MMORPGs How they have changed for the better? or worse?

[Barraind]

MMO's lost a LOT of the sense of community.

In EQ, if you were even halfway memorable, EVERYONE on the server knew you. If you were a screwup? People knew. Guild hopper? People knew. Someone to be wary of? Good luck getting groups outside the other screwups. Fantastic player? Everyone wanted you in a group. Did you craft (especially with the skill for racial armor)? Tells every day. I was the only person on Tribunal who actively smithed Human Cultural armor. It was absurd how many tells I got a day about it.

You could track peoples name changes on a lot of servers. Who is this random new person nobody has ever heard of with 4 pieces of gear from X zone thats app'ing to the not_best_guild? Oh, thats probably soandso after a name and race change, they're the only person on the server who got that combination of loot, left the guild after throwing a hissy fit, havent been on in a few days, and we're pretty sure they PA'd the account.

The community policed itself, and was MUCH better for it.

Guilds were important and mattered. People in 14 can change a FC 3 times in a week and drop their static just before a raid to join a different one and people shrug and say thats a perfectly normal thing to do. The hell it is.


I dont think graphics actually makes MMO's better. I still play EQ and City of Heroes, and I much prefer the experience to some of the play us cause we're new and flashy" games. I play these games for the systems as opposed to the graphics.

Similarly, I dont find twitch combat to be a defining quality of goodness. You could TYPE in chat all raid long while playing EQ, and it made the experience more enjoyable. It wasnt 'gottamashabuttoneveryhalfasecondoreverythingfallsapart'.

I miss the open world and dungeon crawl from older games. Current MMO design feels stale and unimaginative. We arent traversing through massive open world zones. We're going down hallways. And its not like theres an enticing narrative in those hallways now. Heroics in WoW were mostly hallways, but they felt alive. Hallways even in 14 feel like hallways. Copperbell feels great. Haukke feels great. Stormblood feels like a hallway. Shadowbringers is a hallway with EXPLOSIONS. I'm not exploring this castle, or this sea battle, or this countryside, or this magical fae hideaway. I'm taking Mister Toad's Wild Ride at disneyland instead of exploring the Wind in the Willows.


Things felt EPIC in the old games.

They dont anymore.


I also hate WoW for their godawful ilvl formula design of gear. And that developers these days see it and think "This is awesome, it lets me take all the work out of item design' when item design is one of the single most important aspects of an MMO, Please stop doing it that way. Please.

It also started the trend where every (or maybe all but 1) piece of gear you have gets upgraded every raid tier.

We had gear in the old days that lasted YEARS, because it had stats or click effects, or some specific worn effects or procs that were irreplaceable. I STILL carry my epic 2.0 in EQ with me in my bag slot for its click effect 12 (14?) expansions later. It STILL is more relevant than 99% of the gear I will loot in EQ. It will be more relevant in 2 years than anything I get as gear in 14 during Shadowbringers will be in 6.0. If you have a few items from the base game, they're STILL USEFUL TODAY for certain effects. Or it lasted because it came off mobs designed to be a challenge for more than a month or two. Kill the super big bad of the expansion? Your gear drops from it might last past the super big bad of the NEXT expansion (for the first few years of EQ, anyway). Not 'Oh, hey, you killed this planes travelling god and took his sword. Awesome. By the way, the expansion hits tomorrow and Chet the Stablehand will give you a better weapon for killing 5 mutated ant people that are threatning to bore a colony under his cows favorite patch of ground.

In playing the early MMOs I was really excited thinking about what we would see the genre evolve to as technology advanced in 20 years. It feels like everything got simplified and we evolved backwards.

Me as a 17 year old in 2000 playing EQ: I cant imagine what they can do to improve on this genre in 20 years.
Me as a 35 year old in 2019 playing EQ: Very little.

Look at crafting. Is it better than the EQ days? Yes. But you cant tell me its even remotely close to where it should be. Like, we arent discovering 30 item recipes that can use a basic sword recipe with an imbued red gem and some magic moon metal instead of iron, perfectly crafted magical pommel guards, an elaborate setting for said gem and some combination of distillates of wild magic and energy to make a glowing red sword that does fire damage and/or has a fire damage proc and has a wicked red glow to it. We're using the same formula of stuff with a higher item level to make the same thing with a higher item level.

Holy crap thats depressing.

[Nix]

-stuff-

I wish I could hug you for this post - you hit the nail on the head.

For a little backstory, I've been playing MMOs for about 20 years now (EQ, Aranock Online, FFXI, WoW, Asheron's Call, plus some other really obscure ones D: ), and in the early days I remember being dazzled by the worlds I could escape to.

Exploration was daunting and exciting, especially if you were solo, and it was nowhere near as convenient as it is now. I remember running for 20~30 minutes to reach an XP camp so that I could grind monsters with my party.

There were so many aspects of the game now that people would find "punishing", such as xp loss, lack of market boards/auction house, slower travel, grinds to level up not only class but skills; having to PAY to unlock spells/skills from trainers or farming scrolls so your mages could make happy explosions.... ahhh good times!

Now that I'm no longer a kid or teen with too much time on my hands, I'm pleased with the way that MMOs have drifted, for the most part. They feel like they appeal to a crowd that has a short attention span, or less time to play (sometimes both!). It's great to be able to log in and make a little progress. Only got an hour after working in the ER all day? No sweat! I can still do some dailies and level gunbreaker without having to rely on others.

Gaming feels "convenient" now - I don't know of how else I can describe it.

That being said, I feel like we've sacrificed in a few areas too. Games feel a mile wide and an inch deep, classes feel similar, and every patch the metaphorical carrot is replaced by one with a slightly higher iLv; though the method of obtaining said carrot still hasn't changed - you just take your tomes and voila! Carrot.

I feel bad for saying this though, but I feel like the community has changed for the worse - We used to blame it on "WoW players" back in the day, and I know that stereotype still comes up occasionally... But I feel like people screw each other over more now because there's no real consequences.

Back in the day, everyone knew everyone - If you screwed someone / a guild over, you bet your ass your name would be on a forum and everyone would know what happened and who to ignore. Now? Not so much - back in the day, (hypothetically, of course), if you asked someone on your server of -whatevergame- "Who's Fluffy?" they'd be able to tell you "Oh, I XP'd with them before, they're ok!" or "They're in my friend's raid group!" or whatever. We were forced to build bonds outside of our main social circle so that we could make progress.

Now? We have virtual anonymity. You could ask anyone on Hyperion "Who's Fluffy Pancake?" and they'd go "Who...?" despite me playing since 1.0. People don't have to create bonds - they can go into DF, be abusive to other players, be done with their dungeon and never see them again. Rinse/repeat. Screw over a guild? That's fine - name change/server hop, and do it all over again. Heck, you don't even have to server hop, because if you need to run content, you can just rely on DF groups. There are few effective consequences really for being needlessly malicious.

Because of the bonds we created in the past, we treated each other like there was a real freaking human being on the other end of their avatar. Someone wasted a party's time? You all felt that and knew not to do it to someone else. Nowadays, people just don't give a damn, and it's sad.

Overall, games aren't bad now, but they leave me without the sense of wonder and awe I felt back then. I'm happy that games have shifted to accommodate our busy lifestyles... I just wish the community was a bit more old fashioned

Thanks for reading this far~