Honestly... have some of you people even played an MMORPG in the last 5 years? The frequent comments like this make me believe otherwise. This is just a general rant, and I'm not picking on you personally Miele.
There are MMORPGs where LFR does not exist. Some of these MMORPGs have a dungeon finder, and guest what? Even if they do exist not everybody uses them. There are still people standing around camp fires manually LFG. I know because I do it every day. In fact, it is the agreed upon MOST EFFECTIVE means of finding a decent group in the games I frequent. Guilds still form and plan raid schedules. People still form deep and meaningful online relationships in many many many games. There are MMORPGs that have uninstanced PVP. There are MMORPGs with public dungeons, that have respawning boss MOBs with specific loot tables. There are MMORPGs with robust local player driven economies that exist outside of global auction houses. Yeah, quests have markers. Big fucking deal. Everyone who completed their epic without checking out castersrealm/allakhazam please raise your hand. *crickets*
Seriously. You haven't played an MMORPG in years. Give it up. Those of us that have, don't believe you if you say otherwise. Stop lying to yourselves and everyone around you. It's fucking weird.
MMORPGs have always been, and will always be, exactly what you make of them.
/rant off
I'm late replying to this, but RL kept me quite busy: I don't complain about features that ruin the good old days, because the old days were good for different reasons: I was younger, had more free time, EQ was new, etc.
I'm stating what I said above because, with the exception of GW2, every other MMO I played (not many admittely) was a carbon copy of the WoW model, except worse. This makes me do a few considerations:
1) In the end WoW is the best of them, so why change? Settings? Possibly.
2) The open world is less important and/or impactful, just a tool to level up. Exploration is rarely rewarded, even if only in terms of sightseeing and "been there, done that".
3) At the level cap, or "end game" as it's usually labeled, the persistant world is pointless.
4) The layers of complexity have been reduced, sometimes with a positive effect, sometimes not, but I guess this is based on the audience taste.
5) The amount of gameplay (tasks required to access certain zones, for example) sacrificed in the name of accessibility has been in my opinion too much. Nobody wants PoP attunements anymore, but even a single keyquests is frowned upon instead of providing extra content, if only for a night or two.
So no, I wasn't complaining about MMOs becoming single player games, but how they transitioned to a diablo-esque playing style: login, select content, port group in zone, kill, loot, logout.
Sorry for the late reply.
