instead of using bows and arrows like the ranger did.

These days all you tend to find are the same class over and over again. Warrior, mage, ranger.

 

[Globox]

remove pay to win

 

[DarkStryke]

Yes EQ had maps in game, but it wasn't as detailed nor explained, there was no waypoint indicators, etc.

If you wanted someone to find you or were telling someone where to come you had to use loc feature and figure it out yourself.

EQ in the early days did not have any mapping functionality other then /loc, which spit out your axis coordinates. Crude mapping functionality came in with the LoY expansion, which was 4 years post release.

Back in the day we had EQAtlas, which was a collection of hand drawn maps on grid paper. And if you really want to know, there was no in-game compass either, you had a skill called sense direction and it gradually became more accurate with use.

Talk about walking up hill both ways

 

[mlcarson]

How about a system where douchebag activities affected alignment such that they would change faction or something so I'd never have to see them again except to attack them?

I kind of think it would be neat to have a way of doing instanced dungeons with NPC's but with zero rewards except experience. It'd be a way of practicing dungeons before actually having to participate in a normal group. There would then be no excuse for people never having seen an instance and not knowing what to do.

Most of the other changes I'd like to see have been implemented in Guild Wars 2. I'm looking forward to that game.