MMORPGs

Let's talk about the genre with the most wasted potential and most jewish practices to ever grace video games, Holla Forums. MMORPGs.

Are you looking forward to anything? What's the last game you played? Were there any that you really enjoyed? Have you lost all hope?

Also, if you were to put on your ideaguy hat and create an MMORPG, how would you go about it? How would you prevent your game from succumbing to the cancer that plagues the MMO scene?
A lot of MMOs seem to completely forget the role-playing part and just try to copy the latest hip rollercoaster ride in hopes of milking a few shekels before the game inevitably tanks and the cycle continues.
I'd love to see an MMO that does open-world sandbox well, says fuck it to the same old classes of 'warrior, rogue, mage' and just throws a fuckload of different weapons and a bunch of well thought out magic types into the game and lets the player work on 'proficiency' with those types of weapons/magics.

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i still play champions Online despite it being complete garbage cause i have been playing it since 2011
Also PSO2 just because.
Tried Kritika, but it was kinda meh

League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Warframe are the jewiest, most profitable f2p games right now and they blow lifetime MMOs out of the water.

Take Runescape, iron out its flaws like grinding, imbalanced item system (food, weapons) and you have a base for a good MMO. For me at least, MMOs should be more about comfyness, crafting and exploring, less about combat. Wurm looks like a pretty good idea, but it's too complex for a massive playerbase.

This genre will never be good again, so forget it.

Exactly. Combat definitely can't be left out though.
I don't get why no one actually makes life skills useful beyond a way to gather materials for crafting and expand on them so that it's more than watching a loading bar fill up while your PC does a little animation.

2007 is gone and nothing is going to replace the feelings it gave. No more struggles with bad PC's, no more shitty edgy music, no more arena games, shitty internet humor has been replaced. And worst of all, we're not teenagers anymore.
It's dead. Let go.

STOP IT, STOP IT user

we can always summon the meteor, user.
Let it all go back to the stardust

The best way to "fix" MMOs is to focus on the social aspect. Make players interact with each other naturally, make the world feel as if it's an actual world, not just a game with a bunch of multiplayer mechanics. Putting them on a raid que is not natural at all. I know you want to have an auction house because it's so neat and convenient, but you're ripping out a part of what makes MMOs so unique; the interaction between players. There's a lot more that goes on in a manual trading system that shouting in Falador, it makes the act of trade itself much more social and dynamic and spreads it throughout the game.

I know it's inconvenient that you can't sell literally every item at a good price with the press of a button, but that's where the player interaction comes in. You can offer items for a much lowered price, and someone who doesn't necessarily even want it will be tempted to buy it because it would be so easy to flip it for profit. Or they may get a bargain for stuff they might have wanted to stockpile anyway. If you need something really badly for a quest or something, you may want to pay extra which nearby players can capitalize on. And this goes both ways, YOU might randomly get an opportunity get stuff for cheap because someone nearby doesn't want to go sell it. You can also choose to keep it in your bank until you have more reason to go sell stuff. Rich players might drop items because they can't be bothered to go sell them, so you can scavenge for free stuff. You'll probably want to stock up on various items when you go trading, and think about where/when/how to spend your resources because you can't necessarily get stuff very quickly outside the trading location. You're more likely to use items creatively and flexibly because you can't just buy the most efficient items in an instant. All of these dynamics go up in the air instantly if you add an auction house, trading becomes completely soulless in comparison. And that's only the difference that one game mechanic makes.

If you're going to have a grind, then put as much or more focus on the middle game as you're putting on the endgame, or scrap the endgame entirely and focus entirely on the journey. Make the grind "enjoyable", analyze what Runescape did to make it tolerable and then use what you learn from that study.

And for fuck's sake, stop putting the player on rails. Outside Runescape I've never played a MMO that didn't lock you on a path following an endless trail of asinine quests, or the combat shit that will keep moving you from area to harder area to harder area doing the same shit over and over until the end of time, each time the previous area becoming completely obsolete because of the hard tiered design of the game.

I think we often take for granted just how many things Runescape got right the first time around. It's maybe hard to see it as a great MMO these days because the new school version is so botched to hell, and the old school version is so dated. But there's a lot of lessons that could be learned from it if people stopped being so fucking obsessed with copying WoW to a T. I still believe that something truly great even by modern standards could be created, but it most likely requires some kind of indie effort by people who are willing to try new things and really think the design through instead of trying to cash in on the WoW/MOBA train.

didn't Dofus/Wakfu had something like this, but got fucked by groups of player screwing the market on purpose when they needed?

I thought this way after Cataclysm came out but not too long ago I played some janky chinese mmo called Age of Wushu and had a terrific time, ups and downs, with more genuinely memorable moments then I ever got out of WoW. I am not shilling for the current game by the way, I know we have a thread about it right now but the publishers have totally shat the bed and its not worth playing, avoid.

I think you're mostly right. If your conception of MMO is a wow-like you will never experience anything remotely novel and stirring in that type of game ever again. MMOs are not so incredibly transitory that a person can only enjoy them at a certain period of their life. It just requires some honest to god bravery and creativity from a developer.

Although if you have a family and a job and obligations now then yeah, probably no MMOs ever again. But that's a lot of games, fuck, that's a lot of pastimes.

Sounds like you're describing wakfu. That game was pretty awesome, shame it's basically dead now.

On the SEA servers, the chinese screwed everything up and basically killed what was left of any sense of community. They were a minority population immigrating to the server and people were preparing to help and welcome them. Within a month of their arrival they'd committed several acts of electoral fraud (spamming new account votes), eco terrorism and crashed the markets. It was insane. Community managers refused to address the problem and confronting the chinks was met with 'well YOU guys could do it too so why don't you lol gweilo'.

Fuckin' chinese cunts.

Spot on with the auction houses. I hate them.


The Chinese are a fucking plague no matter the game it seems. I really don't know what the fuck is up with those people.

Communism fucks up every country, user. It's like societal rabies.

Who RO here ;_;

ArcheAge did a few things right, with it's idea of easing players from the traditional safespaces of things like WoW into a more hostile world. I liked that idea. I want a proper successor to UO, but it'll never happen. Every attempt at a sandbox has been crippled by greedy publisher/dev's with an eye towards cashshops over quality. An old fashioned subscription model with no cash shop is a must, because frankly I've yet to see a cashshop that didn't make the game worse. Again something we will never see because idiots will pay 20$'s for costumes and mounts and even more if they can get some sort of ingame edge. The consumer killed mmo's, dev's are just following the money.

>no hope in any of the "upcoming" servers like Dawn of Midgard2.0 aka ggROv4.0

It still hurts ;_;

Like well uh
Let's see

Not to mention the chinese have always been subhuman garbage to begin with.

RIP Asheron's Call. Fuck you Turbine for promising to release the server code and then never doing so.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I'm tentatively looking forward to Camelot Unchained.

R.I.P., MegaTen Online.
Still hoping for a sequel, but not gonna hold my breath

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Take UO, EVE and SWG and mash it together. There, perfect MMO but nobody would play it.

I liked LOTRO because it was comfy and had good music. It was just as bad as the other MMOs out there in the gameplay department, though.

It's not dead, though. Not entirely..

no, the grinding of runescape is solid, that's what an mmo is, the progress of illusion. MMO's aren't about being really solid super fun games, they're the epitome of progression simulators.

Plus, the real problem RS has is it's tick system. if it was as responsive as WoW for example, it'd be fantastic.

NO
ok maybe maybe. The biggest annoyance of an mmo is HAVING to interact with others to progress. Not just you get a bonus for doing so, but it's absolutely neccesary.

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Apart from the one instance thing, that sounds exactly like Rust. Fucking dropped

I really want a good monster catching MMO. Digimon masters online sucks as it's nothing but grinding. Dragomon auto plays it's self.

Why can't we just have a sandbox monster catching sim?

Limit servers to 100-150 players. Use rogue like level generation on whole maps so wikis can't catch up. Make abilities require unique items past a certain level, but grant said abilities unique powers and high potentials. Area voice and text chat requiring spells that cost in game money for guild chats and the like. Make a return of crafting and theiving systems specifically used by guilds. Add traps do dungeons.

I think when this is all done the game will be hard enough that modern gamers are forced to talk with each other and make friends.

I kind of get what you're saying, but the point of MMOs is playing the game with others. There should be certain aspects that you can't do on your own. What those aspects should be could be debated, but turning it into a single player game is one of the things that's killing the fun out of it.

There's so many MMO's that would have been fun as single player games too.That's always been one aspect that pissed me off.

I'm fine with the tick system as long as the combat is simple and fitting for it, hell, Runescape's charm was its simplicity and the moment Jagex wanted to make it more than it should be, it went to shit. MMOs did and still do have to sacrifice some technical aspects to support thousands of players in the same area.

The grinding was very grating, though. If it were up to me, I'd rebalance the XP in skills to make early levels take longer and later levels take less long, more evenly distributing the content through progression. More complexity in tasks such as fishing where you sit in one spot doing nothing for long periods of time is greatly needed. Crustacean fishing, for example, could have players wading in shallow water actively looking for a catch; sailing and boat fishing in groups could tie in, making players have to sail to the right areas for the best catch rates. Who knows, coming up with the right ideas isn't easy, but necessary.

anyone played Cabal here or any gooks who tried Cabal 2?
It was fun days
on another note, did anyone ever come across a Cuhrayzee MMO like Last Online? I was said to hear it never took off, would've loved to play that.

I still play with some ITC(8ch guild) bros in another guild.

The grind and gear progression is still cancer, but the weekly node wars sometimes make up for it.

I am playing WoW, enjoy swtor story, wildstar would be great if not for the cartoony graphics and failed launch :\

I still don't know what happened with that game. I was thinking of buying it after I played the beta with Holla Forums, But then a few months later everyone said it had turned to shit and to avoid it like the plague.
What was it that really turned off everyone?

playing wotlk wow on dalaran private server and I dont know why
just wanted a taste of nostalgia again
but good lord does it take forever to level
how the fuck did I ever bear with that shit the first time

well…
shit.

blow them out of the water in what regard?

I wouldn't call Cabal a good MMO. It was a pretty neat game, but not as an MMO.

It suffered heavily from the problem where if another player comes nearby, you want to get the fuck out because it's so hard to share the enemies. That was made worse by the fact that the maps were pretty small, which in itself isn't bad but it was very hard to find open training locations sometimes.

I liked the artistic direction of Cabal a lot. The equipment and skills were very interesting, and the OST was really good.

I think if you took out the flare from Cabal, you'd have a very lame game in your hands.

the game is pure fucking grind
after the initial confusion its a very easy game to get a hold of but fundamentally everything you do in the game is watching bars fill up
wurm is shit tbh

they took literally everything anyone liked about it, and shat on it/remove it
they also made it Age of Wushu/ArchAge-tiers of Pay2Win where you can stomp anyone regardless of skill so long as you open your wallet harder

FUCKING FLAG GODDAMNIT

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That's really fucking gay.


Never heard of it. What's it like?

Made by a lead dev of UO. Check embedded and the wiki: shardsonline.gamepedia.com/Shards_Online_Wiki

I would make a GW1 clone and maintain early GW1's focus on PvP (and avoid class creep - no introduction of new classes with each expansion). With GW1 abandoned and GW2 not being very much like it, there's now an empty spot on the market that no developer seems interested in filling.

It's an excellent type of game and we could really do with another like it.

Just a game where you find skills would be a novelty at this point.

Except guild wars sucked dick, faggot.

I've never liked MMOs since they never felt like games to me, it always just felt like I wasn't really controlling anything. WoW felt like garbage and its clones felt the same.

The only MMO I played that I genuinely enjoyed was eso. I like being able to play in first person and I like that you don't just right click then tap numbers until its over. Mostly though I like that since i'm a huge lorefetcher I can follow the plot perfectly, unlike other MMOs that have no development or past

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Actually, it wasn't very p2w at first. It was when they released value packs that it became p2w.

Themepark terminal cancer grindfest, even though it was supposed to be the greatest sandbox hardcore mmo ever, it released as a demented hybrid that doesn't fully please anyone.

found this also

I still enjoy playing DFO, I just love how saturated the game becomes over a simple concept of 2D brawling.
Now is a great time to start playing, the xmas event is handing exp like candy.

While I think this is a cool idea, I'm not personally a fan of player dictated servers.

It's most likely going to create cliques and make it difficult for random players to jump in and be equal to others. And then you'll have SJW hugbox type people who shun anyone who doesn't remember their pronouns. Plus small separate servers as opposed to larger official ones makes it feel less like a big coherent world and more like a minecraft server list.

I'm concerned that people will come to more public shards to shit things up, and then just run back to camp in their own safe space shards.

Gotta wait and see how it ends up.

Farming for wood to burn for fires certainly was tolerab… oh wait no, the grind in runescape was fucking awful and in no way should be emulated

If you don't like grinding, then you don't have grinding in the game at all. You can't have a levelup system in an MMO without either making it a grind, or pointless in the larger scheme of things.

Runescape's grind was still the best I've seen in an MMO, and I think it's because there was no "endgame" that you need to grind your way to before the game actually starts. You can leasurely grind whatever/whenever you want and stop and do something else if you feel like it.

Granted that's all a problem, but it doesn't sound any worse than the situation with private servers for other MMOs such as wow vanilla servers. And true, we'll just have to see how this all plays out.

Not looking forward to anything after how hard BDO crashed and burned. The only thing I even know of coming out any time soon is Crowfall and last I checked it still looked like trash. Genre's dead and it should probably stay that way, people were burned enough this decade.

Can't imagine them doing that :^)

The basic idea behind it is that it would be '06 Runescape in space. I believe that in order to make something like that work, there needs to be a mechanic that rewards exploring worlds beyond the settlements and industry areas that the planet has.
On the topic of player interaction, I understand why it's a draw-in for a lot of people here, but it's really inconvenient to find a random asshole to buy shit from you, especially if they don't want what you're trying to sell. In an attempt to reach a middle ground in this situation, I came up with this.
Like said, get rid of the need to accomplish a set of tasks necessary to reach a goal determined by the game. Some people like grinding, but others want to just get ahead with the game. In the game, you can grind if you want, but you also have the opportunity to bring any skill of your choice up to your highest level by spending in-game currency, but it will be balls expensive to do so for one skill, and there are a good amount of skills in the game.
Among other ideaguy things:
>Players can customize their own gear and vehicles. The customized gear can be sold to other people, but not to shops. They can customize the shape of the items, the color of it, the decorations on it, and if they want upload an image from their computer and put it somewhere on the gear. Customization is also a skill.
Hypothetically, would you play this game?

So, an auction house?

Is that how auction houses work? Shit, I thought that's just what the names implies, you put the item in and an auction happens. What I had in mind was essentially a trade request sent to everybody on the server, but I could see how that would be annoying.