Modern MMO - how it should be

[alanschu]

Because you're not thinking ahead. Any hostile action would get you a PVP flag, which would allow the victim of that action and his teammates to attack you freely. A rogue can try to steal things, but if he fails, he dies, loses hard earned XP, loses his hard earned gear, everything.

PvP flags? What is this kindergarten!?

[Malcador]

Or many recent MMORPGs.

[alanschu]

Yes I know.

 

It was more a poke at the rest of the ideas which were pretty much the antithesis of recent MMOs

[Malcador]

Shame it is, but I suppose your game won't get very large as people hate being ganked. 

[Bester]

Yeah, LA2 never got big because people hated being ganked, so they all stopped playing and LA2 just died and never got those 8 something addons.

 

God, this new generation of gamers...

 

I guess LoL and Dota2 aren't popular either, cause you can get ganked in there.

Edited January 21, 2014 by Bester

[Endrosz]

...

2) Hard and Unbalanced.

 

I smiled at this naive line. You create an MMO like that, and you will end up with a cozy club of a few thousand players. Maybe a few tens of thousands.

 

You're part of the 1337 crowd, the 1% who managed complete the original Naxx'ramas, right? Let me tell you something: it's not worth spending millions of dollars to create content tailored for you. There's just not enough of you. Blizzard knows that all too well now.

 

Do you know of Darkfall? After a facelift, it's called Darkfall: Unholy Wars. It was built much to you liking, if I understood your list correctly: sandbox gear crafting, sandbox city building, full PvP with very few safe zones, lootable corpses, and many other hardcore game systems. Not everyone wins. And it's never gotten very popular, because not many people want to play that way. But it might be just the thing for you.

[Malcador]

Yeah, LA2 never got big because people hated being ganked, so they all stopped playing and LA2 just died and never got those 8 something addons.

 

God, this new generation of gamers...

 

I guess LoL and Dota2 aren't popular either, cause you can get ganked in there.

 

Well, given I was speaking of MMORPGs your latter two examples don't match. I've no idea what LA2 is, though.  As fun as a game where PvP can happen anytime any moment, with gankers being prevalent, it does reduce the appeal.  EVE has this, though I'd guess other aspects of game do that rather than the fact everyone is out to gank you economically or otherwise.

[ErictheFallenJedi]

I can't see any reason most people wouldn't hate an mmo like that.

[marelooke]

 

thing is, that most mmos do have a sense of complete stagnation

the point is not balance, it is to differentiate classes in more aspects than just their combat skills.

let me put it this way. i play GW2, i have 4 characters, each has 2 of the 8 crafting skills and i get their levels up 5 for each at a time. that allows me to farm the materials and have self made gear for all every 5 levels (crafted gear is in 5lv increments for those who dont know about the game). i do not need the rest of the players of the game, unless i plan to participate in group exclusive events like dungeons.

now if certain non combat related stuff were class based the thing would change. if only warriors could craft melee weapons, only guardians could craft heavy armor, only rangers could craft bows and so on, including that no class could gather materials that were not relevant to it's crafting skill, no player could become self suficient about his gear. it could also be used in dungeons: the engineer could operate a machine that cleared a path that avoided enemies. a thief could disarm an alarm so that no new enemies will spawn and so on

Except that, to a degree, in an MMO you have to afford the ability to solo because there will not always be somebody to play with you at all times. Multiplayer content can be the focus of your game, but you have to design a majority of your content (mostly of the leveling persuasion) around only one player being around at any time.

 

This is why most MMO's are endgame focused... because endgame is the only time you can guarantee there will be a large segment of your population twittling their thumbs. Although City of Heroes added layer after layer of things to the midgame and was built around alts.

 

Out of all the MMO's I've played EverQuest 2 (EQ2) kept me interested the longest (aside from WoW, which was my first and as such has a bit of a special case). The reason I quit playing that game had less to do with the game content than with the utter lack of attention the developer (SOE) had for the game and the constant taking away of features to make the game more easily accessible to new players (read it became more and more of a WoW-clone)

 

I really liked EQ2's ability to "downscale" high level characters (forgot the actual name for it), it worked reasonably well too (except for the fact that it didn't account for out-of-date content, iow high level gear had certain stats that simply didn't exist in the early areas), the real great thing about it was that it actually benefits both the low and the high level characters so it happened very often that when a "lowbie" couldn't find a group there would almost always be a bunch of high level characters ready to jump in to help.

 

The fact that there was just a huge world to explore also helped, it wasn't until the last few expansions that there were multiple areas to go quest in, there were even just "adventure packs", which contained more same-level content with only cosmetic rewards but that had fun storylines. It is entirely feasible (and likely) to hit max level in EQ2 and not have seen more than half of the "world map" and up until the end I kept discovering new quests, dungeons etc, some of which even "ancients" (just made this up, but I mean players that had been playing since the beginning) had forgotten about.

 

You could, and I often did, alone or in group, just go out to an area and see the sights. Sure raiding with people is fun, PvP (world or otherwise) can be great fun if you're into it. But there needs to be more to the world than being guided from area to area doing the same old quests following a singular storyline ending with getting a group to fight some bosses, same as everyone else.

 

There needs to be stuff to discover and the discovery ought to be a reward in itself, not the subject of random achievements ("find all the hidden stone tablets with bull**** written on them"). I remember grinding reputation with factions just to acquire some cool looking (in *my* mind anyway) garb for my character and most of those factions weren't exactly the "endgame" factions. I recall trudging all over entire continents just to acquire a certain title, not because that title signified some awesome boss kill or some exclusive "achievement", but because that title was awesome in itself and *fit my character*. Or even to get some furniture for my house.

 

This generally sounds silly to the "modern" MMO-crowd, I mean, why put effort into stuff that doesn't give you XP or 1337 gear. Right? Yeah, I didn't think so either.

 

I guess the TL;DR, MMORPGs need to become RPGs once more. Maybe then I'll find one I can care about once more.