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The issue with mods is really one of game / encounter design. Mods to move around graphics, fix buttons, arrange hotkeys I can understand. But the raid mods made the game an arms race. The analogy to steroids is completely correct. As raiding progressed there was an expectation that mods were...

More than anything, this is the fun part of MMOs. The excitement of doing something new and accomplishing it for the first time where everyone is kind of a novice. But it also highlights something that is probably the crux of the problems in "end-game" MMO design. You generally have a whole...

I think when people talk about freedom, what they really miss is the "chaos" of the games. That"s pretty much what stood out about UO and EQ back in the day. Nearly everything was chaotic. Just think about trains in EQ for instance, or the insane number of things in UO. Dungeons as they opened...

This is a huge part of the problem. The testing and fixes just never happen. Considering the average zone can be devoured by a dedicated group in less than a day, most of your most glaring bugs should take 1-2 walk throughs of the game to notice and fix. I find broken quests to be utterly...

Haha, totally true. Except with MMOs its more like The only rule is that there are shitty rules.

It"s one thing to fix bugs, or add new content. I can even to some extent understand broken quests or encounters that need to be tuned. Its a whole other problem when developers and designers use release + patches to figure out what kind of game theyre going to deliver in the first place...

Housing in an MMO really depends on the context of the game. More often than not it fails to be at all important. In a game like shadowbane, it was completely integral to gameplay. For many other games it"s just a perk that really doesnt matter except that it gives players yet another thing to...

This is precisely what is wrong with the entire design of MMO games at this point. Massive amounts of damage and massive amounts of healing required. It"s the whole reason "tanks" are even needed. All these games have taken the perverted forms of EQ Classes and just made them worse and worse...

One of the major reasons that mods became so important in Wow is the pacing of combat. You have debuffs that will literally wipe the raid if players dont react in under 5 seconds. At first it was decursive, decurse the raid by spamming a single button so it was removed. Then once that was taken...

I would say that WoW benefited from huge momentum based on the franchise. But a franchise in and of itself cant carry a game. Look at Star Wars Galaxies. Certainly it has a bigger franchise than Warcraft could ever claim. Probably one of the biggest franchises in the entertainment world. But a...

I think the analogy to movies is the most spot on. Developing an MMO really requires the production team to figure out what they"re shooting for. You can as with some movies the entire goal is for commercial success, selling the most tickets, boxes , generating the most revenue. It"s not to say...