Decline Why do MMOs suck so much?

[MadMaxHellfire]

Wow started as the best thing ever happening to MMo

wow started as the popamolization of everything the mmos were trying to be, adding nothing, taking away a lot.

 

[TedNugent]

MMOs being even worse than vanilla is not a bullet point in favor of vanilla.

WoW appeared to be the least bad MMO in 2004. Blizzard production values and the IP have a lot to do with the appeal.

I really do not understand the appeal of vanilla beyond that. Someone please explain.

The appeal of vanilla was obvious after playing a game like everquest, it was taking ages to get a good group going, it was more demanding than some people's job, raids were for the most austitic rejects from the planet , i know what i am speaking about i was in a top tier raid guild, all of this was sorta hellish by the end to be honest . You had corpse recovery, loss of xp backed by an horrible grind, lot of cumbersome unfun mechanisms, pvp was a failure. But it was the first we were pionners , spending the average guy wages in internet provider costs.There was UO too, but it had no such long term staying power.

Wow cut of the bloat , polished like only old blizzard titles were and was well designed , and just plain fun, solo was even possible thats why it was so popular.Also ADSl , high speed internet became available and cheap.There's of course a big dose of nostalgia too

Given that's in relation to Everquest only, while I do really appreciate the historical perspective, it primarily tells me what I already suspected and pretty much said in the quote you're replying to, which is that vanilla WoW was a groundbreaking MMO at the time. People likely played Everquest for the same reason.

Now that the ground has been broken, and we've now proven that we can have thousands of little autists in instanced content silos pretending they're playing in an MMO game, what is the best example of the genre and how does it improve or address the flaws in the genre.

 

[Mortmal]

MMOs being even worse than vanilla is not a bullet point in favor of vanilla.

WoW appeared to be the least bad MMO in 2004. Blizzard production values and the IP have a lot to do with the appeal.

I really do not understand the appeal of vanilla beyond that. Someone please explain.

The appeal of vanilla was obvious after playing a game like everquest, it was taking ages to get a good group going, it was more demanding than some people's job, raids were for the most austitic rejects from the planet , i know what i am speaking about i was in a top tier raid guild, all of this was sorta hellish by the end to be honest . You had corpse recovery, loss of xp backed by an horrible grind, lot of cumbersome unfun mechanisms, pvp was a failure. But it was the first we were pionners , spending the average guy wages in internet provider costs.There was UO too, but it had no such long term staying power.

Wow cut of the bloat , polished like only old blizzard titles were and was well designed , and just plain fun, solo was even possible thats why it was so popular.Also ADSl , high speed internet became available and cheap.There's of course a big dose of nostalgia too

Given that's in relation to Everquest only, while I do really appreciate the historical perspective, it primarily tells me what I already suspected and pretty much said in the quote you're replying to, which is that vanilla WoW was a groundbreaking MMO at the time. People likely played Everquest for the same reason.

Now that the ground has been broken, and we've now proven that we can have thousands of little autists in instanced content silos pretending they're playing in an MMO game, what is the best example of the genre and how does it improve or address the flaws in the genre.

Thats the problem there's none...If there is have yet to see someone mentioning it here .Thats exactly as you say little autists in instanced content, there no real player interaction. I am afraid the best example is still wow.

 

[Poseidon00]

Player interaction is overrated, cooldowns are overrated, there is never a good story to them, they never have good or innovative or interesting mechanics. It's a time, soul, and money sink. Go read a book.

 

[TedNugent]

Player interaction is overrated, cooldowns are overrated, there is never a good story to them, they never have good or innovative or interesting mechanics. It's a time, soul, and money sink. Go read a book.

People have said that FFXIV allegedly has a good story. I find this incredibly hard to believe, but I am minimally intrigued.

As someone who grew up on FFVII and seeing the decline in the Final Fantasy series, I struggle to understand what that even means.

I certainly have never heard of an MMO with passable writing, but I am curious if a monocled Codexer can confirm that this is the case for FFXIV or is a hideous lie from webboos.

WoW writing is beyond cringe so I am curious about experimentation for proof of concept purposes.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Player interaction is overrated, cooldowns are overrated, there is never a good story to them, they never have good or innovative or interesting mechanics. It's a time, soul, and money sink. Go read a book.

People have said that FFXIV allegedly has a good story. I find this incredibly hard to believe, but I am minimally intrigued.

As someone who grew up on FFVII and seeing the decline in the Final Fantasy series, I struggle to understand what that even means.

I certainly have never heard of an MMO with passable writing, but I am curious if a monocled Codexer can confirm that this is the case for FFXIV or is a hideous lie from webboos.

WoW writing is beyond cringe so I am curious about experimentation for proof of concept purposes.

swtor takes this easily, some of the class storylines would be praised by the codex if they were singleplayer rpgs and the expansions range from meh to pretty good
star trek online is also decent for what it is.

 

[Ninjerk]

WoW writing

Spans 17 years now and how many writers? All of it is cringe?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

WoW writing

Spans 17 years now and how many writers? All of it is cringe?

starts off by raping regular warcraft, finishes with WOMYN STRONK

 

[TedNugent]

WoW writing

Spans 17 years now and how many writers? All of it is cringe?

starts off by raping regular warcraft, finishes with WOMYN STRONK

You don't even know the half of it, Jesus Christ. I had to punish my inner child into submission by getting loremaster back in Cata and periodically resub so I can remind myself why I shouldn't.

It makes me feel like crawling into the earth.

If you're referring to BDSM archer with your womyn strong comment, ironically she is now hitched to a giant blue daddy called The Jailer and has done nothing except pout since tumbling into the Maw.

The story itself is quite literally a running joke on the WoWs own paid subscriber story forum, which is filled with people comforting each other and sobbing.

 

[Ninjerk]

 

[Mortmal]

Player interaction is overrated, cooldowns are overrated, there is never a good story to them, they never have good or innovative or interesting mechanics. It's a time, soul, and money sink. Go read a book.

People have said that FFXIV allegedly has a good story. I find this incredibly hard to believe, but I am minimally intrigued.

As someone who grew up on FFVII and seeing the decline in the Final Fantasy series, I struggle to understand what that even means.

I certainly have never heard of an MMO with passable writing, but I am curious if a monocled Codexer can confirm that this is the case for FFXIV or is a hideous lie from webboos.

WoW writing is beyond cringe so I am curious about experimentation for proof of concept purposes.

The secret world has good writing, really. FFXIV probably has good writing ...for FF fans.

 

[Norfleet]

Seriously, who gives a shit about story in an MMO? The real story of an MMO is the hilarious shenanigans people pulled and the things the devs broke. The sundry, banal details of STO's story are irrelevant and uninteresting, but I'll never forget being randomly killed by Starfleet Dental as I left the tutorial. I cannot even remember the storylines of the MUDs I've played, but I sure as hell remember the war stories from fighting various players, or the time I took over a game's economy by using factories to build more factories, something they apparently had not anticipated as they figured people would use factories to build equipment and vehicles, where I instead used them to produce more factories so I could produce more factories.

 

[Morenatsu.]

why not both

 

[Norfleet]

One tends to come at the expense of the other. It's a bit difficult to simultaneously have a world where what occurs tends to be driven by the actions of the players, and at the same time, have a rigid, unchanging story that every player who joins somehow gets to experience from the beginning. Especially when MMO power creep has a tendency to render earlier content painfully irrelevant and useless.

 

[Nikanuur]

Because they never delivered the promiseland back in 2004 when it all started. We awaited same gorgeous RPGs like Baldur's Gate or KOTOR etc. but in a huge world full of possibilities, exploration and possibly other people from around the "real world" behaving like true adventurers. Some evil, some nice, some minding their own business, some maybe issuing quests...

What we received was beautiful graphics devoid of adventuring, demeaning any sense of questing or listening to once renown sages on the top of the hill - now blabbering useless NPC's full of useless information everybody skips. Bland, dull, rinse and repeat genre full of PvP, spouting everywhere the new mechanique called cooldown (i.e. gawk at the graphics not thinking, not doing anything, just mashing those three buttons again and again), toxic communities spending tens of hours for the glory of the day - an item with +0,0005% of dodge bonus bigger then the one before. And all of that, while in it's core a putrid insult to the gaming phenomena, devilishly addictive thing to most who touched it.

That's why.

 

[anvi]

it was a much more fun mmo than the competition , taking the best from everquest and daoc .

This is really not true, especially compared to DAOC, that was basically a PVP only game. They took only small parts and the end result is a very different experience, and not better. They improved a few things, and invented some really good new things too, but for each of those they did 2 things worse than EQ and DAOC. And even 20 years later we've still never had a game that plays like EQ/DAOC but is as accessible as WoW. It is a really sad trajectory the genre took.

All that happened with MMOs is that EQ proved to the world the concept can be popular, and then WoW proved to the world that it can be 10x more popular if you do the same idea but easier and simpler. From that moment on, EQ has never been thought about again by devs. EQ is the example of how to NOT do it. They only had half a million subscribers, WoW had over 10 million! Therefore streamlining == success. That's how the entire games industry thinks. And people keep proving them right. If BG2 or KOTC sold 20 million and Skyrim sold 30,000 then games would be so much more interesting... But that isn't the reality of this world. Skyrim is the biggest RPG ever, WoW the biggest MMO ever, and McDonalds the biggest restaurant ever.

 

[Morenatsu.]

What MMOs need are compelling settings, not narratives. I suppose.

 

[Nikanuur]

it was a much more fun mmo than the competition , taking the best from everquest and daoc .

This is really not true, especially compared to DAOC, that was basically a PVP only game. They took only small parts and the end result is a very different experience, and not better. They improved a few things, and invented some really good new things too, but for each of those they did 2 things worse than EQ and DAOC. And even 20 years later we've still never had a game that plays like EQ/DAOC but is as accessible as WoW. It is a really sad trajectory the genre took.

All that happened with MMOs is that EQ proved to the world the concept can be popular, and then WoW proved to the world that it can be 10x more popular if you do the same idea but easier and simpler. From that moment on, EQ has never been thought about again by devs. EQ is the example of how to NOT do it. They only had half a million subscribers, WoW had over 10 million! Therefore streamlining == success. That's how the entire games industry thinks. And people keep proving them right. If BG2 or KOTC sold 20 million and Skyrim sold 30,000 then games would be so much more interesting... But that isn't the reality of this world. Skyrim is the biggest RPG ever, WoW the biggest MMO ever, and McDonalds the biggest restaurant ever.

When WoW came out, I started tagging people to be dumb slaves of worst case consummerism and fans of a genre that kills gaming. Later I realized it didn't help anything and anyone, big surprise :D, and I've at least acknowledged their right to play whatever they want without fussing about it.

 

[Norfleet]

What MMOs need are compelling settings, not narratives. I suppose.

That sounds about right, yes. A good setting is worth having...being led by the nose through some "story" that somehow features you as the hero doing the exact same thing everyone else did...well, it undermines the entire "MMO" aspect since the "story" is written as if nobody else exists and you're the Ramirez who has to do everything.

 

[TedNugent]

Age of Reckoning actually does a decent job of structuring gameplay around large player versus player world raids.

I installed RoR a few years back. I haven't seen anything like that in WoW since Wintergrasp was live. It's all instanced now, including Wintergrasp. Hard to think of WoW as an MMO any more to be completely honest.

It isn't the best game, but no MMO is. Too grindy and there isn't even any MMO content any more in many of them. They just want you to collect trinkets and baubles and buy shit on their real money storefront.

I can't really think of a game that is almost entirely based around instanced content as an MMO. It's probably better just to think of it as something else entirely.

 

[Nikanuur]

What MMOs need are compelling settings, not narratives. I suppose.

That sounds about right, yes. A good setting is worth having...being led by the nose through some "story" that somehow features you as the hero doing the exact same thing everyone else did...well, it undermines the entire "MMO" aspect since the "story" is written as if nobody else exists and you're the Ramirez who has to do everything.

Age of Conan was one MMO that tried to introduce at least some semblance of true adventuring. I.e. paying attention gives rewards, exploring means finding out new stuff, game is not all about combat or crafting towards combat, there are architectonic puzzles and hidden walls, meaningful gear-wise lore discoveries, and last but never least - as a level 5 you can beat a level 10 if you do extraordinarily well as a player. But sadly AoC didn't deliver much on these elements, and in the end came pretty short and similar to all others.

I've broken my staff over the MMO. It's a bland, debilitating genre according to me. And people who play it long time acquire some of the characteristics of the crack addicts. No rly, think about it. It is true. I'm not saying it makes people really poor minded, no, but it does have some effects this way.

Coming around, I know it can be fun to pursue builds, overpowering other players, raids, items, zillions of crafting... whatnot... so, yeah, whatever. Let people do what they want and if it makes them happy, and they don't kill each other irl :D it's alright. I won't preach the new fashistic dawn of gaming or anything, that'd be bonkers.

 

[TedNugent]

The whole chosen one trope is utterly asinine in an MMO. They could at least go for an "Army of the Light" trope or something that actually fits the genre, but they never do. Couldn't be caught dead promoting group content I guess.

 

[Cryomancer]

WoW.

MMOs pre WoW :

• EQ
• Dark Sun Online : Crimson Sands
• Ultima Online
• Eve Online
• (...)

MMOs post WoW :

• Generic wow clone : Star Wars edition
• Generic wow clone : Conan Edition
• Generic wow clone : D&D edition(neverwinter which doesn't deserve its name)
• Generic wow clone : P2W edition(runes of magic)
• Generic wow clone : (...)

WoW negative impact not only destroyed the mmo market but also dealt a massive blow in SP market, normalizing ludonarrative dissonance and low lethality gear farming cooldown managing gameplay. Even affected table top games, with the 4e Fiasco.

 

[Norfleet]

The whole chosen one trope is utterly asinine in an MMO. They could at least go for an "Army of the Light" trope or something that actually fits the genre, but they never do. Couldn't be caught dead promoting group content I guess.

Which is odd, because group and social content is pretty much the glue that sustains MMOs. People play an otherwise mediocre, low-intensity game...because the people they know play it. It's why I regularly see chain-guild-deaths where an entire guild withers away and dies the moment its core members become sufficiently alienated by whatever has just happened in the game to bugger off.

Curiously, games don't seem to foster player interconnectivity at all: One of the paradigms that has been repeated over and over is that a player belongs only to a single recognized in-game unit, the guild. The guild is singular. The player, barring a case of altoholism, belongs to a singular guild in exclusivity. This means that if the guild explodes in a fit of drama, or dies, that player is likely orphaned from all social connections, as guild exclusivity means he likely has no connection to anything else now. This player, having come unglued, is now very likely to leave.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The whole chosen one trope is utterly asinine in an MMO. They could at least go for an "Army of the Light" trope or something that actually fits the genre, but they never do. Couldn't be caught dead promoting group content I guess.

Which is odd, because group and social content is pretty much the glue that sustains MMOs. People play an otherwise mediocre, low-intensity game...because the people they know play it. It's why I regularly see chain-guild-deaths where an entire guild withers away and dies the moment its core members become sufficiently alienated by whatever has just happened in the game to bugger off.

Curiously, games don't seem to foster player interconnectivity at all: One of the paradigms that has been repeated over and over is that a player belongs only to a single recognized in-game unit, the guild. The guild is singular. The player, barring a case of altoholism, belongs to a singular guild in exclusivity. This means that if the guild explodes in a fit of drama, or dies, that player is likely orphaned from all social connections, as guild exclusivity means he likely has no connection to anything else now. This player, having come unglued, is now very likely to leave.

Elder scrolls online allows you to join up to 5 guilds simultaneously