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

[Insertcoins]

Overall I think they are a little easier because they are more streamlined and we as a player base have more knowledge. I think what changed the dynamic of old school to new school wasn't min/maxing but how you went about it. Back in the dizzay you could look it up and maybe find some vague information but it was far easier to just ask someone in game. That's the socialization that made an MMO. Joining a good guild ment direct access to good knowledge. Now FCs barely know jack and go to limsa and shout out if someone can explain main stat to substat ratios. Or that you need help with something, you will mostly likely be met with silence or told to use PF.

Sadly you're not anywhere near wrong. It's why I'm kindof staying away from FCs on my alts cause if I'm in a large FC I should NOT be using PF for normal content. It's how I feel so if Imma be using that for normal crap I might as well be single. The hell lol.

[Maeka]

I still don't know what this means when people say it. What do you mean by 'people just don't have that kind of time and schedules anymore in today's world?' Are you saying they did back then? What changed, exactly? Probably you just became an adult when back then you were still in your teens/young adulthood.

The economy changed.

More people are having to work two jobs, etc. Back in the early 00's, it wasn't quite as bad, stuff wasn't as expensive, etc.

[Windsun33]

I was thinking about this the other day, I used to as I'm sure many others played Everquest.

Back in the day..

If you pulled a pack with out CC you died

If you tried to pull a pack with out a puller you died.

You needed a buffer/debuffer in the group or you died.

I was just thinking about this when I came across this post. I played EQ from the 3rd day it went live and for 8 more years. Played EQ2 for about 5-6 years. Played other games off and on (WOW, LOTR, some others) but none for very long. And I definitely feel like there is something missing from today's games, including FFXIV. Perhaps it is the lack of skills needed, the repetitive nature of so many quests and dungeons, the overall "vanilla" feel. I dunno, but there is for sure something missing. One thing that EQ had that no game has ever matched was the feeling of "we are in this together" - guilds actually mattered, and were not just some place to plant a garden or toss some statue into.

[Windsun33]

MMOs used to be about exploring huge worlds, character progression, community and challenge.

Now it is mostly just AFKing in town until you get queued in with some random strangers you'll never see again to do braindead content. The world itself might as well not be there once you are done leveling. There's no real sense of character progression.

In playing the early 90s 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.

Part of the minority here I guess, But I agree with most of what you say. There is only one real skill needed in FFXIV - the ability to dodge colored lights on the floor. There is no such thing as crowd control, debuffs are meh at best, FATES are an endless grind. I have been playing for about 8 months and during that time have gone from "wow this is great" to "what am I doing here".

[Amelia_Pond_Behemoth]

My only other MMO was FF11. With that said, progression was PAINFUL unless you had friends available. Need help clearing an instance but your buddies aren't on? Or they're on but busy doing something else? You shout in Jeuno or Whitegate for 5 other randos and hope for the best. And leveling could be super fast or painfully slow. I soloed most of MNK while doing the books.

[gumas]

MMOs used to be about exploring huge worlds, character progression, community and challenge. Now it is mostly just AFKing in town

true, most of the time i keep thinking that future mmorpg might become a hub based type with this one huge town hub and a lot of instance/hub to explore (like PSO2), there is no use to put a lot of town where most of the traffic reside in 1 or 2 town only. yes you might miss the scenery/vista but for how long? 5 times circling in that place and iam sure majority of people didnt bother to explore anymore.

might as well put the effort to make more exploration/dungeon hub, and keep improving this one only town.

i come from very old school mmorpg where map didnt give you waypoint, no quest marker and when you need to search someone or some place you really need to look for landmark and actually search and explore the area, stuff like that, i kinda miss that actually. it still exist in some way but they also keep the graphic like back in 90's era which hurt my eyes lol

[Xatsh]

My only other MMO was FF11. With that said, progression was PAINFUL unless you had friends available. Need help clearing an instance but your buddies aren't on? Or they're on but busy doing something else? You shout in Jeuno or Whitegate for 5 other randos and hope for the best. And leveling could be super fast or painfully slow. I soloed most of MNK while doing the books.

The magic of FFXI happened in the guilds and guild stuff done at endgame honestly, The pug scene in ffxi was utter garbage. Your guild was your key to that game. Without a decent one your progression grinded to a complete halt outside merit grinding or leveling alt jobs.

Leveling was well slow and painful, especially if you were not on an optimal party job (which made up like 1/4th the job pool at best). I leveled mainly with my guild in that game so never minded it much was in ventrillo talking the whole time.

The FFXI leveling method would never work anymore I feel at least not on a large scale. I wish mmos would look at how FFXI did endgame, expansions, and gearing though and bring that into the current era... cause that game use to have more valid progression based endgame content available at one time then any other mmo on the market by several magnitudes. Content was just never fully negated. Would be like FFXIV's endgame consisting of everything from ARR to Current with all gear still having its place in some situational BIS build, Instead of having 1 raid to rule them all type endgame. Yea would not work with FFXIV's design but I do wish the WoW model did not become the default design. (Linear content and Ilvls are bad in my opinion).

[Windsun33]

I lvl and resulting formulas are drag and drop "heres the ilvl, the stats will ALWAYS be: X or Y/Z or A/B/C or E/F/G/H" and you can determine exactly what the total stat value will be of any given piece of gear at that ilvl (and sometimes varying by rarity, but thats not even a thing in 14 anymore) if you know the formula, but there will NEVER be a difference across pieces of the same ilvl.

Comparatively, you have EQ which treats AC, HP and Mana, Base stats, secondary stats, tertiary stats, and resists as different values with different weights and has a range of allowable weights per zone.

I had world firsts in EQ in 2 different guilds for 8 or 9 expansions. We killed stuff and then we... killed days worth of other stuff. Beating the last boss of a raid zone in an expansion meant we still had 2-3 FULL RAID ZONES of relevant content to do (and then it started meaning we had 6 one-off dragons, a couple 36 man zones, a couple 24 man augment farms, a couple raid zones, epic 2.0 fights, and a raid zone for trash farming for augments) on our other raid nights. We had aa farms, or involved tradeskilling, or epic quests that took weeks or months of doing stuff. We could farm old content for fun toys to play with (clicky illusions, clicky shrinks, clicky levitate, clicky haste, clicky shoot a fireball pewpew)

We didnt kill 4 trial bosses in a day and have nothing meaningful to do until reset because you maxxed your tradeskills FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS in 100 leves, 2 weeks of custom deliveries and crystarium quests.

This - and I basically just did exactly that. Do I feel like I accomplished anything? Nope. I have done more in this game in a few months than I did in EQ in the first 3 years, but I don't feel like I really accomplished anything here but check off another box.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

Video games are not a disease either.

pan·dem·ic
/panˈdemik/

adjective

1.
(of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or the world.

noun
noun: pandemic; plural noun: pandemics
1.
an outbreak of a pandemic disease.

Depression, Anxiety disorders, personality disorder are diseases, and are pandemic to some countries, and one of the factors in it's increase is the long exposure to videogames: Particulary MMORPGs.
I never said videogames were a disease. Im saying they make people with some diseases even more sick, and in several countries of the world, these diseases are in fact, pandemic.

See, South Korea and Japan. Countries where the dissociation with real life - a healthy biosocial network is not possible for a lot of people because they just shut into their rooms to do mostly anime, series, or videogames. Yeah, wine and beer are not diseases, nor are hamburguers. Alcoholism and Morbid Obesity are.
Same here.

[Edax]

And my grade thesis was a bit about psychology of gamers in relationship with learning processes and yes, found a lot of evidence for a subportion of the subjects (NEETs mostly) which presented several psychological disorders that were only reinforced by their exposition to videogames, MMORPGs and MMOs in general being the most recurrent "drug".

Depression, Anxiety disorders, personality disorder are diseases, and are pandemic to some countries, and one of the factors in it's increase is the long exposure to videogames: Particulary MMORPGs.
I never said videogames were a disease. Im saying they make people with some diseases even more sick, and in several countries of the world, these diseases are in fact, pandemic.

See, South Korea and Japan. Countries where the dissociation with real life - a healthy biosocial network is not possible for a lot of people because they just shut into their rooms to do mostly anime, series, or videogames. Yeah, wine and beer are not diseases, nor are hamburguers. Alcoholism and Morbid Obesity are.
Same here.

I'm sorry but equating MMORPGs to drugs and saying MMORPGs make the diseased even sicker comes across as needlessly alarmist and hyperbolic.