Why did MMO's die?

>Spending months of your life doing tedious, ardious tasks for a single reward
>”Sustainable”

Companies realized that development costs to make a game that can sustain a playerbase wasn't worth the investment. There were enough people jumping onto the WoW bandwagon following its success to show how much time and effort it takes to make a somewhat moderately successful game.

Possibly, but it’d need to be as big or bigger than WoWs world with fun combat and tons of loot.

Fucking retarded. I guess when you grow up having everything handed to you, you can't understand the payoff of having worked hard for something and finally getting it.

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instances

>Hi, I'm Rainbow Six Siege, I've never met a faggot before... tell me what it is like being one?

>Getting everything in the game that excited you in the first place in the first day
>fun

Fuck I bought warhammer chaosbane expecting a poor mans diablo 3. Beat it, max level, had the absolute best gear I could in ONE FUCKING DAY. Never touched it again. I remember playing diablo 3 for years after they fixed the shitty loot system.

I think for an MMO to be truly successful they would need to reinvent the wheel again. The problem with post-WoW MMOs is they all emulate WoW; why play a copycat of a preexisting game with a larger community? FFXIV for example manages to survive because of japs and weebs, not because it does anything different.

I hate to say it but everquest next with its minecraft shit shit was the closest thing to an MMO trying something new since WoW. I think it could have actually shaken things up had it managed to launch, but no one else wants to take any risks changing the core gameplay loop.

How are instances a turn off exactly? Modern games do the same exact shit, with different names. A max amount of players in a generated area doing a set task.

Fuck a modern dungeons and dragons would be unlike any mmo out there. Its not the items that blow you away, though there are tons and tons of variety and useful ones. its all the awesome class combos that you could do.

it shatters the community into smaller fragments, creates player entitlement and devolves the game into a regular slamm-scale multipalyer rpg with an open world chatroom in the end

1.People got more adhd symptoms (not real patients but same symptoms due to livestyle) =no interest in slow games

2. market saturation = lower ability to gain enough players into a new mmo

3. RMT market and the adaption of it into ingame stores destroyed the carrot. Where nolivers before thrived on being better in a virtual world by spending more time on the game it they are left behind by anyone willing to pull out their credit card today.

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FF does something different to wow - it's easier to play. There's no gigantic entry hurdle and tryharding over gearscore / some addon stat to be allowed to enter a dungeon/raid.

tldr: ff is way more casual friendly.

This is what overwatch was supposed to be like, then they pussied out and made a generic lobby shooter. Companies are gigantic vaginas today, nobody will risk for reward, they want the predictable income curve, and don't care about the love for the game they had to flush down the toilet to get there anymore.

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Fuck playing as a light side jedi consular.

Light side powers suck ass in this game.

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I thought cross server instances fixed the issue of not being able to get a group in? At least in WoW.

WoW was and is shit. Most of it was stolen from Everquest. Many of the devs who worked on the original WoW release played EQ on the regular.

MMOs didn't die because shitty WoW with all its cartoony bullshit "couldn't be replicated." It died because people have become impatient and lazy as fuck. The want the greatest reward for the absolute least amount of effort and time. Why do you think loot boxes are a thing? They wouldn't be if people didn't spend billions on them each year... instead of actually playing and earning those items.

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The games that exist have been going so long and have so much content that people expect that much content out of a new game at launch. So what happens is people will play a new game, burn through it's content in a month, then get 'bored' and go back to WoW. That's how it has been and will be until wow finally shits the bed so hard people actually start quitting instead of just whining. FF14 makes progression so slow that most people want to blow their brains out rather than burn through the story in a few sittings so it's got the illusion of length despite having significantly less content, and succeeds for that reason.

Korean f2p mmos probably would have overrun the market if they didn't get localized with such heavyhanded p2w garbage because they had so much fucking content and such well balanced leveling to endgame.

>RMT market and the adaption of it into ingame stores destroyed the carrot. Where nolivers before thrived on being better in a virtual world by spending more time on the game it they are left behind by anyone willing to pull out their credit card today

This here. People used to look at the no lifers with jealousy, and wanted to work toward what they had, even if never quite as good. It gave you drive to play. But then they demanded to be able to buy their way to success, and took away the carrot and any point in playing a game. A modern mmo would not only have to have nothing but cosmetics for money, but the best ones would STILL have to be ground for to keep interest peaked.

What you didn't mention:
Getting the items playing the game is either not entertaining or takes years. Lootboxes make it infact so that devs have no incentive to make it entertaining.

t. 1fps in main town

would've played SWTOR if it looked like KOTOR 1/2 and not cartoony and had gameplay like SWG
I read about it a couple years back but I still don't remember why SWG died off
I had a character on a friend's account and thus didn't really play it that much

RMT was pretty much everywhere even before WoW got released. What popularized RMT is the ease of online payments, prior to that in Korea people did RMT hand to hand with cash in netcafé. Saturation is barely an issue when you make a good product that can distinguish itself from the crowd.

QoL is pretty much what killed MMOs. Players are used now to game comfortably, large worlds with timesink are just seen as a hurdle / design flaw. Who would want to wait 15 minutes for the Airship to arrive at Jeuno? Who wants to runs 10 minutes from Druim Ligen to Emain Macha or wait 10 minutes to be teleported there to then wipe in 2 minutes? Who wants to level down or wait 5 minutes for resurrection sickness? The same applies to every mechanics that made players "wait" or slowed them down in their progress (low respawn rate or drop rates etc.)

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WTB: FBSS torch 3.

Seriously anyone could make money in this game and buy a reward someone else got and did not need. You could twink new characters and give yourself an early level advantage, making your second character less painful.

Anyone who never got to experience this type of MMO community never got the full experience.

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Agree. I remember running in 60 man raids and dying to Trakanon over and over.... spending almost an hour waiting for the Rogues and Necros to pull corpses back to the zone-in. Finally beating him and winning the roll for the breast plate (I was a Shadow Knight then). Looking at my inventory over and over just to see it.

versus today

>Hey bro you want Han Solo's blaster???
>Bruh just give us $20 and it's yours!

>The same applies to every mechanics that made players "wait" or slowed them down in their progress (low respawn rate or drop rates etc.)

But not getting to max level in the first few days isnt a bad thing. Things like sidequests, crafting, exploreable areas like guild wars 2, these are not bad. MMO's more than any other type of game are about the journey, not the destination.

Pretty much this.
Add in the usual bullshit of monetisation and that shit Craft Bag, and you have a nice blend of good reasons to stay the fuck out of it.
I would like to point out though that thieving is top notch in ESO.

YOU see it that way. the normalfags who spend $400-$500 a month on cosmetics in a game see otherwise. They want to immediately be at cap level.

I'm not saying it's good or bad, just telling you that it's what most consumers do not want nowadays. GW2 is the perfect example that being said. Max level is extremely quick to attain. Gearing up is pretty much pointless quickly. Everything is just super convenient (I played vanilla only a while back, but level scaling is a good example), crafting was a joke, moving around was a joke etc.

You take a game like DAoC or FF XI, crafting required you to move to a remote location to get certain type of material. If you had lost Relic Keep in DAoC you couldn't even easily NPC buy last tier of mats. For FF XI, you had only certain NPC selling specific items, at specific time during the day with a finite quantity. Harvesting was also very limited. Then the crafting process was all manual (no queue/automation). I could go on forever. Today's consumer wants GW2, WoW, XIV basically, MMOs where everything is handed over to you.

I think the big step was from external third party sellers to ingame stores. Most people were too afraid to be banned and didn't participate in RMT. "Legalizing" it with ingame stores opened up a huge new RTM market.

On the second part - that's exactly what i meant with people are more adhd riddled and won't accept slow mmo's. I would start even earlier with leveling phase itself. Nobody really enjoy playing a budget moba version of the class they choose for 60h+ to finally unlock and play it for real.

This.
That's why I've always stuck to single player games.

VR MMOs will be the next big thing. Community and interactions are what keep a lot of MMO players hooked and VR is perfectly suited to catering to that. Hell just look at VR chat and imagine having most of those features in an MMO format, would literally print money.

SWG's death has been told endless times but sure, here's the bullet points
>Was always very niche, only hardcore fans could enjoy it
>Sony tried desperately to make the game more popular
>forced the jedi, once a very obscure class, to be more easy to access, everybody now only cares about becoming a jedi
>completely butchered the leveling system they had, changing it to a much more by the numbers class system
>After WoW came out they tried to copy the combat
>Even with massive fan outcry execs thought the sinking ship that was the player base would "get over it"
Of course there are a bunch of other factors but those are the main ones

>60hr
If only. Try like 250 hrs. 10 days of /played was the typical time needed for a decent players to reach 50 early on DAoC. For FF XI, it was double that for level 75 / subjob 37 due to all first time mandatory quests needed, some people were stucks WEEKS just to get their limit break quest done.

I do agree for RMTs, it was a two stage process. First being to easily purchase using PayPal/credit card and illegal RMT, then directly through the publisher store. RMT was still extremely popular before it even became legal and almost no publishers took stance against buyers. Usually you'd get banned only for selling/cheating. It was very hard to prove that you purchase gold yourself. Otherwise anyone could just frame someone they didn't like, buy gold and have them delivered to their character so they get the hammer.

To be fair though, while WoW made it easier to reach cap, they knew their needed to be some sort of progression limit by adding that arbitrary one week raid lockout for the 40man content.

>about the journey, not the destination.
For that to work, there have to be worthwhile things in that journey. With modern game design, that is not the case, hence the destination is main point.

First people made MMOs fun adventure games with friends where you kept playing due to the social connections you have there
Then someone found out how to also make MMOs that would addict autistic people
Then it exploded with world of warcraft being perfectly crafted to addict people with their desire to see their numbers get bigger, they made tons of money from it and started cutting out all the fun social adventure part because autists can't into friends and they wanted to more efficiently exploit them
Then after over a decade even the biggest autists have realized they're the ones being played and don't fall for it any more, and there isn't any game worth playing underneath the skinner box so nobody bothers at all.

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timegating was going to happen anyway, even if leveling remained difficult, because at endgame eventually people get so skilled at doing it they could run it nearly 24/7 unless you stop them, and if they do that it fucks up balancing and the perceived difficulty of content. But, that has nothing to do with them butchering leveling by not only making it take a fraction of the time, but then selling passes to skip it entirely.

Since selling level boosts they killed all new methods to quicken leveling. It's like the poster example of how cashshop affects ingame design.

I miss uninstanced dungeons. I miss all the little player interactions that took place. I miss the feeling of progress starting just near the entrance and eventually working your way to the deepest reaches. I miss how camping a room felt like actual camping at times. I miss the griefing and the train to zone announcements and everything else. These days people throw a shitfit if anyone is anywhere near them doing the same activity.

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>Why are no "AA" or "AAA" mmo's produced today.

First sentence and you're already a retard. Camelot Unchained, Project Gorgon, Crowfall, and a few other MMOs are currently being made

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Open-world games that allowed the relative vastness of an MMO at a "reasonable" cost.
Social media allowing the previously unsociable to socialize.
Less time spent at work / school to get the same return today means more time to play.
Popularity of the genre reaching a boiling point where it caters outside of the core audience.
WoW's streamlining / perfecting of the genre in '06 leading to the copycat consequence.
A general lack of incentive to play casually, OR casualization removing top-tier challenges.

But there have been new heirlooms introduced the past two or three expansions, and you can buy XP potions for an in-game currency that are bind to account in BfA

Gamedevs were themself involved in backchannel RMT before they went over to selling officially in their ingame stores. It was easy additional income at no cost without bad PR. The entire extent is hard to gauge but numerous example of caught ones exist and RMT exchanges noticed it themselves thanks to holding all the contact info.

Expanding on my post, now if you try to play an MMORPG as a normal person who wants to have fun with others and make friends, you physically can't because after years of cutting out or using queues and teleports to bypass all the fun non-grinding things you can do, the only people left playing these MMOs are the biggest autists in the world who absolutely don't even want to talk to anyone except maybe to ERP with the other degenerates in their guild or whatever, anything that gets in the way of grinding their numbers bigger is an unwanted annoyance.

spleens.net/spleenshots/
Here is a time capsule of what people having fun in MMORPGs used to be like.
People would still play this if it was made as a modern game, but companies don't want anything to do with MMOs after they all tried to make a WoW killer too late and got burned for it.

I've been watching Pantheon closely. It looks good so far. They even have Brasse working on it, or just promoting it, I can't tell

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Those heirlooms got nerved last year. xp potions this year. Well strictly speaking it was listed as a bugfix because it was too good.

I'm not sure for Western ones, but it wasn't the case for FF XI at least as I was GM there and would be in position to know if we were directly involved selling gold ourselves. We had case of abuse that being said (GM creating items for their linkshell mates, but eventually they got found out and fired).

I worked for playerauctions when they still HQd in the US, and had moderated and middlemanned for d2jsp for YEARS before playerauctions rose to relevance. Anything that wasn't WoW had staffers selling currency. Path of exile, runescape was a huge one, money taken from bots wasn't removed from the economy, which is why it never improved. Wildstar after it flopped saw tens of thousands of CREDD being sold for $1 to $2 a piece. Archeage US had millions and millions of gold and thunderstruck logs being sold by community managers and GMs for the english server the day after launch (as well as plots of land but that was a whole different beast).

You're full of shit or were a CM then, Asura and Cactuar had three GMs each selling gil and items.

Nothing has ever lived up to pre-NGE SWG for me
Wish I got to play all those other non mainstream mmo before they died or fucked up

most revenue is DLC, microtransactions

MMOs are about item / grind

If you implement paid rewards it ruins the grind aspect of the mmo.

So making a mobile game costs 1/100th as much and can make as much money

There was a pretty good private rp server of wow. They had even amazing custom mod that gave you the option to place permanent objects ingame and thus construct buildings from existing assets. People build guard towers, roadblocks and all kinds of other stuff. Was pretty amazing.

oversaturation of the market led to a crash
people wanted more convenience and it killed the atmosphere that people liked from MMOs in the first place

Does anyone still play LoTRO?

Because WOW introduced a lot of anti-MMO systems that people didn't mind, but also didn't realize that it was a cancer that killing the genre.

Since 2008 we've seen nothing but WOW clones, but here's the thing, what made WOW so fucking popular in the first place was the 1-60 content was the best on the market for 5+ years, notice how WOW subs started to tank when the 1-60 content was streamlined with dungeon queues and later the linear quest revamp in cataclysm, because WOW lost its strong hook.

WOW's end game has always been mediocre, and every big name MMO since then has only been copying WOW based on its end game, I.E. they create a leveling system that is designed to get people to end game asap, not realizing that the majority of players actually quit when they hit end game, because raiding is a fucking job that and ladder grinding is cancer

Any upcoming mmo actually trying to do something interesting with mechanics like ye olde mmos like Asheron's Call or DAoC did?

There was also Shroud of the Avatar from Lord British which only "launched" a few years ago.

It looks and feels like an early access game and has

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A bunch gave amazing promises but they are all far away, not worth investing time following until it's clear it's more than vaporware.

Graphics are processed client side you double nigger. Literally has nothing whatsoever to do with servers.

>You're full of shit or were a CM then
I was in EU so CM didn't even exist back in 2008~. Also which years are you talking about? Abuse almost exclusively happened up to 2008. After that credentials were severely restricted, only SGM could create items or currency and you only had 3 in the US, 4 in EU and 4 in Japan. (NA had less since they had Advanced GM which EU didn't have, but AGM didn't create items either). Any item creation was automatically appearing into a log that LGM would occasionally review as well. What people mostly abused however post-2009 on the NA side was GDR. But you didn't really need a GM accomplice for that once you understood how our policy worked. The GM didn't have to take any active role in the process and didn't have to put his job on the line.

> had three GMs each
There was no GM assigned per server. We worked on all servers and on rotating shifts. In any given shifts you had about 1~2 SGM + 1~3 Support GM available per region. There is no such things as "3 GM each" on a specific server. GMs were assigned per region and could only act on players within their region except for very rare exceptions.

Because of WoW. They where so commercially successful that every new MMO that came after just tried to copy it one way or another.

Genre became stale with no variety.

Seasonal MMORPG design

AKA it's not meant to last 20 years. 6 month seasons or whatever like POE does with leagues.

The refresh of seasons and a MMORPG built around a seasonal model is the future of the genre. These ever-green mmorpgs with +10 levels every expansion are a dying breed.

The future is POE/D2 model of a new season every 5-6 months and a perm league that all the chars go after each one.

No clue. I do know that the No. 1 straight-up terrible thing that's put in MMOs is this "instancing". There's just no need for it!

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"hello fellow mmo enthusiast. It has come to my attention that you are uneducated in a few games I know to be in production, such as the ones I state here."

OR you could let the shit hitting you in real life make you angry in everything else you do, and stay in a miserable mindset.

MMOs are super basic, but every new MMO that comes out tries to complicate everything with gimmicks.

Biggest problem is WOW, every new MMO thinks they need to compete with WOW, and because of this they tend to be really fucking boring because its the same shit over and over again.

If someone came out with a decently polished dungeon crawling MMO again, it would probably be popular, but everyone is dead set on making WOW clones where you sit there fighitng bosses 90% of the time, where you just sit there playing DDR with a DPS rotation with zero interaction with the game world as you are a damage turret that occasionally has to move to avoid 'mechanics'

All they have to fucking do is make Persistant online D&D, but every single one that comes out now is trying to be some hack and slash beat em up with no gameplay interaction with either players or NPCs, just nonstop grinding

Warhammer age of reckoning invented public quests. That was pretty fucking cool at the time.

You are fucking retarded. Games are made to be playable on toasters for mmos to include the most players possible. if you built a moder day crysis for an mmo, you would have 1/20th of your potential market. It has nothing to do with strain on the server.

They all look pretty rough lol. I'm most excited for Camelot. There's a playable beta for $60 backers and I'm considering it, but I can't find much about it.

None of those are backed by a big enough company to be AA or AAA. I don't think you understand what those terms mean. All of those projects are relatively small when compared to big name games. Sure they might end up being good, but they're B-listers whether you want to accept it or not.

MMOs are long term profit ventures that don't jive well with the get in and get out culture of the modern day shareholder.

>Everquest: Ruins of Kunark
Maximum comfy, friend

There is an issue that is exclusive to MMOs when it comes to graphics and that is scalability.

Because the world is shared with hundreds or thousands of other players, assets, either what the players are wearing or what they're doing or what the world is loading and unloading based on their actions puts a strain on players.

Korean MMOs are a proven point to this, Korean MMOs try to be as pretty as possible, but because of this the client slogs, and because of this most clients are designed to render players as hooded figures until their assets are properly loaded, thats why you can run around a populated city in a korean MMO and everyone looks like generic hooded people.

You also have the issue of asset loading and unloading, which can put a lot of strain on memory and MMOs are usually incredibly big and thus use compressed assets or else they'd take up 200+ gigs.

ff14 is the best mmo on the market hands down. Unfortunately most people drop the game because it starts off very slow and there is a heavy emphasis on the story. However, the gameplay and the story get significantly better if you stick with it and get to the expansions.

No but bump for the game. I'd play if they went fully f2p or at least let me get past L30ish without having to buy quest packs.

WoW killed the market just like Blizzard killed the RTS market. WoW basically took the EQ formula and polished all of the edges off of it and nobody except for gooks bothers to try to make an MMO now because there have been dozens of total bomb MMOs. Cost of making these games is astronomical for what they are.

MMOs cost more to make then a looter shooter.

A looter shooter doesn't require servers that need to handle hundreds of players at once, and MTX kills MMOs, since the whole draw to MMOs is having hundreds to thousands of players in a shared world, but MTX will drive away most players leaving only whales, and whales only buy MTX to show off.

>Best MMO on the market
>Problem is people quit because its story focus
Yeah, when I think MMO I think cutscenes and personal story. That shit already makes WOW boring as fuck.

>Story
>MMOs
Thats why FFXIV is boring as fuck.

Best MMO stories are from EVE online hands down, and thats because the stories are of players and their exploits, not some trash tier fanservice

>and thats because the stories are of players and their exploits, not some trash tier fanservice
Based as frick

Its gonna be reborn like a phoenix with VR and future tech.

MMO's are meant to be escape from reality. A Virtual Reality MMO is perfectly catered to do this.

>MY MOM, SHE BOUGHT ME THIS NEW GAME

MMOs are incredibly expensive to make and maintain, and in most cases, people just stick with the one they've played the longest. There has to be a big, exciting change to the basic formula, which costs even more money, and even then, people will just keep playing WoW or some such because that's been their time sink for over a decade.

On a different subject, I'm sad that Everquest Next got binned.

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Unless it's some matrix shit with full body combat it will remain boring. There's nothing inherently more interesting about playing wow with VR googles and some wiimote knockoff to cast spells.

MMO's were always niche and partially a result of a lack of social media, furthermore the community that WoW managed to tap into prefers lobbies where they can either idle or do meaningless shit while waiting for their preferred gamemode which is what modern WoW is(a better example of this is GTA:Online).

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who cares, mmo games are literal retard garbage

I think we're a pretty long ways off - for now, we're pretty much limited to the sort of silliness people can put together in VRchat and the like.

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>I'm sad that Everquest Next got binned

You and me both. Looked forward to that for 6 years.

Thanks for your valuable insight, captain worthless. But much like your mom being a ho, this was not always so.

IDK Orbus is by no means a full fledged VRMMO but we have that right now.

Imagine what companies are testing that we just do not know about at this very moment.

Counter Point: We haven't had a true MMO experience with AAA polish in over 15 years

Why is such an outdated piece of crap like runescape still popular? They need to make a game like that but with good pathing

Because OSRS is the only pure MMO out on the market right now, even though the current dev team keeps adding in modern nonsense like Raids

>They need to make a game like that but with good pathing
and good combat, dont forget that part

Combat isn't important in an MMO, good MMOs is where certain players can become staples in the community by simply interacting with other players.

>Combat isn't important in an MMO
It really is, why do you think WoW overshadowed Runescape totally in the mainstream? Because people could live out their badass imaginary combat of DnD on a monitor. People play Fantasy MMOs to live in a Fantasy world and a big part of that is fighting monsters and honing your combat craft whether it be with a sword or through magic.

WOW overshadowed runescape because it wasn't a clunky javascript browser and had a much better world to explore at the time.

Fast Forward and WOW in its current form is a hot mess and OSRS has evolved past javascript browser nonsense, and PVP in OSRS is more satisfying then PVP in modern WOW.

MMOs are a product of their time, people can talk online easier than ever so chat rooms aren't as popular. MMOs are basically just games built around chatrooms. They probably wont ever be anything but grind fests again.

RS3 proves that your faggot idea is wrong.

>Lets implement hotbar combat to our game
>WHY IS EVERYONE QUITTING

RS3s combat was poorly done and went against the core premise of the game. That user is on the right track but the combat in rs and wow are a lot different. Combat systems in MMOs are important. They need to be relatively simple but also have some depth.

Every single combat update to every single MMO that tries to make their combat like WOW's has killed the game.

RS3, SWG, ect.

Combat is not what makes MMOs good, its interaction and mechanical depth, neither of which WOW has in its current, mobafied state.

>hotbar combat
>Good
Just so we are clear, Hotbar tab targeting is outdated shit as well, but its better than OSRS combat and at least has some skill expression.

That said, I do think there is a place for old school Runescape combat systems or even non-combat MMOs but they will never be the norm. As a matter of fact PvP is the most important part of an MMO to me and is the reason I dont play FF14 and a thinking of trying BDO despite its other problems.

Interaction and mechanical depth is combat what are you talking about? How else would you have mechanical depth in an MMO besides combat?

You sir are correct, you need depth.

And thats the key issue with many MMOs, they remove depth and focus purely on numbers, not on application of damage or counter play.

And thats why WOW is a terrible example, yes it used to have depth to its combat, some classes were charge in and one shot people, some classes were lock down CC kings, some classes were tanky as fuck, but then they introduced arenas, and every single major change has been to cater to the arena meta, until every class was 'balanced' by being able to do anything and everything in arenas, losing their niches and depth.

Its like magic the gathering, you start out with a color pie, every color has strengths and weaknesses, but as time goes on they keep giving each color similar or functionally the same effect of other colors

>WOW is a terrible example
When I talk about WoW in reference to it overshadowing runescape I am talking about classic wow bot BFA shit

Themepark MMOs were practically a prototype to instanced lobbies and PvE/PvP queues, ironically it was the success of WoW that made devs even willing to continue to attempt big budget MMOs in the first place.

Play rift.

WoW was just a casual MMO experience at the time though. It was like the Madden or CoD of MMOs. I wouldn't call it hard to beat as in so good, it was just casual and catered to the average person. The problem was every decent mmo changed its formula when they realized how much of the casual market they could try and grab but why play an outdated wowlike when you could just play wow? SOE and EA are a bunch of fucking cunts.
Consumers are cunts as well

Didn't that close? Besides, I thought pretty much all of the character options were locked behind a paywall.

Does anyone here still play UO? I know there was a shard that opened half a year ago or so that is popular but i haven't tried it. Rough going alone and i'm so fucking lazy.
No clue as to what the official servers are up to but i know it's still going at least.

Well the thing with WOW is that it hit the perfect point of casual and hardcore.

You could solo, which most MMOs at the time didn't let you do, but if you did it in a group it would go faster, and you'd have more fun, and naturally meet other people.

But WOW was developed by Tigole, every good design WOW had was designed by the rest of the WOW team, the 1-60 experience was on point, but Tigole insisted that WOW was about raiding, WOW was about end game, even though their own numbers shown that only 10% of the playerbase ever hit end game by the time BC hit, and of those 10% only 30k players were raiding on a weekly basis, of their 4-5m preTBC player count, that would mean less then 1% of the playerbase actually raided.

And people loved WOW, it was a great MMO starting out, but once you got to end game, it was raid or die, and that has been the most persistant issue WOWfags have had with WOW in general, that unless you raid, there was nothing to do at end game, and this issue was never ever addressed, the only way blizzard was able to 'fix' it was to add in LFR.

But again, after launch WOW became "raid or die" end game focused, and because of this any and all content had to cater to the raid community, thats why in TBC, they made raid sizes smaller so they're easier to run, they made end game dungeons an absolute joke loot hallways where everyone just ran Mechanar for badges, and anything outside of raiding was pretty much dead content.

And they nerfed exp rates completely, but at least Karazhan was fun enough to run the entire expansion long for most casual players and PVP gave out ezmode gear to keep people logging in weekly.

>but then they introduced arenas, and every single major change has been to cater to the arena meta, until every class was 'balanced' by being able to do anything and everything in arenas, losing their niches and depth
Holy fuck the "everyone must be able to 1v1 pvp" meme. For one thing it's totally incompatible with the Trinity meme in games that have specific classes. For instance, there's no way can a proper healer even damage a tank... unless you wedge in healers doing decent damage specifically for arena combat to work.

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MMOs in general are dying because back when they were new such as in the EQ and FFXI era, the idea of a living breathing persistent world where you interacted with other people was still a novel concept. It was exciting to go around the world and see the bustle and people doing things, and it was something you wanted to be a part of.

WoW didn't really kill MMOs, bringing in a lot of players isn't a bad thing for a game trying to achieve an actual world, but the novelty has worn off. It's all been theorycrafted and solved now. The more interesting elements of them have been casualized to make them more accessible. Every game feels the same. You reach a point where you get lost in the chase and you forget what it was that made the game fun in the first place, and even when you remember you're not going to get that same sense you got when you first encountered that thing. You login to play with your friends but gradually less and less of them are online, and you either need to make new friends or grind by yourself for the sake of grinding. The new expansion comes out and you're hyped for a while, but you burnout faster than you did the last time and never reach the same level of enjoyment.

The genre needs a complete paradigm shift. Stuff is so canned and there's no freedom in anything anymore. There's no mystery or adventure, it's just the grind to max level and the chase to get better gear. It's meaningless. I don't know how all those problems are ever going to be solved because MMOs are expensive to make and maintain and continue development on, and I think it's going to be a very long time before a developer manages to catch lightning in a bottle again and a game reaches even half the success that WoW had. No, WoW classic isn't it, and no FFXIV isn't it.

FF has gearscore and 1000x more content gating; What are you talking about?

The stupid part is most MMOs these days just make everyone able to do all 3 roles, when they should be diversifying the roles completely.

WOW is the only popular MMO right now where there are still pure DPS classes, and they're the least played classes in the game now because if none of your specs are top tier, you're pretty much benched or never invited to PUGs, the exception to this is warlocks and maybe mages, because warlocks are the only class with functional utility in raids, and mages have water, but seriously who needs to fucking drink in 2019 WOW.

>WOW was about end game, even though their own numbers shown that only 10% of the playerbase ever hit end game by the time BC hit, and of those 10% only 30k players were raiding on a weekly basis
I've been playing Shroud of the Avatar, which doesn't have raids, and they are doing their best to reject the raid drops gear trope, but people are so brainwashed by WoW that they complain that it doesn't have raids.
They're trying to push in the dungeon crawler direction, but too many people just want to be able to solo kill everything.

>The stupid part is most MMOs these days just make everyone able to do all 3 roles, when they should be diversifying the roles completely.
What, you actually like the "one character can only be one thing, go make an alt faggot" nonsense from WoW? That was one of the best things about FFXI, not only could you switch up without having to make a dozen alts, you could combine classes with the subjob system. Of course crafting and inventory limits encouraged alts for different reasons, but you only played on one character.

I'd prefer my class to play differently then other classes completely.

>but seriously who needs to fucking drink in 2019 WOW.
In a dungeon setting you could see a restoration druid, mistweaver monk, or arcane mage all busting out their expensive darkmoon fish feasts for a quick re-up. Everyone also eats up post pull on grievous or bursting weeks.

Underrated post.

Agree that novelty has worn off and we need a paradigm shift, something completely new not based on anything that has come before.

man, i remember in 2002 i was 12 playing daoc.

it took me literally 6 months to get a character to 50. i was young and not very efficient, sure, but it took foreeever to level up back then. most "good" poopsock players it would be 1-2 months

i had a blast the entire time.

what can i even play now to scratch that 20 year mmo itch

It couldn't take the next step because all MMO players at their core had this contradiction of wanting to stand out above the crowd with their own skills and achievements but isn't willing to see people better than them obtain rewards that will make them unique so that they can define themselves.

They couldn't take the next step because all MMO players despite buzzing around the term 'MMO' ultimately stick around running instanced areas called dungeons and essentially view the actual world of the MMO as a glorified lobby/leveling zone.

They couldn't take the next step because all 'MMO' players only wanted to progress, nobody wanted the risk of losing what they've earned and want to stockpile more and more and more and more, only gain never loss, only win never lose. This means outside of scripted instances where the games literally steal your shit by force with no variable from player decisions/actions the only way you MMO avatar will go is up up and up.

All this means you will never see an MMO with real war dictated or even influenced truly by players. You will never see huge coalitions of guilds try to rob one another through raiding capital cities to storm into the bank/treasuries. You will never see factions wiped off the map and the survivors having to join the winners with penalties and play under adverse conditions as true underdogs. You will never see players with avatars crippled and have to adjust to a different play style because they've lost an arm or a leg or an eye despite formerly being a top world ranking player because said player chose to stake it all to defeat a boss that was gonna destroy his nostalgic starter home town.

You will never get anything like that. Despite the technology being almost there, there hasn't even been an attempt at anything like such. Why? Because everything has to be safe, whether it's scripted DDR parties or safe and fair 'sports' you call PvP, nothing fucking matters and you're all the SAME.

>I don't know how all those problems are ever going to be solved
VR

>All this means you will never see an MMO with real war dictated or even influenced truly by players. You will never see huge coalitions of guilds try to rob one another through raiding capital cities to storm into the bank/treasuries. You will never see factions wiped off the map and the survivors having to join the winners with penalties and play under adverse conditions as true underdogs. You will never see players with avatars crippled and have to adjust to a different play style because they've lost an arm or a leg or an eye despite formerly being a top world ranking player because said player chose to stake it all to defeat a boss that was gonna destroy his nostalgic starter home town.
DAE EVE online real life wars over a videogame xD?

EVE had the right idea except it's game play revolves around an autistic spread sheet simulator instead of ya know being a traditional 3rd person avatar roaming a world. It's closer to like an RTS MMO. One of the issues with EVE is that macroing is relatively very easy, commanding large scale is a basic element.

In a reasonably ideal MMO, even if a p2w fag buys a huge NPC army to steam roll others with, they would need to maintain loyalty/logistics/etc and train up their officers or get guild players and such to occupy those positions, and everything shouldn't be so fire and forget. Giving complete simplified controls to macro level entities ruins not only the possible experience of being a genuine commander but it limits how the opposition can possibly affect you.

Resources and p2w shit in particular being infinite simply based on money is also an issue. War is essentially a political move over resources, and when resources are infinite it kills half the point of war. Having say p2wfags spend their money like water to fight over a unique legendary weapon at an auction is far more healthy than a p2wfag pumping out a star fleet out of fucking nowhere.

THE FUCKING MMO TRINITY WAS TANK HEALER AND FUCKING UTILITY/SUPPORT YOU DUMBFUCKS. DPS ONLY BECAME A THING AFTER ENRAGE MECHANICS

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