MMO: what went wrong, and where to go

I think we all can agree most MMO are shit, specially those that came after WoW's huge success. We've been reusing the same stale and boring formulas over and over, but what are exactly these caveats, and how would you improve them?

I will start:

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I think there might be some technical reasons why all MMOs are shit that most people are unaware of. I can imagine most developers run into server issues when making large open worlds that have to keep track of hundreds of players at once. Even with modern super-processors like modern Xeons with 20+ cores it'd probably be expensive too

Think about World of Warcraft, Blizzard had to pull of some tricks to give off the illusion of a seemless, massive world

1.) Only half of the games world is loaded per player at any given time
2.) Only a specific, closed area of the world is rendered per player at any given time
3.) There had to be many different servers "realms" to fit everybody, and Blizzard always witheld how many players a realm can actually hold, but supposedly the bound is something rather small like 500 players

It wasn't until Cataclysm that flying mounts became a thing and the limitation of having only a small section of the world rendered at a given time per player was lifted, but the world was then rendered into distance chuncks

Basically, its fucking hard on resources and expensive for developers to deploy and maintain an MMO, even after all of WoWs limitations Blizzard still had to charge 15 bucks a fucking month and they are probably the only company that could've gotten away with that

...

Wakfu was a wonderful game during the beta, but when it went live Ankama went full retard.

They had the right idea about focusing the game on exploration without quests but then they gave up on that, started adding npcs and quests out the ass, generic WoW pets and start removing contents from areas or making it so there was no reason at all to explore.

...

Most of the things WoW "invented" and became staples of the genre were indeed technical limitations. For example, the much abused click-to-autotarget is a trick used to disguise latency.

Anyway, nowadays the main limitation would be bandwidth. Everything else can be handled by any regular server farm, and more subtle "tricks" could be used to further reduce resource consumption of the game now that we got better at game engine design.

These are just the basics.

There are people posting on this board right now who are younger than Ultima Online.

WoW is probably the best MMO ever created. The problem is when people decide to make content that is shit. Like anything from Burning Crusade and onwards. WoW wasn't perfect either, but it was pretty goddamn good despite what you kids say these days.

i recall a couple of gory nps that didn't mde it tha far , around 2007 2008
Also, lest not forget the diablo clones

You don't even know what you want, you're contradicting yourself.
If you want classes to be more unique why the fuck are you letting all classes use everything?

Also
MMO's that had freedom like this suffered greatly. Everyone copied A B or C builds because they were more optimum than the many others, good job on being original for test/roleplaying pourposes, now you have the disadvantage in PvP scenarios.

MMO's has been shit for other reasons instead:
==1º== of all, the community. To make MMO's great you first need an amazing and good community, when we played the good ol' MMO's everyone was friendly or a roleplayer. Everyone had fun together, end game fuckers went to low level areas to hang out with newbies and teach them or to defend them from griefers if the game had open world PvP. So people wanted to explore the world and didn't care about doing a dungeon that gave less EXP than another one just for the sake of FUN.
What do we have in 99% MMOs? "Fuck you that was my mob/monster/enemy" "Fuck you that was my loot" "I report you for picking up loot not for your class" "Why would I go to that dungeon? Noone goes there, 85% of the dungeons are useless, we just go to the other 15% scrub" "It took you 2 to kill me xDD" "Giff moni pls" "I'm not destroying the economy on the game, I'm just simply buying everything with my credit's card, selling everything and then buying everything in the marketplace from other players to make sure its only me and my other accounts selling stuff" "Hi I'm totally a GM, please log in into this totally safe webpage to get free shit"

==2º== P2W bullshit, even in MMO's that you have to pay, everything is bound to P2W. Its not a matter of "it's not pay to win man!" it's a matter of "how p2w-heavy this MMO is". There's not a single MMO that has no p2w, exclusive shit that are not cosmetics and important that can be sold to other players is still P2W niggers, altough that is a "low tier p2w" game meanwhile we can have straight up "I give you stats and exclusive gear if you pay" tier for p2w as well.

==3º== Uninteresting as shit combat. Before we could understand the shitty combat in most MMO's, some are still decent nowadays, but now it's quite hard to play them because they're shitty. This was fixed with interesting world, music, story and dungeons/bosses, nowadays we have none of that.

tl;dr:
Community made MMO's, nowadays people are SHIT.
Greedy business destroys the games further.
Outdated gameplay that we have been burnt for playing for years and years.

Learn to read. He is talking about characters of class A being all alike, not characters of class A and B being too similar.

I agree with everything you said so I'd like to add on to what you said.

The largest problem outside of what you listed is that "MMO" has become a genre. "MMO" is no longer an adjective. We've allowed the MMO to become defined to something preconceived. Back in the day it was understandable due to our limits, but we never moved on. There have been a few MMO's recently that have tried to expand what an MMO can be (RIP Tree Of Savior. Killed by poor execution and toxic as shit community.)

Yes, I'm being vague as shit. And my formatting probably looks like shit.

I'm trying to fix this. And I'll burn trying, but dammit I'm going to try. Hold on for about 5-10 years and we'll see what happens.

Don't give up hope anons, one day something will come around. Wait for the moon.

I've been playing BnS finally. Always thought it was going to be shit, however, it's pretty enjoyable and key on this: The community is not fucking shit.

I've been seeing tons of people running around even high levels going to low level areas to help, there has been a lot of fucking people coming my way when I couldnt solo a dungeon or even people that gave me a bit of money so I could upgrade something and when I got bullied hard in open world pvp my faction would come instantly to defend me even if I'm joking about it and not asking for it.
So far people there have been really nice and helpful.

Now about the gameplay? Well, it's kinda an action game that relies heavily on cancels where skills matters more than gear but let's be honest, even if you are good one thing is soloing a raid boss for 20 minutes and another soloing it for 5 minutes, you have more room to fuck it up with shitty gear, however you can still solo most things.

Wakfu Beta was too pure for this world. We're still not ready for an MMO like that.

I feel like effort with regards to proposed MMO mechanics with classes, crafting etc would be best spent on making a good singleplayer roleplayer's paradise and tacking on some multiplayer as is done in dark souls for example.

not a thing went wrong.Skinner box works, so why change it?

Problem: every mmo has insane amounts of vertical progression.
Effects: new players cannot play with veterans. only a small subset of the game's content is relevant to you at any given point. content becomes obsolete.
Possible solution: replace vertical progression with horizontal and/or cosmetic progression - more options/swagger instead of more power.
Possible outcome: no power gaps dividing the playerbase. all content is relevant.

few mmorpgs + everyone playing the same games = community
many mmorpgs + everyone playing different games = no community

r8 summary of an article i read about mmorpgs

Hadn't it been for MMOs
I'd be married long time go
What went wrong and where did you go?
Where did you go, MMOs?

>No third person Wakfu MMO that lets me explore and play crazy levels of dressup and such, will ever exist.

I just wanna make artisan bread and travel the world with my rolling kitchen and fishing rod…

Power gaps kill interest in starting MMO's. Not to use the C word, but casuals are heavily discouraged when they see that the back end of the server has all the loot, and they're still stuck grinding. Then new expansions come out, and they're stuck grinding STILL while the players ahead, stay ahead.

I mean, I hate PvP and Age of Wushu is good shit, but at the same time, the whales with cash-kung-fu and people who can afford to spend hundreds of hours on the game, persist - holding an inevitable advantage over those who don't p2w and can't p2w.

Power Gaps are a huge problem. As is making the grind to cap fun.

Thanks, now I have that fucking song stuck in my head.

I have a question. Why was grinding in runescape more fun then any other MMO for me?

The root of all this is the excessive grinding mechanics put in place to adapt the psychology of the game to concepts such as powerlevel stroking or skinner boxes. Problem is, it's hard to callibrate: give very little grinding and everybody will stop playing when they realize the game will not change much after that point, give too much grinding and people who haven't been since the start of the game will probably get tired quickly. How would you balance grind with no-grind to keep the game interesting and with some sense of progression?

I think it would be interesting if we could develop some mechanics based around having many quick to max levels, so to speak. For example, if each character had one level for each element in the game (water, fire, earth, wind, dark, light… you name it), you could make one dungeon/quest line for each element, and force the player to level up the strong element against that element to be able to play the dungeon. Then, for example, if a friend of a somewhat veteran player decides to start playing, they can both start anew by picking one of the many elements together and doing that quest/dungeon line from scratch as if they were both low levels. Overall or general level would influence combat very little, and mastering several elements would only make you more useful for multielemental dungeons.

For example:
>Jimbo is a seasoned player who has managed to master light, darkness, fire, radioactive, wood, earth and blood. He is a man of edge
I am not sure how to handle equipment without making it stagnate while giving a sense of progression and not just TF2-style "this weapon is better but it has penalties because FUCK YOU SIDEGRADES" stat changes, and I am also not sure how to handle players that may want to be able to minmax a single element without making them objectively underpowered. Thoughts?

The closest game I found was Project Gorgon, and I found about it here in Holla Forums.

Solution: make a game that's not shit.

I dunno. I didn't take the genre for granted when I grinded 5 classes to 75 from 1 in FFXI.

Then again, had a comfy as fuck community on the game too, so there was always someone at my side when the game was played. Things were different then.

I heard about Project Gorgon, but I never really jumped onto it. Haven't had the spare time until recent, and I hear it's not as alive as it could be.

That, and playing MMO's alone blows. I don't have the spine I used to

Ya there was always someone to talk to who actually wanted to talk. Although the graphics were shit it it was the scenery always had shit going on. The music was awesome and I dunno I always felt like I was going somewhere when I was grinding in runescape. Like there was always a next level that was somewhat useful or just kept me excited enough. Also crafting was simplistic but deep enough to keep you going.

In FFXI it was you vs. the world. No maps, no mouthbreathers on twitch telling you exactly where everything is, no hand holding. (Unless you got the prima guide like a true pro such as myself) No fast travel. Missed the boat? Well shit nigger, you just wasted 30 minutes of your whole party's time. Fights had to be organized in great detail consisting of more than putting up your flag in a LFR queue and hoping the right classes are online at the right time. I could go on and on but the gist of it is that there's no longer a community around your server, it's just a bunch of people competing to be the best using whatever means available (like twitch) to min/max. FFXI was not just about the goddamn destination, it was about the journey and the players you met along the way, each as clueless as yourself. That's just not how it works anymore and I'm afraid there might not be any way to change it.

I think the problem is most mmos focus TOO MUCH on extending content, making grinding longer and longer so it takes longer and longer to reach endgame content, when they should be focusing on allowing players control or manage content, make things character driven, give them power to make their own fun, or methods that allow them to find one another or reasons to interact with one another when meeting in the wild.
Make it so people can actually have FUN doing other things and so that they dont feel that they are wasting time by not grinding 24/7. Give you a reason to explore the world and to ENJOY it, to find things that you wouldnt find otherwise unless you went out of your way to find something cool, not every single location and point of interest being connected to one another by endless quest arrows.

Didn't really happen that much in your pic related, I loved Dofus, there was some freedom for building characters.
This also happened with weapons in Dofus.

I share a lot of this sentiment with Vanilla WoW as well, and know I'll probably get judged for it here, but it was truly an experience in its own right. Azeroth was a wondrous world full of atmosphere and wonderful people at the time. No one knew everything but everyone knew something unique. The world was a huge adventure, and server communities absolutely fluorished for a while. It was a sad, sad, day for me when they introduced cross-realm activity.

TL;DR Datamining and readily available guides ruined everything.

Which is an awful strawman trying to ignore the real issue: That the MMOs have simply been shit.

It's definitely played a big part.

While Wakfu is a husk of its former self I do kind of like that there's barely any resources online for it, and no group building shit either. You have to make a circle of friends to run stuff with and find people to teach you how to do things, because fucking no-one wants to take some random faggot to a high level dungeon and you can't find the mechanics for anything online.

Remove the M, the M and the O from the RPG. Done.

MMOs didn't change (literally, everything is just a clone), the people who played them changed.

Remember The economy?
Only smithing Kamas, wtf was that? Lol

This is almost the entire point to an MMO. A good community can make even the most shitty MMORPGs bearable or even good but the amazing MMORPGs community of the past are just so vastly different from what exists now where almost everyone is either a solo autist who don't know what the term MMO even means or a faggot. I might pick up BnS to check that out too. Sounds like the glory days.

Everquest becoming the to go MMO model instead of Ultima Online
To the roots of UO.
Remove "raids".
Remove "battlegrounds".
Remove the trinity.
Remove player character being special.
Remove every player character being a combat class of some kind.

Fucking retard.

Don't be mad at him, he is just too young to remember the age before WoW.

That was good thou. Money actually had value.
In any other mmo, money comes from anywhere. You can go do a dungeon or whatever the fuck and suddenly "lol i have so much money time to waste it".
In the wakfu beta, you knew the value behind every single coin. You didnt make money by chance. Every single coin you had, you knew what you did to earn it. You either learned to sell resources and their right prices, craft equipment or furniture for yourself or to sell, or you straight up went to the mines and made the money out of raw ores. Think of any other mmo. What are the first things you did to get money and what did you spend it on? just random quests and then bought whatever cheap low level equipment there was around, you were gonna get more money and get equipment from quests that were better soon enough anyway,
Now think back to wakfu: You reached the marketplace but you had no money. You wanted to sell things but you didnt know their value so you ended up underselling bulks of materials or waiting far too long, then you decided to MAKE the money instead. Making your first coin. Making your first 10 coins. All those things took a while but it felt good. only 10 kamas but this was money you WORKED for, you EARNED it. And you were very careful before spending it because you wanted to get something that would last, because these mere 10 coins were valuable to you. They had time and effort put into them.

Add to this silently killing anyone who tries to set up a wiki or any other similar shit that kills any sort of exploration/creativity on community's part.

Yes and no. Some classes had two "best" possible element specializations, but others simply had a single way to become useful. For example, Eniripsas had a grand total of three attack spells of different elements, but the rest of their moveset was Intelligence-based, and unless you wanted to go into 1 on 1 PvP, choosing anything else than full Intelligence was stupid.

In the end, at high levels, there were, at best, two or three possible best builds for each class. There were some crazy maniacs who managed to push their minmaxing to their limits by getting a bit creative, like that fucking Sram with 1/2 crits on Lethal Attack, but it wasn't something most players could do, specially considering the way equipment stats worked in Dofus. In that game, elemental specialization was just subclassing, just that they were nice enough to let you use all spells at the same time.

Yeah, but just for weapons. Then again, equipment wasn't class-locked (not even class specific sets, they just happened to be useless on other classes my Eniripsa used to wear a Xelor hat because they were cute and I like witches) since it was just elemental-based rather than role-based, so the suggestion was mostly for those MMO that still clinge to the idea of limiting their players' possibilities.


Nigger, the system worked. I once spent the whole afternoon mining for kamas and got enough money to three pieces of any high level equipment -which weren't that high by that moment-. They costed around 100 kamas, and I had 300. This was at level 5 or so, so go figure.

You can't fix MMOs. The core problem is the label being associated with massive budget games with ongoing updates forever. No amount of design changes will convince an investor to give you 100m to develop a game when all they can hear from the public is "Well it's still smaller than WoW and I have 1k hours in that, so…"

Plus, there's no tech that can support half the shit people expect on an MMO level without a storm of bugs. Old MMOs managed it because they had very simple systems to work on.

The MMOs of this era are the lobby-based always online games, the pvp only arenas/assfaggots and the early access survival crap. MMOs as we know it are dead and nothing will change that other than a 10+ year drought after WoW dies so people forget their expectations.

Which is a shame, because I'm the kind of autist that actually likes MMOs.

How about you made a game that isn't shit and has actual content, rather than promise non-existant content behind a grinwall, you fucking jew?

Dubs of truth.

The casualization of MMOs also brings a diverse set of player mindsets into the community, including shitters. And when everyone sees that cancerous things like you mentioned are ignored, and straight up become advantages, they will start going on the bandwagon as well.

I feel the greedy business practices begets the shitty community; you start removing the collection addicts when you paywall all the cosmetics, pets and fun stuff. Old WoW Blizzard would just run an event and go "hey look something neat" and people would jump on doing neat things for the sake of neat stuff, now it's "hey look something neat in the cash shop" which forgoes the whole process of doing neat things with other people. Also I think having teleports and methods to avoiding being on the map to be conducive to a shitty community since it removes the players from actually going out and playing in the world. Which story would you rather hear with your guild mates, "yeah so I was running through Tanaris to get to Un'Goro and this Alliance/Horde was just sun bathing and he starting punching and kicking while spamming some macro that said gibberish" or no story because you get no stories when you teleport like a faggot.

people on Holla Forums seem to shit on themepark mmos a lot and I get that but when you look at the most popular mmos, it is always themepark mmo wowclones like ffxiv which is the second largest mmo after wow right now.

so my point is maybe the masses of people who are made up of casuals and normalfags and idiots and what else like their mmos just like their shows on the electric jew. that is to say, the same old rehashed shit over and over again they've seen and played a million times before. this is reflected in how the best selling video games are shit like fps cowadooty halo clones which are literally even worse than mmos are when it comes to being the same shit over and over again but these are what sell well with the masses. the entire fps genre is the most same shit over again of any genre in existence but it's what sells by the millions.

a lot of the ideas or complaints that should be addressed regarding mmos itt already have mmos out there which have fixed this problem, it's just that hardly nobody has ever heard about them and play them because they just don't appeal to the masses. this is the problem when you make anticasual games. Holla Forums's tastes might be too elitist, niche, or dated with the current and terrible generation.

possibly the only thing to do now with mmos is to wait it out until wow finally collapses, freeing up the market and floodgates for players or until vrmmos like exist in fiction finally appear which would truly be revolutionary and game changing to the genre as its what people have been expecting and waiting for for decades.

gotta agree with this

almost perfect

They stopped making worlds and started making themeparks.

But that's a fucking myth. Also, everything you described are fundamentals of game engines and things that existed with EverQuest; WoW didn't invent shit.

MMOs are shit because the gameplay is shit. But before that you had tabletop gaming, where the "gameplay" is making choices followed by doing a bunch of tedious manual calculations, having a computer program do all of that for you, or MUDs/MUSHes (which were even more brutal than EverQuest).

If you guys can handle nographix, you should try Hellmoo.
It's a fun, but small mmo. We even have a guild here on vee

Yes, it attracts shitters and kills whoever wanted to give the game a chance. There are some nice MMO's or with nice ideas that are destroyed thanks to the community or/and because of publisher's greed, an example would be DFO or Vindictus, both have good gameplay but the community is quite awful and elitist on top of that (when they suck at the game, I will never understand elitism when you are not part of the elite to begin with).


Yes, that is why I'm testing Blade and Soul and so far it's doing great regarding all my points previously. Here you can have better outfits than from the store if you work hard for it since they are challenge exclusive shit, at least some of them.
Teleports are quite needed in my opinion when the world is big, however, there should not be as many teleports neither fucking mounts. Fuck mounts, I fucking hate them jesus fucking christ.

So what's the opinion of Black Desert Online?

Shit.

Make class based systems strict again, but able to break out of traditional roles through tactics and teamwork, and often forced to do overcome quirky encounters. Every class has to actually be unique and force a change in the group's tactics.

Remove minimaps and everything except area maps that have landmarks labeled but don't show where the player is, remove quest markers, make soloing unattractive and impossible in many areas, no fast travel except boats or cable cars or shit like that, sub instead of cash shop, old school dnd artstyle. Remove instances.

Or better yet, don't use classes and levels.

Murdered by Daum. I played it on the KR Client when mostly everything was translated in the UI via some google bot which lent a lot of mystery as to what was going on and out of the gate it feels like a genuinely good experience that you could recommend to people, but once you start getting into the meat of the game you start to find it has nothing to offer beyond grinding. I don't have the image with Pearl's original plans, but it sums up what was developed and forcibly scrapped.

How about doing something to exhance player interaction? Right now most MMORPG's feel more like single-player games with random people running around. Raids barely counts, as they're more about pressing buttons until stuff dies and hoping other people can push buttons as fast as you.

Why are you keep talking even though you proved you don't know shit about mmos?

*do

All MMOs are shit.

I think it's a good idea but some MMOs have tried this, like a sort of master-apprentice system to pair up new players to veteran players. It didn't work out too well. To think in the old days, high level players used to help newbies for free. Now it all just seems that is more of a fantasy than the setting of the world the game itself is in.

But maybe there's a form of implementation or execution of such a system or incentives that's missing. The question of enhancing or forcing player interaction is how it should be done and how do you fix the current player character mentality of being an edgy dual wielding guy in a dark trenchcoat solo player in an MMO that is "the thing" right now?

explain yourself.

gee

explain yourself

The environment forced those sorts of interactions and the appeal was not general enough to attract many actual children/retards. Also, most of those people were still present if you're talking about any of the MMOs I'm thinking of, they simply weren't catered to by designers.
MMOs should be single purchase or yearly, at best, with 0 microtransactions. I honestly don't care if it's 30$ a year or 100$ a copy, the quality of the game suffers if you cater to 'give me some piddly shit so I can justify staying subbed this month'fags or 'let me just buy victory lol free game'fags.
mmoRPGs have had shit combat for a long time and I agree that the peripherals that justified or allowed this are disintegrating around us, you have to remember that the D&D generation are leaving the work-force slowly but surely.

What went wrong? Where can MMOs expand, where can they return to if they want to regain the quality of their 'ancestors'?
The goals of future MMORPGs seem clear in one of two sets, the first being to create an immersive and expansive MMO world. This is something everyone wants, even if they don't know it yet. As the fidelity of surrounding content improves, so too with the play experience. It's the shit you see suggested in every thread like this ever made, shifting borders, a real economy complete with peddlers, traders, travelers, caravans, and boats, real transports and travel with functional ecosystems where the monsters aren't just there, but rather something to explore, and where you're in a world that is still barely tapped and rife for the players, as 'heroes', to discover.
The other set and focus would be to eliminate as many traditional RPG qualities as possible and create a fully functional combat system. Typically this implies 1:1 interaction or a third-person brawling game that feels more like Dynasty Warriors or even Mount & Blade. In this manner, progression would be less 'get EXP, invest points' and more 'Train skills, learn to do the actions reliably, interact creatively during combat'. Alternatively, goals for progression are set to establish better grind curves or combat by proxy. This can also involve horizontal 'training' systems, abandoning class, or involve more variety, more stringent but diversified class structure, etc.
It doesn't take much to go back (small features from both of these is really all it takes) but there are challenges to pioneering no one's taken an axe to.


Dominos.
Professions are difficult to grow without stats to back them up.
Equipment has wear and tear, you must find a reliable repairbro, but things don't last super long even then.
Ensure dungeons and areas are long and deep if you want to get the real $$$, encouraging crafting specific classes to be necessary as support members of the group.
Cloth and wood rods don't last long, archers and mages are frail as fuck and their equipment will be in tatters without a group.
Everyone starves and working hard makes you hungrier, gourmet food during 'exercise' can give limited permanent stat gains.
Bonuses and classes related to working in groups, ensure the scale of dungeons is suitable and the AI is resistant to Pulling. Sneaky groups will pop up to try to quietly eliminate cells of monsters at a time, assholes will drag crowds into you, so forth, good wholesome RPG interactions.
Professions are time consuming and highly rewarding and professions have to work together, ranchers need food from farmers and a farm to work on, farmers need the manure, tailors need the leather from it, blacksmiths need hilts and cloths and decorations and flux, miners need something strong to pick with and supply high quality ores if they're good at their jobs, alchemists need rare gems and crops and ores, so on and so forth. Recipes should be avoided at all costs and new content should be analyzed and assigned unique properties, and better and more fulfilling equipment should require drops from dungeons.
Full circle, this is the framework that huge groups of people gathered up to make progress in the game must have to support healthy interaction in this way. Principalities are built on farms and commerce springs up from gathered noncombat mixed with available combat resources (infected forests, loot-full dungeons or ruins).
Alternatively, if you're a casual, emulate Age of Wushu. Controllable and develop-able guild sites, battle arrays, schools to identify with and professions built to complement each-other, all it fucking takes, not hard. Make playing in a group profitable and rewarding and set up a game you can roleplay/shitpost in, you're good to go.

Is there an ultima online private server?

Lotsa, but hard to say which ones are still alive.

EverQuest devs gave into jews having to constantly add more post game content for them stopping them from adding more content to the rest of the game.
Then those same jews made WOW and every following popular mmo the same fucking thing.

HAHAHAHAHAHAH oh yeah that'll totally work when data mining exists.
One second let me write that down in my fantasy journal.
I love ideas guy threads, not because they have good ideas, but because they have clueless retards that I can laugh at.

SILKROAD ONLINE.

What's the point of MMOs anyway?

Every time I've tried to get into one, I couldn't help but feel it would be improved as a singleplayer game. I'd rather straight up pay for or pirate a game then have to pay a monthly subscription, or languish in 'f2p' hell where you have to pay a fee or waste hours of your life if you want to actually play the game. Seeing strangers walking around in their shitty clownsuits doesn't add anything to the experience. I don't have the time or inclination to sit around and try to make money off people either.

PVP and coop are the only thing they've got going for them, but it's not like the rest of the model is necessary. Why is it still around?

shit taste and monetization is my guess

Recipes should exist, but I get what you are going at.


I think he isn't talking about "try to combine stuff randomly until something happens to produce something". That's frustrating and only leads to (understandable) datamining. Instead, he is probably talking about letting the game guess the effects or properties of any given amount of ingredients. For example, you know there is a plant that gives healing qualities to your potions, and you also know there is a plant that tends to corrupt effects, and there is also a plant that makes the potion affine to fire; you combine them all expecting to get a fire poison, but then you find out at least two of those plants have hidden qualities that react differently with each other, and thus you end up with an inert potion; however, it is not actually an useless potion, since it acts as a great healing potion, but only for fire-based races.

If the game gets to determine the results of any given recipe, datamining becomes incredibly more difficult. You would end up with several players trying to become crazy alchemists who give their new experimental potions for their friends to try and report back with the results, or autistic blacksmiths trying to find the correct alloy and forge process (NIPPON STEEL FOLDED 1000 TIMES) for their weapons all day long. You could still have some templates not to accidentally end up with stuff you didn't really want to do (what-the-fuck-am-I-casting style), like sword or mace or shield for weapon blacksmiths, or drinkable potion or throwable potion for alchemists.

That's just as bad
Why even craft if your shit is pure rng.

In fact that's worse than his idea, because your idea actively ruins crafting where his is just impossible

Creative design cannot be 'datamined', 'secret recipes' can.
Interaction would be done by combining features and content in a variety of ways to achieve unique effects based on material, enchantments, quality, your own skill, any buffs or blessings you have, etc.
Rather than 'hey here's a recipe for this cloth shirt', you'd want a slot system
I'm using this material for the sleeves because it was taken from some fire wolf bullshit and I'm building this for an elemental mage, lightweight hide from these rabbits for decent defense. String and twine, studs, gems, 'formulas' but choices on what to put in. Nothing secret, just interactions between enchants and obtaining the skills/materials required to make high-quality gear with more versatility than 'click button get rare armor lol'. In an impractical but superior system, you would use an in-client modeling system and aesthetics would be custom as well, allowing for extreme variety. It's not genuinely feasible as of yet.


I don't get what he's going at in the slightest, do you have a decent translator for retardese?


Waste of trips, I bet you think blacksmithing in WoW is fulfilling and interesting.

They all follow rules. Master craftsmen should be able to determine the output of a recipe before they submit it. Materials and procedures all have unique properties, and you just have to find out what do they do.

BTW, I messed up the quote order in my last post. Please understand.

That is a very severe case of sideways anime mouth.

then it's just gonna get datamined.


That's a massive waste of time, there's gonna be optimal recipes people figure out in 2 seconds and not bother with anything else.

The cartesian product of the combination of all possible items with all possible procedures would be so high it could as well be infinite. You aren't going to datamine that in a while.

Add byte operations fuckery like AND, OR or XOR to simulate chemistry and you have a nice deterministic crafting system that would be very difficult to master. If you design it well, you can even remove the possibility of making a maxed out item.

so one and so forth, you're fucking retarded, keep buckling down on your initial false assumption and pretend you have ground to stand on

That's a hilariously bad RNG based game. No one would play that shit.

Yeah, whatever son.

Okay so there's a very set number of things then.
Datamined ezpz

Fantasy Life for the 3DS tried that. Unfortunately, it uses Friend Code bullshit for its online mode, and the game play is bare bones. But the potential is there for sure. I hope someone else takes this idea and improves on it.

You're being intentionally obtuse at this point.

And you're so full of shit your eyes are brown.

I've already explained and provided examples for implementation, friend, as well as given a context to which this system would make sense.
it not an argument for whether or not adding more user choice and complexity to crafting systems would increase user engagement and force interaction with other players.

Everything can be datamined. You could technically make a list of 10000000 possible combinations (protip: nobody won't. Look at most MMO wikis and how empty they are), but you would probably have an easier time learning the rules and making the recipes yourself.

Also, what's the alternative? Straight out telling the player what can or can you not do? Basically "it's not dotamanida bcoz I just told them lol!"?

No I mean actual implementation dipshit.

Man I made a cloning device that works in theory on everything, what do you mean I don't get awards because I drew a giant box that says clone-vat on it and said "well someone else will figure all the details"

And when I found the best class in Rift, the Saboteur Rogue, and specced to be the ultimate CC poison/slow AoE asshole in PVP and wrecking people's shit nonstop; a few weeks later they nerfed the class into the ground and the game wasn't fun anymore.

It's like you've never actually played any MMOs. Or even videogames in general.

you're right, I'm making an assumption that your game will actually have players.
Which, judging by your ideas, is a bridge too far.

A system like this is no more expensive compared to standard clickbutton bullshit outside of extra UI as long as you aren't on a shit engine.
A system like this takes very little time to introduce but hasn't because drones like you refuse to demand quality MMO design.
A system like this would potentially increase player interactions with professions and maintain a better demographic and progression as you unlock new 'formulas' and resources to try out.
I expect no credit for my concepts or awards but you have not presented a single argument for why they wont work. It's more resilient to datamining, actually, compared to 'hit level 60 crafting and boom you can make this precise best!armor if you have the materials :)' because there would be a variety of valuable combinations introduced with every tier and 'formula' made available.
But, hey,

No, really, what else do you suggest? Plain out telling the player about it so it can't be slowly discovered by the players? Whether it's the developer who tells the player or the player who discovers it by itself, it's gonna end up in a wiki one way or another.

Give a better alternative or fuck off.

Yeah, mr. I have infinite dev time and money to dump on an extremely complex system.
A system that requires a huge playerbase, which it has to have.
The system that not only makes no sense, from an actual implementation standpoint because of the usual limitations, but also significantly narrows my playerbase because of the punishment for playing.

But don't worry, I'm sure that in your fantasy world you have friends to play with too.

My alternative is craft wipes.
Reset em every now and then.

I remember the good days of Ragnarok Online, in which for each different class you had at least two or three viable builds (Lord Knights could be Sword/Agi or Spear/Vit, Paladins could be Spear/Agi, Shield/Vit or Int/GC, etc.). But, no matter what, if you wanted to be part of a competitive clan on the War of Emperium, you needed to be one of the few viable WoE builds (pre-cast, blink-and-asura Monk, Emperium breaker, divester Rogue, coating Alchemist).

As much as people like to shit on WoW for being extremely streamlined within each class spec (and I'm one of those, I hate how you basically don't pick and choose anything anymore), it at least takes away the veil of fake choices.

extremely complex
EXTREMELY COMPLEX
similar and shittier implementations have been made in some garbage coder's fucking free time, pic related. Work would be required to give things traits specially based on its components, but you are going to have these systems in place already. It's not this magical money-sink you claim.
?
You not understanding super basic english doesn't actually exclude it from 'making sense'.
Elaborate.
Boy howdy learning how to make cool new armor your buddies haven't thought about yet sure is a punishment
If you're backtracking to the rest of my argument and you want to talk about other parts of it, please specify your specific objections, a punchline is best delivered as a retort and I want some laughs.

that's because they didn't. it's the same rehashed formula since EQ. it's the people who have changed and you know it.

except, that's exactly the old idea.
Your idea was player made recipes.

You basically described PSO2

No, you fucking retard, the ability to take similar components and have dramatically different outcomes that's being demonstrated. Coding wise, there is very little practical difference from what's being demonstrated there and the sort of system I am saying should be implemented.
enjoy yet another wow-clone with yet another profession system ripped straight from muh moneymaking MMO

it's in the name massively multiplayer online role playing game

there are times when it's just more fun to play with others or show them online

had potential until koreans complained about it not being a themepark linear mmo and not having the game thinking for them.
also

except that's the exact same as the old system.
There's literally no difference except you're not telling them

this is good and why I posted that image
this is bad
this is better and as simple as drag+drop and a few drop-down menus to select designs, insignias, and styles, with no particular reason to do the shit old way over this style of crafting

How simple do I need to make this for you to actually understand? Keep doubling down on your shit initial post and hope it works.

The fact that you have no idea how to actually implement this idea?
You just keep saying your idea over and over again like that somehow makes it easier to actually implement.
Your "example" is literally the same as WoW crafting \\

Morrowind had fairly modular armors. It's literally the same thing, just combined at craft time.

What's your fucking alternative? Come on, you have been avoiding the question so far.

You're right but it'll just lead to min-maxing, one of the major things that killed MMOs. That is, people will only bother listing "the good stuff" or the "the best in slot" shit. Why bother listing 10000000 items when people ultimately only care for the very best ones?But I do wish there was a way to stop datamining. Never has anything since wikis ruined the sense of adventure in a game. MMORPGs were strongly about the journey with some friends you made, who you will most likely never meet, but there's a sort of romance about it like how it was portrayed in the .hack// series or log horizon.Going around randomly exploring and hunting for rare items and unraveling the mystery of the game with your party, maybe even make a name for yourself and party along the way. That's what it should be about.

But that once again just led to mixmaxing.
Or the fortify alchemy loop.
Also that game was single player so there was no need for balance.

There will probably be many useless items, but if you force the stats to be normalized, you can force the player to come up with interesting combinations.

Say, you have 10 points to spend in stats (the actual crafting system wouldn't be like that and would probably involve more complicated maths, but just forget about that). You can make a potion with 10 points in instant healing, but you could try to spend 8 points in instant healing and 2 point in regen to achieve a higher maximum healed amount. That doesn't make the instant healing potion useless; if you are dying, you may not want to wait 4 turns until the potion deals its full effect. If you want to make a poisonous dart, you could spend all 10 points in damage, but what if you spent 9 points in damage and 1 in stun?


That's still not an alternative.

I don't have to, you're losing to WoW crafting.
You made a more redundant version of WoW's crafting.
Good job

You people are retarded and I'm glad that you're not actually working on MMOs.

You still haven't explained why a stats based crafting system is any worse than WoW crafting. You are still relaying all criticism to "muh datamining" despite the fact that WoW's crafts are all over wikis as well. I refuse to continue feeding you until you explain how does an open recipe system protect against datamining.

You've introduced thousands of useless recipes, and that's all you did.

You have to go back.

But they are.

Then prove it.

No satan, fuck you, if you want to see the same fucking setpiece for hundred of hours go check BDO.
I really fucking hope you like your goddamn grass and trees for miles.

SWG, UO and EVE have only minimal themepark elements and they still have nice and interesting locations with lots of random shit to interact with. What's your point?

You don't experience anything in them. Hey remember the time we killed that boss of the dungeon in the same way everyone has because the whole thing is highly scripted and if you deviate from the script everyone dies? The themepark comparison is really apt because it's the same as talking about how much fun you had at that amazing ride at disney world.

k

That's not proof that's personal opinion. And yes I do indeed remember that from WoW and it was very engaging.

Your entire argument right now is basically "theme parks are stupid I hate fun things because other people also tried them". How hipster can you even get.

Why?

1/10 for trying

No, shit it's an opinion. My opinion is that it isn't fun and I'm telling you why because you asked.
Also it isn't because "other people also tried them" it's because it is sterilized, linear, paper-thin garbage.

I didn't ask for anything. I said prove it. Learn to read you fucking retard.
Denial.

Denial is a good keyword. I know it's hard to be critical of something that was basically the entirety of your teen years, but now that they are over you should re-evaluate. They are over, aren't they, user?

Please keep going.

Yes, maybe greentexing will make you feel like you won this after not being able to provide even a halfhearted counterpoint to a halfhearted argument.

Yes keep going this is great.

Mortal Online is a dead game user. Also, I prefer paying a monthly. Shitters like you with the "make the game free to download, free to play, and no pay-to-win" want game devs to put out games at a financial loss to them. It's stupid and unrealistic.


I think VR can solve all the problems you mentioned that are worth mentioning. The "people get salty!" happens in every fucking game, especially f2p garbage. Did you ever play UO? That community was "shit" by your standards.


Go back to playing assfaggots.


I think giving incentives to high-level players to go to low-level areas is one of the best solutions to this along with encouraging it within the, well, culture within the game.


Once you grind all the way up on one MMO, you seem pretty discouraged from doing it again. I agree, Korean/WoW grind is annoying as shit. I was drawn into MMOs by the story, yet most MMOs don't have a cohesive story anymore. Also, I really like the idea of "multi-elemental" dungeons.

It's 8ch's Holla Forums. They play Overwatch and shit on Eve Online for "being too complicated".

They actually shit on it for being too casual.

Yes, but it's the best character creator. Ever. Oh and dat graphics.


Was there ever such a thing? I mean WoW had an established lore before it was ever an MMO. Korean MMOs keep coming up with these interesting concepts and base lore only to never ever fucking develop them. And assfaggots have the worst communities. ToS attracts them due to its isometric nature.

This made me miss Wakfu

The concept of "leveling up" is fucking retarded but kept around because its a millenia old thing now so we're not switching out of it no matter what. Its like instanced dungeons and other concepts that don't really fit into MMOs but get stuck in because its used everywhere else.
The moment you put such huge, grindy bridges between players, you also put a wall separating people's friends and shit form each other.

Sadly I don't know an alternative to the level up system other than that other system where level ups are basically separated into mini forms for each task such as swordplay/cooking/etc/etc instead of just having the whole character level up, but that's still dumb. Maybe I'll figure it out one day

community is everything
mechanics and gameplay don't matter unless they exist to server an aspect of the community. just as in pen and paper table top games, the dungeons and the quests and the events and all the other junk is just an excuse to get people sitting around a table having fun.

modern mmos have forgot about serving the player- the community. when an mmo is about cool dungeons and awesome scripted events in the overworld, it's destined to fail. when mmos return to their tabletop roots, that's when they get good again.
until then, you have tera, or elder scrolls online, where the only reason to join a guild or premade group is because you're bored of playing the game with randoms, not because you must.

World of Warcraft was made.

Why would I go from a bad community to a worse community. No. Tree of Savior's community is batshit retarded. From the players who don't realize parties bring faster clear speeds and tell you to fuck off if you try to play the game in groups to the tumblerina infested Discord community. You think I'm using that word as a joke? You think I'm kidding? No. The game is hell and assfaggots is just a lower level of it.

There will never be a good MMO because none of them are willing to embrace what the fucking word MASSIVE means.

I want to see giant fucking PvE and PvP battles involving many players.

The 40-man raids and the 40vs40 AV battles that were in classic WoW are the bare fucking minimum I expect from a competent MMO.

If you're a game designer and you're making areas that are meant to accomodate 64 players or less, then you're just not making an MMO.

But those suck ass and are nothing but lame clusterfucks where you're not actually really watching what the fuck is happening in the shitstorm on your screen. You're just pressing buttons instead and looking at the target UI and hoping you win.

The whole concept of raids is fucking retarded. It does nothing but accomodate the gay ass zerg mentality where you just join a guild (read: mob) and follow the stream of players into whatever dumb shit they're doing. It means much less actual communication and more clusterfuck gayness.

Having single pre-defined classes is also gay as fuck, and that's the bigger issue with MMOs. Guild War's dual-class system is about the most restrictive I would ever accept in an MMO, and I only accepted it because the rest of the game worked so well. The proper way to do it is to have everyone be the same at the start and give every character the opportunity to develop into anything they want. ArcheAge did this pretty well, but Runescape is still the top-dog in this category. Runescape did it flawlessly.

But the real thing that destroyed MMOs is the dumbass themepark shit. MMOs aren't made as worlds anymore, they're just made as games with a set beginning and end point that you're expected to go through in the path the developers choose for you.

I don't see how that conflicts with what I said though.

Runescape itself had its share of fucking huge PvP battles when the clans would go to war. And because it was all out in the open deep in the Wilderness, sometimes a third large clan would roll up and start killing all sons o' bitches. And it was all organic.

Carebears who didn't want to lose their stuff could have on-demand group PvP in Castle Wars and later PvE in Pest Control, all while the real men went to war in the north.

Probably just because you mentioned WoW and WoW literally triggers me. Fucking awful game.

wew

Just clone the OSRS model where it's actually just an adventure RPG with PVP and an economy.

I'm going to be the next 2002 Jagex

I'm literally planning to make a MMO, starting as a very basic top-down 2D rpg-style game, and eventually upgrading to either isometric 2D or full 3D depending on how much 3D I've learned by the time I want to upgrade. I'll use html5, so it's basically playable as soon as you go to the website. I've experimented with all of that stuff enough to believe that I can do it given enough time.

I think the biggest problem with MMOs (and many other games) is that none of them seem to have genuine love behind their design, or then the devs really don't know what makes a game truly good. I can't quite put into words what this design philosophy is like, some games just have this overwhelming "I'm here just to make money" stench to them, like they're using popular and flashy ideas instead of good ideas, like they're specifically trying to become "big" instead of "good".

My MMO is going to be a hybrid of sandbox and themepark. The themepark is there so you'll have clear direction and objectives to play with while you get used to the game and it's somewhat unusual design. The quests will be similar to Runescape's, there won't be a lot of them but they're all very unique and involve puzzles and problem solving and the like. Similarly the chat is actual dialogue with choices and stuff, not just paragraphs of text. It's difficult to describe what makes it sandbox because they're relatively subtle changes, so I won't go on a tangent. But I want to try to have the entire world be tile-based so everything can be removed and changed in realtime. If it's possible, I'll have a separate anarchy server where PVP and building is enabled everywhere, not just special locations dedicated to them.

Out of all MMOs I know, Runescape is the most similar to what I'm going for, but even that is pretty far. The world is technically grid-based, but you can walk freely on open tiles without being bound to them. You won't be able to jump, because you'll have agility and energy skills that are used to jump fences and bypass similar obstacles. The map will be similarly condensed like runescape, so there won't be a lot of open empty space in most places.

Are you going to hang out in AGDG?

A pretty significant issue is that there are a shitload of MMOs that are simply a matter of how big of a number you can get rather than skill being primary while gear simply makes shit easier. I know Vindictus is a shit game but pre-Ignition update it was pretty damn neat because you could beat most bosses with garbage gear as long as you were good and it wouldn't stop you from getting killed if you were bad, although now they decided that was too fair and instead you get one-shot without end-game gear.

Reminds me of when people found that Cast on Death in PoE could be used in hardcore to become massively OP without actually killing yourself

Your idea is trash don't bother.

If he does then he won't create anything.

Can't promise I'll be active, but I do lurk the agdg threads in here sometimes.

- Getting to max level was in itself an achievement. The people you met along your journey were meant to be markers of achievement. Meeting someone in the same zone as you meant you could have a partner to fight enemies with, run dungeons with, do quest objectives with, and in cases where one player leveled up faster they could powerlevel the other until they were back on even terms. Games like Runescape made legends out of people who simply had the highest level (Zezima).
- You were forced to interact with other people. A dungeon meant you had to go into town to find party members who could help you out, or just run inside with a ragtag group of people who happened to be outside the dungeon gates. Ragnarok Online was infamous for having great areas for grinding separated by areas filled with enemies much stronger than the player characters, forcing players to team up and fight their way through or seek guidance from a veteran who could lead them through or smuggle them in via stealth.

have any of you guys played Planet Calypso? (also known as Entropia Universe and formerly known as Project Entropia)
What are your thoughts on it and its real cash economy?

this is the game that makes me laugh about people complaining about pay to win in other games

I thought about something similar, but I got discouraged by the amount of bandwidth streaming a modifiable map would consume. Basically, most clients would probably experience the great "invisible chunks" problem Minecraft has. Given Minecraft's chunk system is beyond retarded and improving it would be a piece of cake, it's also true no Minecraft server holds as much population as your average MMO server. How could we solve this?

I r8 8/8 gr8 b8 m8

40v40? Eve Online has bigger than that at times, but the game is slow-paced finding fights and takes up a LOT of time.

It's also true that most Minecraft servers are shit because they have to run without profit.

An MMO map would be 2D so the amount of map data you'll have to transfer is like 100 times lower, plus I'm planning to have a Runescape-like top down view (at least for the duration it's 2D) so the amount of chunks you have to transfer is also like 100 times lower. Plus minecraft has to generate terrain which causes the most lag in servers.

Consider pic related, the vision range seems to be about 16-32 to all directions, which is 32-64 in total. Let's say there's another row of 16x16 chunks loaded as buffer, so that's 96 at max. That's less than 10,000 tiles, which isn't a lot at all. Most people will probably be in a small area skilling or killing monsters or socializing most of the time, so they won't be loading anything.

Admittedly I don't have experience with bandwidth related issues, but I think it's possible. It's not required anyway though, I'd be happy enough without, I could still have that in special building locations.

are you trying to get me killed user? I'll stick to just reading stories of merchants that lost $50,000 worth of ships.

...

All they needed to do was add a pvp arena but nooooo, they removed content and shat on the lore and put every single crafting machine in one place and now people dont even know that there are other towns in each nation

...

The same thing that went wrong with civilization: shitters got a say.

MMOs were a mistake.

There's nothing wrong with leveling up if people keep remembering that it's about the journey, roleplaying by immersion of the world, interaction with others, feeding off the drama, and always always having something to do. MMOs are not meant to be the sorts of game that you "beat" like most conventional video games.

People keep whining about all the grind in Korean MMOs as if they invented it but it was us in the west who created invented grinding MMOs. In the old days, it took months just to grind a single level in a western MMO and the Koreans copied that and continued well into Diablo and Runescape in the west and still continues in some other games. It used to be us in the west who laughed at the east and their non-grind instant play games like fighting games and beat em ups which the east invented because it's so casual. To complain about grinding itself is casual, literally. Lives? Friends? What are those? I'm grinding this boss for hours in EQ. I'll sell my gf's body for digital items. I'll piss in bottles and shit in socks to not interrupt raiding. I'll look upon this guy who is level xxx and obviously has no life but holy fucking that level he reached must have been an incredible investment and while he may be a loser in real life, he looks like a god in the game like Lightning or Zezima from Runescape or FangBlade from Maplestory. These are the things that actually happened in the old days. MMOs are meant to be the sort of endless games where it's always something to do with others with massive investment relative to most conventional games even if it's UO where it only took a few hours-days to get fully "back in the game" because of the endless cycle of losing it all. Grinding fulfills that role and even if you never got anywhere close to the highest levels, it was still fun because seeing the gap between the highest players and yourself didn't matter when there was such a focus on the social aspect of MMORPGs. It's a shame young kids these days only care for instant gratification and forgot their roots.

However, I will admit that MMORPGs that have levels where the focus is in the "end game" is absolutely fucking retarded. WoW, GW, all of them. Retarded shit. The game literally doesn't even begin until the "end game". It might as well not have levels at all because it's all about gear so it might as well be a gear based game on its gear level/gear score as level is absolutely fucking irrelevant at that point and all points if there's an "end game". tl;dr Fuck off back to ASSFAGGOTS, kids.

im playing ffxiv like a single player rpg with occasional dungeons played with a controller

The focus being in endgame in itself is a retarded idea, because endgame implies that you have to make a journey to get there. And if you're not focusing on the journey, you should get it the fuck out of the way of whatever it is you are focusing on.

I think this is why grinding in Runescape is/was more comfy than other games, because it had no endgame. The endgame was that your skill level is higher than before, that's it. Maybe you unlock some thing that isn't much different than the other things you've been unlocking every few levels anyway. Reaching level 99 wasn't the reward, the game made it rewarding TO level up by unlocking new parts of the world for training and quests and items. Each quest is unique and interesting, each new item feels good to unlock because the game is visually and otherwise designed to make them very distinctive and memorable. Chances are you'll remember the name of every single piece of equipment you unlock and obtain, how many MMOs can you say that for? Can't necessarily say the same about RS3 because they started turning it into WoW lite and changing all the items into wtfbbq alien designs.

Supposing the lore actually contemplates this possibility, would it be okay for an MMO to let players freely change their race, provided it requires to complete a difficult questline? What about classes?

You had to remind me
Game had a a classtree where you start off as a shit tier fighter, got an early class quest to choose fighter, archer, mage, support, got an anvanced quest later wich gave you a choice between two distintions in that class, i.e. tank/assassin, buffing offtank/healslut.
I remember dressing up in full noob gear and just waiting for actual noobs to come and help out, too. Good times…

I'd like an MMO that is exploration and puzzle based, no real levels.
There would be a substantial number of Zelda-esk dungeons and a number of group dungeons kind of like Portal 2 co-op.
You'd win cosmetic items and other items that can be used to solve more puzzles or explore parts you couldn't reach before.
A lot of interesting lore.
Perhaps a few inventive bosses.
Combat would also be fairly zelda-like with Z-targeting.
Maybe a stronger reliance on the various different slashes you could pull off.
And the ability to make attractive females

Now that brings back memories, even played the beta and it had these giant monsters walking around you had to suck up with some monster vacuum cleaner thing. It advertised itself as "the world's first flying MMORPG" but I'm not sure how true that was. The grind was pretty bad but the social interactions reminded me of ROSE online before duping ruined it. In FlyFF there was always players helping lowbies for free in the game, top players were something inspiring too. I distinctly remember a character named "HinamoriX", a Ringmaster(essentially the game's cleric), helping me all those years ago with crazy buffs and other stuff and she(or he, you never know in MMOs) was on the top high levels list I think ranked the third highest level in the game at the time. The community was truly stand out. Unfortunately, unlike you, I never did get as far as them but I still had fond memories. You don't get MMO communities like that anymore. Also I think Lowtax's relative or friend spent like 3k+ USD in that game lol. The goon should have just stuck to EVE.

meant for

Also you'll never believed how hyped I was when I reached level 20 so I could fly for the first time. Never experienced that in any game before and when the music started playing when I flew for the first time (video related), it was hype as fuck. FlyFF had great music, even when you fought you got dedicated music different from the map BGM.

y would u do that?

ur a faget


Runescape had something special about it for sure but in the end, it's still just a heavily dated java game. I've had hope someone would create a more modern version of it by now but after seeing RS3, I know they'd fuck it up somehow.

And you're saying the lore allows this? Weird as fuck but I guess it's sort of like how Wakfu was you were the race you are because of the God you followed so I guess it could work. It would still be weird as fuck, you wouldn't want to look like a companion for trannies do you? But it seems like nobody crafts great lore for MMORPGs anymore. The ones that used to have great lore all gave up too. What happened?


I'm not surprised since soundTeMP did the music for that game.

That was THE SHIT. Damm, that shitty cheap ass board I used…
I do remember getting wings later on


I was a billposter (the alternative to Ringmaster, though I'd choose diffrently now) and yeah, I was mostly helping people.
Grind was horrible. There weren't even grind quests, you'd just sit at a spawn for ages.

Heh. When I played they realized that Ringmasters where kinda OP in AoE farming because they'd peomanently have a buff up that heals them to full if they fall low.
So they nerfed the cooldown by a hilarious amount, iirc but gave every support level 15 and up a free skill reset scroll, so people could reset their builds.
I still have mine.

… wanna go back and pretend it's like back then? I don't think I have my login and I was on the german server anyway, but maybe just get to 20 and fly around for a bit?

Problem: Holy Trinity (WoW, FFXIV)
Effects: no flexibility, no creativity, rigid, boring, limits people to one role
Possible Solution: Look at PSO2, Look at PSO, make it more VIDEOGAMES and less tank and spank. Dodging attacks, healing each other, attacking and evading as a group.
Possible outcome: More crazy builds, more crazy combos, more fun

So they basically did the same mistake as WoW?

Wew Ankama.

fucking agreed. FlyFF has the happiest fucking music I've ever heard in an MMO

This is something I've read in these kind of threads before but it made a lot of sense to me.

MMO's were fun back then because they were pretty much used as a social media. Most old mmo's were pretty much just an in-game avatar you play while chatting with others. Now that there's so many ways to go about socializing online what MMO's offer is bleak and no one does it anymore. Social media pretty much killed socializing in MMO's and turned them into shitty single player endless grindfests with RNG upgrading systems.

How it was back then:
You find an MMO to play, the gameplay and graphics are pretty much up to par with that gen's single player games. You get into the world, and meet some people. Everyone else wants to meet others as well, you party up, do quests together, add each other to friend list, make a guild and do raids or do nothing at all and just chat.

How it is now:
Group of skype friends decides to play MMO. They have facebooks, smartphones, etc. They ignore everyone in game besides themself. All the content in games now is soloable so there's no reason to party up. They make a guild and become the leader / officers in it and everyone else is just "randoms" aka a pawn for their plane.

Even if you allowed everyone every skill/item, there would always be build/configuations that are plain better - it just stops being a meta the devs planed for, but it's still a meta.

Billposters were so OP. I remember they had that OHKO skill that was like Asura strike from RO. And I mostly just helped people too except I couldn't buff because I wasn't an assist class but a knight with a big ass sword. The game had an amazing community, like when you died, you don't need to go back to town or your save point, you just shout in chat and there will ALWAYS be someone out there who will come flying in just to res you. Also what skill reset scroll? You mean stat, right? I think those things are after my time because I don't remember that. And I don't remember my login or even the email I used back then. It's been like a fucking decade. I'm not even sure whether the game is still up or not. I probably wouldn't mind flying around on my 200k board for a while if I did.


It's funny when you look at the official Japanese PSO2 channel and the comment sections on their videos are always people begging for a western port but it'll never happen after they saw the failure of PSO in the west. You guys just had to fuck it up.

Yes but those were happier times as well.


I can't believe I didn't think about this before. About how the whole online community itself was like before the rise of web 2.0 and myspace / kikebook shit. Hell, kikebook is mostly at fault here. Back in its early days, people in university always talked about how addicted they were to it and how they'd miss exams and stuff because of it. Basically the effect EQ used to have. We could solve so many problems on the internet if we just got rid of social media for good. Let's pray for a great social crash.

Nono, there were skill reset scrolls too.
It was actually common for billposters to go with an str build and their early AoE, then do a full reset wich was fucking expensive and go to an int build with another AoE, this time a line.
Of course, you could take just one option and in case of int be fucking weak untill you get it.
I did this myself. Man…
I remember how I died as a noob and got ressed. Guy said it's be 1000g and I didn't even realize it was a joke.

I just checked. It exists, but seems to have been sold… or at least I know the german servers used to be from Gpotato, now it's webzen.
Kikepedia says gpotato still operates flyff though. Probably means the korean servers only now.
Forums seem active enough. Not sure if there's an engish version.
I still remember some details about my main, but I doubt that support will give me an account simply for knowing three character names. Well, maybe one that's been inactive for years?

The biggest problems with MMOs is that they forgot to be fun.

How many low-rent manga are there about MMOs or super-future VRMMOs with full sensory replacement that have features ANY CURRENT GAME COULD DO? Even basic stuff like making clothing and armor, making potions and salves, and COOKING have their own levels and rules.

...

Did you miss me mentioning Ultima Online several times or are you that ignorant to think it was just like everquest, moron?

is a social crash even possible? we have been praying for a vidya industry crash so long i can only imagine this be another meme

Come think of it… fuck it all, hop on a private server?
magmaflyff.com looks decent, no "hurr I donated my pocket money I'm invincible for today"

Cra had at least 4 or 5 possible builds, you could get a little bit creative and it was nice. My Cra was 199 fire/air, it shoot tormenting arrows for 400/500, it was not common (Everyone thought that skill was shit, but it was the only bi-damage skill, so I realized you could stack tons of flat damage from later gear) and it felt nice having builds like that. Dofus had the best gameplay to me of all MMOs, that pretty much makes it one of the best MMO I've ever played. I mean yes it's turn based but it fits the MMO scheme very well. I also liked you had gear for most combinations of attributes.
That fucking MADMAN, I remember that. Too bad they later changed Letal attack and pretty much killed that build. It was around that point I stopped playing.

...

I really hope the rumors for FFXIV world pvp servers turns out to be true

way I understand it this doesn't apply to the regular game, just whatever clockworks is.
Tehy also have way too many +exp things for a boost that massive.

Game: Spiral Knights

More like

You don't know freedom when you've actually seen it in action.

Darkscape had sicktarded potential.

did wakfu ever implemented that female-steamer-bot?

I miss my werejew enu.

bump

thottbot killed MMOs

prove me wrong

If a different company managed Mortal Online (since the graphics update), it would the best MMORPG out. Prove me wrong.

MMORPGs are too easy and therefore there is no reason to ever find a group to grind the boring stuff.

In FLYFF you died in a few hits and if you wanted to actually level up you NEEDED a party, which is what makes mmorpgs great. Bosses were dangerous as fuck and would kill anyone near, they also dropped super awesome items. Being level 100 mattered, going into the arena fucking everyone up was awesome.

Now everything is too easy, there is no reason to find groups. People stopped liking PK. There is no feeling of satisfaction when you reach a high level.

Yes

Damn dude, that's pretty fucking nice. I heard Luck/Force Cras deal much more burst damage (we may be talking about 1800 on charged arrows, and they have 2 attacks like that if they are multielemental), but they could only do so every 3 turns, if I am not mistaken. Cras' flat damage bonus was pretty crazy with any multi-hitting weapon, like that level 200 all-elements sword or even the enchanting job tools.

Sadly, not all characters had several viable builds. Worst offenders were Eniripsas, who could only be Intelligence healers or Water-based 1 on 1 fighters (basically useless for anything else than old-fashioned PvP). It didn't use to be like this, as properly built Eniripsas were able to defend themselves on Intelligence alone, but they got nerfed to the ground until they became pure healsluts. Xelors were also mostly Wisdom/Water, with the occasional Wisdom/Force, and Sadida were hardly ever anything else than Force-based. Same for Srams, who can either be full Force, full Agility or Force/Agility, which was the preferred option for obvious reasons. Non-Force Iops were also a joke, even though Intelligence Iop (lel) were viable for a small level window. Sacriers and Cras were easily the most flexible classes, although I am talking about the pre-Rogue game since I never managed to find proper Rogues or Masqueraiders.

Yeah, loved it. Sadly, the game quickly runs out of interesting options because there is too little content for all that grind. Seriously, Dofus can put to shame most Korean MMO in terms of grind, specially considering the very stupid experience curve (enjoy leveling from 1 to 199 all over again just to get to 200). It also has gone to shit after all the idiotic changes they performed, like weapon use limitation (there went my DPS Eniripsa) or complete removal of combat RNG even in the RNG class.

I'm talking about one guy who managed to bring down the 1/100 Lethal Attack to 1/2. If I recall correctly, he never revealed his build, although he may have copied it from someone else in another server. Seems like they changed the way crits work now, though.

Yeah, I was thinking either Wakfu-type, where everything is "a dream" and therefore reality is somewhat soft so changing races would be possible if you willed it strongly enough; or Eclipse Phase-type, with cloned or cyborg bodies. I guess biological modification through some sort of chrysalis could also work.

Not really, but I wouldn't like to do the opposite just not to appeal to them. I believe that if you want to introduce something, you should do so without worrying about what kind of people would like it. Furthermore, transsexuals will just look for anything to interpret as "one of their own". For example, they are completely convinced Junkrat from Overwatch is transsexual, and nothing in the lore supports that. If they want to be trans-fans of something, trust me they will find a way

I was actually asking about how fair would it be, though. Most MMO won't let you change races, but more often than not people end up disliking their initial choices, so they either suck it up or make a new character. If you make it more flexible, initial choices would mean nothing, but at least people wouldn't cry as much every time the FoTM got nerfed.

Darkscape was the shit. Even being low leveled was fun, picking fights occasionally, baiting people into guards fucking people up. Shame I didn't get to play when they were doing their closing of the servers, sounded like it would be fun

and since I'm here, can we all agree that while playing solo is nice when your friends are offline or you got things to do, it really puts a dent into MMO's social interaction?

I think one of the better courses of action would be to actually make leveling up in groups actually fun, and flat out better than doing it alone. Make it so grouping up with people and sticking with them is a great idea,Just without a group finder , maybe a notice board for recruiting people instead make it so players have a good incentive to hang out with new people they meet and work together for quests, fightan' monsters, and just socializing with people.

The novelty of peer to peer interaction has simply died with the birth of Internet 2.0 shit.

Now everything is Facebooked and Twittered and the cycle of commitments people have to any one game are so very fickle with everything available.

MMOs should catering to the casuals. Casuals will play WoW anyway.

It was both sad and hilarious watching people cry that it took almost three weeks to hit max level in Aion.

You're absolutely right and that's what made WoW so great in the beginning, you were "forced" to socialize with the other players because if you didn't the game would suck.

I basically quit because fuck, i could go through whole raids without anyone speaking. What's the point of paying for an online-game which the whole selling-point is that it's a massive-multiplayer game, when nobody is actually behaving like players? It was like playing with a bunch of bots at the end there in Wotlk.

This so much. Back in the TBC days before the xrealm dungeon finder the game was so much better.
Even 2 hours Shadow Labyrinth trap runs could be fun if you were grouped with cool people and it was not uncommon to friend each other and do other runs together some other time or get guild invites if you played good.

After the shitty xrealm dungeon finder people barely speak except to call you a noob healer if you somehow fail to keep 5 retards alive that stand in the fire and even if you get paired with cool people you cant even friend them because their from another realm.

this. it is hard to believe this isn't mentioned more. there's been talk about the mmos of people's dreams for decades now like exist in VR fiction but even after all these years the technology still doesn't exist yet. i tried working on mmos and it is hell. the most infuriating things to me were the limits of polygons we were allowed to work with. despite it being on PC which has vastly superior graphical power to consoles it cannot even manage to have superior polygon count enough to have something look good as say fxiii lightning returns.

as it stands, like many have said, mmos rarely bring anything new and the mmo genre has stagnated ever since wow so more or less a lot of us are burned out from the same thing over and over again. only something truly revolutionary through technology that could make vrmmos possibly revive interest in mmos as a whole but it comes with problems.

even if the technology does exist the pool of potential players will be small because for the first few years of it there will most likely only be early adopters and it will most likely even be somewhat prohibitively expensive. the other problem is who will even create such an mmo? what kind of investor will fund what is necessary for it and also the legal fund required since vrmmos really actually do have potential to be a massive lawsuit magnet and this has been explored numerous times in vr fiction.

the final problem will be the community. i highly doubt because of the future young generations we'll be able to have and create the comfy dream of an immersive vr world community full of fun roleplayers and helpful people like exists in vr fiction or how ultima online was. by then we'll also be quite old to the point most us would only be able to roleplay as bear or phyllo from hack sign and roots who are the old wise guys who help out new players and give life advice.

maybe mmos are just better off as a dream.

From about 2 minutes on, no modern MMO would dare to pull this.

Oldfag here. I'm hailing from a time when It was considered 100% legit to grief someone for several months, steal his items once per week and deploy methods to make him want to commit suicide, all while exploring dungeons, farming, hanging out with friends and min/maxing the shit out of everything. The game I am talking about is Ultima Online

Times have changed. People have changed. The market has changed. Once developers were eager to create creative, long lasting, challenging and thoughtout games, while players were looking for fun, competitiveness and had the strive for perfection. The market has echoed these attitudes somehow.

Unfortunately, the gaming market became an industry and this meant: making games for pure $$$ and to make $$$ you had to make games which could be played by every faggot on the planet, including that cocksucking gamepad wielding nigger on a couch.

Games became more shallow, and more focused on short term motivation. Therefore they needed to exploit people's psychology to make games profitable. Social facilitation (buying something to impress), gratification (achievements, faster playthroughs), easily understandable (3 buttons, an arrow over your head) and repeatable (Addons, DLCs) - These are all qualities of average retards. These are the mass consumers.

WoW was the bridge between these two worlds. From then on, it was a steep fall into the Jew's digital abyss. This encompasses every game genre.

Indy was never a real attempt to restore some of the old values, but to trick people into believing they were playing UO while it was developed by a transgender safe space dog fucking imbecile who'd quit after Alpha and run off the money.

These good old times of game design will never return. unless someone nukes the kikes and half of clapistan along the way

Mortal Online; it's too bad the company that runs it is absolute shit.

Darkfall was the better one, but same result greek mafia-like company

so, how does it look in game? good?

What needs to change with MMOs

Lore:
You need to engage the players. Also if you capture the imagination of the autistic lore nerds they will shill your game to kingdom come.
The companies running the games need to be able to take good storylines the players come up with and run with them

Factions:
NPC factions guarentee a place where the noobs and casuals can meet and greet. It's also a great launching off point to starting a player faction.

Customization:
Enough with the basic bullshit MMOs keep throwing at us. Black Desert Online and EVE Online (for basically just the face but still) have fucking great character customization. Either make sure everyone can create the character they want or stop fucking making your game

Crafting:
Mentioning EVE again. I'm from ProviBloc and I know that if I want a Capital ship and don't want to be led into a trap to get ganked I need to order it from Sanctuary Pact alliance.

Economy:
To quote Dr. Eyjo:

Skills/Professions
No two characters should ever be the same

Exploration

Othershit:

You have the tools to change that, it doesn't take a kike to make game. Killing the bad developers won't magically give birth to good ones. If you're not going to do it now, you're not going to do it after X event happens either. That's just rosy grass is greener thinking and excuses.


I won't give a shit about that if the game doesn't make it interesting to go through. Either you go the Runescape way where you get dialogue and puzzles and shit, or you don't have that shit at all.

If I wanted to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of text, I'd read a book. If I wanted to watch hours of cutscenes, I'd watch a movie or anime or some shit. If I wanted to do the same 3 quests over and over again with different text attached to it, I'd play WoW.

Do people still play PSO1 anymore?
Seems that everyone jumped to 2.

wow didn't invent shit, all been done before without limitations.

UO, EQ for example. Games around the same time. L2 and RO

bump

Problem: some classes are self sufficient
Effects: picking up certain classes allows you to play singleplayer in all but the most hardcore dungeons
Possible solution: either make mobs and dungeons much harder, or specialize roles so fucking much they need to rely on each other to be useful in combat
Possible outcome: people teaming up with total strangers out of necessity

Most fun in an MMO I have had in a long time.
Theres still hope though. They have the official Darkscape page still up and I just started sending Jagex emails onto what the server cost would be.

Class restrictions exist so your role is established properly and other people can know what you're gonna do, both in PvE and PvP.
Paladins in WoW COULD tank, but try and not be a heal bitch and see who cares abou you.
Mages also had some builds to make, but go to PvP and try not being a Frost Mage.

If you want unrestricted gameplay, remove classes altogether and let people build their character entirely.
You want to use the heavier armor? Better raise your Strength. You want to move faster and more nimble? Raise Dex.
Your stats and skills should determine the equipment you can use both to balance things and to make builds dynamic.


You still reach the problem, only it takes a bit longer.
As long as you still have to grind for power and all of your interaction with the game is autistic at first (you just increase in power, barely affecting the world) and that grind is seen as the default content, then eventually you'll run out of content to grind and the game will end.


He has the tools to make the game he wants but the game he wants sucks because it's one where he has fun at the expense of someone else that could be playing any other game instead.

This isn't new, many games have tried to be "muh hardcore mega grief experience", just look at DayZ and the plethora of Zombie survival games there are.

It's one extreme to make a game that coddles the player so much he never loses anything from confrontation and doesn't even have to engage with other players.

But it's another to assume that it's good for the game that you can tirelessly hound other players and force them to leave or just make their whole experience miserable.
At the end, it's a game, it's supposed to entertain you, and if it doesn't, you'll live.
And if you manage to make a player so mad\sad that he leaves the game, the only thing you got was a sense of power over him but also one less player playing the game.

So don't blame "da casuls!" for the slow death of your ebin hardcore game when you yourself have fun killing it slowly, one play at a time.

What MMOs need is a different sort of content. A dynamic one that isn't simply achieved or spawned in loot lists.
Epic weapons and armor are terrible rewards for a game because once you got them, the game can't take them away from you and you won't get more of them anymore. They are incredibly limited in their potential to extend the game, despite always being lauded as the solution to endgame.

What you need is a world with a living economy based around dominating important locations and protecting them.
Those locations, unlike gear, can change hand all the time and therefore make for a very interesting end-game content as the "grind" for them literally never ends as long as the game is properly designed.


Ideally, an MMO should have at least 3 major factions, but quite possibly much more. And inside each faction, several minor factions. Major factions can be at peace or at war with each other while minor factions only wage economic warfare on one another among their own faction.

Then, each faction has a Capital (that can be looted but never captured), several Cities ( that can indeed be captured and are centers of economy and industry) and many more surrounding villages (that are easier to capture and hold the places where you collect resources)

World PvP is all centered around the economy, with factions taking over towns and cities from each other, securing resources for themselves to supply their faction and arm their army. All battles are started by an NPC leader at certain intervals (to prevent powergaming) but he can still receive advice from powerfull and influential players by voting on targets.

This is the first layer of gameplay, where default combat takes place. You can then have Technology for each faction dictating what their vendors have for sale or what troops they can field, Technology being a resource stored in Universities and other buildings that can be stolen or ruined in sieges and common thievery. Espionage to find a faction's troop movements and what they are gonna attack next or what supplies they have can also play a factor.

Then you have a final layer that prevents factions from spreading too large. The bigger a faction gets and the more prosperous it becomes, the more attention it draws onto itself from Random Events.
A village that is producing a lot of food\minerals might have a camp of bandits nearby that will constantly attack and rob them.
A bloody battle might trigger a Necromancer to raise an army, build a tower and start attacks on a town.
The sewer system of a city, getting larger as it grows, starts breeding dark creatures that roam the night.

This layer makes it so players don't have to be engaged in PvP to have fun combat but it also gives a purpose and context to the PvE. And since there can always be different chalenges with varying difficulty, then low level players and high level players always have something to do.

This also allows classes to play actual different actual roles, instead of simply being yet another Damage Dealer but with their own twist to it.
Fighters could command large amounts of foot soldiers and take to battle as leaders.
Rogues could rob relics and thecnology from an enemy faction, as well as gather intelligence and assassinate key NPCs.
Mages could do the actual research, unearth and power relics that give their faction massive power, enchant their cities with all kinds of magical help and travel with others for assistance against magical problems or simply creating portals.

As long as permanent warfare between all factions was assured and the world kept spawnin events that answered the rise in power of a faction to keep all players engaged, it would be the best game ever where noobs and pros could play side by side doing something that feels meaningfull.

Lord British conned me with SoTA

Tried playing NuUO last year out of desperation. It's just a really bad Diablo Clone now. They added playable Ninja, Samurai, Elves, Gargoyles.

Went on to UOR and T2A. Dead servers.

Are there no games for UO players?

I miss UO so much. When I quit around 2001 I figured I'd just have to wait a year or two for a successor. It never came.

Shards Online is in development. Hopefully that will save us.

Speaking of MMO's that'll hopefully save fun God and country willing for all the good kids out there, anyone got any decent runners coming? I'm hoping Camelot Unchained will end up doing decent, but I'm pretty much open to any people willing to throw suggestions at this point

I heard these were shit but haven't actually played myself. Maybe you can try out and report back for us.

Link-realms and Wild-Terra Online.

I'm not sure if they can. I think the community that made UO amazing is probably gone.

Yeah, the market segment has changed. Anytime a new MMO comes out everyone just compares it to WoW.

It's gotten a little easier to explain the fun of UO thanks to the survival sandbox genre introducing a generation to games where the community is the game, but up until then I'd just get confused stares trying to explain why a MMO with no quests or bosses was so loved.

Did UO actually had more content than just the PvP though, or was the PvP really that good and worth your time?

I never got to play it but I loathe the "dungeon raids and ebin weapons are the only acceptable late game content".
However, what was the fun in playing if there's no goal to meet except losing whatever gear you've got this far?
What was there really to do in UO?

Chronicles of elyria maybe? They have alot of good ideas but I cant say whether it will be good or not till its done. Worth checking out though.

Crafting, Trading, Stealing, Scamming, PvM, Real Estate.

PvP itself wasn't good, but the rules surrounding PvP were great. Blue (Normal). Grey (Criminal), Red (Murderer).

I was primarly a criminal. I spent most of my game time being a dick thief. You could literally steal from other player inventory. Stake out houses and sneak your way in to steal anything the house owners didn't lock down. Being a cheeky scrub with poisoned food, trapped containers.

I was watching their kikestarter video on that one as well. Gotta say I liked the idea of aging characters with the soul being what sort of allows your legacy to live on, along with the possibility of families.

I'll have to check the rest of the video to see what else they offer, and keep my eyes on it.

The problem is that MMOs are synonymous with RPGs. RPGs have no business being made into MMOs because there is no way of having a decent story arc playout without having a static world. FPS and RTTs are a much better fit for being made into MMOs.

Role-playing is done by the players, not pre-written scripts by game writers.

MMORPG is the only real RPG outside of pen and paper.

What was that?

Also, that doesn't sound that appelaing to be honest.
I mena, I'd probably be a dick thief too, that part at least sounds quite amazing.
But the rest with crafting trading and scamming, if there's no real oposition or reason to gear up, why would anyone bother?


No. MMOs require progression to justify the player coming back all the time and they have to implement it one way or another. RPG elements (not actually RPGs) is the simplest way to include progression since RPGs are all about the progression of your character in the world.

coz PvP was popular. Everytime you died you lost all yours stuff. Everything worth using was player crafted or maybe from really lucky monster drops.

PvM is player vs monster/mobile. There were areas which had difficult monsters that dropped more gold and occasionally rare items that couldn't be crafted e.g. the Orc Mask which made Orc Mobs passive against you.

For leather workers the higher quality leather was from monsters so they'd either get on their PvM character or buy from PvM players to make gear.

Gold was required to buy housing deeds from NPCs. More gold = bigger better house. You could get literal castles as well. Being a thief doesn't pay well though.

Real Estate was a big deal since housing wasnt instanced, they were in the actual game world. People would fight over, housing areas, camp deteriorating houses to take spots. Then they'd sell em for lots of money.

A good spot was dependant on the customer. Some people wanted houses close to towns. Others on private islands and secluded areas. Some players wanted to be near resources to facilitate their production activities.

There were many different motivations, it wasn't the simple skinner box / treadmill of today. The two biggest core motivations I'd say were status and real-estate. With a bigger house you could store more stuff and decorate more, and if you had the rarest decorations to show off other players would be impressed. So you might be out risking farming in a dangerous area (because other players would be, too) because you wanted gold for a house or a rare decoration.
There was no real logic to the "rares", by the way. It wasn't even a real system. The game had a lot of bugs that would lead to players having some items they shouldn't have. Some items only existed one per server, some would be created daily by accident of the maintenance process, but none of the good items were intentional. A "covered chair" (literally a sprite of a chair with a white cloth cover on it) was a very rare decoration and used to sell for $500 USD on UO trading sites. I owned a couple blood stains that would sell for several million gold in-game. I think I paid 5M gold for tarot cards (the gold was probably worth $200 USD at the time). None of these items did anything, they were just a different graphic you could put in your house to show off your status. UO basically invented the F2P economy by accident, and they didn't understand it. They kept trying to ban players over it despite it being the most popular "system" in the game.

Well that does make more sense, even if I think there's still a lot of room to improve.

I had heard that houses weren't instanced which sounds like the most unique aspect of that game, but that also sounds like a whole heap of trouble for the Devs.
Deteoration helps, but what if there are just too many players? How are they gonna garantee location for them all? Where would you store your things if you didn't had an house?
And how would that affect the map layout? 2 rows of houses could create what would actually amount to a whole new street, did the game acknowledge that?
Where there NPCs that traveled around town and had problems with pathfinding?


Well that does sound like the treadmill of today, only with chairs and statues instead of swords and pauldrons.

Except, unless there was a "visitor" system that allowed you to show your house to anyone, there isn't much point to it.
And considering there are thieves, I doubt it.

Just like SWG, Eve and many MUDs, not everyone could get a house or afford to maintain it. There wasn't some magical economic equality, having a virtual monopoly on market segment was entirely possible and other people could just be jealous. That's also good motivator - you see the repulsively rich crafter, hunter, guild, whatever and you thought "I want to overtake them" or just "I want to ruin their little empire". Also most stuff in houses can be locked down to a degree so random visitor doesn't steal shit.

Anyone else like the idea of no channel chatting? As in you have to be near the person to actually communicate. I think that would be neat. I'd also like the idea of removing names and identifiers from the UI unless you actually meet the person via some handshake or so. I feel like this would add a layer of mystery to player interactions in the event you want to go anonymous for something. Plus I think it'd end the hurt feelings reports since you couldn't just track someone unless you jotted down their details and shadowed them, also no whisper spam since the cross region chat channels would be nixed. If I developed an MMO that would be at the top of my features list.

There was also NPC banks. But you have to go all the way back to the main towns for that.

Yeah but you choose to do it and not necessarily related to player power.

Modern MMOs it's raid to get gear to do the next raid to get the gear to do the next raid to get the gear to… etc.

In UO the enjoyment didn't come from gear, it came from simply playing the game and doing whatever you wanted.

For example some players liked to keep and trade severed heads of certain notorious or famous players so bounty hunting was a real thing.

I was so mad when some carebear I griefed bought my head from a mercenary guild that caught me one day. He had it on display at the front porch of his home.

I thought about removing global communications, except for either important (read: contributed a lot) players of a faction or guild sub/leaders who managed to build the expensive (and somewhat limited, definitely not for casual chatting) global chat upgrade. Maybe allow for real global chat for everyone after buying some extremely expensive upgrade, but limited to guild controlled areas or allied guilds. Imagine a magical cellphone tower or something like that. Perhaps even go as far as allowing talk only on-demand instead of instant telepathy, as in actually having to pick up your not-telephone in the middle of the battle and risking your life to answer a call. Everyone else would have to rely on a limited signal system just to let other players know you want to meet them somewhere, like the guild house,

Yeah something like that would be good too. I figure at some point you're going to need an instant messaging system so maybe you could get a Wizard class or so to enchant something with temporary telepathy or act as a conduit for messaging. I always felt like current MMOs focus too much on explosions and neat effects and less on the utilitarian aspects of magic.

I don't think anybody plays Phantasy Star Online 1 anymore.

Last time i played PSO1 i on schtack's server there was a bunch of hackers with Sanic models for their characters running around.

tfw literally just quit Mabinogi and sold a pair of swords for $200.

p2w games can die in a fire

Hahahahaha

Now THIS is something I remember. RPing using olde english drove other players up a wall and assisted you in farming oil tankers filled with tears.


What's wrong with global chat? Most games don't seem to have them and without the global chat, a server can look extremely dead in certain, if not most MMO areas. To me, one of the joys of the global chat is to make enemies anywhere at anytime. You can never have enough enemies.


I was always more of a happy merchant than a PKer so whenever anyone killed me, I called out my contact killer list and they'd hunt down anyone I wanted for months on end… For a price of course. It was worth every gold piece.

Probably the fact the user's peeved about all of the "TRADE X FOR Y" that tend to fill up Global in a shit MMO.

Shit, I remember being a happy merchant in this game too. I think I even had an elf master race son. Too bad there was no way to beat the Chinese ducat and gold farmers or their bots.

And speaking of that, why aren't discussing it more? What can MMORPGs do about botting and duping and other associated problems? It ruined games like RO and nobody seems to have a concrete solution.

That's quickly solved in a game with good GMs that make sure to keep that shit in the buy/sell chat which you can filter easily.

Honestly there aren't many botters or Chinese anymore, but the game is hurting really bad. They just released a gachapon with accessories that add over 60 damage each, 2 months after releasing a gachapon with Fierce accessories.

I decided to jump ship before they shut down servers.

Yeah, that'll kill a game, alright. Or temporarily make devCAT and their publisher loads of shekels from good goyim with gambling addictions. Fuck them for ruining the lore and characters with their shit failed successor games though, even if I did enjoy Mabinogi Heroes aka Vindictus' combat.

Those were only a few motivators, you're missing how sandboxy and player-driven satisfying those motivations was. For example, I never farmed in UO. I played for a few years and I probably killed less than 1k mobs yet I retired rich. For money I scavenged decaying houses, flipped real-estate, sold mounts, did interior decoration, hunted bounties on players, participated in player-run events, and looted. It wasn't like today where if you skip PvM you at best could have a rich bank alt who missed the whole game and who is too weak to go outside. Even though I skipped PvM and only spent a couple weeks raising skills, I had no less of an experience in UO. Other people might have farmed mobs, mined, crafted, etc..

Yeah, I guess there's that but I'd still prefer more context and PvE to contribute.

Like, if you are actually extraordinarly rich, you should be able to hire NPCs that go to a shop and perform all the crafting for you using the materials you leave in a nearby chest.
Then you'd be able to sign trade routes with caravans or carts and have materials delivered to your shop and the product put in display or on a market.
Kinda like The Guild.

Even better if you actually had to buy raw materials from whoever currently controls the production of it, like a player that owns a mine and sells the ore to everyone else. Owners of such prized places could be targeted a lot and every death weakens their claim on it or just removes some of their money (for resurrection) and there's a fee they have to pay to keep it.

Maybe even have PvE events that keep players busy, like Dragons attacking towns full of combat characters, bandits making a fort and raiding nearby places until players handle them, necromancers showing up after battles, ancient evils waking up and the whole server goes looking for a macguffin, or some PC finds a spider egg, raises it in his house and then unleashes Shelob in town.

Strict PvP and strict Trading\Crafting autism sounds like it would end up predictable and boring after a long while.
And yet, where it not for the graphics, that game would indeed be better than any MMO we have now.

So like a linkshell?

And considering there are thieves, I doubt it.
Btw, they did have a system like this after a year or so. You could 'lock down' items in your home. My tower supported about 4k locdowns IIRC. A home owner could also ban people from their house (that pic I posted is of a guy hiding in his house where he can ban me calling me a coward). In a game with almost no safe areas, this made owning real-estate in prime locations valuable.

People would just use a third party voip or irc for text chat.

That guy tries to follow me and has a very bad day, too. If you're bored, this is an archive of my old site with that episode:
belan.variadic.org/nick/nick1.html

That's not why I posted about removing global chat at all. I just want people to go into the world and actively talk to people, I also think it provides some immersion and sense of permanence in adventures a group might embark upon.

They took the only things that went right, being massively multiplayer, and made it focus on 10-25 people in one instance.

While we used ICQ back then, not having global chat was one of the major elements that made UO work the way it did.

A lot of people like MMOs for the general chat so they can have friendly banter with other people while playing the game.
It's not like PvE is that demanding from your attention anyway, so might as well spend that time sperging out in general.

However, that is indeed part of the game that is squandered when it has a lot of potential.
Taverns and similar gathering places have much more meaning when chat is restricted to local, trading happens in the market as well.
Any far away destination actually feels desolate as you don't hear a sound from anyone there.
And the removal of automatic ID makes for some uneasy encounters with complete strangers when you know nothing about them, although having something like a name plate with different colors (that only says "Man" or "Large Women" or your race) would help to distinguish which person was talking.

Then you'd have things like mail having all sorts of alternatives, from pidgeons to couriers to magical methods, all with different amounts of safety and speed.

Of course, that would need a world where mail and communication is actually important and there's a reason to intercept it. As well as a world where you actually have time to hit the tavern and not feel like you're missing out on farm time.


I never liked how Wizards in most MMOs are just fireball flinging archers. Fireballs are cool but Wizards are not sorcerers and they don't solve their problems by blasting them.

Having wizards doing rituals and enchantments, crafting usefull supplies but also enchanting houses, gates, horses and artifacts would be great. Especially if they were the only ones that could see magical stuff and interact with it, players would hire a Wizard to see why their cows are dying all the time and the Wizard would say that the field is cursed and there's a rune that needs to be dispelled there. (maybe placed by an evil wizard hired to fuck with that player)

Magic should be more about the usefull applications it has majoriyl and only a minor section of it for combat.

How would you suppose wizards go about attaining spells? I'm not a fan of the "go here for training" style that's been adopted. I liked the idea blizzard had with putting spell tomes as drops if only to encourage group play, but I would probably prefer some exploration based learning or attending some colleges of magic like in TES to find specialized teachers up to journeyman. In my head I feel it makes more sense for bard to continually travel to at least learn of folk tales or create songs based around an encounter.

In UO, people would spread out to other towns to avoid noise, spam, and crime (town thieves would mainly work the largest towns). And for the subcommunities. It was the lack of global chat and fully safe spaces that made this work. In a game like WoW, everyone piles into the main town as there is no reason not to, and the zone-wide chat imposes a suffocating monoculture on the game.

I was a thief, not a PKer. I just pissed off too many people.

Speaking RP. One time I sold a bunch of deadly poisoned cakes to some RPers. I didn't get to see the result since they moongated but I can imagine.


As a Thief, all I can say is Bank thieves were the worst. They spent most of their time inspecting backpacks that'd never have anything coz ppl just bank em plus you'd risk getting insta-whacked by guards every time.

Finding out where the action is and stealing bandages and reagents from PvPers backpacks was the best. Even better was Disarming the opponent then stealing their weapon.

Anyone here hyped for the game that will save MMORPGs?

What I used to do pre-UO:R was conspicuously steal their scissors or bandages in town while wearing a death robe and get them to chase me out of town and fight. I was actually in a full PvP set with pots and regs and I was very good at it. I'd quickly equip my gear, they'd die, I'd loot all their nice things, then wait for them to return. I'd offer them their things back for 1/2 the expected selling price (the lootee discount I mentioned above) and they'd often get so mad at this that they'd lose several more sets of gear trying to kill me. I also remember manipulating the 2m global flag in some way (to appear blue to others I think) but I've forgotten how or why.
Another trick was to pretend to be a thief in town, look like the shittiest thief (again, death robes), and get in a "fight" with a friend. I'd have the friend yell for help with the thief. People would think they could attack even though I was blue as they believed I had flagged to the victim and they'd get guardwhacked. Free loot for everyone at the bank.

Ehh, a dexer in UO could be maxed out (other than for resist which would take an extra couple days) in a couple hours in both skills and gear and I'd say the game was much better for focusing on player skill rather than grinding for months to lower the artificial difficulty.

Oh boy, get ready for that arbitrarily capped fps because some random Korean library won't be included in the western release. Ok on a serious note, I just looked at a video with the basics on it, does this come with anything else beyond combat or is this just a combat focused mmo?

This is exactly why MMOs are dead.

Someone makes a generic chinese MMO with a few minor tweaks and muh grafix compared to literally every other themepark shitfest and people will act like MMOs are saved.

People don't even know what a good MMO is anymore, they'll get their dicks hard when they see something looks flashy enough or superficially different.

This is a good thing how? I can already tell this is a Korean MMO without even looking at the picture or anything else just from that one line.

Phantasy Star 1 still has some people playing.

yeah if you stole from someone, you'd appear grey to only them no matter your success state for 2 mins or something.

In terms of scheming your story reminds me of when I used to go into War mode stand near someone and write *user is attacking you* or whatever the attack text was at the time in red. So many people would get insta-whacked and I'd just lootem.


Watched a lets play, quests, voiced story. No thanks. Just a WoW clone with better combat.


Sometimes I enjoy comfy grinders like RO and L2. But they have to be grinders, no fucking quests that make me run around all day clicking on NPCs, fuck that.

IIRC there were two flags. You'd be grey to everyone for 2m as a global criminal but afterwards you'd still be grey only to the victim until you died as a way to let them get revenge.
Oh, I remember now, by adding a 2m delay to drop my global flag and baiting the victim to attack, if I won and killed him he couldn't flag me for murder. During the 2m flag it'd be a murder. I'd get them out of town during the 2m flag and drop the 2m flag playing a short hide and seek while watching the clock.

Actually I started looking a little further into it. Guy I was looking at on jewtubes said there's almost no grind and the game is coming out of China on the BigBang engine which nullifies my earlier statement about arbitrary fps limits from shitty gook porting. No gender lock and you can stat your base stats and skills how you want. Plus lineage karma system in effect where if person doesn't fight back then you can lose items on death. I'll keep my eye on it and see where it goes. Free character re-customizations from the select screen too

Asian MMOs are stereotypically uninteresting. The only mechanically unique one I can think of was mabinogi.

But didn't you see? You can customize the looks of your character!
MMOs are back everyone!

Yeah you're right. I'll probably save myself the time and just pass on it. Now that I recall Asian mmos just don't captivate you for long.

ArcheAge was the best MMO in a long, long time and it was Asian. It only lasted like a month before it went down the shitter, but still.

I feel bad for AION.

With all the hype it had and it just didn't live up to it because the combination of fuck ups and the retarded ultra casual community.
People don't even bother mentioning it much anymore over TERA.

They've tried to be creative and innovative for a while with MMOs like Grando Espada (which probably has the greatest OST of any MMORPG in history) but figured out that the casuals which make up the majority of the market only care for WoW clones like FFXIV.

Out of all the WoWclones. FFXIV is so good it's better than WoW. However I just can't stand the whole grind dungeons forever deal. Wheres my successor to UO?!

First of all, drop the "skills" that people get. You make a Fireball a skill, that's all a Fireball is ever gonna be. Spells are things a Wizard should have to write down in his book, practice for a while and then he's able to fire them.

A Wizard should go about obtaining Runes, Words, Sigils and whatever else can make up an Arkane language for magic. The very basic ones, he can find in a regular "Cantrips for Nerds" book for sale. Good ones are taught at the Wizard's Guild, the more you progress there, the more they teach you.
But the real good runes, the Words of Power, those are written in old dusty tomes at the end of a dangerous dungeon and probably in the hands of a Lich.

Even then, finding\buying the runes isn't all. The Wizard would be able to study from any book (including rival wizards books) and try to learn the runes in them. If he's skilled in the relevant area, he'll learn the rune and can write it now, otherwise he simply can't and must practice that field of magic harder.
Training magic would happen by steps and once you reach the first cap, you need to start casting more advanced spells instead to level up that skill.

There, now mages and wizards have a good place to start learning magic, they have a good reason to actually study at a Wizard's Guild but more importantly, they have reasons to go spelunking that doesn't involve finding a shinier robe.

For more detail, knowing is only half the battle. The other half is the gear the wizard has. Wands, Staves, Orbs and Scepters all help the Wizard cast something more easily or with some bonus, but you have to craft them.
So yes, you're gonna have to find and kill a Dragon if you want to make a Staff out of his bone, or a Phoneix to make your Wand.
Then have them have an internal Mana storage that can only reach so high. Crystal Amulets, Rings and Belts further expand it, but they need some rare gems to be enchanted and made into those belts as well.

Finnaly, a mage would have the ability to just draw runes in the air and compose a spell on the fly but it's a bit longer than the previously written ones. So if he finds a warded door, he can scry it first and see what spell he has to write to open it.
Rituals that take several seconds to cast and require ingridients and several runes as well, so you have Wizards carrying pouchs full of newt eyes and toad tongues.

I dunno, being an old bastard going inside a skeleton infested dungeon to get a book that teaches me the final rune for a Lich Transformation ritual, opening doors by cracking an arkane spell and performing a Portal Spell to get back to my tower, all that sounds much more interesting than any Mage in most MMOs…

I had a friend of mine that explained to me more in detail why the game failed so hard.
Basically, it's because it's fucking nothing in PvE and the PvP was doomed from the moment they included only 2 factions.

So you had in one server the Edgys dominating and owning everything. Why? Because they were the majority. And why was that? Because the WhiteKnights, instead of joining that server and fight an uphill battle, went to the other where they became the majority and they won there.
So you'd pick a server based on what faction you wanted to play, if you wanted to win that is.

The rest of the game, I got to try a bit but got very disapointed. Wings don't work in all places and even when they do, it's limited by stamina. I heard you eventually get an upgrade that removes the limit and maybe it's true, but honestly…
I was interested in the game for the aerial combat and vertical gameplay, instead I got the very same standard MMO formula except with mediocre platforming and the flying aspect is never seriously explored, even in the PvP that happens in the sky.

This sounds cool and all, but how would you the warrior to be able to compete on terms of fun? Or pretty much any other class, really.

Also, how would you implement this without making it a chore or making it as batshit insane and un-wizardy as TES' Mages Guid?

We should make a thread and invite anons for comfy questings

Fun story, a friend of mine from Korea told me back around 2004 that the Korean version of the game had mobs called Bin Laden Bombers.

How does one become a healslut these days anons?

Having a story to tell, a world that takes itself seriously, and worrying less about player conveniences but still making rewards worth a player's time would be good places to start for current MMOs.

idk qt, WoW's in bad shape and most other healing games are so impersonal.

This whole thread can be summed up as: kids who never played Everquest

Just play Tibia.

I played it for a bit around '99. I hated it. I think the highlight of my experience was trying to drown myself to end it all and in the combat log, drowning missed.

THE MEMORIESSSSSS

EQ only released in 1999. Did you even make it out of the tutorial zone? Because EQ 1999-2001ish was the golden age of MMO gaming. It was the top of the tops until its most cancerous endgame raiders all left to develop and release WoW in 2004 which everyone worships despite it being a casualized, watered-down EQ derivative and the death knell of the genre. But maybe I shouldn't bust your balls. When WoW came out a friend of mine got it and gave me his free 30-day "get your friend hooked on WoW" subscription. I solo'd my way to 45+ in that time and never touched it again after that.

I just saw it as a graphical MUD without the personal Gods of MUDs to make it interesting, with "quests" which I saw as refocusing MMOs away from the community and more towards a single player game, and without the expressiveness of text (it'd be a long discussion). I'd already done all that kind of gaming and raiding almost 10 years earlier in DikuMUDs. Most of the people I talk to that have a great impression of EQ hadn't played MUDs before so EQ was kinda like Halo was to a whole generation who erroneously saw poor imitations of old features as revolutionary. What UO was accomplishing was far more impressive and totally new, and I went back to it.

I can't believe that Concentrated Smug is fucking dead.
I barely play anyway because TERA is not as fun when alone

I just saw it as a graphical MUD without the personal Gods of MUDs to make it interesting
Well yeah, you don't get a personal Game Master when you're playing with 10's or 100's of thousands of other players in supposedly the same world.

For me, as an over 30 year old, abstraction in games is old hat. I'm done using my imagination and reading about how my player character has encountered A Spoopy Skellington and his defense is now -1 because Scurred. Fuck you developers, I've been doing this vidya thing for two decades now. Show me a skeleton spooky enough that it would rattle me and lower my guard or throw my mouse off the desk or whatever. Fuck outta here with that text shit; it's the current year already. VR to the rescue this decade maybe? But you're right, that's a whole other discussion.

Just started reading, the stolen rune shit was a good laugh.


Holy shit fam, that person was a fucking salt mine.

We did in UO for a while. The Seer program facilitated a lot of interesting RPish organic events in the world. The pic is of a Seer controlling a mob to run an event. We also had Seers help out with making player run towns interesting behind the scenes.
The advantage a MUD had was the players and the developers were on equal footing re events in the world. I could invis and ventriloquist a mob and have him emote things that were happening around him and it'd be just as "real" as developer produced content. I ran some of my own 'quests' and no one ever knew. As we moved to games like EQ that was lost and it made the community unable to compete with the developer. We became dependent on canned content, quests, and a lot of single playerisms with a monthly fee attached. A lot was lost. There were attempts to transition from MUD to 'modern' without losing the ability for players to heavily influence the world (Furcadia, Ryzom Ring, etc.) but no big devs ever attempted it. The money was in content not community so all those ideas have been long forgotten.
Maybe someday.

Oh yeah, the salt in that game was endless. "Jeff the Unsatisfied Customer" was a good one for a guy having a meltdown. He was even talking to himself (I stealthed up to watch and caught him crying about it to no one):
belan.variadic.org/jeff/jeff1.html

Fuckin' hell. Now correct me if I'm wrong, as I haven't played UO before but he was sitting literally on all this stuff in his inventory, which I assume (probably wrongly) that it weighed him down, bad enough that, caught in a bad situation, he tried to throw the gold out of his inventory to avoid being slowed down enough to die, correct?

And as you said yourself, if he's camping spawns carrying all this loot, it's pretty easy to assume he wasn't as poor as he tried to come across as either.

Yeah, so here's basically what happened to him: he was farming at the earth elemental spawn (a popular spot) in the non-PvP facet of the game (this is after the UO:R expansion which made an entire carebear copy of the world). He looted too much gold and his character became overweight. He probably got hit hard and tried to run and when overweight it drains your stamina and you can't move. So he likely dropped a pile of gold (it was very heavy) in an attempt to escape but was too late and died. He ran off as a visible ghost in an attempt to find someone that would resurrect him, but this just let me know there was a dead guy over there to loot. There were a lot of mistakes made.
Now, I could immediately pick up the gold since it was on the ground but I couldn't loot his corpse for 7 minutes due to this being the non-PvP facet until it "goes bones" (would change to a bone pile graphic) at which point anyone can loot. He failed to get back in time and I looted his stuff which wasn't a lot of stuff, maybe 30 minutes of farming was lost. But he acts like he has just lost everything in the world and flips out.
My char was a roleplayed "noble looter" and had all sorts of policies and rules which would always help make a situation worse despite being legitimately friendly and helpful.
Yeah, and I found his house a few weeks later. He had thousands of times more than I took. But they'd often squeal like this.

Honestly the "1/2 price for loot" rule seems pretty reasonable, considering you could just take all of it. I mean sure, you grabbed their stuff to clearly inspect it, but considering also you offered all their loot back, sans choice pieces, at half price you'd think people would be a bit more thankful . But thanks for explaining the situation to me better.

The fact you roleplayed so beautifully on top of all that just makes it all the better. Did you ever have any people actually thankful you offered their loot back? I saw in one story that a guy proceeded to shit talk you after they paid it. Talk about bad business!

Mortal Online has an improved game engine now though. Hopefully one of the two new Darkfall games succeed.

Some did, yeah. But after the fact when they saw themselves on the site (it was a really popular site back in the day, my 15 minutes of fame) they were ecstatic. It wasn't what I expected, I had put the site together with a plan of how I'd feature my best hate mail like Galad the Looter's site but I was just getting buried in praise even by the victims.
As an example, Chelsea, after seeing herself on the site, tracked me down and tried to give me a check for 25k gold as a thanks of sorts. Given what happened I'd have been incredibly embarrassed but she was so very happy. As an overview of this one, she was apparently a big fan of my site and I'd noticed her using my cheesy catchphrases and such, but she was totally unaware that she was talking to me on one of my alts and I was playing with her. This one came off so perfect that I was worried people would think it was staged, but it's real.
belan.variadic.org/chelsea/chelsea1.html

The core of the guild still hangs out in their mumble server. I don't you could convince any of them to boot it back up considering how brawlers and ninjas are fucking the balance sideways. Plus new dungeons were super easy.

I just remembered that the demon language in WoW translates penis to belan

(oOO oooOo)
I'd never noticed. I played through WoW as a warlock. Guess I didn't talk about dicks nearly enough!

Just out of curiosity, where do you or most people go to RMT stuff? I've always heard of it but I've never really explored or checked it out.

This thread has made me want to try UO. Anyone interested in a Holla Forums server?

A warrior should have a set of battle skills that do the standard things like disarming and tripping his foes or jumping over their head.
But just like Spells, those are made up of individual movements like the twist of a wrist or a swing.

Unlike Spells however, you learn the full skill first and then tweak it as you see fit.
You'd see a warrior fighting with a certain skill and every second looking at it gives you insight on it. If he uses it on you, double insight but if he is an enemy, only half.
You would then meditate on all the insight you have and if it's enough (you're prompted when observing if you have enough) you learn the skill, but it's in a crude state now.
As you use it, you perfect each individual movement that composes it and increase the odds it works.
Afterwards, you can meditate and switch parts of that skill for other movements that you know, but only the ones you know at 100%, creating different effects and even animations.

This would make it so you could have two Warriors that both use a Disarming Skill but one triggers much faster than the other, for instance.
Warriors Guilds would have teachers that impart insight into Skills and sparring partners to speed up your training as well.
However, the movements they teach you are the simple basic ones. To find the really good ones, you'd have to travel to monasteries or hidden caves where martial artists live, who know the same skills but with better movements, or go to very dangerous dungeons full of incredibly hard foes that use really good movements too so you can learn from fighting them.
Note that this includes literally all kinds of weapon combat, from standard melee weapons to martial arts and even ranged combat.

Damage should also come entirely from your Strength and other relevant stats as well as the weapon itself, but never from a "Sword Skill" or your level. All that does is create a powergap between low level and high level players that is achieved with time, not skill. A Sword Skill should still be present but all it does is speed up your movements, reduce the stamina you use when you attack and help to prevent the detioration of your equipment.
This way, you could give a Daemonic Sword of Slaying to a complete noob, and he'd be able to equip it and even swing it. But a single swing would tire him massively, it would miss often and the weapon would last much less time.

Finally, the Warrior should also be about leadership. Every other class should also be capable of taking hirelings with them (aprrentices for the Wizard, and gang menbers for a thief for example) but the Warrior should be able to field the largest amount of hirelings would different compositions and call upon them at any time. The Warrior gameplay would revolve around equiping his squad and fighting battles with them, mastering weapons and combat as he goes about the world.

There's still people playing.
phantasystaronline.net/

everquest, wow and so on
anywhere but here