2 years later... the almost sad state of MMOs in the new era

Ukerric said:

VR still hasn't solved the transport sickness problem.

When you move in VR, your brain notices that your inner ear isn't reporting the movement "properly". Which makes you sick and prone to throwing up. Games manage to avoid that by having you stay in place, or put in a vehicle where your brain can assume that you're not really moving, so it's ok.

Until VR can manipulate your inner ear, you won't see a game where you move around, like a RPG.

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Is this a problem if you're not doing full body stuff? In my mind, you'd be sitting with the VR goggles on and running around the world with an analog stick.

Most people want instant gratification in their gaming and if they dont get it they will moan and call the game shit. it's kind of difficult to do in a MMO as you need to keep the players enticed with the content. I mean there will always be min maxers but they are few and far between now.

It's just a different time with different players.

Plus there's the enormous costs associated with developing an MMO.

The key draws to playing an mmo are a social atmosphere and persistent world. This results in difficulty playing for short times or stepping away easily, and an ever growing barrier of entry for new or returning players. Wow addressed these with piles of easy wqs and instanced pugs + complete mudflation each content push, and is successful for it, but does miss a lot of people who like a social world community or long term character buildup. They will probably get a lot of return subs with classic wow for this reason, we will see if they stick around long or not.

In the meantime, mmos largely seem pretty weak on utilizing modders for content, browser or mobile use, or even consoles. The ones that do have flaws elsewhere. Meanwhile, the expected use is stuck really high: an rpg can be a raved about hit if you enjoy 100 hours playing it, while an mmorpg that only sees 100 hours played is probably a heavily criticized flop.

Mmos will do fine when one come alongs that doesn't try too much reinvention. A few gimmicks maybe, but largely that classic mmo feel including grinds. New graphics, web or mobile access, stuff to do for short play, and by some miracle able to balance the community draw with letting people log out when they have to. PokeMMOn or The Wire Online or World of Starcraft, who knows.

You have to be -really- careful with "I can fuck up shit you've been working on for a year" mechanics, though. Games like Shadowbane, or even as recently as Atlas, show that people can stomach bugs to a degree, but if they lose everything they've put lots of work into and feel like it was unfair, they are significantly more likely to quit and never come back.

Funny that you mention that, because that is exactly one of the pain points of old era MMORPGs like EverQuest: you can't solo (except for a few classes) and have to look for a group when you login. If you only have an hour it could very well be that you didn't find a group for the evening and accomplished nothing.

WoW was heralded as the "casual MMO" at launch because a) it was possible to progress your character on your own, and b) use the Hearthstone to instantly go back if you needed to log out suddenly. The only things locked behind group/raid content was acquisition of medium to high end gear.

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Exactly. While lots of people loved that shit, it got old fast. I remember playing FFXI post-EQ1 and my friends had all outleveled me (there was severe XP penalties at the time for grouping with people more than a couple levels beyond you), so I was forced to pug. I would spend 30-60 minutes trying to find a group, finally find one, and it sucked and would take 15 minutes to kill a single crab that filled 1/2000th of your XP bar. I noped out of that game pretty quick once it got to the level range where soloing was no longer an option, because I didn't want to spend most of my freetime doing jackshit.

Another trick WoW missed was elemental gear. They mostly removed that in the first expansion I think.

It's REALLY common in mobile RPGs to have characters and/or gear be linked to an element so you need to grind gear sets or characters more suited to each battle. It's a way to get people invested in farming new gear without powercreep.

Imagine if Cataclysm was the same item level as Wrath of the Lich King but you needed resist gear to go into each elemental plane. So you are farming potentially x4 as much gear but you'll still be going back to Icecrown because maybe your best in slot Trinket is still the one from there, and you aren't getting bored because there's so much variety?

This may sound like shit but the point is find ways to have all your content have a use.

Farming Maraudon, a level 48 dungeon, for poison resist gear for AQ, a tier 2.5 raid, was AIDs man.

When a new raid comes out I want to focus on just that raid, not some gear check to enter it.

BoozeCube said:

I would just like to see a world that follows a more D&D model which Everquest did very well. Why can’t someone just make something similar to that with better graphics and more fluid/responsive game play.

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Because MMORPGs require an insane amount of PVE content, which is why everyone wants to make a big BR game these days. You don't need to design a single AI controlled mob. You can just toss an empty map at your players, and they themselves are the content that needs to be beaten.

Neranja said:

Funny that you mention that, because that is exactly one of the pain points of old era MMORPGs like EverQuest: you can't solo (except for a few classes) and have to look for a group when you login. If you only have an hour it could very well be that you didn't find a group for the evening and accomplished nothing.

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This could very well be avoided by adding even more content, such as trade skills that actually require time pursuing them inside a city instead of just setting your character to make 30 mithril bracers and then you go and take a shit while your AFKharakter generates those sweet "skill" ups.

The whole reason behind EQ requiring you to go LFG and achieving nothing came exactly from the fact that the only way to advance in EQ was killing shit.

Noodleface said:

Farming Maraudon, a level 48 dungeon, for poison resist gear for AQ, a tier 2.5 raid, was AIDs man.

When a new raid comes out I want to focus on just that raid, not some gear check to enter it.

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This. Farming seru bane or poison resist gear blows. It is an artificial way to extend content longevity by forcing people to grind situational items with little usage outside specific fights.

SWTOR started the whole companion/mission running stuff, which WoW and FFXIV adopted

mkopec said:

I still think it was WoW that ruined it all. It basically made any post WoW MMO model, halt on the breaks and say, hey waith a minute, why not just make a WoW clone and rake in mad $$$$. Except we all know that this is not how shit works.

This copy/pasta also basically stifled any and all innovation from the gene. I mean, can you name even one innovation in a post WoW mmo?

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Vanguard - Blood mage, defensive and offensive targets