what makes an MMO fell dead

[RitsukoSonoda]

For FFXIV.

Reasons for the game feeling dead or empty? I have a few thoughts on it.

1. Over reliance on small scale instanced content. There's very little to regularly engage players in the actual open world areas. As such they tend to be empty outside of the week or so of a patch cycle.
2. Overwhelming majority of content being extremely easy and simple. Essentially removes alot of opportunity to have people actually interact with each other resulting in many players just viewing other players in duties as NPCs. FFXI was far more social. It also had far more mechanical detail than this game.
3. Too much "fast travel" Open world games in general have been doing this lately calling it "quality of life" However it's also immersion breaking and anti-social in an MMO as it removes oppurtunities to meet new people since they're all just poofing, fizzling, bamfing, flushing, etc around the world instead of travelling it. Open world games in general also falling into a trend of instantly marking quest objective locations on your map for you the moment you flag a quest is also a contributor to this. No need to ask other players questions if the game is spoon feeding all the answers to you eliminating the need to even read or listen to the quest dialogue.
4. Structured as a single player game. The game is driven on the story line in order to access content. The main story line essentially plays out as if every other player out there doesn't exist making the majority of the game feel like a single player game that has sections where you can add extra players to make it go faster. It's not to say having single player based story campaign is bad. However forcing players to go through it kind of feeds that mind set of "I'm the hero and everyone else is just an NPC" Structuring the game more as a sandbox style then filling the world with optional stories, secrets, lore quests, world or community events in game (can be simple things even like FFXI's besieged and campaign battles). Could even be something like outbreaks of a specific monster type where it keeps track of total killed by the entire player base along with personal counts to unlock reward tiers when the event ends. You can still have an MSQ in this case but not gate things behind it instead making the MSQ an option (albiet easier) to unlock specific things by doing it but have other methods available if people really do not want to do the MSQ. The best example that immediately comes to mind is also from FFXI in the form of the Airship Pass which players got for free doing their nation's rank quests or could just be purchased from an NPC for 500,000 Gil if you refused to do the quests to get it for free.

[Rilifane]

snip

Agreed on all of it.
I've been of the opinion that too much convenience and quality of life hurts a game for some time now. There comes a point where it's no longer a free improvement and instead you sacrifice something else for it, in this case immersion and the world feeling alive.
The amount of fast travel through the world but also into duties paired with the story deliberate isolating you from other players outside a few dungeons/ trials and making other players appear as supporting NPCs to you being the one true hero and the fact that everything is spoonfed just leads to people quickly poofing in and out of zones to do their 5min dailies or something and then stand around in one of the cities while poofing in and out of duties.
A large chunk of materials completely lose meaning once you hit max level on a crafter so people don't have a reason to go back into earlier zones to farm mats there. Once you left a zone after the story is finished there, your only reason to return are hunt trains if you do them and fates if you want to rank up for shared fates or the occasional treasure map.

And I think there's also another problem that affects immersion negatively: the significant lack of world "clutter".
Most zones feel dead and empty not just from a lack of players but also from a lack of things that you'd normally see in a living, breathing world. And if you wouldn't to that extend, it pays off to exaggerate that aspect.
What I mean are things like

• guards, travelling merchants and caravans travelling the roads with the merchants/ caravans maybe also having things for sale that you don't get at every 08/15 merchant in the city,
• a variety of small animals running around in and outside hubs,
• a variety of mobs in each area of a zone, preferably also with interactions (e.g. a predator chasing its food on legs around, a baby animal following/ chasing a critter around for a bit when said critter is within x yards, a male animal dropping food in front of his family and the others doing a kind of eating animation etc)
• NPCs having looping banter, interaction and routes they walk, e.g. an NPC walking up to another, telling them something and to follow them, the two NPCs walk to their new destination together, talk about something there, maybe "interact" with objects and then parting ways again or an animal trying to get into the kitchen and the cook chasing it out again
• objects to interact with, can be a simple gimmick that's just for fun like a lost scroll turning you into a frog (buff, can be clicked off), items that give you a small buff , books/ letters for lore bits, small animals you can pet and that emote back
• small hubs that don't only exist for the main story

Now, overworld clutter obviously wouldn't solve the problem but it's still a very important part of a world feeling alive and immersive and would, at the very least, make it less noticable if they couldn't manage to make some zones feel alive and have players engage in them and with each other.

I think they also limited themselves with their fear of giving people several avenues to get something or adding anything of value outside of dev-approved content (e.g. savage gear).
Zone events, world bosses/ strong rare mobs, open world treasures, open world minigames, world quests/ dailies, invasions... these could all be ways to get tomes, some gear, pets, currency for buying a variety of things or even just plain old gil.
The reward system feels very sterile in many ways. You can only have this thing from this specific content, that's the dev-approved way and we'll not stray from it. No, you can't have rewards for exploring, we want you to do THIS content because it's literally the only way to get something.

[Ranhansha]

Agreed on all of it.

• guards, travelling merchants and caravans travelling the roads with the merchants/ caravans maybe also having things for sale that you don't get at every 08/15 merchant in the city,
• a variety of small animals running around in and outside hubs,
  
  Lots of interesting ideas but...
  [Snip cause word limit]

Hitting the nail right on the head. This and much more is needed. Take for example The Azim Steppe. I love that place. The music is amazing, the views are gorgeous and the lore is interesting, so I'd love to explore it and do something, however, what for? There's nothing to do. I just went there once with some friends, sat on a rock and chatted.

From my experience in WoW, which is not much since I played it for a couple of months during WoD (so you see, not the best time), there was always something to find in the maps. Fill the maps with secret treasures with fashion accessories, parasols, glasses, mounts, minions, glamour items that can't be sold, food, materia, gil, tomestone, housing items, orchestrions, emotes, hairstyles, or even new stuff such as instant chocobo dyes and items that temporarily turn you into animals like the ones in Deep Dungeons, I don't know, the sky's the limit. Some of these things have already been said, but it's kind of obvious.

-Add a new kind of long secondary quests, with a pink icon for example so they stand out (many people ignore secondary quests when they complete MSQ) that can be repeated in areas. Maybe these need you to join a party to clear Fates. They could tell you about the past of the area, myths, creatures or whatever. Or they could be similar to Bozja and activate critical encounters with juicy rewards. Or these Fates might give more bicolor gems. Why would you be stingy with those?

- I've said this before on the forums, but, at this rate, just copy WoW's pet combat. Who is playing Lord of Verminion? Keep it if you want, but, seriously, add the pokemon-style battles. Fill the maps with "trainers" and minions and watch everyone go crazy. Obviously, this would require updating, but they already update TT cards, and minions skills for LoV so adding a tournament every now and then wouldn't be that crazy either.

-The areas seem to get livelier simply when they add a BLU patch, but that lasts a couple of weeks. Well, maybe add BLU content every now and then, even if it's not skills.

I don't know, they are developers, they surely are a thousand times more suited for the task than the vast majority of us are , but they must be willing, and they certainly don't seem to be.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Hitting the nail right on the head. This and much more is needed. Take for example The Azim Steppe. I love that place. The music is amazing, the views are gorgeous and the lore is interesting, so I'd love to explore it and do something, however, what for? There's nothing to do. I just went there once with some friends, sat on a rock and chatted.

From my experience in WoW, which is not much since I played it for a couple of months during WoD (so you see, not the best time), there was always something to find in the maps. Fill the maps with secret treasures with fashion accessories, parasols, glasses, mounts, minions, glamour items that can't be sold, food, materia, gil, tomestone, housing items, orchestrions, emotes, hairstyles, or even new stuff such as instant chocobo dyes and items that temporarily turn you into animals like the ones in Deep Dungeons, I don't know, the sky's the limit. Some of these things have already been said, but it's kind of obvious.

-Add a new kind of long secondary quests, with a pink icon for example so they stand out (many people ignore secondary quests when they complete MSQ) that can be repeated in areas. Maybe these need you to join a party to clear Fates. They could tell you about the past of the area, myths, creatures or whatever. Or they could be similar to Bozja and activate critical encounters with juicy rewards. Or these Fates might give more bicolor gems. Why would you be stingy with those?

- I've said this before on the forums, but, at this rate, just copy WoW's pet combat. Who is playing Lord of Verminion? Keep it if you want, but, seriously, add the pokemon-style battles. Fill the maps with "trainers" and minions and watch everyone go crazy. Obviously, this would require updating, but they already update TT cards, and minions skills for LoV so adding a tournament every now and then wouldn't be that crazy either.

-The areas seem to get livelier simply when they add a BLU patch, but that lasts a couple of weeks. Well, maybe add BLU content every now and then, even if it's not skills.

I don't know, they are developers, they surely are a thousand times more suited for the task than the vast majority of us are , but they must be willing, and they certainly don't seem to be.

Got around to playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla again. Yeah the wandering NPCs and enemies make the world feel more alive. However the game also has alot of activities scattered throughout each section of the world and also a series of NPCs that provide contracts to do things in zones that appear to be mostly random which doing those gives a reason to return to already explored areas since the rewards aren't bad. You get a currency that can be used to buy stuff Ubisoft put in their cash shop from the lead NPC of these contract givers and their stock rotates weekly but also has an item of the day thing too.

[Ranhansha]

Got around to playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla again. Yeah the wandering NPCs and enemies make the world feel more alive. However the game also has alot of activities scattered throughout each section of the world and also a series of NPCs that provide contracts to do things in zones that appear to be mostly random which doing those gives a reason to return to already explored areas since the rewards aren't bad. You get a currency that can be used to buy stuff Ubisoft put in their cash shop from the lead NPC of these contract givers and their stock rotates weekly but also has an item of the day thing too.

That's right. I think rewards need to be important. By this I don't mean everything needs to be a 4-man mount or a BiS weapon, (which, honestly, would be cool and wouldn't break the game when we have 19 classes) but I wouldn't want star sparklers, iron ores and 100 gils in every coffer. Players need to feel they are getting something and making progress. That's one of tha main issues with Gold Saucer. Are chocobo races fun? Yeah, for a while. After I trained it, did every challenge and got all the MGP I could, I stopped racing, because I was getting nothing out of it and there's no interaction.

[Rilifane]

snip

WoW has always done it to some degree but I think they started doubled down on making the world feel alove around MoP and turned it up to 11 with Dragonflight. It's a great example for plenty of things to do overworld while the world itself is also nicely cluttered to make it even more appealing to go out and do all the things.
Putting it in spoilers because it's a bit lengthy and not really related to the topic but just to give you the idea.

• dragonriding is the new way to fly and you unlock it extremely early into DF. You also collect different dragons for it throughout the campaign/ from achievements and all of them can be customized. The customizations are rewards for a ton of different things: achievements, reputation ranks, drops from rare mobs/ world bosses, side quests, dragon racing, treasures, world drop, dungeon/ raid drops (including LFR). While the last one is instanced, everything else is tied to open world content.
• you have several zone events that each have an internal cooldown of a few hours and pop up frequently over the week. Soup event, Storm's Fury, Trial of Flood/ Elements and Dragonbane Siege give you relevant gear once per week and smaller rewards (still worth doing them afterwards imo) from then on and Elemental Storms give you special currency to trade in for gear, pets, mounts, cosmetics and toys
• you unlock being able to find the first type of open world treasures very early into DF, shortly after landing in the new zone and another type of treasure soon after and a few more types later on at higher renown ranks. They're fairly frequent, sometimes you have a few of them at once popping up on your minimap. They give gold, crafting materials, relics, the special expansion resource and as rare drops things like recipes, currency to acquire more crafting/ gathering knowledge, pets, toys. You also have unique treasures that often don't show on the minimap. Can reward toys, a good chunk of gold or other things.
• Maruuk camp moving through one of the zones and giving you a new set of repeatable quests each time they switch location every few days
• Cobald Assembly as an elite area with unique currency and a kind-of reputation system, you get "rep" by farming the mobs there and the mobs drop arcane orbs which give you different buffs like leech, higher crit, stacking haste, auto-exploding every 10s and so on and the rewards are relevant gear, dragon customizations, crafting recipes and cosmetics
• World Quests on a bi-weekly reset, they include pet battles, dragon racing, minigames like climbing up walls and grabbing relics or rescueing animals, catalogue wild life with a camera, battle content (elite/ world boss like and regular) or just general objectives with a few different ways to fulfill them. They give relevant gear, reputation, good chunks of gold

These are the "DF exclusive" open world things. While World Quests are nothing new, they do include features only found in DF like racing, climbing and catalogue so I've count it as more of a DF-flavoured thing.
But then you also have the content that carried over from expansions ago.

• Rare mobs/ Rare Elites/ World Bosses that pop up regularly and give relevant gear, gold, relics, pets, toys, cosmetics, sometimes also special quest items for rep turn in/ another reward
• pet battles with each zone having their selection and special pets appearing during elemental storms
• side quests with quite a few having relevant rewards beyond gold, exp and leveling gear like pets, dragon customization, toys or cosmetics and most of them giving reputation

While not all of them give you a reason to interact with other players, all of them give a good reason to go out into the open world and I'll not count dragon racing, collecting dragon glyphs and getting peaks here as it only takes place in the air and doesn't really make you visible open world.
Elite areas, zone events, WQs and elite rares/ world bosses do encourage that interaction though. It doesn't have to be written communication like "hi, party for WQ?", just players banding together without a lot of chatting or random invites in areas that involve killing mobs, pulling mobs together so everyone can tap them, healers keeping whoever has aggro alive and silently agreeing on not speed-nuking mobs but always leaving a bit of HP so someone else can get a hit in as well is already nice.
And you don't have to do all or even any these tasks, not even the WQs as renown is not required to e.g. unlock M+/ raids, flying/ flying skills or outstanding gear. But you do have plenty of reasons to do it and get a sense of progression when ranking up, unlocking more customization options, expanding your pet battle team, getting more recipes to cast a wider net on the market for getting gold etc. and the expansion resource is used to buy rewards and expand some of the mini games like rock climbing

You constantly see players in the smaller faction hubs where you buy rewards, turn in relics or unlock renown features and they're nice places to stay for a bit instead of porting back to Valdrakken right away because they feel alive and bustling with the NPCs and their banter/ interaction, critters and very varied wild life in general. And Valdrakken, the main expansion hub, looks downright amazing. I've spent a good 2h riding and flying to snoop around in every corner because there were so many neat or cute little details.
It's a combination of a world that's cluttered in a good way and a lot of things you can do and that have an nice reward but not to the point of being a mandatory treadmill.
They struck a good balance there.

MMOs don't need massive amounts of players but they need overworld tasks with interesting rewards and incentives to do them, a decently cluttered environment to support the impression that the world is alive and being openworld with relatively few loading screens and each zone itself not being too big so people don't spread out too far helps as well. Although the latter isn't a deciding factor, gigantic zones are far more difficult to fill than medium-sized zones in terms of tasks, players and clutter.
Relying on instanced content becomes problematic after a certain point because it simply isolates players too much from each other.
Same as restricting the ways players can easily communicate/ organize (*cough*ingamecalenderwhen?*cough*).

Got around to playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla again. Yeah the wandering NPCs and enemies make the world feel more alive. However the game also has alot of activities scattered throughout each section of the world and also a series of NPCs that provide contracts to do things in zones that appear to be mostly random which doing those gives a reason to return to already explored areas since the rewards aren't bad. You get a currency that can be used to buy stuff Ubisoft put in their cash shop from the lead NPC of these contract givers and their stock rotates weekly but also has an item of the day thing too.

This is a neat system in general as well.
If it's from a pool of things they just rotate through, chances are that rewards will re-appear after some time so it's not like missing out on something makes you miss out forever (and plays into FOMO and feels like you HAVE to do the tasks associated with working towards the rewards). I think non-game relevant rewards like mounts, pets, titles, toys and cosmetics are great for giving an incentive to do something since they're never mandatory but the companies will notice if sales for a specific things die down after some time and can consider putting them into ingame currency reward roulettes.
If somoene isn't buying the reward directly, making them play the game for it is still a win over them neither buying it directly nor playing the game.

I could see this working well with the cheaper stuff, e.g. seasonal event emotes/ housing items/ simple costumes but maybe also rotate the occasional Fantasia into it for our circle of addicts
The fact that you miss out permanently on the free event rewards if you weren't playing at that time has been criticised several times so giving people a reason to engage in open world content to have a realistic chance at getting them for free again seems like a good solution for me. And that emotes etc. are not account-wide so even if you did them on one character, you'll still have missed out on them of any characters you created later on.