Naoki Yoshida recent interview

[silentwindfr]

The MMO formula and the way its presented has stayed the same since Everquerst and WoW simply streamlined it and reduced the time that players had to invest. All the other genre added on to whats already established but the MMO formula has remained unchanged. Develpers can add to the formula and tweak it a bit by adding character progression to endgame but then they would have to be willing to let character levels float. If character progession match ilvl progression we'd be lvl 80 right now.

WoW did create the code used by a lot of dev now for the mmorpg theme park, indeed other game before did same, WoW did create nothing, they have reused most of the idea they have added to the game.
but since wow did work soo well dev and player have simply forget that the genre was constantly evolving.

procedurale mission? Anarchy online was doing it (and i'm sure other game before)
more random fight? was done too before...

even different type of content, why it don't appear anymore, because people want to copy WoW thinking it what work...when people get tired of the WoW formula. i do think that the futur of the mmorpg will ask for more than raid as endgame.... i do hope to see different activity that will not rely on scripted environnement and fight.

[Onikimaru]

Well to be fair guys MMO's are generally huge games which doesn't leave much room for innovation because of the initial cost of making an MMO. If you make a themepark MMO and you can make profit why would developers risk losing money and potentially breaking their own game?, it's a smart choice in their eyes. And with how big these games generally are i don't blame them for not making more and unique content because, really they don't have much to work with since they have content release schedules and allotted development time. It's a vicious cycle...but then again i wouldn't really have a clue on how things are from the inside so i could be completely wrong here.

[KisaiTenshi]

even different type of content, why it don't appear anymore, because people want to copy WoW thinking it what work...when people get tired of the WoW formula.

I wish I could be a bug on the wall of the pitches for MMORPG's. I imagine they go like this:

"WoW, but like with Zombies"
"WoW, but with Pandas"
"WoW, but with craftable housing!"
"WoW, but with a third faction!"
"MineCraft, except, with cash shop stuff"
"WoW, but with cash shop stuff!"

Honestly, I used to think Freemium games were better than Subscription games, and then all the subscription games decided to hop on the "EVE" RMT bandwagon, and now they're just freemium games with a startup cost. For the love of all that is fun and great about FFXIV, never jump on this bandwagon. Cash shops just keep getting tweaked so that they bilk whales out of as much money as possible, and once the game is no longer making money, they just kill it. Freemium games rely on "the 1%", and should something better come along, the game becomes a money pit and has to be wound down.

This is why any future "Free to Play" games can't keep using the "buy a titanic full of smurfberries" as a carrot to letting players rush through the game. Zynga produces a lot of shovelware games and Nexon doesn't quite screw their playerbase by putting pay-gates on the content, rather they keep releasing new glamor outfits, and people keep buying them. Those two companies are the "king" of free-to-play content, and only got there because they did it first in their respective parts of the world.

But what have they innovated on since? Nothing. The Sequels to games they already run are getting canceled, and aren't what the players want. You don't convince a player to "start over" by handing them the same game again but only with prettier graphics.

[Obysuca]

Nexon doesn't quite screw their playerbase by putting pay-gates on the content, rather they keep releasing new glamor outfits, and people keep buying them.

Sad part is, some of the games Nexon have aren't bad, until Nexon starts Nexoning it :/ I used to love Atlantica, played it for a good while upon release, but since Nexon got it, it seems they've pushed more of the stuff towards spending in the cash shop. Not to mention it attracted the Nexon crowd of "gamers" >_> so prices skyrocketed from like ~40k for a full set of lvl 50 armor pre-nexon, to like 1 mil for the same full set. Not to mention a few certain items went from ~100k to like 3 billion...

And content seems more geared towards "Did you spend $300.00 to get this outfit/mount that'll make you strong enough to continue to do more content?" Seriously, try imagining the worst RNG you can think of and put a 10.00-30.00 price tag on it with an 85% chance to get a worthless potion or something from it.
I finally quit after Nexon pulled a Nexon and removed a mercenary that was hyped, from the event it was supposed to come from, when other versions of AO, got it for free from the event -.-

But yeah, I miss the days of mmos when a new one would come out and you'd get all hyped for it and it'd actually be something different. Now everything is pretty much the same game, different graphics :/ I also miss the days when a mmo had an actual community and you knew everyone on your server and everyone knew the jerks and you actually had to be nice and cooperate to get things done. Now it's all "Screw everyone else, I won't see them again" and considering every mmo is pretty much the same, there's not really a community since people just drop it or take 5-6 month long breaks because the formula is stale.
Anyone else remember when FCs would have 20-40+ people on in them daily? Unless you're on an overpopulated server, most fcs barely have 10 on at a time, more so hovering around the 4-5 mark. In an older mmo, that would never happen unless crap went down and the fc/guild/linkshell broke, not just within ~1 year of release because of stale content. Take XI for example, 13? years, still going (though ending content updates this year :/ ) and just a plain old social ls has more people online at one time than I've seen in a FC on XIV since release.

I remember a time when people would spend every chance they got on a mmo and rarely, if ever, take a break. Yes, even people with jobs and families did this, so that's a poor excuse for "maybe they don't have time anymore" or "they have lives". People really need to stop using that excuse because guess what, people still played a mmo for the majority of a day(the old mmos that actually felt like an accomplishment to obtain something because of the time/effort needed to obtain it), even with jobs/family, they just knew how to manage time better than kids today do. But that's a whole other topic on how today's generation live their lives like the sims, wake up, work/school, sleep.

Too bad no one has Thal's balls to try anything different these days.