Quote Originally Posted by coppersloane View Post
These modern MMORPG developers really don't seem to understand one simple thing: People play MMORPGs (and even the MMO-lite stuff with action elements) because they enjoy micromanagement. If you're pruning in an MMO, you're doing things wrong. If a skill has become useless, rework it into something else, but do not remove it.

We want a crapload of skills. We want to open up a spellbook and ruminate over the wide range of spells. We want to make decisions. What we do not want is to be told, through pruning, what to do. Start telling us what to do through linearity and we'll be unhappy and we will stop playing your game.
Um, no? There is literally no point in having more skills than I can access or actually use. DDO had that because of it was based on v3.5 D&D. We didn't "make decisions." We took the exact same list of spells 99% of the time because they were the most effective spells. Blue Mage in FFXI is probably the best example of this concept being done right, but even they had specific layouts they'd take depending on the content they were doing and the role they were playing for that content. The only "choice" involved was possibly in which role you'd fill, but that was less often your choice than your group's choice. Choices like this get subsumed by cookie cutter builds, because in an MMO what's most effective will reign.

I feel like you don't properly understand what micromanagement is, either.