Personal opinion on content and fixes that could make the game more enjoyable

[Sonofbaldo]

Yeah, unfortunately what people want isn't always what is good and healthy. A social game needs to do everything in its power to promote social interaction and to do that, it must create a genuine need to interact with the same groups of players on a regular basis.

Those days are unfortunately dead and buried. MMO's have become single player console games.

[Fendred]

Those days are unfortunately dead and buried. MMO's have become single player console games.

Yeah, its a pretty unfortunate state of affairs. Also, we're still using tank, damage dealer, and healer as roles? I was making complaints about the holy trinity ten years ago and they still keep repeating the same mistakes.

Tanking, doing damage, and healing are things that characters do on and off in RPGs, but taken as roles they strip away a ton of depth that makes traditional RPG combat more interesting. In a good team based RPG every character is usually given an opportunity in some circumstance to deal serious damage, usually as part of a strategy agreed upon by his teammates to take advantage of some weakness the enemy has.

To understand how damaging these flat roles are, just look at what happened to Dungeons and Dragons when 4th edition came out. It attempted to copy MMORPG standards into Pen and Paper form to replace a far more flexible system (the kind of system that these roles are inspired from to begin with). Pathfinder is now the most successful pen and paper RPG in the U.S. D&D, the game with an insurmountable monopoly in the P&P RPG space suffered massive losses, a fractured fan base, and was beaten by a game that merely improved upon where 3rd edition D&D left off.

Instead of trying to make DPS rotations more complicated, they should stop looking at jobs in terms of a set role and instead look at what they do. If a monk is a front line combatant, that means he should be able to tank in some respects, correct? Otherwise he might as well be a suicidal man in cloth. Also, what do the classes do outside of combat? What can a dragoon give to a party that no other job can provide? Can his increased vertical mobility give the party access to areas that they might ordinarily not be able to reach?